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Arabs of Palestine/Israel

Well before their partial expulsion from the Holy Land by the Romans in 70 C.E., Jews lived in Hebron, Jerusalem, Tiberias and Safed. So did Bedouin tribes, some in villages. Many Arabs settled the Land of Israel after various incursions, including the taking of Jerusalem by Muhammad’s successors in 636, and during the sporadic rule of Muslim powers from the Fatimids to the Ottomans. For centuries, tax farmers and later urban notables and sheikhs controlled most of the scarce cultivable land in the coastal plain and valleys. The majority-Arab population engaged in subsistence agriculture and lived mostly in the central mountain range, stretching from the Galilee in the north southward through what is present-day Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron.

After modern Israel’s establishment, 160,000 Arabs remained as citizens, while six times that number fled. Arabs constituted some 22% of the Israeli population then and remain about the same percentage today. Arabs of Palestine or Arabs of Israel or Palestinian Arabs living in Israel with citizenship today hold positions in the parliament, the Supreme Court and all walks of life.

Explore All Posts on the Arabs of Palestine/IsraelView All Documents and Sources for the Arabs of Palestine/Israel

The Key Curated Essentials for Arabs of Palestine/Israel

Riots break out in Bethlehem in 1938 during the Arab uprising that began in 1936. (credit: Matson Collection, U.S. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
Explainer: Arabs of Palestine/Israel

Explainer: Arabs of Palestine/Israel

Some ancestors of modern Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, like those of Israeli Jews, lived in the Land of Israel millennia ago, but most came to the area when Muhammad’s successors took Jerusalem and settled there…

Explainer Articles|January 20, 2025

More Curated Essentials for Arabs of Palestine/Israel

Porath: “Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement”CIE+

1973
By Yehoshua Porath, 1973 Historian Yehoshua Porath wrote “Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement” as a chapter for the book Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, Menachem Milson...

Ken Stein: Socio-Economic Differences Preface Palestine’s Political Partition, 1920-1948CIE+

1920-1948
Primary sources, reputable scholarship and archival materials collectively show major communal (Arab-Jewish) socio-economic separation, factors that foreshadowed geo-spatial partition.

Mufti Rejects Majority-Arab Palestinian State, 1939CIE+

March 1939
Mufti opposes Arab majority state in ten years contrary to wishes of a dozen key other Palestinian leaders. Mufti wants no Jewish political presence in Palestine whatsoever.

Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1945-1949 (45:57)CIE+

December 25, 2022
In this 46-minute video recorded Dec. 25, 2022, two emeritus professors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem joined President Ken Stein to discuss the key period when the Zionists succeeded in creating and securing a...

Hillel Cohen, “Army of Shadows,” Showing Regular Palestinian Arab Collaboration With Zionists Through 1947CIE+

1947
Irrefutable evidence shows Palestinian Arab collaboration with Zionists during the British Mandate greatly assisted Jewish state building. Cohen further asserts a general absence among Palestinians of a sense of national feeling, with loyalties instead tied to families, villages and other localities. Quite certainly without Palestinian Arab collaboration, Zionists would not have succeeded in building a nucleus for the Jewish state. Arabic newspapers in Palestine and British scrutiny show the constancy of the Arab population's engagement with the Zionists, and this included Arabs resident inside Palestine.

Maps Comparing 1947 Palestine Partition Plan and 1949 Israeli Armistice LinesCIE+

Spring 1949
The area of Israel expanded and the potential area for a Palestinian Arab state decreased because of the 1948-49 war, Israel’s War of Independence. The Arab rejection of the 1947 U.N. partition plan thus hurt...

Reasoned Views for Palestinian Arabs’ Dysfunctional Condition, 1945-1949

1945-1949
Steady disintegration of Palestinian Arab society from 1945-1949 is detailed by five Arab and non-Arab historians citing local social cleavages, economic impoverishment, fear, indebtedness, and political dysfunction.

Mixed Muslim and Arab Views and Actions Toward Jews, Zionism and Israel, 1920s-PresentCIE+

1920s-Present
For more than a century, Arab and Muslim leaders have expressed hatred for Jews, Zionism and Israel, although some have pointed internally for the failures of the Palestinian Arab national movement.