Palestinian

Palestinian is typically referring to a person belonging to the Palestinian people, an Arab nationalist group defined in the Palestinian National Charter of 1968, also referred to as Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيون‎, al-Filasṭīniyyūn).

It may also refer to:

Palestinians

The Palestinian people (Arabic: الشعب الفلسطيني‎, ash-sha‘b al-Filasṭīnī), also referred to as Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيون‎, al-Filasṭīniyyūn, Hebrew: פָלַסְטִינִים), are an ethnic group comprising the modern descendants of the peoples who have lived in Palestine over the centuries, and who today are largely culturally and linguistically Arab due to Arabization of the region. Despite various wars and exoduses (such as that in 1948), roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in historic Palestine, the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel. In this combined area, as of 2004, Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants, encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.6 million), the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2.3 million versus close to 500,000 Jewish Israeli citizens which includes about 200,000 in East Jerusalem), and 16.5% of the population of Israel proper as Arab citizens of Israel. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip, three-quarters of a million in the West Bank, and about a quarter of a million in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half are stateless lacking citizenship in any country. 3.24 million of the diaspora population live in neighboring Jordan, 1.5 million live between Syria and Lebanon, a quarter of a million in Saudi Arabia, with Chile's half a million representing the largest concentration outside the Arab world.

Arab Jews

Arab Jews (Arabic: اليهود العرب‎ al-Yahūd al-ʿArab; Hebrew: יהודים ערבים‎ Yehudim `Aravim) is a term referring to Jews living in the Arab World, or Jews descended from such persons.

The term was not commonly used until the modern era. Most of the population was forced out or voluntarily left after the founding of Israel in 1948, for the new Jewish state or to Western Europe, and a few went to the United States and Latin America. They spoke Arabic, using one of the many Arabic dialects (see also Judeo-Arabic languages) as their primary community language, with Hebrew reserved as a liturgical language. They usually followed Sephardi Jewish liturgy, making them one of the largest groups among Mizrahi Jews.

In recent decades, the term has come back into some usage by Jews who self-identify as Arab Jews, such as Ella Shohat, an anti-Zionist, who uses the term in contrast to the Zionist establishment's categorization of Jews as either Ashkenazim or Mizrahim; the latter, she believes, have been oppressed as the Arabs have. Other public figures who refer to themselves as Arab Jews include David Shasha, Director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage, Jordan Elgrably, director of the Levantine Cultural Center, and Ammiel Alcalay, a professor at Queens College in New York who began emphasizing the importance of his identity as an Arab Jew in the 1990s.André Azoulay, Jewish adviser to Moroccan King Mohammed VI, also defines himself as an Arab Jew, as does Sasson Somekh in a recent memoir.Ilan Halevi described himself as "100% Jewish and 100% Arab."