I was just listening to a talk by Professor David Nieman (on youtube) and he was discussing how the elites of Israel were taken off to Babylon, but they left the poor behind, while a lot of the middle class took off to Egypt. He says in an “aside” comment that he wonders if the palestinians were descended from those left behind and who lost their faith and later were forcibly converted to Islam.
Awaiting DNA studies on this one...if it is closer to the Jewish DNA than to the Arab/phoenician DNA he might have a point.
There are lots of DNA analyses of Jewish populations.
http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/jewish-genetics/
http://www.cohen-levi.org/jewish_genes_and_genealogy/jewish_genes.htm
...The research was basd on samples from 29 populations, 7 Jewish, categorized into five major divisons: Jews, Middle-Eastern non-Jews, Europeans, North Africans, and sub-Saharan Africans.
The findings were that most Jewish communities, long separated from one another in Europe, North Africa, the Near East and the Arabian peninsula do indeed seem to be genetically similar and closely related to one another, sharing a common geographical origin.
These Jewish communities are more closely related to each other and to other Middle Eastern Semitic populations – Palestinians, Syrians, and Druze, than to their neighboring non-Jewish populations in the Diaspora.
The results also indicate a low level of admixture (intermarriage, conversion, rape, etc.) into the gene pool of these various Jewish communities...