Dammi Israeli: The Genetic Origins of the Palestinians

Times of Israel ^ | 27th December 2025 | Jonathan Kohan

[Cronos]

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is being approached incorrectly. This is because Palestinians are not Arab. They are culturally arabized Jews/Israelites.

I am not the first person to hold this position. Both the first President of the state of Israel Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and the Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, believed that the Palestinians were descended from Jews. David Ben-Gurion wrote several books and articles on the subject and even created a task force with Moshe Dayan to “Judaize” the Bedouins. As war and conflict continued this idea was eventually abandoned. At the time there was no way to really know. However, genetics has progressed incredibly far, and we now know that Ben Gurion was largely correct. Palestinian fellahin are the descendants of the Jews and more broadly Israelites who survived the Roman conquest.

I accidentally fell into this story. I am a Persian-Jew and a few years ago I decided to take a genetic test. Much to my surprise, the test indicated that I was genetically Lebanese. This confused me as I thought Lebanese were Arabs. As a naturally curious person I began to investigate the genetics of the Middle East. Through this process I discovered that most of the Middle East is not Arab, but rather indigenous peoples who are culturally arabized. For example, the Lebanese are largely just arabized Phoenicians. Lebanon is right next to Israel, which is partially why the test plotted me as Lebanese. This then immediately raised the question, what about the Palestinians?

[jimwatx]

Very interesting article. It’s fascinating what they can find out with genetics nowadays. I would love to see mine but don’t trust the companies doing it to keep it private.