The Palestinian Exodus: How the Persecution of Palestinians Echoes the Suffering of the Ancient Israelites

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is often framed as an age-old struggle between two distinct peoples, each claiming rightful ownership of the land. Yet this narrative is fundamentally flawed. Modern research reveals that Palestinians are, in large part, the direct descendants of the ancient Israelites. Ironically, Palestinian displacement and suffering in modern times bear a striking resemblance to the biblical persecutions endured by those same Israelites and is akin to a modern Palestinian Exodus.

This essay explores how contemporary Palestinians share genetic, historical, and cultural continuity with the Israelites of antiquity. It examines parallels between past and present oppression—from ancient Egyptian slavery and Babylonian exile to modern occupation and statelessness. In doing so, it questions the moral implications of history repeating itself, where the once-persecuted have now become oppressors. This tragic cycle is encapsulated in what we call The Palestinian Exodus—the ongoing displacement of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland.

Read more of my essays and articles on Palestine here.

Genetic and Historical Continuity

Genetic Lineage

The dominant historical narrative often presents the modern Jewish population as the sole descendants of the ancient Israelites. However, genetic studies indicate that Palestinian Arabs (especially those in the Levant) have also maintained deep ancestral ties to the land. A 2013 study in Genome Biology and Evolution found that “Palestinian Arabs show a high degree of genetic continuity with ancient Canaanite and Israelite populations,” contradicting the notion that they are relative newcomers.

Other research by geneticists, such as Ariella Oppenheim and Eran Elhaik, supports this idea – many Palestinian families have lived in the same villages for hundreds or even thousands of years, far longer than many European Jewish settlers who arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Historical and Religious Continuity

The cultural and religious history of the region also underscores this lineage. The Quran itself acknowledges the ancient Israelite connection to the land, stating:

“O Children of Israel, remember My favor which I bestowed upon you and that I preferred you over all worlds” (Quran 2:47).

Crucially, not all Israelites left the region during the Babylonian exile or the later Roman dispersions. Many remained in Palestine and gradually adopted new faiths—first Christianity and later Islam—while retaining their ancestral identity. In other words, a significant number of today’s Palestinians are not foreigners to the land; they are its indigenous people, as much heirs to the ancient Israelites as Jews are. Historian Shlomo Sand argues in The Invention of the Jewish People that conversion from Judaism to Christianity or Islam did not erase these people’s ancestral identity. Thus, the descendants of biblical Israel remained rooted in the land and now comprise much of the Palestinian population.

Historical Parallels of Exile and Oppression

Throughout history, the people of this land have endured cycles of exile and return. Two traumatic eras—the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE and the Roman conquest of Judea in the 1st century CE—offer especially telling parallels to the Palestinian experience of the 20th century. Both historic catastrophes resulted in mass displacement and attempts to erase a people’s identity, much like the Nakba (Palestinian Exodus) of 1948.

The Babylonian Exile (586 BCE) and the Nakba (1948)

In 586 BCE, King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon invaded the Kingdom of Judah, sacked Jerusalem, and destroyed the First Temple. Tens of thousands of Israelites were taken captive and deported to Babylon, severed from their homeland. The Book of Lamentations vividly describes the sorrow of this exile:

“Judah has gone into exile, suffering and hard servitude; she dwells now among the nations but finds no resting place” (Lamentations 1:3).

This Babylonian policy aimed not only to subdue Judah but to break its spirit—by destroying its cultural center and forcibly assimilating its people.

In 1948, during the establishment of the State of Israel, Palestinians experienced a strikingly similar trauma. The Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) saw some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs expelled or fleeing from their towns and villages amid war and violence. Crucially, this was not merely a byproduct of war but, in many cases, a deliberate campaign. Zionist leaders had devised Plan Dalet, a strategic plan executed in the spring of 1948 to systematically remove Palestinians from areas allotted to the new Jewish state.

In events like the Deir Yassin massacre (April 9, 1948), armed militias terrorized Palestinian civilians, prompting mass flight. Israeli historian Benny Morris documents that Zionist forces were well aware that their actions would create a permanent Jewish majority by preventing displaced Palestinians from returning. These tactics echoed the Babylonian strategy of depopulating conquered lands and destroying symbols of identity.

The parallels between the Babylonian Exile and the Nakba are striking. In both cases, sacred sites and cultural landmarks were destroyed or usurped. The Babylonians razed Solomon’s Temple—the heart of Jewish religious life—while during the Nakba, over 500 Palestinian villages were systematically razed to erase the Palestinian presence. Places of worship and even cemeteries were demolished or repurposed by the new authorities. Both conquerors also engaged in mass expulsion leading to statelessness.

The Babylonians forced the Israelites into exile in foreign lands, and likewise, in 1948, Palestinian families were scattered into refugee camps in neighboring countries (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and beyond), many never to see their homes again. To this day, Palestinians who were displaced—and their millions of descendants born in exile—remain unable to return home due to Israeli laws that deny them the Right of Return. Meanwhile, Jewish immigrants from anywhere in the world are welcomed to Israel, highlighting the intended permanence of Palestinian expulsion. Finally, both instances involved the systematic erasure of identity.

After defeating Judah, the Babylonians tried to assimilate the Jews and blot out their distinct identity. In a parallel move, early Zionist discourse often described Palestine as “a land without a people” to imply that an entire nation did not exist or could be made to disappear. Many Palestinian place names were replaced with Hebrew names, and even the very term “Palestinian” was denied legitimacy in the nascent Israeli national narrative. Such erasure mirrors the exile’s intent to destroy a people’s connection to their land.

The outcomes of these events also resonate with each other. The Israelites exiled to Babylon became a community in diaspora, longing for Zion. Psalm 137 poignantly captures their grief:

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.”

In a similar way, Palestinian refugees have preserved the keys to their long-lost homes and the names of their villages, still dreaming of return decades later. As another biblical lamentation puts it:

“Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to foreigners” (Lamentations 5:2)

A verse that could easily describe the Nakba’s aftermath. An entire Palestinian society was uprooted in 1948. Those who fled or were expelled (roughly 80% of the Arab population of what became Israel) were made stateless virtually overnight. They and their descendants now form one of the world’s largest refugee populations, cared for by organizations like UNRWA yet denied a nation to call their own. Meanwhile, much as the Judeans remained under foreign rule even after some returned from Babylon, Palestinians who stayed in what became Israel or the occupied territories lived under military law or occupation, their rights and identity sharply constrained.

The Roman Conquest (70 CE) and Palestinian Statelessness

History repeated itself six centuries later. In 70 CE, after a Jewish revolt, the Roman Empire besieged and destroyed Jerusalem. The Second Temple—then the epicenter of Jewish religious and cultural life—was set ablaze and reduced to rubble. Contemporary accounts by the historian Flavius Josephus describe this destruction as an intentional act to wipe out Jewish presence and identity in the holy city. The Roman victors killed or enslaved hundreds of thousands of Jews, and exiled many others across the Empire. Those who survived in the region were largely barred from resettling in Jerusalem or rebuilding their nation. In 135 CE, after a later revolt, Emperor Hadrian even renamed the province of Judea to Syria-Palestina (“Palestine”), expressly to obscure Jewish ties to the land. The Jews of Judea were thus not only dispossessed but also had their homeland’s identity reinvented without them. For nearly two millennia after these events, the Jewish people remained largely stateless, a dispersed nation longing for return and frequently persecuted in foreign lands.

The plight of Palestinian Arabs in the 20th century bears unmistakable similarities. After 1948, Palestinians too became a dispersed, stateless people. Just as the Romans prevented Jewish return to Judea, the new State of Israel enacted laws to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes. In 1952, Israel passed a Nationality Law granting automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide (including new immigrants) but excluding Palestinians who had been living in the land just years prior. These policies ensured that Palestinians would remain in exile, much like the edicts of Roman emperors had done to the Jews. Moreover, the process of renaming and reimagining the land recurred: where Hadrian tried to erase Judea by renaming it Palestine, Israeli authorities in the 20th century attempted to erase Palestine by declaring it the land of Israel and renaming Palestinian localities in Hebrew.

Under Roman rule, Jews faced permanent minority status and subjugation in their own country; under modern Israeli rule, Palestinians who live in the occupied West Bank and Gaza have been kept in a condition of permanent occupation with no citizenship in any sovereign state. Large numbers of Palestinians still live in refugee camps or in a legal limbo. Today over 6 million Palestinian refugees are registered with the UN, living in camps or in exile in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond. In the West Bank, Palestinian residents live under military administration, while Jewish settlers in the same territory live under Israeli civil law—a two-tiered system that underscores Palestinian powerlessness. Gaza remains blockaded and isolated. This ongoing statelessness and military occupation strongly echo the situation of Jews after 70 CE—scattered, without a country, and at the mercy of foreign rulers.

The tactics of domination also curiously mirror each other across eras. The Romans and the modern Israeli state both employed classic methods of settler-colonialism to secure their conquests. Both destroyed indigenous holy sites (the Romans destroyed the Second Temple; Israeli forces have, in various wars and conflicts, damaged or repurposed many mosques, churches, and cemeteries). Both renamed cities and regions to cement their claims (Jerusalem was refounded as Aelia Capitolina and Judea as Palestina; in the 20th century, many Palestinian villages were renamed or rebuilt as Jewish towns with new names). Both brought in new populations to settle the land (Romans settled their veterans and citizens in former Jewish areas; Israel encouraged and facilitated Jewish immigration from Europe, Asia, and Africa to settle in place of displaced Palestinians). And crucially, both prevented the return of those displaced (Roman law barred exiled Jews from returning to Jerusalem; Israel’s policies and military might have kept Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes since 1948).

These parallel strategies are not coincidental; they reflect a continuity of imperial logic. As one scholar put it, the Palestinian Nakba was not just a singular event but “an ongoing process” of displacement and replacement—much as Roman rule in Judea was part of a long-term strategy to erase an indigenous people and supplant them.

Colonialism and the Question of Belonging

The age of European colonialism further shaped these dynamics by reframing who “belongs” to the land and who doesn’t. Western colonial powers, through their policies and narratives, set the stage for The Palestinian Exodus long before 1948. They did so not just with guns and laws, but with ideas—by constructing a story in which the indigenous Palestinians were painted as people with no legitimate claim to their own home.

The British Mandate (1917–1948)

After World War I, Britain took control of Palestine and pledged in the 1917 Balfour Declaration to establish a “national home for the Jewish people” there. This pledge was made without consulting the land’s 90% Arab majority. The declaration did state that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” referring to those same Arabs. In practice, however, British policy heavily favored the Zionist movement and systematically ignored Palestinian rights .

Britain treated Palestine as if it were an empty land or at least an empty stage awaiting a new nation. This reinforced the myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land,” a phrase popular in Zionist discourse. The colonial administration facilitated Jewish immigration and land purchases, often at the expense of Palestinian Arabs. Palestinian resistance to these developments was frequently suppressed or criminalized.

For example, when Palestinians revolted in 1936–1939 to demand a halt to mass Jewish immigration and the sale of their lands, the British crushed the uprising with brutal force . Thousands of Palestinians were killed or imprisoned, and many leaders were exiled, leaving the Palestinian community politically weakened by the time the pivotal year 1948 arrived. By the end of the Mandate, Britain withdrew and left the fate of Palestine to the newly passed UN Partition Plan of 1947. That plan allotted 56% of Palestine to a future Jewish state, even though Jews comprised only about one-third of the population and owned less than 10% of the land. The Palestinian Arabs were allocated the remaining fragments, with no plan for a viable contiguous state. This partition decision, influenced by colonial powers and coming on the heels of Palestinian leadership being decimated, all but ensured conflict. Indeed, Zionist militias seized upon the partition’s passage as a green light; in the months before and after Israel’s declaration of independence, they launched offensives that emptied numerous towns and villages of their Arab inhabitants. Thus, the British Mandate’s colonial policies directly paved the way for the dispossession of Palestinians, making The Palestinian Exodus possible.

Orientalism – Framing Natives as Foreigners

Alongside concrete policies, Western colonialism wielded Orientalist narratives to justify what was happening. Orientalism, as scholar Edward Said described, is a framework that portrays Eastern peoples as backward, uncivilized, and inherently different—often to rationalize imperial domination. In the case of Palestine, Orientalist thinking cast the native Palestinians as undeserving of sovereignty or even as interlopers on their own land. A few key tropes emerged:

• “Generic” Arabs: Western narratives often reduced the Palestinian people to generic “Arabs” who could supposedly move anywhere in the vast Middle East and be at home. This framing ignored the fact that Palestinian Arabs have unique local roots, including descent from ancient Canaanites and Israelites, not simply a recent arrival from the Arabian Peninsula. By labeling Palestinians as indistinguishable from other Arabs, the narrative suggested that they didn’t really belong in Palestine (implying they could or should just relocate to Arab countries), which undermined their claims to specific villages and fields their families had tended for generations.
• Zionist Settlers as “Returning” Natives: Conversely, Zionist immigrants—mostly European Jews—were depicted in Western discourse not as colonizers but as people “returning home” to their biblical homeland. The fact that these immigrants were often coming to a land where they had no recent ancestors was downplayed; what mattered was the ancient connection of Jews to the Holy Land. Framing Jewish immigration as a lawful return helped paint the Palestinians as obstacles to a rightful restoration, rather than as victims of colonialism. The immense suffering Jews endured in Europe (from pogroms to the Holocaust) was used to morally justify giving them someone else’s land as refuge – even though Palestinians had played no part in causing that suffering.
• Portraying Palestinians as Irrationally Violent: Any resistance by Palestinians was routinely depicted as irrational religious fanaticism or barbaric violence. During the Arab Revolt of the 1930s, and later during uprisings like the First Intifada (1987) and beyond, Palestinians were often branded in the Western media as inherently violent or “terrorists,” while Jewish paramilitary groups were seen as freedom fighters building a nation. This double standard dehumanized Palestinian grievances. It suggested that Palestinians were simply opposed to modernity or driven by hate, rather than engaged in a legitimate struggle against dispossession.

These Orientalist narratives had real consequences. They influenced international response to The Palestinian Exodus in 1948 and after. Myths were circulated that Palestinians left their homes on their own accord or at the orders of Arab leaders (“voluntary flight”), shifting blame onto the victims rather than the militias that expelled them. Western powers like Britain and the United States, imbibing some of these biases, were quick to recognize Israel’s claims but showed little support for Palestinian refugees’ right to return. In the following decades, Israeli leaders openly denied the very existence of a distinct Palestinian people. Golda Meir famously said “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people” (London Sunday Times, 1969), a claim that exemplifies the extreme end of the Orientalist erasure. By denying Palestinian identity and history, it became easier for the world to accept their dispossession as an unavoidable, even nonexistent, problem.

Dismantling the Colonial Myth

Understanding the role of colonialism is key to reframing the narrative of belonging. Just as the Roman renaming of Judea as Palestine was an attempt to rewrite history, the British and Zionist portrayal of Palestine as an empty land or of Palestinians as interchangeable Arabs was a calculated distortion. These narratives must be challenged if there is to be a just solution. The Palestinian Exodus was not an unfortunate accident of history—it was the direct result of a colonial project of displacement. Recognizing this fact is the first step toward justice.

Only by dismantling the myths that Palestinians “have no real ties to the land” or that their expulsion was merely an inevitable tragedy can the world begin to hold the correct parties accountable and insist on the rights of those displaced. In short, the story of who belongs in Palestine has long been manipulated by empire and ideology. A clean and honest recounting of history shows that Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants, and their mass exile was a deliberate injustice, not a simple twist of fate.

The “Chosen People” and the Moral Paradox

The historical and political parallels are troubling on their own, but they lead to a deeper moral paradox at the heart of the conflict. The Jewish people’s identity is deeply intertwined with narratives of exodus, exile, and persecution. Central to Jewish theology is the notion of being a “Chosen People,” selected by God for a mission of ethical living. This chosenness, as taught in the Hebrew Bible, was never about privilege to oppress others; it was about exemplifying justice and righteousness. Over and over, the Torah commands the Israelites to remember their own suffering and therefore to treat others with compassion.

Jewish Ethical Teachings

Justice (tzedek) is at the core of Jewish law and tradition. The Torah explicitly instructs the Israelites to care for the stranger and the oppressed, recalling that the Israelites themselves were strangers in Egypt.

“You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the soul of a stranger, since you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9),

is one such command repeated in various forms throughout Exodus and Deuteronomy. This refrain is not merely historical recollection; it establishes a moral principle that past suffering should translate into empathy toward others. The law of Moses even mandates;

“You shall have one law for the stranger and the native alike” (Leviticus 24:22),

insisting on equality before the law regardless of ethnicity or origin. And the emphatic cry;

“Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20),

underlines that justice is an absolute and relentless obligation. Additionally, Jewish tradition outside the Torah reinforces these values. The Talmud, for instance, teaches the Golden Rule in the story of Rabbi Hillel:

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation” (Talmud, Shabbat 31a).

Another Talmudic passage pointedly warns against abusing others and invoking one’s own suffering as excuse:

“Do not oppress the stranger… Do not repay suffering with suffering” (paraphrase of Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b).

In essence, Jewish ethics hold that experiencing injustice should instill a duty to prevent injustice, not a license to inflict it.

The Contradiction in Reality

Despite these profound teachings, the reality of how the State of Israel has treated Palestinians stands in stark contradiction. The once-oppressed have, in many ways, become the oppressors. Consider some stark examples:

• In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian Arabs live under military rule and law, while Israeli settlers in those same areas live under Israel’s civil law and protection. Two peoples reside on the same land but under very different legal systems solely due to ethnicity, a situation hard to square with the Torah’s insistence on one law for stranger and native.
• Over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in 1948, losing their homes and citizenship. Israeli law prevents these Palestinians (and their millions of descendants) from returning to their lands, yet it guarantees automatic citizenship to any Jewish person from anywhere in the world. In effect, a Jewish family with no recent connection to Palestine can emigrate from, say, Russia or America and often even claim property in Israel, while a Palestinian family that lived in Jaffa or Haifa for centuries cannot even set foot there. This selective justice violates the biblical ethos of remembering the stranger.
• Since 1967, Israel has demolished thousands of Palestinian homes and confiscated land to build Jewish settlements, especially in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Palestinian families often find themselves evicted or their homes torn down (sometimes under the pretext of lacking a building permit that the occupation government rarely grants). Resources like water are unequally allocated, and movement is restricted by checkpoints and walls. These actions keep Palestinians economically disadvantaged and constantly insecure. Such systemic oppression calls to mind the very scenarios Jewish people endured historically—ghettos, discriminatory laws, and forced displacement—only now Palestinians are on the receiving end.

The irony is profound. A people that for centuries prayed to return to Zion, that suffered discrimination, pogroms, and ultimately genocide in the Holocaust, now in their own sovereign state enforce segregation and expulsion on another people. The Jewish experience of exile—captured in verses like “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept…”—is now mirrored by Palestinian refugees in camps who weep for their lost villages. History has come full circle, in the darkest of ways. It raises a haunting question: How can those who know the pain of statelessness so deeply impose that very pain on others?

Many Jews, in Israel and abroad, grapple with this moral paradox. There are those who actively oppose the occupation and advocate for Palestinian rights, often invoking Jewish values as their motive. Even some of the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants have raised their voices. In 2014, for example, over 300 Holocaust survivors and descendants published an open letter during the Gaza conflict, condemning what they called the “extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians” in Israel and comparing the Israeli government’s actions to some of the worst regimes in history. Their plea was a poignant reminder that Jewish history, of all histories, teaches the evil of turning a people into pariahs.

Who is the Stranger Now?

In Jewish theology, “the stranger” (Hebrew: ger) in your midst was typically understood to mean a foreigner living among Israelites – someone vulnerable, with no family clan to protect them, toward whom Israelites bore a special responsibility. Today, in the land of Israel/Palestine, the Palestinians have become the stranger – an indigenous people now treated as outsiders in their own home. They live as non-citizens under Israeli control or as second-class citizens in a state defined as Jewish. They are the ones without a state, without an army, without equal rights – effectively guests or intruders in the eyes of the laws that govern them.

This inversion poses a theological and moral challenge: the command “Love ye therefore the stranger” applies most of all to how the Jewish state treats the Palestinian people now. As one early rabbinic teaching from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) reminds us, “The world is sustained by three things: justice, truth, and peace” .

Without justice for Palestinians, there can be no truth or peace in the Holy Land. And without truth about the history and current reality, there can be no genuine peace. Thus, the cycle of oppression must be broken not only for the sake of Palestinians’ rights, but for the sake of Judaism’s moral integrity and the ethical legacy of the Jewish people itself.

The moral test here extends beyond Judaism. It is a test for humanity at large – whether we are able to apply principles of justice consistently, or whether we allow identity and power to determine whose suffering counts. As the Quran, part of the same Abrahamic tradition, wisely counsels:

“Do not let hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Be just; that is nearer to righteousness” (Quran 5:8).

In other words, no amount of past persecution or present animosity can justify doing injustice to another. True righteousness is impartial.

If Jewish history teaches anything, it is that exile and disenfranchisement are terrible injustices that deserve remedy. Jewish people rightly insisted that the world recognize their statelessness as untenable and their historical connection to Israel as real. That same understanding must now be extended to the Palestinians. Their ongoing exile is no more acceptable than the Jewish exile was. To turn a blind eye to one people’s suffering because of the past suffering of another is a betrayal of the very lessons history gives us. Instead, past suffering should sensitize us to injustice, wherever it occurs. The Palestinian Exodus, when seen through this lens, is a moral failure that demands urgent correction. It is not just a tragedy for Palestinians; it is a profound challenge to the ethical conscience of Israel, of the Jewish people, and indeed of anyone who believes in justice.

An Ancient Story in the Modern World

History has come full circle in the land of Palestine. The Israelites, once a persecuted people exiled by empire after empire, have descendants who today hold power in that land and who now perpetrate a form of exile on the Palestinians. The Palestinians, far from being foreign invaders or recent interlopers, are largely the progeny of the ancient inhabitants of the same land – including Israelites – who over centuries embraced new religions but never left their home.

This essay has traced the deep connections between Palestinians and the ancient Israelites and highlighted the painful irony of their entwined histories. We saw that genetic and historical evidence debunks the myth that Palestinians have no claims to the land of Israel; in fact, they share the oldest claims. We examined how the traumatic expulsions of the past, from Babylon to Rome, find echoes in the Nakba and today’s refugee crisis. We explored how colonialism and Orientalist narratives distorted the story, painting natives as foreigners. And we confronted the moral and theological paradox that arises when the oppressed become oppressors, violating the core teachings of their own heritage.

The Palestinian Exodus is not merely a distant historical event; it is an ongoing reality. It echoes the Bible’s oldest themes of exile and longing for home. If justice is to be served in this land, it cannot be one-sided. It must embrace all who belong to the land, not just those with military or political power. Peace and reconciliation cannot be built on erasure and denial; they must be built on truth and restoration. Recognizing Palestinians as a people with equal claim to humanity and history is not a negation of Jewish history – it is, in fact, a fulfillment of the ethical mandate that history imposes on all of us.

Breaking the cycle of oppression will require courage and honesty. It means acknowledging the injustices of 1948 and after, just as the world acknowledged earlier injustices against Jews. It means affirming that no people’s suffering, no matter how profound, justifies inflicting suffering on another. Only by embracing the full historical truth can Israelis and Palestinians finally step out of the long shadow of exile and persecution. In the end, justice must be for all the children of that land. Only then can the promise—echoed in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions alike—of turning swords into plowshares and achieving a just peace become attainable reality.

The Torah commands it. The Talmud reinforces it. History demands it.

References

• Elhaik, E. (2013). Genome Biology and Evolution – study on genetics of Middle Eastern populations.
• Haber, M. et al. (2017). American Journal of Human Genetics – genetic continuity of Levantine populations.
• Morris, B. (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press.
• Pappé, I. (2006). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications.
• Sand, S. (2009). The Invention of the Jewish People. Verso Books.
• Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
• Khalidi, W. (1992). All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated in 1948. Institute for Palestine Studies.
• Masalha, N. (2012). The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. Zed Books.
• B’Tselem (2022). Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories – Data on demolitions and settlements.
• ICAHD (2023). Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions – Report on home demolitions in Palestine.
• UNRWA (2023). United Nations Relief and Works Agency – Statistics on Palestinian refugees and displacement.
• (Biblical and Quranic citations are from the Tanakh and Quran as indicated in the text. Talmudic citations (Shabbat 31a, Bava Metzia 59b) are from the Babylonian Talmud.)

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