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A Palestinian Jew is a Jewish inhabitant of Palestine throughout certain periods of Middle Eastern history.
After the modern State of Israel was born, nearly all native Palestinian Jews became citizens of Israel, and the term "Palestinian Jews" largely fell into disuse. It is still used in contexts where it is necessary to distinguish from Muslim, Christian or Druze Palestinians who are together termed "Palestinian Arabs". (See also Arab Israelis). Jews from Arab lands are today typically not termed Arab Jews, so "Palestinian Arab" today also implies the exclusion of Palestinian Jews.
The Palestinian National Covenant in 1968 defined a Jew as a Palestinian only if their family (through the male line) had resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist migrations (considered to have started in 1917). While a number of Jews fall into this category, most tend to identify as Israelis.
Palestinians themselves may be either Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Druze, or other, although the large majority are Muslim, with a Christian minority.
Part of the difficulty of describing the Jews of Palestine is the wave of renaming over the past few decades. Some advocates want to blur or emphasize distinctions.
Today Palestinians are regarded to fall into 2 groups that are for the most part assumed to be mutually exclusive: Jews and Arabs. Arabs, however, may be of any religion, including most numerously Arab Muslims, then Arab Christians, and various others, including Arab Jews. Likewise, Israelis are also regarded to fall into the same 2 categories. Israeli Jews who comprise the majority of the country, however, hail from dozens of countries around the world and may be of any of the many Jewish ethnic backgrounds, including German Jews, Palestinian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Yemenite Jews, Indian Jews, Chinese Jews, Ethiopian Jews. Only the minority of Israelis that are both Arab and non-Jewish are deemed Israeli Arabs.
In the same fashion, many advocates wish the term "Palestinian" to be used exclusively for non-Jewish Palestinians, and then give Palestinian synonymity with Arab (that is, Arab as understood to the exclusion of Jews from Arab countries).
This creates a dichotomy between "Israelis" (excluding Arabs, and the term "Arab" itself excluding Arab Jews) vs. "Palestinians" (excluding Palestinian Jews). The best known usage is the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict".
During the times of the British Mandate of Palestine, all residents of the Mandate were referred to as 'Palestinian' officially. However, the Arab residents of the Mandate, who largely identified with the Arab cause, and saw themselves as having a different national identity, viewed the term "Palestinian" as a derogatory colonialist British term, designed to erase their Arab identity. This sentiment was especially strong during the 30s and early 40s, when the idea of Greater Syria was viewed positively by the Arab of the Levant, among them the Palestinian Arabs.
Uri Davis, an Israeli citizen, who lives in the Arab town of Sakhnin, and is an observer-member in the Palestine National Council identifies himself as an "anti-Zionist Palestinian Jew".[1][2]
Davis' use of the term is best exemplified by his explanation that: "I don’t describe myself as a Palestinian Jew, I actually happen to be a Palestinian Jew, I was born in Jerusalem in 1943 in a country called Palestine and the title of my birth certificate is ‘Government of Palestine’. That is neither here nor there, though. It is significant only in a political context in which I am situated, and the political context that is relevant to my work, my advocacy of a critique of Zionism. I’m an anti-Zionist Jew."[2]
Elias Davidson, another critic of Zionism, also defines himself as a Palestinian Jew in that he was born of Jewish parents at the time of the British Mandate. [citation needed]
In an interview with Ari Shavit, Edward Said, whose religious background is actually Protestant said, "I'm a Jewish-Palestinian", explaining that he is the last and "only true follower of Adorno.[3]
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