What is the origin of the Palestinians?

Answer 1

The Palestinians are the result of the fracturing of the Levantine Arab identity in the 20th century according to the lines drawn by the British and French when colonizing the Levant. The Levantine Arab identity came from the descendants a number of various Canaanite, Phoenician, Jewish, Armenian, and Arab peoples who underwent a collective process of Arabization in the Southern Levant during the 12th-14th centuries.

More Clarity on Arabization
Arabs, Turks, Magyars (Hungarians), and numerous other ethnic groups are not actually homogenous. They are composed of two historical groups that intermarried and created a unified culture. In the Arab case, Arab nomads from Arabia conquered the Levant region and brought it under their rule. During that period, those Levantines who converted to Islam began to take on the same mannerisms as the foreign Arabs who had conquered them. They began to speak the same language, dress in the same clothes, and believe in the same general ideologies. This process is well-documented by Arabs and is called Arabization or Ta3arib. This is why the Jews and the Christians of the Upper Middle East (the Levant and Mesopotamia) often do not consider themselves Arabs. Unlike their Levantine brothers whose conversion to Islam made them more susceptible to Arabization, they retained their pre-Arabized ethnic sensibility. Therefore, although Palestinians call themselves Arabs, the majority do not and should not have lineages that go back to Arabia, but to pre-Arab ancestors in the Levant region, likely Jews, Christians, and Pagans in the Byzantine Empire.

(The Turks "Turk-ified" the formerly Byzantine population of central Anatolia and most of modern Turkey and had some effect elsewhere in the Balkans. The Magyars made the sedentary population of the Hungarian Empire into Hungarians through conversion to the Catholic Church and the proliferation of the Hungarian Language and customs.)