The Hanover Institute for Public Policy
Data Reportby The Hanover InstituteNovember 9, 2026Updated November 10, 2026

Are Palestinians Indigenous to the land?

The 1931 census counted 759,712 Moslems among 1,035,821 residents; two founding texts claim the same land as a people’s birthplace.

IndigeneityPalestiniansILO Convention 169Census of PalestineIsrael
Are Palestinians Indigenous to the land?

The Government of Palestine’s census of 18 November 1931 counted 1,035,821 residents. Of these, 851,110, or about 82%, were Moslems or Christians, so the population living in the land under the Mandate was overwhelmingly Moslem and Christian, although the census classified people by religion and never by nationality. The Palestine National Council has claimed the land as the birthplace of the Palestinian Arab people in its 1968 Charter and its 1988 Declaration of Independence. That is the kind of self-identification Article 1 of ILO Convention No. 169 (1989) calls “a fundamental criterion,” although the Convention itself names no people. The question’s definite article is where the record divides: Israel’s 1948 founding declaration opens on the same land as “the birthplace of the Jewish people,” and Britain’s 1937 Royal Commission described “two national communities” living there.

Key Findings

  • The Government of Palestine’s 1931 census counted 759,712 Moslems, 174,610 Jews and 91,398 Christians among 1,035,821 residents, classified by religion rather than nationality (Government of Palestine, 1932).
  • Article 1 of ILO Convention No. 169 defines indigenous peoples by three tests: descent from the populations present “at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present State boundaries,” retained institutions, and self-identification as “a fundamental criterion.” It designates no named people (International Labour Organization, 1989).
  • The Palestine National Council’s 1968 Charter calls Palestine “the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people.” Its Declaration of 15 November 1988 says the Palestinian Arab people was “brought forth” in the land (Palestine National Council, 1968; Palestine National Council, 1988).
  • Israel’s Declaration of 14 May 1948 opens on the land as “the birthplace of the Jewish people” (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948). Britain’s Royal Commission had described “two national communities” there in 1937 (Palestine Royal Commission, 1937).
  • Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, publishing as a party to the conflict, recorded about 2.130 million Arabs in September 2025. That is 21.5% of the 9.888 million residents in its two population groups (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025).

Are Palestinians the land’s indigenous people, on the record?

The Government of Palestine’s census, taken at midnight on 18 November 1931, counted 759,712 Moslems among 1,035,821 residents, so the people living in the land under the Mandate were predominantly Moslem. Those Arab residents fall within the residence definition the Palestine National Council later adopted in its 1968 Charter, which counts as Palestinian the Arab nationals who “normally resided in Palestine” until 1947.

The same tables record 174,610 Jews, 91,398 Christians, 9,148 Druses, 350 Bahais, 182 Samaritans and 421 people of no religion. E. Mills, the Superintendent of Census, published these figures in 1932 as preliminary results. He reserved “discussion of the statistics” for the General Census Report of 1933.

The census has no “Arab” or “Palestinian” column. Moslems and Christians together numbered 851,110, about 82% of the 1,035,821 total. Reading that sum, or most of it together with the Druses, as the Arab population is a derivation from the religious tables and not a figure the census prints.

On its plainest form, then, the claim holds against the official count. The land’s population before 1948 was predominantly Moslem and Christian, and on that population the Palestine National Council later built its definition of who is Palestinian.

The same count also bounds the claim in two ways. It recorded 174,610 Jews, 16.9% of the same 1,035,821 total, so more than one community was resident on the census night. The census also records only residence on one night in November 1931. The treaty definition of indigenous peoples asks something different. Article 1 of ILO Convention No. 169 (International Labour Organization, 1989) asks about descent from the populations present “at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present State boundaries,” and about self-identification. The Convention designates no group by name.

The census is therefore one dated snapshot of a Palestinian presence in the land. It is strong evidence of who lived there in 1931 and silent on how far back each community’s ancestry runs.

Source: Government of Palestine, 1932, Census of Palestine 1931 (official record).

Who calls Palestinians indigenous, and since when?

The Palestine National Council declared in its Charter of July 1968 that “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people.” Article 4 adds that Palestinian identity “is a genuine, essential, and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children.” The Charter was revised at the Council’s fourth session in Cairo, and it is the PLO’s own dated self-identification as a people of the land.

The Charter defines membership by residence. Article 5 reads: “The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there.” Article 7 calls a Palestinian “material, spiritual, and historical connection with Palestine” one of the “indisputable facts.” Article 20 pairs that assertion with a denial: “Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood.”

The Council restated the claim of origin at its session in Algiers on 15 November 1988. In the English translation the United Nations circulated, the Declaration of Independence opens: “On the same terrain as God’s apostolic missions to mankind and in the land of Palestine was the Palestinian Arab people brought forth.” It describes “an organic, indissoluble and unbroken relationship among people, land and history.” It calls the phrase “a land without a people” a “falsehood.” It rests the new state on “the natural, historical and legal right of the Palestinian Arab people to its homeland, Palestine” (Palestine National Council, 1988).

These two instruments supply what Article 1(2) of ILO Convention No. 169 treats as “a fundamental criterion”: self-identification. They are dated, signed by a named body and specific about the land. Their claim of long residence is also consistent with the 1931 census, which counted a predominantly Moslem and Christian population.

The claim also circulates outside the PLO’s instruments. Juan Cole, a historian, published a post on his Informed Comment site in May 2023 under a headline opening “Yes, Mr. DeSantis, Palestinians are Indigenous.”

Source: Government of Palestine, 1932; Palestine Royal Commission, 1937; Provisional Government of Israel, 1948; Palestine National Council, 1968 and 1988; International Labour Organization, 1989.

Who was farming the land when Zionist colonies began?

Ben-Bassat’s 2009 peer-reviewed study covers the six Judean colonies founded southeast of Jaffa during the first aliyah, 1882 to 1903. It places those colonies beside neighbouring Arab villages that supplied their seasonal labour and with which they disputed property boundaries and grazing. The study draws on Ottoman records, the Rothschild Bank Archive and the colonies’ own “logbooks, personal letters, receipts, contracts, maps, and pictures.”

On labour, Ben-Bassat writes that “economic connections with the Arab population predominantly revolved around the employment of low-wage day workers, especially during the high agricultural seasons.” He adds that this arrangement “according to some indications, created pockets of resentment among the Arab workers.” In the colonies it ran, the Rothschild administration “set the ratio between Jewish and Arab workers, fixed the workers’ wages,” and “negotiated the purchase of land from local landowners.” Neal’s 1995 honors thesis at Illinois Wesleyan University is undergraduate work that draws on earlier scholarship rather than archives. Reports citing it carry a figure that some early colonies employed five to ten times as many Palestinian as Jewish workers. The deposited scan’s text layer is too degraded to confirm that passage.

On friction, Ben-Bassat (2009) records that “massive clashes with neighboring Arab villagers were not common, but they did occur from time to time” at Gederah, Rehovot and Qastina, “culminating in injuries and even deaths.” He writes that “the immediate causes were generally disputes over property boundaries and grazing.” The colonies financed one another’s lawsuits, including a trial Rehovot brought against the village of Zarnuqa after “a severe clash between them sparked by a dispute over grazing rights.”

The record also shows a turn toward exclusion. Gederah’s managing committee decided in 1903 to stop leasing land to Arabs, and “similar decisions were approved by Rehovot and Rishon le-Zion around that time.” Ben-Bassat reports the stated reason as the colonists’ own claim of “widespread theft and damage to property in the colonies claimed to have been committed by the Arab rural population.” Four years earlier, in 1899, Baron Edmond de Rothschild had expressed the wish to see the region between Eqron and Rishon le-Zion “cultivated by Jewish workers and blooming.”

The study is bounded. It covers one region and carries no rate, share or incident count. Within that region, its sources describe an established Arab rural population working, grazing and litigating over land that the early colonies were settling.

What must a people show to count as indigenous?

Article 1(1)(b) of ILO Convention No. 169, adopted in Geneva on 27 June 1989, covers peoples who descend “from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present State boundaries.” Those peoples must also retain “some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.”

Article 1(2) adds the third test: “Self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions of this Convention apply.” A separate limb, Article 1(1)(a), covers “tribal peoples” whose social, cultural and economic conditions distinguish them from the rest of the national community. Article 1(3) limits the reach of the whole definition: the Convention’s use of the term “peoples” “shall not be construed as having any implications as regards the rights which may attach to the term under international law.”

The text does not ask which people arrived first. It asks about descent from whoever lived in the land at one of three moments: a conquest, a colonisation, or the establishment of present state boundaries. These alternatives are joined by “or,” and the Convention does not say which moment governs when they point to different populations. For a land that has seen several conquests, a colonisation movement contested as such, and boundaries drawn in 1922, 1948 and 1967, the chosen moment largely decides which population the descent test selects.

The retained-institutions test is also open-ended. “Some or all” sets no minimum, and the text gives no list of qualifying institutions.

The Convention entered into force on 5 September 1991. Under Article 38 it binds only the states that ratify it, and under Article 44 the English and French texts are equally authoritative. It is a definition, not a finding. Of its three tests, self-identification is the one both Palestinian instruments of 1968 and 1988 plainly supply. The descent test turns on the reference moment that later sections show each side placing differently.

How did Britain’s 1937 inquiry describe the land’s two communities?

The Palestine Royal Commission was the British government’s own commissioned review of its Mandate. Its six members signed their report on 22 June 1937, and in Chapter XX, paragraph 5, they wrote: “An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.” The report was presented to Parliament in July 1937 as Command Paper 5479.

The next sentence gives sizes: “About 1,000,000 Arabs are in strife, open or latent, with some 400,000 Jews.” Both figures are the Commission’s own rounded characterisation inside an argumentative passage. Neither is an enumeration, and neither is comparable with the 1931 census tables.

The Commission’s framing recurs in other passages. Chapter V, paragraph 47, describes the Government of Palestine as “poised as it is above two irreconcilable communities, compelled to follow a path between them marked out by an elaborate, yet not very lucid, legal instrument.” Chapter XX, paragraph 17, states the central conclusion: “we cannot, in Palestine as it now is, both concede the Arab claim to self-government and secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home.” Partition followed as the remedy. Chapter XXII calls it “the only method we are able to propose for dealing with the root of the trouble.”

The inquiry’s evidence base is on record. A Royal Warrant of 7 August 1936 set it up under Earl Peel. It heard 60 witnesses at 30 public sessions and 53 witnesses at 40 private sessions, all in Jerusalem, from November 1936.

The Commission is the Mandatory power assessing its own obligations, so its description is a British government finding and not a third-party one. Its vocabulary is that of nationality. It names an “Arab claim to self-government” and a “Jewish National Home,” and it treats both communities as national claimants within the same territory. Read against the question, the record of 1937 concedes the Arab community’s majority and its claim to self-government. It describes that community as one of two national communities in the land, not as the land’s sole people.

Does Israel’s founding text claim the land as another people’s birthplace?

The Provisional Government of Israel’s Declaration of 14 May 1948 opens, in the Avalon Project’s English text, on the sentence “ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - The Land of Israel] was the birthplace of the Jewish people.” It is a founding claim of origin in the same land the Palestine National Council later declared the Palestinian Arab people’s birthplace.

The Declaration is a party’s own founding text, and its recitals are its own historical narrative. They run from the First Zionist Congress of 1897, convened by Theodor Herzl, through the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 and the League of Nations Mandate. They end with the UN General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947, whose recognition the Declaration calls “irrevocable.” It was signed by the 37 members of the People’s Council, David Ben-Gurion first.

The same text addresses the land’s Arab population directly. The Knesset’s English version appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” It pledges “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes the same sentence with “inhabitants” in place of “citizens.” Both are translations of the Hebrew original.

Set beside the Palestinian instruments, the two founding texts make mirror claims. The 1988 Declaration says the Palestinian Arab people was “brought forth” in the land. The 1948 Declaration says the Jewish people was born there. Article 20 of the 1968 Charter states that “Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality.” Article 6 of the same Charter treats as Palestinians only “the Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion,” a date it does not fix.

Measured against Article 1(2) of ILO Convention No. 169, each text is a dated self-identification by a body speaking for a people, and each ties that people’s origin to the same territory. The criterion the Convention calls fundamental is therefore met on both sides. That is why the definite article in the question, “the” indigenous people, is where the claims part.

How many Arab residents does Israel’s own bureau count today?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted about 2.130 million Arabs on the eve of Rosh Hashana 5786, in September 2025. This is its own official estimate, published by a party to the conflict, inside a total of 10.148 million residents that includes East Jerusalem residents and Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

The same release counts about 7.758 million Jews and others. The two named groups sum to 9.888 million, and the Bureau’s published shares of 21.5% Arabs and 78.5% Jews and others are shares of that 9.888 million. The remaining roughly 260,000 people are foreign residents, whom the Bureau includes in the total but places outside both groups. Against the full 10.148 million, the 2.130 million Arabs are 21.0%.

An earlier release confirms the order of magnitude. On the eve of Independence Day 2025, the Bureau’s own preliminary figures counted 2.114 million Arabs, 20.9% of a population of 10.094 million (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025). That release defines “Arabs” as Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze. It notes that its figures rest on the 2022 census and are current to the end of May 2025.

The scope of the count matters for the question. The Bureau counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total. Palestinians in Gaza and in the rest of the West Bank fall outside it. The 2.130 million figure is therefore the Arab population resident inside the Bureau’s boundaries, the community that stayed or was born within the state after 1948. It is not a count of all Palestinians.

The Bureau’s categories are population groups defined by religion and community. As in the 1931 census, they record presence on a reference date and not descent.

Source: Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025, Rosh Hashana 5786 release (official record of a party to the conflict).

Where do scholars divide on calling Palestinians indigenous?

Ukashi argued in Peace and Conflict Studies in May 2018 for reconsidering Zionism as an Indigenous emancipation movement and against its characterisation as imperial or settler-colonial. The essay passed double-blind peer review but is openly argumentative: its author states his conclusion in the introduction and presents the article as an intervention in a live dispute.

Ukashi’s position bears on the descent test in Article 1(1)(b) of ILO Convention No. 169. Treating Jews as an indigenous people returning to the land moves the relevant reference point back before the modern settlement. On that reading, the Zionist movement is not the “colonisation” from which indigeneity is measured. The argument is developed at greater length in the debate over whether Zionism is an indigenous rights movement.

Dowty published an essay for the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington on 10 November 2022 under the title “Is Israel a settler colonial state?” It is signed faculty commentary, not peer-reviewed. In it, Dowty, an Israel Studies scholar, argues against the settler-colonial characterisation of Israel. That characterisation is the frame on which much of the case for Palestinian indigeneity rests, because it identifies Zionist settlement as the colonisation the treaty’s descent test refers to. Dowty’s essay contests the same reference point Ukashi’s does, from the direction of the settler-colonial model rather than of indigeneity.

On the other side, Cole’s May 2023 post on Informed Comment asserts Palestinian indigeneity outright. It rests on the descent and continuity of the land’s Arab population, the reading under which the 1931 census population is the one the descent test selects.

The division is not over self-identification. Both peoples supply that test in dated founding texts, as the 1948 and 1988 declarations show. Nor is it over the retained-institutions test, which neither side’s named argument disputes. The division concerns which moment in the land’s history counts as the “conquest or colonisation” that fixes the descent baseline. Ukashi and Dowty place Zionism outside that category. Cole places the Arab population inside the line of descent. The Convention’s text, which lists the three moments as alternatives, does not choose between them.

Methodology and limitations

The evidence comes from four types of source, each labelled where it is used.

  • Official or primary records: the Government of Palestine’s 1931 census, published in 1932; the Palestine Royal Commission’s report, Cmd. 5479; Israel’s 1948 Declaration; the Palestine National Council’s 1968 Charter and 1988 Declaration; and two 2025 releases of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. The last five of these are a party’s own statements or counts.
  • Treaty text: Article 1 of ILO Convention No. 169, read in the reproduction published by the UN human rights office.
  • Peer-reviewed research: Ben-Bassat (2009), archive-based social history, and Ukashi (2018), an interpretive essay.
  • Commentary that is not peer-reviewed: Neal (1995), an undergraduate thesis; Dowty (2022), an academic centre essay; and Cole (2023), web commentary.

The 1931 census. The figures are preliminary tables, read from a scanned volume through OCR. A figure was used only where the male and female counts reproduced the printed total. The census classifies by religion, so any Arab total is a derivation.

The Royal Commission. Its population figures of about 1,000,000 Arabs and some 400,000 Jews are rounded characterisations, not counts. Quotations are cited by chapter and paragraph, because page numbering differs across editions.

Neal (1995). The worker ratio is carried as a figure reported from the thesis. The deposited scan’s text layer is partial and could not confirm it.

The Palestinian instruments. The Charter is quoted in the Avalon Project’s English translation of the July 1968 text. Later PNC sessions in 1996 and 1998 took up the Charter, and the articles are quoted as adopted in 1968. The 1988 Declaration is quoted in the UN-circulated translation, whose wording, “brought forth,” differs from another English rendering in circulation.

Israel’s 1948 Declaration. The opening sentence is quoted from the Avalon text, and the appeal and equality clauses from the Knesset text.

The Bureau’s releases. Percentages are stated only against their own bases, and the Independence Day figures are preliminary.

What the records measure. Census and registry records measure residence on a dated night. None of them measures descent, the variable Article 1(1)(b) turns on.

Conclusion

So are Palestinians the indigenous people of the land? On the record, they are a people with a documented majority presence there and a dated self-identification as its natives. The record also places a second people claiming birth in the same land beside them.

The portrait is consistent across every source read. In 1931 the Government of Palestine counted 759,712 Moslems among 1,035,821 residents. The Palestine National Council claimed the land as the Palestinian Arab people’s homeland in 1968 and as their birthplace in 1988. The one treaty definition, written in 1989, makes that self-identification fundamental but names no people, and it leaves open which conquest, colonisation or boundary fixes descent. Britain’s 1937 inquiry saw “two national communities,” and Israel’s 1948 Declaration calls the land “the birthplace of the Jewish people.” Israel’s Bureau, publishing its own count as a party to the conflict, still records about 2.130 million Arabs inside its boundaries.

The definite article is what the evidence sharpens. A treaty test built around descent from whoever lived in a land at its decisive moment presumes one such moment. Here two founding texts, written forty years apart, each name a different moment and each claim the same birthplace. The word “indigenous” is being asked to settle a question of priority that its own definition was drafted to avoid. Whether any single word can carry that weight between two peoples is the question the record now poses to the societies that use it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did the 1931 census count Bedouin?

The Government of Palestine’s 1931 census enumerated 66,553 people as nomadic, using a separate count that did not take place on the same night as the main census. It counted 969,268 people as settled. Every person in the nomadic count was recorded as Moslem.

Did the 1968 Charter count any Jews as Palestinians?

Article 6 of the Palestinian National Charter (1968) states that “the Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.” The Charter does not fix the date of that beginning, so the clause sets a condition but no count.

What became of the Royal Commission’s partition plan?

The Palestine Royal Commission’s 1937 plan, including its proposal for a transfer of land and population, was a recommendation and was never carried out. The Woodhead Commission found it impracticable in 1938, and the 1939 White Paper abandoned it.

Who sold the land on which the Judean colonies were built?

Ben-Bassat (2009) records that “about a dozen absentee landlords owned property in the region,” and that these landlords, “in many cases Christians from nearby Jaffa,” sold the colonists much of the land the colonies were built on.

How much of Israel’s population arrived as immigrants?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in its own 2025 count as a party to the conflict, records over 3.5 million immigrants since 1948. It also records about 80% of Jews in Israel as Sabras, meaning born in the country. Israel’s population at its establishment was 806,000 on the same release.

Does the 1988 Declaration accept the 1947 partition resolution?

The Palestine National Council’s 1988 Declaration says resolution 181 of 1947 “continues to attach conditions to international legitimacy that guarantee the Palestinian Arab people the right to sovereignty and national independence.” The Council’s references to resolutions 242 and 338 appear in the session’s separate Political Communiqué, not in the Declaration.

Sources

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