Wikipedia
The Palestinian people (, ash-sha‘b al-Filasṭīnī), also referred to as Palestinians (, al-Filasṭīniyyūn, ) or Palestinian Arabs (, al-'arabi il-filastini), are an ethnic group comprising the modern descendants of the peoples who have lived in Palestine over the centuries, and who today are largely culturally and linguistically Arab due to Arabization of the region. Despite various wars and exoduses (such as that in 1948), roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in historic Palestine, the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel. In this combined area, , Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants, encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.865 million), the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2,785,000 million versus close to 500,000 Jewish Israeli citizens which includes about 200,000 in East Jerusalem), and 20.8% of the population of Israel proper as Arab citizens of Israel. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip, three-quarters of a million in the West Bank, and about a quarter of a million in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half are stateless lacking citizenship in any country. Between 2.1 and 3.24 million of the diaspora population live in neighboring Jordan, over 1 million live between Syria and Lebanon, a quarter of a million in Saudi Arabia, with Chile's half a million representing the largest concentration outside the Arab world.
Palestinian Christians and Muslims constituted 90% of the population of Palestine on the eve (1919) of Zionist immigration under the post-WW1 British Mandatory Authority, opposition to which spurred the consolidation of a unified national identity, fragmented as it was by regional, class, religious and family differences. The history of a distinct Palestinian national identity is a disputed issue amongst scholars. Legal historian Assaf Likhovski states that the prevailing view is that Palestinian identity originated in the early decades of the 20th century, when an embryonic desire among Palestinians for self-government in the face of generalized fears that Zionism would lead to a Jewish state and the dispossession of the Arab majority crystallised among most editors, Christian and Muslim, of local newspapers. " Palestinian" was used to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by the Arabs of Palestine in a limited way until World War I. After the creation of the State of Israel, the exodus of 1948, and more so after the exodus of 1967, the term came to signify not only a place of origin, but also the sense of a shared past and future in the form of a Palestinian state. Modern Palestinian identity now encompasses the heritage of all ages from biblical times up to the Ottoman period.
Founded in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is an umbrella organization for groups that represent the Palestinian people before the international community. The Palestinian National Authority, officially established as a result of the Oslo Accords, is an interim administrative body nominally responsible for governance in Palestinian population centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since 1978, the United Nations has observed an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. According to Perry Anderson, it is estimated that half of the population in the Palestinian territories are refugees and that they have collectively suffered approximately $300 billion in property losses due to Israeli confiscations, at 2008-9 prices.