In the conflict over Israel-Palestine, competing claims to indigeneity are wielded as rhetorical weapons. Both sides invoke history, archaeology, and scripture. Yet one source of evidence is increasingly difficult to dismiss: the human genome itself. Modern DNA ancestry analysis is quietly reshaping our understanding of who the original Palestinians actually were—and the findings are inconvenient for ideologues on all sides.

In finance, we speak of information asymmetry—the mispricing that occurs when one party has better data than another. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict suffers from a peculiar variant: both sides operate with deeply distorted information about the other’s origins. Genetic science is the corrective. It offers data that is non-ideological and non-negotiable. Haplogroup frequencies do not attend rallies. Autosomal ancestry percentages do not wave flags. They simply record the deep history of human migration, intermixture, and continuity.

And what they record is striking. A pivotal 2020 study in Cell, led by Liran Carmel and David Reich at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Harvard, analysed ancient DNA from 73 individuals buried at Canaanite sites across the Southern Levant during the Bronze Age. The researchers found that a broader Near Eastern ancestral component—including populations related to the Canaanites, the Caucasus, and the Zagros Mountains—likely accounts for more than half the ancestry of many Arabic-speaking and Jewish groups in the region today. The Canaanites themselves were a mixture of local Neolithic farmers and migrants who arrived over centuries. The deep ancestry of the land, in short, is shared.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867420304876]

Y-chromosome studies sharpen the picture. As Nebel et al. summarised in the American Journal of Human Genetics (2001), drawing on their earlier data, approximately 70 per cent of Jewish and 82 per cent of Palestinian Muslim Arab Y chromosomes belonged to the same chromosome pool—“a remarkable degree of genetic continuity in both Jews and Arabs, despite their long separation.” Hammer et al. (2000), analysing 1,371 males from 29 populations in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found Jewish populations forming a tight genetic cluster interspersed with Palestinians and Syrians—closer to each other than to European, North African, or sub-Saharan African populations.

The picture is not, however, a simple story of identical genomes. Nebel’s 2001 study also found that Jews were slightly more closely related to groups in the northern Fertile Crescent—Kurds, Turks, and Armenians—than to their Arab neighbours, while Palestinians carried distinctive high-frequency J1 haplotypes possibly reflecting migrations from the Arabian Peninsula. And on the maternal side, the story diverges further: Costa et al. (2013) found that a substantial proportion of Ashkenazi maternal lineages trace to Europe, suggesting that male Judean migrants took local wives during the Diaspora. The paternal connection to the Levant is robust; the maternal picture is more complex. Any honest reckoning must acknowledge both.

What does this mean for the duelling narratives? First, the notion that Palestinians are merely “Arab colonisers” who arrived with the seventh-century Islamic conquests is genetically untenable. Nebel et al. concluded that Palestinian Y chromosomes “represent, to a large extent, early lineages derived from the Neolithic inhabitants of the area.” The Arab conquests brought a new language and religion, but the bulk of the population descends from indigenous Levantine peoples who were Arabised culturally over centuries. The genome remembers what politics prefers to forget.

Second, the counter-narrative that Ashkenazi Jews are “European colonisers” with no ancestral connection to the land is equally unsustainable. Behar et al. (2010), in a comprehensive genome-wide study published in Nature covering 14 Jewish Diaspora communities and 69 non-Jewish populations, found that most Jewish samples formed a remarkably tight genetic subcluster tracing their origins to the Levant. European admixture is present, but it overlays a foundational Near Eastern substrate. The Jewish connection to the land is not merely scriptural; it is written in the DNA.

In my own work applying option pricing theory to geopolitical risk, I model alliance behaviour as a portfolio of strategic options whose value depends on information quality. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, among other things, a catastrophic failure of information—a market in which both sides trade on myths about the other’s foreignness. Genetic evidence reprices that market. It reveals that Palestinians and Jews are, in the most literal biological sense, children of the same soil—closer to cousins than strangers.

None of this should determine political rights. Self-determination, statehood, and security are legal questions, not biological ones. Reducing national identity to DNA percentages leads to dark places. But genetic evidence can dismantle the dehumanising mythologies that sustain hatred. When a cheek swab can reveal what centuries of propaganda have obscured, there is no excuse for clinging to narratives of pure indigeneity or total foreignness. The DNA does not lie. Whether the politicians choose to listen is, as always, another matter.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)