Most Palestinians self-identify as Palestinian and speak Palestinian Arabic.  Loosely people who speak some form of Arabic are called Arabs but if you ask a person from Saudi Arabia, “who is an Arab,” you may get a more nuanced answer.  The cultural memory in Saudi Arabia says there are Qaḥṭānī (southern, “pure”) and ʿAdnānī (northern, “Arabized”) lineages—rooting Arabness in the Arabian Peninsula and its tribes. The Pan-Arab tradition says, “anyone whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arab country, and who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arab people,”  is an Arab. It’s more than just the language.   It’s aspirations!  What are the aspirations of the Arab people?  This is a question the rest of the world should answer for themselves before they offer up their politically attractive answers.

There are over 30 different Arabic dialects, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Five major dialects predominate by virtue of the larger populations speaking them: Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Maghrebi Arabic, Peninsular Arabic, and Mesopotamian Arabic.  Palestinian Arabic is a subset of Levantine Arabic. To further complicate the linguistic picture, Palestinian Arabic has numerous regional sub-varieties: Urban in the big cities of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City; rural hill country dialects; Galilee with Lebanese and Syrian features; Bedouin in the Negev; and Gaza, which shares a lot of features with Egyptian. They understand each other, self-identify as Palestinian, but immediately recognize where each speaker is from.

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is a standardized version of Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur’an and early Islamic literature. While people in individual nations speak their own dialects, MSA is the written language of academia, legal documents, most books and magazines, and even some children’s books.

People self-identify with their close cultural group who share a common language. Consider the on-going cultural assimilation problem in modern Israel.  Israel decreed Hebrew to be the national language, although Arabic is spoken by 20% of its citizens and is protected by Israeli law.  Yet the Arab Israeli population lags behind economically and tends to self segregate in the larger cities. Literacy rates in their native languages are about the same, 98%.  Many Israeli Arabs (58.7%) speak good to very good Hebrew; it helps with upward mobility.  Only 10% of adult Israeli Jews speak Arabic. An additional 17% report some conversational ability.

What is the language of upward mobility in Israel?  ENGLISH.

An entire book could be written about why there is such economic disparity between Israeli Jews and  Arab Israelis. The same question can be asked about the economic disparity between any ethnic or religious groups residing in any modern country with defined borders.

Naive American college students protesting about Palestine will cite discrimination and similar catch phrases, but after all the dust settles, language binds people together and language drives them apart.  Religion binds people together and drives others apart. Language and literacy propel people toward prosperity. Hebrew was once an extinct language that was brought back in the late 1800s when Zionist activists started promoting the idea of a modern Jewish state. A logical question would be, “why Hebrew?”  The simple answer is that it binds the people of the new state together. Jews both religiously and linguistically set themselves apart from the rest of the world, which further binds them together. Hebrew and Judaism are the secret code that holds the tribe together and unfortunately keeps everybody else out.  The mysterious classical Arabic and the Islamic religion are the secret code loosely binding together over 2 billion people in a shared ideology. 

That leaves us with the Palestinian question.