Still other Palestinian clans bear names of tribes that arrived in the last two hundred years from various parts of Arabia.
Istanbul, September 15 - A Middle East culture suffused with family appellations attesting to lineages from places outside the Holy Land continues to accuse the people whose ethnonym attests to their origins in the Holy Land of having no connection to the place.
Palestinians, among whom the last names such as "al-Masri," "Abu-Kishk," and "Abu-Sitta" - all denoting Egyptian lineage - or "al-Husseini," "al-Qurashi," and "al-Hijazi - all denoting Arabian Peninsula pedigree, maintained their narrative this week that Jews, who derive their name from Judah, part of modern-day Israel, come from Europe or elsewhere.
Similarly, the group with Iraqi surnames such "Zoabi" "Zubeidi," and "al-Faruqi" call Jews - literally meaning "of Judea" - alien to the land once called Judea. The group with Iraqi surnames also includes large cohorts with names attesting to lineage in Syria, Lebanon, Kurdistan, Sudan, Yemen, and Morocco, among others.
Still other Palestinian clans bear the names of Bedouin tribes that arrived in what is now Israel or Jordan in the last two hundred years, from various parts of Arabia and Mesopotamia. Iconic Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was born in Egypt, and Palestinians do not therefore negate the legitimacy of his attachment to Palestine.
Jews, too, often have family names that refer to locations outside the Levant, but those monikers originated primarily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when local or national governments forced the Jews under their rule to adopt surnames. Before that, Jews used patronymics to distinguish between two people who shared a given name, a practice tracing back to ancient Judah, as recorded in the Bible.
Some Jewish "surnames" did persist since long before that in the male line, specifically those denoting membership in the Israelite tribe of Levi - also recorded in the Bible - or its priestly subset, some variation of "Cohen." A few families also carry names indicating descent from the Biblical King David, who began his ancient reign as king of Judah. Still others indicate a characteristic or profession of some ancestor, with no bearing on lineage beyond the generation that gave rise to the surname.
The propaganda effort parallels with a notion - long discredited by knowledgeable geneticists - that Ashkenazi Jews, whose communities spent centuries in Europe, descend not of Jewish exiles from Judea, but of Turkic Khazars who converted en masse during the early Middle Ages. No DNA evidence supports that contention, and the claim that those Jews are somehow not "real" Jews flies in the face of the notion, accepted by the same propagandists, that converts to Islam become part of the Ummah with legitimate rights to Islamic lands and sites, regardless of their "foreign" ancestry.
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