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The chapter describes the groups of people in Palestine. Modern Palestinians can be divided into four main groups: those who remained in Israel after 1948 and their descendants; those who live in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in their own homes and on their own land; refugees from the 1948-49 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars, living primarily in camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria; and those who have settled in other countries, mostly in the Arab world but some as far away as the United States. This last group is called the Palestinian diaspora. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but of the roughly 7.5 million Palestinians in the world, about half still reside in historical Palestine-in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper.

The chapter describes the Palestinians. Their numbers are relatively small-fewer than 8 million people worldwide-and they have never had an independent state of their own. Yet the Palestinians figure prominently in the strategic concerns of many of the world's most powerful countries, including the United States. The Palestinians are Arabs who currently live, or whose ancestors lived, in the eastern Mediterranean land called Palestine. The modern history of the Palestinians is inextricably linked to the history of another people with ancient ties to Palestine: the Jews. As Jewish immigrants began settling in the region in larger numbers, particularly after World War I, the Palestinians began to see themselves as a distinct national group. And, increasingly, they came to view large-scale Jewish immigration as a threat to their interests. Violence erupted. Efforts by the international community to create independent homelands in Palestine for both the Jews and the Palestinians led only to war in 1948.