New Statesman: Palestine - Who are the Palestinians?

"People tend to see the Palestinians through the lens of their chosen stereotype. For many westerners, they arrived on the scene violently, as "terrorists": hijacking aeroplanes, killing Israeli athletes at the Olympics, causing havoc in league with other unsavoury groups. For the Arab world, and for many recent ex-colonies, they were a people who had been turned into refugees and freedom fighters by a new strain of old colonialism.
In the first intifada in the late 1980s, their cause became synonymous with that of a child facing the might of the Israeli army, with nothing in his or her hands except stones. In the second, and current, intifada, the child has become a suicide bomber, exploding amid the slaughter of innocents, with nothing in his or her heart except a despairing desire for vengeance. And overarching the Palestinian people is the iconic, troubling figure of their unchallenged leader, Yasser Arafat: vowing peace with a pistol strapped to his waist, wearing a keffiyeh shaped in the map of his people, stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
The Palestinians have all these faces - and many, many more. They are a cause, a history, a nation and a land. But who are they? What makes them a people? And why has the simple justice of their case - that of an exiled people's quest for a homeland - become enmeshed in the most protracted, implacable and dangerous conflict of our time? . . ."

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