Palestinian Americans

Palestinian Americans (Arabic: فلسطينيو أمريكا, romanized: Filasṭīnīyū Amrīkā) are Americans who are of full or partial Palestinian descent.

There are around 160,000 Palestinian Americans according to the 2023 American Community Survey, making up around 0.05% of the U.S. population.

The Palestinian community is concentrated in the Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Houston, and Detroit metropolitan areas, with other populations in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas. Some Palestinians have emigrated to smaller metropolitan or micropolitan/rural areas, such as Gallup, New Mexico, in the late 20th and 21st century.

The first Palestinians who immigrated to the United States arrived after 1908, when the Ottoman Empire passed a new conscription law mandating all Ottoman citizens into the military. These Palestinians were overwhelmingly Christian, and only a minority of them were Muslims. The 1922 census of Palestine lists 1,778 Palestinians living abroad in the United States (1,352 Christian, 426 Muslim, along with 19 Druze), the second highest number behind the group listing of South and Central American republics. Palestinian immigration began to decline after 1924, with a new law limiting the number of immigrants, as well as the Great Depression, which heavily reduced immigration.

The population in the United States began to increase after World War II. During the 1950s, many Christians from Ramallah started immigrating to the states, then followed by Muslims from nearby towns. The establishment of the state of Israel led to many Palestinian Jews becoming Israeli citizens, and those that remained Palestinian were principally Arab, many of whom were then displaced in the Nakba due to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. However, the greatest wave of Palestinian immigration began in 1967 after the Six-Day War, or as Middle Easterners and North Africans call it, the June War. This wave of immigrants reached its peak in the 1980s.

After the Immigration and Nationality act of 1965 was enacted, many Palestinians started immigrating again into the United States. Most Palestinians that immigrated to the United States in this period were more educated than the Palestinians that arrived before 1965, due to the preferential status for educated immigrants, and a "brain drain" of professionals and the more educated Palestinians.

Beginning in the 1990s, many Palestinian communities were subject to intensive government surveillance under Operation Vulgar Betrayal (OVB), an FBI-led dragnet operation launched in collaboration with Israeli intelligence which sought to uncover networks of financial support for Hamas and Hezbollah among Palestinian Americans. These suspicions proved to be unsubstantiated, and no terrorism-related convictions were ever made. In 2015, filmmaker Assia Boundaoui produced a documentary on the experience of Palestinians living in Bridgeview, Illinois, revealing the unscrupulous tactics used by the FBI as well as the total lack of transparency surrounding the surveillance effort.

Chicago, Illinois, is home to the largest Palestinian concentration among US metropolitan areas: There is an estimated population of 85,000 Palestinians in greater Chicagoland, and Palestinians form 60% of the Arab community in the region. Bridgeview, Illinois (often referred to as "Little Palestine"), and its surrounding suburbs in southwest Cook County also have a significant population of Palestinian Americans, alongside a large Jordanian American community. The southwest suburban Palestinian community features prominently in Ta-Nehisi Coates' 2024 book, The Message, with the author visiting a survivor of the Deir Yasin Massacre now living in Orland Park, Illinois, and dining in a Middle Eastern restaurant alongside local Palestinian activists and leaders.