Read this article: [link|http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=550|http://www.israelna....php3?id=550]

Here are some relevant quotes:
"Professor of history Rashid Khalidi, himself a Palestinian Arab admits that "Palestinian identity" was the last garb that the Arabs of Palestine tried on when all other possibilities where exhausted. It was shared "by a relatively restricted stratum and among them, as well as among the rural and illiterate majority of the population, the new sense of Palestinian identity competed and overlapped with Ottomanism and Arabism, as well as older religious, local and family loyalties."
...
"Julius Stone wrote in 1970 a must-read paper entitled "Self-determination and the Palestinian Arabs." His arguments are so clear and convincing that it is most effective simply to quote him profusely. He explains that "it twists and parodies both history and justice to present the Palestine issue as a struggle between the Jews of the world on the one hand and the Arabs of Palestine on the other, in which the Jews seized the major share."
Stone continues,
"The struggle was rather between the Arabs of the Middle East region (including some hundred thousand living in Palestine) and the Jews of the world, in which the Arabs took the lion\ufffds share from which in due course a dozen and more Arab states emerged. Neither at the time of distribution, nor for decades later, moreover, was there any identifiable Palestinian Arab people, much less any center of Arab cultural or political life in Palestine."

Rashid Khalidi. Palestinian Identity. Columbia University Press, 1998.
Julius Stone. Self-Determination and the Palestinian Arabs. From the book "Israel, the Arabs and the Middle East," Bantam Books, 1972.