>OTOH, it could well be that the Palestinians didn't want to become Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians and... well, Lebanians (or whatever these are called). I suppose their agenda was to preserve their identity as a nation while in exile. IOW, maybe they just didn't want to melt into the larger pot - maybe, because I really don't know.


One more point. Prior to 1948, the term "Palestinian" referred to anyone living in Palestine, not just to Arabs or Muslims. I believe that after that, the term went out of use for some time. There was no notion of Palestinians as a national group until the rise of the PLO. (Note that the "P" stands for "Palestine," the land, not "Palestinian," a people.") There really was no such national group as Palestinians in the sense we use the term today. For that matter, IIRC, a lot of their leaders, including Arafat weren't born in what used to be Palestine.

Tamar