let me start off by saying this:
most Palestinians do not simply score 2% Levantine. most score much more. from what i see typically it's like 25-70%. your results are clearly an outlier compared to most Palestinians. the 44% Arabian peninsular is much much much higher than average(most often Palestinians score less than 10%) and this certainly indicates your family is not your typical Palestinian. either there is some migrant ancestry in the past handful of generations or your family is from some outlying subset that is still heavily descended from Arabians from a few hundred years ago at most distant.
now onto the political stuff and an explanation of your lack of Levantine:
23andme has no intention to recognize either Israel or Palestine as of now from what i know. which honestly makes sense considering the backlash they'd get from either countries supporters. it is more economically beneficial for them to stay out of the politics of the region entirely.
and besides the fact that your family is much more Arabian compared to the vast majority of Palestinians, you should consider that Palestinians have mixed, like a lot. What is now Palestine has been tossed back and forth by empires for most of the past 1400 years. being controlled mainly by Arabians, Egyptians, Persians, and Ottomans, which very little time being spent as an independent nation. But what do each of those 4 peoples that controlled them have in common? they were all predominantly Muslim. so when they controlled the levant there wasn't a large religious barrier keeping them from mixing with the general population. tests pretty consistently show a large portion of the palestinian genome being from various groups surrounding the levant.
but you might also hear that 23andme only looks into the past 500 years. which is true, but also not true. depends on which populations you look at.
23andme uses levantine christians as their reference population for levantine, this being due to the low levels of outmixing with non-levantines in the christian populations compared to the muslim populations(once again going back to the religious barrier). so whilst they look into the past 500 years for christians they do not do the same for muslims. and it's debated whether or not muslims should be included in the reference populations because many of them are significantly mixed enough in the past 1000 years and even the past 500 to cause issues. the same reason 23andme likely wouldn't include Slovenians in the eastern European reference or mixed south asian and persian reer xamar people in the Somali reference.
regardless of whether or not they should be included this lack of inclusion means two things:
1- muich of the ancestry of muslim levantines in the past 1000+ years does not show as levantine. meaning "low" levantine percentages compared to known family histories for palestinians.
2- understated levantine for many. mainly with it going into broadly arab egyptian and levantine and iranian caucasian and mesopotamian. egyptian and arabian however are more distinctive and less likely to be misidentified.
in conclusion: it's just how 23andme and dna works, nothing against palestinians specifically. no attempted erasure is going on by 23andme just because their ceo is of the same background as palestines biggest enemy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/23andme/com...r/palestinian/
