Interesting question, and the hard truth is that numbers don’t have that much to do with whether peoples have obtained statehood. There are many small island countries that are countries and have a small population. There are many small countries that have a few million or less people and are countries. The question of ethnic or religious or national groups have a right to a state seems bound up in the concept of self-determination that was advanced primarily in Europe and then barely outside of Europe from say 1830-1950 Once you get to the end of the colonial era, very few groups are allowed to create new states : consider the war in Biafra or Congo or other conflicts and you find that the state boundaries of the colonial era become permanent The Kurds suffered from this. The colonial powers carved up the area of what is now the borders of Iraq and Syria and Kurds did not receive rights to a state. In fact they received brutal oppression because of it Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, received a mixed result initially, the British decided to partition what was Mandate Palestine into two pieces as they did in India; in India it was Muslim Pakistan and India; whereas in Palestine they did the same thing; each with the result of war Who decided that create an unwieldy Pakistan that included Bangladesh? The same British officers who thought a Palestinian Arab state of Gaza, Jaffa and the West Bank would function as a state with an intl Jerusalem in the middle The result was endless war There are some different results. Palestinian Arabs did receive some citizenship under Jordan until 1967 and it was then taken away; and they have not received any rights since Kurds also suffered like this to some extent in Syria, often lacking citizenship and rights. In both instances, and many others, there are people who want rights or autonomy The cases can be examined together along with others and the colonial context It’s possible to say that both or neither have a right to a state but they definitely have rights to citizenship. A question then arises why don’t the Palestinians have the right to at least citizenship?