Ottoman Palestine

For nearly four hundred years, from 1517 to 1917, Palestine was a set of Ottoman administrative districts, governed at various times from Damascus, Beirut or directly from Istanbul. It had no fixed borders of the kind it would later be given. What it had was a settled, layered society: farmers and townspeople, Muslims, Christians and a small, long-established Jewish population, most of them living in and around Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias.

By the final Ottoman census before the First World War, the population of the region was somewhere around 700,000 people. Roughly 80 to 85 percent were Muslim, another 10 percent or so were Christian Arabs, concentrated in towns like Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem, and a small minority, perhaps 5 to 8 percent by 1914, were Jewish, a share that had been growing since the 1880s as waves of Zionist immigration began.

A land worked and traded

This was overwhelmingly an agricultural society. Villages grew wheat and barley on the coastal plain, citrus around Jaffa (the famous Jaffa orange was already an export crop by the late nineteenth century) and, everywhere, olives. Olive trees, some centuries old, were an economic asset and a cultural one: a family's grove was inherited, tended and fought over across generations, and the oil pressed from it was traded across the region. That relationship between a family and its trees is one of the oldest parts of Palestinian rural life, long before it became, after 1948, a symbol of loss.

Land tenure was complicated, and it would matter later. Much rural land was held under a mix of private ownership, village-communal arrangements (musha'a, مشاع), and title vested in absentee landlords who lived in Beirut, Damascus or Cairo and rarely set foot on the land they owned. The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 had pushed registration of land into individual names, partly so it could be taxed and conscripted from more effectively, and partly by accident it created a class of large landowners who would later sell land to Zionist settlement organisations, a fact that features heavily, and controversially, in later arguments about how land changed hands.

Jerusalem, and a wider world

Jerusalem was a provincial capital by the late Ottoman period, with its own governor reporting directly to Istanbul because of the city's religious significance to three faiths. Its Old City held Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian quarters in close, if not always easy, proximity. Outside the walls, from the 1860s onward, new neighbourhoods began to spread, some built by Jewish philanthropic trusts, others by Arab Christian and Muslim families moving out of the crowded old city.

Palestinians of this period were, like most people across the late Ottoman Arab world, developing a layered sense of identity: subjects of the Sultan, Arabs sharing a language and increasingly a political consciousness with Damascus, Beirut and Cairo, and residents of a particular place (Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nablus, Gaza) with its own strong local loyalty. An explicitly Palestinian national identity, distinct from a broader Arab or Ottoman one, was still taking shape. It would sharpen quickly once the Ottoman Empire fell and a very different kind of rule arrived.

The Zionist movement arrives

The First Aliyah, the first organised wave of Zionist immigration, began in 1882, bringing settlers from Russia and Eastern Europe who founded new agricultural colonies alongside the existing population. A Second Aliyah followed from 1904. By the eve of the First World War, Zionist organisations were buying land, mostly from absentee landlords rather than the peasants (fellahin, فلاحين) who worked it, which caused waves of eviction and rural displacement that were already provoking Arab protest petitions to Ottoman authorities well before 1917.

Palestinian Arab landowners, notables and newspaper editors in Jaffa and Jerusalem were writing about the dangers of Zionist land purchase as early as 1908 to 1911. Opposition to displacement by land purchase did not begin with the British Mandate or with Israel's founding. It began under Ottoman rule, as a local response to a demographic and economic shift that local people could already see happening around them.

Then came the First World War. The Ottoman Empire sided with Germany, and by 1917 the British Army, moving up from Egypt, had taken Jerusalem, ending Ottoman rule in Palestine.