People & Histories
c. 1850–1917

Late Ottoman Palestine and the roots of Palestinian identity

Under the Ottomans, Palestine's towns and villages grow and modernise, and an educated Arab elite begins to speak of "Palestine" as a homeland, just as Zionist immigration begins.

  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
  • Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 — Beshara Doumani, University of California Press (1995)
  • Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture — Salim Tamari, University of California Press (2009)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)

Debated by historians identityempirelandreligion

The Ottomans ruled Palestine from 1516 to 1917. It was not a single province: from 1872 Jerusalem was a separate district reporting directly to Istanbul, while the north fell under Beirut. But the “Holy Land”, centred on Jerusalem, was a familiar idea, and the name Filastin was used in Arabic.

  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
  • Palestine — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica

In the late nineteenth century the population grew, Jaffa’s orange groves exported to Europe, Nablus thrived on soap and textiles, and mission and state schools spread literacy among Muslims and Christians alike. Most people were peasant farmers (fellahin) in hill villages, tied to extended family and land.

  • Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 — Beshara Doumani, University of California Press (1995)
  • Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture — Salim Tamari, University of California Press (2009)

After the 1908 Young Turk revolution a lively press emerged. Newspapers such as al-Karmil in Haifa (1908) and Filastin in Jaffa (1911) warned against Zionist land purchases and spoke to readers as Palestinians.

  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
Early Zionist settlement prompted protests from the 1880s, sometimes from peasants losing land the colonies had bought from absentee owners. In 1899 Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, a former mayor of Jerusalem, wrote to Theodor Herzl that while Zionism was “natural, beautiful and just” in principle, Palestine was inhabited, and pleaded: “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Herzl replied that Jewish immigration would bring prosperity to the Arabs.
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
When the British arrived in 1917, Palestinian Arabs had a sense of themselves as a people with a homeland, even if they did not yet have a national movement.
  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)

How it's seen
Palestinian view

Palestinians were a settled people with deep roots and a distinct identity centred on Jerusalem and the Holy Land, which was becoming national well before the British arrived.

  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
  • Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 — Beshara Doumani, University of California Press (1995)

Common Israeli view

There was no Palestinian state or nation; the land was a neglected Ottoman backwater whose Arab inhabitants saw themselves as Ottoman subjects, Muslims or Arabs of "southern Syria", and Palestinian nationalism arose mainly in reaction to Zionism.

  • Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
  • Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)

Historians

Historians such as Rashid Khalidi describe overlapping identities, local, religious, Ottoman, Arab and Palestinian, with Palestinian identity sharpening in the decades before 1917, partly but not only in response to Zionism, much as other modern national identities formed.

  • Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness — Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press (1997)
  • The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)

Why it matters today

Palestinians

This period is the answer Palestinians give to anyone who says they did not exist before 1948 or 1964: a living society of farmers, merchants, newspapers and schools, with its own sense of place. It is the world refugees' grandparents remembered.