Modern Palestine

I

Introduction

Modern Palestine, a region in southwestern Asia extending from the southeast shore of the Mediterranean eastward to the Jordan River and from Lebanon in the north to the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt in the south.

During the first half of the 20th century the name Palestine applied to a political entity that lasted for three decades, starting in 1917, when the region west of the Jordan—together with Transjordan, across the river—passed from Turkish rule to British rule. By this time nationalism was well established among the predominantly Arab population. But the Zionist movement in Europe, which had established a number of Jewish colonies in Palestine, had been advocating the establishment of a Jewish homeland there. After 1917 the Zionist settlements in Palestine continued with British protection, despite Palestinian Arab resistance.

The Jewish population rose from 85,000 in 1914, or 12 percent of the 687,000 inhabitants then in Palestine, to more than 600,000, or nearly 35 percent of a population of almost 1.9 million in 1947. In 1947 the United Nations (UN) decided that Palestine should be partitioned between a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem to be under international control. The Zionists agreed to the partition plan and established Israel as a Jewish state in May 1948.

The Palestinian Arabs, 65 percent of the population, rejected the partition plan. As a result of their rejectionist stance, the Arab defeat in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949, and actions by Israel, Jordan, and the United Kingdom, the Palestinian Arabs did not achieve nationhood in any of Palestine. Israel annexed part of Jerusalem (the New City) and nearly half of the area allotted to the Palestinian Arab state. Transjordan—an independent country since 1946 (later renamed Jordan)—annexed the Old City of Jerusalem (East Jerusalem) and what remained of the West Bank of the Jordan River. Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, along the coast. In 1967 in the so-called Six-Day War, Israeli troops conquered and occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. See also Arab-Israeli Conflict.

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The Zionist and Israeli victories resulted in the wholesale displacement of the Arabs of Palestine. From 1947 to 1949 the mass expulsion and panic-induced flight of more than 700,000 Palestinians reduced the Arab population of Israel to only 160,000 in 1949. By 1993 less than 45 percent of the world’s nearly 6 million Palestinians lived in what had been Palestine. Demographic trends in the 21st century, however, began to show a significant increase in the Palestinian population, especially in the occupied territories. By the end of 2006, the Palestinian population worldwide was 10.1 million. More than 1 million Palestinians were citizens of Israel, representing almost 20 percent of Israel’s resident citizens. More than 3.9 million Palestinians lived in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More than 5 million Palestinians lived in exile, mostly in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and other Arab countries.

Despite the military defeats that Palestinians suffered from 1948 through 1967, the spirit of nationalism among Palestinians continued to grow. At the end of 1987 much of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip rose in revolt. On July 31, 1988, Jordan gave up its claim—and severed its remaining ties—to the West Bank. On November 15, 1988, the Palestine National Council declared the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip an independent state, with Jerusalem its capital. On September 13, 1993, a peace agreement known as the Oslo Accords, which called for limited Palestinian self-government in the Gaza Strip and a small West Bank district, was signed by Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Self-government was implemented in May 1994, and talks continued for a two-state solution. However, by 2007 the peace process was at a standstill, and the future of the Oslo Accords was in doubt. This article traces the history of Palestine and Palestinian nationalism from the time of Ottoman Turkish rule to the present.

II

Palestine Before 1948

A

Muslim Conquest and Ottoman Turkish Rule

Ancient Philistia—the name from which Palestine derives—was conquered by Muslim armies coming from Arabia following victories in battles at Ajnadain in ad 634 and Yarmuk in 636. Two years later, the second caliph, Umar (Omar), built a mosque on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple, which the Romans had destroyed. In 691, the ninth caliph, Abd al-Malik, built the still-existing Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque in its place. After the 7th-century Arab conquest most of the population was Arabized in culture and language and a majority converted to Islam; some remained Christians, mostly in Jerusalem and the coastal towns of Ramla, Lydda, and Jaffa. In 1099 Crusaders from western Europe captured Jerusalem and set up a Christian kingdom, but a century later the country was retaken by Muslims, under the Ayyubid sultan, Saladin of Egypt, and his Mamluk successors. In 1517 Palestine was conquered by the Ottoman Turks, and it remained part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire for 400 years.

The modernization of Palestine began after its conquest, in 1832, by Ibrahim Pasha, son of Viceroy Muhammad Ali, who earlier in the 19th century had made Egypt autonomous under Ottoman sovereignty. As his father had done in Egypt, Ibrahim in the 1830s introduced secular schools and civil rights for Christians and Jews alongside Muslims in Palestine. However, the population rebelled against Ibrahim, in reaction to high taxes and military conscription. The European powers forced Ibrahim to withdraw in 1840, after which Ottoman authority was reimposed.

In 1858 an Ottoman land law was enacted that provided for the registration of state-owned communal lands in the villages as private property. It promoted the accumulation of land by urban notables and absentee landlords. Sultan Abdul-Hamid, by strengthening Ottoman control over the far-flung empire, further encouraged the rise of landed estates and private property in Palestine and other Arab lands.

Even more important were the privileges, or Capitulations, the Ottoman government had been forced to grant to European powers in an effort to stave off bankruptcy. European consuls, who had been admitted to Jerusalem in the 1830s, were now admitted to the coastal cities of Gaza, Jaffa, and Haifa. There they promoted sales of European goods through a growing clientele of Christian Arab merchants, some of whom became wealthy. The sultan was also forced to give European powers more control over the Holy Places in Jerusalem and to allow more European settlement and land acquisition in Palestine. Few Christian Europeans came, but, starting in the 1880s, there was a major influx of, and land acquisition by, Jews.

B

Jewish Colonization

In 1881 there were still only 24,000 Jews in Palestine. Prior to the 1880s most Jewish immigrants had settled in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safad, or Tiberias, usually to engage in religious studies and to live a full religious life.

In 1870, however, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, at the initiative of a group of Jews from Russia, had founded an agricultural school for Jews on some land near Jaffa donated by the Ottoman government. In 1878 two English Christians—the Earl of Shaftesbury and Laurence Oliphant—had helped a group of Jews from Jerusalem to acquire land and found a colony near Jaffa.

The main influx of European Jews started in 1882 when a society of Russian Jews, Hovevei Zion (The Lovers of Zion), seeking to escape a wave of terrible pogroms against Jews in Russia, began establishing Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine. Some depended for survival on the charity of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. By 1914 there were 44 Jewish agricultural colonies with 12,000 residents, constituting 14 percent of the 85,000 Jews then in Palestine. The Arab population then numbered more than 600,000.

This new emphasis on land reflected a change in the purposes of Jewish immigration, which was now rooted less in the traditional religious attachment to the Land of Israel than in Zionism, a secular ideology that aimed to establish a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

In 1896, as colonial projects were launched all over the world, Theodor Herzl began to forge Zionism into a modern political movement. He first approached Sultan Abdul-Hamid with a request that he cede Palestine to the Jews for the purpose of establishing “an aristocratic republic” of Jews, in return for financial help from the Zionist Organization, then being set up in Europe and Russia. The sultan, however, would not consider any proposal that might possibly lead to the separation of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire.

In 1902 Herzl turned instead to Great Britain. The British government was under pressure to restrict the entry of a growing flood of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and it was looking to match its European rivals—particularly France and Russia—in their influence over the Holy Places in Jerusalem.

Herzl held talks with the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, on possible interim solutions, including the establishment of a Jewish homeland in British-controlled Cyprus, and in 1903 Chamberlain offered British-ruled Uganda. This proposal, favored by Herzl, split the Zionist movement and was finally rejected by it in 1905. After Herzl’s death in 1904, Chaim Weizmann recruited additional British supporters for the Zionist cause, including David Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, and Sir Herbert Samuel. In December 1916, two years after the start of World War I (1914-1918), Balfour became foreign secretary in a government headed by Lloyd George, and on November 2, 1917, while British and Arab forces were fighting to wrest Palestine from the Turks, the Zionists obtained a promise, published in the form of a letter from Balfour to Lord Rothschild, that the British government would support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The promise became known as the Balfour Declaration.

C

Arab Nationalism

Within Palestine the Arab majority had been developing its own nationalist ideas. These mainly related to the growing current of Arabism, which held that the Arabs were a distinct people with a glorious history and a relationship with one another based on their shared language, Arabic. In Palestine, as in other Arabic-speaking lands of the Ottoman Empire, this current developed particularly among the urban elite, together with a sense of local patriotism focused on Palestine itself. This was visible in such things as the name of the newspaper, Filastin (Palestine), founded in Jaffa in 1911.

The revolution of the Young Turks in 1908 and the ouster from power of Sultan Abdul-Hamid in 1909 led to increased nationalism among both Turks and Arabs. Questions of language, particularly in education, as well as issues of autonomy for the Arab provinces, became matters of contention between many Arabs and the Ottoman government. In 1913 an Arab congress, supported by most of the notable families of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, assembled in Paris and called for “decentralized government for the Arab provinces … and recognition of Arabic as the official language.”

After World War I began, the Turks reacted harshly to manifestations of Arab nationalism. In September 1915, 11 Arab nationalist leaders were hanged in Beirut. In May 1916 another 20 Arab leaders, including 2 from Palestine—Ali Umar Nashashibi of Jerusalem and Muhammad Shanti of Jaffa—were hanged for their participation in an attempted Arab revolt that had been encouraged by Britain.

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