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What Was Palestine Like in the 19th Century?
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British Empire — From Ottoman Territory to British Mandate: Palestine in the 20th Century
In this course, we explore the history of Palestine during the British Mandate (1920-1948), focusing on: (i) the significant geopolitical changes during World War I, including the decline of the Ottoman Empire and conflicting promises made by Britain, notably the Balfour Declaration of 1917; (ii) the establishment of the mandate system post-war, highlighting Palestine’s unique status and the incorporation of Zionist aims into British policy; (iii) early Arab-Jewish tensions and British responses during the mandate, marked by low-level violence and the 1929 riots; (iv) the escalation of conflict during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt and the failed partition plans; (v) the growing unrest leading to Britain's realization in the late 1940s that the mandate was unworkable, culminating in the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel; and (vi) the pivotal UN Resolution 181 advocating for partition, the outbreak of civil war, and the subsequent declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, resulting in the displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs.
What Was Palestine Like in the 19th Century?
In this lecture, we examine the significant changes in Palestine and the broader Ottoman Empire leading up to and during World War I. Key points include: (i) the decline of the Ottoman Empire by 1914, marked by military and political weakness and the decision to ally with Germany; (ii) the devastating effects of the war on the Arab population, including conscription, famine, and blockades; (iii) the authoritarian rule of the Ottoman government during the conflict, which stifled Arab nationalist movements and led to persecution of suspected nationalists; (iv) Britain's renewed interest in the Middle East, resulting in secret negotiations and conflicting promises to Arabs regarding post-war sovereignty; and (v) the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported a Jewish national home in Palestine while neglecting Arab national rights. The lecture emphasises the complexity of these geopolitical dynamics as they laid the groundwork for future conflicts and transformations in the region.
Hi. My name is doctor Lauren Banco.
00:00:05I'm a research fellow in the Department of History at the
00:00:07University of Manchester.
00:00:09I teach on the history of the modern Arab Middle East,
00:00:11and I teach and research on the history of Palestine before
00:00:14nineteen forty eight and the Palestine Israeli conflict.
00:00:17In this lecture, we're going to explore the history of Palestine from
00:00:21nineteen fourteen to nineteen forty eight,
00:00:24first as a geographical space,
00:00:26but also as a site of competing ethno national ambitions as
00:00:28part of an imperial space and also as part of a colonially
00:00:33administered territory in the years leading up to nineteen forty eight.
00:00:37So if we locate Palestine historically in the nineteenth
00:00:41century, it's part of the landscape of the Ottoman
00:00:44Empire.
00:00:47The Ottoman Empire by the nineteenth century administered
00:00:48territories in what today is the Middle East or the Eastern
00:00:51Mediterranean, parts of North Africa,
00:00:54Anatolia, or what's modern day Turkey,
00:00:57Greece, and the Balkans.
00:01:00And the Arab parts of the Ottoman Middle East,
00:01:02which includes what was Palestine,
00:01:04became part of the Ottoman Empire in fifteen seventeen.
00:01:07So by the end of the nineteenth century,
00:01:11Palestine and the wider Arab world had been part of this
00:01:12imperial system for about four hundred years.
00:01:16The Ottoman Empire was this heterogeneous,
00:01:19multi linguistic, multi ethnic,
00:01:22multi religious empire in terms of its
00:01:24population, and that was the same.
00:01:27It was mirrored in the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire.
00:01:29And if we start to locate Palestine itself in a general
00:01:32sense and in the way people in the nineteenth century in the
00:01:36Ottoman Empire would have thought about Palestine,
00:01:39this refers to a space in what was Ottoman
00:01:42greater Syria and in the southern part of Ottoman greater Syria.
00:01:46So what is today Syria,
00:01:50but also some of the other Arab states nearby was part of a
00:01:52larger province in the nineteenth century that was
00:01:55divided into different districts.
00:01:58Palestine itself or what becomes known as Palestine was
00:02:00in the southern part of that district for the most part of
00:02:03the nineteenth century.
00:02:07Palestine was a site in the nineteenth century of cultural
00:02:09significance, also religious significance locally,
00:02:12for Europeans as well or for outsiders.
00:02:16The site of Jerusalem maintained a high degree of importance.
00:02:19But socially, politically, culturally, economically,
00:02:23Palestine or southern Syria and the people who were living
00:02:27there were integrated quite well into the Ottoman Empire.
00:02:30And if we think about the time frame of the nineteenth century,
00:02:34Palestine and the rest of the region are going through
00:02:37massive transformations.
00:02:40So transformations pretty much in every aspect of life leading
00:02:42up to the first World War.
00:02:45Palestine itself is this place in which there's a growing
00:02:47middle class throughout that century which benefited from
00:02:51the spread of education and Ottoman education system such
00:02:55as state schools, growing military institutions,
00:02:59an urbanizing center in places along the
00:03:04Mediterranean coast, but also a growing middle class related to
00:03:07new methods of capitalism, market economies,
00:03:12linkages with Europe,
00:03:15but also linkages with the wider Middle East and North Africa Socially,
00:03:16the inhabitants of Palestine for the most part are socially, politically,
00:03:19about two thirds were what we might think of as rural or
00:03:22agriculturalists.
00:03:24By the middle part of the nineteenth century,
00:03:25this area of southern Syria
00:03:27had a population of a little bit less than half a million people.
00:03:34Overall, out of that half a million,
00:03:39about ninety percent were Muslim and Arab,
00:03:42but there's a high minority of Arab Christians living in what was Palestine,
00:03:45and there's also a small percentage of indigenous or
00:03:49Ottoman, or we can maybe turn them as Sephardic Jews.
00:03:52In Jerusalem itself,
00:03:56which is the city that was probably most well known as a
00:03:58site within Ottoman Palestine, Jerusalem was majority Jewish
00:04:01population in the nineteenth century.
00:04:06But the rest of Ottoman Palestine,
00:04:09the rest of Ottoman greater Syria,
00:04:11the majority is Arab and Muslim.
00:04:12The Ottoman Empire began to centralize administratively in
00:04:14the nineteenth century,
00:04:18and this is where the idea of transformation comes in.
00:04:19So prior to the nineteenth century,
00:04:22this imperial system and the provinces within it had largely
00:04:24been decentralized.
00:04:28There were elements of kind of localized rule,
00:04:29localized methods of tax collection, of administration.
00:04:33But due to a number of factors in the nineteenth century,
00:04:37in particular, the Ottoman Empire becoming militarily
00:04:40weaker, economically weaker in relationship to Europe,
00:04:43in relationship to neighboring places,
00:04:47also politically weaker.
00:04:49One of the ways to overcome that,
00:04:51the government in Istanbul,
00:04:52so the Turkish speaking Muslim government of the empire,
00:04:54decided to centralize administration, tax collection,
00:04:58but also attempted to kind of ideologically centralize the
00:05:02provinces of the empire.
00:05:06So in relation to Palestine but also elsewhere,
00:05:08one of the things that happened was districts and provinces
00:05:11were reorganized to be more centrally
00:05:14administered by governors, by district commissioners,
00:05:17by individuals that were appointed directly from the
00:05:21government in Istanbul.
00:05:23And this is happening across greater Syria and it will
00:05:25happen in Palestine as well.
00:05:27The reorganization specifically for Ottoman
00:05:29Palestine was that this area of Jerusalem and
00:05:32around Jerusalem,
00:05:36the people living there were kind of carved out of the
00:05:37province of Syria and set into a separate independently
00:05:40administered province titled the province of
00:05:45Jerusalem.
00:05:48This wasn't just the town of Jerusalem,
00:05:48but it was kind of the wider area outside of it,
00:05:51but it sort of mirrored what people at the time would have
00:05:53thought of as Palestine.
00:05:56Some of these other reforms,
00:05:58which also affected Palestine but affected the entire region,
00:06:00were changes in tax collection,
00:06:03importantly changes in land tenure.
00:06:06And this is something that by the end of the nineteenth
00:06:08century had a significant impact in Palestine
00:06:10specifically because of new systems put into place that
00:06:13allowed foreigners or non Ottoman subjects to buy land
00:06:17anywhere in the empire.
00:06:21And we'll come to that later on,
00:06:23but the importance becomes very clear around the turn of the century.
00:06:24In terms of land tenure,
00:06:29there's also a process that's introduced by which people
00:06:30could individually own land, could buy and sell
00:06:33it, could have a title deed to land,
00:06:36which was slightly different from the way that land holding
00:06:39was practiced prior to the mid nineteenth
00:06:41century, which was more communal,
00:06:44sort of tenant farmers.
00:06:46Changes to land holding didn't necessarily affect people
00:06:47farming on the land just yet,
00:06:51but it did have changes in who could say they could buy or sell the land.
00:06:53There's also reforms to military,
00:06:58education across the Ottoman Empire,
00:07:01but there's also what we might think of as political or
00:07:04ideological reforms that shifted people's notions of identity.
00:07:07There's the introduction of an Ottoman citizenship law that
00:07:11allowed the government to sort of have an individual
00:07:15relationship with its subjects,
00:07:18which was different from the way that subjects of the empire
00:07:20were kind of represented through communities,
00:07:23religious organizations prior to that.
00:07:26And what this does is it shifts notions of identity.
00:07:29So people living in, say, the province of greater Syria,
00:07:32people living in what becomes Palestine,
00:07:35other parts of the empire,
00:07:38in this kind of combination of these districts being
00:07:40reorganized and also people being given slightly more
00:07:42rights of representation,
00:07:46there is this sort of shifting in terms of thinking about
00:07:48belonging to this space.
00:07:51So part of these notions of reforms were also not just kind
00:07:53of identity and citizenship,
00:07:57but by the late nineteenth century, again,
00:07:59in the early twentieth century,
00:08:02there's a parliament set up in Istanbul.
00:08:03There are representatives from different districts,
00:08:05different provinces sent to that parliament.
00:08:08And in the early twentieth century,
00:08:11there are parliamentarians from Jerusalem who are representing
00:08:13Palestinians in this district of Jerusalem in the Ottoman
00:08:17parliament in Istanbul.
00:08:20The other thing to keep in mind is that these reforms in many
00:08:23ways are because the Ottoman Empire was in sort of
00:08:26transformation, decline in many ways,
00:08:29but they were also pushed by Europe.
00:08:31And that's somewhat significant and that's something we'll get
00:08:33to in a little bit because Europe also had this stake in
00:08:36what would happen in the Ottoman Empire itself.
00:08:39Now all of this transformed geographical notions of
00:08:43Palestine into political and into administrative notions of
00:08:46what this space looked like by the turn of the century.
00:08:50This is happening at the same time as there is a wider
00:08:54Arab cultural, social,
00:08:58kind of historical revival or what was called a renaissance,
00:09:01which was known as the Nafta.
00:09:05This is from the late nineteenth century
00:09:07mid late nineteenth century into the early twentieth
00:09:10century, and it was basically a kind of middle class movement,
00:09:12intellectuals, artists, philosophers, scientists
00:09:16emphasizing
00:09:20Arab, Arabic thoughts, Arabic language, Arab history.
00:09:22There's some emphasis on Islamic religion,
00:09:27Islamic history in the Arab world as part of the Ottoman
00:09:30Empire.
00:09:34But what this does is also emphasize these kind of
00:09:35cultural and social traditions for the region itself.
00:09:38And this mirrors certain things happening in Europe at the time
00:09:41that are linked to notions of the idea of the nation or peoplehood.
00:09:45And so this focus on Arab culture, Arabic thoughts,
00:09:49specifically Arab notions of identity,
00:09:53also begin to cultivate ideas of Arab peoplehood,
00:09:56the idea of the existence of an Arab nation.
00:10:00And at the time that this was happening,
00:10:03despite these reforms in the Ottoman Empire,
00:10:06some of which were successful, some of which were not,
00:10:08there wasn't really a tension between these new notions of
00:10:11belonging to an Arab homeland and notions of belonging to
00:10:15this sort of pluralistic Ottoman space.
00:10:19It comes later on that there do begin to be kind of
00:10:22nationalistic tensions between these different identities,
00:10:26but by the turn of the century,
00:10:29this part of the Arab provinces,
00:10:31Palestine specifically, fit quite well into the Ottoman system.
00:10:33So there was no kind of notions yet of autonomy or sovereignty.
00:10:36This is still an imperial system that Palestine is part of.
00:10:42And then lastly, what's happening again at the same
00:10:46time as reforms, sort of cultural renaissance,
00:10:49is that European Jews in Central Europe, Western Europe,
00:10:54Eastern Europe are beginning to fashion ideas of Palestine as
00:10:59another type of site.
00:11:04And we'll talk about that in a second as well,
00:11:05but what happens by the end of the nineteenth century is there
00:11:07are small numbers of European Jewish migrants coming
00:11:10specifically to Ottoman Palestine settling there,
00:11:14purchasing land, and this is becoming, again,
00:11:17by the turn of the century,
00:11:21not just an issue that is only sort of affecting certain
00:11:23spaces in Palestine, but it becomes a wider issue,
00:11:26a wider political issue in the Ottoman Empire in the lead up
00:11:30to the First World War.
00:11:33
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Banko, L. (2024, October 22). British Empire — From Ottoman Territory to British Mandate: Palestine in the 20th Century - What Was Palestine Like in the 19th Century? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/british-empire-from-ottoman-territory-to-british-mandate-palestine-in-the-20th-century
MLA style
Banko, L. "British Empire — From Ottoman Territory to British Mandate: Palestine in the 20th Century – What Was Palestine Like in the 19th Century?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 28 Oct 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/british-empire-from-ottoman-territory-to-british-mandate-palestine-in-the-20th-century