S. T. Salah, 6/3/26
This section examines how Palestine was governed and inhabited under Ottoman rule and establishes the historical baseline immediately preceding British colonial administration. It reviews administrative records, land systems, demographic continuity, and wartime disruption to clarify what existed before the emergence of a modern settler project and how late Ottoman reforms created legal and administrative conditions later used in processes of land transfer and dispossession.
Between the early sixteenth century and the First World War, Palestine was administered by the Ottoman Empire as a populated provincial territory. Ottoman authorities governed through taxation, conscription, land administration, and periodic reform, generating episodes of local resistance and hardship but without a policy of population removal or settler replacement. By the early twentieth century, Palestine consisted of interconnected towns, villages, and agricultural landscapes with long-standing social, economic, and familial continuity, and its inhabitants related to the land through local, regional, and religious frameworks rather than a modern national designation.
The Ottomans incorporated Palestine into their domains after defeating the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq and al Ridaniyya in 1516–1517. Administratively, the area that Europeans later labelled “Palestine” was divided among several districts under the province of Damascus, including the sanjaqs of Jerusalem, Nablus and Gaza. Sixteenth century tahrir (tax) registers list hundreds of villages in these districts, with named household heads, crop types and livestock totals. These registers show stable rural communities growing wheat, barley, olives, grapes and pulses, paying taxes in cash and kind, and maintaining village structures that would still be recognisable in the late Ottoman and Mandate censuses.
The basic Ottoman bargain in Palestine was taxation and security in exchange for loyalty, with local notable families, religious leaders and village headmen acting as intermediaries. Land tenure was governed by the empire’s system of miri (state) land and various forms of usufruct; peasants held long term cultivation rights in exchange for taxes and military levies. For most of the Ottoman period, outside interventions in local land use were limited. Peasants in areas such as Jabal Nablus, the Hebron highlands and the Galilee cultivated terraced hillsides and plains in patterns that remained recognisable for centuries. Studies of families and waqf endowments in Jabal Nablus between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries show continuity of lineages and land use, not wholesale replacement.
Ottoman rule was not benign. Heavy taxation, corruption and conscription sparked periodic uprisings. In 1834, during an interlude when Muhammad Ali’s Egypt briefly ruled Palestine under nominal Ottoman suzerainty, a major revolt broke out in Hebron, Nablus and other towns against forced conscription and new taxes. Egyptian and allied forces crushed the uprising with executions, village burnings and deportations. When direct Ottoman control was restored later in the nineteenth century, the central state continued to push reforms that increased its reach into rural life, provoking local resistance but not targeting Palestinians as a people for removal.
In the mid nineteenth century the Ottoman government introduced the 1858 Land Code and related cadastral reforms. These required subjects to register landholdings in their own names with state authorities and were intended to increase tax revenue, regularise tenure and strengthen central authority. In practice, many Palestinian peasants avoided registration out of fear that records would expose them to higher taxes, conscription or conscription of their sons. Large tracts of land were registered instead in the names of urban notables or absentee owners in cities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nablus, Damascus and Beirut. Over time, this created a layer of legally recognised ownership above long standing peasant cultivation.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this legal structure became a mechanism through which Zionist institutions acquired land without direct consultation with or consent from the cultivators. Ottoman law allowed sale of registered land to private buyers. Foreign Jewish settlers and Zionist agencies such as the Jewish Colonization Association began purchasing estates and large parcels from absentee landlords, especially in the coastal plain and parts of the Galilee. When title was transferred, peasants who had worked the land for generations but did not hold formal deeds could be evicted. These transactions remained limited in absolute size before 1917 compared with the total cultivated area, but they established a precedent: dispossession could be carried out through legal sale once land had been detached from the people who farmed it.
Ottoman reforms also encouraged limited European penetration. The empire granted capitulations and later commercial concessions that allowed foreign powers to establish consulates, churches, schools and hospitals in cities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Nazareth and Bethlehem. These institutions brought education and medical services but also increased external influence and debt. Railway projects, including the Jaffa–Jerusalem line opened in 1892 and the Hejaz Railway extension to Haifa and Dar’a, integrated Palestine more tightly into Ottoman and regional markets, making export agriculture, especially citrus around Jaffa, more profitable but also more vulnerable to price shocks and land concentration.
Religious and communal life under Ottoman rule was structured through the millet system. Recognised religious communities administered personal status law, religious courts and internal affairs. In Palestine, Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities managed their own religious institutions, schools and charitable endowments. Local conflicts and inequalities existed, including discrimination against non Muslim communities typical of the empire, but the state did not pursue a racial hierarchy that designated one ethno religious group as permanent masters and another as expendable. Anti Jewish pogroms of the type familiar by the Germans in Eastern Europe were not a regular feature of Ottoman Palestine; Jews lived in cities such as Jerusalem, Safad, Tiberias and Hebron alongside Muslim and Christian neighbours.
Ottoman conscription and war making brought direct harm to Palestinians, particularly during the First World War. From 1914 onward, young men were drafted into the Ottoman army and deployed to distant fronts, with high casualty rates. Jamal Pasha’s command in Greater Syria imposed requisitions of grain, animals and labour. A massive locust infestation in 1915 destroyed crops across Palestine and Syria. Combined with Allied naval blockades, German–Ottoman mismanagement and hoarding by local elites, this produced famine conditions across the region. In Mount Lebanon alone, historians estimate that between a quarter and a third of the population died between 1915 and 1918. Palestinian districts such as Jerusalem, Nablus, Gaza and the coastal plain also suffered severe shortages; families sold land, livestock and possessions to survive, and many left rural areas for cities or emigrated abroad. The Ottoman state bore responsibility for requisition policies and failure to secure food supplies, but famine, conscription and disease were byproducts of a collapsing empire at war rather than a targeted programme to remove Palestinians as a people.
Political surveillance and repression intensified in the war’s final years. Jamal Pasha’s authorities executed Arab intellectuals and activists in Damascus and Beirut in 1915–1916 for alleged treason and separatism; Palestinian figures were among those monitored, arrested or exiled. Newspaper censorship, bans on political clubs and suspicion of contact with the Allied powers limited organised political life. Yet during this same period Palestinian elites in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Nablus continued to articulate local demands, including petitions against Zionist land purchase and immigration, within Ottoman legal and political channels.
By the time British forces advanced into Palestine in 1917–1918, Ottoman rule was hollowing out under military defeat and economic collapse but had not uprooted the country’s population. Village and town networks remained intact. Landholding patterns showed increased concentration and external encroachment, but the vast majority of agricultural land was still in Palestinian hands. The empire had extracted labour and resources and committed harsh acts of repression, especially during wartime, yet it had not installed a settler project designed to permanently displace Palestinians or declare the land primarily belonging to another people.
The significance of Ottoman rule for this audit is twofold. First, it provides a baseline of a multiethnic imperial framework in which Palestinians were a rooted, majority population whose presence was not in question, even when their political rights were constrained. Second, certain late Ottoman mechanisms, especially land registration and sale, created legal pathways that Zionist organisations exploited under and after the Mandate. The empire’s collapse opened space for a new colonial project not because it had already erased Palestine but because it left behind a populated, administratively mapped territory that others then claimed and reconfigured.