Table of Contents
Setting the Stage Before 1917
Before the First World War and the modern political struggle over Israel/Palestine, the region had already lived through centuries of shifting rulers, migrations, religious developments, and local social change. To understand why the conflict later took the shape it did, it helps to see what the land looked like in political, demographic, and cultural terms before 1917, when Britain issued the Balfour Declaration and the modern phase of the conflict began.
This chapter sketches major features of the region’s earlier history without yet diving into the organized national movements or diplomatic plans that come later. The aim is to give you a sense of continuity and change: how a relatively small, mostly rural corner of the Ottoman Empire became the focus of intense international and nationalist attention.
Geography and Terminology Before the Modern Conflict
The area that is today usually called “Israel and the Palestinian territories” did not have a single fixed name or administrative unit for most of its history. Different powers used different labels depending on their purposes. In antiquity and late antiquity, you will encounter names like “Land of Israel,” “Judea,” “Samaria,” “Philistia,” “Provincia Syria Palaestina,” or simply “Syria.” Medieval and early modern Muslim geographers often grouped the region under the larger province of “Bilad al-Sham” (Greater Syria), which covered much of what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine.
By the nineteenth century, European travelers, missionaries, and scholars increasingly used the term “Palestine,” often with a mainly geographic or biblical meaning rather than a clearly defined political one. Locally, people were more likely to identify themselves in terms of religion, city, clan, or broader Ottoman and Arab affiliations (for example, as Muslims from Nablus, Christians from Bethlehem, Jews of Jerusalem, or subjects of the Ottoman sultan), rather than as “Palestinians” or “Israelis” in the modern national sense.
The borders were porous and not sharply demarcated in the way modern states are. Trade, pilgrimage, nomadic grazing, and migration flowed across what are now national boundaries. This fluidity of older identities and frontiers forms the backdrop against which modern nationalism later carves out harder lines.
Layers of Conquest and Rule
Long before modern nationalism, the region was part of successive imperial systems. While every period has its own complexity, what matters here is the cumulative effect: repeated conquest did not erase earlier connections to the land but added new layers of meaning, populations, and memories.
In ancient times, various Canaanite and Israelite polities existed, followed by periods of rule by larger empires such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks. The Roman and later Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empires exercised long-term control, turning the area into a crossroads of imperial administration and trade. After the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Arab-Muslim armies incorporated the region into the expanding caliphates. Over centuries, it became firmly woven into the Islamic and Arabic-speaking world, even as religious minorities continued to live there.
The medieval period saw rapid shifts between Muslim dynasties and the Crusader states established by European Christians, who controlled parts of the region for roughly two centuries before being expelled. Later, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt ruled until the early sixteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire defeated them and took control. From that point until the First World War, for about four hundred years, the land was part of Ottoman domains.
These layers of rule left behind religious monuments, place names, legal arrangements, and community traditions that later national movements could draw on when making claims about historical belonging. Competing narratives about “who was here first” or “who ruled when” often selectively highlight particular periods of this long and complex past.
Demography and Social Structure in the Ottoman Era
By the nineteenth century, when modern nationalist ideas were beginning to circulate globally, the population of the region that concerns us was relatively small and overwhelmingly rural. Towns such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, Nablus, Gaza, Safed, and Haifa were important local centers, but most people lived in villages, farming the land or herding animals.
The majority of the population was Arabic-speaking and Muslim. There were also significant Christian communities, many of them Eastern Christian denominations such as Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Syriac, and later various Catholic and Protestant groups associated with European missions. Jewish communities existed in several towns, especially in what Jews would later call the “Four Holy Cities” (Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias), as well as in other localities. These Jewish populations included families who saw themselves as having deep local roots, as well as migrants from other parts of the Middle East and, increasingly in the nineteenth century, from Europe.
Ottoman governance organized society to a large extent along communal and religious lines. Rather than seeing residents primarily as “nationals” of a modern state, the system recognized religious communities (known as millets) with some degree of internal autonomy in matters such as marriage, education, and inheritance. Muslims, Christians, and Jews did not live in isolation, but they often had their own neighborhoods, institutions, and legal forums. Daily life involved both cooperation and hierarchy: Muslims held the dominant status in a Muslim empire, but local Christians and Jews were not strangers to the land; they were part of its social fabric.
Economic inequalities, clan politics, urban–rural tensions, and differences between nomadic, semi-nomadic, and settled populations mattered at least as much as emerging nationalist ideas. When later conflict is framed simply as “Jews versus Arabs” or “Israelis versus Palestinians,” it can obscure how many other social lines shaped pre-1917 life.
Economy, Land, and Patterns of Ownership
Land has always been central to the region’s history, not only spiritually but economically. In the Ottoman period, land tenure and taxation systems were complex, shaped by imperial law and local practice. Much land was technically owned by the state or by large landholders, with peasants cultivating it in return for rights that were sometimes secure and sometimes vulnerable.
In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire tried to modernize and centralize its administration, including codifying land titles more clearly. These reforms, while intended partly to increase state revenues and control, had unintended consequences. Wealthy urban families and investors, sometimes living far from the plots in question, could register large tracts of land in their names even if local peasants had tilled them for generations. This pattern did not yet produce the mass dispossession that would later become politically explosive, but it laid a structural foundation for future tensions once land sales to new settlers increased.
Agriculture remained central to livelihoods: olives, grains, fruits, and livestock were staples, and local trade tied villages to towns and ports. The opening of new global trade routes and technologies, such as steamships and later railways, began to pull the region more directly into world markets. Ports like Jaffa grew in importance, exporting citrus and other products. This integration into global capitalism brought new opportunities for some groups and increasing vulnerability for others, especially smallholders exposed to market fluctuations and debt.
Religious Significance and International Attention
Long before 1917, the region’s religious importance attracted outside actors. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the land contained sites of deep theological and historical meaning: Jerusalem with its Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the al-Aqsa Mosque; Hebron’s religious shrines; Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity; and many others. These sites connected local communities to global religious networks.
European powers, often framing themselves as protectors of particular Christian denominations or of holy places, sought influence in the Ottoman domains through churches, consulates, and schools. Russia, France, Britain, and others backed monasteries, missions, and charitable institutions, sometimes offering legal protections and privileges to local Christians who affiliated with their churches. This competition over religious patronage was not only about faith; it served broader strategic and political aims, giving outside states footholds in the region.
Jewish religious connections to the land also shaped patterns of pilgrimage and settlement. Even before organized national movements, some Jews moved to the area for religious reasons, to live and die in what they considered the ancestral land. Charitable funds from Jewish communities abroad supported religious study and communal life in towns like Jerusalem and Safed. These flows of people and money tied the local Jewish population into a wider Jewish world, long before large-scale political projects emerged.
The combination of spiritual importance and imperial rivalry helped turn a relatively small province into a focus of disproportionate international concern. When nationalist projects later sought to mobilize religious connections for political goals, they were building on patterns of attention that were already centuries old.
Nineteenth-Century Reforms and Changing Power Relations
The nineteenth century was a time of strain and transformation for the Ottoman Empire, sometimes called the “sick man of Europe” by its European rivals. Facing military defeats and internal challenges, the empire launched reforms to modernize the army, administration, and legal system. These reforms, known broadly as the Tanzimat, aimed to create a more centralized, efficient, and, in some respects, more legally equal state.
In the region that concerns us, these changes meant new taxes, conscription, and attempts at more uniform law. Non-Muslim subjects, including Christians and Jews, gained formal legal equality on paper, altering old hierarchies and creating new social mobility for some groups. At the same time, European consular protection allowed some local elites to leverage foreign backing in local disputes, further complicating power dynamics.
Foreign capital and expertise began to arrive in greater numbers, financing infrastructure like railways and modern ports. Urban elites entered into new commercial networks, and some invested in land and export-oriented agriculture. Meanwhile, centralization eroded some of the traditional autonomy of local notables and tribal leaders, leading to periodic resistance and local revolts.
For the everyday inhabitant of a village in the hills or plains, these shifts might appear as new demands from tax collectors, unfamiliar bureaucratic procedures, or pressures from moneylenders. Yet, over time, they also altered how people thought about belonging and loyalty. Concepts such as Ottoman citizenship and, later, Arab and other national identities began to circulate, especially among educated urban circles.
Early Encounters with Modern Ideas and External Observers
As transportation and communication improved, more travelers, scholars, missionaries, and journalists from Europe and North America visited the region. They wrote travelogues, biblical guidebooks, and political reports that reached wide audiences. Their descriptions often mixed careful observation with exoticized or romantic images, portraying the land through religious or orientalist lenses.
These accounts mattered. They shaped how foreign publics imagined the region, as a holy land frozen in time, as a place needing “civilization,” or as a “desolate” landscape waiting to be renewed. Such images later fed into political projects and philanthropic campaigns. At the same time, the presence of foreign schools and universities introduced new curricula and languages, training local students in modern sciences, law, and political thought.
Local intellectuals and activists, exposed to new ideas through education, print media, and travel, began to debate concepts of reform, constitutionalism, and collective identity. Newspapers and pamphlets, often in Arabic or Ottoman Turkish, discussed the future of the empire, the meaning of being “Ottoman,” and the place of different communities within it. These early conversations provide a backdrop to later, more clearly defined national movements, which would reframe the land not merely as a province of a multi-ethnic empire but as the homeland of distinct “peoples.”
Continuity and Change on the Eve of a New Era
By the early twentieth century, just before the First World War, the region was no longer the relatively isolated corner of an older empire that it had been centuries earlier. It was a place where global religious interests, imperial rivalries, economic changes, and emerging modern identities intersected.
The population remained largely Arabic-speaking and agrarian, with Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities living side by side in patterns shaped by long-standing customs and relatively recent reforms. The Ottoman Empire still ruled, but its grip was weakening, and its future was uncertain. External actors were more deeply involved than ever before, while new ideas about sovereignty, nationhood, and self-determination spread among different groups.
This was the landscape into which modern nationalist movements, international diplomacy, and later open conflict would be inserted. When we turn to later chapters, the rise of Zionism, Arab nationalism, and the specific political struggles of the twentieth century will make more sense if we keep in mind that they did not start from a blank slate. They emerged in, and reacted to, a land already dense with history, memory, and lived diversity.