The Land and Its Peoples

Geography and Environment of the Region

To understand the peoples who lived in the land before 1917, it helps to begin with the land itself. The region that later becomes central to the Israel-Palestine conflict lies on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, at the meeting point of Africa, Asia, and, via the Mediterranean, Europe. It is a relatively small area, but its landscapes are surprisingly varied: a narrow coastal plain along the Mediterranean, a central range of hills and mountains, a deep rift valley running north-south, and arid deserts to the south and east.

The coastal plain, including areas around present-day cities like Jaffa, Haifa, and Gaza, has fertile soils and easy access to sea routes. This made it attractive for agriculture, trade, and urban settlements. Moving inland, the central highlands-regions later associated with cities such as Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron-offered natural defensible positions, terraced agriculture, and a cooler climate. The Jordan Rift Valley, including the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, formed a distinctive ecological zone, historically important for irrigation and acting as a corridor connecting the north (Syria and Lebanon) with the south (the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt).

To the south lay the Negev Desert and the Sinai Peninsula, harsh and dry yet traversed by nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples. To the east, beyond the Jordan River, the fertile strip gave way to steppe and desert, but with oases and towns that tied the region into broader trade and pilgrimage networks.

This landscape shaped the livelihoods of the people who lived there. Coastal plains favored grain, citrus, and olive cultivation and linked communities to Mediterranean trade. Hill regions were suited to olives, grapes, and pastoralism. Desert zones supported herding and caravan trade. The fact that the region lay on major trade and military routes-between Egypt and Mesopotamia, between Anatolia and Arabia-meant that outside powers and multiple populations were constantly passing through, settling, or ruling from afar.

Names of the Land Over Time

The land’s many names reflect its layered history and the diversity of its inhabitants. In different periods and languages, the region was known by terms including “Canaan,” “Israel,” “Judah,” “Judea,” “Samaria,” “Palestine,” “Bilad al-Sham,” and “Southern Syria,” among others. These names overlapped in time and sometimes referred to slightly different geographic areas.

In ancient Near Eastern sources, “Canaan” referred to parts of the Levant, including what is now Israel and Palestine. Biblical texts refer to the “Land of Israel” or “Land of Canaan,” often connected with specific tribes or kingdoms rather than a modern-like nation-state. Under Roman rule, administrative units included “Judea,” and later “Syria Palaestina,” a term that contributed to later European usage of “Palestine” to describe the region.

In Arabic, from the early Islamic and Ottoman periods, broader regional terms such as “Bilad al-Sham” (the lands of Greater Syria) were common, with sub-regions known as “Filastin,” “al-Quds” (for Jerusalem and its district), or by city and district names. For local inhabitants, identification often centered more on city, village, religious community, or empire than on a single, unified territorial label.

By the nineteenth century, Western travelers, missionaries, and scholars commonly used “Palestine” in maps and descriptions, while Ottoman administrative units divided the region into several provinces and districts with other names. These overlapping labels can be confusing when looking backward from the perspective of later national movements, but they illustrate that multiple communities, languages, and powers claimed connections (religious, historical, and political) to the same piece of land.

Layers of Population Over Millennia

The land did not have a single, unchanging “original” population. Instead, it saw waves of settlement, conquest, migration, and cultural change. Over thousands of years, different groups entered, intermarried, converted religions, or moved on. This long and complex history became a key part of how later communities would argue about belonging and rights, but before 1917, daily life was shaped less by abstract historical claims than by local social and economic realities.

Earlier historical periods saw various Semitic-speaking peoples in the area, including groups associated with Canaanites, Israelites, Philistines, Arameans, and others. Later came Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman imperial rule, each leaving behind populations, cultural influences, and religious communities. The spread of Christianity and, later, Islam added further layers of identity and practice.

By the medieval and early modern periods, the region’s inhabitants included Arabic-speaking Muslims, Eastern Christian communities of various churches, and Jewish communities with ancient roots as well as later arrivals. There were also smaller groups such as Samaritans and Druze, each with distinct religious and communal traditions. These populations were not hermetically separated; over centuries, they shared languages, markets, and sometimes customs, while also maintaining boundaries through religion, family law, and communal institutions.

The Ottoman Context and Local Society

In the centuries immediately before 1917, the land was part of the Ottoman Empire. Locally, the people who lived there were subjects of the sultan in Istanbul, governed through a hierarchy of provinces, districts, and local notables. Ottoman rule provided the broad political framework, but daily life was organized at the level of villages, towns, tribal groupings, religious institutions, and extended families.

Most inhabitants were peasants, or fellahin, who worked small plots of land, grew olives, wheat, barley, fruits, and vegetables, and kept animals. Some land was held communally by village groups, some by urban landowners, religious endowments, or tribal leaders. In hill villages, families often terraced slopes to retain soil and water. Seasonal patterns of sowing, harvest, and migration shaped the yearly rhythm, as did religious calendars.

Cities and large towns, including Jerusalem, Nablus, Hebron, Jaffa, Acre, and Gaza, served as centers of administration, trade, crafts, and religious learning. Urban elites (Muslim, Christian, and Jewish) often acted as intermediaries between the Ottoman authorities and rural populations, collecting taxes or organizing local defense and public works. Caravan routes, pilgrimage roads, and seaports tied these urban centers into regional and interregional networks: to Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul, and beyond.

Ottoman reforms in the nineteenth century affected land ownership, taxation, and conscription, with consequences for local societies in this region, but the basic pattern remained one of a predominantly rural population with relatively small, though growing, urban centers. Within this framework, communities were categorized and governed in part through their religious affiliation.

Religious Communities and Everyday Coexistence

The population was religiously diverse. The largest group was Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslims. Alongside them lived Eastern Christian communities, including Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Latin (Roman Catholic), Syriac, and other churches, each with its own hierarchy, rites, and connections to external powers or patriarchates. Jewish communities were present in cities such as Safed, Tiberias, Hebron, and Jerusalem, as well as smaller centers, made up of both long-established families and newer arrivals from Europe or other parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

The Ottoman Empire officially organized recognized religious communities into millets, granting them certain rights of internal self-governance in matters like family law, education, and charity. This meant that questions of marriage, inheritance, and personal status were often handled by religious courts rather than a single secular legal system. In everyday life, people interacted across religious lines in markets, workplaces, and sometimes neighborhoods, while still turning to their own communal institutions for key life-cycle events and legal matters.

Shared languages facilitated this interaction. Arabic was the main spoken language for Muslims and most Christians, and also used by many Jews. Other languages, such as Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Yiddish, Armenian, and various European languages, could be heard in specific communities or among foreign visitors. Religious affiliation often overlapped with social and economic distinctions, but it did not always determine political loyalties or personal alliances; class, locality, and family ties were also crucial.

Urban Centers and Rural Villages

The contrast between city and countryside was one of the defining features of the land and its peoples. In rural areas, villages were typically small, with a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants. Houses were clustered together, often built from local stone or mud brick, with agricultural plots and grazing lands surrounding them. Village life was organized around extended families or clans, local elders, and religious figures such as imams, priests, or rabbis.

In urban centers, society was more stratified and cosmopolitan. Merchants, artisans, and professionals formed a middle tier, while notable families and religious leaders held significant social and political influence. Markets, or souqs, brought together farmers, herders, traders, and craftsmen. Some cities, such as Jerusalem, held symbolic importance for multiple faiths, attracting pilgrims, scholars, and foreign consuls.

These cities were not isolated from the countryside. Instead, they depended on surrounding villages for food and raw materials, while villagers relied on cities for trade, legal services, and specialized goods. Seasonal migration between rural and urban spaces was common, and some families maintained ties to both environments, reflecting the fluidity of social and economic life.

Mobility, Migration, and Diversity

Even before the large-scale migrations associated with later national movements, the land was not demographically static. People moved within the region for reasons such as marriage, work, study, or pilgrimage. Pastoral and semi-nomadic groups moved seasonally with their herds, making use of pastures in different ecological zones. Traders and artisans might relocate to promising markets or follow caravan routes.

The region also received immigrants and visitors from elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Sufi orders maintained networks reaching from North Africa to Central Asia, with lodges in key towns. Christian pilgrims and clergy arrived from Europe, Russia, and neighboring Arab lands, some staying as permanent residents attached to monasteries or churches. Jewish migrants came from various directions over many centuries, including from North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, gradually adding to the existing Jewish communities.

This mobility contributed to a population that, while sharing many regional traits, especially language, food, and certain cultural practices, was also internally diverse. Lineages and local traditions carried memories of previous movements and origins, but over time, these blended into a broader sense of belonging to the towns, villages, and landscapes of the region itself.

Social Identities Before Modern Nationalism

Before the rise of modern national movements, people in the land tended to describe themselves in terms that mixed religion, locality, empire, and sometimes broader cultural horizons. A person might identify as a Muslim from a particular village near Nablus, or as a Christian merchant from Jerusalem, or as a Jew connected to a specific quarter of a city and to co-religionists elsewhere. Being an Ottoman subject, or belonging to an Arab-speaking cultural sphere, or being part of a specific tribal or clan network could all be important aspects of identity.

These pre-national identities were not simple or uniform, and they did not automatically line up with later political divisions. Overlapping commitments, to family, village, religious community, city, region, and empire, coexisted and sometimes conflicted. Yet they provided a stable framework within which people navigated daily life and long-term expectations.

The diversity of the land’s peoples, and the ways they lived side by side, created a complex social landscape. That complexity would become a key backdrop for the emergence of modern national ideas and external interventions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but before 1917 it was experienced primarily as the ordinary, if sometimes tense, pluralism of a shared region rather than as a battlefield of fully formed national identities.