Palestine Under the Ottomans
The Unreasonable Palestinian Hatred of the Jewish Immigrants (see also)

Ottoman Palestine was not a prosperous or healthy area. Peasants were dirty, ridden with lice, fleas and other parasites and malaria was endemic. Muslim infant and child mortality was 30%. In villages in the Hebron subdistrict, average life expectancy was 37.2 years for men but only 30.2 years for women. Women in the countryside were much more at risk than men due to malnutriion and childbirths. 0 to7 years and 15 to 35 were particularly high risk ages. Half of the population died before their mid-thirties. Very few people lived beyond the age of 70. Ottoman Palestine was not a peaceful area. Peasant villages were built on hilltops and surrounded by walls for a reason, the wealthy built castles they could defend, travellers went in caravans with armed guards for protection. The early Zionist Jews were so incompetent at defending themselves that they often hired Arab guards to protect them from the very villages that were attacking them.

The Tanzimat reform Land Code of 1858 allowed purchase of land. The Arab A'yan, the effendi, 'notables' - the elites and merchants and local Ottoman beys and pashas took the opportunity to gain legal ownership of property while the peasants, the fellaheen, became tenants, always in debt, of these absentee owners. When Zionist Jewish immigration began in the late 19th century life in Palestine was already so bad that large numbers were emigrating from the Levant and the poor farming practices were affecting the returns from land ownership and making sale to Jews attractive.

From the begining, the response to Zionist Jewish immigration into Palestine was so extremely negative, violent and criminal that one suspects/expects the Jews must have been doing terrible things. But in the period up to WW1, the new legal immigrants had very little effect on the local population. Arab and Jewish communities lived separate lives and by 1914 only a small percentage of the fellaheen had been dispossessed by Jewish purchase of land while more work was available because of Jewish capital investment. By 1914, Jews had only secured about 2% of Palestine land, mostly in the coastal plains and the Galilee and their population had doubled to more then 50,000, 15% of the population. According to Mohsen Mohammed Saleh 55,000 European Jews had emigrated to Palestine between 1881 and 1914 and the first armed attacks by peasants on Zionist settlers ocurred in 1886 In 1914 there were 80,000 Jews in Palestine but the numbers fell to 55,000 by 1918.

Why did the Muslims hate the Zionist Jews so much, so immediately? They had the 1200 years of Muslim history: a 1200 year tradition of despising the Jews as beneath them. : Jews rejected Muhammed, Muhammed's treachery and killing of the Jews of Yathrib and Khaybar, their role as despised dhimmis, the sons of apes and pigs, etc. Jews had lived under the oppressive rules of the "Pact of Umar" and now there were all these New Jews arriving every day and buying land and starting settlements, expanding towns, creating businesses, schools, hospitals and a university, making money and they believed they were better than the locals. It was unacceptable. The elites who had maintained wealth and power as middlemen to the Ottomans could see their position and power might disappear which is part of the reason they regularly stirred up the lower classes to religious anger.

The Zionists were Jews but a different type of non-submissive Jew, outsiders, feranghi, Crusaders, Europeans, Russians, etc. The people of Palestine were not famousfr thei welcoming atitude, they hated everyone, the effendi despised the fellaheen, the fellaheen hated the effendi, they all hated the Ottoman overlords who demanded baksheesh. The Palestnians quickly developed a paranoid fear the Zionists would replace them even though this was clearly impossible …

  • unless there was a world war and Turkey chooses the losing side which ends the Ottoman Empire
  • unless a desperate Britain promises a Jewish homeland for Palestine in a forlon fantasy
  • unless a newly created world body approves this Jewish homeland
  • unless a crazed dictator rules Germany forces hundreds of thousands of Jews to flee Europe
  • unless the Arabs begin a rebellion against the British in the late 1930s and lose
  • unless the Arabs support Germany in the second world war and Germany loses
  • unless inter-ethnic violence forces the British to leave Palestine
  • unless the Arabs start a war against the Jews and lose

but what are the odds that that chain of events could occur …

Righteous Victims: A History Of The Zionist Arab Conflict-1881-2001 Benny Morris

The overwhelming majority of the population was Arab, about 70 percent rural. These were dispersed in seven to eight hundred hamlets and villages ranging in size from fewer than one hundred to nearly one thousand inhabitants. Most of the villages were in the hill country, their location dictated by access to springs or wells and defensive requirements like hilltops or cliffs. Many had been established by invading Bedouin who turned sedentary. The coastal plain and the Jezreel and Jordan valleys were relatively empty, both because of the dangers posed by marauding Bedouin bands and because their swamps presented health hazards and were difficult to cultivate.

Many of the villages fought a continual if low-key battle against the Bedouin, who periodically sortied into the settled areas of Palestine from the desert east of the Jordan, from the Negev, and from the Sinai. There were also protracted land and water disputes between villages and sometimes between clans within villages. These feuds, and rivalries between leading urban families and between various towns, such as Jerusalem and Hebron, were to serve as continuous elements of division and weakness in Palestinian Arab society.

Agriculture was primitive, with little irrigation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, land was usually owned by the villagers privately or collectively. The second half of the century saw the growing impoverishment of the villagers, in large part owing to more efficient Ottoman taxation, and a great deal of rural land was bought up by urban notable families (in Arabic, a'yan), who had accumulated their new wealth as Ottoman agents, especially in tax collection, and through commerce with the West. By the early twentieth century, villagers in dozens of localities no longer owned their land but continued to cultivate it as tenant farmers. Almost all the large landowners (effendis) were urban notables, some of them living outside Palestine, many in Beirut, Damascus, and Paris. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Zionist land purchases from effendis contributed to the roster of dispossessed villagers. The second half of the century witnessed the rapid growth of citrus cultivation, mainly in the humid coastal plain, the produce destined for highly profitable export to Europe. Land became a more attractive investment, and the concomitant price rises led to further sales by impoverished fellahin.

Further Information:

  • Mortality and Life-Course Patterns in Late Ottoman Palestine: Insights from the Hebron Region
  • Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine- - Alan Dowty
  • Infant Mortality in Palestine - Benno Gruenfelder
  • Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era-1908-1914 - Louis Fishman
  • Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948 - Jacob Norris
  • Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 - Gershon Shafir,
  • One Palestine Complete, Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate - Tom Segev
  • The Palestinian Issue - Mohsen Mohammad Saleh
  • The Tanzimat: Secular reforms in the Ottoman Empire - Ishtiaq Hussain
  • Village Life in Palestine - G. Robinson Lees
  • Zionism and the Palestinians - Flapan Simha