Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914

Abstract

Uncovering a history buried by competing nationalist narratives (Jewish, Arab and Palestinian) this book looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has lasted for over a century. It changes how we understand the conflict by exploring the period before World War One: a time when a unique sense of Palestinian identity emerged, and many Zionists imagined a Jewish national home within an Ottoman framework. Further it argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict. The new freedoms introduced by the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution exacerbated divisions, rather than serving as a unifying factor. Offering an integrative approach, this book considers both communities, together and separately, in order to provide a more sophisticated narrative of how the conflict unfolded in its first years. This book is based on documents in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, and French, and moves beyond Palestine to see how the debate over Zionism also played out in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, where both Jews and Palestinians set out to “claim their homeland.