![]() These tensions would later be exacerbated by the Young Turk Revolution and the increasing efforts to Turkify the various Ottoman provinces. There were rebellions against Ottoman rule, and Palestine even managed to win autonomy for a good while under the leadership of Daher al-‘Umar, however, it would eventually be crushed by Constantinople. With the advent of European-style nationalism and the weakening of the Ottoman state, the relations between the various ethnic groups and communities would fray. ![]() Towards the end of the life of the Ottoman empire, the latter was much more common than the former. However, as with any empire, there were times of peace and prosperity, as well as times of hardship and war. This attitude was also extended towards Christian Palestinians, where the keys of the Holy Sepulcher remain traditionally entrusted with a Muslim family to this day. Palestinian Muslims, perhaps uniquely so, were also in the habit of celebrating religious festivals in honor of the prophets and holy men of Judaism such as Reuben, son of Jacob. For example, the inscription on the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem reads “There is no God but Allah, and Abraham is his friend” in a nod to Christian and Jewish Ottomans, who like Muslims, are considered to be part of an Abrahamic religious tradition. Relations between the numerous religious groups in Palestine were generally stable and peaceful, nurtured by more than a millennium of coexistence and shared adversity. While this system suffered from serious flaws, and its breadth and tolerance waxed and waned with different governors and social and economic circumstances, it was still superior to the outright persecution and pogroms which various religious groups on the European continent had to endure. The Ottoman Millet system and its various manifestations provided a certain degree of autonomy to minority religious and ethnic communities. Palestinian Christians made up around 10 percent of the population, while Jewish Palestinians numbered around 25,000, mainly situated in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safad and Tiberius. The population of these three at the time would amount to approximately 600,000, the vast majority of which were Sunni Muslim. ![]() Rather the goal of this introduction is to describe the political context that lead up to the modern Palestinian question. This article does not aim to delve into the minutiae of this Palestinian history, indeed entire books could be -and have been- written on the subject. ![]() Unfortunately, this is the foundational myth of many reactionary ethno-nationalist ideologies.Īs elsewhere, over the millennia kingdoms rose and fell, religions were founded, wars both holy and unholy were waged, and peoples lived, mixed, moved and died out. For example, the impulse to imagine our ancestors as some closed-off, well-defined, unchanging homogeneous group having exclusive ownership over a territory that somehow corresponds to modern day borders has no basis in history. This is not the case, and we should be especially wary of imposing our modern conceptions on a context where they would be nonsensical. Today the nation state is so ubiquitous that many have come to internalize it as natural. For the vast majority of history, the concept of a nation state did not exist. Even Palestinian agricultural practices can be traced back to the Natufians -one of the peoples credited with inventing agriculture- who called Palestine and the fertile crescent their home, as far back as 9,000 BCE.īefore we continue, it is important to stress that when we talk about Palestine, we are not talking about a Palestinian nation state. These ancient influences can still be felt today in the idioms, vocabulary and toponymy used by its native Palestinian population. From Assyrian and Nabataean, to Persian and Roman -and many more- each influencing as well as being influenced by the rich cultural and civilizational mélange that defined the area. Throughout the ages, Palestine has been home to dozens of cultures, kingdoms and empires. First documented in ancient Egyptian tablets as Peleset over 3000 years ago, the region between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan has come to mean many different things to many different peoples.
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