From 1516 until the end of World War I, Palestine formed part of the Ottoman Empire. These four centuries shaped the social, economic, and administrative landscape that Zionist settlers and British officials would later encounter — and systematically transform. Understanding Ottoman Palestine is essential to understanding what was destroyed in 1948.
Administrative Reality
Ottoman Palestine was organized into districts (sanjaks) centered on cities such as Jerusalem, Nablus, Acre, and Gaza. The population was overwhelmingly Arabic-speaking. Muslims formed the large majority, with significant Christian and smaller Jewish communities living as recognized religious groups under the millet system. Local notables (a‘yan) played important roles in politics, tax collection, and mediation with the central authorities.
Land and Society
Most land was held under various forms of tenure: privately owned (mulk), state land (miri), and religious endowments (waqf). Peasant families cultivated the same plots for generations. The 1858 Land Code and the Tanzimat reforms began to formalize ownership in ways that later facilitated large-scale land purchases by Zionist organizations, often from absentee landlords. Yet the overwhelming majority of cultivators remained Palestinian Arab peasants whose attachment to specific villages and lands was intimate and generational.
Emerging Palestinian Identity
While Ottoman subjects identified with religion, locality, and the wider Arab world, a distinct Palestinian sense of place and shared destiny was already visible in the late Ottoman period. Newspapers, local councils, and petitions against early Zionist settlement demonstrated a growing awareness of the land as a specific homeland threatened by external colonization. By the early twentieth century, “Palestine” was not an abstract concept; it was a lived social and geographic reality whose people were beginning to organize in defense of their presence.
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the people of Palestine were not a blank slate. They were a society with deep roots, established villages, refined agricultural practices, urban centers of learning and trade, and a clear understanding that the land was theirs. The colonial project that followed did not settle an empty land; it sought to replace an existing people.