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

The Arab response to Jewish immigration into Palestine was so extremely negative, violent and criminal that one suspects/expects the Jews must have been doing terrible things to the lives of the Arabs. But in the period up to WW1, the new legal immigrants had very little effect on the Arab 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.

Why did the Muslim Arabs hate the Zionist Jews so much, so immediately?

  • the 1200 years of Muslim history: Jews rejecting 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
  • The Zionists were Jews but a different type of non-submissive Jew, outsiders, Franks, Crusaders, Europeans, Russians, etc
  • they hated everyone, the effendi despised the fellaheen, the fellaheen hated the effendi, they all hated the Ottoman overlords who demanded baksheesh
  • They had a paranoid fear the Zionists would replace them even though this was clearly impossible … unless there was a world war which ends the Ottoman Empire, unless a desperate Britain promotes a Jewish homeland in Palestine, unless a crazed dictator ruling 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 lose, unless inter-ethnic violence forces the British to leave Palestine, unless the Arabs start a war against the Jews and lose - but those events could never occur

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 Tanzimat: Secular reforms in the Ottoman Empire - Ishtiaq Hussain
  • Village Life in Palestine - G. Robinson Lees
  • Zionism and the Palestinians - Flapan Simha