A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel

359 Pages·2008·8.253 MB·English

by  Gudrun Krämer, Graham Harman

A History of Palestine

A History of Palestine
FROM THE OTTOMAN CONQUEST
TO THE FOUNDING
OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
Gudrun Kramer
Translated by Graham Harman and Gudrun Kramer
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
P R I N C E T O N AN D O X F O R D
First published in Germany under the title Geschichte Faldstinas: Von der osmanischen
Eroberung bis zur GrUndung des Staates Israel
© Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, Miinchen 2002
English translation © 2008 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,
New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire 0X20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congkhss Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kramer, Gudrun.
[Geschichte Palastinas. English]
A history of Palestine : from the Ottoman conquest to the founding of the state of
Israel / by Gudrun Kramer ; translated by Graham Harman and Gudrun Kramer,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-11897-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Palestine—History—1799-1917.
2. Palestine—History—1917-1948. I. Title.
DS125.K7313 2008
956.94'034—dc22 2007023938
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut that is
funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
1’his book has been composed in Sabon
Printed on acid-free paper. »
press.princcton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
13 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
List of Tables ix
Preface xi
Abbreviations xiii
CHAPTER One Names and Borders 1
Chapter Two The Holiness of the “Holy Land” 18
Chapter Three Contrasts: Palestine, 1750-1840 37
Chapter Four The Age of Reform, 1840-1914 71
CHAPTER Five Evolving Nationalisms: Zionism and Arabism,
1880-1914 101
Chapter Six “A Land without a People for a People without
a Land”? Population, Settlement, and Cultivation,
1800-1914 128
Chapter Seven World War I and the British Mandate 139
Chapter Eight Double Standard, or Dual Obligation 164
Chapter Nine “Two Peoples in One Land” 188
Chapter Ten The Mufti and the Wailing Wall 216
Chapter Eleven From Unrest to Uprising 238
Chapter Twelve The Arab Uprising, 1936-39 264
Chapter Thirteen Triumph and Catastrophe: From World
War II to the State of Israel 296
Bibliography 325
Index 343

ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
Figure 1. Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. Anony­
mous photograph, c. 1900. 34
Figure 2. A glimpse of transport and communication. Anony­
mous photograph, c. 1900. 46
Figure 3. Rural idyll near Jerusalem. Anonymous photo­
graph, c. 1900. 51
Figure 4. Armed Bedouin. Anonymous photograph, c. 1900. 56
Figure 5. Ottoman soldiers in the citadel of Jerusalem. Anony­
mous photograph, c. 1900. 74
Figure 6. The Orientalist gaze. Anonymous photograph,
c. 1900. 88
Figure 7. The Jerusalem railway station. Anonymous photo­
graph, c. 1900. 90
Figure 8. Street scene in Jerusalem. Anonymous photograph,
c. 1900. 92
Figure 9. View of Nablus. Anonymous photograph, c. 1900. 97
Figure 10. Street in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. Anony­
mous photograph, c. 1900. 178
Figure 11. The shrine of Nabi Musa. Anonymous photo­
graph, c. 1900. 209
Figure 12. Prayer at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Anony­
mous photograph, c. 1900. 226
Figure 13. Postcard from Jerusalem: The Temple Mount with
the reconstructed Jewish Temple. (Source: Mordecai Naor,
Eretz Israel. Cologne 1998, p. 97.) 228
Figure 14. The Faithful at the Dome of the Rock. Anony­
mous photograph, c. 1900. 231
Maps
Map 1. Palestine, from Dan to Beersheva 10
Map 2. Commercial and Pilgrimage Routes of the Eighteenth
Century 42
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Map 3. Geography of Palestine 84
Map 4. Ottoman Administrative Districts in Syria and Pales­
tine before World War I 99
Map 5. The Near East following the San Remo Conference
(1920) 162
Map 6. The Quarters of Jerusalem - 233
Map 7. Partition Plan of the Peel Commission (1937) 282
Map 8. The Armistice Lines of 1949 321
Note on Illustrations
Figures 1-12 and 14 come from the collection of historical photographs of
Palestine held at the Faculty of Theology of Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin.
The holdings include around 2,000 glass-plate slides that were collected by
Hugo Grepmann, who taught at Humboldt Unversitat from 1907 to 1927,
and who traveled to Palestine in 1906. While he took some of the photo­
graphs himself, others were made by Gustav Dalman and participants in his
classes. (Dalman served as the first director of the German Protestant Institute
for the Study of Antiquity in the Holy Land in Jerusalem from 1902 to 1916.)
Other collections such as that of the American Colony were later added to
the existing one. It was only in 1994 that the glass-plate slides, which until
then had been housed in various places and many of which were in a precari­
ous state due to war damages, could be assembled in a central location. For
this reason, the precise origin of many slides remains unclear. For the same
reason, it is impossible to reconstruct exactly when and by whom the slides
reproduced in the present book were taken. They are reproduced with the
kind permission of the Faculty of Theology of Humboldt-Universitat zu
Berlin.
TABLES
Table 1. Demographic Development under the British Man­
date (chapter 8) 183
Table 2. Population Density and Distribution by Geographic
Region (chapter 8) 186
Table 3. Immigration and Emigration, 1920-36 (chapter 11) 241
Table 4. Economic Growth, 1922-47 (chapter 11) 243
Table 5. Regional Distribution of Population in Mandate Pal­
estine (chapter 13) 307