Turks, Arabs and Jewish Immigration into Palestine

Abstract

It is commonly maintained that prior to World War I all was well between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. According to this view, the Jews were too few and the Arabs too inarticulate for discord to have manifested itself. Amongst the Arabs there was, at most, only rudimentary opposition to Jewish settlement in the country, and the general harmony was not broken until the British promised national sovereignty to both the Arabs and the Jews in the course of the Great War. This study seeks to do three things. It attempts to trace the development of the Ottoman Government's position regarding Jewish immigration into Palestine between 1882 and 1914, to describe how this policy was translated into practice by the authorities in Palestine, and to discover how the Arabs reacted to this influx of Jews in the light of Ottoman official policy and practice. This study, which is based mainly on diplomatic and Jewish records, reaches the conclusion that the popular notion of Arab- Jewish harmony in Palestine prior to 1914 has little grounding in fact.</p