Edinburgh University Press Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland (Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire)

Looks at how Jews and Palestinians were set into a mode of conflict during the late Ottoman era Challenges previous work on late Ottoman Palestine Argues that a unique sense of Palestinian identity emerged even before World War One Claims some Zionists imagined a Jewish national home within an Ottoman framework Transforms our current understanding of the roots of this century-long conflict Based on documents in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew and French Uncovering a history buried by different nationalist narratives (Jewish, Israeli, Arab and Palestinian) this book looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It presents an innovative analysis of the struggle in its first years, when Palestine was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. And it argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict: the new freedoms introduced by the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution exacerbated divisions (rather than serving as a unifying factor). Offering an integrative approach, it considers both communities, together and separately, in order to provide a more sophisticated narrative of how the conflict unfolded in its first years.