Ethan Bonner
When Israel's ninth graders began classes in September, they were carrying in their book bags tools of a changing national consciousness. Their 20th-century history textbooks had just been revised from the standard Zionist view of the state's founding in 1948 to include elements of a competing narrative. In the new books the term Palestinian is used not only to refer to a people but to a longstanding nationalist movement. In study questions, students are asked to place themselves in the shoes of Palestinian Arabs living in Jerusalem or Jaffa as the Zionists arrived and built their settlements. The students read that the 1948 War of Independence against the Arab world was not as lopsided a contest as Israelis have been brought up to believe. According to the new books, the Jews fielded more trained fighters than the Arabs and, apart from the very first weeks of battle, benefited from a military edge.

The new books, begun five years ago under the liberal administration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and worked on quietly under the conservative Benjamin Netanyahu, were brought out in August under Prime Minister Ehud Barak without advance publicity. They have engendered substantial controversy. An op-ed column in The Jerusalem Post on Sept. 5 titled ''Post-Zionist Takeover?'' lamented the new historical perspectives ''seeping dangerously into our children's classrooms'' and charged that the revised books ''undermine the moral case for Zionism.'' But there has been no move to replace the books.

The French philosopher Ernest Renan once defined a nation as ''a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.'' Some of those responsible for the new textbooks clearly believe Israel fits that description. Avi Shlaim, a professor at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and a leading revisionist historian of Israel whose work has helped inspire the new schoolbooks, does as well. That the textbooks should appear almost simultaneously with the publication of Shlaim's major new work, ''The Iron Wall'' (which will be available on Dec. 6), and an even more significant history of Zionism, ''Righteous Victims,'' by Benny Morris, marks a turning point in the nation's historiography and sense of itself.

The traditional history of the Jewish state portrays Zionism as a pure, almost nave movement of young socialists who fled European anti-Semitism beginning in the 1880's to return to the land of their forefathers. Palestine, this history relates, was a neglected arid strip with a small Jewish population and a larger but still insignificant Arab one.

The Zionists bought land at exorbitant prices and extended hands of friendship and cooperation to the local Arabs. After the Nazis exterminated one-third of world Jewry during World War II, the international community understood the Jewish plight and voted at the United Nations in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews were overjoyed by this compromise, but the Arabs, inflamed by arrogance and hatred, declared war. Over the course of the following year, the tiny, lightly armed Jewish community in Palestine fought off and ultimately vanquished not only local Palestinian gangs but the well-trained armies of numerous Arab states. During the course of that war, the Arab governments called on the locals to leave so that the armies could do their work swiftly and efficiently. That led to the creation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. At the end of the war, Israel tried to make peace with its neighbors, but they rejected the overtures and cynically exploited the Palestinian refugee problem.

Arab scholars and some outsiders have long dismissed this narrative as false and self-serving. But until the middle 1980's, few Israelis saw much to challenge there. Then, with the opening of Israeli state archives and the maturation of a young generation of historians, many of them trained abroad (Shlaim and Morris are among the most prominent examples), Israeli scholars began to question key elements of that history. They declared that the old history was myth, and that they were writing the ''new history.'' They have thus collectively become known as Israel's ''new historians,'' and when their work built up the critical mass of a genuine scholarly movement in the early years of this decade, it created quite a storm.

The old history of Israel was a heroic one, centered, in effect, on the question, How did this miracle happen? The new history has tended to focus on the tawdry and decidedly unmiraculous. State archives contain clear evidence of double deals, schemes to transfer Arabs out of the country and rebuffed gestures of peace by the Arab states. As Shlaim describes it in his new book: ''Revisionist Israeli historians . . . believe that postwar Israel was more intransigent than the Arab states and that it therefore bears a larger share of the responsibility for the political deadlock that followed the formal ending of hostilities. . . . The files of the Israel Foreign Ministry, for example, burst at the seams with evidence of Arab peace feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948 on.''

This is a fairly typical passage from Shlaim. It reveals him to be a historian with a mission and a ready set of judgments. Shlaim is the author of ''Collusion Across the Jordan,'' a 1988 book that detailed the hitherto undocumented cooperation in the 1940's between the Zionists and the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan to divide Palestine and keep down the Palestinian nationalist movement. His new book is less a work of original scholarship than an attempt to create the first post-Zionist narrative of Israel from its establishment to the end of the 20th century. Fascinating but tendentious, the book is only partly successful.

It draws its ''iron wall'' title from a 1923 article of the same name by Zeev Jabotinsky, the philosophical and political founder of right-wing Zionism. Jabotinsky had little patience for early Labor Zionists who advocated peaceful means toward resolving the developing conflict with the Arabs. He said there was no chance that the Palestinians and other Arabs would accept Zionism's aim of a Jewish majority in Palestine. The only way Zionism could succeed was if the Jews built an ''iron wall'' of military force that the Arabs were powerless to penetrate. Shlaim argues that although such thinking was at first rejected by David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues, in short order it was accepted by all Zionist leaders and became the nation's guiding principle. His point is that once the realization was made, Israel was not in a hurry to build peace agreements with its neighbors. To the contrary, its leaders understood that they were stronger than the Arabs militarily and diplomatically and that it would serve the country's long-term goals not to make a quick peace. So early peace efforts by the Syrians and Jordanians, and even by the Egyptians under Gamal Abdel Nasser, were ignored or rebuffed, Shlaim shows. In some cases Israel engaged in deception. Only after that, Shlaim argues, did the Arab leaders decide that the Israelis were untrustworthy and beyond hope for peace.

There is no question that Shlaim presents compelling evidence for a revaluation of traditional Israeli history. A great deal has been learned in the past 15 years because of researchers like him. But just as early Israeli historians showed far too much tolerance for Zionist machinations, Shlaim is guilty of the inverse -- taking Nasser at his word and referring to ''Arab principle'' without skepticism (''The Arab leaders refused to sign the agreement because, as a matter of principle, they were opposed to formal recognition of Israel''). His story is a bracing corrective to the somewhat mythic one told until now. But his political views are jarringly evident, and he never really entertains the possibility that Jabotinsky was right, that only an iron wall could guarantee the security of Israel in its first decades.

By contrast, in ''Righteous Victims'' Benny Morris writes with clinical dispassion. While that makes for a less lively narrative, it also makes for a more responsible and credible one. This is a first-class work of history, bringing together the latest scholarship. It is likely to stand for some time as the most sophisticated and nuanced account of the Zionist-Arab conflict from its beginnings in the 1880's. Interestingly, Morris makes little effort to portray his story as a corrective. He is almost never judgmental and takes great pains to show complexity, coincidence and skepticism. He also makes clear -- with phrases like ''the documentation so far available'' -- that history writing is a work in progress.

A professor of history at Israel's Ben-Gurion University, Morris is best-known for his 1988 book, ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,'' one of the cornerstones not only of the ''new history'' but of all serious inquiry into the Israeli-Palestinian question. His new book benefits both from a careful tone and from the decision to start the narrative with the arrival of the first Zionists in 1881. Early patterns of mutual misunderstanding are shown to be repeated decades later. In Morris's powerful retelling, the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 looks surprisingly like the

1987-93 Palestinian intifada. Morris not only points to the Eurocentric misconceptions of the early Jewish settlers but to historic Muslim contempt for Jews ''as objects, unassertive and subservient.'' He exposes the hypocrisy of Zionist leaders going back to Theodor Herzl, who publicly claimed that Zionism was good for the locals while confiding to his diary, ''We must expropriate gently.'' He also offers the thoughtful interpretation that Zionism was ahead of Palestinian nationalism by some 25 years, a gap that mattered enormously in the contest between the two.

Morris presents the best moment-by-moment, battle-by-battle explanation of how the Zionists won the 1948 War of Independence, known to Palestinians as the naqba, or disaster. He gives proper credence to Jewish fears through the years and does not dismiss them as public posturing the way some new historians have. Finally, in retelling events like the 1976 Entebbe hijacking, Morris is not afraid to give the Israeli rescue the heroic tinge it deserves. The ironies of history are on full display. (The leaders of the Palestinian intifada earned their credentials and established connections while in Israeli prisons. Morris thoughtfully lays out what he calls at one point ''a crude and brutalizing perceptional symmetry.'') In short, this is new history as one would like it -- not as part of a political or scholarly campaign but in the genuine pursuit of complex truth.

For anyone who has taken an interest in the Israeli-Arab conflict, both the Shlaim and Morris books are most compelling in their early sections. Recent history -- the 1982 Lebanon war, the 1993 Oslo peace accord -- has already been amply documented in new history fashion by Israeli journalists and politicians; there are few surprises about it in these books.

That said, the story of Israel's monumental success is still beyond simple explanation. Morris makes this clear when he writes, ''Each victory can be explained in the light of specific concrete factors, but, viewed as a whole, the success of the Zionist enterprise has been nothing short of miraculous.'' Traditional Zionist historians (and Zionists) will be pleased to learn that even in the new history there remains a sense of wonder.

Avi Shlaim: Chapter One of The Iron Wall
The Zionist movement, which emerged in Europe in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, aimed at the national revival of the Jewish people in its ancestral home after nearly two thousand years of exile. The term "Zionism" was coined in 1885 by the Viennese Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum, Zion being one of the biblical names for Jerusalem. Zionism was in essence an answer to the Jewish problem that derived from two basic facts: the Jews were dispersed in various countries around the world, and in each country they constituted a minority. The Zionist solution was to end this anomalous existence and dependence on others, to return to Zion, and to attain majority status there and, ultimately, political independence and statehood.

    Ever since the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C. and the exile to Babylon, the Jews yearned to return to Zion. This yearning was reflected in Jewish prayers, and it manifested itself in a number of messianic movements. Modern Zionism, by contrast, was a secular movement, with a political orientation toward Palestine. Modern Zionism was a phenomenon of the late nineteenth-century Europe. It had its roots in the failure of Jewish efforts to become assimilated in Western society, in the intensification of antisemitism in Europe, and in the parallel and not unrelated upsurge of nationalism. If nationalism posed a problem to the Jews by identifying them as an alien and unwanted minority, it also suggested a solution: self-determination for the Jews in a state of their own in which they would constitute a majority. Zionism, however, embodied the urge to create not merely a new Jewish state in Palestine but also a new society, based on the universal values of freedom, democracy, and social justice.

    The father of political Zionism and the visionary of the Jewish state was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a Hungarian-born Jew who worked as a journalist and a playwright in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Herzl was an assimilated Jew with no particular interest in Judaism or Jewish affairs. It was the virulent antisemitism surrounding the Dreyfus Affair in the early 1890s, which he covered as the Paris correspondent of a Vienna daily newspaper, that aroused his interest in the Jewish problem. He concluded that assimilation and emancipation could not work, because the Jews were a nation. Their problem was not economic or social or religious but national. It followed rationally from these premises that the only solution was for the Jews to leave the diaspora and acquire a territory over which they would exercise sovereignty and establish a state of their own.

    This was the solution advocated by Herzl in the famous little book he published in 1896, Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State. The Jews, he insisted, were not merely a religious group but a true nation waiting to be born. The book provided a detailed blueprint for a Jewish state but left open the question whether the site for the proposed state should be Palestine, on account of its historic associations, or some vacant land in Argentina. The publication of The Jewish State is commonly taken to mark the beginning of the history of the Zionist movement. It firmly identified the author's name with political Zionism, with the view that the Jewish question was a political question with international ramifications and that it therefore needed to be attacked in the forum of international politics. This was in contrast to the practical Zionism of Hovevi Zion, the Lovers of Zion, who had started in 1881 in a number of Russian cities, against the background of persecution and pogroms, to promote immigration and settlement activities in Palestine. The publication of The Jewish State also catapulted Herzl into a position of leadership in Jewish affairs, a position he retained until his death in 1904.

    In line with his explicit political orientation, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress, in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. The congress was initially scheduled to take place in Munich because it had kosher restaurants. But the leaders of the Munich Jewish community declined to act as hosts, arguing that there was no Jewish question and that the holding of a congress would only supply ammunition to the antisemites. The Basel Program stated, "The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law." By adopting this program the congress endorsed Herzl's political conception of Zionism. The Basel Program deliberately spoke of a home rather than a state for the Jewish people, but from the Basel Congress onward the clear and consistent aim of the Zionist movement was to create a state for the Jewish people in Palestine. To his diary Herzl confided, "At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it."

    The publication of The Jewish State evoked various reactions in the Jewish community, some strongly favorable, some hostile, and some skeptical. After the Basel Congress the rabbis of Vienna decided to explore Herzl's ideas and sent two representatives to Palestine. This fact-finding mission resulted in a cable from Palestine in which the two rabbis wrote, "The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man."

    This cable encapsulated the problem with which the Zionist movement had to grapple from the beginning: an Arab population already lived on the land on which the Jews had set their heart. The received view is that the Zionist movement, with the exception of a few marginal groups, tended to ignore the Arabs who lived in Palestine and constituted what came to be called the Arab question. Some critics add that it was this ignorance of the Arab population by the Zionists that prevented the possibility of an understanding between the two national movements that were to claim Palestine as their homeland. It is true that the majority of the early Zionists exhibited surprisingly little curiosity about the land of their devotions. It is also true that the principal concern of these Zionists was not the reality in Palestine but the Jewish problem and the Jewish association with the country. It is not true, however, to say that the Zionists were unaware of the existence of an Arab population in Palestine or of the possibility that this population would be antagonistic to the Zionist enterprise. Although vaguely aware of the problem, they underestimated its seriousness and hoped that a solution would emerge in due course.

    Herzl himself exemplified the Zionist tendency to indulge in wishful thinking. He was certainly aware that Palestine was already populated with a substantial number of Arabs, although he was not particularly well informed about the social and economic conditions of the country. He viewed the natives as primitive and backward, and his attitude toward them was rather patronizing. He thought that as individuals they should enjoy full civil rights in a Jewish state but he did not consider them a society with collective political rights over the land in which they formed the overwhelming majority. Like many other early Zionists, Herzl hoped that economic benefits would reconcile the Arab population to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. As the bearers of all the benefits of Western civilization, the Jews, he thought, might be welcomed by the residents of the backward East. This optimistic forecast of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine found its clearest expression in a novel published by Herzl in 1902 under the title Altneuland (Old-Newland). Rashid Bey, a spokesman for the native population, describes Jewish settlement as an unqualified blessing: "The Jews have made us prosperous, why should we be angry with them? They live with us as brothers, why should we not love them?" This picture, however, was nothing but a pipe dream, a utopian fantasy. Its author completely overlooked the possibility that an Arab national movement would grow in Palestine in response to the Zionist drive to transform the country into a Jewish national home with a Jewish majority.

    In defense of Herzl it should be pointed out that at the end of the nineteenth century Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire, and an Arab national movement was only beginning to develop there. Still, his preference for playing the game of high politics was unmistakable. His most persistent efforts were directed at persuading the Ottoman sultan to grant a charter for Jewish settlement and a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But he also approached many other world leaders and influential magnates for help in promoting his pet project. Among those who granted him an audience were the pope, the king of Italy, the German kaiser, and Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary. In each case Herzl presented his project in a manner best calculated to appeal to the listener: to the sultan he promised Jewish capital, to the kaiser he intimated that the Jewish territory would be an outpost of Berlin, to Chamberlain he held out the prospect that the Jewish territory would become a colony of the British Empire. Whatever the arguments used, Herzl's basic aim remained unchanged: obtaining the support of the great powers for turning Palestine into a political center for the Jewish people.

    In its formative phase, under the direction of Herzl, the Zionist movement thus displayed two features that were to be of fundamental and enduring importance in its subsequent history: the nonrecognition of a Palestinian national entity, and the quest for an alliance with a great power external to the Middle East. Bypassing the Palestinians was the trend in Zionist policy from the First Zionist Congress onward. The unstated assumption of Herzl and his successors was that the Zionist movement would achieve its goal not through an understanding with the local Palestinians but through an alliance with the dominant great power of the day. The weakness of the Yishuv, the pre-Independence Jewish community in Palestine, and the growing hostility of the Palestinians combined to make the reliance on a great power a central element in Zionist strategy. The dominant great power in the Middle East changed several times in the course of the twentieth century; first it was the Ottoman Empire, after World War I it was Great Britain, and after World War II it was the United States. But the Zionist fixation on enlisting the support of the great powers in the struggle for statehood and in the consolidation of statehood remained constant.

Benny Morris: The first chapter of Righteous Victims

The Land and the People

"Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren. . . . The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. . . . It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land. . . . Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. . . . Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. . . . Nazareth is forlorn; . . . Jericho . . . accursed . . . Jerusalem . . . a pauper village. . . . Palestine is desolate and unlovely."

So wrote Mark Twain in 1867. He may have been indulging in hyperbole, but then neither was Palestine, in the mid-nineteenth century, the "land of milk and honey" promised in the Bible.

As it is today, the Holy Land — Eretz Yisrael or the Land of Israel for the Jews, Falastin or Palestine for the Arabs — was defined during the years of British rule (1918 - 48) as the area bounded in the north by a range of hills just south of the Litani River in Lebanon; in the east by the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the Arava Valley (Wadi Araba); in the west by the Mediterranean Sea and the Sinai Peninsula; and in the south by the Gulf of Eilat (or Gulf of Aqaba). In all, it consists of about 26,320 square kilometers (10,162 square miles), an area roughly the size of New Jersey.

Of this landmass, about 50 - 60 percent, the Negev and the Araba, is a wilderness sprinkled with a handful of oases but largely uninhabitable and uncultivable, as is the area called the Judean Desert, between the hilly spine of Judea — running from Ramallah through Jerusalem to Hebron — and the Jordan River.

Palestine is a dry land, with only one small river — the Jordan — which in fact is not inside Palestine but rather demarcates the borders between Palestine and Syria and, farther south, Palestine and Jordan. Otherwise there are only two small streams with perennial water. Most streams run only in winter and are dry beds for the rest of the year. Natural springs and wells dot the northern half of the country; in the south they are relatively rare. The naturally habitable north has rainfall between October and April each year; the remaining months are dry, with summer temperatures reaching 30 - 35 degrees Celsius. The Negev has virtually no rain, and temperatures at its southern end reach 40 - 45 degrees Celsius in summer.

The population has tended to concentrate, in both ancient and modern times, in the hilly central areas of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, and in the fertile coastal plain and the west-east valley that branches out from it between Haifa and the Jordan River, known as the Jezreel Valley or the Plain of Esdraelon. A further fertile area is the northern Jordan Valley running, from south to north, from Beit Sh'an (Beisan) to the Sea of Galilee and its surrounding lowland, to Lake Huleh and then to the Jordan's sources, in the foothills of Mount Hermon.

In ancient times, it is estimated, Palestine contained between 750,000 and 6 million inhabitants, with most scholars giving the figure 2.5 million for about 50 a.d. During the second millennium b.c. it was inhabited by a collection of pagan tribes or peoples — Canaanites, Jebusites, and others — who jostled for control of this or that area. Toward the end of the millennium the Hebrews, or Jews, invaded and settled the land, and for most of the next millennium constituted the majority of the population and governed the bulk of the country. The core of the Jewish state (at one point there were two Jewish kingdoms) was the hill country of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. Through most of the period there was a minority population of Philistines, and later, Hellenistic and Romanized pagans concentrated in the coastal plain, in such towns as Caesarea, Jaffa, Ashkelon, and Gaza. The chapter of Jewish sovereignty ended when the Romans invaded and then put down two revolts, in a.d. 66 - 73 and 132 - 35, and exiled much of the Jewish population. After successive invasions and counterinvasions by Persians, Arabs, Turks, Crusaders, Mongols, Mamelukes, and (again) Turks, the country — at the beginning of the nineteenth century, under imperial Ottoman rule — had a population of about 275,000 to 300,000 people, of whom 90 percent were Muslim Arabs, 7,000 to 10,000 Jews, and 20,000 to 30,000 Christian Arabs. By 1881, on the eve of the start of the Zionist Jewish influx, Palestine's population was 457,000 — about 400,000 of them Muslims, 13,000 - 20,000 Jews, and 42,000 Christians (mostly Greek Orthodox). In addition, there were several thousand more Jews who were permanent residents of Palestine but not Ottoman citizens.

The small pre-Zionist Jewish population of Palestine — usually referred to collectively as the Old Yishuv (literally, the "old settlement") — was largely poor. Many if not most lived on charity from their coreligionists abroad. Both Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) and Sephardim (Jews of Spanish, North African, and Middle Eastern extraction) were almost exclusively Orthodox and were concentrated, in separate areas, in Judaism's four "holy" towns: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safad, and Tiberias. Most were Ottoman subjects, extremely submissive toward the Turkish authorities and deferential toward the large Muslim communities among which they lived. Many spent their days learning Talmud and Torah; a few were merchants and shopkeepers; more were petty craftsmen. All in all, they were a numerically insignificant minority.

The overwhelming majority of the population was Arab, about 70 percent rural. These were dispersed in seven to eight hundred hamlets and villages ranging in size from fewer than one hundred to nearly one thousand inhabitants. Most of the villages were in the hill country, their location dictated by access to springs or wells and defensive requirements like hilltops or cliffs. Many had been established by invading Bedouin who turned sedentary. The coastal plain and the Jezreel and Jordan valleys were relatively empty, both because of the dangers posed by marauding Bedouin bands and because their swamps presented health hazards and were difficult to cultivate.

Many of the villages fought a continual if low-key battle against the Bedouin, who periodically sortied into the settled areas of Palestine from the desert east of the Jordan, from the Negev, and from the Sinai. There were also protracted land and water disputes between villages and sometimes between clans within villages. These feuds, and rivalries between leading urban families and between various towns, such as Jerusalem and Hebron, were to serve as continuous elements of division and weakness in Palestinian Arab society.

Agriculture was primitive, with little irrigation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, land was usually owned by the villagers privately or collectively. The second half of the century saw the growing impoverishment of the villagers, in large part owing to more efficient Ottoman taxation, and a great deal of rural land was bought up by urban notable families (in Arabic, a'yan ), who had accumulated their new wealth as Ottoman agents, especially in tax collection, and through commerce with the West. By the early twentieth century, villagers in dozens of localities no longer owned their land but continued to cultivate it as tenant farmers.

Almost all the large landowners (effendis) were urban notables, some of them living outside Palestine, many in Beirut, Amman, Damascus, and Paris. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Zionist land purchases from effendis contributed to the roster of dispossessed villagers. The second half of the century witnessed the rapid growth of citrus cultivation, mainly in the humid coastal plain, the produce destined for highly profitable export to Europe. Land became a more attractive investment, and the concomitant price rises led to further sales by impoverished fellahin.

By 1881 a third of Palestine's population was urban — up from only 22 percent in 1800. Most of the Jews and Christians lived in the towns, making their relative weight there decidedly greater than in the country as a whole. By 1880 Jerusalem's population numbered 30,000, of whom about half were Jews; Gaza's population was 19,000, Jaffa's 10,000, and Haifa's 6,000. The notables in the towns were nurtured by the Ottoman Empire, which gave them various local positions and tax-collecting functions, and by the British authorities after 1917 - 18. The elite families — the Khalidis, Husseinis, and Nashashibis in Jerusalem; the Ja'bris and Tamimis of Hebron; the Nabulsis, Masris, and Shak'as of Nablus, and others — supplied municipal officials, judges, police officers, religious officials, and civil servants. Inevitably, given their wealth, power, and influence with the imperial authorities, the a'yan emerged as the Palestinian Arabs' local and eventually "national" leadership. A vast gulf — based on disparities in educational level and social, economic, and political position — separated the a'yan from the largely illiterate masses.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw a gradual modernization of the country, accompanying the growing urbanization. While most villages and towns were connected by footpaths rather than paved roads, and people and goods still moved on foot or by horse, camel, or mule rather than in wheeled vehicles, a carriage-road, the first in Palestine, was constructed in 1869 between Jaffa and Jerusalem. The first railroad was laid down in 1892 (also between these two towns), and a second railroad, connecting Haifa and Deraa, running through the Jezreel Valley, was constructed in 1903 - 05.

The century also witnessed a steady increase in literacy. It is estimated that around 1800 only 3 percent of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine were literate (mostly elder sons of the a'yan). As the century progressed, an education "system" emerged, mostly owing to the penetration of European missionaries rather than to Ottoman or local Arab initiative.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, lighting was provided by candles and the burning of olive oil. In the 1860s, naphtha was introduced, and generator-produced electricity reached Palestine during the first decade of the twentieth century. Through the nineteenth century the population was plagued by diseases such as malaria, trachoma, dysentery, cholera, and typhoid fever. Water supplies were inadequate and frequently impure. But the first pharmacy opened its doors in 1842; and the first European hospital, in Jerusalem, in 1843. By the end of the century, there were fifteen hospitals in the town, making it the center of European medicine in Palestine and beyond.

The Turkish Administration

The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine from 1517 to 1917 - 18, was aware of the land's importance as the cradle of Judaism and Christianity but never made it a separate, distinct administrative district. In the 1870s Palestine was part of the province (vilayet) of Syria, which was ruled by a governor (wali) stationed in Damascus. The province was subdivided into districts (sanjaks), three of them in Palestine: Acre, including Haifa, the area of today's Hadera, the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys, the Sea of Galilee, Safad, and Tiberias; Nablus, including Beisan, Jenin, and Qalqilya; and Jerusalem, which included Jericho, Jaffa, Gaza, Beersheba, Hebron, and Bethlehem. The sanjaks in turn were divided into subdistricts, administered by local governors called kaymakams.

In 1887 the sanjak of Jerusalem became an independent mutasarriflik (subgovernorate) answerable directly to Constantinople rather than to Damascus. The following year, the rest of Palestine — the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre — were separated from the vilayet of Sam (Syria) and became the responsibility of a newly created vilayet of Beirut. The new entity, which consisted of the area of much of present-day Lebanon, thus also controlled the northern half of Palestine.

During a decade of Egyptian rule in Palestine (1831 - 40), the authorities had managed to impose more or less centralized government. The powerful Egyptian army, led by Ibrahim 'Ali, brushed aside most of the local magnates who had managed to carve out de facto fiefdoms in different areas of the country. They also staved off the Bedouin incursions from the eastern and southern deserts that had done so much to keep Palestine insecure and poor.

On their return, the Turks instituted a wide range of reforms (tanzimat) — economic, administrative, legal, military, and political — but with mixed results. The new, more efficient and centralized taxation resulted in massive impoverishment of the rural population, which in turn led to the steady depopulation of villages and an influx into the towns. Efforts to conscript villagers into the Turkish army, a return of brigandage on the roads, and renewed Bedouin incursions — all had the same effect. The village rulers, or sheikhs, who before the Egyptian conquest had had considerable authority, lost much of it as their role as tax collectors for the central government passed into the hands of Ottoman officials and urban notables.

At the same time economic conditions as well as law and order in the towns vastly improved. Trade with the West picked up. The urban notables became wealthier and acquired more land. Turkish reforms of local government, both in Palestine and Syria, including the appointment of town councils, also resulted in increasing the power of the a'yan and religious leaders (the ulema) at the expense of Ottoman governors and subgovernors. These reforms proved to be milestones on the road to the emergence of centrifugal Arab "nationalisms." In other ways, too, the tanzimat — which aimed at centralization and unity — contributed to disunity in the Arab provinces of the empire. The impoverishment of the countryside and the growing prosperity of the towns drove a wedge between townspeople and the fellahin, or peasantry. And the Sublime Porte's firmans (decrees) of 1839 and, more decisively, of 1856 — equalizing the status of Muslim and non-Muslim subjects — resulted in short order in the dramatic alienation of Muslims from Christians. The former resented the implied loss of superiority and recurrently assaulted and massacred Christian communities — in Aleppo in 1850, in Nablus in 1856, and in Damascus and Lebanon in 1860. Among the long-term consequences of these bitter internecine conflicts were the emergence of a Christian-dominated Lebanon in the 1920s - 40s and the deep fissure between Christian and Muslim Palestinian Arabs as they confronted the Zionist influx after World War I.