Palestine Wasn't Conquered from Arabs or by Israelis. Here's the Truth.

The 400-Year Rule Erased from the Story

Photo by Fatih Yürür on Unsplash

Palestine was not conquered from the Arabs, nor did the Israelis conquer it; it was conquered by the British from the Turks. From the iron grip of the Ottoman Empire. In 1914 the Turkish monarch still carried the titles of His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, Padishah of the Ottomans, Khan of Khans, Caliph of the Faithful, Shadow of Allah on Earth, Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries, and Sovereign of the Three Continents and Two Seas.

To Europeans, the Ottoman government was known as the Sublime Porte—literally the ‘High Gate’ of Istanbul, where ambassadors and petitioners once passed through massive doors to reach the Grand Vizier, the Sultan’s prime minister. The name evoked majesty and awe, suggesting an empire whose decrees flowed outward from a single fountainhead of authority.

That empire’s rule over Palestine began in 1516, when Sultan Selim I crushed the Mamluk armies at Marj Dabiq. The Mamluks, once slave soldiers who had defended Egypt and Syria against Crusaders and Mongols, had grown weak from internal strife. Their defeat brought Syria, Egypt, and Palestine into the Ottoman fold, where they would remain for four centuries. The Ottoman Sultan then took the title of caliph, the successor of Muhammad and rightful leader of the global Muslim community.

The sixteenth through seventeenth centuries marked the high tide of Ottoman strength. Jerusalem saw new walls erected around the Old City, still standing today, and the repair of aqueducts that revived its water supply. Religious endowments, schools, and charities flourished. The empire governed its diverse subjects through the millet system, granting Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims autonomy under their own religious leaders. Each millet collected taxes, ran its own schools and courts, and maintained internal order. For a time, this arrangement created stability in one of the world’s most contested cities.

Yet empire is never static. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Ottomans slipped into economic and political decline. In Palestine, real authority shifted to local strongmen. Figures such as Ẓāhir al-ʿUmar in Galilee and Aḥmad al-Jazzār in Acre consolidated power, tightened taxation, and dealt directly with European merchants. Ottoman officials in Istanbul often relied on such men to preserve order, granting them broad autonomy.

In the nineteenth century after the Napoleonic Wars, pressures mounted. In 1831, Ibrahim Pasha, son of Egypt’s Muhammad Ali, seized Palestine and briefly ruled from Jerusalem. Though the Ottomans retook the territory in 1840 with European help, the episode showed how vulnerable their hold had become. European powers now planted consulates in Jerusalem and pressed the Sultan for greater rights for Christians and Jews, sparking resentment among Muslims who saw outside meddling erode their dominance.

The millet system, once a source of stability, increasingly drew foreign interference. After the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, Russia gained the right to represent Orthodox Christians in the empire, a clause it later used to claim a protectorate over the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects. France claimed a similar role for Catholics under the Capitulations, while Britain, though less tied to a specific millet, intervened to shield minorities when it suited imperial strategy, especially Armenians in the late nineteenth century. Even the United States, without a formal protectorate, sent missionaries who became active among Armenian and other Christian communities. Jerusalem, where Latin, Orthodox, and Armenian churches contested holy places, became a stage on which these rivalries played out. By the mid-nineteenth century, what had once been a domestic Ottoman system of religious administration had become an international arena, eroding the empire’s sovereignty.

As pressure mounted, the Ottomans initiated reforms. The Tanzimat, (meaning Reorganization) reforms , launched in 1839, promised equal treatment of subjects, new schools, and secular law codes. The 1856 reform edict curtailed the autonomy of the millets, drawing Christian and Jewish communities more directly under state law. A new land code in 1858 encouraged private ownership and commercial agriculture, enriching a few notable families while weakening traditional village structures.

Security improved. Roads expanded. Trade with Europe grew. Yet these reforms revealed more than they solved—the promises of equality for non-Muslims were not always fulfilled.

The Crimean War (1853–1856), fought alongside Britain and France against Russia was a victory but left the Ottomans burdened with debt and exposed their military weakness. Later wars accelerated the unraveling. Russia attacked again two decades later, and in 1877, Russia’s victory forced the empire to concede autonomy or independence to Balkan states. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 stripped away more: Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia, Britain took Cyprus, and the empire’s grip on Europe shrank to Macedonia, Albania, and Thrace.

Jerusalem itself changed rapidly during these days. A municipality was created in 1867, though still dominated by prominent Muslim families. By the late nineteenth century, Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe altered the city’s demography, with Muslims reduced to a minority. The city’s Christians remained divided among Orthodox, Catholics, and the small but growing Protestants, each backed by the rival European powers and joined by a growing American presence. Disputes over church rights could escalate into international diplomatic disputes.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman economy fell deeper under European control.

Capitulations were treaties granting foreign states extraterritorial jurisdiction over their citizens within Ottoman lands—distinct from military surrenders, though they proved nearly as devastating. The first such treaty, signed with France in 1536, allowed French subjects to travel and trade freely while remaining under French law. Other Europeans, lacking similar agreements, often had to claim French protection just to operate safely in Ottoman territory.

Ottoman rulers initially welcomed these arrangements as a pragmatic way to simplify justice for foreign merchants and encourage trade. But what began as convenience metastasized into subordination. By the nineteenth century, nearly every European power—along with newer states like the United States, Belgium, and Greece—had secured similar privileges. These agreements increasingly hollowed out Ottoman sovereignty, permitting foreign consuls to administer their own justice, levy their own duties, and establish banks, post offices, and commercial firms exempt from Ottoman taxes. Foreign nationals operated as states within a state, answerable only to their own governments.

What had once been a tool of diplomacy became a humiliating symbol of Western dominance. By the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire—alongside other Eastern powers like China and Japan—pressed desperately for the abolition of capitulations, recognizing them for what they had become: instruments of imperial control without formal conquest. Japan succeeded in overturning these unequal treaties, where China and the Ottomans struggled.

The Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), established in 1881, represented a surrender of financial sovereignty. The Decree of Muharrem that December reduced the Ottoman public debt from £191 million to £106 million—a concession that might have seemed generous, except for its price. Certain revenues were assigned directly to debt service, giving European creditors priority access to Ottoman income before the empire itself could touch it.

The OPDA operated as a European-controlled organization that collected payments and acted as intermediary for European companies seeking investment opportunities in Ottoman lands. It played a central role in Ottoman affairs, yet the empire retained nominal political control—enough to continue borrowing, adding roughly £3 million annually to the debt throughout Abdülhamid II’s reign. The Ottomans could still dig their hole deeper, but Europeans controlled the shovel.

Meanwhile, European-controlled banks and the tariff limitations imposed by the Capitulations restricted the Ottoman government’s ability to guide economic development or protect local industries. While railways, telegraphs, and ports were built, this was often done to serve European interests. Peasant farmers groaned under taxation and military conscription needed to prevent additional foreign encroachments.

By the late nineteenth century, Jerusalem’s municipality and its consulates often carried more weight in daily life than decrees from the Sublime Porte, a telling sign of the empire’s waning control. But Palestine remained sovereign Ottoman land.

In the final decades before World War I, also known as the Great War, Palestine’s population hovered near 700,000—about three-quarters Muslim, with 70,000 Christians and some 85,000 Jews with around 40,000 in Jerusalem and many others living in new agricultural colonies funded by Jewish philanthropists abroad. These settlements, modest in scale, nonetheless foreshadowed the Zionist project that would define the region’s twentieth century.

Palestine was not conquered from the Arabs, nor did the Israelis conquer it from them.

Politically, the empire reeled from crisis to crisis. Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) suspended the constitution, centralized authority, and relied on censorship and secret police to maintain control. Yet his reign also brought railroads, schools, and a measure of stability to a fracturing state. Opposition brewed among exiled intellectuals and disaffected military officers, coalescing in the Committee of Union and Progress(CUP)—the Young Turks. Their revolution in 1908 restored the constitution and parliament, raising hopes for genuine renewal. But factionalism and the empire’s worsening military record soon crushed those dreams.

The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 delivered the final humiliation: the empire lost nearly all its remaining European lands in a matter of months. In Istanbul, the triumvirate of Enver Paşa, Talât Paşa, and Cemal Paşa seized control, centralizing power in the name of survival. German influence grew, symbolized by General Otto Viktor Liman von Sanders’ mission to reform the Ottoman army, himself a Prussian officer of Jewish heritage whose grandfather converted to Christianity and was baptized.

On the eve of 1914, the Ottoman Empire still held Palestine. Its institutions were hollowed by debt, its politics riven by faction, its borders stripped by nationalist uprisings and European encroachment. Four centuries earlier, the Ottomans had marched into Syria and Palestine as an unstoppable force. Now, they clung to the Holy Land with dwindling strength, weakened yet unbroken, as the world moved toward a Great War that would test whether the empire that had conquered Constantinople could endure. Would they fall like Rome? The Ottomans would not surrender meekly, they would not just hand over the land their ancestors conquered. They would have to be beaten.