Ottoman practice as regards Jewish settlement in Palestine : 1881–1908

Abstract

Palestine were revised in the form of consolidated regulations. But although Ottoman policy and the reasons for it (also discussed in the previous article) was clear and constant, it failed. This was partly because the restrictions flowing from the policy were not watertight (for example, Jewish 'pilgrims' were never barred from Palestine) and partly because the European Powers refused almost uniformly to acquiesce in the restrictions on the grounds that they ran counter to the privileges they and their nationals enjoyed under the Capitulations. But a further important reason for the failure of the Government's policy lay in the difficulties in putting it into practice. That aspect of the question forms the subject of the present article. ('Palestine' is used in this article to mean the area referred to in contemporary Ottoman parlance and documents as 'Arz-i Filistin', which at the end of the nineteenth century was not a single administrative unit but was made up of the Mutasarriflik of Jerusalem to the south and the Sancaks of Nablus and Acre in the north; these Sancaks were part of the Vildyet of 'am ('Syria') until 1888, whereafter they were incorporated into the new Vildyet of Beirut.)