Who are the Palestinian People?

Map of Palestine under Ottoman rule. Source: Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal: Palestinian People: A History. 2003, p. 39.

During the brief nine or so years between 1831 and 1840 the “Palestinian people” steadily emerged as a distinct entity, beginning with their bloody revolt of 1834 against Ibrahim Pasha and Muhammad Ali, according to Kimmerling and Migdal. (1) This revolt united “dispersed Bedouins, rural sheikhs, urban notables, mountain fellaheen [peasants], and Jerusalem religious figures” into a “rebel force” whose sum was greater than the individual groups that were its parts, and whose reality continued beyond the brutal suppression of the revolt in late 1834 by the Egyptians.

The Four Hill Regions of Palestine

Palestine has four hill regions—Al-Jaleel (Galilee), Jabal Nablus, Jable al-Quds (Jerusalem), and Jabal al-Khalil (Hebron). (2) The 1834 revolt was centered in three of the four hill regions (not Galilee). The hill regions were populated with “highly autonomous peasantry, resistant to externally imposed authority, organized in patrilineal clans, surviving by farming small plots of land, and living by norms, customs, and values” anchored in their faiths—mostly Muslim, but also Christian and Jewish. (3) Ottoman authorities did not try to control the inaccessible hill regions as the peasants were usually armed and could hide well. Rather, the Ottoman authorities recruited rural sheikhs who oversaw the collection of taxes and other administrative chores. As a result, the people of the hill regions of Palestine developed their own personality that was based on the musha’a land use system and the hamula structure of social organization. These aspects of organization shaped the 1834 revolt and Muhammed Ali’s subsequent response to it.

Topographic map of Palestine showing Nablus and Jerusalem (Al Quds) but not Hebron, which is southeast of Jerusalem. Source:  http://www.sesrtcic.org/members/ pal/palmapto.shtml; accessed August 31, 2006.

The musha’a village was characterized by assignment of land to peasants in equal portions based on the quality of the land (soil type, terrain, access to the village); the land was periodically redistributed. The hamula system was based on kinship. Each hamula involved numerous mutual social obligations that provided social and physical security. Farsoun explains that “[t]he hamulas regulated and guaranteed access to productive lands and the rights of the individual over them. They also acted as an important credible mechanism for the assessment of taxes and the distribution of the tax burden among the villagers. The hamulas protected the individual and kin form both external attack and internal feuds.” (4) These hamulas and the leading families within them have had remarkable staying power over the centuries, and played an important part in the revolt of 1834.

Ibrahim Pasha’s Reforms

During the nine-year occupation (1831-1840) of Palestine by Egyptians, Ibrahim Pasha introduced reforms that led to the dismantling of the old order. For example, he tried to centralize control of taxation, thereby infuriating the local sheikhs and notables who controlled this function and used it as the basis of their long-standing power and autonomy, as noted above; secularized the judicial system thereby depriving the ulama (legal scholars of the Islam and the Sharia) of their influence; created local councils called majalis to oversee commercial activity; attempted to disarm the population; instituted military conscription and corvee labor; established internal trade monopolies; attempted to settle the Bedouins in southern Palestine and Jordan valley; drained marshes; cultivated new lands; and provided greater protection to Christians and Jewish minorities in an attempt to encourage trade and commerce. (5) Ibrahim, unable to institute a system of direct tax collection, finally reverted to “tax farming”, in which tax farms (portions of land) were auctioned off to the highest bidder—often people who had distinguished themselves in the Egyptian military or bureaucracy—who efficiently collected taxes from the peasants who worked the tax farms. These taxes then flowed to the Egyptian state’s coffers. (6)

Conditions improved in Palestine as a result of these reforms, but widely dispersed local groups resented the burdensomeness of the reforms and finally rioted in response to a conscript drive.

The 1834 Revolt Begins

The 1834 revolt was centered in three of the four hill regions. The first place was Nablus, one of the oldest cities in the world, possibly first established 9,000 years ago (north of Jerusalem; elevation 1,790 feet) whose population then was 10,000 people. An additional 200 villages surrounding Nablus were home to another 100,000 people. The second place was Jerusalem (elevation 2,300 feet) then with a population of 15,000-20,000 people, which was the religious seat of the region and whose religious leader (the Mufti) and chief judge (Grand Qadi) the Ottomans appointed to impose levies and taxes on non-Muslim inhabitants and on Jewish and Christian pilgrims. The third place was Hebron (elevation 2,700 feet), another ancient city located southeast of Jerusalem.

On May 19, 1834, a number of notables and sheikhs from Nablus, Jerusalem, and Hebron told Ibrahim’s civil and military governors that they were unable to supply the quotas of conscripts for Egyptian military service. Undaunted, Ibrahim sent soldiers after the conscripts, an act that triggered riots that first broke out in Hebron, according to one source, and in Nablus, according to a second source. (7) Fellaheen from Sair (elevation 2,800 feet) near Hebron, supported by Bedouins, killed 25 Egyptian soldiers, and Hebronites arrested Ibrahim’s governor!

The hamulas described above converged into unusual alliances. In Nablus the two main Arab families—the Qays and the Yaman—joined against Ibrahim. In Jerusalem, the Husseinis and Khalidis—as well as the Abu Ghush clan that dominated the 120 villages surrounding Jerusalem and controlled the road between the Mediterranean port of Jaffa and Jerusalem—also united against Ibrahim’s conscript drive. The Abd al-Hadis clan in Nablus, however, colluded with the Egyptians, but were neutralized by the Qasims clan who lived in a village outside of Nablus and tried, but failed to take Nablus themselves!

Battle in Jerusalem

Unable to conquer Nablus, the Qasims clan called hundreds of peasants from all over the hilly eastern portion of Palestine to join Hebronites to lay siege to the walls of Jerusalem. The Abu Ghush clan joined the 2,000-strong rebel forces who entered the gates of Jerusalem, opened by Muslims within, on May 31, 1834. As the Egyptians huddled in the citadel, the peasant rebels pillaged Jerusalem and its residents, including Christians, Jews, and even rich Muslim families—the so-called notables (“ayan”) who had found their positions enhanced by Egyptian rule.

Ibrahim counterattacked Jerusalem with artillery in June 1834 and retook Jerusalem. But the revolt continued to spread as Ibrahim’s military suffered thousands of casualties at the hands of the numerically dominant rebels. Muhammad Ali, Ibrahim’s father, looked on with dismay as Palestine was turning “into a graveyard for his dreams as well as for his soldiers.” (8) His military forces of 15,000 men and 40 cannons located mostly in Jaffa were smaller in number than the rebel forces, but he deceived the rebels into believing he had more forces than they did. In addition he opened the road to Jerusalem by offering the Abu Ghush clan amnesty and positions in the Egyptian government. (9) Finally, Muhammad promised to crush the rebels who continued to defy him, and Ibrahim Pasha carried out this plan with aplomb.

The Revolt of 1834 Crushed

On July 4, 1834, Ibrahim directed a military expedition at the heart of Qasim-led rebel forces in the Nablus region, burning to the ground 16 villages en route. In Nablus proper, the Egyptians routed the fellaheen, publicly decapitated their leaders, and secured the city for Egypt on July 15, 1834. Then the Egyptians moved to Hebron where they leveled the city, assaulted the women, conscripted the men they did not kill, and “furnished 120 adolescents to Egyptian officers to do with as they wanted.” (9) The Muslim quarter of Bethlehem was destroyed, the Palestine population was disarmed, and Ibrahim instituted his new order, which was one in which “the state would monopolize the use of violence.” He conscripted 10,000 peasants into the Egyptian army. (10)

Palestinian People Coalesce in the Face of Egyptian Reforms

The revolt of 1834, which brought together the disparate groups of locals from three of the four hill regions of Palestine, lasted about eight weeks. Ironically, points out Farsoun, Ibrahim’s process of centralization actually facilitated the nearly nationwide revolt against his rule and further integrated the country and its people. (10) Farsoun continues: “From then on…varied processes and factors progressively gave the area of Palestine social, economic, administrative, and political coherence, which culminated in the twentieth century Mandate of Palestine. If a modern state is defined by its monopoly over the use of violence and the regulation of both national and local affairs, then the Egyptian administration of Palestine in the 1830s formed the first such entity in the region, and the resurgent Ottoman Empire, which reconquered Syria and Palestine in 1840, continued the process.” (10)

Summary

The “Palestinian people” emerged as a unified entity as a result of the Egyptian occupation between 1831 and 1840—that is, the imposition of reforms by Ibrahim Pasha; the widespread, grassroots revolt against Ibrahim’s new order for eight weeks in 1834; and finally the reassertion of power by Ibrahim, followed by the Ottoman authorities in 1840. In other words, Ibrahim’s centralization of authority facilitated the formation of the Palestinian people whose identity gelled in the ensuing decades. Four Palestinian scholars--Farsoun, Zacharia, Kimmerling, and Migdal—concur on this observation. Before Ibrahim, cohesion among indigenous groups living in Palestine did not exist.

Sources:

1. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal: “Palestinian People: A History”. Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 6-7.

2. Samih K. Farsoun and Christina Zacharia: “Palestine and the Palestinians.1997, p. 23.

3. Ibid, p. 24.

4. Ibid, p. 25.

5. Ibid, p. 29.

6. Tax farming was an excellent way of consolidating land under the state’s power while increasing monies to the state’s treasury. Tax farming also refers to a method of tax collection in which individuals or companies pay the government for the right to collect taxes, keeping any money more than what the government expects. Tax farming was a cause of the French Revolution in 1789. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_farm for more information; accessed August 31, 2006.

7. Farsoun says Nablus (p. 29) and Kimmerling says Hebron, p. 8.

8. Kimmerling and Migdal, p. 10.

9. Ibid, p. 11.

10. Farsoun, pp. 29-30.