A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (review)

In her preface to this book, Gudrun Krämer contends that existing histories of Palestine are susceptible to a modernist myopia. They tend to start with the arrival of the first Zionist settlers in 1882, as if the history of the region begins and ends with the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Krämer, a professor of Islamic studies at Freie Universität Berlin whose previous work includes books on the history of Islam and on the Jews in modern Egypt, chooses instead to begin her narrative with the earliest records of settlement from the Old Stone Age, and she continues from there to the biblical period, the Ottoman era, and the British Mandate. Her account ends, as the title suggests, with the Arab-Israeli armistice of 1949.

The scope of the coverage means that this is necessarily a very broad survey. Krämer relies heavily on secondary sources—primarily in English, but also in German and Arabic—and she moves fairly rapidly through the pre- and early modern periods, devoting just two chapters to Jewish antiquity in Palestine and to the reasons for the region’s spiritual significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This introductory section is followed by three chapters on the late Ottoman period, focusing on the years between 1750 and 1918. The closing date is uncontroversial, since it marks the fall of the Ottoman empire following the Allied victory in the Levant, but the starting date once again emphasizes Krämer’s effort to unseat 1882 “as the date of Palestine’s entry into modernity” (40). By beginning her account in the eighteenth century, Krämer is able to trace the political and economic transformations that more accurately signal the region’s “entry into modernity,” and to show that many of these changes took place well before the Zionist settlers arrived. She pays particular attention to the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, which led to such developments as the expansion of the central and provincial governments, the establishment of a state education system, improved standards of health and sanitation, increased international trade, and sweeping land reforms (71–87). The land reforms are especially significant in light of later events, since they not only marked a shift from collective to individual land ownership, but also made it possible for non-Ottoman citizens, including Jewish settlers and organizations such as the Jewish National Fund, to purchase land. However, although Krämer deals with this issue much later in the narrative (245), at this stage she scrupulously holds herself back from projecting into the future. As she reiterates in her introduction to the next chapter, which deals with the rise of Zionism and Arabism, her aim is not to write history “from its outcome—the foundation of the State of Israel,” but rather to “write a history of the Palestinian economy and society at large” (101), and she accordingly holds out the possibility of alternative outcomes as long as she can.

Krämer is to be commended for giving far more attention to the Ottoman period than most of the existing “relational histories” (xi) of Israel/Palestine have, though historians focusing on its Arab history have also discussed Ottoman institutions in detail.¹ By contrast, in the second half of the book, which is devoted to the Mandatory period, she is on ground which has been very well covered, from relational as well as non-relational angles. That said, Krämer does a fine job of placing British policy towards Palestine in the context of European colonial history as a whole. She is particularly good on the British government’s contradictory promises to the Zionists, the Arab nationalists, and the French (142–43), and she draws attention to early American involvement in the region by noting that Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” was equally...