Chapter 1

Locating the Zionist- arab encounter:

Local, regional, Imperial, and Global Spheres

W

hen Muhammad ruhi al- Khalidi and eliezer Ben- Yehuda sat to-
gether that Saturday in October 1909, they met in Jerusalem.
Where, though, was Jerusalem in the autumn of 1909? attempting to
answer this seemingly simple question is in fact a complicated task,
and the challenge highlights the numerous geographical, social, cul-
tural, political, and intellectual levels of encounter that are studied in
this book. the following pages place Jerusalem in its local setting in
palestine, and palestine more broadly in its Ottoman, Middle eastern,
and european contexts. as we shall see, the categories of religion and
race employed by the communities of palestine in their mutual percep-
tions are best understood within these multiple contexts.

Jerusalem, Palestine, and the Holy Land

When late nineteenth-century Jewish nationalists began to immigrate
to the land they viewed as their biblical and/or historic patrimony
(they generally called it the Land of Israel or palestine interchange-
ably), the region was governed by the Ottoman empire, which, but for
a decade earlier that same century (1831– 1840), had ruled the area
since 1517. Under the Ottoman regime, there was no official, adminis-
trative unit called palestine (nor, for that matter, the Land of Israel).^1
The region had officially been named Palaestina under the Romans in
antiquity and Jund Filasṭīn after the Arab conquest until the Mongolian
invasion,^2 and there was a land legally called palestine after the demise

(^1) On the so- called invention of the Land of Israel, see Sand, The Invention of the Land
of Israel. See also Bartal, “Me- ‘ereẓ kodesh’ le- ereẓ historit— ‘Otonomizm’ ẓiyoni be- reshit
ha- meʾah ha- ʿesrim.”
(^2) porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian- Arab National Movement 1918– 1929 , 4– 5.