February 2, 2022 | “A land without a people, and a people without a land” is how the relationship between Palestine and the Jewish people was described by Christian writers in the 1800s. And the 20th-century history of the Middle East has largely been written through these eyes.
But this film from Al Jazeera Arabic looks at Palestine from a different angle. It hears from historians and witness accounts, and features archive documents that show Palestine as a thriving province of Greater Syria and the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of the 20th century.
The evidence suggests that its cities had a developing trade and commercial sector, growing infrastructure, and embryonic culture that would enable it to meet the challenges of the decades ahead.
However, the political ramifications of the Balfour Declaration,1 San Remo Conference2 and British Mandate3 set in motion a series of events that profoundly affected this vibrant, fledgeling society and led to the events of 1948 and beyond. This film is the other side of the Palestinian story.
1 The Balfour Declaration (1917) was a public statement issued by the British Government during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. Wikipedia
2 The San Remo conference was an international meeting of the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council as an outgrowth of the Paris Peace Conference, held at Castle Devachan in Sanremo, Italy, from 19 to 26 April 1920. Wikipedia
3 Mandatory Palestine was a geopolitical entity that existed between 1920 and 1948 in Palestine under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. After an Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire during WW1, in 1916, British forces drove Ottoman forces out of the Levant. Wikipedia
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