Jerusalem Made a Separate District

Before Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian occupation of the 1830s, the land that became Palestine had no single administrative existence. The sanjaqs of Jerusalem, Jaffa-Gaza and Nablus belonged to the Province of Damascus; Acre was the seat of the Province of Saida. The Ottoman Empire was divided into provinces under a vali, provinces into sanjaqs under a mutasarrif, and sanjaqs into subdistricts under a qa’im maqam — a hierarchy in which Palestine was a set of parts belonging to different wholes.

After the Egyptian withdrawal at the end of 1840 the Ottomans began a long series of reorganisations. Damascus and Saida were combined into a large Province of Syria. Then, after the death of the grand vizier Ali Pasha in September 1871, his successor Mahmoud Nedim Pasha decided in May 1872 to detach the three sanjaqs of Acre, Nablus and Jerusalem from Syria and constitute them a new province — Quds-i Sherif Vilayeti, the Province of Jerusalem, with Jerusalem as its capital. It lasted two months. Nedim was dismissed in July 1872 and his successor, Midhat Pasha, undid the arrangement.

What survived the reversal was the enlargement of the district of Jerusalem and its elevation to a special status, administered separately and corresponding directly with Istanbul rather than through a provincial capital. The reason was partly European: the Great Powers’ consulates, missions and pilgrim traffic had made Jerusalem a place the Porte preferred to govern directly.

The consequence was cartographic and, in the end, political. The boundaries assigned to the district of Jerusalem in the south-west, to Acre in the north and to Nablus in the centre left their mark on the frontiers drawn in the 1920s. The short-lived province of 1872 prefigured to a striking degree the shape of Mandate Palestine. The territorial idea of Palestine — as a unit with edges, an administrative centre, and a name — was in circulation among its inhabitants long before any European power proposed to dispose of it.

Sources

• Ottoman Territorial Reorganization, 1840–1917 — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• I. Ottoman Rule — PalQuest