Palestine by Nur Masalha

Author:Nur Masalha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2018-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

NOMINAL SOVEREIGNTY VERSUS PRACTICAL SOVEREIGNTY

Today there are many formally sovereign states in the Arab world, but not all of them are genuinely sovereign or independent when it comes to foreign policy. By contrast, al-Umar’s state in Palestine was sovereign in substance and reality, while nominally still part of the Ottoman Empire. However, al-Umar’s state was formally recognised by the Ottomans as an autonomous Emirate and at its peak in 1774 (a year before he was killed outside Acre) its territory extended from south Lebanon along the entire Palestinian coast to Gaza and included some regions in northern Transjordan. He also twice laid siege to the city of Nablus (Doumani 1995: 42). The headquarters of his administration shifted westwards, from his first capital in Tiberias to ‘Araabah in central Galilee, then to Nazareth, then to Deir Hanna and finally to the port city of Acre in 1746. In the early 16th century Tiberias had become a city of refuge for Andalusian Arab-Jewish survivors of the Spanish Inquisition. These skilled Jewish migrants eventually contributed both to the expansion of the town’s silk industry and the growth of Tiberias’ role as a trade centre between Damascus and the Hijaz. Al-‘Umar expanded and fortified Tiberias further, but now Acre was the capital of the Galilee and the centre of his lucrative international trade with Europe. Acre remained the centre of his regime for nearly three decades and subsequently became the capital of another autonomous regime in Palestine, that of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (the ‘Butcher’), who lived in the palace built by al-Umar for another two decades from 1776 until 1804. Al-Umar’s regime would demonstrate once again the continuing interdependence of urban centres with their rural contexts in Palestine – a continuing feature of the history of Palestine, ancient, medieval and modern. With his Galilee-based Emirate or dawlah qutriyyah, al-Umar became internationally known in the 18th century as ‘King of Galilee’ (Nasrallah 2015: x).

In the mid-18th century the deeply weakened Ottoman regime had to come to terms with the new power realities in Palestine, a country which remained only nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1768 the Ottoman authorities were forced into a humiliating position of having to recognise al-Umar’s regime in Palestine in the way the Ottomans had been forced to recognise the emirate of Mount Lebanon and the regime of Emir Fakhr-al-Din II a century earlier. The Ottomans granted al-Umar the title of ‘Sheikh of Acre, Emir of Nazareth, Tiberias, Safed, and Sheikh of all Galilee’ (Philipp 2015).

Al-Umar’s economic policies, which benefited the Palestinian peasantry, his military strategies and regional and international alliances (with the autonomous Druze Emirs of Mount Lebanon, Mamluk Egypt and Russia) were partly dictated by his struggle with the Ottoman Empire and partly by his monopolisation of the flourishing cotton and olive oil exports to Europe, especially raw cotton to England following its Industrial Revolution and the expanding British textile industry’s demand for raw cotton from Palestine and the Near East. Al-Umar’s rise to power in the 18th

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