Theme
“What the Ottomans left behind”
Four centuries of Ottoman rule (1516–1917) ended more than a hundred years ago, but much of today's conflict still runs on Ottoman rules: who marries whom, who owns which land, who prays where, and where the borders are.
The picture
The millet system: religion as law for your community.
The Ottomans governed their non-Muslim subjects through religious communities (millets), each running its own courts for marriage, divorce and inheritance. Israel kept the system: there is no civil marriage, and each recognised community has its own religious courts, rabbinical courts for Jews and sharia courts for Muslim citizens. Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority inherited the same arrangement. It's why 'Israel has Sharia' is, in a narrow sense, true, and why same-sex couples can't marry there (see 'A religion doesn't justify having a country.' and 'Israel doesn't even have gay marriage — its gay-friendly image is pinkwashing.').
The 1858 Land Code: both sides argue in Ottoman categories.
The Ottoman Land Code sorted land into categories, private property (mulk), state land with rights of use (miri), and dead land (mawat), and tied rights to registration and continued cultivation. The British Mandate and then Jordan kept it in force in the West Bank. From 1979 Israel used it to declare large areas 'state land', on the basis that they weren't registered or cultivated, which became the legal route for many settlements ⚠. Palestinian owners contesting those declarations argue under the same code, with Ottoman tax and title records (the tapu registry).
The Status Quo at the holy places.
Ottoman decrees of 1757 and 1852 froze who controls what at the Christian holy places, down to who may clean which step in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; Britain, Jordan and Israel all kept them. The arrangement at the Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif after 1967, Muslim prayer and Jewish visits without prayer, is known as the 'status quo' by descent from that system (see 'Al-Aqsa is in danger.').
The borders, and the uti possidetis argument.
There was never an Ottoman province called Palestine: the land was divided among the sanjaks (districts) of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre, and the vilayet (province) of Beirut (see 'Which Palestine?'). The British Mandate drew new lines over them in 1922, and those lines are what later arguments are about. The legal argument called uti possidetis juris holds that a new state inherits the administrative borders of the unit it emerged from, and some scholars argue that this gives Israel the Mandate's borders (see 'The West Bank isn't occupied — it's disputed territory, and Jews have every right to live there.'). What continues from the Ottomans and the Mandate is the territory's outline, not a state: the argument is about which people's state inherits it, and the UN's 1947 partition plan and later international law answered differently.
Traps here:◆ Which territory?
The late Ottoman opening, and its limits.
Reform edicts in 1839 and 1856 ended the legal inferiority of Jews and Christians (see 'Under Islam, Jews were humiliated second-class dhimmis — and Islamists want to bring it back.'), and in 1844 the empire undertook to stop executing apostates. At the same time, the Ottoman government tried to limit Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine from the 1880s, with a 'red slip' that restricted Jewish visitors' stays; the rules were widely evaded ⚠. The 1908 Young Turk revolution opened a brief period of elections and newspapers in which both Arab and Zionist politics took shape; the newspaper Filastin was founded in Jaffa in 1911 (see 'Palestine was definitely a thing — there was even a newspaper called Filastin in 1911 — and almost no Jews lived there, so Israel was a hostile takeover.').
Where it leads if pressed
Why it matters now.
Many of the most concrete disputes, over marriage, land and holy sites, are fought in legal categories neither side created. Knowing that doesn't settle them, but it takes some heat out of the claim that any one of them is a modern Israeli or Palestinian invention. Any solution will have to decide what to keep of the Ottoman layer, as every government since 1917 has.