Palestine,a Four Thousand Year History.
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’.
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