ABSTRACT
Palestine, with its many names and titles – Holy Land, Eretz Israel, Terra Santa, Filistin – was well known to those who dealt with the subject. These names appeared, among others, on different maps that were printed in the beginning of the period under discussion, the late Ottoman period, without any apparent delimiting definitions of its area. Even though official Ottoman documents that dealt with the numerous issues regarding the land used the name Filistin, they did not mention any defined administrative expression of a confined area called by this name, or by any other name. The administrative system of the Ottoman regime had been in turmoil throughout the nineteenth century. The year 1873 saw the final arrangements that delimited the area between the Ottoman authoritative units in the western Palestine area. Excluding minor changes, these arrangements remained stable until World War I. The area that stretches west from the Jordan river was split between three major administrative units. The northern part of Palestine, from a line that connects the area north of Jaffa, to north Jericho and the Jordan, belonged to the province (vilayet) of Beirut. This district was divided into the province-district (sanjak) of Beirut (containing the counties (qaza) of Beirut, Sidon, Tyre and Marj-Ayoun), Acre (with the counties of Acre, Haifa, Safed, Nazareth and Tiberias) and Nablus (with the counties of Nablus, Jenin and TulKarem). The special district of Jerusalem lay to the south of the district of Beirut. Its southern boundaries were unclear, and they coincided with the edge of the settled area in the south of the country.1 The area contained by this district was enlarged following the construction of Beersheba in 1900 and the expansion of Ottoman rule into the central Negev (desert of southern Palestine). It was now bordered by a line that went from the south of the Dead Sea to the north of the Machtesh (crater) Ramon, to the line that was determined in an agreement with Britain, in 1906 (see below). The majority of the central and southern Negev belonged to the province of Hijaz, which also included the Sinai Peninsula, the area east of the Arava, and the western part of the Arabian Peninsula.
