The changing place of Palestine and Palestinian Arabs in the late-Ottoman world has been the subject of important scholarship in recent years, such as Abigail Jacobson's From Empire to Empire (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2013), Roberto Mazza's Jerusalem from the Ottomans to the British (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009), Erik Freas's Muslim-Christian Relations in Late Ottoman Palestine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Michelle Campos’ groundbreaking Ottoman Brothers (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011). Yet no scholar has written as evocatively about Palestinian social history in the period as Salim Tamari. In his newest book, Tamari offers a compelling and entertaining investigation of Palestinian society before and during World War I through eight essays investigating what he terms “the remaking of Palestine” (p. 3).

As in his previous books, Mountains Against the Sea (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2008) and Year of the Locust (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011), Salim Tamari deftly uses words and images produced by Arabs and Turks to recover the rich political, cultural, and social debates of Palestinian society in the late Ottoman period. The range of topics covered in the book is broad, but each chapter touches upon issues of identity and belonging in a world where Ottomanist, Arabist, Southern Syrian, and Palestinian identifications competed for people's attention and new modernist sensibilities were emerging under the forces of Ottoman modernization and globalization.

The first three chapters of the book focus mainly on the Ottoman state's interest in Palestine before World War I. Tamari begins with two chapters that use Ottoman military reports on Palestine and Southern Syria to show how “Palestine was a paramount territory in Ottoman civilian and military strategy,” rather than the backwater depicted in British colonial, Zionist, and later Arab nationalist narratives (p. 36). His second chapter is particularly strong in offering an original and fascinating account of how the Committee of Union and Progress government worked to develop ethnographic and cartographic data on Palestine and Southern Syria in order to protect the region from European encroachment. The state's interest in modernizing and controlling Palestine is further explored in Chapter 3's discussion of urban development in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Beersheba. Here he details how Ottoman planners “created new public domains that echoed a vision of Istanbul modernity, adapted to local conditions” (p. 65), which led to the development of a new secular public sphere in Palestinian cities, while at the same time established Beersheba as the “first ‘intentionally planned urban centre’ in Palestine” (p. 61).

The next three chapters consider how Palestinians dealt with the increased presence of the Ottoman state and its championing of doctrine of Ottomanism. In Chapter 4, Tamari takes the reader along with an Arab delegation that was sent to the Ottoman frontlines during the war in order to drum up support for the Ottoman cause. In discussing the delegation's internal debates about Arab and Ottoman unity, he persuasively demonstrates that the “Syrian-Palestinian Intelligentsia” had a divided loyalty toward Arabism and Ottomanism and held differing opinions about the importance of Islam as a unifying identity (p. 67). The following chapter considers the relationship between Ottomanism, Hellenism, and Arabness in the thinking of two important opposing figures in the Arab Christian Orthodox community: Yusuf al-Hakim, an Ottoman judge and attorney, and Issa al-ʿIssa, publisher and editor of the famous newspaper Filastin. While interesting in and of itself, the debate offers important historical context for similar debates about the community's place in the Palestinian national movement that would later occur during the British Mandate period. Finally, in Chapter 6, the work of two local Nabulsi historians, Ihsan al-Nimr and Muhammad ʿIzzat Darwazeh, is used to demonstrate how one local Arab community grappled with the meaning of the CUP revolution of 1908 and the counterrevolution of the following year.

The final two chapters of the book consider the nascent women's movement in Palestine and the wartime career of the photographer Khalil Raad. While the latter ends rather abruptly, the former offers the strongest historiographical intervention in the book through its argument that historians need to take middle-class women's charitable associations more seriously in their discussions of the feminist movement in Palestine. The chapter should give historians of gender plenty to chew on, and would work well as an assignment for students to consider how gender and class intersected in the emergence of Middle Eastern women's movements.

One of the great strengths of this book is the range of sources that Tamari uses and reproduces. His extensive use of diaries, memoirs, maps, photographs, public speeches, and government reports allows him to paint a rich picture of Palestinian society, but most impressive is his accompanying analysis of the political, social, and biographical context within which those sources were produced. The inclusion of visual sources was especially compelling, but I would have appreciated the publisher being more generous. This was particularly the case in Chapter 3, where Tamari analyzes three photographs to talk about the secularization of public space but only one of the actual photographs is included in the text and where a reference is made to a Map 1 (p. 47) that cannot be found in the text.

Another strength is the book's concentration on Palestine beyond Jerusalem, which typically receives the lion's share of attention. Indeed, a recurring theme is how things often looked different in other Palestinian cities as compared to the perspective in Jerusalem, as shown in Chapter 3's comparison between urban planning in Jaffa and Jerusalem and Chapter 6's comparison between the Nabulsi and Jerusalemite opinions about the Young Turks.

The somewhat eclectic nature of the essays means that at times the book can lose sight of its overall message. This is compounded somewhat by Tamari's writing style, which includes stories within stories. I found this fascinating, but some readers may find some information to be tangential. Nevertheless, due to the presence of World War I looming behind the events in every chapter, the work has a natural coherence that his previous book Mountain Against the Sea arguably lacked. Overall, then, this is a fascinating and compelling story about a vibrant Palestine that was—and might have been—but for the destruction of World War I, the arrival of the British, and the later rapaciousness of the Zionist settlement project. It should find a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in Palestinian history or the history of the Arab Mashriq in the late Ottoman period.