In 1880 the literacy rate was less that 5%, and in 1931 the literacy rate was only 10%. Warfare was very common to find among the small villages of Palestine. From 1876-1909 Abdul Hamid, an Ottoman sultan, ruled Palestine. Although he was in charge of what happened there was a small group of rich families who really had the say about what happened and when it happened in Palestine. The reason for all the trouble during this time was that the families did not care about what happened to all the villagers, they just wanted to make more money. These Palestinian notables also opposed Jewish immigration and land purchase because of fear of economic competition, and resentment of special privileges given to foreign residents. (Tessler) Also explicit anti-zionism developed throughout the Arab population of Palestine. Palestinians were afraid that Zionism would threaten their political aspirations. (Tessler) The Arab-Isreali conflict really does not start until the beginning of the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, which went up until the start of World War I in 1914. This also when the first significant stirrings inside the country of local Arab patriotism and nationalist political activity started to surface.
The Jewish people have a much different history than the Palestinians do. Before 1948 the Jews were also living a very hard life. They had been dispersed throughout the world in the years before. They were a people that really did not have a place they could call their homeland, since they had been kicked out of every place they had ever lived. Jews were forced to adopt nationalities that they did not want just to have a citizenship from somewhere. Common names for Jews were: Turkish Jews, Jewish Frenchmen, Jewish Germans, and so forth. Jews were looked at as individuals and not as a political community. David Vital once said of Zionism, the Emancipation "took the form, for the most part, of a breaking down of the barriers to the Jew's entry into civil society as an individual, not of the establishment of the Jewish community on a basis of equality with other ethnic groups.
