Violence in Palestine before British rule

Violence in Palestine before British rule included military conquest, the killing of prisoners and civilians, attacks on Jewish communities, rebellion and violent repression. The examples below concern the region west of the Jordan, broadly corresponding to present-day Israel and the Palestinian territories, before the British conquest of 1917–1918. They precede the British Mandate and, in the cases listed here, modern political Zionism.

The claim that this region enjoyed uninterrupted peace until Zionism or Israel appeared conflicts with documented episodes from much earlier centuries. The sources also record people protecting neighbours and periods of security. Following the particular rulers, armies, communities and victims gives a clearer history than treating centuries of inhabitants as two permanent opposing camps.

Documented episodes

Date	Place	Violence and responsible actors	Evidence and counting limits
15 July 1099 and its aftermath	Jerusalem	Crusaders captured the city and killed inhabitants. Christian accounts describe executions, burning and the killing of people who had taken refuge; a Jewish letter records killings, captivity and the ransoming of survivors.	Raymond of Aguilers and the Gesta Francorum describe the conquest from the Crusaders’ side. The Karaite leaders’ letter of about 1100 records the consequences for Jewish captives. These accounts establish the violence while giving different perspectives on it; their dramatic descriptions provide no reliable modern census of the dead.
1625–1626	Jerusalem	Governor Ibn Farrukh used imprisonment, threats of execution and extortion against the Jewish community.	Joseph Schwarz’s 1850 historical account describes the seizure of fifteen worshippers as hostages and repeated demands for money. This entry concerns persecution and coercion; the account supplies no secure aggregate death toll.
March 1799	Jaffa	French troops sacked the town, and Napoleon ordered the execution of captured Ottoman soldiers after their surrender.	Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne’s memoir describes roughly 4,000 prisoners and the decision to kill them. This is the memoir’s estimate, published retrospectively, rather than an independently established list of victims. The prisoners’ execution is distinct from the deaths during the capture and sack.
1834	Jerusalem and the surrounding country	Peasant rebels opposed Egyptian rule and conscription, entered Jerusalem, fought the garrison and plundered property. Ibrahim Pasha’s army then suppressed the revolt.	Schwarz describes the entry into Jerusalem as the first such assault he personally witnessed. He also records a rebel leader’s proclamation protecting Muslims, Jews and Christians. Armed conflict and attempts to restrain attacks on civilians appear in the same account.
June–July 1834	Safed	During the revolt against Egyptian rule, attackers plundered the Jewish community and drove residents into destitution.	Contemporary and later accounts describe the destruction of homes, religious property and the community’s printing press. The precise death toll requires stronger evidence than the frequently repeated label “massacre”.
1834	Hebron	Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptian troops took the town, killed residents and plundered the population, including its Jewish community.	Schwarz describes the suppression and sack. John D. Paxton, visiting in the following years, recorded the plunder of Jewish homes and the destruction of synagogue property. These sources identify the Egyptian army as the actor in this episode.
1838	Safed	Druze rebels pillaged and maltreated the Jewish community and demanded a large payment under threat of killing its aged leader.	Louis Loewe, writing in the Montefiore diaries about the 1839 visit, describes the attack of the previous year and says that he visited the threatened community leader the following day. His account establishes violent persecution and extortion without supplying an aggregate death toll.

What the chronology establishes

The Crusader conquest, Napoleon’s killing of prisoners and the 1834 rebellion belong to different conflicts, separated by centuries. Attacks on Jews in Safed and Hebron affected communities already living in the country long before the late nineteenth-century Zionist movement. Together, these episodes establish a substantial history of violence before the modern Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The same records help explain variation in security. Schwarz describes both the coercion of Egyptian conscription and the greater safety of travel after Ibrahim Pasha restored order. He records a rebel leader protecting the three religious communities in Jerusalem while elsewhere soldiers and insurgents attacked residents. The relevant explanations concern the conduct of particular authorities and armed groups, the institutions restraining them, and the people exposed to their power.

Scope and sources

This chronology combines wars, attacks on civilians and persecution, identifying the type of violence in each row. Ancient conquests, the early Islamic period and many medieval and Ottoman episodes require further treatment. Allegations circulated in undated lists should be traced to a dated account before their figures enter a historical total. Earthquakes, epidemics and discriminatory laws belong to their respective histories, with deaths from deliberate violence counted separately.

For the continuation under British administration, read Killings and massacres in Mandatory Palestine. The broader regional history is covered in Antisemitic violence in the Arab world before 1948.