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Palestine has always been well defined in the Western imagination, due to its religious importance. This is only confirmed by the map you showed, whose purpose was to show the location of the twelve tribes in ancient Israel. Christians remember ancient Israel, 1st century CE Judea and the Crusader Kingdom, and draw their maps accordingly.
To Ottomans and Arabs, Palestine was merely a region of Syria, not a country. They never drew borders around it. In the nineteenth century, the region of Palestine was part of three administrative entities (the vileyat of Damascus, the vileyat of Beirut, and the Independent Sanjak of Jerusalem) that also included parts of what are today Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.
For comparison, the Connecticut River Valley is also a well defined region, but it has never been a state or a country. |
