Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem in the context of "Christian pilgrimage"

Ottoman Syria (Arabic: سوريا العثمانية) is a historiographical term used to describe the group of divisions of the Ottoman Empire within the region of the Levant, usually defined as being east of the Mediterranean Sea, west of the Euphrates River, north of the Arabian Desert and south of the Taurus Mountains.

Ottoman Syria was organized by the Ottomans upon conquest from the Mamluk Sultanate in the early 16th century as a single eyalet (province) of the Damascus Eyalet. In 1534, the Aleppo Eyalet was split into a separate administration. The Tripoli Eyalet was formed out of Damascus province in 1579 and later the Adana Eyalet was split from Aleppo. In 1660, the Eyalet of Safed was established and shortly afterwards renamed the Sidon Eyalet; in 1667, the Mount Lebanon Emirate was given special autonomous status within the Sidon province, but was abolished in 1841 and reconfigured in 1861 as the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate. The Syrian eyalets were later transformed into the Syria Vilayet, the Aleppo Vilayet and the Beirut Vilayet, following the 1864 Tanzimat reforms. Finally, in 1872, the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem was split from the Syria Vilayet into an autonomous administration with a special status.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz (Arabic: المملكة الحجازية الهاشمية, romanized: Al-Mamlakah al-Ḥijāziyyah Al-Hāshimiyyah) was a state in the Hejaz region of Western Asia that included the western portion of the Arabian Peninsula that was ruled by the Hashemite dynasty. It was self-proclaimed as a kingdom in June 1916 during the First World War, to be independent from the Ottoman Empire, on the basis of an alliance with the British Empire to drive the Ottoman Army from the Arabian Peninsula during the Arab Revolt.

The British government had promised Hussein bin Ali, King of Hejaz, a single independent Arab state that would include, in addition to the Hejaz region, modern-day Jordan, Iraq, and most of Syria, with the fate of the Palestine region (today's Israel and Palestine) being mentioned in more ambiguous terms. However, at the end of the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles turned Syria into a French League of Nations mandate and Iraq, Mandate Palestine and Transjordan into British mandates. Hashemite princes were installed as monarchs under the British mandates in Transjordan and Iraq; this became known as the Sharifian solution.

The Vilayet of Beirut (Ottoman Turkish: ولايت بيروت, romanized: Vilâyet-i Beyrut; Arabic: ولاية بيروت) was a first-level administrative division (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire. It was established from the coastal areas of the Syria Vilayet in 1888 as a recognition of the new-found importance of its then-booming capital, Beirut, which had experienced remarkable growth in the previous years — by 1907, Beirut handled 11 percent of the Ottoman Empire's international trade. It stretched from just north of Jaffa to the port city of Latakia. It was bounded by the Syria Vilayet to the east, the Aleppo Vilayet to the north, the autonomous Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem to the south and the Mediterranean Sea to the west.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it reportedly had an area of 11,773 square miles (30,490 km), while the preliminary results of the first Ottoman census of 1885 (published in 1908) gave the population as 533,500. It was the 4th most heavily populated region of the Ottoman Empire's 36 provinces.

The Yishuv (Hebrew: ישוב, lit. 'settlement'), HaYishuv Ha'ivri (Hebrew: הישוב העברי, lit. 'the Hebrew settlement'), or HaYishuv HaYehudi Be'Eretz Yisra'el (lit. 'the Jewish Settlement in the Land of Israel') was the community of Jews residing in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The term came into use in the 1880s, when there were about 25,000 Jews living in that region, and continued to be used until 1948, by which time there were some 630,000 Jews there. The term is still in use to denote the pre-1948 Jewish residents in Palestine, corresponding to the southern part of Ottoman Syria until 1918, OETA South in 1917–1920, and Mandatory Palestine in 1920–1948.

A distinction is sometimes drawn between the Old Yishuv and the New Yishuv. The Old Yishuv refers to all the Jews living in Palestine before the first Zionist immigration wave (aliyah) of 1882, and to their descendants until 1948. The Old Yishuv residents were religious Jews, living mainly in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. There were smaller communities in Jaffa, Haifa, Peki'in, Acre, Nablus, Shfaram, and until 1799 in Gaza. In the final centuries before modern Zionism, a large part of the Old Yishuv spent their time studying the Torah and lived off charity (halukka), donated by Jews in the Diaspora.

The Western Wall (Hebrew: הַכּוֹתֶל הַמַּעֲרָבִי, romanized: HaKotel HaMa'aravi, lit. 'the western wall'; pronunciation; Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation: HaKosel HaMa'arovi) is an ancient retaining wall of the built-up hill known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount of Jerusalem. Its most famous section, known by the same name, often shortened by Jews to the Kotel or Kosel, is known in the West as the Wailing Wall, and in Arab world and Islamic world as the Buraq Wall (Arabic: حَائِط ٱلْبُرَاق, romanized: Ḥā'iṭ al-Burāq; ['ħaːʔɪtˤ albʊ'raːq]). In a Jewish religious context, the term Western Wall and its variations is used in the narrow sense, for the section used for Jewish prayer; in its broader sense it refers to the entire 488-metre-long (1,601 ft) retaining wall on the western side of the Temple Mount.

At the prayer section, just over half the wall's total height, including its 17 courses located below street level, dates from the end of the Second Temple period, and is believed to have been begun by Herod the Great. The very large stone blocks of the lower courses are Herodian, the courses of medium-sized stones above them were added during the Umayyad period, while the small stones of the uppermost courses are of more recent date, especially from the Ottoman period.

David Ben-Gurion (/bɛn ˈɡʊəriən/ ben GOOR-ee-ən; Hebrew: דָּוִד בֶּן־גּוּרִיּוֹן [daˈvid ben ɡuʁˈjon] ; born David Grün; 16 October 1886 – 1 December 1973) was the primary national founder and first prime minister of the State of Israel. As head of the Jewish Agency from 1935, and later president of the Jewish Agency Executive, he was the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, and largely led the movement for an independent Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine.

Born in Płońsk, then part of Congress Poland, to Polish Jewish parents, he immigrated to the Palestine region of the Ottoman Empire in 1906. Adopting the name of Ben-Gurion in 1909, he rose to become the preeminent leader of the Jewish community in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine from 1935 until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, which he led until 1963 with a short break in 1954–55. Ben-Gurion's interest for Zionism developed early in his life, leading him to become a major Zionist leader, and the executive head of the World Zionist Organization in 1946.

The history of Israel covers the Southern Levant region also known as Canaan, Palestine, or the Holy Land, which is the location of modern Israel and Palestine. From prehistory, as part of the Levantine corridor, the area witnessed waves of early humans from Africa, then the emergence of Natufian culture c. 10th millennium BCE. The region entered the Bronze Age c. 2,000 BCE with the development of Canaanite civilization, before vassalization by Egypt in the Late Bronze Age. In the Iron Age, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were established, entities central to the origins of the Jews and Samaritans, as well as the Abrahamic faith tradition. This has given rise to Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, Islam, Druzism, Baha'ism, and other religious movements. The Land of Israel has seen many conflicts, come under the control of various polities and, as a result, it has hosted a variety of ethnic groups.

In the following centuries, the Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Macedonian empires conquered the region. The Ptolemies and the Seleucids vied for control during the Hellenistic period. With the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty, the local Jewish population maintained independence for a century before incorporation into the Roman Republic. As a result of the Jewish–Roman wars in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, many Jews were killed, displaced or sold into slavery. Following the advent of Christianity, adopted by the Greco-Roman world under the influence of the Roman Empire, the region's demographics shifted towards newfound Christians, who replaced Jews as the majority by the 4th century. Shortly after Islam was consolidated across the Arabian Peninsula under Muhammad in the 7th century, Byzantine Christian rule over Israel was superseded in the Muslim conquest of the Levant by the Rashidun Caliphate, to later be ruled by the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid caliphates, before being conquered by the Seljuks in the 1070s. Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, the Land of Israel became the centre for religious wars between European Christian and Muslim armies as part of the Crusades, with the Kingdom of Jerusalem overrun by Saladin's Ayyubids late in the 12th century. The Crusaders expanded from their remaining outposts, then hang on to their decreasing territories for another century. In the 13th century, the Land of Israel became subject to Mongol conquest, though this was stopped by the Mamluk Sultanate, under whose rule it remained until the 16th century. The Mamluks were defeated by the Ottoman Empire, and the region became an Ottoman province until the early 20th century.

NILI (Hebrew: נִילי) was a Jewish espionage network which assisted the United Kingdom in its fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem between 1915 and 1917, during World War I. NILI was centered in Zikhron Ya'akov, with branches in Hadera and other Moshavot. Nili is an acronym which stands for the Hebrew phrase: "Netzah Yisrael Lo Yeshaker" (1 Samuel 15:29), which translates as "the Eternal One of Israel will not lie". The British government code-named NILI the "A Organization", according to a 1920 misfiled memorandum in the British National Archives, as described in the book Spies in Palestine by James Srodes.

In choosing to side with the British Empire, the members of Nili went against the majority view of their fellow Jews from the Yishuv. Thus, during the Armenian genocide, the group opposed the Yishuv leadership at the time, and tried to intervene on behalf of the Armenians.