This film examines a pivotal yet largely overlooked moment in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the years just prior to World War I. It looks at a moment of transformation when Ottoman rule in Palestine was still strong, the personal identities of people living there were fluid and overlapping, and few could imagine the conflict that would dominate the region for most of the next century. While most scholars have focused on the later British Mandate period as a locus of the Middle East conflict, this film focuses on the period before World War I, when Arab and Jewish nationalism first made contact, and the conflict was just beginning to germinate.
