Social Factors in the Rise of the Arab Movement in Syria

During the Ottoman Constitutional era, the politics of the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire — of Syria, Palestine and Lebanon in particular — were dominated by a deep cleavage. This political cleavage, mirrored in the local press which flourished in the wake of the lifting of the Hamidian censorship, and recorded in the diplomatic despatches of foreign observers, grew deeper and more intractable in the years following the 1908 revolution, until it culminated in the Arab Revolt and the hanging by the Ottoman authorities, in 1915 and 1916, of dozens of its leaders.