Palestine]
Egyptian Occupation.—To end the nominal Empire of Turkey in Syria took less than a year of Egyptian conquest. To enable Turkey to have real Empire there was the work of nine years more of Egyptian occupation. Ibrahim did very much what Mahmud had done in Asia Minor and had intended to do in Syria, but probably would have been less able to do. He abolished once for all the decentralised pashaliks, and broke the power of local chieftains and recalcitrant or predatory townsmen and villagers, tribes and clans, to a greater or less degree, all over the area; while he enforced regular taxation and compelled the recognition of non-Moslem rights in local government. In the lower and the plain regions, e.g., the Antioch and Aleppo districts, the middle and upper Orontes valley, the Damascus district, the western Trans-Jordan lands, and Palestine generally, his work was fairly complete by 1840, and Ainsworth has testified that in 1835 the Antiochene country was as safe as England. But pacification had not been effected without serious difficulties. The Moslems of Damascus and Safed, for example, had to be compelled by force of arms to admit Christians and Jews to any rights at all, and to forgo the gratification of seeing them walk the gutters or dismount at sight of the faithful. When the British Consul rode into Damascus in 1835 he had to be closely hemmed in by troops. In 1840 he could go where he pleased, unattended. The Nablus folk, who had defied Napoleon, tried the same course with Ibrahim, on being asked to accept military service, and actually besieged him in Jerusalem. Nazareth was as troublesome as Safed, and Hebron held out longer than Nablus. The Hauran Druses and the Arabs of the Ghor and Kerak needed several punitive expeditions and tedious experience of closed markets, occupied watering-places, and prohibited pastures. The Hauran and Kerak in particular gave Ibrahim some stiff fighting; and the villagers of the Judaean highlands once exacted the release of their leader, Abu Ghosh, by blocking, with 17,000 armed men, Ibrahim's passage from Jerusalem to meet his father on
