Southern Syria

Southern Syria (سوريا الجنوبية Sūriyā l-Janūbiyya) is the southern part of the Syria region, roughly corresponding to the Southern Levant. Typically it refers chronologically and geographically to the southern part of Ottoman Syria provinces.

The term was used in Arabic primarily from 1918–20, during the Arab Kingdom of Syria period. Gerber, Remembering and Imagining Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to the Present, MacMillan, 2008, pp.165–166: “It is interesting that even as late as 1918 Palestine was  regarded as an  independent entity. Syria was not seen as a mother-country. The idea of amalgamation was to emerge about a month later, following a strenuous campaign by its supporters. But the documents relating to the initiation of the proposed fusion show what was newly constructed and what was the original (and traditional) mode of self-perception. Thus, the document that speaks about the election of candidates to the first Palestinian congress starts by saying inter alia:  muqat`at suriyya al-janubiyya al-ma`rufa bi-filastin, that is, the land of Southern Syria, known  as  Palestine. In other words, what everybody always knew as Palestine is henceforth to be named Southern Syria. Put differently, the writers were fully aware that had they called the country simply Southern Syria, nobody in the Middle East would have known what they were talking about. But no one needed a map or a dictionary to know what the term Palestine meant. This document also offers a simple explanation for the then popularity of the Syrian option: It was simply the case that for a brief moment Syria was an independent, not to say Arab, country. In Palestine everything was different, and the future looked very bleak indeed. The way in which the term  Southern  Syria was explained by the term Palestine is not confined to a single document. In fact, a more or less similar variant appears in all the documents from this period  that mention the term “Southern Syria”: Southern  Syria is  given as the name of the country, despite the fact that the known term is Palestine. Obviously, Southern Syria was not a traditional name, or even a formal geographical definition. On the contrary, the way in which the term Palestine is always used to explain Southern Syria supports the conclusion that it was quite well known to everybody in the area in 1914 and could not have been invented because of Zionism or for any other reason.”  Zachary Foster in his Princeton University doctoral dissertation has written that, in the decades prior to World War I, the term “Southern Syria” was the least frequently used out of ten different ways to describe the region of Palestine in Arabic, noting that “it took me nearly a decade to find a handful of references”.

Background
Throughout the Ottoman period, prior to World War I, the Levant was administered, taxed and viewed locally as one entity, divided into provinces. Geographically southern Syria included the southern sub-provinces of Ottoman Syria administrative region, including by the end of 19th and early 20th century the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, the Nablus Sanjak and Acre Sanjak (under Beirut Vilayet from 1888 and previously under Syria Vilayet), and a short-lived Mutasarrıfate of Karak (split as a new administrative unit from Syria Vilayet in 1894/5). In 1884, the governor of Damascus proposed the establishment of a new Vilayet in southern Syria, composed of the regions of Jerusalem, Balqa' and Ma'an though nothing came out of this.

At the start of Faisal’s reign in the Arab Kingdom of Syria, the term Southern Syria became synonymous with Palestine. After 1918 it would take on an increased political significance as a way of rejecting the separation of the British Mandate from Syria.

Usage during British and French occupation
In early 20th century, the term "Southern Syria" could imply support for the Greater Syria nationalism associated with the kingdom promised to the Hashemite dynasty of the Hejaz by the British during World War I. After the war, the Hashemite prince Faisal attempted to establish such a Greater Syrian or pan-Mashriq state—a united kingdom that would comprise all of what eventually became Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, but he was stymied by conflicting promises made by the British to different parties (see Sykes–Picot Agreement), leading to the French creation of the mandate of Syria and Lebanon in 1920.

According to the Minutes of the Ninth Session of the League of Nations' Permanent Mandates Commission, held in 1926, "Southern Syria" was suggested by some as the name of Mandatory Palestine in the Arabic language. The reports say the following: "'Colonel Symes explained that the country was described as 'Palestine' by Europeans and as 'Falestin' by the Arabs. The Hebrew name for the country was the designation 'Land of Israel', and the Government, to meet Jewish wishes, had agreed that the word 'Palestine' in Hebrew characters should be followed in all official documents by the initials which stood for that designation. As a set-off to this, certain of the Arab politicians suggested that the country should be called 'Southern Syria' in order to emphasize its close relation with another Arab State'." In 1932, an Arab party named "the Arab Independence Party in Southern Syria" was established in Mandatory Palestine to emphasize the reaffirmed support for Arab pan-Syrianism. In later times, when Syria emerged as an independent nation state, with recognized international borders which did not include Palestine and with an ambivalent and complicated relationship with The Palestinian National Movement, support for the idea of Palestine being "Southern Syria" faded away.