By the way, I surprised myself with there being more dramatic divergences from reassigning Libya than I expected. In many ways, the differences for history of WWI and beyond were even more potentially dramatic than the differences for the next variation I will explore -
Here's an idea for scenario C) Egyptian Palestine, from the 1860s onward. It is not the *only* possible scenario, but the most likely:
The geopolitical effects of Egyptian rule over the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, Sanjak of Acre, Sanjak of Beirut (actually south of Beirut city), the governing units comprising 'Palestine', should be relatively undramatic at first. These provinces add some net revenue to the Egyptian budget, from Christian, Jewish and Muslim pilgrimage tourism and the citrus and olive trades.
In the remainder of the 1860s and into the 1870s, the Ottoman Sultan and his officialdom insists on calling the ruler of Egypt the Wali, or Governor, but Ismail is enforcing the title Khedive on his subjects internally, and that's what the Europeans are pretty much calling him as well. Especially by the time he is doing the grand opening ceremonies for the Suez Canal in 1869.
Between 1865-1882 the Egyptian government may need to deal with some local unrest in Palestine, mostly from local Muslim provincial elites, Druze and Bedouin, the best armed part of the population, if and when they feel their prerogatives are menaced. But Egyptian forces should be able to handle it with sea-mobility along the coast and not terrible land mobility from Lower Egypt and the regime's power center in the Nile Delta. Oppositional elements taking advantage of the border with the Ottoman Empire can be one of the bigger problems whenever the Ottomans are lax about enforcement of border controls or security. The proudly modernizing, glitzier, Suez Canal-promoting regime of Khedive Ismail exercising rule over Palestine, instead of the less ambitious and self-promoting Ottomans, in the late 1860s through 1870s, will likely encourage more European immigration into the cities of Palestine, by European Jews, and European Christians, than we saw in OTL. This would be much like we saw in cities in lower Egypt like Alexandria, with prominent Jewish, Greek, Italian, and pan-European neighborhoods. Khedive Ismail will mostly see these foreigners as welcome additions to the tax and skill base, and there might even be some rudimentary, simple textile manufacturing operations set up in Alexandria and Palestine taking advantage of Egypt's cotton supplies.
Nothing about Egypt possessing Palestine should prevent the Egyptian internal disorder, leading to British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Only now, the British occupation regime is extended to encompass Palestine. In practical terms at first, this means British resident officials and garrisons at Rafah, Gaza, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Acre, and some places in between.
Britain will administer Palestine as another subdivision of Egypt, It will probably be even more uniformly administered with the rest of Egypt compared to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, because it won't spend 17 years under the rule of the breakaway Mahdi's regime, and because Palestine has such relatively close and secure communications with Cairo, Alexandria and Lower Egypt.
Formally, the Ottoman Empire will remain suzerain over Egypt and Palestine.
Like in the case of OTL Egypt after 1882, British ruled Egyptian Palestine will be administered primarily with keeping a balanced budget and servicing western loans in mind. To the degree law and order, public health, and educational minimums help with that, they'll be supported or permitted, but not sponsored with any great generosity or altruism or notable cost to the British electoral class.
Already middle-class or elite types, or ethnic or religious minorities, resident Europeans, and people in urban settings, will generally be better enabled to take advantage of opportunities in the British imperial system than fellahin peasants, manual laborers, and bedouin.
The quest for revenue in the 1880s and 1890s will probably lead to some substantial auctions of state lands Jewish capitalist purchasers and other, Christian and non-religious European purchasers in Palestine. Some of the Jewish purchasers, motivated by the 1882 Russian pogroms and their aftermath, will have mind using at least some of this land as refuges and settlements for Russian and Romanian Jews. As this scales up, this will provoke a degree of local protest. So the Jewish population of Palestine under British administration will be somewhat higher by some thousands by 1900, although this represents no British government commitment to political Zionism....its routine colonial business, pounds and pence. And America, the other countries of the Americas, Britain, France, and the Antipodes are by far the favored destinations of Jewish, and other, emigrants from the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires in the late 19th century decades.
By the late 1890s, Theodor Herzl will organize political Zionism as an international political movement. He will focus his lobbying more squarely on the British government, the Egyptian royal government, and the British administrators in Egypt, with just nominal minimal attention to the Sultan. He will promise Jewish immigration provided great tax receipts of the long-term and great shorter term tax receipts from land sales transactions. The Egyptian interlocutors will all be cold and hostile to the idea, as will the Sultan. The London British will defer to the "men on the spot" in Cairo. The British in Cairo will have a harder time objecting to settlement projects across Palestine, especially in the north, like they were able to object to the El-Arish, Sinai settlement plan of circa 1900-1903, because of lack of nearby water. Northern Palestine has more groundwater and more rainfall. However, already experiencing larger immigrant Jewish and Christian European populations in their midst, Muslim and Christian Palestinian opposition, demonstrations, and petitions against large settlement schemes will be more mobilized than OTL, and will have sympathetic echoes throughout Egypt, and at least adjacent parts of the Ottoman Empire. Substantial European non-Jewish immigrants, in some senses a little higher than Jews in the social hierarchy, or aspiring to be, may join in the agitation to object to mass settlement or special exclusive territorial reservations for the Jews.
The greatest likelihood is the British will come down rejecting Herzl's proposals and Zionist ideas in general pretty definitively by 1905, simply judging it far more trouble that it is worth. It discourages Zionists a bit. A trickle of Jews continue to move in. The thin reed of hope remains for diehards, it's enough to cause rejection of the Uganda (Kenya) option when offered. Development in Palestine, as in Egypt, also encourages increase in Arabic-speaking Christian and Muslim populations, both natural (increase of birth over death rate ratio) and immigration from other parts of Egypt and adjoining parts of the Ottoman Empire.
Then we get to WWI. The Ottoman Empire is still likely to join the Central Powers, because the British are likely to hold back and dreadnought orders in progress, Ottoman anti-Russian feeling in particular, and the fact that it's been Entente powers doing the preponderance of nibbling at and annexing Ottoman territory over the last century or two, and Germany hasn't.
Although it cannot threaten the Suez Canal, an early in the war Ottoman offensive on British Egyptian Palestine fits in perfectly with the global anti-Entente Jihad the three Pashas had the Sultan declare, and they could easily call it Operation Saladin to liberate Al-Quds/Al-Aqsa/Jerusalem. Besides, it is a necessary preemption for strategic depth for the empire's own Greater Syrian and Arabian territories.
Some overactive thinkers among the German diplomats and advisors to the Ottoman Empire, or advising them from Berlin, may be proposing making promises to the local Jewish community of Palestine of some kind of state to win them over out of some exaggerated sense of their power and importance, and their influence over 'Global Jewry' and the Jews of Russia and other important countries. Any of these people will quickly be told by the Ottomans, and German and Austrian colleagues more intimately knowledgeable about the Ottomans, to GTFO and STFU.
They may have counterparts in Britain, but the smart money in Britain, and British administration Cairo and Palestine will decide no, it is time to definitively reiterate Britain's opposition to Zionist projects in Palestine, reiterate that Palestine, Al-Quds, and Al-Aqsa are now and forever Egyptian. Egypt and the canal are just too important to not mollify potential Egyptian unrest. The Muslim population of India, and its outsize representation of the Indian Army is too important to not mollify. As for rallying the local Jews and European communities resident in Palestine and Alexandria, the British figure they have no choice but to rally to the Union Jack, in fear of their lives and property in the event of Turkish conquest.
So, from 1914, Britain further boxes itself out of making any Balfour declaration.
The Ottomans will certainly advance across the shallow Jordan and into the Galilee and some distance into the Negev and quite possibly temporarily occupy Jerusalem, the hills of the west bank and perhaps reach the Palestine coast in some places at best, but it should not take long for the British to recover their position. No later than some point in 1915.
After trial and error, through WWI, eventually the efforts of the Arab revolt out of the Hijaz and the Mesopotamian campaign should succeed.
Since Egyptian administration was already there, present in the Palestine portion of the Levant, the British may give consideration to extending Egyptian administration to the rest of greater Syria and all the Levant. The Egyptian Khedive or King, or certainly one or more of his advisors or courtiers will propose something like this, an "Anglo-Egyptian Syria". But it is not likely to be adopted.
The mandate system is likely to be adopted as OTL, and Britain will likely have to make compromises with the French in the region.
Egypt will be seething with independence desires postwar.
If you're thnking this course of WWI is all running too convergently with OTL, and think something would really have to change, a suppose a pretty plausible change on the Ottoman-Palestine front could be any of the following:
A) Commitment of the Indian Army force that OTL went to Basra, Mesoptamia/Iraq, to Aqaba, southern Palestine instead, to protect existing imperial assets in Palestine. This early injection of forces defend, becomes a sufficient force for an early counterattack, leading, mid-war, in 1916, or possibly if lucky as early as late 1915, to a British-Indian advance up through the Levant to Taurus mountains, converging with southwest marching Russians, somewhere in Kurdistan or Greater Armenia.
B) No change to OTL's Mesopotamia line of advance, but the required defensive effort in Palestine leads to a larger deployment, based off of Palestinian ports closer to targets in the Turkish Levant - no need to lay out water and fuel pipelines across the Sinai. As a result, instead deploying forces to force the straits and invade Gallipolli in 1914, the Allies just pour more resources into the Levant campaign to take Syria and Lebanon and Cilicia, through a frontal and coastal push, or they get fanc and supplement it with a landing operation at Alexandretta/Antioch. Unlike Gallipolli, the Allies meet success here, the Allies take the Levant basically three years early, and the Ottomans in Arabia and Iraq are cut off, preventing the embarassing British surrender at Kut. Again the Allies converge with the Russians in the eastern Turkey area that is mostly Kurdish or Armenian inhabited.
C) A more slight change - no change to Mesopotamia (and the Kut failure), Gallipolli (and its failure), but the alternate version of the Allenby Palestine campaign of 1917-18 has at least a one year head start, starting from Galilee and getting to Damascus and up to the Taurus mountains long before Lawrence's pals can even catch up.
Egypt later on - post-WWI, it will be formally independent and a League of Nations member, but actually a British protectorate (called an ally), hosting British troops. Britain will reoccupy it for WWII assuming that happens. The royal government will extract a commitment for eventual total evacuation of all Egypt, including Palestine, and the canal zone by the end of the 40s or the 50s.
European refugees in WWII (Jews and Gentiles, like Greeks and Poles) may once more take refuge in Egypt, but not in overwhelming numbers.
Without the Arab-Israeli war, the Egyptian monarchy has a greater chance of surviving, especially the more it leans into popular anti-British feeling. However. eventual overthrow by nationalist military officers in the 1950s is still likely in any case, I do not quite believe the conservative Arab monarchist viewpoint that ascribes *all* Mideast popular support for radical republicanism and socialism in the region to the humiliating surprise defeat at Israeli hands. Republicanism and Socialism were also by the 1950s simply much more 'trendy' and 'sexy' ideas than monarchy to the educated classes. Land reform was a popular cause.
There may be a somewhat greater chance for Egypt to keep its parliamentary system, post-coup. But even here, militarist populists may associate parliamentarians too much with the landed and anti-land reform wealthy elite.
The avant garde, lefty socialist and antagonistic to Britain (and by extension Britain's allies) Greater Egypt gets, the more friendly it will be with the Soviet Union. By the year 2000, Egypt will likely still be ruling Palestine and Sinai, but their regional senses of identity, and regional discontentments will have grown much stronger, probably with some activists separatist movements fighting under Islamist or other ideological guise.
