The victory of the Arab-Muslim armies at the battle of Yarmuk (636 CE or 14 of the Hegira) sounded the end of Byzantine rule in the Near East. Yarmuk heralded a new era: a large number of the region’s inhabitants (Christians, Samaritans and Jews) progressively converted to Islam, and the almost complete adoption of Arabic as the language of the region. Palestine, together with its Moslem, Christian, Jewish and Samaritan components, from now on was assimilated into the Arab Empire, as Palestine was integrated into the vast Umayyad Caliphate (661-749) and then ruled by its successor, the Abbassid Caliphate (750-969) it remained important because of the numerous pilgrimage routes across it and because of the statute of the holy city of Jerusalem (Beit al- Maqdis - the House of the Sanctuary). The political and cultural structures were maintained and the new rule was greatly strengthened by the support of the well-established Christian landowners.

At the end of the tenth century, the power base was reinstated to the interior of the country as the Fatimid dynasty began its conquest of Palestine, taking it from the Baghdad-based caliphate: local powers also rebelled, most notably the Bedouin tribe of Banu Jarrah who tried to create an independent state. But new outside forces were preparing to conquer Palestine. In 1070, the Seljuks, a Turkish Sunni dynasty, took Jerusalem and tried to create a kingdom in Palestine and in southern Syria, in the name of the struggle against the Fatimid Shiites. These power struggles and the parcelling out of territory created favourable conditions for Western ambitions in the Near East and the formation of Latin states.

The Crusades, launched by the papacy and supported by many kings or European lords, were promoted under the title of a “holy war,” but they had political motives, whether to expand the power of the church in Rome, to establish a fiefdom, or to divert attention from the misery and violence in Europe. “The crusades will turn the thirst for eternal salvation into plundering ardour.”(G.Duby). In 1187, the forces of Salah ed-Din al-Ayyubi al-Kurdi (Saladin) (1138-1193), a Muslim leader originally from Kurdistan, put an end to the first Latin kingdom in Jerusalem (1099- 1187). After defeating the Crusader armies, in July 1187, at Hittin (near Tiberias), he liberated Jerusalem and all the ports of Palestine. During the Third Crusade (1189-1191), the king of France, Philippe Auguste, and the king of England, Richard the Lionheart, in 1191 took St. Jean d’Acre (Akka in Arabic), creating the kingdom of Acre, though they were not able to take Jerusalem.

During the next century, Palestine was at the mercy of conquests, treaties, and still more conquests, and was partially occupied until the fall of the last Crusader fortifications (Jaffa in 1268, Ascalan in 1270, and Acre in 1291). After Mameluke Sultan Baybar took St. Jean d’Acre, Palestine remained under Mameluke rule (1250-1516); the Mamelukes were a military aristocracy which for two and a half centuries ruled over a prosperous state ranging from Syria to Egypt, in which Palestine was relegated to the status of a province of no political importance, and was far from any power struggles.