During the late Ottoman period, Greater Syria experienced several profound processes. Since the 1890s, the Hamidian regime granted significant concessions for industrializing projects; began cooperating closely with Imperial Germany under the reign of Wilhelm II, and kept settling Muslim immigrants from the Balkan and the Caucasus as well as local nomad populations. The primary goal was to project Ottoman sovereignty in the Arab provinces by increasing economic activity, charging more taxes and most of all setting feet on the ground. This period also saw Jewish settlement and Zionist activity in three provinces of Greater Syria, in what scholars teleologically frame as the “seeds of conflict.” Despite the high relevance of the three processes mentioned above to Zionism, scholars barely account for the complex relations of Jewish-Zionist networks with the Ottoman administration. Therefore, unlike older Jewish communities, Zionism remained an isolationist agent within the historiography of the late Ottoman period. This paper reveals the engagement of the professional elite of the Jewish Yishuv with the Ottoman development efforts as private entrepreneurs and experts whose services were hired by state authorities. Engineers such as the Wilbuschewitsch brothers and Baruch Katinka, agronomists such as Aaron Aaronsohn and Selig Soskin, and physicians such as Hillel Yaffe and Eliyahu Orbach were a few among a network of several dozens of experts born in Tzarist Russia and trained in Germany, who pursued their professional careers in the Ottoman Empire. Working far beyond the narrow borders of the Jewish Yishuv, they became experts of high demand by both central and provincial Ottoman authorities. These experts in effect participated in constituting a crucial link in the German-Ottoman alliance on the ground. The foundation and construction of the Technikum in Haifa between 1908-1914 epitomized this convergence of interests. However, the most intensive phase of their work came about during World War I, when they were all hired to the technical units of Cemal Pasha’s Fourth Army, and special units in his military administration. Drawing upon a plethora of new materials from archives located in Turkey, Israel, Germany, and the UK, I intend to debunk Zionist exceptionalism by revealing the close engagement of experts from the Jewish Yishuv with the Ottoman Empire and by analyzing their roles in it. This paper relies upon my dissertation, a study of entrepreneurship, expertise, and imperial sovereignty in late Ottoman Syria.