Newly discovered Ottoman documents from the collections of the Ba?bakanl?k Osmanl? Ar??v? in Istanbul can teach us a great deal about fundamental changes in the modes of interaction and communication of Palestine’s population with the central Ottoman government in Istanbul as of the early 1870s. The availability of telegraph lines in Palestine from the mid 1860s and the regularization and expansion of postal services can account for these changes. Thus, numerous petitions were sent as of the early 1870s by all sectors of the population, including urbanites, villagers, Bedouins, and even foreign nationals, directly to the Ottoman Grand Vizier in Istanbul, bypassing the local Ottoman authorities in Palestine. Using the new telegraph services and more widespread postal services which were available at the post offices of major centers such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Gaza, Palestine’s residents complained about such varied issues as illegal changes in the status of their lands, the high amount of taxes that they were asked to pay, corruption in the local bureaucracy and unjust treatment by local officials and influential people, discrepancies between the orders of the central government and their implementation on the ground, discrimination vis-à-vis other groups in the population, disregard of longstanding local practices and the like. The paper follows the petitions from the time they were first written and sent, through the way they were handled in Istanbul, including the correspondence between the central government and the local authorities in Palestine regarding the complaints expressed in the petitions, and finally the decisions made about them. The commonality of the petitions and the fact that they were sent by all segments of the population sheds new light on the fundamental changes which the introduction of new technologies and means of communication brought about in the relationships between center and periphery in the Ottoman Empire, the notion of justice as understood by both the Empire’s subjects and the central government, and the subjects' expectations from the central government. At the same time, the paper also explores possible connections between the new avenues opened for the Ottoman subjects to contact the central government and demand justice, on the one hand, and the ongoing changes in the Ottoman bureaucracy and administrative practices in the second half of the 19th century, as they were played out in Palestine, on the other (for instance the establishment of the independent mutasarr?fl?k of Jerusalem which was directly governed from Istanbul).