This paper focuses on the British military occupation of the area known as Ottoman Palestine, from the conquest of Jerusalem in December 1917 to the establishment in July 1920 of a British colonial civil administration. The discussion adopts a threefold approach. First, it will provide some overall context to British decision-making processes during these two and a half years of military occupation. Against that background, the paper then examines specific policies developed by the occupying forces to provide agricultural credit and revitalize a market in land transactions. Not only did land and agriculture constitute the basis of livelihood for the vast majority of Palestine’s population, it also underlay the political tensions with the Zionist movement: for Zionism, land acquisition in Palestine was key to building the homeland which had just been promised by Britain by the terms of the November 1917 Balfour Declaration. The paper concludes with three overall observations about the significance of the period of occupation for a broader understanding of the history of Palestine. First, the central, if disputed, role played by prevailing Ottoman institutions during the military occupation forces a reconsideration of the Ottoman legacy: Ottoman laws and practices were clearly more resilient and effective than popular images of the Ottoman Empire as the historic ‘sick man of Europe’ allow. Second, that, although efforts to conflate the making of British land policies with the directives of Zionism have long been a staple of the extant literature, it is actually rather difficult to find the key to the military occupation’s land-policy making process in a monolithic and overpowering impulse to build a Jewish national home. Third, that the profound transformations experienced by the international system in the early twentieth century, as legitimized by both Britain’s recognition of the pre-war Hague conventions and of wartime Wilsonian notions of a ‘sacred trust’ - often referred to as ‘the spirit of the age’ - forced British officers on the ground to align their policies with prevailing practices which the majority population, or at the very least the political and economic leaders among them, were accustomed. The hope was to build some minimal public backing and a certain level of legitimacy, but it proved an impossible task. In addition to panels on the Palestinian Israeli conflict, this individual paper could fit with the following thematic panels: military occupations; British colonial administration; Ottoman imperial legacy; land and property rights.