This paper explores imperial citizenship in late Ottoman Palestine by telling the story of two prominent figures in this context: Isa al-Isa, the Arab Christian editor of Filastin—widely lionized for opposing Zionist encroachment and molding a Palestinian collective consciousness—and Abu Ibrahim, an Arab Muslim contributor to Filastin, who wrote a monthly column titled "Letters from a Peasant" from 1911 to 1912. In this column, Abu Ibrahim exhibited a cantankerous persona, simultaneously wistful for the simple days before he became involved in political matters and fiercely committed to those very political intrigues. His advocacy focused on improvement of the lives of peasants and included calls for better roads, well-trained veterinarians, modern agricultural machinery, and state-sponsored forestry. All of these claims on the Ottoman state amounted to what scholars have called imperial citizenship, as Abu Ibrahim asserted connections between state and citizen. What seems to make these claims interesting is that they emerge from an ostensible representative of a traditionally marginalized group of social actors: the rural poor. What complicates the story is that Abu Ibrahim was not Arab or Muslim or poor. Abu Ibrahim was, in fact, a pseudonym for Menashe Meirovitch, a Jewish agronomist who emigrated from Russia to Palestine in 1883 to help establish one of the first Zionist settlements, Rishon Le-Zyon. Meirovitch did not know a word of Arabic. It was al-Isa who translated his columns from French and edited them. This paper suggests that this relationship represented a key moment in Ottoman Palestine when communal boundaries remained fluid. Far from "collaboration"—the idea that the nationalist newspaperman betrayed the Palestinian cause or that the Zionist agronomist tricked a venal enemy—the partnership between the two men in 1911-1912 demonstrates how in the late Ottoman period perceptions of citizenship and state responsibilities to its diverse citizens might converge. This partnership was, of course, inconceivable only a few years later.