British administrative unification, not Ottoman precedent, created Palestine as a single political unit

Evidence

The constitution or the formation of a political entity called Palestine which eventually gave rise to a nationality called Palestinian and the reconstitution of Jerusalem as the capital were, it seems to me, very important, and as it turns out, lasting innovations of the British Mandate. Even in the Ottoman period Jerusalem was the capital of the district of Jerusalem, but there were separate districts ruled from other cities such as Safed and Nabulus and Gaza. All of them sub-divisions of larger provinces governed at various times from Damascus, Si­ don, or Beirut. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 818

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the manufactured-polity thread running through Said-adjacent region representation: territory retroactively unified into a single legible unit for imperial administration, much like Mesopotamia or Transjordan.
• QUESTION: Under the Ottoman system Jerusalem district and others were separate: what did that fragmentation mean for local identity versus the unified Mandate nationality?