"Falastin" was established on 14 January 1911 by Issa El-Issa and Yousef El-Issa, two Palestinian Christian cousins from the coastal city of Jaffa in Palestine. It was among a handful of newspapers to have emerged from the region following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire which lifted press censorship. The newspaper was initially focused on the Orthodox Renaissance, a movement that aimed to weaken the Greek clerical hegemony over the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, so that its vast financial resources could be utilized to improve education for the Palestinian Christians of Palestine. Other topics addressed in the newspaper included modernization, reforms and improving the welfare of the peasants. Its geographic scope of interest focused on the Mutassarifate of Jerusalem, primarily news from Jaffa and Jerusalem, but also less frequently Hebron, Jericho and Gaza. The scope of interest later expanded in 1913 to include all of Palestine.