Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (35 page)

The press also served a role in the commercial life of the city, announcing the arrival of ships to Jaffa port, printing advertisements from various private businesses, publishing prices of staple goods, economic reports, new coins in use in the markets, and other related announcements.
¹⁷
In addition, the press contributed to the cultural life of the city by posting announcements of upcoming cultural events and announcements of the establishment of various institutions or associations, in addition to the more extensive coverage that certain organizations or events merited.
¹⁸

Significantly, these news items went beyond the level of mere public service announcements; they were part of the press's active involvement in articulating the contours of a shared, modern city and its citizenry, in prodding the citizenry to participate or think of an event or issue in a particular way. In this vein the office of the
mukhtar
was praised as being useful, and irresponsible or inexcusable (in other words, anticivic) behavior was publicly reprimanded, such as when the Jewish neighborhood Me'ah She'arim was scolded in the pages of the press for refusing to pay for street-cleaning services.
¹⁹

As well, press coverage of other Ottoman and world cities contributed to the local vision of the city. Comparisons were made, differences were pointed out, and lessons were drawn from others. For example, one newspaper editor wrote that “it should be hoped that Jerusalem will learn from its smaller and younger sister,” Jaffa, since even though Jerusalem was cleaner than Jaffa, there were still areas with cats and dogs roaming freely among the trash and sewage.
²⁰
Another article informed Jerusalemites about the municipal reforms under way in Galilean Safad, where, among other things, the deputy governor had ordered work to begin the project of bringing running water to the city and had appointed a citizens' committee to oversee the matter.
²¹
The unfamiliar thus was rendered familiar and possible, and knowledge of precedent elsewhere was intended to empower locals. Such was the case when readers in Jaffa and Jerusalem turned their eyes to the other provincial capitals in the empire, demanding a local health council “like that of other cities in Turkey [sic]” as well as improved infrastructure (port, railroad).
²²

The press also became an important voice in providing public praise or pressure on the municipal council, and the council, like governor Subhi Bey before, had little choice but to respond to the press in public. In the summer of 1909, for example,
Jerusalem
newspaper praised the Jerusalem City Council for banning peasant women selling crates of vegetables from sitting on the steps at the entrance to alleyways, as they blocked the path of residents. The paper then took the opportunity to pressure the municipality to close down the open market adjacent to Jaffa Gate, as it was an eyesore for the tourists who flocked to that part of the city. In response, the city council ordered that the market close down at seven in the morning, when tourists tended to wake up, after which the vegetable market would relocate to a side street.
²³
In another case, a reader of
Palestine
newspaper complained that the Jaffa City Council needed to act against the smoke-filled cafés in town which posed a public health hazard. A few months later
Palestine
again complained that its request to the city council to regulate the meat market had been
ignored, and a week after that, it requested that the city council lower the price of meat for the city's poor.
²⁴
Other newspaper articles demanded more firefighters, policemen, and additional services for the city.
²⁵

Many of these complaints focused on a “modern” vision of the city as the literate, urban middle classes of Palestine demanded cleaner cities and more municipal services, and saw themselves in the eyes of Western visitors.
²⁶
Other complaints, however, were directed at the city council for being a vestige of the ancien régime—corrupt, inefficient, prone to cronyism, and certainly not representative of the people. The Hebrew newspaper
Liberty
complained that one of the newly elected Jewish City Council members, Rahamim Mizrachi, wanted to fire a beloved municipal clerk and hire his sister's son in his place. “We won't let him!” warned the paper.
²⁷
As well, in the summer of 1912
The Crier
newspaper in Jerusalem reported that a municipal inspector who happened to be a member of the mayor's extended family had kicked a peasant woman in the market. The paper warned, “The inspectors should know that they serve the nation and the peasants as one. It is their duty to lighten the burden of the labors of the sellers and to guide them in the order of law.”
²⁸

In fact,
The Crier
engaged in all-out war against the Jerusalem municipality and frequently published criticisms of the mayor, Husayn Hashem al-Husayni, and the council as a whole.
The Crier
accused the mayor of deliberately delaying new elections in 1912 in an attempt to hold on to power. “Certainly the members will not remain the same if there are new elections,”
The Crier
declared confidently.
²⁹
As we will see, this coincided with the beginning of sectarian struggles within Jerusalem.

MUNICIPAL MODERNITY

One of the important expectations of the revolution was its vision of progress and development. Along those lines, the Jerusalem municipality actively promoted local development and progress along a particular model of a modern, urban city, envisioned as a city with running water, electricity and telephones, modern urban transport, and other visible public works. In the summer of 1910, Jewish city councilman David Yellin undertook a fact-finding trip to research municipal services in European cities. Their motivation, according to his letter of introduction sent by Mayor Husayn Hashem al-Husayni, was simply because “after the proclamation of the constitution in Turkey [
sic
], our town of Jerusalem has tried to organize itself and to bring itself to the level of
modern requirements
.”
³⁰

In this endeavor, as in previous projects of local development, the municipality worked closely with (and also sometimes against) other institutions,
individuals, and government bodies to promote and successfully execute the modernization of the city. The various actors' plans for the city were part of the revolutionary project, aspiring to transcommunal “civic Ottomanism,” Ottoman economic nationalism, and a certain degree of mimicry of European modernity.

Perhaps the most important organization for bourgeois activity in promoting local development was the local Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture, established in Jerusalem and Jaffa.
³¹
The chamber solicited the participation of all sectors of the commercial classes so that already in its first months, it had fifty-nine registered voting members. These members ranged from large landowners, import-export merchants, shopkeepers, moneychangers, and other local businessmen; in addition foreign consuls were represented in the chamber. While membership dues were on a progressive sliding scale, the minimum was still a sizable sum that only the reasonably successful could afford.
³²
As evidenced by the list of the chambers' officers, it is clear that Jews and Christians played a prominent role in the commercial life of Jerusalem and Jaffa, respectively.
³³

As a semiofficial Ottoman institution, the chamber served a variety of commercial, legal, and networking functions. Among its central responsibilities were sending weekly statistical reports to the chamber of commerce in Istanbul (which was part of the Ministry of Commerce), registering merchants and businesses in a commercial directory, and serving as liaison between local consulates, merchants abroad, and local businessmen. The chamber had some legal power in that it conducted bookkeeping and certification, legalization, and registration of notes, contracts, bills, and so on, for a fee. It also had legal status in the commercial and
shar'ia
courts.
³⁴
Significantly, the chamber seemed to have a real role in the administration and decision making of the province; it sometimes filled in for the governor in administrative decision making when he was away, and relevant Ottoman officials such as the imperial agricultural inspector were awarded with positions in the chamber.
³⁵

Most important, the chamber represented the interests of Palestine's middle- and upper-class business community, and often served as a lobbying arm between private business and the Ottoman government or European vendors. For example, in 1909 the chamber successfully lobbied the Ministry of Agriculture to send them twenty-five hundred doses of serum to combat bovine pests. On a separate occasion, when the Ministry of Religious Endowments decided to regulate the deforestation of olive and mulberry trees in Palestine, the chamber ordered a reforestation project analysis. The chamber also advocated on behalf of Palestine's vintners, who were being charged a high tax rate (76 percent) for
the sale of alcoholic spirits. More successful, however, was the lobbying drive to establish a mixed commercial court in Palestine, which finally came into being by 1910.
³⁶

The chamber's real ambitions, however, lay with the promotion of public works and infrastructure development in Palestine. While Palestine already had an intercity railway line between Jerusalem and Jaffa, it lacked public transport that would connect the rest of the country, as well as intracity local transport such as electric tramways in Jerusalem to connect the New and Old Cities as well as the outlying villages and towns. It also lacked running water, sewage, electricity, telephones, and other amenities of modern urban life.
³⁷

Until then, Jerusalem had been dependent on rainwater that was stored in the city's numerous public and private cisterns as well as springwater that fed into a number of natural pools and ancient wells around the city; the city's Roman-era aqueduct system had been repaired as recently as the 1890s. However, by the turn of the twentieth century these natural and traditional sources proved insufficient for the growing city, and it was forced to rely on a private market of water purchased from water carriers who transported it from springs and wells outside the city limits.
³⁸

For Jerusalem's leading citizens, infrastructure development, commercial growth, and political liberty were intimately intertwined. As the chamber stated: “Air, water, and heat are the basic elements of the life of man and of beast…we deplore the debased situation…which obliges the municipality to import water by wagon during the years of drought…. It is incumbent upon a constitutional regime to reform the oversights of nature and to render healthy water and lively heat accessible to all the poor.”
³⁹

In fact, one of the first steps taken by the new governor, Subhi Bey, we will recall, was to appoint a local committee to study the question of bringing running water to Jerusalem. That committee, which consisted of a combination of important local officials and regular citizens, including one Christian and one Jew, issued its reports with the understanding that running water was important, not only for the hygiene and public health of the city, but also for the city's dignity as well as its image in the eyes of its European residents and visitors.
⁴⁰
In making its report, the committee thought in clear civic terms as well as commercial ones. Given that in the past forty years the population of Jerusalem had more than doubled and that an additional ten thousand to fifteen thousand immigrants were expected in the following ten to fifteen years, it was imperative that Jerusalem's water needs be addressed as an element of urban growth. As well, the committee was not blind to the fact that the city drew poorer religious pilgrims and migrants more often than affluent
ones, and therefore the affordability and availability of water for all of the city's residents and visitors was a central concern. Free water distributed to the city's public fountains was a necessary component of urban development as well as a respectful continuation of the Islamic charitable practice of building these fountains.

The committee outlined the technical aspects of bringing running water to Jerusalem, siding with an 1891 report by the city's then-engineer, Franghia Bey, which had identified a spring outside of Jerusalem as the best source from which to build canals to the city. The committee then raised the question of financing for the project, given that the municipality could not afford such an investment. The committee recommended that a private Ottoman investment society be founded to undertake the project, that the administrative council transfer funds to the city council
for a research study, and that the eventual water project be organized along the lines of a religious endowment where its revenues would continue to benefit the city in perpetuity. The committee's recommendations signaled a local critique against the standard way that Ottoman development in public works had taken place throughout the nineteenth century—via European concessionaires whose investment in the empire's ports, railroads, and cities were first and foremost commercial ventures. In contrast, Jerusalem's leading members envisioned its development as lying in the hands of fellow Ottomans who had a stake in the project's success for the good of the city's residents, not simply for their own pocketbooks.