Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (44 page)

The constitution and its laws accord to all Ottomans absolute equality, and no one can think to withdraw from the Jews the protection accorded by law. Your Excellency, as an Ottoman citizen, native to the land…for more than ten generations, I take the liberty of telling you of the profound wound that this restrictive order creates deep in the heart of the Ottoman Jews in a critical moment of zeal for the sacred defense of the homeland…. Without speaking of the moral offense done to our Ottomanism…, [continuing this ban] will provoke a grave financial retardation from which you will not be able to overcome.
¹⁰⁰

Antébi's appeal must have convinced the governor, for eventually he and Muhdi Bey agreed that land sales could be carried out to Ottoman Jews not known to be working with the Zionist settlers, and AntAntébi was to submit the names of those Jews in advance for approval.
¹⁰¹
Despite the local government's acquiescence, however, Arab public opinion was being mobilized against Ottoman Jewish land purchase. In November,
The Carmel
revealed that the village lands of Karkur and Beidas had been sold to the Zionist Aharon Eisenberg with the acquiescence of the local administrative council. Weeks later,
Palestine
published an article against the sale, warning that “because of the Zionists the conquest of Palestine in the future will be a second Macedonia, since they do not care about money and they buy village after village…. How long will the vulture eat the body of the homeland? If the homeland is lost to us why do we have life?”
¹⁰²

In response to the attack,
Liberty
printed the crafted response of the Society for Arabic Printing, which had also been sent to the Reuter's telegraph agency. Aharon Eisenberg had been slandered as a “false” Ottoman. In his defense,
Liberty
claimed: “Mr. Aharon Eisenberg is the father of the Jewish Ottoman army officer Eisenberg, who now stands on the battlefront in Shtalja. The young officer…reached the rank of first lieutenant and later yet was honored and achieved the important distinction
of
al-ghāzī
.…If this gentleman and his father are not considered Ottomans, who, then, are the Ottomans?”
¹⁰³

Liberty
chose to focus on the contribution to the Ottoman state that the Eisenberg family was making through the active military service of their eldest son, but the truth of the matter was that Eisenberg
was
a Zionist settler as well as a land agent for the Zionist movement—dozens of lands were registered in his name in the last decade before World War I.
¹⁰⁴
After another such article appeared in
Ottoman Union
accusing Ottoman Jews of buying lands for foreign settlers, Shlomo Yellin wrote in to defend them, claiming that all of the settlers had Ottoman citizenship, and moreover, that Zionism was a humanitarian movement that would contribute to the greater development of the empire. Neguib Nassar of
The Carmel
wrote back: “Suleiman Effendi says that the farmers in these colonies are all Ottoman subjects, and we believe him, since most of them have identity papers in their hands and foreign passports in their suitcases.…[But] how many of them remained Ottomans when they were called up for military service?”
¹⁰⁵
In other words, the term
Ottoman
was not only a legal marker of citizenship; it also implied deeply contested elements of civic duty and violations of that duty.

As we saw in the case of
Palestine
and Aharon Eisenberg, the Arabic press played a leading role in stirring up local awareness of and opposition to land sales to Jews, and the fear that Palestine was being bought out from under them was a recurring theme in the years before World War I.
¹
In addition to the articles targeting Ottoman Jews for violating the integrity of the Ottoman state, increasingly the Arabic press attacked Palestinian Arab land agents and land sellers on more localist, Palestinianist grounds. The Jerusalem newspaper
The Crier
harshly judged them with these words: “They sell their fathers' patrimony for monetary gain; you can see the treachery in their faces.” Following up on an article in
Palestine
that denounced a land sale facilitated by one Salim Mahmud Shahin,
The Crier
demanded that the names of the sellers be made public as well: “We need to know the names of the traitors so the people will know who the liars and occupiers are.” After he was denounced in
The Carmel
for reportedly being poised to sell his land near Tiberias to Zionists, Saʻid al-Jazaʼiri arrived at the paper's offices to defend himself claiming, “We could never sell the Ottoman homeland, just as we could never sell our own father.”
²

The Crier
assumed a preventative role, on the one hand urging people not to sell their land and on the other hand preemptively shaming those who might by publishing lists of landowners and their landholdings.
³
Other newspaper articles blamed the government clerks who were selling Palestine out, “village after village, town after town.” One newspaper was even more direct: “To our sorrow we see that even at this time of great crisis for the state like the one we are in now, the governors and deputy governors are selling the state to its enemies. The aims and ambitions of the Zionists [will be revealed] in the near future and the naked truth will be shown to the Arab nation.”
⁴
In the aftermath of the loss of Libya to Italian forces in 1911, in which there was criticism that the
Ottoman state had not done enough to defend the Arab province, the meaning of these articles was unmistakable.

Indeed, the discourse surrounding land sales simultaneously straddled Ottomanism, Palestinism, Arabism, Islamism, and anticolonialism. All of these strands are found in an undated document entitled “A Declaration from Palestinian Personalities to the Ottoman Parliament.”
⁵
The appeal featured a “general call to citizens,” but also addressed the “sons of Palestine,” “sons of the homeland,” and “O nation.” While appealing to the parliamentarians' Islamic sensibilities (quoting Qur'anic verses against Jews, against leaving one's home, against angering God and his prophet and the angels, and for commanding good and forbidding evil), the letter also rooted itself in Arab-ness and local-ness. The letter called on the legacy of key Islamic leaders ‘Umar bin al-Khattab, who conquered Palestine for Islam the first time in the seventh century, and Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, who reconquered Palestine for Islam from the hands of the Crusaders—all the while making the historical personal by reminding its audience that “thousands of your fathers died for its walls, the martyrs, and holy warriors.” The parallel danger was clear—Palestine, land holy to Islam and fought for by generations of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians, was threatened once again by foreign conquest.
⁶

The iconic figure of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi had surfaced in an anonymous article, widely published in 1910 in the regional Arabic press, denouncing the sale of the land of al-Fula, or Afula.
⁷
As we saw during the Ottoman boycott of Austria-Hungary, Salah al-Din was not only an Islamic hero, but he was also an Arab hero; indeed, the issue of the sale of Palestine would draw Palestinian Christians and Muslims closer together at a critical time. Both
The Carmel
and
Palestine
were Christian-owned, and their own editorials against Zionism emphasized the shared dangers that Muslims and Christians faced in Palestine. The Arabic press proposed that Muslims and Christians unite to establish organizations to purchase land, and Christian Arabs protested the sale vigorously in the fall of 1910 in joint delegations and telegrams. At the same time, Christian and Muslim intellectuals belonged to similar clubs and societies and had joined forces early on to establish a Muslim-Christian society to “battle against the old spirit and to get people to savor the constitution and the new spirit.”
⁸
In other words, Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians were converging on several different levels, not least of which was in joint opposition to Zionism and the changing Palestinian landscape.

Turning to his Christian and Muslim readers,
The Carmel
editor Neguib Nassar warned them of the danger of private interests and religious
solidarity that came between Muslims and Christians. The time had come to unite. “Our cities which used to be blooming are ruins, our plains which used to be fruitful are deserts. O nation, O people, wake up before your sons or grandsons or grandsons' grandsons are in the same situation. Look around and see how the other peoples have advanced while we have regressed. The Zionists who came to your land and live at your expense did manage to revive their nationalism.”
⁹

The growing tensions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine were not limited to the pages of the press, and physical clashes took place in the cities as well as in the countryside in Palestine. These physical altercations had taken place even before the 1908 revolution, but they increased in frequency and their political meaning became still more marked after it.
¹⁰
From 1909, clashes took place on an intermittent basis between Arab villagers and Zionist colonists and guards. Some of these “clashes” were simply economic in origin, such as thefts and highway robberies, whereas some were personal in nature, such as the case of a drunken brawl between a Jew and a Muslim which left both dead but not before enraging both sides. Undoubtedly, however, whatever their original impetus, virtually all of these clashes became part of the political struggle over Zionism in the land.

In the case of the brawl between the Jew and Muslim, which took place in February 1910, even the facts were disputed by both sides to suit their political interpretation of the event. The only parts of the story that both sides seem to agree on are brief: a Muslim from Gaza named Hashem Saqallah and a North African Jew with French consular protection named Ben-Zion Levi were leaving a house (together? at the same time?) when an argument broke out between them. Reportedly enraged by the argument, Levi pulled out a gun and mortally wounded Saqallah. Within days, the extended Saqallah family hunted down Levi and killed him in revenge. The French and British consuls as well as large numbers of guards were dispatched to Levi's funeral to prevent a wider riot from breaking out.
¹¹

For the Jewish paper
Liberty
, Levi was an innocent victim, and the paperʼs editors saw the event as further evidence of the failure of Ottomanism to bring equal rights and protections to Jews, and saw the Jews' failure to protest sufficiently loudly as evidence of their disunity and disorganization. For its part, the Arab newspaper
Success
saw the sad event as another chapter in the Jews' efforts to gain unfair advantage in the country: “People are trying to conceal the facts, but we know that Zion Levi fired first, and we need to preserve the dignity of the homeland. The homeland asks its residents and people without difference to sect or rite if it is just for one sect to rule over them and force its aims and desires on them…. And there is not a single person among us who does not know
the aims of the other [side], and we are for unity of the nation and service of the homeland.”
¹²

This article tapped into a certain public discourse about the violence of the Jewish settlers, particularly those who were employed (or self-appointed) as guards on the Jewish colonies, but it also referenced recurring reports that the Zionist settlers were operating outside of the normal Ottoman legal and social setting. Demands for exclusive Hebrew labor, rumors of the violent kidnapping of Arabs found in the “first Hebrew city” Tel Aviv, and myriad other symbols of autonomy and separation disturbed Palestinian and even some Jewish observers.
¹³
Over three dozen village
mukhtars
and
imams
in the area of Daran sent a petition to Istanbul in 1913 in which they complained about the rough contacts villagers between Ramle and Gaza had with neighboring Jewish settlers. According to the petition, Jewish settlers had oppressed and murdered Arab villagers, and would soon force them off the land.
¹⁴

In the Ottoman parliamentary debate over Zionism that took place in the spring of 1911, Jerusalem MP Ruhi al-Khalidi incredulously described the autonomy of the Zionist colonies. “It is quite strange that within these colonies there is no one from the government. They manage themselves; they have courts, they have an apparatus for settling their own affairs. There are absolutely no government representatives among them: no gendarme, no police, no administrative officials. And some of these are even towns of significant size. No one from the government can be found, they get by on their own!”
¹⁵
This theme of Zionist separation and autonomy was the topic of a blistering attack in
Palestine
two years later:

Till ten years ago, the Jews were a fraternal native Ottoman element, living and intermixing with the other elements in harmony, interchanging business relationships, inhabiting the same quarter, sending their children to the same school, and shadowed by one banner and one crescent. Then these accursed Zionists, composed of German revolutionaries, Russian nihilists, and vagabonds of other countries, came with their cry: O Jew, remember you are a nation, and keep yourselves apart…. They started in the first place to build special quarters for themselves, to which they gradually attracted their compatriots who were living among Mussulmans and Christians, sifting them out like wheat from bran; then they boycotted the vernacular Arabic tongue, and it is no more heard in their homes and streets; then they confined the teaching in their schools to their own dead language, which is useless to the world except as a weapon for Zionists, and prevents natives from frequenting their schools and mixing [with] their children.
¹⁶

At the same time, it is important to note that the collision course between Jews and Arabs described in such sharp terms on the eve of
World War I was not predetermined or, for that matter, irreversible. We have seen that at various moments different elements of Palestine's citizenry embraced the civic project of a “shared homeland” along Ottomanist lines. Another one of those moments occurred during the period of intense mobilization around the Arab reform movement in 1913-14. During this period, there was a momentary transference of the civic imperative from the Ottoman level to the Arab one. In a way echoing Ben-Yehuda's prorevolutionary calls (“Jews, be Ottomans!”), Palestinian Jews were invited to join the Arab civic nation. The Arabic press called on the Jews to learn Arabic “like the Christian community has done…to become part of the Arab nation, and thus this language danger will disappear, [which] brings about a lack of understanding between us.”
¹⁷

These calls were not without echo in the Jewish community as well. In the spring of 1913, the Association of Hebrew Teachers of Arabic in Jaffa met at the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU) school in an effort to unify teachers countrywide. Their meeting featured “very stormy” debates centered around issues such as amount of time spent teaching the language in the cities as well as in the colonies, methods of teaching the language (as a classical language or as a living one), and the final aim of teaching Arabic (for daily needs or for cultural integration). However, it also reveals the underlying tension between the civic and national visions facing Jews in Palestine and the cultural politics of the times, pitting those Jews fully acculturated to Arab society against others who viewed Arabic as merely instrumental.
¹⁸

On the Arabist side of the debate stood the journalist Nissim Malul, seemingly alone in his cultural-political agenda. For him, “the reason for anti-Semitism in Palestine and Syria is due to the lack of knowledge of Arabic. The masses are guided by this. The association will teach the youth Arabic so that they know how to answer them.” In response, Mr. ‘Abadi retorted that “we do not need to be patriots to be enthusiastic of Arabic. We are teachers and we need to talk about instruction and that is all!” With this the association declined to define itself as a political organization, instead choosing to serve as a professional one.