Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (4 page)

Overall, then, historical Jerusalem was, in the words of one scholar, “one that is fundamentally unrecognizable today, a city of considerable social mobility, of ethnic diversity, and of communal conflict that is tempered by a fair amount of mutual dependence and local solidarities.”
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As a result, rather than seeing Muslims, Christians, and Jews (in the religious sense), or Jews and Arabs (in the ethno-political sense) in isolation from each other inhabiting hermetically sealed separate spaces, this book analyzes the historical relationships between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Palestine in their shared spaces through the lens of daily life in which communal and civic boundaries were formulated, negotiated, upheld, and transgressed.
⁴⁵

Ideas of collective belonging and identity as well as new political practices and expectations were never divorced from the socioeconomic realities of religious and ethnic mixing in Palestine and in the Ottoman Empire at large. Overall, this book reconfigures how we see the Ottoman and Palestinian historical landscapes, showing both the extent to which Muslims, Christians, and Jews had interests in common and worked together for their so-called “shared homeland,” as well as the points at which their interests diverged and clashed. By 1914, a process had taken place that succeeded in realigning Muslims, Christians, and Jews, for local, imperial, and geopolitical reasons. This occurred hand in hand with the growth of the Zionist movement, which itself actively sought to segregate indigenous Jews from their neighbors, their environment, and their empire. Ultimately, though, separation in Palestine between Jews and Arabs came about as the
result
of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict—it was not the cause.
⁴⁶

In late July 1908, Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, a twenty-year-old government postal clerk in Nablus, a town in the northern hills of Palestine, transcribed a startling telegram from the governor in Beirut to his local deputy: units of the Ottoman army were marching on the imperial capital in Istanbul, demanding that the sultan reinstate the constitution he had suspended more than three decades earlier. As Nabulsis celebrated with “great joy” over the news, Darwaza joined his fellow clerks in adorning the town post office with banners bearing the revolutionary slogan: “liberty, equality, fraternity, and justice.”
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Sixty miles to the south in Jerusalem, the young Jewish journalist Gad Frumkin caught wind of the startling news from the wire bulletins that arrived from neighboring Egypt. Trembling with excitement and disbelief, Frumkin went out in search of the government censor to sign off on publication of the unofficial rumors in his father's newspaper, the Hebrew-language
Lily (
ava
elet).
When he could not find the Jewish censor, Frumkin gathered his courage to go to the villa of Isma'il “Bey” al-Husayni in the affluent Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood outside the city walls, daring to interrupt the Muslim notable's afternoon siesta only due to the seductive promise of freedom and equality.
²
Frumkin received permission to publish the news, and the following day
Lily
proclaimed exuberantly to its readers: “This is one of the greatest deeds of His Highness the Sultan, May He Be Exalted!” At the same time, printed notices in Arabic were tacked onto the city walls to inform the rest of the city's population about the recent events.
³

Halfway around the world, in New York, the young Christian expatriate Khalil al-Sakakini read of the granting of the constitution in a local Arabic-language newspaper and considered it an auspicious sign. Like tens of thousands of Ottomans before him, al-Sakakini had left his homeland for less restrictive shores, seeking both liberty and fortune abroad. With the news of the revolution, however, al-Sakakini reconsidered
his options and decided to return home to Jerusalem to fulfill his dreams of establishing a progressive school, a newspaper, and youth clubs.
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It took him a few weeks to tie up his affairs in America and borrow the necessary funds for the long, expensive journey home, but by September al-Sakakini was back in Palestine.

As all three men had perceived, unprecedented and widespread changes were about to take place in Palestine and in the Ottoman Empire as a whole that would deeply affect Muslim, Jew, and Christian alike. Within weeks, their hometowns and their empire were irrevocably altered. As one resident of Jaffa wrote to his friend in Beirut, “one does not recognize any more our Turkey [sic], and it sometimes seems as if one lives in a dream.”
⁵
More than any other word, “freedom” or “liberty”
(
urriyya
, Ara.;
hürriyet
, Ott. Tur.) captured the hopes and dreams that millions of Ottoman citizens invested in the 1908 revolution. From the elite military officers, civil servants, and intellectuals who had been involved in underground political activity for decades to the millions more whose first political act may not have taken place until after the revolution's announcement, Ottomans empire-wide had complex and often contradictory expectations of what “freedom” would look like.

At the basest level,
urriyya
was a symbol of rupture from the past and the promise of a new era. As was the case in other revolutionary moments, Ottoman
urriyya
was utopian and messianic, serving as a metonym for “righting” the course of history and restoring the Ottoman Empire to a leading political, economic, and cultural role in the world. At the same time,
urriyya
also drew on a specific nineteenth-century discourse of political liberalism that engaged with, and at times stemmed from, Islamic sources of inspiration. Central in this discourse of political liberalism was a reconfiguration of the legitimate role of the sultan, who went from being a sacred ruler (caliph) to being subject to the will of the nation. Surprisingly,
urriyya
also was a potentially sacrilegious discourse, as the boundaries between support for and sanctification of the revolution became increasingly blurred.

But first, we must turn for a moment to the broader empire and wider intellectual currents in order to understand, not only where the revolution came from and why it came about, but also how it was to take the shape and meaning that it did in our corner of the empire, Palestine.

PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION

The fact that newspapers and telegrams played an instrumental role in bringing news of the revolution to these three young men is a significant marker of the extent to which the empire had been transformed by
modern technology and the new ideas and habits that inevitably went along with it. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Ottoman cities were connected via telegraph, steamboat, and railroad to the greater empire and to the world beyond. Cities throughout the empire exploded in size as they became magnets for regional rural migrants, foreign immigrants, and international capital. Beirut, for example, went from a fishing town of 6,000 residents to a booming port city of 150,000 to 200,000, the largest on the Eastern Mediterranean coast, in less than one hundred years. The largest, most important Ottoman cities, like Istanbul, Salonica, Izmir, and Beirut had running water, electricity, and intracity tramways, developments which had a revolutionary effect on reshaping the urban landscape, restructuring local notions of time, and altering habits of consumption.
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Because of its proximity to Beirut and the status of Jaffa as the second most important port city on the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Palestine was by no means unaware of or unaffected by many of the markers of technological modernization and imperial cosmopolitanism that characterized the rest of the empire. It is true that governors and officers sent from Istanbul or Salonica often thought of Palestine as comparatively backward and provincial, far from the glittering lights and stylish public promenades of the capital, but nevertheless, late Ottoman modernity did arrive in the region to a certain extent.
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In the 1890s, regular train service between coastal Jaffa and holy Jerusalem began, and within a few years an auxiliary line of the famous Hijaz Railway linked Haifa in northern Palestine with Damascus. Ships from Ottoman ports, neighboring Egypt, and Europe arrived in Jaffa on a regular basis, bringing with them pilgrims, migrants, commodities, and mail.

These technological changes went hand in hand with important intellectual developments; as we saw in the case of Shlomo Yellin and his Beirut audience of gentlemen patriots, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented access to education, public as well as private, which contributed to a rise in literacy, an emerging middle class, and the development of a vibrant public sphere of a multilingual press, civil society organizations, and new ideas about sociability and political involvement. Newspapers, magazines, and books from Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Istanbul, and other corners of the empire (not to mention from Paris, Berlin, Odessa, and other European publishing centers) made their way into coffeehouses, libraries, and private homes in Palestine.
⁸
Young men from affluent Palestinian families went to Cairo, Beirut, and Istanbul to continue their studies; many Muslim, Jewish, and Christian families from other parts of the region chose to send their sons to study in boarding schools in the holy city of Jerusalem, bringing with them
ideas, contacts, and habits that connected Palestine to the wider empire. In the last years before World War I, public parks for leisurely family strolls and picnics, “moving pictures” (the cinema), competitive soccer matches, and the automobile and airplane all arrived in Palestine to great acclaim and not a little discomfort.
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