Empire: World History - 296. Ottoman Gaza: Gunpowder Conquests & Rising Nationalism (Part 6)

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

In 1516, the Ottomans defeated the mighty Mamluk Empire in the Middle East, taking control of Gaza. How did Ottoman forces roll out scorched-earth tactics on Gaza City to punish those who had rebelled against them? How did the citrus and cotton industries develop in Ottoman Palestine? What did the rise of nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century mean for Gaza and the surrounding region? Anita Anand and William Dalrymple are joined by Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of The Ottomans, and Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at The University of Oxford, to discuss Ottoman rule in Gaza, from the 1500s to the early 20th century.  Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpodukuk.com. The hot summer sun beat down upon Al-Ashraf Kansu Al-Gauri, 14-9th Sultan of the Mamluk dynasty, as he reviewed his troops for battle. since the founding of the dynasty in 1250, the Mamlux had ruled over the oldest and most powerful Islamic state of its day. The Cairo-based empire spanned Egypt, Syria and Arabia.

Kansu, a man in his 70s, had ruled the empire for 15 years, who was now in Marj de Beek, a field outside the Syrian city of Aleppo, at the northernmost point of his empire, to confront the greatest danger the Mamlux had ever. faced. He would fail and his failure would set in motion the demise of his empire, paving the way for the conquest of the Arab lands by the Ottoman Turks. The date was August the 24th, 1516. Hello and welcome to Empire. And that was a reading from the opening passages of the Arabs by Eugene Rogan, a very good friend of this show and Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History

at the University of Oxford. Welcome to you, Eugene, and thanks for coming back. Thanks, Anita. It's great to be with you. What we're going to concentrate on in this episode is the Ottoman era in Gaza. And just to sort of place you and let you know where we are at in the series, in the last episode, we were very much rooted in the 1300s. The Mamlux slave soldiers who became the sultans of Egypt had conquered Gaza from the Mongols. It had then experienced what I think it's true to say, a golden age of trade urbanisation, wealth. But if you have wealth and you have success, you catch attention. And there is a new empire on the horizon and it is the Ottoman Empire. So just sort of, you know, take us forward from that, because that was the 1300s. In the 1500s,

which is where we are now at, this is the same time that Henry VIII is on the throne in England. what is going on in Gaza and in that region? So Gaza is, as your previous episodes, will have highlighted, a crossroads between Egypt and the Syrian lands. It's a small port. There are bigger ports in the eastern Mediterranean. It's also a major land crossing point. And that is an advantage for Gaza in terms of trade and administration. It's on a vital road linking key territories.

But it's also a danger because when territories change hands, those same. cities at the crossroads really get devastated. And I think Gaz's experience of transition from Mamluk to Ottoman rule would just bear that point out. Running the Ottoman show, if you like, as a man that we've met before in our Ottoman series, but we talked about Salim the first, also known as Salim the Grim. And I feel we need, you know, to go over his CV again in this episode, just to remind us who he was and what he was like. So Salim was one of the more successful conquerors of the early Ottoman Empire. The history of the Ottoman Empire is usually told as empire spanning three continents built in the reins of ten great sultans. And Salim is right in the

middle of those. But his methods of conquest were those that relied on great violence to stun his enemies into submission, and hence the sobriquet, the grim. This was certainly to be the case when the Ottomans decide to divert a campaign that initially was heading towards Persia. But knowing that in going towards Persia, they would have on the right flank, the Mamluk Empire, and the Mamluks had been making noises about allying with the Persian Empire against the Ottomans, Salim decided it was unwise to leave his flank exposed to the Mamluks if he was going to attack the Safavids, and instead decided to turn on the Mamluks. and he brought the full power and force of his very successful shock troops against the Chevalric,

basically knights more in line with the court of Arthur than, let's say that of Henry VIII, and was to bring a gunpowder army to bear against men carrying swords. The result was overwhelmingly Ottoman victory. And this was, in a sense, the same strategy that Alexander the Great had to attack Persia. He decided not to leave his right flank exposed, the same, exactly the same strategy. You know, very wise position in war not to extend your lines beyond what you can secure. And so it made perfect sense. And don't forget, in conquering the Mamluk territories, the Ottomans were adding to their empire,

wealthy provinces, the eastern Mediterranean, the bridge to the Indian Ocean through Hijaz and Egypt, they knew what they were doing. They stood to gain far more out of conquering the elder. mature Mamluk Empire before trying to take on the still virile and dangerous suffavids. And when you talk about sort of this mismatch of power, sure, the Ottomans had, you know, the bigger guns, if you like, but you were talking about the Chevalric thing that, you know, was in the Mamluk's heads. And that very much, I mean, if you were to picture, you know, the OK corral as the single gunfighter who comes out into the middle and calls out their biggest

champion to face one-on-one, that's what the Mamluk thought battle was about, you know, that you face somebody head on and you take honor in defeating them. Whereas the Ottomans not just outgunned the Mamlux, but they have a very different philosophy of fighting. So with the Mamluks, it is, you know, Mano-a-Mano, you fight for your honor, you are the champion, you challenge their greatest champion and you win. It's like that, a very old-fashioned way of fighting. But the Ottomans are not interested in that.

They are interested down, dirty, quick, defeat. Basically, the Ottomans wanted to use whatever weapons of war would give them the best result. And it was a real clash of cultures. You're absolutely right. For the Mamluks, there was this notion that there was honor in warfare. They dressed to the nines to go to war. They wore their finest silks. Their arms were jeweled. It never crossed their minds that they would lose a war. They spent all their days training in martial exercises, and they terrified people by the very confidence with which they went to war. These we should perhaps remind people were the only people, I think, ever to defeat the Mongols, weren't they? The Mamluk famously see off the Mongols in a way that

no other army does at that period. The Mamlux had an impeccable track record, and they had beaten virtually every adversary they came up against in the field. They did so because they just were dedicated to their warfare. They had no other interest. They weren't merchants. They weren't administrators. They were military men who trained day and night to be the most powerful, successful swordsmen in the world. that, they had proven themselves in the Middle Ages to be the greatest single army of force. But this was now the age of gunpowd, and had they failed to modernize in the way that the Ottomans had? For the Mamluk, the idea of putting down their swords to pick up guns was cowardly.

Real men fought face-to-face in battle with swords, and the really proud ones dressed up for it because they knew that there was no risk of them losing. They wouldn't stain their clothes. And so this was really part of the ethos of the Mamblux, and it was that ethos which undermined their position in battle in Marsh Dabek in 1516. You have a wonderful quote from Kansu or a story about Kansu in your book. And that's the same Kansu that William was talking about at the top of the episode. It goes a little, our master, the Sultan, the Ottomans have defeated us, save yourself, take refuge in Aleppo, says a fleeing Bannerman. As soon as he says these words, the sultan suffers a massive stroke. You know, he tries to mount his horse, he falls off the horse and he dies on the spot.

Is that pretty much sort of the end of the Mamluk? And, you know, they've got their leader, their great leader, their idea of chivalry trodden into the dirt, and he falls off his horse. Is that it? Well, the Mamluks will have one last stand in Cairo, their capital. And the Ottomans will work their way through the Syrian lands, conquering towns and cities, Gaza among them. They'll go down towards the hijazz and take Mecca and Medina, which will allow the Ottoman sultans henceforth to claim the dignity of being caliphs of Islam. And then they come north to take on Cairo and to defeat the Mamluk's in their capital city.

And it's there where the Ottoman conquest is completed and the destruction of the Mamluk empire is finished. Now, while they are busy in Cairo, a rumor spreads to Gaza, doesn't it, that they've been defeated, which is wrong. that the Ottomans have been defeated by the Mamluks, and Gaza rises up against the Ottomans. This turns out to be a bad mistake, Eugene, doesn't it? You have to understand that for the notables of a town like Gaza, the Mamluk have been the only state power they've ever known, and they've been in place for centuries. And so your interests are tied up with the Mamluks, and you have a hard time imagining a new power defeating them. So it was quite easy to be taken in by rumors that the Ottomans had gotten overextended and defeated. This happened in other towns as well, where you had local uprisings of the old vested interest in the Mamluk order,

trying to reassert their privileges against these new Ottoman invaders. But they underestimate the Ottomans. They're extremely dangerous, extremely well-armed. And so they come back with scorched earth tactics to put down any town that dared to rise up in rebellion against them. Gaza, unfortunately, fell victim to their scorched earth tactics. So then what follows? Because now, you know, you've got defeat in Gaza. The Ottomans are in charge. What do they decide to do with the place? Well, basically, the Ottomans lay siege to insurgent Gaza, and they level the town. And they reduced a population to about one-sixth its size. So Gaza was to suffer the consequences of its uprising, and it would take years for it to recover from the damage inflicted.

not so much by the first Ottoman conquest, the town more or less surrendered and that the Ottomans pass through. But in rising up, the Ottomans were to put down Gaza in a very violent way. And yeah, the damage to the city was intense. When you say put them down, I mean, we're not talking about in battle then. We must be talking about the kind of red mist that follows conquest that we've talked about before in other imperial scenarios. Do they just go around massacring men, women and children? Basically, it is unleashing the army on the town, and then men, women and children are massacred. So, yes, their superior firepower is brought against a civilian population that rebelled against them.

And in this way, those who resisted are killed, and the town is brought back under order. You do a very crucial point is that in the new Ottoman system, there is no province of Palestine, is there, it's just now part of Syria? Is there a sense in which it has become provincialized that while it was very important for the Mamlux, it's less important for the Ottomans or not? It's not that Gaza or the other towns of Palestine were not important to the Ottomans. It's just that they were trying to put in place a new administrative order that reflected Ottoman methods, which were different from Mamlux.

They had their own system of government. Their empire was based in Istanbul, not in Cairo. And so they put in place provincial administrators, and they created. a provincial system of which towns like Gaza, Jerusalem, Nablus were part. They came under bigger provinces. Gaza, Palestine more broadly tended to be passed between a province based in Saiden on the eastern Mediterranean or Damascus. And for much of the Ottoman centuries, there was no Palestine so much as there were counties led by market towns like Hebron, Nablus, Jerusalem, Gaza.

Give us a portrait of the kind of people who are living in these towns. We saw in our episode about the Crusades that it was only then that Palestine had become majority Muslim. There'd been this very strong Christian minority and there were also Jewish communities in the land. What is the kind of makeup of Gaza and the Palestinian countryside at this point? I couldn't give you precise figures only because we don't really have reliable census figures for the 16th century. But from what we have from Ottoman sources, it's very clear that you had a Muslim majority population across Greater Syria with large Jewish and Christian communities. And the Ottomans were very keen to get the cooperation of all these communities. And so you wouldn't talk about, as it were, discrimination or persecution of minorities, so much as allowing minorities a certain degree of autonomy within the Ottoman system to apply their own personal status laws.

So you'd get married, you'd do business, and get buried according to the rules of your own church or denomination, but your church will be responsible for collecting your taxes and making you live by Ottoman law. There's some talk in some quarters of Dimitude, the idea that Christians and the Jews under Ottoman rule are oppressed, that they have to pay jizier tax, that there's various other discriminations against them.

I mean, this is your specialist subject. Your last wonderful book was about, particularly the Christian minorities in Damascus and the massacres, that take place in the 1860s. Do you see the Ottoman system as fundamentally discriminatory against religious minorities or really not? It's really interesting because, again, we have to compare the Ottoman world with the rest of the world of its own time. And so if you look at the persecution of Huguenots in France, we can see what discrimination really looks like. This was not the case with the minorities

in the Ottoman Empire. Yes, they were branded as themis, meant that they were protected. communities. They did have to pay the jizzy attacks, but that was in compensation for the fact they were spared military service. And I would describe the Christians and Jews of the Ottoman Empire as respected. They had an integral part in society and economy. They were protected. You could not take arbitrary action against minorities, but they were distinctly second-class citizens. They did not enjoy the same full rights that Sunni Muslims enjoyed in which. what was a Sunni Muslim majority empire. But it would be wrong to confuse, let us say, that status of Christians and Jews in the 16th and 17th century

with what will happen in the 19th century when a new idea of citizenship is beginning to compete without a subject to it. Is there a sense in which the local population, particularly the Sunni population, can get on the rungs of the Ottoman system that they can send their sons to Istanbul and become governors and so on? Or do you get the impression that the the grand families of Jerusalem and Aker and Nablus are being ruled by Turkish-speaking foreigners from Istanbul. It really is centralized rule from Istanbul, in which local notables will have authority locally, but you had to play what was termed by Albert Hurania politics of notables.

And this meant that provincial governors sent by Istanbul had to work with local notables in councils to strike a balance and how to rule the territory with the cooperation and acceptance of the local people. So they had influence, but they were not the government officials. Those officials came from Istanbul. If you like, that's what's going on sort of at the highest echelons. But just among people, I mean, what is the attitude of Ottomans who are Turks, not towards, you know, different religions, but fellow Muslims, if you like, but Arab Muslims? Is there a sense that Arab Muslims somehow are not as good. I mean, what is the kind of tension or is there a complete lack of tension among if you are an Arab Muslim or you're a Turkish Muslim? It's, again, very interesting

to look at how national identities played in this early modern period. I would say they really didn't play a major role, that if people had markers of identity, yes, religion was a very important one, but that bound Kurd, Turk, and Arab to a same Sunni faith that meant that dividing the Islamic Ummah by language groups, essentially, was in some way impious. It was the wrong thing to do. So I don't see much evidence of discrimination. I think that the Ottomans saw their empire as a very cosmopolitan one. You have to remember many of the ruling elites of the Ottomans were actually recruited from Balkan Christian communities, brought to Istanbul, converted to Islam. They were hardly themselves, you know, Turkish Muslims in, let us say, the Kemalist vision

of that word. Go back to the 17th century, the 16th century, you're dealing with a world in which your religious affiliation is probably your single most important marker and where people were moved around the map with a kind of cosmopolitanism that really defies what, say, the small city, states of Europe would have been used to. Eugene, in our Ottoman series, which you so kindly came on and helped us with, we met this Turkish traveler, Evlir Chaliby, who's the beginning of the 17th century and who travels around the Ottoman world. And one of the places he goes to is Palestine. He's fascinated by the amount of Sufi shrines and the amount of Islamic holy places that he comes across in this region. Tell us a little bit about his portrait of Palestine.

So Evia Chalibi captured the Ottoman world writ large, and he becomes sort of the most famous travel writer of his day. When it comes to Palestine, as he tries to distinguish what makes it special and exceptional, he falls into a pattern that's common to Western observers as well. It is the Holy Land. It's a place of mosques and shrines. But for him, it's those associated with the first community of Islam, the territory covered by the Prophet Muhammad, and the early Islamic conquests. But does he talk specifically about sort of synagogues and churches, too? And what does he have to say about those? Actually, Avia Chalibi was as interested in synagogues and churches as he was in the religious shrines of the Sunni Muslim community, he really saw all faith communities

as part of that Ottoman world and of interest to Ottoman readers. But the other cautionary note is Evlia was a great exaggerator. And so modern readers are very well aware that he was more interested in spinning a good yarn. We're going to hop, skip and jump a little bit around in this episode, because, you know, from what you're saying, there's sort of huge chunks of stability where things remain the same. There's a stasis. But in the 1700s, just I mean, tell me a little bit about the local leaders in places like Gaza and the surrounding areas? Well, it's really interesting, Anita, because in the 18th century, you're going to see for the first time Palestine emerging as a sort of separate part of greater Syria.

And it happens under the rule of two local leaders who base their power on the resources of Palestine, specifically cotton. And cotton finds huge markets in Europe, particularly from the Eastern Mediterranean, France. And for parts of the 18th century, these local leaders were really able to set the price of their cotton exports, and it made them immensely wealthy. And with that wealth came power. And the power stayed local in Palestine. It didn't go to Istanbul. Where does the cotton come from? Just tell us a little bit about the cotton trade, because in our heads, you know, we've got Cottonopolis and Manchester, and we've got the whole India cycle. But where are they getting

the cotton from so that they can set the price and make their money? So the cotton has grown in northeastern Palestine, and it's really in the area around Tiberius and the Galilee, that you'll have the cotton cultivation that will be the kind of white gold of the 18th century. And the first person really harness this power is a local tax farmer. His name is Zahar al-Omar, and he was very much a native Arab of northeastern Palestine. but he was able through his access to the cotton of the Galilee to amass tremendous wealth. And with that wealth, he extended his power over more and more territory. He makes the port city of Acre, his outlet to the Mediterranean world. And from there, he is able to build a mini empire around much of that southwestern part of Syria that would come to be called Palestine.

First time we really see it separate out under a leadership. He will ultimately fall and be overtaken by Amamluk, whose name was Ahmed Pasha, nicknamed Al Jazar the butcher, because he very much in the line of tyrants of the 20th century, like Saddam Hussein, relied on massive violence to generate total submission through fear. And Ahmed Pasha al-Jazar was to rule in the last quarter of the 18th century on the back of what Zahar al-Omar had created and would die peacefully at his bed, having massacred his way into a position of power

and really separating Palestine out. I'm quite transfixed with this idea of white gold coming from this region. But are we then also talking about a select cadre of incredibly wealthy people and then an enormous peasant class? I mean, I'm just trying to get an image of what people experienced.

You're right to point out that most producers living through this time just worked to the bone and enjoyed very little benefit from it. The benefit went to a very small group who established themselves as the rulers and then had a court around them whose members would be made wealthy and then broken by the powers that be. Both Zaharil Omar and Jazar Pasha allowed their retinue to get rich, but then basically shook them down when it served their interest and demonstrated that no one was powerful except for the tyrant. Now, this of course is a very important and controversial period, because in some accounts we have this idea that Ottoman Palestine is in decline,

it's sort of ruination. And you get that in some travellers, people like Mark Twain paint a picture of this sort of ancient landscape of crumbling ruins. And that's very much there also in the tone, mood, in those people. famous David Roberts Prince that you see all over hotels in the Middle East of, you know, a couple of Bedouin in front of an old Roman ruin with palm trees and the whole thing looking very rural and crumbly. The picture your painting of this sort of nascent capitalist economy with export of cotton and people at the top certainly making money seems to be a bit at odds with that. There is a tendency to talk about Ottoman decline. And of course, historians hate it

because it reduces history to this sort of rollercoaster ride of ups and downs. When really, makes history interesting to us all of the evolutions that are taking place. And so what I would say is happening in Palestine in the 18th century is that you have a phenomenon of peripheral regions of the Ottoman Empire gaining power at the expense of the capital, Istanbul. And so it's what some refer to as a period of decentralization. The Ottoman center is losing control over provincial territories. It's not just Palestine. Damascus is going through this. Mosul and Iraq is going through this. In eastern Anatolia, the Kurdish derrames. So it is a phenomenon of the 18th century and maybe a reflection of the

weakening power of the mature Ottoman Empire to control all of its provinces. But the dynamism of the history of these regions is in defiance of all claims of decline. And we talked about cotton. The other thing that gets going at this period is Jaffa oranges, isn't it? This is the time when Jaffa oranges are being planted and being exported. Well, presumably they were being planted at this time, but they really only come on to my historic map in the 19th century as a real commodity of the Mediterranean trade. And an orange is only so marketable as it can be taken from the tree to the market. The local markets could only eat so many oranges. So you really want to know when they're able to create and ship oranges to Europe. And that's going to be in the age

of steamshiping in the 19th century. I'm really interested in how as this region starts to have autonomy and wealth, and albeit it's not, the trickle-down theory ain't trickling so much, but it's there. The wealth is there in this region. But how are other countries around the world reacting? So, I mean, you know, in the 19th century, you've got the Crimean War, you've got Europe trying to make friends wherever it can, different opposing groups trying to get their fingers in different pies. Is this place on the map, even though, you know, the Ottomans supposedly are ruining everything? Are people trying to make deals with the local leaders here? Well, definitely, as we move from the 18th century cotton trade into the 19th century, you're going to see not just Palestine,

but the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean drawn into massive economic and social change. One is going to be just in trade as industrial Europe is producing far more than its own markets can consume and is looking for exterior markets and the Eastern Mediterranean is right there. So the dumping of industrial goods is changing the nature of trade and commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean. It's also going to be a time in which the European powers begin to play their imperial politics. Napoleon's going to invade Egypt and march through Gaza in 1798 to 1801. In the aftermath of that, you have more and more European diplomatic and consular attention to the region. You have the beginning of European missionaries coming to the region. Through faster

transport, more and more pilgrims coming to the region. The Holy Lands really begins to attract growing interest from common people. And that is going to be accelerated by the work of a good Britain named Thomas Cook, who in the 1860s is going to take advantage of steam shipping to extend the privilege of the grand tour, formerly just the pre, you know, the bastion of the aristocracy, to any middle-class tourist who wants to go across the classical world into the Eastern Mediterranean. Yeah. And if those are you scratching your head listening to this going, oh, I wonder if that's that Thomas Cook, the one that does the High Street. Yes, that Thomas Cook. This is the whole origin story of the Thomas Cook story. But, you know, being sort of somebody who's very interested in politics, I'm most interested in diplomatic efforts, you know, sort of material links and having industrial relations. That's one thing. That happens, you know, sort of behind closed doors. What were diplomatic missions? Would European nations have sent a diplomat to a, a city saying this is, you know, somebody who's going to contact Palestine. How did the rest of Europe view this region, which involved the cities that you've talked to, you know, Jaffa, Jerusalem,

Haifa, Gaza? Would they have seen it as one contiguous power that they would have to send one person to who would umbrella the whole region, or how did it work? So diplomatic relations with the provinces of the Ottoman Empire evolved over the 19th century. And European powers got a more extensive presence in the major towns and cities of the Ottoman East. So in the course of the 19th century, you'll see, you know, consuls going from Cairo, Istanbul, maybe Izmir to begin to dot the map of the Eastern Mediterranean, Beirut, Jerusalem, later in Damascus. What's driving the extension of the European diplomatic presence is going to be either trade or else it's going to be pilgrims and tourists. I mean, basically, countries only send diplomats to places where they have interests, and that's the nature of their interests of the Eastern Mediterranean.

But it just grows so much in the course of the 19th century. And so too does the diplomatic footprint as not just Britain and France, but Prussia, Genoa, Venice, Russia, Greece, they're all there. Even the little United States will begin entering the game sort of in the 1840s as American missionaries begin to flood into Lebanon and Syria. So this will be the driver of the foreign interventions in this region. But at base, it always harkens back to the holy places, the crusades, that legacy, they're very conscious of all of that. But Eugene, I'm just really fascinated. Like, just say on Napoleon's desk, there is a map unrolled. And, you know, all the European powers are deciding where to send our man in Haifa or whatever.

Are they looking at a region that is marked Palestine or Philistina? Or what is this place that they are sending their diplomatic representatives to? I think you would find that most 18th, 19th century maps would have Palestine marked on the eastern Mediterranean in big, bold letters spanning an undefined territory. But with Jerusalem sort of in its middle, maybe where the E of Palestine goes or something. In the same way that you'd have Syria written across parts to the north of there. These were Roman toponyms. They were the ways in which Europeans conceived of the Eastern Mediterranean. And in a way, those Roman toponyms were also absorbed into Arabic. So the word Palestina from the Latin becomes Philistine in Arabic and will be reintegrated into European usage as Palestine. And that toponym definitely features on modern maps from the early modern period.

Obviously, it's a highly contentious point. How much are the people who are living in Gaza or in Jerusalem or in Nablus? Are they thinking themselves as Nablusi and just inhabitants of their town? Or would you have found people in the 19th century who described themselves as Philistine, as Palestinian? So the 19th century is key to this question. I would say before the 19th century, you were in a pre-nation state world where people simply did not go around describing themselves. as national figures. They would not be Italians in 1710, right? They would be Florentines or Venetians. Or Genoans, yeah. Or genuens. And the same applied to the Eastern Mediterranean. If you were to identify, it would be to a town, or if you were from a big city like Damascus, to a quarter. Or it might be a tribe if you were from a rural community or a village, but not a national unit. But that nation-state idea and the whole political ideology of nationalism catches on like a contagion in the course of the 19th century. And by the time you get to the end of the 19th century, when people in the

southern Syrian regions that come to be known as Palestine describe themselves, they will begin using the word Fidelstini, Palestinian. It is the beginning of an awareness of a separate identity, which is still proto-national. But I think for 20th century Palestinians, it demonstrates the deep root of their national identity. And so it becomes quite a contentious thing. When does the Palestinian identity emerge? I would say that that would be something that's happening in the course of the 19th century. And not until the end of the 19th century could we really see people using the place named Palestine as a personal identity marker. We're going to take a break in a minute. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how, as well as the European consuls,

who are now looking at the holy places with Christian eyes, there is increasing attention on the whole Jewish identity of the Holy Land and East European Jews in particular are beginning now to emigrate and the birth of the Zionist movement. That's all after the break. Welcome back. Now, we're going to deal in this half with the rise of political Zionism in the late 19th century. But before we go into that political movement, Eugene, will you paint us a picture of the Jewish community in Palestine? They're well integrated. They've been there for centuries. They share many village shrines with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, but the numbers are not huge, are they? Was it 5 to 10% at this period? That's right, Willie. And it's really

important to remember that there was an indigenous Jewish community in Palestine before Zionism, and they were concentrated in the cities of rabbinic learning, such as Safad, Tiberias, Jerusalem, Hebron. And while these communities were old and deep-rooted, they really didn't extend much further. I think there might have been a synagogue in Gaza, but there really wasn't a Jewish population of any significance in Gaza itself, unlike the cities to the north. So take us through the beginnings of the Zionist movement. Where does it begin? What's inspiring it? And give us a picture of the pogroms and the anti-Semitism, which are driving it in Europe. Well, Zionism is really a creation of the push and pull factors of the 19th century. And I mean, I think many people have been pulled to

the Holy Land. You had Jewish pilgrims coming for religious pilgrimage, many of them to die in the Holy Land. This is part of the Russian diplomatic presence in Jerusalem, dating back to the early 19th century. Then you had from the same Russian Empire the horrors of pogroms in 1881, in which the Jewish communities of the Russian Empire were subjected to brutal and terrible violence, and this drove many to seek to flee the Russian Empire, and this increased those who were taking the path to the Holy Land for religious purposes. And is it some kind of religious mandate? You mentioned sort of to die in the Holy Land. Is that a religious mandate? Where does that come from? My understanding is that for many observant Jews, the annual plea that next year in

Jerusalem settled every Passover was realized by pilgrimage. And so this goal that, you know, next year they would celebrate Passover in Jerusalem, has driven observant Jews to seek chance before they died to go to Palestine. But with the turn of anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire, I think it drove a larger and larger number of Russian Jews to make the move. And they found that there was a support infrastructure among Jewish philanthropy in Western Europe. Certainly the Montefiorei efforts around the Alliance Israelite Universal and the schools that they created across the eastern Mediterranean for Jewish communities to have access to a modern education. And indeed, the Rothschilds with the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association,

were there to support the acquisition of land and to help the colonization of Jews in what were then the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1880s, even before you had the emergence of political Zionism, You had an infrastructure, you had push and pull factors that were leading to a rise in Russian and European Jews choosing to migrate to Palestine. You also have Western politicians like Lord Palmerston, who are advocates of the Jews returning to Palestine. For political reasons, Palmerston writes that the Jews could be useful in buttressing the collapsing Ottoman Empire, thus helping to accomplish the key object of British foreign policy in the area. What's going on there? Well, I mean, I'm going to argue it's the same motive that lies behind the Balfour Declaration

when we get to that, this notion that one might be able to benefit from a Jewish community in the Palestine to advance distinctly national or imperial interests is something that links Palmerston to Balfour. But more than that, I think that the anti-Semitism of Western Europe enshrined around the Jewish question had many in European countries looking to Palestine as a place in which perhaps they could encourage the migration of their own Jewish communities as a way of solving their own anti-Semitic problems. This will, I think, reemerge as one of the drivers around the time of the Dreyfus affair in France. And I think it's one of the push factors that made many politically engaged Jews who began to take from the Jewish question and its underlying antisemitism,

the idea that they were a distinct nation who would never really be accepted. and assimilated into Europe, and to seek through a national movement, national revival in their biblical homeland Palestine. And that's, I think, the background to the emergence of a political movement known as Zionism. I mean, we have talked about the Barford Declaration on this podcast before. What we haven't looked at is actually other countries and what is going on there. So in the early 1800s, you have someone called Francois René de Chateau-Briand, who is a writer, a politician, somebody who has the ear of Napoleon Bonaparte through his writings. But he says something where he says, look, we've got to help the Jews and he calls them,

I mean, this is a direct quote, I believe, from him, the legitimate masters of Judea. So how much does that influence the thinking of France? We've talked a lot about the thinking of Great Britain and we'll come back to that. But what about France? What is going on there? Again, I think you'll find that you had many influential people spouting on the subject. without necessarily taking significant political action. So there is this contrast in the emergence of, let us say, political Zionism,

between what are realistic nationalisms, you know, where a people is on a land and seeks to have their own self-determination sovereignty, which is going to be nationalism in Germany or Italy. And Zionism trying to unite the Jewish people who were in diaspora, spread across four continents. The dream of Zionism versus the reality, of nationalism will always be attention. And people like Chateaubriand, Palmerston, Disraeli, were all spouting ideas without them having any realistic political outcomes.

Take us now to the early Zionist organizations and to Theodore Herzl. Who is he and what is his ideas? Herzl is in a sense the first intellectual to harness the push and pull factors that we have been describing into a distinct political agenda to create. create a Jewish land in Palestine. Born in 1860, he's going to write influential tracts de Judenstadt or the Jewish state, which will set out this agenda. And then as a journalist, he's driven to see the need for a Jewish nation state by his own realization that there is no solution to European anti-Semitism. And for him, I think it was the Dreyfus case, a case in the aftermath of the 1870 war. Yeah, let's talk about that. For those who don't know what the Dravers

there was about, just give us a little thumbnail, would you? Alfred Dreyfus was an officer in the French army who was scapegoated for the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, as though Jews had been in some way responsible for a French defeat that was a national humiliation. And in his trial, which was, by all measures of justice, unjust, this was a story that was covered by Herzl as a journalist, it was the moment of awakening for Theodore Herzl that there was no future for Jews in Europe. Even in post-revolutionary France, Republican France,

with its philosophy, its ideologies of equality. Herzl writes in his journalism, as you say, about what he saw with his own eyes there around the court as the director of Svair was being tried. And he writes about sort of mobs sort of shouting death to the Jew. And that certainly has an enormous impact on him

and what he thinks the future of European jury will be. And for him, the future of European Jewelry was only secure in a Jewish state. And the natural place for that Jewish state was in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, Palestine. He's responsible for the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Tell us about that, Eugene. We hear again, we see the organizational ability of the journalist to be able to rally a group of fellow believers to debate the issues of Jewish nationalists.

And it was a major turning point. In a sense, Jews in Europe had been struggling to assimilate and be accepted as British, as German, as French. The idea of claiming a separate Jewish national identity was going in the face of all those efforts, epitomized by Benjamin Disraeli, who was the first Jewish Prime Minister of Britain, who saw in his arrival in both as a member of parliament and later as Prime Minister, the possibility for assimilation and integration. To then turn around and say, actually, we as Jews are a separate nation, seem to be going with the arguments of the anti-Semites. And it was a very difficult challenge for the Zionist movement to try and gain powerful and influential people

to support their political agenda of trying to create a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. And that's what the first World Zionist Congress held in 1897 seeks to do, and it will be the beginning of political Zionism and its efforts to secure a broad base of support in the capitals of Europe. Now, what does Herzl think about the Arabs already living in Palestine?

Is he aware that they are 80% or 90% of the population? Does he think they're going to live together alongside each other? What's his vision for this? Well, Herzl's quite aware that there is already a population in Palestine. There was a delegation that was sent to Palestine by the early Zionist organizations,

and they reported back that the bride, meaning Palestine, is beautiful, but married to another man, meaning inhabited by another people. So they were well aware, and I think Herzl's solution was, go gently, give push to the local populations to clear the land to enable the space for Jewish colonization, and that this need to be done with the cooperation

rather than coercion, buy up the land, and then push the people off it. But he was clearly looking for an incremental driving of the local population out to make space for a Jewish national home. There's an entry in his diary, which is often quoted in the history books, and it's Herzl's diary from the 12th of June 1895. This is just his own thoughts written into his own journal. This is not something that's published. He writes,

We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. But the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Is there much of that sort of thing said publicly or is that just private thoughts? I believe that Herzl's thoughts were still at this point kept private. I don't think that talk of the expulsion of the local population would have earned the Zionist movement much support. And remember at this point, the Zionist organization is reaching

out to the Ottoman Empire to try and petition for the creation of Jewish colonies. Without official permission, you have the Rothschild-supported PICA organization funding the purchase of lands for the creation of colonization. Since 1882, you've had an uptick in the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, creating towns and farming communities in land supported by a Jewish philanthropy. So there is this notion that you can ask for permission, but then you run the risk of being denied, or you can simply go about buying land and encouraging settlement and building up a Jewish presence in Palestine. That would be the basis for a claim to a state. And I think that that is the route that Herzl until his death in 1904 was to pursue. And Herzl dies at a very

young age. I find this sort of astonishing, actually, that he was only 44 when he died, died of heart problems, a heart attack potentially. Many around him said, you know, this is a man who worked himself to death, but his death didn't mean the end of his ideas. Let's go to 1904 and the founding of Tel Aviv, because I mean, I know this is a series about Gaza, but this is kind of an interesting step on the way to telling the story of Gaza too. What happens in 1904 and why is it so seismic in the region? Well, in a sense, Tel Aviv is going to stand out as the first genuinely Jewish city to be built in the land of Palestine. Until this point, you could talk about settlements that would become the kibbutz's of popular imagination. But the idea of a modern Jewish city

where there had been no previous Palestinian town, this is to the north of Jaffa, it was on beachland, it was laid down with broad avenues. It's called the White City for its Bauhaus architecture. It was a distinctly Jewish articulation of urban space. And that stood out from everything surrounding it in Palestine. This was perhaps the boldest cultural claim of a Jewish presence in Palestine yet undertaken. And that's still at a time where, you know, the presence of Jews in Palestine was a distinct minority and with no official support from any power, least of all the Ottoman Empire. 1904, you have the founding of Tel Aviv. Now, in 1908, you get an incident of serious violence

breaking out now between the New Zionist settlers and the inhabitants of Jaffa, the Jaffer riots of 1908. What's going on there, Eugene? Again, relatively speaking, a small scuffle, but it does lead to fatalities, and it demonstrates the growing tension between the local Palestinian-era population and the Jewish immigrants who, by the beginning of the 20th century, are already politically motivated. They're there with an ideology. They are seen by the Palestinian Arab community as a threat. So members of the Ottoman Parliament from Palestinian jurisdictions have tried to raise the issue of Jewish immigration in the Ottoman Parliament to try and get the government to stop allowing the flow of migrants.

they're increasingly seen as a threat to the status quo. And with such intense tensions, it was unsurprising that you would have the outbreak of street fighting and riots that would lead to violence. I mean, just sort of highlighting what the violence is, you've got Jews attack during the Pyrreroom celebrations. You have one Arab who's then stabbed to death. Then barely months later, you have four Jews who are killed by locals for what they describe as nationalist motives.

the spiral starts small but then starts getting rapidly larger and larger. You said just a moment ago what the reaction was of Palestinian Muslims. Do we have any record of Palestinian Jews who lived there, as you say, for centuries, what they are thinking about what's going on here? Well, the relationship between the indigenous Jewish community of Palestine and the new immigrants is quite an interesting one because the local community was not itself. ideologically motivated. Their presence in Palestine dated back generations, and they were not

politically so much as religiously motivated in most cases, and they saw their place in local societies having been long established by the norms governing relations between Muslim Christians and Jews and the Ottoman Empire. The European immigrants were much more assertive. They were much more politically engaged. And so there's a tension between the local and immigrant Jewish populations of Palestine that meant that they weren't all working towards the same goals. And I don't think that the indigenous Jewish population was really drawn into the activism of the new immigrants. So we now have at this point, just after the founding of Tel Aviv and the Jaffa riots, we have a newspaper founded in Jaffa in 1911 from a pair of Christians called Issa El Issa,

who's joined by his paternal cousin Yusuf El Issa. And this newspaper is called Significantly Enough, Philistine. Is that something that is significant in itself, Eugene, the title? Here again, it's the beginning of people beginning to identify a distinct geographic place with a political identity. And as we said before, in an earlier age, perhaps a town identity would have been the most that one might have recognized. But seeing Palestine, Palestine, as a common territory of the leadership of that newspaper, which was not confined to Java, which would have been sold in Jerusalem and in Haifa, down in Gaza. And in a sense, it's part of the awakening of a distinct notion of a Palestinian identity. But remember, still within an Ottoman context, where independence from the Ottoman Empire

would have been beyond the imaginings of your average Arab citizen. They claimed a distinct place identity, but it wasn't yet, let us say, a nationalist identity. But certainly a step in that proto-nationalism that would emerge after the creation of a mandate after the First World War. So in 1914, now this is just on the eve of the First World War breaking out, which is what we're going to be discussing, and the siege of Gaza, which is going to be dominating our next episode. Just before that, Philistine discusses this issue that we were just talking about. And this is a quote from the newspaper in 1914. Ten years ago, the Jews were living as Ottoman brothers loved by all the Ottoman races, living in the same quarters, their children going to the same schools. The Zionist put an end to all that and prevented any intermingling with indigenous population.

They boycotted the Arabic language and the Arab merchants and declared their intention of taking over the country from its inhabitants. On the eve of the First World War, Eugene, is that now something that people are really beginning to talk about across Palestine, or is it just a small group of intellectuals in Jaffa? And is it true? I mean, what is the veracity of here? You say, you know, the start of a nationalism movement, is it based in truth or something else? In a sense, Palestinian nationalism was disadvantaged in the face of Zionism, in that Zionism was a well-articulated ideology. And the people who subscribed to Zionism knew what their program was. Palestinians living under Ottoman rule in 1914 on the eve of the First World War were not allowed to have a separatist nationalist ideology. The Ottoman states clamped down on any expression of separatism. They didn't want to see the Balkanization of the Arab world. as they'd witnessed in their European provinces. In Bulgaria and in Greece,

which by this stage have just broken off because of nationalist movements. So Greece had Bruges was the first one to go. Greece went already in 1820, and the progressive breakaway of all the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans was exactly what they're trying to avoid in Palestine. And why the Ottomans were actually so hostile

to Zionism, because they saw Zionism as a movement that was trying to separate a territory from Ottoman rule. So in a sense, Zionism, fully flesh nationalist ideology, Palestinians have no scope to create a nationalist movement in their own right. They're part of the Ottoman Empire, but they feel under threat. And they see the Zionists coming in growing numbers. They are assertive, and they have the support of European philanthropy to help them buy land, to build towns and villages, and to create a bridgehead for more Jews to follow. And all I would say, is at this point, you're still dealing with a Jewish community of Palestine. That is absolutely

tiny. You're still 4 to 5% of the total population. So it's not as though the numbers are the threat, but it is the political agenda and the increasing power of land purchase that they were mobilizing that is going to go a long way to creating tensions between the communities of Palestine. So here we are simmering tensions on the eve of World War I. Join us in the next episode when we see what that cataclysm of international warfare will visit on this region. And if you want to listen to that Empire episode with Eugene right now, just head to Empirepoduk.com. That's Empirepodukuk.com to sign up to our membership,

really for the price of a fancy coffee a month. So that's EmpirePodukuk.com. You could early access bonus episodes and a weekly newsletter. For now, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. Goodbye from me, William Durimple.