Ottoman History Podcast - The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine

Episode Date: July 17, 2018

Episode 367 with Salim Tamari hosted by Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Nationalism has greatly influenced the way we think about Palestinian history. In this episode, Salim Tamari discusses this question in relation to his new book, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine, which explores Palestine under Ottoman rule during World War I. Tamari highlights the transformative nature of the conflict in Palestine, and the Ottomanist roots of many Palestinian and Arab nationalists. He also tackles the question of sources in Palestine, and how family papers have been crucial to his work. We conclude by discussing the stakes of recovering that past as the dispossession of Palestinians continues into the present. « Click for More »

It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. Today we are honored to be speaking with Professor Selim Tamari, who is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Birzeit University and currently the Shoaif Visiting Professor at the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University. He's also a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies and the Editor of Jerusalem Quarterly. Among his many works are The Mountain Against the Sea, published in 2008, Year of the Locust, published in 2010, Year of the Locust, published in 2010, and most recently The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine, published in 2017 by UC Press. Salim, this has been a long time coming. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

So I want to speak first about the book, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine. I want to start maybe with the title. How was Palestine made before the Great War and what were the distinctive aspects of it being remade during the war? Palestine was a province but not an administrative area within the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. So it was a very elusive and amorphous region that's corresponding to the area known as the province of Jerusalem or Mutasarrif, Lake of Quds Sharif. In other words, it was also known as Southern Syria. It was known as the holy part or component of Bilad al-Sham and so on.

During the war, the contestation over Palestine and the holy places and the attempts by the colonial powers, by Britain and France and Italy in particular, as well later as Russia, to use their connections with the minorities in Palestine and Syria and their claims for the protection of the holy places, made the Ottoman leadership to react by extending the boundaries of what they called Palestine to the area south of the Litani. So it corresponded more or less to the administrative area established by the British after the war and during the mandate for what became known as Palestine. So we start to see the rough boundaries of what we now see as Palestine,

Israel-Palestine, in the period of World War I. Yes, exactly. So one of the things that's notable, I think, in this work, and maybe all of your work, is how you push back against this idea that the Ottomans were simply oppressors. against this idea that the Ottomans were simply oppressors. You show a sort of richer view of what they're doing in Palestine and in the empire as a whole. So in this book, you suggest that someone like Ruhi al-Khalidi, Jerusalem notable critic of Zionism, you say he can best be thought of as an Ottoman nationalist. And often we think of maybe Arab nationalism and Ottoman nationalism as separate things,

maybe mutually exclusive. And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about those tensions and what you're doing differently. Yes. Ruhi is a very fine example of this conflict within the minds of the Arab intelligentsia, because Rouhi was very proud of his Palestinian-ness, of his Arab identity, of his language, but he was extremely loyal to the idea of the Ottoman bond. And he served as an Ottoman bureaucrat in a number of positions. Most recently was being consul in Grenoble in France but he was also very important member of the parliament Majlis al-Mab'uthan. Ruhi actually died in 1913 so he did not see the fissures and conflicts that

emerged during the war but what happened in his period as well as in the period of his uncle Yousef Diyal Khaldi who was also a member of parliament was this duality between belonging to Bilad al-Sham the layered belonging to Palestine and Jerusalem as the place of their birth, to Nablus the place of their education, as well as to the Ottoman state, the sultana, with which they believed strongly in the bond of what was known as Osmanlilik, or Ottoman constitutional identity, that began to emerge after the first constitutional revolution in 1876. So these people were similar to the case of people like Bustani in Beirut,

Muhammad Qudali in Damascus, and many others in Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Jaffa, as being part of the part and the whole at the same time. Right, and so this idea of a divide is maybe something that's imposed after the fact, more than it's present in their own lives. Yeah, I mean, the reference about Ottoman oppression, of course, was born of real repression established through the dictatorship of Jamal Pasha during the war. And it was partly the product of Turkish xenophism, but more so fear of secession, because this was a period when the minorities, and before that in the Balkan, in Greece, in Armenia began to belong to secessionist movements.

And the Arabs were the last remaining major nationality within the Sultanate to maintain the prospective unity of the empire. So they were very afraid of the secessionist movement and Jamal in particular reacted harshly to what he saw as a potential collaboration with the French and the British. And he saw any sign of a search for autonomy, such as the party which many of the Syrian intellectuals belong to, called the Party of Ottoman Decentralization, as an enemy of the state to be harassed and followed and so on.

So you mentioned Mohamed Kurdali, and in the book you describe how he becomes involved in literary production for the Ottoman state during World War I as part of these delegations of intellectuals, Arab intellectuals. And so there are sort of odes to Jamal Pasha and Enver Pasha that they write. And of course, Muhammad Kurdali, he'd go on to become one of the founding members of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Damascus after the war. So this is a formidable figure of Arab nationalism in a lot of ways. To what extent is the intellectual labor that the Ottoman state is promoting during World War I, To what extent is that propaganda?

And to what extent can we think about that as politics? Or is it impossible to draw a line between the two? No, it's possible to draw a line. I think during the war, the whole idea of the Ottoman Union began to disintegrate. of the Ottoman Union began to disintegrate. And the ideology propagated by the new Ottomans, which was called Osmanlilik or Osmaniyah in Arabic, to win the hearts and minds of non-Turkish citizens, began to wane because of the wave of repression

against dissident intellectuals and against provinces that were seen as secessionists. So one feature of this period and one that involved the work of Muhammad Qutb Ali, who was a Kurd originally from Sulaymanyeh with a Circassian mother and a very strong Ottoman loyalist, exactly like Abu Khaldun Sat'al Husari, Shukairi, and many, many intellectuals from this period. Right, and Sat'al Husari would go on to become this foundational figure in Iraq with education. And I read something that he spoke Arabic

with a Turkish accent his whole life. That's right, yes. And both actually, Muhammad Kudadi and Saad Al-Hosari wrote in Turkish. Turkish was their intellectual tongue, although they were prominent writers in Arabic. But I interrupted you. This question of politics versus propaganda.

Yeah. So during the war, both Jamal and Anwar Pashas began to mobilize the Arab intelligentsia in support of the war effort. And they did this in several ways. One was the establishment of colleges such as Salahiyya College in Damascus and Jerusalem, which were meant to train non-Turkish young academics and bureaucrats and future bureaucrats in the sciences and the languages that are necessary to become part of an Ottoman loyalist. And it was a very strong Islamic component. You see, by then, the Islamic component of Osmanli began to vie with the secular Ottoman component. And the reason for that is because they were challenged from the Hashemites and other groups that were challenging the Turkish caliphate in Istanbul.

So Islam became a very important component of Osmanli Neck and of the education system that the young Turks, the CUP, were espousing. But they also did a number of practical expeditions to mobilize people. And in this book, I refer to the so-called scientific expedition to Gallipoli, which in Arabic is called Al-Ba'tha Al-Ilmiya Ilha Dar Al-Khilaf Al-Islamiyya, organized by Jamal Pasha through Muhammad Kurd Ali to bring in scholars, journalists, writers, poets, and Islamic imams to visit the war front.

And in this visit they pass by industrial projects, war workshops, schools, training grounds in Anatolia, and in Gallipoli to see how the war was proceeding. And the book is fascinating because it's part propaganda but part investigative journalism and it is meant to mobilize the Arabs, the Syrians as they were called, to support the war effort. Then Enver became very jealous of Jamal as usual and he sort of prodded Muhammad Kurd Ali to organize another expedition this time to Medina to the south and it's called Ar-Rehla Al-Anwariyya as you would expect it's named after Enver and full of poetry and It was much more propaganda than the first expedition. It's

all poetry in praise of Enver, Rapacha and so on. But the purpose actually was to establish a link with the Hashemites in Medina, with Sharif Hussein and his sons, to dissuade them to dissuade them from secession. And indeed, in this volume of journalistic writings, we find a number of meetings with Faisal, with Sharif Hossein himself, in which the Ottoman bond was being stressed, and the war preparation in the southern front, which was in Kut al-Amara in Iraq, and in Sinai, which was called the Palestine, Jabhat Palestine, the Palestine front in Beersheba and Sinai.

So that was meant to mobilize people from the south on the Hashemite side and on the Syrian side to support Enver and the war effort yeah I mean it's an interesting alternative perspective because we're so familiar with the Hashemite narrative which has won out in so many ways they also I should remember you should remember they put out a journal expressly addressing the Arab hesitant

population this was the Ottomans the Ottomans they published which was edited by Muhammad Qutb Ali called Al-Sharq, was financed by German money, actually, published in Damascus, and it's pure propaganda. And the Hashemites responded by another newspaper called Al-Qibla, which came out from Medina, also accusing the CUP and the Young Turks of betraying the Ottoman bond, of undermining

the Khilafah, and bringing secularism to schools, and undermining Islam. So that was al-Qibla. So another chapter in the book that I found really interesting is about Adel Azad, the stalwart member of the women's movement in Palestine. She's involved in everything from charity toward the poor in wartime Jaffa to organizing winter clothing drives for rebels in the 1930s. And she was so respected that she became known as a zaime, right? A boss. So she's been left out of a lot of accounts of history of Palestine and the Palestinian women's movement. But you found this vivid source of her life in the form of a letter to her grandchildren.

But we also have absences. You mentioned that all of her papers were destroyed in 1948. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about her story and also the challenges of telling a history without national archives. Adele Azar is a very interesting woman, not because of her leadership role, although that is important, but because she's one of the few unknown pioneers of the women's movement who were eclipsed later by much better known people, much more articulate people who wrote and published, associates Fouda Shaarawy and Zlika Shabi and Issam Abdelhadi and Nablus and so on.

So she's one of the unknowns. And, of course, I happened to have her papers from her grandchildren who supplied me with her notes. And what I framed her diary with was the struggle for the education of girls and orphans in the First World War, in which she played a big role. And she was motivated by two things. First, her sympathy for war orphans, because you remember Palestine, as in Syria,

lost a huge number of its male population and population in general during the war and famine around one between 1 5th 1 6th of the population was and a lot of those were men so that there was a lot of families who were became fatherless a lot of orphans. So she was propelled by charity for orphans, but within the Orthodox movement, Christian Orthodox movement. And the second thing which propelled her were sort of fear

that the missionaries were taking over. Because all modernist schools at the time, with the exception of Ottoman formal Nizamiya schools, came from missionary groups trying to convert the population. There were missions to the Jews, there were Catholic missions, Protestant Syrian College in Beirut. at all levels, from kindergarten to universities, were being introduced by Protestant and Catholic and Russian Orthodox missions to convert the population. They tried to convert the Jews to Christianity and the Muslims to Christianity and ended

up mainly stuck with the Orthodox Christians to bring them to light into the Catholic and Protestant orders. So that, and of course the majority of Christians in the East, including Palestine, were Orthodox. And there was a double kind of exclusion. The first exclusion was by the hierarchy, which was Greek, and excluded the Arab laity from making decisions about the endowments, educational institutions, and the enormous land holdings of the church. And the other one was the exclusion or the attempt by the missionaries to bring in so-called enlightened Western education to the natives. So they started these schools as a challenge to the missionaries and to the fate of the orphans.

And she was a local woman who was very vigorous and very courageous. And she's totally unknown. Nobody knows about this woman. And she wrote a diary. I mean, that's what's interesting about her. I mean, I'm sure there were many others, but she started very early during the war. She started her letter in 1910, 1911. And then she became a refugee in the war of 48. And I write about the struggle of hers for orphanages, for progressive schools for girls. was a very radical revolutionary act to do, to bring girls and give them skills because they became, they were like trained in vocational skills to become

employed so they were became part of the public labor force and then she became a very important local woman and they became known as the boss. And we have a picture of her appearing next to Mayor Haikal in the 1940s in a public square where she gave a speech on behalf of the women of Jaffa. So she became very prominent, not only among the Orthodox associations, but within the women's movement in general. She became a representative for the Arab Women's Union, and she was sent to Cairo in 1936 to represent Palestinian Jaffa women on behalf of the Arab Women's Union to Huda Shaarawi's Congress in Cairo. So I wanted to pick up on one of these threads that you mentioned, which is 1948,

which of course occupies such an important place in the history of Palestine and the Palestinians. And I want to think about it in relation to archives. Because so often archives accompany states. And I mean, not always. But with the case of Palestinian history, it's tricky in some ways, because Palestinians remain stateless without a strong state-backed archival infrastructure. And of course, there are ways to get around this, right? There are the Ottoman archives, the court records, the Israeli state archives, including its abandoned

property section. I think part of what's so interesting and rich about this book, but also all of your work, is how you're creative in the sources that you use. In this work, we're dealing with a letter like Adel Azar wrote to her grandchildren. We're dealing with other diaries, we're dealing with personal papers, photographs. In other words, materials that might not make it into state archives. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about sources and how you've thought about them as part of your own work. Well, you pointed out the gist of the problem, is that the Israelis who have a very highly disciplined archival tradition within the Zionist movement, which was of course a European, Germanic phenomena,

and the Israelis inherited it from the early Zionist movement and in the war the Palestinians lost everything so even compared to the poor archives which we have in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, maybe not Egypt, but in the Bilaad al-Sham and Iraq, the Palestinians did not even have the rubric of a state. And we began to rely on the external sources, obviously. British records, the Israeli archival records, increasingly the Ottoman records, which now have become organized and accessible, less so the Egyptian records. But we had no records of our own. So this was the incentive for looking at family records,

family papers, as one source of covering this void. And it began actually with the preoccupation and development of the oral history project, where you interview the remaining parts of survivors from the 36th rebellion and as people growing old from the 48th war, and covering the quotidian, social life in general, from oral history sources. But oral history now is being supplemented history sources. But oral history now is being supplemented by looking at family papers, which are not exactly oral history. I mean, a lot of them were diaries, memoirs, photographs, as well as records of daily life. And so you have in IPS, Birzeit University, in Quds, in Najah University now, very important archival sources based on these possessions. And I consider myself a small screw in this operation, which utilized a reading of social history through

biographical lens of family papers, memoirs, diaries, and so on. And my book actually is mostly based on this kind of archival sources. So we're speaking on May 15th of 2018, which is being recognized around the world as a day of remembrance and action for the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948. And we're speaking the day after the massacre of protesters approaching the wall in Gaza at this point. The IDF has killed at least 60 people and injured several thousand. So I wanted to connect the present moment to how we think about history. On a previous episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Bashar Doumani said that writing Palestinians into history is almost inevitably a nationalist act.

And one of the things that's so striking about your own work is that you're complicating nationalist narratives. And so I wonder, is that a difficult position to be in, to be writing a history that is almost inevitably a nationalist act while also trying to nuance those nationalist narratives? Is that a difficult position to be in? Is that a difficult position to be in? Is that a vulnerable position to be in? Why am I complicating the nationalist narrative? Well, I think, you know, you're showing how, you know, there's this narrative of the hardships of World War One, sort of characterizing the entirety of Ottoman rule in Palestine. And so, sort of characterizing the entirety of Ottoman rule in Palestine.

And so, you know, one of the things that I think your work does so well is show this rich patrimony of Ottoman culture in Palestine and how, you know, people like Mohammed Kurdali... Well, it's not only Ottoman. I mean, you're right in that the devil is in the detail because once you start examining people's biographical trajectories you discover a great deal of variation in types of consciousness, in experiences of war, in looking back at the texture of the moment which challenges the retrospective way in which nationalist history and historiography has generalized from.

Generalized perceptions, language, experiences. You see this in a number of sources which I have addressed. I have addressed. One very interesting diary of Arif al-Arif, the historian, who was, again, a very important Ottoman officer. He was captured and sent to Siberia by the Russians during the 1915 Erzurum battle. And there he begins to write about the duality of his Ottoman and Arab national consciousness and then he comes back he escapes comes back to Syria joins Prince Faisal in Jabal al Druze and then moves and becomes a mandate official in Palestine so the several layers of transformation in his identity shows that our projection to the past of a single Arab national transformation is too simplistic.

And this repeats again and again with Muhammad Kurd Ali, another important person that I wrote about in this book by the name of Rafiq Tamimi, who was an Ottoman official in Beirut, one of the few Ottomans who studied in the Sorbonne. He actually studied sociology in Sorbonne and became an investigator for the Ottoman state. And he was commissioned to do with the Bahjot a very important kind of salname called Beirut Velayati which is now a very important ethnographic source for urban and rural life at the turn of the century. He was a law at the time of lawlessness. He wrote in Turkish. His book was translated to Arabic by somebody else

but later on in the mandate he became a Palestinian patriot. He joined the rebellion. He became very prominent as a leader of a militia called Al-Najada, which was based in Jaffa. He's relatively unknown, so I try to bring him back to life and his experience. The point of all of this is two things. People experienced the formation of the new national identity and regional identity in installments. They came back and forth and they were partly reacting to circumstances, but partly also finding their place in a new post-colonial order, or in this case, a colonial order. The second part is that the regional local experience was paramount.

Nablus was not Jerusalem. Jaffa had a cosmopolitan, trans-Mediterranean identity which differed from that of the inner cities. And many people who identified themselves as Palestinian patriots in the post-war period actually were also the product of their immediate identity. And most recently, we have a very important work by Adel Manar and also Samir Asmir, who rediscovered or wrote about the events of the 48th war on the basis of a vast number of experiences which were subsumed under the major rhetoric of Nakba of ethnic cleansing of exclusion and exile or which of course happened but they happened and experienced in a very concrete way, in a different way, depending on the locality in which people lived in.

You were trained as a sociologist. I wonder if you could speak about why you chose sociology and whether you see the methods of that discipline informing or how you see that informing your work. I had a grant to study sociology, so that explains my early choice. I was fascinated by, early on when I was studying political science, by the works of C. Wright Mills and Max Weber. These were my two great influences to read urban social history, which became my preoccupation. And of course, classical sociology, which I belong to,

and history are not two separate disciplines. Sociology is social history. We cannot understand the social dynamics of urban life, or rural life, or rural transformations, without understanding the historical trajectories and dynamics of people going through these frames. And that explains my interest in history. So I'm some kind of historical sociologist, I think you can call me that. But the problem is I got stuck in the Great War, the First World War, and I don't seem to be able to get out of it.

Where did you want to go? I want to go to the 20s and 30s. Maybe I'll get there soon. We'll look forward to hearing more about that. One of my favorite details that emerges, and it actually has to do with the 20s and the 30s, it has to do also with Arif al-Arif, whom you just mentioned. So when he was stationed in Gaza in the 1930s, he and Saime, his wife, who was in Jerusalem, they exchanged letters, and they wrote these letters in Ottoman. And you say that part of the reason they wrote in Ottoman, even a decade after the empire's collapse, was to maintain a sense of intimacy, but also because it was part of their cultural patrimony. A lot of the people you write and read about

had this duality in their intellectual production. They wrote often in Turkish. They read Turkish. I mean, in the case of Saima al-Burnu, who was from a prominent family in Gaza, she was not in Istanbul. She was not a part of Anatolia. She went to public school in Gaza, and she was very proficient in Turkish. So it was the intellectual language in the same manner that French and English later became, you know, the language of expression for the post-war intelligentsia. Language was, Turkish was the language of the state. But it was completely suppressed by nationalist historiography.

I summarize it in one sentence. Summarize it in one sentence. The whole Ottoman patrimony of the Syrian provinces was completely ruptured and suppressed through the lenses of the four dark years of the war, which became associated with the famine, with exile through Safar Barlek, and the tragedies of war and the major devastation it did to the urban and rural areas in Syria and Palestine. So before that, of course, there was a flourishing culture. There was a symbiotic culture. There was newspapers, there were colleges in which the ruling ideology was Ottoman. And there was also an Arab Renaissance which was part of this Ottoman project. Later on the Arab Renaissance is examined as a nationalist uprising against Istanbul rule, which is completely false. So when you begin to reread these texts by Boustani and Muhammad Gurd Ali and Yaziji

and Rashid Rida and Muhammad Abduh, you know that we need to reclaim that space and remove the mystification that nationalist historiography has imposed on it. We completely swallowed the British colonial, French colonial and Arab nationalist discourse that these were dark centuries. So we were living under this illusion. And of course, it took the Balfour Declaration and demanded to awaken people from that. But the nationalist geography continued and still continues until today. Salim, I want to thank you so much for joining us today and for your work over the years as a scholar and mentor to so many in our

community. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I want to remind our listeners that we will have a bibliography with relevant works on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, and also encourage you to join us on Facebook, where we have over 25,000 listeners. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time, take care. Thank you.