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Introduction to the Second Edition
My great-great-uncle Najib Nassar was born in 1865 and lived the first four decades of his life under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. As an Ottoman citizen his experience of the land was significantly different from my own. This book explores that difference.
Najib was born in Ay’n Anoub, in what is today Lebanon. He moved south with his family first to Tiberius and then settled in Haifa. Both cities are now part of Israel. During his lifetime, they were all part of the Ottoman Empire. Moving between these areas, Najib did not have to cross any political borders. This was so unlike what I encountered when I followed his travels in the course of writing this book. I had to cross the borders of three states to get from where I live in Ramallah to Ay’n Anoub in Lebanon.
The Ottoman Empire was ruled by a sultan. Yet in this Muslim state the three religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – coexisted, albeit with some restrictions. Sultan Abdulhamid remarked, “We [Ottomans] are a millet [religious community] that has originated from the Arab millet . . . just as we took civilization from the Greeks, Europe has taken it from us.” This identification with the Islamic Arab heritage served to legitimize the Ottoman claim to the caliphate.
On February 5, 1877, the spirit of hope was at its peak. The Ottoman parliament, which convened in Istanbul, has been considered by some as the greatest democratic experiment in history. It was the first legislative chamber through which representatives of different religious communities and races from three continents, Asia, Africa and Europe, speaking fourteen different languages, met. One representative declared, “Serving the entire society is the intention of parliament. When this is the case, there is no need to differentiate by religion.”
Though he was Christian, Najib did not seek to separate from the Muslim Ottomans. He thought of himself as a loyal Ottoman citizen. He was a reformist who called for decentralization and a greater measure of autonomy for the Arabs. To his mind, Arabs included members of the three religions, all of whom were Ottoman citizens belonging to different millets. Members of each millet were left to run their own affairs. Under this system, Arabs and Jews lived and strived together peacefully. He could not have conceived then of the fragmentation of the region a century later into a mosaic of countries based on religious differences.
The shift in the ideology of the empire from Islam to Turkish nationalism after the First World War was the work of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a secret association the Young Turks had formed in Salonica, which was then still part of the Ottoman Empire. This group was made up of army officers and intellectuals who were in power from 1908 until the end of the First World War.
When the First World War (also known as the Great War) began, Najib was against the participation of the Ottomans.
If this was inevitable, the Ottomans, he opined, should align themselves with the British rather than the Germans, and he expressed this in the articles he wrote and published before the war in the newspaper he edited, Al Karmil. His view was interpreted as his siding with the British, and accusations of collaboration, which were totally unfounded, were made against him. An order to arrest him followed.
At first he did not take seriously this action by the Ottoman authorities. He believed he had strong contacts with Ottoman officials who would vouch for his innocence. But times were critical, and he was advised to flee, because if he were caught, he would not get a fair trial and would be hanged along with other Arab leaders who were also falsely accused. My travels in Najib’s footsteps as he was on the run for more than three years, escaping the Ottoman army by moving from village to Bedouin encampment throughout Galilee and then to the east bank of the Jordan River, are recounted in this book. More than a hundred years separate my uncle’s travels and mine; the changes to the landscape in the course of that time is my subject.
It was after his arrest and as he awaited trial in a Damascus prison that Najib first heard of the Balfour Declaration, by which the British promised Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people. There he shared a cell with a Jewish prisoner accused of spying who was waiting to be hanged. In the course of their conversations the man revealed to Najib that he had boldly declared before the tribunal that what he did was done not as a spy or out of treason, but in the service of the Jewish national cause.
In the aftermath of the war, with the victory of the colonial powers of Britain and France, the Middle East was reorganized. Rather than one multiethnic empire ruling the whole region, as had been the case for the previous 450 years under the Ottomans, the region was fragmented into Turkey in Anatolia, and a number of small new nation-states created by the imperial powers of the day: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Emirate of Jordan and Palestine.
The people of Palestine paid dearly for the European decision to use their land as a theater of war. Almost 40,000 Muslims, more than 10,000 Christians and more than 1,000 Jews had fallen victim to tyranny, gunfire, famine and disease. The 800,000 inhabitants who were left were immediately classified by the new British rulers according to religious affiliation: 650,000 Muslims, 80,000 Christians and 60,000 Jews, including both the veteran Jewish millet and the recent Zionist settlers, with the remaining 10,000 being of different religious sects. The immediate consequence of the war was the disappearance of Turkish officialdom and language. It was as though the Ottomans had never existed.
The end of the Great War and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire marked the termination of Najib’s world. This was not only because he had been comfortable in his identity as an Ottoman, but also because, long before others, he was concerned about the effect that the new wave of nationalism sweeping the empire would have on the future of Palestine. How right he was.
From 1918 to 1920, Palestine was under British military rule. In 1920 the British replaced military rule with a civil administration. A high commissioner was appointed to take charge of the country instead of a military governor. Meanwhile the Zionist movement was working hard to make the vague promise of the 1917 Balfour Declaration the basis of the British Mandate over Palestine. Zionist diplomacy was fervently active in the deliberations on the final map of the new Middle East that began in San Remo, Italy, in 1920. Lord Balfour was recruited to head an Anglo-Zionist committee to lobby for the implementation of his 1917 declaration. The United States was persuaded not to oppose the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration in the charter for the Mandate for Palestine.
The outcome was in favor of the Zionists. The 1922 British Mandate for Palestine was created as a “Class A Mandate,” defined as “territories that had previously formed part of the Ottoman Empire and that had reached a state of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized.” Yet this promise was made only to the minority Jewish population, constituting less than 10 percent of the country’s population.
And so began the struggle of the majority Palestinian population against the British Mandate, which worked to deprive them of self-determination in their country. Najib witnessed and reported in his newspaper how the coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine that had lasted many centuries was being destroyed as the Zionists worked for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. With the suffering of European Jews twenty years later under the Holocaust, this ambition became more pressing.
Yet under the Mandate, Jewish settlements had to be established on legally purchased land. This gave Najib hope that if the Palestinians refused to sell land to Zionist Jews, many of whom were fleeing from pogroms in Russia and other European countries, the establishment of the Jewish homeland in Palestine would be prevented. Najib poured his energy into the fight against the sale of land to Zionist agencies.
In 1948 Israel was established in about 75 percent of the territory under the British Mandate. The rest, namely the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was annexed to Jordan, while the Gaza Strip came under Egyptian rule. Of the territory that became Israel, Jews owned through sale only about 7 percent. The rest Israel acquired through conquest: In the course of the 1948 war and afterwards, the Zionists were able to force the majority of the Palestinians out of the territory that became Israel and take over their lands. Although it must be pointed out that to this day Israel has no declared borders. Najib died in March 1948, a few months before the establishment of Israel. One of the tenets of the Zionist ideology behind the creation of the Jewish state was that the land of Palestine would be placed inalienably in the exclusive ownership of the Jewish people. This transition of the region from one ruled by a multiethnic structure incorporating diverse adherents of all three monotheistic Abrahamic religions to one exclusive to a single religion has kept the region in a state of war for the past seventy-five years. Such exclusionist practices and ideology can only be sustained at a great price: Rather than integrate into the region and make peace with its neighbors, Israel has to remain in a high state of military preparedness, ready to defend the gains it has made through war and keep at bay the Palestinians it refuses to allow to return to their homes or to compensate them for their losses.
While writing this book and as I traveled in the footsteps of my great-great-uncle Najib, I wondered about the consequences of delving into this past. I feared it might be like settling old scores and attending to deep wounds that refuse to heal. But I also espoused the hope that I might succeed in imaginatively recreating the region as it existed at the time of the Ottoman Empire, when the land was undivided. I hope this book achieves that objective and helps readers take that leap of imagination.