On 4 July, American Independence Day was commemorated grandly, with the Stars and Stripes raised, despite the protests of the local American Consul, who deemed the colony a fraud and who fought a bitter battle against it.21 On one occasion Edith Spafford dressed as the Statue of Liberty for a staged photograph to celebrate the occasion. By 1913, what had started as a religious undertaking of a few Evangelical Christians had acquired the characteristics of an extended family business: printing postcards, offering guided tours to tourists, and offering photographic services commissioned, amongst others, by the Zionist Organization and by National Geographic magazine.22 The story of the colony inspired a novel by Selma Lagerlöf, the Swedish laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature of 1909. In 1913, as the result of a visit to the colony a few years previously, Klas Pontus Arnoldson, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1908, published a book entitled Jerusalem själ (The Soul of Jerusalem).
What Jewish immigration might ultimately mean for the political destiny of Palestine and for the existing Arab population of the sancak of Jerusalem was unclear in 1913.
The Zionist idea of a Jewish homeland was still a dream taking form. Although Jewish immigration to Palestine had begun to increase in the last decades of the nineteenth century, subject to rather half-hearted and ineffective controls by the Ottoman authorities, Zionism as a political movement was essentially a pressure group within the Jewish world rather than the unambiguous representative of all Jews everywhere. If an increasing number of European Jews saw the potential benefits of a homeland where they could develop as a people, safe from the fear of endless persecution and slights experienced by an Alfred Dreyfus or by a Mendel Beilis, there were others who felt that the Zionist project would mean Jews turning their backs on the promise of assimilation into European societies and ghettoising themselves anew – not broadening their horizons, but diminishing them. There were divisions within the Jewish community between educated western European Jews who valued the economic and social status they had achieved in their respective countries, and generally less well-educated eastern European and Russian Jews – let alone north African or Middle Eastern Jews – some of whom seemed to have barely crept out of the Middle Ages. Even amongst convinced Zionists there was disagreement on the means to achieve a Jewish homeland, and on the precise form such a homeland should ultimately take.
It had not been at all obvious, until the very end of the nineteenth century, that the Zionist project necessarily equated to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, as opposed to some other corner of the world. Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), published in 1896 in Vienna, did not identify Palestine specifically. But even once that central question had been answered at the first Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897, plenty of other questions remained. Did a Jewish homeland entail a majority of Jews within a particular geographical area, or could Jewish security be obtained without Jews being in a demographic majority? Should religion play a strong role in such a homeland, or should it rather be defined by a progressive secular identity, centred more around the university and the opera house than around the synagogue? What should be its language – Hebrew or German, or perhaps both, perhaps many? Should Jews learn Arabic, partly in order to assuage the fears of local Arabs in Palestine that their culture and traditions would be swamped, and partly to more easily negotiate the purchase of land? Should only Jews be employed to work the land of Jewish-owned settlements in Palestine, or should Arabs also be employed, thus allowing for a greater degree of economic interdependence and social assimilation? And, after all this, would Arabs be the contented political equals of Jews in such a homeland, benefiting, as many Zionists saw it, from the economic investment and technical expertise that Jewish migration would bring to Palestine? Or would they be its sullen rivals, either slowly emigrating to other parts of the Ottoman Empire or, more worryingly, remaining entrenched on the land? In the broader political context, what degree of autonomy could or should a Jewish homeland aspire to in the Ottoman Empire; and, as a matter of practical politics, did the route to the establishment of a Jewish homeland lie through Constantinople or rather through Berlin, Paris, Vienna and London?
The role of Jerusalem within a Jewish homeland was itself a question. When Herzl visited in 1898, hoping to persuade the touring German Kaiser to throw his imperial prestige behind the noble idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Herzl found the city cramped, unhealthy, full of dark corners and mysticism – hardly a place to fulfil his vision of a self-confident, liberal, progressive, modern Jewish nation. When, a few years later, he wrote a futuristic novel depicting a Jewish Palestine in 1923 – suitably titled Altneuland (Old-New Land) – he imagined the northern town of Haifa as its powerhouse, not Jerusalem. Thus while some Zionists saw Jerusalem as the inevitable centre of Eretz Israel – the home of the holiest Jewish site, after all, and a Jewish-majority city – and many more accepted the symbolic power of Jerusalem as a means of raising money for the Zionist project, the city was hardly the sole or even central preoccupation of practical, pragmatic Zionists.23 Arthur Ruppin, the head of the Zionist Organisation in Palestine, set up his office on Bustrus Street in the city of Jaffa, down on the coast. He corresponded with Zionist headquarters in Berlin in German, not Hebrew.
When the eleventh Zionist Congress met in Vienna in September 1913 then, the task of its delegates from Palestine was essentially to act as promoters: to ensure that European Jewish support for the project was maintained, that positive momentum was given to the push to secure a proper homeland in Palestine and to achieve more than simply a vulnerable set of settlements. In Vienna, they showed maps of Jewish settlements, photographs showing Jews in the fields of their new homeland, even a film. The push was ultimately given new life by the call for a Jewish University – a ‘new shrine on Mount Zion’, as one delegate called it – to be established in Jerusalem, on land that was bought just outside the city, on Mount Scopus.24
Though the Ottoman Empire had, over many years, attempted to forbid land purchases by foreign Jews in Palestine, prevent settlement, control immigration and limit the amount of time Jewish visitors could spend in the region, these policies were not terribly effective in the face of the determination and wiliness which Zionists brought to their cause on the ground. Land could be bought under different names; newly-arrived migrants could disappear into existing populations, or even be declared dead by the consular officials of the country whose nationality they retained, only to reappear a few years later miraculously alive.25 Given the legal and administrative obstacles presented to migrants, the modus operandi of Zionism was necessarily somewhat underhand on occasion. Messages sent from the Zionist office in Jaffa to headquarters in Berlin were written out in elementary code. In 1913, land already purchased on behalf of Jews would be described as ‘Shanghai’.26 If an offer of sale of land had been made to Jews with ample time to think before a decision had to be made to go ahead or not, this would be conveyed to Berlin with a word describing the tempo of slow-moving music: ‘Adagio’. If there was less time, another word would be used: ‘Allegro’. The project for a Jewish University was referred to as ‘Kunstwerk’, the German word for artwork. Tel Aviv was ‘Stadtpass’ (city pass). Opponents of land purchases were ‘Stickluft’, implying a stifling atmosphere. Enemies were ‘Stickstoff’ (nitrogen), friends were ‘Stiefsohn’ (stepson).
Still, noted a letter back to Berlin in November of that year, ‘the tempo of colonisation is so slow’.27 It continued, ‘we could say without exaggeration that we could have obtained at least 100,000 more Dunam [an Ottoman unit of land] more than we have’. More money, and more political support was always welcome. In December 1913, Berlin asked Ruppin to take special care of the son of a Christian German industrialist who, having completed his military service in China, now wished to see something of the Middle East. ‘We don’t know Dr Kruft personally, about as well as we know Christ’, the Berlin office wrote, ‘but we place importance in German Christians visiting Palestine and offering
them the opportunity to construct their own verdict about relationships there’.28
Meanwhile, Ottoman authorities in Constantinople, Arabs in Palestine and Arabs across the broader Middle East did not always share the same interests regarding what happened in Palestine. The Ottomans’ key objectives were to maintain order, to prevent events in Jerusalem from offering a pretext for further foreign intervention, and to keep Arab nationalism in check. Preventing Jewish immigration was hardly an existential question at this point, as long as immigration did not lead to a movement for Jewish political independence. In any case, any concerns about the demographic balance in Palestine were balanced by wider sets of issues preoccupying the Ottoman state. In 1913, Constantinople had a much more immediate worry: the very survival of the Ottoman Empire itself. Having lost Libya to the Italians a few years previously, and now on the brink of losing what remained of the empire’s historic European possessions to a fractious alliance of Bulgarians, Serbians, Montenegrins and Greeks, the Ottoman Empire needed friends, particularly friends with money. Jewish support could be helpful.
Similarly, for Arabs in Syria or in Egypt, areas far more central to emergent pan-Arab political consciousness in 1913 than Jerusalem, Palestine was a side issue. The causes which motivated Arab elites politically were much broader than the situation in the sancak of Jerusalem, however symbolic. They sought either a greater stake in the running of the Ottoman Empire or, if they could not get that, greater autonomy from it. They wanted accelerated economic development. It was not entirely out of the question that Jewish immigration, and Jewish political support, might actually help in achieving these aims. Was there a bargain to be struck between pan-Arabism and Zionism? Victor Jacobson, responsible for the Zionist Organization in Constantinople, suggested in 1913 that ‘the first article of our work programme ought to be an entente with the Arabs’.29 One of the delegates to the very first Arab Congress that year, held in Paris in June, was Sami Hochberg, the Jewish editor of a French-language newspaper in Constantinople called Le Jeune Turc.30
Some Arabs and some Ottomans were more concerned by Zionism. A number of books and pamphlets were published on the subject. Newspaper articles were written setting out the Zionist challenge in increasingly strident tones, and drawing attention to specific incidents of Jewish land purchases or Arab–Jewish tension. Some articles were themselves countered by Zionists. In 1913, a Moroccan Jew named Shimon Moyal, who had trained in Beirut as a doctor and who previously lived in Cairo, set up an organisation known as HaMagen, which attempted to rebut anti-Zionist articles in the Arabic press and translated such articles from Arabic into Hebrew.31 But the fact that such an approach was deemed necessary was itself an indication of a worsening atmosphere of mutual suspicion and a rising war of words. Ruppin himself saw the growth of Arab nationalism as something to be worried about. ‘If the national consciousness of the Arabs strengthens’, he wrote to the central office in Berlin in early 1913, ‘then we will face resistance that perhaps we will no longer be able to overcome with money’.32
The lifting of censorship in the Ottoman Empire in 1908, and the growth of newspaper print which followed in the Arab world, had allowed grievances to be articulated and spread more readily. In 1911, Najib Nassar published a book in Arabic entitled Zionism: Its History, Objectives and Importance. He admired Herzl for what he had done, for the organisation of Zionism and for its political successes, and urged that Arabs in Palestine respond accordingly, through financial and political organisation. ‘Why do we, who have spent centuries suffering tragedy and misery, not become men’, he asked, ‘and go on the way of freedom and live for our patrimony and for ourselves, so that we shall not invoke upon ourselves the curses of our ancestors and our sons by losing the country which our ancestors acquired with their blood?’33 Ruhi Khalidi, scion of one of Jerusalem’s leading families, and now an elected representative to the Ottoman parliament, tried to awaken his fellow deputies to the issue. In 1913, before he passed away, he was preparing a book on the subject, going through the history of Zionism in detail and outlining the challenges it posed for Ottoman sovereignty in Palestine, and for the existing Arab population.
The situation was inflamed that summer, when a squabble on the road between the Jewish settlement of Rehovot and the Arab village of Zarnuqa descended into a shoot-out.34 Zionists claimed Arabs from the nearby village had been caught stealing grapes from the settlement and that they had attacked a Jewish guard who attempted to interdict them. Arabs claimed the problem stemmed from the militarisation of Jewish settlements, where security had been taken over by an increasingly powerful self-defence organisation, HaShomer. It was claimed that a typically over-zealous Jewish guard had wrongfully accused the Arabs of theft and that he had been disarmed in order to prevent violence. In the confusion immediately following the incident on the road, with Jewish Rehovot settlers and Arab Zarnuqa villagers all thinking they were coming to the rescue of their beleaguered kin, local Jews and Arabs took up arms. A Jewish settler was shot in the ensuing fighting but survived; an Arab villager was fatally wounded. A few days later, a Jewish guard at Rehovot was murdered. Arrests were made. Each side pleaded the justice of their case to the Ottoman authorities, to their community, and to the wider world. ‘No intelligent or impartial person could believe this odious accusation presenting Jewish farmers as provocateurs’, wrote Ruppin to the Ottoman Governor of Jerusalem (in French).35 In the past, he claimed, violence or theft on the part of Arabs had been forgiven: ‘thousands of trees harmed, human lives lost in the fullness of youth, hundreds of animals taken, fruit stolen or ripped off’. But there were limits. ‘We are ready to reform our security’, he wrote, ‘but not to suppress it or give in to those who attack and pillage us’.36
Would this be yet another incident in the long litany of incidents between Jew and Arab, Christian and Muslim, Christian and Christian – built up over years of close proximity in the Holy Land – to be ultimately overcome by common sense and common interest? Would the case be forgotten, accumulating dust in the files of the Ottoman authorities? Or, as some contended, was a point of no return now being approached? In November of that year a poem was published in Falastin, a local Arab newspaper in Palestine, denigrating the Jews and calling upon the Caliph in Constantinople to act:
Jews, sons of clinking gold, stop your deceit;
We shall not be cheated into bartering away our country!
Shall we hand it over, meekly,
While we still have some spirit left?
Shall we cripple ourselves?
The Jews, the weakest of all peoples and the least of them,
Are haggling with us for our land;
How can we slumber on?
We know what they want
And they have the money, all of it.
Master, rulers, what is wrong with you?
What ails you?
It is time to awake, to be aware!
Away with this heedlessness
There is no more time for patience!37
In December 1913 ships set sail from Europe bringing new migrants to Canada, Australia and Argentina. The British naval expedition sent to enquire into the petroleum potential of Persia turned back to London. Algerians, both French and Arab, shuttled between Algiers and Paris. Gandhi contemplated a return from South Africa, where he had now made his name, to India. In Kiev, Mendel Beilis, the Jewish clerk who had been locked up, persecuted and demonised for a murder he did not commit, prepared himself, like so many others, to seek a new life in a new land.
Goodbye, Kiev, farewell my native land, farewell all my friends with whom I have spent my life! I am leaving for the land of our fathers, for the Holy Land, where once flowed milk and honey, and which has always been dear to my heart. I am going to rest body and soul in the Land of Israel.38
Next year in Jerusalem: for Beilis at least, the incantation would become reality.
Taking a coach from Kiev in the middle of the night, practically on the eve of the New Year, Beil
is met his wife and children in the country town Kozyatyn, from where they caught a train, streaking across the frozen countryside of western Ukraine to the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at Podvolochisk. Once across, the way was open to Lemberg (now Lviv), then Vienna, then the Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. Though he attempted to conceal his identity, Beilis’ secret inevitably came out in the places through which he travelled. Crowds gathered around him, intrigued to see the unassuming spectacled figure whose trial and subsequent acquittal had shamed the mighty Russian Empire.
In the first days of the New Year, 1913 having passed away and 1914 arrived in its stead, Beilis’ ship docked first in Alexandria, and then Haifa. ‘The Land of Israel had an invigorating effect on me’, Beilis wrote warmly afterwards, perhaps in the mode of publicist as much as diarist. Israel, he continued, ‘gave me new life and new hope’:
Nature itself, the life of the people, inspired me with vigor and the desire to live. When we had left Kiev, it was cold, and the fields were covered with snow. Here everything was green, and the sun was warm. It was the most beautiful season of the year in Palestine. Everything was blooming; the hills and the fields were covered with vegetation. I could not get too much of the atmosphere. For quite some time I would wander around, inspecting every corner of the country, breathing the refreshing air, deep-lunged.39
Everywhere, he was welcomed with generosity. When he had landed in Haifa, he remembered, a local Arab chief put a coach and horses at his disposal and insisted on riding ahead on the dusty road south, acting as his guard of honour. The welcome from the Jewish community, naturally, was still more enthusiastic. ‘The Zionists are in a frenzy of celebration and have dressed Tel Aviv as for the arrival of a prince’, wrote the German Consul in Jaffa to the German Chancellor in Berlin in February 1914.40
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