by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
While the surface appearance of Haifa seemed to back up what people had told me – it being a city of coexistence – I became aware that I could not see the whole picture. While Arabs in Israel enjoy far more freedom than the Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories, it remains a fundamentally unequal society. Here, as elsewhere in Israel, the Arab community bears the legacy of having had their homes and land taken from them, and when the Jews of Haifa celebrate the anniversary of the Israeli victory in the 1948 war against the Palestinians, there is no local Arab participation for obvious reasons. In some pockets of town, like Masada, young Jews and Arabs mix in hipster cafés, but that social integration is not representative of the norm. Some Jewish and Arab children mix in school but most attend their own schools, with separate curricula. Even the mayor, Yona Yahav, admitted in the run-up to the 2018 celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the 1948 war that he prefers to talk of ‘shared existence rather than coexistence’.
The mayors of Haifa have acted as a barometer of shifting power: the first mayor was Hassan Shukri, who held office from 19141936, and insisted on appointing a Jewish deputy mayor despite the fact that Arabs were the majority; in 1921, he expressed support for the Balfour Declaration in a telegram to the British government that is poignant today:
‘We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy whose wish is to crush us. On the contrary. We consider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our common country’.
Since the early 1940s, when Jews became the majority in Haifa through the forced displacement of Arabs, the roles have switched: the mayor has always been Jewish, and the deputy mayor an Arab from the Israeli Communist Party. This is not a rule, but an organically adopted custom, and a highly unusual one in Israel – even to be a deputy official is relatively unusual for the Arab community.
Part of the reason I came here was to meet Professor Edy Kaufman and his fifth-generation Jerusalemite wife. The couple left Lisa’s hometown of Jerusalem in 2013 because they had had enough of the tensions of the city and moved to the very top of Carmel Hill, looking out over Haifa with a view of the Mediterranean Sea stretching towards Cyprus. When I arrived at their apartment, I was delighted when Edy offered me coffee in a ‘fincan‘ (pronounced ‘finjan’) – the Turkish word for cup (derived from Persian via Arabic), although Edy used it to denote the little brass pot in which he had brewed the coffee. This started a discussion about the way Ottoman Turkish words crop up in the Hebrew spoken by Israeli Jews, particularly domestic words. I asked Edy whether an Israeli in New York would use these words – ‘Certainly not – these words are local.’ It is strange to think that the Hebrew spoken in Jerusalem, which I would have assumed to be the purest form of Hebrew, is Turkish-inflected. I thought of the similar phenomenon of Turkish words in the Greek language, and in particular in parts of Greece with high proportions of the 1923 population-exchange victims, like Lesbos.
Edy has a Spanish accent which initially bewildered me; he was born in Argentina to Ukrainian parents, and came to Israel as a teenager with the rest of his family to work on a kibbutz. His wife, Lisa, is from an old Jerusalemite family; her mother was a Moroccan Sephardic Jew, and her father an Ashkenazi Jew from Russia, killed before the outbreak of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 when he was part of an ambushed medical convoy going to the Hadassah hospital in Mount Scopus. Lisa tells me her grandmother had a ‘milk brother’ – an Arab boy who was breastfed by her great-grandmother. Klein writes about this too, as something that often happened between Jewish and Arab families in the early 20th century, when a new mother found she could not breastfeed and asked a friend to help, resulting in Jewish and Arab ‘milk siblings’48 – a practice that was also common in Jewish-majority Ottoman Thessaloniki.
I was surprised when Edy mentioned that he was a fan of current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s original party, the ‘Pact of Minorities’. This party’s ethos was based on the theory that the Middle East has always been a mosaic of minorities which exists separate from empires, and that if all the minorities band together they are more numerous, and more powerful, than the Muslims. Knowing what we do of Netanyahu’s nationalist policies today, it is hard not to view such a party cynically, as the precursor to a harder anti-Palestinian agenda.
In large swathes of the Ottoman Empire, for example in most of the Balkan states, and particularly in parts of Greece like Salonika, non-Muslims formed the majority of the population for hundreds of years (and even as late as 1912, after the massacres of non-Muslim subjects in the 19th century, there were more Christian than Muslim subjects in eastern Anatolia). In the Middle East, the existence of religious communities like the Druze, Zoroastrians, Yazidis and Samaritans alongside the Christians and Jews contributed to a larger non-Muslim population than often assumed. The Ottoman Empire survived for half a millennium because of the efficiency of its administration and law enforcement; but when non-Muslims were galvanized by the notion of nationhood to break free from the empire in the 19th century, it worked.
As someone who has worked on conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine for decades, Edy is particularly attuned to the language in which we talk about coexistence. He dismisses the ‘melting pot’ as an unhelpful metaphor – identities do not simply melt into each other. He also disapproves of the word ‘tolerance’. ‘If I just tolerate someone, that is not very positive. Likewise, diversity is not enough – we have to be united in diversity.’ This makes me think of Klein’s depiction of pre-1948 Jerusalem as not a mixed but a ‘shared’ community which preceded the nation state, an abstract construction consisting of a flag, a map and an anthem, as the great historian Benedict Anderson points out in Imagined Communities – ‘shared community’ was also the term favoured by Haifa’s current mayor.
Unsurprisingly, Argentina, where Edy grew up, is a place where Jewish and Arab diaspora communities get on much better than locals in Israel and Palestine, and this occurs in the rest of Latin America; in fact, in October 2017 a declaration was signed between several Church organizations, the Latin American Jewish Congress and the Islamic Organization of Latin America and the Caribbean declaring a ‘region of interreligious coexistence’. It is easy to coexist away from the backdrop of war. While diasporic communities often become more entrenched in their attachment to a distant homeland and a corresponding, theoretical, hatred for ‘the other side’, day-to-day coexistence often flourishes more naturally than it could in a home setting plagued by conflict – I found this later when I interviewed Turkish and Greek Cypriots living and working side by side in north-east London.
I wanted to find more harmony in Haifa than I did, but one story did stick with me – that of Maxim Restaurant on the corniche, co-owned by a Jewish and an Arab family. In 2003, an Islamic militant suicide bomber walked in and blew herself up, killing twenty-one people and injuring fifty-one, including family members of both proprietors. The aim was to target a place famous for its coexistence, and the terrorist herself was someone whose life had been devastated by political oppression; her flancé was killed by IDF soldiers when she was twenty-one. What is remarkable about the tragedy, however, is that the surviving Jewish and Arab proprietors reopened the café just seven months later, with a plaque honouring the many dead, and vowing to continue the restaurant in their honour. Today, it is as busy as it was, apparently, before the bombing.
Beirut
As a nation state, Lebanon is a manifestation of semi-organized chaos. It is unique among Middle Eastern countries in its Ottoman-esque recognition of eighteen official minorities, but is liable to break into civil war at a moment’s notice (13th April, the day that civil war broke out in 1975, is still marked every year, but not the date it ended). Its politics are bewildering and unpredictable, the Saudi kidnapping of Lebanon’s prime minister, Hariri, in 2017 being a recent case in point. The Arab Spring passed without a Lebanese revolution, although one nearly started over abandoned garbage. It i
s an attention-hogging diva of a country.
The soundtrack of Beirut is dominated by car horns and the thunder of drills from ubiquitous construction sites. At night, bars in the quarters of Gemmayze and Mar Mikhael pump out music; the defining cliché of Beirutis is that they are famous for partying through war. There is a fatalistic hedonism to the nightlife that is a direct response to decades of conflict; Middle Eastern ostentation coupled with relatively liberal mores give the city its exaggerated ‘party while you can’ attitude and diamante-studded style. Away from the clubs, the more low-key focus of the city is the corniche. As the sun sets over the sea, especially on weekends, men bring plastic chairs down to the rocks and play cards while smoking shisha; on the walkway above, Christian and Muslim families parade in their Sunday best.
The ancient centre of the city – misleadingly called Downtown Beirut – has been renovated in faux-old but obviously modern style by a construction company founded by the billionaire Hariri family (former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, assassinated in 2005, was the father of current prime minister Saad al-Hariri) and largely consists of pristine malls encased in sandstone-coloured concrete, with glass facades displaying Chanel handbags worth many times the yearly income of most Beirutis. The remains of a Roman Forum are scattered in a shallow depression in the centre of this district, surrounded by churches and mosques which give a warped indication of the city’s proportional Muslim and Christian demographics. There is no Shia mosque, for example; those are to be found in the parts of the city held by Hezbollah, the Shia militant group which controls large swathes of eastern and southern Lebanon as well as much of southern Beirut.
The St George Maronite (Eastern Catholic) Cathedral, built in 1894 right next to the forum, has a neoclassical facade and booming interior, and has been restored since being bombed and defaced in the 1975–1990 civil war, as has the rival St George Cathedral opposite, built in 1772 for the Greek Orthodox community. These are the seats of the Maronite and Greek Orthodox dioceses of Beirut and both are trumped in size by the adjacent Mohammed al-Amin Mosque, a Sunni mosque built in 2005. Looking at the three buildings, there is definitely a sense that the superior size of the mosque is deliberate – if anything defines Lebanon, it is competition among its religions, and indeed a bell tower was constructed for the Maronite cathedral in 2016 exactly matching the height of the minarets of the Mohammed al-Amin Mosque.
Synagogues are notable by their absence in Beirut, considering the once-sizeable Jewish community. There is only one left, the Maghen Abraham Synagogue, built in 1925 in the Jewish quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil which was targeted, ironically, by Israeli shells in 1982 following rumours that Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization was storing weapons there. The damaged synagogue was restored in 2010, so I set out to visit it, confidently following directions on Google Maps. As I approached, I found a road block guarded by a gendarme – this is not unusual in Beirut, especially in the newly renovated Downtown area, so I tried walking past, only for the gendarme to stop me. The synagogue was closed, inaccessible to the public. For how long? I asked. The policeman shrugged. ‘Always.’
Later, I found out that the synagogue has never been reopened since the civil war, unlike the churches and mosques similarly damaged. Until the 1960s there were sixteen synagogues in Beirut, for a Jewish community several thousand strong. Lebanon was a magnet for Jews in the Middle East since the 1839 Tanzimat reforms of the late Ottoman Empire; like Jerusalem, Beirut flourished under more liberal laws for religious minorities, and Jews continued to benefit after the First World War when Lebanon came under the control of the French, who continued the tradition of power-sharing among minority communities. After the creation of Israel in 1948, although some of the city’s Jews left for the promised land, Beirut’s Jewish community actually grew as Jews from other Arab countries chose the relative tolerance of Lebanon’s multidenominational state over the increasingly hostile majority-Muslim states that had been their home for centuries.
After Lebanon’s Six Day War with Israel in 1967, however, anti-Semitism began to rise in Lebanon, and became exponentially worse after the Israeli invasion of 1982. The Jewish community in Beirut is now reduced to a few hundred who keep an extremely low profile – as the political scientist Paul Tabar puts it, ‘they have chosen to live as discreetly as possible’. A Syrian Christian I interviewed in Beirut told me about a Jewish friend of hers who gets together with other Lebanese Jews every Saturday in a kind of informal, secret Shabbat; this friend refused (politely) my request for an interview.
The presence of ubiquitous gendarmes and roadblocks in Beirut, coupled with the IDF patrols of Jerusalem, made me think about how minorities viewed ‘the authorities’ in the Ottoman Empire. The line has always been thin between law enforcement and repression, whoever is in charge. In Istanbul, the sultan’s janissaries represented power, of course, but not occupation, as the IDF represents in Jerusalem (although, if its name is to be believed, the Israeli Defence Force acts only in ‘defence’). However, when the empire was violently unravelling during the early years of the First World War, there was a similar resentment towards Ottoman soldiers in Greater Syria, especially among those subjects who saw themselves primarily as ‘Arabs’, and who resented the Turkification of the empire instigated by the Young Turks, which included the enforcement of Turkish as the official language taught in schools. As a result, previously loyal Arab subjects who had supported the Young Turk revolution began to turn against the empire, and, as had happened in the Balkan states, so too in the south-eastern reaches of the empire, nationalism took hold at the turn of the century with violent consequences.
The Maronites of Beirut were among the most prominent of the Arab nationalists who wanted a dual Arab-Turkish nation in which Arabs and Turks had equal rights and responsibilities. The historian Eugene Rogan makes the sage point that these firebrands tempered their ideology with pragmatism: they still wanted to be part of the Ottoman Empire because they feared that otherwise they might become part of a European empire (as indeed transpired under French rule, when the Maronites again showed their pragmatism by forging strong ties with the French).49 The Young Turks were having none of it. In April 1913, the Beirut Reform Society, the foremost of the Arab nationalist entities, was closed down and some members taken prisoner; a strike ensued, and Beirut entered a political crisis until the prisoners were released and the strike brought to an end. The Young Turks made a pretence of listening to the Arab nationalists, inviting delegates to Istanbul for an ‘Arab Congress’ apparently for the purpose of discussing compromise, but within three years several of the delegates had been executed in Beirut. Rogan has unearthed an obscure play called ‘Beirut On Stage’, published in 1920 by the Maronite Georges Mourad about the events of the First World War. The Lebanese characters are victims of the ‘Venality and cruelty of the Turks’ – notable scenes include local Red Crescent units blackmailing Maronite victims of typhus in Beirut, Ottoman authorities requisitioning their houses, and a rape attempt by an Ottoman Turkish soldier on a Maronite girl. While the play is melodramatic and contains hints of Hajdarpasic’s ‘authentic fantasies’, there is certainly plenty of evidence for Ottoman cruelty – for example, Beirut’s Union Square became known as Martyrs’ Square (as it still is today) because in 1916, twenty-one notable Arab nationalists were hanged for treason, singing Arab hymns as they were led to the gallows. Cemal Pasha, who as Governor of Syria was responsible for these executions, became known as ‘Cemal the blood-shedder’ thereafter.
Unsurprisingly, many Lebanese subjects were glad to be free of Ottoman rule. The French Mandate (1923 until independence in 1943) continued a version of the Ottoman millet system with recognized minorities; the Lebanese constitution of 1926 states that Christians and Muslims should have equal representation and rights, something that theoretically holds today – with big caveats.
While the Lebanese diaspora is vast – around 14 million – the country itself is home to roughly 6 million, includ
ing more than a million Syrian refugees and around 175,000 Palestinian refugees. Demographics are hazy, since the last census was conducted in 1932, but there are eighteen official minorities, including various Orthodox and Catholic denominations, Shia and Sunni Muslims, the Jews, and the Druze. Seats in parliament are allocated on a 50/50 basis for Christians and Muslims. Parliament is headed by a troika: the president is a Maronite Christian, the Speaker of Parliament a Shia Muslim and the prime minister a Sunni Muslim; this division of power is growing more controversial as Sunnis are now assumed to be the largest minority in the country, including refugees. Elections present a divisive form of democracy based on partisanship. The representation of minorities is theoretically but not in reality proportional; voting blocs are based on long-standing family and community-based loyalties – essentially tribalism – and there is no real incentive to cooperate for the greater good of all minorities. ‘But compare to other Arab countries!’ some say, in Lebanon’s defence. A comparison to Syria, Yemen or Egypt does not obviate the country’s problems.
