Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness

It has now been generally established that the Arab reaction to Zionism antedated the Balfour declaration of 1917, and was both a local Palestinian and a generalized pan-Arab phenomenon almost from its inception. Chapter 5 touched on the way in which Zionism became an issue in Arab political discourse beyond the confines of Palestine itself from the first stages of active Arab opposition to Zionist colonization early in the twentieth century. This was especially true, and can be perceived especially clearly, after the Ottoman Revolution of 1908 when, as we have seen, the reimposition of the 1876 Constitution resulted in the freeing of party political activity and the growth of the press throughout the Empire.

As was mentioned in chapter 3, newspapers and periodicals founded after 1908 in Beirut and other centers of Arab intellectual life played a major role in the politics and cultural life of the period, drawing on the model provided by the thriving Egyptian press, in which Syrian emigrés were extremely active.¹ Thanks to the proliferation of newspapers after 1908, it suddenly becomes possible for the researcher to find a wealth of source material regarding virtually all the important political issues of the pre-World War I period,² among them the problem of Zionist settlement in Palestine. With the appearance of this plethora of newspapers and periodicals, a society which until that point seemed almost opaque in many respects is suddenly illuminated to the historical observer.

Although it is hard to discern much about popular or even elite sentiment given this opaqueness engendered by the censorship and political repression that prevailed before 1908, some elements of the very earliest reactions to Zionism, both in Palestine and in the Empire as a whole, are clear. They seem to have focused mainly on the problems caused for the local population and the government by the arrival of large numbers of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe who carried foreign passports, mainly Russian and Austro-Hungarian, with all that implied for increased European interference in the affairs of the Empire. This was a function not only of the tenuous nature of Ottoman relations with these two eastern European empires, but also of the fact that Britain had established itself as the protector of the Jews of the Ottoman empire (among other minority groups, such as the Druze), and like other European powers used the situation of its various protègés as a pretext for intervention in Ottoman domestic affairs.³ The potential problems posed by the continuous increase in the number of foreigners in Palestine, many of whom violated Ottoman regulations and remained after their three-month permits had expired, and the reluctance of many of these immigrants to adopt Ottoman nationality, are constant themes in the early reactions to Zionism. These complaints were almost independent of any political ambitions the immigrants might have harbored, and these ambitions indeed may not have been fully apparent to most Ottoman and Arab observers at the outset.

But with the first Zionist Congress in 1897, and with the concomitant launching of modern political Zionism in an institutionalized form, this was to change. Gradually, as more was learned about the nature and objectives of the Zionist movement, mainly from reports of the statements and speeches made by its leaders in Europe, and partly from its activities in Palestine, and as Zionist settlement and land purchase accelerated in the first years of the twentieth century, many throughout the Empire came to fear the creation of yet another Ottoman “nationality problem.” Given the extent of the problems caused for the Empire by similar problems in other regions, particularly the Balkans, such concern on the part of many Ottomans was understandable. The reaction among some was even more extreme: particularly among Palestinians, the fear grew that the country’s existing Arab population might be swamped in a tide of newcomers and that Palestine might one day cease to be an Arab country. And with the growth of peasant resistance, especially after the turn of the twentieth century, which was examined in the previous chapter, there was considerable evidence from the Palestinian countryside that appeared to substantiate these fears.

The press played a central role in the development of these Arab attitudes to Zionism, as we have already begun to see. Newspapers informed their readers not only of the day-to-day details of the progress of colonization in the independent sanjaq of Jerusalem and the southern sanjaqs of the vilayet of Beirut, but also explained to them the aims and extent of the Zionist movement as a whole, sometimes in an exaggerated or distorted fashion, and reported news of the movement’s activities throughout Europe. Thus, beginning in 1908, Arabic-language papers began to reflect a mounting concern about the dangers posed by Zionist colonization to the indigenous population of Palestine, and ultimately to that of surrounding regions. This is among the central conclusions that emerge from a survey of several hundred articles on Zionism published in a number of the most important Arabic-language newspapers during the Ottoman Constitutional period, 1908–14, on which this chapter is based.⁴

This survey shows that although this concern about Zionism was naturally intense in the Palestinian press, it was also considerable in many papers in Cairo and Beirut, the leading publishing centers of the Arabic-speaking world, as well as in newspapers in other cities, such as Damascus. The founding of the Zionist movement, and the establishment of 32 settlements in Palestine between 1897 and 1914⁵ (21 others had been established before the first date), seem clearly to have been perceived regionally, and not just in Palestine itself, as an ominous and potentially threatening phenomenon. Indeed, it was often the press in Cairo, or Beirut, or Damascus, which first raised a concern or expressed a theme, only to have it picked up by newspapers in Palestine, which would write editorials of their own or reprint the original article. Similarly, articles from Palestinian papers were often reprinted elsewhere, first alerting readers far beyond the confines of Palestine to a new trend or an important event relating to Zionist settlement.

Given the overlapping identities and the fluid boundaries of the period, none of this should be surprising. Northern Palestine was of course part of the Beirut vilayet, and the press in Beirut was therefore writing about events in a province of which it was the capital when it described the progress of Zionist settlement in Marj Ibn ‘Amir or eastern Galilee. Many Beirutis, moreover, had important commercial interests in Palestine, among them a number of major landowners. In Cairo, many of the newspaper editors, and many of their readers, were what we would today call Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians, although they were then all called Syrians—or shawam—by Egyptians (indeed this term is still in use), and many of them were deeply concerned with events throughout what they thought of as their home region of bilad al-Sham, including Palestine. Finally, for Damascenes and other Syrians, events in Palestine were on their doorstep, as many Syrians owned land there, and many Damascus families were related by marriage to others in Jerusalem, Nablus, and elsewhere in Palestine. The press reflected this pre-World War I reality, before the European partitions of the postwar years imposed hard and fast frontiers where before there had only been looser Ottoman administrative boundaries.

Ideally, a study of the early treatment of Zionism in the Arab press would survey the published issues of papers from all parts of bilad al-sham, as well as Cairo and Istanbul, and perhaps beyond, for the entire Constitutional period of 1908 to 1914, and where possible even before that. Many issues of some newspapers published during this period are unavailable, however, while others paid varying amounts of attention to the subject of Zionism. In the end, the survey on which this chapter is based examined in detail the issues published over at least three years of the two most important Palestinian newspapers of the era, the two major Cairo papers owned and edited by individuals originating in Syria and which devoted attention to affairs in that region, as well as five newspapers published in Beirut, and one in Damascus, the most widely read of its day in that city. In addition to these ten newspapers surveyed for at least three years of this six-year period, available issues of several other newspapers and periodicals from other cities of the region were also examined, but less intensively. The result offers sufficient diversity, geographically and otherwise, to be considered broadly representative of the treatment of Zionism by the Arabic press from 1908 until 1914.

A total of 22 newspapers and periodicals were thus surveyed in whole or in part for purposes of this analysis, of which ten newspapers were available in continuous runs of at least three years during times when the issue of Zionism was the subject of lively debate, and could therefore be used for purposes of comparison. These ten include the leading Palestinian paper to focus on Zionism, al-Karmil, edited in Haifa by Najib Nassar, as well as Filastin, published in Jaffa by ‘Isa and Yusuf al-‘Isa, both of which were discussed briefly in chapter 3;⁶ al-Mufid, edited by ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraisi and Fuad Hantas;⁷ the Damascus paper al-Muqtabas, edited by Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali and his brother Ahmad, to which extensive reference has already been made;⁸ the two leading Cairo dailies, al-Muqattam, owned by Ya‘qub Sarruf, Faris Nimr, and Bishara Taqla, and al-Ahram, edited by Dawud Barakat; and five Beirut papers: Lisan al-Hal, owned by Khalil Sarkis; al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, edited by Shaykh Ahmed Hassan Tabbara; al-Haqiqa, edited by Kamal ‘Abbas; and al-Iqbal, edited by ‘Abd al-Basit al-Unsi. All were dailies except the latter two, which appeared biweekly and weekly respectively, and al-Karmil and Filastin, which were biweeklies during this period.⁹ The remaining twelve newspapers and periodicals, which were available only for periods of under three years, or for which many issues are missing among the surviving copies, are referred to selectively in the course of this chapter.¹⁰

A total of well over 10,000 issues of these ten papers were examined for this study, yielding more than 600 articles on Zionism (more than 650 articles on Zionism were found in all 22 publications). The greatest interest in the question of Zionism is apparent in the years 1911–13, when more than 450 of these articles were published, notwithstanding the extensive press coverage given first to the Libyan and then to the Balkan wars in those years. The year 1911, during which 286 such articles were published in these ten papers, in many ways marked the high point in the press controversy over Zionism. Thereafter, interest continued in the subject, with escalating warnings about the dangers inherent in Zionist colonization, and reports on its progress and on the actions of Zionist bodies abroad, but without the same frequency.

The only exception to the uniformly negative reaction to Zionism of all 22 publications surveyed was al-Muqattam. Their correspondent in Palestine was Nisim Malul, an Egyptian Jewish newspaper editor fluent in Arabic who had earlier founded two short-lived papers in Egypt, al-Nasr in Alexandria in 1903, and al-Salam in Cairo in 1910, and later was to publish al-Salam briefly in Jaffa in 1920.¹¹ Malul worked for the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization founded in Jaffa in 1908, writing reports on the Arabic press for the Central Office of the Organization in Cologne and later in Berlin which are cited extensively in Neville Mandel’s The Arab and Zionism before World War I.¹² Even in the columns of al-Muqattam, however, which was the only paper of all 22 examined to carry more pro-Zionist than anti-Zionist articles, numerous writers vigorously opposed Zionism, supported by letters to the editor from anti-Zionist readers.

A word is in order on how an evaluation of a newspaper’s position on Zionism was made. To make an assessment, articles on the subject were classified according to three broad categories: “pro-Zionist”; “anti-Zionist”; and “other,” the last category including numerous articles primarily of an informative nature. Although these classifications are far from rigid, and are by no means precise (e.g., apparently “pro-Zionist” articles in a strongly anti-Zionist paper were often merely reprints of material by Zionists published for the information of the readers), a clear picture of the intensity of a newspaper’s position on the Zionist issue could be obtained. While the results will be referred to throughout the newspaper-by-newspaper survey that follows, the most striking conclusion to emerge from this assessment is that with the one exception just mentioned, all the newspapers surveyed were anti-Zionist. Together with the information on the frequency of appearance of articles on Zionism in these papers, these data give the broad outlines of the importance of the Zionist question in the Arab press during this period, as it is reflected in the ten papers intensively surveyed, and twelve others.

The following section analyzes each of these ten papers in terms of its position on the Zionist issue, after which the chapter concludes with an assessment of some of the broad trends discernible in the treatment of this question in the Arab press before World War I.

Of the ten Arabic-language newspapers for which issues covering more than three years were available, al-Karmil was by far the most outspoken in its opposition to Zionism. Named for Mount Carmel, which overlooks Haifa Bay, it was first published in December 1908, and almost immediately became the primary vehicle of an extensive campaign against Zionist settlement in Palestine. That campaign, which involved many organs of the Syrian press, came to a peak in 1911. During that year alone, al-Karmil carried 73 articles on Zionism, or an average of one in nearly every one of its almost 100 issues. In the total of 330 issues surveyed, al-Karmil published 134 articles on Zionism, including 45 editorials or leading articles.

The owner and editor of the newspaper, and often the writer of much of its contents, Najib Nassar did not depend on sheer volume to convince his readers of the extent of the danger the Zionist movement represented to Palestine.¹³ In addition to news items from Galilee and other parts of Palestine, and his own persuasive editorials (a remarkable number of which were reprinted in other Syrian papers, as we shall see), he re-published articles on Zionism from al-Muqattam, al-Ahram, al-Mufid, al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani and other Cairo and Beirut newspapers, as well as the Damascus paper al-Muqtabas, al-Hadara of Istanbul, and Filastin—all, except al-Muqattam, being strong opponents of Zionism.

Not content with his own and other editors’ arguments against the Zionist movement, Nassar covered in detail the activities of the various branches of the Zionist colonization movement in Palestine, and of their parent organizations abroad. As a result, other anti-Zionist papers soon came to depend on al-Karmil for much of their information on these activities. At the same time, the owner-editor of al-Karmil attempted to give his readers extensive background information on the history, objectives, and significance of the Zionist movement. For this purpose he published condensed translations of a lengthy article on Zionism from the Encyclopedia Judaica. Nassar eventually issued this sixteen-part series, published from March until June 1911, as a 65-page booklet under the title al-Sihyuniyya: Tarikhuha, gharaduha, ahamiyyatuha [Zionism: Its history, objective and importance].¹⁴ It concluded by describing the efforts of Theodor Herzl on behalf of Zionism, provoking the observation by Nassar to his readers that what Palestine needed in opposing Zionism was “sincere leaders like Herzl who will forget their private interests in favor of the public good.” Nassar went on: “We have many men like Herzl; all they lack is a realization of their own abilities, and the courage to take the first step. Let such men appear, and not hesitate, and circumstances will favor them, for men’s ideas have matured and we are ready.”¹⁵

Nassar’s opposition to Zionism was linked to a strong feeling of patriotic devotion to Palestine. In an editorial in August 1913, for example, he commented on the recent Zionist Congress, calling for a simultaneous conference to be held in Nablus “while others are meeting to take over our country and our farms.”¹⁶ This and many similar instances of local patriotism were matched by Nassar’s parallel devotion to Arab nationalism in its broader pan-Arab sense. Some of the motivation for this orientation in Nassar’s case and that of many other Arabist thinkers of this period was what was perceived as the bias of the ruling CUP in favor of Zionism.¹⁷ Thus Nassar, whose newspaper in 1908 and 1909 reflected a positive approach to the CUP, by 1911 had become a fervent opponent of the ruling party and supporter of the Ottoman opposition with which most Arabists were by this stage affiliated.¹⁸ Such a development in the overall political line taken by al-Karmil appears to have followed closely, and probably to have been largely influenced by, Nassar’s increasingly uncompromising opposition to Zionism. In this respect, Najib Nassar’s evolution can be seen as representative of that of numerous other Arab political and intellectual figures during this period, although in other respects, such as the sophistication and tenaciousness of his opposition to Zionism, he was definitely a pioneer among Palestinian and Arab journalists.

Although it did not commence publication until January 1911, more than two years after al-Karmil, Filastin soon became its rival both inside and outside Palestine as an opponent of Zionism, and indeed during the Mandate became the more important newspaper of the two, and one of the country’s main dailies. While Zionism was one of the central issues on which the newspaper’s owners and editors, Yusuf and ‘Isa al-‘Isa, focused, others were also important. These included the encouragement of education,¹⁹ the struggle of the Arab Orthodox to free their church from domination by the Greek higher clergy,²⁰ and the poor condition of the peasantry.²¹ In many cases, these other issues came to be connected to Zionism, whether in terms of the local patriotism which engendered much of the editors’ concern for education, the questions of religious and national identity which were raised by the struggle within the Orthodox church, or the problem of rural poverty with its inevitable linkage to land-sales to the Zionist movement and the consequent dispossession of the fellahin.

In its opposition to Zionism, Filastin rapidly became quite as uncompromising as al-Karmil. The concern for the lot of the peasantry expressed in articles on rural conditions, and shown also in the paper’s policy of sending a copy of each issue to every village in the Jaffa region, was at the root of the editors’ fears regarding Zionism. While in early issues of the paper problems such as the Ottoman authorities’ failure to control Jewish immigration and the large numbers of foreigners entering the country were at the center of the critique of Zionism in Filastin,²² in time the problems of peasant dispossession by Zionist land-purchase, and the possibility that the entire Arab population of Palestine might in time be dispossessed by the newcomers, came to the fore. From publishing only a few articles on Zionism every month in its first year, this biweekly was soon publishing an article or more per issue on the subject.

Very soon, Filastin came to be relied upon by newspapers throughout the region for news of Zionist colonization in Palestine, and eventually enjoyed the same high regard as did al-Karmil. Articles from the paper were reprinted widely, and appear to have had a major impact in shaping how Palestinians and other Arabs came to see Zionism. Through stress on this issue, and others which concerned the population of the Jerusalem sanjaq and the country as a whole, Filastin played a role in shaping a sense of Palestinian identity, which clearly was one of its main aims, given that its title means “Palestine.” At the same time, through the influence of its articles reprinted in Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo, Filastin helped to establish the question of Zionism as one that concerned all Arabs. Like Najib Nassar, ‘Isa al-‘Isa and his cousin Yusuf can thus be seen as pioneers of an unwavering Palestinian and pan-Arab opposition to Zionism, which was to continue and intensify in later years.

The newspaper that perhaps came closest to the fervor of al-Karmil in its opposition to Zionism was al-Mufid. As unofficial mouthpiece of the Arab nationalist secret society al-Fatat,²³ it had an influence greater than might at first appear, over a region that stretched far beyond the borders of the Beirut vilayet (which of course included northern Palestine). Although issues of the paper are only available for three years, it is clear that al-Mufid was, together with al-Karmil, Filastin, and al-Muqtabas, the most persistent and determined opponent of Zionism in the Arabic-language press of the period. This is borne out by the relatively large number of articles it carried on the subject—a total of 71, 52 of them in 1911 alone—and by the fact that 22 of the newspaper’s editorials were devoted to it, most of them also in 1911. For a period of nine months during the latter year, al-Mufid carried almost one article on Zionism every three days, many of them violently opposing the sale of state lands to foreigners or their agents, who it was feared were working for the Zionist movement. A large proportion of these articles and others in the Arab press in 1911 dealt with a proposal by Dr. Najib Asfar to buy up Ottoman state lands, a project which was thought to be backed by the Zionists.²⁴ These fears were almost surely misplaced, but they indicate the degree of alarm Zionism had already aroused in certain circles by 1911. During the Mandate, as well as after 1967 in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the issue of the limits and status of former Ottoman “state lands” and control over them continued to be a vital one.

Together with al-Karmil (the two papers frequently reprinted one another’s editorials and news reports),²⁵ al-Mufid laid great emphasis on the importance of protecting the indigenous Palestinian peasantry from being expelled from its ancestral farmland to make way for colonists from Europe.²⁶ And like the Haifa paper, it was scathing in its condemnation of those Arab landlords who sold their land to the Zionists. Not surprisingly, however, given its Arabist political orientation, al-Mufid’s greatest ire was reserved for the CUP-dominated government, which it described as being at best lax in its enforcement of laws hindering Zionist immigration and land-purchase, and at worst as being in complicity with the Zionists, a charge that came to be widely believed in many Arab circles. Soon after the CUP government’s fall in 1912, al-Mufid wrote:

. . . all we said about the Zionist question was totally ignored while the Unionists held power over the nation and accommodated the Zionists. Then we raised cry after cry with no response. Now things have changed and the new government should pay attention to what the previous one ignored. The people of the country emigrate to America, while the Zionists immigrate into our country: one day, if things go on like this, the Arab in his own country will become worse off than an orphan at the tables of the stingy.²⁷

Perhaps the main significance of al-Mufid’s opposition to Zionism lies in its linking of the Arabism that it championed so staunchly with resistance to what it described as an alien colonizing movement that threatened to split the Arab world in half. The fiery editorials of its young owner-editors, together with the many articles written for it by older leaders of the Arab movement such as Shukri al-‘Asali and Rafiq al-‘Azm, undoubtedly had a potent effect on the paper’s strongly Arabist readership, and inculcated them with an intense wariness of Zionism. This connection between Arabism and anti-Zionism was to continue in later years in the Arab nationalist press of Lebanon and Syria and beyond. Significantly, it emphasized the linkage between Arabism and the problems posed by Zionism, which might otherwise have been seen as solely a Palestinian concern.

Edited by the noted literary and political figure Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali and his brother Ahmad, al-Muqtabas was one of the era’s most active opponents of Zionism, carrying the largest number of articles on Zionism of any newspaper surveyed, with the exception of al-Karmil. These included fifteen articles reprinted from the latter, three from Filastin, and numerous other articles reprinted from other papers. This is doubly important because of the wide influence of al-Muqtabas, which was described by French consular reports as the most important Damascus paper.²⁸ Closed down by the Ottoman authorities repeatedly for its Arabist political line, it was forced to change its name, once to al-Umma in 1909–10, and once to al-Qabas in 1913–14. During the latter period, Shukri al-‘Asali is listed as its owner, and he seems to have collaborated with its editors, Muhammad and Ahmad Kurd ‘Ali, throughout, except in 1911–1912, when he was in Istanbul representing Damascus in the Ottoman Parliament.

Two related themes stand out in the many articles on Zionism carried by this newspaper: the first is the complicity with the foreign colonizers of Arab landowners who sell land to Zionist settlers; and the second is the acute observation that Zionist successes are before anything else a function of the failure of the Arabs to organize themselves for resistance. In the first context, al-Muqtabas carried many articles, some reprinted from al-Karmil and some based on the experience of al-‘Asali, detailing how large Arab landowners were involved in sales of land to the colonizers.²⁹ In one such article, Najib Nassar wrote that those who should be leaders themselves are selling their country cheaply.³⁰ He added in another article, in which he held up Saladin as a heroic example of unbending resistance to invasion, that if the current generation had half the patriotism, enthusiasm, and love of country as that which had faced the Crusaders, the Zionists could not dream of regaining Palestine.³¹

The second theme, that of self-criticism for Arab failures, is important because of the way it contrasts with many articles in other papers which ascribe the success of Zionism in Palestine solely to superior financial resources, foreign support, or the laxity of the Ottoman authorities. These are mentioned frequently as factors by al-Muqtabas, but the newspaper leaves its reader with the unmistakable impression that Arab complacency, disunity, greed, and self-interest were more important reasons for Zionist success and Arab failure than the strength of the settler movement itself. Commenting on a report of Zionist activities in 1911, Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali wrote: “Our slowness to resist the Israelites makes one envious of their vigor.”³² Two years later, an article reprinted from Filastin made a similar point, praising the way in which the Zionists evinced solidarity, and bemoaning the lack of it among the Arabs.³³ Like al-Mufid, al-Muqtabas adhered to an Arabist political line during this period, and like the Beirut newspaper, it forcefully espoused the argument that Zionism constituted a shared Arab problem, and that resisting it was a joint Arab cause.

Although neither of these two newspapers carried as many articles on Zionism as the four we have just discussed—and in relative terms carried far fewer—both al-Ahram and al-Muqattam played a central role in the controversy over Zionism in the Arabic press during the constitutional period. This was because these two Cairo dailies had a readership and prestige far greater than that of the papers published in Syria, most of them founded after the 1908 Revolution. Established in 1876 and 1889 respectively, each of these two papers had press runs of well over 5,000 copies according to some sources.³⁴ Their prestige derived both from their age and journalistic professionalism, and from the fact that during the censorship of the Hamidian period they had remained free to write without hindrance about the political events of the day from their base in Cairo. Even after the 1908 Revolution and the growth of a vigorous local press in the cities of Syria, both papers retained an extensive readership there, and remained very influential. In addition, the identification of al-Ahram with France’s Middle East policy, and of al-Muqattam with that of Britain, made them all the more necessary reading for the politically aware in a region that was exposed to the ambitions of both powers.

While the two newspapers published a similar number of articles on Zionism from 1908 until 1914—65 in al-Muqattam and 63 in al-Ahram—there were major differences in their treatment of this issue, and indeed in their general political line. The most noticeable difference was the tendency of al-Muqattam, particularly pronounced at the beginning of this period and less so at the end, to justify and show sympathy for the Zionist movement. As has already been explained, this was largely the effect of the articles written for the paper by Nisim Malul in Jaffa. In addition to Malul, al-Muqattam had a number of correspondents—many of them apparently Egyptian Jews committed to Zionism such as a certain “Jacques Levy” of Tanta—who wrote regularly to the paper in support of Zionism and in answer to articles opposing it which had appeared in al-Muqattam and other papers.³⁵ But even al-Muqattam appears to have been affected by the trend in the rest of the region insofar as Zionism was concerned, for beginning in 1909 and 1910, and growing more numerous in the following years, articles appeared that strongly opposed the Zionist movement, several of them by Palestinian authors. At the same time, the editorial line of the paper vis-à-vis the CUP underwent a gradual transformation from support to opposition, with a corresponding increase in sympathy for Arabism and the growing demands for reforms and decentralization in the Arab provinces of the Empire.

Beginning in 1911, al-Muqattam developed into a forum for a heated dialogue between several of its pro-Zionist contributors and a number of prominent Arab writers and political figures such as Rafiq al-‘Azm and Shakib Arslan.³⁶ It also received articles from Dr. Shibli Shmayyil and ‘Isa al-‘Isa, co-editor of Filastin, supporting the opponents of Zionism in this ongoing controversy. Ironically, some of the strongest and most coherent arguments against Zionism in the pre-World War I period can be found in the pages of al-Muqattam from 1911 until 1914, in the context of these varied responses to the claims made by Malul and other Zionist sympathizers in their own articles in the paper. These were claims that were to be heard for many years, some of which have been touched on in our discussion of the 1911 Ottoman parliamentary debate on Zionism, and Ruhi al-Khalidi’s manuscript on Zionism: Zionism, these writers asserted, was good for Palestine, would bring in much-needed capital, would provide employment for the indigenous population, and had no ulterior political aspirations to rule over the country.

Among the most notable responses to these claims is an article by Shakib Arslan in January 1912, in which he pours scorn on Malul’s claim in an earlier article that ruin will befall Palestine if Zionist colonization is halted. The Zionists, he went on, are benefiting from the country far more than it is benefiting from their presence, and Malul is guilty of gross exaggeration when he describes the blessings of Zionism for Palestine.³⁷ An article in 1914 by Muhammad ‘Abd al-Rahman al-‘Alami alluded to another side of the problem, pointing out that the Zionists are able to buy up land in Palestine only because of the dereliction of its duty by the local government, which he emphasized was made up of rich men willing to sacrifice the whole of Palestine for their own personal benefit.³⁸ A third article by the noted writer Shibli Shmayyil a few days later emphatically stressed that the Zionists were outsiders and aliens (dukhala’ ghuraba’) engaged in stealing the land from its rightful owners. He added that while opposing Zionism, the Arabs must learn from it, competing with it in developing the land and in cultural work.³⁹

Other articles by al-‘Alami and ‘Isa al-‘Isa in May 1914 show that at least the Palestinian opponents of Zionism were well acquainted with the objectives of the Zionist movement as defined by its leaders, and were not taken in by the honeyed words of Malul and others regarding the benign nature of Zionist political objectives in Palestine. Thus, al-‘Alami cited the resolutions of the Basle Congress of the movement as well as a declaration by Max Nordau, a close collaborator of Herzl, regarding Zionist aims in Palestine, while ‘Isa al-‘Isa quoted not only the resolutions of the Basle Congress, and the words of Nordau regarding the undesirability of integration with the local population of Palestine, but also an inflammatory statement by the Russian Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin in direct contradiction to the conciliatory tone found in articles by Zionist writers in al-Muqattam.⁴⁰

Thus even in the columns of the only major Arabic-language paper surveyed that showed any sympathy for the Zionist cause, the reader of the day could find compelling arguments refuting those adduced by the Zionists to prove the harmlessness of their enterprise in Palestine to the country’s Arab inhabitants. In spite of the numerous articles by Malul and others, it is hard to avoid the impression that by 1914 the anti-Zionists were getting the best of the argument, even in the pages of al-Muqattam.

Al-Ahram’s editorial line, by contrast with that of al-Muqattam, was generally anti-Zionist, with occasional pro-Zionist articles, usually from readers reacting to editorials or articles from its correspondents critical of Zionism. This newspaper appears to have been the first during our period to raise the question of Zionism, with two articles in December 1908. The first, with the ominous title “The Ambitions of the Zionists in Palestine,” reported a speech by a Zionist leader in Cairo in which the speaker expressed the hope that two million Jews would settle in Palestine.⁴¹ The second article, a week later, stated that the Zionists did not want to establish a separate government for themselves in Palestine, but only desired to live in equality with its inhabitants. Al-Ahram ’s editors commented warily on these declarations, saying that Zionist immigrants would be welcome only if they abandoned their foreign citizenship and became loyal Ottoman citizens. They added that concentration of the immigrants in one area was also unacceptable.⁴²

Both of these complaints—that most immigrants retained their foreign nationality, and that they were concentrated in a few areas—were in fact old objections by the local Palestinian population to the Zionist colonization movement, and continued to be central themes of the opposition to Zionism during the Constitutional era. The far-sightedness of the editors of al-Ahram can be deduced from their response in July 1909 to a letter from Jacques Tantawi (presumably the same Jacques Levy of Tanta who wrote repeatedly to al-Ahram and al-Muqattam), who protested that the Zionists were loyal Ottoman patriots. Their answer—that any Jew was welcome to settle in the Empire, as long as the colonists were not concentrated in one region, for that “might lead them to aspire to establish a state within a state, even if that was not part of their plans on the day they immigrated”—sounds strangely prophetic in view of subsequent events.⁴³

Notably, although the press of Bilad al-Sham appears to have begun to take the Zionist issue seriously in 1909—spearheaded by al-Karmil—more articles were carried during that year in both al-Ahram and al-Muqattam than in any of the other papers surveyed for this study. For all the importance of al-Karmil in sounding the alarm against Zionism, it indeed seems clear that these two prestigious Cairo newspapers, with their wide circulation in Egypt and far beyond its borders, played an important vanguard role in awakening readers throughout the Arab world to the earliest stages of a problem that has played such a central part in its political life since then.

Seen in this light, even the pro-Zionist articles carried in these papers played a positive function in terms of Arab opposition to Zionism. Such articles seem to have provoked and aroused Arab readers, particularly those in Palestine, who could see with their own eyes what the Zionists were in fact doing, and set that against the honeyed words of writers favorable to Zionism. At the same time, they could compare the soothing arguments of pro-Zionist writers in the two papers who sought to assure them of the benign nature of Zionist intentions, with the blunt and disturbing words of Zionist leaders directed to European and Zionist audiences. Although this was a different function from that of the four newspapers previously surveyed, it was in many ways more important, for the heated dialogues in these two papers are on the whole more convincing rebuttals of Zionist arguments than many of the onesided anti-Zionist diatribes in the pages of the Syrian press.

Of the remaining papers surveyed, four were published in Beirut and were anti-Zionist in their editorial line, although all printed an occasional pro-Zionist article. However, two major differences separate Lisan al-Hal from the other three—al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, al-Haqiqa, and al-Iqbal: It was a strong supporter of the CUP, and its editor was a Christian. It might be added that Lisan al-Hal was the oldest of the four papers, having been founded in 1877, and also probably had the largest circulation of any Beirut daily, and perhaps the largest of any daily in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire.⁴⁴

Mention of the religion of the owner of this paper requires some explanation, for the owners or editors of four of the six papers we have discussed (al-Karmil, Filastin, al-Ahram, and al-Muqattam) were also Christian, but no reference has been made to this fact. The point has been raised here because of a serious misconception to be found in Neville Mandel’s book, regarding the relations between the religious affiliation of a newspaper’s owners or editors, and its pro- or anti-Zionist editorial line. From the regular monitoring of the Arab press by the Palestine Office of the Zionist organization in Jaffa, which was begun in 1911 by Nisim Malul, and specifically citing his analysis of the Beirut and Damascus press in the first half of 1912, Mandel concludes that “in Beirut and Damascus, a newspaper’s stand in respect of Zionism was as much a function of its editor’s religion as of his politics.”⁴⁵

Mandel claims that in these two cities, anti-CUP papers—“almost invariably edited by Muslims”—were anti-Zionist as well as anti-Christian, while papers edited by Christians were generally pro-CUP and either friendly or neutral toward the Zionists: “In other words, Muslim editors in Beirut and Damascus tended to be averse to everything that was non-Muslim and non-Arab.”⁴⁶ Leaving aside the casual bigotry of the last statement (whose falseness can be proven via a perusal of al-Mufid, al-Muqtabis, or al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, with their absence of the slightest hint of religious intolerance, their many articles by Christian writers, and in the case of the former, al-‘Uraisi’s outspoken admiration for European culture⁴⁷), Mandel would appear to be completely wrong in his assessment. Whatever conclusions Malul and the Zionist Organization’s Palestine Office in Jaffa may have come to on this subject, it is absolutely clear from the ample evidence available in the extensive number of issues of the Arabic-language press of the period still extant that pro-CUP papers edited by Christians were generally as outspoken in their opposition to Zionism as anti-CUP ones edited by Muslims.

It is true that no final conclusion can be reached about the Arabic press as a whole on the basis of the limited sample of newspapers discussed here for several reasons: only one of the ten papers surveyed in full was published in Damascus; of the Beirut papers only one was edited by a Christian; and of the remaining twelve papers not discussed in detail, all were either unavailable for a sufficiently long period, or did not publish a significant number of articles on Zionism. Nevertheless, Mandel himself has not utilized any Beirut or Damascus daily newspaper (as noted, he relies mainly on Malul’s press reports), and his usually reliable contemporary Zionist sources seem in this case to have done him a disservice. For not only was Lisan al-Hal—edited by a Christian—firmly anti-Zionist, publishing nine articles against Zionism and only three in favor over the period examined; but also three other Syrian papers edited by Christians of which the available issues were checked for purposes of this study showed no pro-Zionist bias, and if anything tended to be anti-Zionist. Of these, one was a Beirut paper, al-Barq, edited by Bishara al-Khuri (later the first president of an independent Lebanon); another a Tripoli biweekly, al-Hawadeth, edited by Lutfallah Khlat; and the third was the Aleppo paper al-Sha’b, owned and edited by Leon Shawqatly and Fathallah Qastun.⁴⁸

While al-Khuri’s paper was firmly pro-CUP, the latter two opposed the Unionists, with the first supporting the reform and decentralization movement, and the second openly espousing a strongly Arabist line. As for their position on Zionism, it is clear that none of them was favorable to it, even from the limited number of issues available to us. A 1910 article in al-Sha‘b, for example, warns against a large-scale project to develop state lands in Palestine which, it was feared, was backed by Zionist and other foreign interests. The article pointed out that the British had originally gained control over India via a commercial company that developed a privileged position for itself in the country.⁴⁹ Yet another article in the same paper, written by Rafiq al-‘Azm and reprinted in February 1911 from the Arabist Istanbul paper al-Hadara, warned against Zionist colonization of Palestine for fear that the country would be lost to the settlers. It emphasized the poor state of the Muslim and Christian villages in the country when compared with the Jewish settlements.⁵⁰ A third article, printed four days later, reported the speech of an Aleppo deputy in the Ottoman Parliament, Nafi‘ al-Jabiri, who strongly opposed the land-development project in Palestine mentioned above, for similar reasons.⁵¹ The other two papers similarly show no pro-Zionist bias.

As for Lisan al-Hal, perhaps the most important pro-CUP organ in the Arab provinces, it contains little to bear out Mandel’s contention, based on Mahal’s reports, that the Christian-edited pro-CUP press was necessarily any less anti-Zionist than Muslim-edited anti-CUP papers. A 1911 article in Lisan al-Hal reported a speech by the opposition leader Isma‘il Bey in the Ottoman Chamber warning that the objective of the Zionist movement is the establishment of a separate government in Palestine.⁵² A further article a few months later by Jubran Matar, writing from Palestine, described the progress of Zionist colonization in alarmist tones, and concluded by declaring: “If we observe all this heady activity, and we realize the great extent of the accumulated power it represents, don’t we begin to wonder whether Palestine will soon belong to them?”⁵³

Another article in Lisan al-Hal, written in 1914 by ‘Abd al-Ra’uf Khayyal of Gaza, declared that the blame for what is happening in Palestine should be shouldered by the citizens themselves, and not ascribed to the Zionists or the government. They should act instead of talking and writing, imitate the industriousness of the Zionists, and work to oppose their settler movement, which is on its way to taking over Palestine. He went on to warn the nation to beware: “Otherwise you will become the foreigners, and the foreigners will become the citizens.”⁵⁴ While Lisan al-Hal is clearly trying to deflect criticism over the issue of Zionism from the CUP government it supported with this article—what is happening in Palestine, it argues, is not the government’s fault, but that of the citizens themselves—the newspaper’s stance critical of Zionism is nevertheless unmistakable.

From this brief review of only a few papers edited by Christians, it should be clear that Mandel’s sweeping generalizations rest on limited and misleading evidence, and are in the main incorrect. There was little correlation between journalists’ religion and their position on Zionism, and only somewhat more between their stand vis-à-vis the CUP and their attitude to Zionism, although in general anti-CUP papers were strongly anti-Zionist, pro-CUP papers slightly less so. Moreover, there is no apparent reason why their religion should affect editors so much in Beirut and Damascus, and so little in Cairo, Haifa, and Jaffa. Mandel admits that both Filastin and al-Karmil, as well as al-Ahram, all edited by Christians, were anti-Zionist, but claims this was the result of special factors.⁵⁵

In fact, irrespective of the religions of their editors, newspapers in Palestine were virtually all anti-Zionist—and Ya‘qub Yehoshua, the leading Israeli historian of the Palestinian press before 1914, notes that most Palestinian newspaper owners were Christians.⁵⁶ The point is that the same thing can be said in almost every case about Arabic-language newspapers outside Palestine, whether in other parts of Syria, or in Cairo or Istanbul, and whether their owners and editors were Christian or Muslim. The key to anti-Zionism clearly does not appear to be the religion of the journalists concerned. Indeed, there may well be no trend to be discerned here, for as we noted in chapter 3, virtually the only newspaper editor in Palestine to write consistently in favor of Zionism, Iliya Zakka, editor of al-Nafir, was himself Christian, while most of the country’s other newspaper owners and editors in this period, mainly Christians, with a few Muslims, were hostile to Zionism.⁵⁷ Perhaps a more extensive survey covering all the important papers throughout Syria, as well as in Cairo and Istanbul, for the entire period could settle the question conclusively. But the evidence cited above would seem to rule out religion as the determining factor insofar as a newspaper’s stand on Zionism was concerned.

It remains for us to conclude our discussion of the last three of the five Beirut newspapers surveyed. Of them, al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani was both the most influential and the most intense in its concentration on the Zionist issue. Like ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraisi, its editor-owner, Shaykh Ahmed Hassan Tabbara, was an important political figure in his own right. He too played a prominent role in the First Arab Congress held in Paris in June 1913, and like al-‘Uraisi, was hanged by the Ottoman authorities for his Arab nationalist activities (indeed, of the 31 most prominent Arab “martyrs” executed in 1915 and 1916, 16 were journalists⁵⁸). He was in addition one of the leaders of the Beirut Reform Society established in 1913, and after his paper was closed by the Ottoman censor in May of the same year, he changed its name to al-Islah, which it remained for the next seven months.

Like al-Mufid, al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani printed a large number of articles on Zionism by correspondents and contributors from various parts of the Arabic-speaking world, including Egypt, various parts of Palestine, Istanbul, Damascus, and towns like Marja‘youn in what is today southern Lebanon. This journal in addition occasionally reprinted articles on the subject from other papers, notably al-Karmil and Filastin, printing three from the former and one from the latter over a period of three years.⁵⁹ Combined with evidence drawn from an examination of al-Mufid and al-Muqtabas, this shows that Najib Nassar and ‘Isa and Yusuf al-‘Isa were able to reach a wide audience as a result of the reprinting of their articles in the Beirut and Damascus press, in itself a clear indication that their influence spread far beyond the frontiers of Palestine. Thus, three of Nassar’s articles were also published in al-Mufid during the three years for which issues are available, and one in al-Haqiqa,⁶⁰ in addition to the fifteen printed in al-Muqtabas, which have already been mentioned.

In one of the articles printed in al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani in 1910, Nassar warned that the objective of the Zionists was to take over Palestine, a dream he claimed was cherished by the Jews since Roman times. He went on to remind his readers of the danger of apparently innocent projects for commercial development in Palestine, which in fact concealed activities of the Zionist organizations.⁶¹ In another article, printed in both al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani and al-Mufid in February 1911 (and apparently written specially for the two papers) Nassar responded to the claims by a defender of the Zionist movement, Sulayman Effendi Yellin, in the columns of the former paper that Zionism meant no harm to the people of Palestine, and was only a humanitarian movement to relieve the suffering of oppressed Jews, while the settlers in the Zionist colonies were all Ottoman subjects. Nassar’s response was that a true humanitarian movement would not cause hardship to the people of the country so as to relieve the oppression of others. He added: “Sulayman Effendi says that the farmers in these colonies are all Ottoman subjects, and we believe him, since most of them have Ottoman identity papers in their hands and foreign passports in their suitcases. . . . How many of them remained Ottoman when they were called up for military service??”⁶² Nassar concluded by affirming that there could be no legitimate objection to Jewish immigration to Palestine per se, as long as the immigrants avoided segregation from the local population, treated them well, and became loyal Ottoman citizens. In such a case no Ottoman citizen would oppose them, nor would anyone fear their immigration into the Ottoman territories. Belying these reassuring words, however, was the clear implication that Nassar fiercely opposed Zionism because most Zionist immigrants to Palestine did none of these things.

Another leader of the anti-Zionist movement in the Syrian provinces was Shukri al-‘Asali, who as we have already seen was elected to the Ottoman Parliament in 1911 as a representative of Damascus after he had failed to prevent the sale of the lands of the village of al-Fula to the JCA. al-‘Asali went on to become one of the leaders of the Arab opposition to the CUP, and was one of those hanged in 1916 for his prominent role in the Arab nationalist movement.⁶³ We saw in chapter 5 that al-‘Asali actively used the pages of the Syrian, Palestinian, and Istanbul press as platforms for his opposition to Zionist land purchases, writing under the pseudonym of “Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi” (Saladin) while he was still a government official in 1910, and under his own name afterwards. We thus find articles on this subject by al-‘Asali in the Istanbul paper al-Hadara, edited by Shaykh ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Zahrawi, another prominent Arabist leader,⁶⁴ and numerous others in al-Muqtabas (3), in al-Karmil (3), al-Mufid (2), and the Beirut papers al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani (2), al-Haqiqa (2), and al-Iqbal (1) .⁶⁵

One of al-‘Asali’s most widely published pieces appeared in al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani in February 1911 (as well as in al-Mufid and al-Haqiqa),⁶⁶ Its subject was the 10,000 dunum plot of land in al-Fula in the Marj Ibn ‘Amir purchased a few months earlier by the Zionists, and whose transfer al-‘Asali had unsuccessfully tried to block a few weeks earlier, a transaction we have referred to several times. In this article, al-‘Asali described the ruins of an old fortress on the land dating back to the Crusader era, which he said had been captured after a battle in 1187 by Saladin (whence al-‘Asali’s pseudonym in his earlier articles). The article described in detail the negotiations whereby the JCA, together with the original owner of the land, Elias Sursuq of Beirut, had removed the peasant inhabitants of the land, and then attempted to have the transfer officially registered by al-‘Asali in his capacity as qa’immaqam. He included a summary of the texts of several official communications which had passed between him and the Vali in Beirut, wherein the latter took the side of the Zionists, and al-‘Asali did his utmost to block completion of the transaction. Emptying this land of its original peasant tenants, and their replacement with foreigners is treason, al-‘Asali concluded, and something which he refused to have any part in facilitating.

Building on the emotive connotations of Saladin’s reputed connection with the site (which al-‘Asali supports with a quotation from the twelfth-century Arab historian Ibn al-Athir) and on the fact that the nearby Haifa branch of the Hijaz Railway was meant to carry Muslim pilgrims to Mecca and Medina, the article strongly impresses its readers with the power, wealth, and persistence of the Zionists, the venality of the Arab landlords willing to sell their land to them, and the complicity of the authorities, or at least their dereliction of duty. It is no surprise therefore that this article should have been so widely reprinted, or that the Vali of Beirut should have seen the need to reply in the columns of the same newspapers, setting off a controversy that went on for weeks.⁶⁷ Nor is it particularly surprising in light of this incident that, as we have already seen, al-‘Asali should have campaigned in the 1911 by-election in Damascus on a platform pledging him to oppose Zionism, or that in the Chamber after his election he became one of the most outspoken opponents of Zionism.⁶⁸

Although the three remaining Beirut papers—al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, al-Haqiqa, and al-Iqbal—were strongly anti-Zionist, all also carried an occasional pro-Zionist piece, usually a letter to the editor or an article reprinted from another journal followed by editorial comment. Nisim Malul, for example, sent five letters to al-Haqiqa in 1911, provoking angry responses from other readers critical of Zionism.⁶⁹ Similarly, in 1913, at the time of the First Arab Congress in Paris, al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani briefly changed its line, calling for a more understanding attitude to the Zionists.⁷⁰ This shift was apparently motivated by hopes of an agreement with the CUP in the summer of 1913 before and after the Paris Congress, which would have provided for a measure of decentralization and local self-government, and thus would have enabled the local population to regulate and thereby reduce the potential danger of unlimited Zionist immigration. At the same time, contacts had begun in Cairo between Arabist leaders and representatives of the Zionist Organization with a view to exploring the possible grounds for agreement between the two sides. As a result of these two sets of developments, the anti-Zionist tone of the majority of the Syrian and Cairo press lessened noticeably in the late spring and early summer of 1913.

Soon afterwards, however, things changed, after the hopes for an Arab-Turkish entente faded, and after a shift by the Zionist Executive which, in the words of Mandel, “judged it inappropriate for Hochberg [the Zionist envoy to the contacts with the Arabs] to make a secret entente with the Arab nationalists.”⁷¹ Thus in late 1913, al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani (after being closed down by the authorities, and now appearing under the title al-Islah) carried further articles warning against the situation developing in Palestine as far as Zionist land purchase and immigration were concerned. ‘Isa al-‘Isa is quoted in one article reprinted from Filastin in November 1913 as asking what will be the result “if the Zionists arrive in Palestine on every boat and the citizens emigrate on every other?”⁷² Another article ten days later ended with the warning that Zionist immigration, with its attendant expulsion of the indigenous peasant population from their lands, posed a serious threat to the country both from the economic and political angles.⁷³

Although their coverage of Zionism was less extensive than that of the other newspapers surveyed, al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, al-Haqiqa, and al-Iqbal all reflected the same unyielding attitude to Zionism of most of the rest of the Arabic press of this period. That they should have done so is evidence that this issue was one which, although animated largely by the Palestinian press, and by Palestinian journalists and letter-writers, aroused concern far beyond the confines of Palestine itself.

By implication, al-Muqtabas’ critiques of the weakness of the Arab resistance to Zionist colonization in this early phase pointed out the path to fellow: greater understanding of the aims of the Zionist movement, more unity and better organization on the part of the Arabs in resisting it, and so forth. But rarely did the Arab press critics of Zionism go much further. In no article among the more than 650 examined for this analysis of the press and Zionism was there a call for armed resistance to the colonizers, although we have seen that in a few areas the peasants had already spontaneously engaged in such resistance. Nowhere was the much-lamented failure of the Ottoman government to solve the problem cited as justification for extreme measures against it on the part of the Arabs. In spite of the scathing criticism by many writers of land sales by individual landowners, and of the upper classes in general for dereliction of their duty, these analyses never went on to critique the new form of European-derived property relations that made such land sales possible, or to demand a wholesale social transformation as a precondition for success in the conflict with Zionism.

Clearly, in spite of the alarm Zionism aroused among a large section of the Arab intelligentsia, such radical solutions were not yet seen to be necessary, nor perhaps was the time ripe for their propagation. We have nevertheless noted in the preceding chapter that in the countryside, the peasants themselves had begun to react violently to the seizure of what they understood to be their land by its new Zionist owners, after its purchase from absentee Arab landlords. In the pre-World War I period, as afterwards, the literate upper classes were occasionally to show themselves to be ahead of the rest of Arab society in terms of perceptions, but lagging behind when it came to action and, with several notable exceptions,⁷⁴ can thus be judged guilty of a certain degree of failure of leadership—and, at the same time, unwillingness to follow the lead of the fellahin.

In spite of these inconsistencies, and the difficulties of translating the Arab critique of Zionism into an effective program for action, in the course of our survey of the treatment of the Zionist question in the Arab press, based on a close investigation of the ten papers discussed above and a cursory examination of a dozen other newspapers and periodicals, a number of major themes have emerged. One of the first in importance was strong opposition to the laxity of the Ottoman central authorities in restraining Zionist colonization, a stand linked to an intense feeling that local needs, desires, and wishes were being ignored. We have here, in the varied forms in which it emerged before 1914, the embryo of the Palestinian demand for self-government and self-determination, one that would continue to be asserted for a long time to come. This theme, moreover, hints at the beginnings of an identity rooted in Palestine which, while not separate from other overlapping elements of identity at this stage, had its own specificity and its own unique characteristics.

Among other important themes are opposition to unrestricted Zionist immigration and land-purchase, and resentment at the self-imposed segregation of the immigrants and their failure to become loyal citizens of the country they settled in. Looming behind all of these concerns is the fear, expressed in dozens of articles, that the Arabs in Palestine would one day be reduced to a minority in the country, and become strangers in their own land. This, it was feared, would be the result of the Zionists’ achievement of their objective of winning exclusive sovereignty over Palestine, an aim frequently denied by defenders of Zionism, but perceived as being the real, unavowed aim of the movement by most Arab writers at this time. If anything, this is one of the most striking conclusions to emerge from a study of the Arabic press and its treatment of Zionism: by 1914 most editors and writers in the papers examined were fully aware that the seemingly innocuous activities of the Zionist movement were directed at the ultimate establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, with its necessary concomitant of the dispossession of the Arab population.

In chapter 4 we saw an expression in 1899 by one Jerusalem notable, Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi, of an explicit awareness that this was what was ultimately at stake in Palestine: Jewish sovereignty and Arab dispossession. And we have seen in the last chapter how the friction on the land between settlers and peasants came to affect wider and wider circles in Palestine. The period from 1899 to 1914, and in particular the years after 1908, provide us with hundreds of examples drawn from the daily press of the growth of such an awareness, presented to tens of thousands of readers, whose letters to the newspapers concerned reveal that this was a dialectical process, with newspaper readers as well as journalists contributing to a growing awareness of this subject. This is a perfect example of the kind of “imagined community,” mediated and shaped by the press, whose members did not know one another, but who shared a certain body of knowledge, a certain understanding, and a joint sense of grievance, which Benedict Anderson has written about.⁷⁵

We have seen that the first Arabic-language newspapers to devote great attention to this issue after 1908 were those of Cairo, followed closely by al-Karmil (whose first two articles on the subject were reprinted from al-Muqattam with critical comment by Nassar).⁷⁶ Thereupon the initiative seems to have passed to the Palestinian and Beirut press, which in late 1910 and 1911 subjected the Zionist enterprise to minute investigation and scathing criticism. The Tripoli and Balkan wars of late 1911–1912 and late 1912–1913, as well as the CUP’s occasional repression of the press, caused a temporary lull in attention to Zionism from late 1911 to 1912, but by 1913 the press was once again focusing on the matter. Although faint hopes of agreement with the CUP and the Zionists in 1913 caused some shifts in this general trend, by the end of the year the same resolute tone of concern about Zionism and criticism of the government was again apparent in the press, and it would continue until the outbreak of World War I.

Thus in the newspapers of Palestine, of Beirut, of Damascus, and of Cairo, we can already discern during the Ottoman Constitutional period a vivid awareness of the significance and implications of the Zionist movement for the population of Palestine and for the Arab world. The reader of the hundreds of articles on this subject cannot fail to be impressed, not only by the prescience of many of the arguments presented by their authors, but also by the degree to which what they were saying foreshadowed the main lines of Palestinian and Arab nationalist rhetoric about Zionism in the succeeding years.

And in the way in which Cairo, Beirut, Damascus and Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem newspapers played off one another in addressing the question of Zionism, expressing slightly different perspectives in every case, we can see an example of the complex interpenetration between Ottoman, Arab, Syrian, and local Palestinian elements in the framing of this issue, an interplay that came to be central to the definition of Palestinian identity. While a chauvinist modern-day Palestinian nationalist perspective would perhaps stress the role of al-Karmil, Filastin, and other Palestinian newspapers in shaping the Arab response to Zionism, it is clear from our survey of the press in this chapter that the reality was considerably more nuanced. Syrians and Lebanese in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, and Istanbul, as well as Palestinians in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, all played a role in developing the public understanding of what Zionism meant for Palestine and the region. And while these conclusions had the most relevance for Palestine itself, they were shaped by considerations, whether national or religious, that extended far beyond the frontiers of Palestine.