Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness

3. The literature is so voluminous that it is possible to list only a few of the works I found most useful. These include Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) and his article “The Origins of Nations,” Ethnic and Religious Studies 12, no. 3 (July 1989): 340–367; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Rise and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

4. The two approaches are well illustrated in Smith, “Origins,” pp. 341 ff.

5. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 1–7.

6. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 10.

7. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 48–9.

8. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, 6.

9. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 9 and pp. 37 ff. See the interesting critique of Anderson in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed, 1986): 19–22.

10. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 63–86.

11. Smith, “Origins,” p. 361.

12. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 12.

13. The best introduction to their writings can be found in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

1. Israel annexed Arab East Jerusalem in 1967, while the treating the rest of the occupied West Bank as part of the so-called “administered territories.” Israel imposed a physical separation of Jerusalem from the other occupied territories in March 1993. This “closure” has continued since then, notwithstanding either negotiations or agreements between the Palestinians and Israelis. Until 1993, Israel’s annexation of the city had relatively little effect on the movement of Palestinians into or out of Jerusalem. The “closure,” however, meant that West Bank residents needed a special pass to enter the city, which most of them could not obtain. Those who managed to do so had to wait in long lines of traffic to pass through army checkpoints on their way to work, schools, shopping, or prayer in Jerusalem.

2. At the height of the war in Lebanon from 1975 onwards, when checkpoints were set up at which kidnappings and killings on a sectarian or ethnic basis took place, those passing were asked at certain of these barriers to say the Arabic word for tomato: one pronunciation meant the speaker was Lebanese and could pass; another indicated that the speaker was Palestinian, and could be killed.

3. This existential situation is central to one of the most characteristic works of modern Palestinian literature, Ghassan Kanafani’s prescient short novel Rijal fil-shams [Men in the Sun] (Beirut: n.p., 1963) in which a group of Palestinians without “proper” identity documents die inside an airless tanker truck while being smuggled into Kuwait.

4. Before 1988, all Jordanian passports were valid for five years. Previously, Palestinians were distinguishable from other Jordanians by a notation in their passports identifying them as having obtained Jordanian nationality by a special provision of the law (paragraph 3) used to grant residents of the West Bank Jordanian citizenship after the area was annexed to Jordan in 1950.

5. During a typical interrogation after a long wait at Cairo Airport, an Egyptian security officer, frustrated by my replies to his questions as to where I was from (I responded that I was Palestinian but was born in New York), was finally satisfied when I made it clear to him that my family had never lived in Egypt, that I had never been subject to Egyptian jurisdiction, and that I was therefore not one of “their” Palestinians. “What is your connection to Egypt?” he finally asked. “None,” I answered. “Except a pan-Arab one [illa al-‘alaqa al-qawmiyya],” I added diplomatically after a brief pause, which brought a smile and the return of my U.S. passport with an entry stamp.

6. An example of a work that sometimes slips into this error, although it generally avoids it, is Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (New York: The Free Press, 1993): “Had it not been for the pressures exerted on the Arabs of Palestine by the Zionist movement, the very concept of a Palestinian people would not have developed” (p. xvii). For my critique of the book, see my review in the American Historical Review 99, no. 3 (June 1994): 947–948. The best work to date on the early Palestinian national movement is Muhammad Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

1. For a succinct statement of how a society’s representations of time and space can affect the definition of of national identity, see Amnon Finkelstein, “Why Power? Why culture?,” in R. D.Johnson, ed., On Cultural Ground: Essays in International History (Chicago: Imprint, 1994): 36–37. For a treatment that focuses on different treatments of space over time as part of the definition of the nation, see Smith, “The Origins,” pp. 356–357.

2. In Stuart Hall, “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference,” Radical America, 23 no. 4 (October-December 1989): 16.

3. Edward Said, Orientalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 331–332.

4. For more on this episode, see R. Khalidi, Under Siege, chapter 2; and “The Palestinians in Lebanon: The Repercussions of the Israeli Invasion,” Middle East Journal, 38 no. 2 (Spring 1984): 255–266; and Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Boulder: Westview, 1990).

5. The Kurds and Armenians were candidates for self-determination during the negotiations over the post-war settlements, notably in the unratified 1920 treaty of Sèvres, but were ultimately abandoned to their fate by the European powers. Among the inhabitants of the Arab lands that fell under the League of Nations mandate system, only the Palestinians were never considered for self-determination by the powers. Unlike the mandates for Syria and Iraq, meant from the outset to prepare them to become “independent states,” the Mandate for Palestine omitted any mention of independence or self-determination for the Palestinians, referring rather to the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. In the Balfour Declaration, which was incorporated into the text of the Mandate, the Palestinians (94 percent of the population at the time) were referred to as “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” whose civil and religious (but not political or national) rights were to be protected by the mandatory power.

6. Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: The Merchants and Peasants of Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 245.

7. A typical example of the extensive modern popular literature in Arabic on the subject is the small volume on the battle in 1187 in which the Crusaders were decisively defeated by Saladin: Yusuf Sami al-Yusuf, Hittin, 2nd ed. (Acre: Dar al-Aswar, 1989).

8. Most scholarly literature on the Crusades, like the magisterial work of Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–54), depends on Western sources rather than the voluminous Islamic and Eastern Christian sources. For the Arabic sources see Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (London: Routledge, 1969); Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (New York: Schocken, 1985); and Philip Hitti, An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). In the main, literature on the Crusades treat them as an extension of Western European history, albeit one taking place in an exotic locale.

9. Early Muslims also called the city “Ilya,” derived from the Roman name, Aelia Capitolina, used before the Islamic period. Throughout this book, I will use the most commonly accepted English names for Palestinian place-names, irrespective of their derivation: thus Jerusalem rather than al-Quds, and Hebron rather than al-Khalil.

10. Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions (New York: Villard, 1986), pp. 191–198, observes that under the Israeli map of the country, there lies another Arab map. His recent book, Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), examines these matters afresh. As deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Benvenisti played a part in Israeli settlement of Arab areas annexed to the newly expanded municipality after 1967; earlier, his father was one of the geographers assigned to give Hebrew names (some of them Hebrew versions of the original Arabic names) to localities throughout the country, a process accelerated after 1948, when more than 400 Arab villages were obliterated after their inhabitants had fled or been expelled. See the study compiled under the direction of Walid Khalidi, All that Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Destroyed by Israel in 1948 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).

11. Smith, “The Origins,” pp. 356 ff., looks at how what he calls “educator-intellectuals” created a shared sense of attachment to a homeland via “historicizing natural features” and “naturalizing historical features” of a chosen area in order to obtain the same ends as Israeli geographers.

12. A striking attempt to do this is the slide show for visitors to the excavations along the Western Wall of the Haram al-Sharif, which are controlled jointly by the Israeli Ministry of Religion, the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Jerusalem municipality. This excavation involves subterranean tunnels driven through a substructure of arches constructed by Umayyad and Mameluke master-builders as foundations for several superb monuments of Islamic architecture at what is currently ground level, yet the slide show blots out everything but one segment of the city’s history, linking the present to a “privileged” period 3,000 years ago. This process reached its logical extension in recent Israeli celebrations of the “3,000th anniversary” of Jerusalem, a city with a recorded past of more than 5,000 years. See Nadia Abu El-Hajj’s outstanding dissertation, “Excavating the Land, Creating the Homeland: Archaeology, the State and the Making of History in Modern Jewish Nationalism,” Duke University Department of Cultural Anthropology, 1995, notably chapter 3.

13. The most notable attempt to do this was the massive “Jerusalem 3000” celebration just referred to, organized by the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality in 1996, which highlighted King David’s conquest of the city as marking its foundation, and ignored the preceding two millennia of the city’s recorded history. For details, see K. J. Asali, “Jerusalem in History: Notes on the Origins of the City and its Tradition of Tolerance,” Arab Studies Quarterly 16, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 37–45; and K. J. Asali, ed., Jerusalem in History, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, 1996).

14. The cover of the pamphlet reads: “Tarjamat al-kurras al-mad‘u muhamat ‘an huquq Terra Sancta fil-maghara al-mad‘uwa magharat al-halib al-ka’ina bil-qurb min Baytlahm. Mu ’alafa wa muqaddama ila hukumat al-Quds al-Sharif min al-ab Rimigio Busayli, katib Terra Sancta, haziran sanat 1865. Tubi‘a bi-Urshalim fi Dayr al-Ruhban al-Fransiscan.” The pamphlet, which defends the rights of the Franciscan Terra Sancta order to a cave located in Bethlehem, is addressed to the Ottoman authorities.

15. The book is Shehadi and Nicola Khuri, Khulasat tarikh kanisat urshalim al-urtho-duksiyya [A summary history of the orthodox church of Jerusalem] (Jerusalem: Matba‘at Bayt al-Maqdis, 1925).

16. The editorial entitled ‘Jerusalem” in The Times, December 11, 1917, the day General Allenby entered Jerusalem, begins by stating that “The deliverance of Jerusalem . . . must remain for all time a most memorable event in the history of Christendom”; describes the war itself as “a crusade for human liberties”; states that “the yoke of the Turk is broken for ever”; and discusses at length the history of the Crusades, indicating that a consciousness of this religious rivalry still remained alive. See Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1945), the autobiography of the man who was British military governor of the city from 1917 until 1920, for further evidence of this consciousness.

17. For analyses of this phenomenon, see Hassan Haddad and Donald Wagner, eds., All in the Name of the Bible: Selected Essays on Israel and American Christian Fundamentalism (Brattleboro: Amana, 1986).

18. Most later Islamic traditions—the text of the Qur’an (37:100–111) is not explicit—place the sacrifice at Mecca, although the Islamic commentators on the Qur’an state that Abraham was “in the fertile land of Syria and Palestine” at this time, according to the commentary on this passage in ‘Abdullah Yusuf ‘Ali, ed., The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary (Brentwood, MD: Amana, 1409/1989), p. 1149, n. 4096 [this is a reprint of the official Saudi translation of the Qur’an (Medina, 1405/1985) ]. The only other divergence among the beliefs of adherents of the three monotheistic faiths is that the Muslim commentators unanimously consider Isma‘il, Abraham’s eldest son, to have been the intended victim, rather than Isaac. Although the relevant verses of the Qur’an are ambiguous in not mentioning Isma‘il by name, the subsequent reference to Isaac and the clear implication that the intended victim was Abraham’s eldest son bear out the traditional interpretation of these verses by the commentators as concerning Isma‘il.

19. The mosque was first constructed some time between 636 and 670, and the dome was erected in 692 by the Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik. See Rashid Khalidi, “The Future of Arab Jerusalem,” British Journal of Middle East Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 133–143, for more details on problems related to areas around the Haram al-Sharif.

20. Herod, who was imposed on Judea as a ruler by the Romans after the extinction of the Hasmonean dynasty, was “a Jew by religion” but not by origin. His father was Jewish, but his mother was a Nabatean princess from what is today Jordan. Culturally, Herod was thoroughly Roman. The words are those of the Israeli archaeologist Meir Ben Dov, In the Shadow of the Temple: The Discovery of Ancient Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Keter, 1985), p. 62.

21. This is true even in a relatively enlightened work such as that of Ben-Dov, In The Shadow. In it, he devotes 380 pages to a study of excavations around the southern end of the Haram al-Sharif, including his own discoveries of a series of massive and hitherto unknown seventh or eight century Umayyad buildings of great significance, without once mentioning the term Haram al-Sharif, the name used by Muslims for thirteen centuries for what he calls the Temple Mount.

22. The pretext later invoked for the shootings was that the Palestinians inside the Haram were throwing stones at Jewish worshippers at the Wailing Wall plaza below, an allegation that careful journalistic investigation later revealed was false. It is impossible to see the plaza from the Haram, given the high arcade that surrounds the latter, and the Palestinians were in fact throwing stones at Israeli security forces shooting at them from atop the Haram’s western wall and adjacent roofs. It has since been established that most Jewish worshippers were gone before stones thrown at the soldiers went over the arcade and into the plaza. See Michael Emery, “New Videotapes Reveal Israeli Cover-up” The Village Voice, November 13, 1990, pp. 25–29, and the reportage by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, December 2, 1990. For a detailed account based on testimonies of eyewitnesses, see Raja Shehadeh, The Sealed Room (London: Quartet, 1992), pp. 24–29.

23. For details, see R. Khalidi, “The Future.” Moshe Gil writes in A History of Palestine, 640–1099 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 646–650, of a Jewish synagogue during the early Muslim period which he locates in the vicinity of the Western Wall, but his pinpointing of its location seems singularly vague. He does state (p. 646) that in Jewish sources of that period, “we find that the Western Wall is mentioned almost not at all,” while with regard to Bab al-Rahme (sometimes known as Bawabat al-Rahme, or Gates of Mercy) on the eastern side of the Haram, he notes (p. 643) that “the Jews of this period . . . used to visit the gate and pray alongside it, and write about it, mentioning its name (in the singular or the plural) in letters.”

24. Gil, in A History, a revised version of his Hebrew-language work, Eretz Israel during the First Muslim Period (a more apt title than the English one, given the book’s focus on the history of the Jewish community in Palestine) pp. 90 ff., states that the Muslims’ veneration for Jerusalem began decades after they took the city, but fails to account for manifold indications of its sanctity to the earliest Muslims. These include the attention supposedly paid to Jerusalem and to the Haram by the caliph ‘Umar, which Gil himself describes; the building of a large mosque on the site of the present al-Aqsa mosque, traditionally ascribed to ‘Umar, but historically datable at least as far back as 670, when a large wooden structure was described in an account by a Christian pilgrim, Bishop Arculf; the sanctity attached to Jerusalem by the Prophet Muhammad in making it the first direction of prayer before Mecca was finally chosen; and the reference to al-Masjid al-Aqsa (“the farthest mosque”) in the Qur’an. Gil argues that traditions relating this verse to Jerusalem are late ones, begging the question of how the earliest Muslims understood this verse, if not as referring to Jerusalem.

25. Ben Dov claims (In the Shadow, p. 286) that Muslim devotion to this site dates back only to the nineteenth century, and was a response to the growth of Jewish interest in the adjacent Wailing Wall. He refers to a fifteenth-sixteenth century work by the historian ‘Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammdad al-‘Ulaymi, known as Mujir al-Din, to show that Muslims earlier connected al-Buraq to Bab al-Rahme on the eastern side of the Haram. Mujir al-Din (d. 1521) does suggest this in al-Uns al-jalil bi-tarikh al-Quds wal-Khalil [The glorious history of Jerusalem and Hebron], 2 vols. (Amman: Maktabat al-Muhtasib, 1973), 2:28. But a much earlier source, Ba‘ith al-nufus ila ziyarat al-Quds al-mahrus [Inspiration to souls to visit protected Jerusalem] (Khalidi Library MS), by Ibrahim b. Ishaq al-Ansari, known as Ibn Furkah (d. 1328), states (p. 26) that al-Buraq was tethered outside Bab al-Nabi, an old name for a gate that both Gil himself (A History, p. 645), and Mujir al-Din (al-Uns al-jalil, 2:31), identify with the very site along the southwestern wall of the Haram venerated by Muslims today! This dispute about the tethering place of an apocryphal winged horse shows that otherwise sober scholars risk getting carried away where religious claims in Jerusalem are concerned.

26. See R. Khalidi, “The Future” for more details on the destruction of Haret al-Maghariba.

27. Ben-Dov, In the Shadow, p. 378.

28. Two contrasting but complementary perspectives on the role of history and archaeology in the construction of Palestinian identity can be found in Meir Litvak, “A Palestinian Past: National Construction and Reconstruction,” History and Memory: Studies in the Representation of the Past 6, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1994): 24–56; and Albert Glock, “Cultural Bias in the Archaeology of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 24, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 48–59.

29. For details on how Christian and Muslim antiquities unearthed at this and other sites in the Old City of Jerusalem are treated, and the “privileging” of some, see Abu El-Hajj, “Excavating the Land,” chapter 3. Another perspective on the significance of Jerusalem can be found in Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land: An Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), a work of erudition that occasionally betrays the author’s preference for biblical antiquities over those of succeeding eras. Fr. Murphy-O’Connor sometimes goes beyond the mere expression of preferences, as with his occasional derogatory comments on structures associated with the Eastern churches, such as parts of the Holy Sepulcher (e.g., p. 49, where he describes the monument over Jesus’ tomb as a “hideous kiosk”), or his description of Nablus: “the town has nothing to offer visitors, and the uncertain temper of the populace counsels speedy transit” (p. 309). Besides slighting the blameless inhabitants of Nablus, this judgment ignores such antiquities as the late Mameluke-era (fifteenth–sixteenth century) Qasr Touqan, an extensive palace-fortress in the heart of the old qasaba which was dynamited and partially destroyed by the Israeli military in reprisal for the killing of a soldier in 1989.

30. Smith, “The Origins,” pp. 357–358, is particularly illuminating on “the uses of history” by “nationalist educator-intellectuals” to “direct the communal destiny by telling us who we are, whence we come and why we are unique.”

31. Sa‘id al-Husayni and Ruhi al-Khalidi were deputies for Jerusalem in the Ottoman Parliament elected in 1908, and put forward Palestinian and Arab concerns there, while remaining loyal to the Ottoman state; Najib Nassar and ‘Isa al-‘Isa were the most prominent newspaper editors of this period, whose papers, al-Karmil and Filastin were instrumental in shaping early Palestinian national consciousness and in stirring opposition to Zionism; Muhammad Hassan al-Budayri and ‘Arif al-‘Arif were the editors of a newspaper called Suriyya al-Janubiyya [Southern Syria], a pan-Arab journal of the post World War I era, and the main nationalist organ before its suppression by the British in 1920; Musa al-‘Alami was a prominent lawyer, educator, and political figure, whose autobiography, Palestine is my Country: The Story of Musa al-Alami (London: Murray, 1969), shows how he looked at these different sources of identity.

32. On the way this process developed in these countries, see, inter alia, Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Philip Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

33. An extreme, albeit typical, example of this view can be found in M. Curtis, J. Neyer, C. Waxman, and A. Pollack, eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1975), p.4: “Palestinian Arab nationalism, stimulated by and reacting to the Jewish national liberation movement of Zionism, is even more recent. . . . Its chief impetus has come from opposition to Jewish settlement and to the State of Israel.”

34. For more on the stimuli to Palestinian nationalism other than Zionism, in particular the disillusionment of many leading Palestinian Arabists with the incarnation of Arab nationalism in Faysal’s state in Syria in 1918–1920, and their reaction to the incipient nation-state nationalism of Syrians and others in Damascus during this period, see Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism.

35. The best analysis of conflicting Lebanese national narratives is by Kamal Salibi, in his A House of Many Mansions. This is one of the most radical critiques extant of the national myths of any Arab country, and of some shared Arab national myths. See also Ahmad Beydoun’s perceptive al-Sira‘ ‘ala tarikh Lubnan, aw al-hawiyya wal-zaman fi a‘mal mu ’arikhina al-mu‘asirin [The struggle over the history of Lebanon: Identity and time in the work of our modern historians] (Beirut: Lebanese University Press, 1989).

36. In Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993), Alexander Schölch shows convincingly how the idea of the Holy Land which had developed over centuries among Christians and Muslims helped to shape the modern concept of Palestine as a unit in the minds of its Arab inhabitants. We shall come back to this process in several different contexts, in the greatest detail in chapter 7, below.

37. The Ottomans in 1874 elevated the Jerusalem sancak, or district (including the area from the Jordan to the sea, and from a line north of Jaffa and Jerusalem to the region south of Beersheba, and encompassing Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Beersheba, Hebron, and Bethlehem) to the status of an independent administrative unit reporting directly to Istanbul. Earlier, Palestine was usually included as the separate sancak’s of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre in the vilayet [province] of Sidon, or in the vilayet of Syria. Under the Ottomans, Palestine was always administratively separate from the area east of the Jordan, which was governed directly from Damascus. The administrative boundaries of Ottoman Palestine were finally fixed in the 1880s, when the sancaks of Nablus and Acre were attached to the new vilayet of Beirut, an arrangement that remained stable until 1918.

38. Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, is an excellent study of regional loyalty focusing on Jabal Nablus; he quotes a nineteenth century foreign observer as noting that its “inhabitants . . . are most proud of it, and think there is no place in the world equal to it” (p. 21). Doumani describes the Jabal Nablus region as a “social space” similar to Jabal al-Quds and Jabal al-Khalil, the regions centering on Jerusalem and Hebron respectively, noting how each differed from the other in significant respects.

39. This was the premise of the Johnston Plan, which American policymakers in the 1950s hoped would lead to the assimilation of the refugees into the surrounding countries: see Deborah J. Gerner, “Missed Opportunities and Roads not Taken: The Eisenhower Administration and the Palestinians,” in U.S. Policy on Palestine from Wilson to Clinton, pp. 81–112 (Normal, IL: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1995). After a visit to the region, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles expressed the belief in a radio address to the nation on June 1,1953 that most of the Palestinian refugees (described by him as “Arab refugees who fled from Palestine as Israel took over”) should “be integrated into the lives of the neighboring Arab countries.” The Department of State Bulletin, 27, no. 729 (June 15, 1953): 832.

40. On this matter many Zionist leaders and British officials were agreed in 1918, when Chaim Weizmann wrote that “The present state of affairs would necessarily tend towards the creation of an Arab Palestine, if there were an Arab people in Palestine,” and William Ormsby-Gore (Assistant Secretary of the War Cabinet and later Colonial Secretary) stated that “. . . west of the Jordan the people were not Arabs, but only Arabic-speaking.” Cited in Doreen Warriner, comp., Palestine Papers, 1917–1922: Seeds of Conflict (London: John Murray, 1972), pp. 32–33.

41. The details are recorded in Avi Shlaim Collusion Across the Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), and Mary Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain, and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Although the British in 1939 modified the unconditional support they had shown for Zionism for more than two decades, this change in policy was itself limited by Winston Churchill (as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945), perhaps the most ardent Zionist in British public life, and by the fact that British hostility to Palestinian aspirations and leadership remained unabated.

42. Although much past writing on this subject has blurred this harsh reality, more recent research has borne it out: e.g. Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Recourse to Force, 1881–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); see also Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

43. Neville Mandel, Arab Reactions to Zionism 1882–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), is the best work on this early period. See also Rashid Khalidi, “The Role of the Press in the Early Arab Reaction to Zionism,” Peuples Mediterranéens/Mediterranean Peoples, 20 (July-September 1982): 105–124, and chapter 6, below.

44. The entire text of the letter is quoted in Adel Manna‘, A‘lam Filastin fi awakhir al-‘ahd al-uthmani 1800–1918 [Notables of Palestine in the late Ottoman era] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1994), p. 190.

45. Iraq was far more afflicted by these problems than Syria, partly because the three Ottoman provinces, Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, out of which the British had created Iraq, had little in common with one another, and their population was deeply divided on sectarian, ethnic, and other grounds—between Sunni and Shi‘a, Arab and Kurd, urban and rural, settled and tribal populations. See Batatu, Old Social Classes. Syria suffered from some of these problems, but was a more homogenous society than Iraq, with a larger urban and settled population, a clear Sunni majority, less diversity among regions, and only two Ottoman provinces, Damascus and Aleppo, to be subsumed under the structure of a single state.

46. For the best account of how the Mandate systematically excluded Palestinians from senior positions of responsibility, see Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 166–195.

47. The British tactic of reinforcing and manipulating traditional social structures in rural areas as a prop for their rule is examined by Ylana Miller, Government and Society in Rural Palestine 1920–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). This policy was continued by Jordan in the West Bank from 1948 until 1967, and by Israel in Arab areas incorporated into Israel after 1948, and in the occupied West Bank after 1967. For an analysis that stresses the dichotomy between the coastal plain and the hill areas, see Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (New York: Free Press, 1993). For a more sophisticated approach showing the interrelations between them in an earlier period, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine.

48. Population estimates are from Alfred Bonné, ed., Statistical Handbook of Middle Eastern Countries, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Economic Research Institute of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1945), pp. 3–4.

49. For more on the coastal cities, see May Seikaly, Haifa: Transformation of an Arab Palestinian Society, 1918–1939 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995), and Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, as well as Kimmerling and Migdal, Palestinians.

50. Although the press was extremely active, and a number of political parties existed in Palestine in the 1930s, most of these parties were essentially vehicles for narrow family or individual interests, as were some of the newspapers. Hizb al-Istiqlal al-‘Arabi, founded by ‘Auni ‘Abd al-Hadi, was probably the most developed example of a modern political party in Palestine. It is the subject of a University of Chicago Department of Near East Languages and Civilization dissertation in progress by L. Don Matthews, entitled “The Arab Istiqlal Party in Palestine, 1925–1934.”

51. Ted Swedenberg, “The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt (1936–1939),” in E. Burke III and I. Lapidus, eds., Islam, Politics and Social Movements, pp. 169–203 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). His book, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955) is perhaps the best study of the revolt.

52. With the reestablishment of the Palestinian national movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the PLO-Israel accords, it remains to be determined to what degree the development of effective modern institutions and structures that transcend these parochial divisions will make it possible to overcome the persistence of personal, family, regional and sectarian rivalries.

53. In Imagined Communities, p.6, Anderson defines a nation as “an imagined political community . . . imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”

54. The article was published after the Ottoman Constitutional Revolution of July 1908, which liberated the press from the censorship of the old regime, making possible the freer expression of nationalist ideas.

55. Le Réveil de la nation arabe (Paris: n.p., 1905), predicted an inevitable collision between Zionism and Arabism in its opening paragraph. On ‘Azuri, who was Lebanese by origin, see Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 49–52.

56. Cited in n. 36. References to “the land of Palestine” are widespread in the Arabic-language press in Palestine and elsewhere before 1914. A typical example is a lengthy article on Zionism in the Beirut newspaper al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, no. 559, July 19, 1910, p. 2, which warns against “Zionist colonization, in other words foreign seizure, of the land of Palestine.”

57. These sites are mentioned repeatedly, e.g., in Mujir al-Din’s fifteenth century al-Uns al-jalil, and in earlier works of this genre. They refer also to sites throughout Syria that are seen as having a certain sanctity, although a special place is reserved for Palestine, and Jerusalem in particular. Eleven sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that have this same focus are recorded in the standard hadith compilations: Husni Adham Jarrar, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni (Amman: Dar al-Dia’, 1987), pp. 6–8.

58. For background, see Amnon Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1985), and Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

59. This undated document in Arabic is located in the Khalidi Library in Jerusalem together with more than 300 documents that originate in the local Islamic court, the mahkama shar‘iyya, from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. During this time, members of the Khalidi family often held the senior local post in this court, as chief secretary and deputy to the qadi, who was appointed from Istanbul, and generally served for only one year. For more on the Islamic religious hierarchy under the Ottomans, see Madeleine Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Post-Classical Age (Minneapolis: Biblioteca Islamica, 1988), and R. C. Repp, The Mufti of Istanbul: A Study in the Development of the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy (London: Ithaca Press, 1986).

60. Awwal [sic] al-qiblatayn wa thalith al-haramayn al-sharifayn.

61. The assembled dignitaries expressed their displeasure that the Frenchman was entitled by the document he carried to receive treatment “like the Muslim Beys,” including riding a horse and carrying weapons.

62. The wording could also mean “this region of Jerusalem,” but either reading is possible, and there is an implication of sanctity in both cases. That this petition was not exceptional in its stress on the sanctity of Jerusalem is indicated by another more routine one in Ottoman Turkish, dating from later in the eighteenth century. In this undated petition, a large number of Jerusalem notables complain about the misbehavior of local military personnel in the city. The petition begins by stressing that Jerusalem is the “third of the holy places, its nobility protected until the day of Resurrection.” The document, signed by the qadi of Jerusalem, Ma‘nzade Muhammad, is also located in the Khalidi Library, Jerusalem.

63. Kamil J. Asali, ‘Jerusalem under the Ottomans 1516–1917 A.D.,” in KJ. Asali, ed., Jerusalem in History, p. 219.

64. The two articles were in nos. 551 and 552, December 19 and 20, 1910. Two later articles deal with the sale, one of a series of sales by the wealthy Sursuq family of Beirut of property in the fertile and strategic Marj Ibn ‘Amir (Jezreel Valley). For more on the al-Fula sale and its repercussions, see chapters 5 and 6 below.

65. Articles on the subject were widely reprinted in such papers as Filastin in Jaffa and al-Karmil in Haifa, as well as al-Muqtabas in Damascus and Lisan al-Hal in Beirut. In an article entitled “Majlis al-Mab‘uthan: Jalsat 16 Ayyar,” Filastin, May 27,1911, pp. 1–2, carries lengthy citations from the texts of the Parliamentary speeches, having earlier carried summaries. The most extensive account of al-‘Asali’s speech, including his reference to Saladin, is “al-Isti‘mar al-sihuyini fi majlis al-umma: Khitab ran-nan,” [Zionist colonization in the Chamber of Deputies: A ringing speech] al-Muqtabas, no. 691, May 18, 1911, pp. 1–2.

66. This parliamentary debate will be discussed further in chapter 4 below.

67. For more on this election, see Rashid Khalidi, “The 1912 Election Campaign in the Cities of Bilad al-Sham,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16, no. 4 (November 1984): 461–474.

68. Zionism concerned al-Khalidi so greatly that he made an extensive study of the subject, about which he was completing a book when he died in 1913; it is described further in chapter 4, below.

69. The first use of the term “Palestinians” (“filistiniyun” in Arabic) which has been found is in the press of the 1908–1914 period; for examples see the final section of the following chapter.

70. Quotes are from Filastin and al-Muqtabas, cited in n. 65.

71. For a discussion of all of these problems, see Rashid Khalidi, “Arab Nationalism: Historical Problems in the Literature,” The American Historical Review 95, no. 5 (December 1991): 1363–1364. Gil’s A History illustrates the final ones mentioned perfectly: of its 840 pages, the last 350 are devoted almost exclusively to the history of the tiny Palestinian Jewish community, as are generous sections of the earlier parts of the book.

1. See Rashid Khalidi, “Ottomanism and Arabism in Syria Before 1914: A Reassessment,” in R. Khalidi, L. Anderson, R. Simon, and M. Muslih, eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism, pp. 55–57 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), for more on the contrast between the cities of the littoral and the interior in greater Syria. See n. 5, below, for the possibility that Nablus may have been bigger than Jerusalem in the mid-nineteenth century. On the problems of urban demographic analysis in Palestine during this period, see Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 15–16, and Yehoshua Ben Arieh, “The Population of the Large Towns in Palestine during the first Eighty Years of the Nineteenth Century, According to Western Sources,” in M. Ma’oz, ed., Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period, pp. 49–69 (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1975), especially the table on p.68.

2. For more on the growth of the coastal cities, especially Jaffa and Haifa, see Ruth Kark, “The Rise and Decline of Coastal Towns in Palestine,” in G. Gilbar, ed., Ottoman Palestine 1800–1914: Studies in Economic and Social History, pp. 69–90 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), as well as Seikaly, Haifa, Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, and Kimmerling and Migdal, Palestinians. See also Mahmud Yazbak, al-Nuzum al-idariyya wal-buna al-ijtima‘iyya fi Haifa ft awakhir al-‘ahd al-‘uthmani [Administrative arrangements and social structure in Haifa at the end of the Ottoman era] (Nazareth: al-Nahda Press, 1994).

3. McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, p. 163.

4. Kimmerling and Migdal, Palestinians, correctly stress the importance of Jaffa and Nablus, but in doing so slight Jerusalem and Haifa: for a more detailed critique of their approach, see my review of their book in The American Historical Review 99, no. 3 (June 1994): 947–948.

5. Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, p. 1. He also suggests (p. 25) that in 1850 Nablus was “possibly the largest city in Palestine,” on the basis of figures cited in his “The Political Economy of Population Counts in Ottoman Palestine: Nablus, circa 1850,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 26, no. 1 (February 1994): 1–17.

6. Two works that treat this process in detail and with exceptional acuity are Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, for the period 1856–1882, and Haim Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, 1890–1914, Unterschungen, Islamkundliche vol. 101 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1985).

7. For what remains the best analysis of the position of the provincial Arab notables before these changes took place, see the seminal article by Albert Hourani which first proposed the concept of “the notables,” “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of the Notables” in W. Polk and R. Chambers, eds., The Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, pp. 41–68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

8. The expansion of the state educational system is examined in a Ph.D. dissertation by Ben Fortna, entitled “Ottoman State Schools During the Reign of Abdul Hamit, 1876–1908,” Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literature, University of Chicago, 1997.

9. Published beginning in 1876, the Mecelle (Majallat al-ahkam al-‘adliyya in Arabic) was applied in the new state Nizamiye courts, while the shari‘a courts continued to use the traditional sources of Islamic jurisprudence.

10. For illustrations of this autonomy in several major Arab centers in the eighteenth century see Abdul-Karim Rafeq, The Province of Damascus 1723–1783 (Beirut: Khayat, 1970); Percy Kemp, Territoires d’Islam: Le monde vu de Mossoul au xvii siècle (Paris: Sindbad, 1982); Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Daniel Crecelius, The Roots of Modern Egypt: A Study of the Regimes of ‘Ali Bey al-Kabir and Muhammad Bey Abu al-Dhahab (Minneapolis: Biblioteca Islamica, 1981).

11. See Zilfi, The Politics of Piety. Among those who reached such high levels was the Jerusalemite Musa Effendi al-Khalidi, who was Kadiasker of Anatolia in 1832, and whose daughter, Khadija, bequeathed the sum with which the Khalidi Library, al-Maktaba al-Khalidiyya, was established at the turn of the twentieth century by her grandson, al-Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi. See also Haim Gerber, State, Society and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), chapter 2, “The Making of Ottoman Law: The Rise of the Kadi and the Shari‘a court,” pp. 58–78.

12. The original document, located in the Khalidi Library, Jerusalem, is dated 27 Rajab 1213 = 5 January 1799.

13. Diwan Labid al-‘Amiri, riwayat al-Tusi [title in German: Der Diwan des Lebid] (Vienna: Carl Gerold, for the Imperial Academy of Science, 1880), pp. 148–149.

14. See David Dean Commins, Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.91.

15. Of the 255 manuscripts of the al-Aqsa Library that have been catalogued and bear a date of copying, 39 were copied in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the majority of them after 1850. This can be deduced from the two-volume work edited by Khadr Ibrahim Salama, Director of the Library, entitled Fihras makhtutat maktabat al-Masjid al-Aqsa [Index of manuscripts in the al-Aqsa Library], vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Awqaf Administration, 1980); vol. 2 (Amman: al-Majma‘ al-Maliki li-Buhuth al-Hadara al-Islamiyya, 1983).

16. This is clear from the two-volume catalogue compiled by Khudr Ibrahim Salama, Fihris makhtutat al-Maktaba al-Budayriyya [Index of manuscripts in the al-Budayriyya Library] (Jerusalem: Awqaf Administration, 1987).

17. A much-delayed annotated catalogue of the Library’s manuscript holdings is scheduled to be completed in 1997, and published soon thereafter. See L. Conrad and B. Kellner-Heinkele, “Ottoman Resources in the Khalidi Library in Jerusalem,” in A. Singer and A. Cohen, eds., Scripta Hierosolymitana, 30, Aspects of Ottoman History, pp. 280–293 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1994).

18. The ongoing cataloging of printed books in this library should be completed in 1997 as well.

19. This was a one-volume edition of al-Muqaddima, without the remaining volumes of the author’s Kitab al-‘Ibar. There are older Arabic- and Turkish-language printed books in the library in other fields.

20. These include five sets of the standard 7-volume 1284/1867 Bulaq edition of Ibn Khaldun’s Kitab al-‘Ibar in its entirety, including the Muqaddima; three sets of the 1283/1866 Bulaq edition of al-Kutubi’s Fawat al-Wafayat; two of the 1284/1867 Cairo edition of al-Muhibbi’s Khulasat al-Athar, four of the 1286/1869 Istanbul edition of Abu al-Fida’s Tarikh; three of the 1291/1874 Bulaq edition of al-Muradi’s Silk al-Durar, two copies of the 1297/1879 Cairo edition of al-Jabarti’s ‘Aja’ib al-Athar, four of the 1299/1881 Bulaq edition of Ibn Khallikan’s Wafayat al-A‘yan; and four of the 1303/1885 Cairo edition of Ibn al-Athir’s al-Kamil fil-Tarikh.

21. In 1918, Massignon visited the library and donated an inscribed copy of his 1913 edition of al-Hallaj’s Kitab al-Tawasin. The visitors’ book of the library contains the names of numerous ulama’ and Western scholars, and is an indication of the role it played in the intellectual life of the city, particularly in the first decades after its establishment.

22. The best work treating the salafi movement in a specific context is Commins, Islamic Reform.

23. On al-Jaza’iri, see Joseph Escovitz, “ ‘He was the Muhammad ‘Abdu of Syria’: A Study of Tahir al-Jaza’iri and his Influence,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 18, no. 3 (August 1986): 293–310.

24. Fourteen volumes of his influential periodical, al-Manar, are also among the Library’s holdings.

25. The work by ‘Abdu, one of many in the library, is his report on the reform of the shari‘a courts in Egypt, with an introduction by Rashid Rida: Taqrir fadilat Mufti al-Diyar al-Misriyya, al-Ustadh al-Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abdu fi islah al-mahakim al-shar‘iyya [Report of his Excellency the Mufti of Egypt, al-Ustadh al-Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abdu regarding reform of the religious courts] (Cairo: al-Manar, 1317/1900).

26. The photo is inscribed on the verso by al-Afghani (who signs himself “Jamal al-Din al-Asadabadi”) with the words: “Tidhkar ila alif al-haq wa halif al-sidq wa ‘ashiq al-‘adl, mab‘uth al-Quds al-Sharif sahib al-sa‘ada Yusuf Diya’ Basha al- Qudsi al-Khalidi” [A momento to the supporter of right, ally of uprightness and lover of justice, Deputy of Jerusalem, His Excellency Yusuf Diya’ Paşa al-Qudsi al-Khalidi].

27. The Library has three copies of one book, which originally belonged to different members of the family, Kitab al-husun al-hamidiyya li-muhafazat al-‘aqa’id al-islamiyya [Praiseworthy virtues of preserving Islamic beliefs] (Tripoli: Muhammad Kamil al-Buhayri, n.d.). Multiple copies also exist of al-Jisr’s Kitab al-risala al-hamidiyya fi haqiqat al-diyana al-islamiyya wa haqqiyyat al-shari‘a al-muhammadiyya [Praiseworthy essay on the truth of the Islamic religion and the verity of Muhammadan law] (Beirut: Hassan al-Qaraq, 1305/1890). The frequent utilization of the term “hamidiyya” in the titles of these and other works is a reference to Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid, and constitutes an obvious attempt by the authors to obtain the favor of the autocratic, mercurial, and vain Sultan.

28. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1884). This volume was dedicated to Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi in Istanbul in 1888 by a former student with the inscription “Resurgat Arabia!” The other works by Le Bon in the library are: Ruh al-Akvam, a Turkish translation by Abdullah Cevdet of Les Lois psychologiques de l’evolution des peuples (Cairo: Matba’at al-Ijtihad, 1908); Ruh al-ijtima‘, a translation by Ahmad Fathi Zahglul Paşa of La Psychologie des Foules (Cairo: Matba’at al-Rahmaniyya, 1909); Sir tatawwur al-umam, a translation by Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul Paşa of Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (Cairo: Matba’at al-Rahmaniyya, 1909); Muqadimmat al-Hadarat al-uwla, a translation by Muhammad Sadiq Rustum of the introduction to Les premieres civilisations (Cairo: al-Matba’a al-Salafiyya, 1341/1922); and Ruh al-tarbiyya, a translation by Taha Husayn of Psychologie de l’Education (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1925).

29. One example was the Palestine Educational Company, established in Jerusalem in 1910 (with a branch later established in Jaffa) by Wadi’ Sa‘id. By 1930 this had become the largest Arab bookseller in Palestine: see their half-page advertisement in Luke and Keith-Roach, eds., The Handbook of Palestine and Trans-Jordan, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1930), ads, p. 24.

30. The term qutr means region, country, or land. In current parlance, influenced by Arab nationalist denigrations of the existing Arab nation-states, “region” would usually be the most accurate rendering of the word (e.g. “al-qutr al-suri,” literally “the Syrian region,” meaning the state of Syria). In rendering the idiom of 1912, however, the word “country” is more appropriate.

31. “Ila ahlal-‘ilm wal-adab” [To people of learning and culture], al-Munadi, no. 17, May 28, 1912, p.1.

32. “A‘lan bi-ta’sis maktaba ‘umumiyya fil-Quds al-sharif” [Announcement of the founding of a public library in Jerusalem,” n.d. [1899–1900], document located in Khalidi Library. al-Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi is the author of a two-part series entitled “al-Kulliyat al-islamiyya,” Filastin, nos. 52 and 53, July 19 and 22, 1911, p. 1, which examines Islamic educational institutions, and then focuses on the poor state of Islamic schools in Jerusalem, which he ascribes to their being run by “ignorant fools” [“al-juhula al-aghbiyd’ ”].

33. The first dependable literacy figures for Palestine date from the mandate period: among Muslims, literacy was 25% among males and 3% among females; among Christians, 72% and 44% respectively. Needless to say, the literacy rates among the Jewish population were much higher: 93% and 73% respectively: E. Mills, Census of Palestine, 2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1932) 2:110; see also Said Himadeh, The Economic Organization of Palestine (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1938), p. 36.

34. For a discussion of these processes, see Rashid Khalidi, “Society and Ideology in Late Ottoman Syria: Class, Education, Profession and Confession,” in J. Spagnolo, ed., Problems of the Middle East in Historical Perspective: Essays in Honour of Albert Hourani, pp. 119–132 (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1992).

35. For figures on tourists and pilgrims visiting Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman era see Marwan Buheiry, “British Consular Reports and the Economic Evolution of Palestine: The Mutasarrifiya of Quds al-Sharif 1885–1914,” paper presented to the Third International Conference on the History of Bilad al-Sham, Amman, April, 1980. The published version of this study [“The Agricultural Exports of Southern Palestine, 1885–1914,” Journal of Palestine Studies 10, no. 4 (Summer, 1981): 61–81], omits the statistics on pilgrimage and tourism.

36. Throughout bilad al-Sham, these included institutions such as al-Madrasa al-Wataniyya established in Beirut by Butrus al-Bustani in 1868, the schools set up in Beirut by Jam‘iyyat al-Maqasid al-Khayriyya al-Islamiyya [Islamic Association of Charitable Intentions] established in 1878, al-Madrasa al-Hamidiyya, set up in Tripoli in 1895, the famous Maktab ‘Anbar in Damascus, and many others. Some were shortlived, and others like Maktab ‘Anbar came under state control, but there was a constant proliferation of such schools during the last half century of Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces. They included as well such schools as the Mar Mitri secondary school set up by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem to train teachers and prepare students for seminary training as priests: “Mudhakkirat kahin al-Quds: al-Khuri Niqula al-Khuri, Bir Zayt 1885-Bayrut 1954,” Dirasat ‘Arabiyya 30, nos. 5–6 (1994): 62–76.

37. These figures are from Salnameh Vilayet Suriyye 1288, Damascus, 1288/1871, pp. 149–150, which does not break down the non-Muslim schools or students. This volume is nevertheless an exceedingly valuable source on Palestine and other parts of Syria for this period, containing much more data than do most other provincial Salnames. The Jerusalem sancak soon thereafter ceased to be a part of the Damascus vilayet, and after 1874 became an autonomous sancak, but since it was not a vilayet, did not issue a provincial Salname.

38. Shimon Landman, Ahya’ a‘yan al-Quds kharij aswariha fil-qarn al-tas‘ ‘ashr [Quarters of the notables of Jerusalem outside its walls in the nineteenth century] (Tel Aviv: Dar al-Nashr al-‘Arabi, 1984), pp. 93–95.

39. A.L. Tibawi, Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration (London: Luzac, 1956), pp. 20, 270.

40. Anon., [As‘ad Daghir] Thazvrat al-‘arab [Revolt of the Arabs] (Cairo, n.p., 1916), p. 133.

41. Tibawi, Arab Education, p. 271. Ottoman and Mandatory educational statistics are hard to compare, among other reasons, because under the Ottoman system the school age population was counted as those from seven to eleven years of age, while under the Mandate, it was those from five to fourteen.

42. On this institution see Martin Strohmeier, “Al-Kulliyya al-Salahiyya, a late Ottoman University in Jerusalem,” unpublished article, courtesy of the author.

43. The situation continued into the early British Mandate period: according to Raqiyya al-Khalidi, who started school at the end of the Ottoman period, there were never enough places in the government or private schools for girls in Jerusalem. She herself attended both types of school in this period (interview, Jerusalem, October 7, 1993). An article in the Jerusalem paper al-Munadi paints a fascinating picture of the condition of the educational system in Palestine at this time, calling for the implementation of the Ottoman Constitution’s promise of free universal primary education: “al-Ta‘lim al-ijbarf” [Compulsory education], al-Munadi, no. 19, November 6, 1912, pp. 1–2.

44. Burnamij Madrasat Rawdat al-Ma‘arif [Syllabus of the Garden of Education School] (Jerusalem: Matba’at al-Nadi, 1331/1912).

45. For example, the schools mentioned in n. 36, about whose influence on their students much has been written: see R. Khalidi, “Society and Ideology.”

46. Tibawi, Arab Education, p. 59.

47. Muhammad al-Shanti, “Hadith ‘an ‘adliyyat al-Quds wa-ma‘arifuha bayna mutasarrif al-Quds wa mudir ma‘arifuha wa mudir al-Iqdam” [Discussion on judicial and educational institutions in Jerusalem between the Governor of Jerusalem and its director of education and the director of al-Iqdam], al-Iqdam, no. 15, May 4, 1914, pp. 1–2. al-Shanti also visited six new government schools, in Jerusalem, Lydd, Ramallah, Hebron, Nablus, and Bir al-Sabi‘, and found that they were of high quality, and used Arabic as the first language of instruction.

48. Ibid. A leader of the Arabist Hizb al-Lamarkaziyya in Cairo, al-Shanti returned to Palestine upon the outbreak of the war, and was among the Arab nationalist leaders hanged by the Ottoman authorities in 1916.

49. ‘Ajaj Nuwayhid, Rijal min Filastin, ma bayna bidayat al-Qarn hatta ‘am 1948 [Men from Palestine, between the beginning of the century and the year 1948] (Beirut, Manshurat Filastin al-Muhtalla, 1981), pp. 57–60.

50. Yawmiyyat Khalil al-Sakakini: Katha ana ya dunya [Diaries of Khalil al-Sakakini: I am thus oh world] (Jerusalem: al-Matba‘a al-Tijariyya, 1955), pp. 51–52.

51. There is a long article on the school, “al-Madrasa al-Dusturiyya al-Wataniyya fil-Quds,” in Filastin, no. 65, September 2, 1911, pp. 3–4, signed by its four founders.

52. A. L. Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine 1800–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 260–261.

53. Jam‘iyat al-Tabshir al-Kanisiyya (C.M.S.), al-Madrasa al-Kulliya al-Inkliziyya fil-Quds [The English college school in Jerusalem] (Jerusalem: CMS, 1904), p. 2. For details on the lengthy feud between the Bishop and the CMS which led to the founding of St. George’s School, see Tibawi, British Interests, pp. 237 ff.

54. Miller, Government and Society, pp. 98 ff.

55. “al-Ta‘lim al-ijbari” [Compulsory education], al-Munadi, no. 19, November 6, 1912, pp. 1–2.

56. al-Shanti’s article, cited in n. 47 above, is one example of such awareness.

57. For an example of the sacrifices parents were willing to make, see Khuri, “Mudhakkirat,” pp. 63–66

58. For details, see Rashid Khalidi, “The Press as a Source for Modern Arab Political History,” Arab Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Winter, 1981): 22–42. The standard source on the press is Philippe de Tarazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya [History of the Arab press], 4 vols. (Beirut: al-Matba‘a al-Adabiyya and al-Matba‘a al-Amarkiyya, 1913–1933). See also Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

59. Tarazi, Tarikh, 4: 66–68, 138–141, lists only three newspapers and periodicals founded in all of Palestine before the 1908 revolution, whereas 32 were established between then and the outbreak of World War I

60. This refers notably to comments made by some participants at a 1986 Columbia University conference on early Arab nationalism, recorded in R. Khalidi, et al., eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism, p. ix.

61. Ya‘qub Yehoshua, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin fil-‘ahd al-‘uthmani (1909–1918) [The history of the Arab press in Palestine in the Ottoman era, 1908–1918] (Jerusalem: Matba’at al-Ma‘arif, 1974), p. 17 estimates that most Palestinian newspapers in the Ottoman era printed only several hundred copies, with some of them reaching 2,000 during the Mandate period. He does, however, note (p. 44) that al-Quds, the most widely read Jerusalem paper, printed nearly 1,500 copies before 1914, some of which were sent abroad to immigrants to North and South America.

62. The Khalidi Library has seven years of al-Jawa’ib; eight years of al-Jinan; twenty-six years of al-Muqtataf; eight years of al-Hilal; fourteen years of al-Manar, and six years of al-Muqtabas. All are bound, and are additional to a large number of incomplete volumes of these and other periodicals.

63. The al-Aqsa Library holdings of al-Muqtataf are continuous from vols. 5–57; al-Hilal from 1–31; al-Manar from 1–22; and of the shorter-lived al-Muqtabas from 2–7.

64. Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi was a contributor, under the pseudonym “al-Maqdisi,” to al-Hilal and a number of other periodicals and newspapers, while he was Ottoman Consul-General in Bordeaux. In 1902–1903, for example he published a series of studies of Victor Hugo and European and Arab literature in al-Hilal. See chapter 4 for more on his writings.

65. “A‘lan bi-ta’sis maktaba ‘umumiyya fil-Quds al-sharif” cited in n. 32, above. It is clear from the visitors’ book of the Library that all manner of local and foreign scholars, and many ordinary people, availed themselves of its facilities, particularly in its first few decades of operation.

66. al-Buhayri’s press was Matba‘at al-Balagha, where among other things he printed collections of articles from his newspaper

67. In Jerusalem owners of printing presses who also published newspapers besides Hanania included Bandali Mushahwar, publisher of al-Insaf; Iliya Zakka, publisher of al-Nafir (he later moved it and his press to Haifa); and Shaykh ‘Ali Rimawi, publisher of al-Najah; and in Jaffa ‘Isa and Yusuf al-‘Isa, publishers of Filastin.

68. Suriyya al-Janubiyya began publication in 1919, and lasted for less than one year; after it was closed by the British authorities, al-Sabah was founded in 1921. The same press may have been used to publish a paper in the Ottoman period, but the evidence is unclear.

69. Hanania complained about the small size of the Jerusalem publishing market: in an editorial in the first issue of his paper he noted that even though the Arabic-language presses in Jerusalem were few in number “they still do not find enough work”: al-Quds, no. 1, September 18, 1908, p. 1.

70. al-Quds, no. 364, Setpember 30, 1913, p. 1. Hanania went on to ask: “How is an editor to make a living” in such a situation?

71. al-Quds al-Sharif/Quds Şerifi which was printed in Arabic and Turkish on opposite sides of the page, was first published from 1902–1907, and then resumed publication in 1913. al-Quds was founded in 1908 and continued publishing for the rest of the Ottoman period. al-Najah was founded in 1908, but did not last long. al-Nafir, founded in Alexandria in 1904 by Ibrahim Zakka, was moved in 1908 to Jerusalem where his cousin Iliya Zakka took it over, and then moved again to Haifa in 1913. al-Munadi, founded in 1912, published until the outbreak of the war, as did al-Dustur, founded in 1910 by Khalil al-Sakakini, and then taken over in 1913 by Jamil al-Khalidi. Bayt al-Maqdis, founded in 1908, seems to have appeared irregularly thereafter, only to reappear after the war, together with the papers mentioned in n. 68 above. For more details, see Tarazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya, as well as Yusuf Khuri, comp., al-Sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin [The Arab press in Palestine] (Beirut, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1976); and Yehoshua, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin.

72. For details, see n. 61, above.

73. “Mawt al-adab fi Filastin” [The death of culture in Palestine], al-Munadi, no. 16, May 21, 1912, pp. 1–2. Examination of al-Himara reveals why it may have sold more copies than al-Munadi: it was printed attractively, was well-written, and included amusing cartoons. See e.g., the satirical articles ridiculing critics of the May 1911 anti-Zionist parliamentary speeches of Ruhi al-Khalidi and Shukri al-‘Asali (both entitled “Muhawara,” “Conversation”): al-Himara, nos. 31 and 32, June 2 and 9, 1911, p. 2.

74. What will ultimately be required is research into reading habits in the Arab world in this and other periods, along the lines of Robert Darnton’s essay “First Steps Towards a History of Reading,” pp. 154–187 in his The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990).

75. Filastin, no. 241–244, September 29, 1913, p. 1.

76. See, e.g. the editorial “al-Ta‘lim al-ijbari” [Compulsory education], al-Munadi, no. 19, November 6, 1912, pp. 1–2, cited in n. 55, above.

77. Yehoshua, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin, p. 52, who notes (pp. 53–54) that Zakka was “close to the Jews,” that most of his subscribers and advertisers were Jewish, and that al-Nafir was described as “the hired newspaper” by al-Munadi, and was involved in polemics with other Palestinian papers, including al-Quds, Filastin, al-Munadi, and al-Jarab al-Kurdi.

78. “Fi’ata al-sihyuniyya” [The two factions of Zionism], Filastin, no. 84–287, November 8, 1913, p. 1.

79. Yehoshua, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin, p. 55, n.l. This statement appeared on the masthead only with issue no. 1–48, following a brief closure of the paper. An editorial in the paper explicitly stated “you will not see in it an article which does not concern the Palestinians or goes beyond the conditions of their country”: al-Munadi, no. 12, April 14, 1912, p. 1.

80. Cited in notes 31 and 73 above.

81. Yehoshua, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin, p. 54.

82. “Aham arkan al-najah: aw al-tijara wal-sina‘a wal-zira‘a fi rubu ‘Filastin” [The most important pillars of success: or commerce, industry and agriculture in the corners of Palestine], al-Quds, no. 96, October 13, 1909.

83. Muhammad al-Shanti, “Ahadith mudir al-Iqdam ma‘ a‘yan al-Quds,” [al-Iqdam’s director converses with the notables of Jerusalem], al-Iqdam, no. 15, April 5,1914, p.2.

84. One article, “Ihtijaj ahali al-Quds” [Protest by the people of Jerusalem], al-Quds, no. 268, October 17, 1911, describes a petition against the Italian attack on Libya signed by various religious dignitaries (muftis, bishops, rabbis), and by the Mayor and members of the Municipal Council as “the elected bodies of the Palestinian population”; another, “Kitab maftuh ila mutasarrif al-liwa” [Open letter to the governor of the province], al-Munadi, no. 6, March 12, 1912, attacks members of the Municipal Council as “enemies of the country”; finally, a report entitled “Laqad faza al-itti-hadiyun” [The Unionists have won], al-Munadi, no. 14, May 7, 1912, reports that the three deputies elected in 1912 for Jerusalem sancak were the choice of “all the land of Palestine” (kul al-bilad al-Filistiniyya).

85. The memoirs of Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, Khamsa wa tis‘una ‘aman fil-hayat: Mudhakirat wa-tasjilat [95 years of life: memoirs and records], eds., A. Jarbawi and H. Shakhshir, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Arab Thought Forum, 1993), pp. 187 ff. give a lively account of the interplay of local organizations in Nablus, such as jam‘iyyat al-Shaykh ‘Abbas, and Empire-wide parties like the Committee of Union and Progress [CUP].

86. Documents in the Khalidi Library show the continuing importance of the family as a social unit, as a focus for loyalty, and as a framework for a variety of activities. A letter from the founder of the Library, al-Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, to Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi, dated 16 Ramadan 1316/1898, asking for assistance in restarting the library project that Ruhi had originally begun, is replete with references to the family and concludes: “In this way, we can preserve the name of the al-Khalidi family, as long as learning is alive, and the waqf is preserved, and write in its history.”

87. McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, pp. 23–24.

88. This is an extrapolation from the figures given in the table in ibid., p. 158, showing the urban populations in 1922. McCarthy notes, p. 15, that “The population of the cities and towns of Ottoman Palestine is particularly difficult to estimate.” Much has been made of Jerusalem supposedly having ajewish majority before 1914, but the Ottoman sources indicate no such thing, and the non-Ottoman sources are dubious at best: for, as McCarthy points out, how could anyone but the state have had any systematic way of counting population? After the 1922 census, these problems disappeared, as within the gerrymandered municipal boundaries drawn up by the British Mandatory authorities so as to include every Jewish population concentration in the general vicinity, however many miles distant, and to exclude numerous nearby Arab population centers such as Silwan, immediately under the walls of the Old City, Jerusalem clearly came to have ajewish majority.

89. The Khalidi Library contains a number of elementary Hebrew-language books, most of them belonging to Yusuf Diya’ Pasha and his nephew Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi, who briefly attended an Alliance school in Jerusalem, as did his fellow deputy in the 1908 Parliament, Sa‘id al-Husayni. See the following chapters for more details on all three.

90. Some clearly foresaw the struggle to come. Among the first was Najib ‘Azuri, who set down this prediction in his Réveil de la Nation Arabe (Paris: n.p., 1904). We have seen others who looked with foreboding to the growth of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, including the journalists Najib Nassar and ‘Isa al-‘Isa, and the deputies Ruhi al-Khalidi and Sa‘id al-Husayni, who will be further discussed in the following three chapters. Among early Zionist writers, Ahad Ha’am [Asher Ginsberg] was among the most perceptive in foreseeing conflict between the two peoples, as early as 1891: Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken, 1972), pp. 210–211.

91. Gerber, Ottoman Rule, pp. 145–159, provides case studies from the records of the state (nizami) courts in Jaffa in 1887, showing that they had taken over many of the functions of the shari‘a courts.

92. For a good example of state encouragement of popular religion during the Hamidian period, in this case in the Nablus area, see Darwaza, Khamsa wa tis‘una ‘aman, pp. 104–112.

93. Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, pp. 244–249. The al-Husaynis were traditionally among the main participants in the annual Nabi Musa festival, which brought religious and popular processions to Jerusalem from many parts of the country, and thereafter to the Nabi Musa shrine on the road to Jericho for several days of celebrations in honor of the prophet Moses.

94. On changes in the occupational structure of the country, see Gerber, Ottoman Rule, pp. 69–74.

95. Catalogue of the Syrian Protestant College, Beirut, Syria, 1912–1913 (Beirut, The College Press, 1913), p. 13.

1. See R. Khalidi, “Arab Nationalism.”

2. Muhammad Farid, Tarikh al-dawla al-‘aliyya al-‘uthmaniyya [History of the Ottoman state] (Beirut: n.p., 1981). An earlier Beirut edition (Dar al-Jil, 1977) is simply a reprint of the original 1912 edition, without any preface or commentary. A relatively recent work of history follows the same lines: ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Muhammad al-Shinawi, al-Dawla al-‘uthmaniyya: Dawla islamiyya muftari ‘alayha [The Ottoman Empire: A maligned Islamic state], 4 vols. (Cairo: Matba‘at Jami‘at al-Qahira, 1980–1986).

3. Wajih Kawtharani, Bilad al-sham, al-sukkan, al-iqtisad wal-siyasa al-faransiyya fi matla‘ al-qarn al-‘ishrin: Qira’a fil-watha’iq [Bilad al-Sham, population, economy and French policy at the outset of the twentieth century: A reading of the documents] (Beirut: Ma‘had al-Inma’, 1980). Along the same lines, see Muhammad al-Khayr ‘Abd al-Qadir, Nakbat al-umma al-‘arabiyya bi-suqut al-khilafa: Dirasa lil-qadiyya al-‘arabiyya fi khamsin ‘aman, 1875–1925 [The disaster of the Arab nation through the fall of the caliphate: A study of the Arab cause over 50 years, 1875–1925] (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, 1985). It may be significant that a wave of such publications appeared soon after the Islamic revolution in Iran.

4. For a balanced recent assessment of this topic, see ‘Abd al-jalil al-Tamimi, “Importance de l’heritage arabo-turque et son impact sur les relations arabo-turques,” in his Etudes sur l’Histoire Arabo-Ottomane, 1453–1918/Dirasat fil-tarikh al-‘arabi al-‘uthmani, pp. 9–19 (Zeghouan: CEROMDI, 1994).

5. This is the main argument of R. Khalidi, “Ottomanism and Arabism.”

6. For the situation before these changes in the eighteenth century see the works cited in chapter 3, n. 10, above. On career patterns, see Joseph Szyliowicz, “Changes in the Recruitment Patterns and Career-lines of Ottoman Provincial Administrators during the Nineteenth Century,” in Ma’oz, ed., Studies on Palestine, pp. 249–283.

7. The disturbances during the years of Egyptian control, 1831–39, which first upset local power balances in Palestine, are dealt with in the Ph.D. dissertation of Judith Mendelsohn Rood, “Sacred Law in the Holy City: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Government in Jerusalem Under Ottoman and Khedival Rule,” Department of History, University of Chicago, 1993, as well as in Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine.

8. On the destruction of these rural power-bases, see Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, especially the chapter “The Disempowerment of the Local Lords,” pp. 197–240; and the less incisive account of Donna Robinson Divine, Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994), in the chapter “Restoration and Early Reforms, 1840–1875,” pp. 77–106. On the way the process proceeded in the Nablus region, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, pp. 39–53; 233–236.

9. This process is well explained in Butros Abu Manneh, “Jerusalem in the Tanzimat Period: The New Ottoman Administration and the Notables,” Die Welt des Islams 30 (1990): 1–44; and Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, pp. 241–292. For Nablus, see the exposition of this process in Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, pp. 48–53; 230–232; 236–243.

10. The title ra’is al-kuttab is frequently rendered using the Turkish term başkatib, which is often the preferred one, even in many documents and sources in Arabic.

11. A brief biography of Muhammad ‘Ali al-Khalidi can be found in Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, pp. 145–146.

12. For an excellent account of how these courts functioned, and the value of their records as sources, see Bishara B. Doumani, “Palestinian Islamic Court Records: A Source for Socioeconomic History,” MESA Bulletin 19, no. 2 (December 1985): 155–172.

13. The qadi of Jerusalem also had authority over the courts in other parts of Palestine, including Nablus, Acre, Haifa, and Hebron, whose judges he appointed, and where the Jerusalem na’ib had great influence: for an important 1807 case in the Nablus shari‘a court involving Muhammad ‘Ali al-Khalidi, who at that time held the post of na’ib of the Jerusalem court, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, pp. 205–206.

14. See Zilfi, The Politics of Piety, n. 56, p. 79. The post of qadi of Jerusalem was one of 17 great judgeships in major political or religious centers of the Empire for which competition was intense in the Ottoman system, as there were always more candidates than posts; hence the institution of annual tenure by the late seventeenth century.

15. Muhammad San‘allah, whose grandfather had been qadi of Jerusalem (which by the eighteenth century would have been a very unusual appointment for a native of Jerusalem), came from a long line of religious scholars, three of whom had held the position of Hanafi Qadi al-qudat in Mameluke Egypt in the ninth/fifteenth century. The history of the al-Khalidi family is summarized in Nasir al-Din al-Asad, Ruhi al-Khalidi (Cairo: Ma‘had al-Buhuth wal-Dirasat al-‘arabiyya, 1970), pp. 25–30. See also Kamal Salibi, “Listes chronologiques des grands cadis de l’Egypte sous les Mamelouks,” Revue des Etudes Islamiques 25 (1957): 104–107, where the original family name of “al-Dayri” is used.

16. These are part of a collection of documents in the possession of the al-Khalidi family which are to be placed in the renovated Khalidi Library in Jerusalem once they have been catalogued and organized. Forty-six of these documents are described in Donald P. Little and A. Uner Turgay, “Documents from the Ottoman Period in the Khalidi Library in Jerusalem,” Die Welt des Islams 20, nos. 1–2 (1980): 44–72.

17. Several Jerusalem families have such collections, notably the al-Husaynis, whose papers were used by ‘Adil Manna’ to compile A ‘lam Filastin. See Butrus Abu Manneh, “The Husaynis: The Rise of a Notable Family in 18th Century Palestine,” in David Kushner, ed., Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: Political Social and Economic Transformation, pp. 93–108 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1986). Members of the al-Husayni family occupied the post of Hanafi mufti of Jerusalem from the early eighteenth century, as is shown in the 1701 petition referred to in chapter 2 which lists Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Husayni as mufti of Jerusalem. The degree of continuity of Jerusalem families is remarkable: the signatories on this document include members of the Dajani, al-Imam, al-‘Alami, al-‘Asayli, al-Khatib, Abu al-Sa‘ud, Rayyes and other present-day Jerusalem families. The al-Husaynis, like the al-Khalidis, apparently held high religious posts under the Mamelukes: Mujir al-Din, al Uns al-jalil, 2, pp. 220, 226, 233, refers to several of them, but Abu Manneh points out (p. 107, n.7) that “there were other families in Jerusalem that carried the family name ‘Husayni,’ and who might have been distant relatives of this family.”

18. Written on good quality paper, and rolled up with summaries of their contents visible on the outside, the documents were generally in good condition, even though nearly all of them were more than 100 years old, and over fifty were more than 200 years old. Indeed the few twentieth-century documents, on inferior paper, were generally in the worst condition.

19. The best overview is provided by Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, pp. 197–240.

20. In keeping with standard Ottoman practice for holders of the post of qadi (but not local ones such as that of başkatib), he held these posts elsewhere than his native Jerusalem.

21. For details of Yasin’s career, see Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, pp. 154–155.

22. The treatment of Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi in this chapter draws on Alexander Schölch, “Ein palastinischer Reprasentant der Tanzimat Periode,” Der Islam 57 (1980) 316 ff. [translated as the chapter “A Palestinian Reformer: Yusuf al-Khalidi,” in Palestine in Transformation, pp. 241–252]; Abu Manneh, “Jerusalem in the Tanzimat Period,” pp. 40–43; Manna‘, A ’lam Filastin, pp. 156–161; as well as his uncatalogued papers, located in the Khalidi Library, including an eight-page autobiographical sketch covering the period until 1875.

23. He is described on the cover page of a work he published in Vienna in 1880 as “Jusuf Dija-ad-Din Al-Chalidi, Professor an der K.K. Orientalischen Akademie in Wien.”

24. This 319 pp. work is entitled al-Hadiyya al-hamidiyya fil-lugha al-kurdiyya [The Hamidian gift in the Kurdish language] (Istanbul: Martabey Matba‘asi, 1310/1892). It grew in part out of Yusuf Diya’s service as qa’immaqam in a Kurdish district in Bitlis province during the late 1880s, one of several minor posts to which he was assigned after falling foul of the Sultan a decade earlier. The work includes a 30-page analysis of the Kurdish language, 233 pages of definitions of words in Kurdish, followed by 39 pages of examples of poetry and prose in Kurdish, concluding with 13 pages of endorsements by various religious and literary luminaries in Istanbul, including the Sultan’s favorite, Shaykh Abu al-Huda al-Sayyadi.

25. Notably Schölch, Abu Manneh and Manna‘, cited in n. 22, above.

26. For more on Sa‘id and Ahmad Rasim al-Husayni, see Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, pp. 91, 109–110. Sa‘id al-Husayni has a large collection of papers belonging to his grandfather (who bore the same name), which are illuminating regarding aspects of his career.

27. According to Raqiyya al-Khalidi (interview, Jerusalem, September 23, 1995), Yusuf Diya’s three sisters, her great-aunts Amina, Hafiza, and Zaynab, were not educated; only toward the end of the century did females in the family begin to receive modern educations: interview, Wahida al-Khalidi, Beirut, December 12, 1977. See also ‘Anbara Salam al-Khalidi, Jawla fil-dhikrayat bayna Lubnan wa Filastin [Journey of memories between Lebanon and Palestine]. Beirut: al-Nahar, 1978.

28. See e.g. the contemptuous description of him by the German Consul in Jerusalem, cited in Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, p. 250.

29. These details are taken from the autobiographical sketch mentioned in n.22, above. In his own writings and his correspondence with his nephew Ruhi, Yusuf Diya’ often refers to the importance of Western learning. See, e.g., the conclusion to his edition of the poetry of Labid ibn Rabi‘a, Diwan Labid, pp. 147–151. See also Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, pp. 242–243.

30. With the exception of Yasin, little else is known about the careers of the brothers of Yusuf Diya’, beyond the fact that they became ‘ulama and held the post of ra’is al-kuttab in Jerusalem at different times. It is also known that Raghib, grandfather of the founder of the Khalidi Library, died young. Yasin was close to his younger brother Yusuf Diya’, as is clear from their correspondence preserved by the family: a dozen letters between them survive solely for the years 1317/1900 and 1318/1901, the latter being the year of Yasin’s death.

31. Yusuf Diya’s textbooks from Malta and other language texts with his name in them can be found in the Khalidi Library. Having met him briefly in Vienna, Charles Doughty reported the German Orientalist Alfred von Kremer’s comment that he “was a litterate [sic] Moslem, a school-teacher . . . in Jerusalem, who had some smattering of European languages”: Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1888), 2:419. However, the American Consul-General in Istanbul reported in 1877 that he “spoke English and French very well,” and a later Consul-General described him as “speaking English with fluency and much accuracy”: Robert Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), p. 267, n. 40). He taught in German at the Imperial-Royal Oriental Academy in Vienna in the 1870s and 1880s.

32. The exact title was Head of the Municipal Council, which had been established in 1863, well ahead of other Ottoman cities, which obtained similar forms of municipal government only as a result of the 1864 and 1871 Provincial Laws: see Carter Findlay, “The Evolution of the System of Provincial Administration as Viewed from the Center,” in Kushner, ed., Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, pp. 3–29. The details of his efforts to establish this school are described differently in a manuscript autobiography “Mudhakkirat al-Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi” [Memoirs of al-Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi], n.d. p. 31, copy in possession of author.

33. Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, pp. 243–244, Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, pp. 156–157, and Yusuf Diya’s autobiographical sketch describe some of his activities as mayor, which also emerge from letters and publications on water supply, road-building and archaeology among his correspondence (including an 1870 letter from Maj. Gen. Henry James R.E. of the British War Office regarding an effort by Yusuf Diya’ to improve the Jerusalem water supply). His activism did not earn Yusuf Diya’ unanimous praise: Schölch (p. 249, n. 752) reports the hostile attitude of French diplomats in Jerusalem toward him, accompanied by the accusation that he was “pro-German,” perhaps occasioned by his firm stand against French consular moves in support of their religious interests in Jerusalem, or his good relations with the British.

34. The words are those of Yusuf Diya’, in his autobiographical sketch.

35. Copies of a lengthy exchange of telegrams (in French) with the Foreign Ministry and the Ottoman Embassy in St. Petersburg protesting his sudden removal and requesting reimbursement for expenses incurred in Poti are located in the Khalidi Library. There is also a droll eleven-page manuscript account in French of the circumstances of Yusuf Diya’s replacement by his predecessor in Poti, a man he describes as “l’ambitiuex ignorant et renommé illetré, Hassan-Agha.” This document, in the form of a letter dated Poti, November 5, 1874, reads as if it were prepared for publication (Yusuf Diya’ talks of himself in the third person).

36. The Russian passport issued to him to allow him to leave the country, dated December 10, 1874, is to be found among his papers in the Khalidi Library

37. For details on the Ottoman electoral system, see Hasan Kayali, “Elections and the Electoral Process in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1919,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no. 3 (August 1995): 265–286.

38. Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period, p. 267, n. 40.

39. See ibid., pp. 148, 156, 166–167, 241–242, 247–288. See also Abu Manneh, “Jerusalem,” pp. 41–42.

40. Devereux, First Ottoman Constitutional Period, p. 156.

41. This was Mahmud Cellaledin Pasa, who was one of the Sultan’s ministers at this time, in his memoirs Mir’at-i hakikat, 3 vols. (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Osmaniye, 1326–1327), 3:61, cited in ibid., pp. 247–248.

42. See Abu Manneh, “Jerusalem in the Tanzimat Period,,” pp. 40–43; Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, pp. 247–249; and David Kushner, “The Ottoman Governors of Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 3 (July 1987): 283.

44. The Consul General was Eugene Schuyler, in a letter dated May 13,1877, cited in Devereaux, First Ottoman Constitutional Period, p. 267.

45. This is clear both from correspondence from several such individuals, including Alfred von Kremer (some of it in Arabic but most in European languages), and from books by Ernest Renan, Robert Bosworth-Smith, Charles Clermont-Ganneau and other leading European Orientalists of the day inscribed with warm dedications to Yusuf Diya’ found among his personal library, and now in the Khalidi Library in Jerusalem.

46. For a sense of the atmosphere at court during the Sultan’s lengthy reign, see the fictional but highly plausible account in Michel de Grèce, Le Dernier Sultan (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1991), which purports to tell his story from ‘Abd al-Hamid’s own perspective, and is based at least in part on the memoirs of the Sultan’s daughter and the author’s compilation of the recollections of two of his grandsons.

47. In view of the acidic satirical poetry Yusuf Diya’ wrote, the sharpness of his tongue, and his profound dislike of ‘Abd al-Hamid, the lines addressed to the Sultan in the introduction of Diwan Labid (p. 1) can be read only as a thinly veiled parody (though ‘Abd al-Hamid’s censors must have taken them at face value): “Renewer of the structure of the Ottoman state, raiser of the pavilions of security and charity, spreader of the paths of justice with mercy and compassion on the horizons, worthy holder of the throne of the sultanate, protector of the people, benefactor of knowledge, possessor of all benefactions, khalifa of God on earth, prince of the faithful, victor of his age, absolute crown of sultans of the world, spreader of the shari‘a to the horizons, his highness, our lord and master, the sultan, son of the sultan, son of the sultan, father of victories and conquests, the conquering sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II” [there follow seven more equally fulsome lines]. The endorsement by the Sultan’s confidant, Shaykh Abu al-Huda al-Sayyadi, mentioned earlier, must have help secure publication of this work.

48. Salname-i devlet-i aliyye-i osmaniyye [Ottoman state yearbook] (Istanbul: Matba’at Amira, 1307/1890), p. 55. Later yearbooks (1309/1892 and 1314/1896) list similar diplomatic assignments which appear to have been purely nominal.

49. Another Arab official, the Lebanese Najib ‘Azuri, was sentenced to death in absentia on such charges: see Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, pp. 258–259.

50. We can follow Yusuf Diya’s movements for the last decade of his life from the 83 surviving letters he wrote his nephew Ruhi between 1897 and 1906. He appears to have first been allowed to leave Istanbul and travel to Jerusalem briefly in December 1900 (when his brother Yasin was ill), and then for longer periods in several succeeding years. Few of Ruhi’s letters to him survive.

51. Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, p. 159. For the personal dedication to Yusuf Diya’ on a photograph of al-Afghani located in the Khalidi Library, see chapter 3 above, n.26. For more on al-Afghani’s exile in Istanbul, see Homa Nategh, “Mirza Aqa Khan, Sayyed Jamal al-din et Malkom Khan à Istanbul (1860–1897),” Th. Zarcone and F. Zarinebaf, eds., Les Iraniens d’Istanbul, pp. 45–60 (Paris, Teheran, Istanbul: Institut Francais de Recherches en Iran and Institut Francais d’Etudes Anatoliennes, 1993).

52. He received the knight’s cross of the Order of Franz-Joseph on the occasion of the Austrian emperor’s visit to Jerusalem while he was mayor in 1869: Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, p. 249.

53. In spite of being prevented from publishing, he continued to write, as is evident from the manuscripts in various stages of completion among his papers, now located in the Khalidi Library. The longest is a 76-page manuscript analyzing the Bible, entitled “Risalat mumahakat al-ta’wil fi munaqadat al-injil” [Disputes in interpretation regarding the contradictions of the Bible], dated Istanbul 1281 [1864] on the title page and 1296 [1878–79] on the final page. This closely reasoned treatise seems to have been started when its author was a student in Istanbul, and completed while he was in exile in Vienna fifteen years later. Other manuscripts include a 10-page poem entitled “al-‘Arsh wal-hayka” [The throne and the temple], dated 1295 [1878].

54. Yusuf Diya’ sent six letters to Ruhi from July to September 1899 from the Russian hospital in Istanbul, where he was receiving treatment. Letters he sent from Palestine in the following few years also mention ill health.

55. The letter is quoted in Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, p. 160. Herzl’s response is reprinted in Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971), pp. 91–93. See also Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 47–48.

56. The articles are mentioned in Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, p. 157.

57. Bentwich often sent him his writings: one, “The Progress of Zionism,” The Fortnightly Review (December 1898), carried the inscription “With H. B.’s greetings in Zion”; another, Palestine and Her Critics, a 1900 pamphlet, enclosed a card engraved “With Mr. Herbert Bentwich’s Compliments.”

58. The amusing and varied forms of greeting used by the older man in his letters to the younger bespeak strong feelings of affection and solicitude.

59. Yusuf Diya’ and Ruhi’s father Yasin also devoted much of their correspondence (12 letters between them have survived) to discussing means of advancing Ruhi’s career, as did Yasin in the 16 existing letters to his son. It is clear from the entire collection that advancement in the Ottoman bureaucracy was quite difficult without reliance on such influential relatives.

60. A passage by a European contemporary observer describing Yusuf Diya’ is cited in Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, p. 159.

61. This incident is described in Ruhi al-Khalidi, Asbab al-inqilab al-‘uthmani wa turkiyya al-fatat [The causes for the Ottoman revolution and the Young Turks] (Cairo: al-Manar Press, 1326/1908), p. 99, which does not give the name of the individual who berated Ghanem. A marginal note by Ahmad Badawi al-Khalidi dated 1327 reveals that the anonymous deputy was Yusuf Diya’. The remark is characteristic of the man.

62. For a balanced assessment of education under ‘Abd al-Hamid, see A. L. Tibawi, A Modern History of Syria, including Lebanon and Palestine (London: MacMillan, 1969), pp. 194–96.

63. This emerges from the data provided in Rafiq Tamimi and Muhammad Bahjat, 2 vols. Wilayat Bayrut [The province of Beirut] (Beirut: al-Iqbal Press, 1335–36/1917), 2:151–53. Tamimi was born in Nablus and educated in Istanbul and France, while Bahjat, from Aleppo, was educated in law in Istanbul; both were government officials (for details, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, p. 292, n. 42). Their comprehensive survey of government and society in the province of Beirut, based on a detailed field study, is one of the best pre-1918 sources on the region. For more on education in this province see Martin Strohmeier, “Muslim Education in the Vilayet of Beirut, 1880–1918,” in C. E. Farah, ed., Decision-making and Change in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 215–241 (Kirkville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1993).

64. He won prizes for coming in first in Turkish, French, and Arabic grammar, as well as religious sciences, and came in second in his class in English translation and mathematics, winning a prize for good conduct as well. The prizes (mainly works of literature and moral uplift in French) and many of his school-books, are preserved at the Khalidi Library

65. He received the highest grades in 10 of 22 subject areas, including kalam, tafsir and hadith, land law, criminal law, legal procedure, and military law. The original of his diploma and the texts he used at the Mülkiye are also preserved at the Khalidi Library.

66. Ruhi’s older brother, Thurayya, also received both a traditional and a modern education at the instigation of their father, and became a commissioner of antiquities in Palestine during the late Ottoman period, supervising foreign excavations: interview with Raqiyya al-Khalidi (Thurayya’s daughter), Jerusalem, October 8,1993. His books and papers are also preserved in the Khalidi Library.

67. This sketch appeared in the Jaffa periodical al-Asma‘i 1, no. 7 (December 1, 1908): 152–160. For more on Ruhi, see al-Asad, Ruhi al-Khalidi; Khairieh Kasmieh, “Ruhi al-Khalidi 1864–1913: A Symbol of the Cultural Movement in Palestine toward the end of Ottoman Rule,” in T. Philipp, ed., The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th Century, pp. 123–146 (Stuttgart: Fritz Steiner, 1992); and Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, pp. 137–141.

68. The two dozen or so books dating from this youthful period of Ruhi’s life are mainly inexpensive editions of legal works such as Tafsil li-tawdih al-qawa‘id al-fiqhiyya wal-usuliyya fi awwal majallat al-ahkam al-‘adliyya [Clarification of the rules of jurisprudence in the legal code],(Istanbul: n.p. 1299/1881); a book on inheritance in the shari‘a, Shaykh Yusuf al-Asir, Shark ra’id al-fara’id (Beirut: n.p., 1290/1873); collections of poetry like Butrus Karami, ed., al- Muwashahat al-andalusiyya (Beirut: n.p., 1864); and Nukhab diwan Ibrahim b. Sahl al-Isra ’ili al-Andalusi al-Ashbili, n.p., n.d.; and books like Kanz lughat, a Turkish-Persian dictionary by Faris al-Khuri (Beirut: n.p., 1876).

69. The ijaza (or diploma) is dated 1314AH/1897. There are a number of letters extant in the Khalidi Library between Ruhi al-Khalidi and al-Husayni, testifying to the former’s continued interest in religious topics long after he had completed his education. For details on al-Imam, whose grandmother was a member of the al-Khalidi family, see Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, p. 47.

70. The incident is described in the autobiographical article cited earlier, with the author’s intimation that he was not fully worthy of this honor, which may have been conferred on him out of the desire of the Shaykh al-Islam, ‘Üryanizade Ahmet Esad Efendi, to favor Ruhi’s uncle, a ‘alim of distinction, whom Ruhi was accompanying.

71. Among the books in Hebrew from this period in the Khalidi Library are Arabic- Hebrew, Russian-Hebrew, and French-Hebrew dictionaries, as well as a number of Hebrew language text books, some of which belonged to Ruhi al-Khalidi, and some apparently to his uncle, Yusuf Diya.’

72. For more on the salafi trend, see Commins, Islamic Reform, and Escovitz, “ ‘He was the Muhammad ‘Abdu of Syria,’ ” pp. 293–310. There are at least three copies of al-Jisr’s book al-Risala al-hamidiyya (Beirut: n.p., 1305/1887) in the Khalidi Library, originally owned by different members of the family.

73. He apparently got into trouble with the authorities immediately after finishing at the Mülkiye, where his diploma shows he had received the highest grades in the category “Good Conduct,” which would have been unlikely had he been suspected of involvement in forbidden political activities at that time.

74. There is reference to the story about al-Afghani in the autobiographical note published in al-Asma‘i, and elsewhere.

75. Attestation by Derenbourg, dated Paris, October 23, 1897, appended to ijaza from Shaykh Yusuf al-Sadiq al-Imam al-Husayni.

76. Ruhi al-Khalidi, Risala fi sur‘at intishar al-din al-islami fi aqsam al-‘alam [Essay on the speed of the spread of the Islamic religion in the regions of the world] (Tripoli: al-Balagha Press, 1897), [67 pp.].

77. One of the skeptics was the chair of the session, Ruhi’s professor Hartwig Derenbourg, who said “Even if the speaker exaggerated in estimating the number of Muslims as one fifth of the human race, we believe that the Muslims number more than 200 million.” Ibid., p. 65.

79. In addition to those mentioned in n.76 and n.80 below, his published works include the following books and monographs: Tarikh ‘ilm al-adab ‘ind al-ifranj wal-‘arab wa Victor Hugo [The history of literature among the Arabs, the Franks and Victor Hugo] (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1904), [272 pp.], a book that was in print in an edition published in Damascus until recently; al-Inqilab al-‘uthmani [The Ottoman revolution] (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1909), [171 pp.]; al-Muqaddima fil-mas’ala al-sharqiyya munthu nash’atiha al-uwla ila al-rub‘ al-thani min al-qarn al-thamin ‘ashr [An introduction to the Eastern Question from its inception until the second quarter of the 18th century] (Jerusalem: Dar al-Aytam, n.d.), [printed posthumously ca. 1920 by his brother, Thurayya; 81 pp.]; al-Kimiya ‘ind al-‘arab [Chemistry under the Arabs] (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1953), [printed posthumously; 85 pp.]. Many of them were initially published in serial form in periodicals such as al-Hilal, al-Muqtabas, and Tarablus al-Sham.

80. al-Habs fil-tuhma wal-imtihan ‘ala talab al-iqrar wa-izhar al-mal [Imprisonment on accusation and the test for a request for a decision and revelation of wealth] (Jerusalem [?]: n.p., 1321/1903), [86 pp.].

81. There are Masonic books and pamphlets in the Khalidi Library in English, French, and Arabic, several belonging to Ruhi al-Khalidi (which indicate he was a member of the Grand Orient of France and possibly another order in Cairo), as well as a number of French- and Arabic-language anti-Masonic tracts authored by Jesuits.

82. “Osmanli Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti 1327 senasi siyasi programi” [Political program of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress] (Istanbul, Tanin, 1327/1909). The rarity of this 16-page pamphlet was pointed out to me by Şükrü Hanioglu, an expert on the CUP.

83. al-Hadiyya al-hamidiyya, pp. 2–3.

84. al-Asma‘i, pp. 152–157.

85. al-Muqaddima fil-mas’ala al-sharqiyya, pp. b-j [ba-jim].

86. The debate was widely published in the Arabic press, in some cases verbatim; see e.g., Filastin, no. 37, May 14 [sic], 1911, pp. 1–2; al-Karmil, no. 145, May 19, 1911, p. 1; al-Muqtabas, no. 691, May 18,1911, pp. 1–2; Lisan al-Hal, no. 6649, May 18,1911, p. 1. See also Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 112–116. The first two papers, as well as European and Zionist press reports cited by Mandel, state that al-Khalidi opened the debate; Lisan al-Hal describes al-‘Asali as speaking first, while al-Muqtabas, which al-‘Asali wrote for and later edited, provides only a long report on his speech by Haqqi al-‘Azm. The following account draws on all these sources. In Ruhi’s own folder of press clippings and other materials on Zionism, located in the Khalidi Library, he preserved the text of his speech as printed in Filastin, as well as what appear to be drafts of the speech.

87. Lisan al-Hal, no. 6649, May 18, 1911.

88. Ruhi al-Khalidi lived in France from 1893 until 1908, and was therefore exposed to the Dreyfus affair from its inception to its conclusion. His library included numerous books analyzing anti-Semitism, including Zola’s famous tract on the affair, Humanité-Verité-Justice: L’Affaire Dreyfus. Lettre à la Jeunesse par Emile Zola (Paris: Eugene Fasquelle, 1897).

89. Lisan al-Hal, no. 6649, May 18, 1911.

90. Ibid. See also Filastin, no. 37, May 14, 1911, p. 2.

91. al-Muqtabas, no. 691, May 18, 1911, pp. 1–2. The al-Fula sale is discussed in detail in chapter 5, and some of its repercussions in the press in chapter 6.

92. While Shukri al-‘Asali was a spellbinding orator according to a number of sources (see R. Khalidi, “The 1912 Election Campaign,” p. 467), Ruhi al-Khalidi apparently did not inherit his uncle’s talent for public speaking: Manna‘, A ‘lam Filastin, p. 140.

93. The Khalidi Library contains Hebrew-language textbooks which belonged to both men, as well as a few other books in Hebrew, and a large collection of Judaica, books on Biblical archaeology, and numerous editions of the history of Josephus in several languages.

94. Filastin, no. 37, May 14, 1911, p. 1.

95. This is certainly the impression given by the comments of other non-Arab deputies during the debate, although the perhaps overenthusiastic reports by Filastin and al-Muqtabas, cited above, stress how well the speeches were received. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 115–116, suggests some of the reasons why the issue of Zionism did not attract the attention of most non-Arab deputies at this time.

96. This work, still in manuscript, is analyzed by Walid Khalidi in an article entitled “Kitab al-sionism, aw al-mas’ala al-sihyuniyya li-Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi, al-mutawafi sanat 1913” [The book “Zionism or the Zionist Question,” by Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi, died 1913], in Hisham Nashabeh, ed. Studia Palaestina: Studies in honour of Constantine K. Zurayk/Dirasat filistiniyya: majmu ‘at abhath wudi ‘at takriman lil-duktur Qustantin Zurayq, pp. 37–81 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1988).

99. Nassar’s 65-page work is entitled al-Sihyuniyya: tarikhuha, gharaduha, ahamiyatuha [Zionism: its history, aims and importance] (Haifa: al-Karmil Press, 1911), and bears the notation that it is “summarized from the Encyclopedia Judaica,” although it contains a brief introduction, a conclusion and several pages of commentary by Nassar.

100. Ruhi al-Khalidi, “Kitab al-sionism, aw al-mas’ala al-sihyuniyya” [Zionism or the Zionist question], undated manuscript, copy in possession of author, pp. 111–112.

101. W. Khalidi, “Kitab al-sionism,” p. 78.

103. Most sources indicate that he died of typhoid, which must have struck rapidly, as he was only ill for two or three days. His niece, Raqiyya al-Khalidi, whose father Thurayya collected Ruhi’s effects in Istanbul and brought them back to Jerusalem, recalled (interview, Jerusalem, June 28,1992) that her father told her that in Istanbul Ruhi al-Khalidi’s colleagues claimed he had been poisoned, presumably by government agents. There is no evidence for this assertion, and it is possible that when she heard this story in later years (she was a small child in 1913), her uncle Ruhi had been turned into a posthumous Arabist martyr to Turkish persecution by Jerusalem society. It is also possible that such rumours were circulating in Istanbul, but were untrue.

104. See Filastin, May 18, 1911, pp. 1–2, and Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 112–116.

105. Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, p. 246.

106. Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi, ed., Diwan Labid, p. 148

107. See Şükrü Hanioglu, “The Young Turks and the Arabs before the Revolution of 1908,” in R. Khalidi et. al., eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism, pp. 31–49 for early evidence of these tendencies, which were often perceived in exaggerated form by many Arabs in this period.

108. His private correspondence shows Ruhi al-Khalidi to have been deeply moved by the privations and humiliations imposed on his uncle by the Sultan.

109. For more on the CUP, see Feroz Ahmed, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Power, 1908–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); and Erik Jan Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 1905–1926 (Leiden: Brill, 1984).

110. Examples can be found in the al-Khalidi and al-Husayni families: religious education continued to be the standard for at least one more generation among the offspring of Yusuf Diya’s brothers, after which, around the turn of twentieth century, secular, professional education became the norm. Similarly, while one branch of the al-Husayni family held the post of Hanafi mufti of Jerusalem until the 1930s, we have seen that younger members of other branches of the family like Sa‘id al-Husayni acquired modern educations and obtained leading government positions such as Mayor of Jerusalem and parliamentary deputy.

111. See Abu Manneh, ‘Jerusalem in the Tanzimat Period,” pp. 40 ff. for details.

112. For more details see R. Khalidi, “The 1912 Election Campaign.”

113. In his autobiographical sketch for al-Asma‘i p. 157.

114. Cited in n.99 above.

115. al-Asad’s biography of Ruhi is subtitled Ra’id al-bahth al-tarikhi al-filastini, [Pioneer of Palestinian historiography].

116. The phrase is again that of Benedict Anderson, from the title of his book, Imagined Communities.

1. Beyond these overt forms of disruption due to bombing, closures, and so forth, the functioning of these institutions was also affected and their priorities distorted by the demands imposed on them by the nearly constant crises that affected the Palestinian people from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s.

2. Among the exceptions in the generation which grew to maturity before 1948 are ‘Arif al-‘Arif, al-Nakba: Nakbat Bayt al-Maqdis wal-firdaws al-mafqud, 1947–1952 [The catastrophe: The catastrophe of Jerusalem and the lost paradise, 1947–52], 6 vols. (Sidon: al-Maktaba al-‘Asriyya, 1956–58); Ihsan al-Nimr, Tarikh Jabal Nablus wal-Balqa’ [History of the Nablus region], 4 vols. (Nablus: Jam‘iyyat ‘Ummal al-Matabi’ al-Ta‘awuniyya, 1976 [originally published published 1936–1961]); and works by ‘Abd al-Latif Tibawi, Muhammad Tzzat Darwaza, and Walid Khalidi, several of which have already been cited. For general background see Tarif Khalidi, “Palestinian Historiography: 1900–1948,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 10, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 59–76; and Beshara B. Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 21, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 5–28. Works by a younger generation of Palestinian scholars include Musa Budeiri, The Palestinian Communist Party, 1919–1948 (London: Ithaca, 1979); ‘Abd al-Wahhab Kayyali, Tarikh Filastin al-Hadith, 4th ed. (Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 1978; translated as Palestine: A Modern History, London: Croom Helm, 1978); Philip Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Muslih, Origins of Palestinian Nationalism; Emile Sahliyeh, The PLO after the Lebanon War (Boulder: Westview, 1986); Elias Sanbar, Palestine 1948: L’expulsion (Paris: Livres de la Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes, 1984); and Doumani’s Rediscovering Palestine.

3. Yehoshua Ben Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: The Old City (Jerusalem and New York: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Institute and St. Martin’s Press, 1984). See my review of this book in Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 21, no.l (Spring 1987): 25–26.

4. Isaiah Fiedman, The Question of Palestine 1914–1918, subtitled A Study of British-Jewish-Arab Relations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

5. Porath’s The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1919–1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1973), and The Palestinian Arab National Movement 1929–1939: From Riots to Rebellion (London: Frank Cass, 1977); and Lesch’s Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) are the standard works on the subject.

6. Neville Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

7. The best discussion of this bias in favor of elites and against the subaltern, can be found in Guha and Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies, especially the foreword by Edward Said (pp. v-x) and the introductory sections and the first essay by Guha, pp. 35–86.

8. See, e.g. his “Crop-Sharing Economics in Mandatory Palestine,” part 1, Middle Eastern Studies 11, no. 1 (January 1975): 3–23; part 2,11, no. 2 (April 1975): 188–203; “Production and Trade in an Islamic Context: Sharika Contracts in the Transitional Economy of Northern Samaria, 1853–1943,” part 1, International Journal of Middle East Studies 6, no. 2 (April 1975): 185–209; part 2, 6, no. 3 (July 1975): 308–324; and “The Land-Equalizing musha‘ Village: A Reassessment,” in Gilbar, ed., Ottoman Palestine, pp. 91–129.

9. Ylana Miller, Government and Society in Rural Palestine, 1920–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). Other examples of scholarship using archival and other sources to investigate issues at this level are several of the studies in Roger Owen, ed. Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1982); Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, and Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Using primarily Zionist sources, Anita Shapira has shed light on some of the same issues from a different perspective in her Land and Power, although these sources lead her into making mistaken statements such as (p. x): “the association of Palestine and Palestinian with the Arab population of the country now living outside Israel did not develop until after the establishment of the state.”

10. The controversy over From Time Immemorial (New York: Harper and Row, 1984) , which was lavishly praised by Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel, Arthur Goldberg, Theodore White, and other luminaries, finally reached the columns of the New York Times in late 1985. The lapses in the research for it were first documented by Norman Finkelstein and William Farrell, in reviews published in In These Times on September 11, 1984, and the Journal of Palestine Studies 14, no. 1 (Fall 1984): 126–134, respectively. In a devastating review by Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath, entitled “Mrs. Peter’s Palestine,” in the New York Review of Books, January 16, 1986, pp. 36–39, the book was finally shown to be in large part a work of plagiarism, and utterly worthless as scholarship. This conclusion is further documented in Finkelstein’s “Disinformation and the Palestine Question: The Not-So-Strange Case of Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, in Said and Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims, pp. 33–69.

11. Arieh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs 1878–1948 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984).

12. These demographic issues are carefully addressed by Porath, in the review mentioned in note 10 above; by Alexander Schölch, “The Demographic Development of Palestine, 1850–1882,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 17 no. 4 (November 1985) : 485–505; and most thoroughly in McCarthy, The Population of Palestine.

13. Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” Journal of Palestine Studies 13, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 27–48.

14. A thorough treatment of the theme of the absence of the Palestinians from Zionist discourse, an absence of long-standing, can be found in Shapira, Land and Power, pp. 40–82.

15. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. xvii-xviii, summarizes this perspective well: “the conventional view is that all was well between Arab and Jew in Palestine before 1914. . . . Among the Arabs there was, at most, only rudimentary opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine and only a vague awareness of Zionist aims.”

16. The debates over the issue of Zionism in the pre-war Arab press are dealt with in Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, and chapters 4–6 of R. Khalidi, British Policy. Well over 600 articles on Zionism were published in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem newspapers from 1909 until 1914, as is discussed in detail in chapter 6, below

17. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism is the most thorough. Others include Kayyali, Palestine: A Modern History, and the introductory section of Naji ‘Allush, al-Muqawama al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin, 1917–1948 [The Arab resistance in Palestine, 1917–1948] (Beirut: Palestine Research Center, 1967).

18. For more on this development, see R. Khalidi et al., eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism.

19. The literature on the impact of early Jewish immigration to Palestine is vast. Among the most stimulating recent studies are Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins, and Shapira, Land and Power.

20. The figures are taken from McCarthy, Population of Palestine, p. 23.

21. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (London: Methuen, 1981); Charles Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and Northern Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and The Fertile Crescent, 1800–1914: A Documentary History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Two studies illustrating these changes in different regions are Leila Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1983 and Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine.

22. This code is the subject of a 1995 University of Chicago History Department doctoral dissertation by Denise Jorgens, “A Study of the Ottoman Land Code and Khedive Sa‘id’s Land Law of 1858,” which compares the Ottoman and Egyptian land laws of the same years, and shows that they produced fewer changes in land ownership patterns than was formerly believed to be the case. Much recent research is coming to the same conclusion.

23. See chapter 9, “Land Problems and Land Registration,” in Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, pp. 199–222 for a careful treatment of villages in the hilly Jerusalem area on the basis of an examination of Ottoman records.

24. The best analysis of musha‘ in the regions of Palestine where it predominated is in Firestone, “The Land-Equalizing musha ‘Village.”

25. This process is described in A. Granott, The Land System in Palestine: History and Structure (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952), pp. 72–77. As Managing Director of the Jewish National Fund, Granott was perhaps the foremost expert on Zionist land purchase, having been deeply involved in such transactions throughout the Mandate. See also Doreen Warriner, Land Reform and Development in the Middle East: A Study of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 60–70, and the articles of Y. Firestone, cited in note 8.

26. Hisham Sharabi, Arab Intellectuals and the West: The Formative Years, 1875–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), p. 3; Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. xvii.

27. On forms taken by peasant resistance in different contexts, see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

28. McCarthy, Population of Palestine, table, p. 10. See also Doumani, “The Political Economy of Population Counts,” pp. 1–17 for more on the politics of Ottoman enumerations of the population in the nineteenth century.

29. McCarthy, Population of Palestine, pp. 17–24 for an analysis of where the figure of 85,000 came from, and why it is wrong. It was formerly the commonly accepted figure: see Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. xxiv, and Porath, Emergence, p. 17, for example. Since, Mandel notes, “as many as one in every two immigrants may have departed again,” and since Ottoman figures probably did not count some immigrants who retained European nationalities rather than become Ottoman subjects, figures on Jewish population before the 1920s are problematic. McCarthy makes the obvious point (p. 5) that “the only ones who can properly evaluate population numbers are those who count the population. For the Ottoman Empire, it has been shown that no population statistics but those of the Ottoman government provide usable demographic data.”

30. A good map can be found in Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. xv.

31. See Buheiry, “Agricultural Exports,” Table 2, p. 59. Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, pp. 80–92. For the 1923–24 figures, see Survey of Palestine, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Government of Palestine, 1946), Table 2, 1:337.

32. Buheiry, “Agricultural Exports,” p. 92.

33. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 265. The dunum in Palestine was equivalent to a hectare during the Mandate, and to just under a hectare before World War I. About four dunums equal an acre.

34. For more on the impact of this law, see Granott, The Land System in Palestine, Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine,” pp. 11–12, and especially Peter Sluglett and Marion Farouk-Sluglett, “The Application of the 1858 Land Code in Greater Syria: Some Observations,” in Tarif Khalidi, ed., Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East (Beirut: American University Press, 1984), pp. 409–424.

35. See the suggestive comments in this regard on the concluding pages of Doumani’s book, Rediscovering Palestine, pp. 244–245.

36. See Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins, pp. 43–44.

37. For demography in general, consult McCarthy, The Population of Palestine. For patterns of land settlement, see Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, pp. 35–43, 110–117. The number of newly established villages was small: while a few were established in the Jezreel Valley, Table 14, p. 39 in Schölch shows the number of villages in Galilee declining from the 1870s to the 1880s, although total population and the size of most individual villages had grown considerably.

38. Little Common Ground: Arab Agriculture and Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1920–1948 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), p. 259. Although it deals with the mandatory period, this is an excellent treatment of the overall impact of Jewish land purchase and settlement on the rural Arab society and economy.

39. For details, see Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 35–37, and Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins, pp. 200–201.

40. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 36; Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins, p. 200.

41. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 36.

42. Ibid., pp. 37–38; there are a few additional details in Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins, p. 201.

43. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 30–31. For the changes resulting from the second aliya see Alex Bein, The Return to the Soil: A History of Jewish Settlement in Israel (Jerusalem: Youth and Hechalutz Department of the Zionist Organization, 1952), pp. 36 ff. See also Shapira, Land and Power, pp. 53–82, and Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins, pp. 45–90.

44. Shapira, Land and Power, pp. 40–42.

45. Kol Kitve Ahad Ha-Am, p. 23. Summing up this period, Mandel writes (The Arabs and Zionism, p. 31): “Most members of the New Yishuv were genuinely taken aback to find Palestine inhabited by so many Arabs.” A few committed Zionist visitors to Palestine were able to ignore this reality, however: Shapira, Land and Power, p. 45 describes how Menachem Ussishkin came to the opposite conclusions after a visit to the country.

46. Arthur Ruppin, “The Arab Population in Israel,” Arakhim, 3, 1971, p. 10. The original quote is from 1930, but these views were current much earlier, as can be seen from an influential lecture entitled “A Hidden Question,” published in Hashiloah 15 (1907): 193 ff, in which a contemporary of Ahad Ha-Am, Yitzhak Epstein, described how the lands of the villagers of Ras al-Zawiyya and Metulla were bought out from under them when they were sold by absentee landlords in 1882 and 1896, and the settlements of Rosh Pinna and Metullah were founded on these sites.

47. This account is drawn in part from an article by Chaim Kalvarisky in Jewish-Arab Affairs (Jerusalem), 1931, pp. 11–14, reprinted in part in Neville Barbour, Palestine: Star or Crescent? (New York: Odyssey Press, 1947), pp. 133–134. The details on land ownership are taken from a table on p. Ill of the manuscript by Ruhi al-Khalidi, “al-Sionism,” cited in chapter 4. See also Bein, The Return to the Soil, p. 31. For the background to this incident, and later clashes over the same land, see Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 22–23, 67–70

48. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 22.

49. Barbour, Palestine, p. 134.

50. Details drawn from the table in Ruhi al-Khalidi, “al-Sionism,” p. 111; and Bein, The Return to the Soil, p. 31.

51. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 67.

52. For more on the awakening of Arab feeling in the Ottoman Empire at this time see R. Khalidi, British Policy, chapter 4; “Arab Nationalism in Syria: The Formative Years,” in W. Haddad and W. Ochsenwald, eds., Nationalism in a Non-National State: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1977), pp. 207–237; and “Ottomanism and Arabism,” pp. 50–69.

53. The fact that he was a Druze, which was irrelevant in this context, is commented on by Mandel (The Arabs and Zionism, p. 23) who says that Arslan, “although a Druze, supported the Arab nationalist cause.” He appears to share the peculiar notion, propagated by some Israeli Orientalists affiliated with their country’s political, military, and intelligence establishment (presumably for divide-and-rule purposes), that the Druze are not Arabs.

54. Barbour, Palestine, p. 134.

55. This topic is dealt with in detail in the next chapter.

56. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 67.

57. Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins, p. 138, and Shapira, Land and Power, p. 70. For more on Ha-Shomer, see Bein, The Return, pp. 44, 77.

58. Shapira, Land and Power, p. 71–72, states that members of Ha-Shomer took both the bedouin and the Cossack as models to emulate. Yigal Allon, The Making of Israel’s Army (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1970), has a 1909 photo of Ha-Shomer guards in Galilee facing p. 20; there is another 1909 photo of twenty-three members of the group facing p. 86, in Ze’ev Schiff, A History of the Israeli Army, 1874 to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1985), and yet another of four of them, including the founder of the organization, at Kfar Tavor on the dust jacket of Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins. It is clear from these photos that many members of the group cultivated the “desperado” look.

59. The Arabs and Zionism, p. 67.

60. Allon, The Making of Israel’s Army, p. 4.

61. Schiff, A History of the Israeli Army, pp. 1–3.

62. See ‘Abd al-Qadir Yasin, Kifah al-sha‘b al-filastini qabl al-‘am 1948 [The struggle of the Palestinian people before the year 1948] (Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1975, pp. 5–26), ‘Allush, al-Muqawama, pp. 28–30, and Kayyali, Palestine, pp. 40–41 for examples of how early acts of armed peasant resistance are seen as precursors of others to follow, and for the way in which a narrative of the continuity of armed Palestinian resistance to Zionism is constructed.

63. One of those killed near al-Shajara in 1909, Radi al-Saffuri, is described in JCA documents cited by Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 68, as “a well-known robber.” We know nothing else about him, or the others involved in these incidents. For a later period, al-Arif, in al-Nakba, vol. 6, is able to list the names, dates, and places of death of 1,953 Palestinians (out of a total he puts at 13,000) who died as “martyrs” in the war of 1947–49. On the subject of “robbers” and “bandits,” see E.J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969).

64. Granott, The Land System, pp. 80–81. The 1883 figure was obtained by Laurence Oliphant from Alfred Sursuq himself, who complained that it cost him $50,000 to transport his crops to Haifa and Acre for export: Haifa: or Life in Modern Palestine (Edinburgh: Wm. Blackwood, 1887), pp. 42, 60.

65. The JNF was founded in 1901 by a decision of the Zionist Congress, and in 1907 opened its first office in Jaffa, under the direction of Ruppin. Its local agency, The Palestine Land Development Corporation, created in 1909, was meant to centralize and coordinate Jewish land purchase in Palestine, and was successful in this endeavor: according to Barbara Smith, The Roots of Separation in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920–1929 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), p. 89, “it is estimated that about 70% of all land acquired by Jews in Palestine was bought through the PLDC.”

66. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 103.

67. al-Muqtabas, nos. 551 and 552, December 19, 1910, p. 1, and December 20, 1910, p. 1.

68. al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, no. 735, February 18, 1911, p. 1. For a discussion of al-‘Asali’s newspaper articles, see chapter 6, especially note 65.

69. Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins, p. 139.

70. Bein, The Return, p. 78. Bein places the “natural resentment of the former cultivators” third in a list of reasons for their attacks, which is headed by their desire “to steal,” and their dislike of “the intrusion of Jews into what was a purely Arab neighborhood.” The idea that in the eyes of the fellahin it was their land which was being stolen is of course not mentioned. In this account, as in so much else written about the earliest clashes between Jews and Arabs in Palestine from the perspective of the settlers, there is near-blindness to the full weight of this resentment, with the results often contemptuously written off as “Arab marauding.”

71. Ibid. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 216–217, cites the same incident as one of numerous clashes which “reflected peasant resentment” between 1909 and 1913, in which a total of eleven Jewish settlers were killed and others injured, while Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins, p. 141 notes that Jewish critics argued that Ha-Shomer “members behaved aggressively and rashly in using firearms” in the Merhavia incident.

72. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 112, 106–7, covers the al-Fula affair, and on pp. 112 ff. assesses al-‘Asali’s impact in the Ottoman Parliament.

73. al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, no. 737, February 21, 1911, p. 2.

74. al-Muqtabas, no. 740, July 29, 1911, p. 2, and no. 748, August 7, 1911, p. 2.

75. al-Karmil, no. 153, June 23, 1911, p. 3.

76. al-Karmil, no. 151, June 9, 1911, p. 3.

77. al-Ittihad al- ‘Uthmani, no. 737, February 21, 1911, p. 2.

78. See e.g., al-Karmil, no. 171, August 25,1911, p. 1 editorial; al-Muqtabas, no. 767, August 29,1911, p. 3; no. 771, September 3,1911, p. 2; no. 782, September 16, 1911, p. 2; no. 784, September 18, 1911, p. 2; al-Haqiqa, no. 373, August 24, 1911, p. 1 editorial; al-Ahram, no. 10167, August 21, 1911, p. 1; no. 10172, August 25, 1911, p. 1.

79. Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 226–227 gives a table drawn from the Central Zionist Archives listing a total of 1.39 million dunums of registered Jewish land purchases in Palestine to 1945. Granott’s table (The Land System, p. 277, table 32) thus represents about 50 per cent of this total.

81. Ruhi al-Khalidi, “ al-Sionism,” p. 111. The table listing Jewish settlements and the sellers of the land involved is partly based on lists published in Le Jeune Turc, May 18, 1911, p. 1, and March 24, 1911, p. 1, but includes many additions, especially regarding vendors of land, which are not in these lists and can be seen from his notebooks (located in the Khalidi Library, Jerusalem) to be the results of Ruhi al-Khalidi’s own research.

82. For a more detailed critique of the book, see my review of it, the author’s response, and my rejoinder in The Journal of Palestine Studies 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 146–149; and 17, no. 4 (Summer 1988): 252–256.

83. Stein, The Land Question, p. 218.

85. Land, Labor and the Origins, pp. 43–44.

86. Stein, The Land Question, p. 226.

87. W. Khalidi, “Kitab al-Sionism,” p. 80.

88. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 70, quotes a local JCA official as describing Nassar as “one of the principal outside instigators” of the incidents at al-Shajara. We have no way of knowing whether Nassar played such a role, or simply became involved out of sympathy with the peasants concerned.

89. The importance of al-Qassam is underlined in works such as those by ‘Allush and Kayyali cited in note 17, above, and Ghassan Kanafani, “Thawrat 1936–1939 fi Filastin: Khalfiyya, tafasil wa tahlil” [The 1936–1939 revolution in Palestine: Background, details and analysis], Shu’un Filistiniyya 6 (January 1972): 45–77. The writings of ‘Allush, Kayyali, and Kanafani, who were all active in Palestinian nationalist politics (the latter two until their assassinations in 1980 and 1972 respectively), played a major part in shaping modern perceptions of this period. The struggle over the meaning of al-Qassam’s life and actions continues: there is an extensive current literature on him, stressing his Islamic roots, e.g. Samih Hammuda, al-Wa‘i wal-thawra: Dirasa fi hayat wa jihad al-Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam (Amman: Dar al-Sharq, 1986).

90. S. Abdullah Schleifer, “The Life and Thought of ‘Izz-id-Din al-Qassam,” The Islamic Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1979): 61–81. See also his “ ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam: Preacher and Mujahid,” in E. Burke III, ed., Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East, pp. 164–178 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

92. For contemporary documentation of al-Qassam’s importance, see Akram Zu‘aytir, Al-haraka al-wataniyya al-filistiniyya 1935–1939: Yawmiyyat Akram Zu‘aytir [The Palestinian national movement 1935–1939: The diaries of Akram Zu‘aytir] (Beirut, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1980), pp. 27 ff; and Watha’iq al-haraka al-wataniyya al-filistiniyya 1918–1939: Min awraq Akram Zu‘aytir [Documents of the Palestinian national movement 1918–1939: From the papers of Akram Zu‘aytir] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1979), pp. 397–401.

93. A good work on the decisive, later stage in this process is Smith, The Roots of Separation.

94. E.g., Uzi Benziman, Sharon: An Israeli Caesar (New York: Adama, 1985), p. 2: “At first, the conflict took the form of criminal assaults on Jews and Jewish property by Arab marauders”; and Allon, The Making of Israel’s Army, p. 11, who writes of the first Jewish settlers practicing “self-defense against robbery, theft, marauding, murder and rape. These for the most part were non-political in nature.” In the words of Walter Laqueur, in A History of Zionism, pp. 247–248, “Even the most sophisticated Zionist ideologists were usually inclined to deny that the Arabs had been able to develop a national consciousness. Arab attacks were described as mere acts of theft and murder carried out by criminal elements among the Arab population or by a mob incited by agitators devoid of moral scruples.” For a penetrating analysis of the logic of this elite and/or colonial discourse directed against the rural lower classes, see Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Guha and Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies, pp. 45–86.

1. On the “Syrians” (the term used for all those originating in bilad al-Sham) in Egypt, see Thomas Philipp, The Syrians in Egypt 1725–1975 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), and Mas‘ud Daher, al-Hijra al-lubnaniyya ila Misr fil-qarnayn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar wal-‘ashrin [Lebanese emigration to Egypt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] (Beirut: Lebanese University, 1986).

2. For more on this point, see R. Khalidi, “The Press as a Source.”

3. See A. L. Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine, 1800–1901: A Study of Religious and Educational Enterprise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

4. The results of an earlier survey, covering a smaller number of papers, were published in 1982 in R. Khalidi, “The Role of the Press.” These results have since been updated with additional data based on a number of newspapers that were not available at the time of the original survey.

5. These figures are taken from the map on p. xv of N. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism. This data, however, differs significantly from that given in some sources, e.g., Bein, The Return to the Soil, pp. 555–572, who gives a total of 33 settlements before 1914, and later foundation dates for many of those listed by Mandel.

6. ‘Isa and Yusuf al-‘Isa were cousins, not brothers as is stated by a number of authors, including Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East, p. 230 (he has the relationship correct on pp. 66 and 96, however). The articles published in Filastin on literary topics are listed in Qustandi Shomali, Fihras al-nusus al-adabiyya ft jaridat Filastin 1911–1967 [An index of literary texts in the newspaper Filastin, 1911–1967] (Jerusalem: Arab Studies Society, 1990).

7. For more on al-‘Uraisi and al-Mufid, see R. Khalidi, “The Press as a Source.”

8. See Samir Seikaly, “Damascene Intellectual Life in the Opening Years of the Twentieth Century: Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali and al-Muqtabas,” in Marwan Buheiry, ed., Intellectual Life in the Arab East, 1890–1939, pp. 125–153 (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1981).

9. These papers were available for the following number of years: al-Karmil, 4; Filastin, 3; al-Mufid, 3; al-Muqtabas, 6 with gaps; al-Muqattam and al-Ahram, 7; Lisan al-Hal, 7; al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, 7; al-Haqiqa, 4; and al-Iqbal, 4.

10. These twelve include the Palestinian publications al-Nafa’is al-‘Asriyya, al-Quds, and al-Munadi, and al-Iqdam, published in Cairo by a Palestinian, Muhammad al Shanti, all of which were mentioned in chapter 3.

11. Tarazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya, 4, pp. 224, 194, 70.

12. Although Malul is mentioned in different capacities in Mandel’s text, it is only in the “Note on Sources” on p. 237 that he is referred to as author of the press reports on which Mandel largely based his book. See Porath, The Emergence, p. 30, for another reference to Malul.

13. For a very uncomplimentary view of Nassar, claiming that he had originally acted as an agent for land sales to the JCA, see Yehoshua, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin, pp. 136–142, much of which is based on articles by Nisim Malul and others in the pre-1914 Hebrew press. For a more positive appraisal of Nassar, see Qustandi Shomali, “Nagib Nassar: L‘intransigéant, 1873–1948,” Revue d ’Etudes Palestiniennes 54 (1995): 80–90.

14. The booklet was published in Haifa at Nassar’s own al-Karmil press in 1911. The series ran in al-Karmil beginning with issue no. 133, March 31, 1911, and ending with no. 149, June 2, 1911.

15. al-Karmil, no. 149, June 2, 1911.

16. “al-Mu’tamar al-sihyuni” [The Zionist Congress], al-Karmil, no. 358, August 15, 1913.

17. See, e.g., the editorial “al-Qadiyya al-‘arabiyya” [The Arab Question] in al-Karmil, no. 297, January 10, 1913, See also R. Khalidi, “The Press as a Source,” for more details on the connections between Arab nationalism and anti-Zionism.

18. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, wrongly claims (e.g. on p. 130) that al-Karmil was pro-CUP throughout the period.

19. See, e.g., the article on al-Madrasa al-Dusturiyya, cited in chapter 3, n. 51, and the two-part series on Islamic education in Palestine by al-Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, in Filastin, nos. 52 and 53, July 19 and 22, 1911, both p. 1.

20. During the newspaper’s first year of publication a column devoted to this subject appeared in virtually every issue, usually under the rubric “Shu’un urthuduksiyya” [Orthodox affairs].

21. See, e.g., the touching multi-part series entitled “Rasa’il fallah” [Letters of a fallah], published in serial form in the paper in October 1911.

22. E.g., “al-Waraqa al-hamra,” [The red card—referring to the document issued by the Ottoman authorities and allowing three months’ residence to pilgrims], Filastin, no. 69, September 16, 1911, p. 1; and “Istimlak al-ajanib” [Possession by foreigners], Filastin, no. 70, September 20, 1911, p.1.

23. Sulayman Musa, al-Haraka al-‘arabiyya (Beirut: al-Nahar, 1970), p. 103. The full name of the organization, probably the most important of the pre-World War I Arabist groupings, was al-Jam‘iyya al-‘arabiyya al-fatat [The Young Arab Society].

24. There was a wave of articles on al-Asfar in the press at this time, e.g.: “Mashru‘ al-Asfar” [The al-Asfar plan], al-Karmil, no. 117, January 17, 1911, p. 1; “Mashru‘ al-Asfar wal-yahud” [The al-Asfar plan and the Jews] al-Karmil, no. 122, February 7, 1911; Taha al-Mudawwar, “al-Mashru‘ al-jadid, la mashru‘ al-Asfar” [The new project, not the al-Asfar project] al-Ra‘i al-‘Am, August 19, 1911, p. 1; Haqqi al-‘Azm, “Iqtirah fi mashru‘ Najib Bey al-Asfar al-jadid” [A proposal regarding the new project of Najib Bey al-Asfar] al-Ra’i al-‘Am September 16, 1911, p. 1; Muhammad Mahmud Habbal, “Mashru‘ al-Asfar, huwa al khatar al-akbar ‘ala al-dawla wal-umma” [The al-Asfar project is the greatest danger to the nation and the state], al-Islah, no. 72–1468, August 2, 1913, pp. 1–2.

25. Articles by Nassar were printed in al-Mufid in nos. 608, May 5, 1911; 1383, September 23, 1913; and 1425, November 16, 1913. Articles from al-Mufid were reprinted in al-Karmil in nos. 122, February 7, 1911; and 334, May 20, 1913.

26. See, e.g., articles by Shukri al-‘Asali in nos. 619, February 18, 1911 and 620, February 19, 1911, of al-Mufid which are discussed below.

27. al-Mufid, no. 1153, December 18, 1912, p. 3.

28. See the French dispatches cited in R. Khalidi, British Policy, p. 328, note 149; and p. 365, note 65. Ayalon, in The Press in the Arab Middle East, p. 66 calls al-Muqtabas one of the two “most important. . . opposition papers” in the Arab provinces.

29. al-Muqtabas, nos. 551, December 19, 1910; 552, December 20, 1910; 562, January 1,1911; 574,January 15,1911; 891,January 30,1912; 1404, February 3,1914, the latter four written by Najib Nassar.

30. al-Muqtabas, no. 562, January 1, 1911.

31. al-Muqtabas, no. 574, January 15, 1911.

32. al-Muqtabas, no. 568, January 7, 1911.

33. al-Muqtabas, no. 1268, August 13, 1913.

34. Circulation figures for this period are hard to obtain and unreliable. We have already given some for the Palestinian press in chapter 3. These for al-Ahram and al-Muqattam are from an article by al-‘Uraisi written from Paris: al-Mufid no. 912, February 19, 1912, in which he also gives the circulation of al-Mu‘ayyad as 14,000 and that of al-Jarida as 2,000. Ayalon, The Press in the Arab East, p. 58, gives somewhat lower circulation figures for the leading Egyptian papers in this period. A dispatch to the Zionist Executive from the Zionist Office in Jaffa, cited in Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 125–126, gives the circulation of the Beirut newspapers Lisan al-Hal and al-Nasir as 10,000–12,000 and 6,000–8,000 copies respectively.

35. According to Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 149, n. 2, this was the pseudonym of Robert Ghazl, an Egyptian Jew. Five articles or letters by him appeared in al-Ahram and three in al-Muqattam. A number of other pro-Zionist articles in the two papers are signed with what appear to be other pseudonyms, perhaps used by Ghazl or Malul. Malul himself wrote 12 articles for al-Muqattam and three for al-Ahram under his own name, and six more for the former and one more for the latter under the name Nisim Ben Sahl.

36. al-‘Azm, the President of the Hizb al-Lamarkaziyya al-Idariyya al-‘Uthmaniyya (the Ottoman Administrative Decentralization Party based in Egypt), and a major figure in the pre-war Arabist movement, wrote four articles for al-Muqattam (in nos. 6679, March 17, 1911; 7616, April 14, 1914; 7654, May 29, 1914; and 7655, May 30, 1914), and one for al-Ahram (no. 10027, March 8, 1911). Arslan wrote two, in nos. 6929, January 15, 1912; and 6939, January 26, 1912. The former is discussed briefly below.

37. al-Muqattam, no. 6929, January 15, 1912.

38. al-Muqattam, no. 7626, April 27, 1914.

39. al-Muqattam, no. 7630, May 1, 1914.

40. al-Muqattam, nos. 7648, May 22, 1914; and 7655, May 30, 1914.

41. al-Ahram, no. 9339, December 3, 1908.

42. al-Ahram, no. 9345, December 11, 1908.

43. al-Ahram, no. 9517, July 7, 1909.

44. Ayalon, The Press in the Arab World, pp. 67–68 says Lisan al-Hal was the most popular Lebanese newspaper in the pre-war period, and sold 3,500 copies daily in 1914. See different figures in n. 34, above.

45. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 130. In his otherwise extremely balanced book, The Press in the Arab World, Ayalon also focuses inordinately on the differences between newspapers edited by Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt in this period. While some such differences certainly existed and had some importance, they were often not as great as he makes them out to be.

47. See R. Khalidi, “The Press as a Source” for more on al-‘Uraisi’s attitude toward Europe, and his handling of sectarian issues. Mandel’s sweeping comments about Muslim editors in Beirut and Damascus must be surprising to anyone who has carefully read the press of the period, which is remarkable for its relative lack of sectarian prejudice. See, e.g., the numerous articles by Christians such as Rafiq Rizq Sallum in al-Mufid.

48. Issues from seven years of al-Barq were examined, but they were not complete. al-Hawadith and al-Sha‘b were available for three years each, but also were incomplete.

49. al-Sha‘b, no. 187, December 29, 1910. This article, signed by ‘Izzat al-Jundi, is the second of a two-part series criticizing the possible sale of state lands in Palestine to Zionist interests, but the preceding issue of the paper is unavailable.

50. al-Sha‘b, no. 195, February 14, 1911.

51. al-Sha‘b, no. 197, February 18, 1911.

52. Lisan al-Hal, no. 6581, March 10, 1911.

53. Lisan al-Hal, no. 6733, September 9, 1911.

54. Lisan al-Hal, no. 7535, May 1, 1914.

55. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, pp. 129–133, especially p. 133.

56. Yehoshua, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin, notes on p. 55 that “we consider al-Munadi the first Arabic Islamic newspaper published in the country.” At least 16 major papers had appeared before al-Munadi was published in Jerusalem by Sa‘id Jarallah in 1912.

57. The only other exception in Palestine was the unimportant Jaffa paper al-Akhbar. See chapter 3, above, note 77, for more on how pro-Zionist papers were subsidized.

58. Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East, p. 71, citing Amin Sa‘id, al-Thawra al-‘arabiyya al-kubra, [The Great Arab Revolt], 2 vols. (Cairo: Dar al-Tlm lil-Malayin, 1934), 1:58–92.

59. al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, nos. 679, December 10, 1911; 724, February 6, 1911; 1548, November 8,1913; and 1550, November 14,1913 (the latter article is reprinted from Filastin).

60. al-Mufid, nos. 608, February 5, 1911; 1383, September 23, 1913; and 1425, November 16, 1913; al-Haqiqa, no. 370, August 14, 1911.

61. al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, no. 679, December 10, 1910.

62. al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, no. 724, February 6, 1911; and al-Mufid, no. 608, February 5, 1911.

63. For more on al-‘Asali, see pp. 223–243 of R. Khalidi, British Policy. See also Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism.

64. Cited in ibid., p. 84. al-Zahrawi was also hanged by the Ottoman authorities in 1916.

65. al-Muqtabas, nos. 542, December 5, 1910; 752, August 11, 1911; 753, August 2, 1911; and 756, August 15, 1911; al-Karmil, nos. 118, January 20, 1911; 126, February 24, 1911; and 168, August 15, 1911; al-Mufid, nos. 619 and 620, February 18 and 19, 1911; al-Haqiqa, nos. 321 and 322, February 20 and 23, 1911; al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, nos. 689, December 28,1910; and 735, February 18,1911; al-Iqbal, no. 376, November 19, 1910.

66. The article appeared in no. 735 of al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani and in two parts in al-Mufid and al-Haqiqa, all cited in n. 65 above.

67. The Vali’s reply is printed in al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, no. 737, February 21, 1911. Most Beirut papers carried the same letter by Nur al-Din Bey.

68. For more details see R. Khalidi, British Policy, pp. 223–224, and chapters 4 and 5, above.

69. al-Haqiqa, nos. 275, August 29, 1910; 283, September 26, 1910; 287, October 17, 1910; 295, November 14, 1910; and 298, November 24, 1910.

70. See, e.g., the pro-Zionist article in al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani (the first and only one of its kind in this paper) no. 1422, June 10, 1913, by Rizq Allah Arqash, a leader of the Beirut Reform Society and delegate to the First Arab Congress in Paris.

71. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p. 162.

72. al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, no. 1550, November 14, 1913.

73. al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, no. 1558, November 24, 1913.

74. Three such exceptions were mentioned in the previous chapters: Najib Nassar was accused by the Zionists of organizing the peasants to resist the JCA’s purchases at al-Shajara; Shukri al-‘Asali tried to prevent the transfer of the al-Fula lands to the JCA while qa’immaqam of Nazareth in 1910; and Amir Amin Arslan, while qa’immaqam of Tiberias in 1901, supported the resistance of the local peasants to JCA land purchase in that region.

75. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

76. al-Karmil, nos. 30 and 31, July 10 and 17, 1909 (the paper was a weekly for the first year of publication). The articles are reprinted from al-Muqattam, nos. 6152, June 10, 1909 and 6155, June 13, 1909.

1. Such polemics, which have long been a feature of American and Israeli public discourse on the question of Palestine, generally affirm the nonexistence, or the illegitimacy, or the recent provenance, of a separate Palestinian identity. They are epitomized by Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, referred to in chapter 5 above, n. 10.

2. These works include Porath, The Emergence, Kayyali, Palestine: A Modern History; Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism; and Kimmerling and Migdal, Palestinians.

3. These models retain their seductive power notwithstanding attempts to modify them: for one such attempt, see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Most of the standard works on nationalism, from Hans Kohn [A History of Nationalism in the East (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929) and The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Collier, 1967)] through Ernest Gellner [Nations and Nationalism], Benedict Anderson [Imagined Communities], and Eric Hobsbawm [Nations and Nationalism Since 1780], have taken European models as the basis of their analysis, even while noting that they are often inapplicable to non-European cases. On this subject see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.

4. This sort of multifocal identity, or even the paler and more tame “ethnic diversity,” which is sometimes held up as an ideal in the United States, would be unthinkable in a European country with a unitary national myth like France, where citizens, whatever their color, religion, or origin are French—or at least so the myth goes. French citizens of North African and other immigrant origins frequently find that the reality bears little relation to this myth.

5. Perhaps the only intellectual to reflect on the implications of the collision of the Palestinians with the potent Jewish/Israeli narrative is Edward Said, in The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1979), and elsewhere.

6. This intertwining is reflected even in the way information is organized and presented in the catalogues and on the shelves of major libraries, where books on Palestine and Palestinian history are to be found intermingled with others on Israel, Zionism, and Jewish history.

7. Hall, “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference,” p. 16.

8. To see how much has changed in this regard, it is necessary only to note how much more coolly Zionism is treated in most works on Jewish history produced before the period from the rise of Hitler until 1967, when this synthesis was established and became hegemonic, under the impact of the Nazi Holocaust, the establishment of Israel, and Israel’s triumph in the 1967 war. In this context, see the ongoing work of University of Chicago historian Peter Novick on the historiography of the Holocaust—the only part of which published so far is “Holocaust Memorials in America,” in James Young, ed., The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York: Prestell, with the Jewish Museum, 1994, pp. 157–163—as well as Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).

9. One of the first disparaging comments on the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations came from none other than British Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour, author of the Balfour Declaration. In a Foreign Office memo dated August 11, 1919, cited in J. C. Hurewitz, ed., The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) 2:189, he stated: “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” For Balfour, the Zionists had traditions, needs, and hopes; the Arabs of Palestine (who “now”—i.e. recently—inhabited the country) only desires and prejudices.

10. The Sunday Times (London), June 15, 1969, p. 12. This was only one instance of the success of Israeli leaders like Meir, Abba Eban, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhaq Rabin in shaping U.S. public opinion. Although leaders of Likud like Menachem Begin and Yitzhaq Shamir did not have the same broad success, they won acceptance for many of their extreme ideas among key segments of American elite opinion. In trying to obtain support from the American Jewish community and the U.S. Congress for its policies of rapprochement with the Palestinians, the recently defeated Labor government struggled with the consequences of the past propaganda successes of both Likud and earlier Labor governments.

11. For an early example of the terms in which this debate was framed, see Marwan Buheiry, “Bulus Nujaym and the Grand Liban Ideal 1908–1919,” in Buheiry, ed., Intellectual Life in the Arab East, pp. 62–83. Salibi, A House of Many Mansions, is the best survey of the struggle over the historiography of Lebanon. See as well Beydoun, al-Sira‘ ‘ala tarikh Lubnan.

12. Fateh (a reverse acronym for “Harakat al-tahrir al-watani al-filastini” —the Palestinian National Liberation Movement), which held its first conference in Kuwait in 1959, grew out of a number of small Gaza- and Egypt-based student and commando groups formed in the wake of the 1948 war. Similarly, the PFLP, founded in 1968, grew out of the Movement of Arab Nationalists which came into being at the American University of Beirut, also in the wake of the 1948 war. For more on this generation of Palestinian nationalists, see Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Abu Iyyad with Eric Rouleau, My Home My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle (New York: Times Books, 1984); Alain Gresh, The PLO: The Struggle Within (London: Zed, 1988); Walid Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World (New York: St. Martin’s, 1975); and Laurie Brand, The Palestinians in the Arab World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

13. Among the manifestations of this outlook are a tendency to look anachronistically at eighteenth-century leaders such as Zahir al-‘Umar as the forbears of Palestinian nationalism, and a predeliction for seeing in peoples such as the Cananites, Jebusites, Amorites, and Philistines the lineal ancestors of the modern Palestinians.

14. The reference, once again, is to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Anderson’s stress on the crucial role of what he calls “print capitalism” in the genesis and growth of nationalism seems particularly apt in the Palestinian case.

15. Palestine in Transformation, pp. 9–17.

16. This echoes a traditional Hebrew term used to describe the country, ha-eretz ha-mikdash. Given the brief adoption of Jerusalem as a direction of prayer by the early Muslims, and other important Jewish influences on early Islam, there is very possibly a connection.

17. See Kamil al-‘Asali, Makhtutat Fada’il Bayt al-Maqdis [Manuscripts on the “Merits of Jerusalem”] (Amman: Dar al-Bashir, 1984), for an extensive listing and analysis of medieval Muslim works of this genre.

18. Kamil al-‘Asali, Mawsim al-Nabi Musa fi Filastin: Tarikh al-mawsim wal-maqam [The Nabi Musa Festival in Palestine: The history of the festival and the shrine], Amman: Dar al-Karmil, 1990; Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, p. 16; Porath, The Emergence, pp. 1–9. See also Muhammad Tzzat Darwaza’s memoir, Khamsa wa tis‘una ‘aman, 1:92–95, for an account of his participation in the Nabi Musa rites together with others from Nablus in his youth.

19. Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, pp. 12–15; Abu Manneh, “Jerusalem in the Tanzimat Period”; and “The Rise of the Sanjak of Jerusalem in the Late 19th Century,” in Ben Dor, ed., The Palestinians and the Middle East Conflict pp. 21–32 (Ramat Gan: Turtle Dove, 1978). See also ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Muhammad ‘Awad, “Mutasarrifiyyat al-Quds, 1874–1914,” [The district of Jerusalem] in al-Mu’tamar al-Duwali al-Thalith li-Tarikh Bilad al-Sham: Filastin [Third international conference on the history of bilad al-Sham: Palestine], 3 vols. (Amman: Jordanian University/Yarmuk University, 1983), 1:204–223.

20. ‘Azuri’s article, originally published in the Turkish paper Sabah, was reprinted in Arabic in Thamarat al-Funun, September 23, 1908, p. 7. It is interesting that a copy of the article was among papers which Ruhi al-Khalidi was carrying with him to Istanbul from Marseilles in 1908 after he was elected as deputy from Jerusalem: Ruhi al-Khalidi papers, Khalidi Library, Jerusalem.

21. Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, p. 15.

22. Porath, The Emergence, pp. 8–9.

23. The rivalries of the European powers over Palestine in the century before 1914 have not received the treatment they deserve. Works on the subject include Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine, R. Khalidi, British Policy, Norman Rose, ed., From Palmerston to Balfour: Collected Essays of Mayir Vereté (London: Cass, 1992); Jacques Thobie, Intérets et imperialisme français dans l’Empire ottoman, 1895–1914 (Paris: Sorbonne, 1977); and Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey, and Zionism, 1897–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).

24. Undated [1701] document located in Khalidi Library, cited in chapter 2 above, n. 59.

25. These include older works such as the fada ’il literature, e.g., Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Maqdisi [1306–1344], Fada’il al-Sham [The merits of Syria] (Tanta: Dar al-Sahaba, 1988) which focused on Jerusalem, and Mujir al-Din’s al-Uns al-Jalil; and more recent ones like Ihsan al-Nimr’s Tarikh Jabal Nablus; ‘Arif al-‘Arif’s al-Mufassal fi tarikh al-Quds [A detailed history of Jerusalem], 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Dar al-Andalus, 1961); and Mustafa Murad al-Dabbagh’s multivolume Biladuna Filastin [Our country, Palestine], 10 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Tali‘a, 1965–1976).

26. On pride in the village, see Ted Swedenberg, “The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt (1936–1939),” in E. Burke III and I. M. Lapidus, eds., Islam, Politics and Social Movements, pp. 169–203 (Berkeley: University of California, 1988), and Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, pp. 27–29; and Michael Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

27. A recent joke shows the persistence of local loyalties, and how they can still be imagined as transcending broader bonds: the scene is a Jerusalem street, where two Arab Jerusalemites (nowadays outnumbered by Israelis and “newcomers” from Hebron) witness a fight between a Hebronite and an Israeli. When the first asks why the other does not intervene, he answers: “Why should I? It is a fight between settlers.” The continuing strength of these loyalties can also be seen from the vitality of associations for inhabitants of the towns of Ramallah, Beitunia, al-Birah, and Deir Dibwan (to name only four) among Palestinians all over the United States.

28. Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed, 1979), is the best analysis of this phenomenon. See also her more recent book, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (London: Zed, 1994).

29. Filastin special issue (described on the masthead as closed by order of the Ministry of the Interior, an order which this issue, disguised as a one-page broadsheet “open letter to subscribers,” was presumably defying), 7 Nisan 1330/May 1914 [rest of date erased on only copy extant], p. 1. For details of this affair, see R. Khalidi, British Policy, pp. 356–357. While umma can also mean “community,” the more common meaning of nation is clearly meant here since the same article speaks of “al-umma al-‘arabiyya”—which can only mean the Arab nation—in another section cited below.

30. Ibid. A French consular official, commenting on this incident, remarked that it indicated widespread opposition to Zionism among the urban population of Palestine.

31. Filastin, special issue, 7 Nisan 1330/May 1914, p. 1.

33. For more on the struggle of Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox in Syria and Palestine to free their church from the control of its Greek hierarchy and to Arabize it, see Derek Hopwood, Russian Interests in Syria and Palestine, 1800–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).

34. The speech is reported as having been delivered “at the end of the Second World War” in ‘Ajaj Nuwayhid, Rijal min Filastin ma bayna bidayat al-qarn hatta ‘am 1948 [Men from Palestine from the beginning of the century until 1948] (Amman: Filastin al-Muhtalla, 1981), p. 30.

35. See R. Khalidi, “Arab Nationalism.”

36. They perceived this “Turkiflcation” largely after the fact in the years after World War I (although the term was used in the pre-War Arabic press). The rewriting of Arab history in the interwar years to fit this new version of events is a fascinating story that has yet to find its historian.

37. How Arabism supplanted Ottomanism as an ideology is best treated in C. Ernest Dawn’s seminal From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973). See also R. Khalidi et al., eds. The Origins of Arab Nationalism, especially R. Khalidi, “Ottomanism and Arabism” as a corrective to some of Dawn’s views.

38. Khalil al-Sakakini, Filastin ba‘d al-harb al-kubra [Palestine after the great war] (Jerusalem: Bayt al-Maqdis Press, 1925), p. 9. This 56-page pamphlet is a collection of articles originally published in the Cairo newspaper al-Siyasa in 1923.

39. The total number of Palestinians executed for nationalist activities during the war is not known. Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wal-mu’assasat al-siyasiyya fi Filastin, 1917–1948 [Political leaderships and institutions in Palestine, 1917–1948] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1981), pp. 46–52, discusses the cases of nine leading Palestinian personalities executed by the Ottoman authorities or who died in prison. In addition, hundreds of others were exiled to Anatolia with their families during the war on similar charges.

40. McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, pp. 25–27.

41. For an assessment of the impact of all these factors, see R. Khalidi, “The Arab Experience in the First World War,” in H. Cecil and P. Liddle, eds., Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Routledge, in press).

42. See R. Khalidi, British Policy, especially the final two chapters, for more on prewar concerns about the occupation of Syria and Palestine by the European powers.

43. al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wal-mu’assasat, pp. 77–78, notes that although the text of the Balfour Declaration was not officially published in Palestine until 1920, within a few days of its issuance on November 2, 1917, the Egyptian press had published details of it and of the jubilant reactions to it in the Egyptian Jewish community. These provoked a strong reaction among Palestinians when the news reached them soon afterwards.

44. Laqueur, A History of Zionism, p. 145, notes that David Wolffsohn, the President of the Zionist movement following Herzl, from 1905 until World War I, backed off from the idea of a Jewish state expounded by Herzl, as well as from the idea of an internationally guaranteed status in Palestine for Zionism, which Laqueur describes as “tactical changes, shifts in emphasis rather than in the basic attitude of the movement.”

45. The conclusions of the conference are summarized in Parliamentary Command papers, Cmd. 5957, “Correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon and the Sharif Husain of Mecca, July 1915-March 1916,” (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1939). The background to the three British engagements is analyzed in R. Khalidi, British Policy. See also George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938), a classic statement of the Arab case, as well as Elie Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977) for one approach to the dispute, and A. L. Tibawi, Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1914–1921 (London: Luzac, 1977), for another.

46. See Jacob Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, tr. Harry Zohn (Boston: Beacon, 1958), pp. 221 ff. See also Erik Erikson, A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980, S. Schlier, ed. (New York: Norton, 1987), pp. 675–684, for reflections on the psycho-social roots of identity.

47. The rapidity with which fundamental and lasting shifts in attitudes took place among Palestinians and Lebanese in Beirut under conditions of extreme stress from 1973 until 1983 bears out the observation that attitudes can change substantially and swiftly in times of crisis: most Palestinians in Lebanon completely changed their views and came to accept the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel during this period, while the attitudes of most Lebanese toward the Palestinians worsened dramatically during the same time: see R. Khalidi, Under Siege, ch. 1; “The Palestinians in Lebanon: The Social Repercussions of the Israeli Invasion,” Middle East Journal 38, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 255–266; and “The Palestinian Dilemma: PLO Policy after Lebanon,“Journal of Palestine Studies 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 88–103; and Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries; and Too Many Enemies.

48. Akram Zu‘aytar, ed., Watha’iq al-haraka al-wataniyya al-filistiniyya [Papers of the Palestinian national movement] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1979), includes a total of 36 documents reflecting Palestinian political positions in 1918, 1919, and 1920, with more than 50 each from 1921 and 1922. There are considerably fewer from the years immediately following, a period of relative political quiescence.

49. For examples of British prejudices, see Smith, The Roots of Separatism, p. 53 who notes the attitudes toward the Arabs of Sir Herbert Samuel, the first High Commisioner, Balfour, and other British officials. The memoirs of Samuel’s son, Edwin, who served in Palestine for most of the mandate period, reveal his lack of knowledge of Arabic, or of Palestinian society: Edwin Samuel, A Lifetime in Jerusalem: The Memoirs of the Second Viscount Samuel (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1970. See also Edward Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem: Memoirs of a District Commissioner Under the British Mandate (London: Radcliffe Press, 1994.

50. Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1937), pp. 336–338. Storrs was the first British Military Governor of Jerusalem.

51. Papers from the files of Suriyya al-Janubiyya and al-Sabah in the possession of Dr. Musa Budayri, Jerusalem. For the Ottoman and British press laws, see Khuri, ed., al-Sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin, pp. 147–225.

52. After the war, his cousin Yusuf, who had founded Filastin with him, remained in Damascus where he established the newspaper Alif Ba.

53. Filastin, no. 1–328, March 19, 1921, “Hadith qadim wa bayan jadid” [“An old story and a new statement”], p. 1.

54. Khuri, ed., al-Sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin, pp. 14–15. Zakka appears to have benefited from subventions from the Zionist Organization once again after the war: Yehoshua, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya fi Filastin, p. 52.

55. Only a few issues of the paper exist, some in the Khalidi Library in Jerusalem, and others in the possession of Dr. Musa Budayri. Suriyya al-Janubiyya, as well as al-Sabah, first published in 1921 by Muhammad Hassan al-Budayri’s cousin, Muhammad Kamil al-Budayri, was printed in a small set of rooms belonging to the al-Budayri family immediately adjacent to the Haram al-Sharif which is now the site of al-Maktaba al-Budayriyya. Suriyya al-Janubiyya is described by Bernard Wasserstein in The British in Palestine, p. 60, as “the nationalist newspaper.”

56. R. Khalidi, “The Press as a Source.”

57. See Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, p. 168, who notes that al-Budayri, al-‘Arif and Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who wrote frequently for the paper, were leading members of al-Nadi al-‘Arabi.

58. Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 11, November 11, 1919, “Suriyya al-janubiyya” [Southern Syria: this is the title of the article], p. 6. See also Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, pp. 180–82, who incorrectly ascribes to al-‘Arif alone all the credit for producing the paper.

59. See Malcolm B. Russell, The First Modern Arab State: Syria Under Faysal, 1918–1920 (Minneapolis: Biblioteca Islamica, 1985), for the best account of the new Syrian state. The introductory chapters of Philip Khoury’s magisterial Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), is the most judicious exposition of the tangled diplomacy of the end of Faysal’s state.

60. For the somewhat different attitudes of some Syrians, and especially some Damascenes, to the new state, see the dissertation of James Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization and the Foundations of Mass Politics in Syria, 1918–1920,” Harvard University, History and Middle Eastern Studies, 1992; Russell, The First Modern Arab State, and Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism.

61. Among the Palestinians who served Faysal and his government were ‘Auni ‘Abd al-Hadi, ‘Isa al-‘Isa, and Muhammad Tzzat Darwaza. See Dhikra Istiqlal Suriyya [A commemoration of the independence of Syria] (Damascus: n.p., 1920).

62. See R. Khalidi, British Policy, and R. Khalidi et al., eds, The Origins of Arab Nationalism, for details of these pre-war evolutions.

63. Until the 1940s many Lebanese, particularly Sunnis, refused to accept the legitimacy of Lebanon as an entity, preferring to consider the country only as the Syrian coastal region. This attitude was expressed in a series of “Conferences of the Coast” (a name implying a refusal to accept that these regions were part of Lebanon), held in the 1920s and into the 1930s. See Salibi, A House of Many Mansions, pp. 167ff.

64. Report dated August 5, 1920 in the Central Zionist Archives, cited in Porath, The Emergence, p. 107.

65. “al-Anba’ al-mulafaqa” [“Concocted news”], Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 8, October 2, 1919, p. 1.

66. “Ilia natadhakar Filastin?” [“Shall we not remember Palestine?”], ibid., pp. 3–4.

67. “Zubdat al-akhbar” [“The best—literally ‘the butter‘—of the news”], Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 11, November 11, 1919, p. 5.

68. “Hawla al-mas’ala al-sihyuniyya” [“Regarding the Zionist issue”], Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 16, November 27, 1919, p. 4.

69. Samuels’ speech is Cited in Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, p. 76. Porath, The Emergence, p. 319, n. 17 suggests regarding the strong Arab reaction to this speech that “perhaps Samuel had not precisely said what was later attributed to him,” and was misunderstood by the Arabs. As the quotation from the speech cited by Wasserstein shows, however, Samuel said exactly what the Arabs thought he had: that Zionism aimed for a Jewish majority and, eventually, complete control of the country.

70. The only other important newspapers to publish in Palestine while Suriyya al-Janubiyya appeared were Bulus Shahada’s Mir’at al-Sharq, published in Jerusalem starting in September 1919 (this became the organ of the anti-Husayni faction in the early 1920s, and a nationalist organ later on, when Ahmad Shuqayri and Akram Zu‘aytir wrote for it), and al-Nafir and al-Karmil, reopened in Haifa in September 1919 and February 1920 respectively. A few other papers established at this time rapidly folded, or had little circulation or influence. As mentioned earlier, Filastin did not resume publication until March 1921.

71. “Hidhar, Hidhar!,” Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 22, December 23, 1919, p. 2.

72. “Hawla al-mas’ala al-sihyuniyya” [“Regarding the Zionist issue”: this had become a regular column in the paper by this time], Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 48, March 26, 1920, p. 3. This and the preceding article cited reffered obliquely to Amir Faysal’s agreement of January 1919 with Chaim Weizmann, which was fiercely criticized in Palestine when it became known.

73. See Russell, The First Modern Arab State, pp. 124–125; Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, pp. 117–125, and 146–151; and Porath, The Emergence, pp. 102–103.

74. For the calculations of Syrian politicians and the responses of Palestinian officials and activists in Syria at the time, see Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, pp. 151–154.

75. “Wa la tay’asu min ruh Allah” [“And do not despair of the spirit of God”], Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 11, November 11, 1919, p. 3.

76. Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 32, January 23,1920, p. 2. The rhetorical devices used, while reminiscent of romantic nineteenth-century European nationalism, are steeped in Arabic and Islamic imagery and terminology. Such overheated prose has remained a staple of Palestinian political rhetoric down to the present day, in the speeches of politicians like Ahmad Shuqayri (who in the 1920s was a journalist for this paper’s rival, Mir’at al-Sharq), and later was the first head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and his successor, Yasser Arafat.

77. See Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, pp. 84–88, Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, pp. 158–163, and Porath, The Emergence, pp. 32–34, for the significance of these societies. Muslih and Porath report claims that some British officials encouraged their establishment, presumably as a counterweight to the Zionist movement.

78. Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 48, March 26, 1920, “Taqrir min Ghazza” [Report from Gaza], p. 2. The word wataniyya, which can mean either nationalism or patriotism, is derived from watan, meaning homeland. The article in question reported on the strong local reaction to what were described as attempts by Jewish merchants, with the connivance of the British authorities, to purchase large quantities of livestock and other food products in Gaza, and the effect of this in driving up local prices.

79. Suriyya al-Janubiyya, no. 48, March 26, 1920, p. 1.

80. al-Sabah, no. 1, October 21, 1921. This paper was published by Muhammad Hassan al-Budayri’s cousin Muhammad Kamil Budayri in the same offices and with the same political line as Suriyya al-Janubiyya. This terminology soon became routine: on p. 228, Sabri Sharif ‘Abd al-Hadi’s geography text Jughrafiyyat Suriyya wa Filastin al-Tabi‘iyya [The natural geography of Syria and Palestine] (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Ahliyya, 1923), discussed at the end of this chapter, noted in its description of Palestine that Jerusalem is “the capital of the country.”

81. Mir’at al-Sharq, no. 1, September 17, 1919, p.1.

82. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, p. 59; he also notes (p. 150) that the paper’s editor, Bulus Shahada, for a time received a subvention from Zionist funds.

83. These documents, collected by Dr. Musa Budayri, are cited in n. 51, above.

84. Each devotes a chapter to this subject: Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, pp. 131–154; Porath, The Emergence, pp. 70–122. In his chapter, Porath occasionally uses the press as a source, although far more frequently relying on Zionist, British and other Arab sources.

85. For the texts of these declarations, see Hurewitz, The Middle East and North Africa, 2:110–112.

86. The most influential of these counselors was T. E. Lawrence, who was rarely separated from Faysal when he was in London or Paris. His well known self-loathing regarding this period seems to have been related to his (undoubtedly correct) belief that he was deceiving the Arabs as to British intentions. Passages throughout Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom appear to confirm this.

87. al-Hut, al-Qiyadat wal-mu’assasat, pp. 63–65.

88. There is a controversy over whether the British or the Arab army entered Damascus first. It is clear from the most recent and apparently most careful examination of the evidence, by Eliezer Tauber, in The Arab Movements in World War I (London: Cass, 1993), pp. 231–238, that Australian and Arab forces entered the city from different directions on the morning of the same day, October 1, 1918, with the Australians perhaps an hour earlier. Thereafter in Damascus, Amir Faysal was recognized by the British as the commander of the Arab army and therefore the senior allied military commander in Occupied Enemy Territory Administration [East], rather than in any overtly political capacity. His appointees, first Shukri al-Ayyubi and then General ‘Ali Rida al-Rikabi, were confirmed by Allenby as Chief Administrators of OETA-East.

89. Storrs, Orientations, pp. 353–354. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, points out (p. 42, n. 34) that initially Hebrew was not recognized as an official language by the military administration, but that by the end of 1919 this ruling had been overturned.

90. The speeches of Zionist leaders abroad, reported for decades in the Arabic press, had long aroused anti-Zionist sentiment in Palestine and elsewhere in the Arab world, as we saw in chapter 6, above. After the war, speeches such as that of Sir Herbert Samuel, mentioned above and in n. 69, provoked a fierce reaction. But it was the speeches and actions of Zionist leaders and officials in Palestine that provoked the greatest response from Palestinians. The Arabic press of the period is replete with lurid reports of the alleged misdeeds and the provocative statements of leading Zionists in Palestine.

91. For Syria, see James Gelvin, “The Other Arab Nationalism: Syrian/Arab/Populism in Its Historical and International Contexts,” in I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab World (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming) and for Iraq the article by Mahmud Haddad in R. Khalidi et al., eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism, pp. 120–150.

92. [Title illegible] al-Sabah, no. 1, October 21, 1921, p. 1.

93. “Sanatuna al-khamisa” [“Our fifth year”], Filastin, no 1–367, March 19, 1921, p.1.

94. A brilliant satirical illustration of this reality, and of the cruel contrast between it and the high-flown rhetoric of Arabism is Duraid Lahham’s film “ ‘Ala al-Hudud.”

95. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, p. 134.

96. These figures are derived from tables on pp. 270–271 of A. L. Tibawi, Arab Education (those for school-age population and government school enrollment are for 1947–48; the last available figures for private schools are for 1945–46—it is likely that by 1947–48 more children were enrolled in private schools, and that the actual percentage was therefore a bit higher). See Miller, Government and Society in Mandatory Palestine, pp. 90–118, for an excellent account of the spread of education in rural areas, generally at the instigation of the rural population, and of the frustration of the rural pupulation at the obstacles placed in their way by the British.

97. Miller, Government and Society in Mandatory Palestine, p. 98, citing the Palestine Government Department of Education Annual Report, 1945–46.

98. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, p. 179.

99. For the nationalist critique of the teaching of history see Tibawi, Arab Education, pp. 88–89.

100. Cited in n. 80, above. The book was used widely in Palestinian schools.

1. This is the origin of the title of the seminal work by Qustantin Zurayq, Ma‘na al-Nakba [The meaning of the catastrophe] published in Beirut immediately after the 1948 war, and translated as The Meaning of the Disaster by R. Bayley Winder (Beirut: Khayat, 1956). Zurayq, a Princeton-trained historian who served at different times in his career as a Syrian Minister, Acting President of the American University of Beirut, President of the Syrian University, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Palestine Studies, was one of the leading exponents of Arabism from the 1930s onwards.

2. The PLO was founded in 1964 by the Arab League in response to pressures Arab states felt from burgeoning independent Palestinian organizations and from Palestinian popular sentiment, and was meant to contain and control these pressures. Although it was thus initially not an independent actor, the Arab states quickly lost control of it, as it was refashioned by these organizations into the primary vehicle of Palestinian nationalism, a process which was completed by 1968.

3. Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan is the best source on this aspect of the 1948 war. See also Wilson, King Abdullah.

4. The standard work on the subject is now Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Based on Israeli sources, this work has put to rest some of the most tenacious fabrications regarding the Palestinian refugee problem. See also Morris’s 1948 and After, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). For problems with some of the conclusions Morris draws from the evidence he presents, however, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 51–87.

5. Nationality was another matter: in Israel this is not automatically associated with citizenship, but rather with religion. On the question of nationality and citizenship in Israel, see Baruch Kimmerling, “Between the Primordial and the Civil Definition of the Collective Identity: Eretz Israel or the State of Israel?,” in E. Cohen, M. Lissak, U. Almagor, eds., Comparative Social Dynamics, pp. 262–283 (Boulder: Westview, 1985).

6. This entire process is chronicled in Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, in W. Khalidi, ed. All That Remains, and in Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986).

7. The best works on this period are Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization, Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation, Gresh, The PLO, and Brand, Palestinians in the Arab World. Also extremely revealing is the memoir of one of the founders of Fateh, Abu Iyyad, My Home, My Land.

8. A photo of ‘Arafat, clean-shaven and in double-breasted suit and tie, presenting a petition to Egyptian President Nagib together with other student leaders, can be found in Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984) following p. 224.

9. These names were usually not invented: Khalaf’s eldest son is named Iyyad, whence the name traditional in Arab society of Abu (father of) Iyyad; al-Wazir’s eldest son is Jihad, and so forth. ‘Arafat, known as Abu ‘Ammar, who was unmarried at the time, was an exception to this rule.

10. A few of them were absorbed by the Jordanian political establishment, where they had no more independent political power than any other Jordanian politician, but instead, with the exception of a few brief periods, became instruments of the regime of King Abdullah and his grandson, King Husayn.

11. Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed, 1979), pp. 168–179, notes how the deference to age which is a normal feature of traditional Arab society dissolved in the refugee camps in Lebanon in the wake of the 1948 war, as the younger generation saw their elders as ineffective, and held them responsible for the disasters that had befallen the Palestinians. The process Sayigh describes in the camps in Lebanon was at work within Palestinian society at large.

12. The Sunday Times (London), June 15, 1969, p. 12.

13. One of the great ironies of Egypt’s taking on the mantle of pan-Arab leadership in this period was the fact that Egypt was relatively late to subscribe to the tenets of Arabism, having espoused a separate Egyptian nationalism for many decades previously: see Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs, and Redefining the Egyptian Nation. See also the section of Nasir’s Philosophy of the Revolution, reprinted in Nasser Speaks: Basic Documents (London: Morssett, 1972), pp. 44–55, where he explains how he came to understand before and during the 1948 war that Arabism was a crucial element in Egypt’s future.

14. Over time indeed, use of the term qawmiyya, nationalism, which we have seen used to describe Palestinian patriotism in 1914, was restricted in many parts of the Eastern Arab world to Arab nationalism: from this pan-Arab perspective, regional and nation-state nationalisms were accorded the lesser term, wataniyya, patriotism, or even the pejorative iqlimiyya, regionalism.

15. Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation, is the best book on this movement’s early years.

16. This idea of return, with its implied corollary that Palestine was a lost paradise, could be found in forms other than the overtly political, such as the subtitle of ‘Arif al-‘Arif’s 6-volume history, al-Nakba: “The catastrophe of Jerusalem and the lost paradise.” Doumani has a perceptive discussion of this theme of a lost paradise in the historical writings of Ihsan al-Nimr and al-‘Arif in “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine,” pp. 14–17.

17. Abu Iyyad, My Home, My Land, pp. 20–28, gives an excellent account of these conflicts with the Egyptian authorities, as do the sections of Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization, pp. 21–35, and Hart, Arafat, pp. 98–120, which are drawn from their interviews with Abu Jihad, Abu Iyyad, ‘Arafat, and other founders of Fateh. For more on this period, see Avi Shlaim, “Conflicting Approaches to Israel’s Relations with the Arabs: Ben Gurion and Sharett, 1953–1956,” Middle East Journal 37, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 180–201.

18. A scene is reported by Robert Stephens in Nasser: A Political Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), p. 173, of a Downing Street dinner given by Eden for Nuri al-Sa‘id, Prime Minister and long-time strongman of Iraq, and no friend of ‘Abd al-Nasir’s, at which the normally urbane Eden launched into a violent tirade on the subject of the Egyptian leader, shocking those present. Nutting also describes the enraged response of Eden to a Foreign Office memo which called for isolating ‘Abd al-Nasir: “But what’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or ‘neutralising’ him, as you call it? I want him destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him removed . . . And I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.” Cited in Anthony Nutting, No End of a Lesson: The Story of Suez (London: Potter, 1967), pp. 31–35

19. The examples of this genre of argumentation are legion, and can still be found in advertisements in the back pages of periodicals like The Nation and Harper’s: a semi-scholarly work like Curtis, Neyer, Waxman, and Pollack, eds., The Palestinians, is replete with examples of it.

20. A developing scholarly literature has begun to explore these early initiatives, notably the work of Wilson, King Abdullah; Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan; Itamar Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51 (London: Macmillan, 1988); and The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951, rev. ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994). One of the first books to break the iron consensus that the Arabs never wanted peace with Israel was Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Free Press, 1987).

21. The early work of Yehoshaphat Harkabi, a former Chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, especially his influential books, Arab Attitudes to Israel (New York: Hart, 1972); and Arab Strategies and Israel’s Response (New York: Free Press, 1977), formed the basis for many of these more lurid interpretations by others, less knowledgeable than he. Ironically, Harkabi ended his career as one of Israel’s most outspoken doves.

22. Filastin, 7 Nisan 1330, 1-page broad-sheet “Open Letter to Subscribers.”

23. Filastin, April 12, 1921, “Ila qawmi” [To my nation], p. 1 editorial signed by Yusuf al-‘Isa, and either reprinted from his Damascus newspaper Alif Ba’, or written specially for Filastin.

24. Beyond the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, the British and French issued a declaration in November 1918 in which they promised the peoples of the Arab world “complete liberation and the establishment of popular governments which will draw their power from the free choice of the citizens” and encouraged “the establishment of popular governments in Syria and Iraq, which the allies have already liberated. . . .” Text of communique distributed by Muslim-Christian Association in Jerusalem, by order of the British Military Governor in Jerusalem, November 7,1918: uncatalogued papers, Khalidi Library.

25. al-Sabah, no. 15, November 29, 1921, “Hal hadha huwa al-waqi‘?” [“Is this the situation?”], p. 1, signed “ ‘A” [‘Arif al-‘Arif?].

26. “Bayan min al-wafd al-‘arabi al-filastini lil-umma al-karima” [Communique from the Palestinian Arab delegation to the nation], dated July 8, 1921 and signed by the head of the delegation, Musa Kazim al-Husayni: Budayri papers.

27. Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, pp. 220–222, provides much illuminating material on Reuven Shilo‘ah, who organized the Israeli intelligence services. In addition to establishing the networks dedicated to spying on the Arab countries in the 1930s, he was also a labor organizer among Palestinian Arabs. The center for Middle Eastern studies at Tel Aviv University was originally named for him.

28. Hajj Amin, whose brother and three generations of his family before him had held the post of Hanafi Mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed to the post by Sir Herbert Samuel ahead of other apparently more qualified, and older, candidates in a gamble that this young radical, only recently pardoned for his nationalist activities, would serve British interests by maintaining calm in return for his elevation to the post. Despite constant Zionist complaints about him, it could be argued that the gamble paid off for the British for a decade and a half, until the mid-1930s, when the Mufti could no longer contain popular passions. For the best treatment of the subject, see Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem.

29. A biography of al-Nashashibi, by the journalist Nasser Eddin Nashashibi, Jerusalem’s Other Voice: Ragheb Nashashibi and Moderation in Palestinian Politics, 1920–1948 (Exeter: Ithaca Press, 1990), must be used with care, but includes much primary material.

30. The rural operations of some of these merchants and money-lenders in the late nineteenth century are outlined in Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine.

31. A useful perspective on these inter-elite conflicts is provided by Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

32. See Haim Levenberg, The Military Preparations of the Arab Community of Palestine, 1945–48 (London: Cass, 1993), for a generally accurate but somewhat confused account of the background to the Palestinian defeats of 1947–48.

33. Many of these voices were, ironically, to be found in Lebanon, where the absentee landlords who had sold the most land resided.

34. Based on tables in Appendix C of Tibawi, Arab Education, pp. 270–271.

35. The word that perhaps best sums up this sense in which failure has been surmounted and survived, which in itself is a sort of victory, is sumud, commonly translated as “steadfastness,” but encompassing all the meanings just suggested. The word was ubiquitous in Palestinian narrations both of the various stages of the fighting in Lebanon from the late 1960s until 1982, and of resistance to the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from 1967 until the intifada began in 1987. This approach constrasts with that of Ranajit Guha, who states in Selected Subaltern Studies (p. 43), that the “historic failure of the nation to come into its own . . . constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India.”

36. Ghassan Kanafani, Thawrat 1936 fi Filastin: Khalfiyyat wa tafasil wa tahlil (Beirut: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, 1974).

37. Kayyali, Palestine: A Modern History; ‘Allush, al-Muqawama al-‘arabiyya.

38. All substantial works on the PLO give this important episode a full treatment: Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization, Gresh, The PLO, and Abu Iyyad, My Home My Land, are among the best.

39. See the forthcoming book by Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), which deals with this subject.

40. On the 1970 fighting in Jordan, see John Cooley, Green March, Black September: The Story of the Palestinian Arabs (London: Cass, 1973).

41. The PFLP engaged in vigorous self-criticism of its behavior at an internal conference soon afterwards, forswearing further airplane hijackings, but it eventually emerged that some in the PFLP leadership were turning a blind eye to the continuation of such operations, provoking a major split in the group in 1972.

42. The notorious episode when the Arab League mediator in Lebanon, Hassan Sabri al-Kholi, arrived at the Phalangist headquarters to halt the massacre at Tal al-Za‘tar in August 1976, only to find there two Syrian liaison officers, Col. ‘Ali al-Madani and Col. ‘Ali al-Kholi, and two Israeli liaison officers, widely reported in the Lebanese press at the time, was confirmed in an Israeli Knesset debate six years later when Defense Minister Ariel Sharon defended himself against charges of Israeli complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacres by citing a similar Israeli role in the Tal al-Za‘tar massacre under a Labor government: The Jerusalem Post, October 15, 1982.

43. On this phase of the Lebanese conflict, see W. Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

44. See R. Khalidi, Under Siege, p. 200, n.5, for details of casualties.

45. Tape of Shafiq al-Hout speech, November 1982.

46. A series of regular polls of a sample of more than 1,000 by the Nablus-based Center for Palestine Research and Studies have shown consistent majority support, ranging from 50% to 70%, for the interim agreements negotiated with Israel by the PLO, and for the PLO leadership. The September 1995 results show 70.6% of respondents supporting “continuation of the current peace negotiations between the PLO and Israel,” while 53.7% supported ‘Arafat as a candidate for President of the Palestinian Authority: “Results of Public Opinion Poll #19, The West Bank Bank and the Gaza Strip, August/September, 1995,” (Nablus: Center for Palestine Research and Studies, 1995). A poll with 2,770 respondents on election day, January 20, 1996, found that 50.3% supported the Oslo accords and 16.5% opposed them, while 57.4% supported Fateh: “Palestinian Elections: Election Day Survey, 20, January, 1996” (Nablus: Center for Palestine Research and Studies, 1996).

47. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, The Palestinians is a case in point.

48. Porath’s The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1919–1929, and The Palestinian Arab National Movement 1929–1939 (published in 1973 and 1977 respectively) remain the standard works on the period, and were pioneering efforts in terms of historical discourse inside Israel about the Palestinians.

49. Indeed, the inept American diplomatic initiatives during the last two rounds of the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Washington in May and June of 1993 were among the factors that brought the PLO leadership to intensify their secret direct contacts with Israel in Oslo and elsewhere, and to abandon Washington as a negotiating venue and the United States as a mediator.

50. For Palestinians this was because they could not but see Zionism as a European colonial-settler movement which claimed their country, and therefore as necessarily illegitimate, both in terms of its origins and its aims.

51. This is the case notwithstanding the entry of more than 20,000 PLO soldiers into Palestine under the guise of policemen, with the full agreement of Israel.

52. This comparison has been explored in Kenneth Stein, The Intifadah and the 1936–1939 Uprising: A Comparison of the Palestinian Arab Communities (Atlanta: Carter Center Occasional Papers, 1, March 1990).

53. This is currently the situation in Jerusalem, where since early in the occupation, the Israeli authorities permitted the Jordanian curriculum to remain in force, in spite of their annexation of the Arab eastern part of the city, and where today Arab children in private schools study with textbooks bearing the Palestinian flag and issued by the Palestinian Authority’s educational department in Ramallah.

54. Contrary to an impression assiduously cultivated by Israel and its supporters, most Palestinian refugees were not “kept in the camps by the Arab governments.” While this happened in the Gaza Strip from 1948 until 1967, refugees in Jordan and Syria (the overwhelming majority of refugees outside Palestine) were never restricted as to their movement within the country, while the former had full citizenship rights, and the latter had all rights of citizenship except voting in national elections and carrying the national passport. Over time, the majority of refugees in both countries have moved out of the camps: according to UNRWA figures, in 1993 only 22% of registered refugees in Jordan, and 28% in Syria still lived in camps: Palestinian Refugees: Their Problem and Future (Washington, D.C.: Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, 1994), pp. 29–30. The same process occurred in Lebanon after the PLO took control of the camps in 1968, but has been reversed since 1982: in 1993, 52% of registered refugees in Lebanon lived in camps.

55. There are neither accurate figures on the Palestinian population of Lebanon, nor reliable data on casualties among them, but the best estimates are summed up in R. Khalidi, “The Palestinians in Lebanon,” pp. 255–257.

56. Article 11 of the resolution qualifies the possibility of return by saying that the returning refugees must be willing “to live at peace with their neighbours,” and mandates compensation “for loss of or damage to property” even for those who choose to return: George J. Tomeh, ed., United Nations Resolutions in Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1975) 1:15–17.

57. See R. Khalidi, “Observations on the Palestinian Right of Return,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 29–40; and “The Palestinian Refugee Question: Toward a Solution,” in Palestinian Refugees: Their Problem and Future. A Special Report (Washington, D.C.: Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, October 1994), pp. 21–27.

58. This does not apply to Palestinians who became refugees in 1967. Officially described under the rubric “displaced persons,” their fate was supposed to be settled as part of the “interim” negotiations, and in principle most of them should be allowed to return to the West Bank, although the modalities have not yet been fully agreed upon, and it is not clear when, or if, they will be.