Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (22 page)

In this appeal we hear the echo of a republican understanding of citizenship, where every individual has to contribute to the public good. Indeed, the Ottoman press was rife with discussions of “national honor and public spirit”
(hamiyyet
, Ott. Tur.;
amiyya
, Ara.)—those who displayed it were praised
(hamiyyetli)
, those who lacked it were disparaged
(hamiyyetsiz).
⁵⁴
For the “Zealous Ottoman Patriot,” those middle-class merchants and shopkeepers who refused to stop importing Austro-Hungarian goods or who exploited their countrymen through price gouging were most decidedly lacking in public spirit and national honor, not to mention that they were acting against the public good and religious morals.

Though the German Consulate became aware of the threats on its ships and appealed to the Jaffa deputy governor to keep order and ensure that the port stevedores did not refuse to unload German ships, in mid-November a German ship called
Galata
was attacked when it tried to dock in Jaffa. When the ship arrived simultaneously with another ship, the port workers unloaded the ships' goods for a few hours in the morning. Around three in the afternoon a rumor circulated that Austro-Hungarian goods were to be found among the German ship's cargo, and the angry boatmen began tossing the cargo into the sea. Although the German consul immediately went to secure the aid of the deputy governor, the latter “stood quietly and let them do it,” according to the bitter complaints of the consul; the local demonstrators threw 998 packages of commercial goods into the sea as well as an unspecified number of packages sent as a gift by the German kaiser for the German-Catholic hospice in Jerusalem.
⁵⁵
Only the intervention of the newly elected member of parliament Hafiz al-Sa'id persuaded the boatmen to stop throwing the cargo overboard, and he even succeeded in convincing them to fish out several cases of cargo from the sea.

The German consul pressed for a full investigation, and eventually six leaders and fifteen perpetrators of the attack were either arrested or went into hiding. Among the men accused of participation were leading figures of the local CUP, such as army officer Ihsan Effendi, Muslim landowner
Yusuf ‘Ashur, and the Christian railroad employee Yusuf al-'Issa. In addition, the deputy governor Rüşdi Bey was relieved of his duties, the police commissioner Mehmet Fevzi was also fired, and the customs official was threatened with dismissal.
⁵⁶

Yet again, the Austro-Hungarian and German consuls blamed the “terrorism” perpetrated by the locals on the CUP. The Jerusalem governor Subhi Bey and the foreign affairs secretary of the province, Bishara Effendi, reportedly opposed the boycott as they believed it would eventually harm local and Ottoman imperial interests, but they too proved ineffective in squashing the local developments. Government officials in Istanbul also tried unsuccessfully to end the boycott, but their inability to do so was a result both of the power of the CUP to stand as an independent political force and of grassroots fervor. Indeed, in early December 1908, the visit of two envoys of the CUP's central committee to the Syrian port towns led to a renewal of the boycott in Haifa although Austro-Hungarian goods had begun to be unloaded there. In Beirut, the boycott had been dying down as well due to the intervention of the local governor but was renewed upon orders from Salonica and Istanbul, causing “heavy damage” to Austro-Hungarian exports.
⁵⁷

At the same time, there was also a clear, strong grassroots component to the boycott. Certainly, continued news of the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Muslim homes were occupied and mosques were turned into churches and barns, helped to reignite public outrage; in addition, Bosnian refugees flooded into the empire, organizing themselves and publishing their own flyers in support of the boycott. By early December, the boycott syndicate in Istanbul had over fifteen thousand members. In Palestine, newspaper reports commented on the population's identification with the boycott, which “the nation [had] declared.”
⁵⁸
In Jerusalem and Jaffa, the wearing of the white tarbush, produced locally in the empire, rather than the red tarbush, imported from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was greeted as a patriotic act. As well, one Hebrew newspaper reported that in addition to the nightly demonstrations being held in Jerusalem, where hundreds of residents marched through the streets holding torches and singing nationalist songs, a group of five hundred young men showed up at the governor's residence ready “to spill their blood for liberty,” and asked to be sent to the front to battle Austria-Hungary.
⁵⁹
'Izzat Darwaza's memoirs indicate that there was strong public support for the boycott also in Nablus, where popular honorific poems
(qasīda
s) were written in support of the boycott, indicating a deep cultural and emotional support that could not have been purely orchestrated. In fact, boycott fever spread even to British-occupied Egypt, where the press and local stores were mobilized on behalf of the patriotic Ottoman nation.
⁶⁰

Then, abruptly and without much fanfare, on February 27, 1909, a telegram arrived in Jaffa from Istanbul and Beirut stating that the Ottoman boycott against the Austro-Hungarian Empire was over. The Ottoman government had succeeded in forcing Austria-Hungary to agree to a large financial settlement as compensation for the loss of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The economic pressure of the boycott on Austria-Hungary had been significant: as of December 1908 the boycott had cost Austria- Hungary 20-25 million Kronen in lost revenues, and other shipping lines even refused to load Austrian goods for fear of reprisals or landing difficulties at Ottoman ports. The Austrian fez factories and sugar industry were hit hard, but the largest casualty of the boycott of Austria was the Österreichischen Lloyd shipping line, which in four months had seen twenty-nine ships blocked from landing in Jaffa port alone, at a loss of seventy-five thousand francs.
⁶¹

Despite the heavy damage inflicted upon Austria-Hungary by the boycott, the Ottoman imperial and local Palestinian economies suffered greatly from the boycott. Imperial tax revenues declined dramatically and customs revenues declined by almost one-third. In Palestine, due to the delays and losses in shipping, local banks as well as the Jaffa customs house faced a severe downturn. Banks were unable to collect on shipping statements, as most customers refused to pay until they received their goods. In early December 1908, less than halfway through the boycott, local banks had unpaid shipping statements worth 42,715 francs, and the local customs house was even harder hit with 53,571 francs of unredeemed shipping statements.
⁶²

In addition, local merchants were hard-hit by dramatic cost increases in the absence of Austro-Hungarian goods. The export-heavy orange industry in particular suffered, as the boycott began at the start of the fall harvest season. Packing paper and packing crates for the oranges, previously purchased from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had to be purchased at almost triple the price from Germany and Italy. The price of sugar doubled as consumers turned to French, English, and Egyptian sugar; paper, ready-to-wear clothing, glass, and the ubiquitous red tarbush, all middle-and upper-class urban consumer goods, were similarly affected. The one sector that seemed to benefit financially was Jaffa's boatmen, who successfully demanded higher prices for their services; boatmen in other port cities were also successful in pushing for higher wages through the boycott months.
⁶³

And yet, while the boycott of Austria-Hungary took a heavy toll on the Ottoman and Palestinian economies, it was considered a successful example of popular participation in the political process. The Ottoman nation had discovered a powerful new weapon that it would put to use
again. Similar boycotts were waged in 1910 against Greece following its annexation of Crete, in 1911 against Italy following its attack on Ottoman Libya, and in 1912-13 on Greece again as a result of its war over the Balkans.

THE FIRST PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, FALL 1908

If the boycott against Austria-Hungary represented an informal, grassroots entry into the political arena, elections to the new Ottoman parliament presented a formal opportunity for provincial Ottomans to influence imperial administration and policy in the capital. Unlike the first parliament in 1877-78, whose members were appointed by the provincial councils, the new members would be elected by the broader (adult male, taxpaying) population. The 1908 elections marked a new beginning for Ottoman civic-political life. The opening of the parliament in December 1908 was a national holiday, and as we will see, reflected local expectations of “representative government” in the new era. At the same time, however, the parliamentary elections also highlighted the tensions inherent in the new Ottomanist project as the empire's various ethnic and religious groups struggled to find their place in the body politic.

The Sectarian Prism I: Voting Rights

The tension between the electoral system and the expectations of Ottomans was first played out in terms of political enfranchisement. From the outset, confusion and lack of information characterized the election process, particularly concerning the voting status of individuals as well as the electoral (and thus political) power of the various ethnoreligious communities. Among the central issues in the election was the gap between the liberal basis of electoral politics formally adopted—one man, one vote—and the persistence of the legacy of a confessional political system in which the ethno-religious community
(millet)
was the central actor. With regard to demographics, enfranchisement, campaigning, and negotiations, the
millet
took a leading role in the entire electoral process, eclipsing the individual citizen as a political actor. Thus even in this first act of constituting the civic Ottoman corpus, and although celebrating their voting rights as Ottoman citizens, ethnic and religious groups still sought to play a role in the political life of the empire.

According to the electoral system adopted, parliamentary elections were to be a two-tier process. In the first stage, Ottoman taxpaying males
with the right to vote would select second-tier electors (one elector per five hundred voters in the first stage); the second-tier electors would in turn vote for members of parliament (one MP per fifty thousand males).
⁶⁴
Based on the official Ottoman census records, it was determined that the Jerusalem province had the right to 180 electors who would, in turn, choose three members of parliament.
⁶⁵
The northern Palestinian provinces administered by Beirut would also elect two members of parliament.

Ottoman citizens shared a basic inexperience with electoral politics, suffered from haphazard record keeping in the Ottoman registers, and were either enthusiastically optimistic or deeply suspicious of political change. In the cities, an elections inspection commission was established consisting of notable leaders from the community who would meet with the religious leaders and neighborhood
mukhtars
to facilitate the process. In Jerusalem the city council invited all the neighborhood and confessional
mukhtar
s to a meeting to explain the rules and order of the upcoming elections. Election lists and voting procedures were to be announced by criers in the markets and neighborhoods and conveyed by the spiritual heads and
mukhtar
s in addition to being posted in houses of worship and on the streets and published in the newspapers. Citizens were given the opportunity to file a correction or appeal with the elections commission.
⁶⁶

According to the electoral law, any taxpaying Ottoman male citizen over the age of twenty-five was eligible to vote in the parliamentary elections; this necessarily excluded foreign citizens (pilgrims, merchants, non-Ottomanized immigrants), foreign protégés, and stateless persons, as well as women. While tying electoral rights to citizenship was a logical requirement and certainly the basis of modern liberal politics even today, nonetheless in the early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire the result was the effective and disproportionate disenfranchisement of large numbers of non-Muslims from the voting rolls.

In Palestine, for example, a large percentage of the foreign-born Jewish community was disqualified from receiving voting rights in the election, as many of them had arrived under three-month pilgrim visas and simply settled in the country. Thus while the 1905 Ottoman census counted 13,441 Jews with Ottoman citizenship resident in Jerusalem, the Zionist Palestine Office estimated there were up to 45,000 to 50,000 Jews actually living in the city, mostly foreign citizens, while the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem estimated their numbers reached 60,000.
⁶⁷
In other words, although Jews constituted a plurality of the population in Jerusalem (41.3 percent of the city's Ottoman citizens and a majority once total non-Ottoman residents were taken into account), their absolute voting numbers as well as their relative voting power were drastically reduced once non-Ottomans were discounted.