Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (29 page)

The press’s spatial elements were not only imperial, however. The Palestinian press also contributed to a geography of locality, as newspapers featured columns on local news
(akhbār ma
aliyya)
, published reports from correspondents in other Palestinian cities, and featured stories on towns and villages throughout Palestine, from Gaza in the south to ‘Akka in the north. For example,
The Crier (Al-Munādī
) newspaper based in Jerusalem regularly carried news from southern Palestinian cities like Lydda, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Gaza. (We will see later that the press contributed greatly to an emerging Palestinian local identity in ideological ways as well.)

Without ignoring the local aspects of the press’s import, it is important nevertheless to underscore that many newspapers openly declared to their readers their commitment to contributing to the efflorescence of a civic identity in the empire. In the words of one publisher, Jurji Habib Hanania of
Jerusalem:
“Circumstances require the establishment of a press that will plant the seeds of brotherhood and work all together for equality whose aims are service to the homeland, not to take advantage
in the differences of another.”
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And
Progress (Al-Taraqqi)
, a “progressive constitutional newspaper” founded in Jaffa in September 1908, declared that it aimed to: serve the group, homeland, and humanity; enlighten minds; prepare the people for economic changes while limiting the negative effects of those changes; and support principles of brotherhood, justice, and equality.
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MAKING CRITICAL CITIZENS

Much of the press took upon itself the role of promoting citizenship as an active, critical endeavor. Such was the approach of
Ottoman Union:

We said in our last article that it is required of every free Ottoman to show his ignorant brother the benefits of the constitution…. The best speakers in these days are the newspapers, and the newspapers are the ears of the needs and necessities after the constitution. It is true that the establishment of the newspapers was one of the most important of that work which is required of us after the constitution, but which newspapers do I want? Free newspapers whose aims are the reform of the self, not commerce and not literature as is the case in most of the newspapers today.
³²

For
Palestine
, distributing the paper to villagers was a vital fulfillment of its self-appointed role as both informer and educator. As villagers learned of events taking place throughout the empire, which would serve to help underscore the process of “imagining themselves as Ottoman,” at the same time the peasants would learn of their political rights as new citizens.
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Indeed, we have seen the press as playing a central role in transmitting information about voting rights and procedures, publishing candidate platforms and endorsements, and setting expectations for the parliamentary elections of 1908. It continued its work in rendering the constitutional government visible and legible to its readers by publishing regular reports of parliamentary proceedings from Istanbul as well as reporting on the sessions of the provincial administrative and general councils. The demand for governmental transparency and accountability to the people was so strong that one newspaper called for total transparency, demanding the protocols and weekly blotter of the police commission, the balance sheets of the city council, and all incoming and outgoing orders of the provincial government, “so that the people can know what belongs to him and what is incumbent upon him.”
³⁴
Criticisms were repeatedly expressed against newspapers that were seen as towing the government line, such as
Noble Jerusalem
, the official newspaper of the province. The paper was forced to defend itself against these
public charges, arguing that “our paper does not slander and does not take sides, never. Our job is [simply] to convey announcements from the government orders to its people.”
³⁵

A central tool of the constitutional press’s public engagement with government officials and councils was the “open letter,” known as
kitāb maftū
in the Arabic press and
mikhtav patuah
in the Hebrew press. Through the open letter, newspaper editors and private citizens alike addressed their elected and appointed officials, demanding answers, suggesting policy changes, and even, in some cases, rendering accusations and ridicule public. For example, in the summer of 1911 the newspaper
Palestine
addressed a public letter to MP Ruhi al-Khalidi in the aftermath of a storm off the coast of Jaffa which, in addition to destroying several houses and buildings in town, cost Jaffan merchants some fifty thousand cases of oranges.
Palestine
complained that Jaffa had asked the government for a new port for years while its requests had gone unheeded. At once soliciting the MP’s opinion on the matter (“What is your opinion of this, Khalidi? Do you have a suggestion for the government?”), the open letter also made clear that Khalidi would be held accountable for meeting or failing to meet the city’s needs: “Now it is upon you, our honored representative,” to continue the struggle Jaffa’s new port.
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Interviewed for the article, Khalidi responded meekly, blaming his earlier inattention to the port issue on the ongoing war against the Italian invasion of Libya, but nonetheless promising to “bring to fruition the trust of our dear nation.”

The Jerusalem newspaper
The Crier
excelled in the open letter, publishing dozens of them in its short fourteen-month run. Most frequently, these open letters addressed the governor, the general council, and the city council, but the paper also published open letters addressed to the general prosecutor in various Palestinian towns as well as the Jerusalem police commission. In some cases, the open letter provoked a public response by the official or council. Such was the case when former MP Hafiz al-Sa’id responded on the front page of
The Crier.
Likewise, the Jerusalem police department felt compelled to publicly respond to
The Crier’s
charges against it and defend its record.
³⁷

The Haifa-based newspaper
The Carmel (Al-Karmil)
also regularly took government officials to task on its pages, criticizing the new deputy governor in ‘Ajloun for failing to understand constitutional rule, attacking various local officials including the MP from ‘Akka, Shaykh As’ad Shuqayri, the deputy governor of Tiberias, and the former governor of Jerusalem for facilitating Zionism contrary to standard legal procedures and the interest of the Ottoman state, and decrying the corruption of both local officials and notable families.
³⁸
After a particularly scathing
run of articles criticizing the provincial government for failing to provide adequate public security, the deputy governor of Nazareth, Amin ‘Abd al-Hadi, wrote back insisting that the editor of
The Carmel
, Nejuib Nassar, must have confused the boundaries of Nazareth with those of neighboring Jenin, for in his district only three donkeys had been stolen since he had entered office whereas seventy murders had been committed in Jenin in the past three months alone. ‘Abd al-Hadi demanded that Nassar publish his letter along with a correction “in a prominent place on the front page,” in accordance with article 21 of the new press laws. In a follow-up letter, ‘Abd al-Hadi chided the paper saying that it served no good public purpose if he had to constantly write in to correct the paper’s mistakes. In response, Nassar defended his paper’s claim, saying that many crimes were not reported to government officials because people did not expect them to be investigated, but he also expressed a hope that all government officials would take the newspaper as seriously as ‘Abd al-Hadi did.
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And yet, there were nonetheless limits on the freedom of the press to challenge the authorities; on more than one occasion newspapers were closed down, editors sued, jailed, or fined, or other penalties were imposed. One of the earliest cases of this happened when
The Deer
published a rather inflammatory article entitled “We Demand Police!”
⁴⁰
The article decried the lack of public security and complained that Jerusalem had only sixteen policemen while Rome, which was only five times the size of Jerusalem, had four thousand police. In light of this oversight, the author of the article, Itamar Ben-Avi, demanded a police brigade to be made up of Jews and Christians. Despite the fact that the lack of security in Palestine was well reported in the press, the Ben-Avi article crossed an unwritten line and was seen as unacceptable agitation against the government. The article was translated into Arabic and Ottoman Turkish by order of the police, and after being taken to court,
The Deer
was shut down for three weeks.
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The open letter also became a format used to address readers—a conscious act of creating, naming, and enlisting a particular group under a chosen banner. In many cases this was imperial: for example,
Ottoman Union
and other papers frequently published open letters to “all Ottomans,” “brother Ottomans,” and “fellow citizens.” Still other letters addressed a provincial public, such as the letters in
The Crier
“to the Palestinians.” Other letters reinforced the city as a shared civic unit, with letters to “Jerusalemites.”
⁴²
These various audiences can be seen as concentric circles of overlapping affiliation: one was never simply a Jaffan or a Palestinian or an Ottoman or a Christian—one was all at the same time, even when the content or tone of the open letter might highlight the tensions between these various commitments.

As another example of this contextual identification of group-ness and “we”-ness, the Sephardi Jewish newspaper
Liberty
used the Hebrew word
umah
(nation, people) to refer alternately to a number of overlapping groups: the ethnolinguistic (Sephardim), ethnoreligious (Jews locally and/or globally), civic-regional (people of Palestine), and civic-imperial (Ottoman nation). Similarly, in Ladino the words
nacion
and
pueblo
modified various communities, as in Arabic
umma
(nation-people) and
wa
an
(homeland) were at various times local and imperial, confessional or communal. In other words, the “voice of the people” in reality reflected many voices, and many peoples.

INTERCOMMUNAL RIVALRY I: THE PRESS AS A PLATFORM FOR COMMUNAL RIGHTS

The multilingual press of the late Ottoman Empire expressed a keen awareness of the different elements of the empire and their shifting roles in the new political order. Often this came in the form of short notices that underscored the mutual participation of different communities in the Ottomanist project. For example, in the fall of 1908, the Hebrew paper
The Deer
published a notice that the Armenian organization ARF had publicly declared that there were forty thousand Armenians ready to give their lives to defend the empire against external aggression and internal anticonstitutionalists; likewise, the ARF claimed, if the government was short on cash the Armenians were prepared to raise two million Ottoman liras for its benefit.
The Deer
noted that as a result the Ottoman Turkish press was unanimous in praising the “loyal Armenians.”
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In another incident during the Balkan war, the newspaper
The Crier
alerted its readers to the fact that Jewish religious leaders and scholars in town had asked Jewish workers and shop owners to close down during a prayer service in the synagogue for the victory of the empire over its enemies;
The Crier
publicly thanked the Jewish community for the gesture and for the patriotic sentiments.
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