Shmuel Katz

BEGENNING TO RESTORE THE LAND

Chapter 5 – Battleground

The land, unloved by its rulers and uncared for by
most of its handful of inhabitants, whose silences La-
martine had likened to those of ruined Pompeii, and
which Mark Twain had compassionately consigned to
the world of dreams, began to come to life again with
the blossoming of Jewish restoration in the nine-
teenth century. Now, instead of having to adapt the
pattern of their living, as they had done for centuries,
to the frozen mold of Ottoman stagnation, the Jewish
immigrants were able to put down their own fresh
roots. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, under
the pressure and inspiration of the European powers
—especially Britain and France, who were support-
ing, the Sultan’s regime against collapse and his empire
against Russian penetration-the Ottoman government
introduced a series of reforms. Though imperfectly im-
plemented, they restored a degree of law and order
in the country and introduced a revolutionary change
in the communal law: Non-Moslems were henceforth
to enjoy equality before the law with Moslems.

This reform was bitterly opposed by the Moslems.
Non-Moslems had always been second-class citizens
under Moslem rule, and Moslems regarded as sacred
the inequality in their favor. It was considered nat-
ural law that Moslems should be treated as superior
beings. During the middle of the century, in protest
against the new equality, there were many anti-Chris-
tian outbreaks, even massacres, in Syria, Mesopotamia,
and Arabia. In Lebanon, French troops came in, and
at Jidda, French and British warships had to be sent
to intervene on behalf of the victims.

Empty coffers in Constantinople brought about a
reform of even more far-reaching consequence: It be-
came possible to buy land from the Sultan. Tracts of
land, mostly in Syria, much of it altogether unworked,
were bought by a small number of families.

Hence the renewal of Jewish agriculture. Land could
be bought from the new landowners. The Turkish gov-
ernment, however, after the brief flicker of hope of
cooperation in 1880, became antagonistic to the Jewish
restoration. Faced with the organized movement Ho-
veve Zion (Lovers of Zion), an Eastern European
forerunner of the Zionist Organization, preaching
and practicing immigration and settlement in Palestine,
the Turks imposed a dual prohibition on Jews: They
forbade their entry for permanent residence in the
country and their purchase of land. The growing
number of immigrants thus came into the country as
pilgrims, while land was usually acquired by subterfuge
and at appreciably higher prices. The ravaged desola-
tion of the land caused many of its non-Jewish inhabi-
tants to leave it, thus bringing on more desolation
and denudation. For the returning Jews, it held a chal-
lenge and a call for care and love.

The struggle of that generation of pioneers in the
1880s and the two generations that followed them was
carried on in a harsh climate, on toughened, treeless
soil, while waging an often losing battle with malaria,
which came up from the swamps and the undrained
rivers, and resisting Bedouins, whose marauding habits
persisted even into the twentieth century. The process
of reviving the country was to be a long one; it contin-
ues to this day. But by 1914, Jewish villages dotted the
countryside. As for the towns, the Jews became a
majority in Jerusalem by mid-century, then they de-
veloped the city outside the walls. They began to give
new shape to Haifa, Safed, and Tiberias, and in 1909,
expanding the borders of Jaffa, they founded what
was to become the first modem all-Hebrew city: Tel-
Aviv.

The non-Jewish inhabitants of the country were the
passive beneficiaries of these developments. The Otto-
man reforms were followed by the opening up of the
area to European and American influences. The Chris-
tian Churches established schools in Syria and Lebanon,
of which both Christians and Moslems took advantage.
The new Jewish immigrants directly or indirectly
helped to improve their peasant neighbors’ farming
methods and to raise their standard of living.

Thus, at the eleventh hour, with the onset of the new
century, the long process of flight and disintegration of
the non-Jewish population in Palestine was halted.
With the founding of the Zionist Organization in
1897 by Theodor Herzl, the longing for the return to
Zion achieved a serious and comprehensive political
frame of reference for the first time in over seventeen
centuries. Herzl’s logical policy of working directly and
openly for an arrangement with the Sultan’s govern-
ment to create the legal instrument for Jewish colo-
nization on a large scale failed in his short lifetime.
Equally unsuccessful were later efforts to establish rap-
port with the revolutionary Young Turks. Zionism’s
political progress was blocked, but the physical move-
ment of immigration and restoration continued in the
face of endless difficulties erected by the decrepit, back-
ward, and corrupt administration and the physical hard-
ships and perils presented by the ravaged country.

The war that broke out in 1914 provided the most
striking confrontation between the passionate Jewish
affinity to Eretz Israel and the absence of any aware-
ness of Palestine in the consciousness of the Arab
people in general or the Arab community in the country
itself.

To the new and young exponents of the Zionist
dream, the meaning of Turkey’s entry into the war on
the side of Germany was clear from the outset. It was
a historic opportunity: Defeat of the Turkish Empire
could break its hold on Palestine. The Jews, they de-
cided, must range themselves on the side of Turkey’s
enemies, to help bring about the dismemberment that
would make possible Jewish restoration. In the result,
the Jewish people played a part far beyond its weight
and size in winning the war. The Jews had no sov-
ereign power and no national base of operations, they
were a collection of minorities scattered over the world,
and they were in fact fighting as citizens in all the
armies on both sides. Yet out of the vast panorama of
the First World War and its carnage, and the range of
peoples that took part in it, there emerged the phenom-
enon of an additional, superimposed contribution, a
unique voluntary engagement, and a willing sacrifice
that sprang from the Jewish passion for Eretz Israel and
a now urgent hunger for independence.

The Zionist effort in its various ramifications was
spread far and wide. It revolved primarily around the
work of three men: Chaim Weizmann, Zeev Jabotin-
sky, and Aaron Aaronson. Each independently came
to the conclusion that Jewish restoration could be
built only on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Each
in his own way sought to provide Britain and her
allies with help to win the war.

The question of taking sides was not simple for the
Jewish people at large. Considerable numbers of Jews
lived in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

Their condition was tolerable, certainly incomparably
better than the state of the Jews in Russia; Tsarist Rus-
sia-the ally of Britain and France-was unspeak-
ably, endemically anti-Semitic. In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe, it played the role that a
generation later was filled, more directly and thoroughly and scientifically, and with devastating effect,
by Nazi Germany. Not the least of the factors weighing
in the United States and in its Jewish community for
neutrality in the war, or even for support for Germany,
was the deep and widespread disgust for the Russian
regime and the knowledge that a victory for the Al-
lies would mean a victory for tsarist tyranny.

Moreover, there was now a substantial Jewish population in Palestine as well as sizable communities in

other parts of the Ottoman Empire. All these would be
potentially in jeopardy if the Jewish people were to be
identified as anti-Turkish. The disadvantages and the
dangers of identification with the Allied cause were
clear.

Fear of Turkish reprisals and hatred of Russia were
overcome, however, by a more powerful emotion-the
urge to national regeneration.

Under Weizmann’s lead, the Zionists developed a
consistent pro-Allied propaganda in the United States.
The issue was crucial-no more and no less than bring-
ing influence to bear in the United States for the gov-
ernment to abandon its neutrality and to join the Al-
lies in the war against Germany. This was amplified,
as soon as Turkey entered the war, by the campaign
launched by Jabotinsky to form a Jewish Legion in the
British Army to fight for the liberation of Palestine.
Though the idea of a Jewish military unit inevitably
met with considerable opposition both from timid and
assimilated Jews and from the British, it prevailed in
the end. A Jewish auxiliary unit, the Zion Mule Corps,
took part in the Gallipoli campaign. Jewish battalions,
consisting of volunteers from Britain, the United States,
Canada, and Palestine itself, took part in the latter
stages of Allenby’s campaign. They played an especially, notable part in the defeat of the Turks on the Jordan
River and in driving the Turks out of eastern Palestine
(Transjordan).

The Australian general, Sir Edward Chaytor, told the
Legionnaires:
By your gallant capture of the Umm Es Shert Ford
and defeat of the Turkish rearguard I was enabled
to push my mounted men over the Jordan and so you
contributed materially to the capture of Es Salt and
Amman, the cutting of the Hedjaz Railway and the
destruction of the Fourth Turkish Army, which
helped considerably towards the great victory won at
Damascus.

Aaron Aaronson, the only one of the three leaders to
live in Palestine at the time, made a major contribution
to the conduct of the Allied campaign in Palestine. A
brilliant and versatile man, Aaronson by 1914 had won
worldwide fame as a scientist, especially as the dis-
coverer of wild wheat. He was chosen by the Turkish
government to direct the campaign against the plague
of locusts that ravaged the country during the first year
of the war. Soon after the war began, Aaronson was
afforded details of the extermination in cold blood by
the Turks of some two million Armenian subjects of
their empire. By this time, the Jews in Palestine were
already being subjected to terrorization, despoliation,
and deportation. Under the circumstances, it seemed
impossible to fight against the Turks. The leaders of
the still modest Jewish community bowed their
heads to the storm. Aaronson, convinced that a British
victory was vital for the Jewish future, organized the
Nili group-an intelligence service for the British be-
hind the Turkish lines. He himself managed to find
his way to Egypt, where, in addition to directing and
maintaining contact with Nili, he became probably
the most important adviser at British HQ for the forth-
coming invasion of Palestine under the Commander-
in-Chief, General Allenby. Aaronson’s encyclopedic
knowledge of the terrain in all its aspects-popula-
tion, climatic vagaries, water problems, transport prob-
lems-was unique. In addition, a stream of essential
current military information came from the Nili or-
ganization. The price paid by Aaronson’s group was
high. In an attempt to reach Egypt overland by way of
the Sinai Desert, Aaronson’s chief collaborator, Avsha-
lom Feinberg, was killed by Bedouins. In September
1917, the Turks exposed the Nili network. Two of
its leaders, Naaman Belkind and Yosef Lishansky,
were hanged in Damascus; many of the others were
imprisoned and tortured. Among these was Aaronson’s
sister Sarah, who had served as his deputy. During a
respite from torture, she succeeded in shooting herself.8
8 Literature on Aaronson, who died in a plane crash in 1919, is
sparse. See a recent biography by Eliezer Livneh, Aaron Aaronson

The Nili intelligence proved indispensable. British
General Gribbon expressed the opinion that in the
crucial battle for Beersheba alone, it had saved 30,000
British lives. Even more explicit were Allenby’s own
words on Aaronson: “He was mainly responsible for
the formation of my Field Intelligence Organization
behind the Turkish lines.

The significance of that intelligence service was
summed up by Sir George Macdonogh, Director of
British Military Intelligence, in a professional lecture
after the war:
You will remember Lord Allenby’s great cam-
paign in Palestine in that year and you may have
wondered at the audacity of his operations. It is
true that in war you cannot expect a really great
success unless you are prepared to take risks, but
these risks must be reasonable ones. To the un-
initiated it may sometimes have appeared that Lord
Allenby’s were not reasonable. That however was
not the case because Lord Allenby knew from his
Intelligence every disposition and movement of the
enemy. Every one of his opponent’s cards was
known to him, and he was consequently able to play
his own hand with the most perfect assurance. In
those circumstances victory was certain.
The Nili underground was surrounded by an atmosphere
of perpetual terrorization by the Turkish
autthorities. From the very beginning of the war the
governor, Djemal Pasha, had treated the Jews of Palestine as a potential enemy, since he realized that to the
Jews the Turks were the alien occupiers of their country
and that Zionism was now an active force in the world.

In response to the practical manifestations of Jewish
collaboration with the Allies-the Zion Mule Corps in
Gallipoli 1915, the campaign in Britain to create Jew-
ish regiments, the Zionist pro-Allied campaign in the
United States and elsewhere-Djemal became ever
more fierce in his repressions. Police brutality, econom-
ic discrimination, arbitrary arrests, and deportations
were the constant companions of the Jews throughout
the war. Of a population estimated at some 90,000 at
its outbreak, less than 60,000 remained when it ended.

The Arabs living in Palestine did not protest Turkish
overlordship. When war came, they fought to perpet-
uate Turkish imperial rule. The Arabs of Palestine
made no response to the call of Sherif Hussein of He-
jaz, the one zone where Arab action against the
Turks developed, and they contributed nothing to
even that marginal Arab contribution to the downfall
of Turkey. Even when the British forces under Allen-
by, their path eased and smoothed by the Nili intelli-
gence, finally swept into Palestine, there was no Arab
rising behind the lines to help them rout the Turks.

Thus Djemal, commanding the Turkish force which
in 1915 made its way through Sinai to attack the Brit-
ish on the Suez Canal, was able in his memoirs to
emphasize the spirit of solidarity displayed by the Arab
soldiers. “I can have no greater duty,” he wrote, “than
to offer a respectful tribute to these heroes…. In this
force, composed of men of Arab and Turkish stock, a
fine feeling of brotherly affection prevailed. This first
campaign against the Canal was a brilliant revela-
tion of the fact that the majority of the Arabs stood by
the Khalifate with heart and soul. The Arabs, who
composed the entire 25th division and the whole of
the L. of C. Organization, did their duty with the
greatest zeal and devotion.”

Even after the defeat of the Turks, the Arabs were
unable to hide their feelings. British Col. Richard
Meinertzhagen recorded in his diary on December
2, 1917:
The Arabs of Ramleh gave us an amusing incident
yesterday which accurately reflects their attitude to-
wards us. A large batch of Turkish prisoners were
being marched through the village, but they were
not preceded by their British Guard. The Arabs,
thinking it was the return of the Turkish Army,
turned out in force, yelling with delight and waving
Turkish flags. [Middle East Diary, p. 7]

After the war and at the beginning of the British
Mandatory regime in Palestine, Arabs, among them-
selves and in trying to engage the sympathies of the
Moslem world, emphasized how loyal they had been
to the Turks. Writing to the Mufti of Jerusalem on a
visit to India in 1923, the Mufti of Haifa noted:
We found repugnance by every Moslem towards
anyone who was called Arab. . . . They took him to
be like the Sharif Husain of whom they say that he
betrayed Islam. . . . We began to rebut this notion
and to show all that Palestine had done in giving
total aid to the Turkish army and how she fought to
the end.

This attitude and behavior were, in fact, natural and
1ogical. Even in 1914 there were no more than the
faintest glimmerings of any Arabic national consciousness. After 1908-the year of the Young Turkish revolution-an opposition had come into existence in the
empire against the Young Turks’ excessive administra-
tive centralization and cultural Turkification. These oppositional groups worked for decentralization and for
a recognized status for the Arabic language, but they
made no impact on the population: Throughout the
area the membership of all the groups totaled 126. Of
these, 22 were from Palestine.

There was no sign of anything remotely resembling a
national movement, of a sense of nationality, of “own-
ership” of the country they lived in, of rejection of the
Turks. As late as March 1917, T. E. Lawrence-the
last person in the world to understate the Arab case
-wrote in a confidential report in the Arab Bulletin:
The words Syria and Syrian are foreign terms. Un-
less he had learnt English or French, the inhabi-
tant of these parts has no words to describe all his
country . . . Sham is Arabic for the town of Da-
rnascus. An Aleppine always calls himself an Alep-
pine, a Beyrouti a Beyrouti, and so down to the
smallest villages. This verbal poverty indicates a polit-
ical condition. There is no national feeling. [Secret
Despatches, pp. 77-78]

The Arab leaders, before they became involved in
the intrigues launched to resist the Jewish restoration,
gave unequivocal recognition to the Jewish bond with
Palestine and the Jewish right.

The Emir Faisal I, son of Hussein, Sherif of Mecca,
who initiated the Arab Revolt, briefly King of Syria
and later King of Iraq, signed a treaty with Dr. Chaim
Weizmann in February 1919. In this treaty, they out-
lined the relations between “the Arab state and Pales-
tine.” There was no mention of mutual “recognition”
-in the context of the treaty it was superfluous. That
an Arab state was about to arise (as it did) was taken
for granted. It was equally taken for granted that
Palestine was to be a Jewish state.

Before signing the 1919 treaty with Weizmann,
Faisal had told Reuter’s Agency: “Arabs are not jeal-
ous of Zionist Jews and intend to give them fair play,
and the Zionist Jews have assured the nationalist Arabs
of their intention to see that they too have fair play
in their respective areas” (London Times, December
12,1918).

What was the Zionist area? In a letter to Felix
Frankfurter (March 3, 1919), Faisal wrote: “We
Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with
the deepest sympathy on the Zionist Movement. Our
delegation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the
proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organi-
zation to the Peace Conference and we regard them
as moderate and proper.”

These proposals had called for the establishment of
a Jewish state and specified its boundaries in detail.
These took in all of Galilee (including the area up to
the Litany River, later torn out of Palestine and trans-
ferred to the French zone of interest in Lebanon), the
territory east of the Jordan (later torn out of Man-
datory Palestine to become finally the Arab Kingdom
of Transjordan), and part of the Sinai Peninsula.
The treaty itself was couched in simple language:
The Arab State and Palestine in all their relations and
undertakings shall be controlled by the most cordial
goodwill and understanding and to this end Arab and
Jewish duly accredited agents shall be established and
maintained in the respective territories.
In the establishment of the Constitution and Ad-
ministration of Palestine all such measures shall be
adopted as will afford the fullest guarantees for car-
rying into effect the British Government’s (Balfour)
declaration of 2 November 1917.

All necessary measures shall be undertaken to
encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into
Palestine on a large scale and as quickly as possible
to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land.9
The treaty further envisaged Jewish aid to the Arab
state. The Zionist Organization undertook to place at
the disposal of the Arab state a commission of experts
to study economic possibilities and to try to obtain
economic help.

A year earlier Faisal’s father, Hussein (who in his
negotiations with the British on the rewards for his
revolt had demanded all the Asian territory ever in-
cluded in the Moslem Empire, except Turkey, and
who had been promised most of it-excepting Pales-
tine), had written or inspired an article in the Mecca
newspaper Al Qibla, which is most revealing on the
relative affinities of Arabs and Jews to Palestine. It ap-
peared on March 23, 1918, while the war was still in
progress, two months after Hussein had been officially
informed of the British government’s Balfour Declara-
tion promising the establishment of the Jewish Home
in Palestine.

Hussein called upon the Arab population in Pales-
tine to welcome the Jews as brothers and to cooperate
with them for the common good.

The resources of the country are still virgin soil and
will be developed by the Jewish immigrants. One of
the most amazing things until recent times was that
the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering
over the high seas in every direction. His native
soil could not retain a hold on him, though his an-
cestors had lived on it for 1,000 years. At the
same time we have seen the Jews from foreign
countries streaming to Palestine from Russia, Ger-
many, Austria, Spain, America. The cause of causes
could not escape those who had the gift of a deeper
insight. They knew that the country was for its orig-
inal sons [abna'ihi-l-asliyin], for all their differences,
a sacred and beloved homeland. The return of these
exiles [Jaliya] to their homeland will prove mate-
rially and spiritually an experimental school for their
brethren who are with them in the fields, factories,
trades, and in all things connected with toil and
labor.

In that same year, the leaders of the Moslem com-
munity in Palestine itself had an opportunity to give
formal expression to their attitude toward the move-
ment of Jewish restoration and its recognition by the
British government. On July 24, 1918, the foundation
stones of the Hebrew University were laid on Mount
Scopus in Jerusalem. Christian and Moslem notables
attended. The religious leader of the Moslems, Kamil
el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, laid one of the
stones and signed the parchment buried under it. There
the date was given as the twenty-first year after the
first Zionist Congress and the first year of the Balfour

Declaration “promising to grant a national home to
the Jewish people in Palestine.”

The twilight months of the end of the First World
War were a dramatic moment in the history of Eretz
Israel. As the 400-year-old Ottoman Empire, crum-
bling to its fall, released its hold on the country, it
brought to a close the long succession of its foreign
and-except for -the Crusaders-imperial absentee
rulers. For nearly two thousand years, though the Jews
were powerless to prevent it, no other people had made
Palestine its national home. And now Christians and
Moslems, whatever resentments they might harbor,
however much they might dislike or fear the Jewish
return to the land-all now joined in recognition of
the title of the Jewish people to be the land’s master.

The myth of an Arab historic claim to the country
was born later.