Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

For many decades in the 18th century the Galilee-based autonomous regime of Dhaher al-ʿUmar – with its increased trade links with France and Britain in particular – effectively linked the Galilee with the entire Palestinian coast from Lebanon to Gaza. It is not surprising, therefore, that throughout the 19th century the combined effect of European travelogues (‘travels in Palestine’), guide books, religious treatises, novels, pilgrims’ accounts and maps made a clear distinction between ‘Palestine’ and ‘Syria’ and treated historic Palestine/Holy Land for all practical purposes as a separate country. Moreover, throughout the 19th century for European and Russian travellers and pilgrims Palestine and the Holy Land were synonymous and interchangeable. This synonymy did not include Syria, which made Palestine sharply distinct from Syria to the north. In the 19th century religious revivalism, combined with feverish messianic nationalism, ‘back to the Bible’ movements and ‘rediscovery’ of Palestine, swept across Europe and Russia. Moreover, in European and Russian Orientalisms of the 19th century ‘Palestine’ and the ‘Holy Land/Terra Sancta/the land of Jesus’ were interchangeable. This religio-political perception of Palestine, steeped in the stories of the New Testament, made Palestine/the Holy Land seem sharply distinct from Syria and Lebanon and made the Galilee (the birthplace of Jesus and the scene of many of the stories of the New Testament)

inherently and closely linked with Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jaffa and Gaza, more than its traditionally close links under Islam with the vast al-Sham region.

The popularisation of the concept of Palestine was illustrated by the mountains of geographical literature on Palestine listed in the 1890 Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae by Gustav Reinhold Röhricht, a German historian of the Crusades. Röhricht provided a census of 3515 print and manuscript accounts dedicated to Palestine literature between 333 AD and 1878 AD. The work also had a chronological list of maps relating to Palestine. Röhricht’s survey of Palestine literature and publications shows the following:

(a) 333 to 1300 AD: 177 works (b) 14th century: 97

(c) 15th century – with the invention of the printing press–: 279

(d) 16th century: 333

(e) 17th century: 390

(f ) 18th century: 318

(g) 19th century (until 1878) – with the replacement of the handoperated Gutenberg-style presses by steam-powered presses which allowed printing on an industrial scale –:1915 works. (Shalev 2012: 79)

However, this remarkable survey was far from being exhaustive. Western travelogues of Palestine in the 18th and 19th centuries included thousands of books, articles and other materials detailing accounts of the journeys of European, Russian and North American travellers to the Holy Land.

Fuelled by modern capitalism, new printing technologies and new transport means, many of the travelogues on Palestine treated the country not so much as a land of living histories and shared memories of ordinary people but more of a memorial to Western Christianity – a Christianity in search of a new identity in the midst of the raging struggle between scientific rationalism and scepticism, on the one hand, and literalist evangelist fundamentalism, on the other. Typically, a Church of England journal, The Church Quarterly Review of 1891, described Röhricht’s book as ‘indispensable’ to students of Palestinian geography. Röhricht’s survey of Palestine literature is most revealing with regard to two particular periods:

the Renaissance period and the 19th century. These two periods experienced two major European technological revolutions with considerable impact on the Palestine literature: first, the Renaissance printing revolution press from the late 15th century introduced the era of mass circulation of publications and second, in the 19th century the replacement of the hand-operated Gutenberg-style press by the steam-powered press allowed printing and publication on an industrial scale. This unprecedented industrial scale of production, circulation and consumption of Palestine/Holy Land knowledge was aided by the photographic revolution of the 1830s which began to produce masses of images of the Holy Land for the European, American and Russian markets.

A few examples of the large amounts of Palestine literature, including geographic publications on and ‘travels in’ Palestine in the 19th century, in several key European languages, include John Lewis Burckhardt’s Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1822); Thomas Wright’s Early Travels in Palestine (1848), which consists of accounts of the early pilgrims to Palestine, and Leslie Porter’s A Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine: Including an Account of the Geography, History, Antiquities, Inhabitants of these Countries, Part 1 and 2 (1858, 1868), Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine: géographie administrative, statistique, descriptive et raisonnée (1896); Titus Tobler’s Dritte Wanderung nach Palästina (1859); and Bibliographia Geographica Palestinae (1867). John Murray, one of the most important and influential publishers in Britain, produced Porter’s A Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine, which treats Palestine as a separate country. This book describes Palestine in three major sections: Part I ‘Palestine-Jerusalem’ and ‘Southern Palestine’, which includes cities from Gaza to Jaffa, and Part 2 with two sections:

(a) ‘Northern Palestine’, which included the Galilee and Damascus, and (b) ‘Northern Syria’. In a similar vein, Joseph Meen’s Geography of Palestine:

Historical and Descriptive (1865) and Walter McLeod’s The Geography of Palestine, or, the Holy Land, Including Phoenicia and Philistia (1856) were typical of the large number of books on the historical geography of Palestine published in Britain and Europe in the middle of the 19th century. These historical-geographic publications treated Palestine as a distinct country and a geo-political unit separate from Syria, Egypt and Arabia. It is also worth pointing out that the expression ‘Southern Syria’, which appeared briefly in the early 20th century, was never mentioned in these publications.

Crucially, in the second half of the 19th century translations of articles and books into Arabic began to distinguish clearly between Syria and Palestine.

For instance, in 1883 George Edward Post’s article ‘Plants of Syria and Palestine’ was published in the Arabic journal al-Muqtataf (1883), which was founded in 1876 at the Syrian Protestant College, today the American University of Beirut, before moving to Cairo in 1884. The same distinction is also found in the Arabic version of Post’s Nabat Suriyya wa-Filastin wa-al-Qatr al-Misri wa-Bawadiha (Flora of Syria and Palestine and Sinai:

A Handbook of the Flowering Plants and Ferns Native and Naturalized from the Taurus to Ras Muhammad and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Syrian Desert) (1896), an indication that by the 1880s European publications on Palestine geography and their translations into Arabic were beginning to have an impact on modern Arab perceptions of Palestine (Foster 2013) and the evolving notion that Palestine was a distinct geo-political unit.

The work of Guy Le Strange, a scholar of Arabic and Persian at Cambridge University, on the historical geography of Palestine under Islam in the Middle Ages, added another dimension to British preoccupation with Palestine in the second half of the 19th century. Guy Le Strange’s Palestine under the Moslems; A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650

to 1500. Translated from the Works of the Mediaeval Arab Geographers, was published in London by the Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in 1890. The PEF, founded in 1865, had already focused on Palestine/ the Holy Land. Other antecedents to the PEF also focused on Palestine/the Holy Land and made a clear distinction between Palestine and Syria. This included the evangelical British Palestine Association, established sixty years before the PEF. The formation of the Palestine Association in the early 19th century had been spurred by the Napoleonic wars and the 1798‒1801 French invasion and campaign in Egypt and Palestine. Napoleon’s defeat at Acre in 1799 is one of the best-known episodes of modern world history. The collapse of his siege of Acre – the city known in Europe as the last capital of the Latin Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem – in 1799 with the full support of British maritime power ushered in a new era in British direct involvement in the region and the beginnings of British religio-political distinction between Palestine and Syria. This became evident in a long romantic-evangelical poem from 1803, Palestine, which was composed by a clergyman, Reginald Heber, later known as Bishop of Calcutta, with the help of Sir Walter Scott.

The popular poem was recited in London theatres and was later published, and set to music by the composer William Crotch, a professor of music at Oxford University. The increasing British evangelical involvement in Palestine also became evident in the renaming of the Palestine Association, which was established in 1805 shortly after the departure of the French from the region. This society had initially been founded in March 1805 under the name Syrian Society. A month later, on 24 April 1805, its founders decided that the Syrian Society ‘shall henceforth be denominated The Palestine Association’. The Palestine Association was co-founded and led by William Richard Hamilton (1777–1859), a British diplomat, traveller, antiquarian and Egyptologist who later served as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

The Association was formally disbanded in 1834 and incorporated into the Royal Geographical Society (Silberman 1982; Kark and Goren 2011).

Le Strange’s Palestine under the Moslems (1890, 2010, 2014) placed the image of the Dome of the Rock on its cover and contained maps and illustrations. His work, which introduces ‘the mass of information which lies buried in the Arabic texts of the Moslem geographers and travellers of the Middle Ages’ (Le Strange 1890: Preface), provided vivid descriptions of Jund Filastin under Islam on the basis of the accounts of the 10th century Palestinian Jerusalemite historian and geographer al-Maqdisi and his work, Ahsan al-Taqasim Fi Ma’rifat al-Aqalim (The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions) (al-Maqdisi 1994, 2002). Le Strange had already translated from Arabic into English and published in 1886 al-Maqdisi’s famous work under the title al-Mukaddasi’s Description of Syria and Palestine, and this title by Le Strange also underlines the sharp geo-political distinction between Palestine and Syria in European thinking in the 19th century.

The clear distinction between Palestine/the Holy Land, on the one hand, and Syria/al-Sham, on the other, was not exclusively European; as we have already seen, in the 17th century Palestinian Muslim author Salih ibn Ahmad al-Tumurtashi made that distinction in his work The Complete Knowledge in Remembering the Holy Land and Its Boundaries and Remembering Palestine and its Boundaries and al-Sham (1695‒1696).

Also, successive generations of medieval and modern Christian pilgrims referred to geographical subdivision of Palestine, Syria and Arabia. For educated local Palestinians, familiar with both classical Arab Islamic writings on Palestine and al-Sham and European publications on Palestine, and for ordinary Palestinians observing the caravans of European and Russian pilgrims at close quarters, this distinction between Palestine/the Holy Land and Syria would be taken for granted. Western-funded, Roman Catholic Terra Sancta schools based in the urban centres of Palestine where most Palestinian Christians resided began to appear in Nazareth, Jaffa, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and for Palestinians educated in the European and Russian schools at home or abroad the production of the European ‘knowledge’ on the historical geography of Palestine/the Holy Land as well as the mushrooming of European consulates in Palestine would also be a matter of great interest and some concern. From the mid-19th century, with the improvement of communication and establishment of several European consulates in Palestine, the ‘Grand Tour’ of the 18th century – the traditional trip undertaken by mainly upper class European young men of means through Italian cities – was replaced by the ‘Cook Tour’ (organised by Thomas Cook): middle class early mass tourism and travels in ‘Greece, Palestine and Egypt’. Thomas Cook arranged for the German Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit Palestine in 1898. The ‘Cook’s Tour’ and Thomas Cook Holy Land Tourism also spawned numerous publications in many European languages on the ‘geography of Palestine’ and the Holy Land, many of which were also accessible to members of the educated Palestinian elite and Ottoman officials. On a popular level, European mass tourism in Palestine impacted on the Palestinian vernacular and, over time, introduced many French and Italian words into Palestinian Arabic – words such as hotel (otel), chauffeur, douche, beton (baton), mode (moda), canapé (canabai), salon, balcon (balconeh), billet (bolet), farmacia (farmashiyyah), souvenir, ascenseur, (ascensel), dossier (dusiyyeh), automobile, Benzina (banzin) and garage (karaj) still commonly in use today.

In the 19th century and early 20th century much of the European knowledge production on Palestine in books and travel diaries remained dominated by Biblical Studies, Scriptural Geography, Orientalism in which the Palestinian Arabs were portrayed as a ‘simple appendix to the ancient Biblical [landscape] … as “shadows” of the far- off past, “fossils” suspended in time’ (Kamel 2014, 2015), while the Arab fallahin (peasants)

of modern Palestine were viewed as symbols of the ‘biblical Jews’ (Gil, E.

2006). However, as early as the mid-19th century, biblical archaeologist and scriptural geographer Edward Robinson (1794‒1863), writing in the early 1860s when travel by Europeans to the Levant became widespread, notes ‘Palestine, or Palestina, now the most common name for the Holy Land’ (Robinson, E. 1865: 15; see also Robinson 1841; and Robinson et al. 1860).

This observation is also evident from Victor Guérin’s seven-volume Description géographique, historique et archéologique de la Palestine (1868‒1880; also Guérin 1881–1883). In the 1860s, the British had set up the Palestine Exploration Fund, which sponsored the Survey of Western Palestine and mounted geographical map-making expeditions in Palestine. The PEF was a typical example of the ‘learned societies’ founded in Britain and was responsible for processing the empire’s notions and theories into pseudo-scientific Orientalist thinking and argumentation, leading to the shaping of British policy and intentionality which finds its apotheosis in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917. One of the main political motives of the PEF was clear from its own publication: Names and Places in the Old and New Testament and Apocrypha: With their Modern Identifications (Palestine Exploration Fund 1889). The Palestine Exploration Fund listed more than 1150 place names related to the Old Testament and 162

related to the New Testament. British rule in Palestine formally began on 11 December 1917 when General Allenby officially entered the Old City of Jerusalem. Shortly after the British military occupation of Palestine, the British authorities set out to gather toponymic information from the local Palestinian inhabitants. The European preoccupation with ‘biblical place names’ and with Jerusalem, and the European and American growth of ‘Bible Studies’, had some impact on official Ottoman thinking and on the writings of some Palestinian nationalist authors. The latter sought to construct a counter-Zionist discourse by couching modern Palestinian nationalism in primordialist terms, rooted in Canaanite roots and the ‘Land of Canaan’ (see, for instance, Cattan 1969: 3‒4).