Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

Palestinian territorial nationalism, like the idea of Palestine, has multiple beginnings and multiple sources. In Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1998), Rashid Khalidi argues that a distinct Palestinian national identity grounded in the land of Palestine emerged in the early 20th century. But, at the same time, Khalidi and several prominent historians of modern Palestine, including Beshara Doumani (1995), Ilan Pappe (1999), Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal (1993, 2003), all suggested that before the appearance of political Zionism in the late 19th century, a local Palestinian national identity had been in the making (Pappe 1999: 3). This nascent positive Palestinian national territorial identity in late Ottoman Palestine was not connected to Zionism. However, although an incipient local Palestinian national movement preceded the advent of Zionism in Palestine, this movement was also spurred on by Zionist settlement and land-purchasing activities in the period prior to the First World War.

In late Ottoman Palestine, the population of the three Palestinian administrative districts (Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre) was overwhelmingly Muslim and Christian Arab. The Jewish minority numbered about 25,000; the majority was deeply religious and urban-based. Until the advent of European Zionism in the late 19th century relations among the Palestinians (Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians and Jews) were peaceful and stable, forged by centuries of coexistence, shared history and shared country (Khalidi, W. 1984). The memoirs of Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1897– 1972), a Palestinian Christian citizen of Jerusalem, The Diaries of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, provide compelling testimony to the emergence of a two-tier Palestinian Ottoman territorial identity in late Ottoman Palestine and for the co-existence, cultural diversity and intermixing of Ottoman Jerusalem, a microcosm of late Ottoman modernity in Palestine. In the Palestinian world of Jawhariyyeh’s youth, boundaries separating the lives of Palestinian Christians, Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Muslims were fluid.

Jerusalem’s modernity was a feature of internal dynamics in the Ottoman City and I propose that the social structure of the walled city was much more fluid than generally believed; further I suggest that the quarter system signalling the division of the Old City into confessional bounded domains was introduced and imposed retroactively on the city by British colonial regulations. (Tamari 2006: 28)

In Palestine the printing and publication revolution began in the late Ottoman period and developed on an industrial scale in the first half of the 20th century. This revolution was accompanied by the introduction of modern technologies, the growth in secular education and literacy and rapid urbanisation. Within a short period, and by 1948, more than one-third of Palestinian Arab society was urban-based. Together with the sharp rise in modern secular schools in the country, increased literacy broke the monopoly of the small, religiously minded, literate elites in the cities on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle and professional classes in the cities. The increasing cultural self-awareness of educated people led to the rise of secular proto-nationalism in late Ottoman Palestine. Embryonic Palestinian cultural nationalism and territorial patriotism preceded Palestinian political nationalism and this was fostered in schools and teacher training seminaries in late Ottoman Palestine.

In the second half of the 19th century the bilingual Russian Orthodox schools and teacher training centres in Palestine played an important role in promoting cultural renaissance in the country. These schools subsequently came to be among the best in the country, contributing to this national cultural awakening.

The works of Khalil Ibrahim Beidas, Ruhi al-Khalidi and Khalil al-Sakakini were the high end of the educational, cultural and literary revolution of late Ottoman Palestine – a modernist civic revolution which was dedicated to self-enlightenment, self-improvement, social empowerment and – politically speaking – self-representation, equal citizenship and regional autonomy within the Ottoman state. An intellectual and cultural pioneer, Beidas (1874–1949), was a Palestinian Christian scholar, educator, novelist and prolific translator of Russian literary works. Born in Nazareth, in the Galilee, in 1874, Beidas was educated in Russian-funded bilingual Orthodox schools in the Galilee and studied at the highly regarded Russian Teacher Training Seminary in Nazareth,11 which was founded by the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society in 1886, and later housed in a building which became famously known to Palestinians throughout the Galilee as al-Maskubiyyah (‘the Moscovite’ compound). Other Russian compounds created in Palestine, including in Jerusalem and al-Khalil (Hebron), are still referred to by local Palestinians as al‑Maskubiyyah. The most famous building constructed by the Society in Palestine was the Church of Mary Magdalene, on Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, built in 1886. Initially headquartered in Nazareth (between 1882 and 1884), the Society opened four schools in the Galilee and employed Orthodox Arab and Russian teachers and Arabic translators to translate school material from Russian to Arabic.

By 1899 the Society had twenty-three modern ‘Maskob Schools’ in Palestine, and two Teacher Training Seminaries, including one for women in Beit Jala which opened in 1890; villages and towns were asked to provide the buildings, but all books, notebooks, pens and pencils, equipment, sport facilities, administration and teaching were free of charge.12 Most schools were also co-educational, which added another dimension to the educational revolution introduced by the Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society.

Soon after its arrival in Palestine in the early 1880s the Arabic rendition of the Russian name (Russian Orthodox Palestine Society) would have been taught in all Russian Orthodox schools in Palestine as Arabic was the instruction language while Russian was compulsory; other languages such as French, Turkish and Greek were voluntary. After 1889 the Arabic rendition of the Russian name became the Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society . This Arabic version of the Society’s name would have been used not only by Beidas throughout his primary and secondary schooling in Nazareth in the early 1890s, but has also continued to be used in publications by Palestinian Orthodox Christians for more than 135 years.13

Not only that. Eventually on 1 April 1902, after a period of negotiations between the Russian leaders of the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society and the Ottoman authorities, they recognised all thirty-seven schools and seminaries of the Society (the majority of which were in Palestine, with some in Syria and Lebanon) and the occasion was marked by public celebrations in Palestine, Syria and Russia.14 The impact of this important official Ottoman recognition of the activities of the Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society extended beyond education into the encouragement of Russian mass pilgrimage to Palestine, which was also organised by the same society. In the early 20th century Russian pilgrims constituted nearly 80 per cent of all foreign Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. As we shall see below, this Russian mass pilgrimage forced the Ottoman authorities to make further administrative adjustments and in 1906 the districts of Nazareth and Tiberias were added to the Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem, mainly to accommodate the new mass pilgrimage from Russia and the West in facilitating the issuance of a single tourist visa to Christian pilgrims and travellers in Palestine.

Beidas was a product of the educational and intellectual awakening of late Ottoman Palestine. He was also utilising local and imperial resources such as those made available by the Russian Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society to articulate a new sense of modern Palestinian identity. Indeed, many of Beidas’ ideas were also radical and even revolutionary by the standards of late Ottoman Palestine. After graduating from the Teacher Training Seminary in Nazareth, Beidas moved to Jerusalem, then the Palestinian intellectual and cultural capital of late Ottoman Palestine. He worked as a senior Arabic teacher at the Anglican St George’s School in Jerusalem and as a translator from Russian to Arabic for the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society. He also travelled in Russia in 1892.

Beidas’ exceptional linguistic and cultural talents and translations from Russian into Arabic were influenced by the works of leading Russian novelists and poets, including Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Dostoevsky, Leon Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. Some of these authors had developed radical critiques of autocracy, popular approaches to history, identification with the lives of ordinary people and emphasis on freedom and social justice. Tolstoy had an idealistic view of the Russian countryside and Russian peasantry and this had an impact on Beidas’ positive views of the Palestinian countryside and peasantry. Beidas had already translated into Arabic and published in Beirut in 1898 Pushkin’s historical novel The Captain’s Daughter. Beidas’ weekly periodical, al-Nafais al-ʿAsriyyah (Modern Gems) was founded ten years later in 1908 in Haifa and it began by serialising the Russian classic novels Beidas was translating. Beidas is considered to be the ‘pioneer of the Palestinian short story’ (Raid al-Qissah al-Filastiniyyah) (Mazza 2015: 188)

and in 1909 he published The Conditions of Tyranny (Ahwal al-Istibdad), one of the earliest critical accounts of tyrannical rule to appear in the Arabic language. Edward Said, a close relative of Beidas, astutely observed that Beidas’ essays, short stories, historical novels and works of translation in the pre- and post-war periods played an important role in the construction of early modern Palestinian national identity (Moore-Gilbert 2009: 182).

The great flowering of Palestinian and Arab literature and poetry, of novel translations, journalism, educational experiments and private library collections during the late Ottoman period created a living memory of the period in Palestine, one much stronger in living Arab culture, than that of the mediaval al-Andalus period, for example.

Beidas’ own personal Jerusalem library of more than 6000 books was plundered, together with other Palestinian private libraries owned by Khalil Sakakini and other Palestinian Jerusalemites, by the Israelis during the 1948 Nakba and the episode was documented in The Great Book Robbery.15 Beidas’ and other Palestinian library collections can shed a great deal of light on the Palestinian intellectual renaissance and national consciousness in the late Ottoman period. An illustration of this new consciousness is found in the 1898 geographic Preface to Beidas’ translation of Akim Aleksyeevich Olesnitsky’s A Description of the Holy Land, Vol. 1

(also Foster 2016c) – the original version appeared in Russian in 187516 – by the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society. Beidas describes this as a publication of the Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society. Bei Beidas also talks about the inadequate geographical works available in Arabic on his country ‘Palestine’ and about the indigenous ‘sons and daughters of Palestine’ (Abnaa Filastin, أبناء فلسطين ) and ‘their need for an extensive geographic work on their country’. Writing to local Palestinian audiences, Beidas knew that many Palestinians would be closely familiar with the indigenous connotations of the term أبناء فلسطين . Beidas describes Olesnitsky’s work as follows: ‘an extensive book which describes the country of Palestine with its places, rivers, lakes, mountains and valleys’. He also talks about his use of idiomatic Arabic and his choice of ‘the simple expression which is closely related to [our] minds’.

Beidas’ work and activities present a landmark in the emergence of modern Palestinian nationalism for a variety of reasons. Nine factors distinguish the scholarly, cultural and geographic contribution of Beidas to the modern notion of Palestine and the emergence of new a territorial national consciousness in late 19th century Palestine:

• Beidas, a native of the Galilee, was working from a modern wider concept of Palestine – and not just from medieval Arab Islamic social memory associated with the historic province of Jund Filastin.

• Beidas uses the terms Palestinian and Palestine simultaneously and interchangeably, which is a hallmark of modern Palestinian writing.

• The two-page Preface begins with the Arabic expression al-Hamdu Lillah (‘Praise be to Allah’, the Arabic word for ‘God’), an expression frequently invoked by Muslims due to its centrality to the first chapter of the Quran and the name and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.

This expression is also used by Arabic-speaking Christians. But the implication is that work is aimed at all Arabic-speaking Palestinians.

• The complete absence of any reference to Zionism – in contrast with Palestinian national writings a decade later, the most famous examples of which are the newspaper Falastin (1911) and the writings of Ruhi al-Khalidi (1913) (see below) – and this points to the emergence of a two-tier Palestinian Ottoman identity and the beginnings of the Palestinian cultural renaissance in late Ottoman Palestine – a renaissance which preceded the subsequent national preoccupation with Zionism.

• The ease with which Beisas uses the terms ‘Palestine’ and ‘our country’ and the ‘Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society’ without the need to define or explain these terms or introduce this Society. This suggests two things: (1) Beisas thought that his Arab readers would be familiar with these terms and have a full understanding of what he meant; (2)

these terms and this Arabic name of the Society were already commonly used and understood.

• The Palestinian Orthodox Imperial Society ran a translation and publishing house in Jerusalem and after 1889 it operated in Palestine throughout the 1890s under the Arabic name: الجمعية الإمبراطورية الأرثوذكسية الفلسطينية , the name Beidas uses in his 1898 Preface.

• This late 19th century modern geographic (territorial) concept of Filastin advanced by someone educated in the modern schools of Galilee departed from the traditional regional Islamic concept of Palestine described or referred to by the Muslim scholars al-Maqdisi, Mujir al-Din, Khair al-Din al-Ramli and Salih ibn Ahmad al-Tumurtashiin in the 10th, 15th and 17th centuries respectively. The conception of Palestine understood by these four Muslim writers and qadis was derived from the medieval Muslim province of Jund Filastin, whose capital was al-Ramla, but whose territory did not include the Galilee.

• Historically, names of distinguished individuals before and under Islam in Palestine were augmented by adding town names to individual names: examples of prominent or distinguished Palestinians discussed above included:

• Antiochus of Ascalon, in 2nd century BC Philistia.

• Jesus of Nazareth, in the 1st century AD.

• Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima, in 4th century Palaestina Prima.

• Prokopios of Caesarea Maritima, in 6th century Palaestina Prima.

• Al-Maqdisi (of ‘al-Quds’, the ‘Jerusalemite’) in the 10th century province of Filastin.

• Muhammad al-Yazuri: Muhammad Hassan ibn Ali al-Yazuri, from Yazur, a town east of Jaffa in the Fatimid province of Jund Filastin, also vizier of the Fatimid state from 1050 to 1058.

• Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalani (1372–1449), a leading medieval Shafi’i Sunni scholar whose family originated in ‘Asqalan, Mamluk Palestine.

• Kkair al-Din al-Ramli, ‘of al-Ramla’, in 17th century Ottoman Palestine.

• On a popular Palestinian level, individual names were also linked to their home towns, such as ‘ibn Akka’, ‘son of Acre’, or after their clan:

for example, Dhaher al-ʿUmar al-Zaydani ‘of the Zaydani clan’. The traditional forms of identification (whether ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ or ‘Julian of Norwich’, c. 1342–c. 1416) were common throughout the world. In his 1898 Preface, the Galilee-born Beidas talks about the ‘sons of Palestine’, a generic term for the ‘people of Palestine’. This distinct territorial form of identification in the late 19th century is a radical departure from all other traditional forms of identification. In the 20th century the traditional forms of identification did not disappear completely, but they were augmented by this new form of territorial identification and patriotic consciousness (the ‘sons of Palestine’). In the early decades of the 20th century the collective ‘sons of Palestine’ ( أبناء فلسطين ) also became known as Sha’b Filastin ( شعب فلسطين , ‘people of Palestine’) and the ‘Palestinian people’ ( الشعب الفلسطيني ). But the roots of this new territorial national consciousness are found in the late 19th century.

• Today the Society operates publicly and runs various social and educational projects in Palestine and the Near East under the Arabic rendition of the name cited by Bedas in his 1898 Preface: الجمعية الإمبراطورية الأرثوذكسية الفلسطينية . In June and July 2012, to mark the 130th anniversary of the Society’s foundation and start of its operation in 1882 in Palestine, the Society opened the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Bethlehem and staged various celebrations in Moscow sponsored by the Russian government. Two years later, on 3 September 2014, a Galilee branch of the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestinian Society was officially launched at the Arab Orthodox Centre in Nazareth which, despite the change in the circumstances of Nazareth, kept the 132-year-old ‘Palestinian’ name intact. Speakers at this official Nazareth ceremony included Russian official representatives and Hanna Abu Hanna, of Haifa – author of a recent work in Arabic on The Beginnings of the Palestinian Renaissance – who lectured on the seminal cultural activities of the Society in late Ottoman Palestine. It is also worth noting that a significant number of Palestinians educated in ‘al-Maskob schools’ in late Ottoman Palestine later joined Palestinian national parties during the British Mandatory period; some also joined the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) during the same period.