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The Erasure of Ottoman Palestine The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Lesley Poles Hartley, The Go-Between (1953) I fought the English troops at Gallipoli for an Ottoman country that no longer exists—even though I continued living on the same land. Onbası (Umbashi) Muhammad Ali Awad, Palestinian officer in the Ottoman army from the village of Anabta who fought in Suez and in Gallipoli This page intentionally left blank 3 Soldiers’ diaries, particularly those from World War I, have been a constant reminder of the horrors of war. A large stock of such memoirs have reached us from the ranks of the Allied forces, particularly from British, French, American, and Anzac soldiers, as well as from Austrian and German soldiers fighting for the Central powers.1 Much less material has been available from the Ottoman side, particularly from the Syrian provinces. This book analyzes the Great War from the perspective of three ordinary soldiers who fought on the Ottoman side, as expressed in the newly found diary of Private Ihsan Turjman and journal of Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh, both of Jerusalem, as well as in the published Turkish diary of Mehmet (Muhammad) Fasih of Mersin. It explores two important ways in which the Great War impacted the Ottoman Empire. First, it examines how the experience of the war transformed the consciousness and the living conditions of the people of the Arab East (Ottoman Syria)— a shift that historians sometimes describe as the onset of Arab modernity. Second, it looks at what Falih Rıfkı, the Ottoman essayist and modernist, called—with the benefit of hindsight— the “Turkish problem” in Syria: namely the inability of Ottoman constitutional reform to create a multiethnic domain in which the Syria (including Palestine) would become an integral part of the empire. The crucial time for both these transformations was the short but critical six-year period between the constitutional revolution of 1908, with its project for a representative, multi- 4 / The Erasure of Ottoman Palestine ethnic state, and the collapse of this project under the dictatorial regime of Cemal Pasha. While the events discussed in the diary in the second part of this book center in the city of Jerusalem and show the war’s impact on the urban population, they also had a significant impact on the region as a whole. Jerusalem, we have to remember , was the administrative and political center of a huge Ottoman province, the Mutasarflik of al Quds al Sharif, which comprised more than half of what became Mandate Palestine. Its ashraf and notables were a critical elite with a major influence on Ottoman policy in Istanbul as well as in Jaffa, Hebron, and other regional centers.2 The devastation felt by the city during the war—food shortages, disease, pauperization, and mass deportation —was repeated throughout the region in various degrees. The city was the crucible in which the breakdown in the normative system, and the subsequent rupture with the region’s Ottoman past, was first experienced; from there, the turmoil engulfed the rest of the country. The hero of our story is Ihsan Hasan Turjman (1893–1917), a common soldier in the Ottoman military headquarters in Jerusalem . His life was short and uneventful—he served as a clerk in the Manzil (Commissariat) and briefly as a foot soldier in Nablus and Hebron—but his observations on the impact of military events on his relationship to his city and his nation are without parallel. The power of wartime diaries lies in their exposure of the texture of daily life, long buried in the political rhetoric of nationalist discourse, and in their restoration of a world that has been hidden by subsequent denigration of the Ottoman past— the life of communitarian alleys, obliterated neighborhoods, heated political debates projecting possibilities that no longer exist, and the voices of street actors silenced by elite memoirs: The Erasure of Ottoman Palestine / 5 soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds. By the third year of the war, the diaries of such ordinary soldiers project a desperate search for normalcy in daily life—a normalcy that was experienced in prewar Ottoman Palestine but seemed to elude its citizens for the next hundred years. The Great War brought about a radical break with the Ottoman past in the whole Arab East, not only in the established constitutional regime but also in the system of governance, local administration, and identity politics. In the popular memory of peasants and city folk alike, 1915 was the...

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