In the introduction of my book, Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland, I wrote: “When writing histories of conflicts we often read history backwards, projecting the realities of today back in time, leaving us with a skewed picture of how conflicts are formed and how they emerge.” In other words, Israeli history narratives based on Aliyahs, settlement of the Land, and Young Guardsmen, only make sense if the end sum game is 1948; if the state of Israel had not been established, much of this history could be all but irrelevant. On the flip side, had the war in 1948 turned out differently, Palestinian history of the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate period would have been written completely different as well. During the last decade, however, scholars have worked to deconstruct the history of Jews and Palestinians in Ottoman Palestine, radically reassessing our previous understandings, producing what one might even call a revisionist history that is no less important than the revisionist histories of 1948, which emerged in the late 1980-90s. While conclusions might differ, during the last two decades, a plethora of research on Ottoman Palestine points to the fact that nationalist narratives have misconstrued the period (or written a history to suit their nationalist agendas) and that there is a general need to reassess it. In this paper, I will use my previous research as a launching point to ponder on existing narratives of the late 19th-early 20th century Jewish Yishuv and Palestinian history. Importantly, it will rethink the history through the eyes of the majority of the land’s residents, the Palestinians, and use this as vantage point to understanding also the Yishuv itself. Can we reimagine a history of Palestine not necessarily based on Jewish sources but one that places the Palestinians in the center, and the Jewish Yishuv in the background and not in the forefront? In short, this paper is setting out to understand Ottoman Palestine in a new light, one that will help integrate the multiple works out there, which have challenged our convictions of this period. This hopefully will serve as a bridge to understanding the dynamics of Palestine in the post-World War One era, which transformed into a colonial hold of Britian, giving the Jewish Yishuv a novel sense of homeland, while serving as the first real occupation Palestinians would encounter as a modern community.

The story of Jews in Ottoman Palestine has been represented in scholarship as a transition from multiethnic proximity to Muslims and Christian Arab in urban settings to economic and ethnic separation in the context Labor Zionist call for “Hebrew Labor.” This paper, drawing on a set of largely unexamined local archives, considers a site of a different kind of ethnic interaction, one premised on economic hierarchy. The European Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) founded in the last decades of the 19th century on the basis of private capital and later known as the “First Aliyah” persisted in hiring native Arab labor in their citrus groves despite Labor Zionist condemnations of this economic model. Rather than see ethnically hierarchical labor arrangements as a short-lived way-station in the Zionist process of economic development, this paper argues not only that it remained an unacknowledged central feature of Zionist economies, but that these practices, narrated in retrospect especially within and in reference to the “First Aliyah”colonies, constituted a site for a center right discourse of “coexistence” through hierarchy that persists to this day in Likud and other proposals for and claims to economic peace, whether at the Soda Stream factory or in the Trump Peace plan.

In 1915 Cemal Pasha made on offer to Albert Antebi to sell the area in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in order to dismantle the nearly 30 houses owned by Moroccans and create a space ‘reserved for the prayers of the Jewish people.’ Since the mid-nineteenth century wealthy European Jews tried to purchase the same area from the Ottomans but to no avail. The reasons for a denial were different but things did not change under the British despite the support given to the Jews with the Balfour Declaration. After the incidents occurred in 1929 any possibility to acquire the Western Wall was postponed. This paper will briefly address the correspondence available at the Zionist Archives showing the individuals involved took an oath not to ever discuss this business, and highlighting the divisions among Zionists in relation to holy places and symbols. Narratives produced in the following years and decades neglected this event as Zionism became the dominant ideology dictating the writing of the history of the emerging state of Israel after 1948. A perusal of traditional Zionist narratives shows that this event fell victim of the erasure of Ottoman Palestine. Works discussing the history of Zionism and the history Palestine during the war has revealed a static narrative where the four years of military dictatorship of Cemal Pasha have come to epitomize four centuries of – anti-Jewish, later anti-Zionist and anti-Arab - Ottoman rule. Zionist narratives have been built with the purpose to provide meaning for Jewish self-determination and settlement in Palestine. In other words they understood Zionism as a movement that set out just to do that – Jewish self-determination – and in that viewing Zionism in a secular and nationalist light, they simply have not attributed importance to a seemingly isolated episode, such as the purchase of the Western Wall, that may have complicated things, suggesting Zionism has also a quasi-messianic component not in line with Zionist orthodoxy. In the end the Western Wall affair and its failure did not look good: first its purchase may have not fit the paradigm of redemption (the conquest of 1967 did so much better) and secondly its failure was not worth to be reported while the basis for the creation of the state of Israel were being laid down and the Wall was adopted, this time, as a national symbol.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Hebrew was hard to come by in the streets of Jerusalem. Yet in the early twentieth century, after significant Jewish immigration to the city, Hebrew was suddenly everywhere. Stone inscriptions on Jewish institutions, pilgrims’ graffiti, token coins in the market, Ottoman postcards in Hebrew, commercial placards, rabbinical notices, big signs on modern schools and hospitals, newspapers and more. As I explore in my forthcoming book "City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem" (Stanford University Press, 2020), this dramatic proliferation of Hebrew in the streets accommodated several competing, and contradictory political projects. The historiography provides a narrative of the Haskala followed by the movement of Hebrew Revival, the Tehiya, in which the language acquired distinct national, Zionist dimensions - against Ashkenazi Orthodox hostility. Yet the emphasis on the Hebrew’s revival as a national language obscures its no less important, and equally novel, colonial dimension. Hebrew became a language of territorialization, of claiming land, of rewriting and erasure. For Labour Zionists, Hebrew was a field to be colonised, as much as it was a tool of colonisation. The colonizing impetus of Hebrew is often discussed in the context of post-48 Israel, e.g. in the creation of the “Hebrew map”. In this talk I investigate the early moments of this transition in late Ottoman Jerusalem. In this paper I consider the fractured and contested transformation of Hebrew into a language of colonization, focussing particularly on the role of language in urban space. I argue that the Zionification of Hebrew was a tool not only to colonise territory but also to colonise local Jewish communities. I explore local Jews’ ambivalent and sometimes hostile engagement with the project of Revival. I consider the diversity of modern Hebrew forms in late Ottoman Jerusalem, and the difference between non-colonial and colonial approaches. Finally, I ask what we could learn, from the urban texts of early twentieth century Jerusalem, about the possibilities of decolonising Hebrew.