1919, as has often been stated, was a watershed year for the Middle East and this certainly holds true for the confessional groups of Palestine. Perhaps the year’s most politically charged moment in Palestine was the visit of the King-Crane Commission, which was a group of Americans sent to the region by Woodrow Wilson in order to gauge the political aspirations of its inhabitants. This spurred an enormous amount of political maneuvering within and between Palestine’s confessional groups, with many actors attempting to ensure that their political wishes be expressed before the Commission. Lobbying was fierce and elites in all of the confessions were forced to make decisions that would put them directly at political odds with their neighbors. Longstanding communal identities were being rapidly transformed in post-Ottoman Palestine. This paper takes as a point of departure James Gelvin’s observation that ‘a world power necessarily influences the object of its interest simply by turning its attention to it’ (1). While Gelvin has convincingly argued that the King-Crane Commission’s visit led to a more populist nationalism in Syria, it seems that there is more to be said about the unintended consequences of this visit in Palestine. Through the use of archival sources from the Middle East and the United States, and employing discourse analysis based on the work of Ernesto Laclau and David Howarth, this paper will argue that the visit of the King-Crane Commission forced the leaders of Palestine’s confessional groups to take a political stand and the choices that these leaders made strengthened confessional borders and weakened other pre-existing community bonds. More specifically, Palestine’s Jewish communities unanimously (if hesitantly in some instances) chose to side with the Zionist project, and the Muslim and Christian leaders nearly all took staunch stances against this newly united Jewish community. In general, the visit of the King-Crane Commission was a political moment that hastened a broad discursive shift in Palestine (already in motion before World War I) and significantly decreased the likelihood of peaceful co-existence between the Jews and the other populations of the region. (1) James Gelvin, ‘The Ironic Legacy of the King-Crane Commission’, in The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment ed. by David W. Lesch, 3rd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), pp. 13-29, quote on p. 14.

In 1930, amid rising tensions between Arabs and Zionists living under the British Mandate, Jamal al-Bahri was killed in a struggle between Muslim and Christian Arabs over control of an Arab cemetery in Haifa. Those responsible for his death were connected with the Young Men’s Muslim Society. Al-Bahri, however, was Greek Catholic (Melkite), the editor of a Haifa-based newspaper, and president of the local YMCA. Some scholars credited the incident with “open[ing] a chasm” between Muslims and Christians (Seikaly 1995), while other insist that the incident was indicative of pre-existing tensions between the two religious communities. My research shows that while both of those claims may be partly true, the al-Bahri affair also caused serious rifts within the Arab Christian community as Melkites became hostile toward Muslims and Arab Orthodox Christians insisted on strengthening those relationships. My paper examines the al-Bahri incident in detail, looking at the origins of the conflict, including Muslim-Christian relations in Haifa prior to 1930s, the event itself, and finally the fallout from his death. While many histories of Palestine focus on the Jewish-Arab or Jewish-Muslim conflict, my focus is on the often overlooked relationship between Christian and Muslims Arabs. Some of the driving questions in my research are how had Muslim and Christian society previously managed to share the cemetery without resorting to violence? And what changed in 1930 that upset that balance? Much of the answer lies in the changing nature of public sacred space in mandate Palestine, and the effect of the British policies on land use and ownership. I am also interested in how Muslims and Christians in Haifa overcame this conflict and managed to once again be neighbors with those of a different confession. The paper is based largely on opinion columns in al-Bahri’s own paper al-Zahour (which was edited by a family member after his death) and columns in the ‘Islamic’ paper al-Jamia al-Islamia and examines the multiple perspectives on, and implications of, al-Bahri’s death. I also have lawyer files relating to the case, as well as British documents outlining the incident. I closely examine the language used in the columns and the specific arguments found in the government reports to better understand the nature of religious identification and conflict at that time.

Through the study of two Arabic texts written by Palestinian Sephardic Jews in early 20th century Cairo, this paper offers a methodological discussion of the uses of Jewish apologetic literature as a source for scholarship on the Jewish-Arab encounter in the fin de siècle. The two texts, Shimon Moyal’s At-Talm?d (The Talmud) and Nissim Malul’s Asr?r al-Yah?d (Secrets of the Jews), were both directed at non-Jewish, Arabic-reading audiences and aimed to defend the Jews and, especially, Judaism against defamatory accusations. Beyond analyzing these two texts, this paper seeks to address the following broader questions: in what ways can Arabic Jewish religious apologetics be used as sources for constructing not just the intellectual history but also the social and cultural history of Jewish-Arab (or Jewish-Christian-Muslim) relations? The paper employs two points of reference: one synchronic and the other diachronic. From a synchronic perspective, the paper relates the study of these apologetic texts to the study of the those written contemporaneously in Europe. In what respects might insights from the extensive scholarship on modern Jewish apologetics in the European Christian context be applied to this literature written in a Muslim-majority land? How does the fact of the presence of not one, as in Europe, but two major religious communities—Christians and Muslims—among the target audience impact the way in which this literature is understood? (Or, to the extent that Catholics and Protestants in Europe were perceived and addressed distinctly in this literature, how does the Middle Eastern situation compare?) From a diachronic perspective, the paper considers the way in which the study of this early 20th century apologetic literature must be related to the study of medieval and early modern Jewish-Muslim apologetics and the extent to which the very different contemporary political and intellectual circumstances in which this new apologetic literature was produced—British-occupied Egypt, with Zionism in the authors’ native Palestine explicitly in mind—should affect our interpretation of the sources.

This paper presents some new and alternative directions in the analysis and research of relations between Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, while focusing on the links, interactions, and networks that existed between Jews from Middle Eastern descent and the Arab community in mandatory Palestine. One of our main arguments is that the narrative and perspective offered by Jews of Middle East descent was in many ways different from the dominant perspective of the Zionist (Ashkenazi) leadership. However, in the historiographies of the Zionist movement, of the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) as well as in the vast amount of research done on the roots of the Arab-Jewish conflict, this perspective has been largely silenced, neglected and under-studied. In the paper we argue that such a perspective reveals patterns of affinity, coexistence and cooperation between Arabs and Jews and in general a different perception of Zionism and the History of the Jewish Community in Palestine. Awareness of these patterns, which stemmed from the cultural and ethnic proximity between the Arab-Jews and the Arabs living in Palestine, challenges the conventional historiographic narrative, which tends to accentuate the national, social and military conflict between Arabs and Jews during the Mandate era. The paper will consider the claim that a dual society existed in Mandatory Palestine and will discuss the prevalent historiography and its tendency to separate the history of Zionism and the Jewish Yishuv from the study of Middle Eastern history and from the Levant in particular, to divide political-institutional history from social and cultural history, and to largely ignore the historical-sociological debate concerning the Arab Jewish identity.

The Zionist polity of Mandate Palestine proudly fashioned itself as a majority Hebrew culture equipped to assimilate a diverse body of Jewish immigrants into a hegemonic Hebrew center. In practice, however, it was a clear minority society within a majority Arabic-speaking territory and region. The Arabic-speaking context of Palestine was not simply the “outside” or “other” beyond the borders of a sealed Jewish or Hebrew enclave, but rather a multifaceted context around and within the Yishuv that impressed itself upon the Hebrew Zionist project and forced a series of negotiations, both conceptual and practical, by a nominally all-Hebrew society. My paper explores how Zionist discussions about the persistence and functions of Arabic within and beyond the Yishuv shed light on the limits of Hebrew hegemony and the shifting contours of Jewish-Arab relations over the course of the Mandate period. Historians of the Zionist project have often emphasized the growth and development of Hebrew culture with minimal regard for the non-Jewish, non-Hebrew, and non-European context of the Yishuv. The now growing study of Jewish-Arab relations in the late-Ottoman and mandate periods is an important step towards rectifying this oversight. Looking at the Arabic language as an object of Zionist discourse—as reflected in a myriad of Zionist archival and non-archival sources, journalistic works, journals, memoirs, and records of inter-communal correspondence—allows us to relate between spheres of Zionist concern often regarded separately, demonstrating the scope of the Arabic-speaking context of the Yishuv and emphasizing that this context must be thought of as a convergence of political, commercial, bureaucratic, as well as symbolic pressures, some complicated by coexisting pressures from other non-Hebrew languages, namely English and major European Jewish immigrant languages. Zionists (of both European and non-European origin) reflected on Arabic as a language of propaganda and surveillance; they debated the linguistic implications of employing of Arab labor and buying Arab produced goods in both agricultural and urban contexts; they considered the pressures on the Yishuv of the trilingual (English-Arabic-Hebrew) bureaucracy that had emerged in the mandatory context, and they reflected on Arabic in educational settings as a key toward unlocking the authentic Semitic identity of a people long in European exile. To be a minority entailed persistent and revealing reflections on the language of the majority.