During the late Ottoman period, Greater Syria experienced several profound processes. Since the 1890s, the Hamidian regime granted significant concessions for industrializing projects; began cooperating closely with Imperial Germany under the reign of Wilhelm II, and kept settling Muslim immigrants from the Balkan and the Caucasus as well as local nomad populations. The primary goal was to project Ottoman sovereignty in the Arab provinces by increasing economic activity, charging more taxes and most of all setting feet on the ground. This period also saw Jewish settlement and Zionist activity in three provinces of Greater Syria, in what scholars teleologically frame as the “seeds of conflict.” Despite the high relevance of the three processes mentioned above to Zionism, scholars barely account for the complex relations of Jewish-Zionist networks with the Ottoman administration. Therefore, unlike older Jewish communities, Zionism remained an isolationist agent within the historiography of the late Ottoman period. This paper reveals the engagement of the professional elite of the Jewish Yishuv with the Ottoman development efforts as private entrepreneurs and experts whose services were hired by state authorities. Engineers such as the Wilbuschewitsch brothers and Baruch Katinka, agronomists such as Aaron Aaronsohn and Selig Soskin, and physicians such as Hillel Yaffe and Eliyahu Orbach were a few among a network of several dozens of experts born in Tzarist Russia and trained in Germany, who pursued their professional careers in the Ottoman Empire. Working far beyond the narrow borders of the Jewish Yishuv, they became experts of high demand by both central and provincial Ottoman authorities. These experts in effect participated in constituting a crucial link in the German-Ottoman alliance on the ground. The foundation and construction of the Technikum in Haifa between 1908-1914 epitomized this convergence of interests. However, the most intensive phase of their work came about during World War I, when they were all hired to the technical units of Cemal Pasha’s Fourth Army, and special units in his military administration. Drawing upon a plethora of new materials from archives located in Turkey, Israel, Germany, and the UK, I intend to debunk Zionist exceptionalism by revealing the close engagement of experts from the Jewish Yishuv with the Ottoman Empire and by analyzing their roles in it. This paper relies upon my dissertation, a study of entrepreneurship, expertise, and imperial sovereignty in late Ottoman Syria.

During the last decade, much of the historiography on the late Ottoman era has focused on reassessing on how non-Muslim communities were adopting Ottomanism out of a new sense of patriotism, especially following the 1908 Young Turk revolution. What might surprise some, is that this included avid Zionists from among the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine (both rural and urban), something that I bring forth in my upcoming book: Jews and Palestinians in the late Ottoman Era: Claiming the Homeland (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). This paper will move beyond Palestine and focus on range of Jewish settlements in Ottoman Anatolia, which were founded during the 1880s, under the reign of Abdulhamid II. While we know very little about the different settlements, such as Or Yehuda (near Akhisar) and Mesilat Tziyyon (once located on the land of today’s Istanbul neighborhood of Sultanbeyli), it seems that following the 1908 revolution, these communities became centers of Zionist activities. This paper will explore the founding of these communities and how they developed within the local politics of the Ottoman Empire. Further, it will demonstrate how Ottoman Jewish Zionists from Palestine envisioned the future of these communities within a greater project to create mass Jewish migration both to Ottoman Anatolia and Palestine. For this, they first would need to convince the Zionists in Berlin to adopt their project, something that they were eventually unable to do. However, despite this, these Zionists still believed that for the Jewish community in Palestine to develop, the address was in Istanbul, and the inclusion of the communities in Anatolia would play a major role in creating a Zionism connected to the Ottoman Empire. Their ultimate goal was to secure a future place for the Ottoman Jewish community within the political circles of Istanbul, where they could influence Ottoman policy on Palestine, with the aim of not receiving an independent state in Palestine, but rather Jewish autonomous homeland.

This paper contributes to the efforts to bring sociology into the research on the British mandatory rule in Palestine by analyzing two high-profile assassinations—of Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State in the Middle East in 1944, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Mediator for Palestine in 1948. By offering a new reading of the two mini case studies I analyze how these historical events were abstracted from their context and can be understood only in a wider, historical and comparative framework of imperialism and colonialism. By applying the concept of path dependence which implies that a specific decision or event pushes the community along a specific evolutionary path, I argue that the institutional legacy of the Zionist community in Palestine and the representations and articulations of the British rule did not come to an end at the time of decolonization, but continued to be mobilized, reworked and mediated by Israel in its early years in Israel's turbulent relationship with the UN. Thus, the assassinations of Moyne and Bernadotte, which seem to be irrational and counterproductive can explain how the relationship between Israel and the international community have developed.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Gaza – the city and its eponymous region – saw significant shifts. Almost overnight, it turned both into a global commodity frontier, supplying grains to European markets through maritime trade, and into and an inter-imperial frontier, following the British occupation of Egypt. While heavily affecting the lives of peasants, urbanites, and nomads throughout southern Palestine, this dual development also positioned Gaza on the mental map of Jewish geographical horizons. Starting in the 1880s, Jewish immigrants and entrepreneurs, Sephardi and European, Zionist and non-Zionist, sought to benefit from what seemed to be a port city in-the-making as well as from the possibility of future British protection around it. This paper delves into the Jewish past-futures of Gaza, where contending visions of modern urban life, economic development, and imperial subjecthood intersected. The Gazan political and economic borderland allowed the emergence of diverse Jewish realities and imaginaries, which relied upon close acquaintance and cooperation with the Gazan Arab population, the Bedouin tribes of Sinai and local peasants, as well as upon exploiting the frictions between the Ottoman and British imperial interests. Relaying on Ottoman, British and Zionist archival documents, as well as on Gazan histories and memoirs, the paper examines Jewish utopian visions of Gaza and southern Palestine, the haphazard trials for their realizations, and eventually their abandonment, during the early British Mandate period. The paper looks closely at the ties between the Sephardi community of Gaza and Gazan Arab notables and tribal leaders, and at the community’s uneasy dynamic vis-a-vis European Zionist institutions. A historic fossil in eyes of the Zionist establishment, the Sephardi community of Gaza was fully conscious of its advantages as a borderland society and used these to reverse the colonial power structures with their European coreligionists. To demonstrate this social dynamic, the paper analyses cross-border land purchase deals and settlement plans, and the roles of the Arab, Jewish and British parties involved in it. The paper further narrates the story of the Zionist Anglo-Palestine bank, the first to be established in Gaza in 1913, to show how Gaza’s economic prospects were calculated and financialized for purposes of colonization. Finally, the paper discusses Jewish and Arab ruin-dwelling in the war-torn city in the aftermath of the First World War, to examine how Zionist metropolitan dreams and Gazan efforts of reconstruction were shattered as part of a mutual process under British rule.