As Western observers currently rush to describe the Arab Spring as an unprecedented experiment in popular participatory politics, Michelle Campos has provided a timely reminder that Middle Easterners are no strangers to the concepts of civic engagement and representative democracy. In her book, Ottoman brothers, Campos brings to life a moment in which the entire Ottoman Empire, from Salonica in the west to Baghdad in the east, was gripped by a sense of revolutionary fervour resulting from the restoration of constitutional politics in 1908. Focusing her attention on Palestine, Campos offers a vivid account of how deeply the Constitutional Revolution penetrated civic life in this corner of the empire, creating almost overnight a generation of politically engaged Palestinians.
In so doing, she has made a forceful intervention in the debates concerning the nature of Arab politics in the late Ottoman world. From the outset, it is clear Campos's study is building on the pioneering work of Hasan Kayali (Arabs and young Turks), as well as more recent edited collections from Yuval Ben-Bassat and Eyal Ginio (Late Ottoman Palestine) and Salim Tamari (Year of the locust), all of which have challenged the notion that Ottomanism and Arabism were inherently antithetical. In the case of the latter two, Palestine has been the specific object of study and Campos herself contributes a chapter in Ben-Bassat and Ginio's edited volume. But while these works document the persistence of Ottoman allegiances in individual case studies, Ottoman brothers is the first to attempt a holistic study of Palestine through the thematic lens of Ottoman citizenship in the post-1908 era. As a result, the book is able to chart new historiographical ground by asserting that a collective, and yet highly contested, sense of Ottomanism pervaded virtually all political discourse in Palestine after the restoration of constitutional politics in 1908. Not only does Campos dispense with the idea that this was a period of nationalist rejection of Ottoman imperialism, she argues the empire itself was reconstituted as a ‘nation’, albeit a highly diverse and multicultural one.
In the context of history writing on Palestine/Israel, Ottoman brothers also, therefore, offers an important corrective to the popular notion that the basic dynamics of the Arab–Zionist conflict were already set in stone by the time the British arrived. That is not to say Campos shies away from describing the ethno-religious cleavages in early twentieth-century Palestine. Much of the second half of the book is devoted to the so-called ‘press wars’ that raged in Palestinian newspapers after 1908 over the issue of Zionism and its place within the Ottoman polity. Yet Campos demonstrates that for the majority of pro-Zionist Jewish intellectuals in Palestine, the preferred way to defend European Jewish settlement in the country was to deny a separatist agenda and emphasize the movement's potential benefit to the Ottoman polity in economic and developmental terms. This refreshingly Palestinian perspective on Zionism is mostly focused on the longstanding Sephardi Jewish community that was concentrated in Jerusalem and, to a lesser extent, Jaffa. Public figures largely forgotten in the Zionist national narrative such as Nissim Malul, Esther Moyal, and Albert Antébi worked tirelessly to engage with the increasing Arab hostility to Jewish immigration, constantly framing their arguments within a shared sense of Ottoman belonging. From this point, the book's final sections discuss the increasing importance of Arab identity among Muslim and Christian intellectuals in Palestine, with Campos again arguing such an identity was framed within an essentially Ottoman context.
Ultimately, the reader knows this experiment in civic Ottomanism will end in failure, but in the early stages of the book we are transported back to a time when belief in a genuinely inclusive notion of Ottoman citizenship was widespread in Palestine. In the first two chapters, Campos gives a fascinating overview of the 1908 Revolution's potent symbolism: the refashioning of imperial identity through popular art (postcards, literature, theatre), the gradual undermining of Sultan Abdülhamid II's authority, the staging of popular ceremonies, and the purging of the old guard are all covered. Underlying these observations is the belief that Ottomanism was much more than a purely official state project. Challenging Ussama Makdisi's insistence that the various waves of Ottoman reform, or Tanzimat, were purely top-down projects, Campos urges the need to consider the ways in which Ottoman subjects themselves adopted and finessed the state project. She does this by uncovering a number of previously neglected episodes of Palestinian history such as the election of Jerusalem's first parliamentary deputies in 1908, the formation of local Committee of Union and Progress branches, the diffusion of masonic lodges, and, most fascinating of all, the Palestinian boycott of Austro-Hungarian goods in the wake of the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in October 1908.
The book's careful consideration of the limits of civic Ottomanism does at times dilute its overarching narrative. The election results of 1908, for example, demonstrate the continuity of much older networks of patronage fashioned by the longstanding power of urban notables and rural leadership, as Campos herself acknowledges. A more serious problem is the lack of detailed explanation of how this ‘Ottomanist moment’ lost strength over time. Great attention is given to local rivalries, but the book offers little coverage of specific policies which may have alienated Palestinians from this sense of Ottoman belonging. Other questions might be asked about the book's overreliance on print journalism for its source material, as well as the somewhat woolly conception of ‘Palestine’ – in reality the book is more a study of the Sanjak of Jerusalem (in particular the cities of Jerusalem and Jaffa), with little attention given to the northern Sanjaks of Acre and Nablus which together made up the future territory of Mandate Palestine. In general, though, these are only minor shortcomings and the book should be applauded as a bold attempt to revive an overlooked period of Palestine's history. Briefly the flame of shared civic engagement had flickered in late Ottoman Palestine, only to be later extinguished under a British regime obsessed with ethno-religious identity as the guiding principal of governance.
