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“IMPOSSIBLE IS NOT OTTOMAN”: MENASHE MEIROVITCH, ʿISA AL-ʿISA, AND IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP IN PALESTINE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2015

Samuel Dolbee and
Shay Hazkani
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Abstract

This article explores a covert partnership between a prominent Zionist agronomist, Menashe Meirovitch, and the Christian Arab editor of the newspaper Filastin, ʿIsa al-ʿIsa, a founding father of Palestinian nationalism. Under the literary guise of an Arab Muslim peasant called Abu Ibrahim, the two men produced a series of Arabic-language columns in 1911–12 that exhibited imperial citizenship par excellence, demanding political and agrarian reforms in Palestine in the name of strengthening the Ottoman Empire. The article explores their short-lived political alliance to interrogate historiographical uses of the press as a source for social history. Moreover, it challenges the portrayal of cooperation between Jews and Arabs as “collaboration” in its pejorative sense. Far from a simple story of betrayal or corruption, the partnership between the two men demonstrates how a shared commitment to Ottoman modernism brought them together more than nationalism, language, or religion pulled them apart.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , May 2015, pp. 241 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Many historians want to know how peasants viewed the world around them. This concern manifests itself in regular calls for more attention to peasants’ perspectives.Footnote 1 Good reasons exist for historians’ failure to capture these perspectives and their continued desire to unearth them. The voices of peasants are difficult to find because few peasants could read and write. This is an especially pressing issue for scholars of the Middle East, where literacy rates remained low well into the 20th century and where until recently peasants made up the vast majority of the population.Footnote 2

Therefore finding seventeen columns published under the title “Rasaʾil Fallah” (Peasant Letters) in the Jaffa-based Arabic-language newspaper Filastin (Palestine) in 1911–12 seems promising.Footnote 3 The column's author, Abu Ibrahim, obviously was unaware of the enthusiasm he would produce among future scholars. Indeed, Abu Ibrahim was ambivalent about his decision to write. Asking “why did I promise to write?” he admitted, “I don't know.”Footnote 4 Reconsidering the question, he explained that “when the constitution was announced and I heard them attributing wonders to it, I began to read the newspapers and ask this or that.” He was referring to the 1908 reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution and opening of parliament. Both had been suspended for nearly thirty years until a group of educated professionals and military officers known as the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) undertook a coup, forcing Sultan Abdülhamid II to acquiesce to their demands for legal protection and representative government.Footnote 5 After an easing of press restrictions, Abu Ibrahim began to write about the “conditions of peasants.”Footnote 6 But he quickly appeared to regret this decision, complaining that his political engagement had made him “the most miserable person on the face of the earth.”Footnote 7 His obsession with knowledge forced him to bid farewell to his land, plow, and beloved animals. “Yes, I want to know everything,” he wrote, adding “I am no longer that Abu Ibrahim person who used to walk three hours from his village to Jaffa to sell crates of tomatoes.”Footnote 8 In short, the revolutionary events of 1908 seemed to initiate a profound shift in this simple peasant's life.

In this series of columns, many of which appeared on Filastin's front page, Abu Ibrahim presented himself as a Muslim Arab writer in an Ottoman world. Throughout he exhibited the same simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic persona on display above, both wistful for the simple days before he became involved in politics and fiercely committed to those very same causes. His advocacy focused on improving the lives of peasants and included calls for better roads, well-trained veterinarians, modern agricultural machinery, and state-sponsored forestry in the name of strengthening the Ottoman Empire. All of these claims on the Ottoman state amounted to what scholars have called “imperial citizenship,” the assertion of membership within an empire, whether due to sentimental attachment or instrumental appropriation, often to demand certain rights or privileges.Footnote 9

Complicating the story of peasant enlightenment in the text is the partnership that produced it. Filastin's readers were likely unaware that Abu Ibrahim was, in fact, a pseudonym for Menashe Meirovitch, a Jewish agronomist who emigrated from the Russian Empire to Palestine in 1883 to help establish one of the first Zionist colonies, Rishon LeZion.Footnote 10 His son may have been named Avraham, but in reality Abu Ibrahim was not Arab, Muslim, or poor. By his own admission Meirovitch knew no Arabic beyond a few colloquial phrases and was incapable of anything like the eloquent prose that appeared in Filastin. He may have been able to write in French, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish, but with Arabic Meirovitch needed help. And ʿIsa al-ʿIsa, the Greek Orthodox Arab owner and co-editor of Filastin, appears to have given it to him, not only translating Meirovitch's columns from French to Arabic, but also soliciting the column in the first place. There is, as numerous historians have documented, a long tradition of authors using false identities in publishing their work for political purposes, some of which might be accurately labeled propaganda.Footnote 11 Yet this story is about more than propaganda. The secretive relationship between Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa calls into question some of the predominant ways of dealing with the press as a source in early 20th-century Middle East historiography. It also complicates both conventional narratives of nationalism's emergence in Palestine and more recent efforts to understand Ottoman imperial citizenship.

Our argument consists of three parts. The first concerns the press. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, many scholars have located national consciousness in newspaper headlines and fulminating editorials. This type of analysis has often taught us about how people understood themselves in imperial and national contexts.Footnote 12 But tracing the construction and reception of texts has been more difficult. We have little to contribute here in regard to reception. In terms of the creation of the articles themselves, however, we build on the work of Ami Ayalon and Beth Baron by contending that the very process of producing the text reveals much about understandings of self and others. In a period when pen names and unsigned articles abounded, the identities of authors and the path from composition to publication of a text can imply decidedly different things to the historian than can the text on its own.Footnote 13 The text may reveal, for example, a particular discourse about belonging within a certain community; the production of texts and authors’ identities, meanwhile, even if unknown to the readership, can reveal the lived experience and challenges of belonging.

We argue that what specifically enabled the composition of the Abu Ibrahim series was a shared commitment to modernism, defined by James Scott as “a supreme self-confidence about continued progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature.”Footnote 14 Both men, much like the doctors and scientists leading the CUP, called for improved access to rural credit, better infrastructure, and more advanced machines in order to create healthy, well-educated citizens able to capitalize on their land.Footnote 15 As in other parts of the Middle East and the world, class influenced these ideas, but by no means determined them.Footnote 16 Indeed, this intersection of class and a modernist worldview brought these men together more than their divergent religious and ethnic backgrounds pulled them apart. This leads us to our second argument.

We suggest that this tale of partnership complicates accounts of late Ottoman Palestine as simply a prehistory to nationalist differentiation. Scholars who look at the origins of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict tend to privilege instances of nationally driven disputes between Jews and Arabs, while classifying acts of cooperation as “collaboration,”Footnote 17 thus “adopt[ing] nationalism's own language and way of seeing the world.”Footnote 18 When analyzing the violence of the 1930s or 1940s this approach certainly has merit. But in the Ottoman context, to privilege a normative vision of nationalism is to obscure the complex connections, stories, and structures that existed at the time. Rashid Khalidi is careful to avoid this mistake in his pioneering work on Palestinian nationalism. Opposing the canard that Palestinians did not exist, Khalidi argues that Palestinian identity prior to World War I not only existed but also consisted of multiple elements, including city, empire, and religion.Footnote 19 He also contends that opposition to Zionism proved to be among the most crucial of these elements, bringing together both peasants and urban elites.Footnote 20 Citing Anderson's Imagined Communities, Khalidi views the newspaper Filastin as the champion of Palestinian nationalism and the newspaper's editor ʿIsa al-ʿIsa as a founding figure of Palestinian nationalism.Footnote 21 Al-ʿIsa's decision to distribute the newspaper free of charge in rural areas of Palestine reinforces Khalidi's argument that Filastin was a tool for consolidating Palestinian identity.Footnote 22 Khalidi even cites the column “Rasaʾil Fallah” as an example of the newspaper's sympathetic portrayal of rural people.Footnote 23 However when we look at the details of the construction of this text, a more complicated story emerges, a story that links, in Khalidi's words, one of the “pioneers of an unwavering Palestinian and pan-Arab opposition to Zionism” with the Zionist Ottoman citizen from Russia Menashe Meirovitch.Footnote 24 In other words, our story represents what is no doubt an exceptional case in the development of the press in Palestine, but nevertheless demonstrates how political imagination in the late Ottoman period was more flexible than retrospective nationalism allows it to be. The commitment of both men to modernism in an Ottoman context explains why a journalist asked a highly educated agronomist to become a textual peasant in the first place. The abrogation of communal landholding systems, the improvement of roads, and the wooing of foreign capital appealed to ʿIsa al-ʿIsa and Menashe Meirovitch alike, probably more than they appealed to any actual tiller of the soil.Footnote 25

But this is not the whole story. Our third argument relates to how the conventional nationalist narrative matters in some ways, too. After all, the Jewish Meirovitch and the Christian al-ʿIsa became a textual Muslim for a reason. As in other times and places, religion and ethnicity in the late Ottoman Empire defy easy categorization. There was conflict between different groups and communities; there was also considerable cooperation and tolerance. What cannot be denied is that in an empire that was majority Muslim, peasant, and poor, Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa were none of these things. Hence, the column would likely not have had the same authority if its byline featured a Zionist settler from the Russian Empire or an urbane educated Christian, even though he was a native son.Footnote 26 The textual metamorphosis of Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa, then, enabled them a degree of legitimacy that neither could have achieved on his own. Abu Ibrahim could present Jewish immigration in a positive light and retain credibility; Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa could not. This point builds upon Michelle Campos’ argument in Ottoman Brothers that the 1908 Constitutional Revolution enabled horizontal linkages across confessional lines through common Ottoman citizenship. Campos’ Ottoman brothers marched shoulder to shoulder and chanted the same slogans in the streets. They performed imperial citizenship in public. But their attempts to take their relationship beyond performance and toward formal cooperation more often than not ended in a family feud. Such was the case with the Temple of Solomon Masonic Lodge of Jerusalem, which, as Campos tells it, split into two when Muslim and Christian members accused the Jewish members of being Zionists.Footnote 27 Our Ottoman brothers, Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa, did almost the opposite. They revised and published articles collaboratively while erasing any evidence of personal connection. The product of their imperial citizenship—the columns—may have been public, but its input—their brotherhood—was private.

The trail of evidence the two left behind does not allow us to say conclusively whether money changed hands between them. We suggest that this convergence was neither collaboration in the pejorative sense nor an example of romantic coexistence lost. It is not pejorative collaboration because their partnership involved not the betrayal of a sacred national cause but rather the mutual pursuit of modernist goals. It is not an example of romantic coexistence lost because they came together not to unite Arabs and Jews but to pursue their modernist vision of society by masquerading as an uneducated commoner. More than intercommunal harmony, this type of connection was predicated on their differentiation of themselves from other residents of Palestine, whether Arab or Jew. After all, if Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa were Ottoman brothers, their fraternity involved a third party: the peasants, the distant cousins of these cultured elites, through whom Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa could perform an act of class-based ventriloquism. The opinions of the educated and urbane might have carried more weight than the opinions of those perceived to be uneducated and uncultured. But in an era when peasants increasingly functioned as symbols of both cultural authenticity and backwardness, representations of these marginalized yet central figures generated legitimacy in new ways. For this reason, the doctor and scholar Tawfiq Canaan and other Arabs and Jews came together in Mandate-era Palestine to conduct ethnography of a “peasant society” they perceived as threatened by “the forces of modernity”Footnote 28; this also might explain why Muhammad Husayn Haykal, a lawyer, signed his 1913 novel Zaynab with the term “Egyptian peasant.”Footnote 29 Peasants were subject to a wide variety of artistic, literary, musical, and social scientific discourses at this time.Footnote 30 Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa were part of this constellation.

BIOGRAPHIES AND GEOGRAPHIES

ʿIsa al-ʿIsa's early life foreshadowed the boldness of his future career as a journalist. Born in Jaffa in 1878 to a Greek Orthodox, Arab family, al-ʿIsa demonstrated interest in writing for a broad audience while still a student at the Syrian Protestant College, later renamed the American University in Beirut. He helped publish a semiweekly periodical entitled al-Nukhab (The Elites), an ironic name given his later efforts with Meirovitch to masquerade as a peasant.Footnote 31 After graduating, al-ʿIsa worked as a translator for the Persian consulate in Jerusalem. When the Ottoman district governor called on al-ʿIsa—thinking him a Persian national—and requested an authentic Persian tea service, al-ʿIsa did not disabuse the official of his mistaken impression. Instead, the intrepid young translator borrowed a samovar from a friend working at the Russian consulate, bought the finest tea he could find, and left the Ottoman official raving about the “best tea that he had ever drank in Jerusalem.”Footnote 32

Later, al-ʿIsa moved to Egypt, where he exhibited both financial acumen and personal tenacity. While working for the Sudan customs office, he managed to balance the institution's accounts despite a considerable backlog and, as he recalled, hostility from his Coptic co-workers.Footnote 33 In al-ʿIsa's next occupation he was able to combine his financial smarts with his press background. Remaining in Egypt, al-ʿIsa oversaw the supply chain and advertising for African Cigarettes and Co., controlling a budget of £50,000 per year.Footnote 34 While in this job, he accompanied the Egyptian khedive, ʿAbbas Hilmi, to an agricultural exhibition at which the company showed off some of its machines for rolling and boxing cigarettes.Footnote 35 But al-ʿIsa's enthusiasm for machine-made cigarettes did not compare with his ardor for the reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution in 1908.

Al-ʿIsa returned home and used the newly secured freedom of speech to agitate for, among other things, equality between Greeks and Arabs in the Orthodox Church hierarchy. In so doing, he became part of the so-called Orthodox Renaissance, a movement that involved figures such as the educational reformer Khalil al-Sakakini and the cadre of intellectuals who made Jerusalem's Vagabond Café their base.Footnote 36 After working briefly for the Ottoman Bank and facing difficulties from co-workers because of his activism, al-ʿIsa decided to return to journalism. With £70 to his name, he purchased a second-hand printing press, ordered a new set of type from Beirut, and rented space near the Central Post Office in Jaffa.Footnote 37 Alongside his cousin and co-editor Yusuf al-ʿIsa, he celebrated the publication of the first issue of Filastin in 1911 with a party at Jaffa's biggest hotel.Footnote 38 During World War I, the Ottomans exiled al-ʿIsa to Anatolia, a trip he referred to in retrospect as “a long walk.”Footnote 39 After a brief stint in Damascus during Faysal's short-lived pan-Arab kingdom, al-ʿIsa returned to Palestine and to journalism. There he became—in Khalidi's words—“without any doubt the greatest Palestinian journalist of the 20th century and one of the most eminent Arab intellectuals of his generation.”Footnote 40 He left Palestine in 1938 at the insistence of the British in response to death threats leveled at him by rival Palestinian Arab political groups.Footnote 41 He settled in Beirut, where, having witnessed the nakba of 1948, he died in 1950.

Menashe Meirovitch was similarly peripatetic, polyglot, and political. He was born in 1860 in Mykolaiv, then in the south of the Russian Empire (and today part of Ukraine). His father was a merchant; the details of his mother's life are unknown.Footnote 42 At the age of ten, he relocated to Odessa with his family, where after two years in a traditional Jewish school, he enrolled in a government secondary school.Footnote 43 While still a student, Meirovitch witnessed the pogrom of 1871, stirred by a false rumor that Jews had vandalized a local church.Footnote 44 Still, by his own admission Meirovitch felt far from Judaism and Jewish culture, seeing himself closer to the Russian nation.Footnote 45

The land drew the attention of young Meirovitch, and in 1879 he enrolled in the Institute of Agronomy and Forestry in Nowa Aleksandria (present-day Puławy in Poland). He was trained there as an agronomist and wrote his dissertation on wool. When another wave of pogroms against Jews in the Pale of Settlement occurred in 1881–82 and Meirovitch heard the “windows of Jews … shattered by the stones of the hooligans,” he decided to sever his ties with Russian culture.Footnote 46 In November 1882, Meirovitch chose Palestine as a refuge from the shards of glass. He joined a settler group known as Bilu, an acronym for the Hebrew phrase in the Book of Isaiah meaning “House of Jacob, let us go.” Meirovitch planned to put his skills to use by starting an agricultural colony in Palestine. After a stop in Istanbul, where he failed to obtain an Ottoman certificate for the establishment of a colony, he arrived, on his own, in Palestine in 1883. The Ottomans refused entry to two people accompanying him, and only let him in because of his qualifications as an agronomist.Footnote 47 At this point he also acquired Ottoman citizenship.Footnote 48

Upon arrival, Meirovitch headed to Rishon LeZion, a Jewish colony that had been established in the central coastal plain during the previous year. Whereas many of the original settlers soon left the colony due to harsh conditions, Meirovitch stayed. In 1884 he built a house there with funding from the Rothschilds, the well-known European Jewish banking family. Later, he managed to plant a vineyard and married one of the colony's residents. He also became a prolific writer, penning hundreds of articles in English, Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish on topics ranging from silkworms to Hebrew folk music. He regularly published a weekly supplement under the title “ha-Ikar ha-Yehudi” (The Jewish Farmer) in the Hebrew newspaper ha-Tsvi (The Gazelle). Meirovitch used to sign all of his writings with mi zikney ha-yishuv, literally meaning “one of the elders of the Jewish community,” although in a few of his English articles he signed as “an elder of a Jewish village.”Footnote 49

At the dawn of the 20th century, Meirovitch started his official political activity, joining every representative body of Rishon LeZion and elected assemblies in the Yishuv more broadly. He headed fact-finding commissions and delegations to Jewish donors around the world, and in 1913 he helped establish the Association of Jewish Colonies in Palestine's southern coastal plain. He had regular contacts with the Ottoman bureaucracy in Palestine, including high-level officials. Although he had Ottoman citizenship, he was exiled to Tiberias in 1915 with other prominent Zionist leaders who were citizens of countries at war with the Ottoman Empire. In 1917 he and other settlers from Rishon LeZion spent time in an Ottoman prison in Jerusalem. With the end of Ottoman rule in Palestine, Meirovitch joined various commissions and assemblies set up by the imperial power that had recently taken control of Palestine—Britain—and in 1925 he was appointed as a magistrate in the Yishuv court system, although apparently he had no legal training.Footnote 50 In 1948 when the State of Israel was established, Meirovitch was the last surviving member of the Bilu settlers who had arrived in Palestine in the late 19th century. He died a year later.

MODERN OTTOMANS

Al-ʿIsa and Meirovitch died far apart ideologically, but years earlier they came together for a limited time under the banner of Ottoman modernism. This banner was Ottoman because they both made claims upon the Sublime Porte and called for unity among the Ottoman Empire's different communities, utilizing the freedom of the press enabled by the reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution in 1908. Meirovitch wrote frequently about imperial citizenship in this period, calling upon Jewish immigrants to Palestine to become Ottoman citizens. “What right do we have to complain about the government, if we ourselves do nothing?” he asked in a column in the Hebrew-language daily newspaper ha-Or (The Light) in 1912.Footnote 51 Meirovitch furthermore compared the Jewish Yishuv to a small cog in the large Ottoman machine, and warned that if the community did not assert influence beyond its actual size, then its demise was certain.Footnote 52 Though it is unclear if he was a member of the Society of Ottoman Jews, his words frequently echoed the platform of that organization, which advocated, among other things, assuming Ottoman citizenship, the study of Ottoman Turkish, equality and fraternity between Arabs and Jews, appointing Jewish representatives to all Ottoman institutions, and lobbying Ottoman officials for better governance.Footnote 53

Delineating al-ʿIsa's ideas on Ottomanism is more difficult, for he rarely wrote in Filastin, or at least did not sign the articles he authored.Footnote 54 Nevertheless, it is clear that al-ʿIsa made a similar effort to work within the Ottoman system for change. Al-ʿIsa maintained distance from the CUP, believing that the party that led the 1908 Constitutional Revolution was not much better than its corrupt and incompetent predecessors.Footnote 55 But his cousin Yusuf al-ʿIsa was “one of the principal pillars” of the CUP in Palestine, and Filastin generally supported its policies.Footnote 56 Instead of the CUP, ʿIsa al-ʿIsa leaned toward the Decentralization Party. In favor of the process for which it was named, this party was entangled to some extent with Zionist organizations. Al-ʿIsa counted among his close associates the party's secretary, Haqqi al-ʿAzm, who treated Zionists as potential partners.Footnote 57 While Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa may have disagreed about the most effective way to reform the empire, their actions underscore an openness to intercommunal cooperation in the name of change from within the Ottoman system.

The second aspect of their convergence was modernism, rooted in disbelief in clericalism and faith in progress based on economic development. Meirovitch called for changes to rabbinical structures while al-ʿIsa's initial political involvement stemmed from anticlerical activism within the Greek Orthodox Church.Footnote 58 Each also saw economic growth as the key to Palestine's future. Meirovitch viewed foreign capital as particularly crucial, and believed it would benefit Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike.Footnote 59 Al-ʿIsa, meanwhile, retained the fascination with technology first on display when as a young man he showed cigarette-rolling machines to the khedive of Egypt. In two columns he penned on Gaza in 1912 he lamented that the Gaza region consisted of “burnt sands” rather than “flourishing paradises.”Footnote 60 Although he attributed his vision of Gaza's timeless decay to the area being “abandoned by government, cut off from the world, and ignored by God,” he—much like Meirovitch—argued that better roads and governance could ameliorate the situation and, in a parallel to Zionist visions, make the desert bloom.Footnote 61

Al-ʿIsa's concern for the economy may have intersected with his ideas about intercommunal relations. His acquaintances in the Decentralization Party, for example, viewed Zionists as comrades due to what they saw as the region's need for the “capital and energy” that Jewish immigrants could provide.Footnote 62 Al-ʿIsa's own thoughts on this matter are harder to divine, though he did complain in his memoir that immediately after World War I the exodus of Jews from Jaffa to Tel Aviv had decimated Jaffa's economy, which evinces some concern on his part for the shared fortunes of the two communities.Footnote 63 These pieces of evidence portray a semblance of a shared worldview. Combined with Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa’s co-produced columns, they are illustrative, we contend, of the Ottoman modernism that brought these men together.

COMING TOGETHER

The reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution and freedom of the press created the political conditions for Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa to come together. Some journalists used this opening to oppose Zionist encroachment in Palestine.Footnote 64 This was certainly how al-ʿIsa remembered the period and Filastin's role in it. In his memoir, composed between 1938 and 1950, al-ʿIsa wrote in the way that the exigencies of that devastating decade for Palestinians demanded: as a die-hard nationalist. Directly after mentioning the Filastin launch party in 1911, al-ʿIsa described Zionism as the main issue his newspaper would address, arguing that even before the constitution Zionists had attempted to buy land in Palestine. In al-ʿIsa's recounting, “the Jews”—he used this term interchangeably with “Zionists”—“considered me one of their greatest enemies.”Footnote 65 With these battle lines drawn, al-ʿIsa detailed Zionist efforts to influence his anti-Zionist stance. “Their means were varied,” al-ʿIsa wrote, “the most important were money and beauty,” which al-ʿIsa specified was of the “feminine” sort. He also added that “all of their efforts were in vain.”Footnote 66

Yet excised from al-ʿIsa's account of bribery, money, and sex in Palestine's late Ottoman press was a considerably more mundane yet no less important factor in understanding intercommunal relations: copyediting. Meirovitch's handwritten drafts of columns differed considerably from the final versions that appeared in the pages of Filastin. One draft featured a curious mix of Palestinian colloquial Arabic curses transliterated with French accent marks (for example, Alla ihréb betum, or “may God destroy their house”), yet this line disappeared completely in the finished product in Filastin.Footnote 67 Even lines without swearing changed considerably. In the same draft, another Palestinian colloquial phrase (hai, rouh l’el gumuruk, or “come on, go to the customs house”) became far more formal in its iteration in Filastin (idhhab bi-Allah li-nihāyat al-jumruk, or “Go by God to the end of the customs house”). Even small details changed. The draft referred to how Abu Ibrahim's friend had marked old copies of newspapers with a “red pencil” while the final copy referred to a “blue line.” Indeed, these linguistic shifts and color changes point to an editorial process and a more colorful accounting of late Ottoman Palestinian community than that allowed for in al-ʿIsa's memoir.

After all, it seems very likely that al-ʿIsa was the one who cleansed Meirovitch's drafts of curses and colloquial language and changed the red pencil to a blue line. This claim could be made based on inference. In the relatively small educated circles of late Ottoman Palestine, it is inconceivable that al-ʿIsa would not have known the true identity of a folksy and lyrical front-page columnist, and, moreover, one who insisted upon writing positively about the Jewish immigrants to Palestine. But the case for their partnership can be made on grounds more solid than mere conjecture. Unfortunately, we could not find any account of the initial meeting from al-ʿIsa's perspective, nor any evidence of the encounter that dates to the time of the column's publication. Meirovitch, however, did write about the topic at least four times between 1935 and 1946 in press articles, all in Hebrew. The nature of the evidence, therefore, echoes a colonial pattern of Zionist narrative and Palestinian Arab silence all too familiar to the modern history of Palestine.Footnote 68 It also ensures that the exact nature of the relationship between the men will remain difficult to discern. The details of these stories differ slightly but all involve al-ʿIsa approaching a reluctant Meirovitch and pitching the columns on the basis of Meirovitch's knowledge of the land. In 1935, Meirovitch described the first meeting between the two men, which apparently occurred in 1911 in Jaffa:

“I heard,” he [al-ʿIsa] said, “that you write in various newspapers and I ask that you would contribute to my newspaper as well. You know the nature of this land, the conditions of its inhabitants, etc. Now it is our duty to work hand-in-hand for the good of the homeland.” “But, you know,” I answered him, “first of all, I live in a colony, far from politics, and besides, I do not have a command of the Arabic language. And third, as a Jew, it would be impossible for me not to touch upon our conditions and what we were able to do in this land for the thirty years of our existence.”

“As for the language, write in the language which is easiest for you, and I will translate it, and especially because you are a son of the colony and far from politics, write whatever you can to describe our condition, both as a farmer and as a Jew,” answered the editor. I promised him to think about his proposal and return to him with an answer.Footnote 69

Meirovitch did not explain how a Jew and a Christian decided that their literary persona ought to be Muslim.

A second account of the meeting, written in 1941 with a prominent Zionist Orientalist Menachem Kapeliouk, does not shed light on this question either. But, similar to the first account, it suggests that Meirovitch's knowledge of agriculture helped al-ʿIsa overcome any doubts he may have had about his new columnist's Zionist convictions. The second account stated that al-ʿIsa came to visit Meirovitch in his home in Rishon LeZion, which contrasts with the assertion in the 1935 article that the meeting took place in Jaffa. Al-ʿIsa flattered Meirovitch on his previous writing and, in Meirovitch's words, declared he “would like to open his newspaper to an established writer such as myself.” Meirovitch wondered what he might write about since he was merely a “fellah,” using the Arabic term for peasant to convey self-deprecatingly his lack of qualification for newspaper writing. Al-ʿIsa alleviated his concerns, responding, “Well, even better! Write on the matters of the fellah.”Footnote 70 Despite the repeated invocation by both men of the Arabic word fellah, it is likely that this meeting took place in French. ʿIsa al-ʿIsa was a well-known Francophile.Footnote 71 And Meirovitch knew French, too, as his handwritten column drafts prove.

Meirovitch had a complicated relationship with the Arabic word “fellah.” Not unlike other elites in the empire, he apparently felt drawn to the sense of authenticity that the term implied. However, as an agronomist, he also felt himself superior to the peasant, a dynamic underscored by his past use of the term. On a previous occasion he encouraged Jewish agricultural workers to distinguish themselves both from the dissolute Russian peasant (muzhik) and the backward Arab peasant (fellah), calling instead for Jews to become a new kind of Hebrew worker, which he termed ḥaḳlaʾi, the Hebrew word for “farmer.”Footnote 72 Despite these reservations, Meirovitch seemed to have made peace with the term for the purposes of his Filastin column, likely realizing that its adoption would make his writing accessible and interesting to Filastin's readership.

WHY THE COLUMN WAS NOT JUST ZIONIST PROPAGANDA

Planting articles in the Arabic press is an old Zionist tactic.Footnote 73 But Meirovitch appears to have received little institutional support and only cursory recognition from Zionist leaders for his initiative in Filastin. As early as 1909 the executive body of the Zionist movement—the Zionist General Council—asked Arthur Ruppin, the head of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, to come up with ways to influence the Arabic press in Palestine to write more positively about Zionism.Footnote 74 However, little was done until January 1911, when Ruppin instructed his staff to start regularly monitoring the Arabic press for articles about Jews and Zionism.Footnote 75 A month later, Ruppin participated in a meeting with the heads of the Jewish colonies in Palestine and various other Zionist leaders to discuss “the increasing anti-Jewish movement in Palestine.”Footnote 76 Meirovitch attended this meeting. Some in attendance suggested that Jews should more widely embrace Ottoman citizenship and send their sons and daughters to Istanbul for university education. One attendee said that to mollify Ottoman anxieties the Hebrew press should stop distribution in Istanbul. Another called for bribing Arab newspapers by buying subscriptions and ads en masse, a technique allegedly employed by Zionists to secure positive coverage in Egypt.Footnote 77 If Meirovitch had the idea of the Abu Ibrahim column at this time, he said nothing of it at the meeting.

Even when Meirovitch began to write as Abu Ibrahim, Ruppin evinced little enthusiasm for his work, though he was aware of both the columns and Meirovitch's role in their production. In a letter dated 16 October 1911, Meirovitch informed Ruppin that he had become “an Arab intellectual” and asked to know what sum of money he could expect for the months October–December “for the necessary expenditures,” which apparently included buying subscriptions for Filastin and al-Nafir (The Bugle) and paying a translator “who reads the Arabic newspapers with me.” One line in the letter remains cryptic. Meirovitch wrote, “We need something additional for Filastin.”Footnote 78 Whatever these additional necessities were, Ruppin seemed uninterested and neglected to respond. On 27 October 1911 Meirovitch wrote again, asking for 120 francs both for his own expenses and for the purchase of forty additional subscriptions of al-Nafir and a few of Filastin. He believed “that the editorial offices would be happy” with such an action.Footnote 79 It appears Ruppin failed to reply because on 14 November 1911 Meirovitch reiterated his request for the 120 francs he thought he was owed.Footnote 80 The subscriptions could have been a form of bribery, just as had been called for at the February meeting, but if this is what Meirovitch or the editors of these Palestinian newspapers had in mind, it again appears Ruppin remained indifferent.

Meirovitch also pleaded repeatedly with Ruppin to pay for the production of a pamphlet containing all of his columns published in Arabic newspapers. This series of exchanges reveals not only Ruppin's lack of concern but also Meirovitch's indignation.Footnote 81 When Ruppin requested the French originals of Meirovitch's columns, Meirovitch said he did not have them and added with a palpable sense of frustration, “I cannot understand how it is that after years of work in the field of writing, with all that I’ve done, you do not trust me.”Footnote 82 Meirovitch reported to Ruppin that printing such a pamphlet would cost 75 francs, and translating the columns into Hebrew another 50 francs.Footnote 83 Later that month, one of Ruppin's staffers answered with the message that the Zionist Organization could pay only 50 francs of the total cost of publication.Footnote 84 The organization wondered, the staffer added, whether Meirovitch would be willing to cover the remainder of the expenses. A month later Meirovitch agreed but also claimed he did not care about the future of the pamphlet.Footnote 85 Yet he demonstrably did care. In April 1912 he wrote Ruppin again, striking a tone of bitterness familiar from Abu Ibrahim's columns. He noted that “it is quite funny that I work—20 of my articles were already published—and for what? What is the benefit of all that, I do not know.” Meirovitch also requested a greater sum of money in this letter, though he mentioned only al-Nafir as a potential recipient. Again, it appears that Ruppin demurred. All of this seems awfully far from the reception that a heroic Zionist propagandist might expect, although perhaps this apparently strained relationship is not surprising given that on multiple occasions Meirovitch criticized the Jewish community leadership in the press.Footnote 86

THE COLUMNS

Thus far we have focused on the figures behind the production of Abu Ibrahim. In this section we turn to the product itself, the distinctive voice of Abu Ibrahim exhibited in the “Rasaʾil Fallah” series. We argue that the columns underscore a notion of Ottoman modernism framed through imperial citizenship; Abu Ibrahim utilized cross-community comparison to make demands for state services and expert guidance in the realms of public health, agronomy, land reform, and economic development.

Public health occupied an important part of Abu Ibrahim's laments. In one of his first columns, he recalled how before the constitution he did not complain that peasants “die like flies die, without anyone being interested.” In the new age, however, Abu Ibrahim could no longer countenance this degree of government negligence. To make his case that peasants should not die like flies, Abu Ibrahim began with a story about a peasant and a fly. A young man—“the best worker we have,” Abu Ibrahim added—had suffered from head swelling a few hours after being bitten by a fly.Footnote 87 The peasants passed on this story to the doctor who arrived to examine the sick man. The doctor suggested that the insect, after landing on a corpse of some sort, could have transmitted a disease to the man. “Haven't you had animals that died from disease?” the doctor asked Abu Ibrahim. “What do you do with the corpses?” he continued. Abu Ibrahim replied, “we leave them on the edges of the village so the jackals can eat them.” “This is crazy,” the doctor responded, before explaining how disease might spread from rotting animal carcasses to humans with the fly as vector. Shortly after nightfall, the young man died and the doctor departed, leaving Abu Ibrahim to contemplate whom to blame. He settled on the government, which in his view had failed to provide either veterinarians or sanitary police to help the peasants. He also observed the scope of the problem. It was not simply a case of one jackal-scavenged bovine plague victim on the outskirts of a small village. “Dead camels, horses, and dogs,” he wrote, lined all the roads to Jaffa and even the streets of the city itself. Abu Ibrahim closed with a tone of resignation: “we belong to God and to him we will return” (inna lillahi wa-inna ilayhi rājiʿūn).Footnote 88

Abu Ibrahim's seventh column—in which he argued for agricultural mechanization—began in a similar tone. He complained that his previous six columns “went like a call for help in a valley and did not bring the smallest benefit.”Footnote 89 The only discernible change, he grumbled, was the increase in coffee expenses in his hut, because peasants had begun making pilgrimage to his home in the hope that he might ease their predicaments. Abu Ibrahim was not just getting attention from peasants. He observed that residents of the city had begun writing, too, hoping he could solve their problems. Little did they know, Abu Ibrahim wryly noted, that “my language is weaker than theirs and it is only the calamities of fate that educated me.” One such urban reader reportedly protested Abu Ibrahim's critiques of the government, explaining that “it is not in the ability of a peasant like you to understand its [the government’s] ideas.” To rectify this misunderstanding, the reader included an excerpt from the Ottoman Turkish newspaper Tanin (The Resonance) announcing a program aimed at promoting farm mechanization. The article further outlined the distribution of “modern agricultural machines” across twelve depots in different areas of the empire, where peasants could experiment with these implements thanks to preferential credit agreements. Upon reading these details, Abu Ibrahim wrote, “I leaped from the strength of my happiness.” He apparently headed for Jaffa first thing in the morning and asked people about the “warehouse for agricultural machines.” On his arrival, according to Abu Ibrahim, people “started laughing at me thinking that insanity had struck me.” Undeterred, Abu Ibrahim guessed that perhaps the machines were in Jerusalem and he hopped on the train to the city. Yet again, Abu Ibrahim's inquiries about the location of the warehouse resulted in suspicions of insanity. “One of them,” he narrated, “said to another, ‘His mind is lost.’” In Abu Ibrahim's world, belief in Ottoman promises of development amounted to madness.

Finally, Abu Ibrahim encountered a friend of his, who explained the matter with more compassion than the others by contextualizing Palestine's lack with reference to the plenty in other Ottoman provinces. “You want agricultural machines on installment, Shaykh Abu Ibrahim?” the friend asked, before suggesting that Abu Ibrahim “ride a boat and head for Burgas, Kirkilesse, or Dedeağaç,” towns in the Ottoman agricultural heartlands now divided between Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece. “But as for Jerusalem, Nablus, Jaffa, or Gaza,” he inveighed, “you will open these warehouses and there will be apricots.” In fact, there probably would be apricots, given the affinity between Palestine's climate and this succulent fruit.

Yet apricots in Palestine were no solace for Abu Ibrahim, who became even sadder when he compared his meager agricultural tools with the more technologically advanced ones of his Jewish and Ottoman neighbors. “My Israelite neighbors,” he wrote, “complete their harvest in a day or two by means of modern machines.” The inequality particular to Palestine paled in comparison, however, to the inequality on an imperial scale. Abu Ibrahim concluded the column by asking when the Ottoman authorities might “think of us, we, the peasants of Jaffa, Gaza, and Nablus…the native counterparts of the peasants of Burgas, Salonica, and Izmir,” contrasting the towns of Palestine with the agricultural powerhouses of the Ottoman Empire's more northerly provinces. He persisted with this question in concluding the article: “When, oh lord, when?” “Tell me when,” he demanded.Footnote 90

In addition to blaming imperial neglect, Abu Ibrahim argued that prevailing land ownership structures defeated any chance for progress in Palestine. In a November 1911 column, he broached a topic that might have seemed far away from the peasantry: the recent Italian invasion of Libya.Footnote 91 Abu Ibrahim wrote that his own son Ibrahim had volunteered “to avenge the blood of his homeland,” as many Christians and Israelites had done, he added.Footnote 92 According to Abu Ibrahim, one peasant had even sold his donkey and donated the proceeds to the war effort. And although Abu Ibrahim wrote that he himself was “a weak old man” who could not “take revenge with [his] hand for [his] nation and homeland” with all the other denominations, he argued that there was another means of achieving security: economic development. A rich country, he argued, could better repel and even preempt assaults like those of Italy. But a national “malady” undermined these efforts and this malady was the property system (mushaʿ) by which village land was owned communally and redistributed at the conclusion of each year.Footnote 93 For Abu Ibrahim, this meant that what he owned one year became “Mustafa's or Hasan’s” the next year. As a result, making intensive capital improvements of the sort he saw on his Jewish neighbors’ farms proved irrational. Calling for a treatment for this “incurable disease,” Abu Ibrahim suggested that if the Ottoman minister of war managed to take care of matters in Libya, surely, too, the minister of agriculture could take care of land laws.

That a column in Filastin criticized collective landholding might seem controversial, since the end of this practice, according to many, hastened Zionist colonization of Palestine.Footnote 94 But such calls were actually quite common in the Arabic press at the time, although the scholarly literature has tended to ignore the degree of ambivalence on this matter.Footnote 95 Indeed, in the summer of 1913 Filastin published a number of articles that bemoaned peasant backwardness. Much like Abu Ibrahim, the author invoked Arab peasants’ use of tools that date to Noah's times as justification for the establishment of private property. These articles were endorsed by none other than Yusuf al-ʿIsa.Footnote 96

The land might yield more thanks to machines, credit, and property reforms, but this increase in productivity meant nothing without outlets for export to the world. And the creation of this infrastructure required foreign capital, according to Abu Ibrahim's friend ʿAbd Allah, the man whose marginalia had changed from red to blue between Meirovitch's first draft and Filastin's printed copy. When ʿAbd Allah brought Abu Ibrahim some of his marked up copies of newspaper articles about Istanbul's parliamentary debates, he told his friend that despite having submitted many petitions, no change was forthcoming. The city continued to have “customs [facilities] insufficient even for a desolate village and a road leading to it insufficient for the passing of goats.”Footnote 97 Despite these sorry conditions, Jaffa had experienced rapid economic growth in recent years, though ʿAbd Allah was careful not to credit the government in any way. He declared that it was as if the state said, “God bless the Jaffans. Their cows yield overflowing milk and they do not impoverish us of much fodder.” But someone had made Jaffa's udders bulge and in ʿAbd Allah's opinion those people were foreigners. As an example, he cited the “millions of trees the German and Israelite settlers planted” with an eye toward citriculture, trees that would, he expected, enable booming exports in a few years’ time.Footnote 98 The column undoubtedly presented Zionists favorably. But it also called for more robust Ottoman engagement with Palestine that would benefit all of the region's citizens.

A READER WRITES BACK?

We began this article by noting that scholarship on the press and nationalism has had difficulty gauging the reception of the press. We also admitted that we fail to do so ourselves. True, some of Abu Ibrahim's columns—notably the one on agricultural mechanization—involved claims of extensive correspondence and, apparently, coffee dates between Abu Ibrahim and his readers. These were very likely literary devices employed by Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa to make their Abu Ibrahim seem more real. But there is one good case of a “reader response” to Abu Ibrahim's columns that points to, if not how readers responded to these columns, at least a more detailed understanding of how Abu Ibrahim was molded by the two men.

The alleged reader responded to a column signed by Abu Ibrahim calling for state-sponsored forestry. In this column, Abu Ibrahim described visiting his friend Abu Musa. On the way, he encountered sand dunes that blanketed the road. Abu Ibrahim assured readers that the landscape was neither on “the moon” nor “in the deserts of Arabia,” but merely south of Jaffa.Footnote 99 When Abu Ibrahim finally found his friend in this lunar landscape, Abu Musa was planting trees. These were not just any trees, but eucalyptus trees, vaunted throughout the Ottoman Empire but especially among Zionist immigrants as a solution to malaria, since their water-absorbing roots helped to drain the swampy habitats of mosquitoes, malaria's vector.Footnote 100 Yet Abu Musa was not planting them to avoid this malady. He was simply planting them to keep the sand from encroaching on his fields. And it was a difficult task. “I am doing the work of livestock,” he complained. The column took the familiar trajectory of so many of Abu Ibrahim's other columns; Abu Musa proceeded to criticize the Ottoman government for failing to help its poor peasants. Humble peasant though he allegedly was, Abu Musa also had other government models in mind. “Take, for example, the city of Bordeaux,” he told Abu Ibrahim. “Many years ago this city was in danger of sand dunes like these possibly swallowing it.” But a farmer named Bremontier apparently responded to the threat. Bremontier, Abu Musa recalled, “loved his nation and his country and the government helped him to work. So he began to plant pine trees and indeed the result was slow but it was certain.” In the end, the trees “became like walls protecting the city from a very dangerous enemy.” Abu Musa compared this apparent reciprocity between the French government and its citizenry to the Ottoman case. He concluded that the Ottoman treatment of its citizenry befit “slaves” because the state had left its citizens to fend for themselves.Footnote 101 After hearing this tale, Abu Ibrahim returned to the sandy road, carrying almond tree branches in hand to plant in his own garden with Abu Musa's fervent critique of the government in mind.

It is unlikely that an average peasant would have had the intricate knowledge of French forestry that Abu Musa displayed, but there certainly were people in Palestine who would have known of such matters. Ruhi al-Khalidi was one of them. Before this member of one of Jerusalem's notable Muslim families became a representative in the Ottoman parliament, he served until 1908 as the Ottoman consul in Bordeaux, where he wrote numerous articles that, incidentally, he published under a pseudonym.Footnote 102 The contents of the Khalidi Family Library in Jerusalem testify to his interest in questions of infrastructure.Footnote 103 But the people most well known for their interest in Bordeaux were not Arabs; they were Zionist Jews affiliated with the agricultural colonies funded by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. As part of his efforts to establish viniculture in Palestine, Rothschild sent experts from Bordeaux, where his family owned many vineyards, to teach the Jewish settlers how to plant vines and make wine.Footnote 104 Meirovitch's own vineyard was one of the first beneficiaries of the Baron's initiative.Footnote 105

These possibilities notwithstanding, the letter responding to the column did not accuse Abu Ibrahim of being either a Muslim notable or a Zionist colonist in peasant's clothes. As a result, the letter reveals some of the rhetorical rules of the game for this secret brotherhood between Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa that we have outlined. In the letter, the writer criticized Abu Ibrahim for failing to explain the real reason for the government's reluctance to help with forestry: “they indeed banned the planting of trees because Jews are those who demand it.”Footnote 106 The writer connected this injustice to discriminatory immigration policies aimed at Jews but not leveled at “Russians, Greeks, Germans, and other races.” The writer signed the letter “an Ottoman Israelite.”Footnote 107

If this was indeed a letter from an Ottoman Jew who believed in Abu Ibrahim the Arab Muslim peasant, it represents impressive evidence of how people took Abu Ibrahim seriously. But if the letter was fabricated by Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa, as it likely was, it might tell us about the limits of Abu Ibrahim's rhetorical abilities. Abu Ibrahim could look longingly on the modern harvesting machines of his Zionist neighbors, but an Arab Muslim criticizing an Ottoman government policy for hurting the Jews may have seemed implausible to Filastin's readership. Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa needed the voice of a fictitious Jew to express these opinions. This is also why it mattered that Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa concealed their partnership. Just like an imaginary Arab Muslim peasant might not have been able to make these claims credibly on behalf of fellow Ottoman citizens, the partnership between Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa also may have stretched the bounds of appropriate public conduct in a world structured by religious and linguistic communities. Whether the letter from an Ottoman Israelite was genuine or fabricated, it underscores the point that whereas the product of al-ʿIsa and Meirovitch's relationship could be on display, their work behind the scenes could not be. The constitution allowed for Ottoman brotherhood, but religious or ethnic status still structured the opinions that a given person was able to articulate in public.

A FINAL PLEA

In Abu Ibrahim's last column in Filastin, he petitioned the new governor of Jerusalem, Mahdi Bey, on the front page. “Allow, your highness, a simple peasant like me to raise this petition to your position,” Abu Ibrahim began his supplication.Footnote 108 Initially, Abu Ibrahim had hoped to speak with the governor “personally” but he struggled to do so on account of anxiety, he claimed. As he wrote, “My father, my grandfather, and I have not been accustomed to speaking to a great man like the governor.”Footnote 109 Abu Ibrahim had also considered sending his petition “in the post.” But he thought that the document might “reach another hand” before the governor's and end up “in a waste paper basket.”

This tortuous introduction of Abu Ibrahim as an “everyman” should come as no surprise by now. Nor should the subject matter of the petition, which dealt largely with public works projects. What is more significant is what Abu Ibrahim had to say about Ottoman citizenship. He described the absence of adequate schools, law enforcement, and port facilities. As for the roads around Jaffa, Abu Ibrahim wrote simply, “Take pity on our cattle.”Footnote 110 Having outlined these grievances, Abu Ibrahim directly addressed the governor: “If you are a lover of your nation, your sultan, and God almighty, do not think of anything except reform.” Reform, then, according to Abu Ibrahim, was a national, imperial, and religious duty. In case the governor might have viewed some of these projects as unrealistic, Abu Ibrahim admonished, “a friend once told me that the French enthusiastically say that the word ‘impossible’ is not French. So let us Ottomans say that the word ‘impossible’ is not Ottoman.” Abu Ibrahim intended this as a call to action. But at the same time this phrase effectively encapsulated the lives of all three of the men involved in this project: Menashe Meirovitch, the Russian Jew who journeyed from Odessa to Rishon LeZion, ʿIsa al-ʿIsa, the translator-cum-businessman who returned home from Egypt and started a newspaper with a second-hand printing press, and the product of their partnership, Abu Ibrahim, the simple peasant turned columnist.

BREAKUP, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION

For all of this possibility, however, some things were just impossible. Indeed, shortly after the publication of Abu Ibrahim's petition, this convergence of Ottoman modernism and, it seems, the relationship between Meirovitch and al-ʿIsa, disintegrated. A year after Abu Ibrahim's petition to Mahdi Bey, “Rasaʾil Fallah” began to appear in another Arabic newspaper, al-Nafir. Meirovitch had written a series of columns in this newspaper with the title “Rasaʾil Tajir” (Merchant Letters) and the pen name “an Ottoman Merchant” since October 1911.Footnote 111 Any feeling of camaraderie with al-Nafir's editor, Eliya Zakka, seemed to have been founded less on friendship than on capital. Al-Nafir received regular payments from Zionist organizations.Footnote 112 Most of its rather small readership was Jewish, a stark contrast to Filastin.Footnote 113 Whether he published through payment or not, Meirovitch used a note beside his column to explain Abu Ibrahim's breakup with Filastin.Footnote 114 “In the life of men, it is possible even for soul mates, linked to one another with fierce love, to disagree for various reasons,” he wrote.Footnote 115 Abu Ibrahim further explained that, as a good Muslim, he had performed hajj and, upon return, he had been surprised to note the strident tone adopted in Filastin. “Why all this poison that he [al-ʿIsa] inserts in the hearts of the people instead of advising them to come closer and unite?” Abu Ibrahim asked.Footnote 116 He especially found Filastin's treatment of unspecified “neighbors” distressing. In light of these concerns, al-Nafir, Abu Ibrahim stressed, was a more suitable publication for someone holding his views.

Although Abu Ibrahim did not explain the identity of these mysterious “neighbors” against whom the editor of Filastin was writing, Menashe Meirovitch did. Not surprisingly, they were Jews. In late 1912 and early 1913 Filastin had published several vehemently anti-Zionist articles, which brought Meirovitch to write without any pseudonym against Filastin in the Hebrew periodical ha-Or.Footnote 117 In an article calling for restraint after the murder of several Jews by Arabs, Meirovitch lamented Filastin's having turned into an arena for incitement against the Jews. Invoking the very same theme of toxicity that he mentioned as Abu Ibrahim in al-Nafir, Meirovitch characterized these articles as “extremely poisonous.”Footnote 118 The Ottoman authorities agreed. They closed the paper down several times between 1912 and 1914 on charges of spreading libel against Jewish communities.Footnote 119

All of these conditions of impossibility seem to have conspired to kill the persona of Abu Ibrahim as a shared production of ʿIsa al-ʿIsa and Menashe Meirovitch. Nevertheless, the Abu Ibrahim character worked his way into the historical record long after his columns were published. And in this way we know how Abu Ibrahim died. In Meirovitch's papers at the Central Zionist Archives is an undated column written in French in his own handwriting under the title “Rassail-el-Felah.”Footnote 120 It is unclear if it was ever published. Under the name Abu Halil, the column begins as follows: “It is to you my poor peasant brothers to whom I address this letter. I do not know if you are able to remember that before the war … one of our brothers, a simple peasant, had the courage to begin publishing his letters in the newspaper.” In case people had forgotten, Abu Halil described this peasant's columns as so evocative because “it was he who suffered with us also; [he was] in one word one of us and not a journalist of Jaffa or Jerusalem who knows neither our life nor our suffering … this peasant was the old Shaykh Abu Ibrahim.” But Abu Halil had bad news. “It is said that the poor man died at Salt (God rest his soul) where he went during the war to visit his brother.” Luckily, Abu Halil seemed to be willing to accept Abu Ibrahim's rhetorical mantle. “I will speak the pure truth of our life,” he vowed before complaining about the Palestinian Arab nationalist leadership and the massacre of Jews in Hebron, probably referring to the events of 1929. In closing, he asked, “My God, when will we open [our eyes]? To this question I will try to respond in my second letter.”Footnote 121

But as far as we can tell there was no second letter, and it seems unlikely that any Arabic newspaper not taking Zionist money would have even carried the first letter. What is clear is that Meirovitch seized on a moment of crisis in Palestine to bring back the spirit of Abu Ibrahim through this Abu Halil. But what had been possible in 1912 was decidedly less so in 1929.

Still, no story of the Holy Land would be complete without resurrection. And this story is no different. More than two decades after his falling out with al-ʿIsa and more than a decade after Abu Ibrahim's textual death in Salt during World War I, Abu Ibrahim appeared again, this time undisguised in an unprecedented way. In the midst of the Arab general strike of 1936, the Palestine Royal Commission—better known as the Peel Commission—arrived in order to investigate the reasons behind the uprising. They received a letter from Meirovitch in which he offered his help. As one of the first immigrants to Palestine, he explained in his letter, he knew the Arabs well and always maintained friendly relations with them. So well did he know them and so friendly were his relations with them that he had decided he would write an open letter to the elders of the Arab villages to remind them how miserable they had been before the Jews arrived. He would also warn the elders that if they listened to the instigators leading the general strike, they would be in great danger. To prove how serious his intentions were, Meirovitch attached the open letter to the note he sent the commission, and promised that a version in Arabic would be circulated among the elders of the Arab villages.Footnote 122 The secretary of the commission responded that they had noted his letter, but added nothing else.Footnote 123 The letter itself was exactly what Meirovitch promised it to be: a harangue about the ungratefulness of the Arabs in Palestine who in his view benefited from Jewish colonization, echoing the standard Zionist narrative about the Arab uprising, to say nothing of his previous columns as Abu Ibrahim. He closed with questions and orders of the type found in Abu Halil's writing: “Have you ever felt hatred from the Jews towards you? And on the contrary—have you not profited from the Jews, in town and country? Open your eyes and see.” He signed the letter “Abu Ibrahim,” and added a description that left little doubt about his identity: “an elder of a Jewish village.” The time for disguise was over. Its possibility had disappeared long before.

Footnotes

Ibid.
Ibid.
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Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
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Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
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Ibid.
Ibid.
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Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

References

NOTES

Authors’ note: Our deepest gratitude to Ahmad Amara, Ali Adeeb, Beth Baron, Lauren Benton, Jane Burbank, Michele Campos, Frederick Cooper, Jeffrey Culang, Leena Dallasheh, Evelin Dierauff, Danielle Drori, David Engel, Gennady Estraikh, Nitzan Goldberger, Akram Khater, Zachary Lockman, Fredrik Meiton, the NYU Empires Seminar, Graham Pitts, Sara Pursley, Salim Tamari, Arianne Urus, Alex Winder, and four anonymous IJMES reviewers for patient archival, editorial, and translation support.

1 Davis, Natalie Zemon, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Gershoni, Israel, “Rethinking the Formation of Arab Nationalism in the Middle East, 1920–1945: Old and New Narratives,” in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. Jankowski, James and Gershoni, Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 25Google Scholar; Quataert, Donald, Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822–1920 (New York: Bergahn Books, 2006), 2Google Scholar.

2 The 1931 British census estimated that the literacy rate of Palestine's Arab population in 1931 was around 20 percent. Ayalon, Ami, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900–1948 (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2004), 16Google Scholar. The population of Greater Syria was approximately 75 percent rural in 1914. Owen, Roger, The Middle East in the World Economy 1800–1914 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 244Google Scholar.

3 Twenty columns were written but only seventeen were published in Filastin. Of these seventeen, we accessed twelve. The fifteenth column is missing or subsequent columns are misnumbered. We were unable to locate any copies of Filastin for the first six months of 1911, in which the first four columns appear.

4 Filastin, 19 May 1912, no. 141.

5 Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 150–52Google Scholar.

6 Filastin, 19 May 1912, no. 141.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

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10 Neville Mandel, Arabs and Zionism before World War I, 128n52.

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27 Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 191–93.

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30 Shakry, Omnia El, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gasper, Michael, The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

31 al-ʿIsa, ʿIsa, “Le texte: Min dhikrayat al-madi–souvenirs,” in Les mémoires de ‘Issa al-‘Issa: Journaliste et intellectuel Palestinien (1878–1950), trans. and ed. Khalaf, Noha Tadros (Saint-Denis: Institut Maghreb-Europe, 2009), 123Google Scholar.

32 Ibid., 127.

33 Ibid., 129.

34 Ibid., 130–31.

35 Ibid., 131.

36 Robson, Laura, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2011), 34Google Scholar; Salim Tamari, “The Vagabond Café and Jerusalem's Prince of Idleness,” in Mountain against the Sea, 176–90.

37 Al-ʿIsa, “Le texte: Min dhikrayat al-madi–souvenirs,” 134.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., 162.

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41 Al-ʿIsa, “Le texte: Min dhikrayat al-madi–souvenirs,” 227.

42 Tidhar, David, Entsiklopediyah le-Halutse ha-Yishuv u-Vonav (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Rishonim, 1947), 823–25Google Scholar.

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46 Ibid.; Meirovitch, “Tsiyonim ve-Tsiyon,” in a Russian Zionist newspaper, 1902, reprinted in Hevley Tehiyah, ed. Avineri and Meirovitch, 36.

47 Yanovsḳi, Hilel I., “Menashe Meirovitch–mi Zikney ha-Yishuv: Netivot Hayav,” in Minhat ʿErev: Zikhronot, Mikhtavim u-Teʿudot le-Toldot Hibat Tsiyon ve-ha-Tsiyonut, Maʾamarim u-Reshimot be-Sheʾelot Kalkaliyot ve-Tarbutiyot shel ha-Yishuv, ed. Meirovitch, Menashe and Yanovski, Hillel I. (Rishon LeZion: Hotsaʾat Yedidim ṿe-Haverim, 1941), 4Google Scholar.

48 Meirovitch, “Dalim ve-Reikim Anahnu,” ha-Or, 1913, reprinted in Hevley Teḥiyah, ed. Avineri and Meirovitch, 111.

49 Yanovski, “Menashe Meirovitch,” 4–9.

50 Ibid., 9–12.

51 Meirovitch, “Maʿseh Yashan, aval Tamid Hadash,” ha-Or, 1912, reprinted in Hevley Tehiyah, ed. Avineri and Meirovitch, 104.

52 Ibid., 103–5.

53 Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 146–48; Kark, Ruth and Solomonovich, Nadav, “The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 as Reflected in the Media of the Jewish Community in Palestine,” in Late Ottoman Palestine: The Period of Young Turk Rule, ed. Ben-Bassat, Yuval and Ginio, Eyal (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 183–208Google Scholar. Meirovitch's articles in 1913–14 repeat much of the platform of the Society of Ottoman Jews. Menashe Meirovitch, “Veʿod ha-Paʿam: Histadru!” ha-Or, 1913, reprinted in Hevley Tehiyah, ed. Avineri and Meirovitch, 107–9; Meirovitch, “Dalim ve-Reikim Anahnu,” 112; Menashe Meirovitch, “ha-Zilzul be-Hovatenu ha-Ezrahit,” Ha-Or, 1914, reprinted in Hevley Tehiyah, ed. Avineri and Meirovitch, 116–19.

54 Qustandi Shumali lists only 5 articles under ʿIsa al-ʿIsa's name before 1927. Fihris al-Nusus al-Adabiyya fi Jaridat Filastin 1911–1967, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Jamʿiyyat al-Dirasat al-ʿArabiyya, 1992), 338–39.

55 Al-ʿIsa, “Le texte: Min dhikrayat al-madi–souvenirs,” 132.

56 Tadros Khalaf, Les mémoires de ‘Issa al-‘Issa, 67.

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59 Menashe Meirovitch, “Le-Harim Mikhshol mi-Derekh ᶜAmi,” Knesset Yisraʾel (Warsaw), 1887, reprinted in Hevley Tehiyah, ed. Avineri and Meirovitch, 10–16.

60 Filastin, 18 August 1912, no. 167.

61 Filastin, 25 August 1912, no. 169.

62 Mandel, “Attempts at an Arab-Zionist Entente: 1913–1914,” 243.

63 Tadros Khalaf, Les mémoires de ‘Issa al-‘Issa, 113.

64 al-Najjar, ʿAyida, Sihafat Filastin wa-l-Haraka al-Wataniyya fi Nisf Qarn, 1900–1948 (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 2005), 41–51Google Scholar.

65 Al-ʿIsa, “Le texte: Min dhikrayat al-madi–souvenirs,” 135.

66 Ibid.

67 The draft column is in the Central Zionist Archives (CZA) A32/31. The ninth column is in Filastin, 24 December 1911, no. 101.

68 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 89–93.

69 Menashe Meirovitch, “Hishtatfuti be-ʿItonim ʿArviyim,” Doar ha-Yom, 19 April 1935; Meirovitch, Me-ha-Shevil el ha-Derekh: Kovets Maʾamarim u-Mikhtavim bi-Sheʾelot ha-Yishuv ha-ʿIvri be-Erets Yisraʾel (Tel Aviv: be-Hotsaʾat Hevrat Shtibel ve-Hever Yedide ha-Mehaber, 1936), 61–63Google Scholar.

70 Menachem Kapeliouk and Menashe Meirovitch, “Biluyi ba-ʿItonut ha-ʿArvit lifney 30 Shanah” [unknown publication], clipped in CZA A32/28.

71 Shumali, Fihris al-Nusus, 55.

72 Menashe Meirovitch, “Michtavim me-Eretz Yisraʾel: Nituah ha-Gzar-Din shel Mar Meirson,” Voskhod, 1899, reprinted in Hevley Tehiyah, 22; Menashe Meirovitch, “ha-Toʿelet she-ba-Kriʾot le-ʿAm,” Speech Delivered in 1899, reprinted in Minhat ʿErev, ed. Meirovitch and Yanovski, 41–42.

73 Nissim Malul and Shimʿon Moyal contributed columns to Arabic newspapers (including Filastin) and also established their own Arabic newspaper. Jacobson, Abigail, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 114–16Google Scholar.

74 Yaacov Roi, “Nisyonoteyhem shel ha-Mosadot ha-Tsioniyim le-ha-Shpiʿa ʿal ha-ʿItonut ha-ʿArvit be-Erets Yisraʾel ba-Shanim 1908–1914,” Zion (1967), 218–19.

75 Ibid., 214.

76 Minutes of the meeting of representatives of the Judea colonies and the Jaffa politicians from 6 February 1911, in CZA L2/44.

77 Al-ʿIsa, “Le texte: Min dhikrayat al-madi – souvenirs,”137.

78 Meirovitch to Ruppin, 16 October 1911, in CZA L2/167.

79 Meirovitch to Ruppin, 27 October 1911, in CZA L2/167.

80 Meirovitch to Ruppin, 14 November 1911, in CZA A32/31.

81 Meirovitch to Ruppin, 16 October 1911, in CZA L2/167.

82 Meirovitch to Ruppin, 27 October 1911, in CZA L2/167.

83 Meirovitch to Ruppin, 29 February 1912, in CZA L2/167.

84 Letter to Meirovitch, 25 February 1912, in CZA L2/167.

85 Meirovitch to Ruppin, 12 March 1912, in CZA L2/167

86 See numerous examples in Meirovitch, Hevley Tehiyah.

87 Filastin, 23 July 1911, no. 57.

88 Meirovitch used the exact same story, without mentioning names, when petitioning the Ottoman Commission for the Improvement of Agriculture in Palestine in 1911. Menashe Meirovitch, “ʾIgeret Ptuha,” ha-Tsvi, 1911, reprinted in Hevley Tehiyah, ed. Avineri and Meirovitch, 52–53.

89 Filastin, 1 October 1911, no. 77.

90 Ibid.

91 Filastin, 5 November 1911, no. 89.

92 There is no evidence to suggest that Meirovitch's son volunteered in the Ottoman army.

93 It is unclear what al-‘Isa thought about mushaʿ. Tadros Khalaf writes somewhat cryptically that al-ʿIsa “seems to have not missed an occasion to apply his gifts as an administrator, whether it was in the distribution of communal lands or familial lands.” Tadros Khalaf, Les mémoires de ‘Issa al-‘Issa, 116.

94 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 95–96; Pappé, Ilan, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 24–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shafir, Gershon, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1996), 24, 40–41Google Scholar.

95 Munir Fakhr Eldin, “Communities of Owners: Land Law, Governance, and Politics in Palestine, 1858–1948” (PhD diss., New York University, 2008), 70.

96 Ibid., 71.

97 Filastin, 24 December 1911, no. 101.

98 Ibid.

99 Filastin, 21 January 1912, no. 108.

100 Chris Gratien, “From Bad Air to Bad Peasants: Changing Approaches to Malaria in the Ottoman Empire” (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, New Orleans, La., 12 October 2013); Sufian, Sandra, Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920–1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 In 1912 settlers from Rishon LeZion did receive permission to plant eucalyptus trees to stop the sand dunes, however the trees were uprooted during the night by Arabs. Shalmon, Avraham, Rishon le-Tsiyon Bat Shivʿim (Tel Aviv: N. Tverski, 1952), 98Google Scholar.

102 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 79.

103 Norris, Land of Progress, 46.

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105 Ibid., 33–34; Tidhar, Entsiklopediyah le-Halutse ha-Yishuv u-Vonav, 824.

106 Filastin, 25 January 1912, no. 109.

107 Ibid.

108 Filastin, 11 August 1912, no. 165.

109 In fact Meirovitch did speak with the governor personally, when the latter visited Rishon LeZion on 6 August 1912. They discussed issues very similar to those in the petition. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, 134; Haviv-Lubman, Avraham D. and Haviv, Zerubavel, Korot Rishon le-Tsiyon: Mi-Yom Yisudah ʿad Perots Milhemet Sheshet ha-Yamim (Rishon LeZion: s.n., 1971), 84–85Google Scholar.

110 Meirovitch sent a similar petition to the Ottoman Commission for the Improvement of Agriculture in Palestine in 1911. Meirovitch, “Igeret Ptuha,” 52–53.

111 In a letter to Ruppin from October 1911 Meirovitch explained that in Filastin “articles that speak energetically about the Jewish question are making some trouble so for Jewish questions I approached the editor of al-Nafir with an offer to work together.” Merovitch to Ruppin, 16 October 1911, in CZA L2/167.

112 Roi, “Nisyonoteyhem shel ha-Mosadot,” 224; Yehoshua, Jacob, Tarikh al-Sihafa al-ʿArabiyya fi Filastin (Jerusalem: J. Yehoshua, 1974), 52Google Scholar.

113 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 83, 162; Yehoshua, Tarikh al-Sihafa al-ʿArabiyya, 53.

114 Zakka thanked Meirovitch for sending over a column and promised to publish additional articles. Zakka to Meirovitch, [Date unclear], in CZA L2/167.

115 Meirovitch, “Likhvod ʿOrekh ʿIton ha-Nafir,” Letter from Abu Ibrahim to Zakka, circa 1912, reprinted in Minhat ʿErev, ed. Meirovitch and Yanovski, 26.

116 Ibid., 27.

117 Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 222, 228.

118 Menashe Meirovitch, “Nikmatenu ve-Nehamatenu!” ha-Or, 1913, clipped in CZA A32/28.

119 Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 161–62.

120 “Rassail-el-Felah” handwritten draft column, undated, in CZA A32/32.

121 Ibid.

122 Meirovitch, “Likhvod ha-Vaʿada ha-Malkhutit, Yerushalayim,” Meirovitch to the Royal Commission, 28 December 1936, reprinted in Minhat ʿErev, ed. Meirovitch and Yanovski, 57.

123 “Tshuvat ha-Vaʿada ha-Malkhutit,” Secretary of the Royal Commission to Meirovitch, undated, reprinted in Minhat ʿErev, ed. Meirovitch and Yanovski, 58.