Year of the Locust: A Soldier's Diary and the Erasure of Palestine's Ottoman Past
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Year of the Locust: A Soldier's Diary and the Erasure of Palestine's Ottoman Past
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520948785 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Year of the Locust
A Soldier's Diary and the Erasure of Palestine's Ottoman Past
By Salim Tamari
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94878-5
CHAPTER 1
The Erasure of Ottoman Palestine
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Lesley Poles Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
I fought the English troops at Gallipoli for an Ottoman country that no longer exists—even though I continued living on the same land.
Onbasi (Umbashi) Muhammad Ali Awad, Palestinian officer in the Ottoman army from the village of Anabta who fought in Suez and in Gallipoli
Soldiers' diaries, particularly those from World War I, have been a constant reminder of the horrors of war. A large stock of such memoirs have reached us from the ranks of the Allied forces, particularly from British, French, American, and Anzac soldiers, as well as from Austrian and German soldiers fighting for the Central powers. Much less material has been available from the Ottoman side, particularly from the Syrian provinces. This book analyzes the Great War from the perspective of three ordinary soldiers who fought on the Ottoman side, as expressed in the newly found diary of Private Ihsan Turjman and journal of Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh, both of Jerusalem, as well as in the published Turkish diary of Mehmet (Muhammad) Fasih of Mersin. It explores two important ways in which the Great War impacted the Ottoman Empire. First, it examines how the experience of the war transformed the consciousness and the living conditions of the people of the Arab East (Ottoman Syria)—a shift that historians sometimes describe as the onset of Arab modernity. Second, it looks at what Falih Rifki, the Ottoman essayist and modernist, called—with the benefit of hindsight—the "Turkish problem" in Syria: namely the inability of Ottoman constitutional reform to create a multiethnic domain in which the Syria (including Palestine) would become an integral part of the empire. The crucial time for both these transformations was the short but critical six-year period between the constitutional revolution of 1908, with its project for a representative, multiethnic state, and the collapse of this project under the dictatorial regime of Cemal Pasha.
While the events discussed in the diary in the second part of this book center in the city of Jerusalem and show the war's impact on the urban population, they also had a significant impact on the region as a whole. Jerusalem, we have to remember, was the administrative and political center of a huge Ottoman province, the Mutasarflik of al Quds al Sharif, which comprised more than half of what became Mandate Palestine. Its ashraf and notables were a critical elite with a major influence on Ottoman policy in Istanbul as well as in Jaffa, Hebron, and other regional centers. The devastation felt by the city during the war—food shortages, disease, pauperization, and mass deportation —was repeated throughout the region in various degrees. The city was the crucible in which the breakdown in the normative system, and the subsequent rupture with the region's Ottoman past, was first experienced; from there, the turmoil engulfed the rest of the country.
The hero of our story is Ihsan Hasan Turjman (1893–1917), a common soldier in the Ottoman military headquarters in Jerusalem. His life was short and uneventful—he served as a clerk in the Manzil (Commissariat) and briefly as a foot soldier in Nablus and Hebron—but his observations on the impact of military events on his relationship to his city and his nation are without parallel. The power of wartime diaries lies in their exposure of the texture of daily life, long buried in the political rhetoric of nationalist discourse, and in their restoration of a world that has been hidden by subsequent denigration of the Ottoman past—the life of communitarian alleys, obliterated neighborhoods, heated political debates projecting possibilities that no longer exist, and the voices of street actors silenced by elite memoirs: soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds. By the third year of the war, the diaries of such ordinary soldiers project a desperate search for normalcy in daily life—a normalcy that was experienced in prewar Ottoman Palestine but seemed to elude its citizens for the next hundred years.
The Great War brought about a radical break with the Ottoman past in the whole Arab East, not only in the established constitutional regime but also in the system of governance, local administration, and identity politics. In the popular memory of peasants and city folk alike, 1915 was the Year of the Locust ('am al Jarad). Even four generations later, the locust invasion continues to evoke the combined memory of natural disasters and the manmade devastation of war. These events erased four centuries of a rich and complex Ottoman patrimony in which popular narratives of war and nationalist ideology colluded. An anti-Ottoman rewriting of history took place simultaneously, and in the same abrupt manner, both on the Turkish side (in the guise of modernizing the state and making it geographically manageable) and on the Arab side (in the sustained annals of nationalist historiography). The erasure replaced four centuries of relative peace and dynamic activity, the Ottoman era, with what was known in Arabic discourse as "the days of the Turks": four miserable years of tyranny symbolized by the military dictatorship of Ahmad Cemal Pasha in Syria, seferberlik (forced conscription and exile), and the collective hanging of Arab patriots in Beirut's Burj Square on August 15, 1916.
This book deals with the totalizing and transformative nature of the Great War. The war was totalizing not only in the manner in which it molded soldiers' work and living habits but also in its impact on the daily lives of civilians, creating an atmosphere of continued panic and uncertainty and disrupting daily patterns of behavior. This anxiety often took the form of persistent concern about food, clothing, and the availability of essential commodities such as kerosene and tobacco, as well as fear of arbitrary army actions (arrest, transfer of populations, and conscription of older people as the war progressed). This period also saw the first systematic censorship of the press and of people's private mail.
In a related process, the Great War had transformative effects on social norms. In the absence of adult male household members —who either were conscripted or perished at the front—many families suffered extreme poverty, famine, and disease. People were driven to drastic measures that undermined traditional normative behavior. Begging, theft, and prostitution became daily features in the streets of Jerusalem. The war ultimately helped redefine the nature of the state and its relationship to its subjects. In Palestine the war was a watershed that separated the country from its Syrian expanses and brought British colonial rule, creating new borders, new citizenship, and new forms of national consciousness.
The war also had an unanticipated emancipatory impact on society. This aspect is not well discussed in war literature, which stresses rather its devastation, dehumanization, and disruption of normality. Yet in many respects it was precisely the instruments of brutalization and destruction—and particularly the disruption of normalcy—that opened up new social horizons. For example, the socialist theoretician Anton Pannekoek has argued that World War I played a crucial role in shedding illusions about nationalism and opening possibilities for class solidarities across national boundaries. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Engels made a similar analysis of the impact of a future "total war" in which barbarism would give rise to a new civilization. In the same vein, the movement of large numbers of young males from rural areas to army camps created a network of training grounds for former peasants in literacy and manual skills that laid the foundation for mass movements and radical reform. In Palestine and the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman regime, the war had the opposite effect on nationalism and national boundaries. It decisively undermined progress toward a multinational, multiethnic state and gave rise to narrow and exclusivist nationalist ideologies and provincial affinities. But as in Europe it brought masses of people into greater contact with their national communities and enabled the wider introduction of literacy, as well as the expansion of transport networks and greater electrification in urban society—a process that had already been set in motion by the Ottoman reforms of the 1850s but now accelerated several fold.
The presence of army camps near major towns catalyzed many of these changes. Khalid Fahmy has examined the conflictual modernity brought about by Muhammad Ali's army on nineteenth-century Egypt. This process of massive military socialization came to Palestine several decades later, especially after the conscription act of 1914. The first segments of the population to experience the impact of this mobilization were peasants and small-town conscripts. In the Arab East, as in mid-nineteenth-century Egypt, local society underwent changes that altered the rural landscape and redefined its relationship to the city. In his major study of the criminal underworld in World War I Alexandria, The Men of Raya and Sekina, Salah Issa examines the world created by the labor battalions—a sort of conscript peasant labor force created by the British administration, the exact equivalent of the Ottoman Tawabeer al 'amaleh (labor battalions; amele taburlari in Turkish) described in Ihsan Turjman's diary of his war years in Palestine.
These conscript "volunteer labor battalions"—essentially compulsory work gangs—were crucial instruments in building projects, assigned to build roads, railroad tracks, army encampments, and military installations. The misery of these conscripts, often sent to die in the distant expanses of Anatolia or in Gallipoli or the Sinai desert, was tempered by a salutary side: they were offered free food, lodging, and (sometimes) relocation to the big cities of the empire. These forced "volunteers" had almost no option but to join the army. The alternative was often death by starvation. Moreover, the conscripts, isolated in their camp life, developed a critical distance from the normative ethics of their original communities when they moved to the margins of major cities like Alexandria and Cairo.
Since one of their major tasks was to remove the dead and the injured from the battlefield, they became used to the sight of blood and war casualties. They became immune to death, and the mass carnage of war. The ethical norms of civilian life, and the communal boundaries of behaviour from which they had originally come, no longer restrained them in an atmosphere in which killing the enemy became a primary target.
The conscripts also became used to new patterns of consumption and behavior, which created a further rupture from their earlier habitat:
They became attuned to life in the big city, in which they created the illusion that it was their last port of migration; one that would realize their dream of a more hopeful life than the life of village drudgery they came from.... They became used to a cycle of disciplined work, and experienced the luxury of three meals a day, of consuming meat, and buqsumat (army biscuits) and jam—and of periodic changing of their clothes with clean attire. War gave them the opportunity to meet men from other regions which they had only heard about, and to travel in open markets and city boulevards which they had not dreamt of seeing before.
Above all, these experiences of war made it difficult for these conscripts to go back to their villages and towns, and made them shed what Issa calls "the virtue of contentment" typical among Turkish and Arab peasants. Upon their release, this "loss of contentment," among other things, created the social background for the criminal underworld that haunted Alexandria and other port cities of the Mediterranean in the postwar period.
In Palestine the war transformed the country into one major construction site. The Syrian and Palestinian labor battalions (Tawabeer al 'amaleh) were mobilized by the Ottoman Corps of Army Engineers to substantially modernize the communication and transportation system. Many features of Palestine's modernity that have been attributed to the British colonial administration seem to have been initiated by the Ottomans in this period. In the first modern history of Palestine in the new century (published in 1920), Khalil Totah and Omar Salih Barghouti discussed the major changes brought about by the technological exigencies of war. Water wells were drilled all over the country and linked through pipes to the major urban centers. Railroads linked the northern part of the country to the southern front; a network of telephones and telegraph lines connected the country to the outside world. Post offices, which originated in consular European services, were unified and replaced by the Ottoman postal services; roads were expanded to allow the passage of military traffic and mechanized cars (automobiles and buses). Public hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies were introduced in all provinces to combat the malaria, cholera, and typhus epidemics during the war. urban poor. The labor battalions that built this infrastructure—recruited from released prisoners, village dwellers (chosen by lottery), and the urban poor—were different from the conscripts in the army (nizamiyyeh), who undertook the brunt of the fighting on the front and from whose ranks emerged the two diaries I discuss below.
Nevertheless, the emancipatory features of war affected both the regulars and the "volunteers" (because the latter often belonged to minority groups, the Ottomans deemed them unreliable for the front). They both experienced army discipline in military camps, were uprooted from their traditional communities, and traveled throughout the empire for the first time; and both came in contact with "ethnic others" in the imperial army: Turks, Kurds, Syrians, Albanians, and Bulgarians, as well as Austrian and German officers from the European Allies.
The war period also witnessed substantial transformations of lifestyles and work habits. Pocket watches were now worn by the urban population and regulated the beginning and end of work days. Men increasingly met in coffeehouses rather than in each other's homes. An increasing number of middle-class women removed their veils, joined the workforce, and participated in the emerging secular public culture. In Jerusalem and Jaffa (as in Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus) nightclubs and bordellos became available to members of the armed forces under the regulation of the state. In their history of turn-of-the-century Palestine, Totah and Barghouti observe the beneficial interaction between the civilians and the military, and the impact of travel to Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo on people from small towns. But they also lament the decline of the old moral order when people were exposed to the "degenerate" influences of army life:
During the war we witnessed the spread of social diseases among city folks, and we thought that this was a national product [of the war]. But when the German and Austrian soldiers arrived we found that they were worse [than us]. We attributed their behaviour to their contacts with the Turks. And when the British army arrived, we found that they were even more degenerate, for there is no vice and immodesty that is beyond them. We concluded that war is the source of this moral corruption, especially since the city population, and especially those who live in the vicinity of army camps were much more degenerate than those who lived in villages and towns away from military centres.
Yet despite the writers' judgmental tone, they had been ambivalent about the impact of war on Palestine's destiny. They believed that war brought some degree of progress, discipline, and certainly nationalism to the Arab East. Their fears stemmed as much from uncertainty about the new secular modernity as from unease about the unknown future of Palestine after the loss of the Ottoman motherland.
In the annals of World War I much rethinking about the evolution of Arab and Turkish nationalism is under way. Among Arab historians, this has mainly taken the form of rectifying the nationalist historiography of scholars like Khaldun Sati Husari. On the Turkish side, scholars are also a reexamining the idea of an Arab "betrayal" of the Ottomans during the Arab Revolt of 1916–18. Historian Gurcel Goncu noted recently that Arab recruits constituted about three hundred thousand soldiers, a third of the Ottoman forces in 1914—far more than the number of soldiers who followed the banner of the Arab Revolt. In the 2004 ceremonies marking the eighty-eighth anniversary of the Ottoman victory at Gallipoli, the participation of individual soldiers from countries such as New Zealand, Australia, and other Western nations was duly noted, but not the huge [non]presence of soldiers from the Arab provinces, all of whom were subsumed under the Ottoman banner.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Year of the Locust by Salim Tamari. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of FiguresAcknowledgments
1. The Erasure of Ottoman Palestine
2. The Diary of Ihsan Turjman
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
"A must-read for both researchers and the general reading public."—This Week
In Palestine
"A major contribution to the field of social and cultural history of twentieth-century Palestine."—Arab Studies Journal
"Impressively thoughtful, layered, and well-documented. . . . A precise and well-done history."—Middle East Journal