Defining Neighbors

by Gribetz, Jonathan Marc

  ʿAbboud’s rhetoric goes even further, linguistically fashioning a single religious community that unites Palestinian Christians and Muslims, and this is consistently done in relation and contrast to the Jews. In a speech to Muslims and Christians, ʿAbboud warned that “the goal of the Jews is dangerous for our religious-communal existence [kayānunā al-millī] and our national life [ḥayātunā al-qawmiyya].”6 Speaking in Arabic, a language with a grammatical dual form, ʿAbboud nonetheless chooses the singular (rather than the dual) in the phrase “our religious-communal existence,” suggesting that the Muslims and Christians of Palestine share not merely a “national life” but also a “religious-communal existence.” In a later speech, also to a mixed crowd of Christians and Muslims, ʿAbboud appealed not only to their “Arab pride” in their common “nation” and “race” but also to their common language, “our noble Arabic language, the Sultaness of the Semitic languages,”7 yet another mark of identity implicitly contrasted with the Jews and their less exalted Semitic language. This is not to say, though, that particularistic Christian language is wholly absent from this speech. In the text’s conclusion, those who argue that the battle against Zionism is already lost are reminded of “the formal and repeated protestations of his holiness the Pope.”8 Did not the Pope “make clear,” asks the editor of the published speech rhetorically, “that it is forbidden for Jews to rule in the homeland of Christ [waṭan al-masīḥ] and for other religions and races to be subjugated in it on account of Jewish domination?”9 Even with this powerful reference to Palestine as “Christ’s homeland,” though, this is a defense of all “other,” i.e., non-Jewish, “religions and races.” My book provides some of the necessary context to understand this intermixing of religious and racial language in the development of a national identity.

  RACE AS A TOOL OF INCLUSION OR ANNEXATION

  Second, it is worth emphasizing the way in which the racial perspective of Zionists like Ben-Zvi informed their perceptions of nationalism. In contrast to Europe, where race in the fin de siècle was generally a language and tool of national differentiation, in the sphere of Palestine, racial discourse was able to serve an entirely opposite end. As we saw in chapter 3, Ben-Zvi imagined that Palestine’s fellahin, who were in his view racially Jewish, “might become a distinct nation, or they might be dragged toward one of the nations that is established in Palestine in the process of national differentiation that has begun in our time.”10 In other words, in the context of Palestine, race permitted, in the minds of some, a marked flexibility in the boundaries of nationhood. The concept of race could be employed by nationalists not merely to divide communities and to legitimate that division as primordial and scientific; it could also be employed by nationalists to unite apparently disparate communities, for no less national ends.

  RELIGION AND RACE IN THE AGE OF THE MANDATE

  If religion and race were among the dominant categories in the Late Ottoman period, what came of these categories in the subsequent years of the British Mandate? The encounter that these later decades witnessed is typically viewed as a textbook case of nationalist conflict, that is, as a conflict between groups that perceive themselves and their counterparts in national terms. Did religious and racial modes of perception and identification morph into national ones, and if so, through what process? In part, ʿAbboud’s simultaneous use of religious, racial, and national language discussed above alludes to the fluidity between these categories and the ways in which one might be employed in the service of another. Methodologically, however, it is difficult to discern which is the most significant, motivating category and which others are simply serving it. Were speeches such as ʿAbboud’s “truly” nationalist arguments expressed in a language that had not yet fully evolved for the purposes of nationalism and that still depended on older forms of categorization? Were the elites of each community “really” thinking in national terms but employing other terminology and logic to appeal to the masses? Or did all these categories simply continue meaningfully to be used simultaneously, as they had in the Late Ottoman period? I do not propose to answer these questions here—they obviously demand considerable research on the post-Ottoman period. I do, however, offer some suggestive reflections on the years that followed based on the Late Ottoman background that I have presented in this book.

  It seems reasonable to expect that modes of categorization and perception might have changed after the fall of the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the imposition of a League of Nations mandatory regime led by a European (majority Christian) government that was charged with helping to forge a “national home for the Jewish people.”11 But to the extent that mutual perceptions in Palestine were informed by the legal structures of the governing regime, matters in this regard did not change quite as radically with the arrival of the British conquerors as one might suspect. The British left in place much of the Ottoman millet system. In Article 83 of the 1922 Palestine Order in Council, the British declared that “each Religious Community recognized by the Government shall enjoy autonomy for the internal affairs of the Community, subject to the provisions of any Ordinance or Order issued by the High Commissioner.” Four years later, in 1926, the British issued the Religious Communities Organization Ordinance, establishing the process by which a “Religious Community” would apply to the high commissioner to make “regulations for its organization as a religious community and its recognition as such by the Government of Palestine.”12 Assaf Likhovski explains that the British may have left the millet structure in place “to prevent or at least retard the rise of a nationalist nonsectarian notion of Arab identity.” Indeed, the British treated Palestine’s population as three separate groups differentiated by religious affiliation—not merely in matters clearly related to religion—such that the mandatory administration envisioned three separate electoral colleges of Muslims, Christians, and Jews that would elect members of a proposed legislative council. It was only in the 1930s that the British began to include “race” or “nationality” (not as a replacement for but simply an addition to “religion”) as a category of classification of the population in their census.13

  The British did not merely maintain the Ottoman millet system; in certain respects, they actually expanded the Ottoman focus on religion in defining groups in Palestine. As Rashid Khalidi has stressed, the British actually invented “Islamic” institutions that lacked precedent either in Palestine or elsewhere in the Islamic world. These inventions included the Supreme Muslim Council (al-Majlis al-islāmī al-aʿlā), which was granted extensive powers including control over the revenues of the country’s public awqāf14 as well as over appointments of a wide variety of religious bureaucrats and other officials.15 The British also significantly refashioned other religious institutions, especially the position the British named the grand mufti of Palestine (muftī filasṭīn al-akbar), vastly expanding the authority of the former position of Jerusalem’s mufti for the Hanafi rite.16 In other words, far from muting or limiting the place of religion in public life, the British in Palestine consolidated and fortified Islamic religious institutions and positions (even if for ends entirely their own). Thus, despite the fall of the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the advent of the British Mandate, even if one considers simply the legal, public frameworks of Palestinian society, there is ample reason to suspect that religion would have persisted as a primary lens of mutual perception.

  And evidence suggests that religion remained at the center of the encounter, indicated not least by the fact that the moments of greatest conflict in the mandate period were generally associated with religious festivals or locations with strong religious valences.17 Consider the riots of 1920 at the time of the Nabī Mūsā pilgrimage to a location where the biblical Moses was believed to have been buried; or the calls “to protect al-Aqsā from Jewish attacks” in the wake of the incidents at and around al-Ḥaram ash-Sharīf, the Temple Mount, around the Jewish holidays of Yom Kippur 1928 and Tishʿah be-Av 1929; or the so-called Great Revolt of 1936 through 1939, af
ter the funeral of the Muslim preacher ʿIzz ad-Din al-Qassam, who was eulogized popularly as “Islam’s ideal soldier.”18 In each of these cases, religion should not be considered the sole factor in either creating or sustaining the hostility felt between the various communities of Palestine, but it was certainly a factor, and an important one, that informed (and sometimes misinformed) the groups’ perceptions of one another, even as the language and logic of nationalism became more deeply ingrained on all sides.

  The language of race and the notion of a racial link between Jews and Arabs also continued to play a role in the years immediately following the Great War. In January 1919, in the context of the postwar peace conference in Paris, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met with Faisal Hussein, who had led the wartime Arab Revolt against the Ottomans and then proclaimed himself king of Syria. Weizmann and Faisal produced an agreement that stressed race as a point of commonality: “His Royal Highness the Amir Faisal, representing and acting on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of Hejaz and Dr. Chaim Weizmann, representing and acting on behalf of the Zionist Organization, mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bond existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people.”19 In the subsequent months in Paris, Faisal continued to use this language in expressing his sense of connection to the Jews and even his sympathy for the Zionist enterprise. In a March 1919 letter to the Viennese-born American Zionist leader (and future US Supreme Court justice) Felix Frankfurter, Faisal wrote of his belief that “the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race.” As such, he continued, “we Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.” Indeed, deeming the Zionist proposals submitted to the peace conference as “moderate and proper,” Faisal offered to support them. Upon the success of the Zionist project, Faisal assured Frankfurter that he and his fellow Arabs “will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.”20 In emphasizing the connection between Jews and Arabs, Faisal was obviously seeking Jewish support for his political ambitions in Syria and the broader Arab world. However, regardless of the sincerity of his expressions of commonality with and support for the Jews and Zionism, that he framed these expressions through the language and logic of race is significant.

  “IRRESPECTIVE OF RACE AND RELIGION”: A NEW DISCOURSE OF DIFFERENCE IN THE GLOBAL SPHERE

  If, despite their persistent presence, the language and categories of race and religion were less pronounced during the British Mandate than under the Ottomans, the official terms of the mandate likely played a key role in this process. The League of Nations famously incorporated the Balfour Declaration into the preamble of its 1922 Mandate for Palestine, condemning the British (apparently on their own insistence and against the objections of other league members21) to follow through on their dual commitments to promote “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” while somehow also doing nothing “which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Article 2 of the Palestine Mandate restates the Balfour commitment in new and highly revealing terms:

  The Mandatory [i.e., the British] shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative, and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.22

  Whereas in the Balfour Declaration, Palestine’s Muslim and Christian Arabs were referred to as “existing non-Jewish communities,” half a decade later, in 1922, they were now regarded as “inhabitants” (though the categories of rights they could expect to be safeguarded remained the same, still ambiguous “civil and religious”). For our purposes, however, the more significant and consequential change from Balfour’s language was the addition of the phrase “irrespective of race and religion.” The League of Nations demanded that there be no discrimination in civil and religious rights on the basis of the categories of race and religion, those very categories that I have highlighted throughout this book.23

  To understand the significance of the decisions by the authors of the mandate to make explicit reference to race and religion, to pair the two, and to insist that these were illegitimate categories of legal or political distinction, we must widen our historical lens far beyond Palestine and even outside the Middle East. The Palestine Mandate document emerged in the context of a series of postwar agreements and mandates imposed by the victorious Allies. As Eric Weitz has argued, the “Paris system,” represented in the fateful decisions that emerged from the Paris Peace Conference at the conclusion of the First World War, stressed “population politics.” By “population politics,” Weitz denotes the Allies’ vision of the political problems “naturally” posed by “essential” differences among populations within individual states.24 From the perspective of the Allies, there were two primary solutions to the problem of heterogeneity in the regions they had conquered during the war. One option was population transfer—whether voluntary or compulsory—that would create demographic homogeneity where it did not exist. The other solution was to permit heterogeneity within a state but to insist that minorities, per se, be granted special rights and protections from the tyranny of the majority.

  In identifying the problematic demographic differences within a single territory that would warrant population transfer or exchange, the league generally pointed to “race” (or otherwise “race” and “language”). For instance, in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, dealing with former Ottoman territories, the Allies insisted that adults

  habitually resident in territories detached from Turkey in accordance with the present Treaty and differing in race from the majority of the population of such territory shall … be entitled to opt for Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Greece, the Hedjaz, Mesopotamia, Syria, Bulgaria or Turkey, if the majority of the population of the State selected is of the same race as the person exercising the right to opt.25

  Turkey and Greece were to permit “reciprocal and voluntary emigration of the populations of Turkish and Greek race in the territories transferred to Greece and remaining Turkish respectively.”26 In the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, concerning territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Allies granted “the right to opt” to migrate to a region in which one would be among the majority to those who differed from the majority in “race and language.”27 Difference in race, or in race and language, constituted a reason to leave, in the minds of the drafters of these treaties, though, as we have recognized in other contexts in this book, it is far from clear what precisely was meant by “race”—an ambiguity accentuated by the Treaty of Sevres’ references to “non-Moslem races.”28 In cases in which population exchange was deemed undesirable or impracticable, “minority rights” were proposed. For these, the Paris system identified three categories of difference—race, language, and religion. At Versailles in 1919, for instance, the new Czecho-Slovak state and Poland were ordered “to protect the interests of inhabitants of that State who differ from the majority of the population in race, language, or religion.”29

  It was in this political, ideological, and terminological environment that the Palestine Mandate was composed. As we have seen, during the Late Ottoman period, for Jews and Arabs in Palestine, religion and race were at once fundamental marks of distinction and sources of intercommunal commonality. Now, however, in the post–Great War moment, these same categories were redefined by a new dominant international system (the League of Nations) and ruling power (the British Mandate). The insistence that governments treat their residents and citizens equally, “irrespective of race and religion,” implied that, above all, these two frames of identity and status were dangerous sources of difference and potential conflict. These categories were at once acknowledged and, at the same time, relegated to the unspeakable and politically irrelevant.

  The Paris system continued to recognize intercommunal difference, of course,
but the main form of difference that it repeatedly legitimated was that of the “nation” (after all, this system created the League of Nations). There were cases in which the league deemed even “nationality” to be an illegitimate basis for discrimination—requiring, in various treaties, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey “to assure full and complete protection of life and liberty to all inhabitants of Bulgaria without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion.” Tellingly, however, the authors of the Palestine Mandate do not mention birth and nationality.

  In identifying race, religion, and language as categories the mandatory power must ignore in relating to the local population, the Palestine Mandate reflected the Allies’ sense that these were the fundamental differences between the communities in Palestine. Beyond merely reflecting the Allies’ assessment, the mandate document also had prescriptive implications. By not naming “nationality” as an illegitimate category of legal distinction (and by following Balfour’s language of “a national home for the Jewish people”), the mandate effectively permitted distinction and advocacy of distinction based on this category. This would help to shape claims and tensions around the category of nation—one that, incidentally, for many Jews and Arabs seemed to fuse religion and race—in the years to come.

  All parties appealed to the terms of the mandate throughout the years of British rule in Palestine; indeed, the language of the mandate document became the subject of intensive exegesis. In explaining, defending, or, as they often did, modifying or reversing their policies, the British would regularly cite their responsibilities as dictated by the text of the mandate. Thus, for instance, in 1931, British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald aimed to clarify the meaning of Article 2 of the mandate, particularly the phrase “safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all inhabitants of Palestine irrespective of race and religion.” MacDonald insisted that “the key to the true purpose and meaning of the sentence is to be found in these concluding words of the article.” This “protective provision applies equally to Jews, Arabs, and all sections of the population,” MacDonald insisted, implying again that these communities were defined and distinguished by these two categories.30 Similarly, the phrase “irrespective of race and religion” was quoted and highlighted in the 1939 White Paper’s restatement of the primary obligations of the mandate.31 Given the persistent British appeal to this phrase, it is perhaps unsurprising that the parties themselves also cited it in seeking to legitimize their own positions and to challenge the legitimacy of their antagonists’ demands. For example, as late as 1946, in its statement to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, the Arab Office called for a representative government in Palestine that “should be based upon the principle of absolute equality of all citizens irrespective of race and religion.”32 Using the terminology of the mandate, the Arab Office called on the Western powers to comply with their own ostensible values, and thus insisted that communities should not be treated differently based on the categories of race and religion. Throughout the years of the mandate, distinctions based on religion and race were delegitimized, requiring the parties—at least rhetori cally—to stress other categories of difference. In this interwar political-ideological context, nationalism seems to have replaced religion and race as the category of legitimate intercommunal distinction.