(Christian) Arabs and (Russian) Jews: Identity and Zionism Debates in the Transottoman Migration Society of Palestine (1880-1925)

Eveline Dierauff

Together with the sub-project by Alexandra Gerykova, this project examines debates on collective identity among Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine around the turn of the 20th century. This sub-project investigates local concepts of collective identity, group relations as well as state and society building in Palestine in the years before, during and shortly after World War I. This was a period of rapid transformation from Ottoman imperial rule to the British Mandate and rising Palestinian-Arab nationalist aspirations. In several case studies, the project analyses how political concepts from various backgrounds were debated by intellectuals from the rising Palestinian middle class. As main sources the Arab press, diaries and other types of contemporary Palestinian literature will be examined. The Palestinian actors’ views were deeply shaped by concepts of modernity, the age of Ottoman reforms and the cosmopolitanism of a trans-Ottoman migration society in the Jerusalem and Jaffa regions. However, the most controversial discussions developed around the catastrophic events during the 1910s such as the Tripoli War (1911), the Balkan Wars (1912/13), the rise of the Arab Movement for Decentralization in 1913 and, finally, the end of the Ottoman regime during World War I that resulted in the establishment of new political structures by the colonial powers. As a consequence of the political crisis, rising concepts of nationalism began to replace former ideals of multi-confessional and multi-ethnic Ottoman unity.