A recent headline in The Jerusalem Post titled “Turkey expanding Middle East influence to conquer Jerusalem” begs the question: When did the Israeli-Arab Wars begin?
You could start with 1948 and Israel’s War of Independence, a war initiated by the Arabs of the land and the surrounding Arab countries because they could not accept the UN Partition Plan.
Or, you could describe it as a century-long conflict beginning with the Balfour Declaration, as the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi does in his 2020 book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
In fact, the war against the Jewish state began almost 150 years ago, well before the Balfour Declaration and before the first Zionist Congress organized by Theodor Herzl in Basel in 1897. It began in the early 1880s, with Ottoman restrictions on Jewish settlement in Palestine.
Critics of Israel and the Zionist agenda love to point out that during the 1800s, the Jewish population of Palestine, also referred to as Southern Syria by the Ottomans, was very small, only about 5% of the approximate total of 500,000.
What the critics do not mention is that the presence of Jews at all is remarkable given the cholera epidemic of 1831 that devastated the crowded cities where most of the Jewish population lived. Nor do they mention the pogroms of 1834 in Safed and Hebron (500 Jews were killed in Safed alone during a month-long orgy of looting, raping, and killing), and again in Safed in 1838.
Nor do they mention the terrible earthquake of 1837 that devastated the Jewish quarters of Safed and Tiberius, killing thousands of Jews.
It was the First Aliyah, the first organized wave of Jewish immigrants that began in 1881, that resulted in a substantial increase in the number of Jews in the Holy Land. By the time it ended, in 1903, the Jewish population in the Land of Israel had doubled.
Most of the arrivals came from Eastern Europe, especially Russia, pushed by the violence against Jews (pogroms) that broke out following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. A smaller component came from Yemen, in part because of improved travel conditions that accompanied an Ottoman takeover of Yemen, but also pushed by anti-Jewish measures.
None of this is new to those interested in the history of Zionism, but it did surprise me to learn (Neville J Mandel, Middle Eastern Studies, 1974) about the efforts made by the Ottoman government to restrict Jewish settlement in Palestine. The restrictions were in the form of decrees by the Sultan.
The first (1881-82) decreed that foreign Jews could settle anywhere in the empire except Palestine. The second (1882) banned the sale of land in Palestine to foreign Jews, even if they were Ottoman citizens.
The third, the Consolidated Regulations (1900-1901), consisted of rules to prevent Jewish pilgrims from overstaying their visit to the Holy Land and involved a “Special Commission for the Prevention of Jewish Immigrants from Settling in Palestine.”
Zionism vs the Ottoman Empire
The First Aliyah succeeded, despite Ottoman restrictions, because of corrupt local officials who looked the other way, and because some of the newcomers were able to use their foreign status to get around them. Also, the Jewish groups that arrived, especially in the beginning (1881-82), were relatively small and unlikely to attract attention.
For example, the first group of Biluim (an acronym for the house of Jacob, Isaiah 2:5) consisted of 14 university students from the then Russian city of Kharkiv, while only 200 individuals were in the first contingent from Yemen.
So why were the Ottomans so opposed to small numbers of Jews immigrating to a small neglected corner of their enormous empire? According to Mandel, the Sultan and his ministers understood that modern Zionism was a nationalist ideology that might be contagious to other parts of the Ottoman domain.
They were also wary of European designs on the Ottoman Empire, and, in their eyes, the Jews from Eastern Europe were, above all, Europeans.
However, another factor, perhaps the most important one, was that the Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, was also anxious to pursue policies that would benefit the many Arab subjects in his domain, many of whom were chafing under Ottoman rule.
Also, as a Pan-Islamist who viewed himself to be the spiritual leader of all Muslims, how could he simply “hand Jerusalem, the third city of Islam, to the Jews?”
The depth of the Sultan’s feelings was revealed in 1901 when Herzl offered to help pay off the Ottoman debt in return for a charter to allow Jewish settlement in the Holy Land.
The Sultan replied, “The Turkish Empire belongs not to me, but to the Turkish people. I cannot give away any part of it. Let the Jews save their billions. When my Empire is partitioned, they may get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpses will be divided. I will not agree to vivisection.”
The article mentioned at the outset of this column, regarding Turkey’s expanding influence and “neo-Ottoman ambitions” with respect to Israel and Jerusalem, is a reminder that the war against the Jewish state is older and wider in scope than the Israeli-Palestinian arena. Moreover, it is a war that shows no sign of ending soon.
The writer, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor of the University of Waterloo.