Jewish Settlement
The second parliamentary showdown between the CUP and its opposition occurred in the spring of 1911. The decentralist opposition launched a frontal attack against the CUP-controlled government by bringing to the agenda the sensitive issue of Zionist settlement, which closely concerned segments of the Arab constituency. The budget discussions, in the context of which the Zionist issue was broached, became also the forum in which Turkish-Arab tensions, concurrently unleashed in the press, were voiced.
At the end of 1910 an article by the owner of the İstanbul daily Al-‘arab, Ubeydullah (deputy for the Anatolian province of Aydın), used language offensive to the Arabs while discussing the rebellion in Asir. Immediately picked up by the increasingly vocal opposition press, this particular article reverberated widely in the Arab provinces. Sharif Husayn, who was waging the war in Asir against Idrisi, expressed his concerns about the article, and the government had to send assurances that Ubeydullah was properly advised.[66] The opposition press in Beirut and Damascus made the article the launching pad of a systematic antigovernment campaign in an anti-Turkish idiom. The first outburst appeared in ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraysi’s Al-mufid in Beirut in the form of an anti-Turkish poem. Alarmed by the divisive language, the Ministry of the Interior communicated to the provinces that similar publications should be prevented. It also dispatched to Beirut an official, who spoke Arabic and was expected to render useful service in ending the dispute.[67] As the Damascus governor Galib Bey reported after five months of this press campaign, some papers had taken it upon themselves to promote the “separation of elements” (i.e., Arab and Turk) by sowing discord and little could be done with the existing press law to suppress such action.[68]
Other factors contributed to making an assault against the government particularly opportune in the first months of 1911. The winter had been a particularly severe one, especially in northern Syria, causing much suffering and inducing the tribes to raid villages and towns.[69] More relevant to the issue of Jewish settlements, reports from Jerusalem and Beirut had raised alarm about some families selling land to Jewish immigrants, on which large-scale construction was rumored to be taking place.[70]
In the spring of 1911 the deliberations on the budget provided the opposition with an opportunity to embark on a multifaceted attack on the CUP government. On 25 February ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Zahrawi[71] took the floor to denounce salary increases endorsed in Parliament for some high officials. He dwelled on a proposed increase for the salary of the secretary of the Chamber of Notables and pointed to the wide discrepancy in pay between the highest and lower officials. He concluded that a certain lower-level secretary in the same Chamber, “from the Arab nation that has no representatives in the offices of government,” was being paid less than his colleagues.[72] This was the first assertion in Parliament that Arabs were underrepresented and underprivileged in state offices, indeed in Parliament itself. During the budget talks the ultimate concern was with finances and these intimations of alleged discrimination were not addressed.
Two sessions later, opposition deputies Lütfi Fikri and İsmail Hakkı (Gümülcine) accused the Unionist government of operating under the influence of Zionists in concluding certain loan agreements and favoring Jews with alleged links to Zionism when granting economic concessions.[73] İsmail Hakkı referred to Zionism as an appalling malady in the internal politics of the state and went on to describe the goals of Zionism as the establishment of a state extending from Palestine to Mesopotamia through a systematic increase of the number of Jews in those regions.[74]
The opposition’s charges were taken up on the one hand by the Jewish deputies,[75] and on the other by Minister of the Interior Talat and Grand Vizier İbrahim Hakkı Pasha. The Jewish deputies rejected the claim that there was an attempt to establish a Jewish government and disavowed any links between Ottoman Jewry and the Zionists. The ministers disclaimed the alleged links of the implicated Ottoman Jews with Zionism. The Arab deputies remained passive during the discussion. The brief interjections by two deputies, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Yusuf (Damascus) and Ruhi al-Khalidi (Jerusalem), served to discredit the arguments of the opposition deputies. But when Ubeydullah, the deputy from Aydın, who had been tainted by his derogatory remarks about Arabs in his Al-‘arab, accused the opposition of being motivated by spite, four Arab deputies—Zahrawi, Khalid al-Barazi (Hama), ‘Abd al-Mahdi (Karbala), and Rida al-Sulh (Beirut)—rallied to the opposition’s support and threatened to leave the floor unless Ubeydullah retracted his words. “We will leave,” al-Sulh declared, “so that you can go ahead and insult the Arabs now.”
On the whole, during this first debate about Zionism, the division of the Arab deputies between the government and the opposition remained the rule. Nevertheless, the parliamentary debate highlighted the Zionist issue, and more attention was paid to it in the Arab provinces in its wake. Palestinian Arabs sent telegrams to Parliament asking for a halt to Jewish immigration. The press took a keener interest in the issue.[76] For the first time a work written by an Arab, Najib Nassar, on Zionism appeared in Haifa warning of the dangers of Jewish immigration and urging the people to assume greater responsibility to stop the Zionist tide. This increase in public awareness of Zionism led the Arab deputies to take a clear position in the question of Zionist immigration and land purchase. Shukri al-‘Asali, who had carried out an anti-Zionist campaign as kaymakam of Nazareth and was elected to Parliament in the Damascus by-election as these debates were taking place in İstanbul, joined al-Sulh and al-Khalidi in this effort.[77]
In May 1911 the Arab deputies brought the issue of Zionism to the Chamber during the deliberations on the budget of the Ministry of the Interior. On 16 May Ruhi al-Khalidi took the floor expressing his wish to hear the government’s position on an “internal issue,” namely Zionism, before the budget negotiations started.[78] He addressed how the Jews had settled in Palestine and acquired property despite legal prohibitions and maintained that this had been possible because of the officials’ corruption. He proceeded with an extended lecture on Zionism. Even though such a lengthy discourse was out of place in the context of the budget talks, his account was heard with interest. The floor, betraying its ignorance on the subject, urged al-Khalidi on as he talked about the difference between Zionism and Semitism, the different origins of Jews, the formation of the first colonies by Russian Jews in Jaffa, Herzl’s and Mendelsohn’s theories, and so on. He also read various telegrams from Ottoman Jewish leaders and societies denouncing Zionism. He cited biblical verses that depicted Palestine as the Jewish promised land, drawing criticism from the Jewish deputies.[79]
Khalidi was followed by Sa‘id al-Husayni, who dwelled on Jewish land purchases in Jerusalem and urged the government to take more effective measures against Jewish land acquisition. When it was Shukri al-‘Asali’s turn, he proceeded with the same kind of historical introduction to Zionism as al-Khalidi’s. Claiming to speak on the basis of his firsthand experience and investigations, he asserted that three-fourths of Tiberias and one-fourth of Haifa had been acquired by Jews. He accused the government of indifference and of yielding even strategic sites to them. Talat responded that Jews were entitled to buy property anywhere in the empire except in the Hijaz.[80]
The speeches of the Arab deputies did not create the desired alarm. An Albanian deputy, Hafız İbrahim (İpek), raised objections about procedure and complained that the deputies should not be allowed to make speeches on whatever matter crossed their minds. He said that the question of the Jews was neither novel nor as alarming as presented. He scoffed at the notion that “one hundred thousand Jews who have come to Jerusalem will conquer Syria and Iraq.” According to Hafız İbrahim, the Jews were taking over not territories but the economy, as they had done even in Britain, and added that all of Salonika’s trade was in their hands. Dismissing Rida al-Sulh’s attempts to remind him that the Salonika Jews were not foreigners, he pointed to the fact that the trade of Beirut was also in the hands of foreigners. Instead of resenting the foreigners, he concluded, the Ottomans should try to reach their standards.
The discussion on Zionism came to an abrupt halt and the Chamber proceeded to other matters. The next day, apparently swayed by the representatives of the Zionist movement in İstanbul,[81] the Bulgarian deputy Dimitri Vlahof took the floor to speak about the potential economic benefits of Jewish immigration.[82] His statements, at times factually incorrect, met with the protests of Arab deputies. Yet the Arabs were not able to pursue the issue further and apply pressures on the government. The deliberations on Zionism dissipated amidst the broader issue of the budget negotiations.
The unanimity that the Arab deputies had displayed in the Lynch affair was missing during the debates on Zionism, when the battle lines between the centralists and the decentralists were drawn more sharply. Decentralist Arab deputies strengthened the opposition’s assault through periodic outbursts. No sooner had al-‘Asali entered Parliament than he took up the theme of discrimination that had been broached by al-Zahrawi in more militant terms. He decried Arab underrepresentation in state offices, disagreed with the proposition that there was a shortage of properly trained Arabs, and maintained that being Arab was the main reason for rejection when applying for a government post. He demanded legal regulations to ensure the appointment of Arabs to official posts.[83]
These proceedings in Parliament should be viewed against the background of the articulation of the decentralist agenda in an Arabist idiom outside of Parliament. The press articles in Beiruti and, to a lesser extent, Damascene papers advanced similar demands for upholding Arab interests. Accusations and counteraccusations between the Unionist and the Arabist press started in November 1910 and continued through the entire duration of the parliamentary debates on the budget, Arab discrimination, and Zionism. This period also witnessed a renewed effort to constitute an Arab caucus in Parliament. A meeting was held in the home of Sayyid Talib, one of the decentralist leaders in Parliament and later outside it, with the participation of the majority of Arab deputies.[84] Presumably, one initiative that came out of this organizational activity was a letter that was secretly relayed to Sharif Husayn of Mecca imploring him to assume the leadership of an anti-Turkish Arab movement.
The deputy governor in Beirut communicated to İstanbul in April his apprehensions about the growing rancor in the press. He impressed on the government that “up to now such national conflict would have been unimaginable here.” He also reported on a meeting he arranged with the owners of local newspapers. The journalists blamed the CUP for the animosity and stated that they were simply responding to the accusations of Turkish papers. The deputy governor expressed concern about foreigners seizing the opportunity to create further division. He urged the Ottoman navy to visit Beirut “to confirm bonds.”[85] The Ministry of the Interior replied that a delegation would be sent at the end of the parliamentary session. The despatch of this delegation would have to wait until the election campaign of the following year.