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. 1915 was the Year of the Locust ('am al-Jarad) in the popular memory of peasants and city folk alike. The locust invasion continues to evoke, four generations later, the combined memory of natural disasters and the man-made devastation of war. The consequence was the erasure of four centuries of a rich and complex Ottoman patrimony in which popular narratives of war and nationalist ideology colluded.
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The war also contributed to redefining the nature of the state and its relationship to its subjects. In the case of Palestine, the war was a watershed, separating the country from Syrian expanses and bringing British colonial rule, thereby creating new borders, new citizenship, and new forms of national consciousness.
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In Palestine (which was the southern part of the Ottoman Shami provinces), the war transformed the country into one major construction site. The equivalent Syrian and Palestinian Work Battalions (tawabeer al-amale in Arabic, or amele taburlar? in Turkish) were mobilized by the Ottoman Corps of Army Engineers to substantially modernize the communication and transportation system. Many features of Palestine's modernity attributed to the British colonial administration seem to have been initiated by the Ottomans in this period. In the first work on modern history of Palestine in the new century (published in 1920), Khalil Totah and Omar Salih al-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 centres. Railroads linked the north 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 now unified and replaced by the Ottoman postal services; roads were expanded to allow the operation 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 that sprung up during the war. In those construction projects, the conscript battalions were crucial instruments. They were recruited from among released prisoners, villages chosen by lottery, and the ranks of the urban poor (in other words, minority groups who were deemed by the Ottomans as unreliable for the front). In this regard it is important to distinguish between the organization and functions of the 'volunteer' conscripts (Labour Battalions) and the conscript army (nizamiyyah) who undertook most of the fighting on the front.
Nevertheless, the emancipatory features of war affected both categories of soldiers, the regulars and the 'volunteers'. They both experienced army discipline in military camps, both were uprooted from their traditional communities and travelled 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 ranks of the European Allies.
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In Jerusalem and Jaffa (as in Beirut, Aleppo and Damascus) nightclubs and bordellos became available to members of the armed forces under the legal regulation of the state.
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On the Turkish side, there is also a re-examination of the issue of an Arab 'betrayal' of the Ottomans during the Arab Revolt of 1916-1917. Historian Gurcel Goncu noted recently that Arab recruits constituted about 300,000 soldiers, a third of the total Ottoman forces in 1914 - far more than the total number of soldiers who followed the banner of the Arab Revolt. In the 2004 ceremonies marking the 88th anniversary of the Ottoman victory at Gallipoli, the participation of individual soldiers from various countries, such as New Zealand, Australia, and other Western nations was duly noted, but not the impressive absence of soldiers from the Arab provinces, all of whom were subsumed under the Ottoman banner.
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[...] victories are portrayed today as Turkish, not Ottoman, victories. This pattern is equally true for the battles of al-Arish, Suez, Gaza, Megiddo and Kut al-Amara, where native soldiers (i.e. Iraqi, Hijazi, Palestinian and Syrian recruits) constituted a large component of the Ottoman troops. In the diaries of the two soldiers - Mehmet (Muhammad) al-Fasih of Mersin and Ihsan al-Turjman of Jerusalem - this silencing of the ethnically-mixed army comes to light, but only as various nationalities' loyalty to the idea of Ottomanism begins to crack under the strain of the war.
Second Lieutenant Muhammad al-Fasih of Mersin and Private Ihsan al-Turjman from the old city of Jerusalem came from distant sides of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire to join as soldiers in the Sultan's army, thereby encapsulating the manner in which the Great War transformed the lives of its citizens in two different directions - immersion into Republican Turkish nationalism for one, and Arab separatism for the other.
What was common to al-Fasih and Turjman was that they both kept a daily record of their war experiences, and in so doing preserved for posterity a vivid narrative of the great divide that separated the communitarian, multi-ethnic, imperial domain of the end of the nineteenth century from the nationalist era of the post WWI period. Both soldiers were born around 1893, and both were conscripted in July 1914 after the declaration of seferberlik, the general mobilization that brought Turkey into the war alongside Germany and the Central Alliance against Western Allies. Both came from middle or mercantile classes. Fasih's father was a customs clerk, while the elder Turjman was an old city merchant from a landed family that had lost the bulk of its wealth.
Two ordinary soldiers serving in the same imperial army and writing a daily diary is a unique phenomenon for this period of mass illiteracy. For these diaries to have survived and come to light almost a century after the event is quite exceptional, for even among the elite literati very few ventured to record their observations, and even fewer of those records became available to the public. The narratives of al-Fasih and Turjman are particularly valuable in that they recorded the impact of the war on their society, on their own psychological transformations, and the trauma it produced among their officers and comrades.
Unlike Turjman, who reveals that he spent the war years 'playing with my moustache' and using all his skills and family connections to evade being sent to the southern front in Suez, Muhammad al-Fasih was a decorated soldier who fought courageously in Gallipoli - and later in Gaza and Beersheba.
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[...] one episode of his diaries when he wanted to cheer his comrades trapped in the trenches of Gallipoli, he sings Damascene songs in Arabic together with his fellow Mersini soldier Agati.
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Martyrdom was the last item on Ihsan's mind. His main objective was to survive the war in order to marry his sweetheart, Suraya. Turjman was easygoing, nonchalant, and served in the army out of compulsion. He continuously questioned the political objectives of the war, and celebrated the defeat of his own leadership and their German allies. Nevertheless, both soldiers found solace in the camaraderie of the army.
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Reflective intrusions are the exception in Fasih's writing. The thrust of his diary was to keep a record of military operations and his role in them. He is precise, matter of fact, and telegraphic in style. Turjman, by contrast, is mainly reflective, discursive, and meandering. His aim ostensibly is to find in his diary an intimate outlet for forbidden private thoughts, political and personal.
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When the general mobilization was announced by Ottoman authorities in November 1914, Ihsan was conscripted and sent to central Palestine. He was on the verge of being sent to the Suez front in Sinai when he was transferred to serve in Jerusalem's military headquarters under the commander Ali Roshen Bey.
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Ihsan served as a petty clerk at Roshen's headquarters. His main job was to review petitions for exemption from service, and file paper work within the Ottoman military bureaucracy. In that capacity, he was privy to political discussions that took place among Turkish, Albanian and Syrian officers in Palestine - as well as the occasional German visiting officers - and was able to observe the deteriorating mood of the rank and file. The significance of his diary, written daily by candlelight during the early war years, is that it reflects the cosmology of a 'middling' citizen of the city at the critical period of Palestine's history that ushered in the demise of four centuries of Ottoman rule and made possible an unknown future, as the British army advanced on Gaza and Beersheba from the South, and bombarded Jaffa and Haifa from the sea.
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The Turjman diary opens with self-interrogation about the destiny of the Holy Land after the war. "I know that the days of this [Ottoman] state are numbered. There is no doubt that it is heading for dissolution sooner or later. But what will be the fate of Palestine after the war?" he wrote on 28 March, 1915.
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It was the failure of the Suez campaign - in large part due to bad Turkish intelligence about the strength of pro-Ottoman forces in Egypt, as well as underestimation of the fighting capacities of Indian troops under British command and weak performance by Arab troops in Sinai - that unleashed Jamal Pasha's campaign of repression against the Arab nationalist movement in the spring of 1915.
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In one episode Ihsan describes Jamal Pasha's wedding to a 'Jewish prostitute' from Jerusalem as an example of his favouritism. The reference here is to the commander's concubine Lea Tannenbaum whose family was active in the pro-Ottoman Red Crescent Society.
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The pilgrims in Jerusalem are no happier than the pilgrims at Medina. The people of Jesus are as hungry as the people of Muhammad and are equally doomed to live in misery. The only difference is the majestic décor of the beggar in Jerusalem. Medina was an Asiatic bazaar which has turned religion into trade goods. Jerusalem is a Western theatre which has turned religion into a play... I thought the priests of the Holy Sepulcher were wearing false beards. When they bend down, one can see the bulge of their pistol-holsters beneath their robes.
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Monday 10 July, 1916. No more crops in the city. Jerusalem has not seen more difficult days. Bread and wheat are not available anymore. The municipality until recently used to distribute free bread to the poor after nine o'clock, but not anymore. I remember going home from military headquarters at eleven o'clock [and] seeing a long line of women coming from the bakeries grabbing pieces of black bread the likes of which I have never seen. They used to fight over this bread and wait for it until midnight.
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The record contains a wealth of observations about daily life in Jerusalem in 1915-1916; the reaction of the urban poor and artisans to deprivation; and the disasters that accompanied the locust attacks and the army's confiscation of property, means of transport and work animals. But the diary is also full of intimate social details about the soldier's private life: his love affair with a neighbouring woman; his daily visits to his teacher and mentor; his disgust at the debaucheries of his commanding officers; his constant (and failed) attempts to evade army service; the role of rumours in the life of the city; his detective work to uncover the identity of the thief that robbed his house, and his shame at discovering it was his cousins; his rift with his father and family on this subject; and the devastation caused by cholera, famine, locust attack, and the wholesale forced movement of population. Ihsan survives all of these disasters only to be shot fatally by an officer of the withdrawing Ottoman army in 1917. He does not live to see his 25th birthday.
Ihsan's world is permeated by war, and by impending catastrophe: his disrupted studies, scenes of disease and hunger in the streets; the absence of tobacco from stores; and his declining prospects for marriage to his beloved as his and his family's fortunes begins to dissipate. Ihsan's despair seems to echo William Pfaff's belief that "the moral function of war (has been) to recall humans to the reality at the core of existence: the violence that is part of our nature and is responsible for the fact that human history is a chronicle of tragedies".
Fonte:
http://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/30_tamari_1.pdf
