More on World War I: Ottoman Empire Expulsion of Jews From Palestine

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

                                                                      Djemal Pasha

The Ottoman–German Alliance was an alliance was ratified on August 2, 1914, shortly following the outbreak of World War I. The alliance was created as part of a joint-cooperative effort that would strengthen and modernize the failing Ottoman military, as well as provide Germany safe passage into neighboring British colonies

In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers, the Germans. Many people from the opposing Allied countries lived in Palestine, and its Turkish officials considered them a threat to military security. More Jews had immigrated to Palestine in 5 waves, starting in 1881 from Russia and a few other eastern European countries. Pogroms that occurred there were driving the Jews out of Russian areas and back to their origins.   

Two waves of expulsion occurred as part of Turkish failed defense of their fading empire.

In December 1914, the Turks expelled up to 6,000 Jews who resided in Jaffa (a city originally in the area of the tribe of Judah). They were resettled in Alexandria, Egypt.  In February 1915 in Syria, Djemal Cemal Pasha exercised absolute power in both military and civil affairs. Cemal Pasha was convinced that an uprising among local Arabs was imminent. Leading Arabs were executed, and notable families deported to Anatolia.  The Ottoman Empire then issued forcible drafts of Jews into the army, demanding Jews to take Ottoman citizenship or either getting expelled from the region before 15 May 1915. Following the devastating effect of the Lebanese famine, situation worsened.  

                                                                          

 Aharon Aharonson ((Hebrew: אהרון אהרנסון‎) (21 May 1876 – 15 May 1919) was a Jewish agronomist, botanist, and Zionist activist, who was born in Romania and lived most of his life in the Land of Israel, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Aaronsohn was the discoverer of emmer (Triticum dicoccoides), believed to be "the mother of wheat.")    described the situation,  "Meanwhile, people are literally starving. Horrified sights have seen our eyes: old women and children wandering, hunger and nightmare-madness in their dying eyes, no food falling under them and dying.  "An unnamed eyewitness stated,  "Even wealthy people in Jerusalem are becoming recipients (of alms) and even courting the remaining."

The repulse of British forces in Palestine in the spring of 1917 was followed by the loss of Jerusalem in December of the same year. The Ottoman authorities deported the entire civilian population of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, The Tel Aviv and Jaffa deportation, pursuant to the order from Ahmed Jamal Djemal Pasha on 6 April 1917. Tel Aviv and Jaffa are joined together, Tel Aviv being the garden suburb of Jaffa.  Founded in 1909, Tel Aviv  became a separate town in 1921.  In this same year were Arab riots going on, forcing Jews to leave Jaffa and find refuge in Tel Aviv.  

The Muslim evacuees were allowed to return before long. 

At the same period, the Balfour Declaration was being negotiated (published on 2 November 1917) in which the British Government declared its support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

By January 1917, British forces had crossed the Sinai Desert and were about to invade Palestine, which alarmed the Turkish authorities. The Ottoman Empire began to become skeptical of the residents in the region, mostly Jews, as the Ottomans disdained them for alleged collaboration with the British.

                                                       

Ottoman officers who successfully defended Gaza during the first battle

The First Battle of Gaza was fought on 26 March 1917, during the first attempt by the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) to invade the south of Palestine in the Ottoman Empire during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the First World War. Fighting took place in and around the town of Gaza on the Mediterranean coast when infantry and mounted infantry from the Desert Column, a component of the Eastern Force, attacked the town. Late in the afternoon, on the verge of capturing Gaza, the Desert Column was withdrawn due to concerns about the approaching darkness and large Ottoman reinforcements. This British defeat was followed a few weeks later by the even more emphatic defeat of the Eastern Force at the Second Battle of Gaza in April 1917.

At the start of March, all the inhabitants of Gaza were expelled, a town of 35,000–40,000 people, mostly Arabs. They had 48 hours to leave "even if crawling on their knees" of the men were conscripted and the rest scattered around Palestine and Syria, first to nearby villages and then further afield as those villages were also evacuated. Death from exposure or starvation was widespread. Gaza did not recover its pre-war population until the 1940s.

Over 40,000 Jews had been forcibly deported, many would not return until after the British conquest and some died on their way, but many Arabs did. Friedman holds that this was a deliberate decision on the part of the Ottoman authorities. Sheffy regards that it is more reflective of cultural and behavioral differences: the Arabs had no central organization, and with their experience of how government decrees were enforced, just remained nearby until the storm had passed, whereas the Jews obeyed the evacuation decree as a group. In any case, when New Zealand troops entered Jaffa in November 1917, only an estimated 8,000 of the previous population of 40,000 was present.

On 28 March 1917, Djemal Pasha ordered the evacuation of the inhabitants of Jaffa. They could go wherever they liked except Jerusalem or Haifa. Farmers with crops in their fields, the workers of the winery in Rishon Lezion, and the teachers and students of the Mikveh Israel school and the Latrun estate were excluded.  

                                                             

             In 1917, Ottoman forces at the shores of the Dead Sea

 Djemal Pasha, who was in charge of the Greater Syrian Theatre of the war, was forced to provide explanations.            

   Ottoman Authority telling Jews to evacuate from Tel Aviv on April 6, 1917; A total of 1,500 Jewish evacuees are thought to have died after heading north and being forced to lead a nomadic existence.

                                                              

The procession to return the exiled Torah scrolls back to Tel Aviv and Jaffa in 1918.

 Ahmed Jamal Pasha effectively separated these groups. The Jewish evacuees returned after the British conquest of Palestine, in the summer of 1918.   

It followed one month after the expulsion of all the inhabitants of the similarly-sized Arab city of Gaza City. This coincided with the larger and systematic repression on minorities by the Ottoman Empire during the World War I.

However, as Turkish nationalism began to rise in the late 19th century, the Jewish position in the empire came into question. The Young Turks, who came to power in 1908, openly espoused the idea that all non-Turkish subjects had to be Turkified. Even though the Ottoman leaders did not target the Jews for Turkification, their skepticism of Jewish motives increased and as a result of it, they became increasingly hostile towards the Jews.                                                         

The homes and property of the Jews of Jaffa and Tel Aviv were kept in the possession of the Ottoman authorities, and they were guarded by a handful of Jewish guards. Djemal Pasha also released two Jewish doctors to join the deportees. Nonetheless, many deportees had perished during the harsh winter of 1917–1918 from hunger and contagious diseases due to negligence by the Ottoman authorities: 224 deportees are buried in Kfar Saba, 15 in Haifa, 321 in Tiberias, 104 in Safed, and 75 in Damascus.

Many Jewish deportees ended up in Zichron Yaacov, Hadera, Petah Tikva and Kfar Saba, with few chose to go to Jerusalem despite being forbidden by the Ottoman authorities. Sympathizing with the situation, local population decided to provide needed medical and financial support. But when winter 1917–1918 arrived, the situation worsened for many deportees and many died by hunger, famine, starvation and maltreatment, as several Yishuvs didn't receive them and thought they could be Ottoman spies. Deterioration of condition had prompted many Jews to flee and several of them had migrated to Egypt, or Europe and the United States.

On 3 October 1918 forces of the Arab Revolt entered Damascus accompanied by British troops, ending 400 years of Ottoman rule.  The Ottomans finally were  defeated due to key attacks by the British general Edmund Allenby.  

Ottoman casualties of World War I, the Ottoman Empire mobilized a total of 2.6 million men. It lost 325,000 men and 400,000 were injured. 202,000 men were taken prisoner, mostly by the British and the Russians, and one million deserted, leaving only 323,000 men under arms at the time of the armistice.

The financial losses are also huge with an expense of 398.5 million Ottoman Lira, the equivalent of 9.09 billion gold francs of the time: the Empire was practically bankrupt in 1918.

Resource;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire_in_World_War_I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Jaffa_deportation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Aaronsohn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Gaza

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/1917-jews-expelled-from-tel-aviv-1.5244091

CNN's Presentation of Jerusalem, Part 4, The First World War, 1914-1918

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

                                                       Djemal Pasha of the Ottoman Empire

CNN looked at Jerusalem during World War I through the eyes of the Arabs. Jews were not mentioned at all.  

 At the time, the Middle East was under the umbrella of the Ottoman Empire out of Turkey who had been an empire for the past 400 years.  The Arabs, had not been successful in taking the reigns and going against the Turks.  CNN highlighted Djemal Pasha,  who was an Ottoman military leader and one of the Three Pashas that ruled the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He was said to be a brutal man who incited the Arabs against the Turks.  

Jews were not mentioned during this highly critical period.  They were finally mentioned at the end of the program along with the Arabs, both of which had been lied to by Britain.  I found that to be the biggest surprise of all in their covering of this period, though I certainly have never mentioned Djemal Pasha to be an important character in the covering of Palestine or Jerusalem in our history, or TE Lawrence.                                                                   

Emir Faisal, 3rd son of the leader of Saudi Arabia and a Hashemite, direct ancestor of Mohammad,  was mentioned, however, who is one of my favorite characters.  I learned about a different side of him, in that he hated the Ottoman Empire.  The British were deeply involved, said to want the Holy Land to become a Christian land, something left over from the Crusade days.  I'm not sure that's what their main goal was;   more likely part of their empirical aspirations, and possibly learning early on of oil that would eventually be enormous pay-dirt.  After ruling for 30 years in Palestine, they hated to let it go.  The fact that Britain had lied to the Arabs was mentioned.                                 

                                                                             

Notice that Israel was put under international control.  THE MODERN frontiers of the Arab world only vaguely resemble the blue and red grease-pencil lines secretly drawn on a map of the Levant on May 16th 1916, at the height of the first world war. 

They got into the Sykes-Picot Agreement with the French as both did the dividing up of the Middle East and created a different geography.  Iraq was created, and they said that the Arabs had no say in this at all.  I would have thought that Emir Faisal was there representing the Arabs, but his opponents would have been the Allies of Europe; Britain, France, Russia, USA, etc. who did the dividing up of land.   Evidently the Arabs felt they were lied to and didn't realize what the British were doing.  They considered the British presence Occupying Palestine; never mentioned the horrible World War just fought and the fact that the Ottoman Empire had sided with the Germans who started the war.  

Damascus was mentioned a lot as a center for many of the Arabs, but not the word, Syria.                                                             

                         Allenby entering Jerusalem on foot.  Allenby deliberately chose to walk into the Old City because, he said, only the Messiah should ride into the Holy City. (That was not mentioned).  

In 1917 the Ottomans attacked the British supply lines and Pasha had a victory over the British.  Aqaba was a city on the way for the Arabs to take over Damascus. They went around in the desert which was a hard trek and took it from the back of the city that was not expected.  The Turks surrendered.  

Pasha of the Ottomans then went from Gaza to the inland to get to Jerusalem to take that city.  At the time, Germany had told him that he was no longer wanted, and wanted him out of the picture.  Germany had taken Jerusalem and destroyed the British.  The desert fight was brutal.                                                                           

      Liberation of Jerusalem when German soldiers finally left.  General Allenby on his horse saluting the Indian troops outside of Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate on December 11, 1917, (photo credit: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

At last General Allenby of the British entered Jerusalem and took it.  The Germans left, going northward  when a storm came up and did not destroy anything in the city. The mayor of Jerusalem was there with the keys to the city and surrendered to the British with a white bed sheet in December 1917.  Allenby was a brilliant man, speaking 3 languages; Arabic, English and probably French.  He was a man who listened to others when they spoke.                                                                         

Now, T.E. Lawrence entered the program.  He was a Brit but wound up speaking and helping the Arabs in this fight.  The Arabs called him that little white guy.  Lawrence was left for dead in the battle.  We discover that the movie, "Lawrence of Arabia" was not historically  accurate at all.  That's true of many presentations.  Lawrence had no part of our Jewish history at this time, siding along with the Arabs.  He dressed like them when they were together, making him very sheik.  

                                                                           

In January 1918, TE Lawrence went to Damascus.  The San Remo Conference was again mentioned where the Sykes Picot agreement was discussed.  TE Lawrence died in 1935 in a motorcycle accident. "T.E. Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, died as a retired Royal Air Force mechanic living under an assumed name. The legendary war hero, author and archaeological scholar succumbed to injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident six days before. And this is what happened in Palestine during World War I.  The conference was attended by the four Principal Allied Powers of World War I who were represented by the prime ministers of Britain (David Lloyd George), France (Alexandre Millerand), Italy (Francesco Nitti) and by Japan's Ambassador Keishirō Matsui.          

                                David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Britain, 

He served as the legal adviser of Theodor Herzl in his negotiations with the British government regarding the Uganda Scheme, proposed as an alternative homeland for the Jews due to Turkish refusal to grant a charter for Jewish settlement in Palestine.  (This was not mentioned, either.)

It was convened following the February Conference of London where the allies met to discuss the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and the negotiation of agreements that would become the Treaty of Sèvres.  On 30 September 1918 supporters of the Arab Revolt in Damascus had declared a government loyal to Sharif Hussein, who had been declared "King of the Arabs" by religious leaders and other notables in Mecca. During the meetings of the Council of Four in 1919, British Prime Minister Lloyd George stated that the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence was the basis for the Sykes–Picot Agreement, which proposed an independent Arab state or confederation of states. In July 1919 the parliament of Greater Syria had refused to acknowledge any right claimed by the French Government to any part of Syrian territory.

It's hard to cover WWI and especially Jerusalem in one hour, and is also hard to do in my blog article, but one tries.  I was shocked to see that Jews, to the Arab biased professors, would have left them out completely and had just covered the battle of the Ottomans against the British, and the Arabs who had teamed up together to be against the Turks and win the war.  Jews also fought in this WWI battle, but their numbers were smaller than the Arabs, who were united by Emir Faisal.  I didn't notice anything said about  Haj Amin al-Husseni, the Sherif of Jerusalem, the Arab leader who went against Emir Faisal and was an enemy of the Jews.   

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djemal_Pasha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jerusalem

my notes on CNN's presentation

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lawrence-of-arabia-dies#:~:text=T.E.,motorcycle%20accident%20six%20days%20before. ***

https://jewishaction.com/jewish-world/history/whats_the_truth_about_the_uganda_plan/