From Şikayet to Political Discourse and ‘Public Opinion’: Petitioning Practices to the King-Crane Commission

The King-Crane Commission, named after its two chairs, Henry Churchill King (1858-1934) and Charles R. Crane (1858-1939), was an American investigative commission set up to explore possible political arrangements for the former Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of the Empire. While most research has dealt with the issue of whether the petitions submitted to the King-Crane Commission were a genuine manifestation of ‘public opinion’ or merely manipulations by interested elite parties, this article shifts the focus beyond this debate. We argue that a textual analysis of these petitions can shed light on the transformation of the traditional Ottoman form of appeal into a modern political tool used to recruit and generate ‘public opinion’ and foster modern political discourse. We first present a historical overview of petitioning in the Ottoman Empire and the key changes in petitioning practices in the last half of the nineteenth century. We then discuss the King-Crane petitions and highlight their differences from traditional petitions, as well as their contribution to the emerging national discourse in Greater Syria. We show that petitions shifted toward stances that were more ideological and political in nature, a development that coincided with the collapse of the Empire

Jonathan Marc Gribetz. Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 312 pp.

Jonathan Marc Gribetz. Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 312 pp. - Volume 39 Issue 2 - Yuval Ben-Bassa

The arzuhalcis and the changing late Ottoman urban sphere in gaza

Little research has been devoted to date to the work and social background of the arzuhalcis, the professional letter and petition writers in the Ottoman Empire, even though they were part of the Ottoman urban landscape of the 19th century and handled most of the public’s writing and correspondence with the authorities. The services they of- fered were well known to the general public and a wide variety of people, men and women, urbanites, villagers, Bedouins, and officials alike, approached them and paid for having their petitions written professionally. This article examines the arzuhalacis’ social profile and status in society based on the Ottoman census of 1905 for the city of Gaza on the south- ern Palestine coast. Petitions sent from this city to Istanbul by the city’s urban population as well as by peasants and Bedouin from the region were for the most part written in Ara- bic, often in a very high register, which no doubt was formulated by professional petition writers. Several questions come to mind when exploring the place of the arzuhalcis in Gaza, in particular given what we know about this city’s stormy politics at the time. How many petition and letter writers were active in this city? Were any of them identified with one of the factions in this city to an extent that others from rivaling coalitions refrained from using their services? Were any of the petition writers in Gaza former state employees, or perhaps non-natives of Gaza? What was their relationships with state and local officials? Finally, where were they active in Gaza’s public space? This article attempts to respond to some of these questions to better understand the role of the arzuhalcis in the public space of a late Ottoman provincial city in Greater Syria

Ottoman urban institutions and urban governance: a framework for inquiry

The urban history of late Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Bilad al-Sham) is a maturing field of research, and we can now go beyond the format of single-city studies that have dominated the literature over the past decades. Given this fortunate situation, this article addresses three key challenges for a more integrated urban history of the region: How can urban history respond to today’s heightened awareness of cities as crucial spaces in which socio-political processes on various scales interact with localized material structures? How can we capture the trans-local entanglements and connections of individual cities? How can we assess both the commonalities and the specificities of specific developments through comparison? As an answer, we propose a bottom-up and actor-centered perspective on urban history that focuses on urban institutions, defined as systems of social rules that structure social interactions. We further propose to study how urban institutions were anchored in concrete places and material structures, which we call urban nodal points, and how institutions and nodal points were embedded in urban governance, i.e., the ways in which urban societies make decisions on collective problems, and thereby modify the institutional and material landscape of the city

Conflicting Accounts of Early Zionist Settlement: A Note on the Encounter between the Colony of Re ovot and the Bedouins of Khirbat Duran †

By comparing a recently discovered rare petition sent to Istanbul in 1890 by the Bedouins of Khirbat Duran to protest the establishment of the Jewish colony of Re ovot, some 25 kilometres south-east of Jaffa on Palestine's central inner coastline, to accounts written by Re ovot's first colonists, the article explores claims of land ownership rights by the two sides. Beyond this unique perspective on the early Zionist–Arab encounter, these differing accounts highlight some of the underlying reasons for strains in the relationships between the two populations in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century. Agrarian and social developments in Palestine in the decades preceding the beginning of Zionist activity in the 1880s ought to be examined in order to better contextualise both the source materials and the events involving the two populations. We understood that after we had bought the land, paid its price, and received title-deeds from the government, we were the land's sole owners and no one else had a say [on this matter]. Thus, we did not want the Bedouins, they and their wives, children and herds, to come and occupy our land. (Eliyahu Levin-Epstein, the head of the colony of Re ovot in 1890) The farm, which was in our hands from [the time of our] fathers and forefathers was taken from us by force, and the foreigners do not want to treat us according to the accepted norms among the farmers and according to human norms. (The Bedouins of Khirbat Duran in a petition to Istanbul, 1890

Mass petitions as a way to evaluate 'public opinion' in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman empire? The case of internal strife among Gaza's elite

This article evaluates collective petitions (arz-ı mahzars) sent to Istanbul from Gaza at the end of the nineteenth century as a way of assessing the political mood of the elite in Ottoman provincial towns. Gaza was the theatre of considerable tension, cleavages, and rivalry among its elite. One of the key questions in this context is the implications of sending collective petitions from towns such as Gaza to the imperial centre given the political censorship and the absence of free press at a time when there was nonetheless greater communication between the centre and the provinces, and an altered relationship between the state and its subjects. Thus more than ever before collective petitions represented local political alignments and what could be very cautiously defined as 'public opinion' among the elite in provincial Ottoman towns such as Gaza

A Zionist torn between two worlds: Aharon Eisenberg's correspondence after the Young Turk Revolution

Through the correspondence of Aharon Eisenberg (1863–1931), this article examines the reactions of Zionist activists in Ottoman Palestine to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. It challenges the presumed dichotomies between supporters and opponents of the Yishuv's integration in the Ottoman framework in the aftermath of the revolution and between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and argues instead that there was wide-ranging support for Ottomanization in the national circles in the Yishuv, mainly due to realpolitik considerations. This support was made possible by the fluidity of the term "Ottomanism," which allowed a broad spectrum of groups to interpret it as best suited to their interests

Women's Visibility in Petitions From Greater Syria During the Late Ottoman Period

This article focuses on petitions by Ottoman women from Greater Syria during the late Ottoman era. After offering a general overview of women's petitions in the Ottoman Empire, it explores changes in women's petitions between 1865 and 1919 through several case studies. The article then discusses women's "double-voiced" petitions following the empire's defeat in World War I, particularly those submitted to the King-Crane Commission. The concept of "double-voiced" petitions, or speaking in a voice that reflects both a dominant and a muted discourse, is extended here from the genre of literary fiction to Ottoman women's petitions. We argue that in Greater Syria double-voiced petitions only began to appear with the empire's collapse, when women both participated in national struggles and strove to protect their rights as women in their own societies