What arguments are there left to make about the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
In the pro-Palestinian narrative of events, the Palestinian Arabs rightfully opposed the Zionist colonization of their homeland. All Palestinian anti-Jewish violence, including the violence preceding 1948, is justified, excused, or celebrated in that context; after all, who wouldn’t resist their dispossession? The Palestinian Arab refusal to engage diplomatically before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War is considered righteous. Why should Palestinian Arabs leave the fate of their homes to the international community?
The Zionist narrative, on the other hand, sees the establishment of the State of Israel not as a colonial endeavor but as a return. For 2,000, Jews longed, and sometimes fought, for their sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. The events of 1948 are understood in the context of continued Arab violence, refusal to engage diplomatically, and genocidal threats.
But there’s one historical process that rarely makes it into the conversation: the Ottoman Empire’s abolishment of second-class citizenship status for Jews.
THE STATUS OF JEWS UNDER MUSLIM RULE
In the 7th century, the nascent Islamic empire conquered lands at unprecedented speed. The matter of how to handle the native populations that resisted conversion to Islam presented a growing problem.
The issue was resolved with a treaty known as the Pact of Umar. This pact allowed select religious minorities, known as “People of the Book,” to continue practicing their religion so long as they paid the jizya tax and abided by second-class citizenship laws.
DHIMMITUDE AND THE CALIPHATES
Proponents for dhimmitude argued that dhimmi status was not oppressive because it afforded select religious minorities, including Jews and Christians, protection. But charging someone an extra tax so that you don’t murder them is not protection; it’s extortion.
It’s worth noting that dhimmi laws were applied inconsistently and unevenly across different regions and under different rulers. Nevertheless, because Palestine’s population consisted almost entirely of “People of the Book” during the time of the Islamic conquest, jizya taxation was especially harsh, as it provided an enormous amount of wealth to the growing empire.
In fact, jizya coming from Jews, Samaritans, and Christians significantly funded subsequent Arab conquests in North Africa. The Cairo Geniza reveals letters from the early Arab periods in which Jews in Palestine begged their Egyptian counterparts for charity and ransom money.
DHIMMIS AS SUBORDINATES
As dhimmis, also known as “rayas” during the Ottoman period, Jews were to remain subordinate to their Muslim neighbors.
For example:
- Jews were not allowed to build new synagogues, and synagogues could not be taller than mosques, just as Jewish homes could not be taller than Muslim homes.
- Jews could not raise their voices during Muslim prayer times.
- Jews had to show deference to Muslims in all facets of life; for example, if a Muslim wished to sit where a Jew was sitting, the Jew was forced to give up his or her seat.
- Jews had to wear clothing that identified them as Jews.
- Jews could not govern, lead, or employ Muslims.
- Jewish witnesses were inadmissible in court. Instead, Jews had to purchase Muslim witnesses, leaving them with limited legal recourse.
THE OTTOMANS, ISLAM, AND COLONIALISM
The Ottoman Empire was the last Islamic Caliphate. Though its ruling power was culturally, ethnically, and linguistically distinct from those that came before it – in other words, it was Turkic, rather than Arab – it took its legitimacy from the Islamic concept of ummah, meaning “community” or “nation,” that sees the Muslim world as a community that transcends racial, geographical, and national distinctions. In other words, the Muslim majority, irrespective of national or ethnic identity, did not object to its rule for the majority of its run.
In Palestine, specifically, any tensions between the Muslim majority and the Ottomans were centered exclusively on corrupt local Pashas, like governors and dignitaries. The legitimacy of the empire itself was not questioned.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Ottoman Empire began a process of modernization, which included friendlier policies toward European countries. Though these initially started as trade agreements, European powers soon began exerting more and more colonial influence over the declining empire. To the conservative Muslim majority, this presented a growing threat.
TANZIMAT REFORMS
Under increasing pressure from the surrounding European powers, in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire passed a series of reforms known as the Tanzimat (“Reorganization”) Reforms.
- Before the process of the Tanzimat Reforms officially began in 1839, in 1831, Sultan Mahmud II sought to change some of the social and legal abuses directed at Syria and Palestine’s non-Muslim populations. These attempts were discarded due to fierce opposition from the local Muslim majority.
- Shortly after, Mahmud II’s reforms were put on hold after the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, invaded Palestine that same year. When Muhammad Ali Pasha sought to conscript and tax Muslims in Palestine and Syria, the Syrian Peasant’s Revolt broke out, with the local population redirecting its anger at religious minorities. In Palestine, Jews were subjected to brutal pogroms in Hebron (1834) and Tzfat (1834, 1838), both at the hands of the Egyptian forces and their Muslim (and in one case, Druze) neighbors.
"True believers [will] rise up in just wrath against the Jews, and despoil them of their gold and their silver and their jewels."
Local Muslim cleric Muhammad Damoor inciting the 1834 pogroms in Palestine
"We huddled together in Rebbe Avraham Dov's house...The women were hysterical and the children crying. The Rebbe asked me to write a note in Arabic to the mayor, pleading with him not to forsake us in this desperate time. I did so, but his answer was mere lip service..."
Private diaries of Louis Loewe, describing the 1838 Tzfat riots
- On February 18, 1856, the Ottoman Empire officially abolished dhimmi status with the Reform Edict of 1856, eliminating the jizya tax, granting all citizens equal rights irrespective of religion, and granting non-Muslims the right to serve in the military. Those who did not wish to serve could buy their exemption with a special tax.
Letter to London Jewry written by Samuel ben Israel Peretz, describing the 1834 pogrom in Tzfat. August 10, 1834.
BACKLASH
Though dhimmitude was legally abolished in 1856, unofficial discrimination against religious minorities persisted for decades. In Palestine, specifically, the Ottomans banned Jews from settling in Palestine in 1882, and in 1892, prohibited all Jews – foreign and native – from purchasing land in Palestine.
The Tanzimat Reforms were met with swift backlash from the conservative Muslim populace, which saw them as a threat to Islamic authority. This backlash often manifested as retaliatory violence, including the Hamidian massacres (1894-1897), in which 100,000-300,000 Armenian and Assyrian Christians were murdered and another tens of thousands were forcibly converted to Islam. The Tanzimat Reforms also led to the formation of the Young Turks, who supported modernization but opposed the reforms on the basis that they served as passive capitulations to the European powers. The Young Turks later went on to perpetrate to Armenian Genocide. Though largely forgotten, the Armenian Genocide also featured forced conversions to Islam. It’s estimated that up to 200,000 Armenians survived the genocide through forced Islamization.
Conservative Muslim backlash was especially harsh when minorities tried to exert political agency. For example, Christians in Syria, who were seen as a political threat, were treated much worse than Jews, who largely continued to act as second-class citizens.
ISLAMIC AUTHORITY VS. ZIONISM
"Haj Muhammad Said al-Husseini, the mufti of Gaza, issued a fatwa against land sales to Jews arguing that, as a result of Zionism, the Jews had lost their status as dhimmi or wards of Islam and any Muslim or Christian who hekped them would be regarded as an apostate or infidel. In 1935 the first ulama or gathering of Muslim religious scholars issued a similar fatwa."
"1948 as Jihad" by Benny Morris
For conservative Palestinian Arab Muslim figures, from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the father of Palestinian nationalism, to the Black Hand jihadist terror group during the British Mandate (whose leader Hamas named its military wing after), Zionism upended the Islamic social order.
It’s notable that the antisemitic massacres that were carried out during the period of the British Mandate almost exclusively targeted not recent Zionist immigrant communities, but the most ancient Jewish communities in Palestine, which had previously lived among the Muslim minority as dhimmis.
THE KOTEL AS A CASE STUDY
The tensions over the Kotel, also known as the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall, provide the clearest example of Muslim fears over the disruption of Palestine’s longtime status quo, in which Jews were relatively tolerated so long as they remained subordinate to the Muslim majority.
By the time of the Muslim conquest in the 7th century, Jews had been almost entirely banned from Jerusalem for centuries. Initially, the Muslim conquerors reversed this prohibition. But over the following centuries, Muslim caliphs increasingly tightened restrictions on Jewish access to the Western Wall. For example, Jews were only permitted to pray in an increasingly cramped space along the Mughrabi Quarter, which Muslim passersby often used as a dumping ground.
Under the Ottomans, Jews were forbidden from blowing the shofar at the Kotel, as well as from setting up benches, chairs, or a mechitza, the physical barrier traditionally used to separate men and women’s prayer sections.
The violent pogroms that ravaged Palestine in the 1920s, particularly the 1929 Hebron massacre, can be traced back to the incitement of Muslim clerics, particularly Haj Amin al-Husseini, who claimed that Jews intended to change the status quo at the Kotel as a stepping stone to take over Al Aqsa Mosque.
"The figures leaning against the weather-beaten wall, shedding tears, present a touching scene…As nearly as the Middle Ages, probably, the Jews came hither to wail. They are free to do so now, but in ages past they had to pay large sums for this privilege."
19th century traveler's account of the Kotel
A PATTERN OF HISTORY
The Muslim backlash to the Tanzimat Reforms isn’t particularly surprising. Time and time again in history, when a population has grown accustomed to a certain status quo, and that status quo changes, it’s common for there to be backlash from the previously dominant group.
For example, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 infuriated white Americans, both in the North and the Confederate South. In New York City, for example, riots broke out, with working class mobs of white men attacking Black neighborhoods and lynching Black men.
The emancipation of Jews in Europe, which spanned the late 17th to 18th centuries, also produced tremendous backlash, most notably, the 1894-1906 Dreyfus Affair and the rise of racial antisemitism.
That’s not to argue that Palestinian Arab rejection of Zionism can be reduced to backlash over the revocation of Jews’ status as second-class citizens and their exertion of political autonomy. But we cannot adequately explore their perceptions of Zionism without understanding the social, political, and religious context of the time period. And yet, this factor remains largely ignored by both the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel narratives alike.
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