Abigail Jacobson

This article uncovers the short history of the American Colony Christian Herald Orphanage, operating in Jerusalem following the First World War. Hosting around 36 Christian and Muslim girls, the orphanage relied on the financial support of the American-based Christian Herald newspaper. Through the close analysis of this institution, and the comparison with a Jewish orphanage in Jerusalem, the article will critically discuss the links between humanitarianism and photography. The sources used are an annotated photograph album documenting life in the Orphanage, as well as the Record Book documenting the girls who received support through the orphanage. Using these visual materials, the article addresses the ways photographs were used as part of fund-raising, missionary work and relief efforts in the context of Mandatory Jerusalem, and discusses the complex relationship between the orphan girl, the donor who supports her, and the way this relationship is constructed in the photograph.

In a provocative essay published in the Jewish monthly ha-Schiloah in 1907 under the title 'The Hidden Question', Yitzhak Epstein opened the public debate among the Jewish community in Palestine regarding the Arab question in the country.' While focusing mainly on the methods by which Jews acquired lands in Palestine, Epstein strongly criticized the Zionist leaders' neglect of the Arabs, who are 'the residents of the country, its workers and true owners'.2 He blamed the leaders for disregarding the fact that there is another national group in Palestine, which is linked to the country not only due to its long residence in it, but because of its profound emotional attachments to it.' Epstein was the first to argue that the Zionists need to realize the national and civil rights and aspirations of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, as well as to co-operate and live in coexistence with them. Only by creating such a co-operation would the two peoples be able to live in Palestine and develop the country.4 Following Epstein's essay, the debate regarding the Arab question became a central one in the Hebrew press in Palestine. The debate amplified following the Young Turk revolution in 1908, and the further development of the Zionist movement, as well as the emergence of an Arab national movement. This article focuses on the years 1912 to 1914, and uses two types of Jewish-Zionist newspapers to examine this debate, and the attitudes of the Jews in Palestine towards what is known as 'the Arab Question', the relations between Jews and Arabs in the country. The first type includes two workers' papers, ha-Po'el ha-Tza'ir and ha-Ahdut, which were affiliated to two Zionist political parties, ha-Po'el ha-Tza'ir and Poaley-Tzion, respectively. The second type consists of one newspaper, ha-Herut, a Sephardi paper published in Jerusalem. The newspapers represented two different groups among the Jews in Palestine. The worker's papers represented the Ashkenazi Zionists, who immigrated to Palestine in the second wave of Jewish immigration. Ha-Herut represented the Sephardi

LAND OF PROGRESS: PALESTINE IN THE AGE OF COLONIAL DEVELOPMENT, 1905-1948 Jacob Norris Oxford: Oxford Universit y Press, 2013 (256 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations) $125.00 (cloth)The dominant view of British policy in Mandate Palestine has long been that it gave preference to the Zionists. Certainly, with regard to the first decade of British civilian rule, 1920 to 1930, there is virtual consensus around Britain's pro-Zionist bias. Jacob Norris both agrees and disagrees with this view in his excellent new book, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948, in which he sets out to remind us of a critical yet neglected aspect of Britain's moment in the Middle East.Norris's central claim is that British pro-Zionism flowed not from a commitment to Jewish nationalism, but from an ideology of colonial development and a view of the Jews as that ideology's most able agents in Palestine. According to Norris, this ideology was designed by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain at the turn of the century, and soon came to dominate British policy with respect to its non-Western sphere of influence. Norris characterizes Chamberlain's "constructive imperialism" as a "kind of neo-mercantilist attempt to achieve economic self-sufficiency within the British imperial sphere" (7).Acting on Chamberlain's vision, a group of "new imperialists" redi- rected Britain's imperial focus to the search for untapped economic potential within its domain. By actualizing such potential, stagnant backwaters would be transformed into productive lands of progress. In the Middle East, both Palestine and Mesopotamia were identified as possessing exploitable mineral wealth and agricultural potential. Palestine, moreover, was designated as a future staging post for Mediterranean trade.Norris carefully outlines the historical antecedents of British develop- mentalism in Palestine and beyond. Relying mainly on secondary material, he shows that the Ottomans shared in the same ideology of development and anticipated many of the undertakings that the British later carried out. But while the Ottoman Empire embraced a sort of multicultural pluralism, bal- ancing the granting of business licenses among the communities, the British singled out the Jews and made them central to their developmental vision.European Jews, in the British imagination, were ideally suited to the task of developing Palestine for cultural, commercial, and racial reasons. Being "white but not quite," they would provide, in the words of Mark Sykes, "the bridge between Asia and Europe" (81). The economic development that these Jews stood to generate would, so the logic went, trickle down to the rest of the population, in Palestine and then the region.The vision effectively translated into pro-Zionism. Norris notes, for instance, that most of the promoters of the Balfour Declaration in govern- ment circles-for example, Mark Sykes, Robert Cecil, Ronald Graham, Leo Amery, and William Ormsby-Gore-were counted among the new imperi- alists. But their Zionist affinities were incidental to the ideology of colonial development, whose logic was not particular to Palestine. The Jews were not the only non-white group encouraged to migrate within the British sphere of influence for the sake of colonial development; nor was Palestine the only destination for such migration. To name but two of Norris's examples, in the post-World War I period there were advanced plans to settle both Maltese and Indians in Mesopotamia. And in 1903 Joseph Chamberlain himself sought to encourage the Zionists to settle a territory in British- controlled eastern Africa.The two chapters in Land of Progress that contain the most original research examine two cases: the construction of the Haifa port and the grant of a concession to extract the mineral deposits of the Dead Sea. In other words, one case relates to Palestine's imperial role as a regional trading hub, while the other relates to the development of Palestine's untapped natural resources. …

The history of Jerusalem as traditionally depicted is the quintessential history of conflict and strife, of ethnic tension, and of incompatible national narratives and visions. It is also a history of dramatic changes and moments, one of the most radical ones being the replacement of the Ottoman regime with British rule in December 1917. From Empire to Empire challenges these two major dichotomies, ethnic and temporal, which shaped the history of Jerusalem and its inhabitants. It links the experiences of two ethnic communities living in Palestine, Jews and Arabs, as well as bridging two historical periods, the Ottoman and British administrations. Drawing upon a variety of sources, Jacobson demonstrates how political and social alliances are dynamic, context-dependent, and purpose-driven. She also highlights the critical role of foreign intervention, governmental and nongovernmental, in forming local political alliances and in shaping the political reality of Palestine during the cri...

This paper focuses on the National Liberation League (NLL), a Pal-estinian Arab communist movement which operated in Palestine between the years 1943-1948. The paper examines its short-lived history in light of the relevant three contexts in which it operated: the local Palestinian national context; the regional context of communist activity in the Middle East and the external-internationalist context of the Soviet Union. The paper further discusses the activities of the NLL during the period of the 1948 War in Palestine, as well as in the first period of military rule, imposed on the Palestinian citizens of Israel. An analysis of the NLL during the late Mandatory period and the early years of the State of Israel allows a close examination of the ways by which concepts of identity, nationalism, class and ethnic-ity were conceptualised, debated and contested during times of a national conflict and anti-imperial struggle and brings to the fore tensions between ideology and practice, nationalism and internationalism. The NLL offers an important opportunity to look into the complex matrix of communist movements that combine anti-imperial struggles with struggles for national liberation in the context of a national conflict and to examine their dilemmas and what may seem as internal contradictions.

This article focuses on the National Liberation League (NLL), a Palestinian Arab communist movement which operated in Palestine between the years 1943-1948. The paper examines its short-lived history in light of the relevant three contexts in which it operated: the local Palestinian national context; the regional context of communist activity in the Middle East, and the external-internationalist context of the Soviet Union. The paper further discusses the activities of the NLL during the period of the 1948 War in Palestine, as well as in the first period of military rule, imposed on the Palestinian citizens of Israel. An analysis of the NLL during the late Mandatory period and the early years of the State of Israel allows a close examination of the ways by which concepts of identity, nationalism, class and ethnicity were conceptualized, debated and contested during times of a national conflict and anti-imperial struggle, and brings to the fore tensions between ideology and practice, nationalism and internationalism. The NLL offers an important opportunity to look into the complex matrix of communist movements that combine anti-imperial struggles with struggles for national liberation in the context of a national conflict, and to examine their dilemmas and what may seem as internal contradictions.

In this fascinating and well-researched book, Jacob Norris takes the readers to a journey into the history of the colonial development of Palestine in the first part of the 20 th Century. In a very original study, he looks at the history of Palestine between the years 1905-1948 not through the more common lens of the Zionist-Arab conflict, but rather sheds light on the way the British colonial development in the region, and their various modernization projects in Palestine, shaped the local history, as well as the power dynamics between Jews and Arabs. The book follows the ways by which Palestine was imagined by the British at this period as a " land of progress " , to use Norman Bentwich's words, a land of industrial developments and opportunities, but also shows how these opportunities were not open to all segments of the population. Indeed, as Norris clearly demonstrates throughout the book, it was mainly the Zionist movement and several Jewish entrepreneurs who benefitted from this British project of modernization and progress, which stood in many ways in the center of their policies towards Palestine. The book discusses the period 1905-1948, and by this joins other studies that challenge the " rupture " caused by World War I and the transition between Ottoman and British rule in the context of Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean in general. As Norris shows, the process of modernization, both Ottoman and British-led, and the tensions between local agents and colonial agents and their involvement in these projects, have started before the beginning of the British

This article focuses on Jerusalem's Musrara-a neighborhood trapped between borders-between 1948 and 1967. Barbed wire running along the eastern side of the neighborhood divided the city of Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. Musrara's western border separated it from West Jerusalem, thus enhancing the division between its residentsnew immigrants of Middle Eastern descent-and the mainly Ashkenazi population of the western part of Jerusalem. Our analysis of a neighborhood on the margins of Jewish and Arab existence in post-1948 Jerusalem considers the perspectives of immigrants and refugees living on a double border that separated the Eastern-Arab part of the city from its Western-Jewish part, or between "old Jerusalem" and "new Jerusalem." The border also signified the boundary between "first Israel" and "second Israel," or the Jewish frontier and neighborhoods in the city center.

This article focuses on Jerusalem's Musrara-a neighborhood trapped between borders-between 1948 and 1967. Barbed wire running along the eastern side of the neighborhood divided the city of Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. Musrara's western border separated it from West Jerusalem, thus enhancing the division between its residentsnew immigrants of Middle Eastern descent-and the mainly Ashkenazi population of the western part of Jerusalem. Our analysis of a neighborhood on the margins of Jewish and Arab existence in post-1948 Jerusalem considers the perspectives of immigrants and refugees living on a double border that separated the Eastern-Arab part of the city from its Western-Jewish part, or between "old Jerusalem" and "new Jerusalem." The border also signified the boundary between "first Israel" and "second Israel," or the Jewish frontier and neighborhoods in the city center.

This article focuses on Jerusalem's Musrara-a neighborhood trapped between borders-between 1948 and 1967. Barbed wire running along the eastern side of the neighborhood divided the city of Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. Musrara's western border separated it from West Jerusalem, thus enhancing the division between its residentsnew immigrants of Middle Eastern descent-and the mainly Ashkenazi population of the western part of Jerusalem. Our analysis of a neighborhood on the margins of Jewish and Arab existence in post-1948 Jerusalem considers the perspectives of immigrants and refugees living on a double border that separated the Eastern-Arab part of the city from its Western-Jewish part, or between "old Jerusalem" and "new Jerusalem." The border also signified the boundary between "first Israel" and "second Israel," or the Jewish frontier and neighborhoods in the city center.