My Grandmother and Other Stories: Histories of the Palestinians as ...

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The Short Life of Private Ihsan Jerusalem 1915 Salim Tamari First page of Ihsan’s Diary. The hero of our story is Ihsan Hasan Turjman (1893-1917), an ordinary recruit in the Ottoman military headquarters in Jerusalem. 1 His life was short and uneventful, having served as a clerk in the Logistics Department (manzil), and briefly as a foot soldier in Nablus and Hebron. Still, Ihsan’s observations on the impact of successive military events on his relationship to his city and his nation are without parallel. The power of these diaries lie in their exposure of the texture of daily life, long-buried within the political rhetoric of nationalist discourse, and in their restoration of a world that was subsequently hidden by denigration of the Ottoman past: the life of communitarian alleys, of obliterated neighbourhoods, of heated political debates projecting possibilities that no longer exist, and the voices of soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds silenced by elite memoirs. By the third year of the war, the diaries project a desperate search for normalcy in daily life–a normalcy experienced in pre-war Ottoman Palestine, but which eluded its citizens for the following hundred years. [ 26 ] HISTORICAL FEATURES The Short Life of Private Ihsan
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. Dead Ottoman soldier, Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, This anti-Ottoman re-writing of December, 1917. Source: The Jawhariyyeh Collection, history took place simultaneously, IPS Beirut. and in the same abrupt manner, on the Turkish side (in the guise of modernizing the state, and making it geographically manageable), and on the Arab side (in the sustained annals of nationalist historiography). The erasure achieved, in the Arabic discourse of what became known as ‘the days of the Turks’, a retrospective replacement of four centuries of a relatively peaceful and dynamic era, the Ottoman era, into four miserable years of tyranny symbolized by the iconic features of that war: the military dictatorship of Ahmad Jamal Pasha in Syria, seferberlik (forced conscription and exile), and the collective hanging of the Arab patriots in Beirut’s Burj Square on 15 August, 1916. This essay deals with the totalizing and transformative nature of the Great War. By totalizing, I refer not only to the manner in which it moulded the soldiers’ work and living habits, but also its impact on the daily life of civilians, creating an atmosphere of continued panic, uncertainty, and disruption of daily patterns of behaviour. This often took the form of persistent concern about food, clothing, and the availability of essential commodities such as kerosene and tobacco, as well as safety from arbitrary army actions (arrest, transfer of population, and conscription of older people as the war progressed). This period also saw the first systematic forms of censorship of the press and private mail. Jerusalem Quarterly 30 [ 27 ]
Page 1 and 2: Spring 2007 — Issue 30 formerly t
Page 3 and 4: My Grandmother and Other Stories Hi
Page 5 and 6: What kind of rights, legal standing
Page 7 and 8: analytical positioning and narrativ
Page 9 and 10: the reader to the enormous difficul
Page 11 and 12: left home to work as an imam in the
Page 13 and 14: On that ‘very typical’ evening,
Page 15 and 16: law be able to identify him? Dozens
Page 17 and 18: “Of course.” “Doctor, can I t
Page 19 and 20: aising my hopes of stirring his mem
Page 21 and 22: Still, nothing indicated new feelin
Page 23 and 24: The next day we all went to visit t
Page 25: Only three months passed following
Page 29 and 30: War, Conscription, and the Predicam
Page 31 and 32: major urban centres. Railroads link
Page 33 and 34: War Diaries: Mersin and Jerusalem S
Page 35 and 36: Neither his religiosity nor his acc
Page 37 and 38: Ali Roshen Bey. Ottoman military ar
Page 39 and 40: on the eve of announcing the Arab R
Page 41 and 42: command, no one had any notion that
Page 43 and 44: the Sisters of Zion, and Bishop Gob
Page 45 and 46: In his diary, Turjman expressed hos
Page 47 and 48: Ottoman prisoners of war in British
Page 49 and 50: al-Amara (southern Iraq), and his n
Page 51 and 52: Perhaps they took advantage of his
Page 53 and 54: With the economic collapse of many
Page 55 and 56: Monday 10 July, 1916. No more crops
Page 57 and 58: 23 All data about Turjman’s perso
Page 59 and 60: From Seferberlik to the Nakba A Per
Page 61 and 62: its inhabitants. In Abu Jamil’s r
Page 63 and 64: In Abu Fayyad’s home, Jalilah was
Page 65 and 66: to pursue the perpetrator after he
Page 67 and 68: The olive season was a good one tha
Page 69 and 70: Whatever the answers, the fact rema
Page 71 and 72: efore our return to Majd al-Kroum.
Page 73 and 74: Endnotes 1 Not much has been writte
Page 75 and 76: the Majd al-Kroum plains. For furth
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Sa’id Nimr’s Stormy Career From
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“Still, I have to be here.” Gra
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Sa’id saw this as a great opportu
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me to treat their injured. After th
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From the stories I heard about my g
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Once they brought a young man to hi
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My father shared Edward’s deep ap
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Hanna studied in the Schneller’s
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Hanna and Mathilde Bisharat (holdin
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and his new bride to dinner. When d
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in resolving issues between Palesti
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The Palestinian ‘Wailing Wall’
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A Farewell Naila suggests parting f
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His reaction to the news of the wal
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with a different legal status. Appr
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to learn that we weren’t married.
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checkpoint on the southeast side of
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“To Hadassah Hospital,” I answe
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As a ‘spiritual’ Muslim addicte
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what had happened. Why have you cha
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eligiosity. The renaming of the sal
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Jerusalem Diary March - August 2007
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