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

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 ]