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

Labour Battalions, 1916. Source: Jawariyyeh Colelction, IPS Beirut.
The conscripts also became used to new patterns of consumption and behaviour,
which was a further rupture from their earlier habitat. Their experiences of war made
it difficult for them to go back to their villages and towns, and made them shed what
Issa calls “the virtue of contentment” which he attributes, in grand orientalist fashion,
to Turkish and Arab peasants. It was this ‘loss of contentment’ that created, in his
view (among other things), the social background among the released conscripts,
of the criminal underworld that haunted Alexandria and other port cities of the
Mediterranean in the post-war period.
In Palestine (which was the southern part of the Ottoman Shami provinces), the war
transformed the country into one major construction site. The equivalent Syrian and
Palestinian Work Battalions (tawabeer al-amale in Arabic, or amele taburları in
Turkish) were mobilized by the Ottoman Corps of Army Engineers to substantially
modernize the communication and transportation system. 7 Many features of
Palestine’s modernity attributed to the British colonial administration seem to have
been initiated by the Ottomans in this period. In the first work on modern history of
Palestine in the new century (published in 1920), Khalil Totah and Omar Salih al-
Barghouti discussed the major changes brought about by the technological exigencies
of war. Water wells were drilled all over the country and linked through pipes to the
[ 30 ] HISTORICAL FEATURES The Short Life of Private Ihsan