With the Turks in Palestine

CHAPTER I

ZI­CRON-​JA­COB

Thir­ty-​five years ago, the im­pulse which has since been or­ga­nized as the Zion­ist Move­ment led my par­ents to leave their homes in Rou­ma­nia and em­igrate to Pales­tine, where they joined a num­ber of oth­er Jew­ish pi­oneers in found­ing Zi­cron-​Ja­cob--a lit­tle vil­lage ly­ing just south of Mount Carmel, in that fer­tile coastal re­gion close to the an­cient Plains of Ar­maged­don.

Here I was born; my child­hood was passed here in the peace and har­mo­ny of this lit­tle agri­cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ty, with its white­washed stone hous­es hud­dled close to­geth­er for pro­tec­tion against the na­tive Arabs who, at first, men­aced the life of the new colony. The vil­lage was far more sug­ges­tive of Switzer­land than of the con­ven­tion­al sloven­ly vil­lages of the East, mud-​built and filthy; for while it was the pur­pose of our peo­ple, in re­turn­ing to the Holy Land, to fos­ter the Jew­ish lan­guage and the so­cial con­di­tions of the Old Tes­ta­ment as far as pos­si­ble, there was noth­ing ret­ro­grade in this move­ment. No time was lost in in­tro­duc­ing pro­gres­sive meth­ods of agri­cul­ture, and the cli­ma­to­log­ical ex­per­iments of oth­er coun­tries were ob­served and made use of in de­vel­op­ing the am­ple nat­ural re­sources of the land.

[IL­LUS­TRA­TION: THE CEME­TERY OF ZI­CRON-​JA­COB]

Eu­ca­lyp­tus, im­port­ed from Aus­tralia, soon gave the shade of its cool, health­ful fo­liage where pre­vi­ous­ly no trees had grown. In the course of time dry farm­ing (which some peo­ple con­sid­er a re­cent dis­cov­ery, but which in re­al­ity is as old as the Old Tes­ta­ment) was in­tro­duced and ex­tend­ed with Amer­ican agri­cul­tur­al im­ple­ments; blood­ed cat­tle were im­port­ed, and poul­try-​rais­ing on a large scale was un­der­tak­en with the aid of in­cu­ba­tors--to the dis­gust of the Arabs, who look on such usurpa­tion of the hen's func­tions as against na­ture and sin­ful. Our peo­ple re­placed the wretched na­tive trails with good roads, bor­dered by hedges of thorny aca­cia which, in sea­son, were cov­ered with downy lit­tle yel­low blos­soms that smelled sweet­er than hon­ey when the sun was on them.

More im­por­tant than all these, a com­mu­nis­tic vil­lage gov­ern­ment was es­tab­lished, in which both sex­es en­joyed equal rights, in­clud­ing that of suf­frage--strange as this may seem to per­sons who (when they think of the mat­ter at all) form vague con­cep­tions of all the wom­en-​folk of Pales­tine as shut up in harems.

A short ex­pe­ri­ence with Turk­ish courts and Turk­ish jus­tice taught our peo­ple that they would have to es­tab­lish a le­gal sys­tem of their own; two col­lab­orat­ing judges were there­fore ap­point­ed--one to in­ter­pret the Mo­sa­ic law, an­oth­er to tem­per it with mod­ern ju­rispru­dence. All Jew­ish dis­putes were set­tled by this court. Its ef­fec­tive­ness may be judged by the fact that the Arabs, weary of Turk­ish ve­nal­ity,--as open and shame­less as any­where in the world,--be­gan in in­creas­ing num­bers to bring their dif­fi­cul­ties to our tri­bunal. Jews are law-​abid­ing peo­ple, and life in those Pales­tine colonies tend­ed to bring out the fra­ter­nal qual­ities of our race; but it is in­ter­est­ing to note that in over thir­ty years not one Jew­ish crim­inal case was re­port­ed from forty-​five vil­lages.

Zi­cron-​Ja­cob was a lit­tle town of one hun­dred and thir­ty “fires”--so we call it--when, in 1910, on the ad­vice of my el­der broth­er, who was head of the Jew­ish Ex­per­iment Sta­tion at Ath­lit, an an­cient town of the Cru­saders, I left for Amer­ica to en­ter the ser­vice of the Unit­ed States in the De­part­ment of Agri­cul­ture. A few days af­ter reach­ing this coun­try I took out my first nat­ural­iza­tion pa­pers and pro­ceed­ed to Wash­ing­ton, where I be­came part of that great gov­ern­ment ser­vice whose benef­icent ac­tiv­ity is too lit­tle known by Amer­icans. Here I re­mained un­til June, 1913, when I re­turned to Pales­tine with the ob­ject of tak­ing mo­tion-​pic­tures and stere­op­ti­con views. These I in­tend­ed to use in a lec­tur­ing tour for spread­ing the Zion­ist pro­pa­gan­da in the Unit­ed States.

Dur­ing the years of my res­idence in Amer­ica, I was able to ap­pre­ci­ate and judge in their right val­ue the beau­ty and in­spi­ra­tion of the life which my peo­ple led in the Holy Land. From a dis­tance, too, I saw bet­ter the need for or­ga­ni­za­tion among our com­mu­ni­ties, and I de­ter­mined to build up a fra­ter­nal union of the young Jew­ish men all over the coun­try.

Two months af­ter my re­turn from Amer­ica, an event oc­curred which gave im­pe­tus to these projects. The physi­cian of our vil­lage, an old man who had de­vot­ed his en­tire life to serv­ing and heal­ing the peo­ple of Pales­tine, with­out dis­tinc­tion of race or re­li­gion, was driv­ing home one evening in his car­riage from a neigh­bor­ing set­tle­ment. With him was a young girl of six­teen. In a de­sert­ed place they were set up­on by four armed Arabs, who beat the old man to un­con­scious­ness as he tried, in vain, to de­fend the girl from the ter­ri­ble fate which await­ed her.

Night came on. Alarmed by the ab­sence of the physi­cian, we young men rode out in search of him. We fi­nal­ly dis­cov­ered what had hap­pened; and then and there, in the serene moon­light of that East­ern night, with tragedy close at hand, I made my com­rades take oath on the hon­or of their sis­ters to or­ga­nize them­selves in­to a strong so­ci­ety for the de­fense of the life and hon­or of our vil­lagers and of our peo­ple at large.

These de­tails are, per­haps, use­ful for the bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the dis­tur­bances that came thick and fast when in Au­gust, 1914, the war-​mad­ness broke out among the na­tions of Eu­rope. The reper­cus­sion was at once felt even in our re­mote cor­ner of the earth. Soon af­ter the Ger­man in­va­sion of Bel­gium the Turk­ish army was mo­bi­lized and all cit­izens of the Em­pire be­tween nine­teen and forty-​five years were called to the col­ors. As the Young Turk Con­sti­tu­tion of 1909 pro­vid­ed that all Chris­tians and Jews were equal­ly li­able to mil­itary ser­vice, our young men knew that they, too, would be called up­on to make the com­mon sac­ri­fice. For the most part, they were not un­will­ing to sus­tain the Turk­ish Gov­ern­ment. While the Con­sti­tu­tion im­posed on them the bur­den of mil­itarism, it had brought with it the com­pen­sa­tion of free­dom of re­li­gion and equal rights; and we could not for­get that for six hun­dred years Turkey has held her gates wide open to the Jews who fled from the Span­ish In­qui­si­tion and sim­ilar min­is­tra­tions of oth­er civ­ilized coun­tries.

Of course, we nev­er dreamed that Turkey would do any­thing but re­main neu­tral. If we had had any idea of the turn things were ul­ti­mate­ly to take, we should have giv­en a dif­fer­ent greet­ing to the _mouchtar_, or sher­iff, who came to our vil­lage with the list of mo­bi­liz­able men to be called on for ser­vice. My own po­si­tion was a cu­ri­ous one. I had ev­ery in­ten­tion of com­plet­ing the pro­cess of be­com­ing an Amer­ican cit­izen, which I had be­gun by tak­ing out “first pa­pers.” In the eyes of the law, how­ev­er, I was still a Turk­ish sub­ject, with no claim to Amer­ican pro­tec­tion. This was sneer­ing­ly point­ed out to me by the Amer­ican Con­sul at Haifa, who hap­pens to be a Ger­man; so there was no oth­er course but to sur­ren­der my­self to the Turk­ish Gov­ern­ment.