Originally published in GPN, Genocide Prevention Now, Special Issue 5, Winter 2011
Editor’s Introduction: It is interesting to note the little known and rarely remembered expulsion of the small Jewish community in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area by the Turks in 1917. The Jewish community was legitimately alarmed that the expulsion was the beginning of a process such as had just been executed on the Armenians and other non-Turks in Turkey. According to a book published in German in Tel Aviv in 1935, about 4000 Jews left their homes. The exit was very difficult. They suffered hunger and illness and about one-fifth of Jaffa’s Jews died.
Source: Bohm, Adolf (1935). Die Zionistische Bewegung Zvei Bande. Tel Aviv. Hozaah Ivrith Co. Ltd.
The following material combines excerpts from two additional sources.
Yair Auron is the author of an excellent book, originally published in Hebrew and also published in English, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide, that documents in detail the sad story of the State of Israel’s official denial (to this day) of the Armenian Genocide — along with telling of the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide by any number of Israeli scholars, leaders and the media.
Sources: Excerpts with the kind permission of the author, Yair Auron, from: Auron, Yair (1995). The Banality of Indifference: The Attitude of the Yishuv and the Zionist Movement to the Armenian Genocide. Tel Aviv: Dvir (with Kibutzim College of Education). 395 pp (Hebrew); and Auron, Yair (2000). The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Nadav Shragai is an Israeli writer and journalist. He has published “The Story of Rachel’s Tomb,” “Protecting the Contiguity of Israel: The E-1 Area and the Link Between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim,” “The Struggle for the Temple Mount,” “The Dangers of Dividing Jerusalem,” and many more works.
Source: The material that is used in this review is taken from Skyscraper City Forums http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=523382
Yair Auron:
In the spring of 1917, the small Jewish community in Palestine was stunned by an order issued by the Turkish aurhorities for the deportation of the 5000 Jews from Tel Aviv to the small farming villages in the Sharon Plain and the Galilee. This may have been the beginning of a plan to deport the Jews in the villages and in the Jerusalem region as an emergency war measure, and the decree aroused grave concern about the future of the Jewish settlement in the country. When the deportation order became known to the Nili organization, its members publicized the plan in the world press. American Jewry was shocked, and the nations fighting against Turkey released reports on Turkish intentions to exterminate the Jews in Palestine, as they had already done to the Armenians. Public opinion in the neutral countries, as well as in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was outraged and Jamal Pasha was forced to reconsider his plan of action. He promised food and medical assistance to the refugees from Tel Aviv and cancelled the other deportation plans.
Mordechai Ben-Hillel Hacohen was one of the most reliable and observant sources about the history of the Jews in Palestine during the war. In his journal, The War of the Nations, he describes in great detail, over tens of pages, Jamal Pasha’s expulsion order, the reaction of the Jews, the deportation itself and what Hacohen terms “the exile,” and the efforts which were ultimately successful in softening the decree.
On March 30, 1917, Mordechai Ben-Hillel Hacohen wrote in his diary: “The noise of wagons on the paving stones was heard throughout the night in Tel Aviv… tumult and the uproar of flight, the sound of the bell of exile…” Jamal Pasha’s original order called for immediate evacuation of the Jewish residents of Tel Aviv on the grounds of developments connected with the war against the British forces and fear of impending battles in the area. Indeed, in April 1917, there were two assaults by the British army based in Egypt in the direction of Palestine (the first and second battles of Gaza) which ended in disastrous British defeats. Hacohen describes a petition submitted to the Pasha of Jaffa, requesting tha the cancel the deportation order, in the following words:
Firstly, lest there be discrimination between us and the Germans and the Austrians and Bulgarians, and just as they have been granted permission to remain in the country on their own responsibility, so should we too (Jewish immigrants of Russian origin) be permitted to remain on our own recognizance. Secondly, that time be granted, of at least two weeks, to organize the exodus.
Thirdly, that the poor be permitted also to remain in the Galilee, lower and upper, in the environs of Tiberias and Safed, and not to wander far-off Hama, desolate of Jews, and to where the long journey, of many days and weeks, will take a killing toll upon them, and their fate will be as the fate of the exiled Armenians of whom tens of thousands perished during the journey. Fourthly, that guards from among us, persons who have fulfilled their military duty, be allowed to remain in our neighborhoods and to protect our houses and property.”
HaCohen adds a comment which is significant in our context:
I proposed that we write explicitly in the petition the argument that our poor should not be forced to Hama lest they perish like Armenians. I attach value to the fact that the Turkish government has been stained in the eyes of the whole country because of its crimes against the Armenians, and perhaps the government will reconsider its thoughts of doing thus to the Jews as well, but our politicians said that we must not write this lest it arouse ire against the petitioners.
Fear of the Turkish actions was bound up with alarm that the Turks might do to the Jewish community in Palestine, or at least to the Zionist elements within it, what they had done to the Armenians. This concern was expressed in additional evidence from the early days of the war, from which we can conclude that the Armenian tragedy was known in the Yishuv.
HaCohen says that the Pasha of Jaffa rejected the entire petition and all of its clauses. “He has no power of authority to change any part of the order,” and has been sent by Jamal Pasha only to delay the implementation of the deportation.
Hacohen’s comments contain more than a trace of criticism of the politicians who don’t dare to act and he has harsh words for corrupt Turkey: “Their acts of violence and robbery do not end, and they invent libelous charges, sucking the last drop of blood, and anyone can see that our situation in Eretz Yisrael has no solution but a different ruler, whoever that may be.”
In Aaron Aaronsohn’s diary for May 9, we find “Reuters’ [press agency] this evening relates, word for word, my memorandum ‘The Evacuation of Tel Aviv.’ ” The press release stated that on April 1 an order was given to deport all Jews from Tel Aviv, including the citizens of the Central Powers, within forty-eight hours. A week before, three hundred Jews were expelled from Jerusalem: Jamal Pasha declared that their fate would be that of the Armenians; the eight thousand deportees from Tel Aviv were not allowed to take any provisions with them, and after the expulsion their houses were looted by Bedouin mobs; two Yemenite Jews who tried to oppose the looting were hung at the entrance to Tel Aviv so that all might see, and other Jews were found dead in the dunes around Tel Aviv. Some of this information turned out later to be inaccurate. Yet it should be pointed out that despite Aaronsohn’s tendency to portray the situation in stark, acute terms, he did not purposely falsify it.
His diary from this period is full of worry and fear for the Jews in Palestine and contains partial and fragmentary reports. For example, the report of two Jews who were hanged, which was not true, appears first in his diary. In retrospect we shall see that the report distributed by Reuters aroused the fury of Jamal Pasha as well as his reaction and, thus, may have achieved its purpose.
From Aaronsohn’s diary we learn that he tried to enlist the Jews in Russia, the refugees from Palestine in Egypt, and the Jewish community in the United States, as well as in England. With the help of Sir Mark Sykes, Aaronsohn sent telegrams to several prominent Jews in the U.S.: to his brother, Alexander, who was there at the time, to Professor Felix Frankfurter, to Judge Meyer Sulzberger and to Justice Louis D. Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court. Aaronsohn though that the information might be useful in organizing a campaign to create Jewish brigades in the United States which woudl fight the Turks in Palestine. The possibility is mentioned in the telegrams, in various wordings, that “not a trace nor a soul will remain,” and then there will be no further excuse for the Jews to refrain from outright war against the Turks.
Chaim Weizmann also made wide use of the information he received from Aaronsohn through Sykes. He passed the letters on to Jewish and Zionist figures: Chlenov, Sokolow, the Baron Rothschild, Jacobus H. Kann in the Hague, and De Haas and the Zionist office in Copenhagen
Jamal Pasha openly declared that the joy of Jews at the approach of British troops would be short lived as he would make them share the fate of the Armenians… Jamal Pasha is too cunning to order cold-blooded massacres. His method is to drive the population to starvation and death by thirst, epidemics, etc., etc., which according to him are merely calamities sent by God. Those who know his methods will not be surprised if after a short time severe punishment is dealt on those who have plundered and pillaged under his orders, or at least with his connivance. This will be in accordance with his established policy of exciting one part of the population against the other and exterminating all those who are not Turanians. Please give it greatest publicity.
It is difficult to determine with certainty what factors caused Jamal Pasha to modify his attitude towrad the Jews in 1917, and why the suffering and destruction were relatively moderate.
Hacohen sums up the incident: “Well, the walls have ears, and the fear of public opinion in Europe and America is still very strong in the ruling circles in Turkey. Our tears are more than falling pools of water. This is also for the best.” Hacohen also indicates: “There is no doubt that all of the expulsion from Jaffa and the villages around Jerusalem has done awful damage to the Jews and to the Jewish settlement there.”
There are varying opinions among historians as to the relative weight of the parties – particularly the United States and Germany – who aided the Jews in Palestine during this period. In contrast, some historians emphasize the influence of Jewish public opinion in the world, since Jama Pasha – who believed that the Jews had great political strength internationally – feared its alleged power.
Nadav Shragai:
In a section on the outskirts of the Yavne’el cemetery lie dispersed dozens of basalt tombstones, without names. Only one is engraved with a few clear lines, recounting a terrible tale that nearly disappeared into oblivion: “In memory of my dear parents, Yaakov and Creina Klein (Keter) aged 35-38 and my brother Yehoshua Yona (z”l) aged 5, among the deportees from Tel Aviv-Jaffa, in World War I 1917, who lie interred in this section and whose place of burial is unknown.”
The year 1917 was difficult for the Jews in pre-state Israel. The British army, pushing northward from Egypt, had conquered the southern part of the Land of Israel, and the Turks were waging fierce rearguard battles. The Turks were afraid Jews would help the British conquer the northern part as well. On March 28, 1917, the Ottoman military governor, Jamal Pasha, ordered the expulsion of Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s residents. On Pesach eve, April 6, 1917, the first Hebrew city emptied out. Among the thousands expelled was author Yosef Haim Brenner, who was inspired by those days to write the short story “Hamotza” (The Way Out).
Dr. Gur Alroey, who chairs the Land of Israel Studies Department at the University of Haifa, says there was nothing heroic about that expulsion. “It’s almost impossible to grasp today,” he said. “Thousands simply got up and left, without resisting, and maybe that is why nobody likes to remember or recall that expulsion.”
They scattered to Tiberias, Safed, Kfar Sava, Petah Tikva, Zichron Yaakov, Jerusalem. Some 2,500 of them, mainly the poor, wandered as far as the northern moshavim, or small farming communities. They had to contend with the climate, hunger, poverty and typhus. They survived the first few months, but in the winter of 1917-18, hundreds died of exposure, disease and hunger. Most of the dead were buried hastily, in unmarked graves around the country.