The Zionist–Arab incident of Zarnuqa 1913: a chronicle and several methodological remarks

What is it about?

When dealing with the history of early Zionist-Arab encounters, it is very rare to find narratives representing all the parties involved. This is especially true when it comes to the rural Arab population who was mostly illiterate and left very few written documents behind. The Zarnuqa incident in July 1913 between the Jewish colony of Rehovot and its guards, on the one hand, and the villagers from nearby Zarnuqa, on the other, is strikingly different in this sense as there are detailed narratives by several of the parties that were directly involved as well as by broader circles exposed to the event. We have, for example, the narrative of the villagers in the form of a petition they sent to the Ottoman imperial capital Istanbul, reports in the nascent Arab press, several narratives from the Jewish sides (the colonists, the guards of ha-Shomer, the Hebrew press), as well as the recollections of several Dutch travelers who happened to be in Rehovot at the time and left a very interesting description of the events. The aim of this article is thus to present the various narratives available to researchers today, starting with the various Jewish sources, then examining the Arabic sources and finally the Dutch. We will then analyse each of the sources and draw general conclusions about the sources available for historians who study the period of early Zionist-Arab encounters. The different narratives provide a multidimensional perspective on these encounters and on Zionist
Arab relationships in general. Our aim is not to determine whose narrative is closer to historical reality (which would certainly be elusive), or to find out who started the fight and who is to be blamed for the violent confrontation. Rather, our goal is to present the different narratives, what the narrators chose to emphasize and what to omit. The article illustrates the difficult task facing historians dealing with the period of the early Zionist-Arab encounter and conflict, especially given that often the sources available were written years after the events they describe and were influenced by later agendas and political circumstances.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The violent clash between the colonists and guards of Rehovot and the Arab villagers from Zarnuqa in July 1913 was a turning point in Jewish-Arab relationships in Ottoman Palestine in the early twentieth century. Reports in the newspapers at the time, both in Arabic and in Hebrew, the petition sent to Istanbul by the mukhtars of the villagers in the region, the point of view of the Dutch tourists who witnessed the event and the memoirs written many years later about the clash, all show that the Zarnuqa incident was much more than a local event. In this article, we have not tried to trace the ‘historical truth’ or attempted to assign blame. Rather, our aim was to examine the narratives and the way they were presented and to point to the methodological difficulties the historian faces when reading and trying to understand sources dealing with the Zarnuqa incident.