Conflicting Accounts of Early Zionist Settlement: A Note on the Encounter between the Colony of Re ovot and the Bedouins of Khirbat Duran†

What is it about?

By comparing a recently discovered rare petition sent to Istanbul in 1890 by the Bedouins of Khirbat Duran to protest the establishment of the Jewish colony of Rehovot, some 25 kilometres south-east of Jaffa on Palestine’s central inner coastline, to accounts written by Rehovot’s first colonists, the article explores claims of land ownership rights by the two sides. Beyond this unique perspective on the early Zionist–Arab encounter, these differing accounts highlight some of the underlying reasons for strains in the relationships between the two populations in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century. Agrarian and social developments in Palestine in the decades preceding the beginning of Zionist activity in the 1880s ought to be examined in order to better contextualise both the source materials and the events involving the two populations.

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Why is it important?

Petitions sent by the rural population in Palestine against the early Zionist activity are rare testimony on the part of subalterns that provide a unique innovative angle on the early Zionist–Arab encounters in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century. They show that with regard to late Ottoman Palestine, despite the political occurrences and the upheavals in this area in the twentieth century, there are considerable understudied primary sources representing the voices of the rural population. These view developments in a light that differs considerably from the customary prevalent prism of urban elites, national agendas and the ensuing political Jewish–Arab conflict. Beyond the conflicting accounts of the encounter between the first Zionist settlers and the Arab rural population in the 1880s and 1890s, petitions by the rural population vividly demonstrate that the Jewish colonists integrated into a society in the throes of considerable upheavals and transformations as a result of reforms in the Ottoman agrarian system, the nature of the Empire’s bureaucracy and administration and the impact of market forces. The colonies needed to cope with changes which in part remained contested and unresolved (e.g. ownership of land, borders of plots, water rights, grazing grounds). Thus, some of the objections to the arrival of the Jewish colonists raised by the rural population were exacerbated by ongoing developments whose roots went back many years. Many of the daily clashes between the two populations over issues such as borders of plots, grazing and water rights and even cases of theft and intentional damage to fields must be interpreted in this light rather than being merely viewed as ‘cultural misunderstandings’. Moreover, this background must be taken into account when exploring later developments in the relationships between the two populations.