Greater Israel—A Land with No People, for a People with No Land (Part 5 of 5)

(Part 5 of 5)

The Shifting Population Architecture of the Southern Levant in the late 19th and early 20th Century

It has been said that the precursor, template and model for Nazism and its racist nationalism is not to be found in Mussolini’s fascism, as is often suggested, but rather in the genocidal mass murdering nationalism of Kemal Ataturk of the Young Turkish Movement. The Young Turks, paying heed to a long Ottoman tradition of brutal oppression, slavery, and forced labour engaged in a scale of mass murder that is perhaps unmatched in the 20th century with the exception of the Nazis and Bolsheviks. 

The full scope of the Turkish mass killings are vast, and even now are still not fully charted. The duration and timespan of the organized killing is significant. The mass murder went on for years, leaving entire national minorities destroyed and the survivors terrified and traumatized. The pattern of mass killing and forced expulsion has long-established roots in the original invasion and conquest of the Seljuk Turks. Raids and killing continued for hundreds of years, resulting in vast lands being stripped of their peasants and cultivators. It was perhaps the weakness of the Turkish retreat in the face of Russian victories in the Russian Turkish Wars of the 1870s that initiated the large population transfers and resettlements of the late 19th century. 

A wholesale reengineering of the population architecture of the Levant took place in the last decades of the 19th century. The historical research of Professor Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, a scholar of global migration and forced displacement at the University of California has revealed that well-over-a-million Chechen refugees, alone, were displaced as a result of the 1877-78 Turkish Russian Wars. The Ottomans created over a thousand Chechen and North Caucasian villages on the frontiers (and elsewhere) of the Ottoman periphery to protect the empire’s flank from Arabs, Bedouin, and raiding bands and brigands. The entire population and ethnic architecture of the Ottoman frontier towns in East Anatolia, the Levant, the Transjordan and the states that are now Lebanon and Israel were drastically reshuffled and rearranged. Chechen populations, although this fact is largely unknown to most people today, established such important towns on the borders of modern Israel as Amman (1878), Wasi Al Sir (1880), Jerash (1884), Al Qunaitra (1873) , Naur (1901), Russafa (1904), Zarqua, (1902), Sukhna (1905), Asraq (1932), Sweileh (1906) amongst dozens of others. 

Nowhere was radical social engineering and mass murder combined with such cruelty of purpose and ferocity as in Eastern Anatolia. The 20th century mass murder of civilians and peasants by uniformed soldiers has its undisguised origins in Asia Minor and Anatolia in the Young Turks. The Turks, it could be said, taught the Nazis the techniques and means of extermination. 

The genocides of minorities and particularly the ancient Christian populations whose residence and history in Asia Minor long predate their Turkish overlords is a great stain on modern-day Turkish history. It was a genocide that was intense and unrelenting for almost thirty years. The Israeli historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, have referred to this ongoing slaughter as the “Thirty Year Genocide”. Morris and Ze’evi state that of the “five million Christians” in Turkey in 1894 only “tens of thousands remained alive in the country by 1924” and over “two million Christians were murdered by Muslims”. 

The entire ancient Armenian population of Anatolia, the 5000 year-old birthplace and cradle of  one of most industrious peoples in the world (perhaps the first agriculturalists) were destroyed and nearly extirpated and replaced by other nationalities including a good number of their killers, prominently amongst them the Kurds. The scale of the Armenian massacres bear resemblance to the Jewish Holocaust in Europe two decades later. 

But we have many other wholesale destruction by the Turks—the destruction of the Pontic Christian Greeks, and the Greeks from Thrace, for example. In 1923, over 1.6 million Greeks were expelled from Turkey in exchange for 400,000 Muslims from Macedonia. Other Turkish minorities such as the ancient Chaldean Christians, Assyrians and the Druze were slaughtered along with their women and children. During the first World War, Christians in Mount Lebanon subject to an Allied boycott were starved to death, while the Turks refused to allow Syrian grain to be transferred to the blockaded country. Two hundred thousand Lebanese Christians died and a large percentage (some say a third) of the territory’s population fled the country, marking the beginnings of the worldwide Lebanese diaspora.  

The other event of major demographic importance that reshuffled the entire deck of the Levant’s populations was the building of the Hejaz narrow-gauge railway between Damascus and Medina/Mecca, the only railway financed by the Ottomans themselves. This line was built between 1900 and 1905 with an extension of the line to Medina in 1908. The final piece of the railway to Mecca was never completed. Nevertheless, the railway revolutionized the annual pilgrimage to Mecca—the Hajj. A major railway spur to Haifa and further southern spikes through the Jezreel valley were also built during this period. The railway provided for the mass movement of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world. Yet to be fully determined, it is believed that tens of thousands, and perhaps as many as 250,000 people migrated to Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, Syria and Transjordan, facilitated by both the Hejaz railway and the flood of gold and hard currency into Palestine by way of Zionists and Jewish philanthropic organizations.

The entire area of Palestine became a massive boomtown, swollen with refugees, and migrants from throughout the Asian and Arab world. Considerable numbers of people came from the Arabian steppe, and from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Albania, and a not insignificant numbers of Anatolian Armenians, Ethiopians, Sudanese, sub-saharan Africans and an appreciable number of Macedonians, Greeks, Chechens, Circassians, and a small number of Germans, Russians, and Mennonites as well as a numerically small but steady stream of Western European and Oriental Jews. 

The larger question in the face of this slogan “a land with no people for a people with no land” is why was the land of Palestine so destitute as late as the middle of the 19th century. Certainly, we know that the Crusaders moved entire communities to the Italian peninsula, including many talented artisans, glass workers, silk spinners, makers of fine fabrics, metallurgists, sword and canon mongers, physicians, practitioners of viticulture and intensive agriculture of all kinds,  innumerable craftsmen, and even religious scribes, translators, copyists and artists of all sorts. The majority of these workers were of Jewish ethnicity and they played a large role in transforming Italian towns and cities into hives of productivity. Many communities, such as the glass  makers of Venice, Murano and the estates of Conrad of Montferrat, the Crusader King, trace their origins back to the Levant and their Jewish roots, although they have long since adopted Catholicism. Certainly, this large and continuous and long out-immigration undermined much of the long established economy of the Levant. On top of this migration was the corrupt and exploitative overlordship of the Ottomans.  

Seeing 19th Century Palestine in Stereo-Vision

One major archive of fascinating media that has not been plumbed in an effort to better understand the pre-mandatory status of Ottoman Palestine are the astonishing stereo images of these lands. We estimate that there may be tens of thousands and possibly as many as a few hundred thousand unique stereoscopic images of 19th and early 20th century Palestine.

Stereoscopy was an incredible product of Victorian inventiveness and technical ingenuity. Remarkably, stereoscopy, a 3D technology similar to that of holography, captures an entire light field, allowing for extraordinary lifelike details to be captured. This technology is known to all of us from the 3D stereoscopes that we played with as children. These viewers consist of two binocular eye-pieces, one for each eye, and a place to insert a revolving wheel of images at the top of the device. One cycles through the image carousel by pulling on a lever on the side of the viewer which rotates a plastic wheel. The viewer is immediately drawn inside  with mesmerizing detail and richness into the images that ‘pop out’ of the media with a depth and realism that is quite astonishing. This mid-19th century “VR” technology emerged prior to photography! It is counterintuitive and hard to believe, but this is, in fact, the case. The scale of the industry is utterly astounding and surprising. After the invention of the pocket sized carte de visite in 1854 by French photographer Adlophe-Eugene Disderi, “as many as three to four hundred million stereo images sold per year.” 

There were large 19th-century ‘multinational’ stereoscopic corporations (The London Stereographic Company, may  be the first global media company)  that marketed their tens of thousands of ‘parlour voyages’ and specialized ‘series’, as well as sold stereoscopes and related hardware. These stereoscope media conglomerates organized the stereo imaging of sights and scenes all over the world. The stereo-photography industry was a precursor to the nascent 20th century moving pictures industry, and a spur to global tourism, science education, and programs such as those initiated by the National Geographic Company years later. Aspects of a possible 21st century VR industry can be seen in this rich media that flourished in the middle of the 19th century. This dynamic media ecosystem was destined to be replaced by the flat, and comparatively dull images of photography and photolithography in the early 20th century–an actual setback for technology and society as a whole. Technologically, we see here an instance of a more primitive technology (photography) replacing a more advanced technology (stereoscopy) which provided an experience of much greater depth, richness and immersiveness.

Interestingly, the biblical lands of Israel were one of the most extensively stereo-imaged areas in the world. From the 1860s forward, presentations of these images were put together into full theatre productions, and projected onto huge screens, where the spectators wore VR-like goggles. The carousel of images was typically accompanied by a narrated lecture, which was often combined with especially composed pipe organ tracks. These events were utterly transporting. In New York City,  William Stoddard (1835-1925), a prominent stereo-imager of the Holy Land alone put on 50 shows per year, packing almost 2000 people into Broadway’s Dial Theatre, one of the largest theatres on Broadway. More than 100,000 people a year saw this show. The “Bible Lands” show updated its images continuously with new media and ran for almost two decades in New York and travelled to other cities around the world.  

With the aim of better understanding the status of the biblical lands in the pre-Yishuv period we are in the process of acquiring and archiving this extraordinary record of stereo images with a plan to create a comprehensive stereo portfolio. By geo-locating these images we will be able to provide an incontestable picture of the status of the Holy Land, and to take stock of the state of the country, its settlement and people. 

Conclusion

This blog is dedicated to re-envisioning Zionism, specifically elaborating a conception of a Greater Israel. Our objective is to write the next chapters and volumes of Herzl’s unwritten sequel to Altneuland, in order to sketch out Israel’s extraordinary promise and future. Our interest is not to engage in polemics and to waste precious time addressing hateful canards and vile imputations, but rather  to put forward civilizational scale projects and plans that will soon adorn Israel. A number of these projects are already in motion. These projects by their grandeur, scale and brilliance will utterly redefine Zionism. 

As Patrick Geddes famously apostrophized, “Think Globally, Act Locally”. All movements are defined by their goals, their plans, the lofty ideals that they inculcate in their followers, and the horizons they set, and, most importantly, the ability of the informing ideas to motivate and move individuals to action. 

The status of the “lands” of ancient and modern Israel is so encrusted with narrative and political intent, covert and otherwise, that the subject demands some kind of serious address, as we have attempted in this essay. The question is not if or whether the early Zionists found a “land without a people”, but rather why the land was so reduced in population, stripped of its forest and verdant foliage and left it in such a state of decrepitude and waste. What happened to all of Israel’s fabled industries and artisans?

Not only do we have tens of thousands of letters and diaries and documents to attest to this sorry state of affairs, still largely unorganized, but we have found, and might be the first to really point out this fact, that there exists a vast archive of incontrovertible visual imagery, in the form of the astonishing mid and late 19th century inventories of stereo-imagery and stereographs. As previously outlined, we will be organizing and making these images available on appropriate media in the coming years. By enhancing these images, geo-locating their original coordinates and by augmenting and extending these images using various kinds of machine learning assisted reproduction, we intend to create a panoramic 3D/ Virtual Reality visualization of Palestine over time, particularly from the crucial period stretching from Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad excursion (1869) to the beginning of the British mandatory period (1923). This documentary evidence will go far to untangle the actual status of the country, its development, populace and lands and will provide an invaluable resource for further study and research. 

Herzl’s remarkable novel Altneuland, is a foundational document of the Zionist movement and it provides an extraordinary opportunity to interrogate Zionism’s prerogatives and moral premises. In particular, it illuminates Herzl’s hopes as the guiding visionary of the movement for the Jewish State and his belief in its status as a protective refuge, haven and fortress. Altneuland provides us with an unmatched ability to understand Herzl’s dream for the Jewish people. Herzl’s plans were infused with immense ambitions and a deeply felt faith in the unique contributions that the Jewish Nation, reborn and re-enlivened in its ancestral home, might contribute to humankind’s progress, if not its very survival. 

We can see barely one hundred years post-publication of Altneuland, the extraordinary achievement and realization of most of Herzl’s immediate goals. It is not clear if any other foundational utopian outline of a national project can make any kind of similar claim. These achievements include first and foremost achieving actual statehood by the unanimous recognition of the world’s nations and the leading victors and powers of World War Two in 1948 as well as the remarkable achievements of building the infrastructure of the Jewish State, its power and electrical grid, rail lines and roads, establishing technically advanced irrigation and desalination works.Creating a thriving technically advanced economy with a national production of half a trillion dollars in just over 75 years and a per-capita income that exceeds that of most European countries. And further in creating an economy that leads the world in many key technologies. Israel has established great institutions of learning and science. All of this has been forged in spite of and through constant and unrelenting warfare.. All of these achievements were realized in what was for all practical purposes a barren and impoverished land lacking natural resources, fresh water and energy. 

The Jewish people, post-exile, have planted their civilizational seeds throughout the world over the last two thousand plus years. Many of these seeds will germinate, spore and come home to Israel where they will find nourishment in their original environment and soil. The developments that will grow from these seeds will astonish the world and will utterly change our shared future and human possibilities. 

“If you will it, it is no dream” 

-Theodore Herzl

*Dedicated to 31-year-old Ben Shimoni, who heroically saved nine lives on October 7th, 2023 before losing his own life. Ben Shimoni made multiple trips under gun fire to save fellow party-goers at the Supernova music festival. Two passengers on his last rescue attempt were also fatally wounded and died, Gaya Halifa and Ofir Tzarfati. May they not be forgotten and may their memory be a blessing.