102 • CHAPTER 3
Muslims; that they were also arabs often seems irrelevant or unwor-
thy of mention.
But not always, to be sure. at other times, even in ha-Ḥerut and
ha-Ẓevi/ha-Or, the non- Jewish natives of palestine are referred to
simply as arabs. In hebron in June 1909, for example, there was a
public celebration on the visit of a high- level official from the Rus-
sian Orthodox Church. according to ha-Ḥerut’s correspondent, arabs
and Jews joined in the celebration (a fascinating scene of palestin-
ian social history in its own right), and all was proceeding delight-
fully. the festivities were interrupted, however, when an intoxicated
“Arab” with “a good heart” shot his pistol and accidentally killed a
young Jewish woman. the details of this incident are intriguing—
vigilante pursuit of the killer, threats of revenge and counterrevenge,
and so on— but the important point for the present discussion is that
the killer is identified merely as “one of the Arabs.”^31 the fact that he
was intoxicated perhaps suggests that he was not a Muslim— or not
a strictly observant one^32 — but, regardless, for this ha-Ḥerut author’s
purposes, he was simply an arab. the same is true in multiple other
ha-Ḥerut reports, including, for instance, a brief account from the Gal-
ilee of “the arabs of the region” who allegedly planted the “body of a
murdered arab” in the Jewish Kinerret colony near tiberias in order
to accuse the Jews of being “the arab’s murderers.”^33 In these cases,
ha-Ḥerut’s authors use the term arab without reference to the subjects’
religious identity.
as with ha-Ḥerut, Ben- Yehuda’s papers also often refer to non-
Jewish residents of palestine simply as “arabs.” In a report entitled
“The Arabs in Jaffa,” published in January 1909, ha-Ẓevi explains
that, in the wake of the newspaper’s earlier notice about “an Arab”
who allegedly poisoned young Jewish girls, “there erupted among the
arabs great excitement, and on thursday they burst into the store of
a Jewish shopkeeper and beat him murderously, accusing him, the
Jewish shopkeeper, of poisoning Arab girls.”^34 the next month, ha-
Ẓevi reported on another event in Jaffa, in which “an Arab entered one
of the houses in [the neighborhood of] neve Shalom and kidnapped
a young woman.” When the “Arab” was finally caught, he brazenly
declared, in the language of the Young Turk Revolution, that “there
(^31) ha-Ḥerut 1:10 (June 11, 1909), 3. The author is listed as M. ʿ. M.
(^32) For a report on an 1895 alleged incident in which a Muslim notable visited a
Jewish colony and became intoxicated, “something he could not do in an arab envi-
ronment,” see asaf, ha-Yeḥasimbeynʿarvimvi-hudimbe-ereẓ-yisraʾel1860–1948, 25. On
Islamic attitudes toward intoxication, see enes Karic, “Intoxication,” eQ.
(^33) ha-Ḥerut 1:25 (July 26, 1909), 2. The author is listed as Y. B. Sh.
(^34) ha-Ẓevi 25:92 (January 31, 1909), 2. Emphasis corresponds to a repeated pronoun.