“CONCerNING Our ARAb QuESTIOn”? • 103is freedom [ḥuriyya] today!” The author of this report asks rhetori-
cally: “Where are the Jaffa police? And if they are not to be found,
where are the enlightened of the Arabs? Why are they not teaching
the masses knowledge and ethics [deʿahu-musar]?”^35 the problem is
identified here as the absence of enlightened and ethical Arabs. the
journalists who wrote for Ben- Yehuda’s newspapers, like those in ha-
Ḥerut, sometimes defined their neighbors as “Arabs,” displaying no
interest in distinguishing between Arabs of different religions, even
concerning matters of ethics, when one might have expected religion
to enter into the discussion.
how might we account for this alternation between nonreligious
categorizations of Palestine’s natives (as Arabs), on the one hand,
and religious classification (as Christians or Muslims), on the other?
A regional explanation does not fit; there does not appear to be a
geographical pattern of terminology choice, correlated, for instance,
to whether the location described included both Muslim and Chris-
tian populations. Moreover, because articles from these newspapers
are frequently written anonymously or signed merely with initials, it
is difficult to determine any pattern related to characteristics of the
authors: Ashkenazim versus Sephardim, religious versus more secu-
lar Jews, Arabic- speaking versus non- Arabic- speaking Jews, or Jews
more familiar with native life in palestine versus those less versed in
such affairs.
Simpler explanations might apply. Perhaps, if authors knew the
religions of the individuals involved, they would note them; other-
wise, “arab” would have to do. But even this explanation is unsat-
isfactory, as illustrated in a ha-Ḥerut article entitled “a Christian
Stabs a hebrew” from 1910.^36 the article describes an incident in Je-
rusalem in which Jewish schoolchildren were allegedly surrounded
by “arab youths,” one of whom stabbed a Jewish boy in his side,
inflicting a deep wound. The article never mentions the religion of
the assailant; the two times he and his friends are identified, they
are denoted as “arab youths” or simply “arabs.” that the perpetra-
tor was Christian appears only in the article’s title, suggesting yet
another possible explanation for variations: the newspaper’s editors,
who presumably titled the article, may have been more likely than
other writers to view their neighbors in religious terms. regardless
of the explanation, for some of palestine’s Zionists, at least at times,
their encounter with palestine’s natives was an encounter with mem-
bers of two religions.
(^35) ha-Ẓevi 25:98 (February 7, 1909), 2.
(^36) ha-Ḥerut 3:23 (December 14, 1910), 2– 3. There is no named author.