256 Mediated Publics
ather than reflecting everyday inter-communal tensions that might R
emerge as easily as class conflicts, the development of sectarian strife in
Palestine in the late Ottoman period was instead the product of new
power dynamics and a changing imperial landscape. To a certain degree,
the press was used as a tool by both Jews and Christians to divide the
other from their Muslim compatriots. Ha-Herut complained that Falastin
had published “another lie” that local Jews were agitating against the
Muslim Rumelian refugees in the aftermath of the wars in the Balkans
(1912–13). “Our Muslims here should think about the aim of these lies,”
the paper warned.^58 In many other ways the process of reshaping com-
munal boundaries conflicted with imperial ones, and numerous exam-
ples from the late Ottoman period indicate this tension. Parliamentary
elections, wars with Christian Italy and Greece, and the growth of the
Zionist movement within Palestine itself all reflected the imperfect juxta-
position of universal and communal commitments—indeed, the limits of
Ottomanism itself.
Nevertheless, an important revolution had taken place: in the reach
of the press, in the scope of its coverage, and in its own professed aims.
The press was a tool for promoting, defining, and implementing a civic
Ottomanism. Yet it was also a forum for religious, linguistic, and ethnic
communities to promote their own communal imaginings while pro-
jecting their community on the imperial civic stage. In the final analysis,
the press offered a powerful voice and platform for the numerous chal-
lenges—ideological, social, and political—that civic Ottomanism faced.