“CONCerNING Our ARAb QuESTIOn”? • 109of peace and fraternity”^57 — he is concerned that the “Christian arab”
leadership is not acting appropriately to stem the tide of anti- Jewish
attacks in Palestine.^58
Dividing neighbors: Muslims versus ChristiansLater, in May 1909, one of ha-Ẓevi’s Jaffa correspondents reported on
the response of the city’s residents to violent events two hundred kilo-
meters to Jaffa’s north. “On Saturday in Beirut,” Ben- Yehuda’s paper
reports, “they hanged the Muslim army soldier who killed the Beirut
delegate, the Christian arab. the Christian arabs spread the word in
our city [Jaffa], a rousing call to go see the hanging of the en emy.”^59
the article explains that they^60 hired sailors to transport people from
Jaffa to Beirut and back, “and thus those who went were many.”^61 here
we encounter not only ha-Ẓevi’s use of the phrase and concept of “Chris-
tian arabs” but also the rather unsubtle implication that Muslims and
Christians are enemies. the view that the natural pair of antagonists
in palestine, and beyond, were Muslims and Christians— and not, that
is, Jews and Arabs (whether Muslim, Christian, or both)— was at once,
it would seem, a description of perceived reality as well as a prescrip-
tive claim, a statement of what should be. this descriptive- prescriptive
position is a subtext of many Late Ottoman Zionist newspaper reports
concerning the non- Jewish natives of palestine.^62
(^57) ha-Ẓevi 25:71 (January 5, 1909), 2.
(^58) See also ha-Ẓevi 25:155 (April 25, 1909), 2, on the murder of “the Christian Arab
representative arslan Bey.” the reference here is to the murder of Muhammad arslan
Bey on april 13, 1909, in Istanbul. For a contemporary observer’s account, see McCul-
lagh, TheFallofAbd-Ul-Hamid, 316.
(^59) ha-Ẓevi 25:175 (May 19, 1909), 2.
(^60) the article indicates that “the arabs” made this arrangement. this is presumably a
reference to the “Christian arabs” from the previous sentence, but the fact that they are
listed simply as arabs here is yet another complication in this question of nomenclature.
(^61) In telling of the contract they signed with the sailors, the author refers to them here
simply as “the Arabs,” but the previous paragraph makes it clear that these Arabs are
exclusively “Christian arabs.”
(^62) the reports of the murder of the “Christian arab” delegate are all the more curious
and revealing because the murdered delegate was not actually Christian. Muhammad
Arslan was a Druze emir from Lattakia in the vilayet of Beirut. The presence in Pales-
tine and the broader Levant of a non- Jewish community that was neither Christian nor
properly Muslim might have complicated the perspective of some Zionists who viewed
their neighbors in dichotomous religious terms. While Zionists (and later Israelis) would
come to relate to the Druze very differently from the way they treated Palestine’s other
non- Jewish residents, at this early stage of encounter some may not have understood the
distinctions and presumed that, in the Levant, a non- Muslim non- Jew was a Christian.