India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance

Palestinians earlier treatment by the Ottoman administrators. Also at this time, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, secular, religious, Zionist, and anti-Zionist Jews begin to use Hebrew language for communication; this resulted in adoption of a new kind of cultural Zionism among Jews in Palestine, which was meshed with Ottomanism. As Fishman reports the antagonism in the relationship between Jews and Arabs becomes quite remarkable with the use of the notion of “martyrs” gaining prominence. The late Ottoman period looks like the period of the British Mandate, and to a certain extent, evokes “Israel’s post-Mandate relations with its Palestinian minority” (p. 150) that shape later relationships. The last chapter discusses Zionism during the Young Turk period with many complexities in framing Zionism for Ottoman Jews delicately underscored. To illustrate, for the Ottoman deputy Nissim Mazliah, his Zionist preference was interwoven with his loyalty to the Ottoman state and his advocacy for Hebrew culture. For Ottoman Jews, like Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum and Albert Antebi, on the other hand, their anti-Zionism marked something else entirely. “Their anti-Zionism in no way meant they were against Jewish migration to Palestine; rather they were against an attempt at creating an independent state in Palestine (much different from how anti-Zionism is defined today)” (p. 207). This book is an innovative study which demonstrates how the late Ottoman period prepared the ground for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before the two national movements developed during the British Mandate and consolidated later in the aftermath of the 1947–1948 war. Fishman documents how the ideas of equality came out of the Young Turk Revolution, led Jews and Palestinians formulate ethno-national claims and dispatch them to Istanbul. Claiming the Homeland should be of use to scholars of Zionism, who want to learn more about different forms it has taken in the past; it documents how Jewish community in Palestine and Palestinians emerged against the backdrop of late Ottoman state.