The City and its Rural Hinterland

Introduction: The City and the Country

Jerusalem was the least feudal of the major historical cities of Palestine in the nineteenth century. It's religious placement and functions determined to a large extent the preoccupations of its ruling families, as well as their relationship to the surrounding countryside. Pilgrims and the administration of the holy sites continued to play a decisive role in the fortunes of the Jerusalem ashraf and their allies among the rural potentates for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Annals of Palestine, a chronicle of contemporary life in Jerusalem at the first half of last century written by the Greek Orthodox Monk Neophytos, provides us with a rich and detailed (though often partisan) record of the relationship between the peasantry and the city. In this diary we observe three features that dominated this relationship:

• Jerusalem villages were the sites of frequent rebellions against the central authority, most notably against the Egyptian administration of Ibrahim Pasha. The main target of these rebellions was not taxation, as one might suspect, but conscription.
• In their grievances against the High Port, and later Muhammad Ali and his stepson Ibrahim Pasha, Jerusalem notables frequently allied themselves with the peasants.
• Christian and Jewish merchants of Jerusalem were often the target of peasant rebellions. But the attempts of minority communities seeking protection in the administration of Ibrahim Pasha (which he fulfilled) did not extend itself to the Christian peasantry. Some of the severest retribution conducted by Ibrahim Pasha was against the Christian peasantry of Beit Jala, Beit Lahem, and Kerak (the latter in Transjordan).

The most notable of peasant insurrections was that of April-May 1834, in which important sections of the Jerusalem Gentry joined the fallahin rebels against the prospect of conscription in the Egyptian army against his Ottoman in European enemies. Jerusalem was besieged on May 8, and-in addition to local peasants-ten thousand fallahin (according to Neophytos' estimate) joined from Hebron, Nablus and other Jerusalem villages. In absence of Ibrahim Pasha (who escaped to Jaffa in light of rumours regarding a spreading plague), many Jerusalemites joined the rebellion inside the city. Despite calls by Ibrahim's deputy to defend the city, the Jerusalemites actually helped the rebels to storm the city.

The people Jerusalem hurried and broke the locks of the Damascus Gate in and opened it. Thousands of fallahin rushed I and captured the city surrounding the Citadel, under which they opened a rapid fire. Then young and old fell to looting, beginning with houses of the Miralais, whence they removed the heavy articles which had been left behind, such as pillows, blankets and wooden tables. Then they looted the Jewish houses in the same way. The following night, the fallahin, with some low class bandits of Jerusalem, began to loot in the shops of the Jews, the Christians, the Franks and then the Muslims. The grocers, the Shoemaker's and every other dealer suffered alike. Within two or three days there was no tone shop intact in the market, for they smashed the locks and the doors and seized everything of value.

It was usual in those circumstances for the Jerusalem Gentry to hire armed peasant militias to guard their property against looting. These guards were recruited customarily from Malha and 'Ayn Karim. The monasteries were often protected by Ebaidi villagers former Christian slaves were attached to the Mar Saba Monastery, in the same manner that the Ta'amerah Bedouins protected the convents of Bethlehem.

When rebellion was eventually subdued, Jerusalem experienced a few decades of relative stability, peace, and economic expansion, extending to the First World War and the entry of Allenby's army to the Holy City. Trade and mercantile interests in the city brought it into increasing collabouration with Jaffa (the main entry to Palestine of European and Greek and Russian pilgrimage) and to the city of Salt in Transjordan, which was its inland supplier of goods. But Jerusalem, unlike Nablus or Jaffa, never acquired prominence as a centre of production or distribution of goods. They increased security brought about by Ottoman reforms and capitulations led to an increasing number of Europeans, including European Jews, to settle the city after the 1860s. The ensuing building boom created a huge demand for skilled craftsmen and builders. This development strengthened the relationship of the city with the townships of Beit Lahem and Beit Jala (the main suppliers of Jerusalem builders), as well as with Mount Hebron villages. But the actual expansion of the city outside the city walls was Northwards towards the neighbourhoods of Wadi al-Joz, Sheikh Jarrah and Tur. There the Muslim notables began to build their villas. In the Western expanses, Christian and Jewish middle classes established the modern communities in the direction of the villages of Lifta, Deir Yasin and Malha.

The defining relationship between the city notables and the surrounding villages was one of patronage and mutual protection, rather than one of patrician rule over a subordinate peasantry. Occasionally the historic relationship typical of the feudal cities of Palestine (Nablus and Akka) was reversed in Jerusalem. This was the case with the Sheikhs of Abu Ghosh in the West, and the Lahham clans in Bethlehem. Scholch described this relationship as one in which the members of Jerusalem Majlis [city council] derived their power of wealth from the administration of religious endowments in the city, and from using their influence with the Sublime Port to extend favours and mediate conflicts among the village shuyukhs. With increased European migration and settlement these patronages extended themselves to the protection of religious and ethnic minorities in the area.

For much of the second half of the nineteenth century the Western rural Hinterland of Jerusalem was occupied by disputes between the dominant multazimun in the areas (Samhan, Lahham, Abu Ghosh) over the control of tax farming commissions, often through alliances with Jerusalem a'yan. Qays-Yaman peasant factionalism was the crucible used by these Sheikh's to mobilise the peasants of Jerusalem and Bethlehem villages in their respective military bands. The Sheikh of Abu Ghosh (the leading Yamanite) was located in a strategic area because of his control over the Jerusalem-Jaffa highway used by European Christian pilgrims. In effect, he was in a position to charge khawa ['protection money'] from European pilgrims and Arab merchants using the route. It was not until the early 1860s when the Ottoman Governor of Jerusalem imposed the control of the central government over these factions.

Towards the end of the Ottoman rule the Pasha of Jerusalem with the help of the Jerusalem Majlis was able to reorganise the relationship between the governor and the surrounding villages through the appointments of village mukhtars as local representatives of the state. This was the culmination of the modernist administrative reforms which the Ottomans initiated in response to European impositions including bureaucratic centralisation, privatisation of land (through the land code of 1858) and the attempt to eliminate communal [musha'] ownership, and finally the formal elimination of sheikhdoms and tax farming. In the city of Jerusalem, the municipal council rose to prominence. Inherited by the British Mandate, they elevated its ruling families from city patricians to a hegemonic class in the entire country.