Hadera: transnational migrations from Eastern Europe to Ottoman Palestine and the glocal origins of the Zionist-Arab conflict

Abstract

The article explores the interplay between transnational migration, cultural patrimony and political conflict, tying together the former realms of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. It discusses the role played by Russian Jews in the development of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine until 1948. It focuses on the Northern Sharon, where three distinct immigrant groups -Circassians, Bosnians and Russian Jews -settled in the 1870s-1890s. Methodologically, it adopts a new, twofold, approach to the genesis of the conflict, by tracing its roots within the broader setting of Eurasian transnational migrations to Palestine, and the stricter context of 'locality expressing glocality', that is, of specific colonies and their development under internal pressures and outside interactions. In 1948, prior actions aimed at achieving ethnic homogeneity through coerced population transfers during the disintegration Eurasian imperial polities served as a blueprint for some of the same Zionist immigrants for achieving plurality in their new Jewish State.This article explores the interplay between transnational migrations, cultural patrimony and political conflict, tying together the former realms of the Russian and Ottoman Empires, in the genesis of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine (henceforth the conflict).Most scholars discuss the origins of the conflict from a national-territorial perspective. 1 The post-colonial turn in Middle Eastern Studies and Palestine Studies inspired other scholars to regard the conflict as a colonial dispute between Zionist 'settler-colonists' and Arab-Palestinian 'natives'. 2 In the current article, I suggest that reading the pre-national past in light of national spatial and ideological notions is both constrictive and anachronistic.Transnational and local factors influenced the relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors long before Palestine's borders were charted. Therefore, I argue for the need to look at the evolution of the conflict beyond the national arena. In structuralist terms, I call on scholars to study the conflict from two hierarchical, thematically contradictory, but narrativelyThe Version f Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Middle Eastern Studies since