The appearance of Arabic newspapers and journalistic discourse on the Palestinian political, social and cultural stage during the Mandate period shaped the social and cultural awareness of the readers to a great degree. Newspapers reflected the various opinions prevalent among the different sectors of readers and expressed the readers’ social and cultural expectations. This occurred not only in the political sphere. Various social classes perceived the newspapers and the journalistic discourse as a suitable platform for expressing themselves and presenting demands, desires and criticism in a Palestine confronting the Zionist project under the British rule.

Global Dimensions of the Palestinian Press

Palestinian society gave rise to a dynamic and diverse press with different kinds of periodicals (dailies, weeklies, monthlies, reviews) that were a central element in the political expression of different trends and outlooks. Some newspapers gave voice to the causes of these sectors as practical fulfilment of their role as an informative instrument shaping and influencing public opinion. The newspaper al-Karmil, for example, side by side with years of political activity, also dedicated a great deal of attention to the rural classes and to topics of land and agriculture. It often addressed the peasants and guided them on issues such as modern methods of cultivation, desirable crops, circumventing the dominance and the control of the wealthy families who owned the large agricultural assets, or fighting the phenomenon of the sale of land and speculation, which had become very prevalent.

Najib Nassar, the editor of al-Karmil, in contrast to the various Palestinian political organisations and institutions such as the Arab Executive Committee and the Higher Muslim Council, believed that words alone were not sufficient. He often visited distant villages and Bedouin encampments, in particular in the north and in the Valley of Bisan. In his travels he tried to organise alternatives to the traditional institutions that would be capable of assisting the peasants with their problems so that they would be able to resist the proposals of agents and speculators.

This activity is attested to in letters sent by readers from the villages visited by Nassar. They expressed thanks to the editor for his actions as well as raising questions relating to agricultural work and desirable crops or how to avoid paying commissions and to bypass the marketing monopoly of the urban notable families who owned the most significant agricultural assets.

In January 1892, the Cairo newspaper al-Mu’ayyad reported that a woman from Minufiyya province – in the delta north of Egypt's capital – had gone to court seeking a divorce. Her husband, with eight years in prison behind him, faced seven more. When the court refused her request, ‘she worked out a stratagem to rid herself of boredom and irritation’. The woman baked a delicacy beloved of Egyptians, fatira, a rich layered pastry. She awaited her husband along the route by which he would descend the jabal, returning to prison from the day's hard labour. He and five work-crew prison mates ate the fatira. All became ill and two died – the husband not among them. The fatira enveloped poisoned filling.

This woman who tried to poison her husband, remarked al-Mu’ayyad, had been sought in marriage by her first cousin. Editorialising about motives (in shedding her husband she wished to shed ‘boredom and irritation’), al-Mu’ayyad suggested she acted selfishly; it did not broach other possibilities: economic need? social vulnerability? the right to sexual satisfaction as stipulated in Islamic jurisprudence?

In al-Mu’ayyad's local reportage, female subjects in public spaces appeared often as disruptive forces (disprivileged-class adult females) or cherished-but-fragile national commodities (privileged-class schoolgirls, ‘public space’ a gender-segregated classroom). Terse, dramatic reports of incidents and crimes also sketched females as objects of transaction handled by males: relatives, husbands, state employees. As schoolgirl, the female figure emblematised the state's benevolent modernising energies. As woman on the street – spectacle – she signalled a world out of control.

Such vignettes provided fodder for newspaper commentaries on how gender segregation practices meant to guarantee public morals were breaking down. Representations of women and girls in the Egyptian press were not innocent given the era's fierce debates on present and optimal gendered practices in the context of Egyptians’ struggle for independence, and an intensely articulated concern over public order. Representations in al-Mu’ayyad of sexed bodies poised along a range of gendered social practices; bodies as points of access to particular political configurations, physical spaces and modes of legitimacy: these were key to crafting competing visions of what modernity meant, how to perform it, and who would have access to it.

In the press history of Egypt, exceptions to the rule have long held the attention of researchers keen to confirm a mythicised vision of the journalistic profession. In setting out to study the editors who contributed to Ruz al-Yusuf between 1925 and 1937, and in the belief that an understanding of the publication's development is impossible without an acquaintance with those who ‘made’ it, I favoured the collective approach by retaining from individuals’ careers only that which might serve to highlight common features in the cultural surroundings of the two generations as well as in the changing perception of the role of the press and of the professional practice of journalism. In order to do this, my approach was to compile information about those who signed the articles, irrespective of the number of times they wrote and of the nature of the text.

Methodologically, such an investigation is impeded by a number of constraints. The more notoriety Ruz al-Yusuf gained, the less often its articles were signed. Even some of its most significant editors, such as Mustafa Amin and Muhammad ‘Ali Gharib, are only known to have contributed to the newspaper because they are mentioned in other sources and mainly in journalists’ memoirs. These editors signed none of their writings. There are, in addition, great disparities in the information available on these editors. Some of the most regular collaborators have nonetheless fallen into obscurity because, their name aside, little or no information exists about them. In short, articles written anonymously, those signed off with a pseudonym or those with no signature whatsoever make up the majority of those to be found in the newspaper. Beyond these methodological constraints – and in the light of available evidence – I first sought to study the ways in which those from ostensibly opposite cultural world(s) as well as different careers met and interacted in a way that allowed for debate amongst editors as to the ultimate function of the ‘newspaper’. While for some the newspaper represented a means to participate in public debate, others saw it as ‘a product’ to be commercialised.

This chapter deals with a journal entitled al-Misbah (The Lamp), a Jewish Iraqi publication which appeared in Baghdad between the years 1924 and 1929. To the best of my knowledge, it is one of the only journals in the Arab world that has been characterised as a Zionist mouthpiece, on the one hand, and also as a testimony to the success of Arab nationalism, on the other. Reading the pages of al-Misbah does not resolve the puzzle easily. In what follows, I examine the various issues which dominated al-Misbah's pages in order to highlight the identity of the paper and to enrich our understanding of the nature of the Iraqi press under the British Mandate. I address two discursive circles – the Iraqi and the Jewish one. I propose that the paper conveyed an unmistakable Iraqi and Arab identity. Despite the editor's Zionist inclinations, the conversations between readers and writers acquired a life of their own and the paper had, in fact, promoted a new Arab Jewish identity. The themes dealt with by al-Misbah's readers, moreover, illustrate how Jews sought to use the state's institutions built under the Mandate as venues for the cultivation of non-sectarian and democratic citizenship.

The Jewish community in Iraq at the end of World War I numbered about 87,488 individuals out of a population of 2,849,238. In 1920, 50,000 Jews populated Baghdad; this Jewish Baghdadi community had been relatively affluent as far back as the nineteenth century. The community enjoyed commercial ties with migrant communities of Iraqi Jews in India and England, and boasted a secular education system whose roots date back to the mid-1860s when a school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was opened in Baghdad. During the 1920s, the number of exclusively religious Jewish schools decreased and more Jews began attending secular schools (either governmental or sponsored by the Jewish community). Their bilingual education enabled many middle-class Jews to integrate into the state's economy under the Mandate, and many worked in British banks and commercial companies.

Jews began to affiliate themselves with the Iraqi community subsequent to the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. This process was culturally marked by the abandoning of Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew characters) and the adoption of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish in its stead.

À mon père

The signing of the pact on 7 January 1935 between Benito Mussolini, leader of the Italian government, and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval led directly to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia later that year. On the diplomatic level, Il Duce had kept the door open to negotiations with France but his principal goal was a ‘far-reaching, violent solution’ which he had long envisioned in East Africa. It is within this context, and in spite of the initial lack of military progress and the increasingly heavy economic sanctions which followed, that Mussolini's hostility towards the Hoare–Laval compromise and his almost total collusion in seeing it fail can be explained. Meanwhile, on the European front, Hitler's remilitarisation of the Rhineland facilitated Mussolini's unchallenged efforts in Ethiopia, since the attention of France and England had moved considerably away from the Abyssinian conflict. In fact, the Italian aggression against Ethiopia on 3 October 1935 did not represent a simple colonial enterprise. Despite the Fascist regime's attempts to characterise the war in Ethiopia as a domestic matter, in reality it shifted the already precarious European balance of power, creating international tension that was rife with cruel consequences.

In an effort to convince Italians of the merits of the enterprise, Mussolini's regime employed an insistent campaign of propaganda promoting the war in East Africa as the only possible solution to clashes between the Italian colonial troops and Ethiopian forces. Domestically, the simultaneous use of the media to disseminate both information as well as propaganda on the war contributed to creating a consensus in favour of the Italian action, overriding any feelings of agitation or perplexity on the part of the Italian people.

Even in neighbouring Tunisia, home to a large Italian community, the war did not go unnoticed in assiduous press campaigns in the main newspapers and magazines, but they did not have the same positive impact on the domestic level given the mistrust of Mussolini that surfaced after the 1935 agreements in which Il Duce seemed to abandon the Italian promise regarding Tunisia. For the Italians, the political claim had already run its course seeing that the policy of the regime regarding Italians in Tunisia was based primarily on the assertion of an identity between Fascism and ‘italianità’.

The Muslim Mediterranean is considered as a relevant framework to analyse interrelated connections on its shores. Here, I follow Julia Clancy-Smith's conceptualisation of ‘the idea of a “central Mediterranean corridor”, which can be imagined as a series of linked, intersecting borderland regions’. This chapter on press propaganda and subaltern agents of Pan-Islamic networks in the Muslim Mediterranean, dealing with movements and circulations around the Mediterranean, will be particularly concerned with the interface of these two Mediterranean spaces: Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco). It is devoted to the study of the external component of resistance movements in North Africa, dealing especially with press propaganda, contributing to the emerging field of the Mediterranean history. Morocco is viewed as a case study of the extent to which movements of resistance sought external allies as a way of compensating for their weaknesses.

The approach developed in this chapter has two sources of inspiration, the micro-historians and the Subaltern school of Asian historians. Following the micro-historical approach, the attention is focused on individuals, with an actor-centred perspective. Subaltern historians focused on non-elite subalterns as agents of political and social change in the context of the British Empire. More recently, the subaltern in the Middle East has become a source of interest. Subaltern history is very useful to shed light on events or people not well known, belonging to non-elite circles. Both approaches promote a new historical object, history from below, which is much more concerned with the base levels of society than the elite. In this respect, I try to reconstruct micro-histories, or at least part of individuals’ lives and trajectories. Agents of press propaganda, and especially Aref Taher Bey, were not known. Taher Bey conducted subversive activities and travelled widely all around the Mediterranean and had contacts with large networks, such as Pan-Islamic networks. As a modern military officer, he had difficulties finding a place between core and periphery and his position could be viewed as belonging to marginality. In fact, if he could be considered as a member of the elite in his native homeland, he had to migrate and lost his social status, then belonging to the marginal, or subaltern. His activities as a journalist and press propaganda agitator were unexpected.

The press occupies a crucial place in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. Its interest and significance lies in its importance not only as a medium of representation that a society produces of itself but also of what a society produces for itself. An understanding of its historical development is therefore vital to an appreciation of many processes of political, social and cultural change and of the evolution of public opinion and the debates surrounding social and cultural identities in the Middle East.

The Middle East and North Africa region offers a rich range of materials for a study of the press. In the hundred years from 1850 to 1950 it emerged as a medium of expression and chronicler of political developments punctuated by a record of dynamic contact and conflict within local societies and with European imperialism, initially in the latter nineteenth century and subsequently with the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the decolonisation process that immediately followed World War II. During this time intensive, energetic debates were conducted and political struggles waged over the nature of political community, definitions of social classes and the character of cultural identity. The period sees the rise of nationalist movements where the press played a central role in supporting the nationalist cause but also a more complex part in articulating different perspectives on political, cultural and social questions. Essential to an understanding of political history and its representation, the press was also a participant in and subject to political circumstances, at times benefiting from the opportunities offered by free public debate while in other situations being subject to repressive legal regimes. Ultimately, the period ends with formal independence granted across much of the region when a rich tradition of political and cultural contest framed by a context of colonial domination and anticolonial struggle moves to a phase where newly installed national regimes sought to mediate and impose their own agenda on the role of the press. It therefore offers a rich opportunity to explore the press as a forum and an agent in a period of dynamic transformation.

The period following the Allied victory of 1918 was one of dividing up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and political trade-offs between Britain and France, as set down by the Sykes–Picot agreement and the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence. These new states would be governed by the system of Mandates, under the auspices of the newly formed League of Nations. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the dismemberment of its territories left the Greek Orthodox of the city of Beirut in a state of apprehension, insecurity and uncertainty. Soon after the war many Orthodox families moved to Beirut, followed by large communities who came from Anatolia and Cilicia in 1922 in the wake of the withdrawal of the French armed forces from southern Anatolia and those from Hauran in the wake of the Druze revolt in southern Syria in 1925. These refugees moved into a very precarious livelihood in the hill regions of territories belonging to the waqf of the Orthodox community. Their mass arrival from Alexandretta, Adana, Hauran and Cilicia disturbed the balance of social forces in favour of a middle-class commercial bourgeoisie.

The decline of the Ottoman Empire had changed the modes of coexistence of peoples and communities drastically. Formerly a majority among the Christian communities of the empire and protected by Tsarist Russia, the Orthodox were now reduced to a minority in Greater Lebanon, cut off from their traditional geographic concentration which was vital to their business and trade. Deprived of the benefits of Russian protection, the choice of cultural Arabism drew an important faction of this community to support British policies. The Beirut bourgeoisie remained faithful to the concept of supporting the official pro-French government, and it was from this bourgeoisie that the Mandate power chose an Orthodox intellectual journalist and lawyer, Charles Debbas, to become the first president of the new Lebanese republic.

The Khati-Humayun issued in 1856 had demanded the Christian communities of the empire use the laity for the management of internal affairs of the Church, resulting in the formation of the community councils (Majlis al-Milli) in the dioceses of the big cities of Beirut, Damascus, Tripoli and Homs. Considered as the urban notability, they were chosen by the bishop from the so-called seven families (Jubayli, Trad, Bustros, Tabet, Daghir, Fi‘ani and Tueni).

On 16 September 1929, the influential Jaffa newspaper Filastin, which had resumed publication in March 1921 under the supervision of ‘Isa Da’ud al-‘Isa, started to publish a weekly English-language edition. The editors pointed out in the inaugural issue that such a publication would play a vital role in advancing the Palestinian national cause, since

More important, the time was now ripe for the appearance of an English-language edition of Filastin: a month earlier, large-scale popular disorders had broken out, called by the Palestinians the al-Buraq Revolution (Thawra al-Buraq) and more commonly known as the Wailing Wall riots. ‘During the recent disturbances,’ the new paper's editors observed,

As soon as a modicum of order had been restored, the British government set up a formal committee of inquiry, known as the Shaw Commission, to look into the causes of the unrest. In the words of Tamir Sorek, the appointment of the Shaw Commission ‘created the impression that the destiny of Palestine was at stake and would be determined in the very near future’. It therefore seemed evident to the editors of Filastin that ‘the fact that we are on the eve of the arrival of the Enquiry Commission to this country [made September 1929] the very right moment for the publication of such a paper’, which adopted the slightly modified title Falastin.

In order to disseminate its message as widely as possible, the editors of Falastin announced: ‘we intend to send gratis hundreds of copies to all the leading newspapers, the political centres, and all the distinguished politicians of the world so that they may hear our voice and give it their full attention and consideration’.