Nili (1915-1917)

When the First World War began, the Ottoman Empire was officially neutral. But from the very beginning of the war, the Three Pashas at the head of the Empire’s ruling dictatorship had made extensive plans to enter the war on the side of the Central Powers. They had made no secret of their love for Imperial Germany,

and just four days into the conflict signed a secret treaty promising to enter the war as Germany’s ally. In retrospect, this is a difficult decision to make sense of, but from the Pashas’ perspective there were sensible reasons. Germany had been heavily involved in the modernization of the Ottoman Empire even before the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.

And Germany’s own invasion of Belgium demonstrated that neutrality was no guarantor of peace, especially not for a country that had lost three wars and huge amounts of territory in just the previous four years. Less understandable was the treatment that the ruling Committee of Union and Progress then directed against Greater Syria, which, while an integral part of the Ottoman state for four centuries, was in practice treated as an occupied territory

fit only for stationing troops, plundering resources, and extorting the locals. On 1 October, the Three Pashas abolished all foreign concessions in the Empire, declared martial law in Palestine, and banned the use of Hebrew. Upon entry into the war later that month, 50,000 Jews in Palestine, being non-citizens born in the Russian Empire, were automatically classified as “enemy aliens” and scheduled for deportation or internment.

For a brief moment, US ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. convinced the Ottoman government to give these Jewish “aliens” a window of several months to obtain Ottoman citizenship. But it was all for naught, as on 18 November, Navy Minister Ahmed Cemal Paşa was placed at the head of the 4th Army. Already well-known for his antisemitic and generally Turkish-supremacist views,