Explore an overlooked moment in pre-WWI Palestine when people's identities overlapped, and Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities intermingled freely. Few could contemplate the conflict that would engulf their region for the next century.
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipProviding Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipWhere to Watch 1913: Seeds of Conflict
1913: Seeds of Conflict is available to stream on pbs.org and the PBS app.
About the Show
"1913: Seeds of Conflict" looks at the moment of transformation when Ottoman rule in Palestine was still strong, the identities of Jerusalemites were fluid, and few could imagine the conflict that would dominate the region for the next century. Until now, scholars have focused on the British Mandate as the matchstick of the Middle East conflict. Breaking new ground, this film focuses on the moment when Arab and Jewish nationalism first made contact, and the seeds of conflict were first sewn.
Our story’s setting is Ottoman Palestine, a colorful society being pulled between medieval and modern influences, with community alliances built on personal ties. The district of Jerusalem (later southern Palestine) is sensing growing nationalism and perceived threats to Ottoman sovereignty by European "foreigners." Zionism, the European-based movement for a Jewish homeland, and Arab nationalism are the forces that propel our narrative.
We explore this seminal moment in history through the eyes of those who helped shape it first hand.
Through the diaries of our characters and fresh scholarship on the period, we come to better understand and feel early 20th century Palestine. There’s a land boom afoot, as Jewish Zionists and Christian pilgrims eagerly buy up property. The outrageous prices they pay fuel absentee landowners’ willingness to sell. The result pulls the land out from under the feet of tenant farmers who work on it just as their ancestors have for generations. They are suddenly thrown off by Jewish Europeans who understand neither their language nor their culture. These "fellahin" (peasants) are the first Arabs to clash with the Zionist settlers. Their experiences promote a new Arab national consciousness.
Meanwhile, the prosperity of Ottoman Jews is a welcome contrast to the persecution, pogroms, and anti-Semitic violence that is driving European Jews, in growing numbers, to seek refuge in Palestine. Devoted equally to his Ottoman citizenship and his Jewish identity, Albert Antebi is forced by 1913 to choose between the two. The overlapping identities Jews have comfortably held are becoming suddenly mutually-exclusive.
"1913: Seeds of Conflict" is an admittedly-arbitrary glimpse that captures the Palestine of a hundred years ago. Scholars are looking at it as the key to understanding what has happened since and to rethink issues that, today, seem so mired and intractable.
Producer
The delicate cultural balance between Ottoman Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Palestine became undermined by a large influx of European Jews starting in the early 1900s.
1/10
Israel Museum
Before World War I, Israel and Palestine were made up of several Ottoman provinces. At their core was the city of Jerusalem, which was governed directly from Istanbul.
2/10
Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi
Early Jewish settlers imagined, “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
3/10
Library of Congress
Bedouin and new Jewish settlers often clashed over their different understandings of land ownership, with the Bedouin often sending petitions of their complaints to the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul.
4/10
Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi
Collectives of European immigrants, soon known as the kibbutz, were an early building block of the Zionist movement.
5/10
Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi
An Arab family of Ramallah, 1900-1910. Most Arabs lived in the hill-towns of Palestine, eschewing the coastal lowlands where Zionist activity would first take root.
6/10
Library of Congress
Spiritual Jews from the first Aliyah (migration wave) in Jerusalem gather for prayer. Jews fled Eastern Europe after the assassination of Czar Alexander II and the rise of pogroms in 1881.
7/10
Israel National Library
Coastal lowlands of Palestine. Most local Arabs found this area unsuitable for farming. Large tracts of land here were sold by absentee Arab landowners to Zionist organizations.
8/10
Francis Firth Archive
Galata Bridge, Constantinople, Turkey. Outdated immigration treaties prevented the Ottoman Empire from stemming the wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe during the years 1882-1914.
9/10
Library of Congress
Wasif Jawhariyyeh, a musician and vagabond from a middle-class family, authored a unique record of daily urban life in his personal diaries.
10/10
Institute of Palestine Studies
Support for PBS provided by: