Hotels, Immigrant Houses, and Special Neighborhoods

Abstract

The interwar period - largely overlapping with that of British mandatory rule - was crucial for the consolidation of the national idea in Palestine. It witnessed the partition of the ex-Ottoman territories into mandated nation-states, the strengthening of both the Zionist and Palestinian Arab national movements, and the emergence of the Arab-Jewish national conflict. While this linear trajectory of nationalization is mostly taken for granted by historians and the power to diffuse the national idea throughout non-Western territories is attributed to British imperialism, few studies have engaged with when, why, and how this process unfolded locally in detail. This chapter seeks to fill this gap by combining an in-depth review of the existing literatures on the universalization of the national idea, nation formation, and ethnonational partition with a detailed study of the urban history of Jaffa-Tel Aviv, based on a close reading of the Arabic and Hebrew press between 1908 and the 1920s. I argue that the arrival and consolidation of the national idea in Palestine cannot be reduced to imperial diffusion and did not begin under mandatory rule. Rather, the history of Jaffa-Tel Aviv shows, globalization and nationalization must be understood as co-constitutive processes - and experiences of deterritorialization and global upheaval had sparked desires for reterritorialization and reinforced local attachments already in late Ottoman times. To view British imperialism as the sole mediating force between local conditions, global experiences, and globally circulating ideas thus both obscures local intellectual agencies and simplifies our understanding of the role imperial powers played in the post-World War I regime of de- and reterritorializations, globalization and nation formation.