A City Living through Crisis: Jerusalem during World War I ABIGAIL JACOBSON* ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the literature on World War I in Palestine while studying the experience of the inhabitants of Jerusalem during the war. By focusing on a city and its residents, this article offers an analysis of the war from a dimension and lens yet to be explored in the history of Palestine. More specifically, the article will use relief networks in order to analyze not only the ways people experienced the war, but also as a way of exposing inter-communal dynamics between the different communities living in this mixed urban center. The surrender of Jerusalem to the British forces on December 9, 1917 ended a period of great despair in the history of Jerusalem and of Palestine in general, which was caused by World War I. The war is remembered, by locals and historians, as a dark period in the history of Palestine, a period during which people starved to death, were forced to migrate from their homes and lost control over their lives and destiny. However, the study of World War I in Palestine has traditionally focused on the political and military aspects of the war, as well as on the role of foreign powers in developments in the region and their support for the local population. Analyzing the experience of the local population in Palestine during this period, the main focus in most of the existing scholarship was on the Jewish population and the various ways it dealt with the war crisis. 1 The existing literature on the war is somewhat limited in scope, and does not treat the war as a formative event that affected the lives of many Palestinians, Jews and Arabs alike. The treatment of World War I in Palestine is consistent with what Steven Heydemann points out to in the introduction to his edited volume War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East. The study of war in the Middle East has been shaped mainly by diplomatic and military historians, claims Heydemann, and not by social historians or anthropologists. Studies on the war have not paid due attention to the ways by which states and societies in the Middle East have been *The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel. E-mail: abigail.jacobson@gmail.com 1 See, for example, on the Jewish community during the war: Mordechai Eliav (ed.) Ba-Matzor uba-Matzok: Eretz Israel Be-Milhemet ha-‘Olam ha-Rishona (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute, 1991); Nathan Efrati, Mi-Mashber le-Tikva: Ha-Yishuv ha-Yehudi be-Eretz Israel be-Milhemet ha-‘Olam ha-Rishona (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Institute, 1991). On the Arab population in Palestine during the war see: ‘Umar al-Salih al-Barghuthi and Khalil Tawtah, Ta’rikh Filastin (Jerusalem: Matba‘at Bayt al-Maqdis, 1923); ‘Adel Manna’, Ta’rikh Filastin fi Awakhir al-‘ahd al-‘Uthmani, 1700–1918 (Beirut: Institute of Palestinian Studies, 1999); Bahjat Sabri, Filastin Hilala al-Harb al-‘Alamiyya al-Ula wa-ma Ba‘adha 1914–1920 (Jerusalem: Jamiyat al- Dirasat al-‘Arabiyya, 1982). On the military aspect of the war see: Yigal Sheffy, British Military Intelligence in the Palestinian Campaign 1914–1918 (London: Frank Cass, 1998). British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, April 2009 36(1), 73–92 ISSN 1353-0194 print/ISSN 1469-3542 online/09/010073–20 q 2009 British Society of Middle Eastern Studies DOI: 10.1080/13530190902749598