With the Turk in Palestine

This pithy 18,000-word book, unashamedly propagandistic, began life as a pair of Atlantic Monthly articles published in New York in July and August 1916, during the middle year of the Great War. The United States was still neutral in this War. The Western Front was a bloody quagmire, with neither side able to press an advantage. And the Ottomans were squaring off against the British in Palestine. The original title for this pair of articles was ‘Saïfna Ahmar, Ya Sultan!’, a traditional Turkish war-cry which literally translates as, ‘Our swords are red, O Sultan!’ It is an ironic reference, as the text is an indictment of the Ottoman leadership in the war, fighting on four fronts, and its government of Palestine, then a backwater of the Empire. Of course, the Sultan had lost his power during the Young Turks revolt of 1909, and the Empire had been at war since 1912, when it lost the Balkans. 

In 1915 the Ottoman authorities had unleashed the massacre of the Christian Armenians for fear of them being a fifth-column in their war against the Russians. But the main purpose of this small book was to bring the plight of the Palestinian Jews to the attention of the American reading public. At the time, the Holy Land was no more than an exotic travel destination.