Aliyah and Yishuv during World War I

The term "Yishuv" — meaning "settlement" in Hebrew — was used by Zionists from the late nineteenth century onward to describe Jewish settlement in Palestine.[6] Scholars distinguish an Old Yishuv, rooted in religiously motivated communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, from a New Yishuv that emerged after 1882 with organized waves of Zionist immigration.[7][6] On the eve of World War I, these streams formed a community of approximately 85,000 people, about twelve percent of Palestine's total population.[8]

The decade immediately preceding the war had been shaped by the Second Aliyah, which ran from 1904 until the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.[1] About 35,000 immigrants arrived, most from Eastern Europe and a smaller group from Yemen.[9] They joined older communities, settled in farming colonies and new urban neighborhoods, or came as young idealists hoping to construct a Zionist national society.[9] By 1914 there were more than forty Jewish agricultural settlements.[1] Jerusalem contained roughly half of Palestine's Jewish population; Tel Aviv, founded in 1909, had reached 2,000 residents; and Haifa's Jewish community had grown to approximately 3,000.[8] The four traditional holy cities contained nearly seventy percent of the Jewish population, demonstrating the continuing weight of the Old Yishuv alongside the newer colonies.[7]

The Yishuv remained economically dependent on connections abroad. The Old Yishuv relied heavily on Halukkah charitable remittances, while European funding and crop exports were important to the wider community.[10][11] This reliance became a major vulnerability when war severed financial and commercial ties. On July 31, 1914, the Ottoman government again prohibited Jewish immigration to Palestine, and on September 25, 300 Russian Jewish immigrants attempting to land at Jaffa were turned away and compelled to return to Russia.[12]

Before formally entering the war on the side of the Central Powers in late October 1914, the Ottoman Empire canceled the Capitulations regime, ending the consular protection and special rights held by many foreign subjects in Ottoman territory.[13] More than half of Palestine's Jews consequently became enemy subjects designated for potential expulsion. Jews with foreign citizenship — especially Russian subjects, who formed a large portion of the Second Aliyah immigrants — faced a choice between Ottoman citizenship and departure.[10][13]

Ahmed Jamal Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army and Minister of the Navy, arrived in Palestine at the end of November 1914 and moved aggressively against Zionist activity.[10] Zionist leaders including David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi were deported, and in spring 1915 Zionism and its symbols were officially outlawed.[8] Djemal Pasha also sought to halt Jewish immigration, expel recently arrived Jews, and prevent established settlers from buying additional land; communal leaders were deported to Turkey and Syria.[14] Contemporary newspaper reports reproduced by JNS alleged that he ordered Jewish colonization documents destroyed under penalty of death, that some Jewish-settled land was transferred to Arabs, and that wheat collected by the Galilee relief committee was confiscated for the Ottoman army.[15]

On November 22, 1914, Russian Jewish colonists who had not become Ottoman subjects were notified that they must leave.[12] In March 1915, the government offered Jews who naturalized a one-year exemption from military service and a first-year tax reduction. In May it again urged citizens of belligerent countries to naturalize and threatened those who refused with expulsion.[12] Between 15,000 and 18,000 Jews became Ottoman citizens, while approximately 18,000 — mostly Russian subjects — were expelled or left voluntarily for Alexandria.[13]

On December 17, 1914, Ottoman police went from house to house in Tel Aviv, ordered listed Jews to leave, and escorted them to Jaffa, where the ship Florio waited to take them to Egypt.[10] Most were forced to depart without their possessions. The central authorities subsequently halted the deportation, and international pressure — including from Germany, an Ottoman ally — urged restraint toward the Jews.[10]

The Central Zionist Archives preserves a handwritten list of Tel Aviv residents deported to Egypt. Its entries describe people leaving hurriedly, sometimes without a chance to notify relatives. Tamara Minkin was caught in the street and sent to the ship with her three children; her two daughters were separated from her aboard it, and her husband did not learn what had happened until he returned home that evening.[10]

Displacement continued beyond the December deportation. By early 1915, approximately 11,000 refugees and forcibly expelled Jews had gathered in Egypt.[1] A February telegram reported 6,000 foreign Jewish refugees from Palestine in Alexandria, 4,000 of them destitute, with more expected.[12] A separate contemporary report placed approximately 7,000 Palestinian Jewish refugees in Alexandria by the end of January, including more than 1,000 young artisans who had refused Ottoman subjecthood.[15] The U.S. cruiser Tennessee traveled between Alexandria and Jaffa carrying refugees.[12][15] By December 1915, about fourteen percent of the Yishuv had left Palestine, mainly for Egypt.[10]

Egyptian Jews formed a committee to assist the arrivals from the Florio, while British-Egyptian authorities helped house them.[10] The refugees organized schools, cultural activities, and other elements of communal life. Many expected the war to end quickly and hoped to return within months, but most remained in exile for years.[10]

World War I practically paralyzed economic activity across the Yishuv.[1] Ottoman forces requisitioned lodging, seized merchants' goods, and confiscated horses, wagons, and harvest equipment from settlers. Sea transport stopped, agricultural exports nearly ceased, imports of essential goods were interrupted, and prices rose sharply.[1] European charitable remittances also stopped, producing shortages of food and clothing, unemployment, and economic stagnation.[1]

The agricultural economy suffered additional disasters. A locust invasion ravaged crops in 1915–1916, while drought, lost export markets, and Ottoman confiscation further reduced the food supply.[10][8] A contemporary account reported that a $120,000 loan helped orange growers through a season in which 1.5 million boxes of fruit rotted under the trees; without the loan, the groves themselves might have been lost.[7]

By the end of 1917, the country faced mass starvation, and thousands in Jerusalem and Safed reportedly died of hunger.[8] The Anglo-French naval blockade of the Syrian and Lebanese coast also intensified shortages in Palestine by early 1917 and contributed to conditions approaching social collapse.[16]

The Old Yishuv was especially vulnerable because it depended heavily on foreign funds and had little emergency infrastructure. The newer Yishuv was somewhat better positioned because an emergency committee handled economic affairs.[8] Nevertheless, recruitment, heavy taxation, compulsory labor on roads and railroads, property confiscations, and contagious diseases affected both communities.[8] The published papers of Chaim Weizmann estimate that approximately 56,000 Jews remained in Palestine at the end of the war, compared with roughly 85,000 before it.[3]

A November 1914 letter from the Central Zionist Office to American ambassador Henry Morgenthau raised urgent concerns about Russian Jewish subjects, the collapse of crop-export income and European remittances, and the possibility of fighting reaching Palestine.[17] Morgenthau arranged American assistance. Arthur Ruppin estimated that the Yishuv needed at least $50,000 to survive; the American Jewish Committee supplied half, and the balance came from Jacob Schiff and Nathan Straus. On September 24, 1914, the USS North Carolina reached Jaffa carrying $50,000 in gold.[11] The American Jewish Relief Committee and Zionist Executive later obtained food costing $84,627.81, transported aboard the collier Vulcan and distributed among Jews, Muslims, and Christians.[7] American Jewish relief delivered on U.S. naval vessels played a decisive role in alleviating suffering.[8]

Beyond the general economic devastation, Jews in Palestine endured looting, forced conscription, imprisonment, executions, starvation, and disease.[5] Contemporary reports described hundreds of Jewish young men being drafted, including many who were the sole support of their families.[12] Ottoman authorities also confiscated arms from Jewish settlements and Tel Aviv.[8] Before Jamal Pasha's arrival, Jaffa governor Baha al-Din had prohibited Hebrew and outlawed Zionist symbols.[18]

In spring 1917, as the front approached, Jaffa's civilian population — approximately 40,000 people, including all the Jews of Tel Aviv — was ordered to evacuate.[8] A report by U.S. consul Garrels, later reproduced by JNS, alleged that Muslims and Christians could apply for permits to remain while Jewish applicants were refused. It said Jews were given 48 hours to leave, placed the number evicted at approximately 8,000, and described looted homes and starving refugees on roads north of Jaffa.[15] A separate account also gives approximately 8,000 Jewish expellees.[19] A committee organized by Meir Dizengoff sought grain, medicine, temporary housing, transport, and hospitality for the displaced.[20] Refugees found shelter in Jewish agricultural settlements in Galilee and Samaria.[8]

A further plan to expel Jerusalem's residents and the inhabitants of the agricultural settlements was dropped after an appeal to Istanbul, but hundreds of refugees had already died from starvation, disease, and cold.[8] Poor health conditions killed several hundred exiles before their return, while Tel Aviv's largely emptied houses remained physically intact.[20]

A minority within the Yishuv chose active resistance through underground intelligence work. NILI — an acronym derived from a biblical verse — was founded in 1915 by Aaron Aaronsohn, Sarah Aaronsohn, Alexander Aaronsohn, and Avshalom Feinberg.[1] Feinberg is identified as the originator of the idea; he approached agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn, with whom he had worked at an agricultural experiment farm established at Atlit in 1910.[21] The founders believed Zionism's future depended on a British victory over the Ottomans.[22]

Beginning in November 1915, NILI gathered intelligence for Britain on Ottoman troop movements, resources, fortifications, and plans in Palestine and Syria.[1][22] Aaronsohn's regional expertise and authorized travel while combating the locust plague gave him access to sensitive military areas. Reports were transmitted through couriers landing near Atlit.[1][22] NILI also publicized the April 1917 expulsion of Jews from Jaffa and Tel Aviv in European newspapers and helped organize aid for famine victims.[1]

Most of the Yishuv and its leadership opposed NILI, fearing that its discovery would bring catastrophic Ottoman retaliation.[1] On January 20, 1917, Feinberg and Yosef Lishansky traveled through Sinai to restore contact with the British. Bedouins discovered them and alerted Ottoman guards; Lishansky escaped the ensuing gunfight, but Feinberg was killed.[21]

Ottoman authorities uncovered the network in autumn 1917 after intercepting a carrier pigeon and deciphering its code.[22] Naaman and Eitan Belkind were arrested and sentenced to death. Naaman was executed in Damascus in 1918, while Eitan escaped after a Turkish guard was bribed.[21] Sonia Belkind was arrested while caring for people expelled from Tel Aviv.[21] Sarah Aaronsohn was captured and tortured, then died by suicide without divulging the network's details.[1][22]

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy later assessed that NILI's intelligence helped win British support and proved valuable during the conquest of Palestine.[23] The same attributed account states that Aaron Aaronsohn and Chaim Weizmann were the two Zionist representatives present during British cabinet deliberations associated with the Balfour Declaration.[23]

Some Palestine Jews served in the Ottoman army, while a portion of those exiled to Egypt volunteered for British service.[13] Jewish refugees began organizing the Zion Mule Corps in February 1915. The corps performed logistical duties, and its units served at Gallipoli.[13] It was connected to the later effort by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Joseph Trumpeldor, and others to establish Jewish combat battalions.[13]

John Henry Patterson, commander of the Mule Corps, wrote to Lord Rothschild shortly after the Balfour Declaration, urging him to press the War Cabinet to send a trained Jewish battalion to the front and allow it to participate in freeing Palestine from Ottoman rule.[24] Soldiers of the Jerusalem Battalion stationed in Egypt also requested kosher food, prayer books, and a kosher kitchen at their training location.[24]

In 1918, Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor helped establish British Army Jewish Battalions 38, 39, and 40, composed of volunteers from Britain, Palestine, and the United States.[13] By the end of the war, three Hebrew battalions had been formed, with approximately 5,000 Jewish volunteers from several countries; the units were disbanded after the war.[25]

On November 2, 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in a letter to Lord Rothschild. It stated that the government viewed "with favour" the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and would use its best endeavours to facilitate that objective. It added that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status of Jews in other countries.[1][2]

The declaration followed prolonged negotiations conducted by Chaim Weizmann with the British Foreign Office.[4] Aaron Aaronsohn was also present during cabinet deliberations associated with it, according to the account attributed to Efraim Halevy.[23] The declaration gave Zionism the support of a major world power and international recognition for the concept of a Jewish national home.[4]

The declaration did not specify the proposed national home's geographic boundaries.[8] It was issued amid potentially conflicting British commitments. The Sykes-Picot Agreement had envisaged international administration for much of Palestine, and Weizmann protested that the arrangement curtailed the Land of Israel, arguing that Zionist objectives required the land to be placed under British protection.[8] The Hussein-McMahon correspondence was later cited as promising Palestine within the boundaries of Arab independence, although McMahon denied in 1937 that he had intended to include it.[4] The declaration was strongly criticized in the Arab world, particularly in Palestine, as contrary to the spirit of Britain's assurances to Arab leaders.[4]

British forces commanded by General Edmund Allenby advanced through Palestine during the closing stages of the war, ending four centuries of Ottoman rule.[2][26] As British and Ottoman forces maneuvered around Jerusalem in December 1917, women, children, and elderly Jewish men sheltered underground, fearing arrest and expulsion.[5] Jerusalem was surrendered on December 9, and Allenby entered the Old City on December 11, 1917.[5] The occupation of the rest of Palestine was completed in 1918.[2]

The British advance spared the Yishuv further Ottoman persecution and the threat of extinction through starvation and disease.[8] One survey places the Jewish population at approximately 57,000 in 1917, down from roughly 85,000 before the war.[8] The Survey of Palestine, using Turkish sources, estimated the 1914 population at 84,660–86,000 and the wartime low at approximately 56,000, attributing the decline to epidemics, emigration, and Ottoman deportations. It recorded a recovery to approximately the prewar level by 1922.[2]

The transition to British administration did not immediately open the country to Zionist immigration. Immigration was initially forbidden under the military government.[3] The Zionist Organization's immigration department, established in London in February 1919, also urged delay until economic conditions improved. Weizmann signed circulars in April and August 1919 warning against "unorganized immigration," while workers' leaders in Palestine openly called for arrivals to continue.[3]

At the end of World War I, the Yishuv was a heterogeneous population lacking recognized leadership and substantial institutional infrastructure, with an estimated 56,000 Jews living alongside approximately 600,000 Arabs.[27] About 1,200 Jews were unemployed in May 1919, and the number rose as exiles returned. Limited economic opportunities, inflation, epidemics, and a shortage of doctors contributed to severe postwar conditions; immigration in 1918–1920 remained only a "trickle."[3]

The Third Aliyah began early in 1919. A small group arrived via Siberia and Japan, followed by 115 pioneers from Russia and Romania on March 8 and 150 arrivals from Poland and Galicia in April. In December, 620 refugees from Ukrainian pogroms arrived aboard the Russian.[3] These arrivals took place despite the military administration's immigration ban and difficult conditions. The Third Aliyah is generally dated from 1919 to 1923, with estimates of approximately 35,000–40,000 immigrants, predominantly from Eastern Europe.[8][28]

The Russian Revolution, postwar pogroms in Russia, Poland, and Hungary, the British conquest, and the Balfour Declaration all contributed to the new immigration wave.[28] Most newcomers were young pioneers shaped by revolutionary upheaval and wartime suffering.[8] They built roads and towns, helped drain marshes in the Jezreel Valley and Hefer Plain, expanded agricultural settlement, and established early industrial enterprises. The Third Aliyah period also saw the creation of the Histadrut labor federation, representative Yishuv institutions, and the Haganah defense organization.[28]

Population estimates for the Yishuv in 1914 vary. The Survey of Palestine gives 84,660 in its narrative and rounds the figure to 86,000 in its table, while contemporary accounts proposed 85,000, 86,000, 95,000, or approximately 100,000. One contemporary observer acknowledged that such estimates were "largely conjectural."[7][2] End-of-war estimates similarly range from approximately 56,000 to 57,000, depending on the source and year used.[3][8]

The scale of deportations also varies by source and scope. Accounts of the December 1914 action distinguish between approximately 700 people initially deported from Jaffa and 11,000–11,300 refugees and deportees present in Egypt by early 1915.[1][14] Estimates for the 1917 Jaffa and Tel Aviv expulsions range from approximately 8,000 to nearly 10,000, depending on whether the count refers to Jaffa's Jews, Tel Aviv residents, or the broader displaced population.[19][20]

Claims about NILI's influence on British policy are based here on an assessment attributed to former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy rather than independently corroborated documentation.[23] Claims that Ottoman authorities planned to expel all Jews from Palestine, and that a German commander halted the plan, appear in an advocacy-oriented account and should be treated as source-specific.[19] The relationship between the Balfour Declaration and the Hussein-McMahon correspondence also remains historically contested; McMahon denied in 1937 that Palestine had been included in his commitment.[4]