Abdulhamit Kırmızı

This scholarly and well-written book treats the history of late Ottoman Palestine not as a prologue to the present political question as usual, but as a subject in its own right. To avoid teleology, Johann Büssow does not tell the story of homogeneous national societies, but reconstructs Palestine as a social space for different sorts of interactions between individual people and groups. This sort of polyphonic history writing enables the reader to confront a multitude of voices, in contrast to the accustomed dual society model of “Jews versus Arabs” which ignores diversity to try to uncover the historical roots of the present conflict.

Devoid of rhetorical embellishment, this work challenges some traditional notions about the tragic history of both the Muslim and Armenian people of the Ottoman eastern Anatolian province of Van. It is a balanced contribution to a field of study that in the past has often been affected by nationalist agendas and emotionally charged discourses.