Khalil Sakakini

Khalil Sakakini is remembered for his political activism, his contribution to education in Jerusalem and Palestine, and his extensive writings during the first half of the 20th century. Sakakini kept a diary for 45 years starting in his late twenties, at the turn of the century. Almost daily, he wrote about his disciplined exercise routine, his healthy diet and impeccable hygiene, his reflections on philosophy and education, and his profound love for his wife, Sultana.

His expansive diary and the hundreds of letters he wrote to his wife and son, Sari, over the course of the first half of the 20th century reveal a complex and intellectually driven man. Sakakini was a man of profound and often conflicting thoughts and emotions on a variety of personal and communal realities, including his likes and dislikes, his thoughts on British and Western rule in Palestine, Zionism and Jewish immigration to Palestine, and the status of the Palestinian national movement. His diary reveals a great deal about life in Jerusalem before 1948 for upper middle-class Palestinians who were politically and socially active.

Sakakini was born in Jerusalem on January 23, 1878. As Greek Orthodox Christians, the Sakakini family had ecclesiastical connections through Sakakini’s father, who assumed the role of mukhtar of the Greek Orthodox community in Jerusalem. This allowed the Sakakinis to enroll their children in Orthodox and Christian European schools in Jerusalem. Sakakini attended a Greek Orthodox school, followed by the Anglican Christian Missionary School, and finally, the Zion English School, where he studied English literature.1 As a result of his education, Sakakini learned to speak, read, and write in English, in addition to his native Arabic.

An avid reader and admirer of Greek philosophy, Sakakini took to writing from an early age. His reflections on secular European thought, and on modernity and civilizational progress, would come to dominate the pages of his diary following his travels in Europe and the United States in the first decade of the 20th century. While this earned him great merit as an educator in Palestine, it also put him at odds with the more conservative Christian elements of Palestinian society.

In 1907, and following years of economic hardship in Jerusalem, Sakakini borrowed money from his betrothed, Sultana, and from his friend, Dawood al-Saidawi, and took his chance at success in the United States, as thousands of residents of Greater Syria—and much of the “Old World”—were doing. He boarded a ship at Jaffa and set sail for New York, an exhausting journey which lasted approximately two weeks.2 It was during this voyage that Sakakini began keeping a diary and writing letters to his loved ones in Jerusalem.3

At 29, Sakakini was unusually old for a first-time migrant, and he traveled third class on a French Messageries boat from Marseille to New York. Upon arrival, he briefly joined his brother Yousef in Philadelphia, where he had been working as a peddler. He soon connected with the literary scene in New York and began writing for Arabic literary magazines along the East Coast, mostly in New York. To support himself, he translated for a professor of Semitic studies at Columbia University, Richard Gottheil, who was an ardent Zionist. In addition, he worked in a factory in Maine for several weeks.4

Sakakini struggled in the United States. Barely seven months after he arrived in New York and Maine, he wrote to Sultana that he longed to return to Jerusalem, but he worried about what people would say considering his short time away and his limited success:

Then, in another letter to Sultana dated July 27, 1908, Sakakini intimated that he was disillusioned with America and wished to try his luck back home. By then, the Young Turk Revolution had reinstated the Ottoman constitution, limiting the sultan’s power, and Sakakini believed he could now return and express his political and social views more freely:

The 1908 coup, led by the Community for Union and Progress (CUP), was a harbinger of change for many migrants for whom economic hardship and the sultan’s authoritarian rule prompted their migration, and consequently, for whom return was a preferred option over life in the American diaspora.

Sakakini returned to Jerusalem on September 10, 1908, following a brief nine months in the United States. He joined the CUP movement pledging to uphold the Ottoman constitution, grew increasingly involved in local politics and education in Palestine, and started a family and a successful school. Though he often reminisced on his sojourn in America in diary entries and letters to his son in the 1930s, he never again migrated westward.7

Upon his return in 1908, Sakakini worked as a journalist for al-Asma’i, a Jerusalem newspaper that was founded that year by the al-Issa brothers who would later found the nationalist periodical Filastin in Jaffa in 1911. He also taught Arabic at the Salahiyya School and tutored expatriates at the American Colony in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem.8

The next day, Sakakini wrote that withdrawing from the Church was “a sign of honor and a title of pride. Indeed, withdrawing today while I am still active and determined would be more beneficial for my future and more in-line with my principles.”11 For years thereafter, Sakakini devoted his time to teaching, and to his students in the Dusturiyya School, which he established in 1909.12

The split from the Greek Orthodox Church led Sakakini to develop his philosophical humanism further. On March 26, 1915, for example, he wrote in his diary: “I am not Christian and not Buddhist, not Muslim and not Jewish, just as I am not Arab, or British, not German and not Turkish. I am just one among humankind.” 15. This worldview influenced Sakakini’s behavior in Jerusalem; while he was a progressive nationalist in many ways, his renunciation of national or confessional categories of identification led him to question the idea of nationalism itself.

This became particularly acute in 1917, when Sakakini sheltered a Polish American Jew in his home in Jerusalem as the Ottomans were intensifying their suppression of political dissenters and nationalists across Greater Syria. 16. The man, Alter Levine, was wanted for espionage, and had it not been for the British taking Jerusalem days later, Sakakini and Levine would likely have been executed. Instead of execution, the pair were exiled and imprisoned in Damascus. Upon learning of Levine’s suicide, Sakakini told his son in 1933: “If the English were delayed a little in entering Jerusalem, then my and his fate would have been the gallows. This man who was saved from the gallows of the Turks hanged himself with his own hands.” 17.

Prior to their exile, Sakakini justified the aid he offered Levine as follows:

I do not know why the Ottoman government wishes to distance me from Jerusalem . . . It does not bother me at all that the British have arrived to this country, for I have decided that if I survive this war, I will leave this country for America where I will put my son in American schools, and wherever I am, I am but a human . . . And what is nationalism? If nationalism means that the human must be healthy in the body, strong, energetic, straight-minded, of noble values, affable, and kind, then I am a nationalist. But if nationalism means favoring one ideology over another, or contradicting one’s brother if he is not from one’s country or ideology, then I am not a nationalist. 18. 

Sakakini spent several months in prison and was released in the spring of 1918, at which point he returned to Jerusalem to resume his work as a political activist and an educator.

With the defeat of the Ottomans by British forces in December 1917, and with his subsequent return to Jerusalem, Sakakini developed an interesting relationship to British Mandate authorities and with the Palestinian nationalist movement. In 1919, he began working for the Educational Authority of Palestine in Jerusalem as head of the Jerusalem Teachers’ College, a position he held for one year.19 In 1920, with the appointment of staunch Zionist Herbert Samuel as high commissioner for Palestine, Sakakini resigned from his post, a move that many historians consider to be a sign of his principled politics. 

While Sakakini had his reservations about the Mandate, he was conflicted about his admiration for Western culture. As he noted in his diary: “Some who observe me with the British may think that I take their rule over us lightly. No matter how much I love the English, or how much I admire their values, I prefer that we lead ourselves.”20

As another example that demonstrates his conflicting priorities, Sakakini and Colonel Waters-Tyler, one of Sakakini’s pupils and a Mandate official, sat down to chat over a cup of tea in lieu of their Arabic lesson. On March 6, 1919, Sakakini recounted that Waters-Tyler told him that he would soon be relocated to Nazareth. Sakakini continued:

These seemingly contradictory representations of Sakakini may be difficult to explain, but as diaries reflect the inner workings—and not the outward expressions—of their authors, it is worthwhile to understand him as a complex and pensive person reacting to radical changes and events around him. On April 4, 1918, while in prison in Damascus, for example, Sakakini intimated:

His exasperation with the political and social realities of post–World War I Palestine were certainly weighty, and writing from prison undoubtedly impacted his state of mind. But his disapproval of Arab culture and politics was not new. On February 17, 1914, Sakakini confessed his disapproval of the fervor for al-umma al-‘arabiyya (“the Arab nation”), which was percolating across Greater Syria; he implied it was a futile cause. After expressing his concern for the course of the cause, he admitted: “But if I were of a more sophisticated nationality, like the British or French or American nationality, then I would devote my life to the service of al-umma al-‘arabiyya and do all I could to revive it and strengthen it to catch up to other nationalities.”23

This backhanded support for the nationalist movement is intriguing and explains why he was not opposed to British military occupation following the war. On March 26, 1919, Ragheb Nashashibi, a prominent Palestinian figure in Jerusalem and mayor of the city between 1920 and 1934, visited Sakakini, and Sakakini recounted that they “pondered whether the country could rule itself. Do we have among our men he who could qualify as a public leader, a financial, educational, or mail and telegraph inspector, or police director?”24 They then acknowledged the shortage of such men and wondered: “We may accomplish independence if we were mandated, but which of the two would guarantee better success: if we were the leaders and they the advisors, or vice versa?” Sakakini concluded:

Sakakini’s vision for Palestinian independence was indeed curious. Although he was determined to never divide Palestine, he criticized other nationalists for their divided loyalties while holding on to his own pursuit of Western-influenced modernity. On January 26, 1919, he shared his critical impressions of Palestinian Muslims:

Sakakini also loved to host friends and entertain; yet hosting and entertaining fulfilled more than Arab hospitality. Sakakini adored having an audience. When greeting his friends and sometimes strangers, as his daughter, Hala Sakakini, described in her memoir, Sakakini would perform the traditional Turkish salutation of reaching down to the floor with his hand and then touching his heart, lips, and forehead “with exaggerated mock courtesy.” While excited, he would often break into French: “‘Comment ça va? Comment allez-vous? . . . Comment va la santé?’ and for good measure he would add ‘accent circonflex’ [sic] (just for the sound of it!).”27

During these visits, she recalled, her father entertained his friends with philosophical ideas followed by “an animated and interesting discussion” into the night.28 Yet he would consistently lament in his diary that this audience could never fully comprehend him or reach his level of intellectual depth. Even some of his guests commented on what they perceived to be his arrogance. In his memoir, Day of the Long Night, Jamil Toubbeh, son of Issa Toubbeh, who was Sakakini’s friend, described Sakakini as follows: “I was never fond of Sakakini; arrogant and often pompous, he was, however, a model for many Palestinian youths, and I relished his biting humor and double entendres.”29