Eps 16. Off the Rails

Did you know that the forgotten founder of Zionism went on to play a leading role in a good Israel or that was responsible for the continued presence of the Muslim wack on Harabias? It turns out that the margins of history tell the real story. Behind the Times dives into the big concepts and overlook moments that carry vast meaning all through the lens of Torah and rabbitic thought. Join me Gdalia Gutag as I go behind the times to explore the forgotten history, remarkable personalities and transformative moments that shape current events and explain how we got here. Behind the times with Gdalia Gutag. Somewhere in the vast treasure house of books, manuscripts, and documents that is the National Library of Israel, whose heart is a fireproof, bomb-proof, climate controlled, robotic storage facility buried deep beneath Jerusalem's Givat Ram Hill lies a curious album. The album contains just 68 photographs taken in 1907. One shows a train creeping across a low brick bridge in the middle of the desert, suspended between sand and sky. Another picture depicts a line of workers standing beside freshly laid tracks, posing proudly for the camera after carving a route through one of the harshest landscapes on Earth. In a third image photographed from a moving carriage, the shadow of the train stretches across the desert floor as the rails bend away into the distance beneath a towering rock formation. Annotated by Carl Lawren, a Prussian general who took the pictures. These are rare photographs of one of the early 20th centuries most ambitious engineering projects, the Hijaz Railway. The Hijaz Railway ran from Damascus deep into the Arabian Peninsula with a branch line reaching all the way to Kyifa. And it was built by an Ottoman Sultan Abdul Khamed II who was actually the penultimate Sultan of the empire who believed it could save his ailing empire. This long-forgotten railway which ran for only a few years before falling into disuse is a great way to understand the reality of what we're now seeing today. Because as we recall this episode, the Middle East is once again being reshaped. The dream that animated the Abram Accords was that Israel would become the region's great connector, linked to the Gulf through pipelines, railways, and trade corridors, serving as the bridge between Asia and Europe. That grandiose vision now looks almost like history. Because in the wake of Donald Trump's near capitulation in negotiations with Iran, power is shifting. Countries are repositioning themselves for a post American Middle East. And into that vacuum has stepped an ambitious Turkish leader with a very long memory and an even longer strategic horizon. His name is Rebep Taip Edwan, President Edwan of Turkey. One of the most striking signs of this realignment is a proposal that sounds as though it belongs in a history book. None other than the revival of the Hijaz Railway. Suddenly, a railway first conceived more than a century ago has become part of a contest over who will dominate the Middle East of the 21st century. On one side stands Erdogan pursuing a vision that is distinctly neootoman. One that would place Turkey at the center of a network linking Arabia, Syria, Anatolia, and Europe. On the other stands Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose strategic vision has long been to place Israel at the center of a new Middle East, turning the Jewish state into the indispensable bridge between east and west. So, in a sense, what we're witnessing and we're what we're about to speak about is a clash of railways, of pipelines, and of regional orders. Because behind the steel tracks and these logistic corridors lies a much larger question. As American influence recedes, who gets to organize the Middle East and around what idea? To answer that question, we need to go back to those photographs from the National Library taken in 1907 and to Sultan Abdul Kamid's desperate attempt to hold his empire together. If you've ever spent time on a train in Israel, you'll know that they tend to fall into two categories. There are practical routes like Jerusalem Tel a Viv where the whole point is to get somewhere faster. And then there are the scenic routes like the old Mala to B Sheameish line which winds through the Judeian hills at such a leisurely pace that can sometimes feel as though walking might be quicker. But whichever type of train you happen to be on, there's a good chance you're traveling over history. Because the rails beneath Israel's trains often follow routes laid down long before the state of Israel existed. Their story reaches back through the British mandate, through European investors and foreign concessions, and ultimately to the last years of the Ottoman Empire. One of the most important of this stories begins in Kyifa. Today, Khifa is one of Israel's great ports. Goods arrive from around the world. Trains carry freight and land. The city serves as one of the country's gateways to the Mediterranean. But Khaifer's rise was not inevitable. In fact, much of it can be traced back to a railway built by an Ottoman Sultan who had little interest in helping Jewish settlement in the land of Israel. The line ran from Damascus to Khifa and formed part of a much larger project known as the Hijaz Railway. Now, for Abdul Kamid, the railway was never really about trains. It was about saving his empire. For centuries, the fastest way to travel across Arabia had been much the same as it had been back in the days of the Rambam or even the days of Avarino by camel caravan. Pilgrims setting out from Damascus for Medina in what's now Saudi Arabia faced a journey of 40 days across harsh deserts where bandits were constant danger and many people never completed a trip. And then suddenly a new machine appears in the desert, Abdul Kamid's Railway. It's a steam locomotive. Can you imagine this thing belching smoke and sparks and hauling carriage after thundering carriage behind it? It could carry hundreds of passengers and tons of cargo. What had taken weeks obviously only took just a few days. And to many Bedwin, this was the first train they'd ever seen, probably the first machine they'd ever seen. And they gave it this incredible nickname that has been preserved in the annals of the Hijaz Railway. They called it the iron donkey. By the time the iron donkey began hauling passengers across Arabia, the Ottoman Empire was already a very sick patient, basically in terminal decline. And I've said this countless times before because it's such a great phrase. For us, basically most of the 19th century European diplomats has taken to calling it the nickname the Ottoman Empire. They called it the sick man of Europe. For decades, foreign observers had watched their empire weaken and all the European paths were trying to, you know, grab chunks of it and territories were slipping away, including Egypt, fell under British sway, and there were others out in the Gulf as well. There was it was all over being disassembled from the outside. The empire's rulers, including Sultan Abdul Khid, knew that there was a problem. The rulers before had come up with a cure in the mid- 19th century. They came to believe that the answer became known as Ottomanism. That you could unite Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Albanians, Greeks, Armenians, and the whole babble of the Ottoman Empire around a common identity which is that they were Ottomans. But it didn't work. What Abdul Hamid said, he looked at the empire and he concluded that nationality would never be enough. He said the thing all these people did not share was ethnicity but many of them did share a religion and so the sultan reached for a different idea. He said we can unite around Islam that is the governing idea that is the central idea of the Ottoman Empire. Now like all the the sultans of the Ottoman Empire before him he claimed the title of Khalif which is the khif the ruler of the Sunni Muslim world. So he said if Ottomanism can't hold the empire together, let us have another grand strategy and what historians call panislamism. Right? Right? We know Islamism is is an idea that has persisted and shapeshifted, but it's one of the great animating ideas of the radical Muslim world, which is that Islam itself can be the under underwrite the existence of an international entity, which they call the Umah, um in Arabic, which is obviously the same word as our um our nation in Hebrew. And that's what they call it, Islam, panislamism. The Hijaz Railway built by Sultan Alu Hammed was the physical embodiment of that vision because it was no ordinary railway project financed by bankers and investors. Although it cost the project cost nearly 20% of the entire Ottoman budget when it was being built, the other 80% came uniquely only were only allowed to come from Muslim sources and donations poured in from the Muslim Muslims in India, North Africa and beyond. And the point was it was specifically meant to be a project of strengthening the Islamic unity of the state. And therefore they would not take loans, they would not take money, they would not take investment from the Europeans. They specifically wanted to keep them out. Now even today with only parts of the railway operating and the most glorious part is you can there's you can see pictures online in this little dusty little museum somewhere in outskirts of Jordanian capital Aman is worn railway carriage shows the way that it was a very very beautiful parts of it were obviously a very upscale and beautiful line which would have carried rich people across to to Saudi Arabia. Today this hijaz railway is seen as symbolic because it was built with Muslim funds. It's seen not as belonging to any particular country but as having the status of wack the Muslim charity charitable status and religious charitable status which means that it belongs to the Muslim world as a whole which is a very remarkable thing that a railway can be perceived in such a way and that is why the idea that it's going to be rebuilt has been greeted with this kind of scene as an Islamic symbol. Now that religious origin imposed actually farical limitations because the very skilled German engineer whose name I forget but who built the line could not oversee construction in parts of Saudi Arabia which were religiously off limits to non-Muslims. So naturally those sections of the line missed that ykish finishing touch and were built with typical Ottoman or Arabic shoddiness. Over the years that it operated, the railway suffered from the fact that it was running through bandit territory because railway sleepers, the wooden underpinnings in which the rails arrested were actually stolen for firewood by marauding bedawins. But it still it did the job for a few years. And the railway carried pilgrims to Mecca and to Medina. And it also carried soldiers of distant provinces. And what it did was it knitted together Abdul Khameid's empire because it brought Arabia which was still the part of the Ottoman Empire close to Damascus and Damascus closer to Constantinople is Istanbul today and it reminded more importantly reminded the Muslims across the empire that they were all subject to the physical and political protection of the califf in Istanbul. Now obviously Europeans did not like the idea that Abu Mamemed was able to appeal to the Muslims living in European empires. So for example Indian Muslims would have contributed to this or Muslims living in French colonies would have contributed to this as well. But for Abdul Khamed there was another challenge closer to home. Another person who believed who saw that the old order of the Ottoman control was ending and he wanted to reshape the future of the holy land and that was a vianese journalist called Theodoro Herzel. There's a black and white silent film clip that surfaces when you search for the story of the Herzel and Sultan Abdul Khamed I. It shows a tall bearded and distinguished man who was Herzel stepping before another bearded figure who was sitting and wearing a fez. And this other figure wearing the feathers was seated among what look like curti. And over this figure wearing the fez, a servant fans him. Now this ruler is purported to be Abdul Hammed. Well, I say purported to be, it's meant to show one of the most consequential meetings in early 20th century Jewish history. Except that the movie isn't real. The footage was filmed around 1921, nearly two decades after the encounter. It depicts as part of a documentary about Herzel's life. Yet, despite being staged, it captures something important because the meeting really did happen. seeking access to the Sultan was a major preoccupation of Herzel's diplomatic effort. Herzel, Theodor Herzel saw, he said that the first thing he tried was perhaps we can get some type of Jewish autonomy inside the Holy Land. The various plans that he cycled through, this was one of them. And he needed access to the Sultan to make his proposal. And one of the intermediaries that Theodoro Hudson listed was a colorful Jewish man named Ammon Vanberi who was actually obviously very exotic sounding name but he was born Heramman Vanberger not Bamber but apparently Vanburgger into a poor Jewish family in Hungary somewhere in the Habsburg Empire. But this Vanbury invented he became Mushumad and reinvented himself as a traveler, a scholar and expert on the Ottoman world. He was extremely gifted with languages and few Europeans knew Constantinople better. He knew the leadership there which that he the Byzantine literally inner workings of the Ottoman imperial court which was very hard for a European like Theodor Herzel to work out. So he was the go-between this Jew and the two projects unfolded almost simultaneously. So whilst the Herzel was seeking permission for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and he did so from the first Zionist Congress in 1897, the effort ended in 1902 and is finally refused. But at the same time as Herzel is trying his thing, Abdul Khmed was doing his thing. He was building his railway and trying to bind together his far-flung empire to preserve it. And obviously the issue that brought them together and and separated them as well, the Jew and the Khalif, the Sultan was Palestine. Herzel wanted a charter organized Jewish settlement in the land of Israel. Now one of the incentives he knew that he wouldn't just get to not about to give up de facto control of part of his empire. He says one of the incentives that Herzel dangled was Yiddisha gelt Jewish money. He says look you have enormous debts cashrapped ailing empire we have Jewish money. He offered something like 150 million pounds sterling which is equivalent to about30 billion dollars in today's money which was a nicer Shaina Shaina guelt as we say and who was meant to bankroll it Britain's Rothschild banking dynasty had agreed to loan the sum that's nice that could have worked Adul Khid refused the very generous offer because for him it was part of a larger struggle he said no I can't I can't afford to let another province go away because it's part of a struggle to preserve the Ottoman Empire. So therefore he doubled down in those years he refused Herzel in 1902. In 1900 he starts investigating and order ordering the construction of the empire. So the same ruler who was building the hedgehog's railway to tie distant provinces more close to the Constantinople had no intention of allowing another Jew upstart Jews who he said you can settle in little groups throughout the Ottoman Empire no problem but you cannot concentrate in one province. In that effort to hold together the Ottoman Empire for a short time it appeared that Sultan Abdul Khamed might have found the right formula. In September 1908 the Hijaz railway finally reached Medina. right now. Actually, it was meant to reach Mecca further down to which obviously the final the destination for the Hajj pilgrimage which Muslims uh undertake. But it but apparently it stopped there for the simple reason that the locals it was local protectionism, the local Bedwins who made a living off the trade. They said we can't have this iron donkey coming and hehoying its way down the Arabian coast down to Medina because we'll lose our money, our trade. And therefore they stopped it. It stopped at Medina. But it was a very very big achievement. Took eight years. It crossed deserts and mountains and some very inhospitable terrain. But Abdul Hammed was on the brink because within a year he was deposed 1909. Then a few years later came the first world war during which there was the Arab revolt famously the British ally Te. Lawrence obviously a mythical mythological figure of Lawrence of Arabia. He one of the things he did he blew up as to so as to prevent the Ottomans from exerting their control over the Arabian Peninsula. He blew up bits of the Hed's railway. By the end of the war, the railway was gone and so was the Ottoman Empire. And today that borderless Arab or Muslim world which existed then under the Ottomans has vanished. the same route, bits of which still remain, only fragments of it, crosses multiple different countries, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the line fell mostly into disrepair. And you can visit the old railway station in Aman see bits of it apparently in other places. And you'll find this steam locomotives, these fascinating bits of the rails from Belgium and steam locomotives made in Germany. And you can find these the bits of flatsom and jetsum of the old hedge railway involving old tickets and photographs and lanterns from a vanished age. But until recently, the Hedra's railway had become a museum piece, a relic as it were of a failed imperial dream. Or so it seemed. A century after Abdul Khamemed's railway fell silent, another Turkish leader began speaking in a language that sounded familiar. President Erdogan of Turkey has grandio dreams of reviving Turkeykey's Ottoman influence. It's not just the Islam around which his regime is focused. Because for decades Turkey's leaders operated from this kind of modest presidential residence which was Kimal Ataturk the father of modern secular Turkeys his own house and that was the source of their Ataturkian legitimacy when they occupied that house but very significantly Erdogan abandoned it and he built this enormous vast presidential complex that contains well over incredibly well over a thousand rooms a total palace and it's a structure that's actually apparently multiples times the size of the Versailles palace of the French great famous Versail Palace and obviously his critics zeroed in on the fact that he sees himself as a modern sultan and if you see incredibly it looks like fancy dress actually because you see that the guards in this palace and you can see this in kind of official photographs when the Turkish leaders are gathered there the guards are dressed in this incredible array of comic opera costumes from the Turkish past because he really does see himself as reviving the grandeur of of the Ottoman past in much by the way much the same way that uh that the Russian president unashamedly unabashedly uh sees himself as reviving the grandeur of Russia of old the Russian Empire. So the palace in Eddwan's case is just one example of the neotomanism because the Ottoman military imagery is being brought back and foreign policy of Erdogan it focuses on former Ottoman territories in the Balkans, North Africa and the Arab world in a way that a century of secular Turkish leaders before him never dreamed of doing. And occasionally Edwan himself said the quiet part out loud. He said once, "Those who think that we have erased from our hearts the lands from which we withdrew in tears 100 years ago are wrong." He's also said that half of Turkeykey's heart lies in cities in Turkey. The other half remains in Afrin, Aleppo, Hama, homes, and Damascus, which are all but different parts of Syria. And that brings us back to the railway. Because if Abdul Khamemed's answer to imperial decline was to knit together the lands of the empire through steel rails, the strididently anti-Israel Erdogan is drawn to the same idea. He clearly dreams of expanding Turkish influence into Arabia again and at the same time locking Israel out of the web of new infrastructure projects. Now for years that that idea of a railway was a joke because Syria which is the bridge between Turkey and Arabia was up in flames. But then the map began to move. The Assad regime collapsed. It was actually pushed aside by jihadists under Algerani who is a client of Turkey and of Erdogan. And suddenly the route that had been closed for a long time for generations begins appearing on a strategic map once again. And that route is the Hijaz Railway. Until not very long ago, if you boarded a train in Kyifa, there was really only one direction that you could go. To the south, because to the north layban, to the west is the Mediterranean. To the east stood one of the great might have been of Middle Eastern history, the decaying remnants of the Hijaz Railway, which stretched at one time east through what's called the Rakveta, the valley railway and crossed through Be Shaan into Jordan and Arabia. And that too is now different because today as of a few years ago passengers can travel from Kyifa to Bean in air conditioned comfort less than an hour retracing part of the old route of the Rakveta. that particular railway spur the revival of it inside Israel not merely a matter of nostalgia or actually not just a matter of connecting left behind parts of the country which are important right to connect Ban the whole Taria area to Kyifa and from down to the center of the country the railways revival in 2018 the then transport minister Israel Katzen who's now the defense minister unveiled an ambitious proposal that he called tracks for regional peace And the idea was simple. Extend the Rakveta, the valley railway eastward towards Jordan, connect it to the wider Arab rail network and therefore turn Khifa into the Mediterranean gateway for goods moving between the Gulf and Europe. Sounds familiar. In many ways, it was the transportation expression of the Abraham Accords before the Abraham Accords even existed, right? And you can see how they were in the works because they only burst later into view after 2018. But this was a clear long-term vision of Natanyao's vision which was very much bought by the first Trump administration because the Abra's vision was never just diplomatic or about some cheap Israeli holidays in Dubai or some shorter overflight time going across the Gulf. It was geographic. Israel become the bridge. pipelines, ports, railways, and trade routes would connect Asia to Europe through Israel. For Nata, it was about more than economics. It was a way of rewiring the Middle East itself. Because the old Middle East, he said, before the Abraham Accords had been organized around opposition to Israel and the new Middle East, organized around trade routes that passed through Israel. Now, for a time that vision seemed ascendant and then came the big clash with Iran that began on October the 7th and is now stalemated with America in retreat in Tehran and de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz. Now, inevitably, whatever else this long crisis of war has revealed is reminded every governor of the region of one fact that the American security umbrella is slowly or not so slowly now being withdrawn and is not as reliable. And suddenly these railways and pipelines are not just infrastructure projects. They start looking like strategic necessities because the Gulf's resources still need to reach Europe more than ever. The Gulf economies, Saudi Arabia, the biggest, but also the United Arab Emirates, they all say we have to get our money, which is our oil westward. We have to get it towards Europe. We have to get it towards the world. We can't rely on waterways anywhere because that waterway, the straight of Hummus, and to a lesser extent, the Babel Mandeb, which is where opposite Yemen, which is also threatened by Iran, they are blocked. So, we need to get them west. The question is how to get them west. It's important to say there's no guarantee that this Turkish Saudi railway will ever be built. You know, it has to run through Syria and Syria is an unstable place. They might be building homes before they're building railways. But whether the project is completed is almost besides the point because notice you don't sign an agreement like this overnight. And yet the speed with which Ankara and Riyad moved last week this sound last week which was just after the news that broke that America was basically acknowledging defeat in Iran. It suggests that obviously we know that the conversations had been going on for months and years and finally the retreat of America from the region had given impetus to it because these states are reading the writing on the wall. So what do they do? They hedge. They're preparing for a Middle East in which America and power matters less than it once did and that's producing competing maps. One map of the Abram Accords and the corridor associated with the Abraham Accords known as to connect the India, the Middle East and onto Europe is centers on Israel and the other map run through Jordan and Syria before continuing into Turkey and Europe. One is Natanyao's map. The other is Erdogan's map. And suddenly, therefore, the old hedge railway doesn't look anymore like the relic of a vanished empire. It may be the future. There's a final irony to the story of the Hedge Railway, and it's an ironic twist that I think should give us a measure of comfort. Because let's face it, the agreement between Turkey and Saudi Arabia designed specifically to bypass Israel is yet another sign of Israel's isolation after October the 7th. And we might ask ourselves, this is really bad news. How much more can Israel afford to be isolated? But I think take a step back a minute and remember that question is the strategist talking and is the materialist talking because one little wrinkle in the story of the Hed's railway itself is a reminder that for the Marmen for those who believe that Jewish history has a larger driving force behind it there's hope because in one of those great little ironies of history it was actually Sultan Abdul Khamemed himself who seeking to prevent bent the growth of the Yeshu, the Jewish Yeshu in Erit Israel at the beginning of the 20th century unwittingly helped facilitate it because the Sultan had little interest in helping Jewish settlements. In fact, the opposite as we've seen. At a final meeting in 1902, Abdul Khamemed rejected Herzel's overtures and opposed the establishment of any type of Jewish autonomous entity in Palestine. Yet, one of his greatest projects ended up strengthening precisely the city that would become one of the issu's most important assets because Abdul Hammed built a major dep depot for the Hedgeh railway in Khifa so that pilgrims from Europe could reach the Arabian Peninsula. And when the Hijaz Railways branch line reached Khifa in 1905, it transformed the city. Grain started flowing from the Syria I think westward through its port and trade expanded. The Kyifa became the natural outlet for a vast area stretching deep into Syria and Trans Jordan. A city that had long been in the shadow of much larger regional ports like Beirut and others suddenly found itself connected as a major hub of one the Ottoman Empire's great strategic projects. And over time as the Ottomans left and it became under the British mandate, Khifa grew into one of the most important ports in the country. So in ways that Abdul Khid can never have foreseen, a railway that he built to strengthen Ottoman rule ended up helping create the conditions for the success of the Jewish community in the land of Israel. We might put it as David tells us. Hashem who dwells in heaven laughs at the actions of those who seek to oppose him. And as the foes of the Jewish people once again seek to isolate the Jews, to cut them out of vital economic projects. Who knows in what mysterious ways things are working? What divine plan may be unfolding behind it all, sending all their calculations about pipelines and railways off the rails. Thank you for listening to Behind the Times. We appreciate you joining us as we explore the stories and people that shape Jewish history. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share with friends. Until next time.