The Tel Aviv and Jaffa deportation refers to the forcible deportation of the entire civilian population of Jaffa and Tel Aviv on April 6, 1917 by the Ottoman authorities in Palestine. While the Muslim evacuees were allowed to return before long, the Jewish evacuees were not allowed to return until after the British conquest of Palestine.[1]
In late 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered WWI and aligned themselves with the Central Powers. Turkish officials in Palestine considered the recent Jewish arrivals from Russia, as well as citizens from other Allied nations, as a threat to military security. In December 1914, an expulsion order was given to the 6,000 Russian Jews who resided in Jaffa.[2] They were resettled in Alexandria, Egypt.[3]
The deportation was committed by the Turks in compliance with the order of Ahmed Jamal Pasha, the military governor of Ottoman Syria during the First World War.
The Jewish civilian population of Jaffa and Tel Aviv organized a migration committee headed by Meir Dizengoff and the Rabbi Menachem Itzhak Kelioner which arranged the transportation of the Jewish deportees to safety with the assistance of Jews from the Galilee, who arrived in Tel Aviv with carts to help transport the deportees. The exiles were driven to Jerusalem, to cities in central Palestine (such as Petah Tikva and Kfar Saba) and to the north of Palestine, where they were scattered among the different Jewish settlements in the Lower Galilee, in Zichron Yaacov, Tiberias and Safed. Around 10,000 deportees were evacuated from Tel Aviv which as a result remained with almost no residents.
The homes and property of the Jewish civilian population of Jaffa and Tel Aviv were kept in the possession of the Ottoman authorities and they were guarded by a handful of Jewish guards. Jamal Pasha also released two Jewish doctors to join the deportees. Nonetheless, many deportees perished during the harsh winter of 1917-1918 from hunger and contagious diseases. 224 deportees are buried in Kfar Saba, 15 in Haifa, 321 in Tiberias, 104 in Safed and 75 in Damascus.[4]. In total some 1,500 are believed to have died, many victims buried without a name.[5] Only after the conquest of the northern part of Palestine by the British forces at the end of 1918 were the deportees allowed to return to their homes.