Slavery in Palestine

Palestine was close to the Red Sea slave trade, but also to the slave ports of the Mediterranean Sea, were slaves from the Trans-Saharan slave trade were imported via Libya and Egypt.

The Ottoman Empire issued decrees to restrict and gradually prohibit the slave trade and slavery between 1830 and 1909, but these laws were not strictly enforced in the Ottoman provinces, such as Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula.[1]

The last official slave ship arrived to Haifa in Palestine in 1876, after which the official slave trade to Palestine appeared to have stopped.[2] The end of the open slave trade also appeared to have resulted in the gradual death of slavery itself. In the 1905 census for Palestine, only eight individuals were officially registered as slaves.[3] However, while no longer officially referred to as slaves, it appeared as if the former slaves continued to work for their former enslavers, as did their children.[4]

In the last decades of open slavery in Palestine, the origin of slaves appeared to have been similar to other Ottoman provinces: a small minority were Caucasians (usually Circassians), but the wast majority of the slaves were of African origin, mostly from Ethiophia (Abyssinia) and the Sudan.[5]

Female slaves were used as domestic servants in private households as well as concubines (sex slaves), while male slaves were used in a number of different tasks such as laborers, bodyguards, servants and attendants.[6] As commonly in other parts of the Muslim world, slaves were preferred to free employed people as domestic servants, since they were dependent on their employer and not loyal to their clan and their own families.[7] Male slaves are also known as poets to the Bedouin tribal leaders during the 19th- and 20th centuries.[8]

In 1920, Ottoman Palestine was formally transformed in to the British Mandatory Palestine. The British Empire, having signed the 1926 Slavery Convention as a member of the League of Nations, was obliged to investigate, report and fight slavery and slave trade in all land under direct or indirect control of the British Empire. The British policy was thus abolitionist, however in reality they were reluctant to interfere in cultural issues if they feared their interference could cause unrest. In the British report to the League of Nations for 1924, they reported that slavery existed in Transjordan but had ended in Palestine in the early 20th-century after the import of slaves had stopped.[9] According to the British, the Palestina Bedouin tribes did own African servants called Abid, but that they now had the same rights as the rest of the tribe members and should bee regarded as former slaves, and that the same term should apply to the African female domestic servants of the Arab noble families.[10] When the League of Nations ratified the 1926 Slavery Convention, the British were expected to enforce it in their colonies and other dependent land. When the British filed a new report to the League of Nations in 1926, they stated that slavery had no legal base in Palestine or Transjordan, and that it was therefore uneccessary for the British to ban it.[11]

In 1931, the police and the Welfare Inspector Margaret Nixon conducted an investigation on behalf of the British government regarding the enslaved servant girls of private Arab households.[12] The result of the investigation showed that after the slave trade to Palestine stopped, the African abid-slaves of the Bedouin tribes of the Jordan Valley sold their children (primarily their daughters) as maidservants.[13] After the World War I, this custom started to be called employment, upon which the girls were sold as contract servants for a period between seven and twentyfive years, and in 1931, there were about 150 such girls in Nablus and about 150 more in the rest of Palestine.[14] It was also noted, that the Abid-servants of the Bedouin tribes in the Jordan Valley, though they were now officially called former slaves, were in fact still slaves in practice, since they owned nothing, could only marry other Abid and they and their children had to serve their Arab tribe members without salary unless they escaped to another part of Palestine.[15] The British wished to ban the practice, but since the Abid and their daughters appeared to accept the situation as it was and not interested in protesting or changing the practice, the British preferred not to interfere in the matter. The British limited themselwes with introducing the 1933 Employment of Girls Ordinance, which made all contracts stipulating more than one year of service automatically illegal.[16]

In 1934, a report to the League of Nations acknowledged that slaves were still kept among the Bedouin shaykhs in Jordan and Palestine, and that slavery was maintained under the guise of clientage.[17]

Many members of the Black Palestinians minority are descendants of the former slaves.[18]