Overall Chronology

In the early 1880s, a group of Bosnian families who had emigrated from the territory of present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina founded the village of Qisarya on the site of the ancient Roman Caesarea, about 37 kilometers south of the city of Haifa on the Palestinian coast. Several families moved later to other places in Palestine. Initially retaining their traditions and cultures, they gradually assimilated into the Palestinian Arab population and suffered the same fate in 1948 and the following decades.

In 1977, a modern Israeli settlement called Caesarea, covering an area of 3000 hectares, was established on the site of the village. The land comes under the jurisdiction of the Hof HaCarmel  [Carmel Coast] Regional Council. It contains a nature reserve on which archaeological excavations have been ongoing for years. It also has Roman ruins, including an amphitheater, a racetrack for horses, and Roman baths. This settlement is the only one in Israel that is not operated by state municipal institutions, but rather by a private foundation controlled by the Rothschild family. It is considered one of the most affluent residential areas in Israel and has a number of lavish villas, including the private villa of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu , and a villa belonging to one of Baron Edmond de Rothschild ’s granddaughters, the Baroness Ariane de Rothschild , as well as a golf course and tennis courts. Given its distinctly upper-class character and the wealth of its residents, a populist epithet, ‘Caesarea dweller,’ entered the lexicon to refer to upper class residents of wealthy areas in Israel.

Before the Palestinian Nakba , a flourishing Arab town was located on the land now occupied by this settlement. The town was established in the 1880s. In 1891, a settlement called Hadera  was established near it by a group of Russian Jews. Then, in 1940 a kibbutz was established to the south of it called Sdot Yam [Marine Fields]. The Jewish settlers who resided there were known for fishing and operating sailboats; however, the kibbutz also contained a clandestine training center for the marines from the covert Palmach units that operated under the cover of being a sports facility.

Migration to Ottoman Territory

At the Congress of Berlin , which took place in June–July 1878, with the participation of the Ottoman Empire and the principal European countries, it was decided to put the region of Bosnia-Herzegovina under the administration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire . Soon thereafter, hundreds of Muslim families emigrated from this region into the territory of the Ottoman Sultanate. These immigrants hailed mainly from Mostar , which is one of the main cities in the Herzegovina region and is considered its cultural capital, as well as from other cities such as Trebinje , Stolac , and Čapljina .

According to some estimates, the migration to Ottoman territory totaled between sixty to eighty thousand people and took place in three waves: the first was in 1881–1882 after the imposition of compulsory conscription under the Austro-Hungarian flag; the second occurred around 1900–1901, when Muslim protest movement against attempts at Christianization intensified; and the third took place around 1909–1910, after the Austro-Hungarian Empire officially annexed the region of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908.

After stopping first in Istanbul and then Izmir , the people of the first wave of this migration continued their journey onward to the Levant , or bilad al-sham as the province of Ottoman Syria was called, where they settled in villages in the countryside around Damascus , on the outskirts of the Syrian desert. A small Bosnian community lived in the Levant prior to the Austro-Hungarian takeover of Bosnia-Herzegovina; they had migrated for work or as merchants. The Ottoman army also included some Bosnian commanders in its leadership who were assigned to the Levant, the most famous of whom was the governor of Acre , Ahmad Pasha , known by his sobriquet al-jazzar or “the butcher,” who in 1799 confronted Napoleon Bonaparte 's army and prevented it from breaching the city walls.

Two years after settling in Syria, most of these immigrants did not succeed in acclimatizing to their new environment, particularly to the high summer temperatures on the periphery of the Syrian desert, so a number of them decided to return to Anatolia , while others asked for the possibility of resettlement elsewhere in the Levant. The Ottoman authorities would determine the locations for sending the immigrants according to demographic, strategic, and economic factors. Since the region of Palestine was sparsely populated during the nineteenth century, the Ottomans agreed to resettle Bosnian Muslims there, along with a number of Circassians and Moroccans.

Settling in Qisarya

About fifty of these families moved to Qisarya, while a small number settled in the village of Yanun in Nablus district, where a special cemetery was established for them, and in the village of Rummana in the Jenin district.

Most of these Bosnian families were attracted to the site of the ancient [Roman] Caesarea Maritima for three main reasons: the site was an uninhabited ruin, which gave them the opportunity to live separately; it was surrounded by fertile agricultural farmland; and there was also a small Roman-era harbor, which enabled them to have access to the sea and facilitated trade for them.

These immigrants lived in the city of Haifa and its surrounding areas for about two years during the construction of Qisarya. It was designed in the manner of Herzegovinian towns near Mostar, so that it differed in its urban planning and architecture from the neighboring Arab towns and villages, with modern housing and broad, intersecting streets. It also included a mosque with a school that offered children four years of education, and its residents used the services of an Arab schoolmaster named Haj Hassan , whom they paid an additional fee to serve as the mosque’s imam. In addition to the school and the harbor that functioned as a small port, the town also had a khan or caravanserai, a market, and customs offices.

Many Bosnian immigrants fell sick in the early years after they settled in Qisarya due to the difficult climate and the adverse effect of the swamps nearby the town. In their first ten years in Palestine, entire families were wiped out by malaria. To begin with, the Bosnians were the only ones living in the new village in Qisarya, but the Ottoman authorities soon resettled seven Circassian families, two Turkish families, and one Bulgarian Muslim family there.

In their first decades there, the Bosnian immigrants continued to retain their traditional garb and cuisine. Then they began to change the way they dressed to assimilate better with the surrounding environment and to cook local dishes alongside their traditional ones. They were able to acquire land outside the town and hired Arab peasants to work it; the latter planted citrus fruits, grains, and bananas. They also worked in animal husbandry and as artisans in some handicrafts. When it came to marriage, they endeavored to maintain an endogamous community of ethnic Bosnians to preserve their language, customs, and traditions; some of them even traveled to Anatolia in search of wives from the Bosnian diaspora there, or went back, from the mid-1930s, to their original homeland to find wives. But gradually they started to intermarry with the Arab population. Bosnian surnames such as Lakšić, Begović, Muradović, and Jehanović were eventually dropped, and they all came to be known by one surname, Bushnaq, an Arabization of the word “Bošnjak.” This label, indicating one’s geographical origin, is the surname that to this day distinguishes the descendants of all these families.

The Bosnian Migration and Forced Expulsion from Caesarea

The Bosnian migration from Qisarya began early, before the 1948 War and the Zionist occupation of Palestine; the hardship of adapting to the new climate, along with a perpetual sense of insecurity over raids by Bedouins that were commonplace at the time, drove some families to return to their original homeland or to move to another location within the modern state of Turkey , especially to the city of Adana . Since Qisarya had only one primary school, many families moved to larger cities such as Haifa, Tulkarm , Nablus, Jaffa , and Jerusalem in search of secondary schools for their children. Furthermore, the harbor in Qisarya lost its importance after the construction of the port of Haifa, which began after World War I . Similarly, the inauguration of the coastal railway south of Haifa also reduced the importance of the village and pushed some of its  inhabitants to relocate to new places where they could continue as traders.

In February 1948, Palmach units invaded the town of Qisarya, expelling its residents and destroying their homes, turning it into a dead town, with only the minaret of an old mosque remaining today. Its inhabitants were forced to seek refuge in Jordan , Syria, Lebanon , Egypt , and Kuwait .

Bosnian Participation in the Defense of Palestine

The historian Mohammad M. al-Arnaout claims that the contribution of the Bushnaq and the Albanians who fought in the 1948 war has been overlooked in scholarship. He reckons that although they fought as part of an Arab front, they were marginalized as a group after the Nakba.

In 1948, a number of Bosnian volunteers, numbering between three and five hundred, arrived in Palestine to participate in its defense. Their numbers included both officers and soldiers who trained Palestinians to use weapons. They also joined the Arab Liberation Army as military specialists in explosives and mines. Many of them were killed and injured in the battles of al-Qastal , Jaffa, and al-Malikiyya , among others. Some of them decided to remain in Palestine after the end of the war, and they settled and started families in various Palestinian villages and cities.

Regarding the motives of these volunteers coming to Palestine, al-Arnaout points to three main motives: proving themselves as experienced military personnel, choosing to fight on the side of the victim, and demonstrating their identity as non-neutral European Muslims.

The Contribution of the Bosnians to Palestinian Life

The Bosnians have played an active role in various aspects of Palestinian life. In politics, several have been prominent leaders and activists :

• Ali Bushnaq , who worked with Ahmad Jibril to establish the Palestinian Liberation Front in 1959;
• Ibrahim Bushnaq , the political and social activist from the village of Kafr Manda in the Galilee region;
• Mahmoud , Hussam , and Amin Bushnaq from the village of Rummana in the Jenin governorate, imprisoned in the Israeli occupation’s jails;
• Ramez Bushnaq , also from Kafr Manda, who was killed during the October 2000 Events .

Several Bosnian academics, artists, writers, and journalists have become famous throughout the Arab region and as well as internationally:

• Dr. Mustafa Bushnaq (1887–1974), one of the founders of an-Najah National University in Nablus and a member of the Palestine National Council and the Jordanian House of Senate ;
• Visual artist Mohammad Bushnaq (1934–2017), born in the village of Balad al-Shaykh near Haifa. After the Nakba, he and his family were forced to move to the city of Hebron , where he emerged as a talented painter and sculptor, after which he settled in Kuwait in 1954. He had a great influence on the plastic arts movement there through his foundation al-Marsam al-Hurr [The Open Atelier], which he founded at the behest of the Kuwaiti Education Board [precursor to today’s Ministry of Education];
• Suzanne Bushnaq (1963–, daughter of Mohammad Bushnaq) is a prominent painter and lives in Kuwait.
• Musician Suad Bushnaq (1982–), born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, is the first Arab woman in Canada to obtain a bachelor’s degree in music composition and orchestration from McGill University (Montreal) ; she won a Hollywood Music in Media Award in 2021.
• Writer Abd al-Rahman Bushnaq (1913–1999), born in Qisarya. He received his primary education in Tulkarm and his secondary education at the Arab College in Jerusalem . He then studied at the American University of Beirut and completed his graduate studies at the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge in Great Britain and then returned to Palestine, where he was appointed first as a teacher of literature at the Arab College, and then as deputy to its principal, the educator Ahmad Samih al-Khalidi . After the Nakba, he settled in Amman , where he worked as director-general of the Abd al-Hamid Shuman Foundation . In 1963, he was selected to be a member of the Royal Commission for Educational Affairs in Jordan and the Jordan Academy of Arabic [Language].
• Journalist Mohammad Bushnaq , the first Palestinian broadcaster on Huna al-Quds [This is Jerusalem] Radio station, which began broadcasting in 1936.

The Integration of the Bosnians into the Palestinian People

In the beginning, the Bosnian immigrants clung to their native culture and mother tongue; the women passed on the Serbo-Croatian language they spoke to their children. However, over time most of them lost their original language. This was in contrast to other ethnic groups that migrated to the Levant (including Palestine) such as the Chechnyans and Circassians, perhaps partly because the latter maintained a distance from the local Arab population, which helped them to preserve their distinct identity. They were also Muslims by religion like the greater majority of the Palestinian population, and unlike German and Jewish immigrants, did not enjoy the privileges granted to citizens of European countries living within the Ottoman Empire. Subsequently, the British Mandate authorities classified them in the population census as Sunni Muslims, and they adopted the surname Bushnaq en masse. During the Nakba, they went through the experience of expulsion and exile along with other Palestinians and like them had the legal status of Palestinian refugees. These were all factors that contributed to their assimilation into the Arab Palestinian milieu, while still preserving some distinctive cultural and ethnic traits.

Today, they are Palestinian in the eyes of their Arab neighbors, who see them as an integral part of the Palestinian Arab people, so much so that one may say that over a hundred years after their arrival in Palestine, little remains of to their past and origins save their surname.