In late March 1917, on the eve of Passover 5677, the kaymakam (district governor) of Jaffa read out at the saray an official order for the deportation of all the inhabitants of Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Its main provisions, as the sources record:
All inhabitants are commanded to leave at once and to go wherever they wish, but they are forbidden to head for Jerusalem or Haifa. Exempted from the order were farmers who had sown their fields, the winery workers of Rishon LeZion, and the teachers and pupils of Mikveh Israel. Execution was immediate.
source Gur Alroey, "The Deportation of the Jews of Tel Aviv–Jaffa to the Lower Galilee, 1917–1918" (OrientXXI).
Although officially the order was aimed at Jews and Arabs alike, in practice, the research documents, it fell chiefly upon the Jews: the Arabs found a way to return to their homes within days, and foreign nationals were allowed to remain — but not the Jews among them. This matches exactly AZR's testimony of "extermination" by means of exile. The day after the order, Meir Dizengoff published an emergency appeal to the settlements of the Galilee:
Dizengoff's appeal (27.3.1917): a decree of deportation has been passed upon the Jewish community of Judea; upon the settlements of the Galilee, which still lie outside the zone of disaster, falls a historic duty to come to the rescue and to prepare at once ample means of transport for receiving the exiles. Summary of Dizengoff's letter to the Federation of Galilee Colonies (in translation and summary), Central Zionist Archives (CZA) J-90, file 141, in Gur Alroey.
The mortality rate documented by the research corroborates AZR's "transfer from life to death": 430 deportees (about 18%) died in the Lower Galilee, and about 25% of all the deportees in the country. CZA L2, file 191
The 1917 order did not stand alone. The research documents a series of Ottoman decrees that AZR lived through:
The Jaffa deportation, December 1914: the governor of Jaffa ordered the deportation of Jews who had not taken Ottoman nationality (many of them German subjects). Through the intervention of the German ambassador von Wangenheim and the American ambassador Morgenthau, the deportation was suspended, and foreigners were allowed to remain and to Ottomanize.
The campaign against Zionism: the authorities regarded Zionism as treason. AZR's testimony about the order "whoever is found with a Zionist stamp (marka) shall be put to death" fits into the broader record of the campaign of cultural destruction — searches, confiscation of flags and books, removal of Hebrew signs, and the deportation of leaders (Mossinson, Ben-Zvi).
October 1917, the espionage affair (NILI): the exposure of the pro-British spy network set off a wave of arrests and torture — exactly what AZR saw in the Tiberias jail. Only high-level German intervention (General von Falkenhayn, who took command from Djemal Pasha) checked further escalation.
At the end of the war the official tide turned. On 12 August 1918 the Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha delivered an official declaration in the name of the Ottoman government — a kind of answer to the British Balfour Declaration (Nov. 1917):
"The Council of Ministers has just decided… to abolish all restrictive measures on Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine (Eretz Israel)… I declare once more my sympathy for the establishment of a religious and national Jewish center in Palestine (Eretz Israel) through well-organized immigration and settlement… and I am prepared to place this enterprise under the high protection of the Ottoman Empire." Talaat Pasha's declaration, delivered to Leopold Perlmutter, Constantinople 12.8.1918; Political Archive of the German Foreign Office (PArchAA) R14144. In W. G. Schwanitz, "The Ottoman Balfour Declaration," Middle East Quarterly (2018). official document
The declaration came too late — about half a year after the British conquest and some 80 days before Turkey's surrender (30.10.1918) — and had no practical force. But as a document it is extraordinary: the greatest Muslim power in the world recognized the "Jewish nation" and its right to national revival in its land.
AZR's testimony sits between two official documents: the deportation order (March 1917) at the opening, and Talaat's declaration (Aug. 1918) at the close — with the Balfour Declaration (Nov. 1917) in between, which AZR heard of in Tiberias as "the great light of redemption." The official documents corroborate what he recorded from his own experience: decree, extermination-by-exile, and the reversal of fortune.