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This article explores the performance of shehitah (ritual slaughter according to rabbinic law) in British Mandate Jerusalem under the guidelines of the HCC (Hebrew Community Council)—an arm of the Jewish National Institutions—and the alliances that were forged around shehitah among various social and ideological sectors of the city. A prominent example is the collaboration of HCC at times with Agudath Israel, the main political-religious opposition party to the National Institutions, and at other times with Sephardi shehitah services, while creating shehitah regulations that negated the founding principles of the National Institutions. In the present article I argue that these alliances represent compromise over national principles that favored economic and civic interests; as such, civic compromise in Jerusalem engendered alliances in the communal sphere that would have been unrealizable in the national sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matthew Glozier, Ian Howie-Willis, and John Pearn’s book, A Beacon of Hope: 140 Years of Eye Care in the Holy Land, provides a fascinating insight into the history of the St. John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital, highlighting the challenges caregivers face operating against a backdrop of political change and evershifting restrictions of Israeli occupation that impact patients and staff alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Awad Halabi's monograph breaks new ground in uncovering the societal changes contained within Palestine's most popular Muslim festival. Focused mainly on the Mandate period, the book charts the festival's reinvention in the early twentieth century as a major vehicle for Palestinian social and political protest. Far from constituting a platform for purely elite concerns, Halabi demonstrates the multiple ways that subaltern actors expressed their concerns and priorities through the festival's rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the changing cultural, social, and ideological characteristics of the central Sephardi Rabban Yochanan Ben-Zakai synagogue in Jerusalem, as a lens reflecting social and ideological processes of the local Sephardi community during the first half of the twentieth century. These included the community's attempts to consolidate its cultural uniqueness and civic identity vis-à-vis the surrounding and evolving spirits—within the Jewish community and outside it; its struggles with the local Ashkenazi community over historical and legal hegemony; its changing and evolving attitude toward the Ottoman and British Empires; and its gradual yet distinct adoption of the Jewish national framework. The article is based on an in-depth study of the archives of the Sephardi Commission (Va'ad Ha'eda HaSepharadit) in Jerusalem, as well as literary and scholarly sources and the local Jewish press of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks, why was there no Arab university in Mandatory Palestine (while there were two Jewish universities). Apparently, the colonial mentality of the British authorities who deemed the Palestinians yet another colonized people who had to be oppressed, while regarding the Zionist settlers as fellow colonialists, feared that such a university would enhance the Palestinian national movement. At the same time, Zionist pressure, British anti-Arab racism, and lack of resources also combined to undermine the emergence of a proper Palestinian higher education system. Nonetheless, educators, intellectuals and some politicians of the Palestinian community did not give up on the idea. They used several teachers’ colleges to provide high quality university-level studies, the most notable being the Arab College (al-Kulliyya al-‘Arabiyya) whose graduates went on to pursue careers in universities in the region and abroad. There was also an attempt by the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, with the help of donations from abroad, to build an Islamic, but open to all, university throughout the 1930s. This initiative was foiled by the British Mandate government despite the willingness both in the Arab and Muslim worlds to support it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Second World War did occur in Jerusalem. That period, not very often studied, remains decisive in the millennial city’s recent transformation. Between 1939 and 1945, Jerusalem was indeed a city in peace in world at war. Peace in relation to so many other cities at war. Peace in contrast with the periods preceding and following the world conflict in Jerusalem. And yet, under the British mandate, on the maps of the military general staff, Jerusalem was involved in the war. Jerusalem is thus part of this war without a full involvement, as a witness of the conflict. A time of suspension begins in the history of the city, whose population understands that its destiny relies on the war being fought far from their land. New futures are foreseen, a different relation to the otherness, as well as a dense urban life. Meanwhile, in the City Hall of Jerusalem, political tension arises, foreshadowing the new fights to come in the aftermath of the global conflict.

To date little attention has been paid to the perception and representation of the Crusader period in Palestine in works by Zionist scholars and activists in the early years of the British Mandate. To help fill this void, this essay analyzes the work of Ben-Zion Dinur and some of his contemporaries as it relates to Jewish armed resistance and heroism. These scholars revived Jewish heroes from the Crusader period in Palestine to convey Zionist ideals and shape a national narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resemblance between the 1944 outline scheme for Jerusalem and the 1955 one, and the political constellation in which the latter was prepared, raise questions as to its genuine planning necessity. As we suggest, the declaratory importance of the 1955 scheme outweighed its planning reasoning. It was mainly a political measure designed by the government: first, to discipline the Jerusalem Municipality, regarded as implementing a reckless planning and construction policy; second, conveying a message to the international community of unquestionable and responsible Israeli control over those parts of the city which came under Israeli rule following the war of 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the declining fortunes of the mushaa', a once-prominent Levantine culture of common land. Palestinians managed to resist attempts by the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate to break up the mushaa'. Under Israeli colonization, the remaining commons are now subject to another type of appropriation: individual Palestinian contractors seize hold of mushaa' land and build on it. This article introduces the concept of 'enclosures from below', whilst looking at the dynamics of seizure of the commons by Palestinian refugees, who once were peasants practising mushaa' on their lands and are now landless, some having become expert contractors. I show that the contractors consider their actions to be a form of resistance against the settler colonial project, manifested in the advancing of the Wall and settlement expansion. This is described through a case study of the Shu'faat area in Jerusalem. Changing uses of mushaa' land reflect wider tendencies in the Palestinian national project that has become increasingly individualized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Governmental Arab College of Jerusalem is a little-known constructed space that emerged and then disappeared in just a few decades, a remarkable while extremely limited time if we reflect on the ancient history of the town that hosted it. However, it would be a great mistake not to consider these 30 years of history, from 1918 to 1948, and especially the wealth of cultural consciousness that the College was able to instill in its students. Ihsan Abbas (1920-2003), Ismail Ragib Khalidi (1916-1968), 'Abdul Latif Tibawi (1910-1981), Irfan Shahid (1926) as academics, and Haidar Abdel Shafi (1919-2007), Halil-Salim Jabara (1913-1999), Hasib Sabbagh (1920-2010) etc. as politicians and activists are some of the most important names in Arab Palestinian culture and politics of the twentieth century, and all of them studied at the Arab College of Jerusalem. In this article, I would like to focus attention on the importance of this secondary/preparatory school, the social and cultural values that the teaching body was able to impart, and the role it played within the increasing and violent debate that the Arab College ignited concerning the growing Arab Palestinian-Jewish conflict in the first half of the twentieth century under the British Mandate. The Palestinian intelligentsia that was shaped within the Arab College symbolizes a cultural elite that, even if it would learn what it means to live as refugees, continued to work in different ways on its own cultural tradition. A key subject in understanding the main reasons behind the roots of identity within this divided city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hajj Amīn al-Ḥusaynī – the «Grand Muftī of Jerusalem» – is often portrayed as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in the first part of XX century. Due to his collusion with Nazism, such a position implies that the Palestinian people are, at least in principle, responsible for their own tragic destiny. This study challenges that assumption and sheds light on how and why the Grand Muftī was imposed on the Palestinian people by London. Analyzing the rise to power of Hajj Amīn al-Ḥusaynī and the means granted to him is crucial for understanding the ways through which the British authorities related to the local realities in post-World War I Palestine and to what extent these practices have marked the subsequent development of Palestinian society.

This article traces the establishment and development of the first Hebrew ‘gymnasiums’ (academic high schools) during the years 1906–1948: Gymnasia Herzliya, the Hebrew Gymnasia in Jerusalem, and the Reali School in Haifa. It describes how they were set up during Ottoman rule, and their development during the British Mandate up to the establishment of the state, focusing on school culture as it was expressed in both the formal and informal educational systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's insights on the territorial pragmatism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author mentions that Palestinians have dealt with the responsibility of occupation and lack a state while Israelis have been burdened by existential dangers and corrosive influence of being occupier. He adds that the split in Palestinian government has taken away the hope of its citizens of a useful representation in their administration.

The failure of the Western media to open a public forum to the modern history of Palestinian culture is among the tragedies of the ongoing conflict. The publication of the artist Kamal Boullata's scholarly book is the first comprehensive anglophone account of what has been, and continues to be lost through Israel's systematic Judaisation of the territory and eradication or appropriation of Arab heritage. Articulating aesthetic concerns with sociohistorical commentary, Boullata traces the complex, fractured pathways of Palestinian art from the rise of Arab modernism and nationalism during the dying days of Ottoman rule in the latter half of the twentieth century, through successive occupations under the British Mandate and Israel, to the diasporas created by the Nakba of 1948. Jerusalem and Beirut emerge as once thriving cosmopolitan cities, whose modernism was advanced by the mutual influences of Christian and Islamic traditions, and to which women artists continue to make a significant contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]