Search

Combining historical sources with the survey data we document the Bedouin transition from pastoralism to an economy based more on agriculture than animal husbandry. The construction of structures, first baikas and later houses, is evidence for a presumed reduction in mobility. This shift towards an agricultural economy was in part facilitated by the Fellahin/villagers who were hired by the Bedouin to assist in the harvest. This shift and consequential decline in mobility, however, is voluntary and not a result of direct coercion by the Mandate government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1927 Michael McDonnell, a diasporic Irish Catholic, was appointed Mandatory Palestine's Chief Justice, being directed to institute firm British-style legal-judicial foundations for future self-governance. This entailed common, equal status for Arab and Jewish Palestinians, implicitly de-privileging the Jewish National Home. McDonnell was resisted in this by the British Mandate's Anglo-Jewish, pro-Zionist Attorney General, Norman Bentwich. McDonnell prevailed but only at the cost of being characterized lastingly as a pro-Arab, Catholic anti-Semite. McDonnell's continuing defence of a supreme, independent judiciary antagonized the Palestine Executive of High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope, who tried to co-opt rather than subordinate Zionist interests. Consequent frictions culminated in 1936 with McDonnell adjudicating against supra-legal British repression of Palestine's great Arab rebellion. For this he was dismissed and ostracized, subsequently publishing critiques of British policy in fringe right-wing organs. Yet McDonnell professed explicitly non-racist views, reflecting a liberal-minded, constitutional Irish nationalist equation of Palestine with Ireland, seeing comparable settler-colonial abuses and native distress as remediable only by transcendentally impartial justice. Britain reneging on these principles led McDonnell, like those Irish imperial servants noted in India, to identify with colonial subjects against colonialism. His case is one of empire as a system of domination being challenged from within, although his removal foreshadowed emerging imperial counter-insurgency's tendency not only to repress subject populations but deny civil-progressive alternatives for managing post-colonial transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Yaël Ronen introduced the workshop as the fourth in a series of events on legal aspects of the Middle East conflict. The first two events concerned the Palestine Mandate of 1922. The third focused on the 1948 refugee issue. All these events have and are being held with the generous support of the Knapp Family Foundation and under the auspices of the International Law Forum of the Faculty of Law. Also, as part of the Shabtai Rosenne International Law Center Initiative, the first session was dedicated to the commemoration of the work of the late Shabtai Rosenne, whose scholarship spanned a host of international law issues but who is most renowned for his work on the International Court of Justice (ICJ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the gap between Israelis and Palestinians amid their conflict. It analyzes the impact of the growth of the Zionist movement and Arab nationalism. The creation of the British Mandate for Palestine in the 1920s is discussed, as well as the commitment of the British government to establishing a national home for the Jewish people. In addition, the article explores the stance of Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion on the relations between the two parties.

Seventy years after the Nakba, what does it mean to commemorate 1948? This introduction to three articles drawn from the 2018 New Directions in Palestinian Studies workshop at Brown University, "The Shadow Years: Material Histories of Everyday Life," examines the emergence of 1948 as the primary focus of Palestinian commemorative practices and guiding star of future political possibilities, as well as the promise and limitations of the settler-colonial framework. It argues that widening our lens to include the material histories of everyday life in the context of a generational struggle for survival contextualizes moments of great trauma and violence within the larger dynamics of Palestinian society, and recasts the time/space architecture of narratives about Palestine and the Palestinians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the British Victory at Megiddo, which took place in 1918 during World War I. Particular focus is given to General Sir Edmund Allenby, the British commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, who achieved decisive results at comparatively little cost during the battle. Additional topics discussed include a description of the operation, which began on September 19, 1918, Turkish defenses against the event, and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

In the 1930s and 1940s, nearly ninety thousand German-speaking Jews found refuge in the British Mandate of Palestine. While scholars have stressed the so-called Yekkes' intellectual and cultural contribution to the making of the Jewish nation, their social and gendered lifeworlds still need to be explored. This article, which is centered on the generation of those born between 1910 and 1925, explores an ongoing interest in German-Jewish multiple masculinities. It is based on personal narratives, including some 150 oral history interviews conducted in the early 1990s with German-speaking men and women in Israel. By focusing on gender and masculinities, it sheds new light on social, generational, and racial issues in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. The article presents an investigation of the lives, experiences, and gendered identities of young emigrants from Nazi Europe who had partly been socialized in Europe, and were then forced to adjust to a different sociey and culture after migration. This involved adopting new forms of sociability, learning new body postures and gestures, as well as incorporating new habits—which, together, formed a cultural repertoire for how to behave as a "New Hebrew." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an established literature which argues that the Druze of Palestine were either neutral during the Colonial period or supportive of the Zionist Agency and its plans. The aim of this research is to counter the Zionist narratives that promote the concept of Druze--Zionist cooperation. I argue that the Druze were supportive of the Palestinian- Arab cause, and they heavily participated in the anti-colonial activities of the Palestinians, politically and militarily. Their military participation was manifested in their participation in the events of 1929, 1936, and 1948. Politically, Sheikh Amin Tarif led the community in their stance against Zionism. This research will provide a new account and narrative for the Druze role in the events in mandatory Palestine, revealing their supportive stance to the Palestinian national struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To a large extent, the roots of Israeli family law go back to the British Mandate for Palestine. British policy was to enshrine in legislation the jurisdiction of religious courts, so that marriage and divorce would be conducted according to religious law only. At the same time, the British believed that a criminal prohibition should be imposed against bigamy. The Article describes the conflict between Jewish marriage law and criminal law on this matter. The reason for the conflict lies in the complexity of the Jewish bigamy law, which is not uniform for all Jews. A comprehensive archival review shows that it was one specific criminal case that alerted the British mandatory authorities to the fact that they had created a problem in the area of criminal law, at least as far as bigamy offenses of Jewish men were concerned. Because of the complexity of the matter, the task of repairing the relevant section in the criminal code was assigned to the Chief Rabbis of Palestine. On their part, the Chief Rabbis used the opportunity that was offered them to impose on all Jews in Palestine the halakhic approach that rejects bigamy. Naturally, this move involved the Rabbinate and the British in a serious conflict with the various groups of the Jewish population that opposed the amendment of the law. But the amendment created by the Rabbis succeeded, and Israeli criminal law to this day is based on it. This is an exceptional case of a criminal law that distinguishes clearly between Jewish and non-Jewish populations in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of humour in accounts of Israel and Palestine by travellers from the UK and Germany, where humour functions to bring a distant geopolitical context close to European audiences while maintaining the necessary distance to enable critical engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The essay’s focus on Mark Thomas’s Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel’s Separation Barrier. For Fun (2011) and Theresa Bäuerlein’s Das war der gute Teil des Tages (That Was the Good Part of the Day) (2008) considers the extent to which humour provides German and British audiences with a way of looking critically at Israel and Palestine within a genre, travel writing, typically thought of as encouraging conservative politics. Moreover, it traces how humourous depictions of Israel and Palestine work to engage with concerns at home, including the memory of the British Mandate and the role of the Holocaust in twenty-first century German identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the Friends Girls School (FGS) in Ramallah as a site of interaction between Americans and Palestinians during the British Mandate between 1920 and 1947. It draws on extensive archival records as well as Palestinian students' writings and oral accounts to trace how Quakers' education and the nationalist discourse in the country influenced the students' personal and national identities. Palestinian students utilized Quaker education as a springboard for the subversion of gendered religious, political and Orientalist discourses which were prevalent during this time period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads played a key role in defeating the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. Wingate’s Night Squads were distinctive in their approach to counter-insurgency warfare; in addition to bringing Arab insurgents to battle, the Night Squads proved their mettle by ‘flying the flag’ and by improving cooperation between Jewish settlers and British servicemen. Nevertheless, the Night Squad’s accomplishments and legacy must be properly situated within the broader wave of tactical innovations undertaken by the British Army throughout the Rebellion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the perspective of new critical historians of Palestine and the relations between Palestinians and Oriental Jews during the British Mandate period of Palestine. It also disagrees with the opinion on the dual society model which determines the Jewish-Arab relations by Muhammad Muslih and Rashid Khalidi.

This article analyzes the influence of Jewish immigrants on the nascent advertising industry in British Mandatory Palestine. Until a mass wave of immigrants arrived in 1933-1939, local advertising was rather small and undeveloped. Among these immigrants--many of whom arrived from Central Europe, chiefly, Germany (also known as the 'Fifth' or 'German' Aliyah)--were advertising agents and graphic designers who set up the foundations of professional advertising agencies in Palestine. These new immigrants infused local society with messages championing Western European lifestyles, portraying comfort and aesthetics as ideals to strive for, values that were, in fact, contradictory to the work ethic and socialist ethos of the Yishuv at the time. The lasting mark left by this German Aliyah on the local advertising industry, and later on the State of Israel, can be observed in two main spheres: the structural-functional sphere of the industry and the content-visual sphere of the industry's creative products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay looks at the hearing held by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in April 1922 on the subject of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, as well as the broader congressional debate over the Balfour Declaration at that crucial time. The landmark hearing, which took place against the backdrop of growing unrest in Palestine and just prior to the League of Nations' formal approval of Britain's Mandate over Palestine, offers a glimpse into the cultural and political mindset underpinning U.S. support for the Zionist project at the time as well as the ways in which the political discourse in the United States has, or has not, changed since then. Despite the overwhelming support for the Zionist project in Congress, which unanimously endorsed Balfour in September 1922, the hearing examined all aspects of the issue and included a remarkably diverse array of viewpoints, including both anti-Zionist Jewish and Palestinian Arab voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-World War I partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, especially the League of Nations' appointment of Britain and France as the mandatory powers for Palestine and Syria respectively, influenced the lives of the inhabitants of Upper Galilee. With the district left in December 1919 under French rule, the elated Christians began to avenge themselves on their long-time Bedouin opponents, who for their part supported the short-lived pan-Arab kingdom proclaimed in Damascus by Emir Faisal ibn Hussein of Mecca. With the Upper Galilee deteriorating into internecine strife, the Jews, perceived as supporters of the French, became a target for Bedouin attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1919 to 1925, some 400,000 Jews from Eastern Europe emigrated to the United States and Palestine. The central thesis of this article is that the profile of the Jewish exodus before World War I differed from the postwar flow. Above all, Jews who had escaped the carnage of the Ukrainian Civil War (1918–1920) were more akin to refugees than immigrants. The first of this article’s three parts revolves around Jewish emigration during World War I via Siberia to Vladivostok or to the Chinese town of Harbin, whereupon they continued to the port of Yokohama and sailed to the US Pacific coast. The second part focuses on new immigration policies that were rolled out by the authorities in the United States and Palestine between 1921 and 1924. Lastly, the third part delves into comparative and demographic aspects of Jewish migration during the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A century after the outbreak of the First World War, the authors re-evaluate the infrastructure and military logistics of the Ottoman Army in Palestine before and during the war as it affected its ability to successfully wage the military campaign in the Sinai and Palestine. Using primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Turkish, Arabic, English, German and Hebrew, as well as official war literature, memoirs of commanders and soldiers, general military historical scholarly literature, and material specific to Palestine, coming from both adversaries, the authors show how infrastructure and logistics shaped and limited the Ottoman Army’s operational plans and their execution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for a significant revision in the understanding of Jews in late-Ottoman Palestine: from a model of a singular community (theyishuv) to a model of multiple communities, embedded within local, regional and global networks. The conceptualization of Palestine’s Jewry is reappraised, from the Jerusalem School to recent literature. Despite acknowledging their ethnic and linguistic diversity, the historiography has long portrayed Palestine’s Jews as a sui-generis community, a Jewish microcosm united in its unique attachment toEretz Israel. It was studied as part of Jewish history, in isolation from its Middle Eastern context. In contrast, recent Relational Studies stressed Jewish connections to the Arab and Ottoman environment in Palestine. The article examines the self-perception of Jewish communities as plural and heterogeneous, through a survey of early Hebrew press. It traces the genealogy of the termyishuv, from an ideological project of revival and colonization in the 1860s, to an imagined pan-Jewish national community after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. This shift was boosted not only by Zionism and Jewish diaspora influence, but also by Ottomanism. Even then, Jewish communities in Palestine continued to operate separately in a highly fragmented manner well into the British Mandate period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the founding of Tel Aviv adjacent to the Arab city of Jaffa, a new and unique reality arose in Palestine in the form of neighborly relations between a Hebrew city and an Arab city. A deep rift in these relations resulted from the riots of 1921 and 1929, and in Zionist historiography it is argued that from the 1921 riots onward, the ties between them weakened and deteriorated constantly. This article aims to shed new light on the question, and to show that there was, in fact, a clear tendency of continuous improvement in the relationship from the first half of the 1920s until the outbreak of the 1936 riots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of British rule in Palestine, as it settled down after the approval of the Mandate in 1922, had its critics among the Zionist ranks. Using original sources, this paper examines the attitudes of the leadership of the Revisionist Union (RU) towards the British from the first quarter of the 1920s till the mid-1930s. Unlike the later paramilitary organizations, the Revisionist founders, convinced, in their own words, of the common interests shared with the British Empire, had no intention of terminating the British presence, but sought to transform it in order to serve Zionism’s objectives. While official Zionism preferred backstage diplomacy, the RU pursued a different strategy – appealing directly to the masses and making its cause as public and vocal as possible. Eventually, the RU’s strategy combined the principle of pro-British orientation with merciless criticism of Palestine policies on the ground. As far as the British were concerned, the Colonial Office was at best willing to tolerate a set of proposals they saw as unrealistic. Once these started to actively erode the integrity of British policy in the region, unsolicited “enthusiasm” was reclassified as dangerous “extremism.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Yishuv's campaign against British rule has been idealized as a period of bygone heroism and commitment. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, this nostalgia for the pre-state, anticolonial struggle was complemented, even challenged, by a divergent nostalgic force--one that celebrates the romance of the Mandate's colonial features, yearns for the social and political opportunities made possible by the presence of the imperial regime, and ultimately laments its demise. Tracing and contextualizing expressions of this longing in Israeli literature, cinema, and theater, this article argues that "colonial" nostalgia for the Mandate is rooted in the geopolitical effects of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War: driven by a growing sense of guilt over Israel's occupation, Israeli authors have depicted Mandatory Palestine as a cosmopolitan haven in which the Israelis, restored to the status of colonial subjects, are freed from the burden of sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current scholarship emphasises the dominant role played by the Arab press in the general strike in Palestine in 1936. In spite of this, cartoons, a crucial feature of Filastin – the most widely circulated Arabic-language daily in the Mandate – have received little scholarly attention. The current paper seeks to correct this through examining editorial cartoons to demonstrate how they reflect Filastin’s role in engendering sympathy toward and participation in the general strike among a broader audience than could be reach by the textual content of the paper. Cartoons contributed to the transformation of what it meant to be Palestinian in the context of the broader national struggle against Great Britain and Zionism by examining discourses of ‘peoplehood’ – i.e. intersecting and overlapping categories of identity – interrogating subjects such as gender, nation and class to mobilise disparate elements of Palestinian society against colonial intrusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost 70 years after Great Britain gave up its Palestine Mandate, Regional Plans prepared under the Mandate still survive – as live statutory documents that are used to justify planning decisions. Behind them lies a story of how planning is unavoidably tied up with land, with rights, and with power. This article outlines the history of the making of these Plans, explores what the planners of the Mandate epoch thought they were doing, shows how the Plans have been used ever since, and provides an update in the light of a recent UN Habitat Mission to study the planning system under the Israeli occupation. The Plans were the output from the activity of the Mandate government’s ‘Town Planning Adviser’ in the late 1930s and the 1940s – during the period of both the Second World War and the worsening Jewish/Arab violence that led to war in 1947. It was very much a case of the ‘export’ of town planning from urban and industrial Britain to a society which was primarily rural. The Mandate Plans continue to be used in the formal process by the occupation authorities, but selectively: a selectivity which, unfortunately, the Mandate Plans enable by their flexibility. This bites directly on how Palestinians in the West Bank live – ‘the history in the present’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study sheds a light on the history of the Christians of Jerusalem during the period of occupation and the British Mandate, 1917–48. It relies on a set of sources and references, among the most important of which are reports, telegrams, messages and letters exchanged between the British leadership in Palestine and the British Foreign Ministry as well as the Ministry of British Colonies (British Colonial Administration); in addition to Palestinian daily and weekly newspapers; as well as modern sources, studies and memoirs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman's book, "Birthrate politics in Zion: Judaism, nationalism, and modernity under the British mandate." The book examines the decline in birthrate in the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) during the 1930s and 1940s. It explores the reasons behind this decline, including economic factors, social and psychological factors, and the clash between modernist, democratic values and national needs. The book sheds light on the decision-making process of Ashkenazi non-Haredi women who chose not to have more children and the societal implications of this choice. [Extracted from the article]

The Mandate for Palestine has a unique character regarding both its beneficiaries, the Jewish people, wherever they live, and the obligations of the Mandatory power. At the same time it has been a burdensome stone right from the beginning. Representatives of Palestinian Arabs have rejected it as being incompatible with their right to self-determination. The policies of Great Britain, the Mandatory power, show a gradual departure from its obligations. The establishment of the Jewish national home became, instead of the primary obligation, just one of the duties of equal weight and content as others under the Mandate. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, the relevance of the mandatory system in the light of Article 80 of the UN Charter has been recognised, inter alia, by the International Court of Justice. The unique character of the Palestine Mandate, however, has been kept under wraps. Some academic writings and legal actions by the Palestinians now offer a radical revisionism, which uses the Mandate as the legal basis for a Palestinian state. This trend is not without consequences for the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and for the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dr Rabbi Isaac Breuer, a German jurist and Jewish rabbi, represented the ultra-orthodox community in Palestine before the international committees which considered the future of the Palestine Mandate. In his work, Breuer criticised the concept of sovereignty and introduced an alternative regime for global governance of developing peoples. His unique position, as analysed in this article, can contribute to contemporary debates surrounding the role of sovereigns as trustees of humanity, sovereignty and international law and ways of promoting global peace and human welfare.By introducing Breuer's thought, this article seeks to contribute additional sources – both Jewish and universal – to these ongoing debates. Letting these neglected voices in international legal history enrich the debate can convince us, once again, of the importance of the periphery and of peripheral voices for the development, vitality and relevance of international law.Breuer's model replaces the notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘rights’ with those of internalised obligations and subservience to law and justice. Limiting any national aspirations to total sovereignty, he implored the United Nations to refrain from elevating the Jewish national home to statehood. Opposing the Zionist position, he insisted that the Mandatory power and international institutions would enable two nations to develop side by side, in what he termed ‘the state of peace’, under international trusteeship.We carefully draw on Breuer's insights to reflect on present debates on trusteeship, sovereignty and the management of areas devastated by conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the essential characteristics of the Palestine Mandate in the context of the League of Nations mandate system as a whole, pointing out its particular nature. It commences with a brief look at the Versailles environment and the relevance of the principle of self-determination, with an emphasis upon the development of the mandate system. The article then turns to consider the Palestine Mandate in its historical framework and the exceptionality of this Mandate. The distinction between the international allocation of the status of a territory and the determination of its boundaries is posited. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information about the history of the mandate for Palestine discussed at the international workshop held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel on February 11, 2016 is presented. Discussed are the workshop sessions regarding proposals by various Professors on consideration of Palestine mandate as an International governance tool, as rights and obligations’ source under International law, and right to self-determination.