Search

This article discusses the political background of the formation of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) as a corollary of the Arab League’s inability to adopt a unified response to the November 1947 UN Partition Resolution. From its inception, ALA was never intended to help the Palestinian Arabs but to serve the goals of the Arab leaders, especially those of Syrian President Shukri Quwatli who sought to thwart Transjordan’s King Abdullah’s ‘Greater Syria’ scheme. This was the reason why the Arab leaders failed to involve the Palestinian Arabs in ALA’s formation and war operations, or to consult their leader, the former Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin Husseini, when deciding upon the appointment of ALA commander. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article follows the footsteps of the American Jewish newspaperwoman Dorothy Kahn Bar-Adon, who immigrated to Palestine in 1933 and became a central field reporter of the most important English-language newspaper in the country, The Palestine Post, owned by pro-Zionist proprietors. It explores how she transformed the newspaper over the years as a site of dialogue between the Jewish and the Arab societies, especially by her narrative journalism and her human-interest story angle, and how her writing in English – the language of the international power (Britain) designated by the League of Nations to administer the country, rather than in local languages – enabled her to propose a somehow distanced perspective on Palestine, while still promoting Zionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for a common memory creates a link between personal stories and the shared values of the nation's citizens. Flamm's story reflects an attempt to create such a link. In 1943, a group of hikers in the Galilee came upon an Arab who attempted to rob them at gunpoint. Joseph Flamm, the group's guide and an amateur wrestler, fought the Arab, subdued him and killed him. A different version of the story of this incident came up every few years. Joseph Flamm, the story's hero, played a major role in the attempt to paint the incident in nationalistic colours. His own involvement in publicizing and shaping the story enables us to examine the encounter between a personal attempt to enter the national collective memory and the political use that was made of the story. This article discusses the attempt to turn this criminal event into a national heroic event in the context of the Arab Israeli conflict. The later versions presented it as a tangible expression of national myths, among them scouting and knowledge of Israel's geography, physical heroism and defending the homeland. The last version of the story was published in the 1970s, a period that signalled a change in the Zionist ethos. The Israeli public no longer showed interest in heroic stories such as Flamm's. Therefore, despite attempts to revive the story and efforts to affix it in the collective memory, it eventually disappeared from the public eye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the development of brewing and the transfer of knowledge in Mandatory Palestine. Brewing in Palestine proceeded under the watchful eye of the mandate government. Although the reluctance of the British to endorse local enterprises inhibited the progress of beer production in the first decade of the mandate, a thriving brewing industry began to prosper and expand in the latter half of the 1930s. The Palestine Brewery Ltd. exemplified this change. Soon after it started operations, the company gained public confidence and diversified its product range; its products circulated throughout the nation. The challenges by British firms notwithstanding, it gradually took the place of foreign beer in the Palestine market. The company pioneered new methods of communal advertising campaigns and attuned its operations more sensitively to the requirements of the day, elevating it to a symbol of business success and the national economy. Not only popular periodicals but also activities in public relations took on increased significance when it came to promoting products in the market. The demand by military forces allowed further expansion of the company, and the company transitioned into an unprecedented phase of prosperity during World War II. The differing fates of this company and its predecessors proved the primacy of political and social factors for the successful transfer of knowledge between Palestine and Europe.

This paper explores the experiences of Jewish right-wing underground members who were imprisoned in detention camps in Eritrea, Sudan, and Kenya during the British Mandate rule over Palestine from October 1944 to July 1948. These 459 detainees endured harsh conditions and isolation, after being exiled without trial and denied the ability to appeal to a court. Their primary means of communication with the outside world was by correspondence. An extensive collection of letters penned by these detainees to their loved ones and to national and international institutions is housed in Israeli archives, particularly within the Jabotinsky Institute. Additionally, original newspapers and a comprehensive book compiled during their time in the camp are among the preserved materials. Remarkably, these ego documents have seen limited use in academic research. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive depiction of the isolated microcosm of culture, education, struggle, and resilience cultivated by these young Jewish men despite their uncertain condition and lack of control over their fate. This analysis relies on letters composed in real-time, subject to military censorship as well as self-restraint, to avoid causing distress to their families. These letters constitute a valuable historical resource that sheds light on a lesser-known case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholarship on Anglophone Palestinian literature has burgeoned in recent years, there has been no attempt to retrieve and assess the work of Soraya Antonius (1932–2017), author of two remarkable English-language novels depicting British-ruled Palestine from the 1910s to 1948, The Lord (1986) and Where the Jinn Consult (1987). Exploring and contextualising Antonius's contribution to this literary corpus, this article examines the cultural, political and linguistic forces shaping her writings. It begins by tracing the fusion of Anglophile mimicry and anti-colonial resistance typical of her parents – George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening (1938) and Katy Antonius, Mandatory Jerusalem's leading socialite. While her parents funnelled their Levantine-cosmopolitan options into a distinctive Palestinian identity, the Nakba compelled their daughter to take the opposite trajectory, leaving Palestine to pursue cosmopolitan possibilities elsewhere. The article's second section thus considers her work in 1960s and 1970s Beirut, first as a journalist and editor, committed to developing a critical discourse on Western Orientalism, and subsequently as an activist and spokesperson, advocating the Palestinian cause. Probing how these biographical and professional strands shaped her fiction, the final section demonstrates how the first novel's Anglophile fascination with the coloniser's mindset is replaced, in the second novel, with a decided focus on Palestinians' perspectives. Echoing Albert Hourani's critique of the 'Politics of Notables', Where the Jinn Consult thus offers a loving yet bitter account of her parents' generation, complacent and ineffectual in the face of looming catastrophe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the contribution of Jewish women to the Levant Fair during the interwar period. In its time, the Fair became one of the major outlets that permitted Jewish women to contribute to nation-building in the pre-state period, mainly due to a dearth of otherwise suitable opportunities for women. Women participation, however, neither transformed power relations between men and women, nor expanded economic and social rights available to women at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the story of the Na'amien swamp south of Acre, one of Palestine's most extensive swamps, an area where many plans to control it were begun and failed throughout the Mandatory period but were only finally addressed following the establishment of the State of Israel. Colonial and Zionist environmental stances often point to similar views regarding land development and the advantages Mandatory rule provided the Zionist movement at the expense of the Arab-Palestinian population. This article will argue that the environmental British policy was not formulated merely due to similarities and common interests of the authorities and the Zionists. There was also a complex set of considerations typified by internal contradictions, varying interpretations of progress as justification for colonialism, and changing responses to local economic and political developments and to changing British interests in the European arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Bergelson's "I Shall Not Die but Live" takes place during the Nazi invasion of the USSR, in a collective settlement adjacent to an agricultural experimentation farm in the Ukraine. The world premiere of the play took place in Habima in May 1944. It was the first theatre production performed in an Eretz-Israeli theatre to deal with the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. This article follows the transnational network facilitated by this play, its production and public discourse, and explores how this play imported into the Yishuv a symbolic conceptualization of the Holocaust and the Jewish struggle against Nazism. The article points to the centrality of the transnational Jewish cultural mechanism in the shaping of a national, Eretz-Israeli Jewish identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Analyses de Population & Avenir is the property of Population & Avenir and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In press coverage of the 1927 earthquake in Palestine, frequent mention is made of the deaths of three women at the Winter Palace Hotel in Jericho. That the three were from British-occupied India apparently rendered them unusual enough to be noted by a journalist, whose observation was reproduced around the world. This article draws on newspapers, official documents and secondary literatures on the hajj, tourism and the British Empire to consider the history of South Asian travellers to Palestine and relationships between colonialism and travel in the interwar period. One of the three women was Lady Abdul Rauf, the wife of a retired High Court judge and veteran Indian Muslim nationalist campaigner, Sir Syed Abdul Rauf. The couple had departed Bombay in April 1927 for the hajj to Mecca and Medina, but extended their trip to include Jericho. This was not unusual; the Indian Hospice in the Old City of Jerusalem attests to a long history of Indian visitors to Palestine. This paper, however, locates the ill-fated presence of Lady Abdul Rauf and her companions in the changing nature of Indian travel in the region, as religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem combined with politics and tourism, and as changing infrastructures of capitalism and colonialism shifted how Indian visitors experienced Palestine.

The establishment of agricultural and natural history museums in Jerusalem (1920) and Tel Aviv (1925) by individual and institutional Jewish entrepreneurs was a corollary of the wave of exhibitions and fairs in Western countries that swept across Mandatory Palestine's Jewish community (Yishuv) in the 1920s. Yet it also reflected Zionist ideals and perceptions and as such served as a catalyst for providing modern agricultural education to the Yishuv's urban classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Jewish community committees established in the mixed cities of Mandatory Palestine and their role as an agent for instilling nationalistic consciousness and shaping political autonomy in the municipal domain. It examines the way the different committees operated organizationally and politically as well as their impact on the daily lives of the Jewish inhabitants. We look at the attempt of the local Zionist leaders to enlist the community committees to define the autonomous status of the Jews vis-à-vis the British Mandate and municipal government, and explore the use of instrumental nationalism to boost the sense of national and community belonging of the Jewish inhabitants, particularly the old-timers. The article pays special attention to welfare services and education as a tool for building nationalistic consciousness. Our comparative analysis shows that paradigms of Jewish settlement varied greatly and the Jewish communal framework in each city was unique. An important factor in the success of the committees was the economic and demographic expansion of the Zionist immigrants into existing urban centres, which paved the way for instilling Jewish nationalistic values through bureaucratic means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Arab Fair that took place in Jerusalem in 1933 and in 1934 from the economic and political perspectives. It foregrounds the reasons and results of the absence of a continuously held international trade fair by Arabs in Palestine within the schema of Mandatory Palestine in particular and of the post-Ottoman Balkans and Middle East in general. Although it was successful in bringing businesspeople from various parts of the Arab World together, the lack of official support, broad participation, international recognition, and promotional efforts abroad, as well as strong Zionist propaganda campaigns against it, adversely affected the progress of the Arab Fair, and it did not take place after 1934. Unlike most other post-Ottoman states where collaboration between business groups and political elites gave rise to international fairs in the interwar period, Palestinian Arabs could not enjoy any official endorsement from the British to organize and sustain such a business gathering. In contrast with the Arab Fair, the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv in the same period grew in size and popularity and evolved into an international spectacle thanks to the contribution of Zionist leaders, enterprises, business associations, and journalists in and outside Palestine and the considerable support of the British and other colonial governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the formative impact of environmental conditions on spatial policies in the Palestine of the British Mandate government. The article focuses on the Bay area extending from Acre to Haifa, whose southern part was a centre of Mandatory and Zionist economic and urban development, while its northern part, the city of Acre and its environs, was a target of limited urban development and attention from the Mandatory authorities. Moving away from common national dichotomies in the study of modern Palestine's history, this article identifies the environmental conditions and conflicting interests pursued by the various agencies that played key roles in the Mandatory government's urban and rural development policy considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This primary source commentary analyzes a letter (dated 28 July 1929) sent by Alexander Eig, botanist and custodian of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s herbarium, to Judah Magnes, chancellor and later first president of Hebrew University. This letter, which discusses the creation of a botanical garden connected to the university, shows how the emerging Jewish community of botanists at the newly established Hebrew University was carving out space for itself in the international community of botanical experts. Moreover, the letter exemplifies the importance of people’s mobility in creating botanical knowledge, as well as the movement of plants, seeds, and other specimens, and highlights interaction between scientific institutions as an important aspect of nation-building. Mandatory Palestine’s position as the “Holy Land,” as well as its location across Middle Eastern and Mediterranean environmental spaces, made Jerusalem a unique and attractive center for botanical knowledge creation, as was recognized early on by the Jewish botanists in question.

Airports provide an essential infrastructure for the production of airspace by facilitating networks of aero mobility. This study considers the case of Lydda airport in Mandatory Palestine. Promoted in the 1930's as a hub for British civil aviation on its India route, Lydda airport is largely absent from the inter-war history of civil aviation although the site would become the location of the present-day Ben-Gurion International Airport. The study finds that while British decision-makers initially trumped the attempts of Jewish settlers to locate the country's inter-continental airport in Tel-Aviv rather than at Lydda, sustained pressure and an anti-colonial Arab Revolt compromised that decision. The tension between imperial trans-continental priorities and domestic ambitions were translated in Palestine into two separate and partially competing neighbouring airports. • Production of airspace. • Location and facilities of Airports as elements of airspace. • A case study of British-built Lydda airport in interwar period. • Analysis of evolution of airspace in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established in Jerusalem in 1921 by a group of British officials, the Jerusalem Dramatic Society (JDS) was the most prolific amateur theatrical association in Mandatory Palestine; operating continuously until 1947, it played a key role in the cultural life of Palestine's British community. Its unique features—a compressed timeline on the one hand, a surprisingly rich repertoire on the other—make it an ideal case-study, exposing subtle social and cultural mechanisms that made amateur theatre such a pivotal colonial institution across the British Empire. Examining the JDS's development, organisation, and spectatorship, the article demonstrates that while early plans envisioned a society that would bring together Britons, Arabs, and Jews, the JDS soon became exclusively British, employing a specific repertoire to enhance this Britishness further. It was this insularity, combined with the creative and recreational aspects of amateur theatre, which generated a convivial intimacy so instrumental to Britons' communal bonding. Yet the conviviality always went hand in hand with an acute awareness of the productions' amateurishness, generating avid debates concerning cultural hierarches and the objectives of amateur theatre in the colonial sphere. Exploring these concerns, the article ultimately suggests that the historical and historiographical significance of the JDS and similar societies stems from the affinity between amateur theatre and the colonial periphery, both removed from the professional/metropolitan centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Holocaust: Studies & Materials is the property of Association Polish Center for Holocaust Research / Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badan nad Zaglada Zydow and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the role of Majallat al-Kulliyyah al-'Arabiyyah, a 'School Journal' published by the Arab College in Jerusalem during the Mandatory period. This School Journal was a key agent of modernisation, enlightenment and national awareness among the Palestinian people. A period of intense national struggle, the Mandatory period was replete with political and military upheavals that decided the fate of the country and ended with the expulsion of more than half of the Palestinians and the Palestine Nakba of 1948. Among the most significant cultural changes during the Mandate, that had a major positive impact on Palestinians, was the expansion of the press, including the School Journals. These School Journals played a crucial role in widening the circle of education in Palestine, reducing illiteracy rates, advancing modernisation processes in Arab society and, importantly, promoting Palestinian Arab nationalist ideas as an instrument of national struggle against British colonialism and the Zionist settler movement in Palestine. The article focuses on Majallat al-Kulliyyah al-'Arabiyyah as the most widespread and influential Arab School Journal during the Mandate period and analyses the key role played by this School Journal in Palestinian educational institutions and the Palestinian national-political struggles during the Mandatory period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years of the British Mandate in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael were a time of struggle between two competing movements, Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism, both of which dreamed of sovereignty over every part of the country. The article considers a third contested field, namely, the design, content and language of the postage stamps issued by Mandate authorities in the service of all inhabitants of Palestine. Stamps were viewed by the British, the Jewish leadership of the Yishuv and the leaders of the Arab-Palestinian population alike as a public opinion battleground in miniature, and a means of shaping the precarious future of the land. Stamps were powerfully symbolic devices, often illustrating sacred sites (like the Dome of the Rock or Rachel's Tomb), with captions in the corresponding languages (English, Arab or Hebrew), and relative script size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1989, The Jerusalem Citadel (or Tower of David) was inaugurated as the Museum of the History of Jerusalem. The museum's establishment stretched over two decades, highlighting the different dilemmas that were tied to the State of Israel's attitude towards Jerusalem generally and the Old City in particular. The museum displayed Jerusalem using a historical-chronological approach, avoiding adapting it to the city's multicultural, vibrant, diverse, and multihued society after the Six-Day War. This spared and precluded the possibility of focusing on the city's many dilemmas, its complex population and the city's many political questions and schisms following 1967. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the economic history of the small Jewish maritime community in its hometown of Thessaloniki during the 1920s and its new home of Haifa in the early 1930s. The Thessalonikians' strong connection to port occupations made them an ideal pioneer in the Zionist scheme of creating a Jewish maritime presence in Mandatory Palestine. The Thessalonikians' arrival in the Arab-dominated Haifa waterfront led to continuous conflict. The article examines the encounter between the Thessaloniki port culture and the Arab one in Haifa and its reflection in the core issue of the Jewish hold in the port of Haifa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a close reading of personal memoirs about coming of age in Żółkiew in Eastern Galicia and about transitions on the way to immigration to Mandatory Palestine before WWII. It focuses on gaps in the fragmentary autobiographical texts written by Shimon Samet, a native of the town, who became an accomplished professional journalist in Israel, and reconstructs missing pieces of narrative about Samet’s brother and about the Zionist micro universe of transition and training sites in Galicia of the early 1920’s. It points to significant explanatory possibilities gained by identifying such gaps in personal and commemorative narratives.

Formation of agricultural education in high schools was a milestone in the early 20th-century history of Zionist education, and in the Jewish society in Mandatory Palestine in general. Agricultural education was a means of changing the character of the Jewish people by imparting agricultural knowledge and training. Candidates came from agricultural settlements, but mainly – and this was its uniqueness – they also came from the towns. In addition, agricultural education provided a framework for absorbing immigrant youth. This educational framework was, among other things, ideological because those who joined it were usually motivated by a desire to change the character of the Jewish society, return to the land and work it. The cost of funding agricultural schools was high for the local Jewish community, and therefore these schools remained dependent on private initiative and philanthropy. In spite of the widespread ideological support, not many students actually took part in agricultural education due to the high cost of tuition on the one hand, and the need to help support their own families on the other. It can also be said that during this period, parents who had the means to provide their children with higher education, favoured the “Gymnasium” high school model, which could lead to them engaging in other professions.

This is a study of the responses of the Arabic and Hebrew press of Palestine to the abolitions of the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate. It is based on a comparative examination of the contemporary coverage of the events by the Arabic newspapers al-Karmil and Filastin and by the Hebrew newspapers Doar ha-Yom and Haaretz. The analysis yields valuable insights about how the Yishuv and the Palestinians viewed the abolitions of the Sultanate and Caliphate, the contemporary significance of these institutions, Kemalist Turkey, the rival population in Palestine, and Sharif Husayn. Mainly, it shows that the Hebrew press hailed the abolitions as revolutionary developments that would pave the road before the modernization of not only Turkey but the whole of Asia, while the Arabic press considered this too momentous a matter to be decided by Turkey alone and predicted adverse consequences for both that country and the East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores lingering recollections of a marginalised sphere of participation by Jewish and Arab citizens of Mandatory Palestine in the Allied war effort. During the war, Palestine became a major staging ground for Allied troops in the Middle East. Some 15,000 Jewish and 35,000 Arab workers worked in administrative, construction, catering, and maintenances roles within the newly built army bases. The story of civilian labour in RAF Ein Shemer reveals previously neglected normative and non-normative patterns of inter-communal relations between British soldiers and Jewish and Arab workers on the social, economic, ideological, and romantic levels within the context of a colonial-era military installation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the Palestinian urban elites and rural population in the Tiberias district during the Palestine British Mandate, 1918–1948. The article argues that due to the heterogeneity of the Palestinian rural population, urban control of the countryside was stronger than elsewhere in Palestine. In this case, urban control centred, in particular, on the wealthy and powerful Muslim family, al-Tabari. This control maintained its strength until the end of the Mandate. However, despite this urban control of the countryside, the Palestinian Arab population of the district failed to create a united front against the better-organised and far more trained and equipped Zionist Haganah forces during the 1948 War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Autobiografia is the property of Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego / University of Szczecin Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article deals with the case of Greek Christian refugees who fled to Cyprus and to the Middle East during WWII in an effort to point out how their settlement was related in a way to the simultaneous movement of the Jewish refugees, mainly survivors of the Holocaust, who tried to reach Mandatory Palestine. The exodus was part of a general movement from many occupied countries, mainly Greece, Poland and Yugoslavia, towards safer areas under the control of the Allies in the Middle East and Africa. It has been estimated that more than 73,000 refugees from these countries had been established in these areas in 1944. The Greek Christian refugees were placed in Nuseirat and Moses Wells camps, while Atlit remained mainly a camp for the Jewish refugees. The majority of Greek Christian refugees were repatriated by UNRRA in Greece after the liberation of the country, in 1945 and 1946. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the reports of travel to Palestine appeared in Russian after the revolution, focusing on texts produced by Russia Abroad, both by Russian and Jewish observers. The relevant interest of the émigrés in this region should be read as a result, on the one hand, of the traditional cultural and religious ties with the Holy Land and on the other, of the political and social unrest connected to the Balfour declaration and the British Mandate. The friction between the Biblical/Evangelical layer and contemporary reality, between past and present – a distinctive feature of previous texts – persists, but we witness a hypertrophic development of concerns related to the current events, in the wake of the uncertainties triggered by exile and of the need to understand the trajectories and the nature of contemporary Judaism, a crucial question in émigré public debate.

The paper argues that during the Mandate period the Labor Zionist movement was able to successfully create a Sabra identity based on its ideology that was constructed in opposition to the presumed characteristics of the "exile Jew" and how such an identity played a central role in the formation of a security oriented foreign policy. Labor's creation of the Sabra through the "Hebrew Revolution" can be considered as one of the most successful episodes of the twentieth century in which a new identity was created in order to serve ideological goals. Labor's Zionist ideology, which sought to create a "new Jew" that would form the basis of the Jewish national movement, was translated into an identity that in contrast to the diaspora Jew relied on collectivism, agriculture, secularism, and most important of all physical strength and sacrifice in defence of the Jewish nation. This translated into a security-oriented foreign policy that heavily relied on military force and emphasized internal power and strength, which Labor elites argued could only be achieved through self-reliance and independence particularly in regards to defence issues. Such an orientation would form the basis of Israeli foreign policy for years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tempestuous political environment of the final days of British Mandate rule in Palestine saw intensive activity by cause lawyers. As a test case of this activity, this article examines the conduct of the attorneys who handled the case of Dov Gruner, a member of the Irgun Zionist underground. In April 1946, Gruner was sentenced to death by a British military court. Informed by cause lawyering paradigm, the article examines the tactics used by his lawyers and their relations with players within and outside the court. This examination sheds light on the links between nationality, the law and lawyers at that time in Palestine. In particular, the analysis highlights the key role played by the lawyers in the Gruner affair, similar from that perspective to the dominant role of lawyers in the Irish War of Independence and different from the relatively marginal role played by lawyers in Indian freedom struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the cultural transformation that unfolded in urban centres in Palestine during the British Mandate period. Focusing on the city of Haifa as a case study, the article sheds light on how imperial colonial interests prompted massive development of the city that triggered significant cultural changes. The article examines the ways in which different groups in Palestinian-Arab society were involved, and how they initiated, experienced and reacted to the cultural shifts. The rapid increase in the number of cafés, cabarets, bars and restaurants constituted the cornerstone of the commercial entertainment industry in Haifa during this period. By delineating the emergence of new entertainment patterns and recreation habits, the article shows how leisure became a central component in the daily lives of varied social groups. It argues that leisure played a major role as an agent of modernisation and functioned as an essential site for the construction of modern personhoods in Palestinian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tel Aviv, which the Jaffa Arabs saw as the realisation of the Zionist enterprise, begot hostility to itself. Insofar as the city developed, it was perceived as a threat to Jaffa. The authorities' approval of the enlargement of Tel Aviv's boundaries in the early 1940s was, for the Arab side, a challenge to Jaffa's future, and spawned the declaration of a struggle to achieve two goals: obstruction of Tel Aviv's expansion and enlargement of Jaffa's domain. The article examines the measures taken by the Arab side against Tel Aviv's expansion, their gains and their implications for Jaffa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1930s, Franz Rosenzweig's work was celebrated, criticized and questioned for its relevance within the specific cultural, religious and philosophical preoccupations of the inhabitants of pre-state Israel. This could be seen in nuce at the opening of the Schocken Library in Jerusalem in December 1936 that was marked by a celebratory conference dedicated to the memory of Franz Rosenzweig. The evening featured a collection of four lectures held in Hebrew by eminent German-Jewish scholars: Ernst Simon, Julius Guttmann, Hugo Bergmann and Gershom Scholem. Simon and Scholem's lectures in particular put forward two strikingly different views on Rosenzweig's possible Nachleben in the yishuv. The article is followed by Scholem's hitherto unpublished lecture (both in the original Hebrew and in English translation) and Simon's German summary of his own contribution that evening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]