Boulos el-ʿAraj: A Palestinian Quaker Archaeologist of the British Mandate Era (1926–1936)

Arab Palestinian youth and children’s political socialization during the British Mandate (1922–1948) has largely been ignored in the literature. Most of the research has focused on the colonial project in Palestine and how different figureheads influenced the discourse. Indeed, this does not mean there isn’t a framework in place to understand youth and children’s political engagement. This study will focus on how social-political elements conceptualized the formation of Arab Palestinian youth’s political socialization. The Mandate period provided distinct social-political actors elements that were articulated within demographic control, semi-education, and economic deprivation. Arab Palestinian children and youth’s political socialization was shaped within the context of these interweaving social-political aspects. These elements altered the Arab Palestinian community’s livelihood and by extension youth and children’s political engagement. Each one of these aspects was centred within the Zionist ideology and administrated by the British Mandates’ colonial policies. This research deconstructs the juxtaposition of each element in relation to children’s political socialization.

The Position of the Leadership of the Jewish Yishuv on the Mayoralty of Haifa and Preparations for Elections, 1940–1947

This article draws on a collection of petitions by Palestinian Arabs and Jews to explore how families negotiated the admission of mentally ill relatives into government mental institutions under the British mandate between 1930 and 1948. In contrast to the conclusions of the existing literature, which focuses largely on the development of parallel Jewish institutions as establishing the foundations of the Israeli health system, these petitions reveal that the trajectories of both Arab and Jewish mentally ill were complex, traversing domestic, private, and government contexts in highly contingent ways. The second part of this article examines the petitions themselves as dense moments of engagement by Palestinian Arabs and Jews with the British mandate, in which the anxieties and priorities of the mandate were strategically re-deployed in order to secure admission into chronically underfunded and overcrowded institutions. Petitioners also sought to mobilize other actors, often within the state itself, as intercessors, a strategy which attempted to thread together state and society in a meaningful and advantageous way at a time when both seemed to be unravelling. Taken together, these pathways and petitions foreground the space of interaction between the British mandate and its subjects, thereby offering new perspectives on both.

Village Development in Palestine During the British Mandate Get access Village Development in Palestine During the British Mandate. By Henry Kendall and K. H. BaruthLondon, Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1949. 84 pp. Illus. Diagrams. Maps. Tables. 1014′​′×8′​′⁠. 1OS. 6d. J. F. R. J. F. R. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 25, Issue 4, October 1949, Pages 538–539, https://doi.org/10.2307/3018516 Published: 01 October 1949

IntroductionThe tie between the Arab Nahda (renaissance) and the geographical area of Palestine, or better, Qutr al-Filastin (the country of Palestine),1 has usually been underestimated and neglected or considered particularly abnormal: in the beginning, non-existent because absorbed within Ottomanism (Osmanlilik) and Pan-Islam ism; later, during the British Mandate (1920-48) as regionally nationalist and particularly addressed against Zionism and European imperialism; and finally, after the Nakba (1948-49), confused (from the sixties onward) with political struggles and displacement. For these reasons, even today it is hard to apply the term Nahda to the region which would become Israel in 1948.At the same time, the famous, or rather infamous, sentence that Palestine was without a for a without a land' became a political and ideological argument that Zionists exploited for their cause, literally speaking as if Palestine had been as empty and desolate as a desert.2 Even if this phrase was adopted more to define the unclear local boundaries of a nineteenth-century Palestine, still included in the Ottoman Empire, the literary image of a region scarcely populated and available to be dominated was deeply embedded within European diplomatic circles.On the contrary, this land without a people was normally inhabited, and in particular during the British Mandate (1920-48), its population rapidly increased: Turkish sources estimated Arab Palestine residents at 600,000 in 1914, 580,000 in 1919,3 and in 1936, at 1,366,392 inhabitants, the Jewish percentage was 28.1, whereas, in 1946, prior to the war, of 1.94 million inhabitants, 1.33 million were Arabs (1.18 million Muslims and 149,000 Christians), while 603,000 were Jewish (plus 16,000 others, generally foreigners).4If the term Nahda emeiged during the nineteenth century, following the Napoleonic campaign (1798-1801) in the Near East, and in particular afterward La Commission des Sciences et des Arts was able to instill, starting from Egypt, a chaotic melting pot of post-Enlightened principles and values;5 the situation in Palestine at the end of World War I (WWI) showed peculiar characteristics difficult to trace in a more general understanding of the modem Arab awakening.6A Palestinian Nahda during the British Mandate, as will clearly emerge in this article, could be generally summarized using three adjectives that are able to identify it: intellectual (as related to a cosmopolitan intelligentsia), historicized (as particularly interested in historical subjects), and nationalist (concerning the affirmation of a national identity); a fourth characteristic, even if attributable to a post-Nakba phase, is refugee, because Palestinians were forced to abandon the homeland to survive and to increase skills and capabilities.It is also important, to better describe the peculiarities of this Nahda, to discover the contribution that the Governmental Arab College of Jerusalem added in the first half of the twentieth century; this institution, called the Men's Teacher Training College until 1927, grew out of the British military administration's restoration of the Ottoman governmental school system that followed the occupation of Palestine in 1917-18.Before WWI, in 1911, less than a quarter of school-age children in Palestine (17,000: 13,000 boys and 4000 girls) out of 73,000 attended school,7 and the majority attended private schools; despite the progress made by the Department of Education under British supervision, education facilities for Arabs remained inadequate, and in 1946, a scarce third of the school-age population (93,550 out of 320,000) were registered in elementary and secondary institutes.8 Enrollment was higher in towns, and more boys were in school than girls; at the end of the Mandate, the illiteracy rate was still unequal: Jews and Arab Christians were completely literate, while only 40% of Arab Muslims were. …

The purpose of this paper is to review the history of the constitutional regulation of marriage and divorce in British mandate Palestine and the state of Israel from 1918 on. Israel was subject to British rule (mostly under a mandate of the League of Nations) from 1918 to 1948, and was called Palestine at the time. In 1948 some of this territory claimed its sovereignty as an independent state called Israel. The paper will highlight the different constitutional norms and procedures that govern the field of family law in British mandate Palestine and the state of Israel from the beginning of the British mandate to this day.
 The paper is based upon historic scrutiny of the legislation of British Palestine and the state of Israel in the field of family law, analyzing the law in accordance with the historic developments in the region. The results of this scrutiny are that from 1948 to the third decade of the 21st century, the Israeli legislator has repeatedly acted to prevent the constitutional regulation of civil marriage, preserving the archaic millet system, an Ottoman system of marriage within religious communities, that was the basis of the British mandate’s regulation of marriage and divorce in Palestine. But as much as the original millet arrangement was enacted by the British as a voluntary system, it was given new and compulsory features by the Israeli legislator, all the while avoiding a comprehensive constitutional regulation of Israeli family law.
 The paper concludes that a constitutional regulation of civil marriage is probably not possible in Israel, due to the political inability to reach an agreement between religious and secular Jews in Israel. But this did not prevent the Israeli legislature from fundamentally changing the British mandate constitutional arrangement, leaving behind a patchwork of improvised legislation that violates the basic civil rights of Israeli citizens.

This paper aims to describe the evolution of statutory planning in Palestine and its later use during the Israel occupation in the West Bank to control Palestinian development. This statutory planning legacy began under British Mandate and Jordanian rule. The British Mandate (1920–1948), which extended British Town Planning Acts to Palestine, created the machinery that drew up district and local plans in Palestine based on these laws. The plans introduced land zoning, which restricted development in rural Palestine. While retaining the plans, the Jordanian regime that followed the British Mandate made some changes by legislating new planning laws which replaced and amended the British planning acts, defining the planning authority and the planning system. The Israeli occupation continued the control over the development of the Palestinian West Bank, by amending the planning system through authorizing the issue of military orders designed to serve Israeli interests. Regarding the legacy of the Mandatory plans, the Israelis continued to use them as an effective tool for controlling land use by Palestinians. These district plans, although prepared half a century ago under different circumstances, have probably achieved the same goal of controlling the development of a native people, while giving the central regime (colonial or occupation) an effective instrument and mechanism for implementing policies and achieving aims likely to contradict the interests of the native people.

This article examines the reception of radio in Palestinian Arab society from the 1930s until the 1948 war. The article breaks new ground by reconstructing the geographical distribution of radio sets throughout Mandate Palestine and analysing the practices of radio listening. The article argues that radio built on earlier forms of communication and entertainment and depended on existing cultural practices to reach Palestinian society. Radio listening often took place in public spaces and overlapped with the consumption of other media, such as communal newspaper reading. The impact of listening in public was twofold: first, access to radio was shaped by existing social and economic hierarchies and consequently reinforced them; second, public radio listening encouraged critical media reception and cultivated political debates. This way, Palestinians undermined the intentions of the colonial government and used radio for their own ends. By investigating the experiences of radio listeners in Palestine this article sheds light not only on the cultural life of Palestinian Arabs during the British Mandate, but also on the multi-layered, multi-directional workings of media in colonial contexts.

This study examines the prolonged Palestinian division. Its essential focus is to explore the various stages that the Palestinian political system has gone through and track its development from the British mandate up to the ongoing division between Fatah and Hamas. It aims to uncover the roles of regional and foreign actors which have destabilized the Palestinian national movement. Moreover, it demonstrates the role of the United Kingdom and Israel in inciting the divide and conquer principle during the British mandate, as well as the way the Palestine Liberation Organisation managed to maintain national unity from the 1960s. Finally, this study examines the real and historical reasons behind the current division between Fatah and Hamas, as well as the external factors that contribute to the continuity of the division.

A substantive Public Interest criterion promotes planning area residents' welfare, absent countervailing public policy considerations. This criterion is applied to appraise planning practices in two planning regimes in the West Bank of Palestine: the British Mandate and the Israeli occupation. Detailed analysis of these planning systems' institutions, land policies, statutory plans and development control shows that planners in both regimes acted in the Public Interest as they saw it. But under the British Mandate there was no conflict between the two considerations, while the Israeli occupation policy promoting Israeli interests overrides the welfare of the Palestinian population. This conclusion invites reflection on the interaction between planning regimes and the ethics of planners' practices.

This book consists of six chapters, endnotes, a glossary, a bibliography,and an index. Although fairly short vis-a-vis the long period that itcovers (from the Ottoman era to 1988), this book is in fact a very valuablereference work on the subject. The author made considerable efforts tocollect, compare, and analyze the data. However, it seems that the maintitle, Islam and Israel, is rather ambiguous and misleading. The subtitle,Muslim Religious Endowments and the Jewish State, reveals the book'scontents adequately. This title may have been coined by the publisher formarketing purposes.The book explores Israeli policy toward Palestinian Muslim religiousendowments (awqtif, sing. waqf) and studies the methods employed toconfiscate and transfer most of them so that they eventually becameexclusively Jewish property. The waqf system played a very significantsocioeconomic, religious, and educational role in the history of Muslimsociety. About 15 percent of the agricultural land in Palestine is waqf (1.2million dunums), as are many buildings, shops, and other structures inurban areas. The revenue derived from these sources finances importantnetworks of welfare and charitable services in Palestine, such as schools,orphanages, and soup kitchens.The first chapter tackles the Palestinian Muslim waqf system duringthe late Ottoman empire and the British Mandate. It indicates the importanceof waqf for the notable families in Palestine and their administrationof it in ways designed to enhance their power and influence. It also studiesthe arrangements made by the Ottomans during the nineteenth centuryto set up a waqf administrative structure and to develop it under their closesupervision. During the British Mandate (1918-48), however, a new structure,known as The Supreme Muslim Council, was created in 1922. It wasdominated by the Palestinian religious elite and notables and took a"national character" under the leadership of Hajj Am1n al ijusayn1. In1937, the British mandatory government suspended the council's centralcommittee and replaced it with a government-appointed commission.These measures undermined the waqf institution and its role in politics andthe national struggle.The second chapter discusses the Muslim waqf system in Israel from1948 to 1965 and explains how the Zionist state managed to control andconfiscate waqf properties and resources. In the parts of Palestine that ...

Boundaries are defined and maintained to establish and preserve cultural, societal and political integrity. Boundaries change as territorial structures and their related meanings change over time, reflecting the transformation of economic, political, administrative and cultural practices and discourses, and inherent relations of power. The Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv is no different in this context. The end of World War I and establishment of a British Mandate regime in Palestine resulted in the transformation of political, economic, social and cultural structures. The British Mandate afforded the rise of and development of Tel Aviv from Jaffa's Jewish garden suburb into a separate urban entity. Different internal and external factors affected the delineation of the urban bounds of Tel Aviv following its declaration by the British Mandate government as an autonomous township.

The settler colonial framework provides Palestine studies with a useful tool, opening new lines of inquiry and leading to new fields of study. This essay examines the impact of the Zionist settlement policy on rural Palestine during the Mandatory period. Through a demographic analysis, the essay argues the displacement of these peasants was the result of an intentional transfer policy by the Jewish community. Transfer constituted an important part of the overall Zionist ideology and attitude towards the local population. The displacements and removal of the indigenous population started before the Nakba, including the British Mandate period, due to the settler colonial need to become a demographic majority in the land under dispute. Zionist historiography argues Zionists did not interfere in the daily life of the Palestinians and stresses the profitable aspects of Jewish immigration. This essay, using settler colonial theories, challenges this historiography and proposes new tools to deal with other settler colonial cases around the world. This essay is based on four population sources used during the British Mandate to determine the consequences of land purchases and immigration in the Haifa and Nazareth sub-districts during that period. The analysis of the growth rates of all the communities and villages will illustrate the consequences of the Zionist settler-colonial project. This essay discusses the replacement of population and the importance of population, access to land, and immigration trends for the Zionist settler-colonial enterprise on their way to becoming the demographic majority on the land of the Historical Palestine.

Mandates — Palestine — Whether Forming Part of Great Britain — Persons Born and Resident in Palestine — Whether British Subjects.Nationality — Proof of — Issue of Passport — The Law of England — Person Born and Resident in Palestine — Whether British Subject.Mandates — Nationality in Mandated Territories — Persons Born and Resident in Palestine — Whether British Subjects — Mandated Territory — Whether Forming Part of the Territory of the Mandatory — The British Mandate over Palestine.

Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and Discovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950