British Mandate Research Articles

Orchestrating Palestinian youth political socialization during the British Mandate (1917-1948): policies and community responses

ABSTRACT 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.

Trademarks Extraction and Classification from the British Mandate’s Palestine Gazette

Trademarks Extraction and Classification from the British Mandate’s Palestine Gazette

Civil Society Activities in Palestine

The authentic political culture of Palestinians and the prototype of civil society began to arise as far back as the British Mandate period. Since then, it has passed several stages of its formation, and due to the influence of several domestic and foreign policy factors it has, on the one hand, become the main element of general mobilization towards liberation of Palestine and the creation of the Palestinian self-identity. On the other hand, because of its dependence on foreign financial help, it has started to promote international institutions’ values and stopped focusing on domestic crucial issues of Palestine exclusively. Civil society in Palestine is a kind of exceptional subject of the political process, as it exists in absence of a state, in context of the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict and with a low level of the Palestinian National Authority’s support. This paper addresses directions and social, political and economic problems the Palestinian civil society faces and creates, and special attention was paid to online activism and its features.

The Formation of the National Palestinian Ethos

ABSTRACT This study seeks to examine how the Palestinian national ethos was formed based on both primordialism and territorial perceptions. It is based on primary sources—memoirs, public statements, and Palestinian media releases—dating back to the British Mandate for Palestine and examines the use of the basic elements of the ethos: victimhood, victory at all costs, and universal justice. The paper discerns two stages in the process of ethos formation: the first started in the 1910s and ended when the British Mandate was over. The second began after the civil war of 1947–1949 in Palestine. The loss of the Arab-Palestinian side and the consequences of the Nakba has not terminated yet. While the first stage focuses on injustice, the second phase includes all three features of the national ethos.

Radio listenership in Palestinian society: reshaping cultural practices and political debate under the British Mandate, 1930–1948

ABSTRACT 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.

Not the Songs but the Singing: Sounding Sense in Colonial Films from British Mandate Palestine

This essay considers how Palestinian history and experience might be reclaimed from colonial films from British Mandate Palestine, and how sensory and synesthetic attention developed in experimental filmmaking might bear on archival footage. Analysis focuses in particular on the possibilities of sound. My reflections draw heavily on a current work in progress, Partition, which makes extensive use of found footage from Britain’s imperial collections and sound recordings made with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and across the sites of their displacement. The film attempts to harness the disruptive potential of refugee voice to make visible the continuity of Palestinian presence in colonial archives and to deconstruct and reconstruct archival authority and colonial history.

Constitutional regulation of civil marriage in Israel

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.

Community social work in Palestine: from resilience to national resistance

In the absence of a national Palestinian state and in response to the oppressive daily practices of the British Mandate government, the Israeli settlers’ colonial occupation and the Arab governments that ruled the West Bank and Gaza between 1950 and 1967, the Palestinian community has had to create and develop a set of indigenous resilience strategies. Muslih (1993) and Faraj (2017) refer to all these strategies as ‘A’mal Ejtima’y’, or ‘popular social work’, characterised by collectivism, public participation and non-hierarchical design, which has played a role in mobilising masses and facilitating youth engagement in the decolonisation process. Despite more than a century of existence of this form of social work in Palestine, it has received marginal or no attention from formal social work education and research. Recent years have witnessed some indications of the ‘resurrection’ of community social work in its very popular version.

Familial and Marital Law of the State of Israel: Premises of the Establishment and Development

INTRODUCTION. Israel is a diverse and controversial state. Its laws, especially those of the area of family and marital law, are distinctly unique. The reason being that throughout its centuries-long history Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) – the historical name of the country, the structure of norms of this branch of law has gone through a set of changes under different political regimens. The government ruling over this holy land at a certain time period was to some extent influencing current social order and the lives of Jewish people, including such aspect as the performance of religious rituals.Considering the specificity of traditionalistic norms of Judean legal system attempts of influence on it from the outside have always been a big challenge. Those norms had to be strictly followed as it was of utmost importance for the conservation of the Jewish communities, Jewish culture and its authenticity, which for centuries has been challenged by many in attempts to modify, discriminate and even irradicate it. Hence, in this article the authors examined the most notable periods of the existence of Jewish communities in Eretz Israel. Inter alia there is an analysis of rules and measures introduced by the ruling system under the Ottoman Empire (from year 1517 to year 1917), of decrees present under the Mandate of Palestine (1922-1948), of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948 and of current legislation. MATERIALS AND METHODS. The article isbased on the current Israeli legislation which concerns familial and marital relations, as well as on traditional religious code of rules and obligations “Halakha” which is still in action in Israel’s society. In the article Ottoman and British-Palestinian legislation is mentioned which was in force during the corresponding historical periods of time. It is also stated that the majority of the legislative acts in the area of familial and marital relations follow the principles of the International law, the rulings of the Supreme court of Israel are made according to the norms of International law and, among other things, in consideration with the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women of 1979. For the achievement of result general and specific scientific methods of research were applied, in particular historical-legal and comparative-legal methods of study. RESEARCH RESULTS. Research result consists in presentation of current Israeli familial and marital legislation and other religious traditional rules review. It is well-proven that despite the strictness of the Judean traditions, according to the clauses of the Israeli Declaration of Independence 1948, Israel being a Jewish state is also a modern and democratic one. Democratic principles of equality and humanism prevail in cases where in the proceedings regarding marital and family affairs where the rights of one of the parties are violated, every citizen of the state of Israel can appeal to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Justice seeking a justified sentence and protection of one’s interests. Therefore, the result of the integration of the legal principles typical for democratic countries and the traditional norms of Judaism current legal system of the state of Israel was created. The mechanism of this system comes from the respect for the traditions whilst the main principles of democracy are also followed, namely those of justice, equality and humanism. This is what makes the legal system of Israel unique in every aspect, including the norms of familial and marital relations which integrate both traditional implementations and modern aspects. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. In the frames of the present research study the authors found that familial and marital law of Israel is based on norms of the Religious law, on a special code of rules and obligations called – “Halakha”. From the standpoint of the development of law and practice, a certain role was played by the procedural rules introduced in the territory of Eretz Israel during the period of Ottoman Empire. English law had a certain influence on the development of Israeli law in general during British Mandate of Palestine. Modern Israeli legislation in the field of marriage and family relations is based on and takes into account international agreements to which Israel is a party.

The Jewish Question in the British Colonial Imagination: The Case of the Deportation to Mauritius (1940–45)

In December 1940, 1,580 Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-controlled Europe survived a long journey to Haifa only to be deported by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine to the British colony of Mauritius. Using this case study, this article explores British perceptions of the Jewish Question during World War II. It builds on a transnational archive that includes British colonial records from Britain, Palestine, and Mauritius, together with memoirs, letters, diaries, and oral testimonies from the Jewish detainees and the local Mauritians who remember them. In doing so, it asks three interconnected questions: How did the British authorities perceive the Jews deported to Mauritius? How did the deportees perceive Mauritius, their new destination, and its local population? And how were the detainees received and perceived by Mauritians? This three-pronged inquiry invites an exploration of the ambiguity of attitudes toward Jewish refugees inside and outside British colonial frames.

Bloody years of the Jewish Insurgency in British Mandatory Palestine 1939-1948: From the White Paper to the State of Israel

This review article focuses on Jewish insurgency under the British mandate for Palestine from 1939 to 1948. The Jewish guerrilla campaign represents a successful case study in the field of the research on small wars and insurgency, proxy wars. The authors analyze the early phase of the British Mandate in 1918-1939, referred to as the prelude to the subsequent Jewish uprising; a period when Jewish paramilitary groups including the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi emerged and developed, emphasizing their ideological underpinnings, operational and tactical strategies of warfare, and the material capacities that these organizations possessed. The authors primarily emphasize the period from the initiation of the White Paper in 1939 until the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. British restrictions on Jewish immigration and the beginning of the Second World War stimulated the Jewish forces to a massive terrorist campaign against the British resulting in an unprecedented Zionist victory.

Changing Attitudes Toward the West Bank in Jordan

Changing Attitudes Toward the West Bank in Jordan Michael Sharnoff (bio) A quarter of a century after King Hussein’s disengagement from the West Bank, and nearly two decades after the signature of the Wadi Arabah Peace Accord with Israel, Jordan’s western border has still not been fixed and the fate of the Palestinian refugees on the East Bank remains uncertain. —Tariq Mreyoud al-Tal1 This quote, expressed by Jordanian scholar Tariq Mreyoud al-Tal probably appears strange to most Westerners and perhaps even non-Jordanian Middle Easterners. Jordan’s boundaries in question refer to its relationship with the West Bank, a landlocked territory bordering Israel and Jordan and home to around 3 million Palestinian Arabs and half a million Israeli Jews. Jordan occupied this land during the 1948 war and subsequently annexed it in 1950. The West Bank became an integral part of Jordan until Israel conquered the land from Jordan during the 1967 war. Despite Israel’s occupation, Jordan continued to assert sovereignty claims on the West Bank until King Hussein severed all legal and administrative ties in 1988 in favor of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Today, Jordan, along with nearly the entire international community, regards the West Bank as an Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory. The official position of the Hashemite Kingdom supports ending Israeli rule of the West Bank and establishing an independent Palestinian state [End Page 44] there, along with the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as its capital. However, despite Jordan’s disengagement from the West Bank, the Hashemite monarchy’s stance obfuscates Jordan’s complex and historical, political, and legal relationship with this territory. Indeed, Jordan’s attitudes toward the West Bank have evolved, as explained by Adnan Abu-Odeh, former political advisor to both King Hussein and King Abdullah II, from an indivisible part of Jordan, to an occupied Jordanian land with Israel, to a territorial dispute with the PLO, and to an occupied Palestinian land.2 Jordan’s disengagement from the West Bank in 1988 and peace treaty with Israel in 1994 sought to affirm that Jordan is not Palestine, that Jordan would not become a substitute Palestinian homeland, and that the PLO was principally responsible to end the occupation and establish an independent state. This article aims to explain the changing attitudes toward the West Bank in Jordan from 1948 until the present. It will expand on Abu-Odeh’s remarks about the fluidity and evolving perceptions of Jordan’s attitude toward the West Bank and explain why some Jordanians espouse views toward the West Bank which challenge official Hashemite policy. In doing so, this article will demonstrate how Jordanian perceptions of the West Bank are influenced by Israeli and Palestinian politics and will assess how attitudes in opposition to official regime policy seek to defend the kingdom’s national security and protect the Palestinian people. Historical Context During World War I, the Allied Powers recognized Britain at the San Remo Conference in April 1920 to serve as the mandatory power in Palestine. The Allies endorsed the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine based on the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which would comprise land on both banks of the Jordan River. The League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, sanctioned the British Mandate of Palestine in 1922, which remained in effect until 1948. However, in 1921, Britain severed three-fourths of the original Mandate to Abdullah I, son of Hussein bin Ali, Emir of Mecca, based on agreements signed with London before the start of the Great Arab Revolt (1916–1918) against the Ottoman Turks. This new Arab entity became known as Transjordan and comprised territory east of the Jordan River. Transjordan, which gained semi-independence in 1923 and full independence from Britain in 1946, [End Page 45] consisted of vast territory with sparsely populated cities such as Irbid, Salt, Karak, and Ma’an. The ruling Hashemite dynasty governed over a quarter of a million Bedouin and non-Bedouin Muslim Arabs, settled Christian Arabs, and small numbers of Armenian Christians, Druze Arabs, Muslim Circassians, and Muslim Chechens.3 Abdullah I had grand territorial ambitions that Transjordan alone could not satisfy. Coveting a...

From the Dreyfus Affair to Zionism in Palestine: Rashid Riḍā’s Views of Jews in Relation to the ‘Christian’ Colonial West

The ideas of the well-known reformist Sheikh Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (1865-1935) in his journal Al-Manār (Lighthouse, 1898-1935) still inspire many academic researchers who are interested in the study of the Muslim world in the first decades of the twentieth century. As one of the most influential advocates of Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism, Riḍā’s critiques of Zionism and Jewish expansion in Palestine were part of his anti-colonial activities against the ‘Christian’ west. The article discusses how Riḍā was frustrated that European powers let down the Arabs by supporting the Jews in establishing their homeland at the cost of the rights of its indigenous habitants. We shall argue that Riḍā’s harsh views of Zionism should be understood as a mixture of religious rhetoric, nationalist ambitions, resistance to Turkish policies, and political frustration with Europe’s ‘unjust’ colonial policies and special political privileges given to the Jews in Palestine. In the early years of the twentieth century, Riḍā anticipated the progress of the Jews in establishing a nation of their own in Palestine, but his concerns grew after the British Mandate in 1922. The article looks at how Riḍā, in his confrontations with Zionism and Judaism, combined these debates with other ideas on freemasonry, the authority of the Church, the crusades, and the role of Jesuits in curbing the asserted increasing Jewish power in Europe. The article highlights how Riḍā’s Islamic national outlook against the Jews and Zionists in Palestine bears the character of religious and political ferment against the ‘Christian’ west.

Between the Universal and the Local: Representations of Current Events in Lea Goldberg's Writings for Children during the British Mandate

Lea Goldberg played a pivotal role in the children literature arena during the Yishuv period. Beginning in 1936, only a year after her immigration to Mandatory Palestine, Goldberg served as associate-editor for Davar Leyeladim, the leading Hebrew children’s weekly, published by the official newspaper of the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labor). Additionally, over 500 hundred of her works for children, including poems, stories, translations, essays, literary criticism for young readers, and even comic strips were published in the magazine. It was a tumultuous era. The Arab Revolt (1936–1939), the outbreak of WWII and the publication of the MacDonald White Paper of 1939 all exerted a direct impact on the Jewish communities in Palestine and abroad. These political and national crises of the day also greatly affected the educational and literary fields. Though most pieces in Davar Leyeladim touched on current events, Goldberg declared her unflagging commitment to aesthetic and humanistic universal values even in those anguished times. The poets’ role, she claimed, is to remind their readers what is important and beautiful in the world. Her writings for children epitomized this approach at first, but gradually changed as the war in Europe intensified. The article explores Goldberg’s unique treatment of current events in her writings for children, and her efforts to reconcile Labor Zionist ideals and aspirations with her own aesthetic convictions. The conflicts and contradictions between local and universal ideals engendered some of her most fascinating works for children that have not as yet assumed center stage in scholarly research.

Camel Controversies and Pork Politics in British Mandate Palestine

ABSTRACT World War II brought an industrial boom to British Mandate Palestine, but also extreme inflation and scarcity in essential commodities and foodstuffs. In Europe, fresh meat shortages created a market for meat preserves. In Palestine, meat shortages caused an unusual surge in marginal meats, namely, pork and camel. This article traces how pork and camel meat were bred or brought to wartime Palestine, the unusual visibility they gained, and the controversies they caused. Through the struggles of Palestinian Christian pig breeders and disputes over the Jewish consumption of pigs and camels, this article highlights the haphazardness of British provisioning politics as well as the evocative relationship between humans and the animals they rear and consume. Illustrating the decoding of kosher law in a new environment, camel controversies and pork politics illuminate a moment of transition for wartime Jews, from a religious minority in Europe to a settler-colonial minority in Palestine.

התיישבות הבדווים בערים ובכפרים ערביים בגליל, 1948-1918

The article reviews the historical events that prompted the Bedouin population to settle in existing Fellahin towns and villages in the Galilee during the British Mandate period, 1918-1948, in Palestine. The process began with the migration of Bedouin tribes from the Arabian Peninsula to Iraq and Syria, forcing local tribes to migrate west, and continued under the Ottoman rule with the laying of infrastructure for Bedouin to settle in the Arab towns and villages of the Galilee. This trend continued under the British Mandate which ended in 1948. The aim of the article is to analyze the dynamic circumstances that led to the migration of Bedouin communities into Fellahin towns and villages. It argues that Bedouin settlement during this period was affected by centralized government policy; by the influence of Zionist institutions on land acquisition; and by the ways in which local pressures on intra-tribal and rural relations played out. The study rests on archival sources, research literature, and seven in-depth interviews with Bedouin and Fellahin inhabitants of various Arab towns and villages in the Galilee, conducted between the years 2013-2015.

Shaping the Acre region in Mandatory Palestine 1917–1948: environmental conditions and conflicting colonial interests

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.

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

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

Dramatizing Displacement in Israel

Dramatizing Displacement in Israel Chen Alon (bio) and Sonja Kuftinec (bio) As coauthors, we have been in dialogue about theatre and nation-formation for close to two decades. We enter this dialogue from perspectives of ancestral displacement that index the flux of national borders, identities, and movements. In Kuftinec's Croatian family, this migration pattern traced economic opportunity to the United States, where assimilation into the dominant culture was eased by a passage into whiteness. For Alon's grandfather, migration from Europe to Israel offered asylum from the Holocaust. As Zionists, Alon's family felt saved by a return to their "homeland"; serving in the Israeli Defense Force to guard the Jewish "shelter" became a point of generational duty. But serving in the army in Occupied Palestinian territory eventually radicalized Alon. He began to see Israel not only as a safe haven, but also as a colonizing state, one which did not fully recognize Palestinian human rights. He created alliances with Palestinian ex-combatants, cofounding Combatants for Peace in 2005 (cfpeace.org). Shared rituals, theatre, and storytelling became key tools in rehumanization and dialogue, as well as prompting nonviolent direct action resisting Israeli Occupation. These practices of animating dialogue and engaging direct action—grounded in personal stories and collective analysis—informed later activist theatre work with African asylumseekers in Israel. Israel has a complicated relationship with the politics of migration and the embrace of asylumseekers. On the one hand, the state openly welcomes the diasporic return of Jewish refugees to their "homeland." Israel also strongly supported the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, advocating for global asylum. On the other, Israel struggles to navigate its relationship with the Palestinian diaspora, demands for return to (sometimes erased) ancestral communities, and with welcoming African asylum-seekers from areas such as Eritrea and Sudan. We focus in this essay on migration, movement, and polarization in Israel, with particular attention to refugees and asylum-seekers. We examine how vectors of migration align with ethno-national imaginaries—both iterated and challenged through theatre. We first sketch out the emergence of Israel as a state and as a Jewish refuge, while naming the tensions that mark its existence. We then review recent scholarship about Hebrew and Arab-language theatre that structures the social identity of the Zionist subject and reflects on the status of the refugee in Israel more broadly. Finally, we outline adaptations of Theatre of the Oppressed with Holot Theatre (2014–22). This case study of polarized alliances between African asylum-seekers and Israeli citizens models how theatre can reflect and shift the dynamics of migration and belonging, activating ethical citizenship beyond national identity. Establishing Israel as a State of Jewish Refuge The narrative of migration in and around the state of Israel is itself a polarized one, featuring two main historiographic accountings, both oriented around exile and return. For the purposes of this essay, we focus on a timeline beginning with Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth century, prompted by organized massacres (pogroms) in Eastern Europe, and further migration in the 1930s and '40s around the Holocaust. This migration pattern aligns Judaism with asylum-seeking and European nationalism. In the nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals in Europe began to understand [End Page 61] themselves as a nation rather than only as a religion (Berkowitz 84–85). Zionism emerged as a cultural framing for potential Jewish statehood in an Israeli "homeland," then known as Palestine, part of the Ottoman Empire and later British Mandate. Under the pressure of Jewish migration following the Holocaust, in November 1947 the United Nations proposed the creation of two independent states: Israel and Palestine. The Arab world refused to take part in this division, which they saw as an illegal land grab by newly arrived immigrants. The UN affirmed Israeli statehood in May 1948 and, from Israel's perspective, the Arab world attacked and Israel defended itself through the Independence War, in which Arab villagers "ran away" from their homes. In contrast, Palestinians frame the 1948 exodus as the nakba (catastrophe), a violent expulsion of natives by colonial settlers. In 1967, Israel fought allied Arab forces resulting in the occupation of Palestinian land and residents in the Gaza Strip and West...

Ludd and Lydda: A Tale of Two Plans

This article discusses a half century of urban transformation in one relatively minor town in Palestine, situated on a major road, under two regimes: the late Ottoman Empire and British Mandate. The changes in Ludd/Lydda are examined through the planning prism. Given the lack of any systematic, official planning in that town before World War I, an attempt is made to reconstruct such a plan out of available documents. Both the real plan one produced by the British colonial mind and the imagined one—produced so to speak by the Indigenous inhabitants as reconstructed here—serve as case study for tracing how the town’s Palestinian inhabitants coped with different regimes until their town was occupied by the Israeli military and they became refugees.