Interwar Palestine Research Articles

The Makings and Meanings of Childhood: Parents and the Juvenile Justice System in Interwar Palestine

Abstract: Over the thirty years of the British Mandatory government in Palestine, thousands of young people were arrested and tried as juvenile delinquents. This article explores how the parents and families of those "young offenders" confronted the logics of the colonial criminal justice system and argued for their own understandings of the law and their children's places in Palestine's social and political landscape. Studying parental petitions to the government reveals that different groups made fragmented and multidirectional claims on the category of childhood. This article argues that in interwar Palestine, childhood was the political capital through which colonial power was both constructed and contested. In doing so, this article also illuminates the roles that ordinary families and communities played in daily governance in a twentieth-century developmentalist colonial state.

British Colonialism and Prison Labour in Inter-War Palestine

Great Britain ruled modern-day Israel and Palestine from 1917 to 1948. The exploitation of prison labour became a source to fund its colonial government. This study explicates the economic and legal rationale for prison labour, the living and working conditions and discipline of convicts, and public debates and controversies surrounding political prisoners in Mandatory Palestine. With specific references to forced labour in the colonised world, it evaluates the experience of Mandatory Palestine from a transnational perspective and makes a connection between global colonialism and prison labour. Using a rich trove of official documents and newspaper articles as its primary sources, this article links the proliferation of the prison labour system with the introduction and consolidation of British colonialism in Palestine and argues that colonial ideology and practices coloured and justified the use of prison labour.

"Indian Lady Tourists Killed at Jericho": Tourism, Pilgrimage and South-South relations in Interwar Palestine

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.

A Hospital of Her Own: British Nurses, Authority, and the Colonial Space in Interwar Palestine and Cyprus.

During the interwar years, the Overseas Nursing Association (ONA) mobilized hundreds of British nurses throughout the empire. This article explores the experiences of ONA agents in Palestine and Cyprus, focusing on the context of their geographical and institutional allocations. By highlighting the spatial nuances of colonial nursing on the ground through two separate case studies, the author identifies recurrent motifs in nurses' experiences, both within and across specific colonial boundaries. The article argues that localities had a profound influence on nurses' day-to-day practice, authority, and attachment to the colonial space. The effect was articulated largely along the contrast between highly regulated, hierarchal spaces-located at government hospitals in urban centers-and remote settings that offered a more autonomous agency. Underlining the intricate relations between place and authority, the article thus offers new ways of understanding colonial nursing, and, more broadly, local-level imperial agency.

How to lose gracefully in an internationally selfish world: gender, the “New Jew” and the underestimation of athletic performance in interwar Palestine

ABSTRACT During the interwar years, competitive sport become a global phenomenon, in which competitive games were organized by international bodies and professional athletes performed as (inter)national icons of health, beauty, and social success. The following article explores the nature of this transnational change in one particular place: the Jewish community of Mandate Palestine. By focusing primarily on two Zionist athletic delegations (male and female), the paper illustrates the particular way in which the Hebrew worldview positioned athletic performance within its emerging national project. Specifically, it highlights the way in which, unlike the athletes of many other societies at the time, the Hebrew athlete was not embraced as a national symbol. In incorporating the story of the Hebrew athlete’s marginalization, the article advances a necessary (re)examination of “big” Zionist phrases - like “new Jew” or “Muscular Judaism” - not as mere clichés, but in their historical context, as powerful reflections through which a specific group of people perceived themselves and their bodies.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Linda Mahood The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth is the official journal of the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY). Our mandate is to promote the history of children and youth by supporting interdisciplinary research on childhood, youth cultures, and the experience of young people across diverse times and places. I would like to begin this issue by acknowledging winners of recent SHCY prizes. Hizky Shoham's "Small Sales Agents (of Nationalism) Inside the House": Childhood, Consumer Culture, and Nationalism in the Jewish Yishuv of Interwar Palestine" (Winter 2019) won the JHCY Best Article Prize for 2019. The winner of the Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English (2019) is Kelly M. Duke Bryant's "Runaways, Dutiful Daughters, and Brides: Family Strategies of Formerly Enslaved Girls in Senegal, 1895–1911" in Women, Gender, and Families of Color 7 (Spring 2019). The Fass-Sandin Article Prize in Scandinavia (2019) is Randi Dyblie Nilsen's "Barneperspektiv—en ressurs i kritisk samfunnsvitenskap?" in Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk volume 5 (2019). The prize committee awarded an honorable mention to Ning de Coninck-Smith for her article "Transnationale arkitektoniske kulturmøder" [Transnational architectural encounters]. The Grace Abbott Book Prize (2019) was awarded to Rebecca Swartz's Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Mary Hatfield's Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2019) received an honorable mention. We congratulate all of the entrants and winners and thank the judges. For more information about SHCY activities and conferences, go to: https://www.shcy.org. This issue opens with an object lesson by Katherine Reed. Memory forms the thread of "Commemoration of the Living: A Graffiti Fragment from Ellis Island." Reed analyzes graffiti by a fifteen-year-old boy, Cesare Colosimo, who was detained at Ellis Island immigration station in 1922. Reed argues that Colosimo and his desire to be remembered can be seen in the graffiti, memories, and keepsakes at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, which [End Page 1] shapes a collective memory of migration. Memory and memoir are also the theme of "Grief and Youth Remembered: Accessing Experiences of Historical Youth Justice through Memoir" by Clarissa Carden. Carden argues for the recognition of grief as an important, and often neglected, aspect of marginalized youth experiences. Her article examines disenfranchised grief in the memoirs of two former inmates of the Westbrook Farm Home for Boys in Queensland, Australia. The boys were incarcerated in the institution during a moment in its history when abuse was rife. According to Carden, published memoir is a means to access the historical experiences of marginalized young people. Talia Diskin's article "Socializing Austerity: Imparting Legal and Moral Values in Children's Periodicals during Israel's First Years" examines the challenges of the rationing regime during Israel's first decade and its depiction in the central children's periodicals of that time. Diskin shows how the restrictive consumption policy was mediated to children in the young state, the social roles that adults—the journals' creators—had appointed to children during those lean times when the black market prospered, and the ways in which young readers were instilled with the need to conquer their longing for coveted goods and gather their mental and physical strength in the face of adversity. In the next article, we move to Japan, where Tatsuya Mitsuda investigates the interplay between children, sweets, and parents before and after the Second World War. "Consumed by Sweets: Parents, Children, and Snacking in Modern Japan" focuses on the problems posed by the penny sweet shop and the street sweets it sold to children, analyzing society's attempts to control and reform the contents of sweets and the practice of snacking. It demonstrates that street sweets served as powerful exemplars, shaping middle-class notions of "proper" confections, how they should be made, with whom they should be shared, and where and when they should be purchased and eaten. Mitsuda concludes that children were formidable consumers who bought less into the nutritional or hygienic value of confections and more into the broader experience of snacking. The welfare state...

Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel by David Feldman

Reviewed by: Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel ed. by David Feldman Kathy M. Newman Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel. Edited by David Feldman. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 352 pages. $39.68 (paper). In the 1880s, a British émigré to Ireland named Captain Charles Boycott became the target of a widespread community campaign to have him shunned. Captain Boycott was a British military drop-out who had migrated to Ireland and was working as a rent collector for Lord Erne in County Mayo. Captain Boycott ran afoul of an activist group called the Land League when he refused to lower rents and then evicted 11 of Lord Erne's tenants. The Land League subsequently urged Boycott's employees to go on strike and to shun him from the community. Shun him they did, so much so that Captain Boycott could not get his mail delivered or find anyone to sit next to him at church. It got so bad that Boycott had to appeal to the British government for laborers to save his crops. The story of Boycott's shunning spread to America, and Boycott's name would forever be yoked to the tactic that had been used against him. [End Page 430] David Feldman, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and the editor of this collection, reminds us of the shunning of Captain Boycott in his introductory essay. He uses the story to show that boycotts have long been "expressive" as well as "instrumental." Boycotting is a strategic tactic, but it is also a highly emotional one, often rooted in the withdrawal of various forms of patronage from the intended target with the larger goal of hurting that target's reputation and possibly even trying to destroy the target altogether. This collection shows that the history of the boycott is surprisingly long—extending as far back as the eighteenth century. In Michael L. Miller's essay, titled, "In Defense of the Nation: Protectionism and Boycotts in the Habsburg Lands, 1844–1914," we learn about the theories of the nineteenth century economist Friedrich List, a proponent of trade protectionism, whose influence was evident in a series of "buy national" campaigns in nineteenth century Europe, such as the "each to his own" campaign in Czechoslovakia and the "buy only from Germans" campaign in Germany. Many of these "buy national" campaigns had an antisemitic component as Jews were often excluded as members of the nation. In a series of detailed and fascinating essays we also learn about the anti-Jewish boycotts staged in early twentieth century Poland (Grzegorz Krzywiec, "The Enemy Within: The Anti-Jewish Boycott and Polish Right-Wing Politics in the Early Twentieth Century"), Zionist boycotts against Palestinians between World War I and World War II (Hizky Shoham, "Zionist 'Buy National' Campaigns in Interwar Palestine"), Nazi sponsored antisemitic boycotts in Germany (Christoph Kreutzmüller, "Picketing Jewish-Owned Businesses in Nazi Germany: A Boycott?"), and boycotts staged by the radical-left in postwar West Germany, including boycotts against the newly formed state of Israel (Alexander Sedlmaier, "Boycott Campaigns of the Radical Left in Cold-War West Germany"). When we think about boycotts we are most likely to think about those organized by the powerless to put pressure on the [End Page 431] powerful so they will be persuaded to change their actions and policies. As many civil rights scholars have shown, for example, civil rights boycotts were effective in isolating local business elites from purely racist elites, thus leading to positive changes in corporate and civic policies on discrimination. In this collection we see the story of a few such boycotts, including the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott of 1953, considered by many to be a failure because the settlement that ended the boycott did not result in the complete integration of the Baton Rouge buses. However, Derek Charles Catsam argues that the Baton Rouge boycott was an important precursor to the successful and ultimately iconic Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 in his essay, "The Onward March of a People Who Desire to Be Totally Free." In another example, Lori A. Flores argues...

‘A stranger from this homeland’: deportation and the ruin of lives and livelihoods during the Palestine Mandate

ABSTRACTThis article explores Mandate Palestine’s immigration policy through the stories of migrants and settled residents who attempted to resist government-issued deportation orders for their removal from the territory. Individuals who lived in and crossed the borders and frontiers of interwar Palestine without the necessary permissions from the mandate government began to negotiate their relationship with the state once they received deportation orders, had their identity documents revoked, or found themselves under arrest. Through a close reading of archival sources including petitions, letters court case extracts and police correspondence, the article argues that Palestine’s immigration and deportation policies caused and exacerbated precarity and dislocation, all of which represented elements of the modern experience of colonial citizenship.

Hashishophobia and the Jewish ethnic question in mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel

ABSTRACT By drawing on crime fiction, press commentaries and archival records, this article explores Jewish public discourse about hashish in Mandatory Palestine and the first two decades of the State of Israel. Fearing over-assimilation into the Levant, Jews in interwar Palestine shunned the drug, considering it a form of ‘backwardness’ linked to the realities of living among Arabs in the Middle East. Colonial knowledge about hashish (as well as Orientalist fantasies) validated these fears, appearing to confirm that hashish was an Oriental substance that animated the pathologies inhering in Arab mentalities. This knowledge survived the transition to the Israeli state by responding to new realities: the expulsion and flight of the Arab population and the country’s repopulation by Jews from the Muslim world (Mizrahim). Some of these Jews had used hashish in their countries of origin and brought the habit with them to Israel. Others began to smoke hashish in Israel due to their socio-ethnic marginalization. Although hashish smoking in Israel in the 1950s and much of the 1960s remained limited to a few thousand members of the Mizrahi underclass, it rekindled middle-class fears of Levantinization-cum-Arabicization of the Jewish state. It also assisted in further marginalizing Mizrahim in Israeli society.

“Small Sales Agents (of Nationalism) Inside the House”: Childhood, Consumer Culture, and Nationalism in the Jewish Yishuv of Interwar Palestine

“Small Sales Agents (of Nationalism) Inside the House”: Childhood, Consumer Culture, and Nationalism in the Jewish Yishuv of Interwar Palestine

Refugees, Displaced Migrants, and Territorialization in Interwar Palestine

The history of undocumented movement into mandate Palestine by non-Zionist displaced migrants and refugees is one which naturally highlights the territorialization of Palestine’s geopolitical space. From 1920, Great Britain, as the mandatory power in Palestine, bolstered its control over the territory’s physical space through its classification and categorization of refugees and displaced migrants, and the regulation of their movement. Yet, the reactions to these processes by migrants and refugees, highlighted by numerous examples from the archival record, are not entirely ones of resistance. Despite the changing definitions and benefits of refugee and migrant status from the late Ottoman through the interwar period, often-undocumented arrivals to Palestine actively engaged with the mandate’s new immigration and mobility-control regimes and documentary-identity regulations. The active engagement of refugees and displaced migrants included circumventing and subverting these new regimes in a number of pragmatic and inventive ways. As the paper demonstrates, this very engagement serves to highlight the limitations of the mandate administration’s policies on immigration and mobility and of its migrant classification system.

Changing patterns of imperialism and education: the United Kingdom

La educación ha sido fundamental para el mantenimiento de los imperios modernos. Las políticas y prácticas educativas bajo el imperialismo británico reflejaron las complejidades, tensiones y conflictos en los diferentes territorios del Imperio. Esto se ilustra con referencias específicas a la Palestina entre guerras y la India Imperial, donde la política educativa a veces tuvo consecuencias imprevistas en sociedades divididas. El imperialismo cultural era un aspecto inherente de la educación colonial con implicaciones curriculares para la escolarización en el Reino Unido. A medida que el Imperio británico sufrió cambios y, finalmente, se redujo, la educación también cambió en respuesta. Sin embargo, el cambio no fue lineal, ya que el legado del imperio continuó tanto en los antiguos territorios coloniales como en el Reino Unido hasta el presente, con implicaciones tanto para las dimensiones formales como informales del aprendizaje. Es importante destacar que el idioma Inglés se mantiene, en diferentes formas, como un símbolo continuo del imperio, junto con respuestas diversas y, a veces complejas en un momento en que la interculturalidad, el post-colonialismo y la globalización han afectado el discurso sobre el Imperio Británico. Al mismo tiempo, el discurso se complica a veces por un aparente resurgimiento del sentimiento imperial mientras que las artes siguen reflejando actitudes críticas hacia el poder imperial del pasado. El artículo concluye con la opinión de que es necesario desarrollar una comprensión crítica de la relación entre educación e imperio para garantizar cambios en la pedagogía con respecto a una mayor inclusión de aquellos con historias de marginación y subordinación.

Dueling Visions of Rebirth: Interwar Palestine Versus Soviet Russia

Dueling Visions of Rebirth: Interwar Palestine Versus Soviet Russia

‘Dictate More, for We Should Obey Your Orders!’ Cult of the Leader in Inter-War Hebrew Fascism

This article surveys the ideal of the cult of the leader among Revisionist Zionist circles in inter-war Palestine. Relying on the writings of Itamar Ben Avi, Abba Aḥime‘ir, Wolfgang von Weisl, Joshua Yevin, Zwi Kolitz and Abraham Stern, it examines how this leader's cult evolved within the Revisionist movement and what role it played in the Revisionist thought. It concludes by examining this admiration towards national leaders in the context of Robert Paxton's model of generic fascism, demonstrating how this leader's cult can be considered as a ‘mobilising emotion’ of local generic fascism.

“BUY LOCAL” OR “BUY JEWISH”? SEPARATIST CONSUMPTION IN INTERWAR PALESTINE

AbstractThe article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either “Jewish” or “foreign” are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the “dual society” thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv.

Some Thoughts about Hebrew Fascism in Inter-war Palestine

AbstractDuring the 1920s and 1930s, fascist movements and groups flourished all around the world. Relying on Robert Paxton's postulate that the emergence of a fascist movement is an inherent part of modern societies with mass politics, this article examines the probable existence of such a fascist movement in the Hebrew society in Palestine of the time. After a short introduction of concepts of generic fascism and a review of the current state of research into the subject, the article discusses some aspects and characteristics of generic fascism which are specifically significant to this case study.

The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877-1959 (review)

Reviewed by: The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959 Michael Brenner Anthony David . The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. Pp. 451. Salman Schocken was the German version of the American dream: a poor Jew from the Prussian eastern provinces moves to a small town in Saxony, builds up one of Weimar Germany's leading chains of department stores, and emerges as an architectural pioneer who has Erich Mendelsohn build the most exciting Bauhaus-style department stores. He becomes a Zionist visionary and a leading spirit behind the rise of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, builds up a publishing house that serves as intellectual comfort during German Jewry's darkest hours, emerges as the publisher of Franz Kafka and a keen promoter of Shmuel Yosef Agnon for the Nobel Prize. As if this were not enough, he founds an institute for medieval Hebrew literature which searches for the Hebrew Nibelungenlied, possesses one of the most precious private collections of rare books in Judaica as well as German culture, and is responsible for the emergence of Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz. In other words, a biographer's dream. The self-made man from Posen, whom Hannah Arendt called the "Jewish Bismarck" (p. 204), was one of the most versatile figures in an era with no lack of versatile personalities. He was not just the chairman of the Organization of German Department Stores but a person deeply instilled with the ambition to turn his clients into educated people, into Bildungsbürger like himself, and to make his stores aesthetic masterworks of the new Bauhaus style. Next to the underwear counter he would give out poems by Goethe, and with the profit he made, he would support poor writers, such as the young Agnon, who had moved to Germany from Palestine before World War I. His Schocken Library, a predecessor of modern paperback series, produced one piece of essential Jewish culture after the other in Nazi Germany and became a remarkable monument to spiritual endurance in times of horror. The Patron himself had to leave Nazi Germany, and as he was an active Zionist, it was clear where his path would lead. The department stores remained in the hands of "Aryan" trustees until the end of the Thousand-Year Reich, so Schocken concentrated on his favorite endeavors: a research institute on medieval Hebrew poetry, the preservation of his unique library, and his involvement with the Hebrew University. He founded a publishing house in Israel, bought the newspaper Ha'aretz for his son Gershon (who would turn it into Israel's leading paper), and had [End Page 457] Erich Mendelsohn build his private home and his library, which became the unofficial intellectual center of Jerusalem. In the words of his biographer, "it was the only place in town where guests could expect such a high quality of cakes, wines, and light snacks. Being across the street from Golda Meir's residence gave it an added aura of mystery. It was a piece of prewar central Europe lodged in the heart of a Spartan state" (p. 384). As early as the 1930s Schocken suggested S. Y. Agnon, whom he had supported in the difficult years back in Germany, for the Nobel Prize and used all his connections in Sweden and in the literary world to promote this goal. He published Martin Buber and Franz Kafka, and he financed Gershom Scholem's research on Kabbalah. Still Salman Schocken was not a happy man in interwar Palestine. He was keenly aware of how little difference he was able to make there, in contrast to his time in Weimar Germany, and how little recognition he received. "In Germany I was always a part of things" he told the philosopher Hugo Bergmann. In Palestine, he felt like a nobody, writes David (p. 304). In 1939 Schocken left Jerusalem for New York and would thereafter return to Israel only for visits. In the United States, he had high hopes of achieving with American Jews what he failed to do in Palestine: to turn them into Bildungsbürger, who would read and produce a Jewish culture comparable to that found in...

The continuity of subversion: Hebrew satire in Mandatory Palestine

Satirical literature attempts to subvert a cultural system through the manipulation of its foundational symbols. It rests on the assumption that the reader is familiar with these symbols' conventional signification and that he or she also possesses deep knowledge of the cultural system being mocked. This statement holds true for modern Jewish satire, which originated among traditionally-educated adherents of the Jewish Enlightenment in late eighteenth century East Europe and flourished throughout the 1800s. When exported in the early 20th century to Palestine, this subversive tradition took the form of parodies of tradi tional texts such as the Passover Haggadah, produced in the secular atmosphere of Tel Aviv and the kibbutzim. This article sets Hebrew satirical literature produced in interwar Palestine against the backdrop of its European predecessors. Changes in the form and content of parodies of sacred Jewish texts nicely demon strate the transition in the first half of the twentieth century from Jewish to Israeli culture. From the turn of the century through the 1930s, Palestine's Jewish community (the Yishuv) was a liminal zone in which a catalytic, yet ephemeral, coming together of Judaic erudi tion and a freethinking spirit engendered a Zionist secular culture. The principle texts analysed here are Isaak Meir Dick's Masekhet Aniyut of 1844, as an example of learned parody from the period of the Jewish Englightenment (Haskalah); Kadish Yehuda Silman's Bava Tekhnika of 1913, to demonstrate the continuation of the Haskalah tradition in the early years of the new Yishuv; and several satiric haggadot published in Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s. My analysis is informed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas' semi nal essay on the joke, which she defines as:

Health in interwar Palestine: ethnic realities and international views.

This paper analyses the developments of the separate Jewish and Arab health systems and health realities. It is found that the activities of charitable institutions, the attitude of the British mandate government and different traditions of medical policy all played a part in the emergence of two separate health worlds. The influx of foreign funding for private health institutions, in particular, played a prominent part in establishing different service levels of healthcare for Jewish, Arab Christian and Arab Moslem communities. Thus, the medical sphere both reflected and interacted with wider political events.

Economic Structure and National Goals—The Jewish National Home in Interwar Palestine

The formation of the Jewish national home in Palestine provides an opportunity to examine the economics of an unusual “nation building”: the planning and making of a national existence without a state. The revival of Jewish nationality in Palestine started in the late nineteenth century with the first immigration motivated by national ideology (Alia Rishona) and with, the establishment of the World Zionist Organization (1897), whose goal was to create a Jewish political entity and ultimately a state. It was not, however, until the end of World War I that the revival achieved momentum. The Balfour Declaration (November 1917) proclaiming Britain's intention to promote the formation of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the establishment of the British mandate in Palestine after the war provided the supportive political environment for the renewal of Jewish nation building. Moreover, both the League of Nations (which officially granted Britain the mandate) and the British government recognized the Zionist Organization as the legitimate representative of world Jewry and as the leading body of the emerging Jewish community in Palestine for matters concerning the national home. This gave the Zionist Organization an international legitimacy to add to its legitimacy among Jews as a quasi-governmental institution for the purpose of re-establishing their national existence.