Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

Jerusalem was occupied by British forces in December 1917. The League of Nations formally awarded Britain a Mandate over Palestine in 1922. Under the British, Palestine was once again a distinct political and administrative entity for the first time in centuries. The sense of continuity between the ancient, medieval and modern political geography and naming traditions of Palestine eventually came into play in the designation of the British Mandatory Government of Palestine (1918‒1948). This ‘official’ designation of the country as Palestine was universally accepted by the League of Nations, which came into existence in 1920, and by the United Nations which was founded in 1945.

Following the Palestine Exploration Fund, the British Mandatory authorities after 1918 assumed that the Palestinian Arabs (Muslims, Christians and Arab Jews) had also preserved knowledge of the ancient place names which could help identify archaeological sites. Furthermore, in the modern era, and especially during the British Mandate of Palestine, the term ‘Palestinian’ was used to refer to all people residing in Palestine, regardless of religion or ethnicity, including those European Jewish settlers granted citizenship by the British Mandatory authorities.

Fully aware of the destabilising effects of its pro-Zionist commitments and the need to maintain political stability in the country, in the 1920s the British Mandatory authorities in Palestine sought to preserve some of the continuities of late Ottoman Palestine in the Mandatory system. The British authorities decided not only to link the local name of the country, Filastin, to all the official institutions, units and documents produced by the British Mandatory Government of Palestine (1918‒1948), they also linked some of the institutions they had helped create in the 1920s with the administrative structure and districts of late Ottoman Palestine. These official Palestine institutions and documents included:

• The Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine (al-Majlis al-Islamic al-A’ala bi-Filastin): the SMC was established in 1923 with the support of the British Mandatory authorities and with authority over all the Muslim waqfs and sharia courts in Palestine. The composition of the SMC effectively linked the administrative districts of late 19th century Palestine with the administration of Muslim-majority Mandatory Palestine. The SMC consisted of five members: a president and four members, two of whom were to represent the autonomous administrative Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem and the remaining two to represent the late Ottoman sanjaks of Acre and Nablus.

• Palestine Archaeological Museum: continuities of late Ottoman Palestine and Mandatory Palestine are also found in the creation and collections of the Palestine Archaeological Museum. In 1918, almost immediately after the occupation of Jerusalem, the British Military Governor Sir Ronald Storrs took the decision to establish the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem. The cornerstone of the Palestine Archaeological Museum was laid on 19 June 1930. The museum opened in 1938 as a ‘national’ (not biblical) museum and was modelled on modern European museums. The Palestine Archaeological Museum (renamed by Israel after 1967 as the ‘Rockefeller Museum’) contains historical artefacts, jewels and mosaics from the Neolithic through the Byzantine periods, and through the medieval Islamic and modern periods. Together with ancient Neolithic artefacts, the museum has the remains of 8th-century wooden beams from the al-Aqsa Mosque, and an elaborately carved lintel from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from the time of the Latin Crusaders. The Neolithic, ancient, medieval and modern heritage of Palestine is all encapsulated in this museum. The Palestine Archaeological Museum absorbed the collections of the Ottoman Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem, the first archaeological museum to be set up in late Ottoman Palestine, which was founded in 1890 and existed until 1930. The latter’s collections continued first with the British Palestine Museum of Antiquities (1921‒1930) and then with the Palestine Archaeological Museum. That a 1910 handwritten Ottoman Catalogue of the Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem has survived in the library of the Rockefeller Museum, where it is called the ‘Pre-War Catalogue of the Palestine Archaeological Museum’ (St Laurent with Taşkömürl 2013: 22‒23).

• Palestine Passport, Palestine Currency and Palestine Stamps: the British Mandatory Government of Palestine (with its administrative capital in Jerusalem) produced Palestine passports, Palestine currency and Palestine stamps. The stamps were in three languages, with the imprint Palestine, פלשתינה ,فلسطين , showcasing images of ancient and medieval Palestinian holy sites such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Nativity Church in Bethlehem. Interestingly, in 1970 the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, headed by Yasir ‘Arafat, issued a commemorative stamp on the fifth anniversary of its foundation, which also reproduced the British Mandatory stamps with their imprints in Arabic, English and Hebrew.

• The Palestine Pound and the Palestine Currency Board: the British Mandatory Government of Palestine also issued the Palestine Pound (Arabic:

Junyeh Filastini, جنيه فلسطيني ; Hebrew: פֿוּנטְ פַּלשְׂתִֶינאִיָ ). Equal in value to the pound sterling, it was the currency of the British Mandate in Palestine from 1927 to 14 May 1948. The currency of the State of Israel between 15 May 1948 and August 1948 and between 1948 and 1952 the Palestine Pound continued to be legal tender in Israel. The Palestine Pound was also the currency of Transjordan until 1949 and remained in usage in the West Bank until 1950. In the Gaza Strip the Palestine Pound circulated until April 1951, when it was replaced by the Egyptian Pound.

• The Palestine Police Force: set up as a colonial police service established in Palestine 1920 and operated until 1948.

• The Palestine Railways: a government-owned railway company that ran all public railways in Palestine from 1920 until 1948.

• The Palestinian Citizenship Order in Council: a law of Mandatory Palestine governing citizenship in the country. It came into effect on 1 August 1925.

• The Arab Palestine Sport Federation (al-Ittihad al-Riadi al-ʿArabi al-Filastini): a government body operating between 1931 and 1937

and between 1944 and 1948. It organised a variety of sports activities, including football, boxing and weight-lifting (Khalidi, I. 2006, 2014).

• The Palestine Broadcasting Service: it began radio transmissions from the new transmitter in Ramallah, with offices in Jerusalem. Staff were recruited for five hours of daily broadcasts in three languages, English, Arabic and Hebrew, and training was given by the BBC. In 1942, the transmissions were split into two stations: for English/Arabic (Radio al Quds) and English/Hebrew (Kol Yerushalayim).

• The Palestine Citrus Marketing Board: set up by the Mandatory government of Palestine to regulate all citrus exports from Palestine. In October 1956, a group of former Palestinian citrus farmers, who had become refugees in the West Bank in 1948, sued Barclays Bank in a Jordanian court in Jerusalem for £1 million. The amount represented the total value of the citrus crop exported collectively by this group in 1947.

• Palestine Airways: founded by Pinhas Rutenberg in Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1930s; operated under the aegis of British Imperial Airways from 1937 until 1940 until it was taken over by the British Royal Air Force as part of the British war effort.