Whose Rights to Citizenship? Expressions and Variations of Palestinian Mandate Citizenship, 1926–1935
By the latter half of the 1920s and the early 1930s, British and Arab misunderstandings of each other's intentions with respect to identity and citizenship status encouraged even stronger claims by the Arabs to the bundle of rights that they felt entitled to in accordance with their own particular understandings of nationality and citizenship. This chapter ties the discussions of citizenship that circulated in the territory from 1918 through the mid-1930s to the projects of belonging that the nationalists, populists, and the Arabic press attended to and actively worked towards. The active engagement of the press and social groups in political actions with the aim of changing mandate institutions fostered a new vocabulary of rights, political, and civic identity and citizenship belonging in the years just before the start of the Palestine Revolt in 1936. The chapter frames certain discourses on citizenship and national identity as more dominant and others as more subaltern during the latter half of the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter includes a case study of the Palestinian Arab Istiqlal (Independence) Party, whose policies aimed to redefine citizenship and access to rights under the mandate.