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.

Inventing the National and the Citizen in Palestine: Great Britain, Sovereignty and the Legislative Context, 1918–1925

This chapter investigates whether the structures put in place by Great Britain for the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship favoured Jewish immigrants in any way, and demonstrates how and why Great Britain felt the dual administration structure necessary to preserve its own sovereignty from 1918 through 1925. It focuses on the history of British legislation in Palestine and the main actors — and tensions between these actors and their departments — involved in making that legislation, including the mandate's first attorney-general, Norman Bentwich. The aim of British legislation, however, was to simply create a legal citizenship for the mandate's inhabitants, and to provide the means by which this citizenship could be acquired.

The Palestine Revolt and Stalled Citizenship

This chapter chronicles the changes to the various meanings of citizenship and civic identity during the three years of the Palestinian Arab Revolt. Effectively, citizenship claims became rather ‘stalled’ in Palestine upon the outbreak of the nationwide revolt against the British. Rural rebels and revolt commanders co-opted certain claims, which in turn influenced newer meanings of patriotic loyalty and practices of citizenship. In particular, the Peel Commission report, which offered recommendations on policy in Palestine following the initial disturbances, is described in terms of its impact on citizenship in order to offer a historical explanation of the continuities and changes of both the British and the Arabs' perceptions of nationality, citizenship and rights by 1937.

Institutionalising Citizenship: Creating Distinctions between Arab and Jewish Palestinian Citizens, 1926–1934

This chapter analyzes the ways in which Palestinian citizenship became bureaucratised after the 1925 Citizenship Order-in-Council through the early 1930s. This process of bureaucratization allowed local and imperial officials to use nationality and citizenship as tools to classify, categorize, and discipline the citizenry, immigrants, and non-habitual residents. These tools served different purposes for the British officials in London, for those in Jerusalem, and for the leadership of the Zionist Organisation in relation to its activities in Palestine. The division of control between Whitehall and the Palestine Administration meant that, overall, the creation of legislation was de-centralized in nature. The division of control was not always balanced, however: within Whitehall the Foreign and Colonial Offices disagreed over the application of policy and so too did local administrators in Palestine.

The Diaspora and the Meanings of Palestinian Citizenship, 1925–1931

This chapter contextualises the discourses, influences, notions, and political transformations that informed Palestinian Arabs' understanding of nationality and citizenship in the diaspora (particularly in Latin America) and at home in the years leading up to and just after the 1925 Citizenship Order-in-Council. Importantly, it focuses on the impacts of these understandings in Palestinian society and as part of Arab relations with Great Britain as the mandatory power. It offers an entirely new history of the emigrants and their reactions to, and counter-definitions of, the type of legal and apolitical nationality and citizenship that Palestine Mandate and colonial officials attempted to craft during the same time period. The impact of citizenship legislation on the diaspora frames the introduction of debates, discussions and slogans within Palestine, such as the demand for the ‘right to return’ and letters of protest to the British and international community that underscored the grievances of the emigrants who lacked citizenship.

The Notion of ‘Rights’ and the Practices of Nationality and Citizenship from the Palestinian Arab Perspective, 1918–1925

This chapter shifts focus from the British aspect of nationality and citizenship legislation to the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, in order to analyse the development of the civic and political community during the early years of the mandate administration. The new types of spaces and institutions introduced by the new administration in Palestine challenged traditional, Ottoman-style ways of understanding identity, community, and nationality. The challenges and disruptions wrought by the incorporation of Palestine into a new imperial system reconfigured social relations and communal and national boundaries. These disruptions strengthened the Arabs' sense of communitarian belonging to Palestine, allowed for the formation of new civic and political associations and laid the foundation for engagement of Arab society with particular notions, ideologies and claims frequently discussed in a plethora of press articles. These would later constitute a series of demands and appeals for citizenship rights. At its core, the chapter traces how citizenship and nationality took on a specifically political and rights-based understanding of Arab civic belonging in Palestine.

Conclusion – The End of the Experiment: Discourses on Citizenship at the Close of the Mandate

This chapter offers further insight on citizenship in Palestine after 1939 and until the end of the mandate in 1948, and the changing levels of the Arabs' political subjectivity. The differences between the multiple doctrines, vocabularies, expressions, and concepts of citizenship during the first two decades of the mandate administration are reflected in the legislation on citizenship passed by the British administration and in the reactions by the Arab citizens to that legislation. It explores the immediate reactions of Great Britain and the Palestine administration to the increased Jewish immigration to the territory and the changes made to the mandate's citizenship legislation in the wake of the Peel Commission's recommendations.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to present a new understanding of the Arabs' reactions to colonialism and Jewish immigration into Palestine by framing resistance to mandate policies and the early stages of the development of the political project of Palestinian nationalism through the articulated appeals, discussions, ideologies and demands for a political, as opposed to simply legal, identity. The book aims to trace how, and to what extent, citizenship became politically linked to nationality and civic identity as a reaction to the legal parameters of the British-created citizenship status in the post-1918 period. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.