Open Borders, Glass Ceiling: A Syrian Doctor in Palestine's Mandate Health System During the period of British rule in mandate Palestine, health regulation and policy were administered by the colonial Department of Health. Headed by a number of British men on the spot, the lower ranks of the Department were manned mostly by an Arab, Jewish and Armenian personnel. This paper shall focus on Palestine’s medical colonial administration as a regional hub for professionals from across the Levant that enabled professional and occupational mobility. Through the personal story of Dr. Sami Shihab, a native of Aleppo, graduate of the Montpellier’s Faculty of Medicine and a Department employee for over twenty years, serving in various locations in Palestine, the paper will examine the Department as a space of opportunity and challenge. Dr. Shihab’s personal story, as it appears in his personal employee file in the colonial archive, reveals his enthusiasm to work as a Doctor in Palestine. Yet far from his homeland and family, while working within a stressful daily routine, it also reveals the hardships of a non-local who worked under a foreign administration in an environment he knew nothing about. At times, Dr. Shihab was welcomed and even admired by the people of Gaza and Hebron where he was stationed, but he was also targeted by members of these communities for what they saw as his detachment and disrespect of their traditions and customs. Based on archival material, mainly the Department of Health's documentation, newspapers and memoirs from the period, the paper argues that the colonial Department indeed attracted an expanding community of doctors, pharmacists and other professionals from across the region, yet it also contextualizes this attraction within the Department‘s structural hierarchy, which offered limited prospects of promotion.