Almost immediately after the League of Nations granted Britain the Palestine Mandate, British police authorities were granted broad powers to impose British notions of law and order. The Prevention of Crimes Ordinance (1920), the Police Ordinance (1921), and the Collective Punishment Ordinance (1926) allowed authorities to hold entire villages and tribes responsible for the commission of any crimes within their bounds and to punish them accordingly. During the same period, disputes between individuals, families, or villages—particularly in rural areas of Palestine—were often resolved through unofficial reconciliation settlements (sulh), which attached responsibility for prior crimes and potential violations of the agreement to entire communities or parts thereof. My paper will look at these two phenomena — collective punishment and sulh — in juxtaposition. Drawing largely on British administrative reports and Arabic-language Palestinian press accounts from the early 1930s, this paper will focus specifically on the important role played by Palestinian policemen in the conclusion of sulh settlements as well as in the execution of collective punishment in rural Palestine. Palestinian policemen were often key actors in sulh arrangements, using their local knowledge to bring the appropriate parties together and arranging a solution that would be acceptable to all, while their official position lent legitimacy to the proceedings and, often, the threat of repercussions if the agreement did not hold. Meanwhile, a close examination of how the Prevention of Crimes Ordinance, the Police Ordinance, and the Collective Punishment Ordinance were implemented indicates that Palestinian policemen were active there, too, in determining the extent of the penalty and who in the village being punished should be held responsible and/or fined in the event of further unrest. Police involvement in these phenomena indicates the degree to which the boundaries between “unofficial” justice, such as agreements forged between families whose disciplinary force derived from the prestige and honor of those coming to the agreement and the witnesses, and “official” justice, enforced by policemen and adjudicated by the courts and deriving its force from the power of the state, were often blurred or unclear. This paper will thus explore how British notions of law and order were supplemented by, replaced with, or reconfigured through the lens of traditional justice and how British administrators capitalized on the ambiguous position of the Palestinian policeman to blur the boundaries between the official and the unofficial and draw rural communities and the state into more tightly bound relationship.

During the Mandate period, municipal councils had limited authority. Yet, they were a sphere of dispute over national and local sovereignty from the Mandate’s early days in Palestine. This paper explores the contestation over the Nazareth municipal council in 1946. Despite the limitations of the municipal elections process and the limited voting rights, residents of Nazareth were highly involved in the political process, actively participated in the build up to and campaigning for the elections, and engaged in the contest over the results, waged through bureaucratic, legal and informal channels. Having lost the elections, the ‘United Front,’ one of the two elections blocks vying for municipal leadership, contested the results, first appealing to the District Commissioner and later to the court. These appeals relied on Mandate regulations and bureaucratic arguments, including inadequacies in ballot paper and in irregularities in the voting and counting processes, in addition to allegations of undue influence on voters by the certain candidates. At the same time, the appeals advanced claims for rights and affirmed their dedication to the public good in the city of Nazareth. Simultaneously, these appeals included arguments based on religious and familial ties as a communal base of identification. However, going beyond the formal appeals to the Mandate government, the disputing parties turned to the Arab Higher Committee (the organization of the Palestinian national leadership in Palestine during the Mandate) for arbitration while asserting commitment to the general good and the need for unity among the Arabs in the difficult situation of the country towards the end of the Mandate period and under the uncertainty of national struggle. Exploring the discourses and practices of Nazareth residents in their contact with the colonial state and the national leadership, this paper highlights Palestinians’ claims for citizenship and their identifications: local, communal and national. This paper draws on an array of sources, including state archives, MAKI archives, and Arabic newspapers of the period .

From the 1930s through the present day, many of the elected and appointed members of Transjordan and Jordan’s Legislative Council and National Assembly were formerly teachers in the schools of the British Mandates of Palestine and Transjordan. A combination of factors promoted the links between teaching and political office. A scarcity of educated persons meant that almost anyone possessing a secondary school certificate, and certainly a university degree, could quickly find employment in the Government Departments of Education. Moreover, those employed in these Departments of Education could not easily be replaced. Therefore poets, journalists, pedagogues and activists frequently used teaching as a way of subsidizing their political activities. Teachers also enjoyed a captive audience of the Mandates’ most impressionable inhabitants; children. Educators used their experiences as leaders in the classroom and as negotiators with government bureaucracies, to bolster careers not only in education but in politics, journalism, literature, as well as academia. This paper examines how the interactions between teachers and the British Mandate Governments of Palestine and Transjordan shaped these individuals’ dealings with the state more generally, by using reports and memoranda from the Departments of Education, teachers’ personnel files, memoirs, colonial and foreign office documents as well as interviews with former students and administrators. Analyzing Palestinians and Jordanians whose careers began in the schools of the Mandates and ended in the Government of Jordan provides a window not only into practical connections between schooling and governance in a colonial context but also into how concepts of authority based on negotiation and a flexible, if frequently impotent notion of governance are understood and adapted.