The history of identity in early 20th century Palestine has often been depicted in terms of struggles between divergent and newly-formed nationalisms determined by the delineation of pseudo-national mandate borders. Rarely does this history refer to the post-war Treaty of Lausanne’s provisions nationality related to state succession in the Arab provinces of the former Ottoman Empire. Standard histories of the Palestine mandate also often exclude a nuanced analysis of how the inhabitants of the mandated territory experienced the transitions in legal status from Ottoman nationals to Palestinian citizens. The mandate borders recognized in the post-First World War period did not translate into any sudden cast-off of Ottoman nationality and citizenship notions. The current paper, based on Palestinian Arab and British colonial primary sources, uses the historical creation of borders in the interwar Levant as the framework to juxtapose the creation and imposition of Palestinian citizenship before and after 1925 by the Palestinian Administration’s British colonial officials with the continued existence of a strong identification by the territory’s natives as Ottoman-Arab nationals. The paper traces how the restriction of certain identities and promotion of other identities played out in interwar Palestine in light of restrictions imposed through new boundaries. These boundaries of citizenship were both political (eg, borders and documentary identity) and ideological (eg the development of differences between Palestinian Arab citizens and Palestinian Jewish citizens). The paper argues that the Palestinian Arabs created their own notions of citizenship in the early mandate period in reaction to and based on the effects of the imposition of a legal citizenship and nationality status due to post-war international treaties and British legislation. It offers insight into what the new statuses meant for the ways in which the Arabs chose to negotiate citizenship vis-à-vis their former Ottoman nationality and the new Jewish Palestinian citizenship. The paper shows that citizenship itself became a border for the Palestinian Arabs once the British ratified legislation to regulate that status: mandate citizenship effectively denied the existence of an Arab nationality. Finally, the paper demonstrates how these boundaries between Arab and Jewish colonial citizens, caused by the institutionalization and bureaucratization of mandate citizenship, were negotiated, reinforced and superseded by the citizens themselves.

Drawing on British and League of Nations archives and on petitions, diaries, letters, and newspapers in Palestine, Israel, and different Latin American countries in the 1920s, this paper explores how new forms of Palestinian self-understanding and identification, both territorial and diasporic, were molded through complex inter-communal and transnational communication within the context of emerging legal and political world orders. The paper examines the ways in which Palestinian immigrants - who had started leaving their homes in the late 19th century along with their Levantine neighbors for various reasons - came to self-identify in light of new political boundaries and citizenship legislation promulgated by the British-controlled Government of Palestine starting in the early 1920s. While this legislation would ultimately deny thousands of Arab Palestinians living in Latin American countries the right to return to their homeland as citizens, the diaspora it created nonetheless came to play a role in the development of a new and distinct identity among Palestinian Arabs in Palestine and abroad. This paper poses the following questions: to what extent and in which ways was this Palestinian diaspora connected to Palestine and Palestinians in Palestine? How did this connection change from Ottoman to British rule, and why did so many of the immigrants wish to return to Palestine in the aftermath of the Ottoman defeat? Moreover, what did these Palestinians abroad communicate to their relatives in Palestine in the letters and various correspondences from this period? What were Palestinians in Palestine saying in return? Which issues were important to these people as a community that now faced a new political, social, and legal status? In addition to these questions, this project aims to contribute to the expanding body of literature that adds complexity and nuance to the emergence and development of Palestinian nationalist consciousness in the aftermath of the First World War. It does so while paying particular attention to the persistence of the language of the right of return among Palestinians within Palestine and across this early diaspora in the many petitions and letters submitted to British and Arab offices in London and Jerusalem. This paper will thus highlight how the emergence of new political, legal, and social boundaries - both literal and figurative – following the institutionalization of the British Mandate impacted communal and personal modes of self-understanding and identification for people who would come to identify themselves one way or the other, as Palestinians worldwide.

This paper explores imperial citizenship in late Ottoman Palestine by telling the story of two prominent figures in this context: Isa al-Isa, the Arab Christian editor of Filastin—widely lionized for opposing Zionist encroachment and molding a Palestinian collective consciousness—and Abu Ibrahim, an Arab Muslim contributor to Filastin, who wrote a monthly column titled "Letters from a Peasant" from 1911 to 1912. In this column, Abu Ibrahim exhibited a cantankerous persona, simultaneously wistful for the simple days before he became involved in political matters and fiercely committed to those very political intrigues. His advocacy focused on improvement of the lives of peasants and included calls for better roads, well-trained veterinarians, modern agricultural machinery, and state-sponsored forestry. All of these claims on the Ottoman state amounted to what scholars have called imperial citizenship, as Abu Ibrahim asserted connections between state and citizen. What seems to make these claims interesting is that they emerge from an ostensible representative of a traditionally marginalized group of social actors: the rural poor. What complicates the story is that Abu Ibrahim was not Arab or Muslim or poor. Abu Ibrahim was, in fact, a pseudonym for Menashe Meirovitch, a Jewish agronomist who emigrated from Russia to Palestine in 1883 to help establish one of the first Zionist settlements, Rishon Le-Zyon. Meirovitch did not know a word of Arabic. It was al-Isa who translated his columns from French and edited them. This paper suggests that this relationship represented a key moment in Ottoman Palestine when communal boundaries remained fluid. Far from "collaboration"—the idea that the nationalist newspaperman betrayed the Palestinian cause or that the Zionist agronomist tricked a venal enemy—the partnership between the two men in 1911-1912 demonstrates how in the late Ottoman period perceptions of citizenship and state responsibilities to its diverse citizens might converge. This partnership was, of course, inconceivable only a few years later.

This paper focuses on the quotidian cultural relations between Jews and Arabs in the coastal cities of Jaffa and Haifa during the British Mandate. Most of the studies written to date on the relations between the communities have focused primarily on the rivalry and tension between the two national movements. Several recent studies have devoted attention to coexistence on the commercial, business and municipal levels. However, the aspect of day-to-day relations in the realm of entertainment and leisure in Jaffa and Haifa received little or no scholarly attention. An exception to this is the work of Salim Tamari which focuses on the society and culture of Palestine and more specifically on Jerusalemite culture from the late Ottoman period to the end of the British Mandate. This paper will rely on Hebrew and Arabic press as well as archival sources (such as records of the Mandatory government, intelligence reports and protocols of the Haifa, Jaffa and Tel Aviv municipalities), memoirs and personal interviews. These sources will provide further evidence that even at the height of the national conflict—from the mid-thirties up to the dramatic events of 1948—Jews and Arabs crossed national and cultural boundaries by sharing their leisure time in the same entertainment venues, be they cinemas, sports arenas, public parks or beaches. I argue that it was the intensity of daily life in common geographical and crowded spaces, which at times overshadowed the great ideas of nationalism and rivalry between Jews and Arabs and allowed ordinary people to create social and cultural ties without fear of the implications of their actions. Furthermore, pastime activity in Mandate Palestine reflects congruence of social class between Jews and Arabs. In that sense, people of the same social class, both the elites and the lower classes, shared the same recreation and leisure sites. Working through the prism of “Relational History,” this paper will examine the interactions between the communities and the motivations driving members of both communities to spend their time alongside one another. The focus on aspects of leisure and entertainment, while keeping in mind the political context; will provide a richer and more complex perspective on the history of the Mandatory period.