Before Israel
“Before Israel” looks closely at Palestine’s multi-religious, multi-ethnic population, locally- and foreign-born, on the eve of the founding of the State of Israel, through a novel angle. The documental core of this project are the roughly 1,000 applications for British naturalization filed between the 1920s and 1950s by people identified under mandatory rule as “Palestinian.” The Palestinian Citizenship Order, promulgated by the British Mandate in 1925 and in effect until May 14, 1948, granted citizenship to Turkish subjects living in Palestine, some such individuals living abroad, and the children and wives of Palestinian men. Although the British government designed Palestinian citizenship specifically for Jews, locals of various ethno-religious backgrounds applied, including Sunni Muslim and Christian Arabs, Greek and Armenian Christians; Druze; Shi’ites; Samaritans. This project includes those who identified as Palestinian as early as 1918 (directly following British occupation) and applied for British citizenship as Palestinian nationals from the 1920s through the 1950s.
The positivistic aim of this article is to highlight the demographic complexity of the pre-state population through a prosopographical analysis of vocation/profession, ethnic and religious belonging, birthplace, age at application, and motivations for applying for British citizenship. More narratively, this article seeks to recreate individual biographies and discern patterns within this cohort, such as links between profession and professional goals, institutional affiliation, and the quest for or assertion of homeland. Of special interest are cross-communal interactions and partnerships, particularly within the realm of local Palestinian commerce. Historiographically, this article seeks to address the gap in previous scholarship on Jews and empire, a body of work that often overlooks British mandatory Palestine, and to join more recent efforts to examine cotidian lives in British Mandate Palestine.
My previous analysis of hundreds of documents pertaining to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Ottoman subjects who applied for British naturalization between the late nineteenth century and 1931 (https://avivaben-ur.umasscreate.net/projects/) demonstrates the richness and unexpected findings embedded within the sources left behind by otherwise anonymous masses.
