Gil Zohar – The first Palestinian dispossession and loss of citizenship Part I
https://journals.openedition.org/bcrfj/6405
Genesis of Citizenship in Palestine and Israel
Palestinian Nationality in the 1917-1925 Period
Genèse de la citoyenneté en Palestine et en Israël – Nationalité palestinienne de 1917 à 1925
Mutaz M. Qafisheh
Traduction(s) :
Genèse de la citoyenneté en Palestine et en Israël
updated June 12, 2017
Edward Said called Palestinians “the victims of the victims,” and such Holocaust inversion has been baked into the Palestinian story, turning Jews and Israelis into Nazis. This strategy of feigned victimhood and weakness underlies the success story of the Palestinian narrative.
The first Palestinian dispossession and loss of citizenship
Lauren Banko,
The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918-1947
Edinburgh University Press, 2016 £75
Review by Gil Zohar
In the Palestinian narrative, the events of 1947-1949 are referred to as a-Nakba – the Catastrophe. May 15, the terminal date in the Gregorian calendar for Britain’s divide and quit policy in Palestine, is commemorated as Nakba Day. (The State of Israel declared its independence the day before on Iyar 5, 5708 in the Hebrew calendar since May 15, 1948 was the Jewish Sabbath). But as Lauren Banko’s ground-breaking The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918-1947 demonstrates, the Palestinian disaster as dispossessed, stateless refugees precedes the founding of Israel by more than two decades and can be blamed on Perfidious Albion, as well as Zionism.
To understand how some 20,000 to 30,000 Arabs born in Turkish-ruled Palestine came to live in exile and be denied citizenship and a passport, Banko – a research associate in Israel-Palestine Studies within the Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies department at the University of Manchester who received her PhD in History in 2014 from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies – begins with the Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869, which was meant to do away with the millet system in favor of secular nationality.
Citizenship of that vast empire was voided at the end of World War I when Ottoman Turkey collapsed. While residents of Anatolia received new papers following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in Ankara on October 29, 1923, the empire’s former subjects now living in the League of Nations’ Middle East mandates of Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon were excluded.
The mandatory powers Britain and France, both appointed as international trustees, wrestled with the legal rights of their new subjects. The status of those mandates as trusteeships rather than outright colonies or protectorates had little precedence. Banko explores how Britain drew upon its imperial experience in the governing of ‘oriental races’ and ‘subject races’ in Egypt and India. The League of Nations obligated Britain to enact a law for the acquisition of Palestinian nationality for Jewish immigrants, as framed by the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the league’s demand also encompassed for the Arab population, since the mandate stipulated that the Jewish national home policy could not prejudice the civil or religious rights of the existing population.
In 1922, after Britain’s Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) had been in place for the first two and half years of Britain’s rule in Palestine, the territory’s first attorney general, an English Jewish barrister named Norman Bentwich (1883-1971), drafted legislation submitted to the Colonial Office in London. His proposed law envisioned an apolitical quasi-colonial citizenship granting limited civil and political rights.
Indeed Britain never established a Legislative Council in Palestine, as called for by the League of Nations and the 1922 Palestine Electoral Order-in-Council, which set the regulations for elections for the future parliament in Jerusalem.
Bentwich incorporated elements of the Ottoman nationality legislation. As well, he drew upon the British empire’s experience of colonial citizenship. Some of this inspiration came from Lord Cromer in Egypt, whose innately racist bureaucracy featured procedures designed to separate Europeans from local natives, such as the tiered Mixed Courts.
Banko notes how in the case of Palestine, and in keeping with Britain’s divide and rule policy, the procedures to acquire citizenship separated Jewish immigrants from the local Arab population.
Bentwich’s efforts bore fruit in the 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council,
signed by King George V, and implemented in the Palestine Mandate as the first piece of legislation to recognize Palestine’s Arab community as citizens rather than ‘ex-enemy Ottoman subjects.’ The Citizenship Order came into force on August 1, 1925. Like all the other imperial decrees, it was enacted by London, not by His Majesty’s Government of Palestine. Like other jurisdictions in the British Empire, the cover of Palestine’s newly-issued passports featured the same coat of arms – a lion and a unicorn flanking a shield. The document promised its bearer “the protection of His Majesty’s Government,” and read from left to right.
“Bentwich and other colonial officials decided only in May 1925 to change the title of the nationality legislation from the Palestinian Nationality Law to the Palestinian Citizenship Order-in-Council,” writes Banko. (p.52)
“One month before the order’s ratification, the term ‘nationality’ was crossed out and replaced with ‘citizenship’ throughout the text. After the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne, the provisions of nationality were first applied to Palestine, but citizenship remained a term and status in need of legal, diplomatic and political clarification. This again demonstrates the messy definitions of both terms proposed within Great Britain during the 1920s and as applied in indirectly ruled colonies, the Dominions and the non-Arab mandates,” she emphasizes. (pp.52-53)
Clause Twelve of the Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council specified that former
Ottoman subjects who usually reside in Palestine and were absent on the date of its ratification would become citizens if they returned to Palestine within 24 months until August 1926 and assumed permanent residence.
While British diplomats made some effort to publicize this crucial clause to émigrés living in Egypt, Honduras, Brazil. Chile, Cuba and Europe, in an era before mass communications many of those born in Palestine and living abroad were unaware of the new citizenship regulation. In any case, to qualify the law required that they quit their homes abroad and return to the Mandate. Those Ottoman citizens born in Palestine who had left and missed the two-year window would have to undergo naturalization to become citizens.
Many Palestinian Arabs saw this as unjust since newly-arrived Jewish immigrants faced no such requirement. As they saw it, it was inherently unfair that a Jew born in Bialystok was entitled to a passport but not an Arab born in Bethlehem. They argued that the order-in-council was illegal since it was not enacted by a parliament elected by the people.
When one considers that every exile had kinsmen in Palestine, the discriminatory law affected the majority of the population. Even fellahin who never travelled abroad, and thus never acquired a passport, were united in their opposition to Britain’s citizenship act. By 1948, only 500 of those native sons denied citizenship had managed to return.
“The Palestine Arab Executive leadership disagreed with the citizenship legislation on the basis that through these measures the government continued to neglect what it felt to be the ‘natural’ civic and political rights of the Arab population,” notes Banko. (p.54) The citizenship law discriminated against native-born Palestinians while privileging Jewish immigrants, they argued.
“The publication of the provisions of the order that effectively denied access to legally recognized citizenship to thousands of native born Palestinians who had lived abroad galvanised the popular leaders,” Banko adds. (p.82)
The press, especially Isa Bandak’s Bethlehem-based newspaper Sawt al-Sha’b, became the main medium through which discussions on the citizenship order and letters from the diaspora were published. In periodicals as well as in protest memoranda, Palestinians referred to the order as the ‘nationality law’ (qanoon al-jinsiyya or haqq al-jinsiyya) and generally used the Arabic term for ‘nationality’ (jinsiyya) in reference to the more legalistic and perhaps modern ‘citizenship’ (muwatana).
“Bandak, like others such as Arab Executive President Musa Kazim al-Husayni, a number of middle-class nationalists and members of diaspora associations, were baffled by the situation. They found it difficult to reconcile their idea of citizenship as based on an understanding of nationality as rooted in both Arab ethnicity and Ottoman imperial subjecthood with the definition of citizenship provided by the 1925 Order-in-council. To Bandak and Musa Kazim, it seemed natural that the thousands of emigrants could do nothing but keep their Ottoman nationality at the end of the First World War. On the basis of that formal nationality, it further seemed reasonable and proper that Arabs born under the Ottoman Empire would
automatically receive the citizenship of their new mandate administrations,” Banko explains. (p. 96)
Popular leaders and newspaper editors wrote to the British and League to decry the denial of citizenship to thousands of Palestinians who emigrated or lived abroad. In 1926, Bandak established the Committee for the Defense of Palestinian Arab Emigrant Citizenship Rights which lobbied tirelessly into the 1930s against the citizenship order and its amendments.
Rounding out the historical perspective, Banko notes that Arabs spoke of “the
right of return” already in the 1920s. The huge grievance over disenfranchised native-born Palestinians fed into the Arab Revolt of 1936. While the Peel Commission report of 1937 mentioned the plight of the stateless Palestinians, nothing was done to correct this historic injustice.
Banko concludes: “The Palestine Administration and the British government acted in nearly all cases related to citizenship, nationality and passports from 1918 to the year that saw the final changes to citizenship legislation, 1942, to maintain the status quo support for the mandate’s terms that supported Jewish immigration and naturalisation as the primary means through which the Jewish national homeland could be established under the auspices of the mandate itself. For at least the first decade of the civil administration, the first consideration for all of the proposed legislation and regulations, whether by the local administration officials or the officials and policy-makers in Whitehall, was towards the facilitation of this aim in as much as it did not contradict or call into question wider British imperial policy and norms. Citizenship legislation received the same preliminary caution and treatment, although this legislation never progressed beyond its original aim to regulate the legal and international status and documentary identity of Palestine’s population. Thus, citizenship legislation was crucial to the success of the mandate policy, and the British Administration and Great Britain ultimately surrendered to the need to maintain a successful policy and hold ultimate imperial authority in Palestine by regulating citizenship in the ways that it did – ways that did favour continued Jewish immigration.” (p. 208)
“Historically, the Palestinian Arabs – and likewise the Palestinian Jews – never became ‘national citizens’ during the mandate in the sense that scholars today define the phrase. In the absence of an autonomous nation-state, national citizenship remained out of reach. Part of the blame for this absence is to
be laid indirectly on the actions of the British Administration, led largely by imperial concerns as well as initial disinterest in how legal citizenship impacted political understandings of rights, and the ways through which the administration in Palestine and the government in Great Britain bureaucratised citizenship and
categorized the citizens by their respective religious communities. This, in turn, can be partly framed by Britain’s perception of Palestine within imperial and international contexts and the need felt by Great Britain that Palestine conform to both contexts despite its international position. Without a doubt colonial, or mandate, citizenship was imposed upon, and experienced by, Arabs and Jews in Palestine unequally. The institutionalisation of citizenship, and the nature of that institutionalisation, ensured that the mandated citizens themselves had no share in their status – it was not a citizenship that they envisioned nor was it for them.” (pp. 213-214)
Banko’s research on the 20,000 to 30,000 stateless Palestinians in the 1920s blames the British for discriminating between Arabs and Jews. Her work also castigates the Zionist movement for pressuring British politicians. Equally importantly, it gives nuance to the 700,000 refugees from the Nakba, the 2,000,000 Palestinians stripped of their Jordanian passports by King Hussein and King Abdullah II, and the 250,000 Palestinians expelled by Kuwait following the 1991 Gulf War.
The first Palestinian Passport holder
In 1925, Russian Jewish engineer Pinhas Rutenberg became the first person to receive a Palestinian passport. Two years later, Rutenberg (1879–1942) built the mandate’s Naharayim Power Station at the confluence of the Jordan and Yarmuk Rivers. The hydroelectric project included a train station abandoned in the 1048 War of Independence built in the Bauhaus style.
Rutenberg was also a canny businessman and political activist. He was involved in two Russian revolutions, in 1905 and 1917 when he was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks.
Freed in 1918, he travelled via Moscow, Odessa, Constantinople and Marseilles to Britain, and then on to Palestine. He was a contemporary and friends with Zeev Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor, and founded the Jewish Legion and was sent as an emissary to the United States. While in the U.S., Rutenberg completed a detailed design for harnessing Palestine’s water resources for irrigation and electrical power production.
THE KING’S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY NOW THEREFORE, HIS MAJESTY
By virtue and in exercise of the powers in his behalf by the Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1890, or otherwise, in His Majesty vested, is pleased by and with the advice of His Privy Council to order, and it is ordered as follows:
PART 1.
- (1) Turkish subjects habitually resident in the territory of Palestine upon the 1st day of August 1924 shall become Palestine citizens.
(2) Any person over eighteen years of age who by virtue of this Article becomes a Palestinian citizen may […]
(3) Any person over eighteen years of age who by virtue of clause (1) of this Article becomes a Palestinian citizen and differs in race from the majority of the population of Palestine may in the like manner and subject to the same conditions opt for the nationality of one of the States in which the majority of the population is of the same race as the person exercising the right to opt subject to the consent of that State and he shall thereupon cease to be a Palestinian citizen.
Article 21: Definitions
For the purpose of this Order:
- The expression “Palestine” includes the territories to which the mandate for Palestine applies, except such parts of the territories comprised in Palestine to the east of Jordan and the Dead Sea as were defined by Order of the High Commissioner dated the first of September 1922.
2. The expression “Palestinian citizen” means a person who is by birth or becomes by naturalisation of otherwise a Palestinian citizen
