The Meaning of the Mandate

In late October 2024, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer attended his first “Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.” At the summit, which took place in Samoa, the issue of reparations for Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade dominated many conversations. Advocates of reparations spoke powerfully about how slavery fueled the expansion of empire while devastating communities and families who were shipped halfway around the world for their labor to be exploited.

While Britain remains divided about the country’s colonial legacy, many commonwealth countries have reshaped the legacies left for them when the British departed, celebrating traditional aspects of their cultures and reclaiming pre-colonial histories. Even in places where despotic regimes have emerged from the barren political soil left by the British, there is little nostalgia for British rule across the Commonwealth and the territories formerly ruled by Britain.

There is one part of the world, however, where British rule is still an all-important part of collective memory, invoked to legitimize nationalist causes and to deny others’ claims to nationhood. That region is of course Israel-Palestine, where Britain’s rule between 1917 and 1948, first as a military occupier and then as administrator of a “Mandate” granted by the League of Nations, has had a profound impact, both on the development of the region and the fate of its inhabitants.

After wresting Palestine from its Ottoman rulers in 1917, Britain found itself in the awkward position of ruling over a land that was claimed by Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews. Zionist Jews arrived in Palestine to build a national community under British rule and protection, and increasingly agitated for an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Meanwhile, Palestinian Arabs increasingly vented their distress at a perceived British favoritism toward the new arrivals, who seemed intent on claiming a land to which Palestinian Arabs felt they had a far stronger national claim. The Mandate was terminated in late 1947, and Britain evacuated the country in May 1948.

Artifacts from the Mandate period are sometimes used by advocates of both Israel and Palestine to provide a knockout blow which demonstrates that “their side” has the most legitimate claim to nationhood today. But the Mandate — a pseudo-colonial instrument of British rule — does not offer a solid basis for national claims.

Among some Palestinians and many of their allies abroad, items from the Mandate have served as evidence of the historical continuity of a Palestinian peoplehood — something denied by many Zionists today. Two items in particular have acquired near mythical status as a tool of political legitimization, leaning on Britain’s choice of naming and its presentation of space in Palestine.

One is the British Mandate Palestine pound, which was used as currency in the area between 1927 and the early 1950s. The notes and coins are inscribed with the Arabic name for Palestine — “Filastin” — marking the coins as tangible symbols of a national identity that predated Israel’s founding as an independent nation. Replicas of these coins are mass-produced today and sold across the Occupied West Bank. I have one hanging from my key chain. Social media users have recently shared images of the currency on social media as “proof” of a long-standing Palestinian people.

Another artifact with newfound significance is the 1930s-era “Visit Palestine” posters, the most famous of which shows the Old City of Jerusalem nestled behind an olive tree in the foreground. The poster has been adopted, adapted, and reproduced for many of the same reasons — its slogan seemingly “proving” the existence of a Palestinian identity and challenging the idea that the Old City of Jerusalem should be part of the Israeli state and not a future Palestinian one. Since the Israeli invasion of Gaza began in 2023, versions of this poster have been visible at pro-Palestine marches and student encampments around the world. 

This embrace of Mandate-era items is notable, considering how often decolonization movements have rejected the artifacts of their former rulers. In many of these cases, colonial currencies have been recognized as products of coercive financial control, quickly jettisoned and forgotten after independence. These currencies, after all, helped bring colonial territories under the economic control of the metropole, and thus facilitated the enrichment of colonial powers at the expense of native populations. In Palestine, furthermore, the colonial currency was intended to convey Britain’s support for Zionism. As well as an Arabic inscription, the currency also featured the word “Palestina” in Hebrew, a Hebraicization of “Palestine” — the name by which Jews and Arabs knew the territory in the years of the Mandate. The use of Hebrew alone sparked some concern amongst Palestinian Arabs, but it was what was beside the word “Palestina” that sparked the most alarm. Two Hebrew letters, “Aleph” and “Yod,” appear in brackets next to the country name. This was the acronym for “Eretz Yisrael” — “Land of Israel,” a phrase loaded with both religious and national connotations for Zionists. 

The introduction of the currency in November 1927, replacing the use of the Egyptian Pound, was greeted with jubilation by the Jewish population as a symbolic reaffirming of Jewish rights to the territory. As one columnist for the popular Hebrew newspaper Davar noted, “I want to stand in the queue to exchange Egyptian money with Erets Yisrael money. To feel through a coin of my own, the tremor that passes through me, from head to toe, with the first touch of a coin with square letters, Hebrew letters […] Today, we have climbed one step on the ladder, and who can tell where its top will reach.”

The Arab reaction to the currency was one of suspicion and distrust. A report sent to London by a British currency officer noted that Palestinians were widely unhappy with it. As the prominent Palestinian newspaper Filastin noted of the new currency, the British government “makes for us whatever clothes it likes, and we have to wear them, whether it suits us or not.” The Arabic calligraphy bearing the “Filastin” inscription was seen as sloppy, and as such, an insult to the Arabs of Palestine.

Similarly, the story of the “Visit Palestine” posters is much more complex and multifaceted than its recent invocations would suggest. Originally designed by Israeli graphic artist Franz Krausz in 1936, the posters were commissioned by the Tourist Development Association of Palestine, which sought to attract the Jewish diaspora to visit, and ultimately settle, in Palestine. They were essentially Zionist propaganda aimed at encouraging “Aliyah,” or “ascension” as Jewish immigration into the country is termed. Forgotten within a few years of its inception, the image reappeared in 1995 when the Israeli artist, designer, and peace activist David Tartakover reprinted a limited run of the posters in a gesture of hope after the Oslo peace accords. The posters quickly became a hit, and reproductions cropped up across the West Bank, including in the offices of the Palestinian Authority.

Material culture is often reinterpreted, coopted, and adapted for new purposes, subverting its original intentions either consciously or unconsciously. This has happened in many formerly colonized countries, as communities seek to reclaim their past and forge their futures. Uniforms have been repurposed for national police forces and militaries, government buildings adopted for new national institutions, and colonial modes of art and architecture adapted to suit the needs and tastes of independent nations. This is partly what is happening in the case of material culture from the Mandate period. Palestinian artist and designer Amer Shomali, who would rework the “Visit Palestine” poster in 2009, has stated that, in using the poster in its original form, “the Palestinians, in effect, are taking advantage of the ironies embodied in the provenance of ‘Visit Palestine’ to thumb their noses at the Israeli government that for decades claimed there had never been such a place.”

Israelis, living in a state that makes a Jewish claim to the land with all the legal, military, and security paraphernalia of a nation state, have less need for material culture that proves their nationhood. And yet an obsession with declarations, statements, and resolutions from the period betrays a certain insecurity about the legal basis for their claim. We can see this in the frequent invocation by Israelis of British political elites from over a century ago who recognized a Jewish state — a recognition that they did not extend to Palestinian Arabs. 

Many well-written academic punches have been thrown in arguments about the 1917 Balfour Declaration (named after Lord Balfour, British Foreign Secretary), its wording, meaning, and purpose. The motivations behind the Declaration’s public promise that British authorities would — in the words of the document itself — “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement” of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine have been much discussed. The (often bad-tempered) debate is hardly surprising, given the array of different motivations among the creators of the Declaration and their changing recollections and justifications in the years that followed. 

Yet today, the declaration is treated by many Israelis with near hallowed respect. At a 2017 event held in London to commemorate the centenary of the declaration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “it was the Balfour Declaration that galvanized international support for Zionism as never before, and paved the path for Zionism’s entry on the world stage.” Although this is a somewhat questionable historical analysis (even British political elites and administrators were split in their support for Palestine, and many in Britain and abroad still viewed Zionism as a mere pipe dream), it exemplifies the reverence held for a text which managed in just 67 words to be as evasive as it was short, pledging imprecise support for a Jewish “national homeland” — a term with no legal definition — and stopping well short of a pledge to support Jewish statehood. While this evasiveness is exactly what the British intended in 1917, Netanyahu’s misreading of the document gives it the air of a covenant between Israel and the international community.

And yet Balfour had little interest in Zionism as anything more than a useful tool for achieving certain goals in the war — namely galvanizing support for Britain’s war effort in America and Russia. As the British Foreign Secretary put it in late October 1917, “from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made. […] If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.” Such words, forged in the fire of wartime necessity, offer little comfort to those looking for a document signaling British support for Zionist goals in Palestine.

For those for who seek wider international support for Zionist aims in Palestine and the exclusive right of Jews to the land, the San Remo Conference has also become a symbol of the legal recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine. Held in April 1920, the conference brought together the victorious European powers of World War I, as well as the Japanese, to allocate various Mandates over former Ottoman territories that were to be ruled over by Britain and France. The League of Nations acted in a supervisory and advisory role, lending British control over Palestine international acknowledgment. Crucially for Zionism, the terms of the Mandate, agreed to by Britain and recognized by the League, incorporated the Balfour Declaration’s position “in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

To some, San Remo is a legal and binding resolution granting Jews in Palestine political and national rights to the territory. In such an assessment, Zionism arrived in Palestine not as a colonizing force, but as the legally recognized owner of the land. Marking 101 years since the conference in 2021, Israel Hayom — Israel’s most-read newspaper — asked Israel’s political parties to contribute to a piece on the legacy of San Remo. Yesh Atid, then the largest opposition party in Israel, declared that “legal recognition of Israel was born in the Balfour Declaration, but the San Remo Conference was the stamp on the passport. […] There was undisputed international recognition here.” Thus, the argument went, the right of the Jewish people to Israel is “ours by virtue of the law.” Meanwhile, the Israeli Labour party noted that San Remo marked “more than 100 years of international recognition of the Land of Israel as a home for the Jewish people.” The Religious-Zionist party, a key element of the Israeli coalition government under Netanyahu at the time, declared that “national-political ownership of the Land of Israel was granted exclusively to Jews” by the San Remo Conference, and “the rest of the country’s residents” received no such rights. As a result, “in terms of international law, […] Jews have the right to establish a state in the Land of Israel and settle in all its territories.” In this analysis, not only is Israel’s right to its territory recognized, but so is Jewish settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories today. Palestinian Arabs, meanwhile, are downgraded to merely the descendants of the country’s “residents” who have no legal claim to the land.

The language of international law runs just as strongly through many other accounts of San Remo, all of which seek to locate the validity of Jewish-Israeli statehood in the decisions of a handful of European colonial powers and an international body largely set up and run by many of the same imperial nations in the 1910s and 1920s. Beyond the moral dubiousness of using the pledges of imperialist powers to assert Israel’s legal right to the territory, the legal validity of the San Remo Conference has been hotly contested over the years. Claiming international legal support for Israel based on San Remo seems to be reading history backward, given that the parties involved in 1920 did not articulate a vision for an independent Jewish nation in Palestine. Instead, the Mandates were designed as a tool. They offered a thin veneer of seeming progressiveness in their promise of support and tutelage for the native population over what was a colonial enterprise — dividing up the spoils of war amongst the European empires — in the face of half-hearted American protests about British and French imperialism. Britain had no plans on Palestine being anything other than British in 1920.

The use of Mandate-era material culture and documents by both Israelis and Palestinians distracts from what these things actually stand for: British efforts over a century ago to advance and secure its place in the Middle East as a colonial power. A deep irony is that while both sides turn to this history to support their respective claims to the territory, the British public has largely forgotten about its country’s historical role in Palestine. While the debate over the legacy of colonialism rumbles on in Britain, few today remember that one of the world’s most complex and divisive geopolitical issues of the 20th and 21st century was in part caused by British actions in the region, powered by British self-interest. 

When it comes to modern Palestine, the adaptation of Mandate-era material culture to reaffirm a tradition of peoplehood might be strengthened by new framings of pre-colonial Arab-Palestinian culture in spaces of political resistance. Amidst the destruction of the war in Gaza, and while Palestinians across the Occupied Territories face violence and dispossession, traditional crafts continue. Tatreez, the distinctive Palestinian embroidery, has been passed down through the generations, its cultural heritage recognized by UNESCO, which in 2021 placed it on the list of “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” Nablusi soap, a staple of many Palestinian homes, has persevered for over 700 years. Hebron glass meanwhile, goes back to the Roman period. These items are rooted in native histories, cultures, and identities which existed before the British arrived, and in many cases continued in their original forms long after the Mandate came to an end. They are genuine, deeply rooted, and deserving of more attention and understanding when it comes to discussing Palestine and a Palestinian identity.