Summary
Former mayor of Jerusalem who, in Banko’s account, was deported to the Seychelles in 1938 as a political prisoner and protested that his Palestine passport ‘cannot accord its bearer the element once famed [of] British justice which accorded every citizen a right to stand his trial and defend himself’ (The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, PDF p.207 / printed p.196).
Details
- In 1938, the last full year of the 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, most of Palestine’s more radical Arab leaders, including former Istiqlalists and Arab Higher Committee members, had been deported to the Seychelles and interned as political prisoners through 1939; Khalidi, a former Jerusalem mayor, began a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment and wrote to High Commissioner Harold MacMichael of his shame in ‘remember[ing] I carry a British passport’ (PDF p.207 / printed p.196).
- Deported without a trial, he petitioned MacMichael: ‘[w]e are either subjects of Your Majesty’s Government and Empire or we are not’, and if the former, ‘we are entitled to some sort of protection, and such treatment consistent with the fact that we are human beings’, such as rights of due process and return to Palestine (PDF p.207 / printed p.196).
- Banko presents his letter as an example of the complexities caused by administrative disagreements over Palestinian nationality and Britain’s role in providing documentary identity to Arab and Jewish citizens (PDF p.212 / printed p.201).
Related pages
The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, Harold MacMichael, Arab Higher Committee, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine