Summary
‘Isa Bandak, the Bethlehem politician who edited the weekly Sawt al-Sha’b from 1922, who in Banko’s account questioned whether Jewish immigrants had ‘true’ Palestinian nationality or only a nationality ‘on paper’, and whose reactions to the 1925 Citizenship Order were the first to address the emigrants’ political status (The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, PDF p.66 / printed p.55, PDF p.91 / printed p.80).
Details
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Referring to Balfour’s planned visit to Tel Aviv in early 1925, Bandak’s editorial in Sawt al-Sha’b addressed the nationality of Jewish immigrants settled in colonies such as Tel Aviv, questioning whether they had ‘true’ Palestinian nationality — as he conceptualised other former Ottoman citizens, members of the Arabic-speaking Ottoman community, to have — or if their nationality was simply ‘on paper’ as granted by the British; he saw the immigrants as having little more than a British-imposed status that did not require active civic loyalty to Palestine as a political entity (PDF p.66 / printed p.55).
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Bandak had established and edited Sawt al-Sha’b as a weekly since 1922 and served as a popular politician in Bethlehem, where he founded the city’s Literary Club and another pan-Arab periodical (Bayt Laham); the Literary Club and the Bethlehem press under his supervision devoted attention to the Palestinian diaspora, since a large number of emigrants came from Bethlehem and its environs (PDF p.91 / printed p.80).
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In an article titled ‘The law prejudices the rights of the Arabs’ he expressed anger at the harm done by the 1925 Order to the interests of the nation, since the legislation did not grant any rights for the Arabs on the basis of Palestinian nationality, and critiqued its reason: Great Britain enacted it to facilitate Zionist immigration and meet the terms of the Balfour Declaration within the mandate (PDF p.91 / printed p.80).
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He compared the Order with United States citizenship legislation, under which immigrants had to meet several provisions including five years of permanent residence, and reported that all countries in Europe required no less than five years of residency before an immigrant could apply for citizenship; he was the first editor to accuse the administration of placing no restrictions on whether Jewish immigrants could live full- or part-time in Palestine to retain their nationality, a situation that created ‘a wide crater in the roof of Palestinian nationality’ (PDF p.91-92 / printed p.80-81).
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He concluded that a Jewish national home supported by the nationality order would obstruct Arab national control over the country’s resources, allow land to be requisitioned and deplete Arab financial wealth by taking over businesses (PDF p.92 / printed p.81).
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After publication of the provisions denying citizenship to native-born Palestinians abroad, Bandak and others poured their energy into lobbying the administration for repeal of the Order and implementation of new legislation by a national assembly (PDF p.92-93 / printed p.81-82).
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In Banko’s Chapter 4 completion, Bandak wrote in 1926 that no less than 20,000 Palestinian Arabs abroad had no one to defend their interests, set Sawt al-Sha’b’s discourse blaming Britain for deliberate discrimination in motion, solicited the largest number of diaspora letters (from El Salvador, Honduras and Brazil in 1926), and lobbied with Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Ramallah leaders for extension of the August 1926 deadline (The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, PDF p.107-108 / printed p.96-97).
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He founded the Committee for the Defence of Arab Emigrant Rights to Palestinian Citizenship (DAER) in Bethlehem in 1927 to educate Palestinian Arabs about the Order and voice the emigrants’ demands, and in 1929 wrote to High Commissioner Chancellor urging action over the ‘unjust aggression’ against approximately 2,000 Palestinian residents of El Salvador (PDF p.113-114 / printed p.102-103, PDF p.120 / printed p.109).
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Banko lists Bandak among the members of the Independence Party (Istiqlal), alongside Darwaza, Zu’aytir, Hamdi al-Husayni, Ibrahim Shanti and al-Qassam (PDF p.175 / printed p.164).
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Banko, Chapter 7: Bandak, touted as an expert on Palestinian nationality and citizenship due to his lobbyist efforts in support of all Palestinian Arabs receiving citizenship, testified before the Peel Commission in early 1937 and urged the Commission to implement the Arabs’ own suggestions in its future report on citizenship (The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, PDF p.199 / printed p.188).
Related pages
The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council 1925, Palestinian Arab diaspora, Communitarian citizenship