Pensioners, Orphans, and Widows versus Banks: Palestinian Financial History

Abstract

This essay attempts to rectify the silence about the willful expropriation, by British and Israeli forces, of private Palestinian financial assets. Placing at its core the stories of ordinary Palestinians, it explores how they were robbed of their bank accounts, bonds, stocks, pensions, salaries, and safety deposit boxes during the creation and termination of the Palestine Mandate (in both 1917 and 1948). The essay argues that the basic financial structure of colonization, which deprives the colonized of the protection of sovereign banking institutions, facilitated these thefts. It also argues that the supposedly neutral rules of finance acted as a fig leaf to such dispossessions. Based on archival research and oral histories, it presents a new social history of finance that centers the experiences and subjectivities of non-elite Palestinians who strove to defend themselves and assert their rights, individually and collectively, during pivotal moments of violent upheaval and rupture.

Keywords:

• Palestine Mandate
• bank accounts
• bonds
• pensions
• expropriation
• dispossession
• finance
• 1948

Notes

1 Judgment and appeals, Haifa District Court, Clement Menni v. Ottoman Bank, February 1936, 248/11-P, Israeli State Archives (ISA), Jerusalem; and Anis Mansour v. Ottoman Bank, April 1936, 223/11-P, ISA.

2 Letter from Munawwar and Muhammad to High Commissioner, Government of Palestine, 25 April 1940, 296/25-M, ISA.

3 Letter from Khabbazeh and Owaida to David Ben Gurion, Prime Minister, Government of Israel, 2 November 1948, 17039/22-GL, ISA.

4 Letter from Committee of Palestine Bond Holders in Lebanon to King of Great Britain, 28 June 1951, FO 371/91391, British National Archives (BNA), London.

5 Barakat v. Barclays, Civil Case No. 123/52 and Jabaji v. Ottoman Bank, Civil Case No. 248/1952, private archives of the A. F. and R. Shehadeh Law Firm (both translated from Arabic by the author).

6 Letter from Committee of Palestine Bond Holders, FO 371/91391, BNA.

7 The widow and the doctor from Jaffa did, however, eventually, manage to unfreeze their accounts. But that is a story for another day.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sreemati Mitter

Sreemati Mitter is the Kutayba al-Ghanim Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Her work examines the economic and financial dimensions of statelessness.