PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 37

1.  Before May 1948, under the British mandate
the inhabitants of Palestine were “Palestinians”,
regardless of their religion. It was only after the
creation of the State of Israel that the Israeli
authorities made a distinction between Arabs
(whether Christian or Muslem) and Jews.
2. Sreemati Mitter, researcher at Brown Uni-
versity (Rhode Island, US) and author of A His-
tory of Money in Palestine: From the 1900s to the
Present, Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Uni-
versity, 2014. The author presented his work at
a conference at the Palestine Center in Wash-
ington DC on May 20, 2014, and underlined
that 60,000 account holders in these two banks
had about six million Palestinian pounds. This
balance represented more than 43% of exports
from Palestinian in 1945, equivalent to £800
million British today, a very significant sum
that belonged to depositors ‘who were neither
peasants nor the financial or political elite
(who would never have deposited their money
in a foreign bank), but were part of the middle
classes.’ Mitter’s analysis is based on the banks’
archives as well as on the Israeli and British na-
tional archives.
3.  The Custodian of Absentee Property grant-
ed itself the right to appropriate the movable
and real estate assets as well as the funds of
all those considered as “absent” for having left
their homes and property, between November
29, 1947 and September 1, 1948, and gone to
a territory outside Palestine or one occupied by
Arab military forces. In 1950, Israel passed a
law on the lands of absentees which allowed it
to confiscate the property of Palestinians and
pass it on to third parties. For Sandrine Man-
sour-Mérien, author of L’Histoire occultée des
Palestiniens, 1947–1953, Paris, Privat, 2013,
‘the notion of absentees enabled virtually
all the properties of Palestinians to be taken
over, whether they were declared refugees or
not.’ Such was also the case with Palestinian
agricultural lands which, as soon as they were
uncultivated, became Israeli state property. Ap-
proximately 93% of Palestinian land was con-
fiscated. This law created a new class of citizens:
“present absentees”, that is, persons who were
present but considered absent by law. These
Arab Israelis enjoyed full civil rights includ-
ing voting in the Knesset, but were denied one
right: to use and dispose of their property. Be-
tween 30,000 and 35,000 Palestinians became
“present absentees”.
4.  Avicenna (980–1037) was a medieval Per-
sian scientist, philosopher, writer and doctor.
5. Gish Amit, Ex-Libris: Chronicles of Theft,
Preservation, and Appropriating at the Jewish
National Library, Jérusalem, Van Leer Institute,
2014 (in Hebrew) / Ramallah, Madar, The Pal-
estinian Forum for Israeli Studies, 2015 (in Ara-
bic). The book tells the story of 30,000 books in
the Jewish National Library which come from
the looting of the libraries of Palestinian fam-
ilies that had to flee in 1948. See the interview
of Gish Amit on the site allegralaboratory.net:
“We cannot give up hope”, November 2, 2015.
6.  Because Fuad had lived in East Jerusalem
which, between 1948 and 1967 was part of Jor-
dan, he could come and go to the West Bank,
unlike the Palestinians who until 1948 had
lived on land on which Israel was created, and
who had had to flee leaving everything behind.
The right of return for Palestinians who fled in
1948 has been confirmed by several UN reso-
lutions, including Resolution 194 (III) in 1948,
and it is part of the prerequisites for peace with
Israel. Israel is completely opposed to this for
demographic reasons. The PLO demands that
this principle be respected.
7. Aziz was known for having founded an
“Arab Congress for Palestinian Refugees” in
the 1950s. Between 1948 and 1967 he had
militated for the creation of two states, Pales-
tine and Israel. This compromise was seen as
inadmissible at the time both by Jordan and
the PLO (although the PLO would endorse it
later). Aziz died on December 1, 1985, stabbed
to death in his house in Ramallah.
8. The unification of Transjordan with the
West Bank under the Hashemite crown.
9. See Véronique Bontemps, “Entre Cis-
jordanie et Jordanie, l’épreuve du passage fron-
talier au pont Allenby”, Revue européenne des
migrations internationales, vol. 30, n° 2, 2014,
pp. 69–90. Today, the road trip can take six to
seven hours because of the border controls and
checkpoints. For those Palestinians who are al-
lowed to travel from Jerusalem or Ramallah to
Amman, because they hold a foreign passport
or the green identity card (issued by the Pales-
tinian Authority since 1994), this trip generally
takes longer than for citizens of any other state.
10. Between May 15 and June 11, 1948, the
Arab forces confronted the Israeli forces. The
two camps accepted the one-month truce asked
for by the UN negotiator and signed on June 11.
11. These letters are kept in the banks’ ar-
chives; S. Mitter has studied them closely.
12. The West Bank had been part of Jordan
since 1950.
13.  Al Jihad became one of the most famous
newspapers in the West Bank and Gaza, and
more generally in Jordan, until 1967, when it
changed its name to Al Quds.
14.  Israeli laws were translated into Arabic and
English.
15.  In 1902, members of the Zionist movement
had founded in London the Anglo-Palestine
Company (precursor of Leumi) to provide a
financial instrument for Jewish immigrants in
Palestine and to foster industry, construction
and agriculture there in order to lay the founda-
tions of the future Jewish state. In 1971, Leumi
acquired the Arab Israel Bank (AI Bank), whose
clients were mainly Israeli Arabs from the
northern region. In 1983, it was nationalized.
16.  The Israel Discount Bank, known as Eretz Is-
rael Discount Bank or Palestine Discount Bank,
was founded in 1935 by a Greek immigrant.
Fuad
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