Illicit Border-Crossings in Mandate Palestine: Undermining and Transforming Categories of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality through Subversive Movement

The decades from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century represents an era of rapid transformations in mobility. Middle Eastern migrants, displaced persons, and travelers could manipulate, subvert, transgress, and self-suppress the new national or ethnic identities that both nation-states and colonial powers ascribed to them. With the imposition of the Mandate system in the Arab provinces of the former Ottoman Empire, the British and French mandatory powers established a documentary regime alongside new frontiers, borders, and citizenships. Linked to the new documentary regime and its system of passports, visas, border and immigration control officers, frontier posts, and deportation measures, subversion of identity became a pressing issue for each mandate, and especially for Palestine. This paper demonstrates that illicit movements, transgressions, and subversions by temporary and permanent inhabitants of Palestine became predicated upon the ways in which borders became fixed and unfixed. Imperial institutions used nationality and citizenship as tools to control borders, frontiers, and the movement of its Arab and Jewish populations often assisted the illicit movements and subversions of identity by both migrants and residents.

The paper shows that despite attempts by the Palestine Mandate administration to exert control over its new borders and to institute residency and immigration restrictions based on race, ethnicity, and nationality, borders and frontiers remained open spaces for subversion. Palestine as a case study allows for an analysis of the ways post-Ottoman borders in the Arab Levant shaped, and were shaped by, relations of power and patterns of mobility between frontier guards, smugglers, and clandestine migrants. The paper chronicles efforts made by these three groups to undermine the documentary and frontier regime in Palestine through various re-interpretations of race, national identity, and citizenship.