In 1930 the Colonial Office in London received a notice of the 'borderline case’ of a Jewish Palestinian citizen who faced the revocation of his naturalisation due to his residence outside Palestine. Certificates of naturalisation could be annulled if their holders were absent from Palestine for three years and could not offer an explanation for their residence elsewhere. In large part the Colonial and Foreign Offices followed this policy because they feared that Palestinian citizenship could be used by individuals to claim ‘un-entitled’ British imperial protection. The two offices also stressed that any citizen absent for more than three years could not possibly maintain a ‘connection’ – or indeed loyalty – to Palestine and that they thus forfeited their rights of residence, citizenship, British protection and passport facilities. Since the mid-1920s, bothoffices knew of these risks even as each continually emphasised that ‘Palestinian citizenship [carried] with it the right to British protection in foreign countries’. As to the case at hand, which had been passed to the Colonial Office for further advice, the officials who scrutinised the Jewish citizen's claims focused on the accusation that the individual retained his Palestinian citizenship simply to enjoy British protection while resident abroad. In the end, Colonial Office Under-Secretary John Shuckerberg decided that ‘it would be better, at this juncture, not to risk a further squabble with the Jewish Agency’ over the revocation of citizenship. Had his naturalisation certificate and passport been revoked, the Jewish man would likely have become stateless, and the blame for that position would have been heaped on to the Foreign Office. The individual remained a Palestine citizen despite his residence outside of the mandate's borders.

The incident was not unusual and it also represents one way in which various administrators involved in the Mandate bureaucracy applied the provisions of Palestinian citizenship differently for Jews as opposed to Arabs.