In early 1925 Lord Arthur Balfour, the former British Foreign Secretary and author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, visited Palestine for the first time. For the occasion of Balfour's visit, the Palestinian Arab leadership of the Arab Executive Committee (al-lajna al-tanafīdhiyya al-'arabiyya) declared a general strike throughout Palestine and emphasised optimistically that the strike would ‘instill this patriotism to the youngest of our Palestinian Arab citizens’. The Arabic press ran several features on the visit. Referring to Balfour's planned visit to Tel Aviv the editor of Sawt al-Sha'b, a local Bethlehem politician named ‘Isa Bandak, addressed the nationality of the Jewish immigrants who settled in colonies such as Tel Aviv. He questioned whether they had ‘true’ Palestinian nationality – as he conceptualised other former Ottoman citizens who were members of the specific Arabic-speaking Ottoman community to have – or if their nationality was simply ‘on paper’ as granted by the British. Bandak's editorial raises an obvious point: he saw the immigrants as having little more than a British-imposed status that did not require the active exercise of civic loyalty to Palestine as a political entity. Yet even in the late nineteenth century Ottoman world, nationality was not truly the political or legal status that it became in the early to middle decades of the twentieth century. By the interwar period, it took on civic, cultural and political meanings complete with a new (Arabic) vocabulary of reference.

Politicians and nationalists like Bandak helped to develop the political and civic community in Palestine, and by extension advocated particular civic practices that became the source of the Arabs’ political identity in the early years of the Mandate Government. Their understandings of nationality, civic identity and citizenship are analysed in two ways here: the first, in light of the transition of Palestine's population into citizens within a new British imperial context and the accompanying expectations and idealistic visions that the Arabs imagined such imperial membership to convey. These understandings and discussions are also evaluated using the framework of the emergence of new types of spaces and institutions in Palestine, especially that of the mandate as an institution and the growthof civil society.