A History of Money in Palestine: The Case of the Frozen Bank Accounts of 1948

About

On June 20, 1948, a month after the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine, the new government of the new state of Israel ordered all the commercial banks operating within its territory to freeze the accounts of all their Arab Palestinian customers and to stop all transactions on all Arab accounts. The Israeli government gave the banks one month to comply with this order and threatened to revoke the banking licenses of all banks found to be in non-compliance with it. By December 1948, every bank operating in Israel had complied with the order, and thus, just six months after the creation of the state of Israel, all Arab Palestinian refugees, who were already homeless and scattered in refugee camps throughout the Arab world, had lost access to the money and financial assets which they had deposited for safekeeping in their bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes.

This seminar will discuss this episode in Palestinian history, which has never before been written about, and use it as a prism through which to explore how the fact of statelessness, which is generally thought of as political condition, directly affects the economic and monetary lives of ordinary people.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.