Britain in Palestine: An Exhibition and Research Project on British Rule in Palestine
The MBI Al Jaber Foundation is proud to support the 'Britain in Palestine’ exhibition that is being organized by The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum.
The project began with the conference ‘Palestine, Britain & Empire’ held in May 2007 at King’s College London. This conference was organized by The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum and generously supported by the MBI Al Jaber Foundation.
The Britain in Palestine project aims to:
- Create a permanent archive of images, film, documents and oral histories relating to the Palestine Mandate which will be accessible to the public.
- Create a well-researched, high quality exhibition on the Palestine Mandate that features material from the archive, and significant items relating to Palestine from a range of public and private holdings. This exhibition will tour Britain and the Middle East.
- Create a website that will report on the project’s progress, feature items from material collected, and in the long term provide a compilation of sources for Palestine’s history.
The MBI Foundation is currently seconding its Scholarships, Conferences and Events officers Ms. Suhad Jarrar-Browne to work on the fundraising and marketing of the project, and offering other support in-kind to the project.
The Museum has developed a significant collection of film, photographs, oral histories, documents and artefacts relating to the British Mandate for Palestine. This includes oral history interviews with members of the Palestine Police, soldiers and administrators who served in Palestine, and Palestinian Arabs and Jews with memories of British rule. The Museum also has the service records for the Palestine Police for the years 1945 to 1948.
The Museum continues to collect, through research and fieldwork in the UK and the Middle East, the historically valuable memories and personal archives that are crucial in telling the human stories of the Palestine Mandate.
The project website http://www.britaininpalestine.org.uk/ will provide updates on progress and will feature examples of material collected.
The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum is dedicated to the public examination of the 500-year history of Britain’s colonial past. It creates and supports exhibitions, educational programmes, lectures and published resources. The Museum Trust was founded in 1986 as an independent, self-financing organisation with charitable status. We opened public galleries in Bristol in 2002; since then the Museum has won many awards for its exhibition and educational programmes; the ‘Breaking the Chains’ exhibition, on the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, was a finalist for the British National Art Fund Prize 2008.
For further information please contact:
Anne Lineen, Project Director anne.lineen@empiremuseum.co.uk
British soldiers march a group of Palestinian Arabs to a detention centre for questioning, 1938. During the period of the Great Uprising (1936-39), an additional 20,000 British troops were deployed to Palestine in an attempt to clamp down on Arab resistance to British rule. BECM 2006/001/563
Spectators, including members of the Palestine Police, watch a football match at the Jaffa ground, 1940s. BECM 1998/095/011
Two members of the Transjordan Frontier Force. BECM 1998/095/059
The wreckage of the south wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which housed offices of the British administration. The bomb was planted by the extreme Zionist terror group, the Irgun, on 22 July 1946. BECM 2007/095/008
