Concessions in Mandatory Palestine

The Concessions in Mandatory Palestine were a number of monopolies for the operation of key economic assets in Mandatory Palestine.^[1][2]

Front page of the Arabic newspaper Falastin on the 15th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1932. The Jordan River Concession is shown in the top left corner of the cartoon (Arabic: مشروع كهرباء روتنبرغ, romanized: Mashrue Kahraba' Rutenburgh, lit. 'Rutenberg Electricity Project'), and the Dead Sea Concession is shown in the top right.

List of Concessions

The 1938 Woodhead Commission provided a list of the concessions granted:^[3]

Bodies of water

• the Dead Sea Concession (Moshe Novomeysky's Palestine Potash Company)
• the Jordan River Concession (Pinhas Rutenberg's Palestine Electric Corporation and the First Jordan Hydro-Electric Power House)
• the Jerusalem Electric and Public Service Corporation (Euripides Mavrommatis; sold to Balfour Beatty in 1928)^[4]
• the Auja Concession (the Palestine Electric Corporation)
• the drainage of Lake Huleh and the adjacent marshes (first novated to the Syro-Ottoman Agricultural Company, then in 1934 transferred to the Palestine Land Development Company)^[5]
• the Kabbara Concession^[6]

Oil transport

• the Transit of Mineral Oils through Palestine and the Establishment of an Oil Refinery at Haifa (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) ;
• the Transit of Mineral Oils through Palestine (the Iraq Petroleum Company).

Shipping infrastructure

• Lighthouses (Administration Generale de Phares de Palestine);
• Bonded Warehouses (Levant Bonded Warehouse Company);

Spas

• the Tiberias Hot Baths (the Hamei Tiberia Company);
• El Hamma Mineral Springs (Suleiman Bey Nassif);

References

1. Dagan, Peretz (1955). Pillars of Israel economy. I. Lipschitz. p. 76.
2. Smith, Barbara J. (1 July 1993). The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920-1929. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-2578-0.
3. Woodhead Commission report sections 370-373
4. Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua (9 March 2020). The Making of Eretz Israel in the Modern Era: A Historical-Geographical Study (1799–1949). De Gruyter. pp. 365–. ISBN 978-3-11-062654-4.
5. W. P. N. Tyler. (1991). The Huleh Lands Issue in Mandatory Palestine, 1920-34. Middle Eastern Studies, 27(3), 343-373. Retrieved March 1, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4283445
6. Forman, Geremy; Kedar, Alexandre (July 2003). "Colonialism, Colonization, and Land Law in Mandate Palestine: The Zor al-Zarqa and Barrat Qisarya Land Disputes in Historical Perspective" (PDF). Theoretical Inquiries in Law. 4 (2): 490-539. doi:10.2202/1565-3404.1074. S2CID 143607114.

Bibliography

• Saʼid B. Himadeh, 1938, Economic Organization Of Palestine
• Gradus, Yehuda; Krakover, Shaul; Razin, Eran (10 April 2006). The Industrial Geography of Israel. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-97632-4.