A dangerous legacy: Welfare in British Palestine, 1930–1939

Simoni, Marcella

doi:10.1007/bf02336582

Cited by 20 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…However, mounting evidence from later years shows that, with economic and political changes in Palestine, these assumptions (made mostly by Westerners) gradually lost their relevance, and many Arab families and patients sought professional treatment for mental illness. The trend towards urbanization in Palestine and the financial crisis in the 1930s as the shock wave from the world financial collapse reached the country (Simoni, 1999) were catalysts in the diminishing role of the family as the focus for treatment of the mentally ill.…”

Section: Mental Health Facilities Before 1948mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both Wilson (2019a) and Simoni (1999) contend that the segregation of the patient populations in government hospitals was almost completed by the end of the Mandate. Wilson writes that there were only 10 Arab patients (out of 175 beds) in Jaffa by 1946, and in Bethlehem the proportions were reversed.…”

Section: Mental Health Facilities Before 1948mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The numbers of patients waiting to be admitted during those years shed some light on the seriousness of the bed shortage, as well as on the ethnic ratio of patients in government hospitals. The records show that, despite the opening of the second hospital in Bethlehem with 50 beds only two years earlier, in 1934 there were 88 Arabs and 67 Jews awaiting admission (Simoni, 1999).…”

Section: Mental Health Facilities Before 1948mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wilson writes that there were only 10 Arab patients (out of 175 beds) in Jaffa by 1946, and in Bethlehem the proportions were reversed. Simoni (1999: 96) set the number of Jewish patients in Bethlehem in 1940 at 5 compared with 68 in 1931. However, the data we present, which are based on previously unpublished documents from the Israeli State Archive (ISA), show that the number of Jewish patients in Bethlehem was in fact much higher.…”

Section: Mental Health Facilities Before 1948mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Patients behind the front lines: the exchange of mentally-ill patients in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War

et al. 2020

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The British Mandate in Palestine ended abruptly in 1948. The British departure engendered a complex situation which affected all areas of life, and the country’s health system was no exception. Gradual transition of the infrastructure was almost impossible owing to the ineffectiveness of the committee appointed by the United Nations. The situation was further complicated by the outbreak of the Arab–Israeli War. We relate for the first time the story of 75 Jewish patients who were left in a former British mental hospital in Bethlehem – deep behind the front lines. Despite the hostilities, there were complex negotiations about relocating those patients. This episode sheds light on the Jewish and Arab relationship as it pertained to mental institutions during and immediately after the British Mandate.

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Section: Mental Health Facilities Before 1948mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mental Health Facilities Before 1948mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mental Health Facilities Before 1948mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mental Health Facilities Before 1948mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Patients behind the front lines: the exchange of mentally-ill patients in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War

et al. 2020

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“…The existing literature on the management of mental illness in mandate Palestine has tended to approach this period as the story of the struggle of European Jewish psychiatrists to establish private institutions, set up professional associations, and ultimately lay down the foundations of the Israeli mental health system (Zalashik 2012). Insofar as this literature has considered the mandatory government, it has generally been in order to paint a picture of increasing separation and distinction between Arabs and Jews even in the fields of health and welfare across the mandate period, with the former served by an underfunded government system, and the latter by innovative private institutions (Simoni 1999). Certainly private Jewish institutions were important.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Incarcerating the insane: debating responsibility for criminal lunatics between prisons, hospitals, and families in British mandate Palestine

Wilson

2019

Contemporary Levant

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Although much has been written about counterinsurgency, policing, and incarceration under the British mandate in Palestine, little work has been done on those who entered the ambit of the carceral system as 'criminal lunatics'. Criminal lunaticsthe term used at the time to specifically designate those found 'guilty but insane' by the mandate's criminal courts, and retained throughout this article both for the sake of analytic clarity and to avoid misdiagnosing individuals by the retrospective imposition of contemporary medical termsconfounded the mandatory government by potentially falling under the responsibility of both its criminal-legal and medical wings. While the focus in the wider scholarship on psychiatry has often been on its expansionist appetites, the struggle over responsibility for criminal lunatics in mandate Palestine offers a case study in the reverse; an attempt to abdicate, not aggrandise, as the health department staved off repeated efforts to make them take responsibility for these cases. This article traces these disputes, and the development of a distinct institutional landscape attendant on their outcome. But the fate of criminal lunatics was not merely determined by debates internal to government; families were important interlocutors too, who variously sought the release of their incarcerated mentally ill relatives, ormore worryingly for the mandateexploited the criminal-legal system as a back-door to the overcrowded and underfunded government mental institutions. Far from seeing psychiatry as a tool of social control, the government expressed concern about the potential misuse of psychiatric ideas, processes, and institutions by Palestinian families as a way to escape obligations to mentally ill relatives. Foregrounding these fraught contestations brings into focus the sharp limits of the mandate's ambitions in the sphere of the intimate, and the attempts of some Palestinians to expand those limits for their own ends.

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Unknowable Social Problems or Competing Regimes of Truth? Surveying Alcohol in Mandatory Palestine and Syria-Lebanon (1918–1948)

Bourmaud

2021

Alcohol in the Maghreb and the Middle East Since the Nineteenth Century

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A dangerous legacy: Welfare in British Palestine, 1930–1939

Cited by 20 publications

References 1 publication

Patients behind the front lines: the exchange of mentally-ill patients in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War

Patients behind the front lines: the exchange of mentally-ill patients in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War

Incarcerating the insane: debating responsibility for criminal lunatics between prisons, hospitals, and families in British mandate Palestine

Unknowable Social Problems or Competing Regimes of Truth? Surveying Alcohol in Mandatory Palestine and Syria-Lebanon (1918–1948)

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