Welcome readers to todays offering from The-Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. We have an interesting story to tell of a conundrum, for the British, and the Muslims, and the Jews. Perhaps never to be truly solved.
The stamp today is from Palestine from the period of the inter world war British mandate. During the early period of the mandate, Egyptian stamps were overprinted for use in Palestine. The mandate given the British by the League of Nations was to move the country toward independence and unique postage stamp issues are a part of that and came in 1927 with this issue. The stamp is printed in English, in Arabic, and in Hebrew. Gosh.
The stamp today is issue A4, a 13 milliemes stamp issued by Palestine on June 1st 1927. It features the Mosque of Omar, which today is probably better known as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. It was part of a 22 stamp issue put out over 15 years depicting historic local sites. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 40 cents used. A mint version would be worth $17.50.
The British came into possession of Palestine at the end of World War I with the collapse of the Ottoman Turks. The local Arabs had fought with the British under the belief that they would be granted independence. Instead there was separation from the French mandate in Syria and a great number of Jews that were emigrating back to the ancient land. At the time of the 1922 census, the Jews made up 11 percent of the population but there numbers were rising fast. The British having agreed to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
There was much distrust of the British for allowing the emigration and the mandate saw frequent riots and the Jews arming themselves in protection. In 1939, the British sought to limit the numbers of Jewish émigrés to pacify the area. This angered the Jews but they still lined up to fight the Axis with the British in far greater numbers than the Palestinian Arabs, some of which hoped for a German victory. After the war, some elements of the Armed Jewish groups attacked the British. After WWII, Britain was in no mood to keep 100,000 troops in Palestine to be attacked by both sides and petitioned the UN to end the mandate. Israel and neighboring Transjordan declared sovereignty and a war was fought with Israel the victor. There was much displacement of Arab population and Jordan offered citizenship to Arabs with Mandate papers and tried to ban the terms Palestine and Transjordan in favor of the newly declared Jordan that included the west bank of the river and the eastern part of Jerusalem. This history lead the Israelis to declare the Arabs not stateless but Jordanian.
The Mosque of Omar was completed in 691 AD. It is built on the site of an earlier temple to the Roman god Jupiter. Before that it was the site of the second Jewish Temple. It was designed by Arab architects in a style similar to the Byzantine churches of the time. It is considered especially holy in Islam as the site Mohammed ascended to Heaven. At the time of the stamp, the dome was coated in lead, not the gold leaf that was added in the 1950s when the site was under Jordanian control. The tiles that coat the outside date from Ottoman times.
Well my drink is empty and so it is time to open up the conversation in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.