PINING FOR THE MANDATE | February 2nd 2008

Ahron de Leeuw/Flickr

Adam LeBor travels to Israel for a festival of films from the Mandate era. After witnessing grainy footage of barking British officers and squabbling Palestinians and Jews, he is surprised to learn of nostalgia for the days of empire ...

Capturing a city in the Middle East was so much easier a century ago. Back in 1917, General Allenby, commander of British forces in Palestine, simply walked into Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate. His brisk entrance and respectful reception by the city's notables was recorded for posterity on silent black-and-white film. In today's information age of sound bites, high-speed downloads and instant internet access, such footage seems merely a quaint relic of a bygone era. But its very silence, in a Zen-like way, demands the viewer's full attention. And that brings its own rewards, I discovered on a recent trip to Israel.

To mark the 60th anniversary this May of the founding of the Jewish state, the British Council organised a cinema road show of films from the Mandate period. The reel of General Allenby was followed by some evocative footage of Australian troops riding their horses into Jaffa just minutes after the city's capture. There is no shooting or dodging between buildings. The Aussies ride through Clock Tower square as smiling and relaxed as if they were going to a barbecue. The square looked little different then: the magnificent Clock Tower in the centre flanked by two rows of low shops. Each viewing of the films reveals new details: the delight on the faces of the Arab boys in Jaffa as they spot the cameraman; a forgotten Ottoman flag in a doorway in Jerusalem as General Allenby walks past; the sinewy, fluid motions of the Jaffa fisherman unloading cargo from their tiny boats as the waves buffet them up and down.

The archive films were curated by the London artist Judy Price, and the films were followed by a panel discussion after each showing, with myself, James Barker from the Imperial War Museum and a rolling cast of Israeli television journalists and academics. All of the films were engrossing, both visually and for what they told us of contemporaneous attitudes. The women and children repairing the road to Jericho in one short did not look very pleased: British officers in crisp uniforms strode about, barking instructions and waving their swagger sticks at the poor fellaheen (peasants) as they sorted through piles of stones. In fact the Palestinians barely featured at all in any of the films, other than as exotic and backward farmers, tilling the soil with wooden ploughs that, the plummy narrators' tones told us, had barely changed since the days when the ancient Israelites had worked this same land. Edward Said would have had a field day.

But as the organisers pointed out, the festival's aim was to show Palestine as it was seen then by Britain, and not through today's multi-cultural perspectives. The relationship between Britain and Palestine was always tangled. The Balfour declaration of 1917 promised Palestine as a "National Home" for the Jews, which the Zionists interpreted as meaning a Jewish state. The indigenous Arabs thought differently and demanded an independent Palestine. By the second half of the 1940s a three-way war was raging, with Britain stuck in the middle and increasingly anxious to be rid of Palestine. The film "Palestine: this Modern Age" was a remarkable documentary that carefully showed both sides of the conflict, using modern cinematic techniques that  anticipated today's current-affairs programmes. By the end, the narrator is virtually demanding that the United Nations take charge of the problem.

Much British blood was shed in Palestine as the Jewish Irgun and the Stern Group unleashed waves of bombings and shootings on the army, police and Mandate officials. Yet still a kind of Anglo-nostalgia lingers among many older Jewish Israelis. The Mandate helped shape Israel as it is today, right down to the red post boxes that can still be seen on Israeli streets, and the number 144 that Israelis still dial for directory enquires, long out of use in Britain. Allenby has several streets named for him, and a bridge across the Jordan. There is even a theory, suggested by one man in the audience (with his tongue only slightly in his cheek), that the Mandate administration was the ultimate Jewish mother. Britain encouraged and nurtured the nascent institutions of the Israeli state-to-be, wielding a firm hand when necessary but allowing them space to grow.

Certainly in Jerusalem especially, many viewers seemed positively nostalgic for the days of empire: a recruitment film for the Palestine police, which made battling terrorists and insurgents seem terrific fun, triggered a spontaneous burst of applause afterwards. One Jerusalemite waxed lyrical about his childhood memories of Scottish troops on parade, and the sound of the bagpipes.

Still, Britain eventually tired of her squabbling charges and departed in a huff in May 1948. The special relationship lives on in the person of Tony Blair, the former prime minister, now Middle East envoy for the quartet--of the US, the UN, Russia and the EU. Unlike General Allenby, he cannot go for a walk about in the Old City of Jerusalem without serious protection. Empires rise and empires fall, but the attempts to bring peace to Israel and Palestine are set to continue for a long while yet.

(Adam LeBor is a journalist and author of "City of Oranges: An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa".)