In this text, Hicham Safieddine traces the colonial history of money in Palestine, showing how imperial and Zionist financial systems erased native sovereignty through currency design, banking control, and asset expropriation. From Britain’s monetary partition of Greater Syria to Israel’s shekelization of the Palestinian economy, he exposes how finance served as a tool of conquest, settler identity formation, and economic domination, used to better erase Palestine both symbolically and materially.
The Two Pounds of Palestine ///
The currency conquest of Palestine began with Britain’s decree to imprison anyone who used Ottoman paper money following the Allied occupation of Greater Syria (aka Bilad al-Sham, essentially what we otherwise designate as “the Levant”) in 1918. Soon afterwards, Syria’s monetary space was drawn along the lines of imperialist interests, but not without resistance. The newly formed Arab government in Damascus commissioned the design and issuance of a Syrian dinar. In line with the wishes of the Arab population of Bilad al-Sham, as evidenced by the findings of the King Crane Commission, the Arab state was expected to include all of Greater Syria, including Palestine. The dinar was effectively Palestine’s first native money in the post-Ottoman era. While the coin combined symbols of monarchical rule and Arabic calligraphy, the paper banknote version depicted verdant pastures, native trees, and the sketch of a mosque.
These visual symbols embodied the natural and cultural landscape of the region in ways that were never to be seen in subsequent renditions of local currencies by colonial powers.
The Arab government was short-lived and the dinar never went into proper circulation. French forces based in Beirut refused to recognize the government and currency alike: they invaded Damascus. The vision of a single Arab monetary space encompassing all of Bilad al-Sham was replaced by the reality of colonial financial partition. In French territories (namely Syria and Lebanon), the dinar was replaced by a Syrian lira, or pound, issued by the Bank of Syria and Lebanon, a privately-owned and Anglo-French operated enterprise. Banknotes issued in this period testify to the hybrid nature of colonial rule. Visual renderings of pre-Islamic and pre-Arab past, notably Roman or Phoenician monuments, replaced natural habitats and cultural landscapes in harmony with the local popular or elitist social imagination. The note’s numerical value was printed in both languages, Arabic and French.