Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
They illustrate their site with the first stamps used by Great Britain in Palestine after they occupied it.
So what are these stamps?
The first set of four stamps look like this:
Note that it doesn't say "Palestine" or anything close. It says "E.E.F" which stands for the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force which occupied Palestine in 1917. The E.E.F. stamps were valid in Palestine, Cilicia, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan.
Nothing "Palestinian" about them.
The other stamps are variants of this one, but with an overstrike that says "Palestine" in English and Arabic that Great Britain started in 1920 with the Mandate. In Hebrew it says "Palestina E.Y." where the "E.Y" stands for Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.
Palestinian Arabs didn't like the idea that the "E.Y." were on the stamps. They countered that they wanted their own national name on the stamps as well in Arabic if the Jews were allowed to place the "E.Y" after their name.
And the name they wanted to print was not "Palestine."
They wanted the stamps to say ""Suria El Jenobia" -Southern Syria!
This was all recorded in the Palestine Bulletin of October 13, 1925.
Israel-haters keep trying to make "Palestine" look like is was a real Arab country. And they always fail, spectacularly.
(h/t Irene)
