More on water by-laws in Mandate Palestine

I recently posted a piece on H-Empire, based on my article, "Horizontal and vertical influences in colonial legal transplantation: water by-laws in British Palestine" (open access) (see also my recent post on this blog). An excerpt:

Zoltan Kluger, Dizengoff Square Circle in Tel Aviv, 1938 (National Photo Collection)

I ask two questions about the local bylaws enacted in the Mandate period (mainly in the last decade and a half of British rule, which ended in 1948) in the field of water supply and sewage (I'm working on a wider project on this history of water law in Mandate Palestine): Did the initiative for these bylaws, as well as the legal norms and language embodied in them, come from the residents of Palestine and their elected local governments or was it primarily the result pressure applied by the British rulers? And did legal influence cross communal boundaries, between Jewish and Arab local authorities, or did Arab towns tend to copy from other Arab towns, and Jewish from Jewish? The first question I conceptualize as one of "vertical" influence; the second as "horizontal".

As one might expect, the answers to these questions turn out to be less than straightforward, as a few examples will make clear. The first water supply bylaws in the country, based on provisions taken from Nigerian law, were passed in the south of the country in the late 1930s. Gaza submitted its bylaws first for the approval of the central government, followed by nearby Khan Yunis and Beersheba (both based on the Gaza text), and then Majdal, Ramle, and Lydda. All were Arab towns, and all were located in the Southern District of the country, which meant they were all under the supervision of the same (British) District Commissioner. The Nigerian source and the fact that all six towns were in one administrative district are a sure indication of the centrality of one or more British officials in the local legislative process. Nonetheless, signs of local autonomy are evident as well, as in the insistence of Khan Yunis on charging a high water rate on government buildings, over central government objections.

Following on the heels of this burst of local legislation, the Jewish settlement of Petah Tiqva, near Tel Aviv, sought legal authority to deny water to defaulting consumers. The town's legal counsel suggested enacting water bylaws, and pointed to the recently enacted Majdal laws as a framework for the Petah Tiqva legislation. Interestingly, when forwarding the bylaws to the central government for approval, the Jewish town invoked not the Majdal bylaws as its model but the identical ones of nearby Lydda. The likely reason was that the Southern District had recently been split in two, with Majdal now part of the new Gaza District and Lydda and Petah Tiqva grouped together in the Lydda District. So alongside legal ideas and language crossing communal boundaries, from Arab local governments to Jewish, the influence of British administrative divisions on the course of events is again evident. In the following years, though, communal affiliation once again came to the fore, with several Jewish towns basing their bylaws on those of Petah Tiqva, and many Arab towns basing theirs on Lydda's. But there were exceptions: Arab Ramle based its 1944 bylaws on those of the nearby Jewish town Benei Beraq, while several Jewish towns in the center of the country based their bylaws on those of Arab Jenin.