In October 1922, just two years after the establishment of the mandates system by the League of Nations, the Arab members of the Palestine Mandate's administrative advisory committee met High Commissioner Herbert Samuel in Jerusalem to read through the draft of a law to regulate Palestinian nationality. Nationality did not yet exist as a legal status within the territory ceded to Great Britain's administrative control as a mandate, nor as an internationally recognised identity. By that point Palestine's first attorneygeneral, an Englishman named Norman Bentwich, wrote a large portion of the draft legislation and submitted drafts to the Colonial Office for approval. Prior to the First World War, Bentwich served as a barrister in England but he had no specialisations in nationality law. None of the officials in the Palestine Administration, whom historian Michael Cohen once classified as either ill-trained or not at all trained for their positions, had such a specialisation. Those seven Arabs who attended the meeting with Samuel and looked over Bentwich's proposal on Palestinian nationality belonged to prominent Palestinian families. Most of these men received a Western-style education, had some knowledge of Ottoman-era law and they all professed sympathies with the anti-Zionist Palestinian Arab nationalist movement. As the men – certainly not specialists in English law – studied the draft, they were struck by Bentwich's plan to give Jewish immigrants ‘provisional nationality’ while the Arab population in Palestine remained ‘former Ottoman subjects’ categorised as ‘ex-enemy aliens’ by Great Britain. One member of the committee, Abdul Khader al-Muzaffer, bewildered as to why the mandate's Arab-majority population was not given the same status as the new immigrants nor even that of officially recognised nationals, proclaimed ironically that ‘Palestine is a land of marvels and this new regulation [for provisional nationality] is one of them’.

The so-called provisional status held by the Jewish immigrants reinforced the identity of the Arabs as akin to ‘natives’ in colonial terminology. By 1922, as the mandatory in Palestine, Great Britain undeniably acted more as an imperial power than as a trustee and the colonial nature of its rule is evidenced by the ways in which the civil administration created and implemented nationality and citizenship as well as other pieces of legislation in cooperation with the British Colonial, Foreign, Home, and Dominions Offices, the Crown and the Zionist Organisation.