In 1938, the last full year of the Palestine Revolt, most of Palestine's more radical Arab leaders including former Istiqlalists and members of the Higher Arab Committee (HAC) had been deported to the Seychelles following their involvement in the general strike and revolt. Most remained interned as political prisoners through 1939. For these men, Palestinian citizenship seemed to be a meaningless status. As he began a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment, former Jerusalem mayor Husayn Khalidi wrote to High Commissioner Harold MacMichael (Arthur Wauchope's replacement) of his shame in ‘remember[ing] I carry a British passport’. That passport issued by the Palestine Administration, wrote Khalidi, ‘cannot accord its bearer the element once famed [of] British justice which accorded every citizen a right to stand his trial and defend himself’. Here, Khalidi referred to the lack of citizenship rights despite holding Palestinian citizenship – a legal status created by Great Britain – that he and many other Arabs had long envisioned would eventually confer such rights. Deported without a trial and held as a political prisoner on an island in the possession of Great Britain, Khalidi lamented to no effect in a petition to the high commissioner that ‘[w]e are either subjects of Your Majesty's Government and Empire or we are not’. If the former were true, Khalidi begged MacMichael to ‘submit that we are entitled to some sort of protection, and such treatment consistent with the fact that we are human beings’, such as rights of due process and return to Palestine. The following year, the Foreign Office reaffirmed that Palestinian nationality did not reflect nationality in an ordinary sense, nor did it confer rights. Since the start of the mandate, the Palestinian Arabs had not given up demanding that the British grant them the bundle of rights that the former assumed were natural based on their Arab membership in the historical community and nation of Palestine. Instead, because the mandate territory was not an independent nation and since the mandatory had done very little to advance self-governing institutions, Palestine's inhabitants held a specialised and apolitical form of British-protected person or protégé status.