In August of 1929, shortly after the end of the outbreak of violence that had flared up over access to the Wailing Wall (or Western Wall) in Jerusalem, one Arabic press editorial concluded that the riots stemmed from the Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council issued four years prior, in 1925. That citizenship order-in-council, the author of the editorial wrote, supported not only Jewish immigration in large numbers into the territory but it did not foster any sense of loyalty between newly created Jewish Palestinian citizens and the Palestine Mandate Government. He described many of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine as English, Italian or French and argued that they remained English, Italian or French after their arrival. Not only did they fail to truly integrate into local society, they did not immediately naturalise as Palestinian citizens. This, the writer claimed, was contrary to the post-war principle of nationality. Within Palestine, the journalist added, their lack of naturalisation created an impossible situation wherein Jewish residents would not be solely loyal to the Government of Palestine; rather, they were loyal to what the government termed their ‘country of origin’ despite habitual residence within the territory of the mandate. In the journalist's opinion, the problem with this was that such Jews who did not take Palestinian citizenship could individually and collectively influence the governments and other residents of their home countries with respect to policy towards Palestine. In the wake of the 1929 riots such an accusitive type of news editorial was not unusual: in the previous three years, a generous amount of page-space in the Arabic press had been given over to opinion pieces, editorials and letters related to the 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council and what most of their authors felt to be its detrimental effects upon the Arab emigrant population. The order itself, according to press reports, served only the Jewish immigrants since it offered European Jews almost unfettered access to naturalisation and citizenship while at the same time it denied ipso facto citizenship to Palestinian Arabs who happened to reside, even temporarily, outside of the borders of the mandate.

In studies of Palestine under the mandate the term ‘citizenship’ has been used as if it was an accepted and uncontested reality for the population of Palestine from the earliest years of the British Administration.