ABSTRACT
Britain ruled Palestine from 1923 to 1948 under a League of Nations mandate. During this period, the Jewish Agency for Palestine functioned as a British-recognized representative of local Jewish interests. But the Jewish Agency was a proto-state: it developed its own security and social-welfare capacities, facilitated immigration, and worked to knit together a minority Jewish population that was geographically dispersed within the territory. The Jewish Agency's work is a token of a shift in many parts of world toward the idea that a national economy is a coherent whole behavior might be influenced by government policy. This Jewish economy then became, by a gradual metonymy, the "Economy of Palestine". Metzer describes the stakes this way: The "single economy" approach, adopted mainly by Arabs, was consistent with their political views and objectives, whereby Palestine was a single entity in which Jews, while entitled to individual rights, were by no means supposed to have any separate collective standing, let alone autonomy.
