British military rule in Palestine bans hashish

Soon after taking Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, the British military government told the public that it would henceforth be “an offence to cultivate, export, introduce, buy, sell, offer for sale or be in possession of hashish”. It is the first known anti-hashish rule in Palestine. The historian Haggai Ram shows that it, and the laws that followed, mattered less for what they stopped than for what they created: a smuggling route.

A corridor to Egypt

Hashish had been banned in Egypt, the largest market in the region, for decades. Most of it had once come from Greece; after the First World War the route shifted to the Levant. Syria and Lebanon grew and pressed it, Egypt bought it, and Palestine lay between them. When the old region of Greater Syria was cut into British and French mandates, Ram writes, commerce became smuggling: borders appeared where traders had once moved freely.

Year	Rule
1919	Military government warning: growing, trading and possessing hashish become offences
1925	Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, modelled on Britain’s Dangerous Drugs Acts, outlaws the manufacture, import, export and possession of Indian hemp
1928, 1932	Amendments raising penalties for traffickers, on the League of Nations’ advice
1936	New ordinance: transit through Palestine an offence; premises for smoking and pipes punished

A dead letter

Ram calls the ordinances a dead letter. The British in Palestine had neither the means, the money nor the will to enforce them. A 1934 League of Nations memorandum described armed smugglers who fired without hesitation, a long land frontier, many miles of coast and ingenious hiding places. Hashish was dumped near the southern border to wait for a chance to cross the Sinai. The governor of Sinai from 1923 to 1936, Claude Jarvis, compared stopping it to damming a stream with a clay barrier. For the police, short of men, often demoralised and facing other priorities, drug control was mostly a burden.

By the mid-1940s Palestinian Arabs were growing cannabis themselves on small plots, mainly around Jenin and Tulkarm, to cut out middlemen. A Palestinian who wrote to the high commissioner about a Jenin resident’s cannabis field complained that lower officials had ignored him.

From Mandate to State

The 1936 ordinance outlived the Mandate. Israel kept it after 1948 and re-enacted it in 1973. The smuggling networks survived too: Ram argues that Israel remained dependent on hashish crossing the region’s new borders.^[1]