Postcards of Palestine

Abstract

'(The visitor) ... may find amoung the beduin of Beersheba precisely the conditions that prevailed in the time of Abraham; at Bethlehem he may see the women's costumes, and, in some respects, the mode of living of the period of the Crusades; the Arab villages are, for the most part, still under mediaeval conditions; the towns present many of the problems of the early nineteenth century; while the new arrivals from Eastern and Central Europe, and from America, bring with them the activities of the twentieth century, and sometimes, perhaps, the ideas of the twenty-first.' (Sir Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner of Palestine during the British Mandate; in: Luke and Keith-Roach 1922: xi).