Railway sabotage and tourist views of Mandate Palestine

[Mandate Palestine]. Photograph album of British Mandate Palestine.

€ 2.800,00

The souvenir album of a British soldier from the final years of British Mandate Palestine, featuring views of Jerusalem and snapshots of a sabotaged train blown off its tracks, presumably one of many railway sabotages undertaken by Jewish militants affiliated with Irgun, Lehi, or Haganah. The snapshots show many of the most famous sites of Jerusalem in the midst of the daily hustle and bustle: the Wailing Wall, the city gates, famous tombs, churches, and mosques, the cliffside monastery, the river Jordan, and a handful of aerial views. One interesting aerial view is of the King David Hotel, famously bombed by Irgun in 1946, here apparently still intact.

Four photographs are devoted to a sabotaged Palestine Railways train, whose destroyed luxury passenger cars were owned by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL), a company specializing in sleeper cars and the historical operator of the Orient Express. CIWL ran part of its Taurus Express route from Istanbul to Cairo via Haifa. Other views show passenger ships and scenes of British military life in the late Mandate period.

A few hints of glue-stains to photograph margins; quite well-preserved.