1 Palestine Pound

The Anglo-Palestine Bank issued this note under a peculiar legal fiction: it was a commercial bank, not a central bank, yet it functioned as the sole currency authority for the new State of Israel from May 1948 until the Bank of Israel was established in 1954. The Palestine Pound designation was retained even after the state declared independence, purely to maintain monetary continuity during a period when establishing a sovereign currency would have created immediate economic disruption.

The ABNC printing contract predated independence — plates were commissioned while the outcome of the British Mandate was still uncertain. Notes from this series circulated alongside the Israeli Pound after 1952 at a fixed parity.