Mandatory Madness closes with an epilogue, focussed squarely on 1948, which marked the end of the British mandate, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the Palestinian nakba or catastrophe. By reconstructing a series of psychiatric encounters, which attended the end of the mandate period, the epilogue draws out the profound and violent rupture of this moment, as well as the longer processes of partition, erasure, and pathologisation which surrounded it. While the epilogue traces some of these processes into the post-1948 period, it ultimately concludes that this rupture radically diminishes the possibilities for continuing any unitary, entangled history of psychiatry within the territory of what had once been mandate Palestine.

The debates of the UN Security Council in the weeks of May and June 1948 illustrated the strong support given to the new state of Israel by the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Ukrainian SSR, a support that was more emphatic than that offered by the United States. American and British truce resolutions tended to push back Israeli advances and diminish Arab defeats. The chapter documents this contrast in the UN statements of Andrei Gromyko (USSR), Vasyl Tarasenko (Ukrainian SSR), Warren Austin (USA), Moshe Shertok and Abba Eban (Israel), and representatives of the Arab Higher Committee and Syria. While Florimond Bonté, a leader of the French Communist Party, extolled Israel’s cause in the French National Assembly, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff continued to associate the new state of Israel with Soviet expansion, and damage to American strategic interests in the Middle East.

Chapter 4 analyzes abortive attempts to create a national Jewish system of law at the founding of the state. Under the circumstances of the 1948 Jewish-Arab War, the advocates of Hebrew law realized that it would not be possible to institute a comprehensive legal system based on Jewish-Hebrew foundations. Three options thus remained on the table. The first was to legislate as many laws based on Jewish-Hebrew law as possible, or at least to add Jewish-Hebrew chapters or sections to existing laws. The second was to insert into the new country’s declaration of independence or constitution, when they were drafted, a general declaration that Jewish-Hebrew law would be a principal source of legislation for the new country. The third was to have Hebrew law serve as the country’s residual law, meaning that it would apply in cases where there was a legal lacuna. Eventually the young state did not adopt any of these options choosing, at its founding, to circumvent the dispute that would be involved in grounding Jewish-Israeli identity in law.