500 Mils Provisional Issue

The Anglo-Palestine Bank note of 1948 is one of the most historically compressed pieces of paper in the entire Middle Eastern numismatic record. When the British Mandate ended in May 1948 and the newly proclaimed State of Israel had no central bank and no currency of its own, the Anglo-Palestine Bank — a commercial institution — was pressed into service as a de facto monetary authority. These provisional notes were issued as a stopgap, overprinted on existing bank stock, to fill the vacuum left by the departing British administration.

The overprint itself was applied in Tel Aviv under genuinely chaotic wartime conditions, which accounts for the variation in overprint alignment seen across surviving examples.