Featured Egyptian souvenir.

Davey, it looks like Jerusalem to me, Gothic script, probably when it was still Palestine. Palestine also had deserts.
Looks like there is also some writing above the landscape.

 

Cigarette Dispenser I think.

 

It could dispense them by pushing down the wooden slide, but that could also damage them.

 

https://www.worthpoint.com/inventory/search?query=cigarette+dispenser+Jerusalem

 

Seems like the slide should go the other way.
Bezalel could refer to the arts academy founded in 1906.

 

Ah the wonderful uses of spit!
That also says Jerusalem, in Hebrew.

 

it looks like you pick it up , the slide falls , and then you put it down and a smoke pops up.

 

try straws...crayons....anything of similar size should work.....

it works by gravity..

 

It surely does. Was more applied rather than fine art, so they made all sorts of useful items for the home. I had never heard of them until this past year, when it came to my attention that they made some cameos & realized a tiny one of mine with Rachel was probably from there. Bezalel is a master craftsman mentioned in the Bible.

And I still can't figure out how it is meant to work!

 

Appears not to be a hot seller. Davey's slide does not provide enough of a base to make it stand like this & surely the unfinished wood was not meant to be seen all the time.

 

I'd say cigarette box too, but my first thought when I saw this was Tzedaka box, or however one transliterates it. Charity boxes for coins are made in this shape to this day, and in others too. One deposits the coins all year, from pocket change or whatever, and donates the contents to charity some time around the New Year in September. (just in case you ever find one of them instead.) This box looks like it was made for unfiltered ciggies.

 

It's missing the bottom plate. You can see the nail holes in the bottom of the slide.

 

I don't see nail holes and if anything other than a fine strip of.....whatever.. ...were added to the bottom of the plunger....it wouldn't sit flush on the top.

 

I was just starting to wonder whether, went back & saw AJ already suggested it, the slide inserts into the slot in the bottom, which looks smaller to me than the one on the top. Finished end of slide may sit flush as shown, but maybe it's not meant to sit flush.

 

It was how a cigarette would pop up that I couldn't work out. And in listings for others that use the 'slide' as a stand, couldn't figure out why the wood of the foot would be finished but not the rest of it if it was meant to show all the time.

Maybe it's what you've been trying to explain from the beginning. You load the cigarettes...no, wait, that doesn't make any sense either. Aauugghh!