There were Jewish and Palestinian leftists who sought to take an opposite tack, long before the rise of Hamas and even the PLO, but they apparently didn't get very far.
<blockquote>The Arab left's insistence on both the possibility and the necessity of Arab-Jewish solidarity and cooperation, especially among workers, and its criticism of the strategic and tactical errors of the Arab nationalist leadership and its unrepresentative and undemocratic character, made it the target of attack by conservative Arab nationalists. In November 1945 the League of Arab States oversaw the reconstitution of the Arab Higher Committee, originally created in response to the outbreak of the Arab revolt in 1936 but defunct since the revolt's defeat. Early in 1946 Jamal al-Husayni returned from exile to assume its leadership, though its presidency was left vacant for his cousin, the exiled Amin al-Husayni. Determined to reassert the AHC's [Arab Higher Committee's] hegemony within the Arab community, Jamal al-Husayni publicly denounced the AWC for allegedly seeking unity with Ben-Gurion and the Jews. In his reply, NLL [National Liberation League]/AWC leader Fu'ad Nassar rejected al-Husayni's criticisms as misinformed and defended his movement's program. Reiterating the NLL's belief that it was possible to win the Jewish masses in Palestine away from Zionism, Nassar insisted that this struggle must be an essential component of the Arab national movement's overall strategy.[2]
The NLL's insistence on distinguishing between Zionism and the Yishuv was of little or no interest to the vast majority of Jews in Palestine, very few of whom would have been willing to live under any form of Arab majority rule, whatever rights they might have been promised as an officially recognized minority. Though many, perhaps most, of the Jews in Palestine had come there not so much because of Zionist conviction as because of their need to escape discrimination or persecution in their countries of origin, what they increasingly wanted, and what the Zionist movement had by 1945 launched an all-out struggle to achieve, was unrestricted Jewish immigration (to bring about a Jewish majority) and a fully sovereign Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible. There were, however, significant forces in the Yishuv which until late in 1947 still argued that the creation of a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine was unattainable in the face of Arab opposition, would violate Arab rights in the country, or both. The most important of these were Hashomer Hatza'ir and its urban sister party, the Socialist League, which in 1946 merged into the Hashomer Hatza'ir Workers' Party.[3] As I have already discussed, Hashomer Hatza'ir (along with some liberal Zionists) rejected the official Zionist demand for Jewish statehood in part or all of Palestine and instead proposed the establishment in an undivided Palestine of a binational state in which Arabs and Jews would have political parity regardless of their numbers. At the same time, Hashomer Hatza'ir insisted that Jewish immigration must be unrestricted, or at least not so restricted as to prevent the eventual attainment of a Jewish majority. But the tide of events, and of Jewish sentiment in Palestine and elsewhere, was running against them and would render the binationalist position increasingly irrelevant. Moreover, even those forces in the Yishuv most critical of the Zionist movement's increasingly single-minded drive for statehood rejected the NLL's vision of an independent Arab Palestine in which Jews would be at best an officially recognized national minority.
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There are students of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict who have pointed to instances of Arab-Jewish cooperation in mandatory Palestine, and especially cooperation among workers, as evidence that the conflict need not have taken the course it did, that a peaceful solution which met the basic needs of both Arabs and Jews might have been found had the voices of reason, compromise, and working-class solidarity on both sides prevailed. The history of the mandate period thus becomes a story of missed opportunities focused on what might have been, a morality tale in which the "bad guys" on both sides triumph over the peacemakers, whose weakness and ineffectuality is somehow never really accounted for.[7] As I stated in the Introduction, I am not making an "if only" argument here. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that the Zionist and Palestinian nationalist movements sought irreconcilable objectives and were on a collision course from the very start. Moreover, while it is true that during the mandate period various groups of Arab and Jewish workers were involved in efforts to cooperate and in some cases (the railway workers, for example) developed a sense of solidarity that at times transcended (or at least moderated) national divisions, it is also true that relations among them were profoundly affected by the dynamics of the broader Zionist-Palestinian conflict, as the fate of much of the Arab working class in 1948 conclusively demonstrated.
Yet while rejecting this way of writing history, it is important to remember that the workers and unionists and political activists and leaders who figure in this book could not know how things would eventually turn out or what consequences their actions would have. That is why I have tried to make sense of the diverse perspectives of various Arab and Jewish individuals, labor organizations, and political formations on the question of relations between Arab and Jewish workers and labor movements, including even those which seem in retrospect to have been historical dead ends, if not nonstarters. It is easy to ridicule those Jews who in 1920 adhered to what I termed a "Bolshevik-Zionist" vision and could thus imagine Trotsky's Red Army liberating Palestine and making it into a Jewish soviet republic, or to argue that Hashomer Hatza'ir's vision of a binational and unpartitioned Palestine was never really in the cards. Nor is it difficult to see that the National Liberation League's insistence on distinguishing between Zionism and the Jews in Palestine and offering the latter the rights of a national minority in the future independent Arab Palestine never had much prospect of evoking interest in a Yishuv more determined than ever to seek a sovereign Jewish state in as much of the country as it could get. Nonetheless, a fuller understanding of the mandate era, and particularly of Arab-Jewish relations in that period, requires us to take these positions seriously, to try to grasp the spirit, the historical context, and the discursive field in which they were conceived and advanced, as well as to analyze why they failed to garner support and why other visions and strategies and policies won out. For the same reason we must (as I argued in the Introduction) make an effort to understand the subjective impulses, beliefs, and conceptions of the world which led the historical actors discussed in this book to think and act as they did, whether we ultimately judge those actions to have been right or wrong, humane or pernicious, appropriate or misguided, effective or futile.
This applies as much to faith in socialism as it does to faith in nationalism. That nationalism is by definition particularistic and in practice often divisive and exclusionary seems obvious, but in the nineteenth century and through most of the twentieth socialism seemed to many people to offer the promise of an identity and solidarity that transcended national, ethnic, religious, and racial divisions. We know of course that there has never really been a pure class identity "unsullied" by other forms of identity, other energies, other dreams; in fact, one could argue that working-class solidarity has been most effective and durable when it has also been infused by other solidarities, whether of religion, ethnicity, nationalism, gender, race, locale, or kinship. It is even plausible to argue that working-class solidarity, labor movements, and even socialism have in practice often been what we might today term a form of "identity politics" for male workers. Yet if this is an important insight, it would nonetheless be wrong to reduce socialism and worker activism to nothing but a form of identity politics. To do so would be to ignore the very diverse meanings which the socialist vision has had for different people (including many women) in different times and places, and to lose sight of some very important dimensions of human experience. As we have seen, socialism meant very different things to a variety of Arab and Jewish parties and movements in Palestine, and was related to Arab and Jewish nationalisms in complicated ways. These must be separated out and analyzed; they cannot be ignored or dismissed, however unrealistic or self-contradictory or even bizarre some of the formulations to which Arab and Jewish leftists subscribed may seem to us now.
In unpacking and analyzing the programs and actions of various individual thinkers and leaders, and of the organizations or movements within which they operated, I have argued that we must go beyond individual choice or group ideology, and beyond attributing certain attitudes to plain ignorance, to being out of touch with reality, with "the facts." I have instead tried to show how those choices, ideologies, and attitudes, indeed "ignorance" itself, are actually products of certain systems of meaning, of certain ways of knowing. The case of Zionism's (and labor Zionism's) conception of Palestine's indigenous Arab population effectively illustrates this point. As I discussed in Chapter 1, that conception is not usefully explained in terms of ignorance or even of a willful refusal to recognize reality. Rather, if we want to understand why many Zionists were unable to acknowledge the authenticity of Palestinian Arab national sentiment and opposition to Zionism, we need to examine the generation and operation of a certain Zionist discourse about the Arabs, a more or less coherent system of meanings and exclusions which constituted a field of knowledge and simultaneously embodied a specific set of power relations.
That discourse was neither self-generating nor sui generis. It had strong roots in Zionist appropriations of Jewish history. But it also emerged within a broader field of contemporary European conceptions of, and attitudes toward, Asians and Africans, a field which was itself shaped by (and helped reproduce) a power relationship in which Europeans (whether in Europe or settled overseas) ruled over non-Europeans—a relationship summed up under the rubric of colonialism. In this sense, despite the vigorous debates among the various Zionist parties and factions over how to deal with the "Arab question," it seems clear that "the Arabs" (and in the case of labor Zionism "the Arab workers") with whom they were grappling were a constructed representation whose characteristics and relationship to Palestine partook of a broader European colonial discourse while also reflecting the Zionist movement's own economic, political, and psychological needs and interests.
As we have seen, most of the Jews who actually settled in Palestine continued to adhere to these conceptions of Arabs, particularly the rejection of the authenticity and legitimacy of Palestinian Arab nationalism, even when confronted with strong evidence that one might have expected would cause them to question their beliefs. That they were generally able to deal with inconvenient facts in a way that left their core beliefs intact should come as no surprise. This phenomenon is hardly unique to this particular group of people or this historical encounter: all of us do it to some extent each and every day, and sociopolitical movements which must hold to a certain vision of themselves, their mission, and their opponents if they are to overcome great obstacles and achieve their goals do it all the more. This again underscores the importance of exploring the cultural systems through which people make sense of their experiences, rather than trying to explain their beliefs and actions as the unmediated products of those experiences. (Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, <http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6b69p0hf/>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>