IOTL it was mostly a 19th century fad that had died out as the Empire waned and British society became more secular, and even at its height it was only popular with a very small group of the British nobility (and in fact they were probably outnumbered by American Pentecostals). The fact that the movement de-evolved into the white supremacist "Christian Identity" movement in the US didn't help, nor did televangelist Herbert Armstrong's embrace of it.
I see the same happening here.
The movement had as much to do with the history of Zionism and the occupation of Palestine as Black Hebrew Israelites did...actually, they had even less to do with it than the Black Hebrew Israelites since some of those guys moved to Israel.
I do have trouble seeing a Jewish Palestinian Palestine as plausible. It ignores why Jewish immigrants went there before WW2. It was to establish a state
You're all forgetting that Palestine's population was already almost 20% Jewish by 1931, and a little over 31% in 1945 OTL. This is a fact that anyone who doesn't want to go on a campaign of ethnic cleansing needs to take into account.
While I'm not and never have been a Zionist myself (definitely more of the "Doikayt" school), I think there's a level of teleological thinking in the assumption that the ideology of "Zionism" as it developed over the first half of the twentieth century is inherently intertwined with or can be plausibly defined by the actions of the post-1948 Israeli state.
There's a similarity here to the thinking we see amongst a good number of reactionary to liberal types, who treat Stalinism as a simple outgrowth of Marxism, or Marxist-Leninism, rather than the product of a specific historical-developmental trajectory, the joint choices of many thousands of Soviet elites, and the particular circumstances in Post-Tsarist Russia. This isn't to say that Marxism-Leninism has nothing to do with Stalinism, but avoiding teleological thinking does lead to a significantly more complex assessment of the relationship between ideology and state formation.
I agree with your caution on teleological thinking but at the same time, many of the original Zionist politicians, the founders and the organizations, already harbored colonialist and racist sentiments against the Arabs. That Palestine was home to an Arab population who had lived there for many dozens of generations was already known to many in the early 20th century.
I would say that it did not take the State of Israel, the 1947-1949 Palestinian War, to shape Zionism into its modern form. I would say that in the 1930s it was already taking on the necessary ideas to become what it needed to be, as a result of the 1936-1939 Arab rebellion.
But even then there were quite large contingents, as you say, there were significant factions who had more liberal interpretations of a Jewish homeland, who supported binationalism. Berl Katznelson would be a popular example. It's possible I suppose you could get a movement which calls itself Zionist and acts much the same way as the PKP will here. But you have to consider the optics of the term in Palestine. If you want a binational party you have to appeal to the Arabs and they will not like the term "Zionist" so much. In the liberal movement this kind of polarization occured much slowly and more later but in the Communist movement not only did they have the polarizing force set upon them by the Arab response to Balfour, they also had all the declarations by the Bundists, and Vladimir Lenin for example, who called Zionism 'false and basically reactionary'.
It's entirely possible you might be able to get a true "Marxist-Zionist" movement that leaves behind all the Borochovian contrivances but I think that would take someone special, someone really committed to the word and even then it may ultimately hurt their popularity still. I'm just going with what I feel is like the natural course of history here, how the threads end up interconnecting.
By the way, the post I wrote is basically entirely as OTL up until the time of the Leningrad Treaty. Though, it's of course, filtered through the perceptions of post-revolutionary writers and people living in the TCI.
Excerpts from "Palestine and the Interwar" (1966: Abdullah Hassan, Nablus University Press)
…Hundreds of Arab residents are evicted from their Jaffa homes by the Durst Organization, an Americuban estate company – in a bid for development. This is but merely one incident among many in a wave of gentrification as American Jewish emigrates establish themselves. Indeed, the flight of Jewish capital following the Red May Revolution has only increased Palestinian Arab fears of a Zionist takeover of the Mandate, as rumors spread of the Haganah illegally channeling firearms through the ports of Tel Aviv. Already in the prior month of October 1935, British High Commissioner Arthur Grenfell Wauchope had written, in a report to Secretary J.H. Thomas, that one-fifth of the Arab villagers were already landless, the number of Arab unemployed workers in the towns was rising, and resentment against the Government was growing day by day.[...]
By the end of November, a strike was declared by the Arab workers of Jaffa, which is widely observed. Quick to capitalize on the action, the PKP organizes several demonstrations, provides assistance and funding for many of the strikers, in particular among the workers of the shipyards - allowing them to gain further weight as a political force.
The instigating organizations - Arab nationalist campaigners, and the PKP - are not even close to being done. Hot off the presses in Arab cities and in Metropolis, stories lead to donations lead to hundreds of thousands in $URD being amassed. Before they can transform that into aid for the evicted families however, British authorities crack down on the strikes and any transfer of currency into Palestine.
With tensions between the Arab and Jewish communities ramping up, a string of violent attacks begin in Jaffa. A dozen people die of shootings by the end of the year: the most famous incident involves the killing of a British policeman and three Jewish workers by members of the Black Hand guerrilla force. The force is led by the charismatic preacher, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a popular and exemplar icon of Palestinian Arab nationalism. Unlike many preachers, al-Qassam focused on the lower working classes and professed a deep care for them. He was struck by the affliction of many Palestinian Arabs in the cities, many of whom were landless, ex tenant farmers that had been proletarianized. In return, these became his greatest following. al-Qassam was the most radical out of all Arab nationalists, believing that cooperation with the British was impossible and would lead to nothing; in this he paralleled Revisionist-Zionist militant forces like Meyi.[...]
So far so good. The only problem? The British were never a fair enemy to begin with. Like their response to the strike, so would be their response to the shootings disproportionate too, igniting a massive manhunt for the Black Hand and al-Qassam.
In December of 1935, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam was shot dead after a weeks-long manhunt, becoming a martyr for the Arab nationalist cause. The Black Hand disintegrates without its leader, though they had not necessarily failed - after all, it was al-Qassam who said "Die a Martyr". True to this spirit, thousands of peasants had shown up at Sheikh al-Qassam's funeral, showing that the fire of revolution was still alive and burning.
"Let us finish Qassam's work! This is our project, too!"
"Against the British! Against the Jews! Take back what is rightfully ours!"
Flints smashed against each other, sending sparks flying across the hearts of the crowd. Poor peasants and the indebted. Proletarized fellaheen who had been driven out of their fields. Those who had little and those who had lost everything.
All of them heeded the nameless shouts and calls for rebellion. A man there yelled. A woman here shouted. Qassam was their false Vakulinchuk, an anti-Vakulinchuk, and they were the citizens of Odessa in 1905 all the same.
Like a wave of wind rippling across the grass, the call for rebellion spread and spread, from town to town and city to city.
The Istiqlalists were the first political movement to heed the call. [...] Known as the Arab Independence Party in English, they were a Palestinian nationalist movement distinguished by their radicalism in action – peaking in popularity in 1933. They promised action without quarreling - a very appealing promise, for the movement had been long at odds due to the al-Husayni - Nashashibi family rivalry. Unlike the political notables and effendis, who promised reform - one tea party at a time, they called for noncooperation with the British authorities. Indeed, the revolt would initially take on a very anti-British character in particular.
Their slogan: "England is the root of the illness and the basis of all disaster" - a rhyming poem in Arabic…
Young students under the Istiqlalist banner formed National Committees in each locality, and the National Committee became the institutional unit, the indivisible which the revolution revolved around. Dozens of other groups and committees were as well spawned, and the rebellion had begun to seize much of Palestine. Their first action: to declare a national strike on 23 December, bringing the activity of the Mandate to a complete halt.
The Great Arab Revolt had begun, not on a centralized basis, but on mass spontaneity. Even the notables and the effendis, the old feudal leadership of the Arabs, had no choice but to ride the wave to survive. Hajj Amin al-Husayni - the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Supreme Muslim Council, for the first time gave the movement official organization and structure under the "Supreme Arab National Committee". Otherwise, he would have been buried by the wave, and drowned.
Despite its grassy roots, the SANC was taking control and encouraged the spread of the rebellion, organizing dozens and dozens more national committees in the towns and cities. The program remained foremost the end of British rule in Palestine and the end of Zionist activities. Arab leaders at the SANC begin a dialogue with the British, telling High Commissioner Wauchope that they promised to bring order to the Mandate at once, if only they would immediately cease Jewish immigration.
Meanwhile, the nationalist-revolutionary machine continued to grow and unravel in its machinations. For example, the National Committee of Jerusalem had formed special organs of its own to help facilitate the general strike. Subcommittees were created for relief, fundraising, promotion of Arab industries and products, transport, legal and medical services. The rebellion here was of such a scale that spontaneously, a situation of dual power had emerged – and the nationalists were well on their way to forming a state within a state.
The Convention of the National Committees is held by the end of the first week of the year 1936 in Jerusalem. Once again, radicalism prevails – and the National Committees move to cease payment of taxes in the Mandate. The aim of the Palestinian struggle was declared to be 'complete Palestinian independence within the framework of Arab Unity'.
Armed resistance began first in the rural areas and the countryside, as villages harbored newly formed armed bands, and the roads connecting Palestine were seized. An oil pipeline belonging to the Iraqi Petroleum Company, pumping the black gold from the Jordan River to Haifa, was sabotaged and bombed several times by rebels.
Soon, it wasn't just the countryside but also the cities that had slipped out of British control. Barricades were erected in many of the cities' roads – Nablus, Gaza and Jaffa. In Jerusalem, militants began to attack armored car patrols and Jewish buses – while, snipers sporadically fired shots at British patrolmen in their camps from the mountains.
The worst of it all was in Jaffa, where the ancient city had given way to a dense patchwork of alleys impassable to wheeled vehicles, and could be traversed only on foot. According to Wauchope, the city 'formed a hostile stronghold into which the Government forces dare not penetrate'. Here, the conditions typical to urban warfare greatly favored the rebels, and they made no short work of taking potshots at British troops when they could. The military soon began demolition of large swaths of the city, in order to construct a large road - from which they could control Jaffa. Many were thus forced to move out of the old quarter, settling into impoverished sheds, constructed out of the most meager scraps of metal they could find – on the outskirts of the city.
Typical of colonial authorities, the military decided on a regime of punishment – collective and individual – to suppress the rebellion. Later on, the emergency regulations in Palestine had been amended to legalize even more punitive means. The death penalty was to be enforced for those who discharged a firearm or incurred damage with malicious intent – a harsh treatment that any good citizen in the imperial core would have taken to the streets against if it were to be applied to them!
Mass arrests, demolitions, the blowing up of houses the military believed were harboring rebels and collective fines became the norm throughout the year. Meanwhile, armed bands were only continuing to grow in size and had tripled by February of 1936.
[...]
Based on the growing number of intercepted arms shipments into Palestine, the military concluded that more resistance was to be expected. Meanwhile, later in March, the Supreme Arab National Committee affirmed that they would be unable to stop the strike until the Government had suspended Jewish immigration once and for all. Even Iraq's beloved Foreign Minister walked away in failure after being invited to mediate negotiations between the SANC and the Government. That was understandable for however, he could not make any promises on the British's behalf.
By April of 1936, the British Government had resolved to crush the rebellion with intensive measures, and to send additional troops and reinforcements to Palestine for this purpose. Meanwhile, martial law would be declared across Palestine. Lieutenant-General J.G. Dill would assume the supreme military command, and a division of troops was on its way from the home isles.
Syrian Arab revolutionary Fawzi al-Qawuqyi crossed into Palestine, declaring himself the leader of the revolution in "Southern Syria"; or, Palestine. Qawuqyi soon captured much of the rebellion's attention, and as such, his designs were able to help organize and train the armed bands which were carrying out the hard work of the rebellion. By the end of the month, the number of British troops had surged to over 20,000, and battles between the Government and the rebellion increased in number and ferocity.
In the beginning of May, a joint letter was read in Palestine – authored by the Three Kings – Ali bin Hussein, Emir Abdullah and King Ghazi of Iraq. The strike had to be called off, they proclaimed, the rebellion had to be discontinued – and the Palestinians had to rely on the good intentions of their 'friend Great Britain, who has declared that she will do justice'. This was the fruit of several consultations, conferences and interviews the feudal lord/bourgeois dominated SANC and the British Government had done with these 'representatives' of Arab success.
Promptly, the Great Arab Revolt had been called off. Bands were permitted to disband, the borders of Palestine opened, and things had begun to cool down. The rebellion had killed dozens of security forces, Jews, and hundreds of Arabs. It wounded even more. Tens of thousands of fruit trees, lumber, and many thousand acres of crops had been destroyed by the rebellion. It didn't help matters that the military's extremely harsh and punitive measures against the population had served only to incite more anger and resentment in the Arabs. In the end, it was collusion, between the strike leaders, collusion that put an end to the strike: even the effendis and the notables were seeing an impact on their own profits from the rebellion.[...]
Later that month, Lord Peel arrives in the land of Palestine. Mandated by the British Government, he and his Commission would be tasked with investigating the rebellion itself and the causes – as well as potential solutions...
The controversy over the Arab boycott of the Commission finally boils over among leaders, and the boycott is called off in July. Arab authorities begin to cooperate with the Government. In the trials, they stressed the inclusion of Palestine in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence[1], the baselessness of the Balfour Declaration, and the inconsistency of the entire affair with the League of Nations' enshrined principle of self-determination for peoples. In addition, they demanded the end of the Mandate and for Palestine to be established under an independent Arab government.
[...]
On 11 April 1937, the Peel Commission concluded, in their publication of the official report, that Palestine is to be granted independence in ten years' time as an Arab majority state. Lord Peel remarks:
"We have thoroughly investigated and discussed the idea of partition. Partition is both unpopular among the Arabs and the Jews, although for the latter, a fair amount are amenable to it. The challenges with partition are thus: financial difficulties and the foreseeable dependency of the Arab state, political and religious issues, and the necessity of enacting population exchanges on a mass scale. Indeed, these transfers are not unprecedented, but suffice it to say they would be extremely unpopular with the Arabs." [2]
Based on the recommendation of the Commission, as well as mounting geopolitical concerns in Europe and the Americas with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the Revolutions of America, the British Government published the White Paper of 1937, calling for the establishment of an Arab majority independent state with rights secured for a Jewish national home.[3] The mandatory government additionally declared that Jewish immigration would be limited to 75,000 for 5 years, with further immigration to be determined by the Arab majority.
The reaction was overall mixed across the board. First of all, among those who supported it, it was principally the students' committees and the lower ranks of the nationalist revolutionary movement on the Arabs' side. "This is a hard-fought victory, and the realization of our aspirations, our brothers' blood. We can't ask for much more.", wrote one of the newspapers. The Palestine Communist Party also cautiously threw their support behind the White Paper, calling it a 'step in the right direction' even if it was ultimately a bourgeois democracy.
The al-Husaynis were pissed off. The White Paper didn't envision a state governed solely by the Husayni family; the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem masked his seething behind a maximalist position.
What was surprising was that even the Nashashibis initially rejected the White Paper, indubitably for the same reason as the Husaynis. Later, after backdoor meetings with the British, they had become supporters of the White Paper, it seemed. And what of the Zionists? Unilateral rejection across the board, except for the most leftist of them, the Borochovists who could maybe tolerate an Arab majority. Ze'ev Jabotinsky denounced the White Paper as an "utter betrayal, a trampling on their promises, the death of the Balfour Declaration!". Ben-Gurion, would express his disappointment and promised to fight the White Paper "on every word".
[...]
Amin al-Husayni would attempt to convince the Supreme Arab National Committee to reject the White Paper and resume their rebellion. In response, the British authorities would attempt to arrest him for his part in the rebellion. al-Husayni managed to escape, fleeing to Beirut. From there, he would issue directives to those stragglers who still supported him. However, their power was now seriously lacking, and in light of their waning, the Husaynis from there on became quiet.
The Arab Emergency of 1936 was over. But the troubles weren't, no, because the Jewish rebellion would soon start…
[1] The McMahon-Hussein correspondence was a mail exchange between British diplomat Sir McMahon and King Hussein, during World War I. The correspondence was instrumental in securing British support for the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
[2] OTL, the Peel Commission famously recommended partition for Palestine. With greater funding and a longer investigation, they might end up like the Woodhead Commission which rejected it.
[3] It's simply just part of a greater move towards collaboration with local anticommunist nationalists, and dominionization to stem the Red Tide.
Excerpts from "Palestine and the Interwar" (1966: Abdullah Hassan, Nablus University Press)
"Chapter VIII - The Jewish Insurgency of 1937-1942"
…On 1 December 1937, eight months after the publication of the White Paper, the Irgun would declare its insurgency against the Mandate. At that time, Jabotinsky and many other Irgun-aligned Zionist activists were illegals, and were not allowed to step foot in the Mandate. The Irgun circumvented this, having Jabotinsky secretly arrive in the ports of Tel Aviv. Planning for the rebellion had started as early as August the moment Jabotinsky had read the White Paper. Jabotinsky reportedly was so outraged by the paper at the moment, that he had thrown his glasses on the ground, smashing them. A few weeks later, he had sent coded letters to the Irgun High Command proposing that the organization seize key centers of power in Palestine, take the Government House in Jerusalem and hold off the British for 24 hours by any means necessary while Zionist leaders across the world would declare an independent state in Palestine and form a government in exile.
It was a grandiose and ambitious plan. The High Command was impressed but not without reservations – knowing the severe casualties and losses they might face in actually carrying it out. Finally, Avraham Stern suggested to Jabotinsky and the Command that 40,000 European immigrants be recruited and trained for the cause. On the day of the rebellion they would be able to support Jabotinsky's uprising. Jabotinsky liked the idea and even went so far as to contact the Polish government for their help. Fortunately for us, the government, although they had considered it a great deal, rejected the plan. They were willing only to help train 1,000. In the end, Jabotinsky grudgingly accepted their offer, and for the next several months he personally commanded and directed training efforts for an elite Beitar force.[...]
The campaign would be a deliberately provocative one against the British. In the revised plan, Jabotinsky explained that it would be:
"... a spectacle, a drama theater which the world shall set their eyes upon. We will live like true Hebrews, and fight like Hebrews! The world shall take pity on the yid Yishuv when the British have overplayed their hand, and the Mandate will be no more. They shall recognize us as the true leaders of the Jews, and when they have handed power over to us, we will reforge Israel in our image!"
By causing the British security forces to take overly repressive countermeasures and controversy among metropolitan citizens, both Britain's allies and the Yishuv would be alienated. With world attention focused on Palestine, the Jews could force their hand and gain independence in this way. [1]
David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Yishuv – the same Yishuv called yid by Jabotinsky, himself loathed the man deeply and hated the thought of him even taking foot in Palestine. But Jabotinsky was already in Palestine, and he appeared before a crowd in Tel Aviv: "Today, I declare, the struggle has begun!" Ben Gurion was somewhat supportive of an insurgency, but he decided that it would be not wise for the Haganah to immediately join. The Haganah thus far remained noncommitant on the question. [...] But Jabotinsky would be arrested only several weeks after his arrival in Palestine, and was forced to undergo trial by the British. Despite international pressure just like had happened in his trial in the 1920s, Jabotinsky was sentenced to 25 years' of imprisonment without the possibility of parole; his letters with the outer world would be watched by the government like a hawk.
A conspiracy theory among the "True Revisionists" alleges that Menachem Begin was behind the arrest and imprisonment of Jabotinsky. They allege that Begin was responsible for the idea of the insurgency. But his jealousy of Jabotinsky's status was inflamed when he rebuffed him from leading it. According to their allegations, Begin devised a successful plan where Jabotinsky's location would be given up to the British, in order to distract them from the 1,000 Beitar operatives entering Palestine at the same time. Only then, would the seeming survival of the operatives as had happened, make sense, whereas Jabotinsky had not escaped arrest.
In March, Begin would accede to the leadership of HaTzohar following Jabotinsky's death, and consequently assume the status of "Supreme Commander".
Jabotinsky's sentence would inspire widespread outrage among the right wing in the Yishuv, as well as internationally. Finally, on 18 March 1938, a prominent British restaurant was bombed by Irgun militants. Planning for the operation had begun at least four weeks before – the restaurant would be at its peak on a Friday night: the detonation of a barrel of dynamite caused part of the entire building to collapse, killing dozens and wounding more. This was the opening act of the insurgency.
[...]
For several months, the Irgun would bomb governmental institutions like post, tax, immigration and intelligence offices, as well as killing and wounding British soldiers in shootings. In return, the British would carry out reprisals against the insurgents, sometimes extending to the Jewish civilians: casual police brutality, unwarranted stops on the road, and all kinds of minor torments by the mandatory police became commonplace.
The Irgun would finally carry out another major operation in September of the year, where a British payroll train – carrying 35,000 pounds, was successfully derailed by Irgun bandits. These bandits kidnapped the soldiers and the personnel, at least those that were not dead as a result of the crash, and made off with the money without ever being caught. The story was heavily publicized by Yishuv newspapers, taking money from the Irgun in secret; the group leader began calling themselves "Jewse James" after the train robber of the Wild West. The story also made its way to the home isles, making headlines…
Excerpts from "A Party History of the Tahlah; formerly, the Palestinian Communist Party" (2000 ed; Musa Budeiri, University of Haifa)
…The end of the 1935-1937 Arab Emergency had brought with it an unfixable and chronic depression for the Arab economy … Most of the Arab proletariat class had experienced back-migration, departing the cities and the towns in order to go to the countryside. This was done all in order to support the rebellion. When it ended, they had come back to the cities only to find that their previous occupations, their jobs, even homes and so on in some cases, were unavailable to them, taken by Jewish workers, taken by immigrants. Arab labor was thus in a disorganized and weak state following the rebellion.
While terribly unfortunate, it was an opportunity for the Palestine Communist Party to enlarge its membership. Najati Sidqi, head of trade union relations in the Party, capitalized on his relationship with Sami Taha, the ex-leader of the former Palestine Arab Workers' Society – once aligned with the PKP, but closed due to the 1937 Arab revolt. A directly party-controlled trade union would be a blessing for the PKP, and so in late September the long-awaited fruit of Sidqi's efforts would finally be produced: the All-Palestine Federation of Labor...
Excerpts from "Palestine and the Interwar", continued
…The rhetoric of the rebels became increasingly drawn to the situation in Nazi Germany and their adoption of antisemitic policies. They pointed out that for many European Jews living under Nazi oppression, the choice for emigration was either communism, Palestine or death; most countries had closed their doors to Jewish immigration. In October of 1938, a certain group of the Irgun would make one of the most infamous assassinations: Malcolm MacDonald.
The late Secretary of State for the Colonies – and one of the chief architects of the White Paper of 1937, was assassinated by Irgun operatives under the personal command of a certain man called Avraham Stern in his hotel in Egypt. After two days the body was discovered in MacDonald's hotel bathroom, when his political functionaries and colleagues had wondered just what in the world was taking him so long […]
This came directly after the Edward VIII visit to Nazi Germany where he received a personal audience from Adolf Hitler, receiving widespread condemnation and the ire of the Yishuv in Palestine. "BRITISH OVERLORDS – NAZI LOVERS" – Haaretz, a Yishuv newspaper, declared.
The assassination would send ripples throughout the world. Many of the factions in the Yishuv were quick to distance themselves from the Irgun, afraid of punitive operations by the British. Stern would be expelled from the Irgun, taking with him breakaway supporters. Stern, in a radio broadcast, announced the creation of the Meshachrerei Yisrael - Meyi (Liberators of Israel) organization. In an unexpected turn of events, Meyi attempted to forge an alliance with the Third Communist International [2]. Stern said that he had always been "inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky's beautiful and revolutionary poetry", and he saw the Communists as a potential alternative to the Axis, who Stern considered allied to the British for the time being. The American Commission for the Levantine Proletariat, at the time unknown to virtually the entire Yishuv, saw the Meyi as just maybe useful.
The talks entirely and utterly failed, when Stern's racism was considered entirely unacceptable by the American visitors:
Stern at first, after great consternation, said he could adopt "Borochovism" as an ideology. But this was not the point, and the visitors openly rebuffed him, asking him to leave behind his Zionism. Negotiations soon broke down after that. Privately, many of the PKP knew and denounced the man as "no more than a fascist opportunist", and the Arab faction of the PKP, along with Jewish hardliners, completely opposed even letting the ACLP fund Meyi. Stern, rather than leave his racist intentions, decided to fight the insurgency alone.[...]
The Haganah finally announced on 20 May 1939, that they would be joining the insurrection – after "800 days of pleas to the British to end their unacceptable policies, met by 800 days of insults to the Jews." The insurgency, with the entire backing of the Yishuv, entered its hot phase. The British haven't seen nothing yet", Ben-Gurion announced. Ben Gurion, the Haganah and the centrist Yishuv had enough of the government's denials: only several weeks ago, the Nazis had invaded Poland, which was met with complete inaction on the part of the British government.
Ten days later, a one-day general strike across the Mandate was organized: this was also observed by a large contingent of Arabs as a sign of solidarity. In fact it was not the Histadrut that organized it, but rather the All-Palestine Federation of Labor. It would be largely political; a show of the APFL's accruing power, an anti-imperialist demonstration against Nazi Germany, a call for Britain to cease their appeasement policies and to show solidarity with newly occupied Poland. Moreover, the actual intent of the strike was to capture more of the Yishuv into supporting and joining the APFL, to show that the binational union could put their differences aside to fight against a common enemy. "We hate Adolf Hitler just as much," said a spokesman of the Arabs represented in the APFL.
Meanwhile, the Haganah had been ramping up their operations to facilitate illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine, attacking and disabling British radar tracking stations, and bombing patrol boats in the "Night of the Boats". [...] Palestine's transport infrastructure is damaged, with trains grinding to a halt after the Irgun's attacks on the rails and the bridges, once disrupting for example, the rail traffic between Jerusalem and Jaffa for a month. Moreover, the Irgun, Meyi and Haganah also organized prison breaks to free those that had been arrested in the course of their operations.
After a brutal wave of attacks from the Irgun, Britain enacts martial law in the Mandate. A three-hour curfew is imposed on Jewish settlements, and the authorities conduct cordon-and-search operations – filtering thousands of citizens at a time - which are partially successful in wiping out the leadership of the organizations, and seriously decimating their ability to organize an insurrection. The Yishuv soldiers on.
Over time the insurgency would reach a new low in late 1939, with activity slowly picking back up in 1941. [...] For the Yishuv, it seemed the game of cat and mouse would never end. The insurgency, as far as they were concerned, was going to be an indefinite affair…
Excerpts from "Palestine in the Great Revolutionary War" (1968: Abdullah Hassan, Nablus University Press)
…On Valentine's Day 1942, the Yishuv erupted into a shocked celebration. The declaration of war on the Axis by Britain had been something the Jews of Palestine had been calling, advocating, shooting for a very very long time. Just after the official formation of the Franco-British Union, the Haganah ceased all operations against the Mandate, under orders of the Jewish Agency. The Irgun soon followed suit. Some instead defected to Meyi, convinced that the insurgency must continue. The euphoria of the Yishuv with Jews flying British flags, marching out in the streets, was ultimately short-lived. News rapidly reached the Mandate following the contemporaneous invasion of Assyria and Syria by the Turanists: the "Two Hundred Days of Dread" soon began in Palestine with fears of an Axis invasion of the Mandate. In the coming months, tens of thousands of Jewish and Arab volunteers would join the Franco-British Army[...]
On 25 February, Avraham Stern, the leader of Meyi, was arrested by OVRA agents while in Rome, Italy. Stern had travelled to the country, believing that he would receive help from the Axis in liberating and establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Little is known about the operation since many records were destroyed following the war, however it is assumed that Stern was handed over to Nazi agents on their orders. Deported and put on a train to Treblinka, he would die in the concentration camp in late March.[...]
The Palmach elite commando unit is formed by the Haganah, to be used in British operations and in case of an Axis victory in North Africa and Syria, threatening an invasion of Palestine. Similarly, noting the endangered situation of the population, the American Commission agitates for more funding and support to be sent to the PKP and their paramilitary, the PFFL. The PFFL begins a steady expansion.
The Husseinis, disgraced by Axis support for Turanist Turkey and the impending doom for the Syrian Arabs, lose all support in Palestine. The National Defence Battalions would be organized by the Nashashibis in March, with British oversight and support. Despite their near-total control of Arab nationalist politics, they now noticed that the PFFL had in fact, absorbed large swaths of Arab volunteers - this was because to their early concerted attempts to organize, their functional similarity to the Nashashibis in advocating for the White Paper, and control of the non-Jewish trade unions. This would only result in the PKP accruing greater and greater power and prominence. So too little and too late, it was for the Battalions.
Even Meyi would soon cease their operations against the (Franco-)British. Palestine, was now for all intents and purposes, a country in total defense. Every pound earned was a pound for the coming onslaught, every bullet and every manufactured good. To make good of their efforts, the FBU would channel additional funding to the Mandate to encourage industrial development. This, combined with the war demands, resulted in such a strong demand for employment that by June, there was actually a shortage of manpower with nearly all Arabs now working. "It is ironic that our Mandate is now undergoing an economic boom, even as we work with chilling tingles through our spines. We strike the hammer in the forge just that harder, with our eyes fixed to each coming report of every Axis success. It seems that with the Turks and the Italians coming in their tanks, speeding in the sand, we have no one but the Jews and for them us Arabs' to turn to."; said Bashar Alami, an acclaimed Arabic poet turned Jerusalem journalist[...]
Meyi, through their contacts in Europe, learns of their leader Stern's death in the Treblinka concentration camp. Yitzhak Shamir would take power in a duumvirate with Nathan Yellin-Mor. Shamir wrote in his biography: "It seriously rattled us. We had to go on some soul searching that day." Shamir and Yellin-Mor, far less rightist and extremist than Stern, were responsible for the leftward turn in Meyi, and the organization again became a fellow traveller of the TCI. It was always an ideologically heterogeneous organization – its sole declared goal being "the facilitation of the anti-imperialist struggle against the British Empire and the liberation of Palestine".
In August of 1942, the Two Hundreds Days of Dread became, not dread, but terror. The fears of the Palestinian community had come true following the losses in the Battle of El-Alamein, and the successes of the Turanist operations in Syria. Mandatory authorities had already begun to enact Operation "Palestine Final Fortress", a plan designed to line the northern mountain ranges of the Mandate – Carmel, Gilboa, Samarian, and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains - with networks of trenches and deep and fortified complexes. These would serve as bases for a skeletal British force in Israel, consisting of two infantry divisions, artillery, and an armored division, to be supported by the Allied forces in Syria who were retreating. All of the paramilitaries in Palestine – the National Defence Battalions, the Palestinian Freedom-Fighters' League, Meyi, and the Haganah, offered their support to the British. HaShahar (The Dawn), an unit of "mista'aravim" (lit. Arabizeds) part of the Palmach, Haganah's elite force, also began cooperating with the British in particular to sabotage Husayni's supporters. HaShahar was composed of Arabic-speaking Jews of Sephardi and Mizrachi origin, who blended in and easily assimilated into the Arab population. These mista'aravim began operations against the forces of now Berlin-based, Nazi-supporting Amin al-Husayni in August[...]
The Italians enter the Sinai Peninsula on 23 October. As the Palestinians prepared for their impending doom, their spirits were slightly buoyed by C-39s landing in from Iran. This was part of Operation "Manna", an American operation to airlift ammunition, arms and supplies to Palestine for use by the British garrison and the PFFL; Operation Manna resulted in the forces attaining a tremendous amount of firepower, which they could use against the Italians[...]
Italian forces finally march into Palestine following the fall of Aqaba in November. Gaza City and many of the southern settlements are taken without significant resistance. A failed attempt by HaShahar in Khan Younis at inciting a riot against the arriving Italian occupation force marked the only thing of note. While a large contingent decided to stay quiet, many cells of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza decided to celebrate the arrival of the Italians and to greet them as liberators. Meanwhile, much of the Jewish population had already fled the Negev and were making for Transjordan, or the better protected north. The Italians were beginning to see Palestine as much of a breeze than they thought, but Rehovot – 12 kilometers south of Lydda, would sorely put a booger in that perception. The Haganah, using a team of mortars and an artillery gun from the British, would continually shell the Italians' position for several days and nights to spark terror in them: the Italians responded with devastating firepower but arrived on to the scene to find that it had been instead manned by just a few militants with a very big pile of shells. The event and the militants' escape, led by a man called Shlomo Halperin, are remembered to this day. The PFFL and the Haganah, as well as the National Defence Battalions were involved in ferocious slugging matches in the coastal cities of Lydda, Jaffa and Tel Aviv – once again using the dense impassable streets of Jaffa to their advantage. They had given up any notion of actually defending the Mandate successfully but rather to enact pure and raw terror against their soon-to-be occupiers. The cities held out for two weeks of bloody block to block fighting but eventually broke, and the Italians soon moved onward into the hilly passes leading to Jerusalem, and farther north to Haifa. In the wake of the battles, a significant quantity of houses and buildings were destroyed. The towns were left in ruins – like scenes out of the Great War. Over time, the Italians began to treat their opponents even more brutally, in response to the terror they had inflicted on them, and most of all they especially loathed the communist Freedom Fighters' League.
The Italians came upon a heavily fortified pass - Latrun. The resulting "Battle of Latrun" would come down in history as "Palestine's Alamo": the defenders of Latrun – a company of Jewish-Arab British soldiers supported by irregulars in the hilly countryside, held off the Italians' advances for a week and managed to inflict significant casualties, until part of the fort was absolutely demolished by a barrage by an armored division.
Despite fierce resistance by the Palestine military garrison and the paramilitaries of the Mandate, many of their defenses were quickly overwhelmed. They were overrun in a couple of months. In the far north, the Palestinian united front fared better by preemptively marching into the Golan Heights and extending the defenses of Final Fortress, but even this failed and Turkish forces soon marched easily through the Hula Valley, onwards to the Galilee. Unlike the Italians, they were far more hateful to the enemy. The Turks gleefully massacred villages on occasion, and their antisemitic treatment of the Jews was little better.[...]
Heavy fighting in northern Samaria would cease with the fall of the Gilboa Complex, and the Italo-Turkish forces were poised to take the Jezreel Valley. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, the long siege was finally broken, with the already-low resources of the paramilitary defenders having been depleted. The Italians would set fire to multiple quarters attempting to completely eliminate the verminous activity of the paramilitaries, and soon occupied the formerly British governmental offices. They undertook preparations to transfer the country into joint governance under the Kingdom of Italy and the Republic of Turkey – broadcasting on radio the creation of the "Holy Land State". Although fighting has not actually ended with holdouts still persisting – most importantly the Carmel fortress, the Kingdom of Italy announces the "complete capitulation of all forces in the Holy Land". On 22 December, dictator Benito Mussolini arrives in the occupied port of Jaffa in time to visit Jerusalem in a grand motorcade by Christmas's Eve, proclaiming: "...At last, the Roman provinces of the Eastern Meditarranean have been brought back into the empire's fold!"[...]
The Final Fortresses were overwhelmed once and for all by the beginning of January 1943. The first of "Einsatzgruppe Egypt", the Nazi SS extermination force sent to massacre the Jewish population, enters the country. Nominally secular, the heavily catholic Italian governors of the Holy Land State are displeased with Nazi attempts to 'desecrate the Holy Land'. A proposed concentration camp, "Pilgerburg" – to be set up in the former British Atlit internment camp, only 20 kilometers south of Haifa, is canceled. Instead, the Nazis decide to relocate their proposed camps to the Turanist-governed regions of northern Palestine. Another coastal site, due to railway restrictions, is selected – the Arab village of Al-Manshiyya[3], to be demolished. Meanwhile, much of the political leadership of the Mandate, and dozens of thousands of Jews and Arabs flee eastward, crossing the river Jordan – hoping to be smuggled into safety in the Arabian desert.
The Jewish and the Arab paramilitaries are left nearly totally destroyed. As an example, two-thirds of the Haganah's forces had died in the invasion of Palestine. Meyi surviving, owing to their smallness, would serve as the nucleus of the nationalist resistance in the Yishuv. The PFFL is not much better off, but with the National Defense Battalions' destruction, they see an opportunity…
Excerpts from "A Party History of the Tahlah", continued
…Joseph Berger and Radwan al-Hilu negotiated a meeting place in the Arab village of Salbit, deep into the countryside. At first, they were cautious, worried that the National Defense remnants might out them to the Axis forces. But they had told their leader, Mufid Nashashibi, that they would be meeting their delegates. Berger and al-Hilu trusted the man more when he had generously accepted anyway, and the two revealed themselves to Nashashibi at the designated house. They ended up staying a week, above and beyond what was supposed to be the bare necessities for a merger, no they talked about all manner of things, politics, and so on ... They decided there, in that groundbreaking summit, that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was to be founded.
The Front was finally organized after a month, and its existence was officially announced on 14 March, the month after the one-year anniversary of Britain's entry into the war. Spies, resistance militants and all kinds of people, people who weren't even associated with the PFLP – but rather simply excited about the founding of a resistance, spread pamphlets and put up posters. Its announcement was also broadcasted on radio.[...]
The PFLP's executive committee was surprised to learn that Nathan Yellin-Mor, a leader of Meyi, had requested to join them. Along with Yellin-Mor, he had a following of a hundred trained fighters, which were ready to accept the binational liberation cause. They learned that Meyi had suffered a split when the Arab-tolerant faction had decided that they would join arms with the PFLP. In March of 1943, the PFLP was troubled not only by the fact that the Meyi organization still survived, being supplemented by Irgun remnants, and had in fact begun a close cooperation with the reconstituted Haganah, but that 1,000 Jews were now being "processed" at the concentration camp "KZ Akers" on its grand opening just north of the city of Acre…
Excerpts from "Palestine in the Great Revolutionary War", continued
…The day before Erev Pesach (Passover's Eve) on 21 April 1943, a massive bombing blasted the Government House in Jerusalem. An explosive-laden truck was parked next to the Government House. PFLP militant, Comrade Yehudah, calmly exited the truck, crossed the street and quietly announced to pedestrians in the area that there was going to be an explosion. Yehudah disappeared, and mere minutes later the truck exploded, sending hundreds of kilograms of iron chains and weights flying into the wall of the Government House at rapid velocity: the face of the building collapsed and hundreds of people were seriously wounded. Four Italian and Turkish guards were immediately killed as a result of the blast: they counted 13 more dead among the House personnel in overnight operations.
The PFLP claimed responsibility for the bombing, achieving a symbolic victory against the Axis occupation. It was also the first successful car bombing in history[4]. The next days that transpired however, would make them rue the thought that they'd even considered the attack, as a company of Turkish soldiers entered Jerusalem and began opening fire on civilians. In exchange for the 17 killed in the Government House bombing, the Italo-Turkish would kill 340 Arab and Jewish citizens in bloody reprisals over the entire 2 weeks of Passover, all the while blasting over megaphones: "Twenty dead for every single one killed!" It was an absolutely brutal response which showed the entire nation that these were no simple Brits. No, the real occupiers had arrived, the real occupation had begun. The entire ordeal would be remembered as "Bloody Passover".
In May of 1943, due to the massacres of Bloody Passover, the PFLP – currently being seized by a major manhunting operation, would cease major armed resistance against the Italo-Turkish occupiers for the time being. "The PFLP underestimated them, and I am thankful that we had not gone against them sooner. For I underestimated them, friends, and we need to seriously reconsider our strategy against the Axis.", Ben-Gurion would tell in a speech to his underground Haganah cell. The Haganah and Meyi soon follow the PFLP's example, while negotiations begin for an "unified underground resistance". This did not end up working out, but the three paramilitaries at least made official a long undeclared peace between them that had gone on since the beginning of the Days of Dread.
[...]
"Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The Turks and the Italians have left! No more is the Holy Land State! Tell your mothers, your fathers, your brothers and sisters, tell your neighbors and your friends, tell everyone! The Axis have left, tell everyone!" - Quote from Simantov, "The Four Seasons of Darkness"[5]
Following the successes of the Franco-British Army in their military operations against the Italians – liberating the Nile, and the march of Soviet forces in the east, a great retreat of Axis forces began. The Italians made for the safe shores of their mainland peninsula, all the while, yet more retreated into the deserts of their Libya colony.
The short-lived "Holy Land State" had indeed finally dissolved by 1 October 1943. The government made haste for their boats, waiting for them at the coast as a withdrawal of military forces began. The Italian and Turkish soldiers, once an omnipresent feature of the streets in the country, were now gone. Gone were the beatings and the random searches in the middle of night, which left houses picked clean of anything of value. Cities watched as entire convoys of trucks, cars and other military vehicles left for the roads in long lines. The docks of Jaffa, Haifa and Acre were unstoppably busy for many weeks. The KZ Akers concentration camp - the only one that had been constructed in Palestine - is forced to shut down, and moreover, is torched to the ground under the orders of Einsatzgruppe Egypt. They, and tens of thousands of soldiers leave the country, but not without their fair share of rapes and violence, one last little torment against the Palestinian population.
By late October, Allied forces will enter the land: hundreds of thousands march out into the streets in open jubilation…
[1] Typical terrorist modus operandi.
[2] Avraham Stern in this sense, can be compared to Subhas Chandra Bose of the Azad Hind - willing to work with anyone, as long as they help them gain independence.
[3] OTL also demolished by the IDF during the 1947-1948 Palestinian war.
[4] The first car bombing was actually in 1920 – the Wall Street bombing. OTL, it would be another 27 years before a successful use of it, specifically in a modern context as a weapon of urban warfare. OTL, this second bombing had been in fact carried out by the Irgun in Haifa. ITTL, it comes four years earlier, and all thanks to the PFLP. The author is also a little biased on such matters, because who doesn't want to say that their country was the first one to invent the car bomb…?
[5] The Four Seasons of Darkness is a 1983 Palestinian film on the Axis occupation 40 years before, and its "spring, summer, winter and fall".
Hmmm, not too clear on what picture Palestine is left in after the occupation, but it seems that a lot of the hatred between the Jewish and Arab population has been forcibly smoothed over by the atrocities they suffered under. Probably still rough patches that could flare back up, but it seems like the PKP and the Zionist groups are positioned to set up a joint-state solution of some kind.
Hmmm, not too clear on what picture Palestine is left in after the occupation, but it seems that a lot of the hatred between the Jewish and Arab population has been forcibly smoothed over by the atrocities they suffered under. Probably still rough patches that could flare back up, but it seems like the PKP and the Zionist groups are positioned to set up a joint-state solution of some kind.
I wouldn't be too idealistic about the hatred being smoothed over from an occupation. I think the Jews and Arabs will go back to conflict even after they achieve a socialist state.
I wouldn't be too cynical about it either, though. It's a lot easier to put old historical grievances into perspective when neither side can claim a legal or material advantage over the other.
I imagine it would be a rocky coexistance in the beginning with some cases/events here in there that would probably warm and get progressively better overtime. Especially if newer generations of Arabs and Jews are born into the Socialist State unburdened by physical traumas and experiences of the past. Really looking forward to more of the Palestine Updates and hopefully more Updates on the Middle East as a Whole.
The Palestine Communist Party capitalized on this, and made an attempt to organize a renewed Jewish-Arab labor union, the All-Palestine Federation of Labor. The APFL would take in the remnants of the Palestine Arab Workers' Society, also aligned with the PKP, that had been closed during the 1937 Arab revolt…
I wouldn't be too idealistic about the hatred being smoothed over from an occupation. I think the Jews and Arabs will go back to conflict even after they achieve a socialist state.
The important thing is that David Ben Gurion fails and the Mapai and Irgun are exiled to Rhodes while the Arab royalists and ultranationalists are expelled to Jordan so the biggest problem actors are all gone when they aren't outright killed in the process of losing a three way civil war. Being victorious in a civil war and being commanded by people willing to suppress, banish, or kill the primary leadership of the movements deemed a problem to the new way of doing things has a very noticeable chilling effect on the movements that are against the new system. Its not pretty but it works.
Excerpts from "Our Milchemet al-Tachrir, AKA: The Palestinian War of Liberation" (1970; Abdullah Hasan, Nablus University Press)
…Planning for the revolutionary war of independence began as soon as November 1943. Due to rumblings of war in the Horn and Kurdistan, as well as with the ongoing World Revolutionary War, Palestine was left with an unusually light occupation. A substantially low number of garrisons, as well as the devastation caused by the 1942 Axis invasion to Palestine's defenses, made the country ripe for the taking in the eyes of the PFLP. Although the executive was hesitant, Kemal Ouda – coleader of the PFFL, pointed out that time was of the essence, as the FBU could eventually intensify their support for the Zionists, and or the Arab nationalists. This convinced them, and finally in December they contacted the American Commission for the Levantine Proletariat, telling them they were beginning preparations for their war – and that they would need support.
One key to this was the docks of Jaffa. Already a hotbed of communism, the dockworkers had joined the reopened APFL and were now dominated by PKP politics. Another key was the absolute swarm of support personnel and logisticians that the UASR had unleashed upon their allies thanks to Lend Lease: American ships, crews and bases leased from the Franco-British were akin to tomatoes in a chopped salad [1]. And well, if spoilage was just the cost of business, what's a little extra weight? Don't tell people it's bullets. The ACLP conducted the smuggling operation primarily through the Horn, where the Workers' and Farmers' Revolutionary armed forces were already established, and because at that time the Mediterranean was not yet fully safe to ship traffic.
In February of 1944, it was announced that the Mandate would be reestablished. The land of the law would be finally civilian, instead of a military occupation. The occupation had lasted only a short few months. This was once again due to wartime pressures, and because by that point, the Allies already had the Italians and the Turks on the retreat. The FBU did not foresee the Axis ever invading Palestine again. Perhaps it was shortsightedness on the FBU's part, but they had also announced that the new High Commissioner would be The Viscount Gort, the former Governor of Malta who had oversaw its disastrous two-week defense before being overwhelmed by the Regia Marina. Either way, occupation or not, it would not provide an impediment to the PFLP's plans, and in fact would only accelerate them [...]
On 22 April 1944, a massive and sudden outbreak of shootings and violence broke out all over the cities of Jaffa and Tel Aviv. PFLP and PFFL militants, following six months of revisions and planning, lead a sudden demonstration of Arab-Jewish workers in the city. Rousing the people, they declare a strike in Jaffa at the same time they begin their operations against the Haganah and Meyi. PFFL operatives were observed wearing unfamiliar insignia and clothes, and pushing onward north to the city of Tel Aviv. They hoped to strike gravely at the head of the enemy: either kill or capture David ben Gurion. This fails however, and much of the Zionist leadership is able to flee. Yigal Allon, the Commander in Chief of the Palmach, is critically wounded by the PFFL operatives, while Yitzhak Rabin, a brigade commander, was killed in the fighting. At the same time, the city of Tel Aviv was left with burning cars on the streets, improvised barricades, many dead bodies and so many many bullet holes in the walls, leaving an unpleasant impression of the war to come. While their first operation of the war had not gone as intended, the PFLP now had their control over the heart of Zionism. Tel Aviv, a striking and deep cut on the Zionist forces. If they could impose control that is, for it was also the heart of Zionism, and the citizens of Tel Aviv began violent demonstrations and a campaign of civil disobedience against their newfound occupiers. This did not stop the PFLP. The city would never again see a Haganah uniform – only curfews.
Only hours later, a similar whirlwind of violence would sweep Jerusalem. PFFL militants, also wearing unfamiliar uniforms, encircle the Government House compound in eastern Jerusalem and successfully defeat the British troops stationed there in a standoff. The Viscount Gort is captured and held under arrest by PFLP forces, and moved to an unknown location. Yisrael Galili, commander of the Jerusalem PFFL forces, is dispatched to subdue the Jewish quarter in the "Two Days Operation". However, the operation fails at reaching its intended objective, as Moshe Dayan, the Haganah commander responsible for its defense, holds out. The right-eyepatched commander became a rallying voice for the beleaguered Zionists. Nevertheless, after several more days of fighting Galili is able to capture the quarter, and with that, the rest of the British and Zionist forces either retreat, die or surrender to PFLP forces.
The PFLP moves onward to Latrun, the British fortress compound splitting Highway 1, the artery between Jaffa and Jerusalem.
Its capture is critical.
On 24 April 1944, Radwan al-Hilu, Mufid Nashashibi, Joseph Berger and Nathan Yellin-Mor, representing the three factions of the PFLP, held a "Congress of the People" at the Government House. In prior communiques, it was decided that Judeo-Arabic would be the language of the Congress. Ironically, very few of the attendees knew how to speak the dialect. They recruited Amit Shlaim, an Iraqi Jew, to be their scribe: most of the Congress was spoken in Arabic and Hebrew. The people gathered for half an hour as the flagbearer, Emile Touma, hurriedly sped down Jerusalem in a taxi to arrive in time for the ceremony. Then, with the blaring of loudspeakers, they unveiled the flag of Palestine for the first time, and draped it over the wall. al-Hilu and Berger revealed the recently written Palestinian Declaration of Independence, and brought it to key leaders and delegates to sign the Declaration.
In the name of the people, united against division by blood or faith, we declare on this land, the
independence and the establishment of the "Palestinian Federation",
on this date, in Hijri: the 1st of Jumadal al-Awwal 1363, and in 'Ivri: the 1st of Iyyar, 5708.
The announcement of the revolution is broadcasted by radio by captured stations, and the entire Mandate is taken by a red storm – also at the same time, the creation of the "Palestinian People's Armed Forces" (referred to as the Quwwat in Arabic, and Kokhot in Hebrew), is broadcasted. Red banners are hoisted over the street lights and the arches of Jerusalem, writing in bold letters the name of the newly declared country, in various languages – the "Hitachadut HaPalestinit" in Hebrew, and in Arabic the "Ittihad Afilastiniyy".
After the events of 22-24 April, the Palestinian War kicks into high gear. At the start of the war, the Quwwat had roughly 10,000 men under their command; however, they were facing off perhaps a combined force of 50,000 if the Haganah, the various disorganized Arab volunteer groups, and the British military garrison were to act together upon them.
The People's Armed Forces were led by four generals: Kemal Ouda the chief, who had led the PFFL before its reinvention as the Quwwat, and a couple of recent breakaways from Meyi and the Haganah: Moshe Sneh, Shimon Avidan, Yisrael Galili and Nathan Yellin-Mor. Yellin-Mor would primarily serve as a chief of intelligence operations, which proved to be extremely important during the first few months of the war. Galili was a surprise, considering he had been one of the Haganah's top generals. The Generals' Affair, following the obliteration of organized Jewish resistance in the formation of the Holy Land State, saw Ben-Gurion unseat Galili – a TCI fellow traveller, and begin the reorganization of the Haganah under a similar structure to that of the British Army.
Feeling betrayed, Galili inevitably began to consider joining the PFFL, especially with words of encouragement from his fellow defector, Avidan. Galili and Avidan were not the only ones changing their allegiances: a great many had also begun to reconsider their Zionism in the wake of the Axis occupation and the Holocaust being literally brought to Palestine. While many of the Palestinians had already knew to some vague extent about the mass death, Galili was party to the preliminary findings of the "HaShoah BaEretz Yisrael" Committee, for private use by the rebuilt Jewish National Council and which spread among top ranking Yishuv leadership. Even though the full report would not be published until long after the War, at this time they already had horrifying estimates – ranging from 24,000 to 40,000 Jews and a further 10,000 to 15,000 Arabs dead – primarily as a result of the KZ Akers concentration camp, the invasion – the torments, and the massacres.
If Palestine was no longer the safe refuge that they dreamed of, then the fundamental basis for their dream had been undermined. The Holocaust had been a major shift in Palestinian politics – it led to major polarization in Palestinian society, shifting people farther to the extremes as people finally became convinced that one or the other cause was all the more necessary, and stopped waffling to and fro. Thus, the center weakened, and so did the Haganah. Galili and Avidan were outspokenly supportive of the PFLP when they had carried out the Government House bombing back in 1943. Finally, they offered their services to the PFFL, where they were handily accepted after proving their loyalties to the PFLP. When Galili was newly revealed as a commander in the Quwwat, ben-Gurion proceeded to call him the "Great Betrayer"; the affair also left many troops in the Haganah demoralized; not to mention, a large contingent had also defected with Galili and Avidan.
In the Haganah, following the Generals' Affair and the reorganization, David ben Gurion became the principal leader. Under him would be Ya'akov Dori, chief of the general staff, and Yitzhak Sadeh as the field operations commander. Dori, in bad health, was forced to delegate much of his tasks to Sadeh, ironically named the "Old Man". The Haganah also had a similar amount of troops to the Quwwat, with around 10,000. In the following months they would be bolstered by the devastated Meyi joining their ranks, which added around 1,000 fighters, though ultimately the bulk of the growth for both the Quwwat and the Haganah consisted of conscripts.
For the Arab nationalists, comprising those that had not joined the Quwwat and the PFLP, they were commanded by Fawzi al-Qawuqyi – one of the leaders of the 1935-1937 Arab Rebellion. Qawuqyi succeeded in organizing an impromptu force of a thousand fighters under the "Arab Salvation Army", however, compared to both the Quwwat and the Haganah they were at a numerical disadvantage. This would have to be ameliorated by joining forces with the Arab Legion of Transjordan, a highly trained force of a couple thousand troops under the control of Glubb Pasha, a British officer. The Legion was greatly weakened by the Italo-Turkish invasion of the Levant, and as arguably the best trained force in the Middle East, they had been a huge target for the invaders. Consequently, the Legion's numbers rapidly evaporated under their, well primarily the Turkish genocidal onslaught, before they finally retreated deeper into the desert to evade death.
While they were indeed quite weak, the Legion were also fiercely battle-hardened and were gaining in numbers once the occupation had ended. With the sudden breakout of the war in Palestine, the Legion decided to secure the land for the Hashemite royal banner, and were unlike Qawuqyi in that they explicitly advocated for Palestine to fall under dominion, with Transjordan, of a Hashemite kingdom.
About the British. The British military forces in Palestine under GOC Douglas McConnell, handily outnumbered all three combined, with a force of around 35,000. However, they were suffering from a serious resource drain, and in reality, 35,000 would not be even enough to hold all of Palestine, especially a Palestine devastated by the Axis occupation and retreat. As if the High Commissioner being held hostage wasn't enough the Quwwat had also successfully broken through the already less-than-impenetrable fortresses at Latrun, and controlled the pass over which highway traffic between the coast and Jerusalem travelled. However, while things were on the upswing for the PFLP, they had also suffered around half a hundred casualties in taking Latrun – a high price to pay. For that number however they took a little over 60 British soldiers as POW. The Quwwat's "Plan Spear", the military operation to establish a controlled axis from Jaffa-Aviv to Jerusalem, had completely succeeded, and ensured the survival of the revolution: from here now on, it would be crushing the already weakened Haganah, all the while fending off attacks from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab Salvation Army.
Only a week later on 1 May, the PFLP uprising would reach a new climax on Labor Day with large-scale demonstrations in the cities and the declaration of an indefinite general strike against the British and Zionists. The PFLP would begin a rapid transition to dual power by establishing spontaneous local councils and soviets, immediately building a new revolutionary state though at the moment under the control of the Quwwat forces.
Following communiques and negotiations between the Franco-British and the PFLP – promising their continued support for the World War and the return of all hostages – in exchange, the FBU would withdraw from Palestine completely. In the next month, the war would ramp up as McConnell pulled his forces out of Palestine and proclaimed a policy of non-intervention on either side. The Franco-British would however, secretly begin channeling arms and equipment to the Zionist forces. Among the dockworkers of the ports of Palestine a common joke would spread: "Today, we smuggle British bombs, tomorrow we smuggle American rifles…"
As a result of the dire situation the Zionist forces now found themselves in – especially the weakened Haganah, they were forced to put aside their differences. On 30 May, Meyi and the Haganah merged, announcing the formation of the "Israeli Liberation Army", its Hebrew acronym the "Tzachal". This would represent the unification of all Zionist forces in Palestine.
Fortunately for the PFLP, the capture of Latrun and the consequent encirclement of the Zionist forces around Jerusalem provided impossible to dislodge for the new Tzachal. While "Red Haifa", despite having one of the lowest number of PFLP militants at the beginning of the rebellion, had been one of the most ardent supporters of the revolution, the city was now embroiled by the beginning of Sadeh's onslaught as the Tzachal besieged it from the Carmel mountains. The Quwwat was especially worried about maintaining supplies to the city.
Meanwhile, the Arab Salvation Army had already controlled large swathes of territory, north of the Jezreel Valley, around Acre and parts of the Hula Valley. In the south, Gaza was also under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood; the PFLP and the other forces scrambled to control whatever territories remained unoccupied – especially with the British withdrawal from the Negev Desert, normally a restricted military zone.
The threat of a popular Arab resistance in the countryside in the West Bank, as feared by PFLP leadership, proved to have never materialized: the Quwwat soldiers took the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, Tulkarm and Jenin without any real resistance – owing to their preexisting sympathies to the PFLP already.
In the latter days of July 1944, the Arab Legion – coming to the aid of the incredibly underfunded and ragtag ASA, would finally enter the war, taking control of the eastern hills of the West Bank and substantial areas of the Negev, including Umm al Rashrash, the village on the Red Sea and future city of Palestine. If it was not yet more bad news the Arab Legion had also picked up some serious firepower from 'accidentally dropped equipment' by McConnell's forces as the contingent made its way out of Palestine. Ironically, the Franco-British government back in Westminster was publicly embarrassed, about the now very public fact that British officers were employed in a foreign army; they ordered them to return to Transjordan. The officers complied and did as instructed, only to sneak across the border and resume their activities in the Arab Legion – resulting in a bizarre media event. In actuality the officers were where they needed to be for the Franco-British government… bogging down the damn Reds.
Uninterrupted, forces of the Legion successfully make it far west enough to meet up with members of the Muslim Brotherhood on the border with Egypt. Back east, Legion forces attempting to subjugate the Jewish settlements on the southern shores of the Dead Sea meet unexpected resistance from the Etzioni Brigade, which had fled south from Gush Etzion[2] after finding their besieged position by the Quwwat untenable. The Legion and the Etzionis settled into a bitter stalemate as neither could gain the upper hand on each other, and the former could not penetrate their defenses: while they were fierce, for the Etzionis it was a fight for their survival.
While the Arab Legion north nipped away at the PFLP, threatening to crush all in their maw, further west General Sneh enacted Operation "Yated", successfully seizing control of the Jewish cities of Rehovot, Ness Ziona and Yavne. The soldiers travelled as far south as Isdud[3] and Majdal[3], before finally meeting resistance from the Muslim Brotherhood. More importantly, this also served to massively enlarge the Jaffa-Jerusalem axis, and to leave the Tzachal forces in the Negev encircled by the Brotherhood, the Legion and the Quwwat. The following month would see the complete breakdown of Zionist forces in the south with the exception of the Dead Sea encampment, and its partition between the PFLP, the Legion and the Brotherhood.
Following negotiations on 3 August 1944, the Muslim Brotherhood was subordinated to the control of the Arab Legion, and the south falls under their undisputed occupation. Only the PFLP holds out in the Negev, based in Hebron and Beersheba; they are soon barraged by an array of halfhearted offensives from the Arab Legion, which experience mixed success at best: they are too focused on subduing the Etzioni Brigade. For all the good work in the South, the Tzachal had also successfully seized control of the Jezreel Valley, and under Sadeh "Red Haifa" was now barely holding on. If there was any consolation for the city it was the fact that the Arab Salvation Army had unexpectedly and stubbornly held on to control of the Hula Valley, continuing to pester the Jewish settlements in the North. Ben Gurion grew irate at the commander responsible for the floundering northern campaign – Moshe Dayan. "That cynic, that fool, has still got his undies in a bunch from Jerusalem." To make matters worse, during an attack from Qawuqyi Dayan had left an entire company under another commander to fend for themselves, pulling out after only a few hours. He was sacked, and demoted to a lower ranking post.
On a hot summer day, under the command of Kemal Ouda, the Quwwat staged a series of arson attacks on the Carmel Mountains, covered in easily burnable Aleppo pine. A blaze soon engulfed the forests of the mountains, causing the massive 29 August fire – which began to threaten the lives of the Tzachal soldiers, based away in the mountains. The forest fires send titanic billowing clouds into the sky, discoloring the sunset and sunrise – an ominous sight for the Tzachal, at this point their control limited to the Jezreel Valley, and a good sign, yet not really, for the starved citizens of Haifa.
In September of 1944, the PFLP enacted two successful operations against both the Tzachal and the Arab Legion: the first of which was Operation "Hof Al Gharib", commanded by Shimon Avidan. Hof Al Gharib would see the defection and the crumbling of the last Tzachal forces in a long besieged strip south of Haifa and north of Tel Aviv, finally seeing the entire west coast seized by the PFLP with the exception of Gaza, and the north, of course.
In the east, Yisrael Galili, after adapting to his new command in the West Bank at long last led a series of successful offensives against the outnumbered Legionaries, culminating in a cinematic battle at Umm al Abor on the Jordan River. This battle would finally see the Arab Legion being expelled from the West Bank, leaving just the Negev forces – which were faring marginally better. They had at last broke into the defenses and entered the Dead Sea Jewish settlements at the expense of a hundred men. The brigade begin the "Long Retreat" into the Negev desert, accompanied by the evacuated civilians of the kibbutzim and the moshavim, the remaining soldiers weary and uncertain of their future, having fought off three encirclement operations by the Arab Legion before breaking.
Elsewhere, the Legion and Brotherhood also had Moshe Sneh on the defensive, contesting and engulfing the town of Majdal in a bitter and slow battle. The Muslim Brotherhood also finally and successfully pressured the Kingdom of Egypt into intervention: Egyptian military battalions begin to enter Gaza and the Negev in droves. Although the Italian occupation had resulted in the defeat of the Egyptian Army and the seizure of their equipment, their hasty and hellish retreat – especially through the Sinai Desert – had left an enormous number behind. Some of this was already being exploited to good use by the Muslim Brotherhood. All in all, although they had been wounded, it all balanced out by the time for their entrance into the Palestinian War.
In October, the Tzachal's attempts to eradicate the Arab Salvation Army threat once and for all, finally meet crushing success when Qawuqyi is captured by Palmach operatives in a night raid and killed on site. This was the first victory by a recently recovered Yigal Allon, who was now proving how indispensable he was to the Zionist effort. The irregular army begins to collapse. However, despite the dying down of the Carmel forest fire, things could only look worse for the Tzachal: Quwwat battalions, under the command of Avidan and Ouda, manage to take control of the mountains and the coastline pass to Haifa, finally relieving the long embattled city.
The "International Volunteer Brigades - Levantine Detachment" under the control of Jimmie Strauch, land in November of 1944, at the port of Jaffa with the goal of assisting the PFLP forces and are a most welcome sight. They are immediately directed up north to help with the Tzachal threat. Meanwhile, Yisrael Galili and Moshe Sneh finally link up their forces in the south, starting Operation "Mabul" (lit. torrential flood), an arduous campaign to defeat the Legion, even now supported by the Egyptian Army. To their benefit however, with the arrival of the IVB Levantines, a new surge of American weaponry and equipment bolster the Quwwat and would be especially helpful against the tanks of the Egyptians.
Even with the impending arrival of the IVB Levantines, however, the Tzachal had not run out of surprises: nor did Dayan either. Dayan, acting on the orders of Allon, began Operation "Mechiqa", a series of brutal, punitive and genocidal raids in the northern West Bank, striking deep at the Quwwat logistical corridor that supported the Haifa pass. Dayan would remark in his post-war memoirs: "...I, suffering from perhaps my wartime madness, shouted to my Tzachal soldiers, the tironim: "Who here wants to strike a bloody dagger through some Arab hearts in the night?!" The tironim, most of them former Irguniks and Meyiists, raised their palms, outstretched palms into the air excitedly. Never had I seen such a show of hands. They were all eager, unlike the Gachalchiks[4]… Now we were about to leave for this operation, which we had called 'Erasure', and it was not just any normal operation…" And deep they struck: the Tzachal managed to reach all the way to Jenin, inundating the city in all manner of atrocity: it would be remembered by the Jeniniks[5] as "the Scouring" to this day. Almost sixty percent of the former population had been decimated.
The plundering of the city and the genocidal treatment of the Tzachal on the city's residents, accompanied the encirclement of the Haifa-supporting Quwwat forces to the west, threatening to collapse the northern theater.
Finally, the Levantines arrived, and this time, a first for Palestine: with tanks. Indeed, up to this point in the war, the war had been fought entirely with regular infantry, motorized in some places here and there – armored vehicles pretty much a given, mostly though, if they were mobile, it was on a horse. Hitherto, none of the warring factions in Palestine had enough tanks or the logistics necessary to support them. That all changed with the Levantine detachment however, and they whipped the Tzachal good: in fact, the action was so successful that the Quwwat was able to pursue the Tzachal all the way to one of their major bases: Mishmar HaEmek - the Guard of the Valley.
The Second Battle of Mishmar HaEmek would be a long fought battle, lasting several days and nights as the Tzachal fanatically held out at their base. An artillery platoon was brought in by the Quwwat, barraging the kibbutz with shells. Ironically Mishmar HaEmek had been one of the most collectivist places in the Yishuv – it was founded as a workers' kibbutz. And here, it was, being shelled by the Communists. The shelling was not without some criticism for they had killed nineteen non-combatants -- women, children and men, and destroyed the school of the kibbutz at the same time. Victory was victory however, and the Quwwat captured the kibbutz by the end of November. It wasn't just absolutely significant for them either, the kibbutz had been a strategic objective for a long time as it controlled a major route from Jenin to Haifa. For that entire time the PFLP had subsisted on makeshift roads and the Hadera-Haifa coastal route for the logistics of the Haifa battles.
David ben Gurion, having been close to the frontlines at that time, nearly tasted death when an artillery shell exploded only some distance from him. It was fortunate for Ben Gurion that the fragments missed – but had he died, the Tzachal almost certainly would have crumbled. The loss of Mishmar HaEmek would put the Tzachal on the back footing for the rest of the war; Moshe Dayan, promoted back to his original rank and manic with his successful operations against Jenin, plunged into a major depression. The winter was not well for the Tzachal and Dayan, who began to suffer from restless nights.
Suddenly, on the 4th of December 1944, one and a half thousand troops secretly would run away from their posts from the Tzachal, in one of the largest mass defections of the war. Most of them were primarily from Gachal, but of the 1500, a third were also normal Palestinian-born soldiers – among them – a commander by the name of Moshe Dayan. Dayan had exchanged secret communiques with the PFLP prior to his defection. He hoped that in exchange for his surrender he might be at least partially pardoned of his war crimes in Operation Mechiqa. Whether he got his wish would remain to be seen until after the end of the war, as the defectors were interned into a camp as POWs by the Quwwat. The camp was the absolute bottom of the barrel, but it had been nothing many of the pioneers had not seen. It was not great, but not terrible either.
Meanwhile – many kilometers away, Ben-Gurion, praying for a Hanukkah miracle – believing that the Tzachal may once be successful like the Maccabees were, would not get to see any that eve on the 10th. The Quwwat continued their relentless offensives against Zionist forces, capturing the western half of the Jezreel Valley and laying siege to the city of Nazareth. At last, in the middle of the holiday, Ben Gurion called for a ceasefire with Berger and al-Hilu. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Zionist leader called for peace talks at the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, a holy site and ideal for the care which it commanded. After a week of deliberation, mediated by officials from the Franco-British Union and the Union of American Socialist Republics, the Zionists surrendered to the PFLP once they had been assured and guaranteed that they would be treated fairly, moreover, that they might be pardoned for any crimes in the course of the war, and that the Palestinian Federation would allow continued Jewish immigration into Palestine.
This was a point which greatly strained the Jewish-Arab leadership of the Federation. Finally, thanks to their key diplomat, Muhammad Ashkar, they ultimately conceded, on the condition that the immigrants had no other recourse but to go to Palestine – that is, Palestine was the only safe refuge for them and that they were in a dangerous, life-threatening situation.
This was a date which indeed is remembered in history. From here on to the present today, Palestine's immigration policy would be informed by the "Law of Refuge" – that served as a framework, a guiding principle – not just that – it also became the ethos of the Federation.
It was good news and a Christmas miracle. By New Years' on 1 Jan 1945, the PFLP celebrated the surrender of ZIonist forces with large red parades in Haifa, Jerusalem and Ramallah. Many of the former Irguniks and Meyiists were not covered in the "list of pardonable persons" however, and they were mysteriously absent from the surrendering battalions[...]
The failure of the Tzachal in the War of Liberation can be attributed to the Tel Aviv Attacks, from which it never really recovered. The psychological wounding of the Zionist leadership, the loss of initiative, mass defections furthermore and its resulting information leaks, a strategic disadvantage, all compounded to set it on a death course. It is also, of course, hard to keep fighting when the enemy at times, is you, a fellow Jew; the bipolar disorder from which some of the commanders – Dayan is a particularly good example – apparently suffered from, did not help either. Following the retreat of the Italo-Turkish occupation forces, an attitude of complacency had effectively penetrated not just the Zionist leadership but also the British military garrison. It was complacency that cost the Zionists Tel Aviv and the lives of their commanders. They did not seriously believe that the Communists would stage an uprising, let alone so early. Historian Samuel Reid writes: "In fact it would have been better for the PFLP had they started earlier." The defectors from the Zionist forces also gave the PFLP an intelligence advantage, by giving them an expose into the Zionist mentality.
Nevertheless, the road was far from over.
The missing far-right had in fact decided to break away from the Tzachal, and to begin an insurgency of their own in the newly PFLP-controlled north under the name of "Meshachrerei Hadashim Yisrael", or the 'New Liberators of Israel' (Mahi). Fortunately for the PFLP, behind the Mahi insurgency were the same Meyi and Irgun rightists, which Nathan Yellin-Mor knew all too well. With the Mahi's predictability, the PFLP could afford to focus less resources on the North and instead direct more men and arms to Operation Mabul. The IVB Levantines would be sorely needed there indeed. The operation had proceeded in two phases: "Mabul A", which had mostly floundered. No, it was Mabul B, where the tempo of the war really picked up. In one of the surprises of the war, many of the Tzachal soldiers – primarily the defectors, joined the Quwwat in special battalions to fight against the common enemy - the Egyptian invader.
The Quwwat was able to retake control of Majdal and push onward to the fort of Iraq Suwaydan, roughly 30 km northeast of Gaza City. In the sea, the warships of the Quwwat navy – one surviving ship from Haifa and two American-supplied ships -- battled with the Egyptian navy. Further east in the Negev, however, the Quwwat were facing difficulties against the Legionaries who continued to use the desert to evade capture and decisive battles. Beersheba continued to be out of reach for the PFLP, and they would need time to set up a new logistical corridor to the long-neglected southern front.
In February 1945, Operation Pleshet began. The Sea Quwwa successfully defeated the Egyptians off the Gazan coast, finally allowing for a flotilla of ships, packed to the brim with soldiers, to prepare for an amphibious landing. At the same time, Yisrael Galili's forces set off from Iraq Suwaydan, marching towards Beit Hanoun. The Air Quwwa is deployed for the first time, using American-made F-34E Belladonnas. Pleshet had been the first time the Quwwat attempted a true combined arms offensive against any major enemy ever, and this showed: the commanders had difficulty coordinating between all the various arms. In the end though, they managed, and the sudden bombings from the air caught the Egyptian garrison in Beit Hanoun off guard. Beit Hanoun was swooped by Galili's forces, and the combined arms offensive pressed onward to Gaza City. Around 5,500 troops in total attack the city, covered by Palestinian air, from both the desert and the sea. The city is handily captured, and three thousand Egyptian soldiers, plus a similar sized contingent of Muslim Brothers, are either killed or taken prisoner.
Egyptian morale had virtually collapsed by March 1945 as a result of Pleshet: the Quwwat takes the initiative, and the Legionaries are unable to keep the Quwwat from winning in the "Battle of Beersheba", an offensive led by Moshe Sneh and the Levantine Detachment. With the collapse of the Beersheba stronghold, the road ahead to Umm al Rashrash – the gate to the Red Sea, is open.
In a surprise, Glubb Pasha – the leader of the Arab Legion, calls for an armistice with the PFLP. The loss after loss on the part of the Legion had been seriously demoralizing, and Pasha – or perhaps his Franco-British superiors, decided enough was enough. If nothing else, the incredibly shoddy performance of the Egyptian Army was proof that the war against the Federation would be unwinnable. Glubb Pasha was not Palestinian. He was not even an Arab by blood. But he was loyal, or rather, claimed to be loyal to the Jordanian Hashemites, and so he asked Emir 'Abdullah to allow him to return to Transjordan and call off the invasion. It was not even really the Emir that had instigated the entire exercise, but nevertheless the emir, Glubb Pasha's good friend, complied, and called on the Arab Legion to end the war and return.
The announcement of an armistice between the Legion and the PFLP killed any fire the Egyptian Army had in pursuing the war. The wind – blown away from 'Abdullah's peace declaration – from their sails, the Army called a ceasefire with the PFLP and to join the armistice negotiations after several weeks of fighting, as their king wavered whether to continue the war or not.
On March 25th, the armistice was called, and Palestine finally fell silent with the cessation of gunfire after nearly a year of the war.
Then the people exploded into celebration.
Finally, for the first time without shooting each other, the leaders of the war met: Glubb Pasha, Emir 'Abdullah, King Farouk, and the PFLP Quadrumvirate, at the city of Aqaba in Transjordan. 'Abdullah did not like the idea of even giving the Egyptian king Farouk one step into Transjordan, and publicly refused to be in the same room as him – remarking: "That mongrel son of an Albanian farmer, playing toy soldiers with his army!". He had been referring to the disastrous micromanagement of the army by Farouk, which he believed cost the Egyptian Army the war. In fact this was not Farouk's first rodeo: the king had also micromanaged the defense of Egypt against the Italian invasion, going about as well as you'd expect. The Palestinian War was a last attempt to salvage his prestige, and to prove that Egypt was not just a Franco-British client; this too, did not go well. Anyhow, despite the tensions between the Arab leaders, the conference proceeded ahead.
The PFLP was clear about their demands: Get the hell out of Palestine. End the war. Stop interfering in the affairs of the region. Any and every proposal to draw borders beyond what had already been laid down by the Mandate of Palestine was rebuked by the leaders of the Front. Their advantage in the war and in the negotiations were clear from the start of the Aqaba conference, and ultimately the Arab nationalist parties conceded. Farouk would childishly say at the end: "And you're not getting a single cent of mine in reparations!", receiving frosty looks from both of the PFLP leaders.
They at last exited, walking away without looking back: the conference was over, the struggle was over, but something new was beginning: the Federation …
Excerpts from "76 Years of the Palestinian Federation" (2020 ed; Rotem Amin, University of Jaffa)
…The Federation, following the end of the revolutionary war of independence, would finally transition to civil rule under a PFLP-only provisional government at its capital in Jerusalem. At this time, the opposition parties which characterized the later political system of the Federation, had not yet existed or been founded. Nevertheless the PFLP was brimming with factionalism - mainly from the remnants of the National Defence Party, and the Left-Meyiists under Nathan Yellin-Mor. One of the first acts of the Provisional Government was to establish a Constitutional Convention. This was to determine the future electoral-economic-governmental system of the fledgling country. This was followed by a declaration of war on Nazi Germany and the rest of the Axis for a variety of reasons: to repay its comrades in the Comintern for their support, to honor its promise to the Franco-British, gain favorability and prestige, and also increase its chances of becoming a founding member of the United Nations. Though Palestine never participated in any operations directly itself, it continued to support the war effort logistically. Many of its citizens would also serve in the international volunteer brigades and British legions in the closing days of the war. A tradition developed -- one where everyone was expected to volunteer for military service. It continued long after the war had ended. The Provisional Government would frame its participation in the war as the Federation's first trial as a unified, independent country. Redemption and reconciliation between veterans of the war and a shoulder to shoulder march to thrust the sword of liberation into the common enemy – the genocidal fascist menace - would be a key theme.[...]
At the same time, the Government was worried about an institution of theirs, one that seemed on the verge of becoming a bureaucratic singularity. It was the Quwwat, and it was a massive creature. It was not only responsible for the defense of the Federation, the oversight of the Palestinian international volunteer brigades, but also the wartime economic wellbeing of Palestine. Thus it was decided by the leadership that a program of extensive cutbacks for the Quwwat was in order, which would also facilitate its debureaucratization. The period of war communism would finally end by late 1946, concurrent with the implementation of a socialist economy under the Provisional Government and its "Economics Bureau" …
The core of the PFLP – the Palestine Communist Party, were originally orthodox Marxist-Leninists who had no real independence from Moscow in the beginning: they bent over and submitted their will to every directive from the Soviet Union.
However, the PKP had since made a radical transformation (especially after the original Jewish leadership had returned from their downright horrible experiences in the USSR, as it tried to consolidate its grip over parties internationally). Bundism, Tsurikkerism and DeLeonism were major imports of the party, thanks to their longtime connections with the Jewish-American Labor Bund and the American Commission for the Levantine Proletariat. The Party, and even the entire PFLP held a great admiration and respect for their patron the UASR. One of the commitments of the PFLP charter was the establishment of a federal governmental model: this would be an ideal fit for a multinational socialist country – the entire raison d'etre for the existence of the PFLP. It was thus no surprise that they picked the name "Palestinian Federation" when declaring independence.
At the end of the war, the soviets and the Provisional Government of the Federation represented just ~1.6 million people. Although the soviets were highly irregular in size and functioning, some soviets representing far more people than others, and some like completely dysfunctional families, the Constitutional Convention decided that since they already existed, it would be better to use them as the basis for a new soviet democracy in Palestine. It would however, require a new soviet reform, but that was the point of the Convention, right?[...]
The resulting system as described in the Constitution can be summarized as:
A federal soviet democracy, based around the 'Nahal's – the 17 constituent territories of Palestine.
These nahals would be composed of "near councils"[6] at the base and "nahali councils"[7] at the top.
These nahali councils elect the 170 seat Assembly of Delegates, the government of Palestine's legislative branch, known as the Memshelah/Tamthil.
This would then elect the Administration, which would serve as the collective executive government of the country when the Tamthil is not in session.
It is presided over by the Madyan, that determines the formation of the Administration also with the ability to call new administrative elections at any time.
Moreover, the Madyan is also Palestine's supreme court, interpreting the constitutionality of administrative acts (the Constitution like in the UASR is also freely determined by the Memshelah) and serving as the highest court of appeals.
[...]
General elections were called for January 1948: the Provisional Government would continue to rule the Federation for two and a half more years. This was probably longer than necessary however the PKP-dominated PFLP Provisional Government felt like it needed to prove itself as a 'good government of the people'. The end of the World Revolutionary War would also mean an influx of Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees, which the Government had already begun preparing for since its formation. As the elections approached, the Front eventually disintegrated, as the factions could no longer sit on their hands under PKP rule.
First, Nathan Yellin-Mor broke away with his Left-Meyiist cadre, founding the party "L'Canaan" to represent the burgeoning Canaanist cultural movement. Then, an ex-NDP member of the PFLP, Anwar al-Khatib, also broke away and created the "Country's Party", an Arab interests party with the goal of appealing to the Arab-dominated agricultural industry (hence Country's).
The PKP and other socialist dominated remnants of the Front would continue the banner under the name "PFLP", deliberating on what form it should take and holding on to its name to remind the people who was responsible for their freedom. Even at the moment that the other factions had left, the PFLP had already transformed significantly. In the end, a few months before the elections were to begin, they changed their name.
They were now the "People's Movement for the Continued Liberation of Palestine". Originally, as they were the only party to adopt such a name structure, people began referring to them as just the "People's Movement" or simply the "Movement".
Eventually however, after omitting the last word, the Hebrew acronym, "Tahlah", gained mass appeal and achieved mass popularity, catching on as the everyday name of the Party.
The remaining Zionists attempted to run David ben Gurion – pardoned and still a resident of Palestine – but the Government adopted legislation barring any "high-ranking leader, holding the minimum equivalent title of officer of any enemy movement and faction in the Palestinian Revolutionary War of Liberation", from ever running in a political office, or voting, or really, having equal rights. It thus fell to Berl Katznelson[8], an acceptable compromise candidate (given that he was an outspoken supporter of the Peel Commission) to represent the "Mifleget Po'elei Moledet" (Mapam), or the Workers' Party of the Homeland. Neither the Country's Party, L'Canaan nor Mapam would gain a substantial percentage in the 1948 elections, and the Tahlah won 70% of the popular vote. After it was revealed that the Left-Meyiists in L'Canaan bore among them a frankly excessive number of crypto-fascists in the "Eizenkot Affair", the Assembly of Delegates banned it from ever running. Although Yellin-Mor faced controversy, the leader of L'Canaan was not denied the right to political office like Ben Gurion, for he was still greatly respected in the country as a former commander in the war. Still, he never ran again for government and instead focused on cultural-social agitation for the Canaanist movement. To clear his reputation, he in fact publicly applied for Tahlah membership.
In his words: "I no longer desire to continue politics. Going into politics to establish a new culture, a new society, was a mistake: to do so, one needs to go into society. … I am terribly regretful of the fact that I was blind to my peers' affiliations. I founded L'Canaan because I believed the Palestinian people were separated. I think that today, "Jew" and "Arab" is an artificial division, a division imposed on us thousands of years ago, to keep us powerless. We were originally Canaanites. And this is my goal: to remind you of that fact." The Canaanist movement would remain alive in the end.
It is important to note that none of the parties in the Palestinian Federation were ever right-wing in any sense. Social democracy is the furthest you can go to the Right within the Palestinian system. Socialism is enshrined as a basic principle in the Constitution of the Palestinian Federation. Even though the Provisional Government and the Constitutional Convention could not pursue to establish the Federation as an official dictatorship of the proletariat for geopolitical and diplomatic reasons, they sure did their best to make it all but in name.[...]
Demographically, the Jewish population would of course, rapidly increase in the coming years – primarily as a result of the intake of Holocaust and WRW refugees - coming out to a total of 320 thousand[9] as the PFLP had promised all along, back then at the Church of the Annunciation. This realization would have to come at the same time as the state emerged teetering on bankruptcy. It was in a hunger and devoid of natural resources: the Holy Land was said to be filled with milk and honey, but there was, also, not much more else.
To cope with the economic pressures, especially as the Federation had to admit thousands of immigrants into the country every month, the Tahlah enacted a grand reorganization of how life was structured in Palestine. Radwan al-Hilu and Joseph Berger called on the people to begin a grand social-economical revolution. "We are immediately transitioning to socialism", the Tahlah said in their presses. Central to this was the commune, a new unit of settlement slash social unit the Tahlah had created in order to replace all the kibbutzim and especially the moshavim. The "Komunalitziya of 1948-1951" would see much of the country being swept away in the phenomenon, primarily and especially the immigrants. This was actually an austerity plan and also an investment plan in disguise, as the government hoped to reduce rationing itself, and the focus on it, by using the communal lifestyle as a central focus of life, and to use the commune to build infrastructure which the Federation desperately needed. Rationing on basic necessities like food ultimately had to be done. The country had been running an import-export deficit for multiple years in order to keep everyone fed. The government also hoped to reduce the food rationing pressures by encouraging agricultural production in the mostly rural communes, although there were plenty of urban communes established[...]
Concurrent with the Komunalitziya, the Federation lobbied in the outer world for the payment of reparations. In 1951, they were finally able to sign treaties with the Germans, providing an immeasurably helpful flow of foreign capital into the country. The necessity for rationing practically and immediately ended as soon as they had begun their payments. Aid went beyond just monetary – from the east came a shower of technicians, technical expertise, technology, all kinds of materiel and personnel [...]
Ironically, the promises to the Franco-British Union to support their war efforts were a blessing for the Federation's economy. It kept the economy mostly intact even as it was undergoing socialization by the Provisional Government and later the Tahlah. A large black market developed as a result of rationing and communalization, which proved impossible for the Tahlah to eliminate. However their plan had entirely succeeded in keeping tensions low within the country. "As a result of the Komunalitziya, Palestine's population was allowed to increase massively while nobody, not a single one starved. We had very little but by sharing it we were able to grow." – wrote University of Hebron Arab professor Khadra Nazal. The Tahlah imposed the principle of "No One Left Behind", which became a popular slogan among the Palestinians. "Toiling away in the fields and in the factories as Jews and as Arabs with your fellow countrymen, completely irrespective of race, quickly broke any reservations one or the other had about each other.", approved Nazal. Despite the rabble rousing of the Zionist remnants especially in regards to what they decried as restrictive immigration policies, many of the new muhajirs quickly assimilated and became some of the Tahlah and the Federation's most enthusiastic supporters. A unified Palestinian identity was thus successfully built in the Komunalitziya[...]
This has been the final post in the "History of Palestine" series.
The Tahlah continues to exist and govern to the present; in 2020, Palestine is a thriving majority-Arabic[10] speaking country with a population just a little over 9 million.
[1] The ITTL term for "Israeli salad". If you haven't heard of it, PLEASE try it. It's good.
[2] A Jewish settlement near Jerusalem, which stands between it and Hebron.
[3] Isdud - OTL known as Ashdod. Majdal - OTL known as Ashkelon.
[4] Name for a person recruited by GaCHaL (Giyus Chutz La'Aretz), or "Overseas Drafting". Gachal primarily drafted from European immigrants, nearly all of whom were Holocaust survivors themselves.
[5] Modern name for a resident of Jenin
[6] Near councils are a catch all name for "local", "regional", and "city" councils – determined by whether the governed settlement is classified as a city or not, and if not, whether it is big enough for local representation alone, or to be grouped with other settlements in a regional council.
[7] The nahali councils, or the far councils, are in a sense equivalent to the republican congresses of soviets of the UASR.
[8] Does not die of an aneurysm like OTL.
[9] The top three: 120,000 Jews would arrive from Europe in general, followed by 70,000 from Iraq, then nearly 100% of the Turkish Jewish community – 50,000 Jews. Morocco, Yemen, and Syria each saw 20,000 Jews emigrate, followed by 15,000 from Egypt and a further 5,000 from the rest of North Africa. This would take place over a period of 15 years from the Federation's founding. It should be noted that some of the immigrants came in fact as a result of pogroms as a reaction to the Palestinian War. General antisemitism blending with anticommunism, periodic red scares and tensions with Palestine/Iran would contribute to the exodus; the Turkish Jewish community left as a result of trauma and persecution from the Turanist period, and similarly for the European Holocaust refugees.
[10] In the present, the Palestinian Federation's population is 59% Arab, 39% Jewish and another 2% covering other minorities. 3% of the population natively speaks Yiddish, another 12.1% Palestinian Judeo-Arabic, 27.3% Hebrew, and 57.9% Southern Levantine Arabic. Nearly 100% of the population speaks Arabic or Judeo-Arabic as a L2 at least, 90% some basic Hebrew at least, and 70% know at least some English.
So, in previous posts concerning the post-WRW ratlines for Nazis into South America, there was mention of a Palestinian Shin Bet hunting down Nazi war criminals--I'm assuming that Shin Bet is just what it's called in Hebrew, and that as a part of the Federation's government, it has an equivalent name in Arabic?
So, in previous posts concerning the post-WRW ratlines for Nazis into South America, there was mention of a Palestinian Shin Bet hunting down Nazi war criminals--I'm assuming that Shin Bet is just what it's called in Hebrew, and that as a part of the Federation's government, it has an equivalent name in Arabic?
Most likely. Given how the PPAF and the Assembly of Delegates, the armed forces and legislative branch respectively, both have alternative names in Hebrew and Arabic, it would be odd if the same didn't hold true for Palestinian intelligence agencies as well as other governmental institutions. Shin Bet was simply just the more recognizable name which is why it was chosen in that post, I'm guessing.
I wonder what the geographic distribution of Jewish people looks like here, OTL the vast majority of Jews live in either the USA or Israel. It looks like less migration to Palestine is occurring here. Is there still a large population of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa without the vitriolic Arab-Israeli conflict?
I wonder what the geographic distribution of Jewish people looks like here, OTL the vast majority of Jews live in either the USA or Israel. It looks like less migration to Palestine is occurring here. Is there still a large population of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa without the vitriolic Arab-Israeli conflict?
The UASR and the USSR could be actually competing for first place. Depending on how things go in the USSR, it may either have the highest Jewish population by a very large margin, or be a bit behind the UASR. We are looking at populations of 4-6 million for both.
Palestine is a solid third, with ~3.5 million Jews. In fourth place will be the Franco British Union. Canada is in fifth place, assuming no territorial changes.
After that is Iran, definitely. Iran had a population of a hundred thousand Jews and it took until the Islamic Revolution to get them to leave. I am sure it will grow. Iran -- in sixth place.
Argentina will be in seventh place taking in an influx of Brazilian Jews after WW2. I didn't know this while doing my research -- OTL actually Brazil has the tenth largest Jewish pop with 100,000. A chunk of them are likely to emigrate to Palestine.
And a quick final round:
Eighth place - Australasia
Ninth place - Americuba
Tenth place - Brazil
Eleventh place - Hungary
Twelfth place - West Germany, depending on its postwar conditions it could plummet further in population and lose out to countries like Mexico instead.
Not sure about Quartasponda. As for the fastest growing Jewish population? Probably Australasia.
Yes. As pointed out, MENA Red Bloc nations sans Turkey will retain sizeable Jewish populations, but so will Blue Bloc nations to an extent. Not to say the mass flight won't occur. Anti-semitism in the Arab World (which is almost entirely in the Blue Bloc) is still going to flare up after the Palestinian Revolution but to a significantly lesser extent and, much like in Europe, it will be closely related to the cause of anti-communism which will wax and wane depending on the cold war. This could also see other ethnic groups associated with communist countries, like Kurds living in the UHKA/Iraq, get placed under suspicion if not outright persecuted to a degree.
It's also a significant factor that Palestine's "Law of Refuge" is not OTL Israel's "Law of (Jewish) Return". Jewish people can and will immigrate to Palestine but are not given as much financial incentive nor preference if they aren't refugees. It's just incidental that many of them are as of 1946.
The UASR and the USSR could be actually competing for first place. Depending on how things go in the USSR, it may either have the highest Jewish population by a very large margin, or be a bit behind the UASR. We are looking at populations of 4-6 million for both.
Palestine is a solid third, with ~3.5 million Jews. In fourth place will be the Franco British Union. Canada is in fifth place, assuming no territorial changes.
After that is Iran, definitely. Iran had a population of a hundred thousand Jews and it took until the Islamic Revolution to get them to leave. I am sure it will grow. Iran -- in sixth place.
Argentina will be in seventh place taking in an influx of Brazilian Jews after WW2. I didn't know this while doing my research -- OTL actually Brazil has the tenth largest Jewish pop with 100,000. A chunk of them are likely to emigrate to Palestine.
And a quick final round:
Eighth place - Australasia
Ninth place - Americuba
Tenth place - Brazil
Eleventh place - Hungary
Twelfth place - West Germany, depending on its postwar conditions it could plummet further in population and lose out to countries like Mexico instead.
Not sure about Quartasponda. As for the fastest growing Jewish population? Probably Australasia.
I think the FBU might have a pretty big population, considering that IOTL the British Jewish community has a large Haredi population and the French got all those North African Sephardim from the war.
I think the FBU might have a pretty big population, considering that IOTL the British Jewish community has a large Haredi population and the French got all those North African Sephardim from the war.
Hey everyone - wanted to write something a bit more granular that would help me better imagine every-day life and culture in the UASR. Despite having some Yiddish-speaking ancestors, I do not speak much of the language at all aside from some fragments, so if I have gotten anything gravely wrong, please let me know! Cheers.
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Excerpts from the book: "Dictionary of 20th Century Yiddish-American Neologisms, Words, and Phrases", by the Columbia University Institute of Yiddish Studies
The 20th Century dictionary of Yiddish neologisms was one of many language guides published under the "The Languages of the UASR" initiative of the first SEU education secretariat, Elena Jaboritsky**. The program called for a "systematic documentation" of all of the major languages of the UASR, which were initially defined as "languages with over one million speakers, irrespective of the number of native speakers", as well as all of the "historical and current languages of the indigenous peoples of America". The program was aimed at language preservation and to provide resources to communities who were trying to teach some of the lesser known languages in adult education and secondary schools.
A democratically elected commission of scholars, language activists, writers and community representatives was eventually formed to determine the scope and structure of the project. The commissioned concluded that to not exceed the allocated funding, the number of speakers required for a language to qualify would have to be raised to two and a half million, and given the dozens of indigenous languages and the still nascent state of the field of indigenous language studies, that the project would only be able to document six currently spoken indigenous languages, though recommendations were made to the Education Secreteriat that further funding should be secured to document at least all the currently spoken indigenous languages. This would eventually lead to the "Indigenous Language Research Initiative", which extended the scope of the project to another dozen or so indigenous languages.
The commission also determined that given the comprehensive dictionaries, grammars, and histories of some of the qualifying languages (such as English, German, and Spanish), it would be more fruitful and socially useful to examine the pecularities of their use within existing communities of the UASR. After all, many of the UASR's language communities had distinct dialects and neologisms, and some had even evolved distinctive grammatical structures. The proposal made to the Education Secretariat thus included a request to refine rather than completely re-write the dictionaries of a number of the languages, and dedicate the saved funding to work in the more recent historical development of these languages. This was approved by the Secretariat of Education who then appointed a body of scholars which constituted a representative body of all of the sixteen languages which qualified, with two specialists in each language sitting on the body. In accord with the SEU's platform of introducing additional participatory-democratic mechanisms into American politics, these scholars were chosen through a complex electoral process involving universities, local soviets, and, in the case of the indigenous languages, the various indigeneous nations themselves. The following languages were represented in the commission:
This body of thirty-two scholars drafted the plan of research and publications, with most languages being allocated at least one dictionary, and a number of the less studied languages receiving grants for a comprehensive study of their grammar and historical development. Additionally, many of the languages, typically though not exclusively non-indigenous ones, had dictionaries chartered which would catalogue new words, phrases, and expressions introduced in 20th century America. These texts were influenced by the burgeoning field of "Soc-Cop", or the social history of concepts. As a result, they were more akin to encyclopedias than dictionaries, with a collection of separate micro-histories documenting the socio-historical conditions which engendered the creation of new concepts.
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Shtotmensch
Definition, current usage: A cosmopolitan or broad-minded person; an overly analytical or intellectual individual, often to their own detriment; someone who prefers speaking to working, or whose work involves speaking; an anxious person who is unable to relax; an individual committed to Communism and the creation of new social relations; an individual addicted to novelty and change for its own sake; a creative genius; someone whose thoughts don't have any tether and who rambles.
Literal meaning: "City-man"
Extent of usage: Metropolis and some surrounding areas, Great Plains states.
Point of Plausible Origin: Putnam County, New York
Earliest Known Usage: 1939
Introduction
A term that contains a multitude of meanings within it, the Shtotmensch is more a rorsasch test for an individual's own feelings about Urban Communist Modernity than it is a word with anything approaching a stable and continuous meaning. For the admirers of the Shtotmensch, he is something of a romantic hero, a man unafraid to face down even those prejudices and conventions that still exist within a Communist society. While he may be restless, the Shtotmensch's restlessness emerges from the dynamism of the world in which he lives and his desire to reach out into the unknown and experiment with new forms of life. For his critics, the Shtotmensch lacks a sense of rootedness and community, and his desire to engage in critique masks a more fundamental alienation from his fellow men. His need for experimentation and new experience is more a product of his own personal vanity than a part of a genuine political project, and his time might be better spent participating in the local Soviet and getting to know his fellow workers.
History
Ironically, the term Shtotmensch seems to have first arisen amongst a group of Polish-Jewish Bundists who only recently left Metropolis to form a Kibbutz in upstate New York. In the local newspaper, they expressed the wish to free themselves from the "Shtotmensch" mentality by returning to the land and living in nature. The term quickly caught on among the burgeoning Jewish population living outside the cities, and Shtotmensch became something of a retort to the affectionate but condescending term "Dorfying", which implied that most of the Kibbutzers were good-hearted but provincial rubes.
The coinage of the term did not go unnoticed by urban Jews, and in Metropolis it was quickly embraced, its negative connotations inverted: the "Shtotmensch" became a positive symbol of the modern, cosmopolitan worker. Over the years, the term has accumulated a welter of meanings and slowly entered parts of the Gentile lexicon. It is now rarely used in an overtly derogatory manner: more often, the words are used to pick out two distinct ways of life, or more abstractly, two different mentalities or modes of being. "Shtotmensch or Kibbutzmensch?" is a question which might be reductive, but it is often asked as a means of getting a basic sense of a person's priorities and out-look. There have been more than a few stories written about the boy born on the Kibbutz who ends up being a Shtotmensch at heart, and vice-versa.
In recent years, the "Shtotmensch" and "Kibbutzmensch" have become the subject of an increasing amount of academic research. They range from more particularist social-cultural histories like Arthur Townshend's* "The invention of the Kibbutzmensch: Jewish Collective Agriculture and Jewish Identity" to the more philosophical and generalizing, such as Yara Cohen's* "Shtotmensch or Kibbutzmensch: The Two Faces of Communist Modernity". Cohen argues that the two poles of the Shtotmensch and Kibbutzmensch in fact represent a kind of dialectical tension within all Communist societies between the felt need to break free from ossified social and cultural relations and a more prosaic desire to build more rooted, communitarian societies shielded from the ceaseless displacement and whiplash which accompanies capitalist development.
Prevalence
Perhaps because of the very complexity of the term, Shtotmensch has not made its way into the lexicon of non-Yiddish speakers in the same way that more common loanwords like "Frumkomunist" and "Chutzpah" have. It is widespread in Metropolis itself and many great plains states, but it is not frequently used in the Mid-west, the West Coast States, or the South. Unlike many other Yiddish terms, it also does not appear to be used in the People's Federation of Palestine by anyone except American expatriates and immigrants.
Gvirkomunist
Definition, current usage: a stuck-up person, a know-it-all, a buffoon. Usually male. Typically their pretensions of knowledge are hollow.
Literal meaning: "Rich Communist"
Extent of usage: Most of the Eastern Seaboard of the UASR; parts of the People's Federation of Palestine
Point of Plausible Origin: Borough of Manhattan, Metropolis
Earliest Known Usage: 1938
Introduction
The "GvirKomunist" is less a concept than a figure or a type: usually a man, often younger, rarely above the age of fifty, who claims to speak with deep knowledge on something that he knows little about. The Gvirkomunist is rarely a particularly malicious or hostile figure, more ften a simple, well-intentioned but somewhat ego-driven fool than a real menace. The Gvirkomunist undoubtedly needs to learn a degree of humility, which is made difficult by the burning zealotry with which they often speak on their subject of interest.
History
In 1936, tens of thousands of German Jews began emigrating from Germany into the UASR under Foster and Reed's "Victims of Fascism" refugee program. Though the majority of these refugees were settled outside Metropolis, most of them were from large cities such as Frankfurt, Berlin, and Hamburg, and many eventually made their way to the big city. In 1938, it is estimated that there were twenty-five to thirty-five thousand German Jewish refugees within Metropolis. Many (though certainly not all) of these individuals had a bourgeois backgrounds, having previously been secondary school teachers, doctors, small businessmen, bankers, and lawyers. Some of them were able to continue in their chosen profession in the UASR, though under drastically changed circumstances.
Only a tiny minority of the German-Jewish refugees could have initially been hardened communists when they arrived in the UASR. In the Weimar Era, it was the party of progressive Liberals, the Deutsch Demokratic Partei, which earned the vote of most affluent German Jews, with a significant portion also going to the right-wing national-liberal Deutsch Volkspartei . It was only near the end of the Republic that an increasing amount of German Jews began to migrate to the Social Democrats, more out of fear of the fascists than ideological affinity. Nonetheless, it is now a well-documented historical fact that the German Jews became some of the most ideologically militant members of the Workers Communist Party, often occupying its most left-wing fringes.
Many of the German-Jewish refugees in metropolis lived in close proximity to their Eastern European co-religionists, and they often worked on the same factory floors and attended the same workers soviets. The term Gvirkomunist - in Yiddish, literally, "Rich Communist" - seemed to initially be a term of abuse for certain of these formerly bourgeois German Jews who were less than fully conversant in Marxism despite their ideological zeal. In certain contexts, it can be understood as an ethnic slur, though it was typically used with more levity and humor than maliciousness, as when a Yiddish columnist proclaimed in a working-class daily: "Brace yourself, comrades, for the hydra of Fascism has unleashed the GvirKomunist upon us, and it is our duty to be patient in the tribulations he imposes on us."
When the term was used in a more serious, directed fashion, it usually had a specific referent, and was not meant to refer to German-Jewish refugees as a whole. A textile worker wrote in a 1939 diary entry: "The Gvirkomunist Samuel Mandelbaum*, though, ensured that the rest of us had little time to address the matter at further length, and I even witnessed his brother, a polite, reserved, and thoughtful man, looking quite disgusted with him throughout the course of the meeting." At times, the two were even most clearly delineated, as another man's diary entry attests: "Of course, there are some Gvirkomunists among them, we see it every day, but it is a true miracle what Foster and Reed have done, and one day, I hope, we will summon the courage to stand up forthrightly to the Nazi tyranny."
In large part, the figure of the "Gvirkomunist" is reflective of the difficulties that the labor movement had in integrating newly proleterianized workers. Though the precise nature of the conflicts may have been different, the difficulties that unions had in assimilating the influx of agricultural workers at the turn of the century mimics the tension between Gvirkomunist and Jewish Bundist. When workers who have spent their entire lives in the labor movement must conciliate and incorporate workers unfamiliar with its norms and practices, there is bound to be some antipathy and quarreling.
As German-Jewish refugees grew more conversant with Marxism and integrated more fully into local soviets and workplaces, the term began to spread to other communites and also acquired a more generalized meaning. Though the 50s and 60s, it was still employed to target former bourgeois members of the labor movement, but was almost never used to refer specifically to German-Jewish individuals. By the 70s, even this usage of the term had become rarer, as it was picked up by the feminist movement and used to target behaviors associated with male intellectual arrogance and chauvinism, regardless of their prior class background.
Prevalence
"Gvirkomunist" is a common term across much of the Eastern Seaboard and industrialized Mid-West. Outside of these regions, it is heard more frequently in areas with higher Jewish populations and on college campuses. It is also a part of the lexicon of most of the Yiddish speakers in the People's Federation of Palestine.
Frumkomunist
Definition, current usage: An insincere or apathetic person; one who asserts ideals they are not fully committed to.
Literal meaning: "Devout Communist"
Extent of usage: UASR, People's Federation of Palestine, Deutsch Raeterrepublik.
Point of Plausible Origin: Borough of Manhattan, Metropolis
Earliest Known Usage: 1934
Introduction
In communist nations, Frumkomunist is a term similar to "scab" in some of its connotations, implying a lack of genuine commitment to building a socialist society. The Frumkomunist is the individual who frequently does not attend workplace meetings, does not participate in syndical democracy, and generally is more interested in their own private affairs than those of others. Unlike the "scab", the Frumkomunist does profess a commitment to building a socialist society - they simply can't find the time to participate in it. Despite the negative valence of the term, the Frumkomunist is not necessarily a malicious figure. They are often an oddball or an eccentric, and they are never genuinely hostile to the socialist project.
History
The word "Frumkomunist", like many 20th century Yiddishisms, arose in the tumult of 1930s Metropolis. Its first written usage appears to be in a 1934 edition of the Yiddish socialist newspaper Forwerts, where it was used to describe the apathy of Orthodox Jewish Communities to the communist project. The term is something of a double-entendre: "Frum" in Yiddish can mean both "Religious" or "Devout", and also has connotations of steadiness, stability, and uprightness. The irony is that the Frumkomunist, despite their religious conviction, seems to be less than fully devout in their commitment to Communism despite their professed adherence to the doctrine. This also plays on another, long-standing negative usage of Frum: as someone who is hypocritically sanctimonious, more interested in holy words than holy deeds.
The term appears to have spread rapidly into the broader linguistic ecosystem of Metropolis. Already in the late 1930s, it was being used in Metropolitan English-language newspapers which were not written primarily for a Jewish audience. In these newspapers, the term referred to individuals who were perceived to be stuck in the old, bourgeois world of pre-communist America despite an ostensible willingness to accomodate the new, revolutionary one. As time went on, the referent of the term ceased to be a necessarily religious figure. Already in the late 40s, the "Frumkomunist" was used by non-Yiddish speakers to refer to anyone who lacked a sense of civic and political engagement.
In the Yiddish world, it retained its religious valence for a good while longer. This only truly started to change when the 50s and 60s brought about the gradual end of the isolation of the Orthodox-Jewish culture and a consequent re-opening of cultural and social interchange between Reform and Orthodox Judaism. The Yiddish usage of the term now more closely approximates that employed by non-Yiddish speakers employing it as a loanword.
Prevalence
Frumkomunist, like Yiddish loanwords with an older provenance like "Schmuck" and Schvitz", is now common parlance across almost the entirety of the UASR and the People's Federation of Palestine. An interesting development is the spread of the word to the Deutsch Raeterrepublik, perhaps owing to its usage by the American occupation soldiers, the similarities between Yiddish and German, and the apathy of sizable agricultural segments of the Raeterrepublik to the task of building socialism.
You're all forgetting that Palestine's population was already almost 20% Jewish by 1931, and a little over 31% in 1945 OTL. This is a fact that anyone who doesn't want to go on a campaign of ethnic cleansing needs to take into account.
I agree with your caution on teleological thinking but at the same time, many of the original Zionist politicians, the founders and the organizations, already harbored colonialist and racist sentiments against the Arabs. That Palestine was home to an Arab population who had lived there for many dozens of generations was already known to many in the early 20th century.
I would say that it did not take the State of Israel, the 1947-1949 Palestinian War, to shape Zionism into its modern form. I would say that in the 1930s it was already taking on the necessary ideas to become what it needed to be, as a result of the 1936-1939 Arab rebellion.
But even then there were quite large contingents, as you say, there were significant factions who had more liberal interpretations of a Jewish homeland, who supported binationalism. Berl Katznelson would be a popular example. It's possible I suppose you could get a movement which calls itself Zionist and acts much the same way as the PKP will here. But you have to consider the optics of the term in Palestine. If you want a binational party you have to appeal to the Arabs and they will not like the term "Zionist" so much. In the liberal movement this kind of polarization occured much slowly and more later but in the Communist movement not only did they have the polarizing force set upon them by the Arab response to Balfour, they also had all the declarations by the Bundists, and Vladimir Lenin for example, who called Zionism 'false and basically reactionary'.
It's entirely possible you might be able to get a true "Marxist-Zionist" movement that leaves behind all the Borochovian contrivances but I think that would take someone special, someone really committed to the word and even then it may ultimately hurt their popularity still. I'm just going with what I feel is like the natural course of history here, how the threads end up interconnecting.
By the way, the post I wrote is basically entirely as OTL up until the time of the Leningrad Treaty. Though, it's of course, filtered through the perceptions of post-revolutionary writers and people living in the TCI.
There's a lot of equivocation going on here while in real time contemporaneously, the historic Zionist-founded entity called the State of Israel is carrying out a genocide upon the captive population in its prior open-air concentration camp called the Gaza Strip — essentially carrying out not only the most broad daylight and enthusiastic extermination + ethnic cleansing pro forma campaign in living memory — which makes me heavily uncomfortable.
One could go further and say that the Israeli national consensus going from the top all the way down right now as we speak, is like the strongest argument ever made practically for hardline anti-settlerist anti-imperialism: straight-up.
Further, I would argue, with the benefit of hindsight, that all of even the 'left-Zionist' rationales at their kernel, looking on them back from our standpoint now — appear as barely more for "'leave-us-alone' small-state"-Strasserism; and in its discrete-communitarian guise: raw undisguised military-socialist-Hoppeism.
I will go further:
The auxilia-subimperialist 'formation' that both fatuously and hypocritically styles itself the 'State of Israel' …
[ this: due to the fact that literally all founders of Zionism as a movement, largely all the bona fide Zionist 'fathers of the nation', and virtually all the subsequent senior leaders to date — all regarded the Tanakh and the Talmud as superstition and/or fiction; and to boot the credible scholarship across Biblical criticism & archaeology essentially falsifies the idea of a unitary 'Israel' united in people or faith or state in any thoroughgoingly recognizable form til the Hasmonean state, which was largely a theocratic gloss on high politics in the crucible facing a particular party of aristocrats aligned with the aniconic & monolatrist-to-monotheist Yawhist position, vis-a-vis the mixed peasantry & middle classes, in the conditions of geopolitics vs the Roman Republic, Ptolemaic Egypt, and declining but regionally hegemonic Selecuid polity, or that is to say —
'Israel, the Nation' of Exodus / Joshua / Judges
And 'Israel, the United Kingdom' etc
— never historically existed: full stop ]
… furthermore, the cynical contrived-Volkishe pantomime cooked-up by the very trivial Zionist minority IOTL, concretely owed its entire historic fortune to capo di tutti capi among the capitalist imperialist state club — the British Empire.
"Near 20%" was actually barely 17% and it likely net underrepresented non-Jewish residents in the 1931 census: and much of the headcount growth was due to direct sponsorship by that "boss-of-bosses" power—for admitted (openly in the documentation) motives of the most cynical geopolitical kinds—the same sort that persists tho in an evolved but recognizable fashion where the US as succeeding boss-of-bosses flouts not only the international law regime it largely installed under its tutelage, but even its own statute law in permitting auction of stolen Palestinian land in occupied territories. Openly what occurred in a contrived fashion was you have relocated settlers under imperialist sponsorship; these have no right to title on the land in living memory of their mercenary settlership.
Furthermore Zionism was minority to the majority in politics among diaspora Jewry regardless of nation drawn across both:
• "assimilation-opportunity-blocked" middle class
• and of course, working class
… failure of 1917-24 IOTL frustrated this direction; but ITTL, with a heavily chilled-out USSR even under Stalin but also ceding leadership to the more senior UASR with its across-the-Atlantic glacis of newborn red-to-pink allies … and with that UASR being a no-questions-ask refuge for persecuted, especially Jews, and especially Jewish intelligentsia*
[ *provided they not reactionary Anglo-French, US-Russian emigre, or else fascist aligned— oh, and these would be the only remaining candidates for active sponsorship for the IOTL contemporaneous ITTL Zionists … and SURPRISE, little joins the club above but their utter unified racialized hatred of Jewry as such as a race … so good luck ]
I will add to this day the Israeli hasbara apparatus literally squeals openly that Palestinians owned no land since they held it under pre-capitalist tenure relations, and by-right-of-conquest the UK just asserted itself as the paramount landlord in lieu of the Osmanli dynastic patrimony … and proceeded to then preferentially auction it to organized 'leveraged buy-out' operations to subsidize colonization organized thru London Zionist organizations, London banks, and with the connivance of Whitehall.
{ FYI: I call the historically Zionist-founded Raubwirtschaft-und-Landsknecht 'formation' of an 'auxilia-subimperialist'-type because its is rather unique in that it is 'sub-imperialist'
but unlike Russia or other macroregional powers, it is not held in partial / qualified (quid pro quo) relative subordination through structural world-economic & attendant strategically militarily-credible dependency, but rather
it was & is deliberately raised and is sponsored for the purpose as support formation, as the Ancient Roman auxilia were to the legio }
How is Apache language represented in IOTL as a military asset, and yet ITTL represents not even any representation in the language pluricentrism off a shimmer of the IOTL Austromarxist "personal cultural autonomy" that is practiced ITTL?
