One-State, Two-States, Bi-National State

Mandated Imaginations
In A Regional Void

Moshe Behar

Abstract: Studies of the Arab-Zionist matrix are ordinarily written from what may be
termed as a territorially Palestine-centric vantage-point; this obviously makes sense since
the conflicts sorrows, battles, deaths, expulsions and displacements clearly emerged there. But
this approach means something else too: that regional dimensions surrounding the
Palestine/Israel question are often undervalued both historically and in terms of the regions
ongoing ethno-politics. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ever-expanding controversy
between proponents of a One-State, Bi-National-State or Two-State solution to the
Palestine/Israel question (1S2S). This neglect leads the numerous participants in 1S2S
exchanges to debate (and devise) solutions that rest on what I term here mandated
imaginations, that is, scholarly spheres that ultimately conceive of the (post-1922) British-
mandated territory of Palestine/Israel as a secluded island in both historical and contemporary
terms. The problem is that this neither was, nor is, the case. The Palestine/Israel question
acquired a potent regional dimension from at least the time of the Palestinian anti-colonial
revolt of 1936-9 and the historic 1937 pan-Arab gathering in Bludan, convened to overturn
the first Two-State solution proposed by the royal Peel Commission. It logically follows that if
prevailing diagnoses of the very question itself are incorrect or partial due to mandated
imaginations, a Palestine-centric outlook and a neglect of historical and contemporary regional
variables then the corresponding socio-political prognoses (One-State, Two-States or Bi-
National-State) may also be flawed in all terms other than rhetorical-ideational. To
substantiate these propositions, this article is three-fold.

Key-words: Palestine-Israel, one-state solution, two-state solution, bi-national

state, Middle East geopolitics

Pears Lecturer in Israeli and Middle Eastern Studies. School of Languages, Linguistics
and Cultures. University of Manchester, UK.

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S tudies of the Arab-Zionist matrix are ordinarily written from what
may be termed as a territorially Palestine-centric vantage-point; this
obviously makes sense since the conflicts sorrows, battles,
deaths, expulsions and displacements clearly emerged there. But this
approach means something else too: that regional dimensions surrounding
the Palestine/Israel question are often undervalued both historically and
in terms of the regions ongoing ethno-politics.1 Nowhere is this more
apparent than in the ever-expanding controversy between proponents of
a One-State, Bi-National-State or Two-State solution to the
Palestine/Israel question (hereinafter 1S2S). This neglect leads the
numerous participants in 1S2S exchanges to debate (and devise)
solutions that rest on what I term here mandated imaginations, that is,
scholarly spheres that ultimately conceive of the (post-1922) British-
mandated territory of Palestine/Israel as a secluded island in both
historical and contemporary terms.

The problem is that this neither was, nor is, the case. The
Palestine/Israel question acquired a potent regional dimension from at
least the time of the Palestinian anti-colonial revolt of 1936-9 and the
historic 1937 pan-Arab gathering in Bludan, convened to overturn the
first Two-State solution proposed by the royal Peel Commission. It
logically follows that if prevailing diagnoses of the very question itself are
incorrect or partial due to mandated imaginations, a Palestine-centric
outlook and a neglect of historical and contemporary regional variables
then the corresponding socio-political prognoses (One-State, Two-States
or Bi-National-State) may also be flawed in all terms other than rhetorical-
ideational. To substantiate these propositions, this article is three-fold.

Part I is methodological and problematizes briefly Mandatory Palestine

as the territorial framework enclosing the post-1993 1S2S discussion.

Part II is historical in that it addresses the 1936-67 period. It begins

by suggesting that critical observations outside epic and epicentral
Palestine reveal a regionally-profound socio-political butterfly-effect that has
emanated from there since the late-1930s. This effect remains at best
undervalued by scholars and at worst, historically and analytically

1 In Arab politics the term regionalism (iqlimiyya) understandingly embodies negative

connotations denoting that narrow-statist interests are superior to Arab nationalisms
broader/holistic interests. That is precisely what I do not mean in this article when
employing regional and/or region; I instead mean the (English) dictionary-definition of
regional, that is, of or relating to a large geographic region (i.e. opposite of
iqlimiyya).

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cleansed from the scholarship, as is the case with contemporary 1S2S
studies.

It is alternatively proposed that a non-nationalized and non-teleological

reading of the sequence of events that surrounded Arab-Jews2 outside
mandatory Palestine is the only one capable of unveiling the direct socio-
political interface and tangible, bottom-up interaction between Euro-
Zionism and Arab nationalism, including their monumental impacts on
the regions national consolidations. This exercise is crucial for one
reason: the (otherwise contingent) mode via which the conflict, hitherto
confined to Palestine, became regionalized, impacted profoundly on the
political form and societal composition and configuration of both post-
1949 Israel/Palestine and the Arab Middle East (hereinafter AME). As
such, this contingent if somewhat longue dure mode of Jewish and
Arab national consolidations largely renders obsolete studies of the
Palestine/Israel matrix that for whatever reason neglect the regional
dimension; this includes, inter alia, nearly all pre-2011 books and articles
constituting the 1S2S exchange.3

Part III is more contemporary: employing an unapologetically Marxist-

informed materialist vantage-point, it thematically juxtaposes two
dissimilar explanatory frameworks to the question of Palestine/Israel: (i)
the older (ostensibly outdated) analyses as conceptualized by Marxist
and non-Marxist Arabs (and Israelis) in the aftermath of the 1967 war to
(ii) contemporary (e.g. post-1993) 1S2S debates and exchanges (mostly
taking place in Euro-America). Based on this thematic and sequential
juxtaposition between these two periods and their corresponding
analyses I suggest that the prospects for materializing as opposed to
merely envisioning ideationally a modestly-democratic solution in the
(Mandatory) territory comprising Palestine/Israel are likely to remain
unattainable as long as complementary changes remain unrealized in the
region surrounding it. I posit that the tangible attainment of

2 I have explained in depth elsewhere why Arabized-Jews is presently the least-worst

signifier to denote collectively Jews across the pre-1950s Arab Middle East compared to
its nearly twenty competing signifiers (including Arab-Jews, Middle Eastern Jews,
Jews-of-the-Arab-lands, Sephardic-Jews, Arabic-speaking Jews and Oriental-Jews).
For simplicity sake, I ironically disregard here my own advice. See Moshe Behar, Whats
in a Name? Socio-Terminological Formations and the Case for Arabized-Jews, Social
identities (2009) 15/6, pp. 747-771.
3 From contrasting viewpoints the studies of both Benny Morris (2009) One State, Two

States (New Haven: Yale University Press) and Sharif Elmusa (2007) Searching for a
Solution, in Jamil Hilal, (ed). Where now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution
(London: Zed), pp. 211-230 are exceptional in that Jordans East Bank territory is part of
their respective analyses.

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democratically-inclusive solutions in Palestine/Israel probably
necessitates the reinvigoration of a Middle-Eastern/Arab-centric vantage-
point informed by late 1960s Marxist materialism rather than the
narrow, non-regional, liberal, ideational, Eurocentric and non-Arab-centric
terms that have dominated the post-1993 1S2S exchange.

PART I 1S2S: an Immanent Critique

P ost-1993 1S2S scholarship merits two complementary critiques:

transcendental and immanent. A transcendental critique is an
assessment leveled from outside the discursive domain under
scrutiny. In a forthcoming article titled Unparallel Universes: Iran and
Israels One-State Solution4 I present such a critique, highlighting
contextual dimensions surrounding the1S2S exchange and possibly
suffocating it. I conclude that the huge post-1993 corpus comprising the
1S2S spectrum is scholastic, hypothetical and ideational once juxtaposed
with material socio-politics (domestic, regional and global). The present
article ignores these findings and instead develops an immanent critique of
the hegemonic 1S2S discussion.

By immanent critique I mean an assessment leveled from within the

discursive domain under scrutiny. An immanent critique thus accepts as
valid and viable the host of existing assumptions and parameters that
underpin the 1S2S discussion as it manifests itself scholarly and/or
publicly. Such acceptance enables one to engage with the debate
internally offering it a corrective from within. This corrective rests on
identifying significant omissions pertaining to the 1S2S exchanges own
terms of reference, i.e., those terms that to begin with make possible the
very idea of 1S2S scholarship and its collectively acquired hegemonic
configuration in the post-1993 aftermath of the Oslo debacle.

Is Palestine an Island?

Being the territorial domain of the 1S2S discussion, Mandatory

Palestine was demarcated as recently as 1922 under the auspices of
British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill. In 1920 the newly-
established League of Nations awarded mandates to Britain (over
greater-Palestine and Iraq) and France (over Syria and Lebanon). Clear

4 Forthcoming in Global Society, 25/3 (July, 2011); readers may find it useful to read this
article in conjunction with the present one.

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borders between these formerly-Ottoman domains were lacking a fact
that generated British-French tensions. In March 1921 Churchill
convened in Cairo what would become a historically momentous
gathering of experts to assess (i) the question of British-controlled
territories vis--vis French-controlled ones and (ii) the fate, and territorial
composition, of Iraq (Mesopotamia), Transjordan and Palestine.5 The
meetings main conclusions were to offer the Iraqi throne to Emir Faisal
(son of Sharif Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashemi) and the emirate of
Transjordan to his brother Abdullah. During this occasion the territory
nowadays known as historic Palestine (or Eretz Yisrael) was prosaically
demarcated too. The experts drafted a clause that would later be added
(as Article 25) to the final binding text of Britains Palestine Mandate that
extended over the combined territories of present-day Jordan and
Palestine/Israel. The clauses final version of read:

In the territories lying between the Jordan [River] and the

Eastern [Iraqi] boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined,
the Mandatory shall be entitled [] to postpone or withhold
application of such provisions of this mandate as he may
consider inapplicable to the existing local conditions.

If we combine present-day Jordan and Palestine/Israel, Article 25

enabled the British to carve away some 75% of the territory, juridically
construct (Trans-) Jordan and award it to the Hashemites (Britains allies
during the war). Consequently, as presently debated by 1S2S scholars
historic Palestine-Eretz-Yisrael refers to the post-1922 colonial
demarcation encompassing the tiny 26,320 km2 area stretching from the
Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Nearly all post-1993 publications
that discuss the 1S2S conundrum refer exclusively to this Lilliputian
territory.6 From a materialist-informed Marxist vantage-point, this

5 The team included Gertrude Bell, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, Sir Percy Cox, T.E.
Lawrence (of Arabia), Sir Arnold T. Wilson and Iraqs Defense Minister (later Prime
Minister) Ja'far al-'Askari. Also invited was Sasson Heskel (Effendi, Sir), Iraqs first
Finance Minster and most legendary Jewish statesman in the 20th Century AME.

6 This body of writing is huge. A small sample includes Meron Benvenisti, Intimate
Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land (Berkeley: University of California, 1995);
Graham Usher (1995) Bantustanisation or bi-nationalism? An interview with Azmi
Bishara Race & Class 37/2, pp. 43-49; Jenab Tutunji & Kamal Khaldi, A Binational
State in Palestine: The Rational Choice for Palestinians and the Moral Choice for
Israelis, International Affairs, 73/1 (Jan. 1997), pp. 31-58; Ghada Karmi, After Oslo: A
Single State in Israel/Palestine?, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 11/2 (1998), pp.
212-26; Uri Avnery, (1999) A Binational State? God Forbid!, Journal of Palestine Studies,
28/4, pp 55-61; Salim Tamari, (2000) The Dubious Lure of Binationalism, Journal of
Palestine Studies, 30/1, pp. 83-87; Gary Sussman, Is the Two-State Solution Dead?,

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submissive adherence to Churchillian cage appears excessive and may
thus benefit from scrutiny.

PART II Partition/Regionalization/Arab-Jews (1936-67)

T he principal notion of a Two-State-solution the slicing of

Lilliputian Palestine into Arab and Jewish states became
salient in July 1937 upon the publication of the 400 page report
by the Royal Commission headed by Lord Peel. The proposed Jewish
state was to include some 20 percent of the territory, including most
fertile northern areas. Since nearly half its population would be
Palestinian-Arab, the Commission recommended transferring 230,000
Palestinians from their homes in the Galilee. Peels envisioned Arab
state was to include a Jewish minority comprising 10 percent of the
population (ergo a lesser need for analogous transfer of Jews although
several hundred Zionists may have been instructed to relocate to the
Jewish State).

Peels Two-State-partition was rejected outright by non-Zionist Jewish-

Marxists, all Zionist Revisionists, Religious Zionists, some of the General
Zionists and most sections within the dominant Zionist Labor
movement. Hosting nearly 500 delegates, the 20th Zionist Congress,
which convened in Zurich in August 1937, rejected effectively
unanimously the Peel partition plan. However, following the
strategically savvy leadership of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim
Weizmann the Congress empowered the Executive to enter into
negotiations with a view to ascertaining the precise terms of His

Current History, 103/669 (January 2004), 37-43; Daniel Gavron, The other side of despair: Jews
and Arabs in the promised land (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004); Ghazi-
Walid Falah, The Geopolitics of Enclavisation and the Demise of a Two-State Solution
to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Third World Quarterly, 26/8 (2005), pp. 1341-72;
Virginia Q. Tilley, The one-state solution: a breakthrough for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian
(Detroit: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Yosef Gorni From Binational Society to Jewish
State: Federal Concepts in Zionist Political Thought, 1920-1990, and the Jewish People (Leiden:
Brill, 2006); Uri Davis (2006) Whither Palestine-Israel? Political Reflections on
Citizenship, Bi-Nationalism and the One-State Solution, Holy Land Studies, 5/2, pp. 199-
210; Ali Abunimah, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (New
York: Metrpolitan, 2006); Hillal, Ibid.; David Unger, The Inevitable Two-State
Solution, World Policy Journal (Fall 2008), pp. 59-67; George E. Bisharat, Maximizing
Rights: The One State solution to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Global Jurist, 8/2
(2008), pp. 1-36; Alexander Yakobson & Amnon Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of
Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2009); As'ad
Ghanem (2009) The Bi-National State Solution, Israel Studies, 14/2, pp. 120-133.

102
Majestys government for the proposed establishment of a Jewish state.7
Put differently, the Zionist Congress accepted with unmistakable public
agony the principle of partition. It simultaneously insisted on a major
border expansion for the proposed Jewish State while flatly rejecting
Peels foundational diagnosis that the (1922) British Mandate had proved
unworkable. Instead, the Congress demanded the Mandates full
realization which meant the establishment of a Jewish National Home
throughout Mandatory Palestine.

Scholars have amassed a plethora of evidence that the Zionist

consideration of partition was tactical and non-substantive.8 It resulted
from the movements structural weakness and lack of material or
demographic parity vis--vis the indigenous Palestinians. Jews at the time
(non-Zionist Orthodox and Sephardic Jews included) comprised some
27 percent of the population and owned at best 6 percent of the land.9
As the Congresss moderate delegate, Ben-Gurion delivered the most
conciliatory Zionist position vis--vis Peels report:

The proposed Jewish State even if all the necessary and

possible corrections [we demand are] implemented is not the
Zionist aim. It is impossible to solve the Jewish Question in the
territory proposed. However, the proposed state can constitute a critical
stage on our way to fulfilling Big Zionism (ha-tsiyonut ha-gdola). In the
shortest time possible this state will make possible in Eretz
Yisrael the tangible Jewish force that will ultimately bring us to
our historical Zionist destination. [] Precisely as I do not view
the proposed Jewish state as the final solution for the host of
problems faced by Am Yisrael so I do not see the proposed
partition as a final solution of the Eretz Yisrael [Palestine]
7 Protocol of the 20th Zionist Congress, reprinted in Y. Galnoor, Partition of Palestine
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 207.

8 Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian-Arabs (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985); Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel (New York: Pantheon, 1987); Nur Masalha,
Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992); Benny
Morris, Righteous Victims (New York: Vintage, 2001); Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete
(New York: Metropolitan, 2000).

9 David Ben-Gurion in Al Darchey Mediniyutenu: Moatsah Olamit Shell Ihud Poaley Tsiyon:
Din Veheshbon Maleh, Zurich, 29 July-7 August 1937 [Full Report on World Council of Ihud
Poaley Tsiyon] (Tel Aviv: Central Office of Ihud Poaley Tsiyon, 1938), 207. According
to Zionist scholar Isaiah Friedman, Jews owned less than 1% of the territory see The
Partition Scheme of 1937, against the Background of British-Zionist-Arab Relations, in
Meir Avizohar & I. Friedman, Studies in the Palestinian Partition Plans, 1937-47, (Sdeh
Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Center, 1984), p. 113. [Hebrew]

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 question. Correct are those arguing that the territory comprising
Mandatory Palestine cannot be partitioned since it constitutes a
single entity not only historically but also naturally and
economically. The East Bank [Transjordan] was cut-off 15 years
ago. Cant everyone now see that this dismemberment was a
disaster for the East Bank more than it was for the territory [to
the west] of Mandated Palestine? In Palestine development,
growth, population increase, not only Jewish but also Arab. In
Transjordan freeze, dwindling, poverty, under-development.

Ben-Gurion, purportedly a moderate, went on to explain:

The [1922] British Mandate should be understood as the first

stage; the [proposed 1937] Jewish State will constitute the
second stage; yet it will not be the last stage. There are no
eternal political arrangements. We live in a dynamic, changeable
world. In the face of all present and future changes we hold a
singular testing criterion: the rapid growth of Jews in Eretz
Yisrael and the strengthening of their independent force. Thats
the sole pathway to transform Palestine into Eretz Yisrael. If the
power and capabilities of the present British Mandate to deliver
this objective are weaker/smaller than the power and capabilities
of the [sovereign] Jewish State [proposed by Peel] I choose
with no hesitation the proposed state over the present Mandate:
that is the case even if the Mandates territory is considerably
larger than the territory of the proposed state.10

Some thirty years later, Marxist Naef Hawatmeh of the Democratic

Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) would start entertaining a
gradualism reminiscent of Ben-Gurion (albeit with less success).11 With
much agony a gradualist Ben-Gurionist phrase emerged in 1974 during
the 12th Palestine National Council (PNC): The PLO will employ all
means, and first and foremost armed struggle, to liberate Palestinian
territory and to establish the independent national authority for the
people over every part of Palestinian territory liberated.12 Yet acceptance

10 Ben-Gurion in Al Darchey, 72, 76, 209 (emphasis in the original; my translation).

11 William B. Quandt, Fuad Jaber & Ann M. Lesch, The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 103-7; What Palestinian State? An
Interview with Nayef Hawatmeh (Dec. 10 1973), MERIP Reports, 24 (Jan. 1974), pp. 25-
6.

12Political Programme for the Present Stage of the Palestinian National Organization
Drawn by the Palestinian National Council, Cairo, June 9, 1974, Journal of Palestine

104
of the principle of partition remained extraneous to the ten-point
programme. This changed 14 years later in Algiers with 253 PNC
delegates voting for, 46 against, and 10 abstaining. As Edward Said
explained, I myself agree with the policy articulated [...]. I voted
enthusiastically for a realistic and above all clear policy. [...] The struggle
for Palestine has always been, as Weizmann once said, over one acre
here, one goat there. Struggles are won by details, inches, specifics, not
only by big generalizations, large ideas, abstract concepts.13 Said would
modify his diagnosis following Oslos Two-State-debacle.14 These
Zionist/Palestinian temporal juxtapositions notwithstanding, Ben-
Gurions instrumental approach to the concept of partition, like that of
the entire Zionist leadership in (and after) 1937, was clearer in private or
confidential communications and writings.

The Palestinian/Arab response to the 1937 partition was more candid

than the Zionist (and, as such, possibly less productive and rigorous
strategically). Peels proposal to terminate the British [Jewish] Mandate;
limit Jewish immigration; establish an Arab state over (nearly) 4/5th of
Palestine and a Jewish State over the rest yielded the opposite outcome
than the British had intended. Peels Two-State-plan profoundly
radicalized the revolt. This article cannot provide an analysis of the
historically monumental months between July 1937 and May 1939 (when
the British Parliament approved the MacDonald White Paper, see
below).15 Suffice it to say that in terms of historical magnitude and
human and material losses, these critical 22 months were proportionately
more destructive than the horrible month of September 1970 or the
entire (so-called) al-Aqsa/Second Intifada (September 2000 to the 2009
Gaza onslaught). One more development emerged during 1937-9 yet
one that remains politically obfuscated and scholarly underrated,
foremost in contemporary 1S2S scholarship and discussions: a butterfly
began flapping its sociopolitical wings outside Palestine and this tiny ripple

Studies, 3/4 (Summer, 1974), p. 224 (italics added); Eric Rouleau, The Palestinian
Resistance at the Crossroads, Journal of Palestine Studies, 3/2 (winter, 1974), pp. 185-186.

13 Edward Said, From Intifada to Independence, Middle East Report, 158 (May-June,
1989), p. 13.

14 Edward Said, The One-State Solution, New York Times Magazine, 10 January 1999.

15 Ghassan Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine (New York: Committee for a
Democratic Palestine, 1972); Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt. (Arkansas: The
University of Arkansas Press, 2003); Matthew Hughes, The Banality of Brutality: British
Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 193639, English
Historical Review 124/507 (April 2009), pp. 31354.

105
would ultimately develop into a decisive impact on the whole regional
interface of the Arab-Zionist conflict.

Butterfly (1936-41)

Contemporary 1S2S discussions ordinarily debate the future of the

conflict and its possible resolutions without delving much into the past
especially the regional/supra-Palestinian past. This impinges negatively on
the proposed solutions. To start with, what would be the best way to
spell Two-State-Solution? I suggest regionalization. The Palestinian
1936-9 uprising generally and Peels Two-State-plan specifically
affected, and became part of, domestic politics in neighboring Arab
societies and states.16 They have as such impacted the very process of
national formation and the contingent, inter-dependent consolidation of
the Jewish and Arab national collectivities.

For practically all 1S2S scholars, the processes dialectically inter-linking

(i) the Palestine partition, (ii) regionalization and (iii) Arab-Jews amount
to little more than residual dust a historical nuisance to be brushed-off.
These processes are perceived as having neither serious relevance, nor
consequence, for the contemporary Palestine/Israel question (its
possible resolutions included, whether One-State, Two-States or Bi-
National State). Yet active Arab support of the anti-colonial Palestinian
struggle grew exponentially following the publication of Peels Partition
plan.17 As Egypts British ambassador put it: the Palestine question has
to all intents and purposes become a domestic political issue in Egypt.18
I posit that the critical question is this: in what precise manner did this
historically momentous regionalization process manifest itself socio-politically?

Explicitly or implicitly, most studies assume the standard/hegemonic

view, namely, that the so-called real regionalization of the Palestine
question materialized in May 1948 after the British departed and upon

16 Public Record Office, London, Foreign Office papers (hereafter FO), 406/75 includes
extensive documentation of Arab objections to, and protests of, the Peel report.

17 Y. Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1929-1939 (London: Frank Cass,
1977); Y. Porath, In Search for Arab Unity (London: Frank Cass, 1986); J. Jankowski,
Egyptian Responses to the Palestine Problem in the Interwar Period, International
Journal of Middle East Studies, 12 (1980), pp. 1-38; J. Jankowski, The Government of
Egypt and the Palestine Question, 1936-1939, Middle Eastern Studies, 17 (1981), pp. 427-
53.

18 FO 407/222, Lampson (Cairo) to Halifax, 24 May 1938.

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the crossing of armed Iraqi, Egyptian, Syrian, trans-Jordanian and
Lebanese forces into the territory assigned to the Palestinian state in
UNGA resolution 181. I suggest that the precise opposite is the case.
The regionalization of the Palestine question (i) was sociopolitical (rather
than military/armed); (ii) manifested itself tangibly more than a decade
before 1948; (iii) materialized upon the migration of the Palestine question
to neighboring Arab societies/states (rather than the other way around).
If these elements evade even contemporary analysts, it is unsurprising
that during 1936-38 few observers were successful in detecting sufficiently
accurately the multiple dimensions of the regions increasingly entangled
sociopolitical dynamics and more crucially the contingent, sectarian
course which nationalist politics inside and outside Palestine had began to
take.19 (The ideational layer of cross-religious and cross-ethnic secularist
modernism that Euro-Zionists and Arab nationalists often verbalized
declaratively remained factually hollow and never really materialized
empirically).

I suggest that the symbolic butterfly flapping its almost invisible

sociopolitical wings in Bludan, Cairo and Baghdad affected the
(otherwise contingent) consolidation of the phenomenon of nationalism
in the AME and, by extension, significantly raised post-1945 prospects
for concurrent Arab/Palestinian defeat and Euro-Zionist triumph
(which have lasted to this day). Butterfly-effect is defined as a small
change at one place in a complex system can have large effects
elsewhere;20 or small changes in initial conditions [that] can lead to
both large-scale and unpredictable variation in the future state of the
system.21 Briton C. J. Edmonds was among the few who detected these
seismographic vibrations in the early condition of the Arab-Zionist
system. In 1937 he explained from Baghdad:

The most serious aspect of the Palestine problem is that the

communities concerned are not local entities but have racial and
religious affinities all over the world and, in particular, that any
exacerbation of the situation there reacts immediately not only
on the government and Arab majority in Iraq but on the

19 In this context see also Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social
Disintegration, 19391948, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

20 Definition is from WordNet A lexical database of English, Princeton University (at

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ ).

21 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

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 tranquility of the large Jewish [minority] community resident
here as well.22

Although Jews are no longer found in Baghdad, Edmonds observations

remain relevant in two respects. The first is in relation to contemporary
diasporic/extra-territorial Jews and/or Palestinians/Arabs including
those Ben-Gurion dubbed armchair Zionists and Benedict Anderson
long distance nationalists.23 The second respect is more crucial: it
concerns the implicit critique in Edmonds observations regarding the
state of Arab national politics in terms of inter-group relations (whether
religious, ethnic or sect-based); these remain as bleak today as they were
in 1937 and, as such, continue to benefit Zionism. Another analyst who
sensed the butterfly effect was Sir John Shuckburgh (1877-1953), Deputy
Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office. His lengthy 1938
analysis included this observation:

No [British] attention seems to be given to the situation of the

average non-political Jew. I know that the Jewish community in
Egypt, with whose leaders I was on the most friendly terms, are
seriously worried at the likelihood of anti-Semitic reactions
which they have successfully avoided indeed, the thing has
been utterly unknown in Egypt which are likely to be the
direct result of Zionist politics. Hitherto, the leading Egyptian
Moslems, like their humbler compatriots, have entertained most
friendly feelings toward Jews. [...] They are now genuinely
roused [...] at the idea that fellow [Palestinian] Moslems [...] are
eventually to be squeezed out of a country which they have
inhabited for many centuries by [Euro-Zionist] immigrants who
are regarded as being mostly Communists. I am convinced that
if we stick doggedly to partition [in Palestine] it will [...] create a new
and unfortunate attitude on the part of the Moslems and the
Egyptian Copts to the Egyptian Jews. There seems every reason
to believe that the same observation would apply throughout
Arabia and Iraq. [...] Why must we deliberately refuse to make
any effort to find out how far Jewish sentiment and Zionist
fanaticism are really identical?24

22 FO 406/75, Edmonds (Baghdad) to Kerr, 15 November 1937 (italics added).

23 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World,
(London: Verso, 1998), pp. 58-74.

24FO 371/21878, Sir J. Shuckburgh (Colonial-Office) to Sir L. Oliphant, 18 July 1938,

(emphasis added).

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Shuckburghs foresight of the Palestinians squeezing out a decade
before its materialization was undoubtedly impressive yet easier to
extrapolate; more remarkable remains his ability to highlight the regional
impacts on Arab-Jews of (i) the very concept of partition/two-states
and (ii) the (back-then-possible) squeezing out of the Palestinians. Yet
even for Shuckburgh it was impossible to detect the (possible) long-term
impacts of this process on the consolidation of Arab nationalism itself.

I argue that at this precise critical juncture lies the most foundational seed for what
would culminate in a historically colossal Arab defeat by a half-million Euro-Zionists
in the 1940s: the failure to cement a modestly democratic/inclusive
denominator for a horizontal Arab collectivity liberated from the host of
ethnic, religious and sectarian-diametric divisions. Whether it was
voluntary or structural the gradual Arab slide into the sectarian playing-
field fashioned by the Zionists themselves boosted the prospect of
defeat. As shown next, this certainly was the case in 1937-41 and
probably remains so today (as Part III elaborates).

The struggle between the Euro-Zionists and Palestines Arabs intensified

between Britains 1917 Balfour Declaration and its 1947 passing of
Mandatory Palestine to the newly formed UN. Nonetheless, it was a
decade earlier that the conflict in Palestine had began to reverberate
regionally. A highly undervalued core variable that facilitated the Euro-
Zionists historical triumph over their Arab-nationalist adversaries
resulted from the formers success in furnishing some of their fiercest
Arab enemies outside mandatory Palestine with their self-made
conceptions, terms and socio-politically sectarian logic. As exemplified
next via selected dynamics in Syria, Egypt and Iraq from the late 1930s
a politically-significant number of radical Arab nationalists (of both
secular and religious persuasions) began embracing the Euro-Zionist
conflation between Judaism and Zionism; this, in turn, would place them
at the otherwise contingent outset of a self-defeating path.

Syria. Mindful of guilt-by-association as early as 1929, the

miniscule community of Syrian Jews felt it urgent to declare publicly
their disassociation from Palestines Euro-Zionists:

[] Zionism [] was founded by the Jews in Northern Europe

and the Jews of Damascus are totally estranged from it. [] We
have come to declare [] to our fellow Arab citizens [] our
attitude vis--vis the Zionist question, and ask them to

109
 differentiate between the European-Zionists and the Jews who
have been living for centuries in these lands. We ask that the
population and the press consider the Jews of Damascus to be
Arabs sharing completely all of their sentiments in good times
and in adversity.25

Of course this perceived need for public avowals was (and remains)
degrading for any minority community pressed to assure nationalists in
the surrounding majority-community of its loyalty to the given nation
and/or state. Yet the association and subsequently conflation
between Euro-Zionism in turbulent Palestine and minority Jews in the
surrounding Arab areas was not salient politically before 1936. During
Palestines first month of General Strike the Arab Higher Committee
(AHC) naturally appealed for Arab assistance in the struggle over the
homeland. After months of coordination with Syrian nationalists and
members of the Damascus Committee for the Defense of Palestine, Hajj Amin
succeeded in facilitating the first landmark inter-Arab Congress that
convened in Bludan on 8-10 September 1937 (soon after Peels
publication);26 the proceedings were modeled on those of the recent
Zionist Congress in Zurich.27

As in Zurich, over 400 delegates participated in Bludan including 160

Syrians, 65 Lebanese, 30 Trans-Jordanians, 12 Iraqis, 6 Egyptians and 1
Saudi. An examination of available documents produced both for and
during the Congress (by its three constituent committees for Finance and
the Economy; Political Affairs and Education and Propaganda) reveals
the prevalence of a conservative manifestation of religiously-nourished
anti-Zionism. The proceedings attest to acute difficulties in
comprehending the difference not only between Zionists and Jews
generally but, more crucially, between Palestines Euro-Zionists and the
regions Jews (in 1937 that is).

A 30-page tract entitled The Jews and Islam was given to every delegate. It
assembled selective Quran and Hadith excerpts portraying (generic)

25 Primary source reprinted in Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern
Times (New York: the Jewish Publication Society, 1991), p. 328.

26 For Hajj Amin consult Philip Mattar. The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and
the Palestinian National Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

27FO 371/20814, 15 September 1937, comprehensive dispatch (plus five annexes) from
Gilbert MacKereth (Damascus) to Colonial Office.

110
Jews in an inflammatory and xenophobic manner.28 Resolutions
stipulating that Palestine was an integral part of the Arab homeland; that
it must not be partitioned; that the Mandate should be abrogated or the
Balfour Declaration annulled, made perfect sense given the twin-
processes of Euro-Zionist colonization and the simultaneous
dispossession of peasant and working-class Palestinians. But other
Congress components were quite racist, should have been charged as
such, and rejected publicly. One example is the resolution to boycott
all Jewish goods, Jewish productions, and Jewish trade [which] is the
national duty of every Arab no matter who he may be and that he who
disobeys should be considered as a supporter of Zionism whom all must
boycott as well. Yet it was not Euro-Zionist production and commerce
present in markets in Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus; it was, instead,
labor by indigenous Jews, overwhelmingly non-Zionist.

Delegates also learned that before the war, Zionism had been but an
idea in the minds of the world-trotters, the Jews and that it soon
became a definite plan which united them together through the power of
authority and wealth. Arabs must therefore stand and face all greedy
and obstinate peoples. The Congresss juxtaposition of good Muslims
and Christians, on the one hand, to cruel, greedy, victimizing (generic)
Jews, on the other, was predictably confusing and misleading and
would also be profoundly counter-productive in terms of the Arab
nationalist cause itself. Such was the dominant anti-Zionist framing at
Bludan and, more emphatically, during the more (so-called) radical
unofficial gathering that immediately followed it. As Marxist Jews (and
non-Jews) in Egypt and Iraq argued eloquently already in the 1940s,29
such manifestations of anti-Zionism played neatly into the hands of
Zionist strategy in contributing to its overriding efforts at cross-regional
and cross-ethnic amalgamation of ethnically differentiated Jewish
communities. Either way, it was as Philip Khouri puts it the pan-

28 Ibid, annex 5.

29 Yusuf Harun Zilkha (1946) al-Sihyuniyah aduwat al-arab wa al-yahud [Zionism against
Arabs and Jews] (Baghdad: Matbaah Dar al-Hikmah), pp. 63-67; Marsil Shirizi, Against
Zionism for the Sake of Jews and Arabs reprinted in Awraq munadil Itali fi Misr [Papers of
Italian Fighter in Egypt] (al-Qahirah: Dar al-Alam al-Thalith 2002 [1947]), pp. 52-6;
Henri Curiel, Les Communistes gyptiens et le problme juif (Cairo: Huckstep internment camp,
1949), typescript 317 in Inventory of the papers of the Egyptian Communists in Exile
(Amsterdam: Institute of Social History).

111
Arab Congress at Bludan which helped to launch the second and most
intense stage of the [Palestine] rebellion.30

Egypt. Peels proposed Two-State-partition translated into

collective action in 1938 Egypt, unlike any that had transpired before.31
The mawlid an-nab celebrations witnessed hundreds of demonstrating
students attempting to break into Cairos Jewish quarter; the police had
to employ forceful measures to prevent the escalation of anti-Jewish
hostility.32 Palestines partition plan was also assessed by mainstream
bodies including Egypts Grand Ulama on the Question of Palestine, which
held its meeting in Al-Azhar (on 18 August). Its decisions were
personally delivered to the British by Al-Azhar rector Sheikh al-Maraghi
who emphasized:

the danger which Zionism was preparing for all the Jewish
communities in the Middle East. [...] The seizure of a Muslim
land [in Palestine] by the Jews [in fact, Euro-Zionists] with the
support of Britain was arousing much vindictive feeling. [...] It
was quite possible [] that the Jews in Iraq and Egypt []
might shortly find themselves involved in the general anti-Jewish
hostility of the Moslem world [as a consequence of the Palestine
clashes].33

Al-Maraghi was regrettably correct: three years later, over 150 Jews were
killed in Iraq during a two-day spree of violence known as the Farhud.
Since then, two chauvinist tendencies prevail: (i) The Farhud is
necrophilically over-blown by academic Zionists; to paraphrase the
Talmudic proverb, they highlight the Farhud retrospectively less for their
love of [Iraqi-Jewish] Mordechai and more for their loathing of [Arab]
Haman: it is in other words a means of depicting Arabs generically as
anti-Semitic racists in order to whitewash Zionist deeds in Palestine.34
Conversely (ii) the Farhud is hardly mentioned and remembered (if at all)

30 Philip S. Khoury, Divided Loyalties? Syria and the question of Palestine, 1919-39
Middle Eastern Studies (1985) 21/3, p. 332.

31 Jankowski, 1980, 1981.

32 FO 371/21876, Lampson to London, 17 May 1938.

33 FO 371/24879, Bateman to London, 23 August 1938.

34 Examples include Moreh S & Z. Yehuda, eds. (2010) Al-Farhud, The 1941 Pogrom in
Iraq, (Jerusalem: Magness) [originally published in Hebrew in 1992] and Black, Edwin
(2010) The Farhud, Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust (New York: Dialogue).

112
by non-Zionist scholars of the Israel/Palestine question who apparently
find it too challenging to comprehend the Farhuds (Deir Yassinian)
magnitude let alone its dialectic relationship and relevance to the
simultaneous Euro-Zionist historical triumph and Arab defeat. Yet be
these teleological historiographic tendencies as they may the British
1938 assessment of the above-cited Ulama report could sense somewhat
the emerging regional implications of the conflict in mandatory Palestine:

The resolutions of the Grand Ulama of Egypt may have

received some of their inspiration and impetus from those
recently passed by the Ulama of Iraq. [...] It may not be possible
for well-disposed and reasonable Egyptians to stem the tide of
pro-Islamic sentiment [vis--vis local Jews] if no settlement of
the Palestine question, acceptable to the Arabs, is reached.35

The Iraqi Shiite Ulama had indeed called for a jihad two weeks earlier,
followed by a similar call by Iraqs Sunni Ulama.36 In October 1938, the
World Parliamentary Congress of Arab and Muslim Countries for the Defense of
Palestine gathered inaugurating Egypts organized (Arab and/or
Muslim) mobilization on Palestines behalf. The biggest of its kind, the
Congress hosted some 2,000 delegates from across the Arab and/or
Islamic world. As in 1937 Bludan, resolutions cemented around
opposition to the partition plan while demanding the reversal of the
Balfour Declaration and the termination of Jewish migration to Palestine.
The British Embassy reported:

We are doing our best to keep the Congress [...] within limits of
restraint and moderation. But the course of the events in Palestine has
deeply shaken Moslem opinion, and the position of the
Egyptian government, who are loyally trying to damp down
extremism, is becoming daily more embarrassing. [] The policy
of partition will not work [...] even if we succeed in suppressing
Arab resistance, Arabs will seize the first opportunity to rise
against us. Under present policy, gradual conveyance of
Moslem elements in the Near East toward Italy is inevitable.37

35 FO 371/24879, Bateman to London, 23 August 1938.

36 See FO 406/76, Houstoun-Boswall (Baghdad) to Halifax, 10 August 1938 no. 71&72.

37 FO 407/222, Lampson to Halifax, 10 October 1938.

113
Since not only anti-Zionist but also anti-Jewish material had circulated
during the Congress,38 Egypts Jewish community fully alive to the
unfavorable repercussion of the trend of events on the security of their
persons and property had taken precautions [to counter the ultra-
violent expression of opinions in the press].39

A few weeks later, on the occasion of the Balfour Declarations 21st

anniversary, a mass pro-Palestinian meeting convened at Cairo
University. The pro-Palestinian campaign of Young Egypt a proto-
fascist subnational contingent within Egypts predominantly liberal
national movement was extended to include a boycott of not only
Zionist goods but also of merchandise produced in Egypt by Jews. The
Boycott Committee had published lists of names of Jewish merchants
whom Egyptians were urged to boycott.40 In July 1939, Young Egypt
activists placed bombs in or near synagogues in Cairo, Mansourah,
Nahalla Kebir and Assiyut and posted anti-Jewish notices.41 There
certainly were anti-Zionist forces that did not conflate anti-Zionism with
hostility to local Jews: chiefly secularized liberals and Marxists (rather
than Islamists and nationalists), they were ultimately defeated by both
Euro-Zionism and Arab nationalisms xenophobic undercurrent. 42

Iraq. In Iraq, rage over Palestines partition and the brutal

suppression of the revolt was stronger than in Egypt and Syria and
fueled actions against local Jews. Scholarly focus on the 1930s is lacking
since studies commonly regard the epical late 1940s as the more critical

38 FO 406/76, Commandant Cairo City Police to Egyptian Under Secretary of State for
the Interior, 31 October 1938, Enclosure 103 in Lamposn to Halifax, 2 November 1938;
J. Jankowski, Zionism and the Jews in Egyptian Nationalist Opinion, 1920-1939, in A.
Cohen & G. Baer (eds.) Egypt and Palestine, a Millennium of Association, 686-1948 (New-
York: St. Martins Press, 1984), pp. 314-31.

39 FO 407/222, Lampson to Halifax, Memorandum of the Egyptian Press for

September-October 1938.

40 See United States National Archives (USNA), 883.4016-Jews/7, Fish to Washington,

25 September 1939; 883.4016-Jews/6, Fish to Washington, 27 July 1939; J. Jankowski,
Egypt's Young Rebels: Young Egypt, 1933-1952 (Stanford: Hoover, 1975), 39.

41 USNA, 883.4016 Jews/5, Murray to Washington, 24 July 1939 and 883.4016-Jews/6,

Fish to Washington, 27 July 1939.

42 For bodies not conflating anti-Zionism with activism against local Jews consult
Jankowski, 1984; Kramer, 146-54; Gershoni, 1999.

114
terminus a quo.43 In August 1938, the British Ambassador reported on
communications with Iraqs Interior Minister on the subject of the
present position of the Jews in Iraq, with special reference to the bitter
feelings which have been aroused against them by the recent Jewish [read
Zionist] reprisals on the Arabs in Palestine. The Ambassador explained:

I fear that the news received recently of the heavy casualties

which resulted from the explosion of a bomb in the Arab bazaar
in Jaffa [Palestine] may again incense the Arab public and it will
not be surprising if there are further instances of the victimising
of Jews in spite of the preventive measures taken by the [Iraqi]
government.44

A week earlier, an advisor to Iraqs Ministry of Interior approached the

Minister following two bombings of Jewish clubs and the publication of
a jihad-fatwa concerning Palestine (mentioned above). The Minister
predicted:

Before long, a demand might arise for the expulsion of all the
Jews in Iraq. Every day he [the Minister] reads in the press of
some new drive against the Jews in Europe. Nobody has been
able to prevent Hitler from carrying out his drastic anti-Jewish
measures in Germany. The Arab countries as victims of Jewish
[read Zionist] territorial ambitions would have far stronger
justification than the Europeans. It was not entirely fantastic to
visualise the 90,000 Jews of Iraq being escorted across the Euphrates and
told to run the gauntlet of the desert to this Palestine of theirs. No one
could tell when such a demand might arise; it might develop
overnight, it might not be made for three, four or even five
years; but sooner or later it was bound to happen unless there
was a radical change [in British Palestine policy].45

These words are remarkable given that 12 years later the entire Jewish
community would be airlifted to Israel (as a consequence of
Arab/Zionist collusion). It was again left for C.J. Edmonds a

43 Abbas Shiblak, The Lure of Zion (London: Al Saqi, 1986). Moshe Gat, The Jewish Exodus
from Iraq, 1948-1951 (London: Frank Cass, 1997).

44 FO 406/76, Houstoun-Boswall (Baghdad) to Halifax, 29 August 1938.

45 Ibid.

115
seismographer of socio-political dynamics to detect the emerging
regional reverberation:

There is no doubt that the recent campaign of Jewish [read

Zionist] reprisals in Palestine has roused public feeling here to an
unusual pitch of intensity. [] For the Arab spokesman, the
injustice of the policy of His Majestys Government is so patent
that resistance in any form is legitimate, and counter-measures
or retaliation by the other side constitute merely intensification
of the persecution. I am far from suggesting that any action so
sweeping as that imagined [above] by the [Iraqi] Minister [vis--
vis Iraqi Jews] is imminent, or ultimately probable. On the other
hand, there is no doubt that the idea has been [] canvassed; I
remember that Dr Shawkhat, President of the Muthanna Club,
entertained me with similar ideas. [] We had a pale indication
of some of the possibilities in 1936, when several Jews were
murdered in Baghdad in quick succession. It is true that in most
cases the murders were attributed to personal motives; they were
nonetheless symptomatic of a diminution of respect for the
sanctity of Jewish life at a time of popular agitation.46

The meeting with the Iraqi Minister was reported:

The [Iraqi] government would not relax their efforts to control

the activities of the extremists here, but the repressive measures
which the [British] government of Palestine had recently found
it necessary to take had not tended to make their task any easier.
The Minister had in mind the destruction of certain Arab
villages [in Palestine] by British troops. This had greatly incensed
local opinion especially as no Jewish [read Zionist] settlements
ever seemed to have met similar fate and divines, religious
leaders and others were continually asking the Prime Minister to
remove the present ban on public agitation. The Government
were, therefore, very anxious lest events should get beyond their
control, when something unexpected might happen to the
[Iraqi] Jews with whom the Iraqis had lived on good terms for
years.47

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., 14 September 1938.

116
To sum up this Part of the article: most studies of the Arab-Zionist
matrix certainly those constituting the 1S2S debate view the above
dynamics irrelevant to the present time (in case that they are aware of
these dynamics to begin with). Such studies never grant a sufficiently
central role to a critical, regionally-rooted variable whose underlying
sectarian dynamics remain consequential to the conflict to this very day.
The late-1930s sequence of events surrounding the AMEs Jewish
minority communities outside Palestine embodies the earliest, single-most-
tangible manifestation of the nascent regionalization of the Palestine question and its
concrete, bottom-up fusion with Arab national politics. The
contemporary overlooking of the process dialectically inter-linking the
Two-State partition, regionalization and Arab-Jews is stranger still given
that in the post-1949 armistice period (when mass-dispersal of Arab-
Jews began) it would ultimately place two-thirds of them (500,000) in
formerly-Palestine-now-Israel where by 1963-4 they constituted over half
of Israels Jewish citizenry and the vast majority of its working-class. (By
the 1990s scholars would call these individuals Mizrahim). Yet it was
already before the Farhud that Britain utilized Jews outside Palestine to
partially rationalize its 1939 White Paper:

The hostilities in Palestine threaten to become a cause of

permanent unrest and friction throughout the Near and Middle
East. [] Who can tell what the end might be if the bitterness
of Arab Nationalists against the Jews in Palestine were turned
against the Jews in Iraq, or elsewhere? His Majestys Government is
compelled to take a most sober view of the consequences which
policy in Palestine may bring in countries beyond its own borders.48

Instead of Peels Two-State solution, the revolutionary 1939 White Paper

proposed a single and unitary Arab state within a ten-year period (1949)
which would contain some form of a non-statist Jewish National
Home. The Zionists rejected the (non-Zionist) One-State-vision in
1939 as zealously as they reject it today (yet from a radically weaker
material/demographic position). Via the AHC, the Palestinians also
rejected this One-State plan since it neither delivered the immediate
independence demanded, nor blocked Jewish immigration completely
(but instead restricted it to a total of an additional 75,000 Jews). This
may historically constitute the single most significant Palestinian path not
taken, particularly given that in 1939 equally important countries also did
not (yet) enjoy full liberation and/or non-nominal independence
including India, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt.

48 FO 50406/77 56952, Halifax (London) to Lindsay (Washington), 4 May 1939.

117
These developments in epic and epicentral Palestine notwithstanding
what emerged outside was (and remains) equally critical for the long-term
shaping of the Arab-Zionist matrix. As I had the opportunity to explain
elsewhere,49 the historically disastrous conflation between Jews and
Zionists came into being and was advanced steadily, simultaneously and
independently by Zionist, Arab and British politicians and bureaucrats
alike. It gradually magnetized two avidly sectarian forces: separatist
Zionists working to pull Jews into Palestine (and later Israel) and some
of their (ostensibly) fiercest Arab opponents whose collective action
effectively pushed Jews out of Arab societies/states (without having a
concrete geographical destination in mind). This collusion helped the
Euro-Zionists materialize their chief dictums, i.e. liquidation of the
Jewish exile and Aliya (Jewish emigration) to Palestine-cum-Israel.50 The
alliance formed beyond mandatory Palestine across the Arab-Zionist
divide affected the direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the
Middle East followed in the 1949-67 period.

Briefly put, infant Euro-Israel would ultimately double its Jewish

population and become considerably less European demographically
and ethnically. In the Arab world meanwhile, forces under the umbrella
of Arab nationalism who advanced more horizontal and inclusionary
foundations for collective identity and Arab self-determination
including regional, lingual or class were fractured by the regions
relative politicization of religiously-informed affiliations (firstly Judaism
and later Islam). Between the 1940s and the 1960s the strength of sub-
national liberal and Marxist groups in, for example, Egypt and Iraq,
struggling to institutionalize Arab self-determination on a (more than
rhetorical) inter-religious basis correlated negatively with the
strengthening of the separatist Jewish nationalism (which was effectively
aided by their domestic Islamist and/or ultra-nationalist sub-national
competitors). Even if one contests particular elements from the
dynamics discussed above, the overriding argument stands: from the late
1930s it was (and remains) impossible to comprehend the Palestine/Israel
question in any framework that omits its regional dimension (let alone
resolve the question and/or democratize the territory, as part III will
suggest). However, that is precisely the Mandated-Imagination and
Regional-Void that rule post-1993 1S2S scholarship.

49 See Moshe Behar (2007) Palestine, Arabized-Jews and the Elusive Consequences of
Jewish and Arab National Formations, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 13/4, pp. 588-611.

50 See also Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Exile amidst Sovereignty: a Critique of 'Negation

of the Exile' in Israeli Culture, Theory and Criticism, 4 (1993), pp. 23-55 [part 1] and Theory
and Criticism 5 (1994), pp. 113-132 [part ii] [Hebrew].

118
PART III Continuities and Ruptures: post-1967 vis--vis post-
1993

I am unable to address all the themes missing in the Palestine/Israel

discussion as an outgrowth of its mandated imagination, neglect of
regional dimensions, and Palestine-centric outlook. The remainder
thus highlights just one theme by developing a sequential-temporal
juxtaposition of two approaches that methodically and politically either
surrender to or resist the 1922 terms imposed by the Churchillian
cage.

Between 1949 and 1967, post-Nakba approaches to the Palestine

question were Arab-led. Nourished by a 1917 frame of reference more
than by a 1948 one, the conflicts solution entertained a sociopolitical
reversal to a 1917 state of affairs rather than envisioning inclusive
modalities to encompass everyone who was present in Palestine/Israel.
For example, Article 7 of the PLOs pre-1967 Charter stipulated that only
Jews of Palestinian origin could be considered part of the liberated
Palestinian collectivity cognizant of the fact that few Jews in
Israel/Palestine could actually pass this bar.51 And as many Palestinians
concluded after 1967, Ahmad Shuqayris pre-1967 loquaciousness about
the consequences that liberation would yield for Israeli-Jews was not
productive for the Palestinian cause.52

Following Israels 1967 infliction of a landslide defeat over conventional

Arab armies, Palestines liberation struggle changed. Greater efforts
were invested in tying it to antiracist and anti-colonial modalities: more
emphasis was placed on forward-looking democratic and inclusive
solutions to the problem than on pre-1948 Euro-Zionist arrival and/or
deeds in Palestine. In the next section I profile Marxists and non-
Marxists who emerged around 1967 and then juxtapose their diagnoses
and prognoses to those dominating the post-1993 One-State school of
the 1S2S debate.

51 Unlike, incidentally, my Jerusalemite grandfather Moshe Behar (b. 1906) and his
mother Bechora (b. 1888), among others.

52 Yezid Sayighs Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement,
1949-1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 222; Helena Cobban, The
Palestinian Liberation Organization: People, Power, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
1984), p. 31.

119
Resuscitations and Anesthetizations

Two principal sub-national forces consolidated to form the renewed and

modernized post-1967 Palestinian national movement. The dominant
one was the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, known as
Fatah.53 (Fatah would later lead the PNC into the aforementioned 1988
vote and, later, into the jaws of the Oslo peace process). Comparatively
narrow in its socio-political outlook and focus, Fatah concentrated
exclusively on Palestinian nationalist affairs;54 opted to disengage and de-
emphasize Arab and inter-Arab politics and dimensions; viewed social,
economic and political change (including feminism) as secondary to the
standard anti-colonial nationalist struggle;55 and emphasized military
armed struggle while belittling the need to devote time and material and
intellectual resources to the development of what was deemed as abstract
strategic plans for the long-run. Fatah was effectively concerned
exclusively with the establishment of a unitary single Arab-Palestinian
state in Palestine yet reluctant to push too forcefully the question of its
secularism since this could have unleashed intra-Palestinian divisions.
The question of the states internal organization socialist, liberal, etc.
was marginalized too.

The second sub-national force constituting modern Palestinian

nationalism followed the opposite path from that of Fatah. This force
was the unabashedly secular Marxist left including the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the DFLP. Comprehensive
in its outlook and more Arab/internationalist in its orientation, the
secular Palestinian left supported the notion of popular armed struggle
yet acknowledged openly its severe limitations in the absence of thorough
social and political changes in the broader Arab world. Rather than
recall the PFLPs lengthy foundational 1967 and 1969 charters,56 succinct
testimonies convey the guiding Marxist-materialist thrust. George
Habash explained in 1969:

53 Extensive writing is available on Fatah including Quandt, 1973 and Sayigh, 2004.

54 As the leading force, Fatah managed to express this in, for example, Article 27 of the
PLOs post-1967 Covenant.
55 Article 8, Ibid.

56 Both available at http://www.pflp.ps/english/?q=taxonomy/term/5 See also W.

Kazziha, Revolutionary transformation in the Arab world: Habash and his comrades from nationalism
to Marxism (London: Knight, 1975).

120
 Unlike the Moslem brothers in Egypt and some other groups,
we saw the liberation of Palestine as something not to be
isolated from events in the rest of the Arab world as a whole.
We saw the need for scientific and technical renaissance in the
Arab world. The main reason for our defeat had been the scientific society
of Israel against our own backwardness in the Arab world. This called for
the total rebuilding of Arab society into 20th Century society.57

Before analyzing the explicitly regional dimension of Habashs thesis, let

us ponder what might have occurred had he uttered these words
verbatim in contemporary departments of Comparative Literature or
presented them to (non-Marxist) circles advancing One-State Solutions.
Habash may have been branded a modernist and Eurocentric. Be that as
it may, less than a year after the September 1970 disaster Ghassan
Kanafani reiterated the broader Marxist regional outlook:

The PFLP has always insisted that we have four equal enemies:
Israel, world Zionism, world imperialism led by the USA, and
Arab reaction. The overthrow of these reactionary Arab
rgimes is part of our strategy, part of liberating Palestine.58

Succinctly put, Fatahs non-regional outlook i.e. bypassing (ostensibly

non-Palestinian) Arab affairs beyond Churchillian Palestine was judged
ineffectual in theory and praxis by the Marxist Fronts. In applying a
non-sentimental, modernist and materialist analysis to the question of
Palestine/Israel an analysis surpassing the always-captivating, yet
narrowly-defined, nationalist thesis the secular Marxist left could
identify no tangible path to actualize the liberation of Palestine, let alone
materialize its secular democratization in a unitary state, without
comprehensive changes in the Arab region surrounding it. In this
understanding, the road to (secular/socialist) Jerusalem had little tangible
choice other than to pass through civil societies in neighboring Arab
states.59 Right across the Arab/Zionist divide, persecuted members of

57 Interview to John K. Cooley, Green March Black September: The Story of the Palestinian
Arabs (London: Frank Cass, 1973), p. 135; (emphasis in the original).

58 Ghassan Kannafani, The PFLP and the September Crisis, New Left Review, (May-
June, 1971), pp. 50-57. See also Samir Franjieh, How Revolutionary is the Palestinian
Resistance? A Marxist Interpretation, Journal of Palestine Studies, (Winter 1972), pp. 52-
60; Mehmood Hussain, The Palestinian Liberation Movement and Arab Regimes: The
Great Betrayal, Economic and Political Weekly, 8/45 (November 1973), pp. 2023-28.

59 See Habash in Cooley, 139; Sayigh, 73, 390; Muhammad Y. Muslih, Moderates and
Rejectionists within the PLO, Middle East Journal, 30/2 (1976), p. 137.

121
the Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen) were perceptive in real time
rather than in retrospect in detecting (independently) the critical issue
at stake. Their 1969 Position Paper on the Palestinian Movement observed (in
Hebrew):

[] An important new protagonist has appeared on the Middle-

Eastern political stage: the Palestinians. True, they had taken
action into their own hands a few years before the 1967 War,
but the real impetus came only after that war. The positive
factor here is that Palestinian action has transferred a struggle
formerly between governments into a mass struggle. For nearly
twenty years the Palestinians had been an object of history,
passively awaiting salvation by the Arab states in general, or by
the progressive Arab states, in particular Egypt, under the
leadership of Abdel Nasser. [] The emergence of a Palestinian
mass-struggle [] is a positive phenomenon. But one can also
discern a negative and dangerous trend in it. Some sections of
the Palestinian movement have adopted die view that the
Palestinian masses can and should go it alone and solve their
problem themselves, in separation from the all-Arab
revolutionary struggle. Those who hold this view present the
problem solely as a Palestinian one, which can be solved in a
purely Palestinian framework. The stick has not been
straightened, it is being bent in the opposite direction.60

That must regrettably suffice for a telegraphic background of post-1967

Palestinian nationalism in terms of competing Marxist and non-Marxist
explanatory frameworks. Fast-forward to a juxtaposition with the (post-
1993) present. I first ask: do contemporary scholars or activists
promoting the One-State solution resuscitate the post-1967 approach of
Fatah while concurrently anesthetizing that of the Marxist Fronts?

To start with, contemporary scholars advancing the one secular-

democratic state chiefly respond to the Oslo debacle including the
bankruptcy of the Two-State notion and the relative cooptation of post-
1993 Fatah (under both Abu-Amar and Abu-Mazen) into the American-
Israeli orbit. As such, the overall formulation of contemporary One-
Staters resuscitates Fatahs pre-1988 argumentation (save, in most cases,
for the armed struggle) while anesthetizing its historically competing

60 Position written by M. Machover & Jabra Nicola, reprinted in Arie Bober (ed.), The
Other Israel (New York: Anchar, 1972). See also Machover, 2006, 2009.

122
theory and praxis as envisioned and exercised by the Marxist Fronts.
Like historic Fatah and unlike the Fronts post-1993 books, articles,
essays, Op-Eds, declarations (etc.) by One-State scholars61 rarely
mention anything that is either present or empirically taking place in
the regional areas surrounding the otherwise (mandated) borders of the
wishful single state. Socio-economic factors certainly socialism (but I
would add feminism too) remain peripheral and are displaced, rather
than supplemented, by legalistic discourses of human rights and
international law.

For the Ramallah-based Palestinian National Authority (PNA) the road to

(East) Jerusalem begins in official Washington with the fantasy that the
US will deliver the goals of Peace and a State by Western remote
control. The PNAs One-State critics ironically seem to share this logic:
in their case, the road to liberation and a unitary state is chiefly assumed
to begin in the civil societies of London, Madrid, New York and San
Francisco; Amman, Cairo, Damascus or Beirut are rarely mentioned in
pre-2011 One-State studies. The main thrust underlying this approach
its associated activism included is Eurocentric and non-Arab: it
postulates that it was chiefly white Western civil society that toppled
Apartheid South Africa (via boycotts, divestments and sanctions). One-
State scholarship devotes little mention, emphasis or attention to domestic
actions and long decades of pre-1992 systematic, sustained and risky
organized mobilization both inside South Africa and in states regionally
surrounding it by such potent organs as the African National Congress
(ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Union (COSATU) and the
South African Communist Party, organs that have no Palestinian or Arab
equivalents. Furthermore, there are barely even calls let alone viable
plans to create such organs in Palestine and/or the Arab world.

Post-1993 One-State scholarship likewise seems to find it too daunting

to consider lucidly the proposition that the situation of the Palestinians is
probably worse than that of pre-1993 Black South Africans. Seldom
referred to, for example, is the significance let alone possible
implications for Palestine/Israel of the considerable material
dependency that white South Africa had on its black labor-force a
dependency absent in the case of Zionism/Israel vis--vis the
Palestinians. Nonetheless, notwithstanding being critical factors in their

61 Consult note 7.

123
own right62 -- these are tangential issues to the present article. My
principal contention here is much simpler:

It may be productive to recall a Marxist-informed materialist vantage-

point and then probe the Fatahite (and liberal) narrowing of perspective
effectively promoted by contemporary One-State studies. I posit that
the prospects for materializing as opposed to envisioning ideationally a
modestly unitary secular-democratic solution in the territory of
Mandatory Palestine are likely to remain unattainable as long as
parallel/complementary changes fail to surface in the region surrounding
it. Contrary to what both Two-State scholars and (non-Marxist) One-
State scholars would have us believe the land between the Jordan
River and the Mediterranean Sea is not a regionally-secluded island (as
has factually been the case since the 1930s) and the surrounding region
continues to comprise a gigantic variable that cannot be ignored (as it
presently is by scholars along the 1S2S continuum).

Contemporary 1S2S solutions strike me as ideational and formulaic.

They seem incapable of confronting daringly the sociopolitical crisis that
since the 1930s has been metastasizing across the entire AME
(Palestine/Israel included): the territory comprising Mandatory Palestine
is unlikely to be sufficiently transcended without nontrivial
advancements towards a nonsectarian popular Arab democracy. All other
configurations of Arab society whether inspired by such competing
societal foundations as those advanced by Hamas, Hizb Allah, al-Qaida,
authoritarian rulers, the Muslim Brothers, the PNA or ostensibly secular
exclusionary nationalists (as those who prevailed in the 1940s) stand as
much chance of success vis--vis Zionism/Israel as the Arab world has
experienced since 1882. The reason is that such foundational
formulations structurally remain unable to amass a sufficiently potent
nonsectarian force to counter the formidable Israeli/Zionist power they
face (as has actually been the case in and since 1937). And as I
further explain below, such configurations of Arab society seem
incapable of producing a counterweight to Zionism/Israel for the
(possible) mutual benefit of Arabs and Israelis regionally.

Contrasting Euro-Centricities

As indicated in Habashs above citation, post-1967 Marxists (Israelis

included) were as unabashed about and committed to their
secularism as were competing sub-national forces about their own

62See Mona N. Youniss tour de force Liberation and Democratization The South African and
Palestinian National Movements (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

124
fundamentals (religion, culture, language, narrow-nationalism, etc.). The
guiding Marxist-materialist thrust was unapologetically modernist. Yet
unlike modernization theorys liberal formulators, Marxists
conceptualized the progression non-linearly as a bumpy process
fraught with struggles, turmoil and contradictions whereby liberation and
equality revolutionize personal dispositions and collective existence.
Accordingly, without succumbing sycophantically to neighboring
conservative sub-national forces the Marxist PFLP (for example)
maintained:

The struggle for Palestine will as regards the Palestinian and

Arab masses be a gateway towards the culture of the age and a
transition from a state of underdevelopment to the requirements
of modern life. Through the struggle we shall acquire political
awareness of the facts of the age, throw away illusions and learn
the value of facts. The habits of underdevelopment represented
by submission, dependence, individualism, tribalism, laziness,
anarchy and impulsiveness will change through the struggle into
recognition of the value of time, order, accuracy, objective
thought, collective action, planning, comprehensive
mobilization, the pursuit of learning and the acquisition of all its
weapons, the value of man, the emancipation of woman - which
constitute half of our society - from the servitude of outworn customs and
traditions, the fundamental importance of the national bond in
facing danger and the supremacy of this bond over clan, tribal
and regional (iqlimiyya-like) bonds. Our national, long-term
liberation struggle will mean our fusion in a new way of life
which will be our gateway towards progress and civilisation.63

Contemporary postcolonial and/or postmodern theorists possibly

including Arab-Americans working in the Western Academia may have
charged the entire PFLP thesis as Eurocentric, modernist and possibly
Orientalist.64 It nonetheless cannot be denied that post-1967 Arab (and
Israeli) Marxists were an integral part of their (non-Western) societies
that their diagnosis and activism evolved from within, wholly directed

63 PFLP, A Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine (1969), Part 1, Chapter 10 (emphasis
added).

64 Arif Dirlik in his Is There History after Eurocentrism? Globalism, Postcolonialism,

and the Disavowal of History, Cultural Critique, 42 (1999), pp. 1-34 describe this
relationship as follows: interestingly, it is a new generation of Third Worlders, firmly
established in the structures of Eurocentric [academicM.B] power, who now speak [in
the West] for the societies from which they hail, while those back at home are condemned
to inaudibility or parochialism (p. 25, emphasis added).

125
inwardly. Liberation could only originate from within the (non-
European) Middle East and could not be delivered by Western remote
control. Bearing these fundamentals in mind, I now wish to ask
whether in sharp contrast it is liberal Eurocentrism that governs the
(Zionist/non-Zionist) continuum comprising the (post-1993) 1S2S studies? Let me
first address the Two-State school before then tackling its One-State
counterpart.

The Spaniard Jewish physician and philosopher Judah Halevi (c.1075

1141) penned a legendary epigram: my heart is in the East and I in the
uttermost West. Halevis maxim is turned fully on its head in the scholarly
(and existential) conception underlying left-Zionist formulators of the
Two-State solution. This schools ultimate dream is a gigantic cargo
vessel capable of dragging Israel from the Middle East and the affixing it,
across the Mediterranean sea, somewhere between Italy, Corsica and
France. Much more than neo-conservative scholars, left-Zionist Two-
State scholars conceive of Israel as a European outgrowth politically and
culturally. As notoriously coined by Israels former Chief of the General
Staff and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Israel is a villa in the
jungle, i.e., a European-style democratic villa-state amidst an Arab
authoritarian jungle. Scholars promoting the Two-State idea find it
daunting to entertain, politically or analytically, the possibility that such a
construct as a Jewish and democratic state might constitute a
contradiction in terms (and if so then no real villa in Baraks jungle).65
Equally difficult for left-Zionist scholars is to come to terms with the
fact that non-Jews generally foremost Palestinian-Arabs cannot really
appreciate the (ostensibly) benign characteristics of the democratic-and-
Jewish-European-villa.

Enter now the Euro-centricity of the post-1993 One-State school. Non-

Zionist scholars writing at the other end of the 1S2S continuum
effectively share some of the assumptions underlying Baraks construct
of a European-style villa in the jungle. Why is that so and what is the
difference between these two schools? Among One-State scholars this
villa is assigned the futuristic form of a de-Zionized unitary secular-
democratic state, envisioned as shared peacefully by (nationalist and
religious) Zionist-Jews and (nationalist and religious) Palestinian-Arabs,
wishfully hoped to be living in equality and mutual co-existence. Most
crucially, the Middle Easts Western European style, anti-Zionist, secular-
democratic, One-State-villa is hypothesized to materialize amidst as well as
altogether independent of:

65 For example Unger, 2008; Yakobson & Rubinstein, 2009; Morris, 2009.

126
(a) a dysfunctional consociational democracy in Lebanon -- bordering
Palestine/Israel to the north which has experienced two horrific civil
wars between its Arab citizens and non-citizens of various sectarian
denominations (and with no Zionist-Jewish contingent present); (b) a
hereditary-authoritarian Syrian republic, bordering Palestine/Israel to
the northeast, ruled by a sectarian ('Alawi) minority; (c) a non-
constitutional Jordanian monarchy, bordering to the east, where a
Hashemite minority rules over an overwhelmingly Palestinian populace;
and (d) an authoritarian Egyptian state, ruled by precisely three men
since 1952 (one of whom was ousted by assassination), bordering
Palestine/Israel to the south. Due to lack of space, I will skip Iraqs
unitary secular-democratic state where Arabs (chiefly Shiites and Sunnis)
attempt to coexist with apparent difficulties and much bloodshed.

In all cases of Palestine/Israels bordering states/societies, difficulties in

consolidating a unitary secular-democratic state are evident
notwithstanding that in contrast to the territory comprising Mandatory
Palestine they do not include a sizeable (or miniscule) community of
Jews (Zionist or anti-Zionist) who not only differ culturally, linguistically,
religiously and (partially) ethnically but who are also (i) rabid anti-Arab
Eurocentrics, let alone (ii) happen to think of themselves as a separate
group possessing a right of national self-determination in their own state
in the post-Holocaust world. Put differently, if Arab societies/states find
it hard to amass secular-democratic entities even without the
nationalist/statist presence of avidly-Eurocentric Zionists in their midst
what real material prospects are there for such a project to first evolve
successfully in Palestine/Israel (while somehow circumventing societal
complexities typifying such bi-national or bi-ethnic entities as Belgium,
Sri Lanka, or the former Yugoslavia)?

In striking contrast to post-1967 Marxists effectively all post-1993

tracts advocating for a secular-democratic or bi-national state are devoid
of anything existing or empirically taking place beyond the
(mandated) borders of their otherwise hopeful projection, i.e., a
European-like secular-democratic-villa-state in a unified Israel/Palestine.
Contemporary One-State scholars hypothesize that the secular-
democratic island-state will ripen somehow within the surrounding
womb of neighboring states, all of which are neither secular nor
democratic. For materialist readings of historical and contemporary
affairs, such mandated imaginations in a regional void are bewildering: if
the diagnosis is largely off the mark, then the corresponding prognosis
runs the risk of becoming das Opium des Volkes. To paraphrase Baraks
notorious conceptualization, the future of the region may well be this:
either (i) a system of federated villas with no jungle surrounding them;
127
or (ii) a so-called jungle with effectively zero (Arab or
Palestinian/Israeli) villas. The latter fully amounts to a banal
continuation of the socio-political present.

Conclusion

A s a consequence of a territorially Palestine-centric vantage-point,

mandated imagination and a non-Arab centric outlook, many
studies of the Palestine/Israel matrix are ipso facto incapable of
appreciating a core, regionally-rooted variable that reverberates to this
day. That variable is the sequence of events that surrounded Arab-Jews
from the late 1930s that embodies nothing less scholarly-dramatic than
the earliest, single-most-tangible manifestation of the nascent
regionalization of the entire Palestine question as well as its concrete,
material sociopolitical fusion with Arab domestic politics in
contradistinction to speculative, verbal or ideational fusions on the level
of doctrines, ideology, journalism or shuttle-diplomacy. A central yet
neglected reason for the historically-monumental Arab defeat by
Zionism/Israel was the formers inability to first generate, and then
inflict, a nonsectarian response to Euro-Zionism. Contemporary 1S2S
prescriptions for the Palestine/Israel question seem formulaic. They
approximate wishful ideational shortcuts chiefly due to their inability to
confront head-on the inter-dependent crisis that has been spreading
across the AME since the late 1930s (including in Palestine/Israel).
While 1S2S scholarship conveniently depicts Palestine/Israel as a socio-
politically secluded island this territory ceased being so in the 1930s
and remains so today. As such, it is unlikely to be sufficiently
transcended without nontrivial advancements towards nonsectarian
popular democracy in the (Arab) womb surrounding it.

Furthermore, the sole reservoir for a counter-weight to Israels potent

force (social, military, economic, technological, etc.) rests in the Arab
world and its under-utilized human capital. Put differently, sources
capable of modifying the existing (asymmetric) balance of power are
unlikely to emerge from anywhere else including from within Israel
itself (i.e. its non-existent left) or from within Palestine-alone or the
Palestinians generally (due to their inability to amass a
Vietnamese/Algerian-type sources of power). Nor is a sufficient counter-
force likely to emerge from within the Euro-American sphere, its civil
society included; liberation of any part of Palestine let alone a secular-
democratic-state are unlikely to be delivered by benevolent Western

128
remote control (as 1S2S studies effectively imply), be it Western states or
(the partly pro-Palestinian) Western civil society. Once again, it was first
and foremost persistent, painful and long decades of organized
mobilization by the triangular South African alliance and force
comprising of the ANC, COSATU and the SA Communist Party that
toppled Apartheid. With all due respect to Western civil society, ending
Apartheid would not have materialized without the democratic non-
sectarian power that these South African organizations generated.
Whereas Western boycott may have been the icing on the cake, the cake
does remain what is was: South African domestic and regional
democratic and non-sectarian activism.

A lucid and non-escapist diagnosis of any problem whatsoever obviously

constitutes a necessary pre-requisite for formulating a solution that
stands a chance of success. The outward-looking Euro-centricity
typifying 1S2S studies can perhaps benefit from the reinvigoration of a
Middle-Eastern/Arab-centric vantage-point informed by (the ostensibly-
outdated) Marxist materialism that existed in both the Arab world and
Israel during the late-1960s/early-1970s. Unlike contemporary liberal
and ideational 1S2S scholarship, Israeli and Palestinian Marxists suffered
from neither mandated imagination, nor a regional void. They were
therefore reluctant to prescribe sedative shortcuts that bypassed Arab
capitals directly to an island-democracy in Palestine/Israel. In fact,
Marxist Jews in Iraq and Egypt understood this mutual inter-dependency
already in the 1940s.66 While few bothered to listen to them then even
fewer today seem capable of making sense of their existence, activism
and thought or their relevance to the 21st century.

66 See footnote 30.

129

This paper was presented at the international conference Ethno-Politics and
Intervention in a Globalised World, Exeter Universitys Centre for Ethno-Political Studies
(EXCEPS), 27-30 June 2010. Differences in scholarly orientations notwithstanding, I
thank conference participants Ilan Papp, Virginia Tilley and Ali Abunimah for their
remarks. On 26 August 2010 this paper was submitted to International Journal of Middle
East Studies (where I published an article in 2005). On 27 September 2010 I was emailed
a two-sentence letter by the editor notifying me of her decision to deny my paper entry to
the standard anonymous peer review process. This choice was undoubtedly scholarly
and had nothing to do with any less divine realm pertaining to the papers contents. On
3 January 2011 one day before the untimely death of Tunisias martyr for economic
justice, Mohamed Bouazizi this paper was submitted to Middle East Critique (MEC). In
early February a week into the Egyptian revolution I felt that the regions post-
submission developments highlighted the increasing relevance of the paper while also
lending empirical support to its chief dictum, namely, the historical and contemporary primacy
of the regional-Arab dimension surrounding the Palestine/Israel question. Such argumentation
has typically been neglected by the countless non-Arab-centric pre-2011 studies
comprising the One-State/Two-State debate whose framework has remained confined
to the Lilliputian territory of mandatory Palestine. In light of the regions developments I
decided that it makes more (social) sense to remove the paper from the very lengthy
review process typifying such hard-copy publications as MEC and instead seek quicker
exposure and critical scrutiny by general and specialized readers. I am profoundly
indebted to MECs editor Prof Eric Hooglund and editorial assistant Ms Erin Frazier
for their kind understanding of my difficult decision; I was fortunate that they
understood that unprecedented historical developments sometimes call for actions that
otherwise may seem unorthodox scholarly. I finally thank MESOJs editor and the
journals two anonymous referees for their exceptional speed in reviewing this paper
and writing their reports.

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