What the Conflict Is Really About: A Zionist Perspective on History, Propaganda, and the Road to 1948
Part I — From Ottoman Palestine to the Arab Uprising
Sometimes a conflict is easier to see from the side. Maybe that is true here too — but only if someone is willing to listen to both sides and look at the relevant facts.
For a person who is neither Palestinian nor Zionist, this conflict is often presented in a very uneven way. They may hear a polished and organized "Palestinian" argument, an anti-Zionist version of Zionist views, or just the spontaneous and unprepared thoughts of whatever Zionist they happen to speak with. This text is meant to offer a more organized version of one Zionist perspective, while recognizing that there are almost as many Zionist views as there are Zionists.
Parts of my background shape how I see this. I grew up in Russia, in an atmosphere where antisemitism was never far away. It was common to hear that Jews were foreign, harmful to the country, and should "go somewhere else." In that kind of environment, the idea that Jews should have a place of their own feels less abstract. That is what Zionism meant: the belief that Jews should have self-determination in their ancestral land — which today means that Israel should exist.
Another part of my background is family history. Half of my family moved to what was then British Mandate Palestine around 1920. I later got in touch with some of them and found more information in research papers, and that gave me a somewhat different view of the background of the current conflict.
I am related to Eli Teper, who was involved in several left-wing political groups that were quickly moving toward communism. By 1920, when this story began, he was already an experienced and respected operative. His Jewish background, along with the fact that he had family in Palestine, helped determine his appointment there.
Mentors, Organizers, and the Moment They Became Obstacles
Eli Teper belonged to a kind of communist cadre that Stalinism later found difficult to tolerate: the international organizer who worked across borders, mostly behind the scenes, helping movements take shape without becoming the public face of any one of them. A Russian-born Jewish Comintern agent sent to the Middle East, he was not important because he led a mass party of his own. He mattered because he connected people, trained cadres, carried doctrine, and helped fragile communist circles in Palestine and neighboring countries develop into functioning movements.
That role made him valuable in the beginning. It also made him vulnerable once the line changed.
In the 1920s, communist politics in the Middle East were still unsettled, improvised, and heterogeneous. These were not yet fully formed national parties in the later sense. They grew through personal ties, workers' struggles, study circles, émigré networks, and collaboration among people of different backgrounds. In that setting, figures like Teper were essential. They linked local activists to the Comintern, connected one emerging movement to another, and supplied the organizational and ideological framework out of which later parties would be built.
Teper represented an earlier communist outlook: internationalist in structure, wary of nationalism, and committed to the idea that parties should be built on political ability, discipline, and doctrine rather than ethnicity. This was the principle behind his opposition to the "Arabization" of the Communist Party of Palestine. His objection was not to Arab participation in the movement. On the contrary, he was active in recruiting Arab workers and educating new members. What he opposed was the idea that Arab ethnicity should itself become a criterion for promotion and leadership, displacing political merit and ideological formation.
This was not a secondary dispute. It went to the heart of the transformation Stalin was imposing on the communist movement more broadly. One of the defining features of Stalinism — as distinct from earlier Marxist internationalism — was its growing acceptance, and eventually active promotion, of nationalism. Communist parties had originally conceived of themselves in territorial and class terms, not as ethnic bodies. Under Stalin, and through the Comintern, they were increasingly pushed to become nationalized movements, with ethnicity taking on a new political importance. In the Middle East, this pressure came early and with particular force.
In the late 1920s, Teper, Henri Curiel, Yusuf Yazbek, and Fuad Shamali occupied related positions in different parts of the region. None was a classic nationalist leader. All were part of the formative stage of communist politics before full Stalinist consolidation. They worked — in different ways — as organizers, educators, intermediaries, and builders of political infrastructure. They belonged to a world in which communist movements were still being assembled rather than standardized.
Curiel in Egypt was more than just an intellectual influence. He became a key organizer among younger Egyptian communists, closely associated with the urban, cosmopolitan, multilingual environment out of which much of the Egyptian left first took shape. A figure who had helped build the movement could now be recast as proof that it had not yet become truly Egyptian.
Yusuf Yazbek in Syria and Lebanon played a somewhat different role — one of the early Marxist intellectuals and publicists of the movement, helping give communist politics a language, a shape, and an initial coherence. Yet once party leadership hardened and aligned itself more fully with Moscow's preferred line, Yazbek's role became easier to honor symbolically than to preserve politically.
Fuad Shamali came much more directly out of labor activism and practical organization. As the movement became more centralized and disciplined, the rougher, more locally grounded, labor-centered founder became easier to sideline.
What unites these cases is this: all four became less useful once the Comintern no longer wanted merely functioning communist groups in the colonial world, but visibly national parties — Arab-led, mass-oriented, and legible as anti-imperialist movements in the approved form.
Teper's break was especially sharp because he openly resisted the logic behind Arabization. That refusal made him incompatible with the new line. What makes the episode especially revealing is that his position reportedly had support among some Arab communists as well, at least before Comintern pressure fully hardened the new orthodoxy. The conflict, then, was not simply Jewish versus Arab. It was, more fundamentally, a conflict between an older internationalist communism and an increasingly Stalinized national communism.
In Europe, Stalinism often demanded confession. In the colonial world, it more often demanded disappearance.
This is also what gives the comparison with Curiel, Yazbek, and Shamali its force. All four belonged to an earlier phase in which communist politics in the region were more fluid, more mixed, and less bound to the national form that later became mandatory. They helped create the very movements that would eventually outgrow them — or rather recast themselves as having outgrown them.
Another thing that does not fit the current "pro-Palestinian" narrative is the clearly visible, multilayered interaction between Jews and Arabs. As these examples show, there were many kinds of Jews and many kinds of Arabs, differing in how local or rooted they were, in class position, and in political aspirations.
The End of the Ottoman Empire and Rashid Rida
One more thing that matters in this story — especially if we want to stay focused on the practical history of Palestine — is the date: 1929.
To understand why that date matters, it helps to step back to 1898, when the area was still part of the Ottoman Empire — an empire that modern anti-imperialists, for some reason, often do not treat as imperial at all. By then, even if it was not obvious to everyone, the Empire had a serious problem: it was falling behind Europe economically.
Roughly twenty years earlier, in an attempt to deal with this weakness, the Empire had opened itself more to outside investment and immigration. In the Ottoman case, the main large group that responded were East European Jews fleeing antisemitic persecution. Many of them settled in Palestine, then part of the Syrian province, while much of the rest of the Empire continued its slow stagnation. Economists and financial historians often point, among other things, to the lack of separation between religion and state as part of the larger structural problem.
It was in this context, in 1898, that Rashid Rida moved from what is now Lebanon to Cairo and began publishing the journal that would make him one of the most influential Muslim intellectuals in the region. He would become one of the main theorists and popularizers of what we now call political Islam.
In 1898, Rida was still optimistic — and perceptive. In one of the early issues of his journal, he wrote about the Dreyfus Affair, fully siding with those European intellectuals who condemned antisemitism.
In modern Jewish history, the Dreyfus Affair was a turning point — the beginning both of modern political antisemitism and of its answer, Zionism. From the 1890s onward, suspicion toward integrated and successful Jews increasingly turned into conspiracy thinking. That is why the Russian forgery published in 1905 — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — found such receptive audiences.
Now enter the later Rida.
Over more than twenty years of publishing, he watched his ideas fail in practice, saw his home empire collapse, and saw religion pushed aside by modernity. Looking for explanations, he seems to have found one answer that was psychologically tempting and politically disastrous: the Jews were to blame. And now, from his point of view, these same Jews were no longer distant figures in Europe. They were in the southern Syrian lands that would later become British Mandate Palestine.
It is human, in times of collapse, to reach for conspiracy theories. Having lived through the stable period and then the collapse of the Soviet world, I can understand the temptation. But understandable does not mean right. It was still the wrong conclusion.
Rida had two students whose names became even more famous than his own: al-Husseini and al-Banna. If someone has not heard of at least one of them, they probably do not know enough about the modern Middle East.
Al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. In rough comparative terms, Rida and al-Banna stood to political Islam somewhat as Marx and Lenin stood to Marxism: Rida developed and spread the doctrine, while al-Banna organized its practical path into movement form. What neither of them really addressed was how such a society would function economically — even though they had before them the example of the Ottoman Empire collapsing in part because of economic weakness. Instead, that failure was explained away as a result of insufficient piety, and increasingly through the language of Jewish conspiracy.
That distinction matters: what the Nazi group in Cairo (per Alfred Hess's 1933 report) recognized was that classical European antisemitism did not resonate strongly with Egyptians. The group recommended focusing instead on "the place where the real conflict of interests between Arabs and Jews exists" — Palestine. The important phrase there is not "conflict" but "conflict of interests." What was developing was not yet some timeless civilizational hatred. It was a political conflict being sharpened, ideologized, and reinterpreted — and one of the people most important in giving it that ideological form was Rashid Rida.
Before 1920: Palestine Under the Ottoman Empire
So let us zoom in on southern Syria — Palestine — a territory within the Ottoman Empire. In the current "pro-Palestinian" narrative, it is often imagined as a land populated by quiet, wise old men growing olives and oranges. In reality, around 1900 it was a poor province with little that attracted the interest of most people in the Empire.
What we do know is that it was a mostly rural society. More than half of the urban population consisted of Christians and Jews, while the vast majority of the peasants were Muslims, according to the Ottoman census of 1905.
At the top stood a few effendi families, competing with one another for local influence and imperial administration positions. Below them were peasants who, by custom, tended to "support" one family or another. Most peasants had little time to think about politics or power. Their main concern was survival. Less than half of the rural population could support a family from farming alone. Literacy was also extremely low — according to the 1931 report, less than 10 percent of the rural Muslim population was literate.
Some effendis opposed Jewish immigration on principle. Others treated the immigrants as a new local political force to be dealt with through the usual relations of alliance and rivalry. It is interesting that even within the strongly anti-Zionist Husseini family, in 1913 there was at least one influential member who spoke positively of individual Jews (see interview with Said Al-Husseini, 1913); what he opposed was their insistence on acting as a united political force.
By contrast, the Nashashibi family — probably the second most influential in Palestine — was much more pragmatic. In 1920, the Faisal–Weizmann Agreement was signed, in which the de facto ruler of Syria promised the Zionists autonomy in Palestine, including unlimited immigration, in exchange for their support for Syrian independence. British and French policies blocked Syrian independence, and the agreement became void.
1920: The Nebi Musa Riots and Their Consequences
The Ottoman Empire had been defeated. Palestine was occupied by the British, who were soon to receive a mandate to govern the territory on its way toward statehood — committed both to establishing a Jewish national home and to protecting the rest of the population.
It was the al-Husseini family that produced Amin al-Husseini, the future Mufti of Jerusalem. In 1912 he had gone to Cairo for religious study, where he studied under Rida and became strongly opposed to Jews and Zionism.
In 1920, standing beside his uncle (then mayor of Jerusalem), Amin al-Husseini gave a strongly anti-Zionist speech at the start of the Nebi Musa riots. The riots turned into a pogrom against the Jews of Jerusalem: 5 Jews were killed, several hundred wounded, 4 Arabs killed, 18 wounded, and 7 British injured. Although found guilty, the British later granted al-Husseini a pardon.
It is worth noting that sheikhs from 82 villages, claiming to represent 70 percent of the population, condemned the attacks on the Jews — again showing a very different situation from the one often imagined today.
This pogrom convinced the Zionists they could not rely on British protection and needed a defense organization of their own. After 1920, they began to build the first structures of a state.
In 1921, Amin's half-brother Kamil — Mufti of Jerusalem and generally willing to cooperate with both the British and the Zionists — died. A British representative, wanting to support the al-Husseini family, then favored Amin al-Husseini over several more qualified candidates for the vacant post. It remains striking how often the British favored and excused Amin al-Husseini, despite his repeated anti-British activity.
Once elected, al-Husseini was in a position to shape popular opinion in a major way — since for a largely illiterate population, the mosques were one of the main sources of information.
Another important event came in 1922: the start of the anti-malaria campaign, which required cooperation between Jews and Arabs. Malaria was drastically reduced and eventually eliminated by 1960.
1929: The Riots, the Land Question, and the British Response
Then came the riots of 1929. Unlike in 1920, the violence spread to several places and caused far more casualties: 133 Jews were killed and 339 wounded, mainly by Arabs and mostly among unarmed civilians. On the Arab side, 116 were killed and more than 232 wounded, mainly by the British while suppressing the riots.
The immediate trigger was the dispute over the Western Wall and the Temple Mount. A small number of extremist Jews made claims on the Temple Mount in ways that were loud enough to attract attention. Arab authorities hostile to the Jews used this as proof that the Zionists intended to seize the shrine itself — while simultaneously treating Jewish worshippers at the Wall as if they were still dhimmis (people of inferior status), even though they formally had equal rights.
One can already see here a pattern that would repeat throughout the conflict: extremist provocation on one side, deliberate incitement and collective punishment by authorities on the other, with ordinary people caught in between.
The consequences were many:
- On the Jewish side: greater unity, rapid growth of the Haganah, and an accelerating push toward independent statehood.
- On the Arab side: less day-to-day contact between communities, more fertile ground for antisemitic propaganda, and a stricter enforcement of the boycott of Jewish businesses — promoted by Arab leaders since 1922. BDS is not a modern invention.
On land ownership: Most land in Ottoman Palestine fell into three categories: mulk (private property), miri (tenancy on state land), and waqf (religious institutions). Many large Arab landowners — including members of the al-Husseini family — wanted to have it both ways: they objected to the growth of the Zionist community, while simultaneously making fortunes by registering ownership and selling Palestinian land to it.
From the Arab peasant's point of view, however, the picture looked very different. He often had only a vague idea of the legal status of the land, but knew his family had cultivated it for generations. Then suddenly a notice arrived from the very Arab patron he trusted — informing the villagers they had to leave. Soon afterward came the Jews, evicting them from homes they considered their own.
The Hope Simpson Report of 1930 spoke of popular "fear" of Jewish takeover — not actual danger. According to the same report, displacement caused by land sales affected less than 2 percent of the Arab population, whereas low agricultural productivity and the small size of family plots pushed almost 30 percent to move to urban areas.
Yet during the 1929 riots, only about 0.2 to 0.5 percent of the Arab population took an active part in the violence — while roughly 1 to 2 percent of Arabs actively protected Jewish neighbors by warning them, hiding them, or physically defending them.
My conclusion: the riots of 1929 were not broadly supported by Palestinian Arabs at every social level. They were organized by a small extremist faction that included highly placed officials with openly antisemitic views. The British authorities partly accepted their interpretation — and responded in ways that strengthened them.
The Communists in 1929: A Forgotten Dissent
There was another important but often overlooked development in 1929 — and it is where I began this story.
The Communist Party of Palestine (CPP), established in 1924, had been instructed to "localize" — to recruit more local (mostly Arab) workers. Its main difficulties were widespread illiteracy and the fact that people identified more strongly with clan and family structures than with class. Even so, the CPP remained the only communist party in the history of Palestine to have any significant membership from the Arab working class.
When the riots broke out, the CPP's first reaction was to condemn them as an example of the national bourgeoisie diverting popular discontent, and to call on all workers to promote peaceful coexistence.
Then the party's first secretary, Joseph Berger, was summoned to Moscow for a five-hour discussion with Stalin — supposedly to receive an "explanation" of the new development in communist doctrine. The position of the CPP changed: members were encouraged to take more active steps against Jewish settlement. This caused a split within the party, largely along national lines, that continued to weaken it until its eventual disbandment.
Particularly remarkable was the dissenting position of the Haifa branch, which had the highest proportion of Arab members. They — including those Arab members — regarded the events of 1929 as a pogrom, and raised concerns both about further pogroms and about the collapse of communist principles if the party adopted a nationalist line.
It is still remarkable that almost none of the old-guard Arab members of the CPP later joined the nationalist "Marxist-Leninist" movements that emerged afterward, such as the PFLP.
After 1929: Propaganda, al-Qassam, and the Road to Revolt
The 1933 Hess report argued that classical European antisemitism had to be translated into the language of anti-Zionism focused on Palestine. That is, in fact, what followed.
Within Palestine itself, anti-Zionist propaganda developed along two distinct lines:
1. Amin al-Husseini directed his efforts mainly at the educated urban population. His political style seems to have been influenced less by traditional religious leadership than by his admiration for the Nazi movement in Germany. Among other things, he created local adaptations of the Hitler Youth model.
2. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam in Haifa preached jihad against British rule and Zionist immigration to poor city dwellers and rural peasants. He created a small armed organization of perhaps 200 men and died as a martyr in 1935 while trying to launch the jihad he had proclaimed, after al-Husseini refused to join him in a broader rebellion. His death likely set off the chain of events that led to the revolt of 1936–1939.
The Arab Uprising of 1936–1939: What Really Happened
There is broad agreement that economic conditions for the Arab population in British Mandate Palestine worsened between 1930 and 1936. The current "pro-Palestinian" narrative blames Jewish land purchases and labor discrimination. The reality is more complicated.
The wage gap between Arab and Jewish workers was mainly the result of two largely separate economies:
- The Arab sector depended on untrained, often seasonal labor with weak unionization and very limited access to capital.
- The Jewish sector had a growing supply of highly trained workers — partly due to the flight of Jews from Nazi Europe — and benefited from capital transfers via the Haavara Agreement.
Meanwhile, Arab employment in the Jewish sector was roughly ten times greater than Jewish employment in the Arab sector, accounting for about 10 percent of all Arab employment at significantly higher wages. The Jewish sector's contribution to Arab hardship was much smaller than that of the British administration and the Arab elites.
In 1936, violence by an Arab gang triggered Jewish retaliation, which led to widespread protest. What began as a six-month general strike developed into a violent uprising. Unlike the heroic picture often presented today:
- At any given time, only about 4,000 to 5,000 men were actively involved in the rebellion.
- By the end of the strike, tens of thousands of Arabs had been beaten by the rebels for non-participation.
- By the end of the uprising, hundreds of Arabs had been killed by rebel gangs — targeting perceived collaborators, neutral village leaders, and rivals of al-Husseini.
On funding: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy contributed perhaps 10 to 15 percent of total funding — more important as a signal of political support than as a financial lifeline. Their more significant contribution was propaganda: Radio Zeesen broadcasts reached rural populations as radio access grew from 15–20 percent in 1936 to 25–45 percent by 1939.
Casualties in the uprising (per British administrative records):
| Group | Killed by |
|---|---|
| Arabs (by Haganah/Jewish guards) | 100–150 |
| Arabs (by the Irgun) | 200–250 |
| Jews (by Arab rebels) | 400–450 |
| Arabs (by Arab rebels) | 200–250 |
| Jews (by the Irgun) | 3–5 |
By the end of the uprising, popular support for the Arab rebel groups had sharply declined — mainly because of the violence used against their own community. The Irgun, conversely, was strongly opposed by the Jewish majority, including the Labor Zionists who represented 50–60 percent of the Jewish population.
Conclusion: Three Forces That Built a Narrative
The "Palestinian problem," in the form it appears in the current "pro-Palestinian" narrative — as a story of an Arab population suffering under aggression from invading Zionists — was largely constructed in the early 1930s through Nazi propaganda.
This narrative then aligned with, and reinforced, an already existing line promoted by a small but influential section of the Arab elite — which had absorbed European antisemitic conspiracy theories into a doctrine of Islamic revival. The fiction of a spontaneous and unified Palestinian Arab popular nationalism was further strengthened by communist structures at the international level, once they yielded to Stalinist pressure and tried to combine class struggle with nationalism.
In reality, despite tensions and real differences, Arabs and Jews in Palestine were linked by many practical relationships at both the personal and economic level. There were relatively few reasons for conflict that were not amplified, shaped, or outright invented by those three forces: Nazi propagandists, political Islamists, and Stalinists.
While this manufactured narrative was used to explain the practical difficulties faced by Palestinian Arabs, the main causes of economic and political hardship in the Arab sector were in fact the actions and failures of the British administration and the Arab elites.
This is Part I. Part II will continue with the period from 1939 to 1948 and the events surrounding Israeli independence.
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