Maki

Summary

The Israeli Communist Party, which the Palestinian communists of the National Liberation League joined in October 1948 and whose Arab members and leaders are a central subject of Nakba and Survival, particularly its Chapter 3 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.37, 41).

Details

• The Palestinian communists who joined Maki appeared ideologically convinced that their choice to cooperate with Zionism formed part of the international proletarian struggle; their class analysis was dominant over the national dimension, so most accepted Moscow’s positions, and Maki’s policies were devised in Moscow to a large extent (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.29).

• In Haifa and the Galilee, most leaders of the National Liberation League chose to cooperate with Israel, opposed the entry of Arab armies, cooperated with the occupation in July 1948 and completed a 180-degree turn when they joined Maki before the war had ended (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.41).

• Dozens of communists and their families were allowed to return to Haifa and the Galilee in the summer of 1948, an example of return permitted to serve political interests (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.26).

• Maki leaders demanded that Arabs be recruited into the Israeli army as a demonstration of loyalty and an attempt to ensure they could remain and enjoy equal rights, and hurried to urge supporters to vote in the first general elections of January 1949 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.42).

• Communist documents and press in Arabic and Hebrew, and the memoirs of communist activists, make up the major share of Manna’s source list; the communist weekly al-Ittihad provided the counterweight to the government organ al-Yawm (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.47).

• Chapter 3’s opening (part 3) states Manna’s thesis about the merger: the majority decision of League activists to join Maki and support its policies was a choice made in order to remain, later packaged as an independent ideological choice, but in essence the result of the Soviet position’s change from opposing Zionism to allying with it; it proved loyalty to Israel, won the right to legal political activity, and the same party then led the resistance to the military government (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.118).

• Between governmental institutions and Maki there was, despite the huge difference in roles and positions, a secret or veiled partnership in 1948 and the early years of state formation (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.118).

• Maki has no official archives; its press is the abundant documentation — in Hebrew, prominently Kol HaAm, and in Arabic al-Ittihad, which resumed publishing in Haifa on 18 October 1948 — and on sensitive and controversial matters there is an obvious difference between the party publications in the two languages (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.117-118).

• The resistance the party led found fruition in the 1970s: Tawfiq Zayyad became mayor of Nazareth in 1975, Land Day was celebrated the following year, and over half of the Arab votes went to the Communist Party in the 1977 Knesset elections (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.118).

• Chapter 3 in full (part 4) traces the merger’s prehistory: the League’s February 1948 Nazareth decision for partition by simple majority, the Czech arms, the leaflets to Arab soldiers, and the 1 October League request to join Maki, approved 5 October and issued 6 October, with the unity conference at Haifa’s Mayo movie theatre on 22-23 October 1948 on the Jewish communists’ conditions under Shmuel Mikunis (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.126, 141).

• Maki’s press in Hebrew and Arabic adopted Zionist discourse on the war, reserved ‘occupation’ for Gaza and the West Bank, made no mention of the Galilee massacres and expulsions, and opposed Sharett’s proposal to accept the return of 100,000 refugees (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.143-145).

• Manna’s Chapter 3 summary lists five turning points: accepting partition (February 1948), resisting Arab armies’ presence (from May 1948), the October 1948 merger, ‘forgetting’ partition and voting in the 25 January 1949 Knesset elections, and Tawfiq Tubi’s 1949 request to draft Arab youth (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.149-150).

• The party’s first criticism of Israeli policy after the Galilee’s occupation concerned its own detained comrades: 75 communists arrested and ill-treated in upper Galilee villages, who went on hunger strike in POW camps (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.145).

• Chapter 7 in full (parts 7-8): Maki held about 22 percent of Arab votes in 1949 (party data 28 percent), 16.3 percent (10,000 votes) in 1951 and just over 15 percent in 1955, when it rose to six seats on Jewish votes; its Arab representatives remained urban Christians and it included no Muslim in its leadership until the 1970s (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.262-263, 272-273, 281-282).

• Manna’s electoral explanation for the post-1949 decline is structural: the new 1951 electorates (Naqab Bedouin, the Triangle, upper Galilee’s Druze), the abolition of the minorities ministry, the replacement of Mapam military governors by Mapai men, and Israel’s turn from the USSR to the West (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.274-275).

• Its Israeli nationalist discourse persisted into the 1950s: annual front-page invitations in al-Ittihad to celebrate Independence Day as the national day of Arabs and Jews, attacks on Nasser as a British collaborator until the late-1955 Czech arms deal, and a twelfth congress (May 1952) whose proceedings made no mention of Palestinians or the Remainers (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.285-286).

• The reversal of 1955-58 followed Moscow to Nasser: opposition to the 1956 Sinai War, the 6 January 1957 Kafr Qasim mourning strike, the attack on Jews-only Upper Nazareth (“Nazareth will not become South Africa”), and the thirteenth congress (May 1957) affirming that the Arabs in Israel are an inseparable part of the Palestinian people with a “right to self-determination, even separation” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.283-284, 287).

• On 1 May 1958 communists and nationalists together reframed Independence Day as Nakba Day in Nazareth, and the Arab Front followed on 6 July 1958; the government had considered outlawing Maki in January 1958 and retreated, laying down new red lines that pushed the party back to its 1950s positions (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.287, 294-295, 297).

• Following the USSR to Qasim’s Iraq against Nasser cost it the Arab street: in 1959 it won three seats and 11 percent of the Arab vote, third behind Mapai’s slates and Mapam — less than half its 1949 Arab vote (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.287-288).

Related pages

Nakba and Survival, National Liberation League, Emile Habibi, Remainers