Summary
The communist party whose failure to Arabise and reach the Palestinian Arab masses Kanafani treats as one of the conditions that left the national movement to the Feudal-Clerical Leadership in 1936.
Details
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On 1 May 1920 a group of demonstrating communists clashed with a Zionist demonstration in Tel-Aviv and took refuge in the Arab quarter of Manshiya in Jaffa; the Party Executive’s statement that day nowhere mentioned the word Zionist, which Kanafani calls an idealist portrait of the struggle (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.17).
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Its Seventh Congress, held at the end of 1930 (the records are also dated 1930-1931), admitted an erroneous attitude towards Palestinian nationalism, a failure to become active among the Palestinian Arab masses, and isolation through working exclusively among Jewish workers, and it adopted Arabisation and armed revolution under the leadership of the working class as its programme (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.9-10 / printed p.17-19).
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The Party was never Arabised; it split during the 1936 revolt, and again in 1948 and 1965 over Arabisation, although its members threw all their weight into the 1936 revolt, cooperated with local leaders and supported the Mufti, and many were killed and arrested (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.10 / printed p.18).
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The Party attributed the failure of the revolt to five causes, including its own weakness; Kanafani adds that it was close to Amin al-Hussaini’s leadership, viewing him as belonging to the most anti-imperialist wing of the nationalist movement, and incapable of reaching the countryside (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.26-27 / printed p.51-52).
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The Zionist movement sought to isolate and destroy the Party, most of whose leaders were Jews, in the early 1920s and 1930s (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.16).
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Manna’s Chapter 3 (part 4) gives the prehistory: most Palestine Communist Party members were Marxist Zionist immigrants, the contradiction over equal rights for settlers and indigenous Palestinians was disguised under ‘Arab-Jewish brotherhood’, the 1936-39 revolt brought open division on national origins, and the 1943 split established the National Liberation League (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.124-125).
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The communists conducted self-criticism for the League’s responsibility for dividing the party’s ranks along nationalist lines in 1943, paving the way for the October 1948 merger into Maki (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.141).
Related pages
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Arabisation, Histadrut, Feudal-Clerical Leadership, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine