Ilana Kaufman. Journal of Israeli History. Volume 33, Issue 2. September 2014.
This paper analyzes the way in which Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communist parties, the PCP-Maki and the National Liberation League, acted during the 1948 war. Both groups made separate and different efforts to make the two-state solution a reality as originally conceived in the UN partition plan. Ironically, the decisive Jewish victory in the war resulted in an asymmetry between the Jewish Communists the Palestinian Communists when they were unified toward the end of the 1948 war. Despite Maki’s labors for an Israeli victory, its standing in the nascent Israeli political system toward the end of the war remained marginal. The concept of Jewish-Arab cooperation under the aegis of the USSR was seen by the Zionist establishment as dangerous and subversive.
In 1943 the Palestine Communist Party (PCP, Palestinishe Komunistishe Partei in Yiddish) splintered into several factions along national lines. The principal group among the Jewish members, led by Shmuel Mikunis, Meir Vilner, and Esther Vilenska, reorganized under the same name. The Arab Communists set up their own organization, the National Liberation League (NLL—’Usbat at-Taharrur al-Watani).
In other words, between 1944 and 1948 two communist parties operated in Palestine (called Eretz Yisrael—the Land of Israel—by most Jews). The split occurred despite the fact that both parties identified ideologically with the Soviet Union and were in total agreement in rejecting Zionism and viewing themselves as the political alternative to the country’s two national movements, Arab and Jewish. Following the establishment of the Jewish state and its military victory in 1948, those members of the NLL who found themselves within the new State of Israel reunited with the Jewish faction, which was by then called Maki, the Communist Party of Israel.
The fundamental cause of the fracture of 1943 was a debate over whether, following World War II, the political goal for Palestine as formulated by the Comintern, “an independent and democratic (Arab) state,” remained valid or required revision. In 1947, with the British Mandate drawing to an end, the USSR, the communist power to which both the Jewish and Arab Communists looked for political guidance, reversed its stand. Having long opposed the demand for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, it now endorsed the establishment of two states, one Jewish and one Arab, in line with the resolution passed by the United Nations General Assembly in November 1947.
This article has several goals. First, I will chronicle and analyze how the PCP and the NLL positioned themselves in relation to the two national movements, the Jewish and Palestinian Arab, that fought each other in the 1948 war. Second, I will describe how the way in which the communist groups positioned themselves in relation to the national movements affected the nature of their activity. Third, I will examine how the war shaped relations between Jewish and Arab Communists and between the Communists as a group and the Zionist establishment of the new Israeli state.
The Communists and a Political Settlement for Palestine, 1945-1947
The Soviet volte-face at the UN General Assembly in 1947, from unqualified opposition to Zionism to support for the partition resolution, was accepted relatively straightforwardly by the PCP’s Jews. The new Soviet approach fell on fertile ground. For about a decade the party had been challenged by breakaway factions, the Section (Ha-sektziyah) and the Educational Association (Ha-igud ha-hinukhi), which demanded that the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, be recognized as a national group. The exposure of members of the PCP to the currents of postwar European communism also made it easier for them to accept changes in their party’s political program. At conferences of communist-affiliated labor organizations worldwide, and of the communist parties of the British Empire, during the period from February 1945 to March 1947, it emerged that, in the wake of the Holocaust, the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine was no longer anathema to Communists, including delegates from Moscow. Under these circumstances, PCP General Secretary Mikunis could, at a conference in London in February 1947, present the new political goal formulated by the party in 1945-46 and accepted by his party’s Tenth Convention in November 1946. It was based on the assumption that “Palestine is today binational,” that is, that the Yishuv had evolved to take on the characteristics of a national entity, conferring on it the right to make collective demands. However, since Jews and Arabs both lived in all parts of the country, “territorial or economic separation is impossible” and the necessary conclusion was “the establishment of an Arab-Jewish state, democratic and independent … in which Jews and Arabs will enjoy fully equal rights.” This solution still rejected the position adopted by most of the Zionist parties represented in the Jewish Agency Executive when they met in Paris in August 1946: partition and Jewish sovereignty in a part of the territory of Palestine. Partition, the PCP continued to maintain at this point, was a recipe for the outbreak of a violent conflict that would serve the interests of colonial Britain.
A binational state required a binational party. But the feelers the PCP sent out to the NLL during 1945-47 in an effort to unite their ranks were rebuffed. The NLL’s leaders justified this on the grounds that a union with the Jewish PCP would isolate them from the Palestinian national movement. Furthermore, the League continued at this point to advocate a single state without collective Jewish political rights.
The NLL was at that time in a more comfortable political position in relation to the Palestinian national movement than the PCP was with regard to the Zionist movement. The League’s political program was consistent with the strategy for achieving Palestinian independence fashioned by the Palestinian leadership, as represented by the Arab Higher Committee. This did not mean, however, that the League’s relations with the leadership were not tense—it walked a very fine line. Its internationalist tendencies led it to distinguish between the Jews and the Zionists, and it favored cooperation between all the country’s workers, Jewish and Arab. The League criticized the traditional Palestinian leadership for “never seeing as part of its goals the need for making the Jews partners in the liberation struggle,” and it rejected the idea of pursuing a war of terror against the Jews as a means of short-circuiting Zionism’s achievement of its goals. The NLL’s view of the status of Jews in the future Palestinian state also diverged from the position dictated by the Hussayni party, the dominant force in the Arab Higher Committee. The Committee’s position was that citizenship in the Palestinian state would be granted only to those Jews who had arrived prior to 1918, while in the NLL’s version of an independent democratic state, protection and equal individual civil rights would be granted to all Jews within its borders at the time the new country received its independence. Despite these differences, the Arab Communists viewed the Arab Higher Committee under its Hussayni leadership as the only central body that could unite all the fractious Palestinian political organizations. The need to overcome internal dissension was seen by the League at that time as supremely important, vital to avoid the decision on the future of Palestine from devolving on the states of the Arab League.
The Soviet About-Face in the UN and the Communist Response to the Partition Decision
In his famous speech before the United Nations on May 14, 1947, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, surprised Jews and Arabs alike. He empathized with the Jews of Europe who lacked a homeland, who had “been closely linked with Palestine for a considerable period in history.” He declared that the best disposition for Palestine would be a binational state, but accepted as an alternative its partition into two states. The Jewish Communists thus had no reason not to welcome UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which arrived in Palestine in June 1947 with the task of recommending a solution to the conflict in Palestine. The PCP appeared before the panel and recommended the establishment of a binational state. In contrast, the NLL’s internal unity began to crack and its cooperation with the Palestinian nationalists started to unravel. In response to Gromyko’s speech, the League stressed that the Soviet foreign minister viewed partition as a second choice and a first step toward establishing a single state. Privately, however, Emile Tuma, one of the founders of the League and editor of its newspaper al-Ittihad, submitted a memorandum to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in which he warned that support for Zionism and British imperialism would weaken the revolutionary movements in the region and strengthen the forces of reaction, that is the ruling elites in Arab society.
UNSCOP’s majority report recommended partition. The PCP’s response, predictably, was negative. It termed the proposal “unrealistic” and “unconstructive.” It lashed out in particular at the committee’s recommendation that British rule of Palestine be extended for a transition period, until the partition plan could be put into effect. In contrast, the NLL position on the report further widened the gap between it and the rest of the Palestinian leadership and nationalist parties and brought it closer to the position of the PCP. Rather than cooperating with the Arab Higher Committee, the League now accused it of bringing about a diplomatic catastrophe. The failure to offer a more conciliatory political alternative to partition persuaded the members of UNSCOP, the League charged, that the Palestinians were not really interested in gaining their country’s independence. In a speech on October 13, Semyon Tsarapkin, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, showed the USSR’s cards. It had decided to ally itself with the “reactionary” Zionist-led Yishuv, viewing it as a force that could help expel the British from Palestine. The PCP recovered more or less quickly from its shock at this reversal, adopting the Soviet position as its own. Commenting on the change in the Soviet position, the PCP’s newspaper, Kol ha-Am on October 17 emphasized that there would be an economic union between the two states and a transitional regime under UN supervision, leading to a temporary political separation between Jews and Arabs that would “stymie the Transjordanian plot to annex parts of Palestine.” It would then lay the groundwork for “fuller political unity” in the future. The day following the General Assembly’s partition decision the PCP Central Committee changed the party’s name to the Communist Party of Eretz Yisrael (Makei), adopting Zionist terminology.
But the League was torn. Its members had to choose between following their national compass or their international (Soviet) compass, which were now, for the first time, pointing in different directions. Al-Ittihad‘s first reaction to Tsarapkin’s speech, published on October 19, voiced the position of Tuma, the newspaper’s editor—it criticized and rejected Soviet foreign policy and took an independent stance. “We do not accept the position of the USSR on the Palestine question,” the newspaper declared, “and we believe that partition is an unjust solution, about to be applied to the inhabitants of the country without consideration of their opinions…. Our friendship [with the Soviet Union] does not mean that we are subject to the discipline of its foreign policy. We set our policy in accordance with the state of our interests and the free and just goals of our nation.” But loyalty to the USSR, as the force that could correctly evaluate the desired direction of development, and the emerging international legitimization of a two-state solution, led other members of the League to come to terms with the sudden change in the Soviet position.
The League’s Secretariat was divided. A minority advocated accepting the Soviet position, while the majority was opposed. Those who reconciled themselves to partition began to take steps in accordance with the new situation, opening unification talks with Makei.
Like their counterparts in the Jewish party, the supporters of partition in the NLL still hoped that the process would lead eventually to a single state. The united Communist Party, it was envisioned, would operate everywhere in Palestine, in both the Arab and Jewish states.[20] Following the UN General Assembly vote in November, Emile Habibi, one of the founders of the NLL, presented the position of the Secretariat’s supporters of partition to a larger plenum of League members that convened in Nazareth. Following this gathering and an additional fierce debate (which apparently took place in Jaffa), the UN decision was endorsed by a majority. Tawfik Toubi would later explain the rationale behind this position. It was a matter of political realism, not ideological blindness, he asserted, saying: “There are times when you need to accept decisions that switch directions. The decisions emerge from new conditions that come into being. We saw a new situation here … the ongoing opposition of the Palestinian national movement to the decision would lead, in the end, not to an independent Palestinian state but to a disaster. That is what we wanted to prevent. We chose the lesser evil.” But some of the League’s leaders and supporters refused to accept the change. Senior members of the Congress of Arab Workers, led by Tuma, Khalil Snir, and Bulus Farah, who considered the plenum’s decision invalid, were expelled from the League. “It was, for us, an utter surprise that struck us like a storm,” Farah wrote in his memoirs. “Even though partition had been much discussed before the endorsement, we believed that the socialist bloc would not confirm it. We were baffled, confused, and profoundly shocked.” Thus, on the eve of the 1948 war, Palestinian Communists were divided between those who absolutely refused to accept the Soviet diktat and those who were prepared to accept it as a good outcome, or at least as a tactical step that would avert defeat and leave open hope for a one-state solution.
The Communists during the War
The special nature of communist activity in 1948 emerged not only from the positions taken on the partition resolution but also in the progress of the war itself. During the war’s first phase, from December 1947 to April-May 1948, the armed conflict took the form of an inter-communal war between the Jews and Palestinian Arabs, in which Arab volunteers from outside the country—the Arab Rescue Army (Jaysh al-Inqadh al-‘Arabi)—took part. This part of the war, which at first cast doubt on whether a Jewish state could in fact come into existence, ended with the defeat of the Palestinians, the exodus of their leaders and middle class, and the expulsion and displacement of most of the Arab urban population. The second phase of the war, which followed the British evacuation and the Jewish declaration of independence and lasted until the end of 1948, turned into a conflict between armies—the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on one side and the armies of the Arab League states, along with the Rescue Army and another irregular volunteer force, the Holy War militia, on the other. The Jewish-Zionist side won the upper hand, while the Palestinians, both as a society and as a polity, were left without any capacity for determining their future. This situation was reflected in the separate activities of each of the two communist parties. Neither could move their societies away from collision; all they could do was take part in it.
At the beginning of the war, each party identified with its own national society and acted accordingly. The difference in national affiliation between the two communist groups led them to work in different ways. The members of Makei enlisted in the war effort and worked in tandem with the Zionist institutions on the national level to save the Yishuv. They supported the establishment of the state and participated in the Provisional State Council. The war effort of the Palestinian national movement, in contrast, was conducted from afar by its leadership from Cairo, and like the rest of the Palestinians active in the struggle, members of the NLL worked on the local level. Some of them joined the Arab National Committees (see below), while others produced propaganda for the opposition to the Arab Higher Committee leadership. During the second half of the war in particular, Maki (the name Makei adopted after Israel’s declaration of independence) ratcheted up its international propaganda efforts, advocating that Israel should be allowed to retain territories it had seized beyond the borders of the Jewish state as defined by the partition plan. To a certain extent, and for a short time, the party was able to play a role in Israel’s victory. In contrast, the members of the NLL found themselves confronted with the collapse of their nation’s political leadership. As a consequence, it focused its efforts on opposing the invasion of the Arab armies, which it saw as tools of the West, and which it believed would end any hopes of Palestinian independence. It was a daring line to take, opposed to the position taken by both the Palestinian national leadership and the Arab states. In the end, however, the NLL lost any means of achieving the goal it had set for itself at the beginning of the war—the establishment of an independent Palestinian state that would coexist and cooperate with the Jewish state.
The National Liberation League during the Inter-Communal War
According to communist doctrine, imperialism and local reactionary forces lay at the root of the armed conflict. When tensions spiraled in the cities during UNSCOP’s working visit in the summer of 1947, the members of the NLL followed a strategy of lowering tempers and warning against incitement by “irresponsible factors” seeking to ignite disturbances. At the same time, representatives of the League’s 300 members and of its supporters in the Congress of Arab Workers joined the National Committees in Haifa and Jaffa. These committees had been established throughout the country in May 1947, both as local initiatives and at the behest of the mufti and the Arab Higher Committee. They were charged with providing for local civilian needs under the guidance of the Arab Higher Committee, seeing to the regular supply of vital provisions, and providing security through the establishment of guard organizations, enlistment of volunteers in the Arab Rescue Army, and instruction of the civilian population in proper behavior in light of the military escalation. It thus transpired that when hostilities broke out in December, the National Committees included NLL members, some supporters and others opponents of partition. Toward the end of December 1947 and continuing to March 1948, as the number and severity of violent acts and reprisals by both sides escalated, and as Jewish forces gained the upper hand in battles fought within the cities, the National Committees sought cease-fires so as to put daily life back on course and stanch the flow of Arabs fleeing from the country.
Despite being at loggerheads both on the practical and theoretical levels, under the circumstances there was no substantive difference between what the NLL’s opponents and supporters of partition actually did. Since different parts of the country were cut off from each other, and because of dissension in its ranks, members of the League did not act as a single body. The ability of both sides to function in a routine way was greatly curtailed after December 1947, when the different regions of the country in which the NLL members were active were cut off from each other because of the worsening security situation. The British censor’s shutdown of al-Ittihad on January 23, 1948, limited the League to pasting up posters and handing out leaflets, severely cramping its ability to make its case to the public. The shutdown was prompted by the newspaper’s incitement against the British, whom it accused of being responsible for the escalating bloodshed. The opponents of partition openly continued to back the Palestinian national movement, while the supporters, though declaring their allegiance to the national leadership, continued to attack it publicly and to declare that it was leading the Palestinians into disaster. In Jerusalem, for example, a group led by Muchlas Amru organized a propaganda campaign against the UN resolution. After ‘Abd al-Qader al-Hussayni, commander of the Holy War militia, was killed in the battle of Kastel in April 1948, the Congress of Arab Workers, which was centered in Jaffa and affiliated with the League, published an open letter of condolence to the mufti, ‘Abd al-Qader’s uncle. The letter expressed the hope that his death “will bring you and the entire Arab nation comfort in an independent Palestine and the liberation of our nation from imperialist and Zionist schemes.” Supporters of partition did their best to sully the national leadership and the mufti in particular, but neither did they spare the mufti’s most powerful rival for the leadership of Arab Palestine, King ‘Abdullah of Transjordan. In February 1948 the Makei Secretariat notified its cadre of activists that “The League is mobilizing the Arab public for peace with the Jews and for war against imperialism, against the Hussaynis and the partisans of ‘Abdullah, who are endangering the chances for independence at this time.” Members of the NLL handed out leaflets in the Arab neighborhoods of cities of mixed population, warning against “the schemes of foreign imperialism on the one hand and irresponsible and backward elements” in the Palestinian camp on the other. The Arab press was blamed for causing panic in the Arab population and for fanning the flames of extremism, as were the Arab League states. NLL leaflets issued by partition supporters in Jerusalem between January and May also highlighted the shortages in the city, the growth of the black market, and the top leadership’s absence from the city, which led the population to flee and thus abandon Arab neighborhoods. After the first offensive led by ‘Abd al-Qader against the Etzion Bloc of Jewish settlements, south of Jerusalem, was repelled by Jewish defenders, at the cost of many Arab lives, League pamphlets condemned the “bloody acrobatics of the Arab leadership” and the unnecessary deaths of “innocent [Arab] victims.”
League activists in Haifa took an unambiguous stance against the city’s loss of most of its Palestinian population following the seizure of the city by the Haganah, the major Jewish military organization, and the smaller and more extreme Etzel militia. One of their leaflets condemned “the way the Arab National Movement is being dragged along by the policy dictated by imperialism … built on fanning the national struggle between the Arabs and the Jews,” which had led to “this slaughter,” all with the purpose of annulling the partition in accordance with the UN decision. The leaflet accused “imperialist lackeys and mercenaries among the political and military leaders” whose “level of loyalty we have seen very well … when they themselves left the city to its devices.”
According to some of the sources, and some studies, members of the League who opposed partition joined the military effort at this stage of the war. On this account, they founded an underground organization, the National Liberation League—Northern District. But a close examination of the documented activity of Tuma, one of the most prominent of the partition opponents, raises doubts about this claim. Tuma operated within the framework of the National Committee of Haifa. Along with other members of the committee who were not supporters of the mufti (such as the chairman, Ibrahim Rashid), Tuma served on a subcommittee that was assigned “to calm the masses during clashes, and explain to people to continue with their normal work.”
The National Liberation League and the Arab League Invaders
The unique position of the NLL’s partition supporters was especially notable during the second stage of the war, as they called for an end to hostilities. By their own testimony, NLL members in the Galilee operated in the underground “under the regime of the Arab occupiers,” making speeches in villages and handing out leaflets in which they called for armed resistance to and expulsion of Fawzi al-Qawuqji and his Arab Rescue Army from the Galilee (Qawuqji’s force, which operated in coordination with the official armies of the Arab states, was made up of volunteers and irregulars from those countries). The Arab League invasion forces were the principal target of NLL propaganda. At personal risk, NLL activists distributed leaflets in areas under control of the Egyptian army in the south and in the Hebron-Bethlehem region, as well as in the area under Iraqi control in the Triangle (the region in north-central Palestine between the cities of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nablus). The leaflets condemned the invasion and declared that it was detrimental to Arab interests. The Arab armies, the NLL argued in its leaflets, were not actually seeking the liberation of Palestine from the yoke of the British and Zionists, but rather acting as tools of Western imperialism, principally in service of the Hashemite goal of preventing the establishment of an Arab state in Palestine in accordance with the partition plan. This charge disregarded the sharply opposing interests of King Farouk of Egypt and King ‘Abdullah of Transjordan, but the latter’s actions since the beginning of the invasion lent it credence. As early as the end of May 1948, it looked as if ‘Abdullah was well on his way to achieving his unconcealed goal of annexing all or part of Palestine. He diverted the forces of his army, the Arab Legion, to the country’s central region without prior coordination with the other invading armies. He then appointed military governors for the cities of this region. He imposed the use of Jordanian stamps, set up a broadcasting station, and disarmed the Hussayni forces that opposed him. Even without knowing of the secret contacts between ‘Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion over dividing the territory of the planned Arab state (which had taken place prior to and after the partition resolution, on the eve of the invasion), there was good reason to believe that the complementary part of the partition plan, the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel, would never happen. (Had the NLL’s leaders known of the previous secret talks between ‘Abdullah and Ben-Gurion about dividing Palestine between a Jewish state and Transjordan, they would have had even more cause for concern.) The United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, proposed during a cease-fire lasting from June 11 to July 9, and during a second cease-fire that began on July 12, that the partition boundaries be redrawn, demonstrating the diplomatic fragility of the original partition plan and the UN’s ongoing efforts to retreat either fully or partially from it.
A leaflet issued by the League following the first cease-fire was particularly subversive. It warned against a resumption of hostilities and the advance of Egyptian forces, and called on Egyptian soldiers to mutiny against their commanders and their country’s ruler. Under the headline “Nida la-Junud al Arab” (An appeal to Arab soldiers), the leaflet called on “our soldier brothers” to fight the real enemy: “Return to your own countries and direct your fire at the heart of the imperialists and their lackeys, liberate Egypt and the Arab world from the humiliation of imperialism and its puppets!” In July 1948, Ahmad Hilmi, the governor of Jerusalem appointed by the Arab Higher Committee, outlawed the National Liberation League and ordered that its members be searched out and arrested. A few dozen activists, among them senior figures such as Fuad Nassar, ‘Uda al-Ash’hab, and Salim al-Qassam, were captured by the Egyptian and Transjordanian armies in Ashkelon, Gaza, Hebron, and Bethlehem. Most of them were held in the Egyptian army base at Abu ‘Ageila. In April-May 1948, the dimensions of the collapse brought on by the expulsion, removal, and flight of the Palestinian population from mixed cities became apparent. The further the Jewish forces progressed toward military and diplomatic victory, and with the recognition of the State of Israel by the United States and Soviet Union in May, the more it became apparent that the fate of the Arab state would be determined by Israel. NLL supporters of partition thus made a desperate effort to mobilize on the political front and to sway Palestinian Arab public opinion to support the establishment of a Palestinian state that would cooperate with the Jewish state.
During the second cease-fire the NLL issued a leaflet addressed to “the masses of the Arab nation in Palestine.” It was distributed throughout the region occupied by the armies of Egypt, Iraq, and the Arab Legion. The leaflet accused the Arab League of plotting with Anglo-American imperialism to quash the freedom and independence of Palestine. It charged the Arab armies with perpetrating “a racial slaughter that caused the destruction of the country, the uprooting of half a million Arabs, and the killing of thousands.” Furthermore,” it declared, “the claim that the Arabs of Palestine had asked for the intervention of the Egyptian and other Arab armies in the country is nothing but a lie…. It is now clear that all the English and American oil companies are continuing to rob the Arab world of its resources. Their goal [is] to seduce the Arab people and drag them into an abyss.”
The political campaign was based on an assumption that later turned out to be baseless on several counts. The NLL’s partition supporters believed that their political positions would grant them special standing in the wake of Jewish victory and that they could make use of their previous special political connections with Jewish Communists on both the local and international levels. For example, Makei Secretary Mikunis and NLL Secretary Habibi proposed to the Cominform (which had replaced the Comintern) in April 1948 that a regional conference of Middle Eastern communist parties be convened. But, in contrast with the situation before the war, when the NLL had spurned the advances of the Jewish Communists regarding a unification of the parties, the League was now, with the Palestinian defeat in progress, in an inferior political position. Under the current military and political conditions, the League required the intervention of the Jewish Communists in its contacts with the Israeli state in formation. During the war, Maki provided the NLL with a channel of communication with the Jewish public by publishing the contents of its leaflets in Kol ha-Am, and also backed the League against the Israeli military government’s efforts to suppress it. At one of the first meetings of Israel’s Provisional State Council (parliament), in June 1948, Maki’s representative at the meeting, Meir Vilner, called for the legitimization and legalization of the NLL. The correct policy toward the country’s Arab minority, Vilner claimed in reference to the League, required the encouragement of elements who were “prepared to help us in mobilizing public opinion in the Arab population and even participation in the war for their and our independence.” But his proposal was rejected. At the beginning of September Mikunis, Maki’s permanent representative in the State Council, demanded that Minister of the Interior Yitzhak Gruenbaum approve the League’s application, submitted at the beginning of August, for a license to publish a daily newspaper. The Maki chief complained of the slow pace of processing the application, asking: “What reason is there to delay issuing a license to a newspaper that has as its goal enlisting Arab public opinion in favor of carrying out the UN’s decisions against the offensive of the invaders from the Arab countries, defending the interests of the working masses, and promoting integration and democratic partnership between Jews and Arabs?”
Nevertheless, Maki’s assistance to the NLL was subject to its style and its priorities during the war. One example was the issue of Haifa’s Arabs. Four days following the Haganah’s seizure of the city, a leaflet of Makei’s Central Committee hailed the Haganah’s victory but also called for “doing all we can to return Haifa’s Arabs to their homes and jobs … just as we defeated the Arab gangs militarily, we must now win politically and prevent the exodus of Haifa’s Arabs and prove that we are able to defend every Arab in the territory of the Jewish state.” But when nothing changed, the Communists set aside their demand for the return of the Arabs and sufficed themselves with a sharp condemnation of the failure to prevent unlawful and immoral acts by Jewish combatants. Kol ha-Am reported and decried the theft and looting of the property of Haifa’s Arabs, the restrictions placed on their movement, and the failure to supply food and electricity to the remaining Arab population and sources of livelihood in the neighborhoods in which they had been concentrated. Furthermore, Vilner did not speak up on the subject when, in June, Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok (Sharett) informed the Provisional State Council of the government’s position that Israel should take advantage of its military successes to capture territory “outside the borders of the State of Israel” (meaning beyond the partition borders), and the fact that “masses of the Arab population living in the territory of the State of Israel and in the territories and cities that we have captured have abandoned the homes they have lived in for generations and have relocated elsewhere.” The reason for Vilner’s silence, we may presume, was the international context of the debate, which for Maki took precedence over the local problem. The Provisional State Council was at that juncture discussing the first cease-fire and the Soviet Union’s demand to take part in supervising the truce. It also debated the proposals drawn up by Bernadotte and his deputy Ralph Bunche to reduce and change the contours of the Jewish state as specified in the partition plan. Maki, like the Soviet Union, was suspicious of Bernadotte’s mission, believing it to be guided and coordinated behind the scenes by the United States and Britain. As a result, the Israeli Communists found themselves to be part of the hostile Israeli consensus regarding Bernadotte’s approach.
The NLL’s dependence on Makei was somewhat moderated by the fact that it had the sympathy of another Jewish faction. Hashomer Hatza’ir, a component of the Marxist-Zionist Mapam party, had in the past fostered connections with members of the League. They were Zionists but, like the NLL, they were solidly pro-Soviet in orientation, engaged in Marxist discourse, and hoped for a “soft partition” that would include an economic union between the Jewish and Arab states. Mapam’s newspaper, Al ha-Mishmar, reprinted the League’s pamphlets from time to time, highlighting its claim that the NLL represented “progressive circles” in the country’s Arab community. As part of the Zionist military and political establishment, Mapam’s voice was listened to in the Israeli public. So when, at the beginning of May, the NLL’s Haifa branch issued a public call “to Jewish progressive forces” to put an end to the abuse of the Arabs remaining in that city, it also addressed this plea to Mapam. After a description of the looting and the restrictions that the military government had placed on the city’s Arabs, the League appealed to its readers’ consciences: “We know that our war is your war as well.” The purpose of the appeal was “so that you may help us change the situation radically, because huge damage is being done in Israel to the cause of democracy and friendship between the country’s two peoples.” This was the source of the demand that “it is your duty to make a change, and for that reason we appeal to you.” In a number of instances during the fighting, NLL activists engaged in propaganda activity against the Arab League forces and received logistical support from members of Hashomer Hatza’ir serving in the IDF. When the NLL decided to merge with Maki (see below), the Communists were finally successful in removing the barriers to the licensing of the Arab Communists’ newspaper, and on October 20, 1948, al-Ittihad resumed publication. The relations with Mapam also brought results. Mapam-affiliated experts serving in the Minorities Ministry and the military government established in Nazareth after that city was taken by the IDF were apparently able to push through their recommendation that the activity of the League and its members should not be seen as a military threat because “their enemies [Qawuqji’s forces] are our enemies.” As a result, the members of the League’s Congress of Arab Workers were granted the right to help coordinate the activities of the city’s labor bureau.
Two weeks following Nazareth’s surrender, without a battle, to the IDF on July 16, an NLL pamphlet declared that “we, too, should establish our independent state in cooperation with the State of Israel.” Minister of Minorities Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit visited the city on July 30. He reported that representatives of the NLL, which had been outlawed by Qawuqji’s forces, openly approached the offices of the military governor, expecting the Israelis to hand over the city’s administration to them. Sheetrit got the impression that their expectation of receiving special and preferential treatment over other political forces in the city stemmed from both their strong foundation in the city and their position of favoring partition and cooperation with Israel. They soon realized, however, that Mapai, the ruling party, intended to block their rise to power with the help of their old rivals in the city, a coalition led by the Fahum clan. As a result, the Arab Communists were unable to expand their authority beyond their responsibility, through the labor bureau for employment. In a short time they learned that even this prerogative was being eroded. As part of Ben-Gurion’s policy of weakening the Communists, both Jewish and Arab, and Mapam, a second labor bureau was opened in Nazareth in December 1948, under the aegis of a Mapai affiliate, the Alliance of Workers in the Land of Israel. In fact, the IDF had been less than impressed with the League’s activities against enemy forces during the war. Many of the inhabitants of Nazareth and its environs were arrested and about 75 of them were held under harsh conditions as prisoners of war, despite their connections with Maki. League members who had been captured by Egyptian forces and detained in a prison camp in Abu ‘Ageila were not immediately freed when the IDF took that area.
Maki and the NLL Unite
The contacts between Maki’s Central Committee and the supporters of partition in the NLL Central Committee reached fruition in September 1948. The two parties would unite into a single communist party. The cornerstone for unification had been laid a year earlier, before the outbreak of hostilities, in the period around the time of the UN decision on partition. The Makei cadre was informed of the contacts in a letter from the leadership in February 1948. The letter stated that the Communists of both nations were obligated “in the end” to establish “a territorial organization of all the Communists without distinction between their national origins, with a single secretariat and regional institutions for the two states and the Jerusalem region.” This ambiguous wording left open the possibility that the country’s division into two states would be only temporary.
But in the summer of 1948 the dimensions of the IDF’s victory, along with the massive number of refugees and the obliteration of Palestinian political and economic institutions, confronted the membership of the NLL with an urgent need to grapple with the new situation. At the root of unification with Maki and the wish to stake a claim in the new political system was a desire to act not just on the issue of the Palestinian state but also on social issues. The military government’s constraints on the movement of the Arab population; the huge number of jobs controlled by the Histadrut, the Jewish-Israeli national labor union; and the apportionment of commercial and marketing licenses for agricultural produce on the basis of “loyalty” all created enormous obstacles to the League’s political activity in the new Israeli state. Unification with a legitimate Israeli political party thus seemed more urgent than ever. According to Habibi, it was the internationalist principle of establishing an integrated party of Jews and Arabs that was decisive. Members of the NLL therefore turned down a proposal from Eliezer Be’eri and Yosef Vashitz, members of Mapam’s left wing, to establish a political alliance in which the NLL would remain a separate Arab national organization while Mapam remained a Jewish national organization. In a series of public activities in August, the leaders of the NLL on the one hand and of Maki on the other indicated that unification was on the way. In one instance, on August 5, 1948, the League issued a declaration, printed in full in Kol ha-Am, that the establishment of an Arab state in Palestine would be based on “the cooperation of the working class in both countries.” Maki responded with an editorial in the same newspaper: “We will accept the extended hand.” About two weeks later, on August 16, at a public rally in Wadi Nisnas, an Arab neighborhood in Haifa, Habibi declared that “the war for the full implementation of the UN’s decision” required partnering “with the Jewish democratic forces.”
From this point on, unification moved forward quickly. At the end of September the NLL Central Committee issued an announcement that, following joint discussions with its Maki counterpart, “the Central Committee has resolved to propose to the Communist Party of Israel the immediate establishment of a unitary international Communist Party” in Israel. The proposed organization would be founded “on the basis of the existing institutions of the Communist Party of Israel, and in the Arab part of the Land of Israel—on the basis of the existing institutions of the National Liberation League.” On October 15, the Maki Central Committee announced that two weeks previously, on October 1, it had received the text of the NLL declaration, and that following a discussion on October 5 it had decided to endorse the proposal. The two groups agreed that the Maki Central Committee would be expanded to take in those members of the National Liberation League “who are present in the State of Israel, and to accept all the branches and members organized in the National Liberation League in Israel into the ranks of the Communist Party of Israel.” In other words, in organizational terms, the NLL would be absorbed into Maki and would be in every way an Israeli party. The ceremonial public unification assembly, in which 1,500 people participated, took place in Haifa’s Mai Cinema on October 22. The next day Maki’s Central Committee convened in the party’s Haifa headquarters, for the first time with the participation of NLL delegates, led by Tawfik Toubi and Emile Habibi. Toubi declared at this public meeting that unification was a “historic decision,” turning the clock back to the period preceding the split of 1943 and opening “a new era for the Communist Party of Israel.” The significance of the decision, he claimed, extended beyond the party, paving “the way for the new nations, Jew and Arab, to open a new era in relations between them” and squelching “the myth, authored by Imperialism and its reactionary lackeys, according to which … the interests of the two nations are opposed and ostensibly cannot be reconciled.”
As implied by the sequence of unification activities and the language of the declarations issued by the central committees of each party, the terms of the unification were not symmetrical. The initiative was quite explicitly that of the League requesting unification with Maki, and Maki consenting. Just three League members were added to Maki’s sixteen-member Central Committee, relegating the Arabs to being a small minority. Furthermore, one of the conditions of unification was that the League would issue a mea culpa, declaring that it had not served as a “living expression” of the unity of the two peoples before the war. The NLL now explicitly accepted the doctrine that the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine had become a nation with rights to self-determination under the criteria set forth by Lenin and Stalin—that is, historical origin, economic foundation, language, and territory. The League asserted that “in the last 30 years a new nation has emerged in the Land of Israel, a Jewish nation, distinct, developing, and changing, with hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have consolidated into a single nation … a nation establishing its own industry, agriculture, language, and culture.” The NLL acknowledged that it had erred in constructing its membership on an Arab national basis, because “a separate national base created within its ranks the illusion that the Arab nation in the Land of Israel could alone liberate the country from imperialism, without taking into account the revolutionary forces in the Jewish nation.”
The assumption underlying the political program on which the unification with Maki was based was that the bell had not yet been finally rung on a two-state solution in accordance with the partition plan. Members of the NLL in the territories Israel had occupied beyond the partition boundaries retained their organizational independence and they hoped that international pressure and diplomacy would help implement partition as originally envisioned, or alternatively that the IDF would capture the territory held by the Arab Legion and hand it over to “progressive forces,” meaning neither ‘Abdullah nor the mufti. Habibi, representing the League on the unification committee, said that he spoke “in the name of a party that today stands at the forefront of a popular campaign for the expulsion of the occupying armies from the territory of the Arab part of the Land of Israel, to enable the establishment of an Arab state—a free and independent state in the sector assigned it by the UN resolution of November 29; for economic union and constructive cooperation with the State of Israel.” Aharon Cohen of Mapam, which at that time still adhered, officially at least, to the “Palestinian option,” meaning the creation of an independent Arab state in Palestine, continued to hope for an alliance with the NLL. He reported to his party’s Secretariat and Political Committee on October 12, 1948, on the eve of the union with Maki, that Toubi and Habibi had expressed to him “their desire for cooperation … in consideration of the nature of our party, they hope that collaboration can continue. They see the test as being our assistance in their war for the second half of the country. They presume that we will extend all assistance we can offer, just as it would be their and our duty to extend help to the left in Iraq were a rebellion to break out there.”
Was there any foundation for the united party’s political program in October 1948? Until the end of November the government was still discussing whether to keep going and conquer all of Palestine, or at least the Nablus-Jenin region. But studies have shown that a realization of the Palestinian option in accordance with Mapam’s plan, and certainly in accordance with the communist platform—that is, handing over the territory designated for the Palestinian state to “progressive forces” following its occupation by the IDF, or via diplomatic activity—was never seriously discussed. Ben-Gurion rejected it out of hand. Other regional and international actors were also opposed. At this juncture, two claimants vied to represent the Palestinians, King ‘Abdullah and the All-Palestine Government, established in September 22 under Egyptian sponsorship and headed by the mufti. Any hope that the NLL (and Maki) had for the implementation of the partition plan ended when Israel commenced armistice negotiations with ‘Abdullah’s Jordan in January 1949. Yet, in keeping with the party’s official stance that the Western Galilee would, under partition, become part of the Palestinian state, the NLL retained its independent standing there until 1951, when Jordan’s formal annexation of the West Bank headed off any possibility of Palestinian independence. The NLL in the West Bank was absorbed into the Jordanian Communist Party, headed by Fuad Nassar, one of the leading opponents of the Arab League invasion of Palestine during the war.
Soviet Aid to and Legitimization of Makei/Maki
Unlike the National Liberation League, which was shunned by most members and leaders of the society to which it belonged and hounded by the victorious Israeli army, the Israeli Communist Party (Makei/Maki) saw its standing soar during the war. The legitimacy it enjoyed in Israeli society, which enabled it to take an active role in the war effort, was a direct result of the Soviet Union’s support for the UN partition resolution and the assistance it provided to the establishment of the Jewish state. At critical points during the war, the USSR’s veto power in the Security Council enabled it to quash all diplomatic attempts to brake Israel’s capture of territories designated to be parts of the future Palestinian state. The consequence was the emergence of a larger and more secure Jewish state than that originally envisioned in the partition plan. Indirectly, via East European countries in its sphere of influence, the Soviets also provided vital arms supplies and provisions. Together, these helped give the Jews the upper hand in the war and its aftermath. Soviet support was a corollary of Stalin’s decision to use the partition resolution as an all-purpose tool as his foreign policy faced the challenge of the emerging postwar bipolar global configuration. Supporting the establishment of a Jewish state was designed to place a wedge between the US and Great Britain, end direct British rule in Palestine, and help the Soviets gain the sympathy of American Jewry. The Soviet Union firmly and consistently backed the implementation of partition in a way that ensured the establishment of the Jewish state, with none of the hesitation and erraticism of the Americans and British. It categorically opposed the American initiative of April 1948, which proposed setting aside partition and replacing it with a trusteeship. The Soviets declared that Britain and its mismanagement of the transition period were to blame for the enmity on display in the inter-communal war. The de jure recognition of Israel extended by the USSR on May 17, 1948, made the new country’s independence an irrevocable fact. Furthermore, two days previously, the Soviet mission at the UN sharply condemned the invasion of the Arab armies, and during the course of both parts of the war supported nearly all of Israel’s policies. It emphatically rejected both Bernadotte plans, in July and in November 1948, according to which the Negev would be handed over to Jordan; and it opposed his plan to demilitarize Jerusalem. It also voted against UN General Assembly Resolution 194 on the Palestinian refugees, accepting Israel’s position that the issue should be discussed in the framework of its peace talks with the Arab states. The Soviets supported Israeli membership in the UN when the Security Council took up the issue in December 1948.
In addition to its diplomatic activity, which helped grant Israel international legitimacy, the Soviet stance on supplying arms and manpower to the Jewish war effort was of unparalleled importance. From March through May the US and Britain labored to enforce the UN arms embargo, which forbade the supply of materiel and personnel to the warring sides in the hopes of achieving abatement in the fighting. During this same period, and throughout the war, the USSR provided indirect but vitally important assistance to the Israelis. This included not interfering with the extensive logistic aid extended to the Yishuv by the emerging communist bloc in Europe—in particular, arms supplied by Czechoslovakia and shipped through Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Likewise, the Soviets did not stop Central and East European Jews from enlisting in the Israeli army and receiving training in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary. It also allowed about 250,000 Jews from communist Europe to emigrate to Israel. These two policies provided the Jewish state with critically needed manpower for the war, and no less importantly also prevented the sale of arms from the communist bloc to the Arab side. While the military equipment that reached Israel was in part obsolete, consisting of German army surpluses, Ben-Gurion said that it had arrived at a juncture when it played a critical role in Israel’s victory. The arms deals with Czechoslovakia brought shipments of light arms (rifles, machine guns, and ammunition) from the end of March through mid-April, and heavy arms, including combat aircraft, immediately after the Arab League invasion on May 15. Shipments continued to arrive until February 1949. Artillerymen, pilots, and technicians were trained in Czechoslovakia, providing the foundation of Israel’s air and ground actions during the war. The Haganah and IDF established camps on European soil to prepare and train volunteers, and a Jewish-Czech volunteer brigade, made up of World War II veterans, was established (see below).
Makei/Maki—Recruitment and Procurement
How did Soviet backing affect PCP/Maki activity during the war, and to what extent did this activity influence communist bloc support for Israel? Immediately following its recovery from the shock of Soviet support for the partition plan, the party made every effort to put the new Soviet policy to good use and to paper over the long years in which it had kept its distance from, and been kept at arm’s length by, the Yishuv’s political mainstream. It now fully identified with the Zionist cause and strove to demonstrate its reliability and loyalty. Maki did all it could to integrate itself into Israeli institutions and provide the new state with the military power it needed for its defense.
Yet it was not easy for the Communists to act as partners in the Yishuv war effort. The Zionist parties continued to treat them with suspicion and skepticism. The first test of the party leadership’s seriousness about its patriotic stance concerned enlistment in the army. When a draft was first instituted at the end of November and all men of ages 17-25 were required to register for military duty, the party called on its members to obey so that they could join the “defensive force.” The new military organization, Mikunis maintained, should be built on the basis of the Haganah, the Yishuv’s non-partisan defense militia. After the Jewish forces incurred a large number of casualties during the first stage of the war, the Yishuv leadership decided in February that conscription should be extended to include the 26-35 age range. It ordered conscription of formerly exempted non-commissioned and commissioned officers of all ages. To all this the Communists dutifully assented. Kol ha-Am called on its readers: “Officers and NCOs! Commanders, do your duty—report for national service.” The party leadership’s patriotic stance stemmed from not only its new political line, but also its need to respond to the feelings of its rank-and-file. Young Communists were eager to demonstrate their patriotism and required little urging from the leadership. As soon as the recruitment order for combat units was issued, party members of military age joined up, preferring in particular the Palmach, the crack force based in the pioneering agricultural settlements. The Zionist patriotic discourse and rhetoric of the time was soon adopted by the party’s official organs and spokesmen. Patriotic rhetoric continued—on the day after the declaration of Israeli independence, the party issued a statement hailing the Yishuv’s “war of liberation,” fought with the help of the world’s progressive forces, which had succeeded in expelling the British. A photograph of Meir Vilner, signer of the Declaration of Independence, standing alongside David Ben-Gurion, was prominently displayed in the party’s youth newspaper, with a caption reading “Long live our independent and democratic state.”
Despite all this, the party leadership’s request to receive formal representation in the Haganah command and in the Histadrut’s security institutions was turned down. (The labor organization, which functioned as an integral part of the Yishuv’s governing institutions, also had some security matters under its purview.) The party Central Committee issued an angry declaration in February 1948, condemning these institutions’ “attitude of irresponsibility and discrimination” toward the Communists and “the failure to respond to numerous written and oral appeals.” It protested that “Now is not the time for petty political considerations, at a time when the future of the Yishuv, the future of political independence, hangs in the balance.” But, despite its outrage at this unjust treatment, the party called on all its members and youth to enlist “because the concentrated attack on the Yishuv requires maximum mobilization of the Yishuv’s forces into the ranks of the army.” Without members in the IDF high command or an institutional connection with a military unit (as Mapam had with the Palmach), Maki had no influence on the fight in the field. Instead, the party acted in an arena in which it ostensibly enjoyed a relative advantage—propaganda and the procurement of manpower and equipment from communist countries. It was in this field that the party invested most of its energy and effort during both stages of the war. Mikunis later testified that it was the Haganah’s shortage of military equipment that impelled him to set out, at his own initiative, to represent his party in the countries of the socialist bloc and enlist “political-moral help,” as well as weapons and soldiers.
Senior figures in the communist parties of the Eastern bloc indeed opened their doors to Maki’s members. From December 1947 to May 12, 1948, on trips that he did not coordinate with Ben-Gurion, Mikunis met with East European leaders and, on his own account, prepared the ground for obtaining military aid from them. He met with Bulgaria’s communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, and urged him to allow Jews from Eastern Europe to continue to sail from Bulgarian ports to Palestine, as part of the Yishuv’s illegal immigration operation. In Czechoslovakia he spoke with Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis; in Poland he met with party chief Władysław Gomułka and other senior figures; and in Romania he was received by Foreign Minister Ana Pauker. Mikunis traveled again to Prague, once more at his own initiative, in May 1948, after Egyptian planes had strafed Tel Aviv unimpeded. This time, however, he met with Ben-Gurion, telling him that he wished to help with arms purchases and recruiting volunteers. He also asked Ben-Gurion if he would agree to receive communist military advisers. Ben-Gurion responded that “we don’t check [people’s] opinions” and that “they would be received willingly.” But subsequent historical research has shown that Ben-Gurion was not being entirely sincere. While he was prepared to accept military experts from communist countries, he was very apprehensive about the dominant presence of people of pro-Soviet orientation (from both Maki and Hashomer Hatza’ir) at the Haganah’s European headquarters, and was concerned that they would exert a political influence over soldiers in training. Ben-Gurion rejected Mikunis’s request that the Communists be given a seat on the Provisional Government’s Security Committee, or alternatively on the parliamentary security committee that the National Council was supposed to create. Regarding the latter, he said that no such committee had yet been set up and that he did “not see that such would be constituted.” As for the former, Ben-Gurion ruled, “there is no point in changing its composition.”
Maki’s flagship project during the second part of the war was the establishment of the Czech Brigade, a special volunteer force composed of officers and soldiers who were veterans of World War II and the anti-Nazi underground. The idea of forming a new version of the legendary International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, in which members of the PCP had fought, first came up during the first part of the 1948 war, initially as a way of gaining the support of the international left. In January 1948 the party issued an emotional call to its “comrades-in-arms,” the Association of International Brigades Fighters in all countries, to support the Haganah by supplying it with arms and equipment. During his visit to Prague in May 1948, Mikunis worked to further the idea by establishing a unit of Jewish volunteers from Czechoslovakia. Its members would be men of military experience and expertise, and would receive the blessing of the government in Prague, which had recently been taken over by the Communists. Mikunis claimed to have laid the groundwork for the unit in a phone call with the office of Gregory Malenkov, who held the foreign affairs portfolio in the Soviet Politburo, and to have done further work to promote it during his stay in Prague in May. That August the idea took on concrete form in an agreement between the Czechoslovakian and Israeli governments. An IDF delegation opened a training camp under joint Israeli-Czechoslovakian command for veteran volunteer citizens of the latter country. But under Ben-Gurion’s orders, the trainees were not organized into a separate unit but were rather enlisted as individuals and scattered through the IDF’s units. By separating them in this way, Ben-Gurion sought to avoid the creation of what he worried could become a fifth column. In his diary he wrote categorically that “there were without a doubt communist agents in the Czech Brigade.”
The contention between Mapai and Maki was also evident in the historical narrative of the founding of the brigade. Mikunis’s claim of priority in the founding of the unit has been challenged by the scholarship, which points to the testimony of one of Ben-Gurion’s close associates, Ehud Avriel, the man responsible for Haganah arms purchases. At the time, Avriel served as Israel’s official representative in Prague. In his account, the initiative for the establishment of the brigade originated with Jewish officers in the Czechoslovakian army who approached him and offered to volunteer. Historians have also cast doubt on Maki’s particular contribution to the overall effort of arms procurement and enlistment. The arms deals with Czechoslovakia appear to have been signed largely because that country’s government had an economic interest in doing so. Also, the Czechoslovakian population evinced sympathy for Holocaust survivors and viewed the Yishuv as their representative. Maki’s ties with the party leadership in Prague, scholars say, actually had little to do with it. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to presume that Maki’s lobbying contributed to the efforts exerted in the Eastern bloc by the Jewish Agency and the parties of the Zionist left. What is beyond doubt is that the party worked very hard to achieve this goal. In coordination with Ben-Gurion, Maki maintained its own liaison in Prague from May through December 1948, while weapons were being sent from Czechoslovakia to Israel. The liaison facilitated the ongoing dealings of Israel’s official delegation with the authorities there. In that country, as in Bulgaria and Romania, Maki was involved in obtaining the support of communist governments and funding for the establishment of military training camps, as well as general training camps, for families that wished to emigrate to the new country.
Political Activity and Policy during the War
In November 1947, prior to the vote in the UN General Assembly, the Israeli Communist Party called for the establishment of a provisional Jewish government. It recommended that ministers be chosen from the membership of a representative assembly, to be taken from “all the parties represented therein” so as “to guarantee to the Yishuv internal and external security.” In the meantime the war broke out and the process of implementing the partition plan was interrupted. On March 1, 1948, when the names of the members of the Provisional State Council were about to be submitted by the Zionist Executive to the UN implementation committee, it transpired that no communist representative had been appointed. The party vociferously demanded its inclusion, on the grounds that it had supported the partition plan. On March 13 the party Central Committee issued a protest against “the attempt to sideline the Communist Party from any real influence, the attempt to turn the Council into a body with no decision-making power, and the transfer of all real powers to the small body, the People’s Administration [the body that, after independence, became the Provisional Government].” At the same time the Central Committee advocated a change in the composition of the Provisional Council. Mapam’s representation should be increased, the Communists said, so as to accurately reflect its support in the Yishuv. Furthermore, the Revisionists (right-wing nationalists) should be excluded because of their opposition to partition. Seats should also be left open for “the democratic forces from the Arab population inside the territory of the Jewish state.” A few days later the Zionist Executive notified Makei that the announcement that the composition of the Council had been finalized was incorrect. The Communist Party was invited to participate when, after May 15, the People’s Council changed itself into a new Provisional State Council. But the executive body, the Provisional Government, while composed of a broad coalition of parties, left out the Communists (and the Revisionists). Maki sought to join forces with Mapam, one of the largest parties, so as to present a political and ideological alternative to Mapai, but without success. Contacts about this continued throughout the war, but Mapam finally turned down the offer, despite the two parties’ many points of agreement.
When the Provisional State Council held its first session in May-June, Maki found itself with a single delegate, its general secretary, Mikunis. When Mikunis was absent, as at the ceremonial meeting on May 14, 1948, at which the Declaration of Independence was approved and signed, Vilner replaced him. Without a seat in the provisional cabinet, and given that the Council had yet to constitute parliamentary committees, the only way Maki could carry on public activity and voice its positions on national policy in the May-June period was through its newspaper and questions to ministers in the plenum. When it received its seat on the Provisional State Council’s committees in July-August, it ostensibly gained a new platform. Maki was given a seat on the Council’s Foreign Affairs and Constitutional Committees, from which it could question government ministers on policy in more detail. Mikunis was, however, more active in the plenum than in the committee. The reason was apparently that the Foreign Affairs Committee, unlike the Defense Committee, was held in little regard by the cabinet; Ben-Gurion thought it superfluous. At meetings of the full Provisional State Council, Maki supported the war without reservation and took hawkish positions, but at the same time it assumed an oppositionist stance, in particular regarding the new country’s international orientation, and also on the issues of the partition plan and the status of the Arab population. Israel’s leadership had proclaimed its neutrality in the East-West conflict. Maki condemned this as mere camouflage for an alignment with the United States and Britain. The Communists demanded that Israel adhere to the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, in order to demonstrate its independence and sovereignty. In keeping with this position, at the meeting (of what was then still the People’s Council) convened on May 14 to approve the Declaration of Independence, Vilner introduced amendments aimed at adding the words “independent and sovereign” before the words “Jewish state.” He also proposed to revise the document’s preamble to include the sentence: “The forces of progress, popular democracy, and peace are those which support the establishment of our independent state, as opposed to the anti-democratic and war-mongering forces.”
During the war, when it became clear that the government had no intention of burning its bridges with the United States and Great Britain, despite their rickety and equivocal attitude toward Israel’s victories and their sympathy with Bernadotte’s proposals, Vilner insisted there was an alternative. He also castigated the government for its negotiations to obtain a loan from the American state-owned Export-Import Bank, charging that Israel’s leaders were working “to link the State of Israel’s fate and the future of the its military campaign with no other than the rulers in London and Washington.” Instead, Vilner urged, the government should immediately propose to the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia a mutual aid alliance “against aggression” (by which he meant the British). It should also prefer commercial relations with the USSR to those with the West. With Israel facing severe shortages and rationing, Mikunis asked Minister of Commerce, Industry, and Supply Peretz Bernstein, during parliamentary questioning, if commercial negotiations were being conducted with the Soviet Union, which could “supply a large part of our needs for vital goods.” Maki of course shared the view of the Council’s other parties that the Arab League states were for all intents and purposes British puppets in the war. Thus, emulating the USSR at the UN, it opposed the American and British compromise plans, which would have changed the situation on the ground by endorsing Israel’s military gains against the Arab armies. Maki hailed the IDF’s capture of territory in the north and south from May 1948 to January 1949, taking a hawkish line that sometimes supported and at other times opposed government policy. It backed the conquest of the Negev region in the south and opposed pulling back from IDF gains in the northern Sinai, which would, it claimed, be tantamount to surrendering to the US. With the government it opposed the territorial exchanges recommended by UN mediator Bernadotte and his successor, Ralph Bunche, but opposed the government’s acquiescence in the occupation of Jerusalem’s Old City by ‘Abdullah’s Arab Legion. On these issues, and on internal issues such as the Altalena affair (in which Maki supported the Haganah’s sinking of a ship carrying an arms shipment for the Etzel militia), the assassination of Count Bernadotte by Lehi operatives (which Maki, along with the Provisional Government, condemned), and the dismantling of the Palmach command in November, as the war was drawing to the end (which Maki opposed), Maki found itself allied at times with the Ben-Gurion and at other times with the right- and left-wing opposition to Mapai. The fact that other parties were taking the same positions may explain why Maki’s representatives remained relatively quiet about these issues in both the plenum and the Foreign Affairs Committee. Mikunis’s parliamentary questioning of cabinet ministers largely revolved around internal issues, such as the rights of soldiers, the character of the army, profiteering, and the bourgeois-capitalist nature of the Israeli economy, as well as matters touching directly on the party’s interests, such as purging the police force of right-wing personnel and making arrangements for the first parliamentary elections (see below). The positions it took on foreign policy and security issues during the final stages of the war can be discerned in the manifestos it issued the time and in Kol ha-Am‘s news coverage from the end of October through the beginning of December.
Maki’s platform decried the annexation of Samaria by the Transjordanian monarchy. In a discussion of the text of the Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, prior to its promulgation later that day, Vilner proposed a change in the sentence committing the new country to the UN partition plan. The draft contained a general commitment to the effect that “the State of Israel is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947” and “to take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of the Land of Israel.” Vilner proposed the addition of “The principle of the right of both nations to self-determination and their own independent states will serve as a cornerstone of its policy.” For the duration of the war Maki stood firm on the principle of founding an Arab Palestinian state in accordance with the partition plan. In a parliamentary question he submitted to Minister of Defense Ben-Gurion in July 1948, Mikunis went so far as to claim that in Nazareth and its environs there were young people who, if the Israeli army stopped treating them with brutality, would be “willing to enlist in battalions for the establishment of an independent Arab state and to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with the Israel Defense Forces against the invaders.” Nevertheless, perhaps because the Soviets did not view Israel’s capture of the Western Galilee, a deviation from the UN decision to award this territory to the Palestinians, as a serious problem, the party saw no reason to insist that the boundaries of the Arab state strictly follow those laid out in the partition resolution, in particular not in the south. For tactical reasons, Mikunis may have preferred to leave advocacy of the “Palestinian option” in the Provisional State Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee to the representatives of Hashomer Hatza’ir in Mapam.
The party’s position on the return of refugees remained vague as long as the war was in progress. Mikunis seems to have preferred to let Mapam advocate for repatriation, perhaps because that stance was part of the unpopular Bernadotte plan, which Maki opposed on other grounds, and no doubt because of the Soviet Union’s lack of interest in the refugee issue. The equivocal stance on the refugees manifested itself first in October. The NLL’s announcement of its unification with Maki declared that the merger would give hope to “the thousands of refugees wandering aimlessly through the Arab countries.” Yet the platform Maki ran on in the first elections in 1949 did not mention the refugees. It was only in the next election, in June 1952, that it explicitly referred to “the right of the refugees to return to their land.” The party warned against the IDF’s expulsion of Palestinians from their homes during the war, but did not raise the issue in the Provisional State Council. In an article in Kol ha-Am in July, for example, Mikunis referred obliquely to the expulsion of the Arabs of Ramla and Lydda (Lod), calling it a moral stain on the War of Independence and an act that reinforced Arab reactionary forces in the region. “It turns out that what we have before us is a means of ‘liberating’ the State of Israel from its Arab inhabitants, by means of digging a deep abyss between the Jewish and Arab nations.” But when stories spread of rape, looting, and beatings of Arab civilians by Israeli soldiers on the southern and Galilean fronts in October, it was the Mapam representative on the Defense Committee, not Mikunis (who was not a committee member), who demanded an official response from the minister of defense. On the floor of the Provisional State Council it was a Mapai parliamentarian, Beba Idelson, who first asked (apparently at the government’s behest) about the reports; Mikunis’s question at the same session was about “the rabbinate seizing control of the army’s kitchens.” On the other hand, Maki clearly voiced, in the Provisional State Council, its position on the status of those Arabs who remained in the country. Immediately following the proclamation of the state, Mikunis called attention to the fact that the Declaration of Independence’s provision regarding equal rights for all citizens “irrespective of religion, race or sex” guaranteed the Arabs rights only as individuals, not as a national minority. As already noted, in April Kol ha-Am published protests and severe warnings about the treatment of Haifa’s Arabs by the military government there. During the final months of the war Maki’s criticism of the treatment of the Arabs grew more strident. After the party learned from NLL activists about the situation in Nazareth, Mikunis submitted a parliamentary question to Minister of Defense Ben-Gurion, demanding his response to the reports of the cold-blooded killing of at least ten civilians in the village of ‘Eilut in July, during the conquest of Nazareth. He also asked about mass arrests in Nazareth and the army’s harsh treatment of its inhabitants, despite the fact that the city had surrendered without resistance. Ben-Gurion did not respond until October, when he said that the picture painted by Mikunis was false. But research has shown that official reports had at that time already confirmed Maki’s charges.
At this stage of the war, Maki and Mapai were bitterly at odds. Ben-Gurion in fact grew more hostile to opposition of any kind. The acrimony between the two parties (and among all the country’s political factions) intensified with the approach of the date set for the first elections, at the end of January 1949. In the months preceding the poll, procedures and rules had to be established. Most legislators were primarily concerned with voting arrangements and rules for campaigning among soldiers and immigrants. Maki’s salient concern was rules for campaigning among the Arabs and making sure that they would be able to vote. Debates between parliamentarians on this issue revealed that nearly all parties intended to compete for Arab votes, a phenomenon that characterized the Israeli political system for years thereafter.
Mikunis waged a battle, ultimately successful, against Minister of the Interior Gruenbaum, demanding that the names of candidates and parties appear in Arabic as well as Hebrew on the paper slips with which Israelis chose a slate of candidates. In doing so, Mikunis forced the state to live up to its promise of voter equality. Mikunis disregarded the contradiction in Maki’s position—on the one hand it supported the UN partition plan and on the other also the Israeli government’s decision to grant the vote to the Arabs in the “occupied territories,” a term designating those areas, such as the Western Galilee, that lay outside the borders of the Jewish state as defined by the partition resolution. He opposed the prohibition against making campaign speeches in the Arab community (but supported the same stricture regarding the army). On the floor of the Provisional State Council he argued stridently that the ban proved once more that “the Arabs do not enjoy equal rights in the State of Israel.” He accused Gruenbaum and the government of secretly hoping that the Arabs would boycott the election. Mikunis offered Maki’s vision of Arab integration into Israel: “We, the democrats, are interested in having the Arabs participate in the elections and being Israeli patriots and participating in the country’s political and social life!… I myself have appeared before Arabs … I explained the situation to them, called on them to be Israeli patriots. I told them, of course, that Israeli patriotism does not mean accepting every government or the regulations that the government issues against you. Responding to Mikunis, Gruenbaum wondered aloud how it might be possible to turn the Arabs into patriots by persuading them that they do not enjoy equal rights.
Maki was especially vehement regarding those NLL members who were being held as prisoners of war and who had, by virtue of the unification of the parties, become members of Maki in October. Among them were senior figures in the League’s labor union, the Congress of Arab Workers, who had been arrested by the Egyptians and who fell into Israeli hands when the IDF took Abu ‘Ageila as part of the Yoav operation in the south. Dozens of League activists had also been arrested in the Galilee and relegated to a detention camp at Atlit. In November Maki launched a public campaign to win their freedom. In a speech he made on the anniversary of the October Revolution, Mikunis denounced IDF repression of the Arab population as a whole, specifically its persecution of Arab communist prisoners. He pointed to the irony that these people, imprisoned by the invading armies because of their support for partition, were now considered enemies by Israel. That same month the prisoners at Atlit began a hunger strike. Maki organized protest rallies, demanding in Kol ha-Am the prisoners’ release, and urging international labor organizations to send letters of protest to the Israeli government. When these efforts brought no results, Mikunis took advantage of the Provisional State Council’s final session in February, following the first election, to call again for the prisoners’ release. The subject under discussion was a general amnesty, and Mikunis complained that several hundred Arab inhabitants of the state “had been classified as prisoners even though they did not take part in the war against the Israel Defense Forces…. Among these are close to 100 Arab members of the Communist Party of Israel … who should be honored citizens of the State of Israel given the self-sacrifice [they displayed] in the war they conducted [against the invaders].” During the debate, Ben-Gurion cast doubt on Mikunis’s claims regarding the party members’ actions during the war. He promised only to release those who, after careful examination, were found innocent. This indeed happened at the end of March 1949.
As Maki came to realize that the aid of the communist bloc countries and its own untiring pro-Israel activity during the war had not modified Ben-Gurion’s hostility toward his country’s Communists, the party ratcheted up its criticism of Israel’s foreign and domestic policies. In July Mikunis warned that the delay in establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and the countries of the communist bloc was dangerous. Israel’s victory, he argued, was not yet firmly established, and “the enemies will not weaken and will not lift the siege.” The country needed help against “the Bevin-Marshall camp,” which was aiming to “liquidate” Israel’s national sovereignty. In December 1948 and January 1949 Maki accused the government of acting unpatriotically and giving in to the pressure of “its masters,” the United States and Britain, by withdrawing the IDF from Sinai. His language grew sharper and more incensed, setting the stage for the clashes and mutual vilification that became the norm between Ben-Gurion and Maki in the years 1950-53. This animosity reached its climax in the Kol ha-Am censorship case in 1953, when Israel’s Supreme Court set a major precedent by ruling against Ben-Gurion’s effort to shut down Maki’s newspaper. But an earlier and less well-known case came just a few months after the war’s end. The state attorney filed suit against the publishers of Kol ha-Am for “libeling the prime minister.” It had termed the prime minister “a traitor to his people,” an “American agent,” and “a flunky of his American masters,” in part because of his military policy regarding Sinai and Jerusalem in 1948. The article in question had been written in response to a speech Ben-Gurion made at a convention of the Ha-No’ar ha-Oved youth movement the previous day (October 13, 1949). Ben-Gurion had told his audience that it was fundamentally impossible for a Jew to be both a Communist and a loyal Jew. During the Russian revolution Jewish Communists “had abetted the shedding of Jewish blood” and in Israel they had “helped and congratulated the mufti for his deeds.” In the subsequent trial, Maki based its defense on its work in the war effort in 1948. Its actions, Maki claimed, proved that it was a patriotic party concerned with preventing the destruction of the Jewish state, while the pro-American policy of the Ben-Gurion government, which had begun to evidence itself by the end of the war, in fact posed a threat to the state’s survival. Why had Ben-Gurion directed his ire toward Maki such a short time after the party had displayed such devotion in the war? It looks as if Ben-Gurion chose to launch a frontal attack on the party for reasons not directly connected to its actions. His concern was rather that it was a manifestly pro-Soviet party. The tension between Ben-Gurion and Mapam over the dissolution of the Palmach reached a boiling point at a farewell ceremony for Palmach veterans that same week. What Maki had done in 1948 made no difference. Its position as a disloyal faction that owed its principal allegiance not to Israel but to the Soviet Union was what relegated it to pariah status in the Israeli political arena.
Conclusion
The 1943 split between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab Communists preceded the division of the country itself in 1948. The geopolitical circumstances of the postwar world and the lack of other outlets for activity led each of the two parties, the Jewish PCP and the Arab National Liberation League, to move toward the political center of its own nation, hoping to gain legitimacy and influence in the unified state that they hoped would emerge in Palestine. When the Soviet Union announced its support for partition, the two parties sought to maintain ideological consistency by offering an alternative vision of Jewish-Arab cooperation. Prior to the 1948 war they adhered to a dogma that does not stand up to historical critique: that the direct and principal source of misunderstanding between Jews and Arabs was the British Mandate regime and its so-called reactionary collaborators. In this account, getting rid of the British would prevent or end Jewish-Arab conflict. Both groups saw the second half of the war as a battle to end indirect British influence in the region. The result was that the two communist parties were the only political force whose support for the war was based on the belief that it could effectuate the UN partition plan as originally conceived. With the Palestinian defeat in the first part of the war, it looked as if there was little chance for the establishment of the Palestinian Arab state envisioned by the partition plan. Under the circumstances, the (separate and different) efforts of the Jewish and Arab Communists to make the two-state solution a reality were, in fact, a (retrospectively desperate) attempt to maintain the possibility of political cooperation between Jews and Palestinians in the entire territory. Ironically, the decisive Jewish victory in the war resulted in an asymmetry between the Jewish Communists of Maki and the Palestinian Arab Communists of the PLL. The imbalance was reflected in the contours of the unification of the two groups toward the end of the 1948 war. Finally, despite the Jewish Communists’ labors for an Israeli victory, Maki’s standing with the Zionist establishment did not change. Maki enjoyed only marginal legitimacy in the Israeli political system during and toward the end of the war because the concept of Jewish-Arab cooperation under the aegis of the USSR was now seen as no less dangerous and subversive than it had been before Israel was founded.