Communism in Palestine began in 1919 when some Jewish immigrants left the Zionist movement to set up the Jewish Socialist Workers Party. In 1922 the party adopted the Yiddish name Palestinishe Komunistishe Partei (Palestine Communist Party, PCP). The PCP was a member of the Third International (Comintern) headed by the Soviet Communist Party.
Throughout its existence, the party rejected Zionism, which it regarded as an illegitimate colonialist movement. The communists did not believe that Jews from all over the world constituted a separate nation, nor that they had a historical claim over Palestine after 2,000 years. They rejected the 1917 Balfour Declaration, calling it an act of pure imperialism, and demanded the expulsion of the British from Palestine and the creation of an Arab-majority democratic state, in which Jews, including those who had arrived after 1918, would be citizens with equal rights.
Throughout the British mandate (1922-48) the PCP’s stance caused its members to be politically isolated and hated by the wider Jewish population. It also struggled to win Arab support. However, the Arab revolt in the 1930s helped augment its ranks and brought a modest increase in influence among urban workers. All through this period, the party consistently called for solidarity between the local population and the immigrant Jewish community in the name of ‘proletarian internationalism’.
The party’s isolation from the Jewish community significantly diminished after the USSR entered the war in 1941, and its revised position on Jewish settlement also considerably broadened its appeal. This shift began at the end of the second world war, as knowledge of the Nazis’ campaign of extermination spread. The continued existence of camps in Germany for survivors and refugees whom no Western state was willing to accept created an intolerable situation and led the PCP to change its stance.
Communists divided
In 1943 the PCP split. Its (...)
