Palestine, Arabized Jews and the Elusive Consequences of Jewish and Arab National Formations

Abstract

This article analyzes Jewish and Arab national formations by exploring dynamics surrounding their border-zone community of Arabized-Jews during the first half of the 20th century. As the internal composition of the Arab and Zionist-Jewish collectivities was not pre-ordained, their sociopolitical demarcations fluctuated as a consequence of domestic, regional and international developments. The Jewish and Arab national movements sometimes included Arabized-Jews in—and at other times excluded them from—their ranks. From the late 1930s, actions by Zionist and Arab forces vis-à-vis Arabized-Jews converged, producing their dispersal. The events surrounding Arabized-Jews impacted considerably the post-1948 direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East has followed and the imbalance of power between Israel and the Arab states.