The silent pact: anti‐communist co‐operation between the Jewish leadership and the British administration in Palestine

Abstract

This dramatic description was written by a Communist propagandist, expelled from Palestine during the early 1920s.' Three groups appear in this drama: the English police, the members of the Palestinian Communist Party (PKP in its transliteration from Yiddish abbreviation) and the Jewish population. The last group was partly organized in a socio-economic and political entity called the Yishuv. Its leadership and the two other groups figure as dramatis personae throughout the following pages. This article is not devoted to the history of the PKP or to the hagiographic description of its self-proclaimed martyrs. It therefore does not dwell on the ideology of the PKP in Palestine nor on that of the central communist organs in the Soviet Union. Instead it focuses on the attitude of the British Mandatory administration and the Yishuv elite towards the Palestinian communists. What caused these two bodies to carry on an uncompromising battle against the Palestinian communists, and to cooperate in this struggle, while opposing each other in other fields of political activity? My underlying hypothesis is that both the British and Zionist attitudes towards the PKP were derived from their global interests. The first group viewed the issue within the framework of the British empire of which Palestine was an integral part; the second approached the PKP bearing in