In the heart of the dual absence of Middle Eastern Jews from Jewish history and from modern Middle Eastern history, the Jews of Palestine occupy a strange position. On the one hand, the history of Jewish communities of Palestine before the 20th century received far more attention than that of any other Jewish community in the Middle East; and as Beshara Doumani has argued, they have been studied more closely than any other group in Palestine. And yet the study of these communities was framed by Zionist historiography, which saw them as a prototypical Jewish national community, separated from its social environment, connected to the Jewish diaspora, and anchored in ancient continuous presence in Palestine and in yearning for a future Jewish return to Zion. Accordingly, this historiography paid almost no attention to the 20th century history of these communities, as they supposedly cleared the stage for the Zionist “New Yishuv”. At the same time, and other than very general references, Palestinian historiography largely ignored these communities as well. Finally, and most interestingly, the Jews of Palestine also did not feature much in the scholarship on “Arab Jews” since the 1990s, as critical Mizrahi work focussed primarily on Jewish communities in other Arab countries and their fate in Israel. And so, the Jews of Palestine were more visible than any other Middle Eastern Jewish community, and yet absent from 20th century history of Palestine, absent from the history of Zionism, and absent the history of Mizrahi Jews. This presence-absence, however, is changing in the past decade, with important publications (such as Abigail Jacobson, Michelle Campos, Yuval Ben Bassat, Salim Tamari), that shifted attention to the Jews of Palestine in their local Arab and Ottoman environment. In this paper I will examine the reasons for the presence-absence of the Jews of Palestine from the historiography, and the reasons for the renewed interest in them. I will review the recent contributions that have reshaped the field, and articulate a research agenda that seeks to position the Jews of Palestine in their local Arab environment; and finally, I will consider if and how that Jewish Palestinian viewpoint can help to rewrite the discussion on the questions of Zionism, Palestine and Israeli society.