This paper presents some new and alternative directions in the analysis and research of relations between Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, while focusing on the links, interactions, and networks that existed between Jews from Middle Eastern descent and the Arab community in mandatory Palestine. One of our main arguments is that the narrative and perspective offered by Jews of Middle East descent was in many ways different from the dominant perspective of the Zionist (Ashkenazi) leadership. However, in the historiographies of the Zionist movement, of the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) as well as in the vast amount of research done on the roots of the Arab-Jewish conflict, this perspective has been largely silenced, neglected and under-studied. In the paper we argue that such a perspective reveals patterns of affinity, coexistence and cooperation between Arabs and Jews and in general a different perception of Zionism and the History of the Jewish Community in Palestine. Awareness of these patterns, which stemmed from the cultural and ethnic proximity between the Arab-Jews and the Arabs living in Palestine, challenges the conventional historiographic narrative, which tends to accentuate the national, social and military conflict between Arabs and Jews during the Mandate era. The paper will consider the claim that a dual society existed in Mandatory Palestine and will discuss the prevalent historiography and its tendency to separate the history of Zionism and the Jewish Yishuv from the study of Middle Eastern history and from the Levant in particular, to divide political-institutional history from social and cultural history, and to largely ignore the historical-sociological debate concerning the Arab Jewish identity.