This paper examines the Marxist literary scene established by Palestinian and Arab Jewish intellectuals, political organizers and writers of the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI). I examine the roots of this joint culture in writers interconnected roots as Arab Marxists in the Palestine Communist Party, the National Liberation League and the Iraqi Communist Party before the birth of the state, tracing their encounters through the 1948 War and into the reconstitution of MAKI in the 50’s and 60’s. I argue that due to their inability to ground their program in a coherent national liberation movement, they established its collective imagination on the basis of a conversation between anti-Zionism, nascent Palestinian anti-colonialism and other local and global Marxisms. Reading exchanges, debates and poetry and short stories that illustrate conversations between local intellectuals and thinkers from the Arab World, the Soviet Union, the Third World and Europe, I show that despite its near total isolation from the Israeli mainstream, this scene was able to develop an independent democratic aesthetics affiliated with multiple intellectual and political nodes. This focus on micro-histories and their relationship to macro-histories recovers Arab left history from the totalizing erasures brought about by the national historiography and canonization of the post-colonial period. Instead, it reveals the network of conversations and influence at play in the Arab world during the period of decolonization, the rise of Communism and the Internationals. Furthermore, it revives the notion of various local, popular literary imaginaries that are both distinct and in conversation with one another. The paper contributes to recent scholarship that aims to centralize the transitional, heterogeneous, ethnic and religious plurality of the Arab Left during the period of decolonization, highlighting the forces that tied intellectuals and tendencies across national and regional lines.