In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel towns and cities that had grown from Ottoman-era private Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) expressed nostalgia in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, they fondly recalled having had positive relations with their Arab workers until these workers and their villages “disappeared” in 1948. On the other hand, veteran members of these communities actively justified the destruction of those villages and even named new Jewish towns, built on the literal ruins of villages, after iconic settler figures. These dual moves, I show through research in moshava archives and the Zionist press, reflect the contradictions inherent in what I call the “capitalist coexistence narrative.” Capitalist Zionist elements, who flouted Labor Zionist orthodoxy by continuing to hire Arab labor throughout the mandate period, referred to their real, though always hierarchical connections with Arab workers as evidence that they enjoyed positive intercommunal relations that transcended politics. At the same time, they justified their labor practices through an appeal to “apolitical” pragmatism. That is, it simply made economic and security sense to employ their neighbors. This “politics of apoliticism,” as I call it, helped them justify the destruction of those same communities on similarly “apolitical” grounds: the pressures of the moment simply demanded these steps. Within a historiography of Zionism focused on ideological and partisan divides, especially between Labor Zionists and Revisionists, capitalist centrists, their discourses of apoliticism, and the power of such claims to shape collective consciousness have been disregarded. This paper is part of a project, informed by a scholarly turn toward histories of capitalism, to restore these Zionist communities and their particular forms of claims-making to the center of our historical discourse.

Thousands of Jews and Arabs from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the U.S. travelled to Palestine in 1948 to fight alongside their ethnic/religious/national brethren. Their travel—sometimes thousands of miles—signaled an opportunity to show their allegiance to a Jewish or an Arab collective which was larger than their immediate communities back home. But volunteering was not merely the ultimate test for those who identified themselves as part of a larger Arab or Jewish nation. In depth examination of never-before-studied mobilization propaganda in multiple localities—and in multiple languages—demonstrates how malleable the meaning of “Palestine” became for many of the groups seeking to recruit volunteers. In fact, mobilization did not simply call on latent identities for either Jews or Arabs, but also helped mold them, essentially creating new visions of political possibility: being a good American Jew meant at minimum generously donating to the war effort in Palestine, if not going to fight (and possibly die) alongside its Jews; being a Francophile liberty-loving Jew in colonial North Africa meant fighting for the liberty of Yishuv; and most crucially—being a Holocaust survivor hell-bent on fighting Nazism, meant becoming an Israeli citizen while still in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Europe, and quickly shipping out to fight Nazism’s new-incarnation in the form of Arab nationalism in Palestine (or so the message went). The same logic was at play for the mobilization of Arabs as well: bolstering your patriotic credentials as a Syrian or a Lebanese—especially if your reputation was tarnished by selling land to the Zionists previously—meant sending your family or clan to fight partition in Palestine; being a radical Syrian or Lebanese nationalist seeking to end the reign of those collaborating with colonialism but masquerading as nationalists also had its first stop in Palestine. But the opposite was also true—for Iraqi elites seeking to prolong British colonial influence in the monarchy it installed in their country, Palestine became an ideal location where rebellious elements from society could be sent.