Was there — is there — an Arab-Jewish dialogue? My argument in this paper is that this is a question that has insistently accompanied, perhaps silently governed, whether overtly or covertly, the so-called German-Jewish dialogue. This is so for reasons that have to do with the structural associations between the Jew and the Arab through the history of Christian political theology, associations that should continue to remind us that it was not only “the Jewish Question” that was exported to the Middle East, but the Arab (and Muslim) Question as well. More proximately, the two dialogues merge with the rise of that “providential couple,” Aryans and Semites, and its particular, albeit not unique, history in Germany. The Arab-Jewish dialogue, whether or not it was ever real, is the unavoidable correlate of the German-Jewish dialogue. One might even argue that, if dialogue there has been, it could only been conducted between these two sets of dialogue. And it continues to be. The evidence for all this? I find it in Kafka.

The issuance of Balfour declaration in November 1917 is considered to be the greatest achievement of the Zionist movement during the First World War. Much is known about the opposition it met in the Arab world as well as in Europe, Yet little is known about Jewish opposition to it within Palestine. In this paper, we will present Sephardi (Mizrahi) Jewish voices - of Yosef Kastel of Hebron & Jerusalem and Hayyim Ben Kiki of Tiberias - who analysed the destructive ramifications of the Declaration on Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine. Based on the concept of Palestine as a “shared homeland” of all of its inhabitants, these Sephardi writers suggested alternative ways to deal with the “Arab Question”, indeed, with the issue of Arab vis a vis Jewish rights on the land. .Ben Kiki focused on the need of Zionist project to integrate with the local Arab population rather than seek their domination, while Kastel suggested demanding from Britain to issue a new Balfour declaration in which the national rights of the Arabs – rather than only their civil ones - would be acknowledged. The latter, who served as media officer in the Zionist Executive, was among the first Zionists to acknowledge Palestinian-Arab national rights in Palestine. A comparison of the Jewish internal debate after the Balfour Declaration with the current debate in Israel enables us to see the changes in the spectrum of suggested ‘solutions’ to the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. The idea of partitioning Palestine between Jews and Arabs was not part of the political imagination of post-World War I, and mainstream Zionism advocated Jewish-Zionist national home in all of Palestine in which the Arabs would be granted civil and religious rights only. One can see the similarities between this ideology and the current Israeli policy. Oppositional figures – Kastel but also Brith Shalom – proposed a bi-national state all over Palestine but thought of the Jewish element within this state as a European state. The one-statists of today follow, in many ways, this tradition. Ben-Kiki’s approach was much more radical from Zionist perspective in that it rejected the hegemony of the Eurocentric Zionist movement altogether and argued that Jews who want to come to Palestine should Arabize themselves and be part of the “Orient” (without giving up their Jewish identity). This option was rejected by most if not all Zionist and disappeared from Jewish discourse.

It is widely understood that the “Jewish Question” was concerned with the centuries old anti-Semitism and violence against Jews in Europe. It culminated in the genocide and the systematic policies to annihilate European Jews perpetrated by the German state under the Nazi regime during what came to be known as the Holocaust. Meanwhile, establishing an exclusively ethno-sectarian Jewish state in Palestine, dispossessing some 750,000 Palestinians, turning them into refugees, and depopulating and destroying over 400 of their villages in the aftermath of the Holocaust in what came to be known as the Nakba; constituent of the “Arab Question”. This paper probes the principal parameters of each question, the Jewish and the Arab, by bringing to the foreground the displacement of Arab-Jews that is silenced and subverted within both narratives, that of the Holocaust and the Nakba. The paper advocates for the inclusion, of what Ella Shohat calls, “the question of the Arab-Jew”, which constitutes the predicament of the Arab-Jewish populations in both their home Arab locales and in Israel. In the shadow of Walter Benjamin’s critique of history, when considering the displacement of Arab-Jews as a question in its own right, coupled with Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba will put us at the confluence of three, and not only two, questions that have been read separately, independently, and mostly, competitively. The paper argues that the exclusion of Arab-Jews from the Arab/Jewish engagement propagates a European reading of history that silences the histories and historical specificities of Arab-Jews. Such an approach limits the possibilities of an integral engagement that is fully realized within the simultaneous critique of violence in Europe (fascism) and violence outside of Europe (colonialism). Segregated approaches to histories of violence as is the case with the three questions continue to create a hierarchy of victimhood, the trivialization of the suffering of “other/s”, and the denial of the complexity of human histories confining us into intellectual “ghettos” in the historical narration that his paper critiques. If we were to entertain the three questions as part of a single catastrophe, it is imperative that we resume our critique, beyond the Arab and Jewish dichotomy, by returning to question Europe and the critique of the “European”.

There is no doubt about the centrality of the Palestinian question in shaping pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism in twentieth century Arab world. Though taken for granted, this particular topic remains under-researched and in need of further elaboration to explore the ways through which the question of Palestine came to define nationalist and pan-nationalist ideologies. The literature available on the topic focuses on the Mashriq (Arab East) and mostly on post 1967. In contrast, there is lack of focus on the Maghrib (North Africa), and on the interwar period. This chapter sheds light on how Muslim reformers in interwar Algeria responded to developments in Palestine, developments that further solidified an Arab-Muslim identity as it was emerging in colonial Algeria. While the literature has mostly discussed the Messalist views on Zionism in the interwar period and its implication for Muslims and Jews in Algeria, this paper focuses on a group associated with the religious reformist movement led by the Association of Algerian Ulama. It analyzes the content in the Association's newspaper al-Shihab and in newspapers of Ibadi reformers associated with the Association. The paper argues that the question of Palestine was originally regarded by intellectuals and politicians in Algeria as one of similarly important questions in the Arab world, until 1936-9, when the Palestinian revolt shifted the question of Palestine to the centre of attention. Arabic newspapers increased reporting on the events in Palestine, on which intellectuals and political activists commented almost regularly, inserting the question of Palestine into broader narratives of nationalism and anti-colonialism in the 1930s. The Palestinian revolt came to ascertain the regional dimensions of the anti-colonial struggle and to solidify cross-border connections sharing anti-colonial platforms. It also gradually centralized Palestine in national and pan-national identities, as they were articulated in the context of anti-colonialism, and within the concepts of the ‘Muslim World’ and the ‘Arab world.’ In the case of Algeria, the two worlds overlapped and intersected, with Palestine moving gradually to occupy a central space in both. That space was the platform through which Algerians criticized colonial projects in the region and created an association with the broader anti-colonial movements. It was also the platform through which they directly and indirectly contested French colonial rule by creating regional associations based in Islam and Arabism, the tools with which Algerians resisted French colonialism.

This paper interrogates two concepts rarely discussed conjointly: normalization and bi-nationalism. It suggests that the concept ‘normalization’ is helpful to make clearer sense of the history of Palestine/Israel from 1917 to date. It is firstly explained that between 1917 and 1967 Arab Nationalism generally, and the PLO specifically, attempted to materialize in the minuscule territory comprising mandatory Palestine a fairly ‘standard’ anti-colonial struggle vis-à-vis pre-1948 Euro-Zionism and post-1948 Israel, that is, de-colonization of the homeland along the lines of the Algerian/Vietnamese struggles whereby colonialists are meant to exit the colonized territory. The struggle’s frame of reference then was 1917: pre-1967 Palestinian Marxists, Nationalists and the PLO Charter entertained a sociopolitical reversal to a 1917 state of affairs. For a rainbow of reasons, in 1967 the frame of reference of the struggle changed from 1917 to 1948. The principal question has now become this: how to normalize in the colonized territory the existence of some 2.3 million Jewish Israelis and that is so without insisting on their exit (as ‘standard’ anti-colonial struggles otherwise command)? Marxist-Leninist PFLP was willing to grant Israel’s Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews individual rights as equal citizens of a secular-democratic Palestinian-Arab state, essentially conceptualizing them as members of a religious minority group. Post-1962 Marxist Matzpen understood this PFLP framing as ahistorical because it bypassed the possibility that a century of conflict has socially constructed into the Middle East a Hebrew-speaking collectivity that could no longer be conceptualized in individual-liberal terms alone -- let alone by Marxists familiar with the Marxist general-global discussion about ‘the National Question’. Matzpen posited that a unified Arab Middle East is unlikely to materialize without granting – and institutionalizing within it – collective national rights to non-Arab Kurds, South-Sudanese and Hebrew-speaking Israelis. This paper demonstrates how the ‘old’ intra-Marxist PFLP-Matzpen debate remains potently relevant to contemporary controversies over the (post-Oslo) idea of a single non-partitioned state in Israel/Palestine and its possible internal configurations in terms of restoring normalization of life for Palestinians and Israelis all, including individual AND/OR collective rights.