British Palestine, British Communists, and the Ideo-Logical System of Labour Monthly

Abstract

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) offers an account of the Mandate of Palestine strikingly divergent from the rest of British society. Through their ideology, the CPGB constructed a narrative of Palestinian issues focused on British policy, which was identified as the imperial-capitalist activities of a scheming "British imperialism." With this ideological center, a discussion emerged that orientalized the Arab nationalist as a progressive revolutionary, differentiated between reactionary Zionist and average Jewish settler, and opposed partition as imperialism. Running throughout these themes was an optimism for Arab-Jewish unity, a conclusion shared with official British government observers. The British Communist view on the Mandate is marked out as radically Communist and distinctly British.