Rejecting Partition: The Imported Lessons of Palestine’s Binational Zionists

This paper examines Palestine’s Binational Zionists of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, as local actors committed to the struggle against the spirit and the policies of partition and minoritization. While others in Palestine of those years objected to partition, believing their national movement could minoritize or even drive out the other, the binationalists’ case against partition was of a different sort. They hoped and believed that a binational, cantonized or federal state could satisfy the core needs and aspirations of both Zionism and of Palestinian Arab nationalism. “We have no belief in Partition for many reasons — religious, historical, political, economic,” told one of their leaders to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in 1947. “We regard partition as not only impracticable,” he continued, “but, should it be carried through, as a great misfortune for both Jews and Arabs.”

I analyze three different ways in which they argued against partition. Some of their arguments were anchored in their understanding of Judaism and Jewish history. They saw Jews, “the minority nation par excellence,” as a nation “spritualized”, “stripping itself of statehood and territoriality.” Hence partitioning Palestine into nation-states, they claimed, was profoundly un-Jewish. Other anti-partition arguments they voiced pointed to European models of multinational federalization. Their prime examples came from the Habsburg Monarchy, Finland, Belgium, and especially Switzerland. These examples challenged the claim that partitions (and nation-states) are inevitable, and that the vision of a binational Palestine is utopian. Their most decisive argument against partition, however, was grounded in an identification of the Zionist-Arab relation as a relation between Colonizer and Colonized. The only political way for Zionism to diffuse its colonial affiliation and nature, they insisted, was by committing to complete political parity in a binational Palestine.