The Reemergence of One-Statism

between 1918 and 1948, was characterized by two separate societies that did not interact or live “together,” except in the sense of sharing the same air and complaining about the same, or different, British officials.

And the truth is that since the fin de siècle, Palestine Arabs had been murdering Jews on a regular basis for ethnic or quasinationalist reasons. In 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936 – 1939, Arab mobs had assaulted Jewish settlements and neighborhoods in a succession of ever-larger pogroms. Had the presence and actions of the occupying British army not contained them, such bouts of violence would no doubt have been more frequent, widespread, and lethal.

At one point Abunimah casually mentioned one problematic incident—the unprovoked murder by an “Arab mob” of sixtyseven defenseless Orthodox Jews in Hebron in 1929. But he then dismissed the implications by arguing that, ever since, Israelis have made too much of the matter and would do better to focus on the fact that “most of the city’s [seven-hundred-strong] Jewish community were saved because Muslim neighbors protected them.”8 In fact, most were rescued by British police intervention and by the fact that many Jews successfully fended off their assailants for long hours—though, to be sure, Arab neighbors did save several families.

Like the previously quoted one-staters, Abunimah laid the blame for the evaporation of the two-state idea on the Israelis. Again, the settlement enterprise was to blame. “It is not credible