Much of the criticism of Zionism rests with a perception that during the 1948 war, they defeated a broad-based Palestinian national movement. The 2025 documentary, 1936, claimed that the three-year revolt that began then crystallized these aspirations. The actual reality is strikingly different.
The documentary totally misrepresents the uprising. It leaves out its leader, the grand mufti, who, after his exile in 1937, goes to Iraq to foment pogroms as he had in Palestine in 1921 and 1929. The grand mufti then fled to Germany and became a trusted collaborator, broadcasting Nazi propaganda to the Arab world, enlisting Bosnian Muslims to fight with the Third Reich.
The documentary also spends little time on the British Peel Commission recommendation for a two-state partition. It allocated only 12% to the Zionist state. For the mufti, however, any Jewish state was too much and brutalized his opposition. When he learned that one of the notables planned to testify, he wrote: “Those who go to meet the partition commission should take their shrouds with them.” Indeed, mufti supporters killed as many as a thousand Arabs to quell opposition to his political positions. Most importantly, the revolt had little to do with national aspirations as the rejection of the Peel Commission’s recommendation attests to. Instead, it sought to eliminate further Jewish migration and any Jewish state.
MAMDANI’S ANTI-ISRAEL MADNESS ALL HINGES ON THE ‘PALESTINE’ LIE
His brutal treatment of those who disagreed with him led many leading Arabs in Mandate Palestine to reject his leadership. Despite this local resistance, the grand mufti was appointed leader of the Palestinian delegation to the Arab League, reflecting the prestige he had obtained throughout the Arab world for his refurbishing of the Al Aqsa Mosque and implicit support for his Nazi war efforts.
Understandably, many of the mufti’s opponents sought to find accommodations with the Zionists so there was no unified Arab support for the 1948 war effort. The opposition was further alienated when the Arab League selected Fawzi al-Qawuqji to lead the newly-constituted Arab Liberation Army (ALA) to fight against the Zionists before the foreign armies invaded. Qawyqji was a Lebanese pan-Arabist who led foreign volunteers during the 1936–1939 revolt and later served in Nazi fighting units.
As a result, few local Arabs were willing to fight. According to the anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappé, 90% of the 3,000-manned ALA was comprised of foreign volunteers. Due to the unwillingness of many Arab villages to support its efforts, the ALA had inadequate supply lines, making extended military campaigns impossible. The grand mufti formed his own Holy War Army, but it attracted less than 1,000 volunteers. While other locals would join village self-defense forces, it meant few were willing to fight in armed units against Zionist forces.
Well-to-do Arabs and Arab professionals fled to Lebanon and Jordan even before significant warfare unfolded. It is one of the reasons that, after the war, there were no Arab newspapers, political parties, or social institutions to guide Arab citizens. In addition, many Muslims living in the coastal areas were recent migrants from the West Bank. They married women from their home villages and often helped at harvest time. Many fled to the West Bank to avoid the ravages of war.
The arrival of foreign armies could not overcome the lack of local support. Because its Christians had friendly relations with their Jewish neighbors, Lebanon refused to send troops. The Iraqi contingent was small and, after an initial defeat, sat out the war in the West Bank. Syria sent only a few thousand troops. A Syrian Druze contingent also fought with the ALA. After ALA defeats, most defected, with some joining Israeli Druze in the Jewish army.
The 5,000-strong British-trained Jordanian Arab Legion was an efficient fighting force. However, King Abdullah was a fierce critic of the grand mufti and uninterested in aiding his war efforts. Instead, the king only used his troops in areas assigned to the Palestinians by the UN partition, areas he hoped to annex. As a result, it was the Egyptian army, remnants of the ALA, and the Syrian army that were the only real opposition the Zionists faced. Due to the almost total lack of local Arab involvement, disconnected foreign troops were outnumbered by Zionist forces who were better organized and better armed. Thus, it is not surprising that the Zionists had a decisive victory.
This essay has documented that the grand mufti had no interest in an independent Palestinian state if it allowed there to be a Jewish state, however small. Arabs could not live under Jewish rule. When the Zionist captured Haifa in April 1948, the local Arabs began negotiating with the Jewish mayor on remaining there. However, they were ordered by the Arab League in Cairo to evacuate instead.
‘LAND FOR PEACE’ DIED ON OCT. 7. ISRAEL IS TAKING LAND INSTEAD
When the concept of the Nakba was articulated in 1949, it had nothing to do with refugees but instead the catastrophe of having a Jewish state within the Muslim orbit. This was its sole meaning until the 1992 Oslo Accords forced Arafat to seize on the refugees as a means of undermining a two-state solution. He used their squalid conditions in refugee camps across the Arab world as a justification for making the complete right-of-return a nonnegotiable demand. And today, Lebanon and Jordan continue to treat a million descendants of refugees as second-class noncitizens in order to keep this aspiration of undermining the Jewish state alive.
Most importantly, this essay has documented that there was no Palestinian nationalist movement in 1948. There was little support for the war among local Arabs and an unwillingness among the more prosperous to bear any of the war’s costs, leaving a leaderless peasant class to fend for themselves in the Zionist state. This is the history pro-advocates need to know.
Robert Cherry is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate and author of Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come? (Wicked Son, 2026).