Predictive History

Palestinian Elite Betrayal

5 min read

Palestinian Elite Betrayal

Core idea: The Palestinian notable families who led the national movement were simultaneously selling land to Zionist institutions — creating a catastrophic contradiction where the political leadership preached resistance while their economic class interests drove dispossession, leaving the peasant majority without genuine representation and fatally fragmenting Palestinian society before the decisive confrontation.

The Notable Families

Palestinian national politics were controlled by a semi-feudal landlord class — wealthy notable families like the Husaynis and Nashashibis who had held power since Ottoman times. Unlike ruling classes in other Arab countries who generally collaborated with imperial powers, the Palestinian elite was somewhat more resistant because the Zionist movement directly threatened their own position. But “somewhat more resistant” was not the same as actually defending their people.

Land Sales and Rhetoric

The most damning contradiction was the gap between public nationalism and private transactions. Many prominent Palestinian notables publicly denounced Zionist colonization while privately selling their own lands to the JNF and other Zionist agencies. Said al-Husayni, a Palestinian member of the Ottoman Parliament, warned as early as 1911 that “the Jews intend to create a state in the area that will include Palestine, Syria and Iraq” — yet he belonged to a family that continued selling land to Zionists well into the 1930s.

These were not marginal figures. The same people who sat on national committees and spoke in the name of the Palestinian people were enriching themselves through transactions that displaced their own peasants from lands their families had cultivated for generations.

The British Puppet System

The british-mandate-palestine actively manipulated this elite class. Britain funded and installed compliant Palestinian leaders who could pacify the increasingly frustrated population while serving British interests. The British artificially elevated the position of the Mufti of Jerusalem and installed al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni from the elite Husayni family, passing over other competitors specifically to keep the Palestinian masses under control.

To maintain his grip on power and eliminate progressive alternatives, the Mufti is said to have ordered the assassination of Sami Taha, the main Palestinian labor leader at the time. By eliminating the figure who might have organized workers into an independent political force, the semi-feudal elite ensured no grassroots challenge to their power could emerge.

The Failure of the Left

The Palestine Communist Party, predominantly Jewish, also bears responsibility. In 1920, it issued a statement: “The Jewish workers are here to live with you. They have not come to persecute you. They are ready to fight on your side against the capitalist enemy, be it Jew, Arab, or British” — but notably nowhere did they mention Zionism as the primary threat. At its 7th Congress in 1930, the party admitted it had “essentially adopted an erroneous attitude toward the issue of Palestinian nationalism.” It remained isolated and never underwent the “Arabization” demanded by the Communist International. The elimination of progressive Arab labor leaders by labor Zionists, combined with the Communist Party’s failure, left the Palestinian working class politically orphaned and the semi-feudal elite unchallenged.

The ideological consensus on “transfer” extended even to figures touted as the Zionist left’s conscience. Berl Katznelson, one of the most important leftist Zionist ideologues, spoke at the 20th Zionist Conference: “My conscience is completely clear. A distant neighbor is better than a close enemy. They will not lose by their transfer and we certainly will not… I have been convinced that this is the best solution.” The Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz movement, which regarded itself as to the left of Ben-Gurion and was supposedly communist, asserted the right of Jews to settle in Palestine from the beginning — proving that the “transfer” consensus cut across the entire Zionist political spectrum.

Class vs. Nation

The elite consistently preferred diplomatic negotiations with the British over direct confrontation. They bet on committee meetings and petitions — processes that maintained their status and relevance — while peasants were being evicted, impoverished, and pushed off their land. When the 1936-arab-revolt erupted, it was a peasant uprising that bypassed the leadership entirely. The Arab Higher Committee only joined because, as the sources describe, they “realized that if they didn’t follow the tsunami of resistance, it would engulf them.”

Key Insight

The Palestinian elite betrayal is the internal dimension of the Nakba that complicates simple narratives — the Palestinian people were failed not only by colonial powers and Zionist militias but by their own leadership class, whose economic interests were structurally aligned with the colonizers even as they claimed to resist them.

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