Contemporaneous articles from socialist publications:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/04/palestrike.html
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/05/strike.html

According to T Cliff, the strike comprised 32,000 workers, or 15% of the whole working class in Palestine at that time - 26,000 Arab Palestinians and 6,000 Jews.

The strike was denounced by the Histadrut and by Zionist Hebrew newspapers, as well as by at least one (presumably bourgeois) Arabic newspaper which denigrated the strike as "Zionist".

Per Jacobin:

The largest postwar Arab-Jewish joint labor action was the April 1946 strike of blue- and white-collar postal, telegraph and telephone, and railway workers throughout the country — the first general strike of railway and postal workers in Palestine. They were soon joined by government civil servants and Public Works Department and port workers, with about twenty-three thousand workers taking part in total.

The incapacitated British Mandate administration had to concede to many of the strikers’ demands, including wage increases, a cost-of-living allowance, and pension improvements. Neither the Histadrut leaders nor conservative Palestinian nationalists welcomed this expression of Jewish-Arab solidarity.

Unfortunately, after the strike succeeded, this binational solidarity did not really continue much further. The Histadrut would go on to undercut other expressions of Jewish-Arab solidarity in order to solidify Jewish nationalism. The following year, the UN would announce its partition plan for Palestine, and historical Palestine would devolve into civil (and then regional) war.

Relevant Haaretz article by Hadash member Odeh Bisharat: https://archive.ph/kEIUb

The state of Israel currently controls an area of land comprising four distinct regions: the 1948 green line territory (what could be considered “Israel proper”), the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.

In total, about 14.8 million people live in this combined area, with a plurality (but NOT a majority) of them - 7.2 million - being Israeli Jews. That means that the rest, the majority, are non-Jewish - they include Gazans, West Bank inhabitants, and non-Jewish Israeli citizens (aka ‘48 Arabs).

Are Americans aware of this? It doesn’t get brought up very much, but to me this seems like a pretty significant fact. We’re sending billions of dollars a year to Israel so that a minority of the people who live there can have a special set of rights over the majority.

I did not know this prior to October 7th. I was pro-Palestinian prior to that anyway, but I mistakenly thought that Israel was, at least, oppressing a numerical minority rather than a majority.

Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, two-thirds of the world's population don't know the Holocaust happened—or they deny it…

The Middle East and North Africa had the largest percentage of doubters, with only 8 percent of respondents reporting that they had heard of the genocide and believed descriptions of it were accurate. But only 12 percent of respondents in sub-Saharan Africa said the same, and only 23 percent in Asia. People in these groups were likely to say they believed the number of deaths has been exaggerated—just over half of Middle Easterners and a third of Asians and Africans think the body count has been distorted over time…

In almost every religious group, people younger than 65 were much more likely to say they believe that facts about the Holocaust have been distorted, and they were less likely to know what the Holocaust is.

"we'll never be able to accomplish fascism in the US because our base of suburban Fox News watchers are stupid and incurious about political theory" is a pretty amusing premise

I'm probably just ignorant, but aren't these kind of the same thing?

The upshot of both seems to be "modernity is bad, the right way for humans to live is in some vastly simpler system characterized by either sustenance farming, shepherding, and/or hunting & gathering".

https://www.marxists.org/archive//draper/1948/07/israel.htm

I read this recently, and I was honestly kind of shocked because it's just so different from how leftists talk about this issue now.

Draper's ultimate proposal is one that we would probably agree still with today (socialist one state solution, Jewish and Arab workers united together, both groups overthrowing their bourgeois or feudal rulers), but a lot of the premises he endorses in the process of reaching that conclusion are just not things that you would hear supporters of Palestine say anymore today. For example:

• he is very supportive of the concept of Jewish self-determination
• he referred to the Arab countries that declared war on Israel as "semi-feudal oppressors" and "some of the most backward and reactionary kingships and dynasts of the world"
  • he writes further that "The attack upon the Jews’ right to self-determination comes from a deeply reactionary social class – the Arab lords – whose reactionary aims in this case are not alleviated by the fact that they themselves suffer from the exploitation of British imperialism (at the same time that they cling to that imperialism in order to defend their privileges against their own people)."
• he accuses the UK, and in particular the British Labour Party (which was the majority governing party at the time) of "propping up the Abdullahs and Arab landlord-princes of the Middle East against the Jewish state"
• he expresses support for "full recognition of the Jewish state by our own government; for lifting the embargo on arms to Israel; for defense of the Jewish state against the Arab invasion in the present circumstances"

This is all certainly a lot more charitable to Israel/Zionism than we are today. Now, Jewish Israelis are considered undeserving foreign invaders and settlers; it is believed that the state of Israel is an unambiguous creature of Western Imperialism and has always been such; and Arab opposition to the state of Israel is considered progressive instead of reactionary.

What should we make of this? Is this a good representation of how Marxists generally talked about this conflict at that time, or was Draper an outlier? At the time he wrote this, was he wrong about any of his judgments? Was he right to characterize the conflict in this way at the time, but just proven wrong by later history?