On November 8, 1941, a Palestinian politician named Fakhri Nashashibi was shot and killed by unknown gunmen on a street in Baghdad.
He wasn’t killed by Israelis. Israel didn’t exist yet.
Nashashibi was assassinated because he believed Arabs and Jews could share a future, and he had spent the previous decade organizing toward that goal. The New York Times reported his death the following day. His funeral was attended by the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, the former Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, and senior figures of the Jewish political leadership in Mandatory Palestine. The people mourning him were the people he had spent his career trying to build bridges with.
He wasn’t the last person killed for that.
The story didn’t start in 1948. It didn’t even start in 1920. To understand why the moderate voices kept losing, let’s go back to a time before the conflict had hardened into the shape we recognize today.
For centuries under Ottoman rule, Jews and Arabs lived alongside each other across the Levant in a system that was imperfect and hierarchical (dhimmi status) but fundamentally coexistent in its own way. Jews were a recognized minority community with their own religious courts and communal governance. Jewish communities had existed continuously in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias for hundreds of years. In the late nineteenth century, those communities were joined by waves of European Jewish immigrants drawn by the early Zionist movement, whether voluntary or through expulsions. The newcomers bought land, built farms and towns, established newspapers and schools. The existing Arab population watched this transformation with reactions that ranged from commercial engagement to growing alarm.
What’s important to understand about that early period is that the hostility was not universal and wasn’t inevitable. Arab landowners sold land to Jewish buyers throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often at significant profit. Arab and Jewish merchants traded together in the port cities. In 1919, Emir Faisal, the most prominent Arab nationalist leader of the period and son of the Sharif of Mecca, signed a formal agreement with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann supporting Jewish immigration to Palestine and the development of a Jewish homeland there, provided Arab national aspirations in the broader region were also fulfilled. The Faisal-Weizmann Agreement is a document that exists, is signed, and is almost never mentioned in contemporary discussions of the conflict’s origins.
Faisal wrote in a letter attached to the agreement that if the promises to the Arabs were kept, he would do everything in his power to help Jewish immigration and settlement succeed. If the promises were not kept, he could not be responsible for what followed. The promises were not kept. The British and French divided the Arab world between them at Sykes-Picot. Arab independence in Syria was crushed by the French at the Battle of Maysalun in 1920. Faisal’s cooperative framework collapsed with it.
That collapse matters because it removed the one Arab political figure with enough regional authority to make a coexistence framework stick. What filled the vacuum in Palestine was clan politics, religious nationalism, and the systematic elimination of every moderate alternative.
The 1920s were more fluid than the decades that followed. The Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine was building institutions…a labor movement, schools, hospitals, newspapers, an embryonic government. Arab communities were doing the same, though with less organizational coherence and under the constant shadow of factional rivalry.
During this period there were attempts at cooperation. Arab and Jewish labor organizers made early attempts to build joint trade unions. Mixed Arab-Jewish municipal councils functioned in some cities. The Hebrew University, opened in 1925 on Mount Scopus, counted Arab intellectuals among its early supporters. Individual friendships, business partnerships, and professional relationships across the communal divide were common enough to be unremarkable.
The British administered all of this with a consistent tendency to appease whichever side was making the most noise. When Arab riots broke out in 1920 and 1929, British investigations produced reports acknowledging Arab grievances while simultaneously documenting that the violence had been incited by Husayni and his network. The British responded by restricting Jewish immigration, which rewarded the violence and taught the rejectionist faction that violence worked.
The 1929 Hebron massacre is the clearest example of what was being lost. Husayni spread rumors that Jews were planning to seize the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Arab mobs attacked Jewish communities across Palestine. In Hebron, 67 Jews were killed, many from families that had lived there for generations, in a community that predated the modern Zionist movement by centuries. Arab neighbors hid Jewish families in their homes at personal risk during the massacre. Both things are true. The mob and the people sheltering families from the mob existed in the same city on the same day.
That is the history that keeps getting erased. Not that there was no violence, but that there were always people on both sides of it, and the people choosing coexistence faced growing danger for that choice.
By 1936, when the Arab Revolt began, the space for moderate Arab political voices had lessened dramatically. The Mufti’s network had spent fifteen years consolidating control through a combination of religious authority, political maneuvering, and targeted violence against opponents. The Nashashibis were the last organized moderate faction standing, and the revolt years were spent trying to destroy them too.
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