The (third) world of yesterday: Global anti-colonial struggles, Palestinian consciousness, and Zionist-colonial alliances

This article discusses the ways the Palestinian struggle was perceived as part of regional and global networks that crystallised following the First World War, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of mandatory authorities in the Middle East. It examines Palestinian disillusionment with the expectation that the principle of self-determination would serve as a basis for the creation of a new world political order and, in turn, in the dissolution of the world of the colonial authorities. It focuses, on one hand, on the ways in which the Rif War in Morocco (1921–6) and the great Syrian rebellion, which broke out in 1925, affected Palestinian national consciousness, and on the other hand, how these crises revealed the explicit identification of the Zionist movement with colonial forces. In the article I examine the representations of the uprisings in the contemporary Palestinian and Hebrew press as a basis for seeing the uprising as an important turning point, in terms of creating the Zionist separatist space and the strengthening of the alliance between the Zionist movement and the mandatory colonial rule and its identification with global colonial forces.