Echoes of the Spanish Civil War in Palestine

In July 2006, on the eve of the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Eran Torbiner's documentary Madrid Comes Before Hanita (a frontier kibbutz) was screened for the first time in Israel. The film tells the story of a group of Jewish volunteers who left Palestine in order to join the International Brigades and fight for the defense of the Second Spanish Republic. It was screened to a packed hall that included two of the surviving brigadistas. The film, which took several years to make, is based on interviews, memoirs, personal correspondence and footage from various archives, and attracted much public attention.' This is one of many examples testifying to the continued interest which the Spanish Civil War has provoked in Jewish Palestine (and later in the State of Israel) since it erupted in mid-1936. At the time, the Spanish War indeed generated a wide range of reactions among Jews in Palestine. Some sympathized with the nationalist rebels seeking to rid Spain of the 'communist menace'. Others preferred to remain neutral, following the example of Britain, to which the League of Nations had entrusted the mandate over Palestine. However, the majority expressed great support for the Spanish Republic, raising money, food and medicines in order to help the Republic in its hour of need. If one takes into account the size of the Jewish community in Palestine, the number of volunteers who left to fight for the Republic was a considerable one. This article analyses the attitudes of the contemporary political parties, various civil society associations and the local press, all of which mobilized in support of one of the warring factions.2 One of my principal aims is to challenge two central myths concerning the extent to which the Yishuv (the Jewish population of Palestine prior to the establishment of the state of Israel) aligned itself with the Republic. In my opinion, the two are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, there is the tendency to overestimate the commitment of the Palestine Communist Party in support of the Spanish Republic and assume that it was immediate, unequivocal and unconditional. At the same

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