“Whom Did We Liberate?”: <i>Ihud</i> ’s Opposition to Gaza’s Conquest in 1956 and the Emergence of Arab Positive Neutralism

Abstract This article focuses on the activity of the binational movement Ihud during the years between the Israeli Susannah Operation in 1954 and the withdrawal of the Israeli military rule in Gaza in 1957. During these years, Ihud’s discussion of the Bandung Conference, its rejection of Israeli retaliation policy, its call for the return of the refugees and for the abolition of the martial law reveal the connections between three vertexes of a triangle. These were the struggles against the discrimination of Palestinian citizens of Israel, the call for the repatriation of the refugees and the repairment of their status as stateless, and the adoption of a global policy of positive neutralism. The renewed meeting with the Gaza Strip, with the microcosm of pre-1948 Palestine—which was pictured in the Israeli dominant discourse as an act of “liberation”—was seen as a possibility for an alternative imagination of Israel’s position within the local, regional, and global frameworks. Ihud, therefore, should be examined within the context of the political orientations of Arab positive neutralism.