The issue of Palestine at the second congress of the communist international

Abstract EN

Daily sessions of the Second Congress of the Communist International were held in Petrograd's Tauride Palace.

Delegate Alfred Rosmer described the second congress' architectural setting: “the debating hall was like that where parliaments meet in every country … there was a high rostrum, an amphitheater where the delegates were seated, and a gallery for spectators.

” Built by Prince Grigory Potemkin during the eighteenth century as a city residence, and renovated several times since his death, representatives convened under the tiered chandeliers of the Tauride's white-painted convention hall.

In the Prince's debating hall, delegates discussed dictatorship of the proletariat, “hitherto a theoretical question, [it] was now posed as a concrete problem—in fact, as the most urgent problem” before curious spectators.

How radical could a discussion be, held in the home built by the favourite of Catherine the Great, who died during negotiations over the Treaty of Jassy which ended a war with the Ottoman Empire? What place would Arab national liberation play in the Tauride, and what of Palestine? The second congress of the Communist International remained in session until 7 August 1920.

Historian Alexander Schölch points out that—under such circumstances—Arab communists didn't respond very well to Bolshevik forms of organization, as when Poale Zion distributed a pamphlet calling on Arab laborers to stay away from their places of employment on international workers' day and join with Jewish workers under the banner of the red flag.

Schölch invited fellow-researchers to “imagine an Arab coffee house in Jaffa [on May Day 1921], where a small shopkeeper, a docker and an orange picker discuss the contents of the [Arabic leaflet] of which they find a copy.

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