The Holocaust has become increasingly important in international historical culture, and the murder of six million Jews during the Second World War is arguably the ultimate symbol of evil in Western politics, culture and academia. This fact has had its consequences in the Arab world as well, even though the effects there have been significantly different than in the West. Traditional Arab public discourse has a history of feelings of superiority vis-à-vis the Jews, largely based on Muslim theology. The creation of the State of Israel and its repeated victories over Arab armies have kindled political resentment partly based in this tradition, which in turn has made it virtually impossible to assimilate the dominant Western understanding of the Holocaust into Arab public discourse. Instead, Arab public discourse on the Holocaust is highly politicized and almost always displays hostility toward Israel or Jews. Even though the Arab-Israeli conflict is a major motif in this hostile discourse, there is no saying whether a settling of the conflict would open Arab public discourse to the international understanding of the Holocaust and its universal messages of tolerance and anti-racism.

The article deals with the attitudes toward the Arabs in the Labor movement and especially in Mapai during the Arab revolt. The article argues that the ongoing war conditions compounded by an exacerbating and increasingly played up tendency to dehumanize and delegitimize Arabs in Palestine between 1936 and 1939. From a historical perspective the main influence of those years lays in the mental and psychological impact they had on perceptions in Mapai that determined the increasing distance between the two peoples for many years to come.