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.