2. Labor Zionism and the Arab Working Class, 1920–1929

Although the Second Aliya period had witnessed episodes of Arab-Jewish tension and conflict, it was still possible in that period for many Zionists to ignore the question of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine or consider it an issue of only marginal importance. A few years later such an attitude had become altogether impossible. Palestine's conquest by the British during the First World War, the rise under Hashemite leadership of an Arab nationalist movement whose goal was the establishment of an independent Arab state including Palestine, the issuance in November 1917 of the Balfour Declaration, the establishment of the British mandate, the increasingly unmistakable emergence in Palestine of organized Arab nationalist opposition to Zionism and British rule—all these developments required the labor-Zionist movement to address the Arab question much more seriously and directly. The urgency of the issue was further underscored by outbreaks of Arab violence against Jews, in Jerusalem (1920) and Jaffa (1921).

Numerous attempts to come to grips with the ideological and practical dilemmas that Arab (and specifically Palestinian Arab) demands for self-determination posed for left-wing Zionism were made in the early mandate period. These often incorporated elements of prewar socialist-Zionist discourse while developing them into a more theoretically coherent and systematic position that also reflected immediate political exigencies. One of the most serious and authoritative of these early mandate-era texts was a 1921 essay entitled The Arab Movement, by Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi. This essay contains many of the constituent elements out of which labor Zionism's discourse on the Arabs would be constructed for decades to come and therefore merits a close reading.

The Arabs of Palestine In Labor-Zionist Discourse

Already a prominent leader of the socialist-Zionist Po‘alei Tziyon party in Palestine before the war, in 1919 Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi was one of the founders of a new successor party, Ahdut Ha‘avoda (“Unity of Labor”). In the immediate postwar period the international Po‘alei Tziyon movement and its local affiliates underwent a bitter split over the question of membership in the new Communist International and participation in the Zionist Organization. Ahdut Ha‘avoda was the affiliate in Palestine of the world Po‘alei Tziyon movement's right wing, which rejected Comintern membership and favored continued cooperation with the bourgeois Zionists who controlled the Zionist Organization. (I will discuss the path followed by those in Palestine who supported world Po‘alei Tziyon's left wing later in this chapter.) In the 1920s and beyond, Ben-Tzvi would play a central role in the recasting of the prewar Po‘alei Tziyon's Borokhovist synthesis of Zionism and Marxism into the non-Marxist, social-democratic ideology espoused by MAPAI, formed by the merger in 1930 of Ahdut Ha‘avoda with Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir, its smaller, nonsocialist rival within the Zionist labor movement. Ben-Tzvi was also, from its establishment in 1920, a member of (and labor Zionism's chief representative on) the Va‘ad Le’umi (“National Committee”), the executive organ of the Yishuv's elected assembly. Ben-Tzvi was in addition a prolific journalist and a respected scholar. His seniority within the labor-Zionist movement and his knowledge of Arabic, quite rare among Zionist leaders even in Palestine, gave his 1921 essay on the Arab question significant weight for many left-wing Zionists.

Ben-Tzvi began his essay by admitting that only a few years earlier the subject under discussion had been a “hidden question,” while today the Jewish press in Palestine and abroad was full of sensational stories about it and everyone was discussing it.

And if one judges from these [press] accounts it would seem that there is a strong Arab movement in Palestine directed forcefully against us [i.e., Zionism]. And by means of comparison and analogy with other national movements known to us from other peoples and countries, there easily arises the illusory and misleading impression that this Arab movement rests on solid popular foundations, that its demands stem from the interests of the Arab working masses, and that it therefore possesses the character of a movement for liberation and human progress. And not only this, but we already have some Jews with an “Arab orientation,” just as we have more than enough Jews with Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, etc. orientations. These types smear the Jewish national liberation movement, and Zionism generally, with false accusations that it exists only as an agent of European imperialism in order to suppress the liberation movement of the Arab people, and that its whole purpose is to exploit and enslave the Arab working masses.

It was necessary, then, to demonstrate explicitly that there was no contradiction between Zionism and the objective interests of the indigenous population of Palestine. A decade or two earlier the whole issue had played a minor role in socialist-Zionist thinking and practice; now it assumed a central place and had to be addressed directly and forcefully.

Ben-Tzvi argued at the outset that it was incorrect to speak of a single Arab nation, given the absence of any real social, economic, or political basis for unity among the Arabic-speaking peoples. As for Palestinian Arab nationalism, it too was essentially inauthentic. Its demands—opposition to Jewish immigration and settlement and to the Balfour Declaration—were entirely negative, a reflection of the fact that it was not a genuinely popular movement with roots in the indigenous working masses. Rather, it was an artificial creation designed to serve the interests of the Palestinian Arab large landowners, moneylenders, and clerics, who wanted to perpetuate their domination and exploitation of the Arab peasants and workers.^[1]

In Ben-Tzvi's analysis, rooted in the economistic Marxism he shared with his late friend and mentor Borokhov, it was the economic interests of the Arab landowning elite that made it hostile to Zionism. The landowners and their lackeys feared that “the [Jewish] immigrants will come and settle on [unused state lands] and forever deprive the effendis (big landlords) of any hope of grabbing the empty lands for exploitation and speculation, thereby placing in danger the entire future of this class.” These landlords also opposed Zionism because they knew that Jewish immigration and settlement undermined their domination of the peasantry, which actually benefited from the growing Jewish presence and the enhanced opportunities for prosperity and employment it brought. Ben-Tzvi insisted that the Arab peasant in Palestine

does not suffer from Jewish immigration, but from the pressure of his effendi and from exploitation by the city dweller, who is of the same race and religion and mediates between him and the effendi.…[The peasant] is interested in the new [British] regime which ensures peace and security from bandits and thieves, especially the bedouin who used to come out of the desert into the settled lands and lay the country waste without interference; the peasant is interested in a regime which raises the cultural level and ensures justice and defense against extortion. The peasant is also interested in the expansion of employment and industry in the country and the improvement of the workers' lot, which of necessity results from Jewish settlement and immigration. Thus the peasant is not opposed to immigration.…

Zionism was thus deemed to serve the objective interests—defined strictly in economic terms—of most of the population of Palestine. This was already an old theme in Zionist discourse, going back to Herzl. But since the existence of an explicitly anti-Zionist Palestinian nationalist movement was by this time undeniable, Ben-Tzvi had to extend his argument to reject the legitimacy of indigenous anti-Zionism and nationalism by depicting them as the instruments, indeed the entirely artificial creations, of a reactionary elite anxious to preserve its wealth and power. This was a relatively new theme, designed to resolve the moral dilemmas of socialist Zionism in particular and equip its ideological arsenal with arguments more adequate to refuting doubts and criticism within the Yishuv as well as abroad.

However, the circumstances in which Ben-Tzvi and his movement operated also required the further extension of the argument by means of the revival of another old theme and its elaboration in socialist terms. The kinds of socialist and bourgeois-liberal audiences at which Ben-Tzvi's arguments were mainly directed tended to accept the principle that national groups were entitled to political rights, including the right of self-determination. A central task facing Zionism, and particularly a socialist Zionism which sought to distance itself ideologically from colonialism, which many Europeans were coming to see as morally questionable and economically burdensome, was therefore to resolve the apparent contradiction between the long-term goal of Zionism—the creation in Palestine of a Jewish majority and state—and the fact that at present the overwhelming majority of Palestine's population was Arab. To many observers, and even to some Zionists, it was disturbing that the ultimate success of Zionism was predicated on the denial of self-determination and self-rule to Palestine's indigenous population pending its transformation, under the auspices of the British colonial state, into a minority. It was therefore necessary to demonstrate, in “subjective” terms and in a progressive vocabulary, that no violation of the principle of self-determination was in fact involved.

To accomplish this Ben-Tzvi drew on an element of Zionist discourse already manifest in Herzl's references to the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine as a “mixed multitude” and in Borokhov's prognosis of assimilation. Ben-Tzvi, and following him most labor Zionists, transformed these rather crude characterizations into a coherent denial of the very existence of a distinct Palestinian Arab people. Only the bedouins were of pure Arab racial stock, Ben-Tzvi insisted; the remainder of the non-Jewish population consisted of peasants and urban dwellers who are

Arabs in language and culture but by origin and race are mixed and composed of different elements.…As is proven by its national, religious and racial composition, the population of this country is not of one national character and do not constitute a single nation, an enemy to Israel [i.e., the Jews] as a new nation in the country. On the contrary, this population is composed of different religious and national groups each of which has a more or less definite national character.^[2]

Using what he asserted were purely objective criteria, Ben-Tzvi determined that the inhabitants of Palestine were divided by religion and ethnicity into eleven distinct communities. The largest of these, the Sunni Muslims, comprised a majority of the country's population and might one day come to constitute a distinct national group, but it was not one today because of its internal racial, economic, and class divisions, and also because nationality was not a legitimate category of identity for Islam. The other components of the population were much smaller, and only the non-Muslim sects were deemed to possess any national characteristics.

Besides eliminating any possible basis for an authentic Palestinian Arab nationalism, Ben-Tzvi's representation of Palestine's population as essentially heterogeneous and disaggregated had the additional virtue of enhancing the relative demographic weight and political importance of the Yishuv. At the time he wrote, Jews constituted perhaps 10 percent of the country's total population. But by denying that most of the remaining 90 percent formed a more or less coherent Arab community and by breaking that overwhelming majority down into a mosaic of much smaller units, Ben-Tzvi could make the Jews of Palestine—presumed to constitute a monolithic bloc with self-evident national characteristics—suddenly appear as the country's second largest group. The Jews were, moreover, the most active, energetic, and constructive community in the country.^[3]

The conclusion drawn from this analysis was that “there is as yet no place for a single Arab national movement among all the inhabitants of Eretz Yisra’el. The ‘Arab movement’ which pretends to be national is nothing but a movement that arose among certain strata of the owners of property and land, the notable families of the former [Ottoman] regime. This movement is directed not against the Jews, but rather against the workers among their own people and among all the [country's] other peoples and communities.” What then, Ben-Tzvi asked, should be the attitude of the Jewish working people, “not toward today's ‘Arab movement,’ which is not national and has no social content, but toward the various non-Jewish elements living in Zion?” Ben-Tzvi acknowledged that many mistakes had been made in the past and that the question had until now not received the attention it merited, but he failed to offer any clear policy. He concluded rather vaguely:

If we take as a starting-point the common interests of the workers and keep in mind the common interests of our country and its future, on the basis of labor, progress and social justice, then we will easily find the path which will lead us to the solution of our national question in our land, and together with this to the solution to the question of international relations in the interests of the working class in Eretz Yisra’el. What the concrete form of the solution will be, and what is the practical program for achieving the desired relations between the Jewish working people and the workers of the other peoples living in our country—this is material for another topic, beyond the bounds of this essay.

Delegitimizing Palestinian Arab Nationalism

These themes would persist in labor-Zionist discourse on the Arabs of Palestine for decades, and some are still current in Israel and elsewhere. For Ben-Tzvi and many of his comrades, the only way to reconcile their commitment to Zionism with their socialist principles was to deny the existence of a Palestinian Arab people, to define Palestinian nationalism as essentially inauthentic, and to attribute all opposition to Zionism to the machinations of a reactionary and antisemitic elite. At the same time, socialist Zionism adopted from an existing Zionist discourse (and directly or indirectly from colonial discourse) the representation of the Zionist project as the chief (or even sole) force for progress in Palestine, a force which was self-evidently bringing great benefits to the indigenous population through economic development and by opening their minds to new ideas and ways of life. Since there was thus no legitimate basis for Palestinian rejection of or resistance to Zionism, whose benefits for the country and the bulk of its indigenous population were deemed self-evident, it followed that the apparent failure of all too many Arab peasants and workers to understand that Zionism (in its left-wing variant, at least) was entirely in their interest could only be explained by the lies and base appeals to hatred and fanaticism generated by the pseudonationalist effendis and their agents. All manifestations of opposition to Zionism on the part of Arabs were attributed to the insidious effect on the ignorant, unconscious, and gullible masses of “outside agitators”—self-promoting politicians, greedy landowners, obscurantist clerics, antisemitic British officials, even anti-Zionist Jewish communists.

Underlying and reinforcing this explanation of Arab behavior was a representation common in colonial discourse, of colonized peoples as passive, largely incapable of rational thought, and susceptible to control or manipulation: in short, as essentially the eternal objects of the actions of others. Of course, passivity was always in a strange discursive tension with, and always threatening to turn into, its apparent opposite, unreasoned violent action, so that even the apparently docile masses were somehow menacing, capable of exploding into irrational and bloody action at virtually any moment. This only heightened the perceived danger from outside agitators, who might be able to push the right buttons and turn docility into rebellion. Such a discourse left little or no space for a middle ground of rational, self-motivated, self-activated opposition on the part of the “other.” Acknowledgment of the possibility that Arab opposition to Zionism was perhaps not totally irrational or unjustified might have threatened to unravel the whole fabric out of which the discourse was fashioned, with potentially dangerous results for a movement mindful of the need for internal unity, maximal mobilization in the face of enormous obstacles, and the support of Jews and non-Jews abroad.

As we will see, there would be moments in which Zionist leaders explicitly recognized the existence in Palestine of an Arab community deserving of at least some national rights, and the last decade of the mandate would witness the emergence of groups, especially but not exclusively on the Zionist left, calling for a binational, Jewish-Arab state in Palestine. But the central thrust of Zionist discourse and practice, especially of the increasingly influential labor-Zionist movement, was to deny the existence of a distinct Palestinian Arab people with a legitimate claim to the country. This was implicit in the Zionist movement's key demands: the right of unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine and land acquisition in it, and (explicitly from 1942) a Jewish state in all or most of Palestine. Achievement of these goals would inevitably consign the country's indigenous Arab population to either submersion in a Jewish majority or departure from the scene, voluntarily or otherwise.

It is in this context that the following examination of relations between Jewish and Arab workers must be situated. At bottom, the debate that ensued among the various Zionist workers' parties about the importance of Arab-Jewish workers' solidarity and the means to achieve it was framed by a left-Zionist discourse which represented Arab workers as potential allies of the Jewish working class in Palestine while simultaneously assuming that any such alliance should first and foremost serve the interests of the Zionist project. Perhaps not surprisingly, this engendered contradictions which frustrated efforts to achieve cooperation among Arab and Jewish workers. At the same time, so pervasive and powerful was this discourse, so necessary was it to the realization of the Zionist project, that there was very little ground from which Jews advocating a different perspective could operate. As we will see, those Palestinian trade unionists and leftists who sought common ground with Jewish workers often encountered similar problems. The result was a complex series of interactions, a pattern of cooperation and conflict deeply enmeshed within, but always seeking to transcend, its larger political context, the Zionist-Palestinian struggle for control of the country.

The Histadrut and the “Arab Question”

In the 1920s, as the labor-Zionist movement struggled to achieve hegemony within the Yishuv and world Zionism on the basis of the strategy I discussed in Chapter 1, the issue of its relationship with Palestine's Arab majority, and especially its working class, not only persisted but grew more complex, both as a theoretical problem in labor-Zionist ideology and as a pressing practical issue. The question evoked considerable discussion and debate within and among the different parties contending for the allegiance of Jewish workers in Palestine, and in fact surfaced as early as December 1920, at the founding congress of what would become the central institution of the Zionist labor movement in Palestine, the Histadrut.

After the war Zionist labor leaders in Palestine had come to see the establishment of a unified organizational framework for Jewish workers in Palestine that would stand above the existing parties and enhance the movement's political and social weight in the Yishuv as an urgent necessity. After lengthy negotiations and several abortive initiatives, elections were held in November 1920 for delegates to a congress of the Jewish workers in Palestine. Less than 4,500 voters participated, out of a total Jewish population of some 80,000—an accurate gauge of the weakness of the Jewish labor movement which the creation of the new organization was designed to remedy.^[4] Ahdut Ha‘avoda was the strongest single force at the congress that met in Haifa a month after the elections, and though it lacked a majority on its own it largely dominated the proceedings by cooperating with Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir.

These two labor-Zionist parties envisioned the new Histadrut not as a trade union federation on the European model, but rather as an instrument whose primary purpose was to foster the settlement of Palestine by Jewish workers and build a Jewish commonwealth. The Histadrut would thus embody the labor-Zionist synthesis in its emerging “constructivist” form by acting as the vanguard of the Zionist project in Palestine even as it enhanced the power of the Jewish labor movement within the Yishuv and Zionism. This naturally required that the Histadrut be an exclusively Jewish organization rather than one open to all workers in Palestine, for otherwise it could not carry out its Zionist tasks. Hence the presence of an adjective modifying “workers” in the new organization's official title: the General Organization of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel.^[5]

The conception of the Histadrut's membership, structure, and mission advanced by Ahdut Ha‘avoda and Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir was opposed at the organization's founding congress by a small but vocal contingent from the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), who also insisted that the question of relations with Arab workers be addressed.^[6] The SWP had coalesced in the fall of 1919 as the affiliate in Palestine of the left wing of the Po‘alei Tziyon movement, then in the throes of the split between left and right, just as the much larger and more powerful Ahdut Ha‘avoda was the Palestinian affiliate of world Po‘alei Tziyon's right wing. The SWP comprised elements which continued to espouse the orthodox Borokhovism of the prewar unified Po‘alei Tziyon, but also a more radical group which was already moving in the direction of a break with Zionism.

Members of both tendencies had been radicalized by the Bolshevik revolution and saw themselves as the Jewish section of the new Communist International, founded in Moscow the previous year. At this stage it was still possible for SWP leaders and activists to insist that there was no contradiction between enthusiastic support for the Bolshevik revolution and the Comintern on the one hand, and their commitment to creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine on the other. The SWP denounced Ahdut Ha‘avoda for what it saw as that party's abandonment of class struggle, its links to the revived Socialist International, its cooperation with British imperialism, and its alliance with the Jewish bourgeoisie, manifested in its participation in the Zionist Organization. In contrast, the SWP saw itself as providing a revolutionary socialist but also Jewish and still Palestine-oriented alternative to the reformism of Ahdut Ha‘avoda, a position that might be described as “Bolshevik-Zionist.” This position would soon become untenable, and within a year of the Histadrut's founding the SWP would splinter into a number of mutually hostile factions. But in the unique conjuncture of 1919–21, when world socialist revolution seemed imminent, the new Soviet regime enjoyed widespread support among Jews (including Jewish workers in Palestine), and the Comintern was still engaged in a dialogue with left-wing Zionists, these tensions could still seem manageable. It was even possible for some party members to imagine the triumphant Red Army marching on Palestine to liberate it from British imperialism and transform it into a Jewish soviet republic.^[7]

In the period just before and after the founding of the Histadrut, the SWP's stance attracted significant support among Jewish workers in Palestine, and especially recent arrivals from eastern Europe for whom the radicalizing impact of the Bolshevik revolution was still fresh and powerful. The influence of SWP activists in several of the small Jewish trade unions that sprang up in Palestine after the war was also enhanced by their strong commitment to class struggle and worker militancy. Their resistance to what not a few workers regarded as the domineering and centralizing tendencies of Ahdut Ha‘avoda, and later of the new Histadrut's bureaucratic apparatus, also won them sympathy.^[8]

The struggle for support was also fought out in the domain of culture, over the question of language. Yiddish was the mother tongue of the Jewish masses in eastern Europe, and many new immigrants arriving in Palestine remained attached to it even as they increasingly came to use Hebrew. This benefited SWP activists, who used Yiddish proudly in their oral and written agitation and propaganda. By contrast, Ahdut Ha‘avoda supporters saw Yiddish as a language of the rejected Diaspora and tried to avoid speaking anything but Hebrew, whose revival and dominance in the Yishuv were considered essential to the Zionist project of building a new Jewish society. Along with many other nonsocialist but strongly Hebraist Zionists, they regarded Yiddish as a threat and actively sought to suppress its use, especially in public discourse. Those who attempted to speak in Yiddish—to make a political point or because they did not yet have a sufficient command of Hebrew—were frequently shouted down at public meetings. Yet in the very early 1920s this hard-line “Hebrew only” policy hampered Ahdut Ha‘avoda's efforts to communicate with and win over new Jewish immigrants and gave SWP militants opportunities for organizing which they were quick to seize.^[9]

In the debates at the founding congress, SWP delegates criticized the proposal put forward by Ahdut Ha‘avoda and Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir that the new Histadrut be an explicitly Zionist and exclusively Jewish workers' organization. They proposed instead that two separate organizations be established: “a nonparty trade union federation of all the workers of Eretz Yisra’el without regard to national affiliation or political opinions,” and a “settlement organization of all the Jewish workers engaged in building the Jewish socialist center in Eretz Yisra’el.” Complementing these two bodies would be an “international [i.e., Jewish-Arab] workers' council as the political organ of the country's entire working class whose task it would be to seize the reins of government”—that is, a soviet. The SWP thus did not reject immigration and settlement work, the establishment of kibbutzim and cooperatives, or more broadly the goal of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But it demanded that these tasks be handled by a separate organization of Jewish workers, while the class struggle (to which it gave much higher priority than did Ahdut Ha‘avoda) would be led by an organization that included both Jews and Arabs, though in separate national sections.

Not surprisingly, the SWP's proposals received very little support. The other parties had no great desire to discuss, much less resolve, these issues, and in the end they were referred for further consideration to the Histadrut council (mo‘etza), which was to guide the organization's work between congresses. The new organization's constitution made no explicit mention of Arab workers, and when the founding congress resolved that the new Histadrut would “unite all the workers and laborers in the country who live by their own labor without exploiting the labor of others, in order to arrange for all the settlement, economic and also cultural affairs of all the workers in the country, so as to build a society of Jewish labor in Eretz Yisra’el,” it was obvious that “all the workers in the country” actually meant the Jewish workers alone.

“It is clear that we must organize them, but…”

The issue of relations between Arab and Jewish workers could not be put aside so easily, however, and it reappeared on the Histadrut's agenda almost immediately. As I discuss in Chapter 3, through the mid-1920s it was the specific situation of the Jewish railway workers in Palestine that was primarily responsible for compelling the Zionist labor movement to confront the issue, and it was among the Arab and Jewish railwaymen that the various perspectives and approaches advocated by different parties were first put to the test. A discussion of the railway workers' situation at a meeting of the Histadrut executive committee on December 30, 1920, just a few weeks after the founding congress, illustrates the dilemma which labor Zionism faced in grappling with this issue.^[10]

The specific item on the agenda was the upcoming congress of the exclusively Jewish Railway Workers' Association (RWA), but because the railway workforce was overwhelmingly Arab a more substantive discussion of the larger question of relations with Arab workers was inevitable. Berl Katznelson (1887–1944), one of the leading figures in Ahdut Ha‘avoda (and later MAPAI), opened by stating that he saw no danger in the Arab railway workers organizing themselves and cooperating with their Jewish coworkers. Clearly mindful of the SWP's proposal at the recent Histadrut congress that Arabs be allowed or even encouraged to join hitherto exclusively Jewish trade unions, he also expressed concern that the Arab railway workers might want to join the RWA, which would thereby lose its Jewish and Zionist character. Other executive committee members agreed with Katznelson that Jewish and Arab workers should belong to separate organizations.

But some went beyond insistence on maintaining separate organizations to express grave doubts about the whole idea of helping Arab workers organize, for fear that organized Arab workers would inevitably turn against Zionism. “From the humanitarian standpoint, it is clear that we must organize them,” said Eliezer Shohat of Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir, “but from the national standpoint, when we organize them we will be arousing them against us. They will receive the good that is in organization and use it against us.” Another member noted that the trade unions in Egypt were under the influence of the nationalists. It was also well understood, even in this early discussion, that organizing Arab workers might conflict with the goal of achieving Hebrew labor on the railroad: higher pay and better conditions might attract more Jews to railroad work and keep them there, but it might have the same effect on Arabs, thereby making it more difficult for Jews to secure a larger percentage of railroad jobs.

In the end the executive committee decided to procrastinate, affirming the principle of Arab-Jewish solidarity but avoiding any practical decisions pending clarification of the question by a special Histadrut committee. Nonetheless, the issue was now firmly on the Histadrut's agenda, and in subsequent years it would be the subject of considerable debate, publicly in Histadrut and party forums and publications and privately at closed meetings of the leadership. The most immediate problem was what left-wing Zionists referred to as the question of “joint organization” (irgun meshutaf): in what framework should Arab and Jewish workers employed in “mixed” workplaces (i.e., those employing both Arabs and Jews) be organized and seek to cooperate? The railway workers and their specific circumstances were usually at the center of debates about this issue, but before 1948 the mixed sector of Palestine's economy also included other government enterprises and agencies like the telephone and telegraph systems, the Public Works Department and the port authorities, as well as municipal government in cities with mixed populations. Later, the British and Allied military bases and installations in Palestine would become a key arena of interaction between Arab and Jewish workers. There were also a number of privately owned enterprises which employed both Jewish and Arab workers, including several large foreign-owned companies like the Iraq Petroleum Company with its terminal at Haifa, the oil refinery in that city, the Dead Sea potash works, and the Nesher quarry and cement factory. The issue of joint organization was thus potentially relevant to substantial numbers of Arab and Jewish workers.

The question of joint organization overlapped with the question of Hebrew labor, which was by the 1920s the firm policy of the two largest labor-Zionist parties and of the Histadrut which they jointly dominated.^[11] It was clear from the outset that Histadrut support for Arab-Jewish cooperation in mixed workplaces, intended to improve the lot of Jews already employed in them and enable them to stay at their jobs, might have the contradictory effect of undermining Jewish employment in those same workplaces by also raising Arab wages. As we will see, the goal of maximizing Jewish employment in mixed enterprises was never absent from the calculations of Zionist labor leaders of various stripes when they approached the question of joint organization, and it played a significant role in the form and character of the Histadrut's initiatives in this field.

More generally, most Histadrut leaders understood that unskilled and semiskilled Arab and Jewish workers were often competing for jobs within a single labor market. Although the wages of these Jewish workers were generally higher than those of Arab workers at similar skill levels, the two wage structures were linked such that low Arab wages helped keep down wages for Jews. As a result, in addition to ensuring that Jewish employers hired only Jews and grappling with the issue of joint organization in mixed workplaces, the Jewish labor movement had to explore other means of keeping Jewish wages high, whether by subsidizing the wages of Jewish workers (an expensive proposition), by trying to raise Arab wages, by replacing Arabs with Jews in jobs with non-Jewish employers (private or public), or by some combination of these. This exigency made the issue of relations between Arab and Jewish workers of broader importance than it might otherwise have been.^[12]

The question of relations between Arab and Jewish workers and working classes in Palestine had other dimensions as well, raising wider theoretical, political, and moral issues central to labor-Zionist ideology and practice. Socialist Zionists in Palestine felt it necessary to work out a clear position on this question which they could believe was consonant with their commitments to both the principle of class solidarity across ethnic lines and the goals of Zionism. At issue was not only the potential for joint organization of Arab and Jewish workers in mixed workplaces, but also the possibility of the Histadrut's encouraging and supporting the efforts of Arabs in public or private employment to organize. As the existence of an Arab working class became more evident in the early 1920s and as Palestine's economic development seemed to presage the further growth of that class, these issues seemed to become increasingly urgent.

While Palestinian Arab society was still overwhelmingly rural, a high rate of natural increase, a deepening agrarian crisis, and new employment opportunities in the towns resulted in substantial migration from the countryside to urban areas, and especially the booming coastal towns of Jaffa and Haifa. Between the censuses of 1922 and 1931 Palestine's Arab population grew by some 40 percent, but the Arab population of Jaffa grew by 63 percent (from 27,429 to 44,638) and of Haifa by 87 percent (from 18,240 to 34,148).^[13] Some of the migrants were seasonal or temporary, while others became permanent urban dwellers. In both cases, many retained strong links to their home villages and to rural life. These new arrivals swelled the ranks of the urban poor and competed with them for jobs as wage laborers in construction, in public works, on the docks, on the railways, in small-scale manufacturing and service enterprises, and elsewhere. A stratum of skilled and semiskilled workers was also emerging, especially in Haifa, which as we will see was in this period on the verge of becoming Palestine's main port and industrial center.^[14] Moreover, some of the members of this stratum were already beginning to take an interest in trade unionism.^[15]

The formation of a distinct urban Arab working class was only in its early stages in the 1920s, but it had already begun to impinge on the consciousness of Histadrut leaders, and especially those in contact with such relatively advanced groups as the railway workers. As we will see, while their identity as socialists made them inclined to look out for (and take a special interest in) this development, their evaluation of it, and their efforts to formulate a policy to deal with it, were primarily framed by their concern over its potential significance and consequences for the Zionist project. In fact, the positions on relations between Arab and Jewish workers adopted by all the Jewish leftist parties, whether Zionist or non-Zionist, were closely bound up with their broader perspectives on the future of Palestine and of its Arab inhabitants. For one, the question of cooperation between Arab and Jewish workers could not ultimately be separated from the larger Zionist-Palestinian conflict, though this linkage took a variety of specific forms. Moreover, some of the Jewish parties in Palestine now gave the Arab worker and the Arab working class important new roles to play in their scenarios for the future. That the new communist movement in Palestine, in the 1920s still overwhelmingly Jewish, should designate the Arab working class as the force which would spearhead the struggle for national independence and socialism is not surprising. As we will see, however, in the early 1920s many labor Zionists would also embrace a new conception of the Palestinian Arab worker, one which coexisted in uneasy tension with the earlier image of that worker as a competitor for scarce jobs, a dire threat to the Jewish worker and to Zionism. This new conception portrayed the Arab working class in Palestine as labor Zionism's natural ally and was accompanied by a proposed strategy of Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity, a strategy which it was believed would actually enhance Zionism's prospects for success.

Increasingly, too, what had been largely a monologue, entirely unidirectional—Zionists of various kinds discoursing about Arabs, whether workers or not—became increasingly multidirectional and complex, more of a dialogue, as Palestinian workers and unionists made themselves heard. This is not to suggest that lower-class Palestinians had not been social and political actors even earlier, though we still know very little about their perceptions, aspirations, and actions. In the 1920s, however, it becomes easier to hear their voices more clearly. Palestinian workers and unionists would be compelled to confront the issue of cooperation with Jewish workers from their own perspectives and in light of the needs and interests of their own constituencies within the emerging Arab working class in Palestine. Whatever the extent to which their Jewish counterparts explicitly heeded them, their words and deeds affected the course of events and had to be taken into account.

Ben-Gurion and the Arab Working Class

The policy on joint organization which Ahdut Ha‘avoda, and with it the Histadrut, would ultimately adopt was first outlined by David Ben-Gurion in the summer of 1921. Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) had emigrated from Russia to Palestine in 1906 and soon emerged as a leading figure in the prewar Po‘alei Tziyon and then in its postwar successor, Ahdut Ha-‘avoda. He was abroad on a mission for his party when the Histadrut was founded, but upon his return at the end of 1921 he was elected the organization's secretary and quickly established himself as the preeminent leader of the labor-Zionist movement in Palestine. Under his guidance the Histadrut became a highly centralized and powerful institution, and the platform from which Ben-Gurion's party MAPAI would ultimately achieve a hegemonic position in the Yishuv and in the world Zionist movement. As chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion was the de facto leader of the Yishuv from 1935 to 1948, and he served as Israel's prime minister from 1948 to 1953 and again from 1955 to 1963. He possessed tremendous willpower, first-rate organizational ability, and a great capacity for combining tactical flexibility with an unwavering determination to achieve the long-term goals of Zionism. His critics on both left and right not inaccurately saw him as overbearing, self-righteous, and stubborn, but those very traits often enhanced rather than diminished his effectiveness as a leader.

Ben-Gurion first set forth his theses on the question of relations between Arab and Jewish workers in August 1921, in a proposal to Ahdut Ha‘avoda's upcoming party congress. He began by stating that the basis for these relations must be “joint economic, political, and cultural work, which is the necessary prerequisite for our redemption as a free working people and for the emancipation of the Arab working people from enslavement by its oppressors and exploiters, the dominant landowners and propertyowners.” It was “the conscious and cultured Jewish worker, whose historic mission is the building of a free community of labor in Eretz Yisra’el, who must lead the movement of liberation and rebirth of the peoples of the Near East” and “educate the Arab worker to live an orderly and cooperative life of labor, discipline, and mutual responsibility.”

Starting from these premises, which suggest a sort of socialist-Zionist mission civilatrice toward Arab workers in Palestine, Ben-Gurion proposed that “in all the trades which employ Jewish and Arab workers (such as the railways, metalworking, and so forth) the Jewish trade unions should organize the Arab workers in trade unions linked to the Jewish unions. The united unions will together implement activities to improve working conditions and arrange for cultural activities and medical assistance for the Arab workers.” He also suggested that the Histadrut employ Arab as well as Jewish workers, on equal terms, to carry out public works contracts obtained from the government, and called for the establishment of a number of joint workers' clubs which would provide lectures, social activities, and language lessons in Hebrew and Arabic. The kibbutzim should, he proposed, strive to establish contact with the neighboring Arab villages for mutual assistance, including protection against “bandits.”^[16]

As noted earlier, Ben-Gurion and his colleagues felt compelled to take up this issue mainly as a result of developments among the railway workers. But the issue had also surfaced, if in a small way, in other sectors as well. For example, in 1921 the new Jewish woodworkers' union in Jaffa and Tel Aviv had sought unsuccessfully to develop ties with Arab carpenters, most of whom were employed in small workshops and were viewed by the Jews as low-wage competitors. That same year the Jewish-owned bakeries and pastry shops in Jaffa and Tel Aviv proved more fertile ground: Arab workers cooperated with their Jewish coworkers when the latter organized a union, though the Arab workers in Arab-owned bakeries remained uninvolved. The initiative for efforts to develop links with the Arab bakery workers came from radicals among the Jewish bakery workers, who in 1922 went so far as to declare their union “international,” that is, open to both Jewish and Arab members, and actually registered some Arab members. The Histadrut leadership moved quickly to suppress this act of insubordination.^[17]

However, such incidents were few and far between, and it was the railway sector which was of most concern to the Histadrut leadership. As I discuss in Chapter 3, since the middle of 1921 some of the Arab railwaymen had been pressing Jewish union leaders for a clear response to their offer to cooperate; some of them had reportedly even expressed interest in joining the Histadrut. Ben-Gurion and his colleagues were well aware of these developments, and of demands for action from the rank and file Jewish railwaymen. They were concerned that if the Histadrut failed to formulate a clear policy on joint organization, especially among the railway workers, the Jewish railwaymen would turn to Ahdut Ha‘avoda's rivals on the left, who were advocating a fully integrated (“international”) Jewish-Arab railway workers' union. But no concrete action was forthcoming.^[18]

Ben-Gurion's thinking on the question of joint organization was clearly rooted in practical and political considerations, as well as in a broader sense of the good things which labor Zionism could bring the Arab masses in Palestine—what I earlier characterized as a sense of Zionist (and in this case socialist-Zionist) mission civilatrice in Palestine. But his conception of the relationship of the Jewish and Arab working classes in Palestine in the early and middle 1920s, and that of his party, also had other economic, political, and cultural dimensions which need to be unpacked and contextualized. For Ben-Gurion, labor Zionism's approach to joint organization was at bottom largely dictated by the concrete economic situation of the Jewish workers in Palestine. In January 1922 he told the Histadrut council:

Until the last few years the activity of the Jewish worker in the country was almost entirely restricted to a difficult and desperate struggle for the right to work in the few enterprises of the Jewish community, which were closed to the cultured and conscious Jewish worker as a result of the existence of unorganized and easily exploitable cheap labor. Unwillingly and unconsciously, the Arab worker, by virtue of his degraded state, his minimal needs, and his primitive culture, was undermining the Jewish worker's possibility of existence even in the only sphere of employment intended for him. In this situation there was hardly any basis for joint action and class influence. Now conditions have changed. The Jewish worker now works together with the Arab worker in government enterprises, that is in countrywide, general enterprises, on equal terms. But the extent of this “equality” is now determined by the worker with lesser culture and fewer needs; wages and working conditions are determined in accordance with the needs and demands of the Arab worker, a situation which is oppressive to the Jewish worker. Improvement in working conditions in these trades by the Jewish workers cannot be imagined without the active participation of the Arab worker. And the creation of an organized class force of Jewish and Arab workers in order to improve the workers' situation and their working conditions is a necessary condition for the survival of the cultured worker in these occupations.

Ben-Gurion concluded that “the creation of a single common front for all the country's workers to deal with their common affairs is the obligation and right of the pioneers of labor culture in Palestine—it is the mission of the Jewish workers. Not a metaphysical or theological mission, but a mission that derives from and is conditioned by the conditions of our life and work in Palestine.”^[19]

While insisting that cooperation was vital for both Jewish and Arab workers, Ben-Gurion was also adamant that Jews and Arabs had their own specific concerns which required some degree of separate organization. In a speech to the railway workers' union council in 1924, he argued that

Unity between workers of different nations can exist only on the basis of freedom and national equality. For the workers there are matters of common interest where there is no difference between Jew and Arab, Englishman or Frenchman. These are the things that concern work: hours, wages, relations with the employer, protection against accidents, the right of workers to organize, and so forth. In all these areas we work together. And there are interests which are specific to the workers of each nationality, specific but not contradictory interests which concern his national needs: his culture, his language, the freedom of his people, etc. In all these spheres there must be complete autonomy and equality for the workers of each nation.^[20]

As Ben-Gurion and his party saw it, separate unions in mixed workplaces, or at least autonomous national sections within joint unions, were necessary to ensure that the special needs and interests of Arab and Jewish workers be attended to. The version of joint organization which they espoused would allow the Jewish workers in mixed workplaces to improve their circumstances through cooperation with their Arab coworkers while preserving the exclusively Jewish character of the Histadrut and its trade unions, which would thus remain free to carry out their Zionist (“national”) tasks, including the struggle for Hebrew labor. On the same grounds Ahdut Ha‘avoda insisted that Arab workers not be allowed to join the Histadrut. In economic terms, then, this conception of relations between Arab and Jewish workers was quite consonant with the broader strategy which the labor-Zionist movement was coming to embrace in these years.

That conception also had an important political dimension, however. Along with the representation of the Arab working class that underpinned it, it can be read as a response to the emergence in Palestine of a vocal Arab nationalist movement demanding the cessation of Jewish immigration and land acquisition, the termination of British rule, and the independence of Palestine as an Arab state. In various formulations of Ben-Gurion and his party in the early and middle 1920s one can discern an effort to rearticulate Zionism's rejection of the authenticity and legitimacy of Palestinian Arab nationalism in the language of class struggle and class solidarity, with the Arab workers themselves rather curiously cast as Zionism's most crucial potential allies.

In defending the struggle for Hebrew labor a decade earlier, Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi had argued that the conflict between Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine was essentially social rather than national, a struggle between organized (high-wage) and unorganized (low-wage) labor. In his influential 1921 essay, The Arab Movement, Ben-Tzvi had depicted Palestinian nationalism as lacking any authentic popular base or social content, as merely the artificial instrument of the Arab “effendis,” labor Zionism's code word for what it saw as the reactionary large landowners, greedy moneylenders, and obscurantist clerics who wanted self-government for Palestine only so that they could more ruthlessly exploit the Arab peasants and workers. These had quickly become central themes in labor-Zionist discourse, though they did not go entirely unchallenged. Now Ben-Gurion developed this line of argument somewhat differently by insisting that the real conflict in Palestine was not between the country's Arab majority and the Zionist project of Jewish immigration, settlement, and statehood, as the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement claimed, but rather between the Arab workers and their Arab oppressors. To the false Arab nationalism espoused by those oppressors, Ben-Gurion counterposed a class alliance of Jewish and Arab workers grounded in their shared objective economic interests.

Such an alliance would, Ben-Gurion insisted, serve the interests of both Arab and Jewish workers. The more advanced Jewish workers would help their enslaved and ignorant Arab brothers liberate themselves from their real enemies, their oppressive compatriots. In the process the Arab workers would be uplifted and transformed into genuine proletarians, and would thereby come to grasp the beneficial and progressive character of the Zionist project. At the same time, Arab-Jewish class solidarity (at least in certain limited spheres) would help achieve Zionism's goal of Jewish national redemption. Indeed, in the mid-1920s Ben-Gurion was arguing that without such an alliance between Arab and Jewish workers, Zionism could not hope to succeed.

Zionism, Democracy, and Arab Workers

Both the economic and the political meanings built into this conception of the Arab working class and its purported relationship with Zionism were expressed very explicitly in the course of a 1924 debate within Ahdut Ha‘avoda. The British Colonial Office and the mandatory government of Palestine had initiated negotiations with the Arab and Jewish leaderships about the establishment of a legislative council with limited powers. This put the Yishuv and the Zionist movement in an uncomfortable position. On the one hand, the Zionist leadership formally endorsed the principles of self-government and representative democracy and very much wanted to play a role in governing Palestine. On the other hand, it could not accept a fully representative form of self-government for Palestine, since the country had an overwhelmingly Arab population and a representative government would inevitably mean a largely Arab (and therefore anti-Zionist) legislature and administration. Zionist leaders in Palestine and abroad disagreed over how to respond to various British proposals.

The linkage between a legislative council for Palestine on the one hand, and relations between Arab and Jewish workers on the other came to the fore at the third congress of Ahdut Ha‘avoda, held at Ein Harod in May 1924.^[21] Shlomo Kaplansky, a prominent veteran of the Second Aliya who had emerged as leader of the party's left wing, proposed that Ahdut Ha‘avoda demand the immediate establishment of a democratically elected parliament with broad powers. Kaplansky acknowledged that this parliament would inevitably have an Arab majority, but he argued that the vital interests of the Yishuv could be safeguarded, and the long-term goals of Zionism achieved, through an agreement with the Palestinian Arab nationalist leadership.

Ben-Gurion strongly opposed Kaplansky's proposal. Insisting that Zionism was essentially a state-building project, he demanded that all proposals for representative government, however democratic in the abstract, be judged by the extent to which they advanced that project. Any system of government based on the current demographic and political balance of forces in Palestine could only damage Zionism's long-term prospects. In this debate, Ben-Gurion again depicted the Palestinian Arab national movement as an inauthentic tool of the effendis. He told his party's congress: “We must not be afraid to proclaim openly that between us, the Jewish workers, and the leaders of today's Arab movement, the effendis, there is no common language.” “Certainly,” Ben-Gurion went on,

the Arab community in the country has the right of self-determination, of self-rule. It would never occur to us to restrict or minimize that right. The national autonomy which we demand for ourselves we demand for the Arabs as well. But we do not admit their right to rule over the country to the extent that the country is not built up by them and still awaits those who will work it. They do not have any right or claim to prohibit or control the construction of the country, the restoration of its ruins, the productivization of its resources, the expansion of its cultivated area, the development of its culture, the growth of its laboring community.

But then, Ben-Gurion asked rhetorically, with whom could Zionism come to an agreement, if not with the Arab leadership? “We must take the longer and more difficult path—the path toward the Arab worker. There is no common platform between us and the ruling class among the Arab people. But there is a common platform between us and the Arab workers, even if this platform still exists only potentially and not yet in reality.” The Arab worker, he continued, is “an inseparable, organic part of the country, just like one of its mountains or valleys.” It was the historic mission of the Jewish workers to raise their Arab brothers from poverty and ignorance, not out of charity but out of self-interest.

The fate of the Jewish worker is linked with the fate of the Arab worker. Together we will rise, or together we will fall. The Jewish worker will not work 8 hours a day if the Arab worker will be forced to work 10–12 hours. The Jewish worker will not get 30 piastres a day if the Arab sells his labor for 15 piastres or less.…We must seek agreement and understanding with the Arab people only through the Arab worker, and only an alliance of Jewish and Arab workers will establish and maintain an alliance of the Jewish and Arab peoples in Palestine.

The Arab working class in Palestine was thus made to play a significant role in Ben-Gurion's political vision of this period. By representing it as Zionism's potential ally, Ben-Gurion could overcome the apparent contradiction between his unwavering commitment to a Jewish majority and (ultimately) a Jewish state in Palestine on the one hand, and on the other his formal commitment to democracy and to the right of the Palestinian Arabs to self-determination. Denied any voice of its own or capacity for self-motivated action, the Arab working class could be cast as a deus ex machina in labor-Zionist thinking at this time: it compensated for the objective weakness of the Jewish labor movement in Palestine and in effect guaranteed the ultimate success of the labor-Zionist project at a time when a Jewish majority and Jewish sovereignty in Palestine seemed a very long way off and the path to their attainment highly uncertain. This vision affirmed the Arab workers' deep roots, their elemental authenticity (“just like one of [Palestine's] mountains or valleys”), but mainly in order to be able to contrast their rootedness and authenticity with the purported inauthenticity and illegitimacy of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Concomitantly, the Arabs' right to self-rule was recognized in principle, only to be immediately subordinated to the rights, needs, and interests in Palestine of the Jews, who were developing the land and therefore had a stronger right to possess and rule it. Arab objections on nationalist grounds to Jewish immigration, and to Zionism more generally, were by definition invalid, and the whole Arab national movement no more than a fraud which had to be fought, not merely for the sake of the Jews but also for the sake of the guileless and oppressed Arab masses themselves.

The Ahdut Ha‘avoda congress at Ein Harod overwhelmingly endorsed Ben-Gurion's stance rather than Kaplansky's. The Histadrut had already endorsed Ben-Gurion's conception of joint organization among the railway workers, where the issue was most urgent, though debate on the question would continue for years to come: in January 1922 the Histadrut council had adopted a resolution which declared the basic principles of joint organization among the railwaymen to be “organization of the workers on the basis of national sections” and “preservation of the Jewish Railway Workers' Association as part of the Histadrut.”^[22] From the standpoint of labor-Zionist ideology, this “separate but equal” policy had the apparent virtue of reconciling what seemed to be the conflicting demands of Zionism and proletarian internationalism. The Histadrut would thereby demonstrate its commitment to helping Arab workers unionize and improve their lot, which in mixed workplaces would presumably also benefit the Jewish employees. At the same time, this approach eliminated the threat that integrated Jewish-Arab unions and Arab membership in the Histadrut might dilute the Zionist character of these organizations and undermine the struggle for Hebrew labor as well as the achievement of the long-term goals of Zionism. To Histadrut officials it also seemed that organizing Arab workers employed in mixed workplaces or in purely Arab workplaces under the tutelage of the Jewish labor movement would insulate those workers from the pernicious influence of Arab nationalist activists seeking to mobilize them against Zionism. As we have seen, this concern had surfaced early on, and it would persist for decades to come.^[23]

The Controversy over Joint Organization

Though the Histadrut had now formally adopted a policy on joint organization among the railway workers, concrete action was another matter. Through 1922 and into 1923, the Histadrut executive committee sporadically discussed finding someone who could take charge of organizing Arab workers, especially at the Palestine Railways. But effective organizers who were both politically reliable—that is, members of Ahdut Ha‘avoda—and had a command of Arabic were extremely rare, funding was scarce, and many Histadrut leaders were in any case dubious about devoting scarce resources to the project of organizing Arab workers. Some felt that other tasks deserved priority, while others had ideological objections to the whole idea. Ben-Gurion continued to urge his colleagues not to neglect the issue, but apart from passing vague resolutions the Histadrut failed to take action.^[24]

As before, it was developments among the railway workers that compelled the Histadrut leadership, preoccupied with other matters, to once again pay serious attention to the question of joint organization. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, toward the end of 1923 members of a small but vigorous party to Ahdut Ha‘avoda's left won effective control of the still exclusively Jewish railway workers' union, now called the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers (URPTW). That party was Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, which may be translated as “Workers of Zion (Left),” not to be confused with the pre-1919 unified Po‘alei Tziyon. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol had emerged largely from the disintegration during 1921 of the SWP, which I mentioned in connection with the founding congress of the Histadrut.

Between 1919 and 1921, leaders of the Po‘alei Tziyon left in Europe, with which the SWP in Palestine was affiliated, engaged in lengthy negotiations with the Communist International over the terms under which socialist-Zionist parties might be admitted. The chief obstacle was of course Po‘alei Tziyon's commitment to Zionism, which the Comintern (like most of the prewar social-democratic movements) strongly rejected. Until the question of admission was definitively resolved, it was possible for those who saw themselves as Zionists first and foremost to remain in the SWP alongside those who were coming to see themselves primarily as Bolsheviks. But once the Comintern declared in 1921 that communism and Zionism were utterly incompatible and insisted on total acceptance of its stringent conditions for admission, including renunciation of Zionism and dissolution of local Po‘alei Tziyon parties into territorial communist parties, the SWP in Palestine splintered into several factions.

Out of the wreckage, and a series of further mergers and splits, there emerged distinct political tendencies which ultimately cohered into two parties. One was the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), which in 1924 received Comintern recognition as its section in Palestine. Through the 1920s the PCP's membership and leadership were overwhelmingly Jewish. In this period the party was often referred to as “Hafraktziyya,” from Fraktziyyat Hapo‘alim (“Workers' Faction”), the name under which it operated in the Jewish labor movement; but to avoid confusion I will always refer to the party and its adherents as “communist,” even when discussing the period before the emergence of a unified PCP recognized as such by the Comintern.^[25] The communists will appear often in this narrative, but for the moment I will focus on the second tendency which emerged from the disintegration of the SWP. This was Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, heir to the Zionist segments of the defunct SWP and the affiliate in Palestine of the left wing of the world Po‘alei Tziyon movement.^[26]

Po‘alei Tziyon Smol occupied the far left end of the Zionist spectrum. Despite rejection by Moscow, it continued to regard itself as an authentic communist party, committed to world socialist revolution and profoundly loyal to Bolshevism, the Soviet Union, and the Comintern—except when it came to the question of Zionism, about which it deemed Moscow sadly misguided (though perhaps not irredeemably so). Until the late 1930s Po‘alei Tziyon Smol refused to participate in the institutions of the Zionist Organization, since it regarded that organization as an instrument of the Jewish bourgeoisie, with which it could never collaborate. It held fast to a pristine Borokhovist orthodoxy, arguing that the Jewish workers in Palestine must organize themselves and wage their class struggle independently. Like Borokhov, party ideologists were convinced that capitalism was inexorably developing in Palestine, leading to the growth of the working class and preparing the way for the ultimate triumph of socialism. They therefore rejected Ahdut Ha‘avoda's strategy of building up a separate Jewish workers' economy under the auspices of the Histadrut. Not only was such a course foolhardy and a dangerous diversion of workers' energies from class struggle to economic construction, but it also entailed collaboration with (and therefore submission to) the Jewish bourgeoisie, which through the Zionist Organization and its institutions subsidized the Histadrut's enterprises and settlements. At the same time, Po‘alei Tziyon Smol regarded itself as thoroughly Zionist: it encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine and envisioned that land as the site of the future Jewish socialist state.

Po‘alei Tziyon Smol never succeeded in gaining a strong and durable base in Palestine. In the early 1920s most of its members and sympathizers were recently arrived urban workers. As time went on, even left-wing Jews in Palestine came to see the party as rigid, doctrinaire, and sectarian, disconnected from much of what went on in the Yishuv and embarrassingly eastern European in ethos and political style. By the 1930s its place at the left end of the Zionist spectrum would be taken by a new socialist-Zionist political formation with deeper roots in the Yishuv, while Po‘alei Tziyon Smol would decline into marginality. Paradoxically, however, at least in the 1920s, its sister parties in eastern Europe were often stronger than Ahdut Ha‘avoda's sister parties, since the left wing of Po‘alei Tziyon initially won the support of a larger segment of the movement's mass base than did the right wing, though of course the latter was much stronger among Jews in Palestine itself.

As a party, Po‘alei Tziyon Smol initially had little to say about the fate of Palestine's Arab majority. This silence was in part a product of its adherence to orthodox Borokhovism, since as I discussed in Chapter 1 Borokhov himself (who died in Russia at the end of 1917) had envisioned the disappearance of the indigenous population through assimilation into the immigrating Jewish population. As we will see, Po‘alei Tziyon Smol partook of much of mainstream labor-Zionist discourse on the Arab question, though always filtered through its own unique brand of Marxist-Zionist dialectics. In some ways the party was even less willing than Ahdut Ha‘avoda to acknowledge that the Arabs might have national rights in Palestine, insisting that capitalist development and class struggle would make the problem go away.

However, in the workplaces where party militants agitated, things were different. Whatever the party's line on Arab national rights, it was strongly committed to working-class unity across communal lines.^[27] More significantly, as I discuss at greater length in Chapter 3, Po‘alei Tziyon Smol garnered considerable support among the Jewish railway workers in 1923–24, largely because its opposition to separate national sections for Arabs and Jews seemed to open the way for the establishment of a single (and presumably more effective) union encompassing all the railway workers in Palestine. When Po‘alei Tziyon Smol activists secured the leadership of the Jewish railway workers' union in 1924, they went even further in order to win over Arab workers already suspicious of the Histadrut's Zionist character. To the Histadrut leadership's horror, they not only declared the union international (i.e., open to both Arabs and Jews) but also launched an effort to induce the Histadrut to turn its settlement and cooperative functions over to a separate entity and transform itself into a territorial trade union center open to Arabs as well as Jews—a proposal that came to be known as “separation of functions.” This development intensified the debate over joint organization, and over relations between Jewish and Arab workers, that had long been simmering among left Zionists.

Ben-Gurion and other Ahdut Ha‘avoda leaders were extremely distressed that the key railway workers' union had fallen into the hands of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, whose commitment to Zionism they mistrusted. They were also concerned because their party's control over the labor movement seemed to be slipping, putting it on the defensive.^[28] This was also a period in which a wave of Jewish immigration (the Fourth Aliya, 1924–26), largely from Poland and including many middle-class immigrants with some capital of their own, brought economic prosperity to the Yishuv but simultaneously strengthened the social and political weight of nonworker forces, to the detriment of the labor movement.^[29] Ahdut Ha‘avoda leaders tried various means to reassert their party's influence, including an effort to improve relations with Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir. Efforts were also made to reassert control over the railway workers' union, and as I discuss in Chapters 3 and 4 these were ultimately successful. To thwart Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's demand for the restructuring of the Histadrut, which won some support elsewhere in the Zionist labor movement, Ben-Gurion proposed that the next Histadrut congress, still some years off, establish an all-Palestine workers' alliance, in essence an umbrella organization that would include both the Histadrut (which would continue to be autonomous) and its as-yet-nonexistent Arab counterpart. Unions in mixed workplaces would have separate national sections affiliated with their respective national organization.^[30] Facing persistent criticism from Po‘alei Tziyon Smol that Ahdut Ha‘avoda had neglected joint organization, party leaders defended their record, largely through articles in Ahdut Ha‘avoda's weekly organ Kuntres. They insisted that Ahdut Ha‘avoda had always taken the issue seriously and suggested that the Histadrut's failures in this arena were largely due to Arab workers' backwardness and incapacity for organization.^[31]

The terms in which this debate was cast well illustrate the contours of left-Zionist thinking on the question of relations with Arab workers. The supporters of the Ahdut Ha‘avoda line accused the railwaymen's union leadership, now under the influence of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, of neglecting or downplaying its national responsibilities. To even think of divesting the Histadrut of its responsibilities for immigration, settlement, and economic development amounted to “liquidationism,” that is, the abandonment of Zionism. Arab workers should be organized under Histadrut tutelage, but separately, in their own organizations and sections; this was, Ahdut Ha‘avoda supporters insisted, what the Arab workers themselves really wanted. In contrast, the partisans of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol argued that separate national sections were a barrier to joint organization: many Arab workers were ready to join the Histadrut and its trade unions, and the only thing preventing the rapid realization of Jewish-Arab class solidarity was the obstructionism of the Histadrut leadership and its misguided policy.

Yet despite their differences, both sides in this debate shared a common premise: the nonexistence or illegitimacy of Palestinian Arab nationalism, especially as far as Arab workers were concerned. For Ahdut Ha‘avoda, the Jewish national sections in mixed unions would be affiliated to the Histadrut and be part of the Jewish national movement; but the corresponding Arab sections, and an Arab labor federation if and when established, were to be resolutely non-national, indeed even antinational, in the sense that the Arab workers and their unions were to be under the tutelage of the Histadrut and allied to the Zionist movement rather than to the Arab nationalist movement. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's demand that the Histadrut be open to both Arabs and Jews was also not neutral in national terms. Other exclusively Jewish institutions would carry on the “national” tasks taken over from the Histadrut, while the Arab workers were to have no such institutions, since their interests were defined as purely social rather than national. In fact, as I suggested earlier, it can be argued that Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's unreconstructed Borokhovism more completely delegitimized Palestinian Arab nationalism than Ahdut Ha‘avoda's (and later MAPAI's) social-democratic pragmatism. But in this period both these parties largely excluded from thought the possibility that Arab workers in Palestine might in any legitimate way see themselves as members of a national community with interests and needs in conflict with those of the Jewish workers, whose Zionist commitments were simply taken for granted.

The Struggles at Nesher, 1924–25

Though the railway workers still held center stage in labor-Zionist debates about relations between Arab and Jewish workers, by the middle of the decade relations among Arab and Jewish workers in other workplaces were also raising complex issues. This period witnessed the first significant manifestations of organization and action by Arab wage workers, for the most part in and around Haifa. Haifa was at this time experiencing rapid growth: its population (one-quarter of which consisted of Jews) was almost 25,000 in 1922 and would double by 1931.^[32] In the interwar period the city would become not only Palestine's main port but also its leading industrial center. The Palestine Railways built its main repair and maintenance workshops there, a new deepwater harbor was developed, the Iraq Petroleum Company completed pipeline facilities in 1934, an oil refinery began to function soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, and a substantial number of industrial enterprises (most but not all of them Jewish-owned) were established in or near the city. Haifa would become not only “Red Haifa,” a bastion of the Jewish workers' movement and a base for its most radical elements, but also the cradle of the emerging Palestinian Arab working class and of its trade union movement.

The new Nesher cement factory, located not far from Haifa, was the site of several of this period's most important and controversial struggles. Nesher was established in 1924–25 by Michael Pollack, a Jew who was born in Russian-ruled Georgia, made a fortune in Baku oil, and fled Russia after the revolution, eventually settling in Paris. The site chosen for the factory was close to the Arab village of Yajur, on the eastern slopes of Mount Carmel. In 1872 the Ottoman government had sold Yajur village lands to the Sursuq brothers and Salim al-Khuri, Lebanese businessmen who later sold them to Zionist land-acquisition institutions. The Jewish settlement of Yagur was established on a portion of these lands in 1922, but the new cement factory itself seems to have been located on land traditionally belonging to the nearby (and larger) village of Balad al-Shaykh, just to the north. Another Jewish settlement, named Nesher like the factory itself, was established nearby in 1925.^[33]

Construction work for the Nesher factory was carried out by both Jewish workers supplied by the Histadrut and Egyptian workers brought in by a local Arab contractor. The former, Histadrut members, received 20 piastres for an eight-hour workday, while the Egyptians received only 10 piastres for a nine- or ten-hour day. (Egyptian currency was used in Palestine from the end of the war until 1927, when it was replaced by a separate Palestinian currency. Both the Egyptian and Palestinian pounds, close in value to the pound sterling, were divided into one hundred piastres and one thousand milliemes.) Such differentials in Jewish and Arab wage rates for both skilled and unskilled labor were to be typical in Palestine through most of the mandate period. This was the first time these Jewish workers had worked alongside Arabs, if not their first experience of direct contact. Though Haifa was still a largely Arab city, it was already possible for Jewish immigrants to have only minimal contact with Arabs, and very easy to have no ongoing day-to-day engagement. Given that few if any of the Jewish workers at Nesher knew Arabic, and none of the Egyptians were likely to have spoken either Yiddish or Hebrew, the possibility of conversation was probably limited. But decent relations seem to have prevailed nonetheless among the 200 Jewish workers and the 80 Egyptians engaged in building the Nesher factory by 1924.

Nothing is known about the Egyptian workers, but the Jewish contingent seems to have consisted in large part of recent arrivals. The great majority were likely to have inclined toward one of the labor-Zionist parties (Ahdut Ha‘avoda, Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir, and Po‘alei Tziyon Smol) or to have been apolitical Zionists, but a handful of members or sympathizers of the Palestine Communist Party were also employed at the Nesher site. Unlike many labor Zionists, who were usually prepared to set aside worker grievances and preserve labor peace in the interests of developing the Yishuv, the communists had no hesitation about taking militant stands on workplace issues. At Nesher as elsewhere, the communists also attacked the Zionist movement for displacing Palestinian peasants, claiming that the very land on which the Nesher factory was being built had been expropriated. The communists may not have been correct in this instance, since the factory site seems to have been uninhabited wasteland, but the nearby village of Yajur and the Jewish settlement of Yagur certainly provided an example of one means by which Palestinian villagers had been deprived of land which ended up permanently in Jewish hands.

As the factory approached completion, tensions rose between management and the Jewish workers. The latter resented management's adamant refusal to recognize or negotiate with either their own elected committee or the Histadrut to which they belonged. They also wanted an increase in wages to 25 piastres and a one-hour reduction in the workday. Ultimately the Jewish construction workers went on strike. They quickly realized that to win they needed the support of the Egyptian workers. Histadrut and Haifa Workers' Council officials opposed trying to get the Egyptians to join the strike, for fear that their participation might undermine the Histadrut's long-range goal of achieving exclusively Jewish employment at the site, in keeping with the Hebrew labor doctrine. But the Jewish workers decided to seek their support anyway, and the Egyptians, whose wages, working conditions, and treatment by foremen were much worse than those of the Jewish workers, quickly responded by joining the strike, to the astonishment of the contractor who had employed them. The strike dragged on for two months until finally Pollack himself sent a message ordering his agents in Palestine to reach a settlement. An agreement was quickly concluded between Nesher and the Haifa Workers' Council which won for the Jewish workers some of their demands. The agreement said nothing about the Egyptian workers, however, and the Histadrut insisted that it had no responsibility for them. Defying their leaders, the Jewish workers voted 170 to 30 not to return to work unless the Egyptians were also rehired, which Nesher management refused to do. The Histadrut ignored the vote and successfully pressured the Jewish construction workers to abandon the struggle and resume work. Most of the Egyptians were deported to their homeland by the mandatory authorities.

After Nesher actually began production in 1925, another struggle ensued which pitted Jewish against Egyptian workers. While only Jews were employed as production workers at the cement factory itself, Nesher's owner had given the contract for work at the quarry which supplied the factory with its raw materials to Musbah al-Shaqifi, a Palestinian Arab contractor who employed Egyptian workers. Michael Pollack resisted pressure from the Histadrut to replace the Arab quarry workers with Jews, insisting that because Nesher was Palestine's only cement factory and sold its output to Arabs as well as Jews, he was obligated to employ some Arab workers. In protest the Histadrut ordered its members to go on strike against this use of what it called “coolie” labor, and they complied. The contrast with the solidarity the Jewish workers had displayed the previous year is striking. It may well be that the disobedient Jewish workers who had been employed to help build the factory were not taken on as production workers when the factory went into operation, or perhaps the Histadrut had managed to tighten its control over the workforce by some other means. Whatever the case, this strike—a classic manifestation of the Hebrew labor doctrine in practice—was unsuccessful, and until the revolt of 1936–39 the company's quarrying work remained the preserve of Arabs, though over time Egyptians were replaced by Palestinians, mainly villagers from the vicinity.^[34]

Curiously, even as the Histadrut and the Jewish workers at Nesher were seeking to force that company to get rid of its non-Jewish employees, they were supporting a strike for higher wages initiated by twenty-five Egyptian, two Palestinian, and seven Jewish workers employed at another quarry in Yajur, run by a Belgian contractor connected with Nesher. In the latter case the Jewish workers at Nesher provided the strikers with material and moral support, and the Histadrut intervened with the authorities when the Egyptian workers were threatened with deportation. That the Histadrut could simultaneously launch a struggle to deprive non-Jewish workers of their jobs while supporting another strike nearby by non-Jewish workers demanding higher wages might seem contradictory. But the contradiction is only apparent. For the Histadrut, the issue at Nesher was Hebrew labor: jobs in the Jewish sector of the Palestinian economy should go exclusively to Jews. The Jewish labor movement, it was argued, was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with cheaper Arab labor and had the right to defend its standard of living, indeed its very existence.

Commenting on the Nesher strike, David Ben-Gurion was prepared to admit that the Histadrut's struggle to displace Arab workers might “contradict the personal interest of that number of Arab workers engaged in cement quarrying.” But he insisted that the Jewish workers' struggle to secure jobs and increase their wages in the face of cheap local labor would ultimately improve the economic situation of Palestine as a whole, create new and better jobs in the Arab sector as well, and thereby benefit the Arab workers. The Nesher strike was therefore justified, Ben-Gurion argued, since “this struggle completely conforms to the class interest of the Arab worker in Palestine no less than to the class interest of the Jewish worker.” In any event, Ben-Gurion insisted, there was no ethnic or national discrimination involved: “It is not by virtue of his being an Arab that the Arab worker endangers the Jewish worker's employment opportunities, but by virtue of his being unorganized and competing with others.” What better proof could there be of this than the fact that the Histadrut supported strikes by non-Jewish workers when the question of Hebrew labor was not involved? Hence the proud publication in Kuntres of a letter signed by two of the striking Egyptian workers at the Belgian contracting company in Yajur, thanking the Histadrut and the Nesher workers for their support.^[35]

Organizing Arab Workers

The events at Nesher, a number of other incidents elsewhere, and signs that the embryonic Palestinian Arab working class was beginning to stir, finally pushed the Histadrut to take action in the spring of 1925, after years of procrastination. In large measure its initiative was intended to preempt other projects and developments already under way. Some local unions (for example, the woodworkers' union in Haifa) had on their own already begun to informally admit Arabs, who thereby also became members of the Histadrut itself. From both Haifa and Tel Aviv came reports of Arab workers, attracted by the Histadrut's size, wealth, and apparent effectiveness, seeking admission to the organization—which also meant access to its various institutions, including its employment office, loan fund, and the Kupat Holim health clinics. Histadrut leaders were also concerned that their political enemies on the left might capitalize on this issue. They were well aware that Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, which was demanding that Arabs be allowed to join the Histadrut and whose members now led the railway workers' union, had already initiated an organizing committee in Haifa to develop links with Arab workers outside the railways. This initiative had made some headway: party activists had begun to work with a group of some two dozen Arabs who frequented the railway workers' club. The party had also established ties with a small group of Arab workers in Jaffa.

There were also fears that the communists were gaining ground among Arab workers. The communists already enjoyed some support among the Jewish railway workers in Haifa, from which base they were reaching out to Arab railway workers involved in complex negotiations over the establishment of a joint union (see Chapter 3). In the fall of 1924 the party had begun to publish its own Arabic-language journal, under the name Haifa. Its efforts to win support in the Arab community were enhanced by a much stronger and clearer anti-Zionist stance, one of whose first manifestations was a campaign to support Arab peasants resisting eviction from lands near ‘Afula, in the Jezreel Valley, which Arab landlords had sold to the Jewish National Fund. The party was also trying to win over Jewish workers through a “workers' unity” movement (known in Hebrew as “Ihud”), in keeping with recent Comintern directives instructing communist parties worldwide to overcome their isolation by seeking cooperation with left social-democrats within the trade union movement. Though the communists had been expelled from the Histadrut the previous year, the party's strong advocacy of class struggle and trade union autonomy allowed it to retain some support among Jewish workers. In the December 1925 elections to the Yishuv's representative assembly, the party's list won some 8 percent of the vote, and more than 10 percent in the big cities—an electoral success which communists in Palestine (or later in Israel) would never equal.^[36]

At the same time, an independent Palestinian Arab labor movement had begun to emerge, in the form of the Palestinian Arab Workers' Society (PAWS), established in Haifa in the spring of 1925. As I discuss in Chapter 3, the PAWS emerged in the context of the secession of most of the Arabs who had joined the short-lived Arab-Jewish railway workers' union. For a decade and a half its core and most stable component would consist of Haifa-area railway workers, but from the outset it aspired to become the Arab counterpart of the Histadrut, a truly national labor organization encompassing all the Arab workers of Palestine. The emergence of the PAWS, whose leaders were rather conservative but clearly unsympathetic to Zionism and supportive of the Arab national cause, was yet another indication to the Histadrut leadership that the issue of organizing Arab workers could no longer be ignored.

These developments took place in a changed economic climate, which also had an impact on events. In the middle of 1924, the Jewish population of Palestine was estimated at 94,945; a year later it had reached 121,725 and by the middle of 1926 149,500.^[37] This Fourth Aliya, the largest wave of Jewish immigration which Palestine had yet experienced, helped set off an economic boom in the Yishuv, both because of its size and because unlike earlier waves many of the new immigrants brought some capital with them. The immigrants settled overwhelmingly in the cities, especially Tel Aviv, whose population increased from 22,000 in 1924 to 40,000 at the end of the following year. The Jewish construction sector flourished as a result, opening up many new jobs. Jewish unemployment eased dramatically, creating a climate in which Jewish workers were better positioned to try to improve their wages and working conditions. The positive impact on Arab workers was much smaller, if at all palpable, but the period nonetheless witnessed unprecedented labor activism among Arabs as well as among Jews.

By March 1925 the Haifa Workers' Council, on which Ahdut Ha‘avoda was still the strongest party, had grown alarmed by Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's effort to use its base among the railway workers in order to develop contacts with other Arab workers. To preempt that initiative, the Council created a committee to recruit Arab workers into a separate organization which was to have its own employment bureau, so as not to compromise the principle of Hebrew labor. When Histadrut officials in Haifa appealed to headquarters in Tel Aviv for the funds necessary to implement this effort they received a positive response, for the Histadrut leadership was now finally convinced that the time had come to begin organizing Arab workers.^[38] During 1925, with funds from its own budget and from the Zionist Executive, the Histadrut launched two initiatives aimed at developing links with the Arab working class: an Arabic-language newspaper (the Zionist movement's first) and a “club” in Haifa whose mission was to make contact with and then organize Arab workers.

Zionist leaders had talked of starting an Arabic-language newspaper for years, as a means of propagandizing in favor of Zionism among the literate Arab public in Palestine and beyond, as well as of countering the strongly anti-Zionist stance of most of the country's Arabic press. Little progress was achieved, however, until Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi finally convinced the Zionist Executive not only to subsidize the project but to allow the Histadrut to run it. The new newspaper, which began to appear in April 1925, was called Ittihad al-‘Ummal (Workers' unity), which (perhaps coincidentally) had also been the name of a workers' newspaper published the previous year by the short-lived Egyptian labor federation aligned with the nationalist Wafd party. At first Ben-Tzvi edited Ittihad al-‘Ummal (which initially appeared biweekly and later weekly, with some gaps) himself; later Dr. Nissim Malul, the Jerusalem-based publisher and journalist, took over. When Malul moved to Baghdad his wife and later yet another Arabic-speaking Jew took charge.

Ittihad al-‘Ummal had a clear political purpose: as one official Histadrut source put it, it sought “to impart to the Arab proletarian reader general concepts from the international workers' movement and an understanding of the activities and position of the Histadrut in Palestine, and to develop his class consciousness.”^[39] There were therefore numerous articles setting forth the history, ideology, and achievements of the labor-Zionist movement and explaining the structure and functions of the Histadrut and its various components. The newspaper also sought to introduce its readers to socialism by publishing in serial form classic texts by Ferdinand Lasalle and others, and to European literature through translations from such writers as Maxim Gorky and Oscar Wilde. It also featured extensive news of the Histadrut, its subsidiaries and trade unions, and the international labor movement, along with general political, economic, and social news and commentary.

The impact of Ittihad al-‘Ummal on Arab workers seems likely to have been slight, given that most of its target audience was illiterate and that those who could read were also probably most likely to be hostile toward Zionism on nationalist grounds. In any event the newspaper's pressrun was usually only about 500 copies, most of which seem to have been distributed free of charge to Arab railway workers. Ittihad al-‘Ummal was never a moneymaking proposition: it survived thanks only to subsidies from the Histadrut and the Zionist Executive. The crucial funding which the latter institution provided eventually allowed the centrist and middle-class “General Zionists” who still dominated the Zionist leadership to insist that their sociopolitical perspectives be better represented in the newspaper. Consequently from the summer of 1926 it began to devote less attention to the labor-Zionist movement and more to the Yishuv as a whole. This reorientation may also have reflected a desire to reach a broader section of the Arab reading public.

At about the same time as it launched Ittihad al-‘Ummal, the Histadrut hired both a part-time Jewish organizer for Arab workers in Haifa and a full-time Arab assistant, both of whom would work under the supervision of the Haifa Workers' Council. The scarcity of suitable candidates made it obvious from the start who would occupy these posts. Avraham Khalfon was born in Tiberias in 1900, into a Jewish family long established in Palestine. He grew up in Haifa, spoke fluent Arabic, and had extensive contacts with Arabs in that mixed city. In 1923 he was elected to the city's Jewish community council and soon thereafter, at the request of local Histadrut officials, began to devote several hours a week to assisting the railway workers' union make contact with and recruit Arab railway workers (see Chapter 3). A trusted labor Zionist and well known to Ben-Tzvi, who was responsible for Arab affairs in the Histadrut secretariat, Khalfon was the logical choice to take charge of the Histadrut's efforts to organize Arab workers outside the railways as well.

Khalfon worked closely with his assistant, a young Arab tailor named Philip Hassun, said to be originally from Transjordan and the son of a Protestant minister. Hassun is reported to have sought to organize Haifa workers, especially porters, even before he began to frequent the railway workers' union club and developed close ties with local Po‘alei Tziyon Smol activists. An effective speaker with a good sense of humor, Hassun agreed to work as Khalfon's assistant at the substantial salary of £E8 a month. Over the years, Hassun's enthusiasm for socialist Zionism would make him seem somewhat ridiculous even to his Jewish colleagues. In his memoirs Berl Repetur, who would decades later serve as general secretary of the Histadrut but who at the time was a young man working at the port of Haifa, recounted inviting Hassun to a meeting with two Jewish visitors from the Soviet Union in the later 1920s. Hassun embarrassed Repetur and his colleagues with his exaggerated praise for all Zionism had done for the Arabs of Palestine. Repetur recalled that among Jews Hassun was jokingly referred to as “the Histadrut's goy.”^[40]

In July 1925, with a small budget from the Histadrut, Khalfon and Hassun opened the “General Workers' Club” in a busy, Arab, and largely Christian section of the “old city” of Haifa. The club seems to have met a need among Haifa's Arab working class, for it quickly attracted the attention and interest of a substantial number of skilled craftsmen, mainly tailors and carpenters. It offered evening classes in the Hebrew language and in Arabic literacy, lectures by members of various left-wing Zionist parties, and Arabic newspapers from Palestine and elsewhere. Through the club a number of Haifa workers also gained access to a special vocational training course at the Technion, the Jewish technical institute which had been founded in Haifa shortly before the war. But the club's chief mission was labor organizing, which it pursued through the creation of new unions for tailors and carpenters.

The Carpenters' and Tailors' Strike

Discontent among both groups over meager wages, long working days, and abusive employers predated contact with the Histadrut, and it was the workers themselves who pressed Khalfon and Hassun to help them organize a strike if their employers would not agree to raise wages and institute the eight-hour day. Khalfon resisted this pressure at first because he did not think the carpenters and tailors were ready for a strike. In October 1925, however, with the support of the Histadrut executive committee, he decided that the time for action had arrived. In the name of the General Workers' Club Khalfon sent letters to the owners of the twelve workshops in which the one hundred or so unionized carpenters were employed, setting forth the workers' demands and requesting a response within ten days. The employers, never before faced with this kind of organized action on the part of their workers, simply ignored the letters. The carpenters, along with some thirty tailors, then went on strike, under the leadership of Khalfon and Hassun and with the backing of the Histadrut.

The strike was peaceful at first, but clashes ensued when the employers tried to bring in strikebreakers from the nearby town of Acre. The police intervened and arrested a number of the strikers, but the well-connected Khalfon was able to free them, by posting bail for them and by sending the alcoholic English police inspector in charge a case of his favorite brand of whiskey. Nonetheless, as the strike went on, it became increasingly clear that despite financial support from the Histadrut and the railway workers' union the clashes and arrests were exhausting the meager resources at the workers' disposal. There was also growing pressure on the workers from the local Arab press and local church officials. Haifa's oldest Arabic newspaper, al-Karmil, was strongly anti-Zionist, and while expressing sympathy for the workers' demands it also voiced its fear that the strike would serve Zionist rather than Palestinian Arab interests. “We fear,” al-Karmil declared, “that the purpose of inducing the Arab workers to strike is (1) to incite them to rebellion; (2) to cause a disturbance in the business activity of Arab enterprises; (3) to raise prices so that it will be easier for Jewish goods to combat and compete with the Arabs and take jobs from them. We warn the leaders of this movement against falling into a trap, even as we acclaim the workers' awakening, for we are disgusted that someone should enrich themself from the sweat of the worker's brow.”^[41]

Local Christian clerics echoed al-Karmil and other Arab newspapers. The spiritual leader of Haifa's Maronite community, Father Francis, called in twenty of the strikers to warn them against cooperating with the Jews, who were spreading Bolshevism in Palestine, and appealed to them to form their own Muslim-Christian union which would be free of Jewish influence. According to the Histadrut's account of the meeting, the Arab workers replied that the Socialist International had delegated the task of organizing workers in the Middle East to the Histadrut and they must therefore affiliate with it. The International had of course done no such thing, but the claim does convey the sense of proletarian mission civilatrice with which socialist Zionists in Palestine were often imbued. The strikers were also said to have told the cleric that there was nothing to fear from the Jewish workers because the latter would not accept the meager wages paid to Arab workers.^[42] This was probably true in tailoring and carpentry, but of course one of the Histadrut's motives in helping Arab workers organize was to open up more jobs for Jews by raising wage levels.

After meeting with a delegation of strikers, Najib Nassar, the editor of al-Karmil, invited the two sides to meet at his newspaper's offices and resolve their conflict. The strikers insisted that Khalfon and Hassun accompany them to the meeting. Nassar was unhappy that the two officials of what his newspaper referred to as the “Zionist workers' association” had come, but they were ultimately allowed to remain as observers. After several hours of negotiations an agreement was reached by which, after two weeks, the strike was brought to an end. The workers achieved gains that, given the miserable conditions that had prevailed until then, were not insubstantial: a nine-hour workday, a half-hour lunch break, and seven paid sick days a year.^[43]

In its account of the strike's settlement, al-Karmil expressed the hope that in every trade a “guild” of employers and workers could be established to deal with the workers' grievances and thereby “block the involvement of Zionists in the affairs of Arab workers.”^[44] Nassar and his associates in the Arab bourgeoisie of Haifa were quite conservative on social issues and did not initially have much interest in the needs or interests of the emerging Palestinian working class. But events like the October 1925 strike pushed them toward greater awareness of, and interest in, labor affairs, mainly out of concern that the Zionists (whom they believed were also spreading the virus of Bolshevism) might promote and capitalize on class conflict within the Arab community. It was thus probably al-Karmil's strongly anti-Zionist stance, rather than a newfound concern for social justice and worker empowerment, that led it and other conservative but nationalist newspapers to publish news of the new Palestinian Arab Workers' Society formed in Haifa a few months earlier, and more generally to take an interest in Arab workers and even to support the formation of labor unions. By the summer of 1927 Filastin, based in Jaffa, was expressing pleasure that Arab workers finally seemed to be heeding its frequent warnings that “the Jewish unions got involved in [Arab] workers' affairs only when it was in their own interest, in the interest of the Jewish workers, while the Arab worker was in their view only an instrument with which to threaten the government if it did not submit to demands to provide jobs for Jewish workers at high wages.” The newspaper went on to call on Arab workers to quit Jewish unions and form their own labor organizations.^[45]

The Histadrut leadership was still not without misgivings about the idea of organizing Arab workers. On a visit to Haifa during the carpenters' and tailors' strike, Ben-Gurion congratulated Khalfon: the strike was a big achievement for which labor Zionism had been striving for many years. It would allow the Histadrut to prove to the international socialist movement that it was not only seeking to build an advanced Jewish society in Palestine but also looking after the Arab workers. But, Ben-Gurion warned Khalfon, “Do not go too far. You are their teacher, and you have taught them to strike. They have already made some large steps. [But] the day will come, and it is not far off, when [the Palestinian nationalist leader] Hajj Amin al-Husayni will come and collect these same workers whom you have led like laid eggs, in order to use them to fight against us with the same means you have taught them.” Ben-Gurion urged Khalfon to accept Najib Nassar's proposal for negotiations with the employers and seek a compromise which would end the strike quickly.^[46] Despite his rhetorical support for organizing Arab workers, the Histadrut secretary was clearly uneasy about the long-term political consequences of such a course, from an entirely realistic assessment that as they became more organized and class-conscious Arab workers would also probably incline more strongly toward nationalism and against Zionism.

As it happened, the October 1925 strike led by Khalfon, Hassun, and their General Workers' Club marked not the beginning but the high point of the Histadrut's first attempt to organize Arab workers in Haifa. While some Arab workers are said to have attended the traditional May Day strike and rally organized by the Haifa Workers' Council the following spring, the influence of the General Workers' Club was in fact already on the wane. In part this was due to a deteriorating economic climate. The last months of 1925 witnessed the beginning of a severe economic downturn in Palestine that would last until 1929, resulting in high unemployment and depressed wages for both Arabs and Jews in many trades. The grim situation in the Haifa building trades, particularly hard-hit, was exacerbated by an influx of carpenters and other craftsmen from Syria, where a nationalist uprising and massive repression by that country's French colonial rulers had disrupted normal economic life. In these circumstances workers were less willing to take risks and the General Workers' Club found it impossible to repeat the success it had achieved with the carpenters and tailors in October 1925. Its involvement in subsequent workers' struggles was restricted to a few isolated instances.^[47]

The decline of the Haifa club was certainly also hastened by the barrage of criticism and hostility to which it was subjected from both Arab nationalists and Jewish communists. These groups were united in seeing the club as essentially an instrument by which the Zionists were surreptitiously and illegitimately seeking to infiltrate and dominate the Arab working class. As an Arab directly employed by the Histadrut and doing its work, Philip Hassun was a prime target of nationalist invective, denounced as a lackey of the Jews and a traitor to his people.^[48] By 1927 the club was virtually moribund: its organizing efforts had petered out, few workers frequented its premises, and the activities of Khalfon and Hassun were largely restricted to arranging lectures and evening classes. Elsewhere in Palestine, the Histadrut's efforts to develop links with Arab workers never even approached the level briefly attained in Haifa.

After two years of effort, the Histadrut leadership could point to few successes that might justify the continued allocation of funds and staff to the project of organizing Arab workers. At the same time, it was increasingly preoccupied with other problems. The economic crisis had hurt the Yishuv badly: the unemployment rate in Tel Aviv reached 40 percent in February 1927, the Histadrut's Solel Boneh contracting company went bankrupt four months later, and that year more Jews left Palestine than entered it. Both the Histadrut and the Zionist Executive were forced to cut their budgets, with the result that funding for organizing Arab workers was sharply reduced. One consequence of these cuts, which can also be taken as an indication of the Histadrut's changing priorities, was the end of Avraham Khalfon's career as a labor organizer. In the spring of 1927, at the urging of Ben-Gurion and Ben-Tzvi, Khalfon left the General Workers' Club and moved on to a new job as the Jewish secretary at the Haifa municipality, from which post Histadrut leaders hoped that he would be able to get the municipality to hire more Jews. Over the following quarter-century Khalfon would ascend through the ranks of the local administration and ultimately attain the post of secretary of the municipality. Philip Hassun remained in charge of the General Workers' Club after Khalfon left, but the club had accumulated large debts and Hassun's job was itself precarious. Ittihad al-‘Ummal no longer appeared with regularity and after several hiatuses it ceased publication altogether at the beginning of 1928, largely because the Zionist Executive, facing its own budget shortfalls, cut the subsidy it had been providing the Histadrut for the newspaper.^[49]

“We cannot be your slaves”

Though the Histadrut's first effort to develop a base among Arab workers had been unsuccessful and its leaders' interest in the project was waning, the question of relations with Arab workers did not completely disappear from the agenda of the labor-Zionist movement. In fact, even as practical activity virtually ceased the issue continued to garner attention, especially during the period leading up to the Histadrut's third congress, scheduled for the summer of 1927, at which the question would be discussed and policy set. In the process Ahdut Ha‘avoda was compelled to fend off criticism from its rivals on the left and right while clarifying its own position on the issue.

Po‘alei Tziyon Smol was the chief source of criticism from the left, since the openly anti-Zionist communists were altogether beyond the pale. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol could by this point claim that it had living proof that Jewish-Arab solidarity was possible, in the form of a small group of Arab workers in Jaffa with which it had developed close ties. The leader of the group was a carpenter, George Nassar, who had become an enthusiastic and loyal adherent of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol and a protégé of one of the party's top leaders, Moshe Erem. Once, when asked why he supported Zionism and whether that support did not make him a traitor to his people, Nassar responded that he supported Zionism “precisely because I am a good Arab. I know and see with my own eyes that Jewish immigration improves the situation of the Arab masses, it contributes to raising the [Arab] worker's wages in Palestine and his standing in society. And since I seek the welfare of the Arab worker, I am ready to support Jewish immigration to Palestine.”^[50]

Very few Arabs in Palestine were prepared to embrace this logic, and it is not even clear that any of the Jaffa workers in Nassar's group shared his political vision. There is room for suspicion that the Po‘alei Tziyon Smol activists with whom these workers were in contact tended to emphasize the party's refusal to join the Zionist Organization and its proletarian internationalist ideology rather than its strong Zionist commitments. Nonetheless, it does seem that in this period there were in fact Arab workers who sincerely wished to join the Histadrut, which they perceived as a powerful and wealthy organization, provided that it dissociate itself from Zionism. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol used this sentiment to bolster its demand for “separation of functions” in the Histadrut and its transformation into an Arab-Jewish trade union center, with Arab workers as full and equal members.

In December 1925 Po‘alei Tziyon Smol leaders arranged a meeting between Histadrut secretary David Ben-Gurion and George Nassar, accompanied by several of his coworkers. The meeting was not a success: the Arab workers heard the Histadrut leader reject their demand for admission, which Ahdut Ha‘avoda regarded as a threat to the labor-Zionist project and a provocation on the part of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol. In response Nassar told Ben-Gurion that he and his comrades wanted to join the Histadrut as “loyal members” and rejected the proposal that they join a separate club, as in Haifa. “We cannot be your slaves,” he told the Histadrut leader. “We want to be members and subject to [Histadrut] discipline.…All our comrades want to be members of one organization with you, they will pay dues and organize meetings everywhere.” But Ben-Gurion stood firm: “We will not decide here. The members of the Jaffa Workers' Council will consult with other workers and inform you of their decision. We will not argue about [Histadrut] membership cards. This is our rule, and until the next congress we can decide nothing.”^[51]

In the run-up to the 1927 Histadrut congress Po‘alei Tziyon Smol sought to step up pressure on the organization's leadership by circulating petitions to be signed by Arab workers demanding admission. Among those who signed were a group of several dozen workers at a building site in Nazareth, who had sent one of their number to Haifa to seek Histadrut support upon launching a strike. Local Histadrut officials promised help but failed to act. The Nazareth workers then linked up with Po‘alei Tziyon Smol activists in Haifa, and George Nassar traveled to Nazareth where he was apparently able to convince the workers still at their jobs to join the strike. With Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's encouragement (and perhaps guidance), the Nazareth workers subsequently wrote to the Histadrut to demand that they be allowed to join. All told, Po‘alei Tziyon Smol leaders claimed that some 700 Arab workers had signed petitions asking to be allowed to join the Histadrut.^[52]

Palestine, South Africa, and Native Labor

Criticism from the left was, however, less politically significant to Ahdut Ha‘avoda than criticism from its rival (and junior partner) on the right, Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir. That party was much more straightforwardly nationalist than Ahdut Ha‘avoda. Because it was not explicitly socialist, much less avowedly Marxist, had never professed allegiance to the principle of proletarian internationalism, and was able to concede the nationalist character of Arab opposition to Zionism, Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir did not need to resort to the tortured dialectics to which Ahdut Ha‘avoda (and Po‘alei Tziyon Smol as well) had recourse when called upon to justify their positions. From Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir's standpoint, the central task of the Histadrut was to realize the Zionist project through the construction in Palestine of a separate Jewish society and economy, and this alone was sufficient justification for such policies as Hebrew labor. As a party Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir was thus at best profoundly skeptical about, and at worst hostile to, what it regarded as utopian pipe dreams like joint organization in mixed workplaces and the organization of Arab workers elsewhere. In fact, it saw such projects as potentially dangerous, in that they diverted scarce resources better devoted to meeting Jewish needs and aroused false hopes. From Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir's standpoint, too much concern for the well-being of the Arabs or guilt and self-doubt over possible violations of their rights were manifestations of an unhealthy “galut mentality” inappropriate to the project of Jewish national reconstruction.

Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir's analysis of the problem was articulated by Hayyim Arlosoroff in a 1927 essay entitled “On the Question of Joint Organization,” published as an intervention in the debates on the question that preceded the Histadrut's third congress. Born in the Ukraine in 1899 and raised in Germany, where he studied economics, Arlosoroff settled in Palestine in 1924 and became a prominent leader of Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir. When MAPAI was founded through the merger of Ahdut Ha‘avoda and Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir in 1930, he became one of the new party's top leaders. A year later he was chosen to direct the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, which had been established in 1929 to bring together Zionist and non-Zionist Jews in the project of developing the Jewish “national home” in Palestine. Though not formally a Zionist institution, the Jewish Agency was soon dominated by Zionists and became the institution through which resources were channeled to the Yishuv from Jewish communities worldwide. The Jewish Agency executive would come to function as the de facto leadership of the Yishuv, and Arlosoroff's appointment to direct its Political Department, like Ben-Gurion's elevation to the executive and then to its chairmanship, signaled the ascendancy of labor Zionism in the Yishuv and the Zionist Organization. Arlosoroff's assassination on Tel Aviv's beachfront in 1933, a crime which most labor Zionists blamed on Jewish extremists linked to Vladimir Jabotinsky's right-wing Revisionist Zionist party, ignited a bitter conflict between the left and right wings of the Zionist movement whose legacy is still discernible in Israeli politics today.

In his essay Arlosoroff claimed to be undertaking a strictly realistic and rational economic analysis, unencumbered by the ideological considerations which, he argued, had distorted the thinking of Ahdut Ha‘avoda leaders like Ben-Gurion. Arlosoroff accused the latter of trying to theorize out of existence the real, everyday, and essentially national conflict between expensive Jewish and inexpensive Arab labor. He rejected the notion that joint organization could significantly raise the general wage level in Palestine and thus facilitate the struggle for Hebrew labor by making Jewish workers more competitive with Arab workers. He was also convinced that Ben-Gurion's portrayal of the nascent Palestinian Arab working class as Zionism's potential ally was nothing but a fantasy. Even in the form envisioned by Ahdut Ha‘avoda, joint organization would lead to disaster for the Zionist project, for it would result in the deterioration of Jewish wages to the Arab level, making it impossible for European Jewish workers to survive in Palestine.

To support his argument Arlosoroff cited the case of South Africa, where as he saw it conditions most closely paralleled those which confronted the Jewish workers in Palestine. The white workers there were unable to compete in a labor market dominated by abundant and cheap African and Indian labor. They had therefore organized and used their political clout to secure the imposition of a “color bar” which excluded nonwhites from supervisory, skilled, and well-paid jobs. Similarly, if Jewish and Arab workers in Palestine competed within the same labor market, the result would be not only the cessation of Jewish immigration—for Jews would not come to or stay in Palestine if they could not find decently paid jobs there—but also substantial Jewish emigration, making realization of a Jewish majority unlikely. Joint organization could never overcome the dynamics of the capitalist labor market. The only way out of this dilemma, Arlosoroff insisted, was for the Zionist labor movement to devote its resources and energies to developing a separate high-wage, high-productivity, and exclusively Jewish economic sector, which would coexist with an unproductive and low-wage Arab sector for decades to come. This was in fact already happening, but Arlosoroff wanted the movement to be much clearer about its goals and methods, and above all to give up on what he saw as the dangerous delusion of joint organization.

In addition to building up a separate Jewish economic enclave, the labor-Zionist movement was also using political means to try to escape the constraints of a local labor market in which, as Arlosoroff had demonstrated, its members found it difficult to compete successfully. For example, during the middle and later 1920s, the Histadrut pressed the Colonial Office and the government of Palestine to set a minimum wage for unskilled labor. This would have the effect of reducing the competition which Arab labor could offer Jewish labor, thereby preserving jobs for Jews and perhaps also opening new ones to them. The British authorities were not receptive to this demand, however, in keeping with their general policy of avoiding direct regulation of the labor market insofar as possible.^[53] The Zionist Organization and the Histadrut also sought to ensure that wage rates for unskilled Jewish workers employed on relief projects by the Public Works Department during the post-1925 economic crisis were higher than those paid to Arab workers. British officials resisted this demand, too, because it favored Jewish labor over Arab labor and because it would increase their labor costs. Nonetheless, in 1928 a government wages commission reported that four wage levels for unskilled labor were in effect: rural Arab labor received 12–15 piastres a day, urban Arab labor 14–17 piastres, unionized Jewish labor (i.e., Histadrut members) 28–30 piastres, and nonunion Jewish labor 15–30 piastres.^[54]

At the same time, as I will discuss later, Histadrut and Zionist officials incessantly lobbied the British authorities in both Jerusalem and London to ensure that Jews received as large a proportion as possible of public works jobs and contracts. For example, the Zionist Organization demanded that Jewish workers be given 50 percent of the unskilled jobs created by the construction of the new deepwater port at Haifa and paid at standard Histadrut rates. Zionist leaders argued that this demand, and many similar demands raised with regard to other spheres of employment, were justified by the fact that the Jewish contributation to the government's tax revenues was proportionally much larger than the Jews' share in Palestine's population. Labor Zionists contributed to this lobbying campaign by utilizing their close connections with Trades Union Congress and Labor Party leaders in Britain to step up the pressure on the Colonial Office. British officials, especially in Palestine, opposed Zionist demands, on the grounds that it constituted favoritism toward Jews and because it would substantially increase the costs of the Haifa harbor project.^[55]

From “Historic Mission” to Benign Neglect

By the second half of the 1920s, then, the mainstream of the labor-Zionist movement was in practice firmly committed to a strategy based on both the struggle for Hebrew labor and the development of a separate Jewish economic enclave. Yet Ben-Gurion and his party found it difficult to accept this reality, which implied giving up on the vision of joint organization and Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity as a solution to labor Zionism's dilemmas. In October 1926, at Ahdut Ha‘avoda's fifth party congress, Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the difficult situation in which the labor-Zionist movement currently found itself was not conducive to a correct assessment of the question of joint organization. But, he insisted, both moral and other considerations required that the party and the movement it led continue to understand that the fate of the Jewish working class in Palestine was inextricably linked to the fate of the Arab working class. “It is inconceivable,” Ben-Gurion declared, “that we should succeed in entrenching ourselves in Palestine, in creating a large Jewish working class, in putting masses of Jews to work, and in building a lasting Jewish economy if, alongside the Jewish worker and the Jewish economy, there will remain the downtrodden and unorganized Arab worker, who will compete with us and see us as his enemy.” Ben-Gurion reiterated his call for a Jewish-Arab workers' alliance, based on autonomous national organizations and separate national sections for mixed workplaces.^[56]

Ben-Gurion made his remarks in the context of a discussion about the general policy on joint organization and relations between Arab and Jewish workers which the forthcoming Histadrut congress would adopt. Besides his own proposal, the party had before it a more complex scheme for an “international Eretz Yisra’el workers' alliance” (brit po‘alim bein-le’umit eretz-yisra’elit) put forward by Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, to be composed of the Histadrut, such purely Arab unions or labor federations as might be established, and “international” unions with separate national sections in mixed enterprises like the railways.^[57] Ben-Tzvi's proposal was (like Ben-Gurion's) designed to deflect criticism from the left by demonstrating Ahdut Ha‘avoda's commitment to creating a framework for Arab-Jewish workers' solidarity, while at the same time protecting the party's right flank by barring Arabs from Histadrut membership, preserving the Histadrut's Zionist character, and ensuring that even Jewish workers in mixed unions would be able (through their separate national sections) to participate in the effort to construct a separate Jewish society in Palestine.

While more detailed than any previous proposal, Ben-Tzvi's scheme can also be seen as a manifestation of Ahdut Ha‘avoda's declining interest in organizing Arab workers. When Ben-Tzvi had first outlined his scheme for an Arab-Jewish workers' alliance two years earlier, it had been implicitly understood that the Histadrut should play a key role in organizing its sister organization for Arab workers.^[58] By contrast, his proposal to the fifth party congress made no mention of what Ben-Gurion had once called the Histadrut's “historic mission.” Nor, for that matter, did Ben-Gurion's own remarks at the congress: they were rather vague and general, and though not without passion they seemed to imply that the Histadrut's responsibility was restricted to allying itself with the Arab working class once the latter had succeeded in organizing itself, rather than actively assisting it to do so.

In effect, the leaders of Ahdut Ha‘avoda were moving away from their earlier emphasis on the importance of an alliance between the Jewish and Arab working classes in Palestine and toward Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir's relegation of joint organization, and more generally of the question of Arab-Jewish relations, to the margins. This shift reflected the gradual ideological convergence of the two parties which a few years later would result in their merger and the creation of MAPAI. Ahdut Ha‘avoda's drift in this direction was manifested in a much more modest notion of what joint organization might achieve for both Jewish and Arab workers, and greater emphasis on labor Zionism's own constructive efforts as the determining factor in Zionism's ultimate success.^[59]

The Histadrut's declining interest in organizing Arab workers and its move toward what might be called a policy of “benign neglect” also coincided with (and was probably bolstered by) the launching of a campaign to compel Jewish citrus farmers in the moshavot to dismiss their Arab workers and hire Jews instead. Most immediately, the Histadrut's rationale for renewing the struggle for Hebrew labor in the moshavot was the urgent need to relieve very high urban unemployment in a period of severe economic crisis. But the campaign also served to deflect Jewish workers' anger and frustration about their plight onto Arab workers, with whom they were competing for scarce jobs and who could be depicted as taking the bread out of their (and their families') mouths. In launching this campaign the labor-Zionist movement also gained an opportunity to assert its self-proclaimed role as vanguard of Zionism and the Yishuv, since it could cast itself as the defender of poor Jewish immigrants fighting for jobs and survival against the greed of the unpatriotic farmers, who preferred to employ cheap Arab labor even if that undermined the Zionist enterprise. This campaign dramatically heightened intra-Yishuv tensions but it thereby also enhanced the power, moral authority, and vanguard status of the labor-Zionist leadership and the institutions it controlled in relation to competing Jewish sociopolitical forces.

Ahdut Ha‘avoda's new orientation also reflected the growing strength and social weight of the Jewish labor movement in Palestine. The Histadrut had grown from 4,433 members at its inception in 1920 to some 25,000 members by 1928. Despite the economic downturn that had set in by 1926, the Yishuv seemed to be developing and labor-Zionist leaders could envision continued slow but steady growth. Arab opposition to Zionism persisted, but in the later 1920s the national movement was factionalized and ineffective, and British support for the establishment of the Jewish national home seemed secure. In the second half of the 1920s Ahdut Ha‘avoda gradually abandoned the radicalism that had sometimes characterized its rhetoric earlier in the decade and gave up on the idea of building a socialist Jewish community in Palestine through the workers' efforts alone. Instead it more wholeheartedly embraced the idea of an alliance with Jewish (private and Zionist) capital, and sought (successfully) to exploit that alliance in ways that would enhance its own strength and that of the institutions it controlled. These trends and developments interacted with one another and contributed to the party's retreat from its earlier emphasis on the importance of Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity.

The shift emerged clearly at the Histadrut's third congress, held in July 1927. Among other things, the congress was to finally decide what form joint organization of Arab and Jewish workers in mixed workplaces should take. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol had submitted draft resolutions calling for the radical restructuring of the Histadrut into a trade union federation open to all workers in Palestine, along with petitions signed by hundreds of Arab workers requesting membership in the organization.^[60] But the party was a small minority in a congress dominated by Ahdut Ha‘avoda and its ally Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir, and the question of joint organization no longer enjoyed a very prominent position on the Histadrut's agenda.

Nonetheless, the issue surfaced right at the outset, as various observers and guests rose to present their greetings to the delegates. One of these was Philip Hassun, who claimed to speak on behalf of the Arab workers organized by the Histadrut in Haifa. Hassun praised the Histadrut in rather obsequious terms for the selfless assistance it had extended to Arab workers and declared that “the Arab worker has no one to depend on except the Hebrew worker.” This kind of rhetoric was predictable, since Hassun was a Histadrut employee. However, the speaker who followed Hassun struck a very different tone. This was Ahmad Hamdi, who said he was greeting the congress as representative of a group of some 600 Arab workers. We know nothing about Hamdi, but it would seem that his appearance at the Histadrut congress was sponsored by Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, that he had acquired his knowledge of the Jewish labor movement largely through that party, and that the Arab workers he claimed to represent were those who had, at that party's urging, indicated their interest in joining the Histadrut. Hamdi called on the Jewish workers to help the Arab workers liberate themselves from their degraded state. But why, he wondered, did the Jewish workers want to isolate themselves in their own separate organization?

Such separate organizations are dangerous. Let not [distinctions between] East and West, Zionism and Arabism, Torah and Qur’an, cause divisions among us. When the Arab workers approach the Jewish workers, their enemies say to them, “You are Zionists!” And others say, “You are communists!” And so the Arab worker is confused. We must unite and present common demands to the government, which ignores its obligations to the worker and instead sends in the police and puts him in jail.

As Hamdi saw it, the Jewish workers' movement as such was not Zionist, and that distinction should be made clear to all so that there would be no divisions between Arab and Jewish workers.^[61]

These remarks seem to have aroused Ben-Gurion's ire, for he immediately rose to respond. The Histadrut secretary declared that while he welcomed any sign of awakening among the Arab workers, he wanted the Arab workers and intellectuals—at least those few who, Ben-Gurion said, had so far freed themselves from “the enmity which the effendis were sowing around the Zionist enterprise”—to understand that “the Jewish workers in Palestine are the Zionists,” a remark which the delegates greeted with applause. Ben-Gurion went on:

They came to Palestine only thanks to Zionism. Had it not been for Zionism there would not be 30,000 organized workers in Palestine, there wouldn't be this congress, nor the Histadrut nor the movement which will raise the [Arab] worker from his degradation. And I want to tell you, Comrade Hamdi, what the workers' Zionism is. You say that the Arab worker is oppressed and his situation is degraded. But our situation is even worse. If the Arab worker works in difficult conditions, the Jewish masses don't even have the opportunity to work. And Zionism aspires to bring the Jewish masses to Eretz Yisra’el and to labor, to transform here the Jewish masses into workers, and they will also bring about the strengthening of the workers and Arab masses in Eretz Yisra’el and the neighboring lands.…This is Zionism: the return of the Jewish masses to Eretz Yisra’el and their transformation into a productive workforce on which the country's future regime will be based.

That is why, Ben-Gurion argued, the effendis were fighting Zionism: this new force would put an end to their plundering and exploitation. “You, the Arab workers, must not harness yourselves to the cart of the effendis in their war against Zionism,” he warned. “We believe that to the extent that our strength in the country grows, so will grow the strength of the working class which Hamdi and his comrades hope will liberate this country.”^[62]

The main presentation on joint organization was given by Ben-Tzvi, who criticized both Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir's insistence on a complete separation between Jewish and Arab workers and Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's demand that Arabs be allowed to join the Histadrut, arguing instead for his rather complex scheme for an “international workers' alliance” in Palestine. There was also another resolution put forward by the “Kibbutz Faction,” representing new political forces based in the Third Aliya (1918–23) which, in the form of Hashomer Hatza‘ir, would eventually supplant Po‘alei Tziyon Smol as the main party on the Zionist left (see Chapters 4 and 5).^[63] In the end, the congress adopted what amounted to a rather vague statement of principles, apparently the result of a compromise worked out behind the scenes between Ahdut Ha‘avoda and Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir. The resolution stated that the congress saw the need for “cooperation between Jewish and Arab workers in the vital matters common to them,” but immediately qualified this by stating that “the basis for common action is recognition of the essential value and rights of Jewish immigration to Palestine.” It went on to proclaim the establishment of an “international alliance of the workers of Palestine” on the basis of autonomous national units, but appended a clause making it absolutely clear that this decision would entail no change whatsoever in the structure or mission of the Histadrut.

With this resolution the Histadrut's highest body put the organization on record as favoring the creation of some framework within which Arab and Jewish workers might cooperate. It was clear, however, that this was to be done in a manner consistent with Ahdut Ha‘avoda's vision of the Zionist project. The Histadrut left's demand for the admission of Arabs was decisively rejected, while the congress strongly endorsed the Histadrut's independence, gave Jewish immigration priority over Arab-Jewish cooperation, and ensured that even in mixed workplaces Jewish workers would have their separate organizations. Perhaps as important as what the resolution said, however, was what it did not say. The resolution dealt only with the organizational structure within which Arab-Jewish workers' cooperation was to occur, with no mention whatsoever of any commitment on the part of the Jewish working class to assist Arab workers to organize. The sense of labor-Zionist mission, a frequent theme in Ahdut Ha‘avoda rhetoric only a few years earlier, was absent from the resolution.

This silence, and the tone and content of remarks on the question by Histadrut leaders, underscore the change that had taken place in Ahdut Ha‘avoda's perception of the linkage between the fate of the Zionist project and Arab-Jewish working-class relations. The equation which Ben-Gurion had set forth a few years earlier had now been reversed: the organization of Palestinian Arab workers and Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity were no longer seen as the guarantor of the success of Zionism, an essential element in the struggle to secure the basis for a large and powerful Jewish working class in Palestine and defeat the effendis' opposition to Zionism. Instead, it was the success of the Histadrut, the development under its guidance of the Yishuv's economy, the construction of a strong and exclusively Jewish enclave, that would enhance the ability of Arab workers to win higher wages, improve their working conditions and living standards, and by organizing themselves become a significant force in their own community. From this perspective, the Jewish working class would still play a leading role in “awakening” the Arab workers, but it would be a much less direct role than initially envisioned. It would entail not so much the commitment of significant human and material resources to the organization of Arab workers as the provision of an attractive model of a well-organized and powerful labor movement which Arab workers could emulate, along with the creation of a high-wage sector which would eventually help raise wages throughout the Palestinian economy.

In fact, from this point on Arab workers largely ceased to occupy a key place in mainstream labor-Zionist discourse, and the movement's script for the drama of Jewish redemption in Palestine was rewritten so as to eliminate the central role they had earlier been assigned. However, this is not to say that the question of relations between Arab and Jewish workers disappeared from the agenda of the labor-Zionist movement in Palestine: it did not, though the ways in which that question was posed, as both a practical and an ideological issue, would change considerably. But for much of the labor-Zionist movement, realization of Arab-Jewish class solidarity and joint organization had lost their perceived urgency and centrality. It was mainly the smaller left-Zionist parties (and of course the communists as well) which, along with a few dedicated but isolated individuals within MAPAI, continued to regard them as vital missions. For Ahdut Ha‘avoda and then for MAPAI, this whole arena would come to be seen as a sideshow.

As a result, though they were the culmination of years of debate within the Zionist labor movement in Palestine, the resolutions adopted at the Histadrut's third congress had virtually no immediate impact. Given their limited scope, the difficult economic situation, and the preoccupation of the Histadrut leadership with other problems, no new resources were devoted to organizing Arab workers. As I noted earlier, Ittihad al-‘Ummal was allowed to fade out of existence in the half year that followed the third congress, while the General Workers' Club in Haifa closed its doors sometime in 1928 or 1929. There is evidence of only one strike by Arab workers in which the Histadrut was involved in this period, and it is symptomatic that this was a spontaneous walkout which the Histadrut supported only after it erupted.^[64] Po‘alei Tziyon Smol maintained its links with George Nassar's circle in Jaffa, but this remained a very small and isolated group which exercised no influence on the growing Arab working class in that city. Other relationships which that party had sought to develop with groups of Arab workers failed to survive, much less thrive.^[65]

During 1928 and into 1929 there was sporadic talk of reviving Ittihad al-‘Ummal, reopening the Haifa club, and devoting greater attention and resources to organizing Arab workers. Several factors helped keep the issue alive, including explicitly economic considerations. In May 1929 David Hacohen, a leading figure in the Histadrut's economic enterprises, warned the secretariat that the government's Public Works Department was inclined to hire cheap contracted Arab labor, which would make it impossible for Histadrut enterprises to win contracts which provided jobs for Jewish workers at good wages. He proposed that the Histadrut begin organizing Arab workers, in order to show the Public Works Department that “the path of pushing down wages for Arabs is not strewn with roses.” While there was no immediate follow-up on Hacohen's proposal, the idea of securing more jobs for Jews by raising Arab wages through labor organizing would continue to influence Histadrut policy-making in this arena for many years.^[66]

Histadrut officials also saw a need to counter the communists' ongoing efforts to organize Arab workers in Haifa, as well as to refute continuing criticism from the Zionist left.^[67] At the same time, individual Arab workers were still approaching the Histadrut and seeking admission, suggesting that some framework was needed within which such people could be absorbed. There was also an international dimension which helped prevent the Histadrut from abandoning this sphere of activity altogether. The Histadrut and the parties of the labor-Zionist movement in Palestine were active participants in the international trade union and social-democratic movements, and they very much wanted to secure those movements' support for the Zionist cause. Many European leftists, Jews and non-Jews alike, were critical of labor Zionism's refusal to admit Arabs to the Histadrut and its policy of Hebrew labor, as well as its rejection of immediate independence for Palestine. To counter such criticism and bolster labor Zionism's internationalist credentials, it helped to be able to point to ongoing efforts to establish contact, and develop friendly relations, with the Arab working class in Palestine. This led at least some Histadrut leaders to feel that continued activity in this sphere was worthwhile.

Although Histadrut officials were somewhat skeptical about Philip Hassun's capabilities and suspicious of his links with Po‘alei Tziyon Smol leaders, it was clear that he was the only candidate available to take this work on. Hassun had repeatedly proven his loyalty to the Histadrut and had sacrificed much on its behalf, including his tailoring business and the financial well-being of his family, and he had considerable experience in this field. In the spring of 1929 the Histadrut secretariat resolved to look seriously for funds, from the Zionist Executive and other sources, with which to clear up Hassun's debts and resume the Histadrut's work among Arabs. This decision was not, however, followed by action, in large part because it came during a period when Histadrut and Yishuv leaders were increasingly preoccupied by rising tensions between Arabs and Jews, rooted in growing Arab popular resentment of perceived Zionist encroachment and fueled by an increasingly politicized dispute over rights of access and worship at the Western Wall/Temple Mount complex (al-Haram al-Sharif) in Jerusalem.

In August 1929 these tensions suddenly exploded into a week of countrywide violence on an unprecedented scale: 133 Jews lost their lives at the hands of Arab mobs, 116 Arabs were killed (mostly by British police and soldiers), and many hundreds were wounded. The heavy loss of life and the ferocity of the violence, after years of relative calm, came as a tremendous shock to the Yishuv and the Zionist movement and produced a variety of responses. The violence led Ben-Gurion to reevaluate his attitude toward Palestinian Arab nationalism, which he had hitherto dismissed as a fraud on the part of the effendis. Displaying his characteristic tactical flexibility, Ben-Gurion now began to tell his colleagues that it was a mistake to ignore or downplay the depth and strength of Arab nationalist sentiment in Palestine. Zionism had to come to some agreement with the Arab national movement, indeed with the very effendis he had denounced for much of the previous decade as bloodsucking exploiters with whom the Jewish workers had nothing in common and could never compromise.

This was something of a departure from labor Zionism's traditional denial of the authenticity of Arab nationalist sentiment, though not (as future events would show) an irreversible one. However, this shift also implied abandonment of the notion, advanced by Ben-Gurion and his comrades earlier in the decade, that the Arab working class was the Zionist project's natural (if not only) ally in the Arab community, and hence the loss of a prime ideological and strategic rationale for investing resources in organizing Arab workers under the Histadrut's tutelage. As a result, while the 1930s were to witness the intensification of labor-Zionist efforts to organize Arab workers, these would be motivated by different goals, take place within a different organizational framework, and be informed by a different ethos than had been the case during the previous decade.

Notes