3. The Railway Workers of Palestine (I): The Struggle for Arab-Jewish Unity, 1919–1925

A visitor to Israel, or to the West Bank and Gaza, might be forgiven for completely failing to notice the existence of a railway system. Some of the oldest and historically most important lines today operate on a minimal schedule and carry few passengers and little freight, while others no longer function at all. In truth, motorized road transport won its lengthy struggle with the railroad as the preferred means of moving goods and people several decades ago. Despite sporadic discussion in Israel of reviving the existing rail system and even of building new lines, the railways are moribund and seem likely to continue to decline for lack of investment and interest.

Yet the railways of Palestine have a long and memorable history. Proposals to construct a railroad in Palestine, a relatively underdeveloped region of the Ottoman empire but one which was already attracting the special interest of Europeans, were put forward as early as the 1850s. But it was only in 1888 that Yosef Navon (1858–1934), a wealthy Jewish notable from Jerusalem, acquired from the government of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid a concession to build and operate a railway line between Jaffa, Palestine's largest town and main port, and Jerusalem high up in the hill country. Navon Bey then sold the concession to a new company formed in France to raise the necessary capital and implement the project. The Jaffa-Jerusalem railroad was completed in the summer of 1892, and in the years that followed it helped stimulate the economic growth of Palestine by facilitating the export of citrus and encouraging the tourist trade.^[1]

The Ottoman government also developed Palestine's railway system on its own, in connection with the Hijaz Railway. That project, implemented in 1900–1908 with German technical and financial support, was intended to strengthen Ottoman control of the Hijaz and its holy cities and facilitate the annual pilgrimage by linking Damascus with Mecca, but the line reached only as far south as Medina. In 1905 a branch line was completed which linked the Hijaz Railway in southern Syria with Haifa on the Mediterranean, via Dara‘a, Samakh (at the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee), Beisan, and ‘Afula, and a spur connecting Haifa with Acre to the north was opened in 1913.

The First World War witnessed the rapid extension of Palestine's railway system, largely for military purposes. With German technical assistance and local conscript labor, mainly Arab peasants but also Jewish artisans and others, the Ottomans built narrow-gauge rail lines through the central hill country of Palestine, connecting the Haifa-Samakh line at ‘Afula with Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm, ultimately reaching the town of Lydda, on the coastal plain southeast of Jaffa. Military railroads also extended on to Gaza and across the Sinai, to facilitate an Ottoman invasion of Egypt. The British forces which conquered Palestine from the Ottomans contributed several lines of their own which were abandoned once their military usefulness had ended, but the British also built a permanent new line along the Mediterranean coast of Sinai and Palestine, running from al-Qantara on the Suez Canal (where it connected with the Egyptian railway system) to Haifa, via Gaza and Lydda. This latter town, which was also on the Jaffa-Jerusalem line, thus became the country's main rail junction.

After the war's end, control of the country's railways—as well as of the Sinai and Hijaz railways—was transferred to the Palestine Railways, Telegraph and Telephone, an agency of the mandatory government of Palestine. The new management shut down many of the little-used lines, but over the years it also upgraded several existing lines to standard gauge and constructed some new ones. Perhaps the most important of these was the extension in 1942 of the al-Qantara–Haifa coastal line northward to Beirut and Tripoli in Lebanon, which Allied forces had just conquered from the forces of Vichy France. By the end of the British mandate period there were 290 miles of railroad in Palestine, which in 1946–47 carried 1.9 million tons of freight and some 900,000 passengers.^[2]

Throughout the mandate period, the Palestine Railways was one of the largest employers of wage labor in the country. The size of its workforce fluctuated, but at its wartime height in 1943 there were nearly 7,800 railway workers in Palestine. Most of these were unskilled Arab peasants hired to build and maintain roadbed and track, but a substantial minority—more than 1,200 in 1943—were relatively skilled and permanent industrial workers concentrated in the railway workshops on the northern outskirts of Haifa, while many others worked elsewhere in Palestine operating and maintaining railroad equipment, stations, and depots.^[3]

The Early Railway Workforce

We know very little about the railway workers in Palestine before or during the First World War. At least initially, Europeans probably held a substantial number of the more highly-skilled jobs on both the Jaffa-Jerusalem route and on the Hijaz Railway's lines in Palestine, as well as at railroad repair and maintenance facilities. A small number of Jews, whether long-time residents or recent arrivals, were also employed on the railroads of Palestine, especially during the war when railway employment seemed a relatively safe and easy way of performing obligatory military service. But the majority of the permanent workforce certainly consisted of Muslim and Christian Arabs, along with some Turks in supervisory and clerical positions and some members of indigenous but non-Arab minority groups like the Armenians. Not all the Arab railway workers originated from within the territory that would later become Palestine: before the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Palestine was a purely geographic term and there was considerable labor migration across Ottoman provincial and district boundaries. So, for example, the extension of the Hijaz Railway to Haifa in 1905 and the establishment in that town of its operational offices and other installations led to the settlement of some Syrian Muslim railway workers in the Wadi Salib neighborhood of Haifa. As we will see, several of the railway workers who in the mid-1920s would emerge as the founders of the Palestinian Arab trade union movement were Syrian-born veterans of the Hijaz Railway.^[4]

Considerably more information is available about the railway workforce in the period immediately after the end of the war, though major gaps remain. In these years the railways were transferred from military to civilian control, and both skilled and unskilled workers were needed to replace the departing soldiers who had helped operate the system during the war. A small number of non-Jewish Europeans were kept on or hired to fill skilled and supervisory positions; not a few of the foremen at the workshops, for example, were Greeks, possibly from the large Greek community settled in Egypt, while senior officials were all British. But the great bulk of the railway workforce, then and through the mandate period, continued to consist of Arabs, mainly from Palestine itself but also from Syria and Egypt, where there were more workers with experience in railroad work. A considerable portion of the railroad's unskilled manual labor was initially performed by Egyptians, large numbers of whom had been conscripted by the British and brought to Palestine for labor service.

A rudimentary mutual aid society seems to have emerged among the Arab railway workers as early as 1920, when a small group in Haifa began collecting funds with which to assist sick workers and the families of deceased workers. By 1923 this seems to have evolved into a somewhat more organized benevolent society for railway workers, formally registered with the government. As we will see, among those most actively involved in this society were a number of skilled workers and foremen who in 1925 would help organize the first purely Arab labor union in Palestine. Until then, however, they seem to have kept largely to themselves, refraining from any kind of overt trade union activity and from seeking any contact with Jewish railway workers. They will therefore not resurface in this narrative until we come to the events of 1925.^[5]

From 1919 on, the railway workforce also included a small but growing number of Jews who had recently arrived in Palestine. Some were demobilized soldiers who had served with the British forces, but most were immigrants who came to Palestine as part of the Third Aliya (1918–23). They were initially channeled into railroad jobs by the Zionist Commission, sent to Palestine by the Zionist Organization in April 1918 to help restore the Yishuv, which had been impoverished and partially dispersed by the war, and to prepare the way for the large-scale Jewish immigration which the Balfour Declaration had finally made possible. Jews were also recruited for railroad work through the employment offices run by the two rival labor-Zionist parties, Ahdut Ha‘avoda and Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir. Later these modes of recruitment were supplemented by personal connections, as newly hired Jewish supervisors, foremen, and workers got other Jews taken on.^[6]

For the Zionist Commission and the labor-Zionist parties, placing the new immigrants in jobs on the railroads was of course a way of securing their individual livelihoods, since jobs were in short supply. As I discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, however, it was also part of the broader campaign for the conquest of labor and the achievement of Hebrew labor. The creation of a strong cadre of Jewish railway workers was seen as a means of transforming those individuals into proletarians and of demonstrating that in Palestine Jews could successfully perform even the most strenuous kinds of physical labor. But it was also regarded as a way of securing for the Jewish working class a foothold in this important sector of Palestine's economy. It is not surprising, then, that labor-Zionist leaders regarded the main task of the Railway Workers' Association (Agudat Po‘alei Harakevet, RWA) established by the Jewish railway workers in 1919 to be the conquest of labor on the railways.^[7] The usual purpose of trade unionism, the improvement of workers' wages and working conditions, was not deemed unimportant, but in accordance with the ideology of labor Zionism it was considered to be secondary to broader national interests, a means to an end. By securing higher wages and better conditions for their members, unions would serve to strengthen Hebrew labor and further the goals of the Zionist project in Palestine. As we will see, however, not all the Jewish railway workers would always share this conception.

The first wave of Jewish immigrants channeled into work on the railroad did not last long. Looking back on this period from the vantage point of January 1921, the union leadership commented that the Zionist officials in charge of employment apparently intended mainly to

provide work for the newly arrived young men, who had been looking in vain for jobs. They wanted to get rid of them, and so they sent them to the railroad. But in truth, this was not the human material needed to accomplish this great conquest of labor, and those who sent them did not take an interest in creating for these young people the conditions which would facilitate their entry into this work. And so from all those who were hired to work on the railroad, a few hundred in number, only a few remained, those who—solely because of their aspiration to win for Jews a place in railroad work—possessed enough patience to endure and suffer through the difficult conditions.^[8]

This problem was to plague the labor-Zionist leadership throughout the mandate period. Few Jews were willing to endure for long the low wages, long hours, harsh conditions, and abusive treatment characteristic of railway work in Palestine, and whenever better jobs were available elsewhere they left. The leadership was thus continually confronted with a conflict between the material interests of individual workers and the strategic goal of strengthening Hebrew labor in this vital enterprise. Only by significantly improving wages and working conditions could they hope to keep a significant number of Jews working as railwaymen. But the Jewish workers could only win such improvements by cooperating with the Arab railway workers who constituted the great majority of the railroad workforce. Yet the gains which such cooperation might achieve were likely to strengthen the position of the Arab workers and make the achievement of Hebrew labor even more difficult.

This was a contradiction which labor Zionism never successfully resolved. In an effort to circumvent the problem, the Zionist Executive lobbied the British authorities to dispense with the many Egyptians who were employed by the Palestine Railways and on public works projects and replace them with Jews, or if not with Jews at least with local Arabs. It was hoped that this measure might open up more jobs for Jews; at worst it would mean that Palestinian Arabs would replace the Egyptians, whose wages were extremely low. British government and army officials initially resisted this demand, since replacing Egyptians with Jews or even with Palestinian Arabs would mean substantially higher wage bills, but by 1922 the government of Palestine was committed to phasing out Egyptian labor. This did not, however, open up any significant number of new jobs for Jews, since few Jews were interested in, or capable of, doing the kinds of work the Egyptians had done.^[9]

The Arab and Jewish Railway Workers: First Contacts

It was from the ranks of those few Jews who remained in railway work for more than a few weeks or months that the organizers of the first Jewish railwaymen's union were drawn. The RWA, whose first congress was held in Jaffa in November–December 1919—a year before the founding congress of the Histadrut—got off to a rocky start. In part this was a result of the instability caused by high turnover in membership as new immigrants entered and then quickly quit the railway workforce, but the fledging organization was also weakened by struggles for control waged by the various parties. In 1919–21 the Socialist Workers' Party, still straddling the boundary between Zionism and Bolshevism, found considerable support among the Jewish railway workers, which led to conflict with Ahdut Ha‘avoda. There were also conflicts between the union's central committee, elected by the workers themselves, and the official appointed by the Zionist Commission to supervise the union and get more Jews hired as railway workers, in keeping with the campaign for the conquest of labor in this sector. In its early years the union was financially dependent on the Zionist Commission, which supplemented the wages of Jewish railway workers and gave the union money with which to provide them with such services as workers' kitchens (to compensate for the inadequate nutrition their meager wages allowed them), classes in Hebrew and English (the latter so that they could upgrade their technical skills and qualify for better jobs), and books and magazines.

Even after factional infighting diminished and the union's leadership managed to convince the Zionist Commission to remove the supervisor it had appointed, the organization remained weak. Contact with its branches, especially those in distant stations such as al-Qantara at the far end of the Sinai line, was irregular, and the union's main preoccupation seems to have been directing new immigrants to job opportunities on the railroad. A memorandum setting forth the grievances and demands of the Jewish railwaymen was drawn up and sent to the newly arrived High Commissioner, who headed the mandatory government of Palestine, but there was no response.^[10]

Even at this early stage, the question arose of how the Jewish railway workers should relate to their Arab coworkers. On the one hand, it was obvious to labor-Zionist leaders that the Jewish railway workers—a few hundred out of a workforce of several thousand—could not hope, however well organized they may be, to improve their lot without the cooperation of their unorganized Arab fellow workers, and that only by achieving such improvements could the way be opened to strengthening Hebrew labor on the railroad. At the same time, there was considerable anxiety about the possible consequences of organizing Arab workers and the extent to which these might hinder achievement of Zionist goals. As I discussed in Chapter 2, this issue surfaced at one of the very first meetings of the Histadrut's executive committee, on December 30, 1920, only a few weeks after the organization's founding congress. While some Histadrut leaders at the meeting argued that the Jewish workers must help their Arab coworkers organize themselves, they also expressed fears about the potential implications of such assistance for the Zionist project. It was also well understood, even at this early stage, that organizing Arab workers might conflict with the goal of achieving Hebrew labor on the railroad. At the same time, many felt that the Histadrut could not remain uninvolved. In part this was for political reasons: if the Histadrut did not organize the Arab workers, anti-Zionist leftists or Arab nationalists might, with potentially dangerous consequences. But it should also be said that many of the labor Zionists took their internationalist and socialist principles seriously and felt a moral obligation to help those they perceived as their less class-conscious and unorganized Arab brothers. This obligation could often take the form of paternalism, and ultimately it cannot be separated from the broader issue of the Zionist project in Palestine and its implications for the country's Arab majority. It would nonetheless be a mistake to lose sight of the subjective moral impulse involved, and of the humanitarian and socialist terms in which many left Zionists understood what they were doing.

In the end, as we have seen, the Histadrut executive committee decided to procrastinate: it instructed its representatives to the Jewish railway workers' union congress to affirm the principle of Arab-Jewish solidarity but avoid any practical decisions pending further clarification of the issue.^[11] As a result the thirty or so delegates to the RWA's third congress, representing some 600 Jewish railway workers, devoted little or no attention to the question of relations with their Arab coworkers. Apart from deciding that the RWA would join the new Histadrut as a unit, their discussions focused on how to get more Jews hired and how to improve the lot of those already employed on the railroad. As a result, in the months that followed the Histadrut's interventions with the mandatory government were exclusively on behalf of the Jewish railwaymen. In this period and through much of the 1920s, it was generally Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi who served as the Histadrut official with primary responsibility for overseeing the railway workers and representing them in contacts with Palestine Railways management and government officials. His mediation was necessary because both railway and government officials refused to grant the RWA official recognition or deal directly with it as the workers' bargaining agent.^[12]

However, the question of relations with Arab workers soon surfaced again, and this time as a much more pressing issue. In the summer of 1921 Arab railway workers in Haifa, to which the main maintenance and repair workshops of the Palestine Railways were gradually being transferred from Lydda, along with many Jewish and Arab skilled workers, began approaching their unionized Jewish coworkers about the possibility of cooperation. That the Haifa workshops were the scene of these initial contacts was no coincidence. At the time these shops constituted the largest single concentration of industrial wage labor in Palestine, employing side by side hundreds of Arab, Jewish, and other workers, skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled. In this hothouse atmosphere numerous ideas, political tendencies, and organizations contended for the workers' allegiance.

Bulus Farah, who came to work in the Haifa railway workshops in 1925 as a fifteen-year-old apprentice and would later become a leader of the communist and labor movements in Palestine, has provided a vivid description of this unique environment:

The railway workshops were a mixture of every nationality, but the Arab and Jewish workers were the overwhelming majority. A kind of mutual understanding prevailed among them, despite the differences in language, customs, traditions, and level of civilization. The majority of the Jewish workers had come from eastern Europe, mostly from Poland, and they would try to learn Arabic from their colleagues the Arab workers. The common language among them was Arabic. There was also a scattering of European workers, some of whom had participated in labor or socialist movements. And while Zionism interfered directly in the affairs of the Jewish workers, through its agents, there also came a response to this interference from leftist elements among the Jewish workers, regardless of whether these leftists were Bolsheviks or social-democrats who inclined toward the Second International. I would notice that violent arguments and discussions would go on between the left generally and the partisans of the Histadrut, who supported the Second International. These arguments did not take place in a vacuum, they were not about this or that abstract theory; for the Jewish right and left the key question was their attitude toward the Zionist movement, British imperialism, the Arab national movement, the communist revolution in Soviet Russia, the revolutionary line on the workers, socialism, imperialism.…The Jewish workers regarded their Arab coworkers with considerable respect, for they understood that the Arab workers possessed a great deal of professional skill, even if they were not on the level of the Jewish workers in terms of culture.^[13]

Farah's portrait of relations between Arabs and Jews in the Haifa workshops is too rosy, but it does seem that a unique atmosphere prevailed in this workplace. That atmosphere helped make possible a matrix of interactions between Arab and Jewish workers that existed nowhere else in Palestine. Just as important, however, was the emergence in the 1920s of a new stratum of relatively skilled and educated Arab workers receptive to trade unionism. Some of them were no doubt influenced by the activities of the Jewish union and conversations with Jewish unionists. But others may have gained awareness of labor organization in their countries of origin (e.g., those from Syria or Egypt) or through contacts with non-Jewish European railway workers, mainly Greeks and Italians, who had their own mutual aid societies.

In the summer and autumn of 1921 a series of meetings was held at the homes of Arab railway workers at which the Arabs expressed to Jewish union leaders their interest in participating in a joint union of all railway workers in Palestine, and even in joining the Histadrut, which offered its members a variety of services such as health care, loan funds, and consumer cooperatives. These initiatives induced considerable anxiety and confusion among the leaders of the RWA, who at first sought to dampen Arab interest by avoiding their questions and exaggerating the burdens of union membership. When the Arabs persisted and pressed for an unequivocal response, the RWA again turned to the Histadrut for guidance.^[14] As I discussed in Chapter 2, the issue of relations between Arab and Jewish workers in mixed workplaces, usually referred to as the problem of “joint organization” (irgun meshutaf), thus forced its way onto the agenda of the Histadrut leadership late in 1921 and became the subject of controversy and debate among the labor-Zionist parties. In January 1922, spurred on by the need to provide guidance for the railway workers, the Histadrut council endorsed Ben-Gurion's proposal that among the railway workers joint organization would entail “organization of the workers on the basis of national sections” and “preservation of the Jewish Railway Workers' Association as part of the Histadrut.”^[15] Any Arab railway workers who joined the RWA would thus be consigned to a separate section, while the Jewish workers and their organization would remain tightly linked to the Histadrut.

This conception of joint organization came under fire from left forces in the Histadrut and among the Jewish railway workers, countrywide but especially among those employed at the Haifa workshops, where both Po‘alei Tziyon Smol and the communists had substantial support. In part this was due to the composition of the railway workforce, and particularly the workshop workers. Most Jewish railway workers were recent arrivals in Palestine, without deep roots in the country or strong links with the institutions of the labor-Zionist movement. At the same time, many had been profoundly affected by the revolutionary upheavals in the Europe they had just left. Impoverished and exploited but also highly politicized, many of them came to feel that they had little hope of improving conditions except through joint struggle with their Arab coworkers. The emphasis which Po‘alei Tziyon Smol and communist activists and propagandists placed on class struggle and on internationalism, on unifying and mobilizing Jewish and Arab railway workers to fight for higher wages and better conditions, had considerable appeal for them. In contrast, the Histadrut leadership's constant exhortations to self-sacrifice and its insistence that the class struggle must be subordinated to the “national” tasks of immigration and settlement soon wore thin. Leftist activists accused the Histadrut of downplaying or even suppressing workers' struggles in order to accommodate the bourgeois leadership of the Zionist movement, and its preference for building up a separate labor economy—a policy leftists derided as “the socialism of poverty”—could seem misguided, even delusional, in light of the acute deprivation experienced by significant sections of the urban industrial working class in a period of low wages, widespread unemployment, and even hunger.

The circumstances of the Jewish railway workers (and again, particularly the workshop workers) also differed significantly from those of most other Histadrut members. The Histadrut included not only urban wage workers but also numerous people who, although officially classified as workers, were in fact self-employed, whether individually or collectively. These included members of kibbutzim and moshavim, members of the Gdud Ha‘avoda (“Labor Brigade”) who contracted themselves out collectively on public works projects, members of producers' and consumers' cooperatives, and so forth. The nonworking spouses of Histadrut members could also join and vote in elections. The railway workers were by contrast proletarians in the classic sense, urban wage workers, while the workshop workers in particular lived and worked in a large, ethnically mixed seaport city which was on its way to becoming Palestine's major industrial center. While other Histadrut members might be in conflict with their relatively small-scale Jewish employers, or might be suffering because of general economic conditions, for the railwaymen it was clearly the colonial state—the mandatory government and its agency, the Palestine Railways—which was responsible for what they experienced as starvation wages and subhuman working conditions. They therefore tended to be much more receptive to the militant message of political forces to the left of Ahdut Ha‘avoda than was the bulk of the Histadrut's membership.

The railway workers also developed a strong tradition of independence. Many of them, including even some who agreed politically with Ahdut Ha‘avoda, resented what they perceived as the domineering behavior and centralizing policies of the Histadrut leadership. Much of the latter consisted of veterans of the prewar Second Aliya who, though only in their mid-thirties, could now seem quite old and distant from the ethos of the younger and more radical new arrivals who made up most of the Jewish component of the railroad workforce. In the face of the Histadrut's efforts to establish its control over the trade unions, the railwaymen insisted on their organization's autonomy. At the same time, the railway workers had relatively weak ties with the rest of the Zionist labor movement. To the annoyance of the Histadrut leadership, many of them were remiss about paying their Histadrut dues, and the RWA had its own separate strike and mutual aid funds. By 1922–23 officials of the Ahdut Ha‘avoda–controlled Haifa Workers' Council, the local organ of the Histadrut, had come to regard the Haifa branch of the union as a hotbed of opposition because it acted largely on its own and seemed to provide fertile ground for radicalism. However, it should also be noted that the railway workers' union was in fact dependent on the financial support of the Histadrut, which paid the salary of its full-time secretary and kept a close watch on its affairs. This enabled the Histadrut leadership to apply pressure on the union and ultimately rein it in.^[16]

Worker Militancy and Arab-Jewish Relations

The growing strength of the left among the Jewish railway workers ensured that there would be extensive debate on the question of joint organization when the RWA's fourth congress convened in Haifa in February 1922, a month or so after the Histadrut council had endorsed the policy of national sections. All the delegates agreed on the urgent necessity of joint organization with the Arab workers, which increasingly looked like the only solution to the problems faced by the Jewish railwaymen, but a substantial minority rejected the Histadrut's directives on the form it should take. The congress, dominated by supporters of Ahdut Ha‘avoda and Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir, ultimately endorsed the Histadrut's decision to establish national sections, with the Jewish section to remain part of the Histadrut, but it added a proviso that until there were enough Arab members to create a separate Arab section the RWA would accept Arabs as full members. This already marked a departure from Histadrut policy and signaled the growing influence of the left.^[17]

In the months that followed, some Arab workers in Haifa began to work closely with the union, renamed the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers (URPTW) to reflect its broader membership, although none of them actually joined as full dues-paying members. In addition to the union's own efforts to reach out to Arab workers—in which Po‘alei Tziyon Smol members in Haifa took the initiative—the impetus for growing Arab involvement seems to have been the wave of layoffs which swept the railroad in 1922 and exacerbated the resentment of workers already suffering from poor wages and working conditions. These layoffs, part of a government-wide effort to reduce expenditures by shrinking its workforce, hit the railway workers particularly hard, in part because the great majority of railway employees were officially classified as daily paid staff and therefore enjoyed no security of employment or right to compensation for dismissal. This was also a period of high unemployment, which meant that the laid-off workers had poor prospects for finding other jobs.

For the first time, the union and the Histadrut tried to intervene with management and the government on behalf of the Arab as well as the Jewish workers who had lost their jobs. Although only some of the dismissed workers were ultimately rehired, the union's efforts on their behalf enhanced its standing among Arab workers. The union also complained about harassment and persecution of workers by supervisory personnel, some of them Jewish.^[18] By the autumn of 1922 there was widespread support among both Jewish and Arab workers for strike action to resist the layoffs and harassment, but the Histadrut executive committee, with which the union leadership consulted closely and to whose decisions it deferred, rejected the idea. In part this was because Ben-Tzvi and his colleagues were not convinced that the Arab workers would actually join a strike, but larger political considerations were also involved. “Let us suppose,” Ben-Tzvi told a meeting of the Histadrut executive committee,

that they succeed, that a miracle occurs and not a single Arab accepts a bribe to betray the workers, that they all strike. Let us say that we succeed in everything—then what will we demand? That Moshlin [a Jewish railway official for whose transfer to Palestine the Histadrut had fought but who was now disliked by the workers] be fired! And in his place will come an Arab or an Englishman. A few days ago the [Jewish] linemen demanded the hiring of a Jewish official, and now they will strike to demand the firing of a Jewish official? All the decisions about a strike are worthless, they cannot be considered. From every standpoint the thing is a total loss.

Ben-Tzvi told the union leaders, who were convinced that there was strong support for a strike and that they could paralyze the railways, to calm the workers down.^[19]

Nonetheless, 1923 witnessed the beginning of a new phase of organizational and political activity among the railwaymen. Unrest grew as management intensified its drive to cut costs. Workers (especially union activists) were fired without notice or severance pay, the maximum allowable workday was increased to sixteen hours, the workers' old employment contracts were canceled and no new ones were issued, the right of workers to choose their weekly day of rest in accordance with their religion was revoked, and foremen and managers continued to fine, abuse, and harass workers under their control. Management ignored repeated requests by the union to discuss these and other long-standing grievances, insisting that it did not recognize the union as bargaining agent for the workers. When in January 1923 a group of dismissed Arab and Jewish workers formally authorized two Jews, presumably URPTW leaders, to appeal to management for severance pay, the General Manager of the Palestine Railways, R. B. W. Holmes, responded with sarcasm:

As far as I know no offer was made to you by this Railway to induce you to leave your homes in Europe and seek employment in Palestine.…As presumably the workers you represent came to Palestine as emigrants [sic] under the aegis of the Zionist Commission presumably that body will look after you until such time as fresh employment can be found for you and you are, therefore, in a better position than your brother workers whose habitation has always been Palestine and who have no Society to look after their welfare. It is regretted that it is quite impossible to consider the payment of gratuities [severance pay] to daily paid staff who have only served the Railway for a short period.^[20]

This dismissive letter, quite typical of management's attitude toward its employees, only served to heighten their anger, which was manifested at large meetings of railway workers organized by the union in various parts of the country. As the months passed and the URPTW came to be seen to be the only force trying to resist management, increasing numbers of Arab workers participated in protest meetings sponsored by the Jewish-led union and signed its petitions, while a few Arabs began working closely with the union.^[21] The union now wished to initiate more vigorous and systematic efforts to develop relations with Arab workers. Very few Jewish railway workers knew any Arabic, however, so the union turned to the Histadrut for help in finding someone with the requisite linguistic skills who could help it make contact with, and ultimately recruit, some of the more educated and politically conscious Arab railwaymen. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the union finally secured the assistance of Avraham Khalfon, a young Jew from a family long established in Palestine who had grown up in Haifa, had extensive contacts with Arabs in this mixed city, and now began to devote several hours a week to the union's drive to recruit Arab workers.

As a way of establishing relations, Jewish railway workers would invite Arab coworkers to the union club, where Khalfon could meet them and talk to them about the union. These informal discussions might continue at a local Arab coffeehouse. One of the first Arabs with whom contact was made in this way was Ibrahim al-Asmar, a foreman in the freight car (“wagonage”) department. Al-Asmar eventually brought along another foreman, ‘Ali al-Batal, a boilermaker by trade. The willingness of these men to associate with Jewish unionists and to advocate unionism themselves, despite reprimands and threats by management, signaled to the rank and file Arab workers that involvement with the union was relatively safe, and gradually significant numbers began to frequent the club. There the union began to offer lectures on trade unionism and talks by representatives of the various socialist-Zionist parties, translated into Arabic, as well as language lessons in Hebrew and Arabic so that the workers could communicate more easily. The union also sponsored social events to bring the workers together and cultural programs that appealed to the tastes of the Arab workers.^[22]

The increasing involvement of Arab workers in the union and the upsurge of militancy among the railway workers in general, as well as widespread disappointment with the Histadrut, greatly strengthened the forces to the left of Ahdut Ha‘avoda—the communists and Po‘alei Tziyon Smol—though the latter was still more of a loose-knit political tendency than a unified and disciplined party. As the left gained ground among the Jewish railway workers and as even some Ahdut Ha‘avoda partisans among the railwaymen began to follow the left's lead, the Histadrut leadership grew increasingly nervous. In June 1923 Ben-Tzvi relayed rumors that the communists were trying to convince the railway workers to pull their union out of the Histadrut, and there were reports that the Arabs who were considering joining the union were also expressing opposition to affiliation with the Histadrut. In July Ben-Tzvi and Ben-Gurion intervened personally to delete a strike threat contained in the Arabic version of a letter of protest drawn up by railway workers in the Jaffa-Lydda area.^[23] The Histadrut leadership's concern about losing control of the railway workers' union was magnified by its perception that, despite its overwhelming majority at the recent Histadrut congress, it was facing a growing threat on its left flank. For the growing strength of the left opposition among the railway workers was very much part of a general increase in support for the left among Jewish urban workers. Both the communists and left-wing Zionists were gaining ground in several of the large urban trade unions, and by organizing around the issue of unemployment, particularly acute as the Yishuv felt the effects of the economic crisis most strongly in 1923–24, they attracted support among the numerous new immigrants who earned starvation wages or could not find jobs.^[24]

The confrontation between the various forces contending for the allegiance of the railway workers came to a head at the URPTW's fifth congress, held in Haifa in September 1923. The outgoing central committee was at the end of its tether, at a loss to find some way to reverse the deterioration in the situation of the Jewish railway workers and their union, and it called on the congress to resolve basic questions of organization, revitalize the union, and set strategy for the future. Twenty-one Jewish delegates represented 200–250 unionized Jewish railway workers at the congress. Of these, about 130 worked in Haifa, about 50 in Jerusalem, and the rest in Jaffa and Lydda, at smaller stations or as itinerant linemen. The total railway workforce at this time was about 2,000. The sharp drop in the number of Jewish railwaymen since 1920–21 probably strengthened the left forces in the union, because it reinforced their argument that the only way out of the desperate situation the Jewish railwaymen found themselves in was Jewish-Arab solidarity. For the first time, two Arabs—Ibrahim al-Asmar and ‘Ali al-Batal—also attended the congress, as observers. Although only five Arabs had actually joined the Haifa branch of the union, these two delegates represented a much larger number of Arab workers in Haifa who were now in close contact with the union. Several top leaders of the Histadrut and of the various parties active in the Jewish labor movement, among them Ben-Tzvi, attended and participated in the debates, a reflection of the importance they attached to this union, its political orientation, and its relations with Arab workers.

The congress focused on the union's relations with the Arab railway workers and with the Histadrut. Left-wing delegates criticized the Histadrut's policy of national sections as unfeasible and a barrier to the successful organization of Arab workers. A demand by the communists to rescind the decision of the fourth congress on national sections was tabled, however, and the congress ultimately adopted a resolution calling for intensified organizational work among the Arabs without specifying the exact form it should take. The resolution was a partial victory for the left, given that it was passed in the face of appeals by Ben-Tzvi and others that the union move cautiously on this question and abide by Histadrut guidelines. On the question of relations with the Histadrut, there was much criticism of that organization's alleged failure to support the union, and especially its efforts to develop relations with Arabs. Some delegates argued that Arab workers were reluctant to join the union because it belonged to the explicitly Zionist Histadrut. But the communists' demand for withdrawal from the Histadrut won little support. Even delegates sympathetic to Po‘alei Tziyon Smol were aware that their union was heavily dependent on the financial resources of the Histadrut and its access to the British authorities, and in any case they still hoped to reform the Histadrut from within. The congress ultimately adopted a Po‘alei Tziyon Smol resolution that reaffirmed the union's affiliation to the Histadrut as an autonomous unit, but called on the next Histadrut congress to restructure it so as to separate its cooperative from its trade union functions and establish the latter on an “international” (i.e., Jewish-Arab) basis. If the Histadrut did not implement this separation of functions the railway workers would hold a referendum to decide on disaffiliation.^[25]

All told, the results of the fifth congress amounted to a victory for the left forces in the union over Ahdut Ha‘avoda. The line of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, with its emphasis on militant trade unionism, class struggle, and Jewish-Arab solidarity, was now setting the tone. This was manifested in the union's new bylaws, which made no mention of national sections but did declare that the union was “based on class struggle.” But Ahdut Ha‘avoda was by no means powerless. The party still had many supporters among the Jewish railwaymen, some of whom also secretly served in the Hagana (“Defense”), the clandestine Jewish military organization controlled by the Histadrut (and therefore largely by Ahdut Ha‘avoda). Moreover, if the Haifa branch was a hotbed of radicalism, the Jaffa-Lydda branch tended to align itself more closely with the Histadrut leadership. The railway union was, despite its self-image as the vanguard of the radical Jewish proletariat in Palestine, still a weak organization, unrecognized by management and subject to the authority of the Histadrut executive committee, which also held the purse strings. In addition to appointing and paying the union's full-time secretary, Histadrut funding also made it possible for the union to publish its irregular journals in Hebrew and Arabic.^[26] Nonetheless, in the year that followed the fifth congress, the left forces within the union would assume effective leadership, especially in Haifa, and seek salvation in joint organization.

Struggling for Unity

In the aftermath of the fifth congress the number of Arab workers who seemed ready to join the union rose sharply. A core group of Arab trade unionists with a substantial following were now prepared to discuss joint organization quite seriously, and for the first time the prospect of a joint Arab-Jewish union loomed large. The first manifestation of this new reality, and of the contradictions it raised for those who wanted the union to be both a model of proletarian internationalism and an integral component of the Zionist movement, surfaced at the meeting of the union's council held in March 1924. Both Ben-Gurion and Ben-Tzvi were present as representatives of the Histadrut, again indicating the crucial importance the leadership attached to this union.

Six representatives of the Arab railway workers attended the council meeting, not (as at the fifth congress) as silent observers but as active participants determined to make themselves heard. One of them, Ilyas Asad, put their perspective forward bluntly in his address to the council:

I am striving to establish ties between the Jewish and Arab workers because I am certain that if we are connected we will help one another, without regard to religion or nationality. Many Arab workers do not want to join nationalist organizations because they understand their purpose and do not wish to abet a lie. They saw on the membership card [of the URPTW] the words “Federation of Jewish Workers” [i.e., the Histadrut] and they cannot understand what purpose this serves. I ask all the comrades to remove the word “Jewish,” and I am sure that if they agree there will be a strong bond between us and all the Arabs will join. I would be the first who would not want to join a nationalist labor organization. There are many Arab nationalist organizations, and we do not want to join them, and they will say we have joined a Jewish nationalist organization.…The thousands of workers who established the Histadrut have done nothing of benefit for the workers, and the reason is that inscribed on their membership cards is the word “Jewish,” and this leads to division and jealousy. If they take out this word we will unite and work together.^[27]

The other Arab delegates echoed Asad's demand that the railway union sever its ties with the Zionist Histadrut and become fully independent and international. Their perspective was thus close to that of the communists, whose activists within the railway workforce had for months been working to develop their own links with Arab workers and had been warning them about the problematic character of the union's link with the Histadrut. But it was also not too distant from that of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, which was demanding that the Histadrut at least divest itself of its Zionist functions.

Many of the Jewish delegates were not unsympathetic to the Arabs' concerns: five months earlier they had threatened to disaffiliate from the Histadrut if it did not radically restructure itself, and they understood that the Arabs regarded any hint of Zionism as an insurmountable barrier to their joining the union. An alarmed and angry Ben-Gurion responded to the arguments of the Arabs and the Jewish leftists with a forthright defense of the Ahdut Ha‘avoda perspective.

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 or 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.

Comrade Ilyas said correctly that the Arab workers do not want to join nationalist organizations whose purpose would be false to the workers' interests. And we are not asking the Arab workers to join a Jewish nationalist organization, but rather to be connected to the Histadrut. We do not want the Arab worker to alienate himself from his people and his language.…

He went on to argue that deprived of the support of the Histadrut, the URPTW would be weak and without influence.^[28]

The delegates were in the end unwilling to accede immediately to the demand for disaffiliation, and the resolutions they adopted reflected the contradictions in the union's position. On the one hand, the council asked the Histadrut to set up a consumers' cooperative and a loan fund for the railway workers, to fund a paid staff of organizers fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, to subsidize its publications, and to find jobs for workers who had been laid off. On the other hand it demanded that the Histadrut executive convene a meeting at which its trade unions would establish a separate confederation—a variant of the Po‘alei Tziyon Smol demand for the separation of functions. The council also established a special committee, consisting of members of the central committee and the Arab workers' leaders, to negotiate an agreement on joint organization.^[29] From the perspective of the Histadrut leadership, the situation in the railway workers' union seemed to be going from bad to worse. After the March 1924 council meeting the secretary of the Haifa Workers' Council, concerned over the growing strength of leftist forces in the URPTW and the union's apparent determination to admit Arab members, warned headquarters in Tel Aviv that “it will likely be necessary to split the railway workers' union.”^[30]

By the spring of 1924 as many as forty Arab workers had formally joined the union's Jaffa-Lydda branch, and the long-dormant branch in al-Qantara, which consisted mostly of Egyptian workers, had been revived. Many Arab and Jewish railway workers participated in the traditional May Day work stoppage, despite management's threat to dock their pay. But in Haifa the crucial negotiations between Jewish unionists and the leaders of the Arab workers—better educated and more politically conscious than elsewhere—dragged on inconclusively. In a letter to their Jewish coworkers, the Arabs insisted that they could not join a union “whose purpose is not just that of labor but also has other purposes which for you are more important than the interests of the railway, postal and telegraph workers.” They instead proposed the formation of a new union which would be “unconnected with any federation or other organization and whose activities, opinions, and ideas would be free from any outside influence.” The URPTW leadership rejected this proposal, and the union secretary appointed by the Histadrut (an Ahdut Ha‘avoda loyalist) privately argued that the union should stop trying to reach an agreement with the activist foremen with whom they were negotiating and instead bypass them by seeking to recruit Arab members directly. This approach, which as we will see the union would often adopt in later years, reflected Ahdut Ha‘avoda's hostility to any form of joint organization that might involve a retreat from its conception of Zionist principles.^[31]

With talks between the union and the Arab representatives at a standstill, the Jewish communists within the union apparently decided to step up pressure on the URPTW leadership to accept the Arabs' demand that the union be non-Zionist, independent, and international. Communist activists charged that by giving priority to their commitment to Zionism, the Histadrut and the union leadership were destroying any hope of Arab-Jewish class solidarity. Union leaders greatly resented these attacks, which they regarded as provocative and destructive of the union's cohesiveness, but they resisted pressure from the Histadrut leadership to purge the union of communists. Such a step would have brought the railway workers' union into line with what was going on almost everywhere else in the Histadrut, for in April 1924 the Histadrut had declared the communists to be enemies of the Jewish people and of the Jewish working class in Palestine and launched a vigorous and systematic campaign to expel them from the Histadrut, its trade unions, and the local workers' councils, and destroy their influence.^[32]

In part, the anticommunist purge was triggered by the Histadrut leadership's fear that the communists would find increasing support among hungry and desperate new immigrants as the economic crisis persisted, undermining the Zionist project when it was at its most vulnerable. The expulsion of the communists was also legitimized by the increasingly explicit and vocal anti-Zionist stance adopted by the Palestine Communist Party, which had been formally accepted as the Palestinian section of the Communist International in February 1924. The communists in Palestine, still virtually all Jews, were by this point openly calling for an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine and exhorting the Jewish workers to break with Zionism and seek a revolutionary alliance with the Arab workers and peasants. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, the PCP would that autumn play a key role in supporting and publicizing the resistance of Arab peasants near ‘Afula, in the Jezreel Valley, to dispossession by the Zionist land-purchase agency which had acquired their land from absentee Arab landlords. The PCP's stance was prompted in part by a vigorous anti-Zionist campaign launched that same year by the Soviet government and communist party, a campaign which culminated in the arrest of large numbers of socialist-Zionist activists and the suppression of their organizations, which had hitherto been tolerated. Both the Soviet campaign of vilification and repression and the PCP's total break with Zionism aided the Histadrut leadership's efforts to delegitimize the communists in Palestine, who found themselves increasingly isolated and reviled in the Yishuv.^[33]

The Histadrut leadership's campaign to purge the communists became entangled with the URPTW's effort to achieve unity with Arab workers. In May 1924, a month after the anticommunist campaign began, communist activists in the railway workers' union invited some of the Arab workers' leaders with whom the union had been negotiating to a meeting at the PCP branch in Haifa and declared that they accepted the Arabs' proposals for unity. The union's leadership would later claim that the communists had deliberately sought to give their Arab interlocutors the impression that they were speaking for the entire union. The truth of that allegation seems doubtful, since it is unlikely that the Arabs, who had been negotiating with union leaders for months, could have been so easily misled about whom they were dealing with. But it is true that Moshe Ungerfeld, a communist who served on both the union's central committee and the special committee on joint organization, was at the meeting in question, which may have imparted to it something of an official tone. Whatever the truth of the matter, the union's leadership was outraged by this apparent breach of discipline and usurpation of its authority. For organizing this unauthorized meeting with the Arab workers, seven Jewish communist railwaymen were quickly brought before a union court and expelled from the union for one year.^[34]

Nonetheless, the URPTW leadership, as always anxious to defend their union's autonomy, still steadfastly refused to take part in the Histadrut's purge of communists. However bitter their ideological conflicts with the communists and however angry they were at what they regarded as their provocations, Po‘alei Tziyon Smol leaders and activists, and many unaffiliated left-wing Zionists among the railway workers, were against wholesale expulsions without due process.^[35] Even after the expulsion of the seven communists charged with breach of discipline, the union continued to reject the right of the Haifa Workers' Council to expel from the Histadrut two communist activists who represented the URPTW, especially as one of them was also a member of the union's central committee. URPTW leaders persisted in this attitude despite heavy pressure from the Histadrut, protesting to Ben-Gurion and Ben-Tzvi that “We do not expel members for their opinions, we are a trade union and have members who belong to various parties.…We will not allow our autonomy to be reduced to nothing.”^[36]

Though they refused to submit to what they saw as the Histadrut leadership's dictates, many URPTW leaders in fact blamed the failure of negotiations with the Arabs on the Jewish communists, who (they were convinced) had poisoned the Arabs' minds against the union and the Histadrut and incited them to demand complete disaffiliation as the price of joining. Moshe Ungerfeld, a communist leader and URPTW central committee member, rejected this charge, as well as widespread pessimism among Jews concerning the prospects for organizing Arab workers.

The situation is not as bad as it has been described here, and it is not the [communist] Fraktziyya that is responsible for the present situation; the Fraktziyya is more interested than others in having Arabs join the union. It was not we who told them about the Jewish Histadrut, they themselves saw what was written on the membership cards they received, and then the question of whether they could be members of a Jewish organization arose among the very first recipients.…There is a sickness among you and you do not know how to cure it, so you look for others to blame.^[37]

A tendency to blame “outside agitators” was indeed characteristic of much labor-Zionist thinking about Arabs, serving as a convenient mechanism by which to avoid confronting real contradictions in thought and practice. The Hebrew terms often used in this regard were mesitim (“inciters”) and hasata (“incitement”). Arabs were often perceived as passive subjects susceptible both to incitement and manipulation by unscrupulous outsiders (communists, Arab “effendis,” clerics, etc.) and to enlightenment by labor Zionists who wanted to bring their less advanced Arab brothers class consciousness and authentic proletarian culture. (As one Jewish railway union leader put it, “We opened up the Arabs' minds” by explaining to them the virtues of cooperation, unity, and the class struggle.)^[38] This conception rendered it difficult to think of Arabs as rational, thinking human beings who were capable, for example, of grasping on their own the problems involved in joining a union which belonged to the explicitly Zionist Histadrut and which was committed to strengthening Hebrew labor on the railroad. Ironically, the very meeting of the union's central committee which heard the communist activist Moshe Ungerfeld denounce the tendency to blame Arab opposition on “inciters” went on, with a complete lack of self-consciousness, to call on the Histadrut to use its influence and connections to get more Jewish workers hired.

There was also an important cultural dimension to the left-Zionist perceptions of Arabs. Very few Jews in Palestine, including even those like the railway workers who were in daily contact with Arabs, took the trouble to learn Arabic, familiarize themselves with the ways of Palestine's indigenous majority, or develop personal relationships with Arabs. Yehezkel Abramov, an Ahdut Ha‘avoda loyalist who started work at the Palestine Railways in 1921 and served as the union's secretary for many years, complained that he was unable even to teach the Jewish workers to refer to Arabs by their proper names. Instead, in both private conversations and public meetings, individuals were routinely referred to, in the Yiddish which many of these recently arrived Jews still knew best, simply as “der Araber.” Despite Abramov's admonitions to “go sit with the goyim” at lunch breaks, his Jewish coworkers usually kept to themselves.^[39] These attitudes, rooted in a perception of Arabs as not only irredeemably alien but also backward and culturally, intellectually, and morally less advanced than these European Jewish immigrants, further reduced the likelihood that even those Zionists who in principle favored equality and brotherhood would be able in practice to treat their Arab coworkers with respect, confront differences openly, and eschew manipulation and dissembling.

The Histadrut leadership eventually got its way on the purge of communists. When communist activists organized a meeting of railway workers to protest the expulsion of the seven communist members, the central committee voted to suspend its one communist member.^[40] This marked the end of effective communist influence in the union's leadership. However, PCP members and sympathizers continued to be active among the rank and file railway workers, agitating and propagandizing against the union leadership and the Histadrut. As relations between the communists and the labor-Zionist movement worsened, the mutual recriminations grew more virulent and sometimes degenerated into violence. Open activity by communists now carried the risk of expulsion from the union and even dismissal from their jobs, and the communists grew weaker and more isolated among the Jewish workers. This reality, and the desire to transform their organization into a binational party, stimulated the communists to redouble their efforts to develop contacts and win support among the Arab workers on the basis of their opposition to Zionism and their championing of the Arab national cause, though with little immediate success.

Arab-Jewish Unity and the Question of Zionism

The removal of the communists from leadership positions in the railway union did not signal the eclipse of the left. On the contrary: in the second half of 1924, with the internal turmoil produced by the struggles with the communists largely over, the influence of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol increased and the union leadership devoted more attention and energy to joint organization than ever before. At its June 1924 meeting, the union's central committee decided to dissolve the ineffective special committee on joint organization which had been formed a few months earlier and take upon itself the task of organizing Arab workers. The union's leaders now gave this project serious and sustained attention: leaflets and other propaganda material were issued in Arabic, members of the central committee visited the branches to address meetings on the question, and Jewish workers were encouraged to extend and develop their contacts with their Arab colleagues, through personal conversations as well as public assemblies. All the branches established their own committees for joint organization which took responsibility for planning and implementing systematic efforts to recruit Arab workers.

What actually seems to have opened the way to unity, however, was the leadership's abandonment of the idea of restricting Arabs to a separate national section, as Ahdut Ha‘avoda and the Histadrut had long insisted, and its acceptance of the Arab demand that the union be purely unitary and territorial in structure. The Po‘alei Tziyon Smol activists who now set the tone for the union had long advocated these positions, and so negotiations between Arabs and Jews, stalled for many months, could now move forward.^[41] We have no evidence of an explicit written agreement between the Arab workers' leaders and the Jewish officials of the railway union. It is likely, though, that the two sides came to an understanding that the union would be formally declared international and that Arabs would be incorporated into its leadership on the basis of parity. The Arabs probably also secured assurances that the joint union would be non-Zionist, although subsequent events suggest that the Arabs and Jews had different understandings of what this meant. In light of those events, it also seems likely that the Arabs who joined considered their adherence to the railway workers' union to be conditional on the union's implementation of the decision of the fifth congress regarding relations with the Histadrut. That is, the union would demand the transformation of the Histadrut into a non-Zionist trade union federation based on mixed Arab-Jewish unions, and if that struggle proved unsuccessful it would secede from the Histadrut.

Some Arab railway workers' leaders opposed unity on this basis, instead insisting on acceptance of the proposals put forward in the spring for an entirely new and independent union. But they seem to have become inactive after the expulsion of the communists, leaving the field to those still willing to seek common ground with the Jews and join the union before the question of its relationship with the Histadrut was definitively resolved. Those Arab workers and foremen who had for several years devoted themselves to the mutual aid society for Arab railway workers mentioned earlier in this chapter simply continued to refrain from any association with Jews, though it is unlikely that they welcomed the apparent realization of Arab-Jewish unity.

On the basis of this tacit understanding between the Arab and Jewish unionists, an unprecedented influx of Arab workers into the union took place: by the end of November 1924 several hundred Arabs had joined the URPTW. The available figures are not entirely reliable, but it seems that at the end of 1924 the union comprised some 529 Jewish and Arab railway workers, out of a workforce of almost 2,400. Almost all the Jews employed on the railroad belonged to the union, but only 10 to 15 percent of the Arab employees. In the Jaffa-Lydda and Jerusalem branches, membership was more or less evenly divided between Arabs and Jews; in al-Qantara, nearly all the members were Egyptians; and in Haifa Jews outnumbered Arabs two to one. Whatever the precise numbers, a union which had since its inception been virtually all Jewish had now become roughly half Jewish and half Arab.^[42]

In October 1924 the union leadership, still at this point entirely Jewish, began to fulfill another part of its bargain with its new Arab comrades: as I mentioned in Chapter 2, it launched a campaign to restructure the Histadrut. In a circular to all the branches, the central committee announced that the URPTW would lead a struggle to separate the Histadrut's Zionist settlement and cooperative functions from its trade union functions, establish the latter on a purely territorial basis, and make joint organization a key priority.

Considering the present structure of the Histadrut, there is no possibility of the Arab worker organizing himself in an organization of “Hebrew workers” until the necessary changes have been made in it.…Even today a large number of Arab workers refuse to join our union as long as it is connected with the General Organization of Hebrew Workers. As long as our union did not have many Arab members who belonged to the Histadrut and were bound by all the decisions of our union, this question was not posed sharply and we did not have the right to demand changes. Now that we are confronted with the living fact of our union being truly international, it is impossible for it to be part of a General Organization of Hebrew Workers. Therefore, in order to achieve unity with the Arab workers in all branches of work, we deem it desirable that first of all the name of the Histadrut should be changed.^[43]

This circular touched off a heated debate in the Histadrut on the issue of joint organization, and on separation of functions as a way of achieving that goal. Supporters of Ahdut Ha‘avoda accused the URPTW leadership of being so blinded by the prospect of Jewish-Arab unity that it had forgotten its national (i.e., Zionist) tasks and obligations. One Ahdut Ha‘avoda loyalist offered a sociological explanation for the strength of radical forces among the Jewish railwaymen:

The worst thing about railroad work, as a result of which we have come to this proposal which undermines and endangers the foundations of our enterprise in this country, is that this occupation was almost entirely abandoned by elements bearing any pioneering, national, or social aspiration. The element which ended up here was influenced rather by those parties which have no support in the established workplaces and labor enterprises of the Jewish worker, because the pioneering tendency is a fatal potion for them.^[44]

The union leadership and its supporters tended to respond to criticism with pragmatic arguments, insisting that “without joint organization our union cannot survive” and that the idea of national sections had simply proven unworkable.^[45]

Within the union itself, the influx of Arab members led to restructuring. In November 1924 it was formally agreed that all elected union bodies would be half Arab and half Jewish, with each group choosing its own representatives, and Arabs were co-opted onto the central committee. A plan for representation at the upcoming union council was formulated which balanced the number of delegates to which each group would be entitled, with a slight majority for the Jews. The process of achieving unity was not entirely smooth, however, for the issue of Zionism soon surfaced once again. At the very first joint meeting of the central committee, one of its new Arab members, Hasanayn Fahmi, an Egyptian railway clerk, posed two questions to his Jewish colleagues. Was there, Fahmi asked, a connection between the railway workers' union and the Zionist movement, and were the Jewish members of the central committee themselves Zionists?

Fahmi's motives in asking these questions are not difficult to fathom. An Arab who joined what might be generally perceived to be a Zionist organization ran the risk of being attacked as a traitor to his people and their national cause, of allying himself with the foreigners who were seeking to take Palestine away from the Arabs and make it their own. The Arab nationalist leadership had little interest in social issues in general or the needs of the fledgling Arab working class in particular, and it would be unlikely to accept Arab participation in any organization linked to Zionism (and the Histadrut was certainly understood to be a Zionist organization) even if such participation might in some way benefit the Arabs concerned. Furthermore, for months the PCP members inside and outside the union had been warning the Arab railwaymen not to trust what the union and Histadrut leaders were saying and encouraging them to ask precisely these questions of the union leadership, in order to expose their Zionist affiliations and loyalties.

After some consultation among themselves, the Jewish central committee members responded that the union was economic in purpose and nonpolitical, with no connection with Zionism; anyone who wanted to introduce politics would be expelled. To Fahmi's second question they replied: “Just as we do not ask you who you are, to which party you belong, what are your political opinions, so you have no right to ask us about these things.…” The Jews felt that their response had made a good impression on their Arab colleagues, but in fact it was disingenuous and evasive and seems to have been received as such by Hasanayn Fahmi. Through its affiliation to the Histadrut, which was a key Zionist institution, the URPTW was in fact linked to the Zionist project in Palestine. And even if the more left wing of the union's Jewish leaders sincerely believed that the “proletarian Zionism” they professed eliminated any possible contradiction between the interests of Jewish and Arab workers in Palestine, from the standpoint of the indigenous Arab population they were no less involved in a settler-colonial endeavor than the Histadrut mainstream. No Arab railway worker possessing any degree of national consciousness could avoid these issues or entirely separate them from purely class considerations, for the logic of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism constantly and inevitably raised them.

A few days later Hasanayn Fahmi, apparently less than satisfied with the answers he had received, published a letter in the Arabic-language newspaper al-Nafir in which he reiterated his questions and called on the Arab railway workers to leave the union because it was in reality a Zionist organization.^[46] Only a minority of the union's new Arab members seem to have followed Fahmi's advice and quit at that point, but the issue was clearly on the agenda once again and must have influenced the deliberations of the union council when it convened in January 1925.

That crucial meeting was preceded by an event which seemed to bode well for the union's future: for the first time, union representatives were granted an interview with the General Manager of the Palestine Railways. Until this point management had consistently refused any formal contact with the union, despite persistent lobbying of the mandatory government and the Colonial Office by the Histadrut, Zionist leaders, and sympathetic officials of the Trades Union Congress and the Labor Party in Britain. The formation of a Labor Party government in Britain the previous year certainly helped induce railways management to agree to the meeting; indeed, Histadrut officials commented, it had produced a “distinct improvement” in management's attitude toward the railway workers, manifested in somewhat improved working conditions. Little was accomplished at this session, but the fact that it had taken place at all was held to signify official recognition of the union. In fact, formal recognition was not to be granted for years to come, although meetings between union officials (usually accompanied by Ben-Tzvi or some other Zionist leader) and Palestine Railways managers would henceforth take place at irregular intervals. After the Labor government fell, conditions palpably worsened as management reverted to its hard-line approach.^[47]

The twenty-five voting delegates who participated in the January 1925 meeting of the URPTW council, held in Haifa, comprised the nine members of the central committee along with nine Jews and seven Arabs representing the branches. Three of the Histadrut's top leaders—Ben-Gurion and Ben-Tzvi of Ahdut Ha‘avoda, and Hayyim Arlosoroff of Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir—also attended, in the hope of countering the influence of their rival on the left, Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, and its new Arab allies. The agenda was dominated by the question of the union's relations with the Histadrut, with most of the Jewish council delegates demanding the separation of functions. For many in the organization this had come to seem a question of life and death. Some number of the union's Arab members had recently heeded Hasanayn Fahmi's call and quit over the issue of Zionism. For those who remained—and for the left-wing Jewish activists—it was crucial that the railway workers' union either convince the Histadrut to transform itself into a non-Zionist entity to which the Arabs could belong as equal members or disaffiliate from it.

The Histadrut leaders were dismayed by the radicalism of some of the Jewish delegates, one of whom went so far as to dissociate the “proletarian Zionists” from the “bourgeois Zionists” who “plundered the Arabs.”^[48] One of the Arab delegates, Ahmad al-Nimr, declared that “the promises of the executive committee to resolve the question of joint organization are like the promises of Balfour”—a formulation which implicitly raised the issue of Zionism and must also have infuriated the Histadrut leaders. In response, Ben-Gurion directed his remarks primarily to the Arab delegates. His speech was translated into Arabic by Avraham Khalfon, who fifty years later would admit that his translation “altered Ben-Gurion's speech completely.”

Because if I had translated what he said, I was sure that 90 percent of the Arabs would have fled. He spoke in a very extreme way. From a Jewish standpoint it was excellent, but whether it would have attracted or repelled [the Arab delegates] is another matter. So I changed it, I watered down the contents. I saw how long he spoke for, and then I spoke for half an hour too. During the break Ben-Tzvi [who understood Arabic] came to me and kissed me: “Bravo, thank you!” Neither Ben-Gurion nor Arlosoroff knew that I had changed anything, but Ben-Tzvi sensed that I had.^[49]

Khalfon's admission raises some important questions about the character of the Jewish unionists' relationship with their Arab colleagues. Ben-Gurion's speech was not in fact particularly extreme: it was a straightforward exposition of the Histadrut's position favoring separate national sections within mixed unions and separate labor federations. As if talking to children, Ben-Gurion explained in very simple terms that beyond the common interests which all workers shared, Jews and Arabs had their own special needs which required separate organizations. Perhaps Khalfon thought that Ben-Gurion's explicit references to Jewish immigration and settlement, and the Hebrew language, as examples of the needs which made it necessary that the Histadrut remain an essentially Jewish organization were extreme; if so, one can only wonder what it was that he had been communicating to the Arab unionists for whom he had been translating over the previous year or so and how much they really understood about the aims of the Jewish labor movement in Palestine.^[50] This incident, like the evasive response of the Jewish unionists to Hasanayn Fahmi's pointed questions the previous November, suggests that even left-wing Zionists were willing to deceive, or at least to mislead, the Arabs by downplaying their commitment to Zionism and using vague or even obfuscatory language. In so doing they took advantage of the fact that the Arabs knew little or no Hebrew, had only a vague grasp of the ideological differences among the parties of the Yishuv, and lacked the political sophistication and experience typical of their Jewish counterparts.

The council ignored the pleas of the Histadrut leadership and by a vote of eighteen to seven proclaimed the establishment of a territorial and international trade union open to all railway, postal, and telegraph workers regardless of race, religion, or nationality. The majority favoring this decision, as well as a second resolution demanding that the upcoming Histadrut congress require all trade unions to be international and establish a labor federation open to all the workers of Palestine, consisted of the nine Jewish members of the central committee, the seven Arab delegates, and two Jewish branch delegates. In other words, an alliance of the Arab delegates and the Jewish adherents of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol controlled a majority of the votes at this crucial meeting. To Ben-Gurion and his colleagues the council's decisions and the composition of the majority that made them were outrageous; the Histadrut leaders fumed that only Jews should have had the right to vote on the union's connection with the Histadrut and rejected the council's decisions as invalid. But Yehezkel Abramov pointed out to Ben-Gurion that it was unfair to have allowed the Arabs to vote and then denounce the council's decisions because Arabs contributed to the majority that endorsed them.^[51]

Ahdut Ha‘avoda still had cards to play, however, for the left lacked a firm majority among the Jewish railway workers outside Haifa and most of the Jewish delegates from the branches had voted against the resolutions that so infuriated Ben-Gurion. Moreover, many of the postal and telegraph workers who made up a significant minority of the union's Jewish membership were uneasy about the union's new course and were talking of seceding to form their own independent union. The council passed a resolution denouncing this tendency and promised to redouble efforts to incorporate them more fully into the union. On one issue, at least, there was hardly any disagreement: the delegates, including all the Arabs, voted to confirm the central committee's decision to expel Moshe Ungerfeld, the communist activist. At the end of the meeting, seven Arabs—five from Haifa, including Ibrahim al-Asmar and ‘Ali al-Batal, one from Jaffa-Lydda, and one from al-Qantara—were formally elected to the union's central committee.^[52]

Narratives of Failure

When the January 1925 meeting of the union council adjourned, it probably seemed to the participants that the way was now open for a new era of cooperation between Arab and Jewish railway workers within the framework of a joint union. In retrospect, this meeting actually marked the high point of joint organization in this sector. In the months that followed most of the Arab workers who had joined the union left it, and a new and exclusively Arab union of railway workers emerged in Haifa. The circumstances surrounding these developments are complicated and in some details unclear, but there can be little doubt that the main issue which undermined the joint union and divided Arab from Jew was the URPTW's continuing Zionist affiliations.

There are several versions of what happened in the first half of 1925, some of which tell us more about the perspective and conceptions of the narrator than about what actually took place. The Jewish union leadership blamed the communists for sabotaging the unity that had finally been achieved after overcoming so many obstacles. The union (and the Histadrut) charged that the Jewish communists had told the Arabs that the union was “Zionist-chauvinist” and that its Jewish leaders were double-dealing; the communists had sown lies and mistrust, had spread false rumors and forged embarrassing letters, and had even employed physical violence against their opponents. This campaign of slander and harassment allegedly induced the Arab workers to leave the union in large numbers in the first half of 1925. In August 1925 the union permanently expelled thirteen communist activists, arguing that its tolerant attitude toward the communists had been repaid by betrayal and subversion.^[53]

There is no doubt that the PCP had been sharply critical of the union leadership and its loyalty to the Histadrut and to Zionism. Moreover, its members and publications had seized every opportunity to denounce what the communists regarded as the leadership's betrayal of the workers' interests and proletarian internationalism. It is also quite possible that the communists at times employed underhand tactics to expose and harass their enemies. It is nonetheless clear that the departure of most of the Arabs who had recently joined cannot be attributed mainly to agitation by communist activists. That agitation had been going on for many months, if not years, and communist attacks on the union leadership as Zionist cannot have come as much of a revelation to Arab workers in the first half of 1925. The communists' tactics may have become more provocative and their propaganda more virulent as they were purged from the Histadrut and its unions. Their increasingly open support for the Palestinian Arab nationalist struggle against Zionism certainly deepened their isolation from the Yishuv and made them the object of bitter hatred among most Jews. But while the union's leaders may have felt themselves under siege by the communists inside and outside the union and may have convinced themselves that everything would have been fine had the communists not “poisoned the minds” of the Arabs, this explanation says more about their perception of Arabs as guileless, passive, and easily manipulable than it does about what actually happened. It certainly exaggerates the influence of the communists and denies the Arab workers any capacity for rational reflection and self-interested decision making.

This explanation, which is fairly standard in the labor-Zionist literature on this episode, is further undermined by the fact that at the end of 1924 and through the first quarter of 1925, the communists were in fact not calling on Arab workers to leave the URPTW. On the contrary: the Jewish communists repeatedly and forcefully exhorted the Arab workers to remain within (or rejoin, for those who had already quit) the union and struggle against its Zionist leadership in order to make it a truly international union oriented first and foremost toward the class struggle. For example, in December 1924, before the collapse of the joint union, articles in the PCP's Arabic-language biweekly Haifa noted that both Zionists and Arab nationalist effendis were upset that Arab workers had joined the railway workers' union. The two groups, Haifa declared, were “perfectly matched in their campaign against the workers' unity and solidarity and their splendid organization which has replaced the old enmity and division, now completely gone.”^[54] A month later, in January 1925, an article signed by “a railway worker” (almost certainly a Jewish communist activist) specifically rejected Hasanayn Fahmi's appeal to Arab workers to leave the URPTW.

By withdrawing from the union we strengthen the position of the Zionists within it; they welcome our withdrawal so that they will have no internal opposition to their political activities.…We must endeavour to take over the leadership of the union and make of it an organization which will defend the interests of all the workers whether Arabs or Jews. There are a large number of Jewish comrades with considerable experience in running a union who are ready to help us loyally and sincerely.^[55]

A few months later, after most Arab union members had quit and after Haifa had reported favorably on the establishment of a separate Arab railwaymen's union, it published a letter by Moshe Ungerfeld rejecting separatism, insisting that it was incorrect to term the old union “Zionist” just because its present leadership was Zionist, and calling on the Arab workers to join progressive Jews in fighting for control of the URPTW.^[56]

Some Jewish observers also blamed the management of the Palestine Railways for undermining Arab-Jewish unity. According to this explanation, by the end of 1924 management had realized that the joint union was gaining strength and decided to adopt a new and more sophisticated strategy to destroy it. Instead of outright and total hostility to the union and blanket rejection of the workers' demands, management agreed to meet with union representatives and for the first time acknowledged that many of the workers' grievances might be justified. At the same time, however, it made skillful use of its power to reward and punish to divide the workers and undermine the union. Instead of a general wage increase, for example, management granted selective wage increases to those workers favored by the foremen. The clerks as a group were granted a substantial increase in order to alienate them from the other employees. Arab workers who kept their distance from the union were also rewarded with higher wages and freedom from the threat of dismissal. On the punishment side, management underlined the weakness of the union by dismissing a worker who refused to work overtime and ignoring the union's appeals to rehire him. The workers cannot have missed the message management's new policy was intended to convey.^[57] However, this explanation of why the joint union failed is not convincing: though Palestine Railways management was certainly likely to have desired the collapse of unity between its Arab and Jewish workers and may indeed have sought to deepen divisions within its workforce, the departure of the Arabs from the joint union cannot reasonably be attributed in any large measure to management's actions.

While communist propaganda and agitation, and management's divide-and-rule strategems, may indeed have contributed to the union's problems in 1925, they do not provide anything approaching a complete explanation of why most of its Arab members quit. For that we must pay attention, as the labor-Zionist sources generally do not, to what the Arab workers and unionists themselves were saying and doing. The Arabic-language sources are unanimous in specifying the union's persistent Zionist affiliations as the fundamental issue that induced most of the Arabs who had been elected to the union's central committee at the January 1925 council meeting to quit soon thereafter. Apparently, Hasanayn Fahmi's questioning of the Jewish unionists in November 1924 and the letter he published in al-Nafir had touched off a crisis in the union which the decisions of the January council meeting were ultimately not able to dispel. The scantiness of the sources makes it difficult to determine precisely how and why the Arab unionists came, at this particular moment, to conclude that the union was irretrievably Zionist and that they had no place in it. It seems that at some point most of the Arab leaders came to feel that they were not being dealt with honestly, that the Jewish unionists were in effect deceiving them about their Zionist affiliations, and that even the left-wing Jews placed their commitment to Zionism above the welfare of the railway workers. They came to believe, as one article in Haifa put it, that “the foundations and principles of this union were not based on the interests of the worker and the improvement of his life (raf‘ mistawa’hi) but rather on the implementation among the workers of the goals of Zionism.”^[58]

The feeling that they had been deliberately deceived and misled, and their good faith betrayed, by their Jewish colleagues seems to have especially rankled with the Arab unionists. Arab accounts of the split make frequent reference to the “prevarications” (murawaghat) and “duplicity” (khida‘) of the Jewish union leaders. An article in Haifa published in late April 1925 makes explicit reference to Avraham Khalfon, who as we saw had deliberately mistranslated Ben-Gurion on at least one occasion, suggesting that the Arab unionists had come to feel that were being deceived by their Jewish colleagues. The difference in language between Arabs and Jews, Haifa noted, had “necessitated the employment of a translator in order to solve the problem; but this employee, who was not of the working class, curried favor for Zionism in the performance of his duties and abetted the spread of its influence and introduced it into the union's affairs.” More generally, the article went on, “Whenever [the Arab leaders] made even the most minor proposal to facilitate mutual understanding and unity, they encountered only opposition and contradiction from the Zionists regarding everything which might lead to success and to the establishment [of the union] on a strong basis and with a program of action capable of achieving the rights of the oppressed workers.”^[59]

The issue which was most likely to have convinced the Arab railwaymen of their Jewish colleagues' bad faith and which made the issue of Zionism most concrete for them was that of Hebrew labor. Getting more Jews hired on the railroad had been one of the union's chief goals since its inception, and the communists had made a point of telling the Arab workers that this was still the case, regardless of what the Jewish unionists claimed. In his memoirs, Bulus Farah quite plausibly contends that Arab workers in the Haifa workshops felt strongly about this issue. According to Farah, a supervisor named Moshlin, whom we have come across earlier as a foreman disliked by the workers but who the Histadrut wanted to keep on the job because he was a Jew, was regarded by the Arab workers as a Zionist who would give

every job that opened up to a Jewish worker without regard for seniority or professional skill, or would hire new Jewish immigrants at high pay for jobs they were not competent to fill.…The Arab railway workers refrained from joining the Histadrut, and those who did join quit as a result of their bitter experience, after they observed that the Histadrut's trade unionism consisted of discrimination against Arab workers. They experienced at first hand how [the Histadrut] stole jobs from the Arab workers and gave them to the Jewish workers, and how it used them in the international labor movement to conceal its Jewishness while at the same time riding the horse of internationalism. But the Arab workers felt the need for separate trade union organization because the professed internationalism of the Histadrut had been exposed as having been exploited by Zionism.^[60]

It is certainly true that in this period the Histadrut continued to use its influence with the Jewish foremen to get more Jews hired.^[61]

The Palestinian Arab Workers' Society

The disillusionment of the Arab unionists who had joined the joint union coincided with another development among the Arab workers which probably also contributed to their decision to quit and go their own way. Toward the beginning of 1925 a new group coalesced at the Haifa railway workshops, led by a number of skilled workers who had been involved with the mutual aid society for Arab railway workers established a few years earlier and had never displayed any interest in sharing a union with Jews. Building on their earlier experience with their benevolent society and on widespread resentment about the Hebrew labor issue, they now sought to establish an independent and purely Arab organization of railway workers.

The leaders of this group included several young men who originally came from what had become, after the First World War, the separate French-ruled state of Syria. ‘Abd al-Hamid Haymur, a boilermaker by trade, was a fervent Muslim and Arab nationalist with a thin face and a wispy beard who continued to dress in the style of his native region: a long overcoat over pants and a cloak decorated in the shami (“Syrian”) style. A man of few words who preferred to avoid the limelight, ‘Abd al-Hamid Haymur worked behind the scenes for many years as one of the most important leaders of the young Palestinian Arab labor movement. His brother, ‘Id Salim Haymur, worked in the Palestine Railways' wagonage department. Their colleague Sa‘id Qawwas was a turner, short and slight, who wore Western-style clothing and a tarbush, in the style of the young intellectuals of those days; he was described by Bulus Farah as a man of broad culture. Both ‘Abd al-Hamid Haymur and Qawwas had previously been employed on the Hijaz Railway.^[62]

The Haymur brothers and Qawwas found a substantial number of other Arab workers in the Haifa workshops angry about what they perceived as discrimination in employment in favor of Jews and receptive to the idea of their own separate trade union. At the end of February 1925 they organized a meeting at which some 200 Haifa railwaymen elected a committee to represent their interests. This new movement from below, organized by skilled workers who had never joined the Jewish-led union, probably helped stimulate the departure of most of the Arabs who had joined, led by some of the foremen. The two groups, whose motives for independent organization may initially have differed but who were now brought together by circumstances, soon merged into a movement of several hundred Arab railway workers in Haifa, out of which there emerged the first purely Arab labor organization in Palestine.

Though it seems to have originally styled itself a benevolent society and may have been a continuation of the organization which the Haymur brothers and their colleagues had led for some years, by the summer of 1925 this new formation was calling itself the Palestinian Arab Workers' Society (PAWS), and it formally registered under that name with the British authorities. It consisted almost exclusively of Arab railway workers in Haifa, but its new name and its program indicated its ambition to make of itself the Arab counterpart of the Histadrut, an organization which would eventually encompass all the Arab workers in Palestine and seek to advance their interests.^[63] The leadership of the new PAWS included men drawn from both the groups which had contributed to its formation: Ilyas Asad, ‘Ali al-Batal, and Farid Kamil (a locomotive engineer) had long been involved in negotiations with the Jewish unionists, and Kamil and Batal had briefly been members of the joint union's central committee, while Sa‘id Qawwas, ‘Abd al-Hamid Haymur, and his brother ‘Id Salim Haymur were skilled workers who had been involved with the old mutual aid society.^[64]

Given the situation in Palestine, the emergence of a separate Arab railway workers' union was probably inevitable. Relations between Arab and Jewish railwaymen could not remain unaffected by the deepening conflict between Zionism and the Arab national movement, recently manifested in the struggle at ‘Afula and other incidents. A stratum of relatively well-educated and increasingly self-confident skilled workers and foremen who had assimilated the model of trade unionism as the form of organization most appropriate to their circumstances had emerged among the Arab railway workers. When members of this stratum lost faith in the possibility of participating in a union dominated by their Jewish coworkers and tainted by its association with Zionism, the establishment of a union of their own seemed the only reasonable alternative. The Arab unionists were no longer willing to submit to what they perceived as Jewish tutelage, especially as they came to perceive that tutelage as serving goals which harmed their interests as both Arabs and workers. The survival of the URPTW as an Arab-Jewish union would have required its transformation into a completely international organization by severing its links with the Histadrut and the Zionist movement, renouncing the struggle for Hebrew labor, and accepting that the organization would be largely Arab in membership, leadership, and orientation. This was the course the Jewish communists advocated, but it went well beyond what even the most radical Po‘alei Tziyon Smol activist or leader could accept. When the Arab railwaymen's leaders grasped this, most of them quit and joined up with other Arabs who had never taken any interest in the prospect of a joint Arab-Jewish union.

As a result, from 1925 until the end of the British mandate two unions were to be active among the railway workers, one exclusively Arab, the other overwhelmingly Jewish in membership and Zionist in political orientation. Nonetheless, as the next chapter will explore, not only did the conditions of the railwaymen's working lives push the two unions toward cooperation, but the dream of unity would remain very much alive among both Arab and Jewish railway workers for years to come. At the same time, various dynamics produced estrangement and conflict between the organizations and their members. Relations between the two unions would thus always be complex, in ways that tell us a great deal about the parameters and character of the matrices of interaction among Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine.

Notes