5. Arab Workers and the Histadrut, 1929–1936

As I discussed at the end of Chapter 2, in the late 1920s the Histadrut had essentially abandoned the notion that the success of the labor-Zionist enterprise in Palestine was closely linked to Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity. However, the bloody events of August 1929 and their aftermath compelled all Zionists to give more serious attention to the “Arab problem.” Ben-Gurion and some of his colleagues now began to talk of the need for an agreement with the leaders of the Arab community, whom they had denounced through much of the 1920s as reactionaries with whom labor Zionism could never compromise. At the same time, those events and several related developments induced the Histadrut leadership to renew its attention to the question of relations with Arab workers.

That leadership was now firmly in the hands of MAPAI (“Party of the Workers of Eretz Yisra’el”), formed in 1930 by the merger of Ahdut Ha‘avoda and Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir. MAPAI's platform addressed the question of Arab workers only by asserting that “the united party… establishes comradely relations with the Arab worker and fosters relations of peace and understanding between the Hebrew people and the Arab people.”^[1] This vague and noncommittal formulation was much closer to Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir's line than to that of Ahdut Ha‘avoda. On the other hand, when it suited its purposes MAPAI's leadership continued to use Ahdut Ha‘avoda's old rationale for organizing Arab workers. For example, in a December 1929 letter to the Palestine Zionist Executive requesting funding for an Arabic-language periodical, clubs for Arab workers, and a renewed propaganda effort aimed at British and international public opinion (especially trade union movements and labor and socialist parties), the Histadrut executive committee declared that “an agreement with the Arab inhabitants cannot be effected through political compromises with those sections of the population that aspire to destroy our undertaking in Palestine, but rather through a systematic cultural-economic activity among the masses of the Arab workers in town and village, which in the course of time will bring about our desirability to the masses, on the basis of the great good that Jewish settlement showers also upon them.”^[2]

In January 1930 the Zionist Executive agreed in principle to subsidize the Histadrut's activities oriented toward Arab workers. But actually finding the necessary funds was a much more difficult matter, since any large sum would have to be raised outside the regular budget, from wealthy donors abroad. In the interim, the Histadrut decided to allocate a small amount of money from its own budget—£P20 a month—to reopen the Haifa club. Philip Hassun, who during the club's first incarnation, between 1925 and 1928 or 1929, had served as Avraham Khalfon's assistant and then took over the club's management when Khalfon moved on to other things, seemed the only person available to start the club up again, though Histadrut leaders had doubts about his abilities as an organizer. But in the tense political climate then prevailing, Hassun was nervous about the club being openly identified with the Histadrut and insisted that the connection be kept secret. Despite misgivings the Histadrut executive acceded to Hassun's request, because it was clear that for the moment very few if any Arab workers would be willing to join a club openly funded and run by the Histadrut. The club finally opened in the fall of 1930.^[3]

The Renewal of “Arab Work”

Several developments prompted the Histadrut to renew and escalate what was now coming to be called “Arab activism” (pe‘ilut ‘aravit) or “Arab work” (‘avoda ‘aravit).^[4] As I mentioned in Chapter 4, in January 1930, after years of inactivity, the Palestinian Arab Workers' Society had succeeded in organizing the first countrywide congress of Arab workers. Sixty-one delegates gathered in Haifa, claiming to represent some 3,000 workers. Almost half the delegates came from Haifa itself, and nearly half of those represented the railway workers there who constituted the PAWS' main base of support. But there were also smaller contingents from Jerusalem, Jaffa, and other towns representing workers in a variety of trades. Though a number of Arab unionists who belonged to or sympathized with the Palestine Communist Party helped organize the congress, it was largely under the control of the more conservative and noncommunist unionists who had originally founded the PAWS in 1925. The congress resolved to set up a nationwide labor movement which would lead the struggle to improve the wages and working conditions of Arab workers and secure their rights. It also declared its opposition to Jewish immigration and Zionism and its support for Palestine's independence as an Arab state. In response to Zionist efforts to secure a large percentage of government jobs for Jews, on the grounds that Jews paid a disproportionately large share of taxes, the congress called on the government of Palestine to reserve for Arab workers a share of jobs equal to the proportion of Arabs in the general population.^[5]

Histadrut leaders were well aware of the Haifa congress and anxious that it might signal the emergence of an active and growing Arab labor movement aligned with the anti-Zionist nationalist movement. Before the congress, Philip Hassun had met with some of its organizers and urged them to avoid politics and refrain from attacking the Histadrut and Zionism. In an effort to counterbalance the impact of the congress on Haifa-area workers, the Haifa Workers' Council issued a leaflet in Arabic, in the name of a fictitious “Advisory Committee of Haifa Workers,” welcoming the congress but also expressing the hope that Arab workers would be protected from “corrupting hands and misleading thoughts.”^[6] Po‘alei Tziyon Smol tried to play a direct role in the congress: George Nassar, the young Arab carpenter who in the 1920s had become closely connected with the party, appeared at the congress and asked if he could deliver an address explaining his pro-Zionist position. The organizers denied him permission to speak, however, and had him expelled as a Zionist agent. Increasingly isolated in his own community, Nassar found employment at ‘Etziyon, a Histadrut-owned woodworking enterprise, where he would remain for many years while continuing to be a staunch Po‘alei Tziyon Smol loyalist.^[7]

This first Arab workers' congress proved not a new beginning for the Arab labor movement in Palestine but an isolated incident. The PAWS was unable to follow up and lay the basis for an effective countrywide organization, and for the next few years it remained an organization whose base was largely restricted to Haifa and to railway workers. Nonetheless, the congress made at least some Histadrut leaders feel that a coherent program of activity among Arab workers was now an urgent necessity.

That sense of urgency was reinforced in the late spring of 1930 when forces on MAPAI's left flank launched a new public campaign to raise the question of Arab-Jewish workers' relations and push the Histadrut to take action. Behind this initiative stood Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, which since 1928 had been split into two contending factions: a more orthodox Borokhovist, European-oriented, and Yiddishist faction led by Moshe Erem, and a more Palestine-oriented and Hebraist faction led by Ze’ev Abramovitch and Yitzhak Yitzhaki. On May 1, 1930, each faction, in collaboration with nonparty personalities including some prominent liberal intellectuals and academics, announced the establishment of a separate organization to promote Arab-Jewish workers' solidarity. A week later, recognizing that it made little sense to have two separate organizations pursuing almost identical aims, the two groups merged under the name which one of them had taken, Ahavat Po‘alim (“Workers' Brotherhood”).^[8]

Over the next two months, Ahavat Po‘alim sought to push the Histadrut to take a more active stance with regard to Arab workers. It insisted that the events of the past year had demonstrated the vital importance of joint organization in order to combat the efforts of both the “Arab effendis” and the Jewish bourgeoisie to incite hatred and promote discord, and to improve the lot of both Jewish and Arab workers. Ahavat Po‘alim complained that the Histadrut not only remained closed to Arab workers but had done virtually nothing to help Arab workers organize themselves. Yet the new organization's insistence that Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine had completely compatible interests entangled it in some of the same contradictions which had long plagued Po‘alei Tziyon Smol. For example, even as Ahavat Po‘alim called on the Histadrut to admit Arab members and do more to foster joint organization, it was publicly protesting the British government's decision to restrict the immigration to Palestine of Jewish workers. The organization's first membership meeting adopted a resolution which recognized both the full right of the Arab working masses to free social and national development in Palestine and the right of unlimited Jewish immigration and Jewish social and national development. While this formulation seemed to recognize Arab national rights, its insistence on unlimited Jewish immigration inevitably infringed those rights, since such immigration would ultimately lead to a Jewish majority and the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state. Yet without large-scale Jewish immigration the Zionist project lacked any prospect of success.^[9]

The ranks of those dissatisfied with the Histadrut's failure to initiate an active program of Arab work were further swelled as Hakibbutz Ha’artzi–Hashomer Hatza‘ir, which I discussed at the end of Chapter 4, emerged in the Histadrut and the Yishuv as an increasingly significant force to MAPAI's left and began to address itself to the question of joint organization. As I mentioned, Hakibbutz Ha’artzi joined Po‘alei Tziyon Smol in berating MAPAI and the Histadrut it controlled for their inaction with regard to Arab workers in the cities and in calling for a much more serious commitment to joint organization. But the movement's leadership was divided over whether or not to join Ahavat Po‘alim. Me’ir Ya‘ari, Hakibbutz Ha’artzi's preeminent leader, argued that the new organization was too far from the socialist-Zionist mainstream, while MAPAI now seemed to be taking a greater interest in joint organization. Leaders of the left wing of Hakibbutz Ha’artzi argued that if Hashomer Hatza‘ir got involved, Ahavat Po‘alim could be taken out of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's control and developed into the nucleus of a broader movement to foster Arab-Jewish workers' cooperation and pressure the Histadrut into action.^[10]

The question soon became moot, however: in the middle of July 1930 Ahavat Po‘alim was dissolved by the mandatory government, which was never enthusiastic about initiatives to foster Arab-Jewish worker solidarity, and especially those sponsored by Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, which the authorities regarded as Bolshevist and strongly anti-imperialist. There were rumors that the Histadrut leadership had secretly requested the British authorities to suppress Ahavat Po‘alim, a charge the Histadrut vigorously denied and for which no evidence has surfaced.^[11]

Developments in both the Arab and Jewish communities may have pushed MAPAI to devote greater attention to organizing Arab workers during 1930, but the party was adamant that this project be pursued as it saw fit. At its May 1930 meeting the Histadrut council declared that the organized Jewish workers in Palestine were obligated by class solidarity to try to help the Arab workers improve their standard of living and satisfy their “economic and cultural needs,” but it added that “every step toward advancing [the organization of Arab workers] will facilitate the struggle for existence of the Hebrew worker and the Hebrew economy built on Hebrew labor in this country.” At the same time, the council explicitly rejected Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's long-standing demand, now taken up by Ahavat Po‘alim, that the Histadrut be transformed into a territorial labor organization open to Arabs as well as Jews, and contented itself with endorsing the measures which the Histadrut had already been discussing, including the opening of clubs for Arab workers and the publication of an Arabic-language organ.^[12]

At the end of 1930 the Histadrut went a bit further by formally establishing a special secretariat or department for Arab affairs, under the supervision of its executive committee. This department had one full-time staff member, Yehuda Burla, who from his office at Histadrut headquarters in Tel Aviv tried to plan and coordinate the work of a small number of other individuals attached to workers' councils in various towns and cities who had an interest in organizing Arab workers. Burla (1886–1969) was born in Jerusalem to a family that had moved from Izmir to Palestine in the seventeenth century. Trained as a teacher, he spent most of his life up to 1948 working in Hebrew-language schools in Damascus and then in Palestine. His main claim to fame, however, is as an author: he was the first modern Hebrew writer whose stories and novels focused on the lives of Jews of Middle Eastern origin, though some of his romantic fiction featured bedouin characters. After his stint at the Histadrut (1930–32) he returned to teaching, then worked for the Keren Hayesod (one of the Zionist Organization's financial arms) and after the establishment of the State of Israel served as a middle-level government official.^[13]

As the Histadrut's Arab Secretary, Burla worked under the supervision of those few top leaders of the Histadrut who took an interest in Arab affairs. Among them was Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, who as we have already seen had worked closely with the Jewish railway workers through the 1920s and had been very involved with the question of joint organization. Though preoccupied with his duties at the Va‘ad Le’umi, the nominal leadership body of the Yishuv whose chair he assumed in 1931, Ben-Tzvi participated sporadically in Histadrut leadership discussions on Arab affairs. Another leading Histadrut and MAPAI official involved in this sphere was Dov Hoz (1894–1940). Hoz had arrived in Palestine in 1906 and held various senior labor-Zionist movement leadership posts until his untimely death in an automobile accident. Yet another personality who at this time began to play an increasingly important role in the Histadrut's Arab activism, mainly in Haifa but also nationally, was a young man who adopted the Hebrew name Abba Hushi (1898–1969). Born in Galicia, Hushi came to Palestine in 1920 as a member of Hashomer Hatza‘ir. After a stint on a kibbutz he settled in Haifa in 1927 and worked his way up through the local Histadrut and MAPAI hierarchy, assuming the powerful post of secretary of the Haifa Workers' Council in 1931. His rather domineering and abrasive personality led many of his colleagues to find him difficult to work with. Hushi became very much the labor boss of a cosmopolitan port city, with a finger in even the most sordid of local pies; it was said, for example, that he was on good terms with members of Haifa's Jewish criminal underworld. Hushi's efforts to learn Arabic and organize Arab workers in Haifa, especially dockworkers, were in keeping with his desire to be top dog in Haifa. After nineteen years as chief of the Histadrut in Haifa, Hushi became the city's mayor in 1951, a post he retained until his death.

The new Arab Department's first and main preoccupation was funding. The Histadrut's resources were limited, and because many of the organization's leaders were highly skeptical about, if not opposed to, efforts to organize Arab workers, the Arab Department enjoyed a rather low priority, especially in periods of austerity when the budget allocation for Arab work was often reduced. The Department was therefore always short of money and in search of additional funding, from the Palestine Zionist Executive (which also subsidized other Histadrut programs) and then from the new Jewish Agency, established in 1929 as a vehicle through which non-Zionist Jews could participate in the development of the Jewish “national home” in Palestine.^[14] In their appeals to Zionist leaders for funding, Burla and his colleagues usually played on two themes. On the one hand, they argued that Arab and Jewish workers had common economic interests which could serve as a basis for building friendly relations. On the other hand, as Burla put it in January 1931, “If we do not see what is coming and take the initiative, others will appear and organize the [Arab] masses against us, in order to make us fail. And then, if the Arab people in their broad masses will be organized against us—our situation in Palestine will be a hundred times more difficult than it is today.”^[15]

As had been the case during the first phase of activity in the mid-1920s, the Histadrut's Arab activism was in this period virtually restricted to Haifa, where though desperately short of funds the Arab workers' club claimed a membership of 138 in February 1931. Almost all of these were skilled workers, mainly carpenters, stonecutters, and blacksmiths, most of whom were employed at the city's larger enterprises and earned from 15 to 40 piastres a day. The predominance of skilled workers was no accident: with the endorsement of Histadrut officials, club secretary Philip Hassun deliberately sought to exclude unskilled workers or those without steady employment, for fear that the club might acquire the reputation of an employment agency through which Arab workers could find jobs in Jewish enterprises. In addition, the club served the Arab members of the Histadrut-affiliated International Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers (see Chapter 4). Though most of the club's members possessed basic reading and writing skills, few could read books or even newspapers. The club provided language courses in Hebrew, English, and (for Jewish workers) Arabic, made books and newspapers available, sponsored lectures and discussions, and had a football team and an exercise program. But probably most attractive to its members were the services it offered: access to the Histadrut's Kupat Holim health clinics for the modest sum of 15 piastres a month, and a revolving loan fund whose initial capital had been provided by the Jewish Agency and by a Histadrut credit cooperative, and from which some fifty workers had borrowed sums ranging up to £P5 by February 1931.^[16]

But the club's meager budget did not long suffice even for this level of service. Hassun repeatedly complained to his superiors at Histadrut headquarters in Tel Aviv that the club's activities had to be cut back because the money had run out, while Burla was constantly beseeching the Jewish Agency for additional funds. At the same time, Burla had to allay the suspicions of conservative Jewish Agency officials that the Histadrut might be using Zionist funds to implant socialist ideas among Arab workers. In their appeals for funding and their discussions of Arab work, Histadrut officials never lost sight of the political implications of this sphere of activity: the possibility that organizing Arab workers would benefit the Zionist project by weakening Palestinian Arab nationalism.^[17]

The Drivers' Strikes

Even as the Histadrut's Arab Department was trying to get its still relatively small-scale effort off the ground, Arabs and Jews were cooperating in an unprecedented display of militant and effective action in defense of their economic interests. In July 1931 and again in November, Arab and Jewish taxi, bus, and truck drivers launched joint strikes which paralyzed motor transport in Palestine. These were not really instances of worker solidarity: most of the participants were not wage workers but petty proprietors, as a whole industry mobilized to demand redress of its grievances from the mandatory government. Nonetheless, these strikes attracted widespread public attention and sympathy, and for a moment seemed to underscore the possibility of Arab-Jewish cooperation in pursuit of common economic interests.

Drivers of motorized vehicles constituted a new social category in Palestinian society. They and their vehicles transformed local travel and transport and embodied new modes of communication that linked even remote parts of the country. As elsewhere, drivers in Palestine acquired a certain reputation as independent loners, tough guys braving life's obstacles and the dangers of the road, and were incorporated as such into Arab popular culture. This self-image and social representation may have enhanced both the drivers' solidarity and the sympathy with which much of the public regarded them.^[18]

Motor transport had developed very quickly in Palestine during the late 1920s and early 1930s as the government built new roads and improved existing ones.^[19] A substantial number of Arabs and Jews purchased cars, buses, or trucks and went into business carrying passengers, freight, or both. The majority of these were individuals who owned and operated only a single vehicle, but a few Arab businessmen established larger companies which employed drivers to operate more or less regular taxi and bus lines linking Palestine's cities, towns, and villages, along with buses for tourists and trucks to carry freight. Efforts had been made to reduce fierce competition among the Jewish owner-drivers by allocating fixed routes, and the Histadrut had through its Cooperatives Center sought to establish a cooperative of Jewish drivers. But these initiatives were largely unsuccessful, and motor transport remained largely unregulated, even anarchic, with too many owners and drivers competing for too few passengers and too little freight.

By 1930, all three categories of those who made a living from motor transport—owners who employed drivers for wages, those wage-earning drivers themselves, and those who owned and operated a single vehicle—had come to share a common set of grievances, largely directed at the government. The owners, drivers, and owner-drivers complained bitterly that gasoline prices, already kept high by the two companies (Shell and Vacuum Oil) which controlled the Palestinian market, were jacked up even more excessively by government taxes. A tin of gasoline, they claimed, cost 405 milliemes in Palestine (of which taxes accounted for 205 milliemes) but only 240 to 260 milliemes in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. The government of Palestine also imposed an annual license fee of £P10–12, while licenses were free in Egypt and Syria. Customs duties on tires were also very high, as were the fines for traffic violations which the drivers claimed were being unjustly and arbitrarily imposed on them. “And as if the government were not satisfied with all these troubles and thinks that there is still some breath of life left in us that can suffer even more,” declared a public statement issued in the name of the drivers and owners in June 1931, “it enacted a new law called the Road Transport Act of 1929, inserting conditions and rules which will bring ruin to us and to our trade forever and will leave us no hope in life.”^[20]

At the end of 1930 a group of Arab owners and drivers asked Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani, a handsome young lawyer from a prominent Palestinian Arab family, to present their demands for lower prices, taxes and fees, and relief from fines, to the petroleum companies and the government. When these talks failed to yield results, discontent among both Arab and Jewish owners and drivers grew and al-Dajani began to work closely with Shraga Gorokhovsky (later Goren), director of the Histadrut's Cooperatives Center, who claimed to speak for the Jewish drivers. By June 1931 there was growing sentiment, especially among the more militant owner-drivers, for a strike of motor transport that would compel the mandatory government to meet their demands. On June 29, 1931, al-Dajani announced the formation of a strike committee composed of both Arabs and Jews and declared that a countrywide general strike of all motorized vehicles carrying passengers and freight would begin on July 1, to be accompanied by peaceful protest caravans of vehicles in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. The goals of the strike were a 50 percent cut in the gasoline tax and in customs duties on tires, the abolition of license fees, and revision of the Road Transport Act. The strike committee appealed to owners of private automobiles to respect the strike as well, but promised to make vehicles available in each of the major cities to transport physicians in cases of medical emergency.

In internal discussions the Histadrut leadership opposed a strike for fear that it might get out of control and result in violence, or take on political dimensions; in either case the security of Jewish settlements and the ability to get Jewish produce to market might be compromised. Some Histadrut officials professed to see the hand of the Arab nationalist movement or even the communists behind the drivers' militancy. Behind the scenes the Histadrut pressed the Jewish owners and drivers to oppose the strike, but it was unable to prevail: the Arab drivers were solidly for action and many of the Jewish drivers supported them. Unable to prevent the strike, but also fearful of the consequences of opposing it publicly and thereby breaking with the Arab drivers, the Histadrut was reluctantly compelled to endorse the proposed action.^[21]

The Histadrut was not alone in regarding the drivers' militancy with unease. The Arab Executive, the nominal leadership of the Arab national movement in Palestine, cannot have been too happy about the emergence of an active Arab-Jewish alliance of this sort. For one, it tended to blur the lines that divided Arab from Jew and undermine the claims and demands of Arab nationalism. Second, this was a movement directed squarely against the policies of the British administration in Palestine, and the Arab Executive at this time still hoped that it could peacefully secure a change in British policy which would bring a quick and easy end to the Zionist project. Finally, the Arab Executive was controlled by the dominant faction within the nationalist movement, led by the Husayni family and its allies, while Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani was the scion of a prominent family opposed to the Husaynis and usually aligned with their chief rival, the Nashashibi family. The Nashashibis were regarded as pro-British and sympathetic to Britain's client ‘Abd Allah, the ruler of Transjordan, who had long-standing ambitions in Palestine. It may well have appeared to the Husaynis that by organizing the drivers, their rivals for the leadership of the Arab community had acquired a new constituency of considerable economic and political importance. But like the Histadrut, the Arab Executive could not afford to defy public and press opinion, which largely sympathized with the drivers. On June 29 it issued a statement signed by its president, Musa Kazim al-Husayni, which expressed support for the drivers and hope that their grievances would be resolved without a strike. Interestingly, the statement made no reference to Arabs or Jews but spoke only of “vehicle owners and drivers.”^[22]

As it turned out, a last-minute concession by the government—a month's hiatus in the collection of license fees—caused the strike to be postponed. In the weeks that followed the drivers formally organized themselves into a Vehicle Owners' and Drivers' Association, with an elected executive committee comprised of equal numbers of Arabs and Jews and chaired by al-Dajani, with Gorokhovsky as vice-chair. The committee entered into negotiations with the government, which offered concessions that fell short of the drivers' demands. Though al-Dajani was hesitant and Gorokhovsky (backed by the Histadrut) strongly opposed a strike, the other members of the association's executive committee, under pressure from the rank and file, pushed for a renewal of the strike threat, and a new strike date was set for August 7. Government officials were divided over how to respond, some favoring concessions and others advocating a hard line. Among the hard-liners motives were mixed: the Director of Customs opposed any concessions that might reduce customs revenues, while the General Manager of the Palestine Railways seems to have hoped that a firm stand by the government would cause a prolonged strike, thereby enhancing the revenues of the ailing railways.^[23] After urgent appeals from the Arab and Jewish chambers of commerce and the leaders of the Yishuv, anxious to avoid any disruption of motor transport, the government offered to appoint a committee which would investigate the drivers' and owners' demands and issue a report by the end of October. The Drivers' and Owners' Association accepted the offer, called off their open-ended strike, and organized a twenty-four-hour stoppage instead. The strike came off peacefully and was deemed a success by the Association.^[24]

In the months that followed Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani came under strong attack in the Arab press for cooperating with Jews. Surprisingly, the attack was led by Filastin, a newspaper aligned with the Nashashibi-led opposition to the dominant Husayni faction. On September 18, 1931, Filastin published an editorial clearly directed at al-Dajani: it advised “anyone who has cooperated with the deceiving Zionists to give it up and instead strive to form an Arab association in which no non-Arab has any role, and God will forgive what has gone before.” A leaflet from about the same time, signed by three Arab drivers but probably inspired by pro-Husayni activists, accused al-Dajani of being a Zionist stooge:

There is no doubt that those who are informed about the Association's affairs know that Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani draws his power only from the Jews. He is in Tel Aviv every day, and every day he has meetings with the Jews there. Is it reasonable that he would go along with any policy that was against the interests of the Jews? And does he not do within the association what the Jews tell him to do?

The leaflet went on to call for al-Dajani's deposition and the breakup of the joint association, a demand echoed by a number of letters signed by drivers and sent to Filastin.^[25]

Al-Dajani's response to his critics, published in Filastin two days later, was somewhat disingenuous. He stated that a purely Arab association of drivers and owners had been formed several years earlier. But, he went on, “we realized that we could not strike a heavy blow against the government and force it to accept our demands unless the strike was general and total in all parts of the country. As soon as word of the strike spread some of the Jewish drivers let us know that they wanted to join with us, so we met them and agreed on basic conditions—but we did not unite.” Contrary to the facts, al-Dajani insisted that there was no joint association, but rather an alliance of two entirely separate organizations, one Arab and the other Jewish. In any event, these attacks do not seem to have greatly weakened al-Dajani's position or Arab-Jewish cooperation: when the drivers began to mobilize again in late October, he was still their leader and Arabs and Jews continued to work together closely. The committee of inquiry had recommended a number of concessions, including the abolition of license fees, but the government of Palestine declined to accept the recommendations and announced that it would require several more months to reach a final decision. The angry drivers organized another national congress and decided to strike as of midnight on November 2–3, 1931.^[26]

This time the threat was carried out, as some 2,000 drivers struck for nine days, until midnight on November 11. The strike was highly effective: newspaper accounts indicate that apart from military and police vehicles, hardly a car, bus, or truck was to be seen on the roads of Palestine, which were taken over instead by donkey carts. For the first few days the drivers seem to have enjoyed the sympathy of Arab and Jewish public opinion; even Filastin, which had earlier been so hostile to al-Dajani, supported the strike. The Arab merchants' association called for a three-day sympathy strike, to pressure the authorities to accept the drivers' demands and get back to business as usual, but called it off when the government announced a one-month postponement in the collection of license fees. As the strike began to disrupt economic activity and inconvenience more people, the drivers came under increasing pressure to return to work. The Histadrut exerted pressure on the Jewish drivers, and Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani began to waver under pressure from Arab businessmen. The strikers' delegates held out for some time, but finally agreed to end the strike after the Arab chambers of commerce promised their support in achieving the drivers' demands. A few months later the drivers achieved a partial victory when the government reduced license fees, though to offset this loss of revenue the government simultaneously increased duties on spare parts.^[27]

In the aftermath of the strike, al-Dajani toyed with the idea of transforming his constituency among the Arab drivers into a broader political organization. In secret talks with officials of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, he sought Zionist funding to help establish a “Palestine Arab Workers' Party,” apparently envisioned as something of a cross between a political party and a trade union federation. Moshe Shertok and other Political Department officials were quite interested in the idea, and Histadrut officials went so far as to draw up a charter for the proposed organization. Nothing came of these plans, however. While remaining head of the Arab Car Owners' and Drivers' Association al-Dajani became involved in Arab politics as one of the leaders of the National Defense Party, founded in 1934 by the Nashashibis and their allies after the dissolution of the Arab Executive and the open fragmentation of Palestine's Arab elite into rival political factions, each with its own party.^[28]

The motor transport strikes of 1931 thus produced no lasting Arab-Jewish organization. They did, however, lead to much more intense government regulation of motor transport in Palestine and the restructuring of the industry. New laws and regulations were issued which fixed bus routes and made licenses more difficult to obtain, thereby squeezing out small-scale owner-drivers while strengthening the fleet owners. This benefited the Arab bus company owners but also the Histadrut, which under Gorokhovsky's leadership organized the Jewish drivers into cooperatives.^[29] Like other sectors of Palestine's economy, motor transport would become increasingly segregated, with several large Histadrut-affiliated bus and trucking cooperatives serving Jewish towns and settlements, and private Arab companies serving Arab towns and villages.

“Arab Activism” in Crisis

The Histadrut leadership's ambivalence about the drivers' militancy was paralleled by its ambivalence about efforts to organize Arab workers employed in the Jewish sector. This was demonstrated in September 1931, when some thirty Arab workers employed by Jewish farmers in the moshava of Benyamina went on strike in response to a wage cut and approached their Jewish coworkers for support. The strike was formally endorsed by both a general meeting of the Jewish workers in the moshava and the Histadrut executive committee, which promised that Jews would not use the strike to displace the Arab workers and that Jewish workers would join the picket lines in solidarity. In private, however, officials of the Histadrut and of its local organ the Benyamina Workers' Council were quite unenthusiastic about the strike. This was a period of high unemployment in the Yishuv and MAPAI was not anxious to have the Histadrut defend Arab workers employed in moshavot when it really wanted to replace them with Jews. Unemployed Jewish workers were already venting their frustration on Arabs: in ‘Afula that June a group of Jews without jobs had attacked and driven off Arabs engaged in road building work on a government contract. The MAPAI loyalists who controlled the Benyamina Workers' Council decided to refrain from any active support of the strike, which soon collapsed. While Hashomer Hatza‘ir activists in the moshava denounced the Council and the Histadrut leadership for the strike's failure, MAPAI supporters blamed it on the Arab workers' alleged lack of commitment and capacity for organization.^[30]

At the same time, the momentum which had seemed to characterize the Histadrut's effort to develop a constituency among urban Arab workers in late 1930 and early 1931 was faltering. In a memorandum drawn up in December 1931, Yehuda Burla stressed the urgency of expanding activities targeting Arabs as a means of overcoming the growing enmity between Arabs and Jews and called on all the institutions concerned—the Histadrut, the Jewish Agency, and the Va‘ad Le’umi—to work together. He envisioned the establishment of clubs for Arab workers in all the major cities and towns, organizing work in Arab villages, a vastly expanded loan fund whose capital would be subscribed by all the Jewish-owned banks in Palestine, and an Arabic-language newspaper.^[31] But Burla's expansive vision was out of touch with reality: by the beginning of 1932 this sphere of the Histadrut's work was at a virtual standstill. Facing a budget crisis, the Histadrut suspended plans to start up clubs for Arab workers in Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Lydda, along with funding for Arabic lessons and other activities. The Haifa club continued to operate but only barely, and Histadrut leaders doubted that they would be able to provide even the modest sum hitherto allocated to sustain it. Many did not feel that the club was justifying the resources which had been put into it and wondered if it could not somehow be combined with the Arab section of the railway workers' union.^[32]

Abba Hushi, the new secretary of the Haifa Workers' Council, played an increasingly active and central role in these discussions and in the Histadrut's subsequent interactions with Arab workers. Hushi believed that the Haifa club should be seen as only a transitional form, a means to an end: the ultimate goal was the mobilization of Arab workers around economic issues and their organization into trade unions linked to the Histadrut. Hushi had no use for the Haifa club in its present moribund state and saw its secretary, Philip Hassun, as an ineffective and expensive “legacy” from the club's earlier incarnation, someone who would never be capable of exercising the kind of leadership necessary to organize a substantial base among Arab workers. If the club was to be reactivated and the Histadrut, or more precisely the Haifa Workers' Council, was to undertake the strategy Hushi advocated, Hassun would have to go.^[33]

By this point Hassun was in fact almost at the end of his tether. In frequent letters to the Histadrut executive committee, he complained that he had not received any funds for months and had been unable to pay the club's rent, electric bills, or caretaker's wages. Sunk in debt because he had borrowed heavily to keep the club open, Hassun pleaded with Histadrut leaders to pay off its debts and close it down so he could reopen his tailor's shop and feed his hungry family. By the spring of 1932, as his relations with Abba Hushi, never very cordial, reached the breaking point, Hassun's letters took on an increasingly desperate and bitter tone. In a letter to his old mentor Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, Hassun charged that Hushi had publicly threatened to beat him up if he persisted in demanding to see the club's accounts. “So dear brother,” he told Ben-Tzvi, “this is our reward after ten years work, and after sacrificing youth and family on the altar of the Histadruth viz;—in old age there springs up a foolish fellow from the Histadruth threatening to beat and disgrace us. Is that not a great blessing?” Hassun begged Ben-Tzvi and Ben-Gurion to come to Haifa to get the club out of the “muddle” it was in and rescue him from Hushi's abuse.^[34]

But Ben-Gurion and Ben-Tzvi sided with Abba Hushi rather than with Philip Hassun, whose career with the Histadrut came to an end soon thereafter. In June 1932 he was dismissed as secretary of the Haifa club; what became of him after that is unknown. His removal from the scene was a triumph for Abba Hushi, who had already begun to implement the new approach he had been advocating and could now take full charge of the Histadrut's Arab work in Haifa. That work was bolstered by the arrival at about this time of additional funds raised in England by Israel Sieff, a wealthy Zionist who had founded a group in London which sought to foster better Jewish-Arab relations.

On the Haifa Waterfront

The first arena in which Hushi's strategy for reviving and expanding the Histadrut's work among Arabs would bear fruit was the old port of Haifa. (A new deepwater harbor, Palestine's first, was under construction but would not be completed until the end of 1933.) Histadrut leaders had taken an interest in the port since the early 1920s, because of its obvious economic (and potential political) importance, and in keeping with the policy of Hebrew labor had sought to gain a foothold for Jewish workers there. The Zionist Executive and the Histadrut incessantly lobbied the government of Palestine and the Colonial Office to induce the port authorities and the Arab contractors who controlled most of the jobs at the port to employ Jews, both in the operation of the old harbor and the construction of the new one, but they were never very successful. The government of Palestine, backed by the Colonial Office, generally resisted these pressures for political reasons but also because Jews would have required higher wages and better working conditions. At the same time, as with railway work, it was difficult for the Histadrut to get Jews to seek and stay at jobs in the port. Except during periods of economic crisis and high unemployment, few Jews were interested in enduring the grueling working conditions and miserable wages which port work offered, even though they were paid higher wages than the Arab port workers.

At various points during the 1920s the Haifa Workers' Council had dispatched members of several kibbutzim-in-formation to work at the port, but these groups seldom stayed for very long. The number of Jews working at the old port of Haifa therefore remained small: at the end of 1929, some two dozen Jews, almost all skilled workers or supervisory personnel, were employed there, as opposed to some 450 Arabs. Of the latter, many were not from Palestine but from the Hawran region of French-ruled Syria. During the mandate period, and especially during the first half of the 1930s, thousands of desperately poor peasants came to Palestine from the Hawran, seasonally or for longer periods, in search of work in agriculture, the ports, road and railway construction and maintenance, and other sectors where low-wage manual labor was required. The term hawrani would in fact enter colloquial Palestinian (and later Israeli) Hebrew as a synonym for “poor” or “ragged.”^[35] As we will see, some left-wing Zionists would argue that Palestinian Arab and Jewish workers faced a common enemy in these Hawrani migrants and should unite to counter the threat they allegedly posed.

In the early 1930s, faced with high unemployment in the Yishuv, the Histadrut stepped up its efforts to get more Jews hired at the harbor by bringing pressure to bear on British officials, locally and through channels in Jerusalem and London, including friends in the Labor Party and the Trades Union Congress. Histadrut and Zionist leaders advanced the argument that since Jews paid some 50 percent of Palestine's taxes, they were entitled to 50 percent of the jobs in government-run enterprises, including the ports.^[36] The Histadrut also sought to induce the Jewish citrus farmers, whose Pardes export company accounted for a large proportion of the goods that passed through the port, to insist on Hebrew labor at Haifa. At the same time, Abba Hushi and other officials of the Haifa Workers' Council cultivated relations with some of the Arab labor contractors at the port in order to get them to add a few Jewish workers to their work crews.

The Histadrut did manage to secure for Jews a large proportion of the jobs created by the construction of the new deepwater port at Haifa. But at the old port its lobbying yielded meager results: in May 1932 only twenty-eight Jews—mainly future kibbutz members living in Haifa temporarily and ready for any sacrifice in the struggle for Hebrew labor—were working at the old port as stevedores, porters, or lightermen. The stevedores, who loaded and unloaded ships, were the elite of the harbor workforce; the porters carried goods between the railway siding and the docks; and the lightermen worked on the boats (“lighters”) that conveyed goods to and from freighters, which because of the shallowness of the water anchored about a mile offshore.^[37]

In these circumstances, it was obvious that, as with the railways, Jews could be placed and kept in jobs at Haifa harbor only if wages were substantially increased and working conditions considerably improved for the Arabs who worked there. This is why Abba Hushi moved quickly to seize the opportunity that presented itself when, in April 1932, a number of the Arab lightermen suddenly went on strike, apparently to protest the contractors' decision to employ them on a daily rather than a monthly basis and to dismiss some workers without taking seniority into account. The Jewish lightermen with whom the Arab strikers had been working side by side for a year and had developed friendly relations refused to serve as strikebreakers; many of them were Hashomer Hatza‘ir members awaiting settlement in a kibbutz, and they saw the strike as an opportunity to demonstrate the proletarian internationalism which was one of their movement's slogans. At first some of the Arab strikers suggested approaching the Haifa-based Palestinian Arab Workers' Society for assistance, but when the PAWS proved of little help the Arab workers agreed to authorize Abba Hushi to negotiate on their behalf.

Though Hushi was on good terms with the contractors, he was unable to achieve much for the strikers: after four days they returned to work with only a verbal promise that after two weeks they would again be employed on a monthly basis.^[38] The Arab lightermen were nonetheless impressed by, and grateful for, the support they had received from their Jewish coworkers, the Haifa Workers' Council, and the Histadrut: the slow season had begun, and had their Jewish coworkers not joined them and the Histadrut not backed them, they probably could not have stood up to their employers. After the strike ended, the lightermen and a number of other Arab harbor workers joined a new Histadrut-sponsored Harbor Workers' Union for both Arab and Jewish workers. Though the Jewish workers who identified with Hashomer Hatza‘ir wanted a fully international union with no internal divisions, Hushi and his MAPAI colleagues insisted that the union comprise separate national sections.

The Arab members of the Harbor Workers' Union were to constitute the first cell of a new organization which was established in 1932 to recruit and organize Arab workers under the auspices of the Histadrut. In Hebrew the new organization was called Brit Po‘alei Eretz Yisra’el, the “League of Workers of the Land of Israel,” and in Arabic Ittihad ‘Ummal Filastin, the “Union of the Workers of Palestine.” I will henceforth refer to it as the Palestine Labor League (PLL), its official name in English. As I discussed in Chapter 2, after years of debate on the question of joint organization the Histadrut's third congress had in July 1927 adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of an “international league (brit beinle’umit) of the workers of Eretz Yisra’el” which was to include the Histadrut and its as-yet-nonexistent Arab counterpart. No such league or alliance had ever been formed. Instead, what was in fact a small organization created to serve as the Histadrut's auxiliary for Arab workers was endowed with the rather grandiose name originally intended for the proposed binational labor federation. The PLL's charter was drawn up by Histadrut officials and ratified by its executive committee in May 1932, and though the latter claimed to be implementing the resolution of the 1927 Histadrut congress, it was obvious that this was not really what had been envisioned five years earlier.^[39]

By creating the PLL, the Histadrut leadership foreclosed any possibility that Arab workers would be allowed to become full and equal members of a transformed, non-Zionist Histadrut, as Po‘alei Tziyon Smol and the Arab workers aligned with it had long demanded. This step also rendered Hashomer Hatza‘ir's call for joint Arab-Jewish unions in mixed workplaces largely irrelevant, since Arab workers were now to be organized within the exclusively Arab PLL. For the remainder of the mandate period, in fact until 1959 when the Histadrut decided to allow Arabs to become full members, the PLL (renamed the Israel Labor League after 1948) was the organization to which Arab workers organized under the tutelage of the Histadrut were consigned. There was never any question that the PLL was very much an instrument of the Histadrut: it was run exclusively by Jewish Histadrut officials, its budget came almost entirely from the Histadrut and other Zionist sources, and it cleaved faithfully to the Histadrut line—or more precisely, the MAPAI line—on all questions. Arab workers who joined were issued PLL membership cards, and in return for regular payment of dues gained access to various Histadrut services, most importantly the Kupat Holim network of health clinics and special loan funds.

The day-to-day work of running the new PLL and recruiting Arab workers was entrusted to a newly hired full-time organizer, Eliyahu Agassi, who for more than four decades would play a central role in the Histadrut's Arab work. Agassi was born in Baghdad in 1909 and followed his family to Palestine in 1928. After graduating from the elite Herzliyya secondary school, where he joined one of the labor-Zionist youth movements, he began studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the summer of 1932 he accepted an offer from Dov Hoz and Abba Hushi to move to Haifa and work full-time organizing Arab workers there, replacing Philip Hassun. To Hoz, Hushi, and the other Histadrut leaders interested in this sphere of activity, Agassi must have seemed the perfect candidate for the job, the kind of organizer they had dreamed of for years. Agassi was Jewish, a loyal member of MAPAI, fluent in Arabic as well as English (essential for dealing with British officials and managers), well acquainted with Arab culture, and (unlike most MAPAI members) deeply committed to organizing Arab workers, both from socialist conviction and as a means of realizing Zionism's goals. It should be added that Agassi's personal qualities also served him well: unlike not a few of his Histadrut colleagues, who were overwhelmingly of eastern European origin, he was a gentle, soft-spoken and mild-mannered man, and also respectful of Arabs. These qualities helped endear him to many of the Arabs with whom he came into contact, including even some who vehemently rejected his politics and mission.^[40]

Travails of Hebrew Labor

For Agassi, Hushi, and their Histadrut colleagues, organizing Arab workers was understood as inextricably bound up with the struggle for Hebrew labor. None of them saw any contradiction between the two tasks; indeed, labor-Zionist discourse posed them as entirely complementary. Decades later, when asked why Abba Hushi had felt so strongly about the need to organize Arab workers, Agassi would explain that “Haifa was a mixed city. There were workplaces in which Jews had no foothold, like the harbor. For him this was an opportunity to organize Arab workers and also to get Jewish workers into the harbor.” Ben-Gurion made a similar connection at a meeting of the Histadrut executive committee immediately after the lightermen's strike: “From what the comrades in Haifa have told me, some fifty Jewish workers may be able to get work at the harbor, and thereby help the Arab workers who are there.…We are facing the possibility of getting Jewish workers into an important branch of activity and of organizing Arab workers.”^[41] When in later years Arab workers would sometimes challenge Agassi about the Histadrut's campaign for Hebrew labor, Agassi would respond with a simple metaphor. The Arabs, he argued, had three “sacks of flour”—that is, jobs in the Arab, government, and international sectors—while the Jews had only one sack, the Jewish sector. As long as this was the case, the Jews were entitled to reserve their “sack” for themselves, while also seeking their fair share of jobs in the government and international sectors.^[42]

So it was that even as the Histadrut was working to secure a base among Arab workers at Haifa harbor, it was also trying to secure more jobs for Jews there, which meant the likely displacement of Arab workers. In addition to the kibbutz members who volunteered or were recruited for harbor work, Abba Hushi (with support and funding from the Histadrut) began in 1933 to organize the immigration to Palestine of groups of Jewish dockworkers from Salonika, in the hope that these tough and highly experienced men would be able to displace Arabs and gain a permanent foothold for Jews in Haifa harbor.^[43] A year later Hushi worked out a deal with the Pardes company by which the latter would contract with the Histadrut to provide labor for the porterage of its citrus exports at Haifa, thereby providing more jobs for Jews, though some Arabs would be hired as well. When the new deepwater harbor opened, the Histadrut formed its own company, Manof, to supply labor, mainly Jews from Salonika, though during the busy season Manof hired Arabs as well. In April 1936, on the eve of the general strike that launched the Arab revolt, some 200 Jews had regular jobs at Haifa harbor. As we will see, that strike would create conditions in which Hebrew labor could be more securely established and considerably expanded in this vital enterprise.^[44]

As the decade wore on, Hebrew labor would become an increasingly sensitive issue for labor Zionists. The Histadrut's campaign in 1929–30 to force Jewish citrus grove owners in the moshavot to employ only Jewish workers had not been a great success, despite the availability of numerous unemployed and desperate Jewish workers in the cities who could be mobilized and dispatched to the moshavot to picket, harass, and if necessary forcibly expel Arab workers. MAPAI and the Histadrut it controlled depicted this campaign as a life-or-death struggle for “the right to work” and used it as a way to enhance the Histadrut's growing power and influence within the Yishuv. But the policy elicited considerable criticism, from the parties to MAPAI's left and other sociopolitical forces in the Yishuv but also from otherwise pro-Zionist European social-democratic parties and labor organizations. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald browbeat Ben-Gurion about the issue at the Empire Labor Conference in July 1930, though MacDonald's concerns had less to do with socialist principle than with the security of the empire. “The Muslims of Bengal are hinting to us that we must satisfy the Arabs of Palestine,” MacDonald told Ben-Gurion. “Look here, the Jewish Agency has a rule that forbids employment of Arab workers. Until now it went unnoticed, but now the business is known throughout India. I even asked to be provided with a copy of a Jewish Agency contract, to see for myself whether a rule enforcing exclusively Jewish labor does exist.…You are causing us tremendous problems.”^[45]

Such warnings did nothing to deter the Histadrut from launching several new rounds in the struggle for Hebrew labor during the first half of the 1930s, mainly in the moshavot but also in the cities. Though these aggressive campaigns aroused great resentment among Arabs and strengthened labor Zionism's preeminence in the Yishuv and world Zionism, they did not accomplish their proclaimed goal. At the beginning of 1936 Arabs constituted some 35 percent of the labor force in Jewish agriculture, 20 percent in transportation in the Jewish sector, and 12 percent in construction.^[46] Moreover, as we will see, by 1934 the Histadrut's campaign had begun to engender organized Arab resistance to displacement and counterprotests. But a more significant cause of the Hebrew labor campaign's failure was the unprecedented economic expansion Palestine began to experience in 1932 and which would last into 1935.

The economic boom had several causes, one of the most important of which was the great surge in Jewish immigration into the country that began in 1932 and reached its peak in 1935. During the 1920s Jewish immigration had averaged less than 10,000 a year, below the natural increase of Palestine's Arab population. As a result, in 1931 the 174,000 Jews in Palestine still accounted for only 17 percent of the country's population; that year only 4,000 Jews had immigrated to Palestine. In 1932, however, Jewish immigration more than doubled, and the following year it more than tripled again. In 1934 over 42,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine and in 1935, the high point of this wave, almost 62,000—about equal to the net Jewish inflow (immigration minus emigration) in the entire decade from 1922 to 1931. As a result, even without counting additional thousands of immigrants who had entered the country illegally, Palestine's Jewish population roughly doubled between 1932 and the end of 1935 to reach 375,000, about 27 percent of the population. Almost 60 percent of these immigrants came from Poland and Germany, countries in which Jews faced a rising tide of antisemitism that assumed increasingly virulent and menacing forms. The new immigrants settled disproportionately in the big coastal cities, which grew very rapidly: Tel Aviv and its suburbs accounted for 26.5 percent of the Yishuv's population in 1931 and 36.7 percent in 1936, while the figures for Haifa were 9.2 percent and 13.6 percent respectively.

This influx of Jewish immigrants was accompanied by an unprecedented influx of Jewish capital, which also stimulated Palestine's economy. Some of this capital was brought by the immigrants themselves; another portion was invested by Jews who remained abroad; and some of it was channeled into Palestine through the controversial “Transfer Agreement” which the Jewish Agency negotiated with the new Nazi regime in Germany in 1933 and which remained in effect until the beginning of the Second World War. This agreement, which was vigorously denounced by many Jews and other antifascists who were trying to organize an economic boycott of Nazi Germany, permitted some of the capital of emigrating German Jews to be exported to the Yishuv in the form of German goods.^[47]

Most of this new capital went into residential construction, especially in Tel Aviv and the Jewish neighborhoods of Haifa. A large fraction went into citriculture, which accounted for four-fifths of Palestine's exports and grew dramatically in these years as both Arabs and Jews expanded existing groves and planted new ones. The value of Palestine's orange exports (the great majority of which went to the United Kingdom) increased from £P727,647 in 1930–31 to more than £P3 million by 1934–35. There was also substantial growth in manufacturing, mainly for the rapidly growing local market: capital invested in Jewish-owned industrial enterprises rose from £P2.2 million in 1929 to £P5.4 million in 1933 and to £P12.7 million by 1937. All told, in the four years 1932–35 Palestine's industrial output grew by 61 percent, imports by 130 percent, exports by 77 percent, and consumption of electrical power by 335 percent.^[48]

This influx of capital and immigrants, some of whom came with skills that had been in short supply, obviously benefited the Jewish sector of the Palestinian economy most. But the rapid growth of the Jewish sector stimulated growth in the Arab sector as well, and some of the Yishuv's prosperity trickled down to Arabs in the form of expanded employment opportunities and higher wages for workers, an expanding local market for merchants, manufacturers, and farmers, and growing demand for services. Large numbers of Arab peasants, desperate for some income to supplement meager livelihoods from agriculture, were attracted from the countryside of Palestine (and, as noted earlier, from the Hawran region of Syria) to jobs in the citrus groves, the ports, urban construction, and public works sites. Government statistics still classified some two-thirds of Palestinian Muslims as dependent on agriculture, but growing numbers of peasants now spent at least part of the year working for wages in the citrus groves and in the burgeoning coastal cities.^[49]

The prosperity which the Yishuv enjoyed between 1932 and 1935 undermined the Histadrut's struggle for Hebrew labor. An abundant supply of Arab workers kept wages low and made it difficult for Jewish workers to compete for unskilled jobs in agriculture (especially citriculture), the railways, public works, the ports, and urban construction. At the same time, despite the Histadrut's exhortations, relatively few Jewish workers, whether newcomers or veterans, were willing to forsake relatively well-paying jobs in construction, services, or industry in the towns and cities for poorly paid and difficult work in the citrus groves, or for that matter in the ports and on the railways. As a result, Arab employment in Jewish-owned citrus groves and at urban construction sites expanded rather dramatically in the 1932–35 period. In the late 1920s high urban Jewish unemployment had provided the Histadrut with an effective weapon in the struggle for Hebrew labor. By contrast, the economic expansion of the early 1930s made the conquest of labor much more difficult. This did not stop the Histadrut from trying; but as we will see, it was not until political conditions changed dramatically in 1936 that the Histadrut would be able to achieve even partially the goals it had dreamed of for so long.

Arab Workers, the Histadrut, and the Paws

When Agassi arrived in Haifa in the summer of 1932 to take up his new post as the Histadrut's chief organizer of Arab workers, the Haifa Workers' Council had already taken under its wing a core group of some eighty Arab port workers. Other groups of Arab workers soon began to approach Agassi and Hushi to seek their assistance in organizing and negotiating with employers. These workers were not necessarily unfamiliar with labor organizing and trade unionism; some had had previous contacts with the PAWS, which had been present (if not always very active) in Haifa since 1925. But impressed by the Histadrut's intervention on behalf of the lightermen, they hoped to benefit from the Jewish labor movement's apparent wealth, power, and effectiveness. The following case illustrates some of the circumstances in which Arab workers approached the Histadrut at this early stage, as well as some of the complexities which always characterized its interactions with Arab workers.

In July 1932, a delegation of skilled construction workers employed by the contractor ‘Aziz Khayyat on a large project at the Iraq Petroleum Company installation and the nearby Customs Office appeared at the Haifa Workers' Council. The 150 skilled and unskilled workers for whom the delegates spoke worked twelve and a half hours a day, including an hour off for lunch. Unhappy with this extremely long workday, the forty or so stonecutters working at the site had consulted the PAWS, of which some of them had been or still were members, and on its advice had informed Khayyat that they would henceforth work no more than eight hours a day. To this Khayyat replied that he had no work for anyone unwilling to labor twelve and a half hours a day. The stonecutters walked off the site, in effect declaring a strike, but rather than post pickets and publicize their struggle they simply found other jobs elsewhere, so that Khayyat was able to replace them without difficulty.

The PAWS failed to take any further action, suggesting only that the remaining workers hand over membership dues and join up. The scaffold erectors employed at the site, still dissatisfied, met, announced that they too wanted an eight-hour day, and elected one of their number, a man named Jurji (“George”), as their representative. But when Khayyat fired Jurji and threatened the rest of them with dismissal, they backed down. It was at this point that the scaffold workers accepted the advice of the one Jew among them, a Histadrut member, to turn to the Haifa Workers' Council for help. Hushi told the workers that the stonecutters, the PAWS, and the scaffold workers had gone about it all wrong: one could not go on strike without proper preparations, and if one did launch a strike one didn't just find another job somewhere else. After the scolding, Hushi offered to have their one Jewish coworker approach Khayyat and threaten a strike if Jurji was not rehired. Hushi also asked the workers to contact the PAWS and convey the Haifa Workers' Council's desire for cooperation.

Three days later the delegation returned and told Hushi and Agassi that the PAWS leaders had refused to cooperate with the Histadrut, because the latter was a “Zionist organization which wants a strike so that it can remove the Arab workers from this workplace in order to replace them with Jews, just as [according to the secretary of the PAWS] the Histadrut had done after the lightermen's strike at the port of Haifa.” Happily for the Histadrut, an Arab lighterman was on hand to deny this accusation, although as we have seen the allegation was in fact not entirely inaccurate. Taking the initiative, Hushi and Agassi sent two letters directly to the PAWS, suggesting that either the PAWS declare a strike, with the Histadrut's support, or that the two organizations meet and plan a strike together. There was no reply, and the refusal of the PAWS to cooperate with the Histadrut made the latter look reasonable.

However, the Histadrut was unable to take advantage of these circumstances, because just as the Arab building workers had contacted both the PAWS and the Histadrut to achieve their ends, they had also appealed for help to the British authorities, in the person of the local District Commissioner, the chief British administrator in that part of Palestine. The Commissioner rejected the workers' demand for an eight-hour day, insisting that Palestine was not like England or other European countries, but he did secure the agreement of Khayyat and other contractors to reduce the workday by one hour, to eleven and a half hours. Some of the building workers favored accepting this proposal, while others rejected it as inadequate. We do not know for certain how things ultimately turned out, but because there is no further evidence of unrest among this particular group of workers it seems likely that most if not all of them ultimately accepted Khayyat's offer or quietly found jobs elsewhere.^[50]

What we do know about this incident nonetheless tells us some important things about relations among Arab workers, the Histadrut, and the Palestine Arab Workers' Society. For one, it suggests it is not at all useful or accurate to characterize Arab workers who were not unaware of the Histadrut's Zionist commitments yet nonetheless chose to cooperate with the Histadrut and its emissaries as gullible dupes. As we will see in other cases as well, Arab workers possessed a capacity for agency, for making their own sense of complex situations, and for acting to further their interests as they saw them, though their perceptions and actions did not necessarily coincide with those of middle- or upper-class nationalists. They were often willing, or more precisely compelled, to seek the help of any organization, institution, or individual that might help them in their grossly unequal battle with their employers, including even Zionists or officials of the colonial state, whose intervention they not infrequently sought when they thought it might be of some use. Hence the inadequacy of labeling such interactions simply as instances of “manipulation” or even “collaboration,” as if these terms were not embedded in a particular nationalist discourse and did not themselves require elucidation and contextualization. I will return to this issue later.

This episode also helps us understand the PAWS' attitude toward the Histadrut more clearly. In Chapter 4 I showed that while the leaders of the Arab railway workers who constituted the core of the PAWS were willing to work with the Histadrut as the representative of the Jewish railway workers, they adamantly rejected the right of the Histadrut to recruit or represent Arab railway workers. The case of the building workers demonstrates that the PAWS applied the same principle in other sectors as well. Thus, in its efforts to recruit Arab workers in Haifa, the Palestine Labor League had always to contend with the hostility and rivalry of the PAWS, which though small and weak was very much part of the local labor scene. Wherever the PLL developed ties with Arab workers and sought to represent them in a labor dispute, the PAWS was sure to show up, denounce the PLL as Zionist, try to take charge of handling the dispute, and seek to recruit the workers involved. The workers themselves seem to have been aware of this rivalry and were sometimes able to take advantage of it in ways that pleased neither the Histadrut nor the PAWS.

In its rivalry with the PAWS, the PLL had some important advantages. Backed as it was by the Histadrut, whose achievements in winning higher wages for Jewish workers and building up a powerful network of economic, social, cultural, and political institutions and enterprises were plain to see, it seemed to offer Arab workers a stronger position from which to bargain with employers, useful connections, and access to a broad range of services. The PAWS sought to counter these advantages by developing its own connections with nonworker personalities, particularly locally prominent lawyers, who could bargain on the workers' behalf from a position of relative equality and impunity. One of these lawyers was Hanna ‘Asfur, who served as the PAWS' legal counselor for much of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Shafa ‘Amr in 1902, ‘Asfur attended schools in Palestine and Lebanon, held a clerical job at the Palestine Railways, and then served as a court translator in Haifa. He graduated from a local law school and opened his own office in Haifa in 1929.^[51] Later other lawyers, linked to different factions within the Palestinian Arab elite and nationalist movement, would develop ties with various segments of the fledgling Arab labor movement.

The Histadrut frequently denounced these lawyers as self-interested and opportunistic outsiders, contrasting their role in some of the Arab unions with the purported independence of the Jewish unions, led by authentic workers. This depiction was not altogether inaccurate: some of these outsiders, like Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani in 1931 and Fakhri al-Nashashibi a few years later, did try to use the labor movement as a base from which to further their political ambitions. But from the standpoint of the rank and file Arab workers and the leaders of a weak Arab labor movement, they could often be quite useful allies, and the workers who ran the PAWS may have seen themselves as “using” these lawyers and notables every bit as much as the latter were exploiting the workers. Moreover, the Histadrut's claim to be an independent labor movement interested only in benefiting the workers was belied by an easily observable fact. The PAWS could and did point to the Histadrut's status as a central institution of the Zionist project, whose ultimate goal was the creation in Palestine of a Jewish majority and the country's transformation into a Jewish state. It also pointed out the obvious contradiction between the Histadrut's professed commitment to worker solidarity across national lines on the one hand, and on the other its unrelenting struggle for Hebrew labor, which often meant, or was taken to mean, displacing Arabs from their jobs. As the case of the building workers outlined above makes clear, attacking the Histadrut on these grounds was not automatically effective: Arab workers might choose to ignore the appeal of nationalism and work with the Histadrut, or even join the PLL, if they felt it was to their advantage. But the Zionist commitment of the Histadrut, and by extension the PLL, gave the PAWS and later other Arab labor organizations a potent weapon.

While its contacts with the building workers did not result in a sustained relationship, the PLL did in the summer and fall of 1932 develop ties with other groups of Arab workers in Haifa. The case of seven Arab workers at a Haifa bakery is typical. These workers approached their employer (a member of the city's small German community) to seek a reduction in their workweek from eighty or eighty-five hours to sixty, a wage increase (from £P3 to £P3.5 a month), and free bread, as was the custom at other bakeries; when he refused, they turned to the PLL and joined its newly formed union for Arab workers employed in European-style bakeries. Though the PLL cautioned them against hasty action, the owner's intransigence and abusiveness ultimately led the workers to strike. Hushi and Agassi saw this as a test case: in a letter to the Histadrut executive committee, they insisted that “on this occasion, the first instance of an organized strike by Arab workers connected with it, the Histadrut must demonstrate its organizational power, the solidarity of its members, and its readiness to stand by the Arab worker and help him materially and morally.” The Haifa Workers' Council provided the workers with strike pay and issued a Hebrew-language leaflet to publicize their cause. But the bakery owner brought in strikebreakers, Haifa's German community supported him (rendering a consumer boycott ineffective), and the strike ended in failure. When the workers could not find new jobs, the Haifa Workers' Council helped them organize a cooperative bakery. However, within a few months internal conflicts led to the transformation of the cooperative into a private business. The small PLL-affiliated union of bakery workers survived this failure, but only barely.^[52]

In October 1932, the General Workers' Club in Haifa was reopened after half a year's hiatus. It was intended to serve as a meeting place and cultural center for the workers organized into trade unions under the auspices of the PLL, and a framework within which individual workers not yet organized into unions could associate. In a report to the Histadrut leadership on activities among Arab workers in Haifa, the lack of an Arabic-language organ which would carry and reinforce the PLL's message received special emphasis. There was, the report noted, a reading room at the club which featured Egyptian illustrated weeklies and the Cairo daily al-Ahram; but “the Palestinian Arab press is out of the question, because it is likely only to poison the minds of the [Arab] workers.”^[53] The PLL also established a cell among the workers of the Vacuum Oil Company in Haifa and made contact with various groups of workers in Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Among the latter were drivers, mostly Greek Orthodox and Armenian, who had organized independently of Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani's organization.^[54]

The Nesher Quarry Workers

The most important and best publicized struggle in which the PLL was involved in this period was at the quarry attached to the Nesher cement factory at Yagur (Yajur) on the outskirts of Haifa. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Nesher had been the site of a series of important struggles in 1924–25. At the factory itself, still Palestine's only producer of Portland cement, the principle of Hebrew labor was strictly observed, with the Jewish workers earning 30 to 35 piastres for an eight-hour workday. The quarry concession, however, was in the hands of a Palestinian Arab contractor, Musbah al-Shaqifi, who employed only Arabs; by the early 1930s these were recruited mainly from villages in the area. The Histadrut had never been happy about the employment of Arabs at the quarry but had been unable to do much about it. The quarry workers received 8 to 12 piastres for a workday of twelve or thirteen hours, low even by the miserable standard for unskilled manual labor in Palestine at the time. They lived in company-owned shacks at the work site while their families remained behind in their home villages, and they were compelled to buy their groceries at inflated prices from a store owned by the contractor.

At the end of September 1932 al-Shaqifi announced a wage cut and some 150 quarry workers, pressed beyond the limits of endurance, went on strike. Their main demands were a nine-hour workday, a daily wage of 15 piastres, and the closing of the employer-owned store. The strikers immediately contacted the Nesher-Yagur Workers' Council, which not only had never previously sought to organize the Arab quarry workers but in principle opposed their employment, and asked it to negotiate on their behalf. When al-Shaqifi refused to make any concessions, local Histadrut officials, with the support of headquarters in Tel Aviv, organized picket lines, held daily meetings, and sent strikers to the villages from which they had come to spread word of the strike and warn off potential strikebreakers. Though they believed that this was a strike which had to be won, Histadrut officials at Yagur confessed that it had caused “confusion” among the Jewish workers in the factory itself. For some of the latter the quarry strike seemed a golden opportunity to introduce Jewish workers into the quarry, and it was not clear whether or not the Jewish factory workers would refuse to accept materials quarried by any strikebreakers the contractor might bring in. To Histadrut officials' relief, however, Nesher's management kept to its previously arranged schedule and shut down the cement factory for the holidays just a few days after the quarry strike began, thereby avoiding conflict between the Arab and Jewish workers.

The PAWS responded to the Histadrut's involvement by sending representatives out from Haifa to ask the strikers to sever their connection with the Jewish organization, but they were unsuccessful. When the contractor sent one of his clerks to offer a small wage increase, he was set upon by the strikers and was spared a beating thanks only to the intervention of a Histadrut official. The strikers' large numbers, their solidarity, and the support they received from the Histadrut deterred al-Shaqifi from trying to bring in strikebreakers, and after eighteen days he was compelled to offer more substantial concessions to end the strike. The workday was reduced to nine hours, the daily wage was raised to 12.5 piastres, with a further raise to 15 piastres promised after three months, and the workers would henceforth be free to spend their wages wherever they wished. Al-Shaqifi was also forced to negotiate with the workers' elected committee (but not the Histadrut) and to agree to the establishment of a committee composed of representatives of labor and management which would resolve future disputes. Out of the strike there emerged an organization of some 140 Nesher quarry workers allied with the Histadrut.^[55]

This victory proved short-lived, however: al-Shaqifi had no intention of respecting the agreement he had been compelled to sign and quickly moved to regain the upper hand. In an effort to undermine the Histadrut's influence over his employees, he hired a large number of new workers and got them signed up as members of the PAWS. It is not known whether PAWS leaders were entirely happy to play this role, but they were certainly anxious to eliminate the PLL's base among the Nesher quarry workers. In the months that followed, al-Shaqifi favored the newly hired PAWS members while harassing the veteran workers who belonged to the PLL. This campaign reached its high point in April 1933: when the 130 PLL-affiliated workers at Nesher returned to work after having spent a holiday in their home villages, they found that al-Shaqifi had replaced them. He offered to take them back on condition that they purchase the implements they needed for work with their own money and submit to a medical examination at their own expense. When they refused, al-Shaqifi locked them out. Picket lines went up, but with the help of the police and the cooperation of the workers affiliated with the PAWS al-Shaqifi was able to keep the quarry operating.

The Histadrut weighed in on the PLL's side by authorizing the seventy Jewish workers employed at a department of the cement factory connected with the quarry to refuse to handle materials supplied by workers they defined as strikebreakers. In a statement defending their case published in Filastin, the Arab strikers denounced al-Shaqifi's many abuses and expressed their appreciation for the Jewish workers' solidarity.^[56] Given the circumstances, the Histadrut's action was probably not motivated by solidarity alone. The struggle at Nesher now pitted those workers who belonged to the PLL against al-Shaqifi (and behind him Nesher's management) and the workers who supported the PAWS. The influence of the PLL and the Histadrut at this large and important workplace was at stake, and it would not bode well for the Histadrut's reputation and its ability to organize Arab workers elsewhere if an Arab employer allied with the strongest Arab labor union succeeded in driving the PLL out.

The struggle at Nesher dragged on inconclusively for some six weeks. For most of that period al-Shaqifi refused to negotiate, and for a time he even went into hiding in Nazareth in order to avoid pressure to begin talks. Nesher management initially denied that the strike was its affair, but ultimately it compelled al-Shaqifi to negotiate by threatening to cancel his contract for the quarry. The police seem to have cooperated with al-Shaqifi by protecting the nonstriking workers while harassing and arresting picketers and strike leaders. At one point the police even arrested Eliyahu Agassi after an informer swore that Agassi had given him a pistol; fortunately for Agassi, he was able to provide a credible alibi and was released. At the beginning of May 1933 the Histadrut agreed to end the strike, with all outstanding issues to be referred for arbitration to a British official. The arbitrator ordered that the contractor restore almost all of the strikers to their jobs and later ruled in favor of the strikers on some of their economic demands, but he did not require al-Shaqifi to recognize the PLL as their bargaining agent.

During the strike, the Histadrut leadership came under fire from both the Palestine Communist Party and Po‘alei Tziyon Smol. The former insisted in leaflets that the Zionist Histadrut was once again betraying the Arab and Jewish workers alike and called for an independent strike committee which would lead a joint struggle to equalize Arab and Jewish wages. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol publications complained that the Histadrut was not aggressive enough: instead of focusing on improving the workers' wages and working conditions, it had given priority to the more modest goal of getting the locked-out workers reinstated. It seems clear that the Histadrut very much wanted to hold on to its base at the Nesher quarry, but its commitment there also seems to have had limits beyond which it hesitated to venture. In any event, the strike of April–May 1933 marked the beginning of the end of the PLL's influence at Nesher. Over the following months harassment and firings by al-Shaqifi, who ignored most of the arbitrator's rulings, along with pressure from the PAWS, destroyed the PLL's local base, and its organization of quarry workers disintegrated.^[57]

The PAWS did not fare much better. In January 1936 it led a one-week strike of Nesher quarry workers against the same oppressive contractor, Musbah al-Shaqifi, demanding that wages be raised to 16 piastres for an eight-hour day, that the system of heavy fines for infractions of work rules be abolished, that al-Shaqifi's harassment of the workers come to an end, and that the workers be allowed to live wherever they wished. This last demand reflected the workers' long-standing desire to live not in company-owned barracks but with their families, hitherto compelled to remain behind in their home villages. Al-Shaqifi signed an agreement with the PAWS but as in the past failed to honor it. Another very brief strike therefore erupted in mid-February 1936, and then yet another at the end of that month, as the 325 quarry workers tried to force al-Shaqifi to pay what was in fact still a substandard wage of 16 piastres a day and grant some reduction in their fourteen-hour workday. This last strike dragged on until mid-March, but it too ended inconclusively. As I discuss in Chapter 6, the general strike that erupted in April 1936 would finally make possible the realization of the Histadrut's long-standing goal of achieving Hebrew labor at the Nesher quarry, just as it would at Haifa harbor.^[58]

The PLL in Haifa

During this same period, the PLL also developed links with other groups of Arab workers in and around Haifa, including stevedores at the port and barrel makers at Shell Oil, as well as with workers in Acre and Nazareth.^[59] These relationships were all short-lived, however, and neither the fledgling Harbor Workers' Union nor the other workplace-based nuclei established in 1932 succeeded in transforming themselves into stable trade union organizations. In fact, the PLL was never really able to consolidate a stable base of support among Arab workers. Apart from a very small number of loyal members in various trades, its relationships with any specific group of workers never lasted for more than a few months before fading away. The sites at which it was active were always shifting, and whatever continuity the PLL possessed as an organization in Haifa was imparted by Eliyahu Agassi and Abba Hushi.

As we have seen, the PLL's efforts in Haifa were often hindered or undermined by the PAWS, which while only sporadically capable of taking the initiative nonetheless did its best to intervene wherever the PLL was active and keep its pro-Zionist rival away from the Arab workers whom it saw as its exclusive constituency. In this struggle, sometimes (as at Nesher) waged in temporary alliance with Arab employers, the PAWS could make effective use of the argument that the Histadrut was really seeking to push Arab workers out of their jobs and replace them with Jews. Histadrut officials also blamed the Jewish communists for the PLL's lack of success, seeing them as traitors always on the lookout for opportunities to disseminate their anti-Zionist poison and mislead naive Arab workers. There is little doubt that the communists did seek to undermine the Histadrut's efforts to organize Arab workers, but the party's weakness, and the wariness with which most Arab workers regarded communism, suggest that the PLL's difficulties cannot really be accounted for by communist sabotage.^[60]

Another significant factor in the PLL's inability to consolidate a stable base was the character and circumstances of the Arab working class in Palestine at the time, which of course also hindered the organizing efforts of the PAWS and other Arab unions. Many if not most of the workers with whom the PLL came into contact in 1932–33 were relatively recent recruits to the urban wage-earning workforce, peasants who found it difficult to support themselves and their families in their villages and were attracted to the rapidly growing towns by the availability of jobs there. They were largely illiterate or semiliterate, and many of them retained close ties with village life and the agrarian economy. At Haifa harbor and at Nesher, for example, much of the work was seasonal, and in the slack season workers would usually return to their home villages. Because much of the urban labor force was unskilled there was also high turnover, which made it very difficult to create stable organizations. Unskilled workers at some site who had developed a connection with the PLL (or the PAWS) might well move on after a few months, to be replaced by new workers who had no such ties. The abundance of cheap unskilled labor also made it easy for employers to dismiss troublesome workers, combat the growth of trade unions, and find strikebreakers when necessary. Moreover, while these workers were often quick to go on strike, they were much less interested in paying dues, attending meetings, or submitting to organizational discipline. As for skilled workers, as the case of ‘Aziz Khayyat in June 1932 showed, during good times when their skills were in demand they might find it to their advantage simply to leave an oppressive employer and hire on elsewhere rather than assume the costs and risks of involvement with a trade union.

But the PLL's lack of success is also attributable to the low priority assigned to organizing Arab workers by the Histadrut's leadership and membership. The resources at the disposal of the PLL were miniscule; in effect, Agassi was the PLL, as the organization did not really exist outside Haifa before the end of 1933. Even there Abba Hushi had many other responsibilities as secretary of the Haifa Workers' Council and could devote only a small proportion of his time to Arab affairs. Scarcity of resources dictated that the PLL operate in a purely reactive manner. As a rule, Agassi and Hushi would wait until they were approached by some group of Arab workers who were already discontented and organized enough to take the initiative, and only then would the PLL and Histadrut become involved, intervene on their behalf, and try to sign them up.

It is perhaps understandable that Agassi should have felt that his time was best spent maintaining and developing links with groups of Arab workers who had already begun to organize themselves or had actually gone on strike, rather than trying to organize workers who had not yet indicated a clear interest in action. This approach maximized the limited funding and staff resources available to the PLL. However, the PLL's reactive stance, competition from the PAWS (and later other Arab trade unions), and the unfamiliarity with organization, high turnover, and vulnerability of the Arab workers it was seeking to reach, made it difficult to create a solid core of members, much less a cadre of Arab trade union organizers who could eventually work on their own. In numerous cases, Arab workers came to Agassi and Hushi after having already declared a strike, and Hushi was constantly scolding Arab strikers for what he saw as their impetuousness and their failure to prepare adequately before doing so. The Histadrut often found itself leading strikes under circumstances which did not allow much room for maneuver or much prospect of victory. But even when workers achieved some short-term gains from the Histadrut's intervention, an organizational connection with the PLL did not necessarily follow; and even when the PLL succeeded in organizing workers who approached it for help during a strike, the new PLL cell rarely lasted for long.

The parties to MAPAI's left were not hesitant about denouncing the Histadrut leadership for the PLL's rather poor showing. In March 1933 Po‘alei Tziyon Smol warned of the consequences of MAPAI's failures: “Thousands of Arab workers in the government sector, in the citrus groves, in construction and crafts, in the municipal and international sector will rise up, emancipate themselves and organize despite all the obstacles. With us, if we bring them into our camp as equals; without us and against us, if we stand apart or become an obstacle to their organization.”^[61] While Hashomer Hatza‘ir denounced Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's approach as a “serious danger to the realization of proletarian Zionism,” it too criticized MAPAI's insistence on total Hebrew labor, its policy zigzags, its undemocratic domination of a bureaucratized Histadrut and its failure to pursue joint organization with the seriousness it deserved.^[62] Not surprisingly, the PCP went much further in its denunciation of the Histadrut:

After strangling strikes by Arab workers, the Histadrut's leaders are trying to channel a small number of Arab workers into a Histadrut organization. The purpose of the PLL, which has been resurrected in Haifa, as well as of the International Union of Railway Workers, is to organize a certain portion of Arab workers in an organization whose function is to provide the Histadrut's efforts at conquest [of labor] an internationalist cover, and to divert the Arab worker from the path of establishing his own class organization in order to hitch him to the cart of chauvinism and Zionism.^[63]

The Histadrut leadership was accustomed to such attacks, which MAPAI's domination of the Zionist labor movement allowed it to ignore for the most part. But the PLL's apparent inability to establish a durable base in Haifa, and especially its failure at Nesher, the most important struggle in which it had been engaged so far, led to a decline in its activity in that city, and the enthusiasm and sense of possibility which had characterized the PLL's work there in the summer of 1932 evaporated. By the spring of 1933 funds for Arab work were again virtually exhausted; Yehuda Burla had left his post as secretary of the Histadrut's Arab Department; and by November Abba Hushi was reduced to threatening the Histadrut executive committee that he would terminate his efforts to organize Arab workers in Haifa unless the Histadrut provided adequate funding and gave some serious attention to this project. The rent on the Haifa club was by then three months in arrears and the landlord was about to shut it down. The Histadrut seems to have come through with some money and the club remained open, but the PLL continued to stagnate through 1934, claiming no more than 200 members scattered among small workplaces in and around Haifa.^[64]

Arab Workers and Hebrew Labor in the Moshavot

As we will see, the PLL would soon strike roots in another urban center, Jaffa. But before that a strike by Arab agricultural workers attracted widespread public attention and sparked an intense debate within the labor-Zionist movement over Hebrew labor and policies toward Arab workers, especially agricultural workers. Early in June 1934 some 250 Arab workers in the citrus groves in and around the moshava of Nes Tziyona, on the coastal plain west of Ramla, went on strike against both Arab and Jewish farmers to secure an increase in their wages from 12 to 17 piastres a day. Some of the strikers were Palestinians, but many were migrant laborers from Egypt and the Hawran, attracted to Palestine by the country's relative prosperity and higher wage levels. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol activists in the moshava immediately contacted the strikers and offered their support. Anxious to head off its rival on the left, the Histadrut leadership quickly dispatched Eliyahu Agassi and other MAPAI loyalists to the scene to find out what was going on and take charge.

The Nes Tziyona strike, and a number of similar strikes that erupted at Petah Tikva and other moshavot soon thereafter, confronted the Histadrut with a dilemma. That spring the Histadrut had launched a new round in its campaign to pressure Jewish farmers to employ only Jewish workers, focused on the citrus groves in and around Kfar Saba. This campaign in the countryside was later to be supplemented by a renewed effort to enforce Hebrew labor in the cities, especially in construction. The Histadrut justified this renewed offensive by claiming that the boom in citrus cultivation had brought many more Arab workers from Palestine, Egypt, and the Hawran into this sector, but it also had roots in political struggles between MAPAI and its rivals within the Yishuv. The campaign was not, however, going very well: despite picketing, harassment, and heavy political and moral pressure the farmers were resisting the Histadrut's demand that they replace their Arab workers with Jews. Moreover, with easier and better-paying urban jobs relatively plentiful, the Histadrut found it impossible to mobilize sufficient numbers of Jews to move to the moshavot and replace Arabs in the citrus groves, even though Jewish workers earned up to twice as much as Arab workers.

In this context, Histadrut leaders feared that support for the Nes Tziyona strike might imply recognition of the right of Arab workers to employment in the Jewish sector, which would undermine the struggle for Hebrew labor. However, open opposition to the strike and a move to displace the strikers would damage the Histadrut's reputation, bolster MAPAI's opposition on the left, and strengthen the Arab nationalist movement, which made considerable political capital out of the Histadrut's Hebrew labor campaign. As a result, though the Histadrut executive committee decided (with much ambivalence) to endorse the Nes Tziyona strike, publish a leaflet supporting it, and contribute money for a strike fund, these decisions do not seem to have been implemented. This led Hashomer Hatza‘ir and Po‘alei Tziyon Smol members to charge that MAPAI, which controlled the Histadrut apparatus as well as the Nes Tziyona Workers' Council, had once again failed to honor its promise to support a strike by Arab workers. The strike seems to have petered out in a rather disorganized manner after a week or so, with some of the workers winning a wage increase and returning to their jobs while others found work elsewhere. A number of the Arab workers at Nes Tziyona subsequently formed their own organization which alternately approached the Histadrut and Arab labor organizations linked to the nationalist movement for support, suggesting once again that Arab workers were quite capable of maneuvering in their own perceived interest.^[65]

The wave of strikes in the moshavot and its aftermath again put the question of the Histadrut's policy toward Arab agricultural workers on the organization's agenda. The question was extensively discussed when the Histadrut council convened in August 1934. Dov Hoz, speaking for the Histadrut's MAPAI majority, defended his party's position on joint organization. “We must,” he argued, “refrain from activity of a missionary character.”

It is very easy to excite groups of Arabs. In their excitement, lacking knowledge and experience, they are ready to rally to any flag and later to go over to another camp. In this regard the experience of the Nes Tziyona strike is instructive. The Nes Tziyona strikers came to an agreement with us. Then they published a letter in the Arab newspapers that they had broken with us. And then they came to us again and said that the letter was only “politics.” In the meantime a club linked with the Arab Executive has been formed.

Claiming that most of the strikers at Nes Tziyona were migrant laborers from outside Palestine, Hoz argued that such workers posed a threat not only to the struggle for Hebrew labor but to Palestinian Arab workers as well. He insisted that priority be given to the struggle for Hebrew labor, though he acknowledged the need to intensify the Histadrut's work among Arabs and proposed the creation of a permanent committee which would direct and develop the organization's activities in this sphere.^[66]

Hashomer Hatza‘ir sought to distance itself from both MAPAI's demand for “100 percent Hebrew labor” and Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's outright rejection of the struggle for Hebrew labor. It proposed that the Histadrut commit itself not only to preserving the jobs of the “permanent” Arab workers in the moshavot, by which it meant workers originating from within Palestine who had worked for at least two years in one place, but also to organizing them, along with Arab workers in the cities. In its view the strikes in the moshavot marked the beginning of a new period in which the organization of Arab workers would become even more essential for the long-term success of the labor-Zionist enterprise. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's delegates to the Histadrut council ridiculed Hashomer Hatza‘ir's formulaic attempt at a compromise on the question of Hebrew labor, arguing that it was impossible to impose an artificial distinction between “permanent” and “temporary” workers, organizing the former while trying to displace the latter and get Hawranis expelled from the country. This party's leaders reiterated their call for a Histadrut which would be open to, and actively seek to recruit, all the workers in Palestine, including even the migrants from the Hawran, and noted that if the Arab workers were inclining toward nationalism, they were only following MAPAI's example: “You want the Arab worker to understand why you are allowed to collaborate with the Va‘ad Le’umi [which included representatives of bourgeois parties], but he is forbidden to collaborate with the Arab Executive?”

Both Po‘alei Tziyon Smol and Hashomer Hatza‘ir threatened that if the Histadrut did not take Arab work seriously, they themselves would take the initiative. It was in part to forestall this possibility that the resolution endorsed by the council's MAPAI majority declared that Arab work should be intensified under the guidance of a new Histadrut committee. The council also insisted that only the Histadrut had the right to organize Arab workers, though it avoided any explicit commitment to the organization of Arab workers in the moshavot. A month later, in September 1934, the Histadrut executive committee formally established a committee on Arab affairs to guide its work in this arena. Despite Hashomer Hatza‘ir's objections Po‘alei Tziyon Smol was excluded from participation, and only one member of Hashomer Hatza‘ir (Ya‘akov Riftin, a leader of the movement's left wing) was appointed. The others were all MAPAI members: Dov Hoz, Abba Hushi, David Hacohen (director of the Histadrut's Contracting Office, which carried out construction and infrastructure projects as well as public works projects on government tenders), Nata‘ Harpaz, and Reuven Zaslani, a newcomer to this sphere of activity to whom I will return shortly. In keeping with his movement's perspective, Riftin proposed an ambitious program to expand the Arab Department's work, including the organization of “permanent” Arab agricultural workers in the moshavot into the PLL. But his MAPAI colleagues on the new committee opposed organizing those workers because, as Hacohen put it, in the moshavot “I am fighting for my life against the Arab worker”—that is, to achieve Hebrew labor. It quickly became clear that the Histadrut's involvement with Arab workers was to have a strictly urban focus.^[67]

The Dockworkers of Jaffa

By the time this new committee was formed, the PLL's main arena of activity had shifted from Haifa to Jaffa, where the PLL had previously had only limited contacts with Arab workers. This began to change when a group of workers employed at a Greek-owned leather factory near Jaffa approached the Histadrut for help and Agassi began to come down from Haifa to work with them. These leather workers eventually went on strike with Histadrut support, but the employer brought in strikebreakers and the strike was defeated. Some of the workers returned to their old jobs while others found work elsewhere. Among the latter was an Egyptian who had previously worked as a stevedore at Jaffa harbor and now returned there. Through him Agassi established contacts with Arab stevedores and lightermen at the port of Jaffa who welcomed his willingness to help them seek redress of their grievances.

Jaffa's port remained important even after Haifa's new deepwater harbor opened in 1933, especially as an outlet for Palestine's booming citrus exports. The Arab stevedores and lightermen who worked there, employed through Arab labor contractors, were increasingly discontented and ripe for organization. Though paid a fixed daily wage, in the busy citrus export season the stevedores might be compelled to work up to eighteen hours a day; they were therefore interested not only in a higher daily wage but also in compensation for overtime. The lightermen received not a daily wage but a share of the receipts of the boat on which they worked, which gave the boat owner or contractor for whom they worked control over their income and plenty of opportunity to shortchange them. They wanted some reform of this system to make their income more predictable and enhance their control over how much they worked and earned. Both groups were engaged in dangerous work and suffered numerous accidents for which they were only rarely compensated by the employers.

At the same time, these workers, who were mostly Palestinians from Jaffa itself or from the towns and villages of the coastal plain and enjoyed some job security (though employment at the port fluctuated seasonally), saw their jobs and wages threatened by migrant workers coming from the Hawran (and to a lesser extent Egypt) who were attracted to Palestine by the country's relative prosperity and were taking over jobs at the port. The stevedores and lightermen hoped that by organizing themselves into a union they could protect their incomes from the downward pressure which the presence of these low-wage competitors posed and secure their jobs through enforcement of the principle of local preference in the allocation of work. It was not only Jaffa port workers who in this period perceived a threat from low-wage migrants: in Haifa the PAWS sent a petition to the government of Palestine protesting what it perceived as the flooding of the local labor market by Hawranis, who threatened the jobs and wages of Palestinian workers.^[68]

The Histadrut shared this goal of excluding non-Palestinian Arabs, because the exclusion of migrant workers would facilitate the struggle for Hebrew labor by keeping wages within Palestine relatively high. As I discussed in relation to the debate over the Nes Tziyona strike, only Po‘alei Tziyon Smol advocated extending the principle of proletarian internationalism and joint organization to encompass even the Hawranis and Egyptians, and it did not carry much weight within the labor-Zionist movement. Though MAPAI and Hashomer Hatza‘ir disagreed over whether Hebrew labor should be total or should exempt “permanent Arab workers,” the two parties agreed that Hawrani and Egyptian migrant workers should be displaced, barred from entry into Palestine, and whenever possible expelled. MAPAI leaders generally insisted that the Arabs of Palestine did not constitute a distinct nationality entitled to self-determination but were members of a larger Arab nation, and that it would therefore not be terribly unjust if they had to live within a Jewish state or were even resettled outside Palestine. With respect to the labor market, however, the Histadrut found it expedient to stress the distinctiveness of Palestinian Arab identity and interests so as to keep out non-Jewish immigrants whose influx might hinder the realization of Zionist goals. In fact, the Histadrut tended to exaggerate the number of Hawranis and others “infiltrating” into Palestine, and it routinely declared Arabs employed at work sites targeted for the conquest of labor to be non-Palestinians so as to justify their displacement.^[69]

To attract the Jaffa stevedores and lightermen, the PLL opened a club near the port at which a Kupat Holim clinic operated; it also provided a loan fund and other services, among the most important of which was legal assistance. The government of Palestine had enacted legislation requiring employers to compensate workers for work-related injuries, but few Arab workers knew about the law or possessed the means to take advantage of it. The first cases in which Histadrut lawyers sued Arab employers on behalf of injured Arab stevedores made a strong impression on Arab workers in Jaffa and enhanced the reputation of the PLL and the Histadrut there. By the fall of 1934 the PLL was claiming about one hundred Jaffa stevedores as members of an affiliated union, and after lengthy negotiations some of the lightermen were also beginning to join. However, the fact that many port workers left Jaffa and returned to their home villages during the slack season made it difficult to sustain the Jaffa stevedores' union: it had in effect to be reestablished when the busy citrus export season began in the late fall. But for Histadrut officials the PLL's apparent success in organizing these workers made it possible to envision a situation in which, as one of them put it, “we will be the rulers in the port of Jaffa and will be able to do great things there, both politically and economically.”^[70]

Agassi began to visit Jaffa once a week to work with the lightermen and stevedores, while Histadrut leader Dov Hoz intervened on their behalf with the British officials who ran the port and sought support from dockworkers' unions in Britain. During 1934 Agassi also developed ties with cigarette workers at the Maspero factory in Jaffa and with weavers in the town of al-Majdal, on the coast north of Gaza—today the exclusively Jewish city of Ashkelon in Israel. At that time al-Majdal was a major center of textile production; one correspondent called it (with great exaggeration) the “Lancashire of Palestine.” About 1,000 men and 500 women were employed in numerous small workshops owned by some sixty loom owners. In August 1933 some 800 of these workers had gone on strike for an increase in their piece rate that amounted to only one additional piastre a day. The male weavers seem to have won their demand, though at the price of abandoning the female workers whose employers rejected any concession.^[71] It was during this strike that these weavers first sought to make contact with the Histadrut, rumors of whose strength and influence had apparently reached even far-off al-Majdal. A delegation was dispatched to Tel Aviv to seek the Histadrut's help but had ended up establishing contacts with Po‘alei Tziyon Smol instead; it is possible that party activists conveyed to the weavers from al-Majdal that they were actually Histadrut officials. A year later, Agassi insisted on taking over these contacts and developing them on behalf of the Histadrut, which was as always nervous about Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's relations with Arab workers (mainly through George Nassar and the small group he led) and determined to enforce the Histadrut's monopoly in this sphere. After a few visits to al-Majdal, Agassi and his colleagues decided that all they could offer was assistance in setting up a weavers' cooperative. Nothing came of this and contact with the al-Majdal weavers was eventually lost.

Labor Organizing and Intelligence Work

As the pace of PLL activity in Jaffa quickened in the summer of 1934, the Histadrut hired another staff employee to coordinate its Arab Department and work with Agassi. This was Reuven Zaslani, mentioned earlier as a member of the Histadrut's newly formed Arab Committee and perhaps better known under the name he would later adopt, Reuven Shilo’ah. He was born Reuven Zaslanski in Jerusalem in 1909, the son of a rabbi who was both orthodox and Zionist—a rare combination in Jerusalem in those days. In his teens he broke with his father's orthodoxy, studied drama, and joined the Hagana, the Yishuv's main paramilitary organization. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Zaslani was adopted into the labor-Zionist elite, developing close personal ties with Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, his wife Rahel Yana’it, and three of their younger protégés: Dov Hoz, whom we have already encountered as a top Histadrut leader; Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), who in 1933 would succeed the murdered Hayyim Arlosoroff as director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department and would later serve as Israel's foreign minister (1948–56) and prime minister (1953–55); and Eliyahu Golomb (1893–1945), one of the founders and top commanders of the Hagana. (The three men would become relatives by marriage when Hoz and Golomb married Shertok's sisters.) In 1928 Zaslani began to study at the Hebrew University, concentrating on what in Israel is often still called mada‘ei hamizrah—“Oriental studies”—including the Arabic language. But he remained active in the Hagana, placing his growing command of Arabic at the service of its fledgling intelligence branch.^[72]

Zaslani never finished his university degree. Instead, on the recommendation of Ben-Tzvi, who had just taken over as chair of the Va‘ad Le’umi following MAPAI's victory in elections to the Yishuv's representative assembly, Zaslani, not yet twenty-two years old, was sent to work as a teacher at a Jewish school in Baghdad. That at least was his cover, for while working as a teacher he also helped organize an underground Zionist youth movement and carried out propaganda and intelligence work for the Jewish Agency. In this latter capacity, under Shertok's supervision, Zaslani cultivated ties with prominent Iraqis, sought to win friends for Zionism in this key Arab country, and on at least one occasion exposed an Iraqi Jewish communist to the Iraqi authorities.

Zaslani's sojourn in Iraq between the summer of 1931 and October 1932 was one of the earliest efforts to initiate Zionist intelligence and propaganda work in the Arab world. It was also in keeping with a dimension of the Histadrut's Arab work to which I have not devoted much attention thus far. For in addition to organizing Arab workers under labor-Zionist tutelage, Histadrut and other Zionist officials were also interested in influencing Arab public opinion both within Palestine and outside it. As early as 1930 Ben-Tzvi was speaking of “committees” which had been founded in Egypt and Syria to influence the local press, a goal which the Histadrut and Jewish Agency continued to pursue. A few years later, in 1934, the Jewish Agency covertly provided funding to establish the Cairo-based Agence d'Orient news service as a means of influencing Arab public opinion. Zaslani's mission to Baghdad was part of the same project.^[73]

Zaslani's effort to lay the foundations of a Zionist intelligence network in Arab countries outside Palestine was undertaken in cooperation with British intelligence. In fact, after his return from Baghdad Zaslani, with the approval of his superiors at the Hagana and the Jewish Agency, went to work as translator and secretary to the British officer in charge of the Royal Air Force's intelligence branch in Palestine. (The Royal Air Force had primary responsibility for intelligence in Palestine and the surrounding countries.) Zaslani thus served as the link between British intelligence on the one hand and the Hagana and the Yishuv's leadership on the other. In this period, despite sporadic tensions, Britain and the Zionist movement still saw each other as allies with common enemies—Arab nationalism in Palestine and elsewhere, and the communist movement, which was both anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist. Their intelligence agencies therefore sought to cooperate. It was apparently in the service of both these masters that Zaslani was again dispatched to Iraq in May 1934, obstensibly as a journalist employed by an English-language Palestinian newspaper. During this visit he traveled through Iraq's Kurdish regions. His main purpose seems to have been to survey Jewish communities in northern Iraq. But one may perhaps also discern in this trip another element which would later become a central pillar of Zionist and then Israeli regional strategy: support for and alliances with ethnic or religious minorities disaffected from or in conflict with Arab nationalist governments or forces, including the Kurds in Iraq, the southern Sudanese, and the Maronites in Lebanon.^[74]

In July 1934 the Iraqi authorities, suspicious of this peripatetic Jewish “journalist” from Palestine, expelled Zaslani from the country. Upon his return to Tel Aviv he was appointed coordinator of the Hagana's Arab intelligence activities; at the same time his mentor Dov Hoz took him into the Histadrut apparatus as secretary of its Arab Department. This is the context in which, in the summer of 1934, Zaslani began to work with Eliyahu Agassi in developing ties with the Arab stevedores and lightermen in Jaffa and with other groups of Arab workers in the area. Zaslani's double life as labor organizer and intelligence operative is in a sense symptomatic of the contradiction at the heart of labor Zionism's policy and practice toward Arab workers in Palestine. As we will see, the contacts Zaslani and his colleagues established and the information they gathered through their day-to-day activities as labor organizers would prove of substantial benefit to the Zionist project, enhancing both the struggle for Hebrew labor and the Yishuv's intelligence and military capacities. Zaslani's subsequent career was entirely in the field of intelligence: he continued to play a central role in the intelligence apparatuses of the Hagana and the Yishuv and after 1948, under his new Hebrew name Reuven Shilo’ah, he organized and for a number of years presided over the new State of Israel's complex of domestic and foreign intelligence and security agencies. He remained a central figure in Israeli intelligence, foreign policy, and security circles until his death in 1959. Tel Aviv University named its center for Middle Eastern studies in his honor, though Makhon Shilo’ah (“the Shilo’ah Institute”) was later incorporated into the university's Dayan Center.

Arab Workers and Hebrew Labor In Jaffa

The PLL's successes in organizing Arab workers in Jaffa during 1934, especially the dockworkers, alarmed Arab trade unionists and their nonworker nationalist allies and stimulated much more vigorous and effective efforts to counter the Histadrut. The summer of 1934 witnessed the emergence, initially under the patronage of a prominent politician, of a new Arab labor organization which became quite active in Jaffa. The politician was Fakhri al-Nashashibi, nephew and devoted assistant of Raghib al-Nashashibi, who had been mayor of Jerusalem since 1920 and led the opposition to the Husaynis and their allies within the Palestinian Arab elite.

As noted earlier, despite occasional tactical resorts to ultranationalist rhetoric, the Nashashibis led the pro-British and pro-Hashemite segment of that elite, while the Husaynis and their allies, led by al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, took a stronger anti-British, anti-Zionist, and distinctly Palestinian stance. Both factions still believed, however, that they could block the Zionist project and achieve Palestine's independence through negotiations with the British. Relations between the two camps had recently deteriorated sharply. The Arab Executive, on which all the leading Palestinian notable families were represented, had ceased to function altogether and would be formally dissolved in August 1934, opening the way for the creation of rival political parties, each linked to a particular family or faction. In the summer of 1934, moreover, Raghib al-Nashashibi was running for reelection as mayor against Dr. Husayn al-Khalidi, who was backed by both the Mufti's camp and most Jerusalem Jews, who wanted to get al-Nashashibi out of office.

It was in this context that Fakhri al-Nashashibi hit upon the idea of mobilizing local support by creating a labor organization in Jerusalem, where unlike Haifa, in which the PAWS had long been established (if not always very active), the field was wide open. At the end of July 1934 he proclaimed the establishment of an “Arab Workers' Society” (AWS), with himself as president. The AWS was generally understood to be a creation of and vehicle for the Nashashibis, though it did Raghib little good: in September he was defeated for reelection. As the Nashashibis and their allies moved toward the creation of their own political organization—the National Defense Party, formally established that December with Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani as one of its secretaries—Fakhri al-Nashashibi seems to have seen in Arab workers a potential constituency which could be organized and mobilized for the benefit of his faction. In August 1934 he therefore opened the first AWS branch outside Jerusalem, in Bayt Dajan, a substantial village some five miles southeast of Jaffa. In October an AWS branch was established in Jaffa itself, under the leadership of Michel Mitri, a young engineer who had grown up in Latin America and received his education there. The AWS was strongly supported in its efforts by the pro-Nashashibi Filastin, which hailed Fakhri al-Nashashibi as “protector of the workers” and began to devote unprecedented attention to labor affairs.^[75]

To build support, the AWS quickly seized on an issue of concern to many Arab workers: the Histadrut's campaign for Hebrew labor. As I mentioned earlier, in the spring of 1934 the Histadrut had launched a largely unsuccessful campaign to achieve Hebrew labor in the moshavot. When that effort in the countryside yielded only meager results, MAPAI and the Histadrut it controlled decided to shift the campaign to the cities, deploying mobile bands of pickets who moved from one construction site to another and sometimes went beyond picketing by trying to forcibly expel Arab workers from their jobs. These tactics led to clashes between Jews attempting to keep out or drive out Arab workers, and Arab workers trying to get to or stay at their jobs. Employers would frequently call in the police to restore order and protect their Arab workers; this in turn led to fights between Jewish pickets and the police, and arrests of Jews for disturbing the peace. The campaign on the streets was accompanied by a very aggressive propaganda campaign waged by means of leaflets, articles, and advertisements in the Histadrut press, rallies, and the like. The propaganda campaign not only denounced the employment of Arab workers, depicted as “cheap,” “unorganized,” and “alien,” but demanded that Jewish consumers boycott Arab produce and products and instead “buy Jewish” whenever possible.^[76]

This campaign in the cities achieved only limited success. As I discussed earlier, this was a period of prosperity in the Yishuv. In the absence of a large mass of unemployed Jews desperate for jobs, the Histadrut found it almost as difficult to enforce Hebrew labor in the cities as it had in the moshavot. But its campaign did succeed in inflaming Arab-Jewish relations and heightening the anxiety and resentment with which many Arabs regarded Zionism and the Yishuv, especially in a period when Jewish immigration was surging dramatically. To alert the public to what was going on, the Arab press, along with the Palestine Communist Party's clandestine or front publications, were quick to translate and publish Histadrut calls for the imposition of Hebrew labor and the boycott of Arab produce, manufactures, and shops, and news of clashes at urban building sites spread quickly.

Fakhri al-Nashashibi and the new AWS sought to capitalize on growing concern about this issue by publicly demanding that the British authorities take forceful action against the Hebrew labor pickets. The AWS also called on Arab workers to adopt weapons from the Histadrut's arsenal by setting up their own picket lines and boycotting Jewish products and produce. In December 1934 Fakhri al-Nashashibi set up in Jerusalem what Filastin, his biggest booster, described as “the first Arab picket.” This was in reality not so much a picket line as a march by al-Nashashibi and some of his followers through the streets of Jerusalem, in the course of which buildings being put up by Arab contractors were visited and the employment of Jews at those sites (generally as skilled craftsmen) was protested.^[77] The AWS does not in fact seem to have carried out any sustained picketing in this period, though as we will see Michel Mitri would use this tactic to great effect in the spring of 1936. But the organization did take the lead in efforts to counter the Histadrut's Hebrew labor campaign, for example at the stone and gravel quarry at Majdal Yaba (also known in Arabic as Majdal al-Sadiq, and in Hebrew as Migdal Tzedek), an Arab village on the western slopes of the Nablus mountains, east of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv was at the time experiencing a building boom, and much of the stone and gravel used for new construction came from this quarry, on Arab land leased to Jewish entrepreneurs soon after the British occupation. The quarry workforce was entirely Arab, consisting of about thirty workers from Majdal Yaba itself and an additional 400 Arab workers from other villages.

In the fall of 1934 the Tel Aviv Workers' Council, which steadfastly insisted that the quarry workers were not Palestinians but “bedouins” or Hawranis, negotiated an agreement with the quarry operators to introduce Jewish workers at the site and thereby supply Tel Aviv with what it termed “Hebrew stone.” Jewish workers in the building trades were called on to refuse to handle any stone produced by non-Jewish labor, as evidenced by the absence of a special seal. To implement the agreement, the operators were to build up a large inventory of stone and gravel and then, on the pretext that supply far exceeded demand, send the Arab workers back to their home villages, whereupon they would be replaced by Jews. The AWS in Jaffa got wind of the plan, however, possibly from Jewish communist sources, and warned the Arab workers, who remained at the site and for seventeen days withstood the Histadrut's efforts to introduce Jewish workers, until the quarry's managers agreed to retain all the Arabs employed there. As we will see later, the Histadrut would make other attempts to replace Arabs with Jews at the Majdal Yaba quarry, in 1936 and again in 1947.^[78]

The Jaffa Dockworkers and the PLL

Agassi, Zaslani, and their colleagues involved in organizing Arab workers could not avoid confronting the issue of Hebrew labor as it gained greater public attention during 1934. They were well aware of how much the Histadrut's Hebrew labor campaign alienated Arab workers and undermined the PLL's efforts. However, as loyal MAPAI members they supported Hebrew labor in principle, if not always the way the campaigns to achieve it were carried out, and they did not believe that it in any way contradicted their commitment to socialism or to the organization of Arab workers. So while Hashomer Hatza‘ir activists tended to evade or downplay the issue, the MAPAI members involved in Arab work tended to confront it head-on, confident that they could make a good case for their party's position. In Jaffa at the end of 1934, however, this was less a matter of virtue than of necessity: Zaslani and Agassi could not really hope to avoid the issue, since it was being raised very openly and forcefully not only by Arab trade unionists seeking to destroy the PLL's influence and “rescue” Arab workers from Zionist influence but by rank and file workers themselves.

In November 1934, in an effort to seize the initiative from their opponents in the struggle for the support of the Jaffa dockworkers, Zaslani and Agassi went so far as to invite the secretary of the Jaffa branch of the PAWS to a meeting of some fifty Arab workers, most of them stevedores, at the PLL's club. According to Zaslani and Agassi, who submitted a report on the meeting to the Histadrut and to the Jewish Agency's Political Department, the PAWS leader denounced the Histadrut for stealing Arab jobs, reminded the stevedores of the “disaster” which had occurred at Haifa harbor (i.e., the introduction of Jewish workers after the organization of the PLL-sponsored Harbor Workers' Union there) and asked if they wanted to allow the Histadrut to bring about the same outcome in Jaffa as well. In their response, Zaslani and Agassi did not directly address the substance of their opponent's charges but instead sought to put him on the defensive and undermine his credibility by demanding that he provide proof of his allegations.

The Jewish unionists thought they had made their case, but after the PAWS secretary left the stevedores reiterated his allegation that the Histadrut was out to bring Jewish workers into the port, take it over, and deprive the Arabs of their livelihood. They pressed Agassi and Zaslani for an explicit promise that the Histadrut would not seek to bring Jewish workers into Jaffa harbor. Zaslani and Agassi could not of course make such a promise, since the Histadrut did in fact hope to achieve Hebrew labor at the harbor as elsewhere; indeed, one of the PLL's chief raisons d'être was to facilitate that effort. In the end the stevedores had to settle for a much vaguer promise that no Histadrut member would take a job from any permanently employed port worker. Zaslani also had to promise that the stevedores' union would remain independent even after it affiliated with the PLL.

Zaslani and Agassi concluded their report on this episode by stating that “one may say with confidence that as a result of this meeting our organization in Jaffa has been strengthened and inoculated.”^[79] This statement soon proved to be rather overconfident, as the PLL in Jaffa remained under constant pressure from Arab labor organizations. A few days after this debate, Zaslani reported to Agassi that both Michel Mitri's AWS and the Jaffa branch of the PAWS were leafleting the stevedores affiliated with the PLL and that this activity had led at least one member of the union's leadership to resign. At the same time, Ibrahim al-Sawi, who was receiving money from the PLL and acting as its main agent among the stevedores, was said to be displaying dictatorial behavior and angering union members. Moreover, the port workers were insisting on keeping some distance between their union and the PLL: they had refused to sign their names to the application of the PLL's Jaffa branch for registration as an officially recognized organization. For the same reason, the letter which the Jaffa stevedores' union sent to the various labor contractors at Jaffa port in January 1935 contained no mention whatsoever of the PLL or the Histadrut, though it was Zaslani who forwarded a translation of the letter directly to the British official who managed the port of Jaffa.^[80]

The stevedores' tough questions at the meeting and their insistence on independence from the PLL indicate that they were not quite as unaware, guileless, and docile as labor-Zionist leaders tended to depict them—nor as easily duped and manipulated as Arab nationalists believed. Agassi would later speak of the effort to instill “proletarian consciousness” (hakara po‘alit) in these workers, by which he meant labor Zionism's conception of how Arab workers should think and behave.^[81] In fact the stevedores, and other groups of Arab workers elsewhere, seem to have had their own sense of who they were and what they wanted, a sense which did not necessarily coincide with what the PLL proposed. The stevedores understood that several rival labor organizations were seeking to win their support and sought to turn that rivalry to their advantage; they also knew that identifiable union members were subject to threats and harassment, and even exclusion from work, from the labor contractors through whom they were employed. They were obviously well aware of the Histadrut's commitment to Hebrew labor and that policy's implications for their own livelihood. As a result, though they were not in principle unwilling to cooperate with the Histadrut, whose clout and resources they knew to be considerably greater than those available to any Arab labor organization, they sought insofar as possible to do so on their own terms. This episode can therefore be read as reinforcing my argument that it is not useful to uncritically accept Arab nationalist depictions of cooperation between Zionists and Arab workers as instances of either manipulation or collaboration, at least in any simple sense of those terms.

The stevedores faced extremely adverse conditions in their struggle to organize. While L. K. Pope, Port Manager at Jaffa, urged the contractors to meet with the stevedores' representatives, his main concern was to avoid any trouble and preserve the status quo until the end of the citrus export season. He and other British officials were also concerned that if the Histadrut succeeded in organizing Arab workers at Jaffa port it might achieve a stranglehold over this vital enterprise. In a letter to the Director of Customs, Excise and Trade, Pope declared that the stevedores' demands for better pay, an eight-hour day, and overtime pay—“doubtless prompted by the General Federation of Jewish Labour in Palestine”—were exaggerated. In any event, he went on, “I am not in favour of an 8 hour working day for Arab labour. Such labourers are in actual fact more contented and happier when they work than they would be were a considerable portion of their waking hours to be spent lounging in the Cafés and markets of the Town.”^[82]

But growing tensions and eventually open conflict at the port soon made Pope's dismissive attitude untenable. At the end of February 1935 some sixty workers employed at the port development project went on strike, originally to protest the dismissal of a comrade who had been fired after a dispute with his foreman, and then to demand an eight-hour workday, a six-day workweek, and higher wages. AWS leader Michel Mitri quickly appeared on the scene and sought to negotiate on the workers' behalf. Though the strike ended in failure after a week, it was a clear manifestation of growing discontent. The contractors' efforts early in 1935 to break the stevedores' union by harassment and, for a time, by refusing to employ union members led to persistent friction and sometimes violent conflict on the docks. To restore order, and to deflect questions being raised by Labor Party members of Parliament, the British authorities in Palestine appointed a committee to investigate labor conditions at the port of Jaffa. Since that committee was chaired by none other than L. K. Pope, it not very surprisingly reported that the stevedores had no serious grievances and that no immediate government action was called for. In fact no further action was taken before the outbreak of the 1936 general strike.^[83]

During the latter part of 1935 the PLL's base of support at the port of Jaffa disappeared. With the support or acquiescence of British port officials, the contractors sought to break the dockworkers' union by various means, including the denial of work to union members and other “troublemakers.” Poignant evidence of the use of this tactic has survived in the form of a petition bearing the signatures or thumbprints of fourteen Jaffa dockworkers who had been dismissed by their boss, Mahmud al-Qumbarji, at the end of June 1935.^[84] Competition from the Arab unions and rising political tensions exacerbated by the Histadrut's Hebrew labor campaign also helped increase the costs of cooperation with the PLL well beyond any actual or potential benefits to Arab workers. Then, in October 1935, a barrel purportedly containing a shipment of cement accidentally broke open while being unloaded at Jaffa and was found to contain arms and ammunition being smuggled into Palestine for the Hagana. The discovery created an uproar in the Arab community and went a long way toward destroying what remained of the PLL's links with the Jaffa dockworkers. By the end of 1935 almost all the stevedores and lightermen had severed their ties with the PLL or simply allowed them to lapse, gravitating instead into the orbit of Arab trade unions. Despite this the PLL persevered in its efforts to set up a Jewish-Arab boat company at the port as a way to get Jewish workers employed there, but the anti-British and anti-Zionist general strike that began in April 1936 brought that project to an abrupt end.^[85] The Jaffa dockworkers joined the general strike en masse when it erupted and would remain on strike until it ended.

The “Even Vesid” Affair and the IPC Strike

Even while things were still apparently going well in Jaffa, Zaslani, Agassi, and their colleagues felt that they had not gained much if any ground. At the end of 1934 Abba Hushi was complaining that “within the Histadrut there is no psychological preparation for this work, there is a passivity which opposes it, and the work is being carried out by a small number of comrades; there is no sympathy for this work.” Despite frequent appeals for a larger budget, funding for Arab work remained at very low levels from both the Histadrut and the Jewish Agency. But as Hushi saw it, the disinterest or hostility of most MAPAI members was not the only problem. The PLL's work, he felt, had been too haphazard and passive, and he called for a more active approach, one that did not depend on an individual Arab worker, or group of Arab workers, happening upon the Haifa club or approaching the Histadrut for help during a strike. “Some 1500 Arab workers have passed through the club and only a very small number of them remain today,” he noted. Agassi echoed Hushi's emphasis on the importance of taking the initiative in targeting and organizing specific work sites.^[86]

David Hacohen, who as director of the Histadrut's Contracting Office was one of the organization's preeminent entrepreneurs, proposed another strategy: the explicit transformation of the PLL into a labor contracting agency. The Histadrut would set up a contracting company which would bid on public works contracts and then implement them by employing only Arab workers who belonged to the PLL. Although Hacohen did not mention it, this scheme might also have brought the Histadrut extra profits by allowing it (through its PLL-linked subsidiary) to bid on and win public works contracts which stipulated that a certain percentage of those working on the project be Arabs. Hacohen also proposed that the PLL organize and supply Arab workers to Jewish-owned urban enterprises. These steps would, he argued, give the organization's membership, or at least some substantial portion of it, a clear economic stake in loyalty to it.

In fact, many Arab workers already viewed the PLL primarily as an employment agency: they approached it and sought to join only because they were under the impression that members were entitled to jobs in Jewish-owned enterprises. In October 1934, for example, three Arab workers from a village near Acre wrote to “the respected head of the Jewish workers' association” expressing their interest in joining; when someone (probably Agassi) contacted them, they asked for jobs and were refused, though Agassi did occasionally try to place loyal PLL members in jobs at various Jewish enterprises and organizations. Hacohen's proposal would have systematized this aspect of the PLL's work and used it as a way to build the organization.^[87]

An incident from this period which aroused considerable debate among labor Zionists may serve to illustrate the contradictions which Hacohen's conception of the PLL's mission might have entailed. The Even Vesid stone quarry and limestone kiln, established near Haifa in 1929, was unique in that it was owned jointly by the Histadrut's Contracting Office and one of Haifa's leading Arab businessmen, Tahir Qaraman. The company employed both Arabs and Jews in roughly equal numbers, but the fact that it employed any Arabs at all was embarrassing for the Histadrut, committed as it was to Hebrew labor, especially in its own enterprises. To make matters even more embarrassing, the wages which Even Vesid paid its Arab workers were, at 12 piastres a day, not only substandard but also far below the 25 piastres a day which the Jewish workers there earned for more or less the same work. These issues, hitherto discussed only in closed Histadrut leadership forums, came to public attention in April 1935 when some of the Arab workers at Even Vesid went on strike. Their demands included a minimum daily wage of 15 piastres, an eight-hour workday, a weekly day of rest, and the removal of a foreman they disliked. Leadership of the strike was quickly assumed by the PAWS. The Histadrut denounced the strike as politically motivated, claimed the strikers were being exploited by Hanna ‘Asfur and other Arab nationalist activists, and tried to keep the quarry operating with the Jewish workers and with Arab strikebreakers, apparently recruited from among quarry workers who belonged to the PLL. Despite clashes with police and arrests, the strikers held firm, and in the end an embarrassed Histadrut had to back down and grant a wage increase.

Hashomer Hatza‘ir excoriated the Histadrut leadership for having failed to ensure that all the Arab employees of an enterprise of which the Histadrut was part owner were organized in the PLL. The question also arose as to why this enterprise employed Arab workers at all, to which David Hacohen responded that Even Vesid's existence depended on Tahir Qaraman's cooperation and its profitability required the use of cheap Arab labor. In other words, the jobs of the relatively well-paid Jewish workers there depended on the employment of at least some poorly paid Arab workers. To further complicate things, a Jewish quarry owner who employed only Jews filed a complaint against Even Vesid with the Yishuv committee charged with overseeing its “buy Jewish” campaign. He demanded protection from Even Vesid's competition, arguing that that quarry's use of Arab workers allowed it to sell its products for less than Hebrew-labor quarries. Histadrut leaders debated whether it was right for the Histadrut to partially own an enterprise which employed Arabs even as it demanded that other Jewish enterprises and farms employ only Jews.

This episode and the uproar it caused cannot have made MAPAI leaders enthusiastic about Hacohen's proposal. From the Histadrut's standpoint, using the PLL to supply and control Arab labor in Jewish enterprises carried significant risks. It might also present an obstacle to the ultimate realization of MAPAI's long-term goal of achieving total Hebrew labor in every such enterprise, especially those it controlled, even if that goal could not be immediately achieved.^[88]

A few months before the Even Vesid affair erupted, another strike had attracted countrywide attention, especially among Arab workers, and had seemed to underscore both the potential of working-class solidarity and its complexities. As I noted earlier, February 1935 had witnessed a week-long strike among workers at the port of Jaffa. At the time, observers generally perceived that strike as having been inspired by the much larger strike (already mentioned in Chapter 4, in connection with the railway workers) which had begun a few days earlier at the Iraq Petroleum Company's facility in Haifa. The IPC workers' strike, directed against a wealthy, powerful, and highly visible transnational corporation which was also one of the country's biggest employers and whose links to British imperial interests in the Middle East were obvious, was one of the largest Palestine had yet witnessed.

Construction of the IPC's facilities, including storage tanks and an oil dock for petroleum extracted from the company's fields in northern Iraq and pumped to Haifa through a pipeline that crossed Transjordan and northern Palestine, had only recently been completed. On February 9, 1935, some fifty workers employed by one of the IPC's contractors had successfully struck for higher wages. Their example may have been fresh in the minds of the IPC's own workers, for when the company announced a few weeks later that some of its workers would be laid off and the remainder would have their wages cut, a strike erupted. The strike that began on February 22 initially encompassed some 150 skilled workers in several of the technical departments, who formed a strike committee and demanded not only the recision of the wage cut but also a minimum wage of 15 piastres a day, an eight-hour day and six-day workweek, overtime pay for extra hours, and various other gains. Within a week the strike had spread to encompass some 600 of the IPC's 800 workers, almost all of them Arabs; but even the few Americans employed at the facility, presumably skilled oil workers or engineers, are reported to have stayed away from work.

Both the PAWS and the Histadrut soon became involved in the strike. The PAWS had the support of most of the workers and called in its counsel, Hanna ‘Asfur, to negotiate with the company, while the PLL represented some one hundred IPC drivers whom it had organized. Initially the PLL seems to have tried to keep the drivers separate from the rest of the IPC workers, but when this failed Eliyahu Agassi joined ‘Asfur and the strike committee in talks with the company. The wave of militancy and solidarity which accompanied the first two weeks of the strike facilitated cooperation between the PAWS and the Histadrut. At one point early in the strike IPC management tried to exclude Agassi from a meeting with the strike committee and PAWS leaders, but the latter refused to permit this and the company had to back down. After some initial hesitation, the Histadrut backed the strike and appealed to its members to contribute to a strike fund.

The Histadrut and the PAWS called on the government to intervene. Under pressure from local British officials the IPC offered some concessions, but ‘Asfur was unable to convince the strikers to accept them and return to work. As the days passed, however, the leaders of the PAWS, which represented mainly the skilled workers, came to feel that their members' demands had largely been met and that the strike was now being waged mainly on behalf of the unskilled workers. They were also growing increasingly suspicious of the Histadrut, which they feared was seeking to use its base among the drivers and its control of the strike fund to take charge of the strike.

At that point, more than two weeks after the strike began, Fakhri al-Nashashibi, the self-styled “leader of the workers,” suddenly appeared in Haifa and began to mediate between the company and the strike committee. It is not clear whether or not the PAWS had invited him to intervene, but once on the scene al-Nashashibi largely ignored the PAWS' leaders and conducted his own secret negotiations with IPC management. After three days of talks al-Nashashibi informed the strike committee that he had reached an agreement with the company, in whose “good intentions” he declared his trust, and persuaded the committee to endorse it. Most of the strikers returned to work on March 11; others, clearly disgruntled about the strike's outcome, held out for a few more days before reluctantly resuming work.

The Histadrut was profoundly unhappy about al-Nashashibi's intervention and denounced him as a reactionary nationalist who had sold out the workers by pressing the strikers to accept less than they might have won through greater militancy and by agreeing to the formation of what amounted to a company union. The communists agreed that al-Nashashibi was a bourgeois opportunist but held Agassi, Hushi, and the Histadrut equally responsible for “betraying” the IPC workers. By contrast the pro-Nashashibi Filastin hailed the outcome as a great victory for the workers, especially as it had “put an end to the Histadrut's attempts to exploit the strike.” That it may have done, but in the months that followed IPC management reneged on many of its promises and largely destroyed the PAWS' organization among its workers.^[89]

Though it ended in only a partial victory for the workers, the scope and duration of the IPC strike and the issues it raised aroused great interest among, and had a strong impact on, Arab workers in many parts of Palestine. Numerous Arab trade unions sent messages of solidarity, and various groups of workers were inspired by the IPC workers' militancy, including Jaffa dockworkers and the railway workers in and near Haifa, who as I mentioned in Chapter 4 were in close contact with the IPC workers. For years after, leftist and prolabor accounts of the Iraq Petroleum Company strike of 1935 routinely attached the adjective “great” to it, and not a few contemporary observers, both Arab and Jewish, saw it as marking the beginning of a new stage in the emergence of a class-conscious Arab working class in Palestine.^[90]

The Gathering Storm

In the aftermath of the IPC strike, the PLL seems to have lapsed into virtual quiescence. It had lost its base at Nesher and among the Haifa dockworkers, and its once promising relationship with the Jaffa dockworkers was rapidly evaporating. In both cities only small groups of workers at less important workplaces remained in its orbit, along with a number of individuals who frequented its clubs or maintained contact with Agassi. The Histadrut's Arab Committee failed to meet between May 1935 and February 1936, and the ambitious plan of action it had adopted was never implemented. There was discussion of publishing propaganda material in Arabic to put forward the labor-Zionist position on such urgent questions as Hebrew labor, but the Arab Department was desperately short of funds and nothing was done.^[91]

The major reason for the PLL's virtual paralysis during the latter part of 1935 was the increasingly tense political climate in Palestine and the radicalization of the Arab community, including Arab workers, who became much less inclined to affiliate, cooperate, or even associate with a Zionist organization. The rapid growth of the Yishuv had intensified Arab fears: for the first time, a Jewish majority and Jewish statehood appeared feasible, perhaps even imminent. Reports of large-scale Zionist land purchases made the threat of dispossession ever more palpable, and the discovery that arms and ammunition were being smuggled into Palestine for the Hagana seemed to confirm long-standing Arab fears that the Zionists were preparing to seize the country by force. Government policies which Arab public opinion perceived as pro-Zionist also exacerbated Arab resentment and anger. At the same time, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and Germany's reoccupation of the Rhineland made war among the European powers seem imminent and underscored Britain's apparent weakness.

Moreover, the years of prosperity came to an end in 1935, leading to rising unemployment and social discontent in the Arab community. Shantytowns sprang up around Haifa and Jaffa, inhabited by thousands of destitute migrants from the countryside. The residents of these shantytowns provided a constituency for recruitment by radical nationalists, notably the popular Muslim preacher Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam of Haifa, who called for moral renovation and denounced the factionalism and ineffectiveness of the elite politicians. Al-Qassam eventually organized a small guerrilla band that in 1935 took to the hills in the hope of sparking an armed revolt against British rule and Zionism. In November 1935 al-Qassam was killed in a gun battle with police near Jenin, but his death and funeral aroused strong nationalist and religious sentiments and dramatically increased pressure on the politicians to put aside their debilitating factional squabbles and take a much more aggressive stance toward Palestine's British overlords.

Palestinian Arabs were also well aware of nationalist upsurges in neighboring countries. In November 1935 Egypt had been swept by demonstrations demanding the restoration of the suspended constitution and full independence. These demonstrations forced the holding of new elections, the return to power of the nationalist Wafd party, and the opening of a new round of negotiations between Egypt and Britain. In French-ruled Syria rising nationalist agitation culminated in the eruption of a general strike in January 1936. The strike lasted for fifty days and compelled the French to invite a Syrian delegation to Paris to negotiate a treaty which would move Syria toward independence. Palestinian Arab nationalists were inspired by these examples of popular mobilization, especially the Syrian general strike, and contrasted them to the Palestinian nationalist leadership's weakness, disunity, and entanglement in apparently endless and fruitless negotiations for a proposed legislative council. Younger, more radical nationalist activists, convinced that further negotiations with Britain were pointless, were ready to emulate their Arab brethren outside Palestine by launching a vigorous and sustained popular struggle to put an end to what they perceived as the looming threat posed by Zionism, and to the British colonial regime which protected it.

The supercharged political climate and high unemployment among Arab workers at the end of 1935 notwithstanding, the Histadrut leadership came to the conclusion that the end of the construction boom and rising unemployment in the Yishuv justified the escalation of its Hebrew labor campaign. Given the circumstances, this escalation not surprisingly provoked an unprecedentedly vigorous and militant Arab response. Once again the AWS in Jaffa took the initiative, under the creative and effective leadership of its young president, Michel Mitri. Mitri had taken over the organization after Fakhri al-Nashashibi lost interest in labor affairs during 1935 and built it into a strong local force which claimed some 4,700 members. In some ways Mitri was a forerunner of the new kind of Arab labor leader who would emerge during and after the Second World War. An educated man with knowledge and experience of the wider world, he was a capable organizer and knew how to seize on an issue and use it to serve his movement's goals. He also understood the importance to the labor movement of building broad-based alliances. For example, he was quite willing to cooperate with radical nationalist and leftist forces in the Arab community, including members of the left wing of the pan-Arab nationalist Istiqlal (“Independence”) party and even with Arab communists. Apparently impressed by Mitri's leadership abilities and potential effectiveness, the Histadrut approached him in September 1935 and offered him its organizing experience and access to funds to build up the AWS, on condition that he distance himself from the Arab nationalist movement. Mitri, a staunch nationalist, refused and instead adopted a new and effective strategy to mobilize his constituents.^[92]

In December 1935 Mitri sent a letter to the District Commissioner of Jaffa claiming that more than a thousand of his members were unemployed and requesting permission to hold a protest march through the streets of Jaffa. Mitri's explanation of the purposes of the demonstration suggests that Arab unionists clearly perceived a connection between Arab unemployment, Hebrew labor, and Zionism: “to ask for the relief of unemployment, to protest against Jewish picketing, the Judaization of the Port and the policy of immigration according to the absorptive capacity of the country.” The District Commissioner prohibited the march, but Mitri and his colleagues proceeded to step up their campaign against Hebrew labor. To build support the AWS convened a national conference of Arab trade unionists in Jaffa, and in February 1936, using the same arguments that the Histadrut advanced in defense of Hebrew labor, Mitri launched a campaign to protest the awarding of a government contract for three schools in Jaffa to the Histadrut's Contracting Office, which generally employed only Jews. He pointed out that the buildings were located in a predominantly Arab city, that Arabs were never given contracts for construction in Jewish areas, that the Histadrut had forcibly driven Arab workers away from Jewish building sites, and that unemployment among Arab workers was very high. When no relief was forthcoming, AWS members adopted the Histadrut's own tactics: unemployed Arab workers began picketing building sites where Hebrew labor prevailed, in particular the three schools under construction. This led to clashes in which Arab workers were arrested by the police.

The pickets seem to have been well aware of what was at stake. One of those arrested told the judge before whom he was brought that “[w]e Arab workers are unemployed. We asked the government to remove Jewish workers from Arab enterprises but it took no interest in our just demand. So we went to the site and tried to expel the Jewish workers from jobs to which we have more right than anyone else, and the police arrested us.” The strategy seems to have produced results: the government eventually agreed to require that 50 percent of the jobs at the school construction sites be given to Arab workers, though it rejected the demand that Arabs also be guaranteed 50 percent of the total wage bill. But Mitri was not satisfied and, emulating MAPAI, he demanded 100 percent Arab labor. A leaflet issued by the AWS in the spring of 1936 conveys the pitch of militancy which its campaign had attained: it called for mass picketing of construction sites “until the jails are full of [Arab] workers” and designated alternative leaders for the AWS in the event Mitri and his colleagues were arrested.^[93]

There was also renewed conflict at the Majdal Yaba quarry, where with the Histadrut's blessing management once again tried to fire all its Arab workers and replace them with Jews. With backing from the AWS, the Arab workers responded with picket lines. Even the MAPAI loyalists who sat on the Histadrut's Arab Committee seem to have been embarrassed by what was happening at Majdal Yaba. That the Histadrut secretariat had approved the wholesale dismissal of the Arab workers at Majdal Yaba without first consulting its own Arab Department, presumably responsible for coordinating the organization's policies toward Arab workers, was rightly taken as a sign of the low esteem in which the leadership held that department. Ya‘akov Riftin, the Hashomer Hatza‘ir representative on the committee, denounced the indiscriminate firing of Arab workers and the drive for total Hebrew labor which motivated it. Though uneasy, his MAPAI colleagues contented themselves with a request that the Histadrut executive committee require that all Histadrut organs check with the Arab Department before dismissing Arab workers. As had been the case in 1934, the Arab workers' vigorous response frustrated the Histadrut offensive at this site.^[94]

In an article published on April 1, 1936, Riftin looked back on the preceding year and saw nothing but missed opportunities. MAPAI, which controlled the Histadrut, had never really tried to implement Histadrut decisions with regard to organizing Arab workers, and the PLL was weak and ineffective. While the Arab pickets in Jaffa were misguided, Riftin argued, it was MAPAI which had given Michel Mitri the weapon he needed to mount his campaign by insisting on total Hebrew labor and firing Arab workers wholesale. Riftin reiterated Hashomer Hatza‘ir's vision of an alliance between Jewish and Arab workers, which he counterposed to MAPAI's tendency to see the entire Palestinian Arab community as a monolithic bloc with which Zionism would have either to compromise or fight. Riftin feared that unless the labor-Zionist movement changed course, difficult times lay ahead: the nationalist tide was rising in Syria and Egypt, and in Palestine “the legend of [al-Qassam's] ‘heroic struggle’ near Jenin is growing.”^[95]

Had Riftin written his article a few weeks later, he might have cited another development which he would surely have seen as ominous. On April 10, even as public opinion was demanding that the Arab politicians set aside their differences and close ranks, representatives of the various segments of the Arab labor movement in Palestine gathered again, this time in Haifa, to lay the foundations of an all-Palestine Arab labor federation. Among those attending were ‘Abd al-Hamid Haymur, the veteran Haifa railway worker who was secretary of the PAWS; Sami Taha, who would later emerge as that organization's preeminent leader; Michel Mitri and George Mansur, leaders of the AWS in Jaffa; Khalil Shanir, one of the Palestine Communist Party's top Arab leaders; Hamdi al-Husayni of Gaza, a radical young journalist who belonged to the Istiqlal party and had links with clandestine Arab nationalist groups preparing for armed revolt; and Akram Zu‘aytar of Nablus, another radical Istiqlalist in contact with members of al-Qassam's guerrilla band holed up in the hills around Nablus.^[96] This gathering manifested the convergence of the fledgling Arab trade union movement with the most radical segment of the nationalist movement and with the Arab communists, signaling not just a desire for labor unity but also a sense that the Arab labor movement must play an important role in the more militant phase of the national struggle that seemed about to begin.

The Haifa conference, and the convergence of sociopolitical forces that it manifested, suggest that accounts which depict the outbreak of mass popular opposition to Zionism and British rule in April 1936 as entirely spontaneous and unexpected are inadequate, since they fail to take into account the kinds of grievances, struggles, and developments discussed here which prepared the ground for that explosion of popular energy and helped shape the historical conjuncture within which it emerged. The uprising which began in the spring of 1936 had antecedents, for example, in the rising tide of worker militancy which the AWS campaign against Hebrew labor both built on and stimulated. At the same time, that campaign strengthened the links between worker grievances and militancy on the one hand and the national question on the other, links which were further reinforced by the labor movement's new ties with radical nationalists anxious to mobilize the populace at large. The tide of worker unrest had itself been fueled by al-Qassam's resort to arms the previous fall and the popular sentiments it unleashed, and more generally by the poverty and despair in the shantytowns and working-class neighborhoods of Haifa and Jaffa, which had in turn nourished al-Qassam's movement.^[97]

Though tensions in Palestine were clearly rising in the spring of 1936, the storm broke earlier than anyone expected, and long before efforts to establish a new Arab labor federation linked to the more radical wing of the nationalist movement could bear fruit. The Arab general strike, and then the revolt against British rule and Zionism, would have complex and paradoxical consequences for both Arab and Jewish workers and labor movements in Palestine. While it unmistakably demonstrated the Arab community's rejection of Zionism, it resulted in the paralysis of the Arab labor movement and allowed the Histadrut's Hebrew labor campaign to achieve unprecedented gains, though it also undermined whatever prospects the PLL may have had of taking on some life of its own. At another level, the character and consequences of the revolt, and especially its defeat, contributed significantly to determining the ultimate outcome of the struggle for Palestine a decade later.

Notes