7. Workers, Labor Movements, and the Left During the Second World War

The promulgation of the White Paper of May 1939, the end of the Arab revolt a few months later, and then the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 set the stage for the beginning of a new period in the history of mandatory Palestine. The hothouse atmosphere engendered by the war brought about rapid social, economic, and political changes, profoundly affecting the scope and character of interaction among Arab and Jewish workers. Though the overt political struggle over Palestine's fate was largely in abeyance while the war lasted, developments during the war years had an important, perhaps even decisive, impact on the final phase of that struggle which began when the war came to an end.

The War Years: Economic and Political Change

The war affected Palestine's economy in important ways. In its first months, the closing of the Mediterranean shipping lanes badly hurt the country's export-oriented citrus industry. The civilian construction industry, a very important sector of the Yishuv's economy in particular, also suffered, both because Jewish immigration fell off and because the imported materials on which the industry was heavily dependent were less available, and most of what did reach Palestine was diverted for military use. Unemployment remained relatively high among both Arabs and Jews through 1940. As the war went on, however, the decline in imports of foreign-made finished goods created new opportunities for local manufacturers. More importantly, Palestine became a major base and staging ground for British and other Allied military forces, which enormously stimulated demand for manufactured goods as well as agricultural produce. To help meet this demand, the British authorities took steps to encourage local industry in Palestine and surrounding countries, coordinated after April 1941 by the Cairo-based Middle East Supply Center. The construction sector also began to flourish as the War Office and the government put out numerous contracts for military-related projects.

A few figures will suffice to illustrate the scale of the war-induced economic boom. Between 1940 and 1946, some £P12 million were invested in Jewish-owned industrial enterprises in Palestine, almost double the total for the entire 1930s. British and Allied military expenditures in Palestine for goods ranging from clothing to processed food products to ammunition, for construction and for maintenance and repair services amounted to about £P1 million in 1940; they quadrupled the following year, more than doubled again the following year, and reached some £P12 million in 1943. Military orders in 1942 equaled Palestine's entire industrial output in 1939. During the war Palestine came to export significant quantities of various manufactured goods, mainly to Allied forces and neighboring countries: industrial exports rose from £P470,000 in 1940 to £P11 million in 1945.

As a result tens of thousands of Arabs and Jews found employment in new and newly expanded factories and workshops, and in the scores of British and Allied military bases, repair, maintenance, and storage facilities, and other installations which sprouted the length and breadth of the country. The war also led to the creation of many new jobs in construction, ground transport, the ports, and shipping, to serve both military and civilian needs. The widespread unemployment and underemployment that had afflicted the Arab sector of the Palestinian economy for much of the second half of the 1930s were replaced by labor shortages, despite government efforts to expand and channel the country's labor force and regulations which prohibited workers in essential industries (including the railways) from leaving their jobs. Employment in both Arab and Jewish agriculture declined during the war years as many people sought better-paying and less onerous work in industry and services.

The extent and speed of war-induced proletarianization within the Arab community was particularly striking. By 1944, Palestine's wage labor force is estimated to have encompassed some 100,000 Arab wage workers employed full-time outside agriculture—approximately one-third of the entire Arab male population of working age.^[1] More than a third of these were employed at British army camps and installations, alongside some 15,000 Jewish workers, while thousands of others were employed by contractors working on military-related projects. The camps thus constituted a new and important social space which came into existence very quickly and in which unprecedentedly large numbers of Arabs and Jews worked side by side, producing new forms and dynamics of interaction.

Wartime economic expansion was accompanied by a surge of inflation, after a long period of price stability. By one calculation, the cost of living index rose only from 100 in 1936 to 103 in 1939, but then surged to 153 in 1941 and to 222 in 1942. By 1943 the index had reached 269, rising to 274 the following year, and to 295 in 1945. As a result real wages declined sharply in the first part of the war. To this both Arab and Jewish workers responded with widespread activism and organization. Many of their struggles were successful, and by war's end real wages in Palestine had risen considerably. This was true not only in industry, construction, and services but also in agriculture: the war brought considerable prosperity to the Arab rural economy as wage rates for agricultural labor rose, the government paid high prices for produce, and rural indebtedness declined somewhat.^[2]

The war years also witnessed important changes in the political arena, creating space for the emergence of new political forces among both Arabs and Jews. The defeat of the Arab revolt had left the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement much weakened and in disarray. Its top leaders were in exile, as were many key activists who were not dead or in prison. It was clear that the end of the war would bring a renewal of the struggle over Palestine's fate, but in the interim the old guard nationalist politicians still in Palestine were largely quiescent. The weakening of the control which the powerful elite factions had exercised over the Arab community, together with growing social differentiation in urban and rural communities, widespread proletarianization, and the hothouse political climate of the war years made possible the emergence of a new Arab left, embodied in the National Liberation League (NLL), which developed out of the disintegration of the Palestine Communist Party in 1943. This organization, which included veteran Arab communists but also members of a new generation of progressive intellectuals and many working-class activists, developed a strong base in the rapidly expanding and unprecedentedly active Arab trade union movement. As we will see, the NLL advocated Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity, for its own sake but also as a way of achieving what it regarded as a “democratic” solution to the Palestine problem.

The war years brought significant shifts in the politics of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv as well. The Zionist movement's struggle against the 1939 White Paper was largely put on hold as the Yishuv mobilized in support of the Allied war effort, though efforts to get Jewish immigrants—refugees from persecution, and then from extermination, in Nazi-controlled Europe—into Palestine despite British restrictions continued, as did Jewish land acquisition and settlement. The war years witnessed the consolidation of the gains that the Yishuv had made during the 1930s, when it first approached the demographic weight, military capacity, social development, economic base, and political unity necessary to launch a viable bid for statehood. This emerging reality in Palestine itself, along with growing awareness of the unprecedented persecution to which the Jews of Europe were being subjected, prompted a Zionist conference held in New York City in 1942 (known as the “Biltmore conference” after the hotel at which it convened) to openly declare, for the first time, that Zionism's goal was the establishment of a Jewish “commonwealth” in all of Palestine.

Though the demand for statehood enjoyed majority support within the Zionist movement and the Yishuv, it was not unopposed. In 1939 a group of liberal professionals and intellectuals, together with several Po‘alei Tziyon Smol leaders, had formed the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation to promote mutual understanding and political compromise. In 1942 Hashomer Hatza‘ir formally joined the League, adding the weight of its Hakibbutz Ha’artzi federation (which now encompassed over forty kibbutzim in various stages of settlement with more than 7,500 members) and of its urban sister party, the Socialist League. Hashomer Hatza‘ir had developed into an increasingly significant force in the Yishuv: in the elections to the Histadrut's fifth congress, held in April 1942, Hashomer Hatza‘ir and the Socialist League together garnered 19 percent of the vote (mostly from cities and moshavot) on a platform advocating worker militancy, nonviolent mass opposition to the 1939 White Paper, and Arab-Jewish compromise. During the war years and until the end of 1947, Hashomer Hatza‘ir vigorously opposed both the Zionist leadership's demand for Jewish statehood in all of Palestine and any form of partition, advocating instead the establishment in an undivided Palestine of a binational state in which Arabs and Jews would have political parity regardless of their relative numbers. This was very much a minority position within the Yishuv, but as Joel Beinin has pointed out, binationalism was at the time still within the bounds of legitimate political discourse in the Yishuv.^[3]

Political change in the Yishuv was facilitated by factional infighting within MAPAI, culminating in a bitter split in 1944 and the secession of its left wing, which established itself as a new party under the name of Ahdut Ha‘avoda. In so doing it claimed the mantle of the old Ahdut Ha‘avoda, which had been the larger and more explicitly socialist of the two parties that had merged to form MAPAI fourteen years earlier. Though MAPAI remained the single largest party in the Histadrut, the Yishuv, and the Zionist movement, the split weakened MAPAI's hegemonic grip and opened up new political space within which other forces could expand and demand a share in decision making. The changing wartime political climate benefited even the Jewish communists. The Jewish communist organizations that emerged from the breakup of the Palestine Communist Party in 1943 remained small and weak, but their efforts to seek common ground with Zionism won them greater legitimacy in the Yishuv, as did the reflected glory of the Soviet Union, which enjoyed great prestige and popularity among Jews in wartime Palestine as the Red Army blocked the Nazi onslaught and then began to destroy the German war machine as it fought its way toward Berlin.

The Railway Workers: From Estrangement to Joint Struggle

It was within this rapidly changing economic, social, and political context that interactions between Arab and Jewish workers unfolded during the war years. The new atmosphere, already palpable from the beginning of 1940, was manifested in the restoration of Arab-Jewish links that had been severed, or at least dormant, during the Arab revolt. In January 1940, for example, Arab and Jewish citrus grove owners in the Petah Tikva area met to choose a joint delegation to present their demands for relief to the government. Later that year Jewish and Arab building owners, merchants, and other propertied groups also began to work together to further their common economic interests, in a manner that would not have been possible a year earlier.^[4] Not surprisingly, the Arab and Jewish railway workers were also among the first groups to resume contact after the end of the revolt, as the restoration of tranquillity and the sharp decline in real wages caused by wartime inflation facilitated the resumption of organizing activities on both sides and renewed interaction between them. The war and immediate postwar years would witness not only an unprecedented degree of cooperation between the Arab and Jewish railway unions but also unprecedented militancy, highlighting trends manifested by other segments of the Arab and Jewish working classes in Palestine as well.

In addition to higher wages, the railwaymen wanted an end to the short hours in effect during most of the revolt years as well as implementation of all the promises made by management and the government in 1935 but never fulfilled. By the beginning of 1940 the International Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, now exclusively Jewish in membership, had renewed contacts with some of the veteran leaders of the Arab railwaymen, especially in Haifa. Progress was slow, however, because the Arab unionists were still reluctant to be publicly associated with Jews. Nonetheless, Arabs and Jews at the Haifa workshops were able to formulate a joint memorandum setting forth their demands. When in March 1940 management rejected these demands, interest in renewed activism and cooperation spread from Haifa to other parts of Palestine. As the Arab Union of Railway Workers, which had virtually ceased to function during the revolt, resumed activity and began recruiting new members, talks involving activists from both unions as well as unaffiliated Arab workers got under way in Haifa, Lydda, and elsewhere. As in previous years, the AURW demanded that any joint delegation to management be constituted not on the basis of parity—as the IU insisted—but in accordance with the relative proportions of Arabs and Jews among the railwaymen. Under pressure from the rank and file to find some way to cooperate with the IU, the AURW ultimately conceded on this issue, and in August a joint delegation met with the General Manager of the Palestine Railways for the first time in more than four years.^[5]

The new opportunities for mobilizing workers which the war opened up once again compelled the two unions to grapple with the question of their mutual relations. The IU leadership understood that the situation of the Jewish railwaymen could be improved only through cooperation with the Arabs and the encouragement of worker activism. But they also understood that the renewal of activism would stimulate many of the Arab workers to seek trade union organization, an impulse which would primarily benefit the AURW. They had not entirely given up the hope that the IU might be able to recruit Arab workers, but under the circumstances this seemed an unrealistic prospect. In practice, therefore, the IU generally accepted that it had to cooperate with the AURW as representative of the Arab workers. For its part, the AURW had abandoned the idea of uniting all the railway workers into one organization, although it had made such proposals up to the very eve of the revolt. Still fragile and cautious, and anxious to avoid any action which might subject it to criticism on nationalist grounds, the AURW was ready to cooperate with the IU in drawing up memoranda and forming delegations but still refused to forge any public or formal links with the Jewish union. So while its leaders did in fact work with the IU, they did not do so as official representatives of their organization but as individual activists.^[6]

The two unions continued to work together on this informal basis through 1940 and 1941, jointly pressing their common demands in meetings with management officials. In this period the Palestine Railways expanded rapidly to serve the British and Allied military forces stationed in and passing through the country. Total tonnage carried rose from 858,995 in 1940–41 to 2,194,848 in 1943–44, the chronic deficits of previous years were replaced by budget surpluses, and the railway workforce rose to an all-time high of 7,778 in 1943.^[7] As a result short hours were abolished and the workers no longer faced any threat of layoffs. Indeed, skilled labor was in short supply, leading to a great deal of overtime (but also to speedups), and thousands of Arab peasants acquired their first experience of wage labor as unskilled railway workers. The key issue confronting the railwaymen (and most other workers as well) was now higher wages, since the cost of living allowance (COLA) granted by the government as a supplement to their basic wage late in 1941 had failed to offset steadily rising prices. The wage gap between the railway workers and private-sector workers rose to 50 percent or more, a differential which was made even more burdensome by the promulgation of military regulations which prohibited railway workers from leaving their poorly paid jobs because they were deemed essential to the war effort and labor was in short supply.

Under pressure from the rank and file, AURW leaders finally agreed in January 1942 to make their links with the IU public and official and participate in a joint campaign to win the railway workers' demands. A countrywide petition drive was launched, and early in February 1942 the two unions convened a meeting of representatives of the railway workers at the PAWS union hall in Haifa. This well-attended and highly spirited event reminded observers of the heyday of solidarity among the railwaymen in 1935.^[8] Over the months that followed worker discontent was further exacerbated by shortages of basic commodities: by August 1942 flour was altogether unavailable in some urban areas and bread could be found only with difficulty, and then at such a high price that it accounted for nearly half of a railway worker's wages. In meetings with management and Labor Department officials, railway workers' representatives demanded that the workers be provided with regular rations of flour, rice, sugar, clarified butter, and other basic commodities, and also that the government establish a consumer cooperative for them to reduce prices. The Palestine Railways, apprehensive about growing unrest and anxious to prevent a decline in the efficiency of its workforce due to inadequate nutrition, did in fact arrange for the sale of essential foodstuffs to railway personnel at controlled prices.^[9] But negotiations over higher wages and the COLA dragged on without result, until workers' frustrations finally erupted in the form of a three-day strike of all the Haifa workshops workers in December 1942, in defiance of an official prohibition of strikes in essential industries.

Palestine Railways management at first refused to respond to the workers' wage demands, insisting that it could not act until a government committee on wages had made its decisions. But a few days later General Manager A. H. Kirby, fearful of further disruptions and more sympathetic to the workers' demands than his predecessors, made a number of important concessions, including the institution of annual wage increases for all workers, a wage scale based on seniority, and the introduction of regular overtime pay. Kirby was himself a veteran railwayman and former union member (in Britain) who had worked his way up through the ranks. The Jews with whom he dealt also regarded him as quite sympathetic to Zionism, unlike many other British officials in Palestine. Kirby was aware of changing official attitudes toward unions and had come to feel that the high-handed and repressive methods which had previously characterized management's dealings with the railway workforce were outdated. He therefore sought to institutionalize management's hitherto rather sporadic and informal contacts with the workers through the establishment of a “standing staff committee” consisting of representatives of management, labor, and the government's Labor Department. The establishment of this committee amounted to unofficial recognition of the workers' trade unions, since the General Manager agreed to allow the two unions to nominate the workers' representatives to it.^[10]

Some months passed before the IU and AURW were able to reach agreement over who would represent the railway workers on the committee. Once again, a key sticking point seems to have been the question of parity: the AURW demanded at least a symbolic majority on the joint committee which would choose the workers' representatives on the staff committee. At the same time, the IU leadership seems to have hoped that it could take advantage of the AURW's weakness outside Haifa by organizing Arab railway workers under its own auspices. In Lydda, for example, the IU branch developed ties with a substantial number of Arab workers early in 1943. But lack of organizational resources, especially someone who knew Arabic and could work with this group on an ongoing basis, prevented the IU from consolidating its links with these workers. As 1943 wore on the AURW established an increasingly effective presence outside Haifa, rendering the IU's hopes unrealistic, though a few Arab workers retained ties with the IU even in Haifa. In the end each union appointed one member to the staff committee, though a proposed joint committee representing all the railway workers never came into being. As we will see later in this chapter, as well as in Chapter 8, the railway workers' discontent and their readiness for action would assume even more dramatic forms in the months and years ahead.^[11]

The Histadrut, Hashomer Hatza‘ir, and “Arab Work”

During the first year of the war Histadrut officials gradually became aware that the hostility and tensions unleashed by the revolt had diminished greatly and that new opportunities for developing relations with Arab workers had opened up. In July 1940, for example, Eliyahu Agassi visited the town of Safad, in the Galilee, where a group of some fifty Arab workers had contacted the local Workers' Council and asked its help in organizing themselves. Agassi was struck by the changed atmosphere, less than a year after the end of the revolt: though the Arabs of Safad were, he reported, known to be no less “fanatical” than the residents of Nablus—by reputation one of the most strongly nationalist towns in the country—he found Arabs and Jews again mixing in the streets and cafés.

However, it soon became clear to Agassi and his colleagues that in one crucial respect little had changed: as had been the case before and during the revolt, Arab workers approached the Histadrut and took an interest in the PLL largely in the hope of finding jobs. In this instance, Solel Boneh, the Histadrut's construction and road-building company, had won a tender to build a new police station near Safad, on condition that it employ some Arab workers from the vicinity. This police station was one of many fortlike structures which the government had built to garrison and control the countryside of Palestine during and after the revolt; they were nicknamed “Tegarts,” after Sir Charles Tegart, one of the government's chief counterinsurgency experts and the man who had recommended their construction. The Arab workers who had approached the Histadrut wanted Solel Boneh to hire them in place of the workers already employed through the local Arab subcontractors to whom Solel Boneh had given some of the work. Cautious as always, Agassi was hesitant about the PLL taking on the role of a labor contractor for Histadrut enterprises, mainly because organizing these Arab workers might interfere with the employment of as many Jewish workers as possible on the project. Agassi also feared that any Arab union he helped organize might later get out of control and start demanding not only more jobs but also the same wages and hours as the Jewish workers. Nonetheless, he concluded, it was important for political reasons to organize them and place them in jobs with Solel Boneh: demonstrating the benefits that good relations with the Jews could yield might shake things up a bit in Safad.^[12]

However, the Histadrut's Arab Department was hardly prepared to take advantage of the new circumstances. Its funds were depleted, the PLL did not exist outside Haifa, and even its branch there was barely functioning. After three years of publication Haqiqat al-Amr remained a hand-to-mouth operation, kept going by a subsidy from the Jewish Agency and by such meager supplemental funding as Agassi, Michael Assaf, and their colleagues could induce Histadrut officials to allocate. The Histadrut committee charged with overseeing Arab work rarely met and its decisions were never implemented.^[13] Perhaps most importantly, despite a sense that new opportunities had arisen, Histadrut officials remained wary. “We must do our work with caution,” Dov Hoz told his colleagues early in 1940. “We must not be swept away by the enthusiasm for linking up with us which the Arabs are displaying in the present conjuncture, because it may cause us and them many disappointments and failures. We must try to form among the Arab workers a stable nucleus which will benefit both them and us.”^[14] The death of Dov Hoz in an automobile accident a few months later removed from the scene one of the few top-ranking Histadrut leaders who had taken a serious interest in Arab work.

As I discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, Hashomer Hatza‘ir had been criticizing the Histadrut's cautious, reluctant, and pessimistic approach toward organizing Arab workers for many years. Yet despite its denunciations of MAPAI, numerous internal discussions of the issue, and repeated resolutions on the need for Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity, through the 1930s Hashomer Hatza‘ir had done very little in this sphere. Movement members working in the cities and moshavot had in certain instances pressed for vigorous support for strikes by Arab coworkers; among the railway workers Hashomer Hatza‘ir members and sympathizers strongly advocated cooperation and even unity with the Arab railway workers; and on some Hakibbutz Ha’artzi–affiliated kibbutzim there were individuals or small groups who tried to foster friendly relations with neighboring Arab villages. But Hashomer Hatza‘ir had been largely preoccupied with immigration, the establishment and consolidation of its kibbutzim, and its crystallization as a unified and stable movement with a coherent and distinctive ideology, and so its ringing resolutions on relations with Palestine's Arab majority remained without practical effect. Once a year, as May Day approached, the secretary of Hashomer Hatza‘ir's political committee would draw up a leaflet exhorting Arab workers to solidarity with their Jewish comrades, have it translated into Arabic, and send it off to the kibbutzim, which were supposed to distribute it to neighboring Arab villages. Thus for all its criticisms of MAPAI's and the PLL's shortcomings and failures, in practice Hashomer Hatza‘ir left concrete organizing work to the Histadrut, which it continued to see as bearing primary responsibility for dealing with Arab affairs.

By the end of the 1930s, however, there was growing agreement within the movement about the need to act independently in this arena. The revolt had not only made the depth of Arab opposition to Zionism unmistakably clear but had also raised the specter of partition, to which Ha-shomer Hatza‘ir was strongly opposed. Yet in order to be able to “sell” its binationalist alternative to the Jewish labor movement, the Yishuv, and the Zionist movement as a whole, Hashomer Hatza‘ir needed to show that it had actual or potential allies within the Arab community who might be amenable to such a solution. Moreover, the Histadrut's hesitant and small-scale efforts to organize Arab workers seemed unlikely ever to yield significant results, despite the new opportunities which the changed political and economic climate in the country seemed to offer. It therefore seemed increasingly clear that Hashomer Hatza‘ir would have to act on its own.

By 1940 this realization had culminated in an explicit decision that Arab activism (pe‘ilut ‘aravit), as Hashomer Hatza‘ir generally called it, was too important to be left to the Histadrut's lackadaisical Arab Department, the inactive PLL, and a Histadrut largely uninterested in (if not disdainful of) the whole enterprise. The leadership of Hashomer Hatza‘ir, by now a well-established, self-confident, and highly disciplined movement, in fact the second-strongest force within the labor-Zionist movement in Palestine, decided to form a trained cadre of activists drawn from within the movement which would formulate and implement a systematic program of Arab work. Primary responsibility for this initiative was entrusted to Aharon Cohen, who would play a central role in Hashomer Hatza‘ir's efforts in this field through the 1940s.

Cohen was born in Bessarabia (then within the Tsarist empire but later part of Romania) in 1910; he had come to Palestine in 1929 already a dedicated member of Hashomer Hatza‘ir and joined Kibbutz Sha‘ar Ha‘amakim, not far from Haifa. Four years after his arrival in Palestine, his movement sent him back to Romania as a youth movement organizer and Zionist emissary. After his return in 1936 Cohen rose quickly within the ranks of his movement: he was elected to the executive committee of Ha-kibbutz Ha’artzi the following year and would remain a member of that body until 1954. In 1937–38 he coordinated Hashomer Hatza‘ir's political work in Haifa, while continuing to undertake missions abroad for his movement and helping organize illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine. A talented and highly efficient organizer—it was said that he kept a record of every work-related conversation he ever had—he was a logical choice when the movement leadership looked around for an energetic and proven activist who could launch Hashomer Hatza‘ir's program of Arab activism.^[15]

With characteristic energy, Cohen laid the foundations of the Ha-shomer Hatza‘ir–Hakibbutz Ha’artzi Arab Department, which he would head for the next decade. While recognizing the growing importance of the urban intelligentsia and working class, Cohen initially proposed a strategic focus on the countryside. This approach was in keeping with both Hashomer Hatza‘ir's character and self-image as a kibbutz movement and the fact that many of its kibbutzim interacted with neighboring Arab villages and their residents on a daily basis. Such an approach would also clash less directly with the Histadrut, since that organization's Arab Department had a predominantly urban focus, except for efforts to develop ties with specific villages for security reasons—as with the Druze in ‘Usufiyya on Mount Carmel, or with Wadi ‘Ara and neighboring villages during the revolt.

Cohen's conception of how to go about developing relations with Arabs was, at least on paper, much more systematic and proactive than the rather haphazard and reactive style which characterized MAPAI's work in this field. Cohen also went well beyond his MAPAI counterparts by proposing not only new organizational initiatives but also the production of a new and comprehensive kind of knowledge about the Arabs of Palestine. Cohen insisted that to successfully develop ties with the Arabs, with whom he believed the Jews would one day share an undivided and socialist Palestine as equals, one had first to understand them thoroughly. He therefore envisioned the establishment of a centralized set of files packed with data on Arab villages and the state of the Arab community, to be achieved through systematic information gathering. While Abba Hushi, Agassi, and their MAPAI colleagues had certainly developed a wide network of contacts and informants in Arab towns and villages, the idea of setting up what today we might call a comprehensive database never seems to have occurred to them. The research which Cohen and his Ha-shomer Hatza‘ir colleagues carried out during and after the war years, and the relationships they developed, resulted in the publication of some of the most substantial and relatively objective studies on the Arabs of Palestine produced by avowed Zionists up to that time.^[16] As Aharon Cohen probably knew, the Hagana's intelligence service was engaged in a database project of its own: looking ahead to future battles, it was systematically gathering and cross-indexing information on every Arab town and village in Palestine. Cohen's conception of the relationship between knowledge about Arabs and Zionism's power relations with them was certainly much more benign than that of the mainstream Zionists, for he saw that knowledge as a way of building bridges of friendship with the Arab community. But of course the knowledge he and his colleagues produced could be, and in the event would be, put to use in ways they might not have intended or approved of.

Cohen began by trying to educate his own movement's members about the importance of good relations with Arabs. In numerous lectures to kibbutz members he exhorted them to build bridges with their own Arab neighbors, for example by establishing clinics and sports clubs which would serve nearby villages. He also sought to identify individuals in kibbutzim and in the towns and cities who were interested in this sphere of activity and could form local cells of activists linked into an ever growing network guided by the movement's Arab Department. To build that network, Cohen began publishing an information bulletin which covered the doings of activists in various kibbutzim, publicized the work of the Arab Department, and discussed Hashomer Hatza‘ir's programs and policies in this arena. He also sought, with some success, to have the movement's various periodicals devote greater attention to Arab affairs, both to raise members' consciousness about the issue and to propagandize the movement's line in the wider Yishuv. At the same time he built up his department by recruiting additional staff members, all of whom learned Arabic thoroughly.^[17]

Cohen pressed his movement's leadership to have Hashomer Hatza‘ir formally join the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation, which he saw as the vehicle through which those forces within the Yishuv which opposed MAPAI's demand for Jewish statehood could coalesce into an effective counterweight and develop alliances with like-minded elements within the Arab community. When Hashomer Hatza‘ir finally did join the League in June 1942, Cohen became its most vigorous and outspoken activist. At the same time, he and his colleagues continued to urge the Histadrut to activate the PLL, and more generally to take advantage of what they saw as the great new opportunities which now existed for furthering Arab-Jewish cooperation. In this respect Cohen was carrying on the long tradition of the left wing of labor Zionism, which had always insisted that Arab-Jewish understanding, and ultimately cooperation and compromise, was essential to the realization of Zionism.^[18]

Hashomer Hatza‘ir's independent initiatives were accompanied by stronger criticism of MAPAI's (and therefore the Histadrut's) inactivity with regard to organizing Arab workers. However, MAPAI leaders, more focused than ever before on the goal of Jewish statehood and skeptical about the possibility of compromise with the Arabs, resisted demands that the Histadrut revive the PLL and take the offensive. In a letter to the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation Moshe Shertok, director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, declared:

The most crucial time for Zionism is the period of transition from a Jewish minority to a majority. In this period not the Arabs but the British and the Americans will be the decisive factors. It is not the Arabs who will have the final word, neither in the world nor here; let us not adopt the view that one has to go to the Arabs and agree with them.^[19]

Eliyahu Sasson, head of the Political Department's Arab Bureau, expressed the leadership's attitude clearly in an April 1941 letter to Aharon Cohen, responding sarcastically to a recent article in which Cohen had argued that new opportunities for political compromise had arisen which should not be neglected as they had been in the past.

I would be very grateful if you would be good enough to explain to me, in a personal letter and not in the pages of the newspapers, what are the newly-opened possibilities for political negotiations and who are the “certain circles” [among the Arabs] who are ready at this time to discuss a Jewish-Arab political agreement which will permit the realization of Zionism.

As in the past, MAPAI loyalists blamed the PLL's failures on Arab workers' lack of discipline and their reluctance or inability to organize themselves properly.^[20]

Despite profound disinterest at the top, the handful of Histadrut officials still committed to the project of organizing Arab workers desperately sought some way of reviving the PLL. One option, which had already been considered in years past, was to focus on the PLL's function as a supplier of reliable Arab labor to Jewish contractors. After all, it was not the PLL's trade union activity (minimal in any case) but its ability to place members in jobs at Jewish enterprises that gave those workers some incentive to remain loyal. Eliyahu Agassi and his colleagues naturally looked to the Histadrut's own contracting company, Solel Boneh, as a potential source of jobs for PLL members, especially as that company's contracts with the government and the military generally stipulated that it employ at least some Arab labor. However, Solel Boneh was completely uninterested in turning to the PLL for the Arab workers it needed, to the extent that Agassi accused it of deliberately boycotting PLL members. At the same time, the very fact that Solel Boneh employed Arab workers at construction projects and elsewhere, in apparent violation of the principle of Hebrew labor, was a source of distress to the Histadrut leadership and the subject of repeated discussions.^[21]

At the end of 1941, after many months of drift, Abba Hushi, the powerful secretary of the Haifa Workers' Council, intervened to get the Histadrut's program of Arab work back on track and moving forward. In 1932, when the Histadrut's effort to organize Arab workers had foundered, it was Hushi who had breathed new life into the Arab Department and launched the PLL, with the help of Agassi and a handful of others. Now, a decade later, after having devoted only sporadic attention to the question during the intervening years, Hushi stepped in once again and, with the blessing of the Histadrut's top leadership, took charge. As the Jewish labor boss of Haifa, Hushi was well positioned to see what was going on: a rapid expansion of the Arab working class in and around Haifa as elsewhere, and especially the burgeoning of British military bases and facilities in which unprecedented numbers of Jews and Arabs were employed side by side. Hushi was anxious to take advantage of the new situation by launching a renewed effort to organize Arab workers (including camp workers) into the PLL through workplace-oriented trade union activism, and he asked the Histadrut for an increased budget and the appointment of additional personnel.^[22]

Some Histadrut executive committee members were dubious: one of them told Hushi that in the past “the question was not about an unwillingness to give money, it was the recognition that [Arab activism] was a waste.…For me the essence of the PLL was first of all something for tourists.” Hushi nonetheless went ahead and prepared a plan of action which provided for the hiring of several new organizers and staff members, to be funded jointly by the Histadrut and the Jewish Agency. Much of 1942 went by, however, before Hushi obtained the commitment of resources he wanted. In the interim the PLL signed up Arab workers at several army bases but then failed to follow up because the Histadrut still refused to commit to any serious initiative.^[23]

The Revival of the Arab Labor Movement

Two factors finally induced the Histadrut leadership to address seriously the question of organizing Arab workers at the end of 1942 and to launch a major new initiative during 1943. On the one hand, after many months of prodding by Abba Hushi and others, MAPAI officials became seriously concerned that Hashomer Hatza‘ir, now their party's major ideological and political rival within the labor-Zionist movement in Palestine, had initiated its own organizing effort in this politically and economically sensitive sphere.^[24] But of even greater concern to the Histadrut leadership, and much more important in stimulating it to take action, was the reemergence and rapid expansion, after years of dormancy, of the Arab trade union movement in Palestine, along with the fact that much of that movement was now led by leftists.

As I discussed in Chapter 6, after an upsurge in 1934–36 the Arab trade union movement became all but paralyzed during the revolt years. Widespread unemployment undermined organization, energies were diverted to the struggle against British rule and Zionism, and massive repression, including the detention of many unionists, made overt activity all but impossible. During the first year of the war high unemployment and the aftereffects of the revolt's defeat hindered the resumption of trade union activity. But as we have seen, the AURW had gradually resumed activity during 1940 and 1941, and by the end of 1941 the PAWS with which it was affiliated was also beginning to expand its membership base and influence. The PAWS' core still consisted largely of Arab railway workers in Haifa, and several of the railway workers who had founded it in 1925 still played key leadership roles, among them ‘Abd al-Hamid Haymur, his brother ‘Id Salim Haymur, and Sa‘id Qawwas. However, these veterans, men of working-class origin who had little formal education, preferred to remain in the background. As a result, from this time onward the organization's best-known public figure was Sami Taha. Born in 1915 in the village of ‘Arraba, Taha had begun his career in labor in the early 1930s as a young clerk at the PAWS headquarters. As I noted in Chapter 6, he was detained without trial for six months during the revolt. Though still only in his late twenties, Sami Taha now came to see himself as Palestine's preeminent spokesman for Arab labor and worked to enhance the PAWS' size and stature.^[25]

Although Sami Taha and the veteran leaders backing him exercised considerable influence in Haifa itself, the PAWS was a rather loose-knit organization and the authority of its national leadership was limited outside Haifa. As a result it was possible for leftists (including veteran Palestine Communist Party activists) to assume the leadership of many of the rapidly growing new PAWS branches which sprang up in 1942. Thus although, for example, the vigorous new labor organization in Jaffa was formally a branch of the PAWS, it was in fact headed by Khalil Shanir, a longtime PCP leader. These leftists regarded Sami Taha and the old guard in Haifa as conservative, cautious, and ineffective, but they preferred to remain within the PAWS, Palestine's oldest and most established labor organization, in the hope of transforming it, first in the branches they controlled and then at the national level as well, and eventually taking it over.

A leaflet issued during this period by the Jaffa branch sheds some light on the attitude of PAWS activists there, and especially the leftists among them. The leaflet appeals to Arab workers to unite in defense of their common economic interests, outlines the purposes of the PAWS, and explains the benefits organization could yield for those who join. The leaflet is devoid of any specific political, much less explicitly nationalist, content. The Jews do receive mention; however, they are not castigated as an alien element scheming to seize Palestine or deprive Arab workers of their jobs, themes popular up to 1936. Rather, the Jewish workers are upheld as a model worthy of emulation. “Here are the Jewish workers before you,” the leaflet declared.

You can see that every one of them works no more than eight hours a day, earns a high wage, more than the Arab worker gets, and receives free medical treatment for themselves and their families. What is it that has brought them to this situation? Do you think that the Jewish employer is more beneficent than the Arab employer? No, my brothers! The Jewish workers know how to defend their rights, they established a union and all of them joined it, and that is what brought them to the state that you see them in.^[26]

The PAWS, and soon rival trade union formations as well, benefited greatly from an unprecedentedly favorable attitude on the part of the government of Palestine. In the late 1930s the Colonial Office had begun to rethink its traditionally hostile attitude toward trade unionism and labor movements in Britain's colonial empire. Episodes of worker unrest in various countries led British officials to realize that trade unions in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean could no longer be ignored or suppressed but must instead be accommodated or even co-opted. In part this revised strategy was the result of a growing understanding that capitalist development in the colonies had given rise to a permanent new class of wage workers in relatively large and modern industrial and transport enterprises whose needs and demands would have to be taken into account. But this shift in attitude and policy also had a political dimension, in that British officials hoped that the appearance of solicitude for labor, official recognition of trade unions, the promulgation of labor and social legislation, and the establishment of labor departments in colonial administrations would help channel trade unionism in safely apolitical directions and insulate it from radicalism and anticolonial nationalism. The entry of the Labor Party into the wartime coalition cabinet gave further impetus to this new turn.^[27]

In keeping with this policy shift, in 1940 the government of Palestine appointed its first Labor Advisor, R. M. Graves. Brother of the poet and novelist Robert Graves, he had begun his career in the British-run security apparatus in Egypt. When a Labor Office was created within the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior in 1930, Graves was appointed to direct it, and he remained at the head of that department until 1939, when Egyptianization of the upper levels of the government bureaucracy made his position untenable. He thus came to Palestine with considerable experience in colonial labor policy and administration.^[28] Graves' recommendation that the government of Palestine create a full-fledged Labor Department was accepted in 1942, and the new department was charged with the investigation of labor conditions, preparation of labor legislation, and regulation of trade unions. A number of British, Arab, and Jewish inspectors and subinspectors were appointed to staff the department, signaling the government's intention to play an active role in labor affairs. Since the Histadrut was already a well-established and powerful organization, Labor Department officials devoted themselves largely to the encouragement of trade unions for Arab workers.

In this endeavor one of the Labor Department's British inspectors, H. E. Chudleigh, played a key role. Chudleigh, a veteran of the English trade union movement, devoted much of his time and energy in 1942–43 to urging and overseeing the establishment of Arab unions in many parts of Palestine. Some observers, especially Histadrut officials, felt that Chudleigh was particularly supportive of labor organizing by communists or those close to them. This may well have been the case, in part because Chudleigh thought that communists were the most effective organizers and in part because, as I will discuss shortly, in 1942–43 the Arab communists in Palestine were strongly supportive of the Allied war effort.^[29]

Government solicitude and support for trade union organization undoubtedly stimulated the process of unionization. But the main impetus, and much of the leadership for unions old and new, came from a cadre of experienced communist activists and radical intellectuals who helped create and lead a militant new left wing within the Arab labor movement. As I noted earlier, some of these leftists operated within the framework of the PAWS, where they nominally acknowledged the national leadership of Sami Taha and the old guard in Haifa while building up their own largely autonomous local branches in Jaffa, Jerusalem, al-Majdal, and elsewhere. At the same time, another group of communist and leftist intellectuals and unionists led by Bulus Farah was organizing an entirely independent labor organization in Haifa itself.

Farah had gone to work in the Haifa railway workshops in 1925, at the age of 15. By the early 1930s he had joined the Palestine Communist Party and in 1934 was sent by the party to the University of Toilers of the East in Moscow, where communist activists from the colonial world received training. Farah returned to Palestine in 1938 and soon became a figure around whom Arab communists disgruntled with the party's longtime secretary, Radwan al-Hilw (usually referred to by his party name, Musa) gathered. Farah made it clear that he had little respect for Musa and considered himself more capable of leading the party.

But Bulus Farah's conflict with the party leadership did not mainly concern personalities; there were important political differences as well. Farah was more inclined toward Arab nationalism than some of his comrades and played a key role in the struggle which the party's largely Arab leadership waged to restore control over the autonomous Jewish Section established during the revolt. While some of the Jewish Section's former leaders and members ultimately submitted to the authority of the central committee, others broke away from the PCP in 1940 and formed a separate, exclusively Jewish communist group under the name Emet (“Truth”). But Farah was himself expelled from the PCP central committee that same year, after the leadership claimed he had informed on the party while briefly in police custody. Farah insisted that his enemies within the party had not only turned him in but also besmirched his good name.^[30]

Farah was now on the fringes of the party and openly contemptuous of its leadership, which he argued was not only ineffectual but also infected with Zionist deviationism; among other things, he was outraged that the PCP leadership had readmitted the dissident (and largely unrepentent) Emet group in 1942. Farah struck out on his own and during 1941–42 built up a strong following in Haifa. The group he led included both PCP members and a growing circle of left-leaning educated young men, mainly secondary school graduates now employed in white-collar jobs. Farah and his colleagues also developed close ties with members of an emerging stratum of militant working-class unionists who were frustrated by the PAWS' failure to respond aggressively to the new circumstances and opportunities created by the war, and receptive to Farah's emphasis on trade union organization and worker militancy. In 1942 Farah's group established a club in Haifa under the name “Rays of Hope” (Shu‘a‘ al-Amal) to serve as a center for its activities, which initially had a democratic and antifascist focus. The PCP leadership responded by setting up its own rival “People's Club” (Nadi al-Sha‘b), but it failed to significantly undermine the appeal and influence of Farah's dissident group.

That these organizations, in which known communists played key roles, could function more or less openly without fear of the kind of police repression with which every manifestation of communist activity had been met in the 1920s and 1930s was largely due to the fact that since the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the communists and their allies were among the strongest and most vocal supporters of the Allied war effort within the Palestinian Arab community. The British authorities knew full well that, at least until the tide of war began to turn in the Allies' favor, many Palestinian Arabs were at best ambivalent about the Allied cause and at worst hopeful of an Axis victory, which would mean the end of British rule and the Zionist project. Some of the leaders of the nationalist movement, including its preeminent leader Amin al-Husayni, had gone so far as to openly embrace the Axis cause from exile. The British were therefore ready to tolerate, and even encourage, the Arab communists' activities, because a key component of communist propaganda and organizing work in Palestine was building Arab support for the antifascist cause and the Allied war effort, which the communists saw as a contribution to the defense of the Soviet Union.

In November 1942 the coalition of young radical intellectuals and working-class activists organized around the Rays of Hope Club took the leap into labor organizing by establishing the Federation of Arab Trade Unions and Labor Societies (FATULS). This new organization quickly won the allegiance of unionists at several large Haifa-area workplaces long neglected by the conservative and unenergetic PAWS, including the Iraq Petroleum Company, the just-completed Consolidated Refineries, and the Shell Oil Company's installation, and it later organized port and camp workers as well. At the end of 1942 the Labor Department estimated that the FATULS had some 1,000–1,500 members, compared with the PAWS' countrywide membership of about 5,000 and a dues-paying PLL membership generously estimated at 500.^[31] The rivalry between the PAWS and the FATULS, and later between both of them and the PLL, stimulated all of them to escalate their efforts to organize unorganized workers and win the allegiance of those in unions. It should be kept in mind, however, that a significant portion of the PAWS' membership belonged to branches under the leadership of communists and their allies, so that from 1943 onward a sizable segment of the organized Arab working class in Palestine was effectively communist-led. Relations between the PAWS' Haifa-based conservative leadership, headed by Sami Taha, and its left wing were characterized by sporadic conflicts and jockeying for power within the organization, so that the Arab labor scene was complicated by internal tensions as well as interorganizational rivalries.

Hashomer Hatza‘ir in Search of the Arab Left

Aharon Cohen and his comrades in Hashomer Hatza‘ir were quick to grasp the significance of these developments. “We are witnessing important developments among the Arabs which open new horizons and encourage intensification of our activity,” wrote Eli‘ezer Bauer in July 1942. “A workers' movement is awakening, trade unions are emerging, groups of socialist intellectuals are taking shape, and the socialist intellectuals and the workers' movement are growing closer together.”^[32] Not surprisingly, their frustration over what they regarded as the Histadrut's abject failure to rise to the occasion and take the initiative grew more intense, and they vented their feelings in their movement's press and at Histadrut meetings.^[33] But these developments also prompted Cohen and his colleagues to rethink and then reorient their strategy, by shifting their focus away from the countryside (which in any case seemed unpromising) and toward what they saw as “progressive Arab forces” in the cities, especially socialist and left-leaning workers and intellectuals. They hoped that by developing close ties with these forces, Hashomer Hatza‘ir could counteract the influence of both bourgeois Arab nationalism and anti-Zionist communism while fostering the emergence of an Arab left which would be Hashomer Hatza‘ir's partner in fighting for a binational and socialist Palestine.^[34]

This reorientation prompted Cohen and other members of the Ha-shomer Hatza‘ir Arab Department staff to devote considerable time and effort to cultivating relations with left-wing Arab circles. During 1942 they made contact with the group around the PCP's People's Club in Haifa, and especially with ‘Abd Allah al-Bandaq. It was no secret to Cohen that al-Bandaq, who came from a prominent Bethlehem Christian family, was a leftist with close and long-standing connections with the PCP, and he also knew full well that al-Bandaq was widely believed to be a member of the still illegal party's top leadership. Yet Cohen not only accepted al-Bandaq's assurances that he was not currently a party member but vigorously promoted him to his colleagues in Hashomer Hatza‘ir, the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation, and the Histadrut's Arab Department as the prototype of a new breed of leftist but noncommunist Arab activist with whom left-wing Zionism could find common ground. In fact, because Cohen saw al-Bandaq and his circle as the key to establishing a long-term relationship with the emerging vanguard of the Palestinian Arab radical intelligentsia and workers' movement, he went even further: he discussed with al-Bandaq the idea of using funds provided by Hashomer Hatza‘ir to launch a new newspaper which would conduct antifascist propaganda in the Arab community and promote Arab-Jewish cooperation on the basis of political equality. He also convinced his movement's leaders to agree to help al-Bandaq establish an Arab socialist party which would promote Arab-Jewish cooperation. By February 1944 Cohen and al-Bandaq had together formulated a draft program for the new party which, among other things, seemed to recognize Jewish rights and interests in Palestine.^[35]

In retrospect, the relationship between Cohen and al-Bandaq seems quite bizarre, because despite al-Bandaq's denials he was not only a member of the PCP but had been a leading member of the party's central committee since 1936. In 1944 he would surface as a member of the central committee of the newly formed National Liberation League, a quasi-communist and unequivocally anti-Zionist organization. Al-Bandaq's motives in pretending to Cohen and other Jewish contacts that he was not a communist, and thus not fundamentally hostile to Zionism, even in Hashomer Hatza‘ir's socialist and binationalist version, are perhaps comprehensible. He seems to have hoped that this kind of Stalinist double-dealing would enable him to extract from his Jewish interlocutors material resources which his party could put to good use. What is less easily understandable is how Cohen could not have known that al-Bandaq and his associates were committed communists and as such unlikely to be suitable partners for Hashomer Hatza‘ir; or if he did know, why he concealed that fact and tried so hard to “sell” al-Bandaq to his own movement and to the Histadrut as a potential ally.

An Israeli historian of the communist movement in Palestine has recently depicted Cohen as a deceiver who simply lied about al-Bandaq, even to his own comrades.^[36] Yet one might more reasonably suggest that Cohen's friendship with al-Bandaq, his passionate commitment to the cause of Arab-Jewish cooperation and compromise, and his conviction that there existed authentic Arab socialists ready to ally themselves with socialist Zionists impelled him not only to convince himself of al-Bandaq's veracity but to try to convince others. This would then be an instance not so much of deliberate prevarication for political ends as of unconscious self-delusion, of an inability to “see” certain things or to admit them to oneself, even long after the relevant political conjuncture had passed. Indeed, Cohen seems to have gone to his grave unable to fully acknowledge that in the 1940s there were no significant left-wing forces within the Arab community ready to compromise with Zionism, of whatever variant. To fully acknowledge this truth would have been to admit the futility, or at least the failure, of his vision of Palestine's future and his life's work.^[37]

The Resurrection of the PLL

Confronted toward the end of 1942 by the rapid expansion of a reinvigorated Arab labor movement with a strong communist-led component and by Hashomer Hatza‘ir's overtures toward the new Arab left, the Histadrut leadership finally began to devote greater attention and funds to its Arab Department and to the PLL. A number of high-ranking MAPAI leaders were appointed to guide the work of the Histadrut's Arab Department, along with Aharon Cohen representing Hashomer Hatza‘ir and Moshe Erem representing Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, and the department's budget was greatly increased. This made it possible, for the first time in years, to hire additional Arab and Jewish organizers, revive dormant PLL branches, and establish new ones. At long last, the Histadrut seemed to be sending a clear signal that it was launching a serious effort to organize Arab workers.^[38]

The Histadrut's conception of what it was undertaking and why was set forth in a pamphlet on the PLL which it published in April 1943, under the signature of Abba Hushi.^[39] The pamphlet opened with an epigraph, attributed to “an old Arab worker,” which very nicely captures the way that labor Zionists wanted to believe they and their enterprise were seen by Arab workers: “Just as the sun, unbidden, spreads light and warmth, so the Histadrut has spread light and warmth to the Arab workers by the very fact of its existence.” Hushi's pamphlet reviewed the history of the Histadrut's efforts to organize Arab workers and the work of the PLL up to the present time, paying special tribute to the contribution which the PLL's activities in Haifa had made to preventing Arab “terrorists” from closing the port there during the revolt. Like other MAPAI loyalists, Hushi attributed the PLL's failure over the previous decade to the difficulties inherent in organizing Arab workers, who belonged to “a poor, largely under-nourished, semi-feudal people, living in a part of the world where fatalistic resignation is consciously inculcated, a subject people faithful to a patriarchal religious tradition which has continued virtually unchanged for more than thirteen centuries.” As for the Arab labor unions established during the war, Hushi asserted that they were organized by “sons of wealthy Effendis, whose political past is somewhat questionable, and by Communists who participate either openly or covertly,” and claimed that they did not have the workers' true interests at heart. The pamphlet called on the Histadrut to rededicate itself to the task of organizing Arab workers into trade unions under its auspices (i.e., into the PLL) so as to facilitate realization of the labor-Zionist project. An English-language version of the pamphlet, obviously targeting audiences in Europe and the United States, also rebuked the government of Palestine for allegedly hindering efforts to develop closer relations between Arab and Jewish workers—a veiled reference to the Labor Department's encouragement of Arab unions and its disinterest in the PLL.^[40]

It was clear to the Histadrut leadership that reviving the PLL and aggressively seeking to recruit Arab workers meant destroying any basis for cooperation with the PAWS and (in Haifa) the FATULS, which would regard these steps as provocative and threatening. But as Abba Hushi put it at a meeting of the Histadrut's Arab Affairs Department, reiterating MAPAI's long-standing position, “the Histadrut must act on behalf of the Arab workers as if the Arab unions did not exist… we want the Arab worker to be organized by us alone.” Others associated with the Arab Department, especially Aharon Cohen and Moshe Erem, were doubtful about this strategy, partly because they understood why Arab workers were attracted to the Arab unions rather than to the PLL. Erem quoted an Arab he knew in Haifa who had told him that he was going to join the FATULS “because there the Arabs themselves run everything, it is a lively, bustling club and not just an employment agency like the PLL.” But as usual, MAPAI's domination of the Histadrut ensured that the course of action it preferred would prevail.^[41]

The strategy advocated by Hushi and endorsed by the Histadrut was soon put into effect in Jerusalem and then Jaffa, sabotaging initially promising efforts at cooperation between the Histadrut and Arab unions. At the beginning of 1943 the Jerusalem branch of the PAWS and the Histadrut's Jerusalem Workers' Council were negotiating jointly with city officials on behalf of some 340 employees of the Jerusalem municipality, including sanitation workers, road crews, and drivers, of whom 250 were Arabs and 90 were Jews. Like almost all workers in Palestine, the Jerusalem municipal employees had suffered a sharp decline in their real wages because of inflation; they also lacked many basic benefits, including paid sick days or vacations and compensation for work injuries. These negotiations failed to yield results, and in February 1943 the Histadrut and the PAWS together led a six-day strike which compelled the municipality and British officials to grant the workers a cost of living allowance and some of their other demands. The basis seemed to have been laid for fruitful cooperation along the lines which the PAWS had long advocated and which the Histadrut seemed to have tacitly accepted: the PAWS would represent the Arab workers and the Histadrut would represent the Jewish workers. A Histadrut official involved in the February 1943 strike summed up the spirit of a joint meeting by expressing the hope that “this is the beginning of joint action and that we will continue to work together to improve the working conditions of the laborer in this country, Jew and Arab.”^[42]

Within a few weeks, however, it had become evident that the Histadrut had instead decided to exploit the prestige which the municipal workers' victory had given it by establishing a PLL branch in Jerusalem which would directly recruit Arab workers, a policy which Hushi's soon-to-be-published pamphlet would set forth explicitly. This shift outraged the Arab unionists, who insisted that Arab workers should belong exclusively to Arab unions rather than to a subsidiary of the Jewish Histadrut and who could not regard the launching of a PLL branch in Jerusalem as anything but a hostile act intended to undermine and perhaps destroy the PAWS in that city. Their anger was certainly magnified by the fact that the nucleus of the new PLL branch (consisting largely of workers recruited at Jerusalem-area army bases) included some PAWS members, one of them a former branch secretary who as recently as January 1943 had been a delegate to the PAWS' national congress. Histadrut officials in Jerusalem had secretly been cultivating ties with anticommunists struggling for control of the PAWS in Jerusalem as far back as September 1942, and when the PLL branch was established the following spring some of them were induced to defect from the PAWS and join the PLL. (Perhaps partly as a consequence of this, by the fall of 1943 the Jerusalem PAWS branch was firmly in the hands of the left.) However, the Histadrut's control of the new PLL branch in Jerusalem was not absolute: branch members blocked the Histadrut's attempt to impose the most prominent PAWS defector as branch leader, leaving Histadrut officials without a well-known local figure around whom to build the organization.^[43]

The same confrontational strategy was soon thereafter implemented in Jaffa, where the Histadrut also sought to establish a PLL branch. In this city the PAWS had a solid base and was headed by a veteran communist, Khalil Shanir. In Jaffa as elsewhere, PAWS leaders expressed willingness to cooperate with the Histadrut as representative of the Jewish workers but vehemently rejected the Histadrut's right to organize Arab workers through its subsidiary the PLL. The PAWS particularly resented PLL efforts to win over its current, former, or potential members. Aware of the difficulties of securing a foothold in Jaffa, the Histadrut secretly hired Adib al-Disuqi, who had been a member of the defunct Arab Workers' Society and was now involved in Jaffa-area sports activities, as its local organizer. Al-Disuqi began by opening a sports club which he used as a means of making contacts with local workers. Eliyahu Agassi helped out by exploiting the contacts he had made in his many years as the PLL's moving spirit.

By the summer of 1943 al-Disuqi and Agassi had signed up over one hundred Arab sanitation workers, some of them former PAWS members, who had been aroused by the victory of their counterparts in Jerusalem but were disappointed by the PAWS' failure to act vigorously on their behalf. Now the PLL, with the backing of the powerful and prestigious Histadrut, offered to fight for them if they joined the PLL, and many of them responded positively despite harassment from the PAWS. By July Agassi and al-Disuqi were openly negotiating with the Jaffa municipality on behalf of both the Arab and Jewish sanitation workers, and by August they felt strong enough to call the sanitation workers out on strike for four days. Despite threats by management and PAWS efforts to convince them to leave the PLL, the strikers remained steadfast and won higher wages. This victory allowed the PLL to consolidate a branch in Jaffa which by September 1943 claimed some 200 members, most of them municipal employees. By that time the PLL had also expanded its presence in Haifa, where it claimed (with great exaggeration) 1,200 members, and had established new branches in Acre, Tiberias, and the village of Qalunya, near Jerusalem.^[44]

Nineteen forty-three thus witnessed the reentry of the Histadrut onto the Arab labor scene as a well-financed and determined contender for the support of Arab workers. This led to conflict with the Arab unions while further complicating struggles within the expanding Arab trade union movement and affecting political struggles within the Arab community. The Histadrut's efforts in Jerusalem and Jaffa signaled a new aggressiveness and yielded significant short-term successes, but it was the 50,000 Arab and Jewish workers employed at British and Allied military bases and installations throughout Palestine who would constitute the most important battleground in this struggle for power.

The Camps and the Camp Workers

The British military bases and installations that sprang up across the landscape of Palestine during the first years of the war created a new social space in which unprecedentedly large numbers of Arab and Jewish wage workers interacted. By 1943 about 35,000 Arabs (most of them manual laborers) and 15,000 Jews (two-thirds of them skilled or semiskilled, or engaged in clerical work) were employed directly by the British military authorities in well over a hundred installations large and small; thousands more were employed by Arab and Jewish contractors, including the Histadrut's own Solel Boneh, to build bases, Tegart police forts, roads, railways, and other projects. In everyday and even official usage, Jews in Palestine generally referred to these bases as hakampim, “the camps,” a Hebraicization of the English word for camp. In Arabic they were referred to as al-mu‘askarat, the military camps.

Many of the Arab camp workers were peasants, often from villages located near the camp in which they worked, drawn into wage labor for the first time or now dependent on nonagricultural income as never before; others came from the ranks of the prewar urban unemployed. Many of their Jewish coworkers were recent immigrants, young people, Jews of Middle Eastern origin, individuals who for a variety of reasons had not found better and more secure jobs in other sectors, and even some people seeking to evade the mobilization for the war effort decreed by the Yishuv leadership. Wages and working conditions in the camps were generally poor. Though Jewish workers were better paid than Arab workers, camp pay scales in general were well below those which Jewish industrial workers enjoyed, and the British authorities refused to grant camp workers the cost of living allowance which the Histadrut had won for industrial workers. While some of the larger camps were located on the outskirts of cities and towns, many of the smaller ones were situated in remote areas where living conditions were often substandard, health and recreational facilities were meager, and workers were under the control of British army officers whose management style was often highly authoritarian and who treated their workers as if they were soldiers. Camp workers enjoyed little protection against exploitation, arbitrary dismissal, or military-style discipline, they were exempted from legislation providing compensation for work-related injuries, and their hours of work tended to exceed norms in other sectors.

As early as 1940, Histadrut leaders had appealed to the Trades Union Congress in Britain for help in improving the low wages paid to camp workers. The following year Haqiqat al-Amr reported that Arab and Jewish camp workers had asked the Histadrut for help in winning higher wages, and after lengthy negotiations with the British authorities the Histadrut did in fact secure a wage increase for all camp workers, which was however soon eroded by inflation.^[45] But the Histadrut made relatively little effort to establish a strong organizational presence in the camps during the first two and a half years of the war, so that at the end of 1942 only about one-quarter of the Jewish camp workers were dues-paying Histadrut members, a proportion far below that which prevailed in most other sectors in which Jewish workers were employed. Several factors seem to have contributed to this neglect. For one, the camp workers' dispersion in numerous sites throughout the country, some of them in remote and largely uninhabited areas, made organization difficult. Moreover, it was obvious that these were temporary workplaces: as soon as the war was over most of the camps would be dismantled and those employed in them would lose their jobs. The Histadrut leadership also seems to have been reluctant to confront the British military authorities over the camp workers' situation as long as Egypt and Palestine seemed imminently threatened with invasion by Axis forces; neglect of the camp workers was in this sense a manifestation of the Yishuv's strong commitment to the Allied war effort.

However, Histadrut documents from this period suggest that other factors were also involved. Labor officials tended to perceive the camp workers as a rootless, volatile, and motley group, as “human material” of rather poor quality who were largely beyond the influence (much less control) of labor Zionism's economic, social, cultural, and political institutions and who were not really doing their part to realize the Zionist project. They were seen as not measuring up to the widespread (though of course highly idealized) labor-Zionist image of the authentic Jewish proletarian in Palestine, the experienced, ascetic, and self-disciplined industrial or construction worker or kibbutz member who was also an obedient member of the Histadrut and, by extension, a MAPAI loyalist. This image had a distinct ethnic component, since a significant proportion of the Jewish camp workers were of Mizrahi (“Oriental,” i.e., Middle Eastern) rather than Ashkenazi (eastern and central European) origin, which cannot have enhanced their status in the eyes of the almost exclusively Ashkenazi Histadrut (and Zionist) leadership. One report from 1942 sneered that the Jewish camp workers “were gathered from among the peddlers of Shuk Hakarmel [the Jewish market] in Tel Aviv. Itinerant shoe-repairers from the streets of Tel Aviv have elevated themselves to the rank of expert builders.” Reports that some Jewish camp workers were stealing and selling government property also imparted to this workforce a whiff of criminality, or at least of immorality and lack of Zionist and proletarian discipline—though it should be noted that the Hagana also exploited the camps as a source of weapons and other useful materials. The Histadrut leadership regarded this relatively unorganized, undisciplined, and transient workforce as especially vulnerable to “penetration” and influence by its political enemies, including the communists and Hashomer Hatza‘ir on the left and the Revisionists on the right.^[46]

The Histadrut did seek to maintain contact with Jewish workers at remote sites by sending emissaries on sporadic visits, but this was hardly sufficient to integrate them firmly into the embrace of the labor-Zionist movement. As a result the Histadrut had little effective presence in many of the camps in the early war years, and many Jewish camp workers displayed little interest in or enthusiasm for the Histadrut; some members even refused to pay Histadrut dues, prompting official concerns about lost revenue. Many Jewish camp workers expressed bitterness toward the Histadrut for what they perceived as its failure to defend their interests. The Histadrut's organizational weakness in many camps made it possible for activists from parties to the left of MAPAI—Hashomer Hatza‘ir and the PCP—to win support among Jewish camp workers, whose low wages, oppressive working conditions, and isolation from the Yishuv mainstream tended to make them receptive to an oppositional perspective. Both communist and Hashomer Hatza‘ir activists in the camps also made strenuous efforts to establish friendly relations with Arab coworkers and lay the basis for cooperation.^[47]

Even though Jewish and Arab camp workers were brought together by common concerns—mainly a sharp decline in real wages through 1940 and 1941—cooperation was often impeded by a legacy of mistrust. One incident from the summer of 1941 may serve to illustrate both the potential for militancy and the complexities of relations among the Arab and Jewish camp workers in the first years of the war. Some 150 Arabs and 100 Jews were employed at a site known as Wadi Sara, for daily wages of 12 and 20 piastres respectively—a not untypical wage differential, related only in part to differing skill levels. Unrest erupted when the commandant announced that the workday would be increased from nine to twelve hours. At least some of the Arab and Jewish workers agreed to protest this decree by showing up for work an hour later than usual. However, the protest failed, in part because the Arab workers believed that they were being manipulated by their Jewish coworkers, who they thought were out to get their jobs. In the end some forty Jewish workers involved in the protest movement were fired, and Histadrut efforts to get them reinstated were unavailing.^[48]

In the long run, the camp workers were too large and potentially important a group for either the Histadrut or the resurgent Arab labor movement to ignore. Histadrut officials worried that unless camp workers' wages could be improved, primarily by compelling the British to extend the COLA to cover workers in this sector, Jews would be forced out of camp jobs which would then be taken by Arabs who were more willing to accept the substandard wages offered by the military. The low wages and poor working conditions in the camps were also a drag on Jewish wages elsewhere in the Palestinian economy. As a result, in the camps as on the railways, the Histadrut's desire to secure high wages and jobs for Jewish workers eventually compelled it to pay attention to the plight of Arab workers as well, for here too Jews formed a minority of the labor force. In addition, Histadrut officials had become concerned that if they did not seek to organize and improve conditions for the Jewish camp workers, forces hostile to MAPAI (the communists and Hashomer Hatza‘ir) might seize the initiative and gain a solid base in this sector. There was also growing awareness that both the PAWS (especially the communist-led branch in Jaffa) and the FATULS (in Haifa) were making efforts to contact and organize Arab camp workers.^[49]

In the summer of 1942 the Histadrut launched a more serious effort to establish committees to represent the Jewish workers in camps where these did not already exist and to link these committees into an effective network under the control of a new Histadrut department coordinated by Berl Repetur. Some of the local urban workers' councils also established new departments for workers in nearby camps. Given that the Histadrut was dominated by MAPAI, this also meant an effort to ensure that MAPAI loyalists, and not Hashomer Hatza‘ir members or communists, controlled both the newly established and the existing committees, even if undemocratic means were necessary to ensure the desired outcome. The Histadrut's campaign to organize the camps also had a security dimension, in that Histadrut officials helped the Hagana set up channels through which Jewish camp workers could smuggle out stolen weapons.^[50] At the same time, the PAWS and the FATULS were intensifying their efforts to organize Arab camp workers in various parts of the country. Both the Arab and Jewish labor movements were in part responding to grassroots demands by camp workers for support and assistance as well as to independent local efforts to organize.

Neither the Arab unions nor the Histadrut achieved total success. While the PAWS (and to a lesser extent the FATULS) did sign up new members in various camps, the great majority of the Arab workers remained unorganized. Similarly, as late as March 1943 only about 8,000 of the 15,000 Jewish camp workers were Histadrut members, while an additional 1,200 belonged to other Jewish labor organizations, probably those affiliated with the right-wing Revisionist and religious-Zionist parties. A small number of Arab camp workers were recruited into the PLL, but in general the Histadrut remained quite reluctant to organize Arab camp workers directly, for fear of having to find employment for them when the camps were dismantled at the war's end. Instead the Histadrut sought to build strong local Jewish workers' committees through which it could exercise influence over Arab workers too, though at some sites it had to contend with existing joint Arab-Jewish committees.^[51]

By the beginning of 1943 there were already signs of growing unrest among the camp workers, including a flurry of brief protest strikes and other actions.^[52] Though the daily wage for unskilled camp labor had risen to about 21 piastres for Arabs and 28 piastres for Jews, prices had increased much more rapidly. Discontent was also fueled by the military authorities' increasing reluctance to recognize or negotiate with local committees, or even with the Histadrut, as well as what seems to have been an attempt to strengthen management's control over the camp workforce. This harder line may have had something to do with a more abundant labor supply: the British military no longer needed the cooperation of the Histadrut to channel workers into the camps and military industry, and it was also increasingly anxious to keep labor costs down. At the end of March 1943 a government committee on wages approved a substantial cost of living allowance for industrial and service workers, but despite numerous appeals from delegations of Arab and Jewish camp workers the military authorities refused to extend it to the camp workers. Those workers now displayed a new readiness to organize and fight with which both the PAWS and the Histadrut had to reckon. It was clear that the time for action had come, requiring both organizations to decide what means of struggle were appropriate and how to relate to one another in an effort to improve the lot of this mixed Arab-Jewish workforce.

The Struggle for the Camps

The PAWS responded to the upsurge of unrest in the camps by convening a meeting of some one hundred branch leaders and delegates in Jaffa early in April 1943. The camp workers' situation was the main issue discussed at the conference, which approved resolutions calling on the government to grant the camp workers large wage increases, along with the COLA, overtime pay, and pay for religious holidays, to soften the harsh discipline imposed in the camps, and to negotiate with the Arab workers' representatives. A number of the delegates also denounced what they saw as official discrimination in favor of Jewish camp workers, manifested mainly in higher wages for Jews, and the meeting demanded the equalization of Arab and “non-Arab” (i.e., Jewish) wages in the camps. But though speakers criticized the Histadrut's attempts to organize Arab camp workers, accused it of trying to take jobs away from Arabs, and insisted that only Arab unions could speak for Arab workers, the PAWS remained willing to cooperate with the Histadrut in negotiations with the British authorities, on condition that the Jewish organization desist from recruiting Arabs and restrict itself to representing the Jewish camp workers alone. PAWS leaders made no mention of strike action: aware of their limited resources and somewhat fearful of directly confronting the British authorities, they seem to have hoped that their demands could be achieved through negotiations, provided that a common front could be formed with the Histadrut. It is likely too that in Palestine as elsewhere, the communists who controlled the FATULS and played a major role within the PAWS opposed any work stoppage as detrimental to the war effort, or more precisely to the defense of the Soviet Union, a duty to which all other considerations were to be subordinated.^[53]

The Histadrut was now faced with a decision over whether to cooperate with the PAWS, which had a substantial base among the Arab camp workers, or to go it alone by claiming the right to represent both Jewish and Arab camp workers. During the first two years of the war the Histadrut had in effect been negotiating with the British authorities on behalf of all the camp workers. The PAWS had lacked the capacity to bargain with the British civil and military authorities on a national scale, nor did it have anything approaching the Histadrut's close and long-standing connections with government officials in Jerusalem or with Colonial Office, Labor Party, and Trades Union Congress officials in London. By the spring of 1943 the Histadrut had revived the PLL and committed itself to an aggressive effort to recruit Arab workers in Jaffa, Jerusalem, and other towns, in direct confrontation with the Arab unions. Yet the camp workers constituted something of a special case: insistence on the Histadrut's right to organize and speak for at least some of the Arab camp workers would inevitably provoke a very open and public clash with the PAWS and might sabotage efforts to mount an effective campaign on behalf of the camp workers.

When the Histadrut secretariat met on April 13, 1943 to discuss the situation, there was general agreement that if the army did not agree within ten days to extend the COLA to the camp workers, the Histadrut would follow the PAWS' example and convene its own national conference of camp workers, and also stage a one-day protest strike. The question of how the Histadrut should relate to the PAWS—whether meetings in the camps, and the projected national delegate conference, should be sponsored by the Histadrut alone, or jointly with the PAWS—was delegated to the organization's newly established Merkaz Ha‘avoda (“Labor Center”), responsible for the Jewish camp workers, and to its Arab Department. At a joint meeting two days later the decision was taken: the Histadrut would not cooperate with the PAWS in the struggle to win the COLA. A national conference of camp workers was scheduled for May 2 in Tel Aviv, to be followed by a one-day strike.^[54]

The PAWS responded angrily to this unilateral initiative and to the Histadrut's efforts in the weeks that followed to organize mass meetings in the camps in order to mobilize the workers and choose both Jewish and Arab delegates to the May 2 conference. A PAWS leaflet dated April 26 denounced the Histadrut's attempts to recruit Arabs to attend that meeting and warned Arab workers against participating in what it described as an effort to destroy what the PAWS' own April 4 conference had sought to build.^[55] The Histadrut nonetheless went ahead with its conference, which was attended by some 147 delegates from ninety work sites throughout Palestine. The official report on the meeting does not specify exactly how many Arab delegates attended but, apparently in order to convey a sense that the meeting brought Arabs and Jews together on an equal footing, claimed that equal numbers of Arabs and Jews had spoken during the discussion. After concluding remarks by Berl Repetur and Golda Meirson (later Meir), then head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department and a top Histadrut leader, the delegates, claiming to speak for all 50,000 camp workers, called for a one-day strike if the COLA was not granted, with the exact date to be set by the Histadrut leadership. A telegram sent by the PAWS declaring that the conference represented only the Jewish camp workers, that any Arabs attending represented only themselves and that the Arab workers recognized only the decisions of its own April 4 conference in Jaffa, was apparently not read to the delegates. A few days later the Histadrut announced that the strike would take place on May 10.^[56]

The PAWS promptly responded with a leaflet which admitted that a few well-intentioned Arab workers had attended the Tel Aviv meeting but reiterated that the Histadrut represented only the Jewish workers. The leaflet went on to denounce as politically motivated the Histadrut's decision to organize a strike without consulting the authentic representative of the Arab camp workers. When the Histadrut officially announced a strike for May 10, the PAWS launched an intensive effort in the camps to convince Arab workers not to strike. It also issued a leaflet in Hebrew appealing to the Jewish camp workers not to join a “separatist” strike but instead to cooperate with the Arab camp workers' committees and the PAWS in order to achieve victory for all camp workers. At the same time, however, the Arab union sent the Histadrut a letter offering to discuss cooperation between the two organizations.^[57] As Histadrut leaders began to realize that many of the Arab camp workers might heed the PAWS' appeal and refuse to join the strike, which as a result might end in failure, doubts began to surface about the wisdom of the decision to exclude the PAWS. Some members of the Histadrut executive committee asked why no effort had been made to secure agreement with the PAWS and wondered if there was still time to approach that organization. Those who wanted to stay the course continued to disparage the authenticity and representativeness of the PAWS while pointing out that cooperation with the Arab union was tantamount to recognizing it as the sole representative of the Arab camp workers, and by extension all Arab workers. This meant in effect giving up on the PLL as the instrument through which the Histadrut could directly recruit Arabs.

In the end the Histadrut executive committee decided to proceed with the strike. Yet doubts persisted, and on May 8 Histadrut secretary David Remez contacted a PAWS leader to see if something could be worked out. The unnamed leader held firm and insisted that there could be no cooperation as long as the Histadrut persisted in trying to organize Arab workers. Worried Histadrut officials considered postponing the strike for a week, using a recent Allied victory in Tunisia as a pretext, for fear that if the strike failed the Histadrut's prestige and bargaining position would suffer. “The strike's victory will lead to defeat,” Yosef Sprintzak predicted. “We will gain no benefit from it. The Histadrut will not gain control of the Arab and Jewish workers by this means.…It is now irresponsible to proceed with the strike.” Nonetheless, despite considerable hesitation and trepidation, the Histadrut stayed its course.^[58]

As the strike date approached the PAWS stepped up its campaign to thwart Arab participation. A leaflet distributed to the camp workers denounced what it described as Histadrut propaganda to the effect that the PAWS had been consulted about, and had consented to, the strike:

The truth is that the Histadrut has not recognized and does not recognize the Arab workers' unions.…The PAWS in Jaffa has decided that the date set for the strike is untimely for the Arabs and it sees the workers' interest as lying in awaiting the final results of the negotiations soon to follow.…The strike is the workers' only weapon, but this weapon must be used at a time when it will lead naturally to achieving our demands.…^[59]

The Histadrut's daily newspaper Davar would later claim that Histadrut offers to cooperate in good faith with the PAWS had been spurned and that the PAWS had opposed the strike on purely political grounds, attacking it in leaflets as a Zionist conspiracy. But examination of leaflets issued by the PAWS in these weeks and records of the deliberations of the Histadrut leadership bear out neither of these allegations.^[60] Moreover, the PAWS' appeals to Arab workers seem to have hit home, especially in the larger camps situated near major towns. A Jewish visitor to Sarafand, one of the largest British military bases in the Middle East, located a few miles northwest of Ramla, reported that Arab workers there had asked him: “How can you ask us for cooperation, when you didn't consult with us but [instead] informed us that there will be a strike tomorrow—and you want us to join it?”^[61]

On the appointed day nearly all the Jewish camp workers joined the strike. The extent of Arab participation is less clear. The Arab press insisted that the Histadrut's attempt to bring the Arab workers out on strike had been a complete failure, and a British Foreign Office dispatch similarly asserted that the Arab workers had not joined in. A PAWS leaflet depicted the Arab workers' “100 percent” rejection of the strike as “decisive proof that the Histadrut has been taught a lesson, that it should refrain from claiming to represent the Arab workers because they have their own independent organization in the PAWS.” By contrast, the Histadrut's organ Davar claimed that the great majority of Arab workers had taken part. The Palestine Post, which expressed the views of the Yishuv's official leadership, asserted that “solidarity between Arab and Jewish workers was complete in most camps, though some Arab workers remained at their jobs in two urban centres in compliance with the appeal of the Arab Labour Societies in Palestine.” Some Histadrut officials estimated Arab participation at 17,000–20,000, about 50 to 60 percent of the Arab workforce, but a Histadrut leaflet issued a few days after the strike spoke more vaguely and modestly of “thousands” of Arab strikers.^[62]

It does seem that some thousands of Arab workers joined the strike, especially those employed at sites at which the Histadrut was the only organized force and which were relatively remote from the three cities in which the PAWS exercised the most influence. But despite the Histadrut leadership's public claim that the strike had been a great success, it was understood in private to have been a failure. By far the greater part of the Arab majority of the camp labor force had refused to follow the Histadrut's lead, demonstrating that the campaign to exclude and undermine the PAWS was unviable. Since the British authorities showed no sign of granting the COLA to camp workers, the Histadrut leadership faced continuing pressure from below as both Jewish and Arab workers held protest meetings and joined brief local strikes to demand the COLA and urge their leaders to work together.^[63]

In the weeks after the strike the Histadrut finally responded to outstanding invitations from PAWS leaders to begin talks. This did not, however, reflect any substantive change in the Histadrut's position. Though the strike's failure and pressure from below now compelled it to deal with the PAWS, it continued to insist that the Arab union publicly recognize the PLL and kept trying to mobilize and organize the camp workers on its own. As this was guaranteed to render cooperation with the PAWS impossible, it is not surprising that the talks did not go very well.^[64] In meetings with Jaffa PAWS leaders, for example, Histadrut officials (especially Berl Repetur) took a hard line, criticizing the PAWS for opposing the strike and lecturing its leaders about their organization's numerous errors and shortcomings. Neither Khalil Shanir, leader of the PAWS in Jaffa and a veteran communist, nor any of his colleagues much appreciated this attitude, and they responded angrily. But what most effectively sabotaged the talks was the Histadrut's insistence on including PLL members, notably Adib al-Disuqi, its organizer in Jaffa. Given that al-Disuqi was just then engaged in raiding the PAWS' membership, that very few Arab camp workers actually belonged to the PLL, and that the conflict over the camp workers' strike had turned on the Histadrut's insistence on recruiting and representing Arab workers, the PAWS leaders could only see al-Disuqi's inclusion as a deliberate provocation, if not an insult, and as proof of the Histadrut's bad faith. Shanir and his colleagues expressed willingness to cooperate with the Histadrut, but only if the PLL was excluded. One meeting broke up in an uproar after al-Disuqi spoke up to criticize the PAWS. Shanir exploded in anger: “Get out of here, you're a Zionist, a pariah, you've sold yourself to the Jews, you've rented yourself out for £P18 a month!”—a reference to al-Disuqi's salary as PLL organizer in Jaffa.^[65]

Talks were also held in Haifa in early June, at the initiative of local Arab camp workers affiliated with the PAWS. Here too Histadrut representatives brought local PLL members along to the meeting and accused the PAWS of “knifing us in the back” by opposing the strike. Unlike their more militant counterparts in Jaffa, the Arab unionists in Haifa were willing to sit down with PLL members. But although these talks were less vituperative in tone, little progress was made. Nonetheless PAWS and Histadrut representatives continued sporadic negotiations through mid-June, because unrest among the rank and file camp workers compelled both sides to look as if they were genuinely seeking cooperation.^[66] Soon thereafter, however, the main impetus for cooperation faded away. Early in June 1943 the government announced that government employees would be granted the COLA. Some weeks passed before it became clear that this would apply to camp workers as well, and it was not immediately certain if the COLA would be calculated in a way that came close to meeting the workers' demands. During that interval PAWS and Histadrut leaders discussed joint action, including strikes, but by late June many of the camp workers' outstanding grievances had been addressed, although the poorest-paid segment of the camp workforce had gained the least.

Though neither side now saw much point in continuing negotiations, both felt obliged to defend their own commitment to solidarity and blame the other side for the breakdown of the talks. The Histadrut claimed that the PAWS had never really been interested in unity, while the PAWS issued a long leaflet putting forth its version of relations with the Histadrut and blaming it for sabotaging efforts at cooperation. After the talks broke down, the PAWS also began to demand more forcefully than before that more Arabs be hired as foremen and clerks in the camps, jobs which were disproportionately held by Jews.^[67] Both the Histadrut and the PAWS remained active among the camp workers, but as the wave of worker militancy subsided so did the intensity of the conflict between them. At the end of June 1943 the Histadrut convened another meeting of camp workers' delegates in Tel Aviv, but although some Arab delegates participated the PAWS does not seem to have responded very vigorously. In that same period Agassi, sometimes accompanied by an Arab PLL member, visited various camps and addressed meetings of Arab workers about the PLL. At some of these meetings workers asked Agassi why he was not accompanied by someone from the PAWS and how negotiations between the Histadrut and the PAWS were coming along; at other camps he was not challenged in this way.

But although Agassi, as optimistic as ever, reported to his colleagues that many Arab camp workers were ready and willing to join the PLL, the Histadrut was largely uninterested in signing them up and forming new PLL branches.^[68] As earlier, the overriding consideration seems to have been the fear that recruiting Arab camp workers into the PLL would saddle the Histadrut with an obligation to provide them with jobs when their wartime employment inevitably came to an end. So even as the Histadrut continued to insist on its right to organize and represent Arab workers in general and the camp workers in particular—a stance which sabotaged cooperation with Arab labor organizations—it was not in fact very interested in actually recruiting camp workers into the PLL.

In September 1943 H. E. Chudleigh of the Labor Department summed up the state of relations between the Arab and Jewish labor movements in Palestine:

The situation as between the Arab and Jewish Trade Unions has, if anything, hardened in recent months. Common economic interests are overridden by political considerations which dominate all discussions. “Pig-headed” would not be too strong a term to apply to the leadership on both sides. Struggle for power is a further complicating factor. Possibilities of cooperation in the army camps and workshops, the Jaffa Municipality and elsewhere have been allowed to pass. Only in the case of the Jerusalem Municipal dispute has any degree of working together been achieved.

As we saw, cooperation in Jerusalem had in fact also been short-lived.^[69]

The Collapse of the PCP and the Emergence of the NLL

The conflict between the PAWS and the Histadrut over the camp workers' strike of May 1943 had an impact in another sphere as well: it helped precipitate the crisis which led to the disintegration of the Palestine Communist Party as an Arab-Jewish organization. Tensions within the party had been building toward crisis for some time. Many of the party's Jewish members and leaders had come to believe that it should moderate its unrelenting hostility toward Zionism and take advantage of widespread sympathy for the Soviet Union in the Yishuv in order to rebuild its base among Jews. In theoretical terms, these Jewish communists argued that the party should recognize that the Yishuv had grown significantly and undergone important social changes in recent years. The Jewish community in Palestine, they argued, had to be analyzed not as an undifferentiated and uniformly reactionary bloc, an alien colonial enclave, a “Jewish Ulster” implanted in Palestine by British imperialism, but as an increasingly distinct and complex society with significant and deepening roots in the country that had acquired many of the characteristics of a nation. Some went so far as to question the PCP's opposition to Jewish immigration. Many of the Jewish communists also advocated reentry into the Histadrut, based on a distinction between that organization's Zionist leadership and the Jewish working class itself, which the communists believed could be weaned away from Zionism through a struggle carried out within the Histadrut's institutions and affiliated unions. In many arenas, these Jewish communists also argued, there was room for cooperation with progressive Zionists.^[70]

Most of the PCP's Arab members, and especially those who belonged to the younger generation of Arab intellectuals and labor activists now coming to the fore, were moving in a very different direction. They believed that the party should give priority to overcoming its weakness among Palestine's Arab majority and transforming itself into a significant political force. As they saw it, Palestine was an Arab land and its communist party should therefore orient itself first and foremost toward the indigenous Arab majority and its national movement. Rejecting any accommodation with Zionism, the party should appeal to broad sections of the Arab community on a program that combined Palestinian Arab nationalism with a commitment to progressive social reform and democracy. Among Arab communists prominent within this tendency were Bulus Farah, who had built up his own following in Haifa and had long been convinced that the party leadership had already succumbed to Zionist deviationism, and ‘Abd Allah al-Bandaq, a veteran party leader who was, it will be remembered, Aharon Cohen's candidate to lead a noncommunist and pro-Zionist Arab left.

The tensions within the party came to a head at the beginning of May 1943 when the central committee dissolved dissident Jewish branches and expelled several Jewish members for defying the leadership by participating in May Day celebrations organized by the Histadrut. The internal crisis this touched off was further exacerbated when it became clear that Arab and Jewish party members were supporting different sides in the struggle between the PAWS and the Histadrut which preceded the May 10 camp workers' strike which the latter had called. Arab communists active in the PAWS naturally worked hard to convince Arab workers not to join the strike, a position endorsed by the central committee. However, though many Jewish communists agreed that the Histadrut deserved blame for trying to exclude the PAWS by calling the strike unilaterally, they very much wanted to rejoin the Histadrut fold and could not bring themselves to call on Jewish workers to break the strike.^[71]

Despite efforts by some Arab and Jewish communists to hold the party together, the following months witnessed the disintegration of the PCP amidst barrages of mutual recriminations and expulsions. Stalin's dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943 as a gesture of goodwill toward his British and American allies helped deepen divisions within the party. Although the communists in Palestine had few if any direct links with Moscow, the elimination of this nominally internationalist framework strengthened those forces within the PCP which argued that it was essential to strike deeper roots by adapting to local conditions and adopting a more nationalist stance. This is the course that some of the Arab militants (among them al-Bandaq and his younger colleague Emile Habibi) seemed to be following when, at the end of May, they issued a statement in the name of the central committee declaring that the PCP had finally purged itself of those Jewish members who had succumbed to Zionist deviationism. The statement went on to define the PCP as “an Arab national party which includes in its ranks Jews who accept its national program.” This constituted a decisive break with the party's historic self-definition as an Arab-Jewish and internationalist formation, though some of its proponents probably saw it (at least in part) as a response to their former Jewish comrades' apparent embrace of Zionism. Not all Arab communists immediately subscribed to this position: some, like Khalil Shanir, still hoped for a time that it would be possible to preserve an Arab-Jewish party. But efforts to find common ground failed, and the more nationalist orientation long advocated by dissident communists like Bulus Farah, whose following in Haifa now constituted the single most cohesive Arab communist group, ultimately prevailed.

Out of the wreckage of the PCP three distinct organizations would eventually emerge, two entirely Jewish and one entirely Arab in membership. One group of Jewish communists continued to move away from the PCP's traditional line and toward the Yishuv mainstream by embracing positions which the party had for many years denounced as Zionist. This group organized itself as the Communist Educational Association in Eretz Yisra’el, following the example of communists in the United States under the leadership of Earl Browder, and later renamed itself the Hebrew Communist Party. A second and larger group of Jewish communists insisted that it was the organizational and ideological continuation of the old PCP and continued to call itself the Palestine Communist Party, but it was in fact a very different party, in terms of both its exclusively Jewish membership and its ideology, which substantially abandoned many traditional communist positions in order to gain greater acceptance in the Yishuv.

However, much more important than either of these two small and weak Jewish parties was the new Arab political formation that emerged out of the wreckage of the unified PCP. In the fall of 1943 some of the leading Arab communists began holding meetings to discuss the establishment of a new, exclusively Arab organization. By the beginning of 1944 they had emerged publicly at the head of the new ‘Usbat al-Taharrur al-Watani (“National Liberation League,” NLL), which had as its organ al-Ittihad (Unity), originally established by the FATULS in Haifa and later the newspaper of the new labor federation controlled by the NLL.

Though almost all its top leaders had been PCP members, the NLL defined itself not as a communist party but as a progressive nationalist organization open to any Palestinian Arab who accepted its program, which called for the independence of Palestine as an Arab state with a democratic government as well as fundamental social transformation. The NLL sought to propagate a version of Palestinian Arab nationalism imbued with a progressive social content. It called for social reforms to benefit the Arab workers and peasants and argued that only a mass-based and democratized nationalist movement could successfully challenge British colonial rule and Zionism. The NLL leadership believed that the wartime quiescence of the traditional Palestinian Arab leadership—which had never displayed much interest in social issues and many of whose members were in exile—had created an unprecedented opportunity for the NLL to mobilize the radicalized intelligentsia and the growing working class and establish itself as a vigorous and independent left wing within the Palestinian national movement.

From its inception the NLL enjoyed a strong base within the labor movement, since it included the leaders of both the left wing within the PAWS and of the Haifa-based FATULS. It also enjoyed the support of many educated young Arabs organized in the League of Arab Intellectuals. The NLL hoped it could build on this base and ultimately capture the leadership of the national movement by combining a strong commitment to nationalism with a commitment to social reform and mass mobilization, much as communists were then doing in China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere.

Like the official leadership of the national movement, the NLL opposed Zionism, Jewish immigration, and Jewish statehood, and it insisted that as the indigenous majority the Arabs of Palestine were entitled to self-determination. However, as former communists who for years had worked very closely with Jews, its leaders had a much fuller and more nuanced understanding of Zionism and the Yishuv. They therefore departed from the official nationalist stance by maintaining the time-honored communist distinction between the Jewish masses in Palestine and Zionism per se: while the latter was to be extirpated as a form of colonialism, the Jewish masses (and especially the Jewish working class) could and should be won over by being brought to see that their true interests lay in solidarity and unity with the Arab masses. This implied that all the Jews then in Palestine would become equal citizens, and perhaps even have the status of a distinct national-cultural minority, within the future independent Arab Palestine. More practically, it meant that unionists in those segments of the Arab labor movement under NLL leadership tended to be open to cooperation with Jewish workers and unions, and even the Histadrut, as long as the latter did not seek to organize, recruit, or speak for Arab workers. With the left gaining strength within the Arab workers' movement and with that movement experiencing both rapid expansion and internal conflicts during 1944–46, there was once again considerable room for both conflict and cooperation between Arab and Jewish unionists.

The PLL: Confusion, Drift, and Defeat

In October 1943 Histadrut officials calculated that over the course of the year some £P3,300 had been allocated for the organization of Arab workers, an unprecedentedly large sum; for 1944 the Arab Department was seeking a budget of £P12,000, over and above the cost of publishing Haqiqat al-Amr. This sharply increased level of funding (provided in large part by the Jewish Agency) had made possible the expansion of the Arab Department's staff in Tel Aviv, but it does not seem to have greatly enhanced the PLL's base among Arab workers. On paper, the PLL's Haifa branch remained its strongest, claiming some 400–500 dues-paying members. But the organization's membership in Haifa consisted almost entirely of individuals employed at a wide variety of small workplaces in and near the city. The PLL had not succeeded in establishing an effective or coherent presence at any of the city's major workplaces or in forming even nuclei of trade unions. One Histadrut Arab Department official likened the PLL branch in Haifa to “a sponge, absorbing and emitting members in accordance with the employment situation; the people being absorbed and emitted see the branch only as an employment office for times of need, and since dues are low it is more worthwhile than paying fees to the private Arab labor brokers operating in the market.” Many of the PLL branch's core members in Haifa were employed, directly or indirectly, by the Histadrut or other Jewish enterprises.^[72]

In Jaffa, the situation seemed at first glance somewhat better. The PLL branch there retained the base of support it had won among employees of the municipality earlier in 1943 and, as we will see, before the end of that year it developed what seemed a very promising connection with skilled workers at one of the city's major industrial sites, the Wagner metalworking factory, with more than 160 workers, almost all of them Arabs. The branch in Acre also seemed to be flourishing at the end of 1943, but this was largely because its Arab secretary, operating without direct day-to-day supervision by any of the Jews who ran the PLL, was signing up members (largely camp workers) by promising that the Histadrut would make sure they had jobs. When Histadrut officials discovered what he was up to he was fired and replaced by a Jew. The Acre branch subsequently disintegrated as Arab workers found their hopes of employment disappointed.^[73] The Jerusalem branch had never really got off the ground: it comprised a small number of municipal employees and several dozen Arabs from the outlying village of Qalunya who worked at the Jewish-owned Steinberg tile factory nearby.

Arab Department officials were increasingly defensive about the fact that the PLL remained a Jewish-run organization, without even a provisional leadership body composed of Arab members. But they themselves had a rather low opinion of the Arabs they had elevated to local leadership positions, declaring that “when there is no Jewish worker in a branch, the Arab worker is not worth much” and that “most if not all [of the PLL's Arab activists] are greedy,” requiring close supervision by Jews, especially when it came to branch funds.^[74] Uncertain about how to proceed and anxious for guidance, members of the Histadrut Arab Department staff met with MAPAI's secretariat in November 1943 to discuss the future course of the Histadrut's Arab work. Present were several of the top leaders of MAPAI, the Histadrut, and the Yishuv, most of whom would later become high officials of the State of Israel, including three future prime ministers (David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Shertok/Sharett, and Levi Shkolnik/Eshkol), a future president (Zalman Rubashov/Shazar) and at least two future ministers (Pinhas Lubianker/Lavon and Eliezer Kaplan).^[75] The ensuing discussion effectively illustrates the extent to which MAPAI's leaders had relegated the PLL, and the question of relations with the Arab working class, to marginal status in their vision of Palestine's future.

The discussion was opened by Shmu’el Solomon, the senior member of the Arab Department staff, whom a visiting English trade unionist would aptly characterize as “such a nice man, a German Jew who has studied Talmadic [sic], classical and Islamic scholarship but can you imagine Laski doing a year in a Catholic University in Ireland and then organising the peasants of Salway in Erse.”^[76] Solomon expressed optimism about the PLL's prospects but acknowledged that Arab workers clearly regarded the Histadrut and the PLL first and foremost as sources of employment—a perception which would likely create problems after the war, when PLL members currently employed in military bases would again seek jobs in Jewish-owned enterprises and farms. “All our explanations that they are not Histadrut members, that there is a difference here [between Histadrut and PLL membership], are of as much use as the blowing of a shofar [the ram's horn sounded during prayers on the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur].” Solomon also admitted that signs of discontent had already surfaced among Arab workers over the fact that the PLL was entirely controlled by the Jewish officials of the Histadrut's Arab Department, and he noted instances in which Arab workers had told him that they wanted to pay the same dues as Histadrut members and receive equal benefits in return.

MAPAI leaders failed to give Solomon and his colleagues the support and guidance they sought. Eliyahu Sasson expressed skepticism about organizing Arab workers. Criticizing Solomon for both underestimating the strength of the Arab unions and overestimating the PLL's prospects for growth, he argued for a PLL of no more than 1,000–1,500 loyal members, just large enough to hinder the Arab labor unions and to be useful in the event of another crisis like the 1936–39 revolt. Ben-Gurion reiterated his opposition to organizing Arab workers employed by Jews but argued that Arabs employed in the government, international, and Arab sectors should be organized. However, he wanted emphasis to be placed not so much on organization as on providing social services to Arab workers, and he also raised the idea of creating a small pro-Zionist Arab party which might prove useful in the political struggles that clearly lay ahead.

On the whole, while giving the Arab Department staff a pat on the back for its efforts, the MAPAI secretariat left it to continue doing what it had been doing, despite the fact that it had little to show for the energy and money invested over the previous year. It would seem that with a few exceptions MAPAI's leaders had lost what little interest they had once had in organizing Arab workers. Having come to the conclusion that this enterprise would play little if any role in determining Palestine's fate after the war, they regarded it as little more than a side show.

But the Jewish staff of the Arab Department had not yet given up. In the first half of 1944 they tried to breathe some life into the PLL and raise the morale of its tiny cadre of active Arab members by imparting to it some semblance of autonomous organizational life. Among other things, they launched a (short-lived) internal bulletin in Arabic and convened, at Histadrut headquarters in Tel Aviv, the first meeting ever held of active Arab members of PLL branches. But none of this could alter the fact that the PLL was created and run by Jews, nor could PLL officials ever find a way to overcome the obstacles they faced as they tried to organize Arab workers. For example, Arab Department officials hoped to alter the PLL's reputation as an employment agency by recruiting Arabs who already held jobs. But they quickly discovered that the Jewish foremen at the military bases where many Arab workers were employed, as well as the Jewish officials of Solel Boneh which held contracts for numerous military and public works projects, were still at best indifferent, and at worst openly hostile, to efforts to recruit their Arab employees into the PLL. Further complicating matters was the fact that Arab workers generally saw no difference between Solel Boneh on the one hand and the Histadrut and the PLL on the other, though many believed that Solel Boneh treated Arabs worse than did most private contractors. None of this suggested that the PLL had much prospect of ever establishing a secure and substantial base in the Arab working class.^[77]

The PLL's meager prospects for making permanent inroads into the Arab working class, even in a major urban center, would soon be conclusively demonstrated by the outcome of a struggle in which the organization was involved in Jaffa, at the Wagner metalworking factory, in the first months of 1944. Originally established and managed by German businessmen, when the war began the British authorities seized the enterprise as enemy property, interned its owners as enemy aliens, and closed it down. It was reopened in 1941 under the management of an Arab entrepreneur, Stilo ‘Awwad. ‘Awwad's harsh attitude toward his 160 or so workers, nearly all of them Arabs, and especially his refusal to pay them the full cost of living allowance decreed by the government, led a group of Wagner workers to contact the local PLL branch for assistance. Despite harassment from their employer and opposition from the PAWS, which was very anxious to prevent the PLL from gaining a foothold in this large and prominent workplace, a large majority of Wagner workers eventually signed up with the PLL, thus fulfilling the Histadrut's precondition for providing assistance. Arab Department officials felt they had achieved a major breakthrough, since the Wagner workers were not unskilled migrants from the countryside but skilled urban wage workers, just the kind of authentic proletarians they had long dreamed of organizing into a stable union.

‘Awwad eventually expressed willingness to satisfy the workers' demands but adamantly refused to recognize or negotiate with the PLL. The dispute was ultimately submitted for arbitration to the Labor Department, whose officials insisted that the PAWS must also be included as a party to the discussions. Although British arbitrators eventually granted many of the workers' demands, they refused to endorse the PLL's claim to represent these Arab workers. R. M. Graves, the director of the Labor Department, told Arab Department staff members that “we want the organization of the Arab workers, but not by means of the Histadrut's method.” The government favored “independent Arab trade unions, not organizations run by an alien leadership.…We know that the Histadrut can bring to this work knowledgeable and experienced people, but in the end this would [still] be an alien leadership.” H. E. Chudleigh added that “we are interested in and support organizations of Arab workers led by [Arabs] themselves. Moreover, we are interested in unifying the [Arab labor] organizations in order to create a united Arab workers movement. The PLL creates divisions, it divides rather than unites.”^[78]

The PLL's base at Wagner disintegrated during the course of 1944. Wagner's management fired a number of workers identified with the PLL and harassed others, while the PAWS launched an effort to drive the PLL out, aided by denunciations in the Arab press of Wagner workers who had joined the PLL as lackeys of the Zionists. The PLL was unable to protect its supporters at the factory and by the fall of 1944 the last of its members there had severed all public connection with it. What had seemed a year earlier like a very promising beginning, a potential breakthrough to establishing a solid base in the Arab working class of Jaffa, had failed completely.^[79]

During the same period pressure from the PAWS also drove the municipal workers whom the PLL had first organized to quit, and deterred other Jaffa workers from joining. That pressure, and the PAWS' struggle for the Wagner workers, were components of a more or less concerted and ultimately quite effective counteroffensive which the PAWS launched against the PLL in the spring of 1944. The high point of that campaign came when PAWS members packed the meeting organized by the PLL to celebrate both May Day 1944 and the opening of its club in the al-Manshiyya neighborhood of Jaffa. By shouting, clapping hands, and asking incessant questions of the Histadrut officials on the podium, the PAWS members succeeded in breaking up the meeting and, more importantly, in intimidating PLL members and potential recruits, who thereafter virtually ceased to visit the club and distanced themselves from the PLL. Security concerns soon compelled the PLL to move its club from al-Manshiyya to a nearby Jewish neighborhood within Tel Aviv, and by the end of 1944 the PLL hardly existed in Jaffa.^[80]

We get some idea of the sentiments of the Arab workers who ruined the PLL's 1944 May Day celebration from a leaflet entitled “From Arab Workers to the Jewish Workers,” signed by five Arab workers against whom the Histadrut had brought charges of disturbing the peace in connection with its abortive meeting. What is most striking about the leaflet is that it is in Hebrew, demonstrating a concern to expose Jewish workers to a version of what happened on the evening of April 30, 1944 that differed from the version propagated by the Histadrut. The leaflet rejected the Histadrut's allegations that those who had disrupted its meeting were agents of the police or of Stilo ‘Awwad, manager of the Wagner factory, with whom the PLL was then engaged in a bitter struggle. The signatories insisted they were rank and file workers who “wanted to know why the Histadrut comes to them on holidays with parties and choirs, and the rest of the year—with pickets. They wanted to know why they were driven from their jobs and their bread stolen from them.”

Brother [Jewish] workers! Imagine to yourselves what you would say if this happened to you, if they expelled you from your job only because you were Jewish, if you saw your families hungry and your children crying for bread. Imagine to yourselves what you would say if these same people who yesterday expelled you from your job came to you today talking about May Day, even while declaring that tomorrow too they will put you out of work, if they can manage it. Right now, in these very days, the Histadrut has organized pickets at the [Akiva?] factory in Rishon Letziyon to drive the four Arab workers employed there from their jobs.

The leaflet went on to cite a recent article by Abba Hushi in which the Histadrut boss in Haifa had talked of stepping up the “conquest of labor” at the railroads, oil installations, and port there as a way of alleviating Jewish unemployment.^[81]

It is not clear why the Histadrut chose to bring charges against these five Arab workers in particular, though one may speculate that they were known and identifiable as local PAWS activists. It is however interesting to note that although the leaflet strongly attacked the Histadrut leadership (as well as the leadership of the Yishuv, in the person of Ben-Gurion) both for pursuing Hebrew labor and demanding Jewish statehood in all of Palestine, it never condemned (or even mentioned) Zionism per se and stressed Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity. This may have been merely a tactical maneuver on the part of local NLL activists, but it may also have reflected an interest among leftist Arab trade unionists in seeking the support of Jewish workers on moral grounds (“Imagine to yourselves what you would say if this happened to you.…”) as well as in terms of common economic interest. A Jewish witness to the Jaffa incident noted that the disrupters were quite polite toward the Jews present; their anger was directed toward the Arab PLL members, whom they regarded as traitors and abused verbally (and perhaps physically as well).^[82] For these Arab leftists, the Jewish working class (and even the Histadrut) could still be envisioned as a potential ally, as long as it gave up its vision of Jewish sovereignty, its exclusionary practices, and its claim to represent and speak for Arab workers.

The PLL's fortunes in Jerusalem paralleled its fortunes in Jaffa: after some initial successes it underwent a sharp decline from which it would never really recover. Early in 1944 the PLL succeeded in recruiting more than a hundred Palestinian Arab, Egyptian, and Sudanese workers employed at the prestigious King David Hotel, and after Labor Department mediation these workers eventually secured a decent contract. However, the PLL's success prompted the PAWS to launch a campaign to induce the Arab workers at the hotel and elsewhere to sever their connection with the Histadrut. As in Jaffa, the Jerusalem PAWS branch (now led by communists) disrupted the PLL's 1944 May Day celebration, while its leaflets denounced the “hirelings of Zionism” and attacked the Histadrut for having induced the recent annual conference of the British Labor Party to adopt a resolution supporting Jewish statehood in Palestine and the “transfer” of Palestine's Arab population to neighboring Arab lands. The Arab press joined in with articles denouncing the PLL and demanding that the Arab hotel workers fulfill their obligations to the nation. The PLL managed to retain the loyalty of most of its members at the King David Hotel. But in July 1946 the hotel (much of which had been taken over by the British civil and military authorities for office space) was closed down after a bomb planted by the right-wing Zionist military organization Irgun Tzva’i Le’umi (“National Military Organization,” often referred to by its acronym ETZEL), destroyed an entire wing, killing almost a hundred people, among them Arab and Jewish civilians. Thanks to the contract which the PLL had negotiated, the hotel employees at least received some compensation when their jobs disappeared.^[83]

Another struggle involving hotel workers in Jerusalem during this period more dramatically underscored the PLL's very limited prospects for establishing a cohesive and stable base among Arab workers. In September 1944 several dozen Arab men and women employed at the American Colony hotel approached the PLL for help. Originally founded in the late nineteenth century by an American Christian sect whose members came to settle in the Holy Land, the American Colony's guests now included high government officials and distinguished foreign visitors. Its management had acquired a well-deserved reputation for treating its Arab employees, many of whom came from nearby villages, very poorly. When in October management fired several employees identified as troublemakers, the workers (now PLL members) went on strike, whereupon they were summarily expelled from their lodgings at the Colony. The conflict quickly took on political dimensions, perhaps inevitably so given the PAWS' frustration at its failure to block the PLL at the King David Hotel and the rising tensions among Arabs and Jews in Palestine as the Zionist movement stepped up its drive for increased Jewish immigration and the Arab nationalist movement began to revive. The PAWS and the Arab press denounced the strike as a Zionist plot and made strenuous efforts to get the workers to abandon it. When those efforts failed, the PAWS went so far as to provide the Colony with replacements for the striking PLL members. Histadrut efforts to secure Labor Department intervention were unsuccessful, dooming the strike to failure. The Histadrut found alternative employment for some of the American Colony's workers, while others returned to their jobs on management's terms.^[84]

As with the strike at Wagner in Jaffa, the defeat of the American Colony strike in Jerusalem marked the virtual end of the local PLL branch's efforts to organize Arab workers employed by non-Jews. In the years that followed the PLL in Jerusalem led a successful strike by Arab villagers from Qalunya employed at the Steinberg tile factory and represented Arab workers employed at Jewish bakeries, but these were small-scale and rather marginal efforts. The PLL's contacts with other groups of Arab workers who approached it for assistance in this period failed to develop into anything concrete. In private, Arab Department officials admitted that the disruption of their 1944 May Day celebrations in Jaffa and Jerusalem had left the PLL virtually paralyzed. Though they understood that these incidents (and a similar but less successful attempt at disruption in Haifa) were part of a campaign by the left wing of the Arab labor movement to discredit and isolate the PLL, they were unable to respond effectively. The PLL's defeats at Wagner and the American Colony confirmed that it had little prospect of overcoming its weakness and marginality, which were in striking contrast to the rapid growth which the vigorous (if fractious) Arab workers' movement was experiencing in this period.^[85]

Worker Activism and the Arab Labor Movement

Both the Arab and Jewish working classes in Palestine manifested considerable dynamism and militancy in the final two years of the war. The wage increases which substantial numbers of workers had won during 1943 did not offset rapidly rising prices for very long, ensuring that unrest would continue. This was manifested most dramatically at the Haifa railway workshops, where discontent again reached the boiling point early in 1944. A government decision to reduce the COLA produced widespread resentment, which for the Jewish workers was only made worse by the Histadrut's apparent acquiescence in the decision. Spurred on by rank and file demands for action, the Haifa branch committee of the IU—composed of two MAPAI members, two members of Hashomer Hatza‘ir, and one person identified with the now entirely Jewish Palestine Communist Party, which had the support of some thirty Jewish workshop workers—approached the AURW leadership to discuss joint action. Perhaps because of the tense relations between the PAWS and the Histadrut, the Arab unionists were ambivalent about cooperation, at least until an accidental spark touched off an unanticipated explosion.

On Wednesday, February 2, 1944, an Arab worker at the workshops was seriously injured in an industrial accident. Because there was no physician stationed at the workshops and the ambulance was under repair, a physician had to be fetched from the nearby Vulcan rubber factory, owned by the Histadrut. When he arrived he was unable to suture the worker's head wound because the necessary supplies were not available. The injured man was eventually transported to a hospital, but the workers were outraged by management's failure to make adequate provision for emergency medical care. Efrayyim Krisher of Hashomer Hatza‘ir and the senior MAPAI leader in the workshops immediately called for a demonstration, and within a quarter of an hour all 1,400 workers—some 200 of them Jews—had downed tools and gathered outside the main offices. They were soon joined by another 170 men in the locomotive running sheds nearby. A strike committee of three Arabs and two Jews was chosen which presented management with a list of long-standing demands, including preservation of the COLA, an increase in the base wage, compensation for workplace accidents, the extension of retirement benefits to all workers, and the permanent stationing of a physician at the workshops.

General Manager Kirby refused to negotiate until after the workers had returned to their jobs. At the end of the day the workers went home, but they returned en masse the next day and refused to leave the workshops until their demands were met. The workers' spirits were extremely high and Jewish-Arab solidarity was very much in evidence. The workers spent the night in the workshops compound, talking and singing around campfires. When the PAWS sent in food, the Arab workers shared it with their Jewish comrades; and when the Haifa Workers' Council belatedly sent in supplies, the Jewish workers also shared them. The food from the Jewish side arrived only after a long delay because the Histadrut leadership in Haifa, and especially Abba Hushi, were strongly opposed to the strike and wanted it ended as quickly as possible. As a rule Hushi resented, and sought to stifle, any workers' initiative from below in what he regarded as “his” city. More importantly, together with IU national secretary Yehezkel Abramov and the Histadrut leadership in Tel Aviv, Hushi feared that the strike would strengthen the AURW and the PAWS. As Abramov saw it, the Arab railwaymen would learn to organize and use the strike weapon effectively, and if another revolt broke out one day they would probably join in, unlike 1936.

Abramov did his best to end the strike. In this task he was aided by Sami Taha, the secretary of the PAWS, who as head of the more conservative wing of the Palestinian Arab trade union movement was not interested in a long, militant, and politically risky strike at a government enterprise in wartime. Under heavy pressure, the Jewish union leaders in Haifa caved in and agreed to call for an end to the strike, even though Kirby had conceded virtually nothing. The Arab unionists were more resolute, but faced with management's intransigence and pressure from Sami Taha they too eventually gave in. It took considerable effort to weaken the workers' determination to go on: at several mass meetings the rank and file expressed their readiness to hold out indefinitely. But eventually the leadership succeeded, and on Friday night, after three days on strike and two days of occupying the workshops, the workers left and went home. The next morning they reported for work as usual, having won only a minor concession over the retirement fund and a promise that the Labor Department would examine their grievances.^[86]

Despite their failure to win anything substantial, the Haifa workshop workers emerged from the strike with a stronger sense of their own power and of the value of Arab-Jewish unity. This did not deter the IU leadership from looking for ways to undermine the AURW and organize Arab workers on its own,^[87] but the AURW's growing strength and effectiveness frustrated its hopes, as did continued rank and file discontent manifested in a number of brief strikes during 1945. In March, for example, the Haifa workshops were shut down for an hour and a half by a protest strike which forced management to disburse wages earlier than usual, because of the upcoming Muslim and Jewish holidays. The following month some 150 Arab and Jewish postal workers in the Jaffa–Tel Aviv region, now acquiring a reputation for militancy, went on strike briefly. During the summer of 1945 the postal workers organized a national conference and elected an executive committee consisting of three Arabs and three Jews. These developments were viewed with some ambivalence by both the Histadrut and the PAWS. But the left wing of the Palestinian Arab labor movement, led by the quasi-communist National Liberation League, welcomed them. The NLL's newspaper al-Ittihad proclaimed that “the cooperation between the Arab and Jewish telegraph and postal workers is clear proof of the possibility of joint action in every workplace,” provided the workers steered clear of interference by both Zionism and Arab reaction.^[88] As we will see in Chapter 8, in the final three years of British rule in Palestine the railway and postal workers would play a leading role in mobilizing other Arab and Jewish workers across communal boundaries in defense of their common economic interests.

The rank and file militancy which characterized groups like the railway and postal workers gave impetus to efforts by Arab leftists to assume the leadership of the organized Arab working class. The breakup of the Palestine Communist Party in the middle of 1943 and the emergence early in 1944 of the NLL opened the way for a realignment of forces within the Arab labor movement in Palestine. It now became possible to envision the creation of a new NLL-led labor federation which would encompass both the Haifa-based FATULS and the PAWS branches in Jaffa, Jerusalem, and elsewhere which were under communist leadership.

At the same time, tensions between the communists operating within the PAWS and the organization's Haifa-based central leadership had been growing. The leftists increasingly resented both Sami Taha's authoritarianism and his conservatism. One British trade unionist who visited Palestine in the middle of 1945 described Taha's leadership style in these terms:

The PAWS was founded in 1925 and have done quite a considerable amount of genuine trade union work. It has certainly managed to survive some most difficult political years and keep the flag flying.

But its secretary, one Sami Taha, a snake of the first water, ran the show in a most dictatorial fashion, e.g. the organisation is on a territorial rather than a Trade basis: each branch elects an executive committee: each E.C. sends a representative to a “Supreme Workers Council” in Haifa: but the Executive Committee of the whole Society is another name for the Executive Committee of the Haifa Branch (i.e. Sami Taha) and this had not been elected for ten years. No democracy, comrade.

This observer noted, however, that though “Sami may be rather a rat… I do not believe he is wholly a rat.” ^[89]

In the summer of 1944 the Nazareth branch of the PAWS, led by the communist Fu’ad Nassar, seceded from the organization and with the FATULS formed a “Supreme Arab Workers' Council,” which, however, existed only on paper. But the majority of the communists within the PAWS, still anxious to preserve labor unity and hopeful that they could eventually gain control of the organization, declined to follow Nazareth's example. So although by the end of 1944 leftists led several of the most important urban branches in the PAWS, Sami Taha was able to retain control of the nominally united organization through his domination of the Haifa branch and of most of the branches in the smaller towns and large villages. But the leftists' determination to remain within the PAWS was increasingly eroded by Sami Taha's refusal to share power and his high-handed leadership. They were particularly angered when Taha succeeded in having his longtime associate Hanna ‘Asfur, the Haifa lawyer and PAWS counsel, designated as the organization's official delegate to the international trade union conference scheduled to convene in London in February 1945 in order to lay the foundations of a new, unified postwar world trade union movement. Bulus Farah, preeminent leader of the FATULS in Haifa, who along with his fellow NLL members regarded ‘Asfur as a reactionary and a bourgeois, was able to attend only as an observer, the same lowly status accorded George Nassar as representative of the PLL.^[90]

The choice of a conservative nonworker like ‘Asfur, together with the fact that the London conference had adopted a rather pro-Zionist resolution on Palestine, gave considerable ammunition to the left wing of the PAWS in its campaign against Sami Taha and his allies. It certainly strengthened the leftists' resolve (trumpeted in the pages of al-Ittihad, which now spoke for the NLL, the FATULS, and the PAWS left) that the Palestinian Arab delegates to the upcoming congress at which the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) was to be formally established, scheduled to convene in Paris at the end of August 1945, should be chosen democratically and should actually be workers. In the 1920s and 1930s, the kind of high-handed leadership style which Sami Taha displayed and the imposition from above of a “notable” like Hanna ‘Asfur as representative of the workers had been common features of the Arab labor movement. Such practices had made it easier for the Histadrut to depict Arab unionists and unions as mere tools of scheming and self-interested nationalist effendis. By the mid-1940s, however, such things were no longer acceptable to many rank and file Arab workers and to trade union activists, especially those influenced by the left. Those who led the NLL were certainly Stalinists in terms of ideology and organizational style, but in the concrete circumstances in which they operated they constituted the more democratic, militant, and worker-oriented camp within the Palestinian Arab labor movement, in increasingly sharp contrast to the conservative, notable-linked, and authoritarian old guard which ran the PAWS in Haifa.

It was the struggle over the composition of the Palestinian Arab delegation to the Paris WFTU congress which precipitated the final split between left and right in the PAWS. After an August 1945 meeting in Nablus at which Sami Taha and Hanna ‘Asfur had themselves designated the PAWS' delegates to Paris, the Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Gaza branches, along with eight others, mainly in southern and central Palestine, seceded and formed the Arab Workers' Congress (AWC), into which the FATULS soon merged itself. This new trade union federation, aligned with the NLL, chose Bulus Farah and Mukhlis al-‘Amr (a leader of the PAWS branch in Jerusalem) as its delegates to Paris. There they succeeded in blocking the adoption of another pro-Zionist resolution and helped secure the election of Mustafa al-‘Aris, a Lebanese communist, as Middle East representative on the executive of the newly created WFTU, defeating the candidacy of a Histadrut official. Sami Taha and Hanna ‘Asfur enjoyed only observer status at the Paris congress.^[91]

The struggles and realignments within the Arab labor movement had echoes even within the PLL, where the pro-Zionist resolution on Palestine adopted at the February 1945 London conference aroused discontent among the few Arab activists the organization possessed. Toward the end of the war some of those activists, constantly accused by Arab trade unionists of being Zionist agents, mere window dressing for an entirely Jewish-run organization, had begun to demand a greater role in the running of the PLL. A committee of branch representatives was eventually formed, but it never amounted to much and effective control remained firmly in the hands of the Jewish branch secretaries and the Arab Department's entirely Jewish staff. That staff had always insisted that the PLL was an apolitical organization concerned only with enhancing its members' economic, social, and cultural well-being. Resolutely ignoring the fact that the PLL was a project of, and entirely controlled by, the Zionist Histadrut, they contrasted the purported disinterestedness of the PLL's mission with what they denigrated as the explicitly political (i.e., Arab nationalist and anti-Zionist) stance of the Arab labor organizations. At the same time, MAPAI loyalists consistently rejected demands by partisans of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol and Hashomer Hatza‘ir that the PLL adopt a more explicitly political stance, whether the former's now rather shopworn orthodox Borokhovism or the latter's distinct blend of socialism and Zionism. These debates involved only Jews, however: rarely had Arabs within the PLL challenged their Jewish leaders, and then generally only over the immediate question of Hebrew labor rather than the broader issue of the Zionist vision of a Jewish state in some or all of Palestine.

In the increasingly tense and politicized atmosphere that prevailed in Palestine by 1945, however, such docility and deference were no longer viable. The PLL's handful of Arab activists was now more than ever on the defensive, under unrelenting pressure from Arab unionists in the PAWS and the FATULS (and later the AWC) who rarely missed an opportunity to denounce them as lackeys of the Zionists. Arabs openly identified with the PLL were no longer willing or able to remain silent when a representative of their supposedly apolitical organization took a pro-Zionist stance in a public forum. So it was that in September 1945 Muhammad al-Halabi, the Arab secretary of the PLL branch in Haifa, and three of his colleagues wrote a letter to the Chief Secretary of the government of Palestine, with copies to various international trade union organizations, dissociating themselves from the pro-Zionist stance which George Nassar had adopted in the name of the PLL at the international trade union conference in London the previous February. Probably moved to action by discussion of the Paris WFTU congress in al-Ittihad, which devoted considerable attention to the debate over a resolution on Palestine, they said that they had read in the newspapers that the Histadrut delegate in London had called for a Jewish state in Palestine, with the endorsement of the PLL—that is, George Nassar. Cleverly using their Jewish leaders' insistence on the apolitical character of the PLL against them and asserting the organization's autonomy from the Histadrut, they declared that “as a matter of fact the Palestine Labour League do not agree that Palestine should become a Jewish National Home, and they work on the basis of raising the Labour standard and not on the basis of exploiting their name by others from a Political point of view.” They went on to “protest on [sic] the trick done by the Arab Labour section in the Histadruth to send the above mentioned [George Nassar and his colleague Muhammad al-Hajj] in the name of the Palestine Labour League” and called on the government to prevent them from traveling to Paris.^[92]

The letter seems to have cost Muhammad al-Halabi his job as secretary of the PLL's Haifa branch: he was dismissed shortly thereafter, accused by the Arab Department of financial irregularities, although that charge may have been raised to deflect political embarrassment over his firing. By November al-Halabi had publicly proclaimed his allegiance to the PAWS. His protest and dismissal signaled the growing unviability of the kind of relationship between the Histadrut and the PLL that had prevailed since the latter's creation in the early 1930s. Times had changed, and the political naiveté which had allowed at least some Palestinian Arabs to take at face value the Histadrut's efforts to reach out to Arab workers was becoming increasingly rare.

The anonymous Arab teacher who wrote to Haqiqat al-Amr around this time to say that he read the newspaper regularly and enjoyed its style is another case in point. His letter went on to say that he had recently visited a kibbutz, where a conversation he had had with some Jewish children had left him with the impression that they believed that in the end the Arabs would be expelled from Palestine to make room for Jews.^[93] By the last year of the war it was clear that the decisive struggle over Palestine's fate was fast approaching, and the always shaky ground on which the Histadrut's Arab Department had sought to build was quickly disappearing. In the postwar period it would disappear altogether, though as the next chapter will explore this actually enhanced rather than diminished the possibility of cooperation between Arab and Jewish workers—at least until the political crisis engulfing Palestine deepened to the point where cooperation of any kind became all but impossible.

Notes