8. Labor Activism and Politics, 1945–1948

The political, economic, and social changes which the war years had brought to Palestine set the stage for a renewal of the Zionist-Palestinian confrontation. The annihilation of most of Europe's Jews strengthened the resolve of the Zionist movement, backed by the great majority of the Yishuv, not only to force the British to open Palestine to Jewish immigration but also to seek Jewish statehood by any means necessary. Even before the war in Europe ended, Zionist opposition to British policy had begun to take stronger and sometimes even violent forms, eventually developing into an insurgency which the British proved unable to suppress. The Zionist campaign helped stimulate the revival of the Arab nationalist movement. Though that movement, and the Arab community in which it was rooted, had not fully recovered from the defeat of the 1936–39 revolt, they were more determined than ever not merely to stop Jewish immigration and block the Zionist project but also to achieve Palestine's independence as an undivided Arab state. It was therefore clear that once the war in Europe was over, the final and decisive phase of the long struggle for Palestine would commence.

Curiously, in one of the many ironies with which the modern history of Palestine is replete, the same years (1945–47) that witnessed rising tensions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, tensions which would culminate in bloody civil and then interstate war, the creation of the State of Israel, and the transformation of half of Palestine's Arab population into refugees, also witnessed an unprecedented level of joint struggle among Arab and Jewish workers in pursuit of common economic goals, along with strenuous (if ultimately futile) efforts by various Arab and Jewish political forces to seek a peaceful resolution of the deepening political crisis. In retrospect it seems highly unlikely that events could have taken a different course. But for Arabs and Jews in the Palestine of those years there could be no way of knowing precisely what the future would bring; and not a few individuals and groups sought to actively shape that future by participating in the political and socioeconomic struggles of the day.

Perspectives on Cooperation

Unlike the official leadership of the Arab nationalist movement in Palestine, which was still dominated by Amin al-Husayni, his relatives, and his allies, and which often failed to distinguish between Zionism and the Yishuv, if not all Jews in general, the National Liberation League and its new labor front the Arab Workers' Congress continued to insist on preserving the communists' long-standing ideological distinction between Zionism and the Jewish masses in Palestine. A January 1945 article published in al-Ittihad declared that the representatives of Palestine's Arab workers at the international trade union conference soon to convene in London had to make clear to world public opinion that

we distinguish between the Zionist movement as an exploitative movement and the Jews, and the Jewish workers specifically, as a minority [in Palestine]. In calling for an independent national regime, the Arab workers seek to liberate the broad masses of the people, Arab and Jewish, from the noose of exploitation and Zionism, and they declare that an independent national regime will ensure all just national rights to the Jews and the other minorities settled in Palestine.

By adopting what it termed a racist (i.e., anti-Jewish) stance and failing to make clear the Palestinian Arab national movement's essentially liberatory and democratic goals and character, another article in al-Ittihad charged, the reactionaries who had led that movement in the past had made it easier for the Zionist movement to maintain its control over the Jewish masses in Palestine, by frightening them with the specter of Arab rule and Arab violence.^[1] Though there were disagreements within the NLL/AWC leadership over this question and some of the organizations' statements struck a more Arab nationalist tone, they generally insisted not only that the Jewish masses could be won away from their allegiance to Zionism provided the Arab national movement adopted a clear democratic and antiracist stance and offered the Jews a secure place in the future independent Arab Palestine, but also that Arab-Jewish cooperation was key to achieving the independence of an undivided Palestine.

The Arab left's insistence on both the possibility and the necessity of Arab-Jewish solidarity and cooperation, especially among workers, and its criticism of the strategic and tactical errors of the Arab nationalist leadership and its unrepresentative and undemocratic character, made it the target of attack by conservative Arab nationalists. In November 1945 the League of Arab States oversaw the reconstitution of the Arab Higher Committee, originally created in response to the outbreak of the Arab revolt in 1936 but defunct since the revolt's defeat. Early in 1946 Jamal al-Husayni returned from exile to assume its leadership, though its presidency was left vacant for his cousin, the exiled Amin al-Husayni. Determined to reassert the AHC's hegemony within the Arab community, Jamal al-Husayni publicly denounced the AWC for allegedly seeking unity with Ben-Gurion and the Jews. In his reply, NLL/AWC leader Fu’ad Nassar rejected al-Husayni's criticisms as misinformed and defended his movement's program. Reiterating the NLL's belief that it was possible to win the Jewish masses in Palestine away from Zionism, Nassar insisted that this struggle must be an essential component of the Arab national movement's overall strategy.^[2]

The NLL's insistence on distinguishing between Zionism and the Yishuv was of little or no interest to the vast majority of Jews in Palestine, very few of whom would have been willing to live under any form of Arab majority rule, whatever rights they might have been promised as an officially recognized minority. Though many, perhaps most, of the Jews in Palestine had come there not so much because of Zionist conviction as because of their need to escape discrimination or persecution in their countries of origin, what they increasingly wanted, and what the Zionist movement had by 1945 launched an all-out struggle to achieve, was unrestricted Jewish immigration (to bring about a Jewish majority) and a fully sovereign Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible. There were, however, significant forces in the Yishuv which until late in 1947 still argued that the creation of a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine was unattainable in the face of Arab opposition, would violate Arab rights in the country, or both. The most important of these were Hashomer Hatza‘ir and its urban sister party, the Socialist League, which in 1946 merged into the Hashomer Hatza‘ir Workers' Party.^[3] As I have already discussed, Hashomer Hatza‘ir (along with some liberal Zionists) rejected the official Zionist demand for Jewish statehood in part or all of Palestine and instead proposed the establishment in an undivided Palestine of a binational state in which Arabs and Jews would have political parity regardless of their numbers. At the same time, Hashomer Hatza‘ir insisted that Jewish immigration must be unrestricted, or at least not so restricted as to prevent the eventual attainment of a Jewish majority. But the tide of events, and of Jewish sentiment in Palestine and elsewhere, was running against them and would render the binationalist position increasingly irrelevant. Moreover, even those forces in the Yishuv most critical of the Zionist movement's increasingly single-minded drive for statehood rejected the NLL's vision of an independent Arab Palestine in which Jews would be at best an officially recognized national minority.

Yet the NLL/AWC leadership's ideological commitment to Arab-Jewish coexistence, and especially worker solidarity, did contribute to better relations between Arab and Jewish labor organizations in Palestine. An August 1945 article in the English-language edition of al-Ittihad, published (somewhat sporadically) in an effort to influence public opinion within and outside Palestine, hailed the Jewish workers

who showed willingness to coordinate their activities with organised Arab labour in spite of the taboo being observed by Histadruth [sic].…The conditions have always existed for such co-operation and their success now depends on the policy of the Histadruth who have always wanted to promote co-operation only in so far as it furthered the political chauvinist policy of Zionism. Withall, the future is in the hands of the workers themselves who will consciously strive to build their co-operation in a manner which would bring democracy, freedom and peace to Palestine.^[4]

Though less consistently, and on pragmatic rather than ideological grounds, the PAWS, which not only survived the secession of its left-led branches but experienced significant growth in the period that followed, would also cooperate with the Histadrut in certain arenas, as long as the latter did not claim to represent Arab workers and treated the PAWS as an equal.

Given Arab interest in cooperation, a shift in the Histadrut's stance was necessary to open the way to a more fruitful relationship between the Arab and Jewish labor movements. The virtually total paralysis into which the PLL had fallen by 1945 had conclusively demonstrated the futility of the Histadrut's efforts to undermine the Arab unions by organizing Arab workers under its own auspices. This led the Histadrut leadership, if grudgingly and with some lapses, to abandon that project and recognize that if it wished to protect or improve the lot of Jews employed in mixed workplaces, there was no alternative to cooperation with the Arab unions. Abba Hushi seems to have been among the prime movers behind the Histadrut's new orientation. For many months he had kept his distance from the Histadrut's Arab Department, whose staff he held in low regard, but as the war ended he resumed an active role in setting the Histadrut's policy in this arena. As the organization's top official in Palestine's main industrial center, Hushi was often more in touch with realities on the ground (and especially in the Arab community) than were many of his colleagues at Histadrut headquarters in Tel Aviv. He seems to have recognized the need to seek better relations with the Arab labor movement even if that required effectively abandoning the PLL.

In August 1945 Hushi sent an unprecedentedly polite, even comradely, letter to Sami Taha proposing cooperation in the postwar era then dawning. Taha replied that while he supported Arab-Jewish workers' cooperation in principle, the Jewish labor movement's allegiance to Zionism, manifested above all in its persistent campaign for Hebrew labor, made joint work impossible at present.^[5] Given his situation at that time, with his leadership under severe challenge and his organization undergoing a bitter split, Taha was apparently reluctant to assume a more compromising stance. Sami Taha's willingness to cooperate openly with the Histadrut was probably also inhibited by the new links he was developing with the leadership of the Palestinian nationalist movement. When Jamal al-Husayni reorganized the AHC in April 1946, he appointed Sami Taha a member. Within a few months another reshuffling terminated Taha's AHC membership, but he retained close ties to the Husayni-dominated nationalist leadership through the first half of 1947. In that period he served on an AHC subcommittee charged with drafting a constitution and an election law for the future independent Arab Palestine, and he was also appointed to the AHC delegation at the abortive negotiations on Palestine held in London in 1947.^[6]

The roles which the PAWS leader was called upon to assume in the nationalist leadership did not involve any real decision-making power, but they did have symbolic value. They signaled heightened public awareness of the growing social weight and potential political significance of the organized Arab working class in Palestine, as well as the leadership's desire to bring this social force more effectively and directly under its control. Moreover, by enhancing Taha's stature the Arab Higher Committee sought to weaken and isolate the AWC and the NLL, whose criticisms of the nationalist leadership's conservatism, authoritarianism, and ineffectuality were as little appreciated as their advocacy of democracy, social reform, and solidarity between Arab and Jewish workers. Taha's association with the leadership bolstered his claim to be Palestine's preeminent Arab labor leader, helping him and the PAWS recover from the traumatic schism of the left-led branches and the formation of the AWC.

These circumstances, and the deepening political crisis that began to engulf Palestine during 1946, would render cooperation between the PAWS and the Histadrut more difficult. Nonetheless the PAWS, and the new AWC as well, would frequently demonstrate a willingness to cooperate with the Histadrut, though the interactions among the three organizations were never entirely free of conflict and suspicion. In this period three sectors of prime economic and political importance constituted the main arenas of interaction between Arab and Jewish workers: the petroleum sector, including the pipeline installations and refinery in Haifa but also facilities operated by transnational oil companies elsewhere in Palestine; government service, both white-collar and blue-collar and including the railway workers; and the British military bases.

The Petroleum Sector, 1943–48

As I discussed in Chapter 5, a pipeline bringing crude petroleum from the oilfields of northern Iraq (exploited largely by British companies) through British-controlled Transjordan to the port of Haifa had been completed in 1934. Soon thereafter British government officials and oil company executives began discussing the construction of a refinery at Haifa, which would allow processed Iraqi crude to be used to refuel British warships in the eastern Mediterranean (for which Haifa had become a base, especially after the completion of the deepwater harbor in 1933) and enhance the position of British oil companies in the world market. Construction of the Haifa refinery, which was owned and operated by Consolidated Refineries, Limited (CRL), a subsidiary of what was then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and later became British Petroleum, began late in 1938, at a site about seven kilometers north of the center of Haifa, on the Haifa-Acre highway, not far from the railway workshops. Production of refined petroleum products began in 1940, though it was another year before the refinery reached its planned capacity of two million tons. By 1944 the refinery's capacity had been expanded to handle some four million tons of crude petroleum a year.

By the middle of 1943 the Haifa refinery employed about a thousand workers, making it one of Haifa's (and Palestine's) largest workplaces. The PAWS had a strong base among the Arab refinery workers, though its rival the communist-led FATULS also had substantial support there; only about thirty of the Arab refinery workers belonged to the PLL. Though Jews made up only about one-third of the refinery workforce, they held a much higher proportion of the skilled and clerical jobs; but only half of the Jewish refinery workers were Histadrut members, a rather low rate by the standards of the Jewish labor movement in Palestine. Like the workforce at the British military bases, the refinery workers included many new recruits to industrial wage labor. The refinery, and the petroleum sector more broadly, was one of the most capital-intensive sectors of the Palestinian economy, and its workers among the most classically proletarian. As time passed, the refinery workers and others employed by the transnational petroleum companies—especially the Arabs among them—acquired a reputation for militancy and for resistance to control by management as well as by labor leaders who failed to respect their autonomy and meet their needs.

In keeping with the Histadrut's general policy in 1942–43, the Haifa Workers' Council initially sought to convince CRL management to recognize it as the exclusive representative of all the refinery workers, Jewish and Arab. When that bid failed, the Histadrut was compelled to enter talks with the PAWS and the FATULS about the establishment of a joint committee representing all the refinery workers. Those talks foundered over the question of representation, with the Histadrut demanding Jewish-Arab parity and the Arab unions insisting that the committee's membership reflect the ethnic composition of the refinery workforce. More than ever before, this issue had come to be seen as essentially political, because the Arab unions believed that acceptance of Arab-Jewish parity implied tacit recognition of the Zionist claim to equal Jewish rights in Palestine. In the spring of 1943 the Histadrut on its own formally declared a labor dispute at the refinery, in the hope of winning improvements in the wages and working conditions of its members there, and especially of securing for them a cost of living allowance to offset skyrocketing inflation. With Labor Department mediation, the Histadrut won extension of the COLA to cover the refinery workers as well as recognition as representative of the Jewish workers, though various other issues were left unresolved pending direct negotiations between the Histadrut and company management.^[7]

Continued inflation as well as the looming threat of layoffs as the war came to an end eventually created a basis for Arab-Jewish cooperation at the Haifa refinery. During the fall of 1945 the PAWS and the Histadrut negotiated jointly with CRL management and won many of the demands put forward by the refinery workers, who now numbered 1,800 and whose position was strengthened by their unprecedented unity.^[8] Neither the refinery workers nor those employed by the various transnational oil companies operating in Palestine—most prominent among them the Iraq Petroleum Company, Socony Vacuum, and Shell—joined the general strike launched by government employees in April 1946; I discuss the reasons for this later in this chapter. Nonetheless, the Arab and Jewish oil workers were strongly affected by the militancy and steadfastness of the government employees, as were workers throughout Palestine, and soon after the general strike rank and file pressure compelled the leaders of the unions to which many of the oil workers belonged to become much more aggressive in seeking immediate satisfaction of the demands for higher wages and improved working conditions which they had been advancing in fruitless negotiations for some months.

However, the oil workers' newfound militancy was not accompanied by the kind of cooperation that had characterized relations between the PAWS and the Histadrut at the Haifa refinery the previous fall; indeed, an atmosphere of outright hostility now prevailed between the two organizations. The Histadrut was increasingly mindful of the economic and political importance of the transnational oil companies and wanted to strengthen its influence over their workforce by bolstering Jewish employment but also, it seemed, by once again trying to represent Arab workers. This aroused Sami Taha's suspicions and resentment, especially since he had recently come under fire from the Arab nationalist leadership and press for having cooperated with the Histadrut in the government workers' general strike. It was a politically sensitive moment as well: the Arab nationalist and Zionist movements as well as the British government were awaiting the report of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which had been established (following heavy pressure on Britain from the Truman administration) in response to Zionist demands that Palestine be opened up to Jewish immigrants, especially survivors of the Holocaust still living in displaced persons' camps in Europe.

As a result, the PAWS refused to join a countrywide strike of Socony Vacuum employees which was launched jointly by the Histadrut and the AWC in late April 1946. The Histadrut's clerical workers' union had organized many of the Jewish employees at Socony Vacuum and the other oil companies, and also had close (if covert) ties with some of the Arab clerical and other workers in this sector. Sami Taha claimed that the Histadrut had called the strike unilaterally at a time when he was still conducting negotiations with management; the Histadrut in turn denounced the PAWS as an agent of the oil companies and tried, in de facto alliance with the AWC, to shut the PAWS out of contract negotiations. Most of Socony Vacuum's Arab workers seem to have supported the strike, except in Haifa, where the PAWS was strongest and succeeded in persuading many workers to stay at their jobs. The strike lasted twelve days and resulted in some gains for the workers. The Histadrut and the AWC sought to keep the PAWS from being a party to the new contract, but company management invited the PAWS to sign it as well, which made it possible for Sami Taha to claim that it had been the negotiations he had conducted, rather than the strike, which had yielded results. It was nonetheless clear that Sami Taha had suffered a humiliating defeat, and this left a legacy of bitterness which would for a time poison relations between the PAWS and the Histadrut in this sector.^[9]

In the aftermath of the April 1946 wave of worker militancy and the deterioration of its relations with the PAWS, the Histadrut once again considered trying to bypass the Arab unions and establish direct links with Arab workers, especially clerical employees in what it called the “international sector.” It was the Histadrut's links with Arab white-collar workers at Socony Vacuum which had made possible an effective strike at that firm in the face of the PAWS' opposition. The Haifa Workers' Council and those Histadrut officials most involved with the affairs of workers in the state and transnational sectors urged the organization to step up its efforts in this arena, perhaps by fostering joint Arab-Jewish workers' committees through which the Histadrut could exert its influence at specific work sites. But the Histadrut was not in a position to implement this strategy effectively when worker unrest again flared up in Haifa's petroleum sector early in 1947.

At first the locus of action was the refinery, which employed about 1,800 people, almost 80 percent of them Arabs, though here too Jews held a disproportionate share (44 percent) of the clerical jobs. As with the Socony Vacuum strike the previous spring, and as with several smaller conflicts involving oil workers, the CRL workers' struggle with management was complicated by struggles between the PAWS and the AWC and between the PAWS and the Histadrut. Despite growing rank and file discontent over low wages and other issues, and close cooperation between the Arab and Jewish workers at the refinery and their committees, neither the PAWS nor the Histadrut were anxious to organize and lead a strike. But CRL workers who belonged to the AWC or were under its influence pressed for action, with the support of the Jewish workers' committee dominated by Hashomer Hatza‘ir activists, and in mid-January 1947 a spontaneous strike erupted which quickly expanded to encompass hundreds of the company's workers. The PAWS sought to bring the strike to an end as quickly as possible, in part because it was committed to an earlier agreement with management and in part because it feared that the strike might provide the Histadrut and the AWC with an opening to enhance their influence at CRL. It succeeded in getting the workers back to work after a few days, but only at the cost of angering and alienating many CRL union activists. They demonstrated their unhappiness with the PAWS leadership in various ways, among them a decision to convene several meetings of the Arab refinery workers' committee not at the PAWS' headquarters but rather at the local Hashomer Hatza‘ir branch, an indication of the good relations then prevailing between Arab and Jewish worker activists at this workplace.

Left-wing Arab unionists were particularly angry about what they regarded as Sami Taha's sabotage of the strike. Al-Ittihad sarcastically denounced the “honorable unionists” of the PAWS who,

compelled by their desire to save their Arab worker brothers from the clutches of the Zionist Histadrut and its many machinations and by seeing a Histadrut representative try to intervene in the strike and lead it, as the Histadrut always seeks to do, thought that the only way to frustrate the Histadrut's schemes and isolate it from the masses of workers was by demanding that the workers return to work, on the pretext that the strike had been foisted upon them by the Histadrut and its officials.

A few months later the committee representing the Arab CRL workers publicly denounced the PAWS for the high-handedness of its leaders, one of whom had told the CRL workers that he, and not the workers themselves, knew what was best for them and that they should accept his decisions without question. The committee also criticized the PAWS for its undemocratic character, its compromises with CRL management, its sabotage of efforts to unite the petroleum workers, and its unsavory tactics.^[10]

The PAWS also came under fire when in early March 1947 discontent among the Iraq Petroleum Company's workers erupted into strike action. The company employed some 2,500 people, with Arabs making up 98 percent of its manual workers and 84 percent of its office workers. The AWC was the dominant force among the IPC workers and had been able to resist an attempt by the PAWS to raid its membership and set up its own union of IPC workers. A strike of some 1,600 IPC workers (including a few dozen Jewish employees) began on March 6, mainly over wages, lasted until March 19 and resulted in a new agreement between IPC and its workers, who gained some but by no means all of their demands. The strikers received moral support from Arab workers across Palestine, but the AWC accused Sami Taha (and behind him the Arab Higher Committee) of trying to bring the strike to a quick end, which indeed seems to have been the case. Taha's role in the IPC strike was apparently the last straw for the Arab refinery workers: at the end of April 1947 the CRL union formally severed its connections with the PAWS, accusing Sami Taha of having tried to sabotage the IPC strike and of serving the interests of the oil companies rather than of those companies' workers.^[11]

There were also a number of other, less dramatic, and sustained upsurges of worker activism in this sector in the postwar period. These involved Arab workers almost exclusively, since with the partial exception of the Haifa refinery, which employed a substantial number of Jewish skilled and clerical workers, the petroleum sector workforce was overwhelmingly Arab and the Histadrut's efforts to enhance its influence were largely unsuccessful. Histadrut officials in Haifa complained to headquarters in Tel Aviv about Jewish weakness in this economically and politically important sector, and in the government sector as well, and demanded more funds with which to subsidize Jewish workers' wages as well as stepped-up pressure on corporate and government officials to get more Jews hired. Abba Hushi told the Histadrut executive that it had to “place on its agenda the conquest of labor in the cities. We can over the coming years get 5000 workers hired; workers are needed in the posts, railroads, telegraph. Today it is Arabs who are hired for these jobs—and it is this which will determine the fate of Haifa.”^[12] But Hushi was wrong: it would in fact be the superiority of Jewish military forces that determined Haifa's fate in the spring of 1948, culminating in the flight of the great majority of its Arab inhabitants. By that time, as we will see, the Haifa refinery had achieved notoriety as the scene of the single bloodiest incident of the first month of the Arab-Jewish fighting which erupted immediately after the United Nations General Assembly voted to recommend that Palestine be partitioned.

The April 1946 General Strike

The largest and most dramatic episode of joint action between Arab and Jewish workers in the history of Palestine took place in April 1946. Postal, telephone, and telegraph workers were responsible for touching off what became an unprecedentedly broad strike of white- and blue-collar government employees. Postal department officials had long rejected or ignored the postal workers' demands, leading Sami Taha of the PAWS and Yehezkel Abramov, secretary of the International Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, to plan a limited strike of mainly Jewish postal and telephone workers in Tel Aviv, scheduled to begin on April 9, 1946. Abramov had insisted that the strike be delayed until after the departure from Palestine of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, for fear that it might get out of hand or that Arab nationalist activists might transform it into a protest against the Committee. In this sector Arab and Jewish unionists had many years of experience in working together, and relations were generally friendly. There is even some evidence of male bonding among them: four decades later Abramov would still remember fondly how he and his Arab colleagues would repair to the Tel Aviv beachfront after negotiating sessions and watch the Jewish women bathers.^[13]

On the appointed day the workers, including thirty or forty Arabs employed at the Tel Aviv post office, went on strike. Their militancy proved infectious and by the following day all the postal workers in Palestine had stopped work. In the negotiations that ensued postal officials quickly made far-reaching concessions, and the Histadrut recommended that the workers accept the offer and end the strike. As on similar occasions, the Histadrut feared that the strike might undermine the Zionist campaign then under way to force the British government to open Palestine to Jewish immigration. However, the rank and file postal workers, who had lost all faith in official promises, were in no mood to compromise and voted overwhelmingly to reject management's offer and continue their strike. Their militancy spread quickly: on April 14 the Arab and Jewish railway workers, members of both the IU and the AURW, also went on strike, paralyzing the country's railway system.

There had never before been a general strike of Palestine's railway and postal workers, but what made this episode even more extraordinary was the fact that the middle- and lower-level white-collar government employees also joined the strike. As I noted in Chapter 7, in May 1943 desperation over sharply dropping real wages had pushed the normally docile Arab and Jewish civil servants (organized in the Second Division Civil Service Association) to the extreme measure of staging a sit-in strike. Though that action eventually won them a cost of living allowance, persistent inflation and poor working conditions ensured that unrest would continue. In the spring of 1945 the Association organized several short countrywide protest strikes; these enjoyed Histadrut support, though the Histadrut had also worked behind the scenes to ensure that these protests by civil servants, most of whom were Arabs, would not be linked in the public's mind with the protest strikes which the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement organized at the same time in solidarity with the struggle for independence in Syria and Lebanon.^[14] The clerks' grievances were not redressed, however, and when the postal and railway workers stopped work en masse in April 1946 they too were caught up in the countrywide wave of labor militancy and joined in, as did Public Works Department and port workers.

By April 15, 1946, less than a week after the Tel Aviv postal workers had stopped work, some 23,000 employees of the government of Palestine were on strike. For a time it seemed that the tens of thousands of workers employed at British military bases, along with the petroleum workers in and near Haifa, might also join the strike. Arab and Jewish communists certainly hoped this would happen: an April 18 leaflet issued jointly by the NLL and the Palestine Communist Party called on the refinery, military base, and municipal workers to join the general strike, while castigating the “imperialist government” of Palestine for allocating more than one-fifth of its annual budget to the police and prisons but only 8 percent to health, education, and social welfare combined.^[15] However, both the Histadrut and the PAWS had reason to oppose expansion of the strike by keeping the refinery and base workers at their jobs. In private, Histadrut officials expressed concern that the oil workers would be unable to stay out on strike for an extended period, weakening the government employees' ability to wage a successful long-term struggle. They were also fearful that a strike in the petroleum sector would quickly paralyze much of Palestine's economy, disrupting motor transport and the provision of food to urban areas and interfering with the Yishuv's struggle to compel the British to permit more Jewish immigration.

The Histadrut's behind-the-scenes role in keeping the oil workers at their jobs did not prevent Abba Hushi from insisting to his colleagues that it was really Sami Taha who had kept them from joining the general strike. Hushi claimed that when the government employees' strike began, Taha had received a telephone call from Arab League headquarters in Cairo telling him not to go too far in cooperating with the Jews, whereupon he tried to dampen the Arab workers' militancy and prevent the petroleum workers from joining the strike. Hushi was never renowned for his truthfulness, even to his own comrades, but it is certainly possible that Sami Taha also used his influence to keep the strike from expanding; as I noted when discussing the petroleum workers, this was a politically sensitive moment and Taha was trying to avoid overt cooperation with the Histadrut.^[16]

Though neither the refinery nor the camp workers joined the strike, it effectively paralyzed the mandatory administration and compelled the government to grant its employees many of their demands, including increases in basic wages and the COLA and improvements in the pension system. By the end of April all the strikers had returned to their jobs. Leftist forces in both the Arab and Jewish communities hailed the April general strike as a victory for Arab and Jewish workers and as incontrovertible evidence of what working-class solidarity could achieve. Warning against “defeatist and reactionary elements, Arab and Jewish,” the NLL and PCP declared the strike “a blow against the ‘divide and rule’ policy of imperialism, a slap in the face of those who hold chauvinist ideologies and propagate national division.” Mishmar, the organ of Hashomer Hatza‘ir, also acclaimed the strike and argued that it demonstrated the possibility and efficacy of Arab-Jewish cooperation. The Histadrut's Davar, faithful exponent of the MAPAI line, blew hot and cold, reflecting the labor-Zionist leadership's ambivalence. The more conservative newspapers were less than thrilled. Filastin criticized the PAWS for colluding in what it regarded as a politically motivated movement that was inspired and orchestrated by the Zionists and largely served their interests. The right-wing Hebrew daily Ma‘ariv initially welcomed the strike but later denounced it as detrimental to the Zionist cause.^[17]

Whatever various forces in the Yishuv and the Arab community made of the strike, it proved to be an isolated incident. Although there was continuing unrest among certain categories of government workers during the months that followed, there were no further dramatic upsurges, and the focus of labor activism shifted elsewhere. The hope for Arab-Jewish cooperation which the general strike had seemed to evoke soon dissipated as Palestine sank deeper into political crisis in the year that followed.

The British Military Bases, 1945–48

The British military bases, which had emerged during the war as an important site of interaction between Arab and Jewish workers, retained their significance even after the war's end. Many Arab and Jewish camp workers, and the labor organizations which sought to represent them, continued to feel that they had common interests because they faced common problems. These included the rigid work discipline which British officers sought to impose on their civilian employees, poor working conditions and lack of benefits, but perhaps most importantly the downward pressure on their real wages—both absolutely but also relative to the wages of workers employed in private industry and construction and in other sectors of the country's economy—created by persistent inflation and the British military's desire to keep labor costs down.

Increasingly, however, the camp workers also perceived a threat to their very jobs. As Allied and Soviet forces gained the upper hand in North Africa and Europe and the Axis threat to the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean receded, the British military's needs for civilian labor in Palestine naturally diminished. In October 1943 the War Department employed some 50,000 civilians in Palestine, but by the beginning of 1944 the number had dropped to about 47,500 and by March 1944 to under 44,000. The end of the war in Europe brought much more widespread layoffs: during the first ten months of 1945 almost 20,000 camp workers lost their jobs. The wave of layoffs then subsided, and over the following half year the redeployment to Palestine of British forces stationed in Syria, the expansion of existing military facilities, and the launching of new projects resulted in the hiring of a substantial number of additional workers. In April 1946 a Histadrut official estimated that the British armed forces employed about 22,000 Arabs and 8,000–9,000 Jews in Palestine, though the actual number may well have been somewhat higher. Despite the respite, it was clear that over the longer term the number of camp workers would shrink drastically.^[18]

The plight of the camp workers received increasing attention from both Arab and Jewish labor leaders from 1945 onward. Al-Ittihad argued that the workers of Palestine had contributed to the Allied war effort and now deserved prompt and effective government measures to offset unemployment and boost wages.^[19] The Histadrut leadership was similarly concerned about both unemployment and low wages. As always, however, it was also concerned about the potential impact of low wages on Jewish employment in the military sector: officials expressed alarm that unless camp workers' wages could be increased, Jews would leave for better-paying jobs elsewhere. But since Jews constituted only a small minority of the military's civilian workforce, joint action with the Arab majority was essential. The bitter experience of the 1943 camp workers' strike had demonstrated that the Histadrut could not hope to organize significant numbers of Arab workers under its own auspices, contributing to a growing recognition that in this sector as elsewhere it would have to cooperate with the Arab unions. As in the petroleum sector, the left wing of the Arab labor movement, now organized in the new Arab Workers' Congress, was generally more amenable to working with the Histadrut than the PAWS, which was more closely linked to the Arab nationalist leadership and reluctant to be seen as overly interested in cooperation with Jews.

One of the first workplaces at which this new spirit of cooperation manifested itself was the British military workshops established on what had been the grounds of the Levant Fair, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. In September 1945 the AWC and the Histadrut jointly planned and led a seven-day strike of some 1,300 workers there to demand official recognition of their committee, payment of the COLA, recision of a rule fining workers a full day's pay plus another day's COLA for each day of work they missed, and the reinstatement of several workers unjustly dismissed. The Arab and Jewish workers set up joint pickets at the gates of the fairgrounds and organized a joint march through the streets of Tel Aviv, chanting (in Arabic and Hebrew) such slogans as: “Long live unity between Arab and Jewish workers,” “The Arab and Jewish workers are brothers,” and “Long live the Histadrut and the [Jaffa] Arab Workers' Society [affiliated with the AWC].” The Hebrew-language daily Ha’aretz reported that “masses of people crowded both sides of the streets to watch this extraordinary sight of Jewish and Arab workers marching through the heart of Tel Aviv.” Only some of the strikers' demands were met: among other things the British military authorities agreed to recognize the workers' committees and to provide a week's advance notice of layoffs.^[20]

The success of this strike led the Histadrut to more explicitly endorse cooperation with the Arab labor movement. Rank and file pressure, coupled with fear of being outflanked from the left, also contributed to this shift in policy: both communist and Hashomer Hatza‘ir cadres were seeking to win support among the camp workers by criticizing the Histadrut for its inaction and advocating greater militancy and closer cooperation with Arab workers.^[21] Several factors rendered cooperation difficult, however. One was the division of the Arab labor movement into two competing and often hostile camps, each of which had a base among the camp workers. Having established a degree of mutual trust the previous autumn, the AWC and the Histadrut found it relatively easy during the spring of 1946 to agree on a common set of demands and plan a joint campaign of struggle which might ultimately lead to a general strike of Arab and Jewish camp workers. The AWC's largely communist leadership had no ideological qualms about cooperating with avowedly Zionist workers and unions, as long as the latter refrained from seeking to recruit Arabs and as long as that cooperation was restricted to the class struggle. By contrast, just as in the petroleum sector during this same period, the PAWS leadership was reluctant on nationalist grounds to be perceived as cooperating with the Histadrut. This presented a major problem: as Arab and Jewish unionists well understood, without the participation of the 8,000 Arab camp workers who supported Sami Taha's organization it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to wage a successful struggle on behalf of the camp workers.^[22]

Another complicating issue was discontent among Arab workers over the higher wages which Jewish coworkers often received for the same jobs, as well as the disproportionate number of Jews who held better-paid and easier supervisory, skilled, and clerical jobs at British installations. Sami Taha had raised this issue in a telegram to the authorities in 1944, and al-Ittihad took it up early in 1946, reporting that Arab workers at the Bayt Nabala base near Lydda were demanding not only higher wages but also wage equality with their Jewish coworkers and the hiring of more Arab foremen, since the Jewish foremen were perceived as giving preference to Jews in hiring and treatment. Arab protests there culminated in clashes and even casualties. According to the AWC's organ, the Arab workers wanted more Arab foremen “not because they hate the Jewish foremen at the camp but because [those foremen] carry out Zionist plans with complete obedience; as the saying goes, ‘We don't fight the wolf because of his color or shape but because he eats our ewes’.” In the spring of 1947 some 1,500 Arab workers employed at military bases in the Haifa area participated in a one-hour protest strike organized by the PAWS to demand that their Jewish foremen be replaced by Arabs.^[23]

Nonetheless, although wage discrimination and a desire for a larger share of the better jobs continued to be of concern to Arab workers and unionists, they were generally willing to subordinate those issues to the broader struggle to improve the camp workers' wages and working conditions and protect their jobs. By the early months of 1947 the Histadrut was discussing cooperation with both the PAWS (which had by far the strongest base among the Arab camp workers) and the AWC, though the poor relations between the two rival Arab organizations sometimes required Histadrut officials to act as mediators. Agreement was soon reached on a set of demands which included an increase in the base wage, a bonus for wartime service, severance pay, improvements in sick pay, vacations, and work regulations, and official recognition of the workers' committees and unions. When in May 1947 the British authorities began a new round of layoffs without prior warning, the Arab unionists pushed for a one-day protest strike of all camp workers, to which the Histadrut agreed.^[24] The strike, which took place on May 20, 1947, encompassed some 40,000 workers and passed without incident. Its success was in sharp contrast to the debilitating failure of the May 1943 strike, which the Histadrut had called on its own and in which most of the Arab workers had refused to participate. The PAWS wanted to build on this success with further action in the form of an extended strike, but Histadrut officials were opposed, because they feared that such a strike might serve the Arab nationalist cause by touching off violent disturbances just when the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine was due to arrive to pursue its inquiry into the country's problems and future status.

As the spring of 1947 turned into summer and talks between British officials and the camp workers' representatives failed to make much headway, the PAWS and the AWC began to push for a strike of indefinite duration. Early in July the PAWS declared that if the authorities did not meet the camp workers' demands within twenty-five days, it would call the workers out on strike. Histadrut officials had by now convinced themselves that Sami Taha and his organization were pliant instruments of the dominant nationalist faction led by Amin al-Husayni, who was still in exile, and they were certain that a camp workers' strike would serve Arab nationalist interests and harm the Zionist cause at a politically sensitive moment. As Berl Repetur later put it in a report to the Histadrut's executive committee, “we feared a strike of the Jewish and Arab workers, a strike which would be anti-Jewish in its political and security character.” Consequently, the Histadrut rejected the PAWS' call and instead proposed a three-day protest strike.

For a time it seemed that both the PAWS and the AWC might adopt the Histadrut's proposal, but in early August the PAWS, acting on its own, announced that the camp workers would go out on strike on August 25, 1947. The AWC denounced this unilateral decision as destructive of the camp workers' unity and claimed that the PAWS was secretly cooperating with the Histadrut in an effort to isolate and weaken the AWC. Histadrut and PAWS officials had in fact met and decided to refrain from unilateral acts. A few days before the strike date, the British authorities agreed to satisfy several of the camp workers' demands. Though the key demand that laid-off workers be paid compensation was not met, this small victory considerably eased relations among the PAWS, the AWC, and the Histadrut. Soon thereafter the War Office finally extended formal recognition to the Arab unions and the Histadrut as representatives of the camp workers and seemed to indicate a willingness to make concessions on other issues. The way thus seemed to be open for further gains by the camp workers.^[25]

The Disintegration of the Arab Workers' Movement

As among workers in the petroleum sector and in government service, the unprecedented cooperation that characterized relations between Arab and Jewish camp workers in the immediate postwar years was in the fall of 1947 submerged by a rising tide of intercommunal tensions. On August 31, 1947, the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) released its recommendations for resolving the Palestine problem. UNSCOP had been established by the General Assembly the previous May, after an exhausted Britain, unable to suppress Jewish insurgency in Palestine, induce Arabs and Jews to reach agreement on the country's future, or impose a solution of its own, had turned the Palestine problem over to the United Nations. UNSCOP had visited Palestine in the summer of 1947, and after a painstaking inquiry and lengthy discussions among its members it issued a majority report which recommended that Palestine be partitioned into independent Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem to be placed under international control. (UNSCOP's minority report, which recommended the establishment of an Arab-Jewish federal state in all of Palestine, never received serious consideration.) According to this plan, the Jewish state would encompass some 55 percent of Palestine's territory, though Jews constituted less than one-third of the country's population at the time. The Zionist leadership welcomed the prospect of an independent Jewish state which the majority report offered, though it hoped for more territory. The Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, as well as the Arab states, vehemently rejected the recommendation as a violation of the right of the country's indigenous Arab majority to national self-determination in an undivided Palestine.

On the morrow of the report's publication, an intense diplomatic struggle began over whether the General Assembly would endorse UNSCOP's recommendations by the required two-thirds majority. In Palestine itself, with partition now a very real and imminent possibility and the country's fate hanging in the balance, the climate of Arab-Jewish relations changed abruptly. There was a hardening of political lines between and within the Arab and Jewish communities which very quickly rendered impossible the kind of cooperation among Arab and Jewish workers and labor organizations which had manifested itself so prominently during the previous two years. As a result, the momentum which the PAWS, the AWC, and the Histadrut had built up through the camp workers' struggles they had jointly led dissipated very quickly. The much more tense and crisis-ridden atmosphere that now prevailed also contributed to the virtual paralysis of the Arab labor movement. It was the PAWS which experienced the sharpest reversal in its fortunes, for in mid-September 1947 it suffered a devastating blow from which it never really recovered.

As I mentioned earlier, Histadrut officials had long been convinced that the PAWS' general secretary, Sami Taha, was a completely obedient agent of Amin al-Husayni, Mufti of Jerusalem and president of the AHC, whom Zionists regarded as their most implacable Arab foe. In reality, tensions had been growing during 1947 between the PAWS leader and the Husayni loyalists who dominated the Arab Higher Committee. The Mufti and his allies seem to have been increasingly angered by what they saw as Sami Taha's refusal to obey the AHC's orders, as well as by his growing inclination to chart an independent course in the political arena. Taha's purported deviations included the PAWS' alleged refusal in November 1946 to endorse the AHC's call for a day-long protest strike on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration; the PAWS' adoption that same year of a vague “socialism” as its guiding principle—a step which had to do with both its growing political ambitions and its rivalry with the communist-led AWC; Taha's talk of creating an independent Arab labor party; his denunciations of partisan and factional politics; and his pronouncements on political matters, which though often vague or naive were taken as criticisms of the Husaynis' domination of the nationalist movement. Perhaps most damning were allegations that Taha was in favor of seeking some modus vivendi with the Jews and might even be willing to accept partition, as well as the PAWS' secretary's ties with some of the exiled Mufti's political rivals, particularly Musa al-‘Alami, who in the late summer of 1947 was regarded by the Husayni camp as the leader of those forces within the Palestinian Arab community most amenable to some compromise with Zionism.^[26]

The rift between Sami Taha and the AHC emerged into public view at the end of August 1947, when the PAWS leader became the target of a barrage of defamatory attacks in newspapers identified with the Husayni camp, especially al-Wahda. Taha and his organization were denounced for being insufficiently anti-Zionist and anti-British, and for failing to conform to the official nationalist line; rumors were also spread that Taha was a paid agent of the Zionists. Among other things, al-Wahda cited a resolution adopted at the PAWS' national congress, held in Haifa in late August, which declared that “Arab Jews are our fellow citizens and brothers in nationality.” The PAWS responded by issuing a series of leaflets refuting the charges against it; the last of these, dated September 9, 1947, pointed out that the Arab Higher Committee had itself recently declared that the Jews who had lived in the country before the British conquest and their descendants were welcome to remain as full citizens of the future independent Arab Palestine.

Taha's efforts to defend himself and the organization he led were unavailing. On September 12, 1947, he was assassinated outside his home in Haifa. His murderer was never apprehended, but it was generally believed that Sami Taha was killed on orders of Amin al-Husayni, as part of a campaign by the Mufti's camp to settle accounts, intimidate potential opponents, and tighten its grip on the Arab community as the final phase of the struggle for Palestine approached. It was thus probably no coincidence that Sami Taha came under public attack very soon after UNSCOP recommended that Palestine be partitioned, a recommendation whose implementation the AHC vowed to fight with all the means at its disposal.^[27]

In the wake of Sami Taha's murder the PAWS' leaders publicly pledged their loyalty to the AHC. In private they assured their Histadrut counterparts that cooperation would continue, and the PAWS, AWC, and Histadrut officials responsible for camp workers' affairs soon resumed their contacts. But they were unable to follow up on the gains they had made in late summer, and as the British moved toward the complete evacuation of their military forces and installations in Palestine, the camp workers' ranks were further decimated by new waves of layoffs, though some compensation was apparently paid to dismissed workers. The PAWS never really had the opportunity to recover from the murder of its secretary and best-known public figure. In the fall and winter of 1947 and the early months of 1948, with its bases of support among camp and government workers shrinking, its organizing activity declined and then virtually ceased and it gradually fell into a state of paralysis. Early in April 1948 the Histadrut's Eliyahu Agassi met in Haifa with Sa‘id Qawwas and Husayn Nasir, veteran PAWS leaders. The feisty Qawwas berated Agassi for what he saw as Haqiqat al-Amr's negative portrayals of Arabs and the Arab labor movement and its lack of balance. “Why does it only expose the problems with the Mufti's policies? Are there no problems with Ben-Gurion's policies?” Qawwas asked. By that time the PAWS was barely functioning, and it seems likely that most of its historic leadership, core cadre and rank and file base was dispersed a few weeks later, in late April 1948, when Haifa's Arab neighborhoods surrendered to Jewish military forces and the great majority of their inhabitants fled the city.^[28]

The AWC did not fare much better in the fall of 1947 and the winter of 1947–48. It held an apparently successful national congress (its third) in September 1947 and seemed poised to engage in a new round of vigorous activity and expansion. But in the weeks that followed, labor activism became increasingly difficult as public attention focused on the question of Palestine's fate and both Arabs and Jews closed ranks and girded themselves for the struggle ahead, a struggle in which all sides were ready to resort to violent means. At the same time the AWC and the NLL, under whose guidance it operated, were thrown into disarray, their political bearings lost, by a dramatic shift in the Soviet Union's stance on the Palestine question.

Though not formally a communist party, the NLL had become increasingly open about identifying itself with the international communist movement, most notably by participating in the conference of communist parties in the British empire, held in London in February–March 1947. Its position on the Palestine question had been identical to that long advocated by the international communist movement and by the Soviet Union. However, to the surprise and dismay of the NLL, and of Arab communists elsewhere in the Middle East, the Soviet government began moving away from its traditional position on Palestine and Zionism in the spring of 1947 and abandoned it altogether that fall, in the midst of the struggle over whether the UN General Assembly would endorse partition. In May 1947, in an address to the General Assembly on the Palestine question, Soviet representative Andrei Gromyko signaled quite clearly that his government was reconsidering its long-standing and vehement opposition to the idea of partition and Jewish statehood in Palestine. Expressing sympathy for the suffering of the Jewish people during the war and voicing understanding for the Jews' special interest in, and attachment to, Palestine, Gromyko implicitly recognized the existence of two national communities in Palestine and reluctantly concluded that if Arabs and Jews could not find a way to coexist peacefully in the framework of a single state, partition might be the only fair and viable solution.

NLL leaders did their best to avoid coming to terms with the implications of Gromyko's speech, but they could not ignore the explicit decision of the Soviet Union, in October 1947, to endorse UNSCOP's recommendation that Palestine be partitioned into independent Arab and Jewish states. The result was a split in the NLL leadership, which included many veteran communists who had loyally followed Moscow's line for many years. Some NLL leaders embraced the new Soviet line, accepted partition, and would later denounce the Arab states' military intervention to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state; others rejected the new line and would seek to participate in the struggle against the establishment of a Jewish state. As a result of the split, the suppression of the organization's newspaper al-Ittihad by the British authorities in February 1948, and then the uprooting and displacement of much of Palestine's Arab population in the months that followed, the NLL and the AWC fell into disarray. In the spring of 1948 AWC activists helped organize local self-defense units in Jaffa and Gaza to protect poor urban neighborhoods, but these were swept away in the chaos that was engulfing Arab Palestine. With their leaders and activists dispersed and much of their mass base transformed into refugees, the NLL and the AWC largely ceased to function, at least as coherent national organizations. The new Arab left which had emerged in Palestine during the war and which had contributed so much to the development of the Arab trade union movement was thus swamped by the rising tide of intercommunal tension—the very tension it had hoped to moderate and overcome through Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity.

The PLL: Paralysis and Pathos

In none of the three main arenas of Arab-Jewish worker interaction during 1946–47 which I have discussed in detail in this chapter did the PLL play any role whatsoever. In fact, by the spring of 1946 internal Histadrut discussions were already taking it for granted that the PLL was no longer a particularly useful or valuable instrument. The new reality was not lost on Arab Department officials: at one meeting Shmu’el Solomon complained bitterly that the Histadrut had kept the PLL out of the strikes in the government, petroleum, and military base sectors during April and May 1946. “The PLL today is just a phrase,” Solomon admitted; “neither the Arabs nor the Histadrut want it.” The Histadrut leadership had in fact explicitly prohibited the PLL from trying to organize Arab camp workers, and the Histadrut's Trade Union Department, which handled labor affairs, had more or less excluded PLL representatives even from negotiations at workplaces where the PLL had some members, because it knew that if the PLL was included neither the PAWS nor the AWC would participate. Arab Department officials could not hide their feelings of betrayal and disappointment, but the decision to more or less write off the PLL, or perhaps more accurately to let it languish, had been made at the top, dictated by the exigencies of the postwar era.

Department officials now sought to preserve what they could of the project to which they had devoted so much energy, largely by trying to find jobs for loyal PLL members, even at the expense of displacing other Arab workers. Many of its branches melted away as members stopped attending meetings and paying dues. By May 1947, Arab Department officials were reduced to threatening the members of what had once seemed a flourishing PLL branch in Qalunya that the Histadrut would no longer represent them unless they paid their dues; and though the branch in Acre no longer had many members it was decided to keep it going, in hope of better times to come. It was a sign of the times that George Nassar, who under the tutelage of Moshe Erem of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol had thoroughly assimilated that party's socialist-Zionist ideology and for many years had proudly served as the most prominent and publicly presentable Arab associated with the Histadrut, was now no longer able to live safely in Jaffa. As tensions rose in Palestine during 1947, Nassar's open identification with the Histadrut and Zionism raised concerns for his personal safety and that of his family and compelled him to ask for the Histadrut's help in finding a place to live in Tel Aviv.^[29]

However, though the PLL was quite moribund as a labor organization, it still had its uses for propaganda purposes. The memorandum which the Histadrut submitted to the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine in the summer of 1947 included a section touting the PLL (whose membership was with great exaggeration given as 2,500) as the key vehicle of cooperation between Arab and Jewish workers and blaming the “reactionary political leadership” of the Arab community for preventing “a rising Arab proletariat [from] finding its natural ally in the Histadrut.…” Arab Department officials understood the useful role which those few Palestinian Arabs sympathetic to Zionism could play in the battle for world public opinion then under way. Referring to upcoming conferences of scouts in France, of youth in Prague, and of athletes in Warsaw, they noted that “it is desirable that friendly Arab delegations should appear at these conferences together with the Jewish delegations [from Palestine]. The PLL can put together such delegations from among its members.”^[30] The continued existence of the PLL also allowed the Histadrut to claim that it represented Arab workers and was entitled to speak for them within the international labor movement. In June 1947, the Histadrut sent George Nassar to Prague as the PLL's representative at a meeting of the WFTU General Council, accompanied by Eliyahu Agassi; Arab Department officials thought it would be useful if another Arab delegate could also be sent, preferably a Muslim, so as to give the delegation a more representative appearance.^[31]

Though they still went through the motions, however, the Jewish officials who ran the Arab Department and the PLL seem to have understood that the game was up. They knew very well that in Palestine itself the PLL was discredited among Arab workers, except for those few who had secured employment through it, and that even their loyalty to the organization was extremely shallow. They also knew that leaders of the international trade union movement were becoming increasingly familiar with, and respectful of, authentic Palestinian Arab labor leaders, men like Bulus Farah who not only came from the working class but had also acquired years of experience in the communist and trade union movements. The days when the Histadrut had any chance of “selling” the PLL as the authentic representative of the Arab workers had passed forever.

The work of these Jewish officials—at least of those who sincerely believed in what they were doing—had always involved a strong dose of self-delusion, of an ability not to see what was going on around them, or more accurately to see and interpret events only through the filters imposed by the ideology they professed. Now, however, as the understanding sank in that the Histadrut's project of organizing Arab workers under its auspices had finally reached a dead end, that self-delusion was increasingly supplemented by pathos. Shmu’el Solomon, who had led the Arab Department for several years, was already sounding a note of resignation, and perhaps of self-pity, in the autumn of 1945. “We cannot be happy about what we achieved,” he told his colleagues. “But we did a lot, we did our duty, without negligence. We regard the results not with pride, since there have been many failures, but not with pessimism [either], taking into consideration the circumstances. We sowed seeds which will still bear fruit—we hope—in our own day.”^[32]

The tone of pathos is even more evident in a letter which Eliyahu Agassi wrote to the WFTU's general secretary on the eve of the June 1947 meeting of that organization's General Council. In the letter Agassi complained about the harassment to which PLL members were being subjected by both the PAWS and the AWC. Agassi displayed no self-consciousness whatsoever about the fact that it was he, a Jew, who was writing this letter on behalf of a purportedly Arab organization, an organization which the Histadrut was still portraying (in its propaganda outside Palestine, at least) as the sole authentic voice of the Arab working class. Yet that fact, a manifestation of the PLL's inability to develop any Arab cadre or leadership or to transcend its origins as an instrument created, funded, and entirely controlled by the Histadrut, surely constituted a rather glaring admission of failure in and of itself. Just as peculiar was Agassi's insistence that now, at long last, the Arab workers were finally coming to understand “that the leaders of the [Arab] unions have misled them by warning them of imaginary disasters which are liable to strike them if they co-operate with their Jewish fellow-workers.” This assertion was of course a distortion of a much more complex historical record, but it is also a sad commentary on the capacity for self-delusion of a decent and intelligent man like Agassi, who certainly believed in what he was doing, had selflessly dedicated many years of his life to organizing Arab workers, and had not a few Arab friends.^[33]

By March 1948 what was left of the Histadrut's Arab Department in Tel Aviv was devoting itself to propaganda and information gathering, while the PLL was little more than a labor contracting agency through which some one hundred Arab workers in Haifa secured employment with Jewish companies at the port, especially Solel Boneh. These PLL members, whose wages were higher than those of other port workers, were now under increasing pressure from the nationalist camp, which regarded them as Zionist collaborators. In an ironic twist on the Hebrew labor issue, these workers defended themselves by arguing that if they stopped working for Jewish employers, their jobs might be taken over by Jews, or by Arab contractors using even more exploited Arab workers. But their situation took a turn for the worse when in March 1948 they became entangled in a conflict with their foreman, who was pocketing part of their wages. Some of them brought the foreman up on charges before the local National Committee. As the area in which the British still exercised control shrank, this committee had increasingly assumed responsibility for law and order among the Arab residents of Haifa. The foreman responded by charging that his accusers were helping the Hagana, which was at that moment engaged with Arab militias in a struggle for control of the city. The Committee's judges exonerated the workers, but in the days that followed the situation of the handful of Arabs still publicly associated with the PLL had become so perilous that consideration was given to having them go underground. They themselves rejected this option, since they could not afford to give up their jobs.

As the battle for control of Haifa intensified in April 1948, contact between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods became increasingly difficult. In the second half of April, after several weeks of fighting and intensive shelling of Arab neighborhoods by Jewish military forces, Arab resistance was broken. Arab Haifa surrendered on April 22, and in the days that followed the great majority of the city's remaining Arab population, panicked by the fighting and fearful of their fate under Jewish rule, was evacuated under British protection northward to Acre or Lebanon; most would eventually end up in refugee camps in Lebanon. On a visit to Haifa's Arab neighborhoods at the end of April, Eliyahu Agassi found that the formerly “teeming and noisy streets had overnight become as silent as a cemetery.” But he managed to locate a few PLL members still living in their homes, arranged to get them some food, and tried to reassure them about the rights which Arab workers would enjoy in the Jewish state, whose formal establishment was now just a few weeks away.^[34]

Hashomer Hatza‘ir and the End of the Binationalist Dream

Hashomer Hatza‘ir activists involved with Arab affairs had come to the conclusion that the PLL was not just useless but a serious obstacle to developing good relations with the Arab labor movement as early as 1945. One Hashomer Hatza‘ir activist in the Jewish railway workers' union in Haifa would later go so far as to declare that in that city, the PLL's historic base, it was regarded by the Arabs as a “quisling” organization to which no self-respecting Arab would belong.^[35] However, for all its criticisms of the PLL, the Histadrut leadership and MAPAI, and its sincere efforts to develop friendly relations with Arab unionists and leftists, Hashomer Hatza‘ir shared some of labor Zionism's key premises regarding Palestine's indigenous population. It too believed in the self-evidently progressive, emancipatory, and beneficial character of the Zionist enterprise's impact on Palestine's Arab majority, and even some of Cohen's coworkers in the Hakibbutz Ha’artzi Arab Department could sometimes express skepticism about the strength and authenticity of a distinct Palestinian Arab national identity.^[36] Moreover, Hashomer Hatza‘ir's political (and psychological) need to reconcile its faith in Zionism with its recognition of Arab national rights in Palestine sometimes led even those activists most passionately and sincerely concerned about Arab-Jewish relations into self-delusion.

We have already seen one instance of the self-delusion which Ha-shomer Hatza‘ir's ideological stance facilitated (and perhaps required) in Aharon Cohen's lengthy courtship of ‘Abd Allah al-Bandaq, the veteran communist whom Cohen—Hakibbutz Ha’artzi's leading expert on Arab affairs and a man of no small political sophistication—cast in 1942–43 as the potential leader of a pro-Zionist Palestinian Arab left. In its political struggles within the Yishuv and the world Zionist movement in 1945–47, Hashomer Hatza‘ir's advocacy of a binational state as an alternative to partition required it to find elements in the Arab community willing to take a similar stance. Though the movement and the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation in which it played a leading role devoted considerable time and energy to this search, it proved futile: such elements hardly existed, and those few Palestinian Arabs ready to break with their community's consensus in this way were quickly marginalized, if not liquidated.^[37] Nonetheless, until the fall of 1947, Hashomer Hatza‘ir strove mightily to find grounds for optimism about the prospects of Arab-Jewish compromise and friendship. When, for example, units of the Arab Legion, a force composed of Transjordanians but under British command, were stationed in Palestine in 1946 to help the authorities maintain order and suppress the Zionist insurgency, the Yishuv's leadership protested and proclaimed a policy of nonfraternization with its officers and soldiers. Some members of Hashomer Hatza‘ir kibbutzim located near Arab Legion camps defied this policy and sought to befriend the Transjordanians, who (much to the displeasure of their British commanders) were said to have responded warmly to this hospitality.^[38]

The handful of Hashomer Hatza‘ir members concerned about Arab-Jewish cooperation knew that they had to overcome considerable apathy, skepticism, and hostility even within their own movement. Zyoma Ben-Artzi, a member of Kibbutz Mazra‘, reported that when he developed friendly relations with the Arab Legionnaires stationed nearby, some of his fellow kibbutz members warned him against fraternizing with “these blacks” (hashehorim ha’ele), a derogatory term he was sure they would never have used to refer to Indians or Englishmen. The kibbutz youth (to whom Ben-Artzi referred by the Arabic term shabab) were, he went on, a rather wild bunch who were not properly educated about Arab-Jewish relations and were capable, just for the fun of it, of ganging up on “some poor Arab shepherd” and stealing a goat from him. Yosef Vashitz, who worked with Cohen in the movement's Arab Department, noted sadly (and with much idealization) that

there is more of a simple human attitude in the Arab's attitude toward the Jew than in the Jew's attitude toward the Arab. For the Arab, the Jew is first of all a human being, and only then a Jew; for the Jew, the Arab is an Arab and only after that a human being. In our kibbutzim as well, only a few have the proper human attitude toward their Arab neighbors. We have to remove the national and political clothing from day-to-day relations and worry about normal human relations. We should not strive to be missionaries or political preacher-activists, but seek relations among people who though different from one another are nonetheless human beings.^[39]

But more important than individual attitudes was the fact that rapidly changing political circumstances were eliminating the ground on which Hashomer Hatza‘ir had hoped to build Arab-Jewish friendship and develop support for a binational solution to the Palestine problem. The binational idea enjoyed only weak support in the Yishuv and the international Zionist movement, which in its great majority had embraced the demand for a sovereign Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible, and it was coming to seem ever more unrealistic. For one, all organized political forces in the Palestinian Arab community rejected it, since it entailed political parity between Arabs and Jews even though the former outnumbered the latter two to one, and in the version Hashomer Hatza‘ir espoused would also allow for continued Jewish immigration, eventually producing a Jewish majority. Like most Zionists, Arab nationalists wanted a state of their own in all of Palestine. But even those external forces on which Hashomer Hatza‘ir had pinned its hopes of preventing partition and securing some sort of binational solution in an undivided Palestine now abandoned this option. As we have seen, in May 1947 the Soviet Union began moving away from its historic support for a united Palestine and toward acceptance of partition if Arabs and Jews could not find a way to live together within a single state. The formal Soviet endorsement of UNSCOP's majority report in October 1947 meant that the world communist movement, toward which Hashomer Hatza‘ir oriented itself despite the obvious ideological difference over the question of Zionism, had abandoned a binational solution.

Unlike their Arab counterparts, the Jewish communists in Palestine were quick to embrace the new Soviet line. The entirely Jewish PCP not only abandoned the binational stance it had adopted after the collapse of the Arab-Jewish PCP and endorsed partition; before the end of November 1947 it went so far as to drop the word “Palestine” from its name and begin calling itself the Communist Party of Eretz Yisra’el, thereby reconciling itself to the ancient Jewish (and modern Zionist) name for this land, one which communists had always rejected.^[40] And when, on November 29, 1947, after intensive lobbying and considerable arm-twisting, the General Assembly voted by the necessary two-thirds majority to endorse partition, the binational option for which Hashomer Hatza‘ir and its allies had long fought was rendered entirely moot.

By that time Hashomer Hatza‘ir was already moving to adapt to changing realities. In the autumn of 1947 it was conducting merger negotiations with another left-Zionist party, Ahdut Ha‘avoda, which as I mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 7 split off from MAPAI in 1944 and two years later absorbed most of the remnants of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol. Despite these parties' very different origins and political trajectories, they shared much common ideological ground. But Ahdut Ha‘avoda strongly rejected Ha-shomer Hatza‘ir's advocacy of a binational regime for the country, favoring instead the creation in all of Palestine of a socialist Jewish state in which Arabs would have equal rights. Ahdut Ha‘avoda members played leading roles in the top ranks of the Yishuv's strongest militia, the Hagana, and of the Hagana's elite military formation, the PALMAH. Moreover, that party was infused with a rather aggressive, even militaristic (“activist”) ethos, in sharp contrast to Hashomer Hatza‘ir's historic aversion to violence and its emphasis on peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews. However, the UN's endorsement of partition allowed Hashomer Hatza‘ir to abandon binationalism and opened the way for unity with Ahdut Ha‘avoda. Early in 1948 the two parties merged to form MAPAM (the Hebrew acronym of “United Workers' Party”), which would serve as one of MAPAI's junior partners in the provisional government of the new State of Israel proclaimed on May 14, 1948, and which provided a highly disproportionate share of the commanders of the new Israeli army. In Israel's first parliamentary elections, held in January 1949, MAPAM emerged as the country's second-largest party, after MAPAI. By then, of course, the contours of the Palestine conflict had changed dramatically and irrevocably.^[41]

The Descent into Madness

It is a sad irony that the single bloodiest incident of the first month of the Arab-Jewish violence that erupted immediately after the UN General Assembly endorsed partition not only involved workers employed at a mixed workplace but occurred at a site which had a history of close cooperation between Arab and Jewish unionists. This incident, one of the first massacres of the 1947–49 period though by no means the last, contributed greatly to the dissemination of fear and hatred among both Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

The site in question was the Haifa oil refinery, which at the end of 1947 employed some 1,700 Arab and 270 Jewish manual workers, in addition to 190 Jewish, 110 Arab, and 60 British clerical workers. As I discussed earlier, the refinery workers had been involved in important struggles in 1946–47. In these struggles Arab workers and union activists had played the leading role, not surprisingly given the composition of the workforce and its high degree of organization. But the Arab unionists' relations with the Jewish refinery workers seem to have been good: the Histadrut's clerical workers' union had close ties with some of the Arab white-collar employees at the site, while the local Jewish workers' committee was dominated by Hashomer Hatza‘ir members who had developed good relations with Arab leftists and labor activists at the refinery. In the summer of 1947, for example, the members of the Jewish workers' committee at CRL were invited to attend the funeral in Acre of an Arab refinery worker who had been killed in an industrial accident. The Jewish activists accepted, and at the cemetery one of them eulogized the deceased. The Jews' participation made a positive impression on the Arab refinery workers and in Acre generally. The Arab and Jewish workers' committees also cooperated in organizing a brief memorial strike in the deceased's department at the refinery, together took up a collection to help his family, and joined in pressing management for fair compensation.^[42]

Whatever good feeling may have existed seems to have evaporated during the fall, and after the UN General Assembly voted to endorse partition the Jewish workers at the refinery became increasingly worried about their safety. On the morrow of the vote violence erupted in various parts of the country. At first this took the form of random attacks by Arabs against Jews and Jewish property and settlements, but Jews soon responded with attacks on Arabs. This quickly escalated into a cycle of violence and counterviolence using terrorist means, the first phase of an increasingly bitter and bloody civil war which would soon pit Arab and Jewish militias against one another in a deadly struggle for control of strategic roads, sites, and areas, and ultimately of Palestine itself. On the Jewish side the leading role in this struggle was played by the Hagana, the Yishuv's largest military force, which was closely linked to the Histadrut and was under the control of the official leadership of the Yishuv, itself largely dominated by the labor-Zionist movement from the mid-1930s onward. There were, however, other Jewish military forces which did not accept the authority of the Yishuv's leadership. The most important of these (though much smaller than the Hagana) was ETZEL, commanded by Menahem Begin and better known in the United States as the Irgun. As I mentioned in Chapter 7, it was ETZEL (linked to the right-wing Zionist Revisionist party, ancestor of today's Likud) which carried out the bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946. And it was an operation planned and executed by this organization which at the end of 1947 touched off the orgy of bloodshed at the Haifa refinery.

During December 1947, as civil war erupted in Palestine, the Hagana focused largely on protecting Jewish lives and property and on securing key lines of communications and transportation; later it began to take the offensive by mounting a series of military operations designed to crush Arab resistance and secure territory for the future Jewish state. Although during 1948 ETZEL would also stage military operations, in December 1947 it devoted itself largely to retaliating for attacks on Jewish civilians—thereby, it insisted, deterring further such attacks—by targeting Arab civilians. On December 29, 1947, ETZEL had staged a bomb attack at the Nablus Gate of Jerusalem's Old City which killed or wounded forty-four people. On the morning of the following day, Tuesday, December 30, 1947, ETZEL operatives threw bombs from a speeding car into a crowd of several hundred Arabs standing outside the main gate of the Haifa oil refinery in the hope of finding employment as day laborers; six people were killed and forty-two wounded. ETZEL would later announce, quite unapologetically, that these acts of terrorism in Jerusalem and Haifa had been carried out in retaliation for recent attacks on Jews elsewhere in Palestine.

Within minutes of the bomb attack at the Haifa refinery gate, some of the Arabs who had been part of the crowd outside surged into the refinery compound and, along with some of the Arab refinery workers, began attacking Jewish refinery workers. An hour passed before British soldiers and police arrived to restore order, by which time forty-one Jews had been killed and forty-nine wounded. This was the largest and most brutal massacre of civilians which Palestine had witnessed since the UN vote a month earlier. A committee of inquiry appointed by Haifa's Jewish community concluded that the massacre of Jews at the refinery was unpremeditated and that it had been precipitated by the ETZEL attack on the workers outside the gate.^[43] The Jewish Agency, the official leadership of the Yishuv, promptly denounced ETZEL for the “act of madness” which had brought about the catastrophe at the Haifa refinery, but it simultaneously decided to emulate ETZEL by secretly authorizing the Hagana to retaliate. A day after the refinery massacre, members of the Hagana's elite strike force, the PALMAH, attacked the village of Balad al-Shaykh not far from Haifa, where a number of Arab refinery workers lived, and nearby Hawasa as well. (The Nesher cement factory, where as we have seen the issue of Hebrew labor surfaced so contentiously in the 1920s and 1930s, was located near Balad al-Shaykh, and the village's cemetery contained the tomb of Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, whose death in a gunfight with police had made him a nationalist martyr and would set the stage for the outbreak of the 1936–39 revolt.) The Jewish attackers killed some sixty men, women, and children and destroyed several dozen houses. The contrast between the Yishuv leadership's official stance and its actual response to the refinery massacre was not lost on many Arabs. When Eli-yahu Agassi visited Haifa early in April 1948, an Arab worker berated him: “We know you Jews: you preach one thing and practice another. What was the crime of the Arab workers at Hawasa and Balad al-Shaykh whom your people attacked at night and slaughtered?”^[44]

The report of the Jewish committee investigating the refinery massacre noted that “there were isolated incidents of Arab workers and [white-collar] employees who in various ways warned and even succeeded in saving a number of Jews, their coworkers” and added that “not all the Arab workers at the enterprise participated in the rampage, and a significant number of the workers and employees did not participate in it.” However, the committee also found that “some of [the Arab refinery workers] took an active part in the riot” and that “there was no effort by a group of Arab workers to prevent others from rampaging.” This was, fortunately, not the case that same day at the railway workshops, located a short distance from the refinery. During December 1947 tensions between Arab and Jewish workers there had sometimes run high, despite efforts by Arab and Jewish union activists and leaders to keep the peace. When news of the bomb attack at the refinery reached the workshops, tensions soared and some of the younger and more hotheaded Arab workers there stopped work, shut down the machines, and began arming themselves with whatever makeshift weapons came to hand. For some very tense moments it seemed that the massacre at the refinery might be repeated at the railway workshops. But Arab unionists, including veteran PAWS activists like Sa‘id Qawwas and AWC sympathizers as well, promptly intervened to prevent violence. At great personal risk they prevailed on the hotheads to calm down and preserved order until arrangements could be made for the Jewish workers to leave work and reach their homes safely. A Jewish unionist at the workshops declared that “without a shadow of a doubt it is thanks to [the Arab unionists'] courage that what befell the workers at the refinery was not also our lot that day.”^[45]

The Arab unionists' effective intervention to prevent violence against Jews at the railway workshops received little public attention. Not surprisingly, the Yishuv focused on the massacre of Jews at the refinery, while the Arab community preferred to dwell on the preceding bomb attacks by Jews and the Hagana's subsequent retaliatory raid which took an even larger number of Arab lives. The vision of Arab-Jewish worker solidarity and of peaceful coexistence which had once motivated so many people could not survive the atrocities and the mutual dehumanization which were the inevitable by-products of the ferocious intercommunal warfare which engulfed Palestine in the months that followed. Even less could it survive the actual physical displacement of much of Palestine's Arab population. By May 14, 1948, when the State of Israel was formally established, several hundred thousand Arabs had already fled or been driven from their homes, land, and places of work. Over the following half year or so the ranks of the uprooted would double again, encompassing in all some 700,000 people, half of Palestine's Arab population and some 80 percent of the Arabs who had once lived within the three-quarters of Palestine that now became Israel.

So it was that in the summer of 1948 Efrayyim Krisher, a Hashomer Hatza‘ir activist employed at the Haifa railway workshops who had worked closely with Arab unionists for a decade and owed his life to their quick thinking and personal bravery on December 30, 1947, was busy trying to round up enough Jews who knew something about railway work to get what was now the Israel Railways up and running again. Some of his recruits were Jewish refugees from Europe, survivors of the Nazi campaign to exterminate European Jewry who had only recently arrived in the new Jewish state. These new arrivals, and Krisher's other recruits, filled jobs which until a few months earlier had been held by Arabs, most of whom had lost their homes and their homeland and were now beginning bitter new lives as refugees.

Notes