9. Conclusion

At the end of December 1947, Pinhas Lubianker (later Lavon) addressed the central committee of MAPAI on the topic of “the Arab worker in the Jewish state.” A senior party official who would later serve as Israel's minister of defense and as general secretary of the Histadrut, Lubianker began by asserting that this would be the first time in the history of the Jews that they would have a non-Jewish minority population living among them, requiring them to set a good example of how a majority should behave toward a minority. It would not be easy, Lubianker warned.

There is [already] a sediment of 20 years of education, and especially the last 10 years, which has not inculcated in us the capacity for living together with the neighboring people. There is a primitive nationalism among the tzabarim [young Palestine-born Jews]. There is an historical instinct for revenge among the Oriental Jewish communities. There is danger from [Jewish] terrorist groups and the [right-wing Zionist] Revisionists and their nationalist megalomania. And we must also not forget the danger from the other side: the desire to paper over contradictions and shape Jewish-Arab relations in accordance with a sentimental irrationalism imported from abroad.…In the past we neglected the sphere of activity among Arabs not a little. It was not just that we had a weak program, but our will to realize this weak program was also weak. Today as well, the problem is not so much a change in the program as a change in our will. In other words, in addition to sporadic activity among the Arabs by seeking connections with individuals here and there, organizing a club, etc. etc., there is a need for large-scale and comprehensive activity in the Arab sector. Let us not forget, if we neglect this sphere the communist party in all its manifestations will exploit it.

Lubianker argued that since Jews and Arabs would be equal citizens in the Jewish state, the principle of Hebrew labor should not apply to either government employment or the private sector. He also advocated the establishment of state-run employment offices open to all, the equalization of Arab and Jewish wages and, eventually, the creation of a workers' movement which would encompass both Jews and Arabs.^[1]

A few months later Eli‘ezer Bauer (later Be’eri), a member of the Ha-kibbutz Ha’artzi–Hashomer Hatza‘ir Arab Department staff, put the issue even more sharply at the conclusion of a detailed report he had drawn up for the Jewish Agency's Labor Department on “The Arab Worker in the Jewish State.” “The transition from a colonial regime [in Palestine] to [Israel's] independence must not be for the Arabs a transition from a colonial regime in which a people from overseas rules repressively and exploitatively to a colonial regime in which the dominant people is local. A state which seeks to realize the ideas of Herzl's Altneuland cannot accept the existence of conditions like those in South Africa, where the human rights of an entire subject people are denied.”^[2]

Bauer's reference to Altneuland is ironic, though that was surely not his intention. By the time he submitted his report many tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs had already been forced from their homes, seeking refuge from the escalating warfare between Arabs and Jews or under compulsion from Jewish military forces. In the months that followed the trickle turned into a flood, and by the time the fighting ceased early in 1949 half of Palestine's Arab population had been displaced, including most of its working class, which had been concentrated in the more developed central and coastal regions which now became part of Israel. Many of these refugees found themselves outside their homeland, where they and their descendants remain today, while those Palestinians still within it, in those parts of Palestine which now became known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, found themselves under Arab but nonetheless alien rule, whether by the Hashemite regime based in the former Transjordan or by Egypt. The seeds were thus sown for continuing conflict, driven by the Palestinians' refusal to accept the consequences of defeat in 1948 and their apparently ineradicable drive for self-determination in some part of what had been Palestine. In his utopian novel Herzl had been vague about how Palestine's Arab majority had so quickly become a small minority amidst a sea of Jews, though he implied that the process had been peaceful and insisted that the Arabs had welcomed the influx of Jews. By contrast, the actual demographic transformation of Palestine in 1947–49 was accompanied by a great deal of force and violence and was certainly not welcomed by the country's Arabs, among whom it left scars that remain unhealed to this day.^[3]

Nor did Bauer and Lubianker's vision of a Jewish state in which Arabs would enjoy equality actually come to pass. The 160,000 Arabs who remained within Israel in 1949 became citizens of the new state and had the right to vote in local and national elections. But despite the promise embodied in the eloquent language of Israel's declaration of independence, they were certainly not full and equal citizens. Most of them remained under military administration until 1966, their lives subject to the often arbitrary authority of (Jewish) army officers from whom permits were required for many of the activities of daily life. The military administration, aided by the security service, sought to control the “Israeli Arabs” (as they were now designated), ensure their docility, and garner their votes for MAPAI by manipulating village, clan, and family rivalries and by using the same extremely broad powers of administrative detention, censorship, control of associational life, and restrictions on movement which the British had used to suppress the Arab revolt of 1936–39 and then (much less successfully) against the Jewish insurgency of 1945–47. Israeli officials justified these measures by the need to protect the state's security from subversive elements within a potentially hostile minority, a dangerous fifth column aligned with the Arab states with which Israel was still at war, though in fact the Palestinians within Israel were hardly rebellious. But these broad powers also served, along with a variety of legal and administrative strategems, to facilitate the transfer of large amounts of Arab-owned land to the control of the state, which then allocated it (as it did many other resources) for the exclusive benefit of Israel's Jewish citizens.^[4]

The hope that in the Jewish state Jewish and Arab workers could finally achieve cooperation and unity as equals was also not realized. The Israeli government and the Histadrut adopted policies and practices which sought to ensure that Arab workers were largely excluded from the Jewish sector of Israel's economy—in effect, a continuation of the old Hebrew labor policy, now enforced much more effectively by the sovereign authority of the state. Arab citizens of Israel were largely restricted to jobs in their own communities, though the government sometimes turned a blind eye to their employment elsewhere. MAPAI, in control of the government as well as the Histadrut, rejected demands by the socialist-Zionist MAPAM and the Israeli Communist Party (which included both Jews and Arabs) that Arabs be allowed to join the Histadrut. Instead, the Palestine Labor League was resurrected, renamed the Israel Labor League and used as the framework within which Arab workers were to be organized, under the close supervision of the Histadrut and the security apparatus, which also prevented the establishment of an autonomous Arab labor movement within Israel.^[5]

As Michael Shalev has shown, changing labor market conditions in the late 1950s, including developing labor shortages in the Jewish sector and a desire to gain access to new pools of cheap Arab labor, helped stimulate Histadrut and government officials to abandon rigidly exclusionary policies and allow Arab workers into the Israeli Jewish labor market. In 1959 the Histadrut officially resolved to admit non-Jews as full members, and they were able to vote in Histadrut elections for the first time in 1965. The Histadrut dropped the word “Hebrew” from its name and henceforth called itself simply the “General Organization of Workers in Israel.” The Israel Labor League, which like its predecessor the Palestine Labor League had never achieved any autonomous organizational life, was now finally and permanently disbanded. In 1966, after a long struggle waged by both Arabs and Jews but also in order to facilitate labor mobility, the military administration of Arab areas within Israel was finally abolished. As a result of these shifts Arabs gradually replaced “Oriental” Jews—that is, Jews from Arab countries or from elsewhere in Asia or Africa—in the lower strata of the labor force, especially in agriculture and construction, allowing the latter to move up the occupational ladder and the social scale. This process was further accelerated after 1967 as the Israeli labor market was flooded by a mass of even cheaper Palestinian workers from the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza, who unlike Palestinian citizens of Israel were not permitted to join the Histadrut and enjoyed few social benefits or workplace rights. These Palestinian workers came to dominate the very bottom ranks of the Israeli labor force.^[6]

The roots both of Lubianker's glowing vision of friendship and cooperation between Jewish and Arab workers in the Jewish state, and of the less pleasant realities of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel, can be traced back to the mandate period. As we have seen, the labor-Zionist movement consistently declared its adherence to the principle of friendship, solidarity, and unity between Jewish and Arab workers in Palestine. But the specific understanding of that principle evinced by the dominant force within that movement made realization of the ideal of cooperation between Arab and Jewish workers, unions, and labor organizations largely impossible. For by cooperation and solidarity Ahdut Ha‘avoda and then MAPAI generally meant that Arab workers should be organized under the exclusive tutelage of the Histadrut, in keeping with their deeply ingrained conviction that neither Palestinian Arab nationalism nor the Palestinian Arab workers' movement were authentic or legitimate. At the same time, Ahdut Ha‘avoda and MAPAI always gave highest priority to the struggle for Hebrew labor, which Arab workers could not help but understand as an actual or potential threat to their livelihoods.

It was only in the years between the end of the Second World War and the end of the mandate, when the Histadrut's Hebrew labor campaign and its effort to organize Arab workers were largely in abeyance, that the way was opened for fruitful cooperation between the Histadrut and the increasingly vigorous and effective Palestinian Arab workers' movement. As a result those years witnessed episodes of unprecedented worker activism and solidarity that transcended communal boundaries. But of course relations between Arab and Jewish workers, complex and often conflictual in their own right, could not be isolated from the larger conflict between Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism which in that same period entered a new and decisive phase. The violent struggle for control of Palestine that ensued determined whether Jews or Arabs would dominate in that land, and it also determined the fates of Palestine's Arab and Jewish working classes. One was largely dispersed, while the other, though the highly organized bulwark of Israel's dominant party, failed to achieve the exalted status, prosperity, and security which the visionaries and propagandists of labor Zionism had promised Jewish sovereignty would bring.

“If Only” History, Lost Voices, and Ways of Knowing

There are students of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict who have pointed to instances of Arab-Jewish cooperation in mandatory Palestine, and especially cooperation among workers, as evidence that the conflict need not have taken the course it did, that a peaceful solution which met the basic needs of both Arabs and Jews might have been found had the voices of reason, compromise, and working-class solidarity on both sides prevailed. The history of the mandate period thus becomes a story of missed opportunities focused on what might have been, a morality tale in which the “bad guys” on both sides triumph over the peacemakers, whose weakness and ineffectuality is somehow never really accounted for.^[7] As I stated in the Introduction, I am not making an “if only” argument here. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that the Zionist and Palestinian nationalist movements sought irreconcilable objectives and were on a collision course from the very start. Moreover, while it is true that during the mandate period various groups of Arab and Jewish workers were involved in efforts to cooperate and in some cases (the railway workers, for example) developed a sense of solidarity that at times transcended (or at least moderated) national divisions, it is also true that relations among them were profoundly affected by the dynamics of the broader Zionist-Palestinian conflict, as the fate of much of the Arab working class in 1948 conclusively demonstrated.

Yet while rejecting this way of writing history, it is important to remember that the workers and unionists and political activists and leaders who figure in this book could not know how things would eventually turn out or what consequences their actions would have. That is why I have tried to make sense of the diverse perspectives of various Arab and Jewish individuals, labor organizations, and political formations on the question of relations between Arab and Jewish workers and labor movements, including even those which seem in retrospect to have been historical dead ends, if not nonstarters. It is easy to ridicule those Jews who in 1920 adhered to what I termed a “Bolshevik-Zionist” vision and could thus imagine Trotsky's Red Army liberating Palestine and making it into a Jewish soviet republic, or to argue that Hashomer Hatza‘ir's vision of a binational and unpartitioned Palestine was never really in the cards. Nor is it difficult to see that the National Liberation League's insistence on distinguishing between Zionism and the Jews in Palestine and offering the latter the rights of a national minority in the future independent Arab Palestine never had much prospect of evoking interest in a Yishuv more determined than ever to seek a sovereign Jewish state in as much of the country as it could get. Nonetheless, a fuller understanding of the mandate era, and particularly of Arab-Jewish relations in that period, requires us to take these positions seriously, to try to grasp the spirit, the historical context, and the discursive field in which they were conceived and advanced, as well as to analyze why they failed to garner support and why other visions and strategies and policies won out. For the same reason we must (as I argued in the Introduction) make an effort to understand the subjective impulses, beliefs, and conceptions of the world which led the historical actors discussed in this book to think and act as they did, whether we ultimately judge those actions to have been right or wrong, humane or pernicious, appropriate or misguided, effective or futile.

This applies as much to faith in socialism as it does to faith in nationalism. That nationalism is by definition particularistic and in practice often divisive and exclusionary seems obvious, but in the nineteenth century and through most of the twentieth socialism seemed to many people to offer the promise of an identity and solidarity that transcended national, ethnic, religious, and racial divisions. We know of course that there has never really been a pure class identity “unsullied” by other forms of identity, other energies, other dreams; in fact, one could argue that working-class solidarity has been most effective and durable when it has also been infused by other solidarities, whether of religion, ethnicity, nationalism, gender, race, locale, or kinship. It is even plausible to argue that working-class solidarity, labor movements, and even socialism have in practice often been what we might today term a form of “identity politics” for male workers. Yet if this is an important insight, it would nonetheless be wrong to reduce socialism and worker activism to nothing but a form of identity politics. To do so would be to ignore the very diverse meanings which the socialist vision has had for different people (including many women) in different times and places, and to lose sight of some very important dimensions of human experience. As we have seen, socialism meant very different things to a variety of Arab and Jewish parties and movements in Palestine, and was related to Arab and Jewish nationalisms in complicated ways. These must be separated out and analyzed; they cannot be ignored or dismissed, however unrealistic or self-contradictory or even bizarre some of the formulations to which Arab and Jewish leftists subscribed may seem to us now.

In unpacking and analyzing the programs and actions of various individual thinkers and leaders, and of the organizations or movements within which they operated, I have argued that we must go beyond individual choice or group ideology, and beyond attributing certain attitudes to plain ignorance, to being out of touch with reality, with “the facts.” I have instead tried to show how those choices, ideologies, and attitudes, indeed “ignorance” itself, are actually products of certain systems of meaning, of certain ways of knowing. The case of Zionism's (and labor Zionism's) conception of Palestine's indigenous Arab population effectively illustrates this point. As I discussed in Chapter 1, that conception is not usefully explained in terms of ignorance or even of a willful refusal to recognize reality. Rather, if we want to understand why many Zionists were unable to acknowledge the authenticity of Palestinian Arab national sentiment and opposition to Zionism, we need to examine the generation and operation of a certain Zionist discourse about the Arabs, a more or less coherent system of meanings and exclusions which constituted a field of knowledge and simultaneously embodied a specific set of power relations.

That discourse was neither self-generating nor sui generis. It had strong roots in Zionist appropriations of Jewish history. But it also emerged within a broader field of contemporary European conceptions of, and attitudes toward, Asians and Africans, a field which was itself shaped by (and helped reproduce) a power relationship in which Europeans (whether in Europe or settled overseas) ruled over non-Europeans—a relationship summed up under the rubric of colonialism. In this sense, despite the vigorous debates among the various Zionist parties and factions over how to deal with the “Arab question,” it seems clear that “the Arabs” (and in the case of labor Zionism “the Arab workers”) with whom they were grappling were a constructed representation whose characteristics and relationship to Palestine partook of a broader European colonial discourse while also reflecting the Zionist movement's own economic, political, and psychological needs and interests.

As we have seen, most of the Jews who actually settled in Palestine continued to adhere to these conceptions of Arabs, particularly the rejection of the authenticity and legitimacy of Palestinian Arab nationalism, even when confronted with strong evidence that one might have expected would cause them to question their beliefs. That they were generally able to deal with inconvenient facts in a way that left their core beliefs intact should come as no surprise. This phenomenon is hardly unique to this particular group of people or this historical encounter: all of us do it to some extent each and every day, and sociopolitical movements which must hold to a certain vision of themselves, their mission, and their opponents if they are to overcome great obstacles and achieve their goals do it all the more. This again underscores the importance of exploring the cultural systems through which people make sense of their experiences, rather than trying to explain their beliefs and actions as the unmediated products of those experiences.

Specificity and the Relational Approach

Having advanced this argument, I hasten to add that how we go about analyzing the systems of meaning which informed and helped structure the ways in which the Arabs and Jews discussed in this book saw themselves and others, and the practices in which those discourses were embodied, also makes a big difference. For it is easy, and all too tempting, to essentialize discourses, to describe and analyze them as if they were unitary, internally unconflicted, and unchanging over time. In this book I have tried to argue that although one can discern certain core beliefs and considerable continuity in each, in Palestine neither Jewish nor Arab nationalisms were unitary and static objects. They need to be disaggregated, their complex forms and contents unpacked and contextualized. They were not self-contained objects with a singular meaning, nor did they exist in any authentic, original, or pure form, an ideal against which we may measure conformity or deviation. They, and the ideologies and movements they spawned, were constructed from diverse, sometimes even contradictory, elements within a particular social, cultural, political, and economic field and a particular historical conjuncture. Indeed, what gives them their specificity is their very complexity, even contradictoriness, a product of the complex fields within which they took shape and of the diversity of the social and political forces which deployed them in different ways, as well as of the obstacles and opponents they encountered along the way and which also shaped them.

Thus, for example, I have suggested that much of labor-Zionist discourse echoes themes found in colonial discourse generally: the denial of rational agency to the indigenous population, the definition of that population as lacking the characteristics of a nation and therefore as not entitled to self-determination, the attribution of anticolonial and nationalist sentiment and action to the malign influence of a small minority of self-interested “inciters,” the conception of the land as empty because not settled or utilized in familiar ways, the sense of European civilizing mission, and so forth. But labor Zionism's deployment of these themes was made distinctive, and perhaps especially complicated, because they were couched in the language of socialism, class struggle, and international working-class solidarity. As a nationalist project, labor Zionism posited ethnic/national boundaries between the Jewish and Arab working classes in Palestine, and more generally between Jews and Arabs, boundaries which also often involved elements drawn from colonial discourse. But because labor Zionism simultaneously conceived of itself as a working-class and socialist project, a component of the international labor and socialist movements, it also posited valid boundaries along class lines. It therefore had to find ways of managing the noncoincidence of those sets of boundaries.

The discursive and political contestation among the diverse forces within the labor-Zionist camp over a range of issues was bound up with the articulation over a period of several decades of a set of often exclusionary practices which shaped the Yishuv and later Israeli society in crucial ways. Those practices were themselves grasped as the basis not only for Jewish working-class formation and solidarity but for the realization of the Zionist project more broadly. These Jews in Palestine recast themselves as workers by securing or creating certain types of jobs, but also by endowing their acts with certain kinds of working-class and nationalist meaning, a process in which the economic was inextricably bound up with the cultural. As we have seen, at a certain stage in this process of self-definition Arab workers were assigned an important role: for a time the dominant tendency within labor Zionism found it useful to cast them both as an enemy to mobilize against, for economic as well as political ends, and as an ally, a passive junior partner, whose presence could be read as a guarantee of, and a justification for,the Zionist project. To put it another way, and more broadly, in Palestine as elsewhere working-class formation (indeed, all class formation) was as much a discursive as a material process, and needs to be analyzed as such.^[8]

It was in this sphere of Arab-Jewish interaction, and more generally in the way in which elements of a national project, a colonial-settler project, and a socialist or working-class project interpenetrated in a unique way and a unique context, that much of Zionism's specificity can be located. Comparison of Zionism with other contemporary cases of European overseas colonization and settlement bear out this claim by showing how very different political, social, and economic outcomes can (for example) be traced back to varying labor market strategies as well as to differing discourses and practices with regard to the indigenous population, which in the case of Palestine can in turn be related to the labor-Zionist movement's struggle for hegemony within the broader Zionist project. It is of course true that the realization of labor Zionism's vision of a “normal” Jewish society could be attained only after the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine, accompanied by the displacement of most of the Palestinians who lived in what became that state's territory and a massive influx of poor Jews (mainly from Arab countries) to fill the vacuum they had left. Yet labor Zionism's relative success in excluding Arab workers from the Jewish sector and constructing as self-sufficient a Jewish enclave as possible in the four decades before 1948—a strategy bound up with the articulation of certain visions of itself and of Arabs—was a key factor in making partition and Jewish statehood in most of Palestine possible. Moreover, many of the institutions most characteristic of Israeli society through the 1960s also took shape in the context of these specific practices and representations. After 1967, of course, things would change again, as Palestinians from within Israel but especially from the occupied West Bank and Gaza would come to dominate the lower ranks of Israel's working class. Yet this development too bears out my point, for it contributed in complex ways to the decline of labor-Zionist hegemony, manifested most dramatically in the defeat of the Labor Party (heir to MAPAI and its offshoots) in the 1977 elections, years of ascendancy by the Israeli right, and profound changes in Israeli politics, society, and culture.

Much of what I have said applies to Arab nationalism and the Arab workers' movement in Palestine as well. As both an ideology and a movement, Palestinian Arab nationalism encompassed a variety of interests, aspirations, visions, and sociopolitical forces, and we must be careful to avoid treating it as if it were monolithic or possessed some essential meaning. Unfortunately, most studies of this nationalism have focused on the politics of the Palestinian Arab (male) elite, while what that nationalism actually meant to the peasant and poor urban majority of Palestine's Arab community has received little attention.^[9] The kinds of things I have tried to address here—such dimensions of the Palestinian Arab experience as the Arab railway workers' persistent dream of unity with their Jewish coworkers, or the hopes and concerns of the Haifa construction workers and the Jaffa dockworkers discussed in Chapter 5, or the struggle which rank and file Arab workers in Jaffa waged against Hebrew labor and which helped set the stage for the general strike against British rule and Zionism shortly thereafter—have as a consequence been sorely neglected.

By the same token, the conventional narratives of Arab nationalism in Palestine do not provide much help in understanding why it was that some Arab unionists took pains to explain their perspective to Jewish coworkers in Hebrew-language leaflets, or in understanding the attitudes toward cooperation expressed by Arab labor leaders, unionists, and leftists in the 1940s, attitudes which sometimes brought down upon them the wrath of the nationalist leadership. The Arab workers and unionists discussed in this book were virtually all nationalists, in the broad sense that they strongly opposed what they regarded as Zionist encroachment on their homeland and favored an independent Arab Palestine. Nonetheless, as we have also seen, many of them were willing to ignore or defy the official nationalist line by embracing a discourse of worker solidarity across national boundaries that justified cooperation with Jews whom they knew to be avowed Zionists, provided it was on terms they deemed fair and equal. It is of course probable that many Arab workers, such as the Haifa tailors and carpenters whose 1925 strike the Histadrut helped guide, had (at least initially) only a limited understanding of what the Zionist project meant for them as Arabs (and specifically as Arab workers). Nonetheless, as I suggested in Chapter 5, it is not helpful to attribute such actions simply to ignorance, manipulation, individual pathology, or collaboration. To do so is to uncritically adopt nationalism's own language and way of seeing the world, for neither “ignorance” nor “collaboration” (nor even, on the positive side of the ledger, “resistance”) can be regarded as simple, transparent, uncomplicated, self-evident terms. All are very much embedded in nationalist discourse and must be analyzed as such.

It is not difficult to understand why nationalist movements find it necessary to condemn certain relationships between members of the national group and aliens as harmful to the national cause and try to deter or punish those involved in them; we may even deem such measures justifiable under certain circumstances. But for historians that must be where the questions about what collaboration really means to those involved in it start, not where they end—at least if we wish to avoid operating from within nationalism's conception of itself as a unitary and internally unconflicted ideal and identity that is superior to (or exclusive of) all other identities, sentiments, interests, loyalties, and aspirations. In the case at hand, the Arab nationalist perspective on cooperation between Arab and Jewish workers—or more precisely, the perspective of the nationalist movement's elite leadership—implicitly denied working-class Palestinian Arabs any capacity for agency, for making their own sense of complex (and generally adverse) circumstances and acting to further their interests as they defined them. It is not enough to label Arab workers who under certain circumstances cooperated with Zionists as “dupes” and leave it at that. We need, as I have tried to do here, to acquire a much more complex, nuanced, and historically grounded understanding of why particular people thought and acted as they did, however we ultimately judge their actions in moral or political terms. This in turn requires a more subtle and flexible conception of national identity, one that treats it as a complex of ideas, symbols, sentiments, and practices which people from various sociopolitical groups appropriate and deploy selectively and contingently, rather than some essence which is derivable from the writings and speeches of nationalist thinkers, leaders, or activists.

On both sides, then, contending sociopolitical forces put forward conflicting visions of national and class identity, and differing notions of how to relate to the other side's working class and labor movement. On both sides these conflicting definitions and strategies were influenced by Arab-Jewish interaction, in workplaces, neighborhoods, and daily life as well as in the formal political arena. More broadly, the existence in mandatory Palestine of overlapping Arab and Jewish markets for unskilled and semiskilled labor, and even to some extent for skilled labor, especially in the large and important government and transnational sectors, helped shape perceptions, strategies, and relationships among large segments of the Jewish and Arab working classes in Palestine. In this sense we may extend the late E. P. Thompson's evocative imagery to suggest that the Arab and Jewish working classes in Palestine not only “made themselves” but also to a large extent “made each other,” that each influenced the processes by which the other was formed, within a broader matrix of relations and forces. So instead of trying to characterize the sole or essential meaning of relations among Arab and Jewish workers and labor movements as either cooperation or conflict, it may make more sense to shift our focus to the ways in which intercommunal as well as intracommunal identities, boundaries, and projects were constructed and reproduced, and foreground the contestation which always characterized those processes.

However, as I suggested in the Introduction, it is not only with respect to workers that a relational approach which focuses on the mutually constitutive interactions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine may prove useful. I have argued, for example, that it was the urgent need to exit (at least partially) a labor market dominated by abundant low-wage Arab labor which prompted the labor-Zionist movement to strive to construct a relatively self-sufficient high-wage Jewish economic enclave in Palestine. This imperative also propelled the unrelenting struggle for Hebrew labor and other practices couched in the language of worker solidarity and class struggle but aimed largely at excluding or displacing Arab workers. These practices exacerbated intercommunal tensions, but they also facilitated labor Zionism's drive for hegemony over rival social and political forces within the Yishuv. By the mid-1930s this strategy, implemented mainly by the Histadrut (whose membership encompassed more than a quarter of the Yishuv's population in 1936) and its affiliated economic, social, cultural, and military institutions, had helped the labor-Zionist camp become the dominant force within the Yishuv and the international Zionist movement. In this sense, as I noted earlier, many of the institutions and practices which for an entire historical period—from the 1930s into the 1970s—were seen as the most distinctive features of the Yishuv and of Israeli society (the kibbutz and the moshav, the powerful state and Histadrut sectors of the economy, the cult of “pioneering,” the central role of the military) can be understood as directly or indirectly the product not so much of the values brought by the immigrants of the Second Aliya, as the functionalist school of Israeli sociology would have it, as of the Zionist project's interaction with Arabs and Arab society in Palestine itself.

Similarly, while Israeli sociologists have conventionally explained the subordinate social location and status of Israel's “Oriental” Jews in terms of the failure of these culturally “traditional” people to adapt successfully to a “modern” society, recent critical scholarship has stressed their relegation upon arrival in Israel to the bottom ranks of the labor market (where they displaced or replaced Palestinian Arabs) and official denigration and suppression of their cultures, defined by the dominant groups in Israel as backward (read Arab).^[10] Before the First World War some Zionist leaders had already envisioned Yemeni Jews as replacements for Palestinian Arab agricultural workers and actually sponsored Yemeni Jewish immigration to Palestine. This failed to solve the problem of Arab competition, however, and the Jewish labor movement turned instead to the struggle for Hebrew labor and economic separatism. After 1948 it was largely Jewish immigrants from Arab countries who filled the social vacuum created by the flight or expulsion of the vast majority of the Arabs who had lived within what became the borders of the new State of Israel, and as I noted earlier Oriental Jews' upward social mobility in the 1960s and 1970s was facilitated by the influx of Palestinians into the lower strata of the Israeli working class. It can thus be argued that the matrix of Jewish-Arab interactions in Palestine played a central role in shaping ethnic relations within Jewish society in Palestine and later Israel.

It is clear, too, that Arab society in Palestine was profoundly influenced by the Zionist project in a variety of ways. There was of course the catastrophic displacement of 1947–49, but in the preceding decades Jewish immigration, settlement, investment, and state building had already had an important impact on Arab society. That impact can be seen in the direct and indirect effects of Jewish land purchases, settlement, and agricultural practices on Arab agrarian relations, the complex effects on the Arab economy of the large-scale influx of capital that accompanied Jewish immigration and development, and the effects of the economic and social policies implemented by a British administration committed to fostering a Jewish “national home” in Palestine but also concerned about alienating the country's Arab majority. To take that impact into account does not imply downplaying other sources of social change or denigrating the Palestinians' capacity for historical agency. Rather, it broadens our frame of reference so as to include more of the complex historical field within which modern Palestinian Arab society developed.

As historians and others explore the history of modern Palestine in new ways, as the object of inquiry is reconceived and a different set of concepts and categories deployed, it will, I believe, become increasingly clear that the two communities were neither natural nor essentially monolithic entities. Nor were they hermetically sealed off from one another, as the conventional historiography assumes. Rather, they interacted in complex ways and had a mutually formative effect on one another, both as communities and through relationships that crossed communal boundaries to shape the identities and practices of various subgroups. These complex and contested processes operated at many levels and in many spheres, including markets for labor, land, agricultural produce and consumer goods, business ventures, residential patterns, manufacturing and services, municipal government, and various aspects of social and cultural life. These interactions also had an important but little-explored spatial dimension, manifested in shifts and reorientations in demographic, economic, political, and cultural relations and flows among and within different settlements, villages, urban neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions of Palestine.

As I discussed in the Introduction to this book, a number of recently published studies already manifest new approaches to the histories of Arabs and Jews in Palestine, approaches that challenge conventional categories, cross hitherto unquestioned boundaries, and treat Palestine not as sui generis but as eminently suitable for comparative study. This process will be furthered as more scholars frame and explore new and different kinds of problems while drawing on both Arabic and Hebrew source materials. There is certainly a lot to be done. I have already mentioned the paucity of work on women and gender, but many other areas remain largely unexplored, among them interactions in neighborhoods and markets, the development of colloquial language, and personal (including sexual) and business relationships across communal boundaries. While many of these things do not figure, or figure only marginally, in this book, I hope that it will nonetheless help stimulate further research in new directions.

One of feminist theory's most powerful insights is that all social relations, all human interactions, are gendered; that is, they manifest, and cannot be fully understood without taking into account, the system or systems of gender relations that prevail in a given society at a given time. Similarly, in her recent book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison has argued convincingly that one cannot really understand American literature, even that part of it written and largely read by whites, or by extension almost any aspect of American culture and society, without bringing race and race relations into the picture, without dealing with the way racial categories, identities, and attitudes help shape most if not all other categories, identities, and attitudes in American society. In Culture and Imperialism Edward W. Said has proceeded along similar lines by exploring the mutually formative relationship between nineteenth- and twentieth-century European (and American) culture and contemporaneous European imperial expansion and domination, and later American global hegemony as well. In so doing Said seeks to break with conventional perspectives which have treated “the West” and the rest of the world as entirely distinct and largely unconnected cultural domains.

In this book I have sought to approach Arab-Jewish relations in modern Palestine in much the same way. As I argued in Chapter 1, from the very beginning of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine the presence of a substantial Arab population must be seen not as marginal to the Zionist enterprise nor simply as an extraneous obstacle to be bypassed or overcome, even though that is how many, perhaps most, Zionists thought of it at the time, if they thought about Arabs at all. That presence must instead be seen as an essential, constitutive element in the formation of the Zionist project and the Yishuv, an integral part of the story rather than just a footnote. Moreover, Palestinian Arabs must be regarded as having possessed a capacity for agency which often intruded upon and altered Zionism's conceptions of itself and its mission, and always registered itself on and helped shape the Zionist project. Similarly, though for a long time the Jewish presence in Palestine may seem to have impinged much less directly and obviously on the country's Arab majority, it nonetheless had a significant impact in many spheres well before 1948, and like it or not room must be made for that presence in the story of the Palestinians.

Though the character and circumstances of their interactions have changed over time, over the past century Arabs and Jews in Palestine have helped shape each other's society and historical trajectory, as well as the ways they have thought of themselves and each other. That this interactive relationship continues to operate is evidenced by the political, social, and cultural impact on both Palestinians and Israeli Jews of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza from 1967 onward. As I suggested earlier, the occupation and its consequences reinforced trends already operative in Israeli Jewish society, contributing to the erosion of labor Zionism's political, ideological, and socioeconomic hegemony. We can also discern the effects of that impact in (for example) the growing strength of the Israeli right during the 1970s, the new political and cultural assertiveness of Israeli's Oriental Jewish communities, the Americanization of Israeli Jewish culture and politics, chronic instability and paralysis in the political system, and the decline of the Histadrut as a political, economic, and social institution.^[11] At the same time, after 1967 (and especially from the second half of the 1970s onward) the Palestinians within Israel have grown increasingly assertive in demanding both equal rights within Israel and Palestinian national rights more broadly. Their growing numbers, education, social weight, and capacity for mobilization have allowed them to take better advantage of the Israeli political system to pursue their interests as a community, while the end of their isolation from the rest of the Palestinian people has strengthened their national identity, if in complicated ways. Whatever the fate of the West Bank, Gaza, and their Arab inhabitants, the Palestinians within Israel will remain a presence with which their Jewish fellow citizens will have to reckon.

The occupation has also had profound effects on the Palestinians in the occupied territories. These include the decline of local agriculture, widespread proletarianization, the reinforcement of Palestinian national identity accompanied by a sense that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have their own particular problems and interests, the emergence of locally based organizations, a better understanding of Israeli politics, society, and culture, and a new capacity for resistance. This last effect was manifested most dramatically in the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the occupation which erupted in December 1987, at a moment when most Israelis but also many Arabs and others seemed to have once again written the Palestinians off as political actors.

Though it ultimately failed to win the Palestinians statehood, the intifada had a significant impact on Israeli and Palestinian perceptions and on the balance of forces between them. It dramatically raised the political, economic, and moral costs of the occupation for Jewish Israelis, compelling many of them to reckon as never before with the ineradicability of Palestinian nationalism, and it eventually led Israel to negotiate directly with the Palestinians (and ultimately with the PLO itself) rather than only with Arab states. It also prompted many Israeli Jews to seek new ways of understanding Zionism's encounter with the Palestinians and how the occupation had affected their own society. At the same time, the intifada gave the Palestinians, and especially those within the occupied territories, a new sense of self-confidence, in their capacity to resist and confront Israel but also in their ability to live alongside it in peace, provided they too are permitted to realize their dream of self-determination. The occupation, the intifada and its aftermath, as well as contact with Israeli society and the bitter experience of most Arab peoples with authoritarian regimes, have also strengthened the determination of many Palestinians that the future Palestinian state be democratic and fully respect its citizens' human and civil rights and liberties.

As I write these lines, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization are rather fitfully striving to implement (if only partially) the agreement they signed in September 1993. That agreement provided for the gradual introduction of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza, while deferring resolution of all the difficult issues—control of land and other resources, Jerusalem, the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the Palestinian refugees, Palestinian statehood—to future negotiations. That deferral has allowed the Israeli government, led by the political heirs of labor Zionism, to continue to put off having to accept, once and for all, the legitimacy of the Palestinian people's national rights, including the right to national self-determination in some part of what was once Palestine. Only time will tell whether the Israel-PLO agreement marks the beginning of a process which will ultimately lead to a comprehensive and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people, based on statehood for both peoples in Palestine, or whether it will turn out to be yet another dead end, another abortive attempt to reconcile Palestinian and Israeli Jewish aspirations to sovereignty and security. Given the agreement's flaws and limitations, the tragic history of this conflict, and the complex circumstances under which the current effort to bring it to an end is unfolding, a large dose of pessimism laced with a touch of hope would seem appropriate.

It is likely that many more struggles, crises and, I fear, more violence lie ahead. Beyond that it is useless to try to predict how things will develop, for the outcome of the current conjuncture will be determined by a very complex and rapidly changing mix of interacting political, social, economic, and cultural factors and forces. In that mix the effort by historians and other scholars to reinterpret the modern history of Palestine, to which this book is a contribution, may perhaps play some very modest part, by helping to undermine the hegemonic grip of nationalist mythologies on both sides and open up space for new modes of thought and action, and even new ways of imagining the future. In that sense, even if most Palestinians or Israelis do not come to see their pasts or their futures very differently as a result of scholarly reinterpretations of the history of modern Palestine, historians' efforts to understand the past may nonetheless have some bearing on current political struggles.

But historians must pursue their craft regardless of the impact of their work. I have sought here to explore some of the ways in which the histories of Arabs and Jews in modern Palestine have been inextricably and fatefully intertwined, while also attending to what makes those histories distinctive. Whatever the future may bring, the historical trajectories of Israeli Jews and Palestinians will continue to be intertwined. We are therefore compelled to try to envision how these two peoples might one day live together in peace, for the alternatives to peace are terrible to contemplate; and we may at least hope that a better understanding of the past will help bring that day closer.

Notes