1. This message is already suggested by the essay's title, for by calling it The Arab Movement (in the original Hebrew, Hatnu‘a Ha‘aravit), rather than, say, The Arab Nationalist Movement, Ben-Tzvi implicitly denied the authenticity of Palestinian Arab nationalism. Some sort of Arab movement apparently existed, but it was not genuinely national or nationalist in character.

2. Ben-Tzvi asserted that most of Palestine's Arab peasants were in fact descendants of the ancient Jewish rural population, who eventually adopted the language, culture, and religions of their conquerors. This would seem to contradict his argument about the ethnic incoherence of Palestine's Arab population.

3. As Ben-Tzvi put it, “The second element, after the Sunnis, is the Jewish people—second in number but first in building [up the land].” The phrase rhymes in Hebrew: hasheni beminyan, verishon bevinyan.

4. As Yonathan Shapiro points out, however, a few months earlier Ahdut Ha‘avoda alone had received 5,600 votes (the largest total for any party) in elections to the Yishuv's representative assembly, suggesting that it had already acquired some support among broader nonworker circles in the Yishuv. See The Formative Years of the Israeli Labour Party: The Organization of Power, 1919–1930 (London, 1976), 75. On Ahdut Ha‘avoda, see also Yosef Gorny, Ahdut Ha‘avoda, 1919–1930: hayesodot hara‘ayonim vehashita hamedinit (Tel Aviv, 1963). For a lively account of the founding of the Histadrut and its early years, see Ze’ev Tzahor, Baderekh lehanhagat hayishuv: hahistadrut bereishita (Jerusalem, 1982).

5. As the Histadrut will henceforth play a central role in this study, it is worthwhile to discuss it further. To start with, the very Hebrew term (‘ovdim) chosen for “workers” in its title tells us something important about labor Zionism's conception of itself and of the working class whose formation and course it saw itself as guiding. ‘Ovdim suggests all those who labor, thereby encompassing that large and politically powerful segment of the Histadrut's mass base which consisted of members of kibbutzim and moshavim, employees of Histadrut enterprises who were deemed to be members of producers' cooperatives rather than exploited proletarians, and even nonworking wives of the organization's largely male membership. (In this respect ‘ovdim may be usefully contrasted with another Hebrew term, po‘alim, which in left-Zionist usage had the narrower connotation of wage workers conceived of as proletarians.)

The choice of term was thus rooted in a labor-Zionist discourse which saw the Histadrut not as a traditional labor movement whose goal was to defend the interests of urban wage workers, but rather as an instrument to realize the Zionist project by constructing an egalitarian-cooperative Jewish society, in effect by means of the extension of the Histadrut and its network of institutions to encompass the great majority of the Jewish population of Palestine. This vision was ultimately manifested in David Ben-Gurion's slogan of the early 1930s, mema‘amad le‘am (“From Class to People”), suggesting that the labor-Zionist movement had achieved hegemony within the Zionist movement, that its interests now coincided with those of virtually the entire Yishuv (and Jewish people), and that therefore the rhetoric of class solidarity and struggle could be largely put aside.

The choice of the term “organization” rather than “federation” is also discursively significant. The new Histadrut's leadership, largely in the hands of Ahdut Ha‘avoda with Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir as junior partner, saw it not as a federation of largely autonomous trade unions, like the British Trades Union Congress or the AFL (and later the CIO and the AFL-CIO) in the United States, but rather as a highly centralized institution. Early efforts by some of the Jewish trade unions to achieve autonomy were quickly crushed by the Histadrut leadership, and thereafter top-down control was exercised through a powerful and increasingly bureaucratic apparatus based in Tel Aviv (the Histadrut's headquarters there was later nicknamed “the Kremlin”) as well as through a network of “workers' councils” (mo‘etzet hapo‘alim) in every city and town whose members were largely chosen not by the trade unions but by vote of all local Histadrut members, under a system of proportional representation according to party lists. This system tended to give party officials (and especially Ahdut Ha‘avoda and then MAPAI apparatchiks) control of the Histadrut apparatus at the local as well as at the national level.

The Histadrut was (and is) also perhaps unique among labor movements in that trade union affairs were (and to this day still are) relegated to a specific department which functioned alongside other Histadrut departments responsible for such “national” tasks as immigration, settlement, education and culture, and so forth. This again reflected the Histadrut's role as a central institution of the Zionist project, which usually overshadowed its trade union functions. By the mid-1920s, the organization's executive committee also exercised effective control over both Hevrat ‘Ovdim, the holding company for many of the Histadrut's expanding network of economic enterprises, and Kupat Holim, the Histadrut's health care system.

6. The protocol of the Histadrut's founding congress has been published in Asufot 1, no. 14 (December 1970).

7. On the formation and evolution of the SWP, see Slutzki, “MPSI.”

8. The SWP won 19.5 percent of the vote for delegates to the founding congress of the Histadrut in Jaffa and Tel Aviv and 16 percent in Haifa, reflecting the party's strength among urban workers, many of whom were recent immigrants. In contrast, the party did very poorly in the moshavot, where more conservative and veteran workers loyal to Ahdut Ha‘avoda and Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir predominated. Overall, the SWP received 6.8 percent of the votes cast, but its influence, and especially its ability to annoy and harass the labor-Zionist leadership, was out of all proportion to its limited base of support.

9. On the language question, see the serialized memoirs of communist activist Nahman List, “Tzadak hakomintern,” Keshet, no. 18 (1963), 139.

10. EC/H, December 30, 1920.

11. On the Hebrew labor campaigns during the 1920s and 1930s, see Shapira, Hama’avak, and Steven Glazer, “Propaganda and the Histadrut-Sponsored Pickets for ‘Hebrew Labor,’ 1927–1936” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, 1991).

12. On the linkages between Arab and Jewish wages, see Tzvi Sussman, Pa‘ar veshivayon bahistadrut: hahashpa‘a shel ha’ideologiya hashivyonit veha‘avoda ha‘aravit ‘al s’kharo shel ha‘oved hayehudi be’eretz yisra’el (Ramat Gan, 1974).

13. Government of Palestine, A Survey of Palestine (Jerusalem, 1946), vol. 1, 141, 148. Unfortunately, the mandatory government's censuses categorized people by religion rather than by nationality or ethnicity. As a result, the figures I cite here for Arabs are actually the combined totals for Muslims and Christians, and therefore include some non-Arab Christians, such as Armenians. But given the relatively small proportion of non-Arab Christians in the total number for Christians, my point about relative growth rates remains valid. It is perhaps also worth noting that urban growth was very uneven during the 1920s: inland towns grew much more slowly than Jaffa and Haifa, while the population of Gaza on the Mediterranean coast seems to have stagnated.

14. On labor migration, see Rachelle Taqqu, “Peasants into Workmen: Internal Labor Migration and the Arab Village Community under the Mandate,” in Joel S. Migdal, ed., Palestinian Society and Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 261–85. On Haifa specifically, see May Seikaly, “The Arab Community of Haifa, 1918–1936: A Study in Transformation” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Somerville College, Oxford University, 1983).

15. On the Palestinian working class and labor movement, see inter alia Musa al-Budayri, Tatawwur al-haraka al-‘ummaliyya al-‘arabiyya fi filastin (Beirut, 1981); Taqqu, “Arab Labor”; Salim al-Junaydi, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliyya al-‘arabiyya fi filastin, 1917–1985 (Amman, 1988); and ‘Abd al-Qadir Yasin, Ta’rikh al-tabaqa al-‘amila al-filastiniyya, 1918–1948 (Beirut, 1980).

16. These theses were first published in the Ahdut Ha‘avoda organ Kuntres, no. 91 (August 1921), and later in a collection of Ben-Gurion's essays and speeches on the Arab question, Anahnu veshkheineinu (Tel Aviv, 1931), 61–62.

17. As the Ahdut Ha‘avoda organ Kuntres put it proudly some years later, “the secretariat of the [Jaffa] Workers' Council, which was composed of five members of Ahdut Ha‘avoda, succeeded by means of constant and careful supervision of the union in suppressing the liquidationist [i.e., anti-Zionist] tendencies of the SWP members, and did not permit them to turn this union into a ‘political’ field of activity for them by bringing in Arabs whose attitude and loyalty toward trade union organization still required basic testing.” In fact the Jaffa Workers' Council expelled the left-led bakery workers' union from the Histadrut, but after the unions of metalworkers and building and roads workers threatened to quit in protest the Histadrut secretariat reversed the expulsion decision, on condition that the bakers' union stop calling itself “international.” See S/EC/H, July 31, 1922; ISA, Division 65 (Public Works), 2/149/1, C.I.D. report, August 9, 1922; Kuntres, no. 241 (November 27, 1925).

18. EC/H, October 28, 1921; S/EC/H, December 17, 1921 and January 19, 1922.

19. Kuntres, no. 106 (January 1922).

20. Kuntres, no. 165 (March 14, 1924).

21. See Ahdut Ha‘avoda, Have‘ida harevi‘it shel Ahdut Ha‘avoda: din veheshbon (Tel Aviv, 1924), and Kuntres, no. 172 (June 6, 1924).

22. Histadrut (Hava‘ad Hapo‘el), Din veheshbon lave‘ida hashlishit shel hahistadrut (Tel Aviv, 1927), 155. I discuss the impact of this resolution on the railway workers' union in Chapter 3.

23. In 1921 Ben-Tzvi warned his colleagues that it was “very likely” that “agitators” from the nationalist railway and tramway unions in Egypt would come to Palestine to organize local workers. S/EC/H, December 17, 1921.

24. For example, the Histadrut's second congress, held in February 1923, called for the “establishment of comradely relations with the Arab workers in the country and the development of ties with the Jewish and international workers' movement in the world.” Histadrut (Hava‘ad Hapo‘el), Have‘ida hashniyya shel hahistadrut (Tel Aviv, 1923), 30, 47–48. On Histadrut discussions about organizing Arab workers, see, for example, EC/H, March 23, 1922, and AA 208/28, Ben-Tzvi to Yitzhak Shemi, January 9, 1924.

25. The acronym PKP was often used to denote the Palestine Communist Party, from its initials in Yiddish, the language which most of its early adherents knew best and made a point of using when addressing Jews, since Hebrew had Zionist connotations; Zionist anticommunists seem to have used this acronym as a way of insinuating that the party and its ideology were alien imports in the Yishuv. The most important studies of the communist movement in Palestine in this period include Musa Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party, 1919–1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism (London, 1979); Shmu’el Dothan, Adumim: hamiflaga hakomunistit be’eretz yisra’el (Kfar Saba, 1991); Alain Greilsammer, Les Communistes Israeliens (Paris, 1978); Samih Samara, al-‘Amal al-shuyu‘i fi filastin: al-tabaqa wa’l-sha‘b fi muwajahat al-koloniyaliyya (Beirut, 1979); and Mahir al-Sharif, al-Umumiyya al-shuyu‘iyya wa-filastin, 1919–1928 (Beirut, 1980).

26. The only major study of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol is Elkana Margalit, Anatomia shel smol: Po‘alei Tziyon Smol be’eretz yisra’el (1919–1946) (Jerusalem, 1976). In the early 1920s Po‘alei Tziyon Smol is perhaps better characterized as a fractious political tendency than a unified party, and it would always be plagued by factionalism and splits, but for simplicity's sake I will discuss it here as if it were already at this point a unified and coherent organization.

27. For example, one source reports that as early as the autumn of 1922, Po‘alei Tziyon Smol militants in Haifa (of whom there were only a handful at this point) helped organize a strike of Arab workers employed at two carpentry workshops, one Jewish-owned and the other German-owned, which succeeded in raising wages and reducing the working day from twelve to nine hours. See Ze’ev Studni, “ ‘Al hayamim harishonim behaifa,” in L. Tarnopoler, ed., Ze’ev Abramovitch vemorashto (Tel Aviv, 1971), 399. Himself a Po‘alei Tziyon Smol activist in Haifa in the 1920s, Studni published a number of articles reminiscing about episodes in the history of the Jewish working class in Palestine. His accounts are not always reliable, however, as I will note later when citing him in connection with the strikes at Nesher in 1924–25.

28. Though Ahdut Ha‘avoda had won only 41 and 47 percent of the votes to the first and second congresses of the Histadrut respectively, it had managed to secure effective control of the organization's governing bodies. But in the September 1924 elections to the local workers' councils the party lost ground, and in both Haifa and Jerusalem it lost its majorities. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol did especially well in Haifa, where most of its votes came from the railway workers. Moreover, after these elections Ahdut Ha‘avoda perceived its rivals on left and right (Po‘alei Tziyon Smol and Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir) as conspiring to undermine its power.

29. On this period, see Shapiro, Formative Years, chs. 5–6. On Po‘alei Tziyon Smol in the 1924 elections, see Studni, “ ‘Al hayamim harishonim behaifa,” 402–5.

30. Kuntres, no. 166 (March 28, 1924).

31. See, for example, Eliyahu Golomb's article in Kuntres, no. 192 (November 7, 1924), and responses in subsequent issues.

32. Government of Palestine, Survey of Palestine, vol. 1, 148.

33. See Khalidi, All That Remains, 151–54, 202–3. As I noted in the Introduction, this is an invaluable source of information on pre-1948 Palestine.

34. On events at Nesher in 1924–25, see Kuntres, no. 301 (April 29, 1927); David Hacohen, Time to Tell: An Israeli Life, 1898–1984 (Cranbury, N.J., 1985), 90; Joseph Vashitz, “Jewish-Arab Relations at Haifa under the British Mandate” (unpublished manuscript), Part 3, 16–17; Ze’ev Studni, “Shvitat po‘alei Nesher,” Me’asef, no. 6 (March 1974); and Histadrut, Din veheshbon lave‘ida hashlishit, 157, the official Histadrut account. That account somehow manages to leave out the fact that the purpose of the 1925 Nesher strike was to prevent the employment of contracted Egyptian labor, while Studni fails to mention the second strike altogether. At about the same time there also seems to have been a strike involving both Arab and Jewish workers at the Grands Moulins flour mill in Haifa, but little is known about it.

35. For Ben-Gurion's comments, see Anahnu veshkheineinu, 107 (emphasis in the original); the letter is in Kuntres, no. 211 (March 27, 1925).

36. On the communists in Palestine in the 1920s, see Nahman List, “Tzadak hakomintern,” Keshet, nos. 18, 20, 22, 24, 27, 30, 34 (1963–67).

37. Government of Palestine, Survey of Palestine, vol. 1, 141.

38. S/EC/H, March 23, 1925, and EC/H, April 1, 1925; Kuntres, no. 301 (April 29, 1927).

39. Histadrut, Din veheshbon lave‘ida hashlishit, 156.

40. Berl Repetur, Lelo heref: ma‘asim uma’avakim (Tel Aviv, 1973), vol. 1, 101; AA, Center for Oral Documentation, transcript of interview with Avraham Khalfon, January 29, 1976; Ze’ev Studni, “Nitzanei ha’irgun hameshutaf behaifa beshnot ha‘esrim,” Me’asef, no. 7 (May 1975), 149–51.

41. Al-Karmil, October 10, 1925.

42. Ittihad al-‘Ummal, October 21, 1925.

43. AA, interview with Khalfon, January 29, 1976.

44. Al-Karmil, October 21, 1925. The Arabic term which al-Karmil used for “guild” was niqaba, which was already by this time the standard term for a labor union in Egypt. But in Palestine it still apparently retained its older guild-related connotations.

45. Filastin, August 19, 1927.

46. AA, interview with Khalfon, January 29, 1976.

47. For examples, see Histadrut, Din veheshbon lave‘ida hashlishit, 158.

48. For a good example of Palestinian nationalist attacks on the Histadrut's efforts to organize Arab workers, see Filastin, June 4, 1926, article entitled “Indigenous Workers between Zionism and Communism,” and another published on August 19, 1927, entitled “Our Workers Awake… The Jewish Unions Exploit the Forces of the Indigenous Workers… Need for the Establishment of National Unions.”

49. AA, interview with Khalfon, January 29, 1976; S/EC/H, May 2, December 14, 1927.

50. Quoted in Ze’ev Abramovitch, Besheirut hatnu‘a (Tel Aviv, 1965), 263.

51. S/EC/H, December 11, 1925.

52. AA 490/1–2.

53. See Taqqu, “Arab Labor,” 76–77.

54. Smith, Roots of Separatism, 155–59.

55. See, for example, CO 733/161/6 and 733/165/2.

56. Ben-Gurion, Anahnu veshkheineinu, 131–33.

57. Kuntres, no. 280 (October 26, 1926).

58. Kuntres, no. 211 (March 27, 1925).

59. See, for example, Yosef Yudelevitch's two-part essay in Kuntres, nos. 280 and 282 (November 1926).

60. When Po‘alei Tziyon Smol leader Moshe Erem addressed the congress, he acknowledged that in Poland his party favored separate national sections for Jewish workers within the trade unions, because there Jews were an oppressed national minority. But in Palestine, he argued, there was no need to separate Jewish from Arab workers.

61. AA, minutes of the third congress of the Histadrut, 13–15.

62. Ben-Gurion, Anahnu veshkheineinu, 138–39; emphasis in the original.

63. One can already detect in the Kibbutz Faction's cumbersome proposal the contours of Hashomer Hatza‘ir's constant battle to carve out for itself some political space within which its formal commitment to revolutionary socialism and Arab-Jewish fraternity could be reconciled with the exigencies of the Zionist project. For the wording of the proposal, see Efrayyim Krisher, “Ha’irgun hameshutaf bemivhan hahagshama,” Me’asef, nos. 3–4 (August 1972), 168–69. Strangely, Krisher asserts that the Kibbutz Faction's position was “basically accepted” by the third congress, which was in fact not at all the case.

64. For an account of the strike at the Mabruk factory, see Kuntres, no. 338 (June 1, 1928). The strikers succeeded in defeating an attempt by management to extend the workday.

65. For example, the Nazareth building workers whose strike Po‘alei Tziyon Smol had supported during the summer of 1927 had set up a club of their own, and Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi and Philip Hassun paid it a visit in January 1928. However, Ben-Tzvi's main concern about this fledgling organization was that the club, recently raided by the police for operating without a license, might end up under the control of the nationalists or be used to serve the interests of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol rather than those of the Histadrut. There was no follow-up on the part of the Histadrut and eventually contact was lost with this embryonic workers' organization, whose fate is unknown. S/EC/H, December 14, 1927, January 8, 1928.

66. S/EC/H, May 31, 1929.

67. For an example of the latter, see the February 10, 1929 issue of Derekh Hapo‘el (Worker's path), published by a group which called itself the “Left Bloc” and denounced the Histadrut leadership for neglecting joint organization and sabotaging Arab-Jewish class solidarity.