1. Quoted in Shapira, Hama’avak, 72.

2. CZA, S25/2961, EC/H to Zionist Executive, December 12, 1929.

3. Kisch, Palestine Diary, 259 (entry for September 9, 1929); EC/H, April 28, 1930.

4. In Hebrew slang, the term ‘avoda ‘aravit came to acquire a specific (and obviously racist) meaning: it meant work that was shoddy or inferior in quality. However, as used by labor Zionists in the context I am discussing here, the term ‘avoda ‘aravit meant simply work or activity among Arabs with the aim of organizing them under the Histadrut's tutelage.

5. The official account of the congress is in Jam‘iyyat al-‘Ummal, Mu’tamar al-‘ummal. Some of the Arabic-language press was hostile to the congress, for example the conservative Muslim al-Sirat al-mustaqim, which alleged that the congress was a Zionist plot. This prompted PAWS leaders to insist in Filastin that they were strongly anti-Zionist and rejected unity with Zionist workers.

6. CZA, S9/1679, January 15, 1930; Bilitzki, Beyitzira uvema’avak, 222.

7. Jam‘iyyat al-‘Ummal, Mu’tamar al-‘ummal, 42. In 1944 Nassar would refuse an offer to become a paid employee of the Histadrut's Arab Department because, he said, he preferred to remain a worker; see CoC/H, December 3, 1944.

8. AA 490/4; CZA, S25/30.043.

9. Not all of Ahavat Po‘alim's leaders shared Po‘alei Tziyon Smol's confidence that a truly socialist Zionism was entirely compatible with the interests of Arab workers in Palestine. Samuel Hugo Bergman, who was lecturer in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the first director of the National and University Library, and one of the leading figures in Brit Shalom, an organization of liberal Jewish intellectuals founded in 1926 to seek Jewish-Arab reconciliation, touched off a controversy within Ahavat Po‘alim when he took Moshe Erem to task for arguing that joint organization should be fostered not only because it was a manifestation of proletarian internationalism but also because it would promote class struggle and class polarization within the Arab community, thereby facilitating Jewish immigration and the Zionist project. “To use joint organization in order to realize the political aspirations of one people means destroying any possibility of joint organization,” Bergman insisted. He went on to argue that

Jewish immigration, despite all the good things that it has brought the Arab worker, weakens the political power of one of the peoples [in Palestine] and strengthens the political power of the other people, at a time of harsh struggle between the two peoples which all of Comrade Erem's class ideology cannot eliminate, at least for now, as long as no Jewish-Arab agreement has been reached. To seek joint organization at this moment in order to eliminate barriers to Jewish immigration—to this no patriotic Arab, no Arab worker with nationalist sentiments, will agree.

10. EC/KA, July 14, 1930.

11. EC/H, July 14, 21, 1930.

12. AA, minutes of the Histadrut Council, May 24–26, 1930.

13. For discussions of Burla's highly romanticized depictions of Arabs, see Risa Domb's very inadequate The Arab in Hebrew Prose, 1911–1948 (London, 1982), 49–56, and Gila Ramras-Rauch's somewhat better The Arab in Israeli Literature (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 22–27. Menahem Perry has discussed modern Hebrew literature's portrayal of Arabs much more interestingly in “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as a Metaphor in Recent Israeli Fiction,” Poetics Today 7, no. 4 (1986). Domb states that after 1948 Burla directed the cultural department of Israel's Ministry of Religious Affairs, while Ramras-Rauch asserts that he directed the Arab affairs department in the Ministry of Minorities; perhaps he held both posts at different times.

14. As I noted in Chapter 4, the Jewish Agency, though formally independent of the Zionist Organization, was soon effectively dominated by its Zionist members and became the de facto leadership body of the Yishuv. Ben-Gurion became a member of the Jewish Agency executive in 1933, after MAPAI emerged as the largest party within the Zionist movement, and its chairman in 1935.

15. See Kisch, Palestine Diary, 374 (entry for January 13, 1931); AA 208/320bet, Burla to Kisch, January 30, 1931 (emphasis in the original).

16. CZA, S25/3120, Burla to Kisch, February 18, 1931; EC/H, March 16, 1931.

17. Ibid; AA 208/320bet, Hassun to EC/H, February 10, 1931; CZA, S25/3120, Burla to Kisch, February 2, 9, 1931, and Jewish Agency to Histadrut, February 20, 1931; CZA, S25/2961; EC/H, March 16, 1931.

18. On drivers in Palestinian Arab popular culture, see ‘Ali al-Khalili, Aghani al-‘amal w’al-‘ummal fi filastin: dirasa (Jerusalem, 1979), 127–33. Lev Luis Grinberg's unpublished seminar paper, “Shvitat irgun hanehagim hayehudi-ha‘aravi, 1931,” which the author kindly shared with me, contributed to my understanding of this episode, though I do not entirely agree with his analysis or his conclusions. Anita Shapira also discusses the drivers' strikes briefly (and not very satisfactorily) in Hama’avak, 83–84.

19. See Gid‘on Biger, Moshevet keter o bayit le’umi: hashpa‘at hashilton habriti ‘al eretz-yisra’el, 1917–1930 (Jerusalem, 1983), 96–113.

20. AA 490/5, “Gilu’i da‘at,” June 29, 1931. Though motor transport competed with the Palestine Railways and adversely affected its revenues, it provided the mandatory government with a substantial new source of revenue which exceeded expenditures on road building and repair.

21. EC/H, June 30, 1931.

22. Filastin, June 30, 1931.

23. EC/H, August 3, 1931.

24. See Filastin for August 1931.

25. The leaflet can be found in CZA, S25/10.664.

26. For an account of the congress, see Filastin, November 3, 1931.

27. See AA 425/13, “El hanehagim ha‘aravim vehayehudim” (PCP leaflet), February 1932.

28. AA 208/321 and CZA, S25/2961. This was not the first time that members of the al-Dajani family, and perhaps Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani himself, had sought Zionist support. In 1922–23 the Zionists secretly funded a “National Muslim Society,” one of whose leaders was Shukri al-Dajani, in order to undermine the strongly anti-Zionist Arab Executive; and in 1923 Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani was among the initiators (with the Nashashibis) of the anti-Husayni “Palestinian Arab Nationalist Party,” which also secretly sought Zionist funding. See Ann Moseley Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939: The Frustration of a Nationalist Movement (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), 93–97, and Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 (London, 1974), 215–16, 224. For a sympathetic portrait of the Nashashibis and their political role, see Nasser Eddin Nashashibi, Jerusalem's Other Voice: Ragheb Nashashibi and Moderation in Palestinian Politics, 1920–1948 (Exeter, U.K., 1990).

29. AA, Center for Oral Documentation, transcript of interview with Shraga Goren (Gorokhovsky), May 24, 1972.

30. CO 733/206/8; Bulitin Hashomer Hatza‘ir, September 30, 1931; Ha-shomer Hatza‘ir, November 1931; Shapira, Hama’avak, 84–85; David Zait, Tziyonut bedarkhei shalom: darkho hara‘ayonit-politit shel Hashomer Hatza‘ir, 1927–1947 (Tel Aviv, 1985), 74–76.

31. AA 208/320alef, December 7, 1931.

32. EC/H, January 18, 1932; CZA, S25/2961, letter to Arlosoroff, March 22, 1932.

33. Hushi set forth his perspective in an article in Davar, December 13, 1932.

34. AA 208/321, Hassun to Ben-Tzvi, May 12, 1932; CZA S25/3120, Hassun to Ben-Tzvi, February 23, March 4, 1932.

35. See the entry in Dan Ben-Amotz and Netiva Ben-Yehuda, Milon ‘olami le‘ivrit meduberet (Tel Aviv, 1972).

36. See, for example, the minutes of a meeting of Histadrut leaders with the High Commissioner, March 22, 1932, in AA 208/280alef; CO 733/161/6, 165/2; and the minutes of the International Committee of the TUC's General Council for 1928–30, in the TUC Archives, box T 1853.

37. On the struggle for Hebrew labor at the Haifa port, see Lina Dar, “Hanisayon le’irgun meshutaf yehudi-‘aravi benamal haifa be-1932,” Me’asef, no. 14 (1984).

38. Ibid.; Yitzhak Pesah, “Leshe’eilat ha’irgun habeinle’umi shel sapanei haifa,” Hashomer Hatza‘ir, June 1932.

39. EC/H, May 29, 1932.

40. Oral interview with Eliyahu Agassi, May 6, 1987; AA, Center for Oral Documentation, transcript of interview with Eliyahu Agassi, February 22, 1972. After working in the Histadrut's Arab Department until the 1960s, Agassi set up and then directed its Arabic-language publishing house, retiring in 1975.

41. Oral interview with Agassi, May 6, 1987; EC/H, May 23, 1932.

42. Oral interview with Agassi, May 6, 1987.

43. Ben-Tzvi had already gone to Salonika to recruit Jewish dockworkers and seamen in 1914, but the outbreak of the war had frustrated his efforts. A few Salonika port workers did arrive in Haifa around 1922, however.

44. Dar, “Hanisayon,” 58ff; Taqqu, “Arab Labor,” 95.

45. Quoted in Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War (Oxford, 1985), 110.

46. Sussman, Pa‘ar veshivayon, 40.

47. See Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Untold Story of the Secret Agreement between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine (New York, 1984). On capital imports into Palestine more generally, see Rafael N. Rosenzweig, The Economic Consequences of Zionism (Leiden, 1989).

48. See Sa‘id B. Himadeh, ed., Economic Organization of Palestine (Beirut, 1938); David Horowitz and Rita Hinden, Economic Survey of Palestine (Tel Aviv, 1938); A. Revusky, Jews in Palestine (New York, 1936).

49. On Palestinian agriculture, see Henry Rosenfeld, “From Peasantry to Wage Labor and Residual Peasantry: The Transformation of an Arab Village,” in Robert Alan Manners, ed., Process and Pattern in Culture (Chicago, 1964), 211–34; Joel S. Migdal, ed., Palestinian Society and Politics (Princeton, 1980); Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984); Ylana N. Miller, Government and Society in Rural Palestine, 1920–1948 (Austin, Tex., 1985); and Sarah Graham-Brown, “The Political Economy of the Jabal Nablus, 1920–48,” in Roger Owen, ed., Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1982).

50. This episode is detailed in AA 208/321, Haifa Workers' Council to EC/H, July 1932. See too the Palestine Communist Party's Arabic-language organ Ila al-Imam, May 1933.

51. See al-Shakhsiyyat al-filastiniyya hatta ‘am 1945 (Jerusalem, 1979), 99.

52. AA 208/321, letter and leaflet; AA, interview with Agassi, February 22, 1972.

53. CZA, S25/3120, Haifa Workers' Council to EC/H, undated but probably late 1932 or early 1933.

54. Mo‘etzet Po‘alei Haifa, Hahistadrut behaifa beshanim 1933–1939 (Haifa, 1939), 240–41; AA 208/321, Haifa Workers' Council, “Memorandum on the Activities of the Labour Federation among the Arab Workers at Haifa,” 1932; AA 208/321, notes on meetings with Arab workers in Jaffa; AA 208/321, Dov Hoz to Tel Aviv Workers' Council, August 8, 30, 31, 1932.

55. AA 208/321, Nesher-Yagur Workers' Council to EC/H, September 28, 1932; CZA, S25/3120, Haifa Workers' Council to EC/H, c. November 1932; EC/H, October 3, 1932; AA 208/321, handwritten PCP leaflets, October 9, 10, 1932.

56. April 27, 1933.

57. AA 208/1200, “Din veheshbon memo‘etzet po‘alei Nesher”; AA, interview with Agassi, February 22, 1972; Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, Leshe’alot harega‘ (Tel Aviv, 1933).

58. AA 208/1200, Nesher, “Din veheshbon”; AA 205/6; AA 208/781bet, PAWS leaflet, March 1, 1936; S/EC/H, March 6, 1936.

59. CZA, S25/3120, “Shvitat hastevedorim ha‘aravim ha‘ovdim behevrat Jabra, Mursi ve-Onbarji”; CZA, S25/3120, March 5, 1933, “Irgun po‘alei Shell.”

60. See, for example, CZA, S25/3120, “Shvitat hastevedorim.” Histadrut officials were quick to report communists to government officials and employers so that they could be fired.

61. Halohem, March 2, 1933. See too Po‘alei Tziyon Smol, Me’ora‘ot oktober 1933 (Tel Aviv, 1933).

62. Hashomer Hatza‘ir, Matza‘ Hashomer Hatza‘ir lave‘ida harevi‘it shel hahistadrut (December 1932).

63. “Reshima ma‘amadit,” in MAKI (Israel Communist Party) Archive, at Hakibbutz Hame’uhad Archive, Yad Tabenkin (Ef‘al), series 35, “MAKI—shonot.” Shmuel Dothan has pointed out that in the early 1930s Hashomer Hatza‘ir's membership constituted an important source of recruits for the PCP, and the leadership of that socialist-Zionist movement was preoccupied with suppressing what it saw as leftist “deviations” tending toward “liquidationism” (i.e., abandonment of Zionism) in its ranks. See Adumim, 165.

64. CZA, S25/2961, Kaplan to Arlosoroff, April 3, 1933, and Hoz to Shertok, December 20, 1933; CZA, S25/3120, Hushi to EC/H, November 23, 1933; CZA, S25/2961, Zaslani to Shertok and Kaplan, October 17, 1934.

65. EC/H, June 7, 13, 1934; Shapira, Hama’avak, 177–79; Zait, Tziyonut, 136–37.

66. AA 104/35alef-bet, minutes of council meeting.

67. EC/H, September 6, 29, 1934; CZA, S25/2961, “Kavim letokhnit hape‘ula” and meeting of the Arab Committee, December 23, 1934.

68. CZA, S25/4618, “Co-operation between Jewish and Arab Workers under the Auspices of the General Federation of Jewish Labour,” memorandum submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission, 1936. On Haifa, see Vashitz, “Jewish-Arab Relations,” Part 1, chs. 2, 6.

69. Hashomer Hatza‘ir managed to find in the “Hawrani threat” one more guarantee of socialist-Zionist success. The movement's second-in-command, Ya‘akov Hazan, sounded the alarm about “the uninterrupted mass entry of cheap labor from neighboring countries into Palestine.” But he went on to argue that this “threat” would open the way to “a new period of development in the relations between the Palestinian Arab worker and the organized Jewish worker. This will be a period characterized by the joint struggle of the organized Jewish worker and the Arab worker against this wave of cheap labor. Such a front will pave the way to a better mutual understanding and correlation between the two peoples than any amount of diplomatic maneuvering on this field.” See Ya‘akov Hazan, “Jewish Unions and Arab Labor,” in Enzo Sereni and R. E. Ashery, eds., Jews and Arabs in Palestine: Studies in a National and Colonial Problem (New York, 1936), 244–45. Hazan's prognosis that Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews would unite to defend their jobs and wages against Hawrani migrants, thereby conducing to international class solidarity, would not be borne out. Though some organized Arab workers clearly did feel threatened by migrants from outside Palestine, they felt much more threatened by the Histadrut's relentless campaign for Hebrew labor. The British authorities eventually responded to Zionist and Arab protests by encouraging Arab contractors to prefer Palestinian labor. By 1935, when about 20 percent of the stevedores and 25 percent of the porters at Jaffa harbor were non-Palestinians, no new licenses were being issued to newly arrived non-Palestinians; see Taqqu, “Arab Labor,” 95.

70. CZA, S25/2961, Zaslani to Hoz, October 14, 1934 (emphasis in the original); AA, interview with Agassi, February 29, 1972; CZA, S25/3107, Zaslani to Hoz, September 24, 1934.

71. On this strike, see Filastin, August 18, 31, 1933.

72. On Zaslani/Shilo’ah, see Haggai Eshed, Mosad shel ish ehad: Reuven Shilo’ah—avi hamodi‘in hayisra’eli (Tel Aviv, 1988), from which much of the information in this section is drawn.

73. EC/H, April 28, 1930; AA 208/320bet, “Tokhnit pe‘ula,” 1931; Ian Black, Zionism and the Arabs, 1936–1939 (New York, 1986), 175–85.

74. In November 1946, for example, Eliyahu Sasson, director of the Arab Bureau in the Jewish Agency's Political Department, sent a memorandum to his boss Moshe Shertok arguing that the time had come to develop a comprehensive plan to influence the course of events in the Arab world. In addition to gaining control of newspapers in the Arab states for propaganda and political purposes, Sasson proposed that the Zionist movement consider devoting resources to bringing about the partition of Lebanon between Muslims and Christians, preventing the expansion of the League of Arab States, and helping Iraq's Shi‘i community against that country's strongly anti-Zionist Sunni rulers. See CZA, S25/3016, November 20, 1946.

75. See Filastin, July–October 1934.

76. See Shapira, Hama’avak, 229–33; Glazer, “Propaganda and the Histadrut-Sponsored Pickets for ‘Hebrew Labor’.”

77. Filastin, December 18, 1934.

78. A translation of the Tel Aviv Workers' Council circular and an account of the incident can be found in George Mansur, The Arab Worker under the Palestine mandate (Jerusalem, 1938), 29–31. George Mansur worked as a baker and then as a schoolteacher (including a year at a Jewish school in Baghdad), and later served under Michel Mitri as secretary of the AWS in Jaffa.

79. CZA, S25/2961, “Din veheshbon shel Agassi veZaslani,” November 20, 1934; emphasis in the original.

80. AA 250/436, Zaslani to Agassi, November 25, 1934.

81. AA, interview with Agassi, February 29, 1972.

82. ISA, Jaffa Port, 28/1, 158/35, January 16, 1935; on political and security concerns, see FO 371/17878, CID, July 14, 1934.

83. On the strike of February–March 1935, see Filastin, March 5, 6, 8, 1935, and Jabra Niqula, Harakat al-idrabat bayn al-‘ummal al-‘arab fi filastin (Jaffa, 1935), 10–14. Niqula was a veteran communist activist whose survey of strike activity in Palestine denounced both the “Zionist Histadrut” and the “opportunist” Michel Mitri for their “betrayals” of the workers. His accounts of strikes tend to exaggerate the role played by the Transport Workers' Union, a marginal organization controlled by the PCP. On the findings of the 1935 Jaffa labor committee, see Taqqu, “Arab Labor,” 96–98, and CO 733/292/3, High Commissioner to the Colonial Secretary, April 11, 1936.

84. AA 208/4495.

85. AA 205/6, meeting of the Arab Committee, November 11, 1936; CZA, S25/2961, Agassi to the Political Department, February 15, 1937.

86. AA 250/436, minutes of meeting of the Arab Committee, December 23, 1934.

87. Ibid., and various letters in the same file; CZA, S25/2961, Hoz to Shertok, January 17, 1935.

88. Mansur, Arab Worker, 33; Hashomer Hatza‘ir, May 15, 1935; Kol Hano‘ar, July 1935. For an overview, see Anita Shapira, “Even Vesid—parashat shutafut yehudit-‘aravit menekudat hare’ut shel ‘avoda ‘ivrit,” Me’asef, no. 7 (May 1975). It is interesting to note that few of the labor-Zionist accounts of the PLL mention this strike.

89. Niqula, Harakat al-idrabat, 15–27; Filastin, February–March 1935; AA 426/16, PCP leaflet, “Lekol hapo‘alim hayehudim”; AA, interview with Agassi, February 29, 1972; Abba Hushi, Brit po‘alei eretz yisra’el (Tel Aviv, 1943), 19–22.

90. For example, ibid.; Niqula, Harakat al-idrabat; Hashomer Hatza‘ir, March 15, 1935.

91. CZA, S25/2961, Hoz to Shertok, January 17, 1935; February 25, 1936, Zaslani to Shertok. The role which the PLL played in one labor struggle in this period once again pointed up the contradiction between the Histadrut's commitment to Hebrew labor and its rhetoric of solidarity with Arab workers. In October 1935 the Jewish-owned Mosaica floor-tile factory, which had employed both Jews and Arabs, was moved from Haifa to a new site north of the city on land owned by the Jewish National Fund. Because that institution required that only Jews live or be employed on land it leased out, the factory took the opportunity to fire all its Arab workers and replace them with Jews. Abba Hushi intervened, not to save the workers' jobs (he approved of the factory's transition to full Hebrew labor) but to try to secure some severance pay for them, because the fired Arab workers were PLL members. At the same time, the factory's Jewish workers went on strike after the owner withheld their wages. A PLL leaflet urged the fired Arab workers to demand severance pay for themselves but also to support the Jewish strikers. See AA 208/781alef, Haifa Workers' Council to Histadrut Arab Secretariat, October 22, 1935, and PLL leaflet, November 1, 1935.

92. See Mansur, Arab Worker, 6.

93. Mansur, Arab Worker, 59–61; Filastin, February 21, 1936; al-Difa‘, February 23, 1936; AA 490/2, AWS leaflet; George Mansur, testimony before the Peel Commission, in Great Britain, Palestine Royal Commission, Minutes of Evidence, 343.

94. AA 205/6, Arab Committee, April 2, 1936.

95. Hashomer Hatza‘ir, April 1, 1936.

96. Al-Difa‘, April 12, 1936.

97. Curiously, Yehoshua Porath makes no mention of this politically significant convergence in either The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929–1939 (London, 1977) or “Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement,” in Menahem Milson, ed., Society and Political Structure in the Arab World (New York, 1973).