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.