The Jaffa Dockworkers and the PLL

Agassi, Zaslani, and their colleagues involved in organizing Arab workers could not avoid confronting the issue of Hebrew labor as it gained greater public attention during 1934. They were well aware of how much the Histadrut's Hebrew labor campaign alienated Arab workers and undermined the PLL's efforts. However, as loyal MAPAI members they supported Hebrew labor in principle, if not always the way the campaigns to achieve it were carried out, and they did not believe that it in any way contradicted their commitment to socialism or to the organization of Arab workers. So while Hashomer Hatza‘ir activists tended to evade or downplay the issue, the MAPAI members involved in Arab work tended to confront it head-on, confident that they could make a good case for their party's position. In Jaffa at the end of 1934, however, this was less a matter of virtue than of necessity: Zaslani and Agassi could not really hope to avoid the issue, since it was being raised very openly and forcefully not only by Arab trade unionists seeking to destroy the PLL's influence and “rescue” Arab workers from Zionist influence but by rank and file workers themselves.

In November 1934, in an effort to seize the initiative from their opponents in the struggle for the support of the Jaffa dockworkers, Zaslani and Agassi went so far as to invite the secretary of the Jaffa branch of the PAWS to a meeting of some fifty Arab workers, most of them stevedores, at the PLL's club. According to Zaslani and Agassi, who submitted a report on the meeting to the Histadrut and to the Jewish Agency's Political Department, the PAWS leader denounced the Histadrut for stealing Arab jobs, reminded the stevedores of the “disaster” which had occurred at Haifa harbor (i.e., the introduction of Jewish workers after the organization of the PLL-sponsored Harbor Workers' Union there) and asked if they wanted to allow the Histadrut to bring about the same outcome in Jaffa as well. In their response, Zaslani and Agassi did not directly address the substance of their opponent's charges but instead sought to put him on the defensive and undermine his credibility by demanding that he provide proof of his allegations.

The Jewish unionists thought they had made their case, but after the PAWS secretary left the stevedores reiterated his allegation that the Histadrut was out to bring Jewish workers into the port, take it over, and deprive the Arabs of their livelihood. They pressed Agassi and Zaslani for an explicit promise that the Histadrut would not seek to bring Jewish workers into Jaffa harbor. Zaslani and Agassi could not of course make such a promise, since the Histadrut did in fact hope to achieve Hebrew labor at the harbor as elsewhere; indeed, one of the PLL's chief raisons d'être was to facilitate that effort. In the end the stevedores had to settle for a much vaguer promise that no Histadrut member would take a job from any permanently employed port worker. Zaslani also had to promise that the stevedores' union would remain independent even after it affiliated with the PLL.

Zaslani and Agassi concluded their report on this episode by stating that “one may say with confidence that as a result of this meeting our organization in Jaffa has been strengthened and inoculated.”^[79] This statement soon proved to be rather overconfident, as the PLL in Jaffa remained under constant pressure from Arab labor organizations. A few days after this debate, Zaslani reported to Agassi that both Michel Mitri's AWS and the Jaffa branch of the PAWS were leafleting the stevedores affiliated with the PLL and that this activity had led at least one member of the union's leadership to resign. At the same time, Ibrahim al-Sawi, who was receiving money from the PLL and acting as its main agent among the stevedores, was said to be displaying dictatorial behavior and angering union members. Moreover, the port workers were insisting on keeping some distance between their union and the PLL: they had refused to sign their names to the application of the PLL's Jaffa branch for registration as an officially recognized organization. For the same reason, the letter which the Jaffa stevedores' union sent to the various labor contractors at Jaffa port in January 1935 contained no mention whatsoever of the PLL or the Histadrut, though it was Zaslani who forwarded a translation of the letter directly to the British official who managed the port of Jaffa.^[80]

The stevedores' tough questions at the meeting and their insistence on independence from the PLL indicate that they were not quite as unaware, guileless, and docile as labor-Zionist leaders tended to depict them—nor as easily duped and manipulated as Arab nationalists believed. Agassi would later speak of the effort to instill “proletarian consciousness” (hakara po‘alit) in these workers, by which he meant labor Zionism's conception of how Arab workers should think and behave.^[81] In fact the stevedores, and other groups of Arab workers elsewhere, seem to have had their own sense of who they were and what they wanted, a sense which did not necessarily coincide with what the PLL proposed. The stevedores understood that several rival labor organizations were seeking to win their support and sought to turn that rivalry to their advantage; they also knew that identifiable union members were subject to threats and harassment, and even exclusion from work, from the labor contractors through whom they were employed. They were obviously well aware of the Histadrut's commitment to Hebrew labor and that policy's implications for their own livelihood. As a result, though they were not in principle unwilling to cooperate with the Histadrut, whose clout and resources they knew to be considerably greater than those available to any Arab labor organization, they sought insofar as possible to do so on their own terms. This episode can therefore be read as reinforcing my argument that it is not useful to uncritically accept Arab nationalist depictions of cooperation between Zionists and Arab workers as instances of either manipulation or collaboration, at least in any simple sense of those terms.

The stevedores faced extremely adverse conditions in their struggle to organize. While L. K. Pope, Port Manager at Jaffa, urged the contractors to meet with the stevedores' representatives, his main concern was to avoid any trouble and preserve the status quo until the end of the citrus export season. He and other British officials were also concerned that if the Histadrut succeeded in organizing Arab workers at Jaffa port it might achieve a stranglehold over this vital enterprise. In a letter to the Director of Customs, Excise and Trade, Pope declared that the stevedores' demands for better pay, an eight-hour day, and overtime pay—“doubtless prompted by the General Federation of Jewish Labour in Palestine”—were exaggerated. In any event, he went on, “I am not in favour of an 8 hour working day for Arab labour. Such labourers are in actual fact more contented and happier when they work than they would be were a considerable portion of their waking hours to be spent lounging in the Cafés and markets of the Town.”^[82]

But growing tensions and eventually open conflict at the port soon made Pope's dismissive attitude untenable. At the end of February 1935 some sixty workers employed at the port development project went on strike, originally to protest the dismissal of a comrade who had been fired after a dispute with his foreman, and then to demand an eight-hour workday, a six-day workweek, and higher wages. AWS leader Michel Mitri quickly appeared on the scene and sought to negotiate on the workers' behalf. Though the strike ended in failure after a week, it was a clear manifestation of growing discontent. The contractors' efforts early in 1935 to break the stevedores' union by harassment and, for a time, by refusing to employ union members led to persistent friction and sometimes violent conflict on the docks. To restore order, and to deflect questions being raised by Labor Party members of Parliament, the British authorities in Palestine appointed a committee to investigate labor conditions at the port of Jaffa. Since that committee was chaired by none other than L. K. Pope, it not very surprisingly reported that the stevedores had no serious grievances and that no immediate government action was called for. In fact no further action was taken before the outbreak of the 1936 general strike.^[83]

During the latter part of 1935 the PLL's base of support at the port of Jaffa disappeared. With the support or acquiescence of British port officials, the contractors sought to break the dockworkers' union by various means, including the denial of work to union members and other “troublemakers.” Poignant evidence of the use of this tactic has survived in the form of a petition bearing the signatures or thumbprints of fourteen Jaffa dockworkers who had been dismissed by their boss, Mahmud al-Qumbarji, at the end of June 1935.^[84] Competition from the Arab unions and rising political tensions exacerbated by the Histadrut's Hebrew labor campaign also helped increase the costs of cooperation with the PLL well beyond any actual or potential benefits to Arab workers. Then, in October 1935, a barrel purportedly containing a shipment of cement accidentally broke open while being unloaded at Jaffa and was found to contain arms and ammunition being smuggled into Palestine for the Hagana. The discovery created an uproar in the Arab community and went a long way toward destroying what remained of the PLL's links with the Jaffa dockworkers. By the end of 1935 almost all the stevedores and lightermen had severed their ties with the PLL or simply allowed them to lapse, gravitating instead into the orbit of Arab trade unions. Despite this the PLL persevered in its efforts to set up a Jewish-Arab boat company at the port as a way to get Jewish workers employed there, but the anti-British and anti-Zionist general strike that began in April 1936 brought that project to an abrupt end.^[85] The Jaffa dockworkers joined the general strike en masse when it erupted and would remain on strike until it ended.