Zachary Lockman, ‘Railway Worker and Relational History: Arabs and Jews in British-Ruled Palestine’



INTRODUCTION

During the period of Ottoman rule over the Arab East, from 1516 until the end of the First World War, the term Palestine (Filastin) denoted a geographic region, part of what the Arabs called al-Sham (historic Syria), rather than a specific Ottoman province or administrative district. By contrast, from 1920 to 1948, Palestine existed as a distinct and unified political (and to a considerable extent economic) entity with well-defined boundaries. Ruled by Britain under a so-called mandate granted by the League of Nations, Palestine in that period encompassed an Arab majority and a Jewish minority.
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…the evolving relations between Arab and Jewish railway workers, especially those employed at the railway repair and maintenance workshops on the outskirts of Haifa.

Several factors make exploration of this group particularly interesting. Unlike nearly all Arab-owned enterprises and most Jewish-owned enterprises in Palestine, the Palestine Railways (an agency of the mandatory Government of Palestine) employed both Arabs and Jews. It was, therefore, one of the few enterprises in which Arabs and Jews worked side by side, encountering similar conditions and being compelled to interact in the search for solutions to their problems. The Palestine Railways was also one of the country’s largest employers, with a work force of about 2,400 in 1924, reaching a war-swollen peak of 7,800 in 1943. This work force, comprised of numerous unskilled Arab peasants hired to build and maintain roadbed and track, also included substantial numbers of skilled personnel in the running and traffic departments and at stations across the country and, in 1943, some 1,200 Arab and Jewish workers employed at the Haifa workshops. Indeed, until the proliferation of British military bases during the Second World War, the Haifa workshops constituted Palestine’s largest concentration of wage workers.

In addition, the railwaymen were among the first industrial workers in Palestine to organise themselves. An organisation of Jewish railway workers was established as early as 1919, while Arab railway workers began to evince interest in trade unionism soon thereafter and would go on to play a key role in founding and leading the Palestinian Arab labour movement. Moreover, it was in large part the interaction of Jewish and Arab railway workers that first compelled the Zionist labour movement and the various left-Zionist political parties, as well as the largely Jewish but anti-Zionist communists, on the one hand, and various forces in the Arab community on the other, to confront, in both ideological and practical terms, the question of relations between the Jewish and Arab working classes in Palestine.

The extent, duration, and character of the interactions among Arab and Jewish railway workers were exceptional, making them an atypical group in many respects. That very atypicality, that group’s location astride communal boundaries, may, however, serve to highlight some of the problematic features of the nationalist and conventional scholarly narratives of the mandate period.
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HEBREW LABOUR AND ARAB WORKERS

Although Palestine’s first railroad line, a French-financed project linking Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast to Jerusalem high in the hill country, was opened in 1892 and the subsequent two and one-half decades witnessed substantial railway development, very little is known about the railway workers themselves until after the First World War. At that point the railway work force seems to have been drawn mainly from the local Arab population, along with many Egyptians conscripted for labour service with the British forces conquering Palestine from the Ottomans and a small number of Syrian, Greek, and other foreign skilled workers. These workers were joined from 1919 onward by Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland channelled into railway jobs by agencies of the Zionist Organisation and by the employment offices of the two labour-Zionist parties, the social-democratic Ahdut Ha‘avoda (Unity of Labour) and its nonsocialist rival Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir (The Young Worker). The Zionist movement was anxious to lay the basis for the large-scale immigration and settlement finally made possible by the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which Britain had committed itself to supporting the establishment in Palestine of a “national home” for the Jews.

For the labour-Zionist parties and, from 1920 onward, for their creation the Histadrut (the General Organization of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel), which soon became not only the central institution of the labour-Zionist movement but also a dominant force in the Yishuv [the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine] as a whole, placing new Jewish immigrants in jobs on the railroads was not simply or even primarily a matter of securing individual livelihoods. It was part of the broader campaign for the conquest of labour (kibbush ha‘avoda), a campaign the goal of which was the achievement of Hebrew labour (‘avoda ivrit).

From its inception at the turn of the century and with diminishing consistency up to 1948, the labour-Zionist movement tended to use Hebrew (‘ivri) instead of Jewish (yehudi) to refer to itself and its project. This was an expression of labour Zionism denigration and rejection of Diaspora Judaism, which it associated with statelessness, powerlessness, and passivity, and its exaltation of the (suitably mythologized) ancient Hebrews as a socially normal and politically sovereign nation living in its homeland and working its soil. By conceiving of themselves as Hebrews, a new and different type of Jew living in the land of Israel and free of the defects allegedly produced by two thousand years of exile, these Zionists meant to emphasize their authenticity and their rootedness in Palestine.

These were central elements in the discourse and practice of the labour-Zionist movement. Though they had roots in the socialist ideology which adherents of labour Zionism brought with them from Eastern Europe, they were in large part the product of the Jewish workers’ encounter with Palestinian realities in the decade before the First World War.

Those immigrants’ desire to proletarianize themselves and create a Jewish working class in Palestine which would both wage its class struggle and assert itself as the vanguard of the Zionist movement as a whole foundered on the fact that the gradual, though incomplete, integration of Palestine into the capitalist world market and the transformation of agrarian relations in the countryside from the late nineteenth century onward, coupled with rapid population growth, had created a growing pool of landless Arabs available for wage labour in the new Jewish agricultural settlements, as well as in the towns and cities. The domination of the local labour market by large numbers of Arab workers willing to work for low wages and a severe shortage of employment opportunities owing to the country’s underdevelopment posed a serious problem for the Zionist project. Unless employment in jobs with wages approaching European rates could be found or created, it was unlikely that Jewish immigrants would come to Palestine in significant numbers or remain there long, and the firm implication of an ever-growing Yishuv would be very much in doubt.

Through a process of trial and error, the labour-Zionist movement gradually developed two complementary strategies to deal with this situation. To create employment opportunities and develop the Yishuv’s increasingly self-sufficient economic base, the Histadrut, less a conventional trade union federation than a highly centralized instrument of the Zionist project, used funds supplied largely by the Zionist Organization (which until the 1930s was dominated by bourgeois Zionists) gradually to build up its own high-wage economic sector in which only Jews would be employed, including a ramified network of industrial, transport, marketing and service enterprises and new forms of collective and cooperative agricultural settlement (the kibbutz and the moshav). At the same time, the labour-Zionist movement engaged in a sustained effort to gain for Jews a larger share of the existing and newly created jobs in other sectors by trying to induce Jewish and other private employers and the British administration to hire Jewish workers instead of less expensive and (at least initially) less demanding Arab workers. This in turn required an effort to pressure Jewish workers who sought easier ways of making a living to accept and remain at even the most difficult and poorly paid occupations. The Histadrut leadership insisted that the fate of the Zionist project in Palestine depended upon the success of this relentless campaign for the conquest of labour and the achievement of maximal Hebrew labour (that is, Jewish employment) in every sector of Palestine’s economy.

Ben-Gurion went so far as to accuse Jewish private employers (mainly citrus farmers) who preferred Arab to Jewish workers of “economic antisemitism”.

JOINT ORGANIZATION AMONG THE RAILWAY WORKERS

Achieving the conquest of labour on the Palestine Railways proved particularly difficult, however. Few Jewish immigrants channelled into railroad jobs were willing to endure for very long the low wages, long hours, harsh conditions, and abusive treatment characteristic of railway work in Palestine, so whenever better jobs were available elsewhere, the Jewish immigrants quit. The leaders of the first organization of railway workers in Palestine, the exclusively Jewish Railway Workers’ Association (Agudat Po‘alei Harakevet, RWA), founded in 1919, and leaders of the Histadrut to which that union was affiliated thus found that labour Zionism’s struggle to strengthen Hebrew labour in this economically and politically vital sector conflicted with what most Jewish workers perceived to be their own self-interest.

It soon became apparent that a significant number of Jews could be kept working as railwaymen only if wages and working conditions were significantly improved. However, the Jewish railway workers, though disproportionately represented among skilled workers, accounted for only a small minority (ranging from 8 to 12 percent) of the railway work force as a whole. No matter how well organized, the Jewish railway workers could not hope to improve their wages and working conditions by their own efforts. This brought to the fore the issue of cooperation between Jews and the Arab railwaymen who constituted the great majority of the work force, especially the Arab foremen and skilled workers in Haifa. The issue became especially acute when in the summer of 1921 Arab railway workers in Haifa…approached their unionised Jewish coworkers about the possibility of cooperation; some even expressed interest in joining the Histadrut, attractive not only because of its apparent strength as a labour organization but also because it offered its members such services as health care, interest-free loans, and access to consumer cooperatives.

That the Haifa workshops were the scenes of these initial contacts is not surprising. As noted earlier, before the Second World War these shops constituted the largest single concentration of industrial wage labour in Palestine, employing side by side hundreds of Arab, Jewish, and other workers, many of them skilled or semiskilled. In the 1920s, a substantial Jewish minority lived alongside an Arab majority in Haifa, which was rapidly growing and relatively cosmopolitan city already on its way to becoming Palestine’s main port and industrial centre. In this atmosphere it was possible for Jewish workers, especially recent arrivals from Russia who had been radicalised by the October Revolution and its aftermath, to establish contact with an emerging stratum of relatively skilled and educated Arab workers and foremen interested in trade unionism. Some of the latter were no doubt influenced by the activities of the Jewish union, but others may already have become acquainted with trade unionism in their countries of origin (for example, those from Syria or Egypt) or through contact in Palestine with non-Jewish European workers, mainly Greeks and Italians, who had their own mutual aid societies.
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On the one hand, many left-Zionists professed loyalty to the principle of class solidarity across ethnic lines. As socialists standing at the head of what they regarded as a better-organized and culturally more advanced Jewish working class, they felt that they had a moral obligation to help their less class-conscious and largely unorganised Arab fellow-workers – a sort of proletarian mission civilisatrice. Although this perspective was tinged with paternalism and replete with contradictions and ultimately could not be separated from the broader issue of the Zionist project’s implications for Palestine’s Arab majority, it would nonetheless be a mistake to lose sight of the subjective moral impulse involved and of the extent to which even the most exclusivist practices were embedded in a discourse of socialism and proletarian internationalism.

Arguments based on morality and principle were complemented by more pragmatic arguments. Some labour-Zionist leaders argued that the best way to eliminate the threat that cheap unorganised Arab labour posed to expensive organized Jewish labour and enhance job opportunities for Jews was to help Arab workers organize themselves. Organized Arab workers would presumably be better able to raise their wages, eliminating or at least reducing the wage differential which led employers to prefer them to Jews. It is unlikely that such a strategy could have been effective in the labour market that existed in Palestine at that time, but it nonetheless had its proponents, among them (in the early 1920s, at least) David Ben-Gurion, the Histradrut’s increasingly powerful secretary and pre-eminent leader of Ahdut Ha‘avoda.

But the labour-Zionist leaders also expressed anxiety about joint organization’s possible consequences for the Zionist project. The admission of Arabs to the Histadrut or its constituent trade unions, or even their organization into separate unions under the Histadrut’s tutelage, was likely to conflict with the long-term goal of increasing Jewish employment; and once organized, the Arab workers might not be controllable. “From the humanitarian standpoint, it is clear that we must organize them,” said one Histadrut official in December 1920, “but from the national standpoint, when we organize them we will be arousing them against us. They will receive the good that is in organization and use it against us.” Histadrut leaders were also well aware that in neighbouring Egypt, for example, the trade unions were under the influence of the nationalists and played a significant role in the anticolonial struggle.

In the end, the most important factor prodding the Histadrut toward action was probably the fear that if the Histadrut did not organize Arab workers, the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement – defined in labour-Zionist discourse not as an authentic national movement but rather as an instrument of exploitative and reactionary Arab landlords and clerics – might seize the initiative with potentially dangerous consequences for the Zionist project. In January 1922 the Histadrut majority, led by Ben-Gurion and his allies, endorsed joint organization among the railway workers, a decision reaffirmed and extended to encompass workers in other mixed workplaces at the Histadrut’s third congress in July 1927. However, these resolutions also required that any joint union of Arabs and Jews be composed of separate and largely autonomous national sections for each, with the Jewish sections to remain affiliated to the Histadrut. From the standpoint of labour Zionism, this approach had the apparent virtue of reconciling the demands of proletarian internationalism and Zionism. The Histadrut would demonstrate its commitment to helping Arab fellow workers unionise and improve their lot while at the same time preserving the exclusively Jewish character of the Histadrut and its trade union organizations, which would thus be free to carry out their national (i.e. Zionist) tasks, including immigration, settlement, economic development and the struggle for Hebrew labour.

ABORTIVE UNITY

This position was not, however, acceptable to the Arab skilled workers and foremen who spoke for a substantial number of other Arabs employed in the Haifa railway workshops and elsewhere. As they became increasingly aware that the Histadrut was an integral part of the Zionist movement, the Arabs insisted that any joint union of Jews and Arabs not be divided into separate national sections and not have any links with the Histadrut. Ilyas Asad, one of the Arab workers’ leaders, told his Jewish colleagues at a March 1924 meeting of the Railway Workers’ Association council that

I am striving to establish ties between the Jewish and Arab workers because I am certain that if we are connected we will help one another, without regard to religion or nationality. Many Arab workers do not wish to join nationalist organizations because they understand their purpose and do not wish to abet a lie. They saw on the membership card [of the railway workers’ union] the words Federation of Jewish Workers [i.e., Hisadrut] and they cannot understand what purpose this serves. I ask all the comrades to remove the word Jewish, and I am sure that if they agree there will be a strong bond between us and all the Arabs will join. I would be the first who would not want to join a nationalist labour movement. There are many Arab nationalist organizations, and we do not want to join them, and they will say we have joined a Jewish organization.

As a result of these differences, negotiations between Arab and Jewish railway workers’ leaders over the formation of a joint union for all the railway workers in Palestine were for years unsuccessful. In 1924, however, adherents of Po‘alei Tziyon Smol (Workers of Zion-Left), a party which occupied the extreme left end of the Zionist spectrum, won effective control of the RWA. Although committed to establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, this small but vigorous party simultaneously regarded itself as the authentic revolutionary vanguard of the world Jewish proletariat (and unsuccessfully sought admission to the Comintern as such); rejected participation in the Zionist Organization, which it regarded as an instrument of the Jewish bourgeoisie; and denounced the Histadrut majority’s determination to build up a separate high-wage economic enclave for Jews in Palestine. This party won growing support among the rank and file of the (still exclusively Jewish) railway workers’ union because its call for militancy and class struggle was attractive to many disgruntled workers whose already miserable wages and working conditions were being exacerbated by layoffs and management efforts to cut costs and who had lost patience with demands by the Ahdut Ha‘avoda-dominated Hisadrut for self-sacrifice in the national cause. Po‘alei Tziyon Smol also advocated a position on the question of joint organization that seemed to offer a real prospect of achieving unity between Arabs and Jews, which many of the Jewish workers had come to see as an absolutely essential precondition for improving their situation. The party not only rejected the notion of separate national sections within the railway workers’ union but also wanted the Histadrut itself to undergo what it termed a separation of functions: that is, to transfer its Zionist functions to a separate organization and transform itself into a Jewish-Arab trade union federation committed solely to the class struggle.

After an intensive effort, the new railway union leadership came to terms with the leaders of the Arab workers in November 1924. The Arab unionists agreed to join their Jewish colleagues in a new international union with the understanding that they would play an equal role in running the union and that the new organization would disaffiliate from the Histadrut if it refused to accept the separation of functions. By the end of November 1924, several hundred Arab workers had joined the union (now known as the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph workers, URPTW), transforming an organization which had since its inception as the RWA been virtually all Jewish into one whose membership was roughly half-Jewish and half-Arab and encompassed some 20 to 25 percent of the railway work force.

This joint union of Arabs and Jews survived for only a few months. Most of the Arab unionists soon concluded that their Jewish colleagues were not sincerely committed to achieving unity as originally conceived nor to developing a completely independent and apolitical trade union dedicated only to the interests of the railway workers. The Arabs also grew impatient with what they took to be dissembling, if not outright deception, on the part of their Jewish colleagues, whom they came to believe were not being straightforward with them about their commitment to the Zionist project.

Their suspicions and doubts were not without basis in reality. Even as they spoke of proletarian internationalism and Arab-Jewish solidarity, the Jewish union leaders continued to work behind the scenes with the Histadrut to increase Jewish employment by incessant lobbying of railways management, the government of Palestine, and the Colonial Office but also pressing Jewish foremen to hire only Jewish job applicants. The Histadrut’s campaign for Hebrew labour on the railways, to which even the new Po‘alei Tziyon Smol-influence leadership was party, was a source of tremendous resentment among the Arab rank and file, who felt that they were being discriminated against in hiring and promotion and feared displacement by Jewish immigrants.

[Refers to evasions of Jewish trade union leaders towards their Arab colleagues with regard to their commitment to Zionism]

But there were also instances of deliberate deception. At a meeting of the union’s council in January 1925, for example, the Jewish translator who was rendering the proceedings into Arabic for the benefit of the Arab delegates deliberately watered down the Zionist content of a speech by Ben-Gurion to make it more palatable to the Arabs. These things made the Arab unionists vulnerable to criticism, from the Arab nationalist press and activists and from among the rank and file, that the Arab unionists were being duped and exploited by the Zionists, In the first months of 1925, most of the Arab trade unionists who had joined the URPTW’s leadership only a few months earlier quit, taking most of the Arab rank and file with them.

The Jewish unionists and the Histadrut attributed the collapse of the joint union to sabotage by the communists, Palestine Railways management, or both. Activists of the still most exclusively Jewish but strongly anti-Zionist Palestine Communist Party (known as the PKP, from its initials in Yiddish) had sought to alert the Arab railway workers that they were joining a union still closely affiliated with Zionist Histadrut and led by committed Zionists; but at the beginning of 1925 the communists were in fact urging the Arab workers not to leave the joint union but rather to remain within it and struggle to reform it. Palestine Railways management had an obvious interest in keeping its work force divided and does seem to have used selective wage increases and equally selective dismissals to signal its anti-union attitude to the Arab rank and file; but the decision of most of the Arab workers to leave the union cannot be attributed solely or even mainly to management pressure. In fact, the Histadrut’s attempt to pin the blame on “outside agitators” tells us less about the actual causes of the breakup in early 1925 than it does about labour Zionism’s conception of its own project and of Arabs, which rendered it unable to come to terms with its own role in the failure.

In the summer of 1925, a few months after the breakup of the joint union, the seceding Arab unionists joined forces with the leaders of a mutual aid society for Arab railway workers and established a new, exclusively Arab organization, the Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society (PAWS). Although PAWS initially consisted almost exclusively of Arab railway workers in Haifa, its new name and its program indicated its founders’ ambition to make it the Arab counterpart of the Histadrut, an organization which would eventually encompass all the Arab workers in Palestine. Until the emergence of rival communist-led trade union federations in the 1940s, PAWS was indeed the largest and most important Palestinian Arab labour organisation, uniting a fluctuating membership drawn from various trades and locales around a more stable core of Haifa railway workers, whose own organization would later be formally known as the Arab Union of Railway Workers (AURW).

TENUOUS COOPERATION

From 1925 until the end of the mandate period, then, two separate unions were active among the railway workers. Relations between the AURW and the older, larger and wealthier union led by Jews, soon back in the hands of supporters of Ben-Gurion and the Histadrut majority known from 1931 as the International Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Employees in Palestine, were often rocky, with alternating periods of cooperation and of conflict. The main impetus for cooperation was the glaringly obvious fact that, confronted by a highly intransigent management backed by a miserly colonial state, neither union was sufficiently strong on its own to achieve very much for its membership: The IU had some 250 dues-paying members in 1927, and the AURW even fewer. Chronic discontent by the rank and file over low wages and poor working conditions was periodically exacerbated by what the workers perceived as arbitrary and abusive acts by management, including wage cuts, layoffs, and short hours. The resulting sense of grievance and the understanding that disunity meant weakness generated demands from rank-and-file Arab and Jewish workers that their leaderships put aside their differences and work together.

Typically, pressure from below and upsurges of rank-and-file militancy led the two unions’ leaders to negotiate the formation of an ad hoc joint committee based in Haifa [to represent the workers in talks with management]. …These joint committees tended, however, to be rather shortlived. After a few months they were increasingly undermined by conflicts between the two unions, ultimately resulting in the joint committee’s dissolution and barrages of mutual recriminations as each side accused the other of selfishly sabotaging unity and the workers’ interests.
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In large measure, this mistrust was generated by the steadfast insistence of the IU that it was the sole legitimate representative of all the railway workers in Palestine, Jewish and Arab. The Jewish-led union thus refused to regard its Arab counterpart as an equal partner that authentically represented the Arab railway workers and even launched sporadic drives to undermine it by directly by recruiting Arab workers.
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For their part the AURW’s leaders accepted the legitimacy of, and were willing to cooperate with, the IU, but only as the representative of the Jewish railway workers. The Palestinian unionists enormously resented the IU’s refusal to extend reciprocal recognition, its attempts to recruit Arab workers and its continued commitment to Hebrew labour, manifested in constant lobbying to get more Jews hired. Arabs who joined the IU were denounced by AURW leaders as dupes or lackeys of the Zionists, if not outright traitors.

However, the rank and file’s desire for cooperation was such that neither leadership could afford to appear to be seen as openly opposed to unity. For example, even when IU leaders concluded that the benefits of cooperation were accruing disproportionately to the AURW, broke up joint committees and initiated drives to recruit Arab workers, they sought to place the blame for the collapse of cooperation on their erstwhile Arab partners, whom they accused of inactivity or bad faith. The Arab unionists displayed a similar concern for rank-and-file opinion: On several occasions in the late 1920s they went so far as to distribute leaflets in Hebrew to the Jewish railway workers to make known their version of what had led to the breakup of a joint committee and to accuse the IU leadership of acting in bad faith and undermining the workers’ unity. Moreover, at least until the outbreak in 1936 of a country-wide Arab revolt against British rule and Zionism, Arab railway unionists generally ignored or resisted pressure from the Palestinian nationalist movement to terminate cooperation with Jewish unionists. It is significant, too, that the dream of single union for all Palestinian railway workers remained very much alive among the rank and file right up to 1936, and in more subdued way even beyond, though its realization was always blocked by the same issues that had undermined unity in 1925.

The extent to which this apparently widespread desire for cooperation at the institutional level was accompanied by the development of social relationships between Arab and Jewish workers at the personal level, within or outside the workplace, is unclear. In the early 1920s, at least, some Jewish railway workers lived in predominately Arab neighbourhoods of Haifa, and elsewhere the long shifts characteristic of railway work threw Jews and Arabs together, especially at remote locations. A report in 1928 of Arab workers attending the funeral of a Jewish coworker suggests some degree of social interaction. In his memoirs, Bulus Farah, an Arab unionist (and later a communist activist) who went to work in the Haifa workshops in 1925 as a fifteen-year-old apprentice, spoke of the “mutual understanding” that had prevailed there and suggested that the Jewish workers respected their Arab coworkers for their technical abilities. This is not implausible, given that most of the Jews were new to industrial work and some may have seen the Arabs as exemplars of the proletarian authenticity for which they were striving. Over the years, Arab and Jewish union leaders do seem to have developed personal relationships: Yehezkel Abramov, a longtime Jewish railway union leader, would in his old age remember sitting around with colleagues from the AURW on the Tel Aviv beachfront after a joint meeting with management.

Yet Abramov also conveyed his frustration that most of his fellow Jews could not be bothered to learn or use the names of Arab coworkers and instead referred to specific individuals simply as “the Arab.” Unlike his colleagues, Abramov took the trouble to learn Arabic and made a point of sitting with Arab workers during lunch breaks at the Haifa workshops. That he regarded himself as exceptional in this regard suggests a high degree of social separation: though Arabs and Jews may have worked side by side, apparently in their leisure time within and outside the workplace they generally kept to themselves.
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In mixed cities like Haifa, some degree of interaction in public spaces was inevitable and persisted until 1948. Despite Zionist campaigns to boycott Arab in favour of Jewish produce, many Jewish (especially from the working class) continued to frequent Arab markets to take advantage of lower prices; and some Jews continued to live in Arab neighbourhoods, where rents were lower. But Jews were increasingly concentrated in exclusively Jewish neighbourhoods, for example the string of new workers’ suburbs just north of Haifa, especially after outbreaks of violence in 1921, 1929, and especially 1936-39, made mixed neighbourhoods unsafe.

WARTIME RESURGENCE AND POSTWAR MILITANCY

In addition to exacerbating residential, social and economic segregation, the intercommunal violence and tensions which accompanied the 1936-39 revolt made cooperation between Arab and Jewish railway workers even on purely economic issues all but impossible. By contrast, the period of 1940 to 1946 witnessed unprecedented solidarity between Arab and Jewish workers, not only among the railwaymen but in many mixed enterprises as well. This may seem ironic in retrospect, since by the end of 1947 Palestine was engulfed in a full-scale civil war. But during the Second World War and immediately after it, a short-lived conjuncture created new possibilities for militant joint action, thought they were eventually eclipsed by escalating political tensions.

The Palestinian working class, Arab and Jewish, expanded very dramatically during the war. Disruption of the usual sources of supply stimulated development of the country’s industrial base, as did the demand created by the enormously swollen British and Allied military presence. Military bases and related service enterprises proliferated, drawing tens of thousands of Arab peasants and townspeople into wage labour at work sites which also employed Jews.
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Labour shortages in many sectors strengthened the workers bargaining position, while high inflation pushed them toward action. In Palestine as elsewhere in Britain’s domain during this period, the British colonial authorities moderated their hostility to trade unions, created a new apparatus to monitor and mediate labour disputes, and looked more favourably on labour legislation. In these circumstances there ensued an unprecedented wave of unionisation and militancy which affected Arab workers most dramatically because they had hitherto been less active and less organized. The leaderships of both the Histadrut and the PAWS regarded this development with some ambivalence. By contrast, this upsurge was encouraged by, and in turn benefited, newly reinvigorated left-wing forces in both the Arab community and the Yishuv which implicitly challenged nationalist leaderships on both sides by advocating class solidarity and political compromise between Arabs and Jews.

During the war a new Arab left emerged in Palestine, organized in the communist-led National Liberation League (‘Usbat al-Tahurrur al-Watani, NLL). Left-wing trade union activists, among them veterans of the AURW, won significant support in unions hitherto under the control of the more conservative PAWS leadership, as well as in newly organized unions, leading ultimately to a split in the Arab trade union movement and the establishment of a left-led Arab Workers’ Congress aligned with the NLL. In the Yishuv, the initially kibbutz-based socialist Zionist Hashomer Hatza‘ir (Young Guard) movement, which advocated a bi-national Palestine and Arab-Jewish class solidarity and was trying to extend its influence among Jewish urban workers, now emerged as a serious force on the left flank of the Histadrut leadership. In a sense, Hashomer Hatza‘ir can be said to have replace the defunct Po‘alei Tziyon Smol at the left end of the Zionist spectrum; and it won significant support among militant Jewish workers, including railway workers in what had become known as Red Haifa. The Jewish communist movement also resurfaced during and after the war. Largely discredited in the Yishuv because of its support for the 1936-39 Arab revolt, it now sought to gain legitimacy and support from the wartime popularity of the Soviet Union, whose Red Army the Yishuv hailed as the main force fighting the Nazis, and by trying to ride the wave of worker activism. The Jewish communists also moderated their long-standing hostility to Zionism and sought admission to the Histadrut, from which they had been purged two decades earlier.

Among the railway workers the changing circumstances were first manifested in unprecedentedly smooth relations between the IU and the AURW from 1940 onward. The IU tacitly recognized that under the prevailing circumstances, recruitment of Arab workers was unrealistic and rapprochement with the AURW therefore unavoidable, while the paralysis of the Arab nationalist movement during the war years and strong rank-and-file pressure made the AURW leadership more amenable to cooperation. A series of job actions and short strikes culminated, much to the unhappiness of the Histadurt and PAWS leaderhips, in a three-day occupation of the Haifa workshops in February 1944. Unrest continued after the end of the war in Europe, manifested during 1945 in a number of brief wildcat strikes by railway and postal worker, now among the most militant and experienced (and of course integrated) segments of the Palestinian working class. The NLL’s newspaper, al-Ittihad, hailed these incidents as “clear proof of the possibility of joint action in every workplace,” provided that the workers steered clear of interference by both Zionism and “Arab reaction.”

The Arab communists’ prescription seemed to find confirmation in April 1946, when a planned strike by Jewish and Arab postal workers in Tel Aviv spontaneously expanded to encompass some 13,000 Arab and Jewish postal, telegraph, railway, port and public works department workers, along with 10,000 lower- and middle-level white collar government employees. This general strike paralysed the British colonial administration and won the support of much of Jewish and Arab public opinion. The Arab and Jewish communists naturally sae in it a wonderful manifestation of class solidarity, “a blow against the ‘divide and rule’ policy of imperialism, a slap in the face of those of hold chauvinist ideologies and propagate national division,” but warned the strikers against “defeatist and reactionary elements, Arab and Jewish.” Conservative newspapers on both sides were less enthusiastic. The conservative nationalist newspaper, Filastin, for example, attacked PAWS for allegedly colluding in what it regarded as a politically motivated and Zionist-inspired movement. The right-wing Jewish daily, Ma‘ariv, hailed the strike at first but later denounced it as detrimental to the Zionist cause.

The strikers ultimately won many of their demands, and their victory gave a strong boost to the fledgling Arab labour movement. The following year witnessed the rapid growth of unions and the spread of worker activism, especially in the army camps and at the oil refinery and the Iraq Petroleum Company’s pipeline terminal in Haifa. In these workplaces Arab and Jewish workers often cooperated in pursuit of higher wages and better conditions, although relations between Histadrut and the Arab unions were never entirely free of friction.

CIVIL WAR AND PARTITION

That friction was exacerbated, and the postwar wave of activism ultimately brought to an end, by the rising political tensions which accompanied the escalation in 1947 of the three-way struggle amongst the Zionist movement, the Palestinian nationalist movement, and the British to determine the fate of Palestine. In 1944 the Zionists had launched a campaign to force Britain, their erstwhile protector and ally, to open Palestine to Jewish immigration and move toward Jewish statehood, which in turn helped stimulate the revival of the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement. Unable to suppress opposition or achieve a negotiated solution, an exhausted and isolated Britain turned the Palestine issue over to the United Nations, whose General Assembly adopted a resolution on November 29, 1947, recommending the partition of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states. Partition was rejected by the leaders of Palestine’s Arab community, still two-thirds of the country’s population, who saw it as a violation of their right as the indigenous majority to self-determination in an undivided Palestine. Partition was accepted by most of the leaders of the Yishuv and of the Zionist movement, for whom a sovereign Jewish state, even if in only part of Palestine, was still a tremendous achievement.

This is not to say the Zionist leadership actually desired or expected the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state. The Jewish Agency, the de facto leadership of the Yishuv, had in fact secretly reached an informal understanding with King Abdullah of Transjordan whereby the king would occupy and annex much of the territory assigned to the Arab state.

Violence between Arabs and Jews erupted almost immediately after the vote and quickly escalated into a cycle of terrorist violence and counter-violence directed mainly against civilians. By the end of December over 350 people had lost their lives in the civil engulfing Palestine. The single bloodiest incident of this first month of violence was touched off on December 30, 1947, when operative of the right-wing Zionist Irgun Tzva’i Le’umi (National Military Organization, usually referred to in Hebrew by its acronym, Etzel), commanded by Menachem Begin, threw a number of grenades into a crowd of some 100 Arabs gathered at the main gate of the British owned oil refinery on the northern outskirts of Haifa in the hope of finding work as day labourers. Six were killed and forty-two wounded in what Etzel claimed was an act of retaliation for recent attacks on Jews elsewhere in Palestine. Within minutes of the incident, an outraged mob of Arab refinery workers and outsiders turned on the Jewish refinery workers killing forty-one and wounding forty-nine before British army and police units arrived.

Although the Jewish Agency promptly denounced the Etzel attack outside the Haifa refinery as an “act of madness,” it also authorized its own military force, the Hagana, to retaliate for the massacre of Jews at the refinery by attacking and killing Arab civilians in the outlying village of Balad al-Shaykh on December 31.

News of the bloodshed at the oil refinery quickly reached the nearby repair and maintenance workshops of the Palestinian Railways. Tensions were already high there because of the deteriorating political and security situation in the country, and now they soared to explosive levels as some of the younger Arab workers threatened their Jewish coworkers (of whom their were fewer than a hundred at the time) and tried to shut down the machinery. The railway workshops were, however, spared the orgy of bloodletting which had engulfed the oil refinery. The veteran Arab unionists, some of whom had been among the founders of PAWS, quickly intervened, faced down the hotheads and kept the peace until buses could be brought to transport the Jewish workers home safely. The workshops were then shut for ten days, until relative calm had been restored in Haifa and security arrangements put in place.

In the following months, Palestine descended into full-scale civil war, but the railway workshops continued to function as normally as external circumstances allowed. The existence of Arab and Jewish union cadres with extensive experience of cooperation and a tradition of mutual respect allowed these workers to avoid, for a time at least, being drawn into the maelstrom of intercommunal violence. After April 1948, however, the question of relations between Arabs and Jews at the Haifa workshops became moot. The work force there was left almost exclusively Jewish when most of the city’s Arab population fled as Jewish military forces besieged their neighbourhoods. The same transformation took place throughout the country. Though the work force of the Palestinian Railways had been mostly Arab, the flight or expulsion from their homes of half of Palestine’s Arab population during 1947 to 1949 left the work force of the new Israel Railways almost entirely Jewish. Nearly four decades of interaction among Arab and Jewish railway workers thus came to an abrupt end.







Zachary Lockman, ‘Railway workers and relational history: Arabs and Jews in British-ruled Palestine’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), 601-627.

RETHINKING PALESTINIAN HISTORY

There are students of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict who have pointed to instances of cooperation between Jews and Arabs in mandatory Palestine, 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, or a morality tale in which the so-called bad guys on both sides triumph over the peacemakers, whose weakness and ineffectuality is somehow never really accounted for.

I am not making that argument here. On the contrary, the Zionist and Palestinian nationalist movement clearly sought irreconcilable objectives and were on a collision course from the very start. Moreover, although during the mandate period Arab and Jewish railway workers were involved in persistent efforts to cooperate and developed a sense of solidarity that at times transcended (or at least moderated) national divisions, relations among them were profoundly affected by the dynamics of the broader Zionist-Palestinian conflict, as the dénouement of their interaction in 1948 conclusively demonstrated. In addition, as I noted earlier, the railway workers were in many respects an atypical group.

In the history recounted here, one can find instances of both conflict and cooperation between Jews and Arabs. Instead of trying to locate the sole or essential meaning of relations among Arab and Jewish railway workers in either term, however, 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 place in the foreground the contestation which always characterized those processes. Thus among the Arab railway workers some unionists who certainly regarded themselves as nationalists strongly opposed to what they saw as Zionist encroachment on their homeland nonetheless defied the official nationalist line by embracing a discourse of worker solidarity across ethnic boundaries that promoted cooperation with Zionist Jews. Similarly, contending political forces among the Jewish railway workers put forward conflicting definitions of what it meant to be a Jew and a worker in Palestine and widely differing notions of how to relate to the Arab majority of the railway work force. More broadly, the existence of a more or less unified market for unskilled and semiskilled labour in Palestine, especially in the government sector, and the circumstances and exigencies which employment by the colonial administration generated, helped shape perceptions, strategies, and relationships among all members of the Palestine Railways work force. In this sense, the Arab and Jewish railway workers not only “made themselves” (to borrow E.P. Thompson’s imagery) but also “made” each other within a broader matrix of relations and forces.

It is not only with respect to the railway workers that a relational approach which focuses on the mutually constitutive interactions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine may prove useful, however. For example, I suggested earlier that the urgent need to exit (at least partially) a labour market dominated by abundant low-wage Arab labour prompted the labour-Zionist movement to strive to construct a relatively self-sufficient, high-wage economic enclave for Jews in Palestine. This imperative also propelled the unrelenting struggle for Hebrew labour 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 also facilitated labour 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 Zionist labour camp become the dominant force within the Yishuv and the international Zionist movement. In this sense, many of the institutions and practices which for an entire historical period, from the 1930s into the 1970s, were considered among the most distinctive features of the Yishuv and of Israeli society (e.g., the kibbutz, the powerful public and Histadrut sectors of the economy, the cult of pioneering, the role of the military) can be understood as directly or indirectly the product of the Zionist project’s interaction with Arabs and Arab society on the ground in Palestine.

Similarly, while Israeli sociologists have conventionally explained the subordinate social location and status of Israel’s Oriental Jews – the majority of the country’s Jewish population, which derives from Arab countries or from elsewhere in Asia or Africa, as opposed to Eastern Europe – in terms of the failure of these culturally traditional people to adapt successfully to a modern society, recent critical scholarship has stressed their relegation to the bottom ranks of the labour market (where they displaced or replaced Palestinian Arabs) and official denigration of their culture, defined by the dominant groups in Israel as backward (Arab). 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. 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 the borders of the new state of Israel. From this perspective, then, it can 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).

Arab society in Palestine was, in turn, 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. […] …neither the evolution nor the content of a distinctly Palestinian Arab culture, identity, and national movement can be adequately understood except in relation to the specific character of the Palestinians’ confrontation with Zionism. Nor can one make sense of the labour-Zionist project without taking into account not only labour market strategies but also the ways in which the Arab worker and the Arab working class in Palestine were represented and the roles they were made to play in labour-Zionist discourse. At a crucial stage, it was to a significant extent in relation to those (always contested) representations of Arab workers that labour-Zionism articulated its own identity, its sense of mission, and its strategy to achieve hegemony within the Yishuv and realize its version of Zionism. The modes of interaction between the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine and their mutually constitutive impact on one another must therefore be seen as discursive as well as material.
[…]

…the two communities were neither natural nor essential monolithic entities; nor were they hermetically sealed off from one another, as the conventional historiography assumes. Rather, the two communities interacted in complex ways and had a mutually formative effect on one another, both as communities and through relationships which crossed communal boundaries to shape identities and practices of various subgroups. These complex and contested processes operated at many levels and in many spheres, including markets for labour 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 relatiosn and flows among and within different settlements, villages, urban neighbourhoods, towns, cities, and regions of Palestine.