"Real unions": Arab organized labor in British Palestine.

In Palestine, as in the rest of the world, the end of World War II brought hard times to workers; Palestinian Arabs, like workers elsewhere, reacted vigorously to their new situation. As the prosperity of wartime production vanished and veterans swelled the workforce, unemployment and a falling real wage roused workers to protest. Massive strikes from Bombay to Seattle to Lagos - and in Palestine - registered workers' frustration.

In 1946, then, Palestinian Arab workers and their unions were alive to the same postwar pressures and took up the same means of resistance as counterparts both in other colonized countries and in the United States. Yet, barely two decades earlier, few Palestinian Arabs had jobs in which a union would be useful. This article contends that, once engaged in mass industrial employment, Palestinian Arabs quickly developed unions that operated well within the range of commonly accepted union activities and structures. They established, that is, mass organizations that defended their on-the-job interests vis-a-vis employers and pressed the government to protect their class interests. These unions, like others, generally grew stronger or weaker with the demand for labor. They governed themselves, more or less democratically. They formed shifting alliances, based on members' and leaders' perceptions of their interests, with government bodies, political and civil interest groups, and one another.

The Arab workers built these very ordinary unions despite extreme abnormalities in their economic and political situation. First of all, the British occupation of Palestine put Arab workers in the same abnormal position as workers in any other Western colony. Typically, Western-owned enterprises employed Western managers, supervisors, and technicians, giving them more money and more respect than the mass of mostly unskilled indigenous workers. Colonized workers resented the unfairness of management and the frequent arrogance of their European fellow employees. They also saw those employees form unions which could wrest better pay and working conditions from the employers. Such unions often furthered the interests of the expatriate employees at the expense of the local. Colonized workers thus set out to form unions of their own.(1)

Colonial officials sometimes sought to discredit unions of colonized workers by characterizing them as mere nationalist front organizations. Colonized workers did often act on interests specific to their nation rather than those they shared with workers of different nationality. They did not join foreign co-workers in actions that might not benefit, and could harm, them. They also often "collaborated" with compatriot non-worker politicians to further national interests. No particular choice between class and national interests, however, is per se indicative of some essential union identity. Colonized workers who ignored international solidarity or cooperated with selected non-workers were behaving no differently than the foreign employees of the same firm. In Western Europe and North America, too - for example, in Europe at the outbreak of World War I - workers based similar choices on national considerations.(2)

Palestinian Arab workers under British rule shared the situation, and the reactions, of workers in other colonized economies, but more particularly of a special group of those workers. Palestine was among the colonies where Westerners did not simply rule; they settled. This situation created special conditions for indigenous workers: they had to deal with foreign co-workers and employers not just as individual expatriates, but as members of an immigrant community that competed with their own for jobs and markets. Their unions therefore defended workers' national interests against settler agencies as well as colonial authorities. The Palestinian Arab unions matched the pattern not only of unions in general, but specifically of unions in settler colonial economies.

Scholars did not immediately recognize the authenticity of the Palestinian Arabs' unions. Until the 1980s, few historians of Palestine under the British Mandate mentioned the Arab labor unions; almost without exception, those few referred to the Arab unions as small and weak, commonly fronts for notable factions, and often based on clan ties.(3) Several factors may have fed this misperception. Scholars examining Mandate Palestine concentrated their attention on diplomacy and politics. Their sources were unlikely to discuss the independent activities of workers or unions; the rare scholarly discussion of class focused on the peasantry. Scholars also may have held the Arab unions to a standard of static, full-blown unionism that labor historians did not apply to Western workers in similar transition from pre-capitalist tradition to disciplined militance. Some historians, in addition, may have taken as a standard the powerful Histadrut conglomerate established by the Jewish community of Palestine. This standard was inappropriate: the Histadrut was not a "real union," but an amalgam of trade union, entrepreneur, political party, and public agency.

In recent years, historians have examined economic and social aspects of the Mandate, but still without taking Arab unions seriously. Exceptions are Zachary Lockman, who has examined the effect of Arab unions on the ideology and activities of their Jewish counterparts, and Issa Khalaf, who has noted the growing influence of individual union leaders in Palestinian Arab political circles. These scholars acknowledge the legitimacy of the Arab unions, but it is peripheral to their major concerns.(4)

The history of the Palestinian Arab unions merits more concentrated attention, for its significance extends beyond its interest as an institutional chronicle. The development of any Western-type institution outside the West is not a mere sign of "progress" (or decline) toward Westernization. It sometimes demonstrates strategic flexibility in a people whom Westerners have judged too slow to give up traditional ways. It can, for instance, show that Palestinian Arabs, confronted by a new situation - in this case, the large capitalist workplace - were ready to adopt a relevant and useful response even though it was of alien origin.

This article first outlines Arab workers' development of unions, then describes the two large federations of the 1940s at their point of fullest maturity. Although their colonized status presented them with serious obstacles, the Arab unions of British Palestine were not, I argue, exceptions to some general rule of union development. Rather, they differed from (and resembled) the unions of various countries in various ways at various times - as they did one another.

THE LIFE HISTORY OF PALESTINIAN ARAB UNIONS, 1921-1947

For most of the period between the early British mandate and the Second World War, Palestine's Arab unions really were small and weak - and for good reason. Typically, a union develops when wage workers concentrated in a large workplace recognize common interests and grievances and decide to act on these in common. Nineteenth-century workers in Western Europe and North America developed the first unions; as other countries industrialized, their workers commonly heard about and adopted that form of response. Until the British occupation, Palestine had no industries that drew together large, cosmopolitan workforces. Arab workers did not need - or hear about - unions.

When the British invasion of Palestine in World War I began to change that situation, Arab workers were quick to organize. The new rulers conscripted railroad workers from Egypt, where transport unions were already strong. After the war, Jewish immigrants entered railroad work, especially in the big Haifa maintenance shops, bringing the European union tradition. Palestinian Arabs coming into railroad work put their co-workers' experience to use. As early as 1921, they began to seek a binational union with their Jewish shopmates. When Histadrut opposition blocked creation of a nonpolitical (non-Zionist) union, the Haifa Arab railroad workers in 1925 formed the first - and longest-lived - Arab union in Palestine, the Palestine Arab Workers Society (PAWS).(5)

The First Wave of Arab Unions, 1925-1940

For nearly a decade, PAWS remained Palestine's only sizable and durable union: growing competition for jobs left no leverage for labor organizations. Arab employment was artificially restricted: British economic regulations hurt Arab employers, while Zionist agencies, in particular the Histadrut, pressed Jewish employers to hire only Jews. At the same time, Arab rural migration and Jewish immigration rendered the workforce, in effect, limitless.(6)

Despite their lack of power, urban Arab workers persistently organized. They tested various forms, including benevolent associations, a religious-based (Orthodox Christian) workers' society, and employer-employee groups like the Jerusalem Car Owners and Drivers or the Jaffa Boatmen's Association. They also held occasionally successful strikes, usually over wages, hours, or working conditions, and (often in connection with strikes) formed ephemeral unions.

In January 1930, a nationwide workers' conference brought together the strands in the Palestinian Arab labor movement as it then existed. The organizers were Arab unionists, members of the binational Palestine Communist Party and of the strongly nationalist PAWS. Most of the sixty-one participants were elected by their co-workers; a handful were intellectuals; and one was a village notable. Both Communists and notables sought to influence the delegates as they acted on concerns about the workplace, public policy, and national liberation. Rejecting a notable-inspired call for a fourteen-hour workday to "build up the national economy," delegates instead adopted a Communist-backed demand for an eight-hour day. They also called for government policies to benefit workers specifically: for the right to strike and an end to discrimination against Arab workers in pay and hiring. At the same time, they expressed the national interests which they shared with Arab employers. - retaining Arab control over their country and remaining part of the regional Arab community. To maintain workers' strength vis-a-vis government and employers, they proposed the creation of a nationwide Palestinian Arab union federation.(7)

The delegates' evident sophistication in political and union matters was to have few immediate results. The idea of a strong national federation had outrun the capacity of Arab wage workers. Most Palestinian Arabs were, after all, still cultivators: even in 1936, after several years' massive shift into non-farm jobs, just eight percent of working-age men were employed in industry, many of them in one- or two-person shops. Only a tiny proportion worked in large capitalist enterprises where Western-style unions were the clearly appropriate response to their employers.(8)

Although wage workers remained a small minority throughout the 1930s, their numbers and their unions did grow rapidly during the immigration-driven boom at the middle of the decade. Thousands of Arabs entered wage labor, and veteran unionists were ready to organize them. Arab unions developed in size and militance, particularly in the port cities of Jaffa and Haifa.

Much of this union activity was in effect nationalist, for Arab labor organizations confronted not only a union's ordinary problems with employers but problems rooted in Zionist settlement. The British administration's disproportionate use of Jewish contractors limited Arab employment, while the Histadrut's "Jewish labor" campaign sought to take Arabs' jobs for Jewish workers. The economy's new need for Arab workers had not raised the wage of the unskilled to anywhere near that of comparable Jewish labor. Finally, the Histadrut's new Arab section, the Palestine Labor League, was trying to organize Arab workers.

In Jaffa, the Arab Workers Federation (AWF) responded to these challenges with particular determination and flexibility. based among port, building, and citrus workers, the AWF was part of a tradition of leftist, militant unionism which Jaffa workers never abandoned. It employed tactics from petitions to strikes to "work-ins" in order to mobilize support, influence government, and pressure employers. Even in 1937, as the unions faltered, the AWF could still claim some 4,700 members.(9)

In Haifa, Palestine's industrial center, PAWS expanded beyond the railroads to organize petroleum, tobacco, and other firms. Arab workers, sometimes in tenuous cooperation with Histadrut unions, struck Arab, Jewish, and European employers. The issues were basic - pay, hours, benefits, and job security - but often reflected inequities with Jewish workers. In the first half of 1935, as economic development reached its height, 800 Arab workers struck Karaman-Dik-Salty, Palestine's largest tobacco company; Arab laborers struck a quarry jointly owned by an Arab and the Histadrut's construction firm; and 500 Arab and Jewish employees, led by an Arab former railroad worker, struck the Iraq Petroleum Company - all with partial or total success.(10)

After two years of rapid growth, the Arab unions suffered catastrophic reverses during the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939. In Jaffa, workers closed the port; the British then destroyed workers' neighborhoods and authorized Tel Aviv to develop its own port. Jobs disappeared and workers were dispersed as the city lost its pre-eminence among the ports of Palestine. In Haifa, different responses produced similar effects. Workers in the large transport and manufacturing industries participated briefly, if at all, in the political strike: with so many Jewish and expatriate workers at hand, any effort to "close it down" would have seemed futile. Many of the region's Arab workers, however, turned their energies from union to overtly national questions; some - most visibly the guerrilla followers of the fallen 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam - took to the hills.(11)

Union membership and activity fell. The number of economic strikes nationwide dropped from fifty-eight in 1935 to fifteen the next year, just two of them during the six-month political strike.(12) By 1940, only the original PAWS chapter, in the Haifa railroad yards, survived. Between 1921 and 1936, however - in barely fifteen years in large-scale industry - Arab workers had established a corps of union veterans and a practice of unionizing to which they could return.

The Arab Unions Reach Maturity

The Allies' Middle East production needs of World War II brought Palestine's Arab workers the employment base and the official support to build on their union tradition. By 1942, well over 100,000 Arabs - more than a third of the working-age men - were in paid employment, many in military production camps.(13) Arab union activists also gained a new ally. Britain's Colonial Office, seeking a vent for the stresses and ambitions the war would arouse among colonized peoples, had already urged Imperial administrators to promote labor unions. In 1940, the Government of Palestine appointed a Labor Adviser; then, in 1942, a Labor Department. The new Department worked not only with PAWS, but with the Arab Communist unionists, whose party had recently been legitimized by the British-Soviet military alliance.

The hungry job market and official commitment to organizing gave the Arab unions the most favorable conditions in their history. They responded with rapid growth, not only in size and bargaining power, but in international contacts and political sophistication. PAWS again organized railroad and tobacco, and added municipal workers: according to the Labor Department, its membership rose from 1,000 in October 1942 to 9,000 the following August. In November 1942 a competitor, the Federation of Arab Trade Unions and Labor Societies (FATULS), formed, representing skilled workers in large enterprises: Haifa's port, petroleum plants, naval base, and government transport. FATULS was the project of the Arab leftist Rays of Hope Society. Maintaining fewer than 2,000 members and negotiating for some 3,000 more, it became influential by organizing strategic industries and by issuing a newspaper, Unity.(14)

The approaching end of World War II brought Palestine's Arab unions the opportunity to take a respected place in the worldwide union movement. At first, however, this opening led to frustration. In February 1945, PAWS monopolized the Palestinian Arab credentials at a London meeting to plan a World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU); its self-appointed representatives, secretary Sami Taha and legal counsel Hanna Asfur, failed to prevent passage of a resolution supporting the Jewish National Home. The presence of Asfur, a notable, lent credibility to the standard Histadrut charge that the Arab labor movement was just a front for nationalist politicians.(15) In August, a PAWS meeting in Nablus - away from the mass of industrial workers on the coast nevertheless named Taha and Asfur to represent Arab workers once again, at WFTU's official founding meeting in Paris.

Union democracy and nationalist effectiveness - the first a concern perpetual among union reformers, the second common among national union centers - thus became issues between the rival Arab federations. Within two weeks, on 19 August, representatives of FATULS, eleven leftist-led PAWS branches, and several independent unions met in Jaffa and founded the Arab Workers Congress (AWC). Their expressed grounds for splitting PAWS were the repeated selection of Asfur, the desire of several large PAWS branches for more influence on decisions, and the tactical failure in London.

The AWC immediately established its standing in the international labor movement by gaining the right to represent Palestinian Arabs at the Paris WFTU meeting. There its delegates succeeded in securing the rejection of a resolution supporting Zionism and went on to help a Lebanese Communist, Mustafa al-Ariss, defeat a Histadrut candidate for Mideast representative on the WFTU executive body.(16)

Postwar conditions brought the Arab unions more than exciting international opportunities; like unions in other countries and the West, they faced grave new challenges. Unemployment grew, driven by a steady reduction in government jobs, the return of thousands of Jewish workers from war service, and the Histadrut's revival of its "Jewish labor" campaign. The unions already represented most urban Arab workers and at least some in most industries, especially large workplaces of the military, government, oil, and transport; membership continued to rise. Defending growing numbers of workers, the unions fought for job security, severance pay, and cost-of-living increases. In 1946 they held twenty-five strikes; the wartime high, in 1943, had been eleven.(17)

As their size and activity grew, the unions faced not only old political adversaries, but new ones as well. The end of the wartime lull in Zionist initiatives sharpened tensions between Arabs and Jews. At the same time, notable politicians, especially the Husayni-dominated Arab Higher Committee, mistrusted the increasingly powerful union leaders. Reluctant to share power as individuals or as a class, the Husayni faction seized on any cooperation with the Histadrut to accuse union leaders of collaborating with the Zionists. In the perpetual rivalry between the federation leaders, PAWS occasionally sabotaged joint AWC-Histadrut actions on the same grounds. AWC, in return, accused PAWS of collaboration with employers and the British.

While political struggles were isolating the Arab federations, economic pressures brought Arab and Jewish workers and unions together. In April 1946, a week-long strike of 23,000 Arab and Jewish government workers, white-collar and blue-collar - members of PAWS and AWC, the Histadrut, and binational unions - shut down the country's transport and communications. The leftist Arabs' National Liberation League and the primarily Jewish Palestine Communist Party supported the strike. When strikers marched through Jerusalem, their signs read "Long Live Unity" in Arabic, Hebrew, and English; the strike committee sent greetings to Muslim, Christian, and Jewish strikers on the religious holidays they celebrated during the strike. Unity was effective: workers in the various divisions secured, to varying degrees, better pay, pensions, and cost-of-living adjustments. A year later, a one-day joint AWC-Histadrut protest against layoffs turned out 40,000 Arab and Jewish workers in the remaining military production camps.

In the fall of 1947, as they planned their next moves, both PAWS and AWC suddenly collapsed, victims of political events. In September, Sami Taha, PAWS' dynamic young leader, was assassinated. Contemporary observers and historians alike have suspected that al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, exiled leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement, ordered the execution in order to discourage dissidence and cut off a potential rival. In the next four months, PAWS had two secretaries in succession; its activity virtually ceased. At the end of the year, as civil war followed the United Nations' partition resolution, the surviving Arab federation, the AWC, split over whether to accept the partition.(19)

In May 1948, the state of Israel was created in the very coastal strip where the mass of Arab industrial workers were employed. Many Arab workers fled the fighting in Palestine; Israel's borders closed permanently behind them. The Arab unionists who remained confronted new conditions in a new state.

WERE THESE REALLY LABOR UNIONS?

The assumption persists that the Arab unions of British Palestine were, throughout their existence, not only exceptionally small and weak, but somehow not "real unions."(20) Former urban artisans and recent village migrants alike supposedly proved unable to shake off divisive traditional allegiances sufficiently to recognize, much less to defend, their common interests in their new lives as wage workers. This assumption has helped support a broader one: that Palestinian Arabs were so culturally conservative as to be incapable of response to changing conditions.

Closer examination may invert this perception of the unions' significance in Palestinian history. The decisive question is whether the unions merely clothed old patronage relationships in a new organizational form or used that form to respond to their new workplace and social concerns and their national concerns as colonized workers. The foregoing account of the unions' development offers some indications; analysis of the unions at their peak, in the context of common union patterns, can provide a more definite answer. Aspects examined here are the identities of the primary organizers, the extent of unions' appeal to workers, and the unions' programs, governance, and political connections.

The Major Arab Organizers: Notables or Leftists?

In establishing their organizations, Palestinian Arab workers drew encouragement and support from two very different groups. Notables helped the workers defend their workplace interests against attacks by Jewish workers and organizations, most visibly against the Histadrut's persistent "Jewish labor" campaign. Communists (often workers themselves) went further, helping workers defend their interests against employers and claim their rights from the colonial administration.

As the body of Arab workers grew in size, militancy, and organization, notable politicians came to regard them as a possible source of valuable support, both in contention with the Zionists and in their own factional rivalries. More and more rapidly after the end of World War I, land sales to Zionists, population growth, and British taxes, later aggravated by a series of bad crop years, drove peasants to seek work off the farm. Many left the mountain districts, where every village was part of some network of notable patronage, for the economically vibrant coast, where society was more fluid. Notables seeking ways to maintain their influence evidently recognized workers as a dynamic potential constituency and the union as a type of organization that could attract them. They began to establish ties with union leaders; they also set up unions of their own.

The notables conducted their major organizing efforts in 1934, a year when economic development caused rapid growth in the Arab work force - and when the two major factions were preparing to establish political parties. Jamal Husayni, a leader in the dominant family faction, proclaimed himself head of a Jerusalem union that summer. Half a year later he became president of the Husaynis' new Palestine Arab Party; no more was heard of his union work. In the fall, the strongest rival faction, clustered around the Nashashibi family, prepared to set up the National Defense Party. Fakhri Nashashibi took over a union in Jaffa, attracting workers through resistance to a Histadrut "Jewish labor" drive. After a highly visible counter-picketing campaign, he, too, turned to other projects; his union developed into the leftist-led Arab Workers Federation.

The Arab politicians and unions never emulated the symbiotic relationship of the Jewish Agency and the Histadrut, "a settlement movement without settlers and a workers' movement without work."(21) Zionist politicians needed a strong economic and social organization to attract immigrants en masse. The Histadrut needed political support to help protect Jewish employment against lower-paid Arab competition. Their importance to the settlement project enabled Zionist labor leaders to dominate the policies and the governing bodies of the Zionist community in Palestine. Arab unionists were too few, and the Arab politicians too powerless, to give one another this kind of help. This weakness brought one benefit: the Arab unions were less tightly bound to politicians than was the Histadrut.

As labor organizers, the notables had several handicaps. They lacked power to defend workers against British or Zionist employers, who owned most large-scale industry. Within the Arab sector - mostly building, citriculture, transport, and light manufacturing - they were burdened by their obvious class interests. Those who were not themselves employers were likely to have relatives or clients who were.(22) Although the power of the militant nationalist Husayni faction rested on administrative and religious posts and extensive rural patronage networks, it had many supporters among entrepreneurs. The politically conciliatory Nashashibi faction was based among wealthy merchants, planters, and manufacturers. Both groups led workers in contention against the Histadrut rather than employers; in strikes, their role was to mediate, trying to minimize damage to Arab employers while maintaining the political support of the workers. When Arab workers struck an Arab employer or cooperated with a Jewish union, notable-backed newspapers were likely to accuse them of collaborating with Zionism.

Beyond their problems of power and class, the notables as organizers suffered an attitudinal handicap: reluctance to foster responsibility among those outside their own group. Like their methods of seeking national liberation, their union initiatives indicated little interest in developing popular potential for independent action.

The notables' disabilities did not lead unionists to characterize them as adversaries. Testifying to Britain's Peel Commission in 1937, AWF leader George Mansur, a former Communist and certainly no political naif, described the two major notable factions this way:

The party led by His Eminence the Mufti is not a party of wealthy men; it depends upon the support of the peasants and the working classes. The other leading party, the National Defence Party, headed by Ragheb Bey Nashashibi, is, indeed, composed largely of wealthy men, but they are not opposed to the reasonable demands of the working classes. . . .

We are glad to be able to record that our movement was sympathetically regarded by the Arab Higher Committee [before it was exiled] and to record our belief that Arab workers are likely to receive a far more sympathetic hearing under a national Government.(23)

Although workers generally supported the notables as national leaders, Arab communists and socialists were far more successful organizers. Among the early Arab members of the overwhelmingly Jewish Palestine Communist Party were workers and intellectuals interested in building a labor movement. Since the Histadrut repelled all the leftists' efforts to form non-Zionist mixed unions, the Arab Communists concentrated on developing Arab unions. Supporting their efforts, as notables sporadically supported PAWS, was a group of young professionals and entrepreneurs (many of them from notable families). These were veterans of the early lef-nationalist party, Istiqlal, who had remained active in nationalist initiatives. Through the 1930s, the leftists made no attempt to establish a separate union federation, but rather built up existing unions like the Jaffa Transport Society and the Arab Workers Federation. In the 1940s, some worked within PAWS, while others established FATULS and AWC. Leftist intellectuals maintained a closer relationship with workers than did notables. For one thing, the Arab left was actually committed to building a labor movement; more concretely, workers were active in left organizations. As a result, leftist influence came closer to reflecting workers' actual concerns.

Ultimately, the impetus for organizing the major Palestinian Arab unions came from workers, whether centrists or Communists. Both groups of workers succeeded in establishing durable federations; the notables did not. The workers who led the unions were often influenced by non-worker groups, mainly notables or leftist intellectuals. This influence sometimes, but by no means always, harmed workers' interests. It certainly did not, however, distinguish them from labor organizations in the West.(24)

Characteristics of the Arab Unions

What proportion of Palestine's Arab working class joined unions is unclear. Membership figures for the Arab federations at their high point, in the mid-1940s, vary widely. They can be calculated as representing 33,000 wage earners out of 115,000 - more than one out of four - or 15,000 out of 130,000 fewer than one out of eight.(25) Both proportions are comparable to rates of unionization in the industrialized West: while the first does not approach, for example, the United States high of about 35 percent in the 1950s, the second approximates recent United States rates. Even at the lower figure, the Arab unions, which barely existed in late 1942, were a substantial presence when they were cut off five years later.

The Arab unions negotiated effectively: by 1945, the government considered this basic union function their most successful activity. Most significantly, AWC, based in urban corporate industries, won contracts from foreign firms like Consolidated Refineries and Iraq Petroleum. These pacts were apparently good enough to fend off competition from PAWS and the Histadrut's intermittently functional Arab section.(26)

Beyond bargaining and other workplace activities, the programs of the two Arab federations followed two familiar union patterns. PAWS emphasized economic programs; by 1943, the British reported that it enrolled five thousand members in six cooperatives and operated a savings and loan program. Politically, PAWS took the common nationalist view, considering the Histadrut the Arab worker's primary adversary.(27) PAWS leaders maintained cordial relations with the nationalist establishment; they would, for example, ask such figures as Jamal Husayni to settle a strike. This stance drew periodic allegations of class collaboration from both the Histadrut and rival Arab unions.

The character of FATULS and its successor, AWC, derived from their relation to the Arab left, based after 1943 in the independent National Liberation League. These unions pursued political education and action to secure workers' rights and protect their interests: in 1943, FATULS was advocating the legalization of strikes, active government support for collective bargaining, social insurance, public works for postwar employment, and subsidies for displaced workers returning to the land. Through their paper, Unity, FATULS and AWC reached PAWS members as well as union and political activists in Lebanon and Iraq.(28)

The leftist unionists practiced an internationalist nationalism. Taking the consistent internationalist position of the Arab left, they defined Jewish workers as potential allies and the colonialist British government, which sponsored the Zionist project, as the basic opponent. At the same time, viewing their national aspirations as part of a worldwide anti-imperialist movement, they always assigned high priority to national interests. In the Peel Commission testimony quoted above, for example, George Mansur clearly did not find his socialist convictions an obstacle to an endorsement of the notables' political parties. (Nor did his Christian background prevent him from endorsing the leadership of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti and head of the Supreme Muslim Council.) For this labor leader addressing a British panel, the class welfare of Palestinian Arabs was inseparable from their national liberation.

As the Arab federations matured, both modified their stances, decreasing the differences between them. Both recognized the interests that all workers share vis-a-vis employers, but also the national, nonclass concerns common to colonized workers. The AWC, although it pressed for public policies that would benefit the working class, placed less emphasis on politics than had FATULS. At the same time, Sami Taha, in the hitherto more conservative and nationalist PAWS, by 1946 was speaking of "our socialist principles" and of common interests with Jewish workers. The two federations nevertheless remained on unfriendly terms: Taha refused to entertain the AWC's persistent call for amalgamation, and each repeatedly accused the other of class or national betrayal.

The federations' governing systems, like their programs, followed patterns common in Western unions. Far from being notables, the leaders of the Haifa-based federations, not only Taha and his predecessors in PAWS but Bulus Farah of FATULS and AWC, came from the railroad shops. PAWS operated as a "popular bossdom": Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described Taha as "very close to the Western stereotype of 'union leader'." PAWS did not hold nationwide or branch elections; Taha personally controlled its many small locals. The AWC, in contrast, regularly held conventions and elections; the 1946 convention, with many women delegates, elected two women to its executive.(29)

In the postwar period, union leaders began to make a mark in nationalist politics. To the notables, the British, and the Arab League, Taha, in particular, came to represent the new power of workers. In 1946 and 1947, the Husayni-led Arab Higher Committee (AHC) gave him temporary posts; the British and the Arab League pressed for his appointment to the AHC itself. In August 1947, choosing a path common among Western labor federations, PAWS passed a resolution favoring creation of a labor party.(30)

That September Taha moved further toward internationalism, saying, "whether the Jews in Palestine are going to be many or few, we shall have to collaborate with them, and we had better make up our minds to that from now on."(31) As independent politician Musa al-Alami held the same position, the statement could be interpreted not only as an expression of workers' solidarity, but as an abandonment of the Husayni political faction. Within days, Taha had been killed.

The AWC, meanwhile, worked as closely as PAWS with nationalist political figures, but these were dissidents; one scholar has called it "the only organized opposition to the Husaynis."(32) Rather than propose a labor party, the AWC advocated unity of workers of all political persuasions. It consistently called on the self-appointed AHC to reconstitute itself as a representative body.

Taken all in all, then, by the summer of 1947 Palestinian Arab unions were unexceptional components of the organized labor movement worldwide. They had the members and the skill to carry on resistance to both corporate employers and government policies. Their programs and governance structures resembled those of unions in Western countries. They were operating as colleagues of unions in Europe; in Palestine, they were beginning to carry weight in their national movement. The speed with which workers in Palestine's newly established mass industries built these standard unions illustrates the Palestinian Arabs' ability to develop strong and appropriate institutions, despite externally imposed pressures and constraints.

The Arab federations were far from perfect. Even in prosperous times, their strikes were not always effective; nor were their negotiations always successful; leaders, steadfast; members, united; or counterparts, in solidarity. They were very ordinary labor organizations, which shared in the strengths and weaknesses of real unions everywhere.

NOTES

1. For more fully elaborated discussion of colonial workers' situation, see, for example, Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), chapters 1-3 passim.

2. Ellis Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor, and Textile Worker: Class and Politics in Egypt, 1930-1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 74-75, provides an instance of official portrayal of unions as nationalist fronts. For discussions of colonized workers' choices of ally, see Beinin and Lockman; Goldberg; Thomas Hodgkin, "Some African and Third World Theories of Imperialism," Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, ed. Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 111-13; and Zachary Lockman, "Introduction," Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. xxiv.

3. Even so sympathetic a scholar as Ann Mosely Lesch explained that "the labor societies were heavily politicized, and efforts to expand them in the 1930s were used by the various Arab political parties to increase their own bases of support, rather than to redress specific labor grievances." Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917-1939: The Frustration of a Nationalist Movement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 64.

4. Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939-1948 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

5. Zachary Lockman has provided discussions of the Histadrut and the Arab railroad workers in "Railway Workers and Relational History: Arabs and Jews in British-Ruled Palestine," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35, No. 3 (July 1993), pp. 610-15, among other articles.

6. Barbara Jean Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920-1929 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), describes the operation and effects of British economic policies in Palestine.

7. Rachelle Leah Taqqu, "Arab Labor in Mandatory Palestine" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1977), p. 140; Maher al-Charif, "Le premier congres ouvrier arabe: emergence du mouvement ouvrier arabe en Palestine," Mouvement ouvrier, Communisme et nationalisme dans le monde arabe (Paris: Les editions ouvrieres, 1978), pp. 152-55.

8. Roger Owen, "Economic Development in Mandatory Palestine: 1918-1948," The Palestinian Economy: Studies in Development Under Prolonged Occupation, ed. George A. Abed (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 16.

9. Palestine Royal Commission, Minutes of Evidence Heard at Public Sessions, Colonial No. 134 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1937), p. 340; George Mansur, The Arab Worker Under the Palestine Mandate (Jerusalem: 1937).

10. Taqqu, p. 145.

11. Abdul Wahhab Said Kayyali, Palestine: A Modern History (London: Croom Helm, [1978]), p. 194; Mansur, p. 9; United Kingdom, Colonial Office, Report by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Transjordan for the Year 1937, Colonial No. 146 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1938), p. 130.

12. United Kingdom, Colonial Office, Report by His Majesty's Government . . . for the Year 1936, Colonial No. 129 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1937), pp. 139, 140.

13. Owen, p. 16, has pointed out the small proportion of Arabs who were of working age, and the likelihood that most Arab women were not in paid employment. Out of an Arab population of about 1.2 million, half were of working age, and half of those would have been women. Taqqu, p. 159, says the figure of 100,000 represents a third.

14. United Kingdom, Public Records Office, CO 859/93/3, Harold Chudleigh, "Progress of the Palestine Arab Trade Union Movement During 1943," 13 September 1943, p. 3. The new federation showed precocious sophistication, presenting the government's Wages Commission with a lively memorandum on the expenses of the city worker and providing a copy to Britain's Trades Union Congress (Federation of Arab Trade Unions and Labour Societies, FATULS), Memo to Wages Commission, MSS.292/956.9/3, 31 December 1942, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, hereafter MRC).

15. This was a consistent Histadrut allegation. The same year, for example, it asserted in its "Survey of Arab Labour Organisation in Palestine" (Tel-Aviv: the Federation, 1945), p. 23, that "any statement of opinion which may be made by [the Arab working masses] is only what has been put into their mouths by others."

16. Government of Palestine, A Survey of Palestine, prepared for the information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (Jerusalem: Government Printer, 1946-1947), pp. 765-66; Musa Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism (London: Ithaca Press, 1979), pp. 189-94; and Federation Syndicale Mondiale, Rapport de la conference congres syndicale mondiale (Paris: [FSM, 1945]), pp. 208-209.

17. Government of Palestine, p. 763; Taqqu, p. 315.

18. Gabriel Baer, "Jewish and Arab Workers: Divided or United?" Towards Union in Palestine: Essays on Zionism and Jewish-Arab Cooperation, ed. Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Ernst Simon  (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972, reprinted from Jerusalem: IHUD [Union] Association, 1947), p. 76; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, pp. 334-35, 338.

19. Baruch Kimmerling, The Economic Interrelationships Between the Arab and Jewish Communities in Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1979), p. 96, note 101; Richard Graves, Experiment in Anarchy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949), p. 84; Taqqu, p. 318; Budeiri, pp. 199-200.

20. One example: In Palestinians: The Making of a People (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1993), Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal noted "some progress" in organizing in the 1930s, but concluded: "Most of these labor activities did not amount to much." They mentioned eventual "significant union-organizing progress" in the 1940s, but then, without analyzing workforce characteristics (see Note 13 above), pointed out that this "left the Arabs with one-tenth the Jewish union membership, for a population more than twice as large." Unlike earlier writers, however, they did not invoke Arab "backwardness" in explanation: "Perhaps the labor scene was still too chaotic for any organization to do better. The working class remained a jumble. . . . " (pp. 50-51).

21. Michael Shalev, "The Labor Movement in Israel," The Social History of Labor in the Middle East, ed. Ellis Jay Goldberg (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), p. 141.

22. Salim Tamari, "Factionalism and Class Formation in Recent Palestinian History," Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Roger Owen (Oxford: St. Antony's College, 1982), p. 199.

23. Mansur, pp. 8-9.

24. The United States, for instance, offers many examples of nonworker influence on unions. Two that are relevant are the early Twentieth Century union attempt to work with employers in the National Civic Federation, and the CIO organizing drive of the 1930s, in which many of the Communist organizers were not workers.

25. For the figures 15,000 (PAWS) and 18,000 (AWC), see Baer, p. 79; the figures 115,000 to 130,000 come from Hurewitz, pp. 121, 189; a total of 15,000 to 20,000 comes from Government of Palestine, p. 766.

26. Government of Palestine, p. 763.

27. Chudleigh, p. 2. Ironically, PAWS's stress on economic benefits led FATULS and AWC to accuse it of copying the Histadrut.

28. Budeiri, pp. 143-44; Taqqu, ibid., p. 209; Government of Palestine, p. 765.

29. H. A. Turner defines a popular bossdom in Trade Unions Growth, Structure and Policy: A Comparative Study of the Cotton Unions in England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, n.d., reprinted from George Allen & Unwin, 1962), pp. 290-91, 315-19 passim. The leader of a popular bossdom retains power as long as the union provides workplace protection, since its members generally have no long-term commitment to a specific occupation. Taqqu, ibid., p. 290; Kimmerling, ibid. (readers will judge for themselves the significance of the description); Budeiri, pp. 198, 199; J [Hanna] Asfur, "Arab Labour in Palestine," Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 32 (1945), p. 204; Capt. Filsar, Report to the Trades Union Congress, MRC, MSS. 292/956.9/4, p. 1.

30. Taqqu, ibid., pp. 307, 298-309 passim; Khalaf, pp. 128-130, 156. North American labor movements have not established successful political parties; for decades, a repeated search for explanations has sustained lively speculation among labor historians.

31. Graves, p. 84.

32. J.C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968, reprinted from New York: W.W. Norton, 1950), p. 122.

Jane Power is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia.