Summary
The aim, as the Administration’s Memoranda for the Royal Commission state it and as George Mansour develops it in 1937, of penetrating Jewish labour into all spheres of work in Palestine — industry, trade, the public services and above all agriculture — displacing Arab workers wherever they could be ousted, so that the vacancies created by picketing and pressure could be filled by Jewish immigrants under the Government’s Labour Schedules (The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, PDF p.11-12, p.16).
Details
-
The Administration’s Memoranda, as quoted by Mansour, name as one of Mapai’s aims “the so-called conquest of labour, namely the penetration of Jewish Labour into all spheres of work, industry, trade, the public services and most of all into agricultural work” (The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, PDF p.11 / printed p.200).
-
Mansour’s gloss: the Histadrut’s fundamental aim is to introduce as many Jews of its own type into Palestine as quickly as possible and push them into every sort of work; no Arab has the right to a job a possible immigrant might occupy, or to work in Jewish undertakings; displacement of Arabs in the Haifa and Jaffa ports is good, and pushing Arab labour out by picketing and pressure is better than the employment some Jewish orchard owners still gave it (PDF p.12).
-
The worked mechanisms in Mansour’s excerpts: bulk payment and agency-supplied labour saving devices at Haifa Harbour (PDF p.4-5); the Labour Council of Tel Aviv’s 1934 campaign for Jewish stone only, with a controller’s seal, inspectors and a duty to refuse stone of Arab provenance (PDF p.13-14); the attempted dismissal of some 400 Arab workers at the Majdal Yaba quarries (PDF p.15); and the tremendous extension of picketing in 1934, in Hadar Ha Carmel, Rehavia, Kfar Saba, Bait Vegan and elsewhere, driving Arabs away by force if necessary (PDF p.16).
-
Mansour’s counterfactual test of sincerity: the Histadrut might have employed one quarter Arab labour with its own labour, taught the Arabs its skilled processes and paid the same wage for the same work; instead it never employed a single Arab if it could help it and paid forced Arab employees half its own men’s wages (PDF p.12).
-
The causal chain Mansour closes with: the vacancies created by such means, often including violence and other illegalities, were filled by the Labour Schedules the Government granted, which made 1935 the record year for immigration and prepared the way for the disorder of 1936 (PDF p.16).
-
In Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, Wolfe traces the policy to its origin and generalises it: in 1905 Hapoel Hatzair resolved to abandon market rationality for a Jewish-only isolate rejecting any labour that was not Jewish; the World Zionist Organization took the policy up, inspired in part by Arthur Ruppin’s admiration for Bismarck’s East Prussian Germanisation scheme, and funded it through the Jewish National Fund, established in 1901 for that land purpose; its core institution was the Kibbutz, a totally insulated Jewish-only capsule, and its premise — that it was more important that labour be Hebrew than that it be productive — was the centrepiece of an all-encompassing Conquest of Economics made possible by capital that required no profit (PDF p.19-21 / printed p.151-153).
-
Wolfe’s account and Mansour’s agree on the policy’s exclusionary character and its displacement of Arab labour; Wolfe supplies the pre-history (1905, the Algerian and East Prussian models via Gershon Shafir) that Mansour’s 1937 evidence presupposes, and Mansour supplies the worked mechanisms on the ground in 1934-1935 that Wolfe does not detail.
-
In Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers, the policy appears under its settlers’ name Kibbush Ha-Avoda, glossed Conquest of the Labour Market: expelling the Palestinian workforce from the old Jewish colonies is named, with laying the foundations for the future state, as the achievement of the few thousand Second Aliya settlers who remained, and congregating in exclusive enclaves was in part a material necessity of conquering the labour market in order to secure jobs and immigration (PDF p.10 / printed p.48). The same article records how exclusion was justified to socialist settlers: employing Arabs was called exploitation, hence they should not be employed (PDF p.11 / printed p.49).
-
In Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir, the twin doctrines of the ‘conquest of labor’ (kibbush ha’avoda) and ‘Hebrew labor’ (‘avoda ‘ivrit) were adopted by 1914 as one of labour Zionism’s two worked-out solutions, envisioning a secure Jewish working class through maximal exclusion of cheaper indigenous Arab labour from the Jewish sector; Lockman’s reformulation is that “the precondition for achieving the (metaphorical) conquest of labor was the (military) conquest of the land and the displacement of most of its Palestinian inhabitants” (PDF p.4, p.23).
Related pages
The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, Jewish Labour Only, Histadrut, Mapai, Labor Zionism, George Mansour, Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir