Summary
The question — in what framework Arab and Jewish workers in “mixed” workplaces should be organised and cooperate — that stood at the centre of the Histadrut’s debates about relations with Arab workers through the mandate period in Zachary Lockman’s account, with the railway workers usually at its centre (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 866-870).
Details
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The question (irgun meshutaf) arose immediately after the Histadrut’s founding: at the executive committee meeting of December 30, 1920, called over the congress of the exclusively Jewish Railway Workers’ Association, Berl Katznelson saw no danger in Arab railway workers organising and cooperating with Jewish coworkers but feared they might want to join the RWA, which would thereby lose its Jewish and Zionist character; the committee affirmed Arab-Jewish solidarity in principle and procrastinated on any practical decision (lines 860-868).
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Mixed workplaces before 1948 also included the telephone and telegraph systems, the Public Works Department, port authorities, municipal government in mixed cities, later British and Allied military bases, and private enterprises such as the Iraq Petroleum Company terminal at Haifa, the Haifa oil refinery, the Dead Sea potash works and the Nesher quarry and cement factory (lines 866-868).
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The question overlapped with Hebrew Labour: Histadrut support for cooperation in mixed workplaces, intended to improve the lot of Jews already employed there and keep them at their jobs, might contradictorily undermine Jewish employment in the same workplaces by also raising Arab wages; maximising Jewish employment in mixed enterprises was never absent from Zionist labour leaders’ calculations (lines 868-870).
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The policy Ahdut Ha’avoda and the Histadrut ultimately adopted, first outlined by David Ben-Gurion in summer 1921, was separate unions in mixed workplaces, or at least autonomous national sections within joint unions: Jewish workers would improve their circumstances through cooperation with Arab coworkers while the Histadrut and its unions preserved their exclusively Jewish character and remained free to carry out their Zionist tasks, including the struggle for Hebrew labor; on the same grounds Arab workers were not to be allowed to join the Histadrut (lines 880-904).
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Against this, the Socialist Workers’ Party had proposed at the founding congress a nonparty trade union federation of all the workers of Palestine without regard to national affiliation, with a separate Jewish settlement organisation (lines 854-856), and Histadrut leaders feared that without a clear policy the Jewish railwaymen would turn to left rivals advocating a fully integrated (“international”) Jewish-Arab railway workers’ union (lines 888-890).
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The 1924 Ein Harod debate: Shlomo Kaplansky proposed an immediately elected parliament accepting an Arab majority, through agreement with the Arab nationalist leadership; David Ben-Gurion defeated it, arguing agreement must come through the Arab worker, whose fate was linked to the Jewish worker’s, while denying Arabs a right to control the country’s construction (lines 912-926).
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The controversy sharpened when Po’alei Tziyon Smol won the railway workers’ union in 1924, declared it international and demanded “separation of functions”; Ben-Gurion countered with an all-Palestine workers’ alliance of autonomous national organisations, and both sides shared the premise that Palestinian Arab nationalism was nonexistent or illegitimate (lines 928-950).
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The Histadrut’s third congress in July 1927 adopted a vague compromise: “cooperation between Jewish and Arab workers in the vital matters common to them” on the basis of “recognition of the essential value and rights of Jewish immigration to Palestine”, proclaiming an international alliance on autonomous national units that would entail no change in the Histadrut’s structure or mission — with no commitment to assist Arab organising (line 1068). Lockman calls the outcome a reversal: Arab organising was no longer the guarantor of Zionism’s success; the exclusively Jewish enclave’s success was now to raise Arab wages by example (lines 1070-1074).
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Hayyim Arlosoroff’s 1927 essay attacked joint organisation from the right, citing South Africa’s “color bar” and arguing for a separate high-wage Jewish sector coexisting with a low-wage Arab sector (lines 1030-1034).
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Arab workers’ own demands for admission recur in the range: George Nassar’s December 1925 “We cannot be your slaves” to Ben-Gurion, petitions said to carry some 700 signatures, and Ahmad Hamdi’s greeting to the 1927 congress, “Such separate organizations are dangerous” (lines 1022-1024, 1056-1060).
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In Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Chapter 3, the question was worked out in the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers: its fourth congress (February 1922) accepted Arabs as full members until a separate Arab section could be created; its fifth congress (September 1923) demanded the Histadrut separate its cooperative from its trade union functions and establish the latter on an “international” basis; in March 1924 six Arab representatives, led by Ilyas Asad, demanded the word “Jewish” be removed from the membership card and the union’s Histadrut ties severed, David Ben-Gurion answering that common work matters would be handled jointly while each nation’s specific interests required “complete autonomy and equality” (lines 1426, 1446-1468).
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The joint union actually achieved in late 1924 rested, in Lockman’s reconstruction, on abandoning national sections for a purely unitary, territorial structure and on a tacit understanding that the union would be formally international and non-Zionist — understandings the two sides held differently; by the end of 1924 the union was roughly half Arab and half Jewish (lines 1494-1504).
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The arrangement collapsed in early 1925: after Hasanayn Fahmi’s unanswered questions about the union’s Zionism, the January 1925 council proclaimed an international union by eighteen to seven with Arab votes in the majority, the Histadrut leaders rejected the decisions as invalid on that ground, and most Arab members then left, the Arabic-language sources unanimously specifying the union’s persistent Zionist affiliations — and the felt deception over them — as the fundamental issue, with Hebrew Labour the issue that made Zionism most concrete (lines 1512-1558).
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Lockman’s conclusion for the sector: the URPTW’s survival as an Arab-Jewish union would have required severing its Histadrut and Zionist links, renouncing Hebrew labor and accepting a largely Arab membership, leadership and orientation — beyond what even the most radical Po’alei Tziyon Smol activist could accept (lines 1570-1572).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Histadrut, Labor Zionism, David Ben-Gurion, Palestine Railways, Hebrew Labour, Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, Palestine Arab Workers Society