Summary
The Arabic-speaking Haifa labour Zionist whom the Histadrut put in charge of organising Arab workers outside the railways in 1925, who with Philip Hassun ran the General Workers’ Club and led the October 1925 Haifa carpenters’ and tailors’ strike — the high point of the Histadrut’s first attempt to organise Arab workers (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 988-998, 1006-1012).
Details
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Born in Tiberias in 1900 into a Jewish family long established in Palestine, Khalfon grew up in Haifa, spoke fluent Arabic and had extensive Arab contacts; elected to the city’s Jewish community council in 1923, he had assisted the railway workers’ union’s contact work with Arab railway workers before taking charge of wider Arab organising under the Haifa Workers’ Council (line 988).
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In October 1925, with Histadrut executive support, he sent the demands of some 100 unionised carpenters to their twelve workshops’ owners; ignored, the carpenters and some thirty tailors struck under his and Hassun’s leadership, and Khalfon freed arrested strikers by posting bail and sending the English police inspector a case of his favourite whiskey (lines 996-998).
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David Ben-Gurion, visiting during the strike, congratulated him but warned him not to go too far, lest Hajj Amin al-Husayni later collect the workers Khalfon had taught to strike and use them against Zionism (line 1006).
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In spring 1927, at Ben-Gurion’s and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi’s urging, Khalfon left the club to become Jewish secretary at the Haifa municipality — a post from which Histadrut leaders hoped he would get more Jews hired — and rose over the following quarter-century to secretary of the municipality, ending his career as a labour organiser (line 1012).
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Much of the Haifa organising narrative rests on the Histadrut archives’ interview with Khalfon of January 29, 1976 (Chapter 2 notes 40, 43, 46, 49).
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In Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Chapter 3: before the 1925 Haifa work, Khalfon devoted several hours a week to the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers’ drive to recruit Arab railway workers — Jewish railwaymen invited Arab coworkers to the union club, where Khalfon talked unionism with them, discussions continuing at a local Arab coffeehouse; among the first contacts were Ibrahim al-Asmar and, through him, ‘Ali al-Batal (lines 1438-1440; Chapter 3 note 22).
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At the January 1925 URPTW council Khalfon translated David Ben-Gurion’s speech into Arabic and, as he admitted in his January 29, 1976 interview, “altered Ben-Gurion’s speech completely”: “Because if I had translated what he said, I was sure that 90 percent of the Arabs would have fled.…So I changed it, I watered down the contents”; Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who understood Arabic, kissed him in the break — “Bravo, thank you!” — while Ben-Gurion and Hayyim Arlosoroff knew nothing of the change (lines 1526-1528; Chapter 3 note 49). Lockman notes the speech was not in fact particularly extreme and raises the question of what Khalfon had been communicating to Arab unionists over the previous year.
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A late April 1925 article in the PCP’s Haifa expressly referenced Khalfon in charging deception: the language difference had “necessitated the employment of a translator in order to solve the problem; but this employee, who was not of the working class, curried favor for Zionism in the performance of his duties and abetted the spread of its influence and introduced it into the union’s affairs” (line 1552).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Histadrut, General Workers’ Club, Haifa, Joint Organization, Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers