Summary
The Palestinian worker who came to the Haifa railway workshops in 1925 as a fifteen-year-old apprentice and later became a leader of the communist and labor movements in Palestine, whose memoir Min al-‘uthmaniyya ila al-dawla al-‘ibriyya (From Ottomanism to the Hebrew State, Nazareth, 1985) is a principal Arab source for Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948’s railway chapters (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1412-1416; Chapter 3 notes 6, 13).
Details
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Farah’s description of the Haifa workshops is quoted at length: a mixture of every nationality with Arab and Jewish workers the overwhelming majority, Arabic the common language, Jewish workers learning Arabic from Arab colleagues, and violent arguments between the Jewish left and Histadrut partisans over Zionism, British imperialism, the Arab national movement and the Soviet revolution; Jewish workers, he wrote, regarded their Arab coworkers with considerable respect for their professional skill while rating them lower “in terms of culture”. Lockman calls the portrait “too rosy” while accepting that a unique atmosphere prevailed there (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1412-1416).
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Farah described Sa’id Qawwas as a man of broad culture (line 1566).
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In his memoirs Farah contended, in Lockman’s account plausibly, that Haifa workshop Arab workers felt strongly about Hebrew Labour: the supervisor Moshlin was regarded as a Zionist who would give every job that opened up to a Jewish worker without regard for seniority or skill; Arab workers who joined the Histadrut quit after observing that its trade unionism “consisted of discrimination against Arab workers”, that it “stole jobs from the Arab workers and gave them to the Jewish workers” and used them in the international labor movement to conceal its Jewishness while “riding the horse of internationalism” (line 1556; Chapter 3 note 60).
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In the war years, in Lockman’s account, Farah was expelled from the PCP central committee in 1940 after the leadership claimed he had informed on the party while briefly in police custody — he insisted his enemies within the party had turned him in and besmirched his good name — and, outraged at the readmission of the Emet group in 1942, built a strong Haifa following in 1941-42, establishing the “Rays of Hope” (Shu’a’ al-Amal) club in 1942 (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 3353-3357).
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In November 1942 the coalition around Farah’s club established the Federation of Arab Trade Unions and Labor Societies; Farah later attended the February 1945 London trade union conference only as an observer, and was chosen with Mukhlis al-‘Amr as an Arab Workers’ Congress delegate to the Paris WFTU congress in August 1945 (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 3361, 3531-3538).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Palestine Railways, Haifa, Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, Hebrew Labour