Summary
The Diamond Control Board (DCB), established by the Palestine government in August 1943 to formalize British control of the diamond industry at the moment the Diamond Syndicate switched Palestine’s supply from Sand and eight-cuts to Melees (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.144).
Details
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It had to report daily to the government on the regulation of the diamond industry, inspect its import and export activities, advise the Palestine Diamond Manufacturers’ Association on its internal affairs, and even deal with labor unrest (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.144).
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Its personnel were Geoffrey Walsh (chair), John Fletcher of the Customs Department and controller of light industries, Oved Ben-Ami and Yehoshua Mazur from the PDMA, the diamond merchant Oscar Fischer, and David Andreson of the Palestine Corporation, soon joined by Albert Ehrenfeld (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.144-145).
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Through the DCB the British formalized control over the industry and applied new means of pressure; the means available to the PDMA to resist seemed weaker than the means of control and dependence employed by the MEW-DCB axis (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.146).
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The DCB became an essential address for discontented manufacturers, and in late 1943 it allowed the establishment of an independent organization of exporters — the first time in three years that merchants who were not cutters or manufacturers were allowed to export diamonds (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.146-147).
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In winter 1944 its chair Walsh appointed an inquiry subcommittee (Fletcher, Salomon Horowitz and David Andreson) into PDMA mismanagement allegations; its March-May 1944 report reinstated Ben-Ami while recommending a more democratic PDMA structure (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.158-159).
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The government, increasingly worried about endemic unrest, directed all unions to notify the government’s diamond controller of any dispute so as to allow preemptive mediation during the 1943 agreement negotiations (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.178).
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Its controllers Walsh, Fletcher and Ehrenfeld advanced the establishment of the Diamond Inquiry Committee (1945) on 22 August 1945 to decide on the extent and mode of deregulation (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.211).
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The call of the Zionist institutions after the King David Hotel bombing (22 July 1946), in which Walsh and the inquiry secretary Bourdillon were killed, that the industry not cooperate with the British on the DCB remained unheeded by the industry; the DCB’s intervention in the industry weakened in the latter part of 1946 (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.233, p.235).