Summary
The joint Arab-Jewish strike of motor-transport owners and drivers against British Mandate taxation in 1931, which Lev Grinberg analyzes as a successful anti-colonial mo(ve)ment of civil society — and as the “impossible path” whose failure to open a shared Political Space explains the turn to ethnic confrontation by 1936 (Moments of Resistance, PDF p.73-77).
Details
- The strikers’ joint organization comprised private companies owned by wealthy Arab bourgeois, public transportation cooperatives owned by individual middle-class Jews affiliated to the Histadrut’s Department for Cooperatives, and unorganized private owners of one truck or bus, the “singles”, the majority in both communities; private car owners joined them (400 cars of 2,400 vehicles in total, Census of Palestine 1931) (PDF p.74).
- The taxes arose from the Mandate government’s budget deficit, caused by the failure of the state-owned train company: the government deficit in 1931 was £100,000, the train company’s £150,000 (PDF p.74).
- Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani, a young London-educated lawyer hired by the Arab bus companies to negotiate oil-tax reductions, concluded after negotiations failed that an effective strike required mobilizing the singles and Jewish cooperatives too (Davar, August 20, 1931) (PDF p.75).
- After an almost spontaneous 24-hour warning strike on August 7, 1931, the Histadrut, having failed to prevent the joint organization, demanded and obtained a parity central committee of 16 Arabs and 16 Jews, with Shraga Gorochowsky, manager of its cooperative department, as el-Dajani’s deputy (PDF p.75).
- The ten-day general strike totally paralyzed motorized transportation, with joint Jewish-Arab demonstrations in the mixed cities and, at its end, solidarity commerce strikes; the government caved in, fearing expansion to all merchants. A striking feature was the complete absence of violence (PDF p.74-77).
- Chaim Arlosoroff wrote that the conjuncture might be “a turning point in the development of Arab-Jewish relations” (letter to Pinchas Ruttenberg, November 22, 1931, quoted PDF p.76).
- The strike’s success ran counter to the Zionist Labor Movement’s segregation strategy because it demonstrated that free markets can foster shared interests, cooperation and joint organization; the Histadrut and David Ben-Gurion worked afterward to underplay it, rejected el-Dajani’s proposals to expand cooperation, and terminated transport cooperation by creating the separate Jewish cooperative Egged in 1933 (PDF p.77-78).
- Grinberg records that the story has been forgotten because it fits neither the Zionist nor the Palestinian national narrative (PDF p.88).
Where sources disagree
- Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 gives the November 1931 strike as nine days; Grinberg gives the general strike as ten days (PDF p.74, 76). Both are recorded as their sources present them.
Related pages
Moments of Resistance, Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani, Histadrut, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Political Space, Movements of Resistance