Summary
Palestinian trade unionist (b. 1905 – d. 1963), Secretary of the Arab Labour Federation in Jaffa, whose January 1937 evidence to the Royal Commission on Arab workers’ grievances became the 1937 booklet The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate (The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, PDF p.1-2).
Details
- The editors’ biographical introduction in The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate gives his early work as baker, then school teacher in Nazareth, the family’s move to Jaffa in 1927, and work first in trade and then in manufacturing; as Secretary of the Arab Workers Society, a labour organisation founded in 1934, he was a central figure in the 1936 General Strike, helping to write and distribute communiques and leaflets and organise rallies, marches and pickets (PDF p.1).
- After his arrest in late 1936 he testified before the Royal Commission in January 1937 about the grievances of Arab labourers in Palestine; frustrated by the Peel Commission Report, he published The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, based largely on his evidence to the Commission and designed to appeal to British public opinion (PDF p.1).
- In the House of Commons Debate on Palestine of July 21st, 1937, quoted at the head of the booklet, Earl Winterton defended his standing against the charge that he represented nobody but himself: he represented the only organised Arab labour in the country, and his evidence was that Arab labour could not accept the present position and were at one with the people of other classes in objecting to Jewish immigration as it stood (PDF p.2).
- The editors give his later life: appointed to the Palestine Office in London, where he remained until the Second World War, on the strength of his testimony and his relationships to trade unionists in Britain; on returning to Palestine, unable to revive his labour work under continued harassment and repeated arrests; then Baghdad, as a teacher and organiser of popular committees in solidarity with Palestine; after the war and the Nakba, labour organising, journalism and education in Egypt and work with the Arab Higher Committee, moving with the Committee to Beirut in 1959 and spending his last years in trade union work (PDF p.1).
- In Kanafani, George Mansour, secretary of the Federation of Palestinian Arab Workers in Jaffa, reported to the Peel Commission on Arab workers’ conditions, and the Federation produced the 1936 census of 1,000 workers in Jaffa (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.7-8 / printed p.13-14).
Related pages
The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, Arab Labour Federation, Michel Mitri, Peel Commission, Jaffa, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine