Hanna 'Asfur

Summary

The Haifa lawyer who served as the Palestine Arab Workers Society’s legal counselor for much of the 1930s and 1940s, negotiating on its behalf in the 1935 Iraq Petroleum Company strike (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 2361-2518).

Born in Shafa ‘Amr in 1902, ‘Asfur attended schools in Palestine and Lebanon, held a clerical job at the Palestine Railways and then served as a court translator in Haifa; he graduated from a local law school and opened his own office in Haifa in 1929 (lines 2361-2376).
The PAWS developed connections with lawyers such as ‘Asfur to counter the Palestine Labor League’s institutional advantages: locally prominent lawyers could bargain on the workers’ behalf from a position of relative equality and impunity. The Histadrut frequently denounced such lawyers as self-interested, opportunistic outsiders, a depiction Lockman calls not altogether inaccurate in some cases, while noting the workers and PAWS leaders may have seen themselves as “using” the lawyers every bit as much as the lawyers exploited them (lines 2361-2376).
In the IPC strike of February-March 1935 the PAWS called in ‘Asfur to negotiate with the company; he joined Eliyahu Agassi and the strike committee in talks, and was unable to convince the strikers to accept the concessions the IPC offered under British official pressure (lines 2507-2518).
In the April 1935 Even Vesid strike the Histadrut claimed the strikers were being exploited by ‘Asfur and other Arab nationalist activists (lines 2497-2506).

tags
aliases	Hanna Asfur