Summary
The mandatory government agency that operated Palestine’s railway system and, in Zachary Lockman’s account, was one of the few enterprises in Palestine employing Arabs and Jews side by side, making its workers a central case for the relational history of Arab and Jewish labour (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 290-294).
Details
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The Palestine Railways was one of Palestine’s largest employers: a workforce of about 2,400 in 1924 reaching a war-swollen peak of 7,800 in 1943, comprising numerous unskilled Arab peasants hired to build and maintain roadbed and track, substantial skilled personnel in the running and traffic departments and at stations, and (in 1943) some 1,200 Arab and Jewish workers at the Haifa repair and maintenance workshops (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 290-292).
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Until the establishment of an oil refinery in Haifa at the start of the Second World War and the proliferation of British military bases during the war, the Haifa workshops constituted Palestine’s largest concentration of industrial wage workers (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 292).
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The railwaymen were among the first industrial workers in Palestine to organise: a Jewish railway workers’ organisation was established as early as 1919, Arab railway workers began to show interest in trade unionism soon after and played a key role in founding and leading the Palestinian Arab labour movement; Lockman devotes two full chapters of Comrades and Enemies to the railway workers (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 292-294).
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In Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Chapter 2: it was the railway workers’ specific situation that, through the mid-1920s, primarily compelled the Zionist labour movement to confront relations with Arab workers; the Histadrut executive committee’s discussion of December 30, 1920, formally over the upcoming congress of the exclusively Jewish Railway Workers’ Association, turned substantive because the railway workforce was overwhelmingly Arab, and since the middle of 1921 some Arab railwaymen had been pressing Jewish union leaders for a clear response to their offer to cooperate, some reportedly expressing interest in joining the Histadrut, while leaders feared Jewish railwaymen would turn to left rivals advocating a fully integrated Jewish-Arab railway union (lines 860-864, 888-890).
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In Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Chapter 3: the system’s history runs from Yosef Navon’s 1888 Jaffa–Jerusalem concession (line completed summer 1892) and the Ottoman Hijaz Railway (1900–1908; Haifa branch 1905) through wartime military extension to the mandatory Palestine Railways, Telegraph and Telephone; by the mandate’s end there were 290 miles of railroad, carrying in 1946–47 1.9 million tons of freight and some 900,000 passengers, Lydda being the country’s main rail junction (lines 1366-1376).
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Chapter 3’s workforce account: the permanent pre-war majority was Muslim and Christian Arabs, with Turks in supervisory and clerical positions, Armenians and, in skilled jobs, Europeans; Syrian Muslim railway workers settled in Haifa’s Wadi Salib after 1905, and several founders of the Palestinian Arab trade union movement were Syrian-born Hijaz Railway veterans; after the war many workshop foremen were Greeks and all senior officials British, much unskilled labour was initially performed by Egyptians conscripted by the British, and an Arab railway workers’ mutual aid society existed from about 1920, registered by 1923 (lines 1380-1388).
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The wartime peak figure is given in Chapter 3 as nearly 7,800 railway workers in 1943, more than 1,200 of them relatively skilled, permanent industrial workers in the Haifa workshops (line 1376) — against the Introduction’s workforce of about 2,400 in 1924 reaching a peak of 7,800 in 1943, with some 1,200 Arab and Jewish workers employed at the Haifa repair and maintenance workshops in 1943 (lines 290-292); the figures are kept as given in each place.
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Chapter 3 is devoted to its workers’ union, the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers: the Haifa workshops, to which the main workshops were gradually transferred from Lydda, were then the largest single concentration of industrial wage labour in Palestine (lines 1410-1412).
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In Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Chapter 4: workforce figures as given — Jews 12.7 percent (405 of 3,182) in 1926, only 184 Jews (less than 6 percent) by August 1934, and at the end of 1935 3,171 Palestinian Arabs, 345 Jews and 1,307 “others”; “unclassified” employees rose from 2,765 in March 1933 to 4,138 by March 1936; management, backed by the government and Colonial Office, generally refused both official recognition of the Jewish-led union and Histadrut pressure to hire more Jews, insisting Arabs were hired simply because they were cheaper (lines 1852, 1910-1912, 1936-1938; Chapter 4 notes 22, 24).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Relational History, Labor Zionism, Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, Palestine Arab Workers Society