Summary
The party at the far left of the Zionist spectrum in mandate Palestine, heir to the Zionist segments of the defunct Socialist Workers’ Party, which in 1923-24 won control of the Jewish railway workers’ union and pressed for a single “international” union and Histadrut membership for Arab workers against Ahdut Ha’avoda’s Joint Organization policy of separate national sections (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 934-950).
Details
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The party emerged from the SWP’s disintegration in 1921, after the Comintern declared communism and Zionism incompatible; the other tendency cohering from the wreckage was the Palestine Communist Party, recognised by the Comintern in 1924 (lines 934-936).
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It regarded itself as an authentic communist party loyal to Bolshevism, the Soviet Union and the Comintern except on Zionism, refused until the late 1930s to participate in the Zionist Organization’s institutions, held a pristine Borokhovist orthodoxy, and rejected Ahdut Ha’avoda’s Constructivism — building a separate Jewish workers’ economy under the Histadrut — as a diversion from class struggle entailing submission to the Jewish bourgeoisie; it encouraged Jewish immigration and envisioned Palestine as the site of a future Jewish socialist state (lines 938).
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It never gained a strong durable base in Palestine; its early-1920s members were mostly recent urban arrivals, it came to be seen as rigid, doctrinaire and sectarian, and by the 1930s its place on the Zionist left was taken by a formation with deeper Yishuv roots, while its eastern European sister parties were initially often stronger than Ahdut Ha’avoda’s (line 940).
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On the Arabs it was initially silent, from orthodox Borokhovism’s assimilation prognosis, and in some ways even less willing than Ahdut Ha’avoda to acknowledge Arab national rights, yet in workplaces it was strongly committed to working-class unity across communal lines (lines 942-944; Chapter 2 note 27 records that in autumn 1922 its Haifa militants helped organise a successful strike of Arab workers at two carpentry workshops, raising wages and cutting the day from twelve to nine hours).
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Its railway-union leadership in 1924 declared the union international (open to Arabs and Jews) and demanded “separation of functions” — the Histadrut handing settlement and cooperative functions to a separate entity and becoming a territorial trade union centre open to Arabs and Jews alike (line 944).
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In the debate, both it and Ahdut Ha’avoda shared the premise of Palestinian Arab nationalism’s nonexistence or illegitimacy: under its scheme exclusively Jewish institutions would carry on the “national” tasks while Arab workers’ interests were defined as purely social; Lockman argues its unreconstructed Borokhovism delegitimised Palestinian nationalism even more completely than Ahdut Ha’avoda’s pragmatism (lines 948-950).
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It used its small Jaffa Arab workers’ circle around George Nassar to press the admission demand: a December 1925 meeting with David Ben-Gurion ended in rejection, and petitions it circulated before the 1927 Histadrut congress were said by its leaders to carry some 700 Arab workers’ signatures (lines 1018-1024).
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At the Histadrut’s third congress in July 1927 it was a small minority; its restructuring resolutions and petitions were decisively defeated (lines 1054-1056). Its leader Moshe Erem acknowledged there that in Poland his party favoured separate national sections for Jewish workers, Jews there being an oppressed national minority, but argued no separation was needed in Palestine (Chapter 2 note 60).
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The only major study of the party is Elkana Margalit, Anatomia shel smol: Po’alei Tziyon Smol be’eretz yisra’el (1919–1946) (Jerusalem, 1976); in the early 1920s it was perhaps a fractious tendency rather than a unified party (Chapter 2 note 26).
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In Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Chapter 3: Smol members in Haifa took the initiative in the railway union’s outreach to Arab workers, and the party’s line of militant trade unionism, class struggle and Jewish-Arab solidarity set the tone after the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers’ fifth congress (September 1923), whose Smol resolution demanded the Histadrut separate its cooperative from its trade union functions and establish the latter on an “international” basis; in the second half of 1924 Smol’s influence in the union increased and its activists’ long-held unitary, territorial position made the joint union possible (lines 1430, 1448-1450, 1494).
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Its adherents nonetheless defended the union’s autonomy against the Histadrut’s anti-communist purge on due-process grounds — at the April 1924 Histadrut council meeting the sole vote against the purge was cast by a Smol railway workers’ delegate from Jerusalem (lines 1482-1484; Chapter 3 note 35) — and the January 1925 council majority that proclaimed an international union was an alliance of the Arab delegates and the Jewish adherents of Po’alei Tziyon Smol (line 1530).
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Lockman’s limit: even the most radical Smol activist could not accept the transformation the union’s survival as an Arab-Jewish union would have required — severing the Histadrut and Zionist links and renouncing Hebrew Labour (line 1572).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Po’alei Tziyon, Socialist Workers’ Party, Palestine Communist Party, Histadrut, Joint Organization, George Nassar, Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers