Summary
The Palestinian affiliate of Po’alei Tziyon’s left wing, which at the Histadrut’s founding congress in December 1920 proposed a nonparty trade union federation of all the workers of Palestine, Jews and Arabs in separate national sections, against the exclusively Jewish Histadrut that Ahdut Ha’avoda and Hapoel Hatzair created (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 846-858).
Details
-
The SWP coalesced in the fall of 1919, comprising elements that continued to espouse the orthodox Borokhovism of the prewar unified Po’alei Tziyon and a more radical group already moving toward a break with Zionism; both tendencies had been radicalised by the Bolshevik revolution and saw themselves as the Jewish section of the new Communist International (lines 846-850).
-
It denounced Ahdut Ha’avoda for abandoning class struggle, its links to the revived Socialist International, its cooperation with British imperialism and its alliance with the Jewish bourgeoisie in the Zionist Organization, offering instead a revolutionary socialist but still Jewish and Palestine-oriented alternative Lockman describes as “Bolshevik-Zionist” — a position that soon became untenable, the party splintering within a year of the Histadrut’s founding into mutually hostile factions (lines 848-850).
-
Before and after the Histadrut’s founding its stance attracted significant support among Jewish workers in Palestine, especially recent eastern European arrivals, and its activists’ influence in several small postwar Jewish trade unions was enhanced by their commitment to class struggle and worker militancy and their resistance to Ahdut Ha’avoda’s domineering, centralising tendencies; its proud use of Yiddish in agitation also advantaged it against Ahdut Ha’avoda’s Hebrew-only line (lines 850-854).
-
At the founding congress its delegates criticised making the Histadrut an explicitly Zionist, exclusively Jewish organisation and proposed two separate bodies — a nonparty trade union federation of all workers without regard to national affiliation or political opinions, and a settlement organisation of Jewish workers building the Jewish socialist centre — complemented by an international (Jewish-Arab) workers’ council, a soviet, as the political organ of the whole working class. The proposals received very little support and were referred to the Histadrut council (lines 854-858).
-
In Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Chapter 2 (part 3 range): after the Comintern in 1921 declared communism and Zionism incompatible and demanded renunciation of Zionism and dissolution into territorial communist parties, the SWP splintered; out of the wreckage cohered the Palestine Communist Party (Comintern-recognised 1924) and Po’alei Tziyon Smol, heir to the SWP’s Zionist segments (lines 934-938). Chapter 2 note 8 gives its founding-congress delegate vote: 19.5 percent in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, 16 percent in Haifa, 6.8 percent overall.
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Po’alei Tziyon, Ahdut Ha’avoda, Histadrut, Labor Zionism, Joint Organization