Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine

Summary

David De Vries’s history of the diamond cutting and polishing industry in British-ruled Palestine argues that the industry’s wartime emergence cannot be explained by Jewish diamond merchants’ trust networks alone: the British Mandate state, acting with the De Beers cartel, was a primary force that enabled, shaped, limited and controlled the industry, choosing the private entrepreneur Oved Ben-Ami and a monopolistic, Jewish-only organization, the PDMA, over the Yishuv’s national institutions, under a logic of limited expansion that made Palestine a contained wartime alternative to Antwerp. Tracing the industry from its preconditions and the PDMA monopoly of 1940 through small-stone specialization, the conveyor-system labor process, the workers’ exceptional strike militancy, wartime supply politics and the Diamond Control Board, postwar deregulation and the 1946-1947 crisis, to the reproduction of the state-capital pact in Israel after 1948, the book shows how that pact legitimized private capital and weakened organized labor, and how the exclusion of Arab manufacturers and workers from the Jewish-only industry persisted through demonopolization, which the 1948 war only cemented (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.19-370).

What the file is

The open-access ebook edition (2019) of the book first published in 2010 by Berghahn Books (New York • Oxford), made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to Knowledge Unlatched (PDF p.5-6). ISBN 978-1-84545-633-7 (hardback) and 978-1-78920-117-8 (open access ebook) (PDF p.6). 370 PDF pages, about 167,104 words; printed pagination runs to p.351 (the end of the Index) with front matter in roman numerals; PDF p.370 carries only the license line. A significant bulk of the primary sources, press and secondary literature used is in Hebrew, with titles given in translation (PDF p.16). The text copy is legible with occasional ligature spacing artefacts; figures and illustrations are captioned but not reproduced in the text.

Section by section

Front matter (PDF p.1-18)

Title, copyright and dedication (“To Relli and Ruti”, PDF p.7); Contents listing the Introduction and eight chapters, Epilogue, six appendix tables, Notes, Bibliography and Index (PDF p.9-10); lists of tables, figures and illustrations (PDF p.11-14); Acknowledgements naming the archives used, from the Netanya City Archive and the Lavon Institute to the National Archives in London and the National Archives at College Park, and private papers including Oved Ben-Ami’s (PDF p.15-16); Abbreviations including DTC, PDMA, DCB, MEW and CSO (PDF p.17); and Map 1, which traces rough diamonds from the Belgian Congo and Sierra Leone to the Diamond Trading Company in London, distribution to Netanya and Tel Aviv, and export of cut diamonds to New York (PDF p.18).

Introduction. Global and National: War, Diamonds, and the Colonial State (PDF p.19-30 / printed p.1-12)

De Vries states the book was triggered by his research on labor strikes in Palestine: the most vocal and militant strikers in the wartime peak of labor militancy, which included cooperation in strikes between Arabs and Jews, were Jewish diamond cutters and polishers who seemed an unlikely “labor aristocracy” (PDF p.19-20). Explaining them opened onto the close association of the Yishuv’s private sector with the rise of European Fascism, British colonialism and the war against Germany; the umbrella the Mandate gave private capital; and the growing legitimacy and power of the Jewish middle class against the politically hegemonic Zionist Labor movement (PDF p.20). He describes the diamond commodity chain from mining in South Africa, the Belgian Congo and Sierra Leone through the London Diamond Trading Company (DTC), the De Beers cartel’s sales subsidiary, sightholders and middlemen to cleavers, sawyers, cutters and polishers, the Antwerp and Amsterdam exchanges, and consumers (PDF p.20-21). Against literature that treats Jewish diamond communities’ trust, reputation and noncontractual arrangements as distancing them from the state — citing Avner Greif on the Maghreb traders and the work of Lisa Bernstein and Barak Richman — De Vries argues the state was a primary force enabling such occupational communities, to the point that the boundaries between state and capital become often blurred (PDF p.24-25). The 1940s boom strengthened manufacturers’ organizations, destabilized the Histadrut’s relative power, and produced an upsurge of strike action in 1941-1946 partly against organized Labor’s authority (PDF p.25). He revises the older story of an exchange of political hegemony for economic liberalism between Labor and capital: British colonial rule supported the “strong” sectors, gave half-hearted recognition to trade unionism and shied away from labor legislation, and the war and Mandate intervention made the Yishuv’s move toward a capitalist society irreversible (PDF p.27-28). He also argues that reading the later state of Israel back into the Mandate period has underrated the British Mandate state, whose role in shaping Jewish control of the diamond industry and the segmentation of Palestine’s urban labor market the book restores (PDF p.28-29). The discussion is divided into three parts: emergence under Belgian hegemony (chapters 1-3), the wartime spurt (chapters 4-5), and the effects of Belgium’s liberation, crisis, and the re-emergence of the capital-state pact in 1948 (chapters 6-8) (PDF p.30).

Chapter 1. Palestine as an Alternative — Preconditions (PDF p.33-39 / printed p.15-21)

The chapter opens with Frederick A. Mathias’s report of 27 March 1940, which saw no reason a prosperous secondary cutting industry should not be developed in Palestine but insisted on “a very strict limit to its immediate extension” (PDF p.33). De Vries sets the industry’s heroic founding-fathers memory against the interplay of international politics, global finance and local entrepreneurial energy (PDF p.33-34). Early schemes — the 1907 Zionist Congress proposal to apprentice Kishinev Pogrom orphans in Jerusalem, the 1908 Bezalel proposal defeated by Ottoman customs, and the Friedman-Fisher and Bodenheimer schemes — struck no root (PDF p.34-35). Four factors kept Palestine off the diamond scene: Jewish immigration patterns and Labor Zionist preselection that overlooked diamond cutters; Belgium’s hegemony, reinforced by De Beers because Belgian companies controlled the Belgian Congo mines, with Antwerp specializing in small stones (Sand and Melees) whose position low-wage centers could endanger; the absence of a substantial middle class of diamond consumers; and high Mandate customs on rough imports that lowered value added (PDF p.35-37). The crack in Belgium’s domination was the rise of Fascism: from 1936 the Reichsbank subsidized German cutting at Hanau and Idar-Oberstein, Germany coupled amassing rough diamonds for industrial-military use with Taylor-inspired efficiency and lower wages, and Antwerp employment fell (PDF p.37-38). In early 1939 Jews constituted 350 of the 400 diamond brokers, 6,000 manufacturers and some 80 percent of the 25,000 diamond workers in Belgium, where most of the 90,000 Jews (about 65,000 in Antwerp) were not citizens (PDF p.39). De Beers’s sales in 1938 were a mere third of the previous year’s, and on the outbreak of war Britain and De Beers launched a worldwide search for an alternative to Antwerp (PDF p.39).

Chapter 1 — Local Initiatives (PDF p.39-44 / printed p.21-26)

The Jewish Agency’s Department of Trade and Industry, the Histadrut and the Revisionist Movement each moved, largely clandestinely, to attract Belgian diamond manufacturers and cutters (PDF p.39-40). The few who came in 1934-1937 — Zvi Rosenberg, Asher Daskal, Joseph Nadel, the Pickel brothers, Heinrich Goldmann, Shmuel Moed and Moshe Offen — opened Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva workshops dependent on Antwerp for rough stones, and by 1939 supported scarcely sixty workers, 0.03 percent of the 192,000 earners in the Yishuv (PDF p.40-41). The Diamond Club, established in Tel Aviv in November 1937 under Akiva Weiss and taken under the Jewish Agency’s wing, pressed the British on customs, which were drastically reduced in September 1938 (PDF p.41-42). Oved Ben-Ami, chairman of Netanya, who had no diamond background and espoused a liberal, capital-based Zionism, established a municipal fund in 1939 guaranteeing manufacturers free land and factory space to settle in Netanya, creating an alternative both to Tel Aviv’s concentration and to regulation from above by the Jewish Agency and the Diamond Club (PDF p.42-44).

Chapter 1 — The Pressure of the War (PDF p.44-50 / printed p.26-32)

The war made all diamonds potentially industrial and strategic; the Board of Trade set up a Diamond Export Committee including Frederick Albert Mathias of the Sierra Leone Selection Trust (PDF p.44). Antwerp’s Jews fled mainly to Southern France and England, directed in part by mayor Camille Huysmans and dealer Romi Goldmuntz; Palestine’s supply routes from Belgium were cut off by January 1940, and its manufacturers were forced to buy collectively from the London DTC and export exclusively to the US for dollars (PDF p.44-46). Britain needed American dollars and De Beers needed an alternative outlet as Belgian demand fell; Palestine seemed an obvious choice — far from the front, Jewish-dominated in the craft, Zionist-opposed to Nazi Germany, and controlled by British rule and the recently issued White Paper (PDF p.46). The persuasion campaign split into two factions: the Tishby-Weiss camp of the Jewish Agency and Diamond Club, advocating a national-liberal private industry under Zionist institutions with the Diamond Club as sole organizing body; and Ben-Ami’s group, advocating a Netanya-based industry under a monopolistic organization closely inspected by the government and free of Jewish Agency or Palestine Manufacturers’ Association intervention (PDF p.47-48). Both lobbied in London, Antwerp and Johannesburg in winter 1940; Ben-Ami, on a March 1940 trip, found only fifteen manufacturers and some experts in Antwerp willing to commit to settling in Netanya under a regimenting pledge, with all applicants to be screened by British intelligence for trading relations with German dealers (PDF p.49-50).

Chapter 1 — The Logic of Limited Expansion (PDF p.51-56 / printed p.33-38)

Frederick Mathias, the Ministry of Economic Warfare advisor with a long De Beers and colonial-service history, shaped the colonial framework: his Sierra Leone experience of working through a local chief was consistent with working through Ben-Ami as an economic intermediary, not simply a “comprador” (PDF p.51-52). His proposal after meeting Ben-Ami in March 1940 held Palestine ripe but insisted development be limited and slow: not all involved were certain to be “men of integrity”, diamonds might be smuggled to Germany via Syria, unrestricted growth would harm the industry elsewhere and antagonize Belgium — whose Sand cutting was its “life’s blood” — and threaten the employment of Christian diamond workers in Europe (PDF p.52-53). He recommended a Jewish-only organization under Ben-Ami’s strict management, imports only under government license by joint purchase from the single London source, the DTC, through a trustworthy broker, compliance with the ILO Labor Code including a minimum wage on Belgian lines (250 francs a week) — which also barred employing cheap Arab labor — and growth kept within limits by restricting workers, supply and specialization (PDF p.53-55). In return for a monopoly over all Palestine diamond manufacturing, Ben-Ami committed to buy only from the DTC, accept British regulation, and export all polished product to the US (PDF p.55). In late April 1940 High Commissioner Sir Harold MacMichael ordered that no rough diamonds be imported into Palestine except from the DTC and through Hennig & Co., whose associate George Prins had persuaded Ernst Oppenheimer to supply Palestine (PDF p.55-56). De Vries argues the British chose the private sector over the Yishuv’s national institutions because a small group of unofficial entrepreneurs could deliver control — preventing diamonds reaching the enemy, pacing development so Belgium’s return was not threatened, and securing dollar exports — without the White Paper costs of supporting a Zionist-oriented project (PDF p.56).

Chapter 1 — Conclusion (PDF p.57-59 / printed p.39-41)

The Tishby-Weiss faction’s appeals — Joseph Linton to the Colonial Office, Zionist activists to Ernst Oppenheimer in Johannesburg, Jewish Agency officials to Geoffrey Walsh in Jerusalem — failed, which De Vries reads as the new British interventionist style and a strengthening of the capitalist camp in the Zionist state-building debate (PDF p.57). The Colonial Office–Ministry of Economic Warfare agreement with the entrepreneurs that the industry be open only to Jewish manufacturers and workers formally agreed “not only on maintaining an ethnic occupational tradition but also on ethnic segregation and Arab exclusion”: the cutters were to become Britain’s and De Beers’s “special natives,” on the Sierra Leone Selection Trust model (PDF p.58). The industry was a designed creation — state-sponsored planning artificially reallocating an industry as a temporary wartime measure — established at the nexus of the British war effort, De Beers’s survival, and the Zionist project (PDF p.58-59). Illustrations 1.1-1.3 show the Alamz and Feldman factories in Netanya and cutting at the Yahalomim (Pickel) factory in Tel Aviv, 1944 (PDF p.60-61).

Chapter 2. The Making of a Monopoly (PDF p.63-82 / printed p.45-64)

The chapter opens with David Rothblum’s January 1944 greeting calling the industry “the most important branch of our industry” (PDF p.63). Defining the private diamond industry’s public functions as a “war industry” required institutional control: no diamonds to reach the Germans, all production exported for American dollars to the Palestine government and the Sterling Bloc, all rough from the single DTC source, the Jewish-only character safeguarded, Netanya made the project’s capital, and the Jewish Agency kept from meddling — a social engineering of capital and labor from above (PDF p.64). The German occupation of Belgium and Holland in May 1940 (military rule under Alexander von Falkenhausen) paralyzed Antwerp, ended the scheme to bring experts over, and forced selection of entrepreneurs locally; it also settled Ben-Ami’s contested quest for small-stone specialization, because Belgium needed to be quickly replaced (PDF p.65). The Palestine Diamond Manufacturers’ Association (PDMA) began in Netanya on the morrow of the occupation; in late July 1940, with six factories operating, the government authorized it under the Ottoman Law of Societies, with Ben-Ami as president and Chaim Friedman as administrative secretary, its regulations shaped in the government-nominated Control Committee of Rough and Polished Diamonds (Fetcher/Fletcher, Ben-Ami, Friedman); the first shipment of small rough stones arrived from Hennig & Co. in August 1940 (PDF p.66).

Under “Organizing Capital,” De Vries argues the rich Low Countries legacy of exchanges and associations, and Palestine’s own frail manufacturers’ organizations (the loose Palestine Manufacturers’ Association of 1921; Ben-Ami’s 1920s Bnei Binyamin experience), were less influential than the novel form itself: a private monopoly under close government inspection, the war’s most powerful and regimented employers’ association in Palestine (PDF p.67-68). The PDMA was a monopoly in six senses: sole importer of rough (even members could not import independently, and Diamond Club members were placed outside); membership open to Jewish applicants only, an informal understanding of the British government, the Syndicate, Hennig & Co. and Ben-Ami held essential to earning American dollars; membership compulsory for anyone cutting or polishing in Palestine, with British intelligence and MEW “black lists” used in screening, factories always member-owned and home work barred; De Beers/the Syndicate the single authorized source and Hennig & Co. the sole sightholder, with PDMA–Hennig correspondence screened by the British censor and 1 percent of all import orders assured to Ben-Ami as the President’s Fund; all polished stones oriented to export through PDMA quotas to authorized dealers mostly in New York, with free local marketing barred; and ownership uniting buying, producing and exporting in the factory owner, an importer-cum-industrialist-cum-exporter (PDF p.68-70). Ben-Ami, “both creator of the organization and created by it,” became the linchpin of the whole import, production and export system, and Netanya its nerve center (PDF p.71).

Under “Power and Contestation,” recruitment was government-authorized and the PDMA’s social base was created locally: by mid-1942 thirty-three factories, many with two or three owners (PDF p.72). Table 2.1 gives factories/employees rising from 1/10 in June 1936 to 26/1,820 in November 1941 and 32/2,500 in May 1942 (PDF p.73). Applicants fell in three groups — experts from Belgium and Holland (acceptance straightforward unless reputation problems over Germany or illicit dealings), workers gathering experts and capital to move into ownership, and capital owners with no diamond background, whom the British viewed with suspicion as outside the trade’s trust system; an expert quoted by De Vries says most owners had only part of their wealth in diamonds and lacked knowledge of the profession (PDF p.73-74). All applicants were Jews — as far as the sources show, no Arabs applied until after the war, and those few were mostly merchants — and all perceived themselves as middle or low-middle class, of the Civic Circles; credible reputation mattered as much as capital (PDF p.74-75). Ben-Ami told the British in October 1942 that, with the Competent Authority (Diamonds), new establishments were authorized on a fixed six-monthly quota — sixteen new in 1941 in addition to seventeen existing, thirty-three in total — to check “mushroom growth” (PDF p.76). Table 2.2 distributes the factories: Netanya 12, Tel Aviv 14 in November 1941; Netanya 14, Tel Aviv 16, Ramat Gan 2, Jerusalem 1 in October 1942 (PDF p.77). Ben-Ami ran the PDMA from his Netanya town office in what many considered a “dictatorship,” controlled the President’s Fund personally, and the British soon realized the monopoly’s power could challenge restrained development, as inexperienced investors competed for experts and apprentices and sought quick profits (PDF p.77-78). Contestation from without came from the Belgian diaspora: some fifteen thousand Belgian refugees in England, a government-in-exile from October 1940, and from October 1940 the Correspondent Office of the Belgian Diamond Industry (COFDI), established by Romi Goldmuntz and Herman Schamisso with Camille Huysmans and finance minister Camille Gutt, which lodged seized diamonds in De Beers vaults until the war’s end, maintained refugee contacts so experts would return to Belgium, and lobbied against enlarging rough supplies to Palestine and New York (PDF p.79-80). The PDMA tightened control in 1941: Fletcher ordered in June 1941 that “the industry shall be strictly controlled, not only in respect of supplies of raw material, but also in the disposal of finished products,” and local disposal was prohibited; membership was redefined around an ideal minimum of fifteen cutting machines, a two-month candidacy, two votes per factory, and screening of new candidates stopped completely in September 1941 until winter 1942 (PDF p.80-81). De Vries closes that the PDMA served its members well — British protection, steady supplies, a club-like transformation into “nation-builders” — and in Ben-Ami’s perception was built also against labor, while the British realized the entity they had given birth to was “an uneasily tamed creature that used the British shield but also disliked its fetters” (PDF p.81-82). Illustrations 2.1-2.2 show the plan of the Palnat factory in Netanya and a Tel Aviv factory, 1945 (PDF p.83-84).

Chapter 3. Diamond Work and Zionist Time — The Reign of the Small Stone (PDF p.85-96 / printed p.67-78)

The chapter opens with David Rothblum’s 21 September 1943 memorandum to the Jewish Agency describing Palestine’s “conveyor system,” in which each worker does only a small part of the work, against the Amsterdam/Antwerp worker who completed polishing from beginning to end (PDF p.85). Transplantation was a negotiation between tradition and novelty, in a commodity chain restructured by the occupation: mining continued (including in the Belgian Congo, loyal to the government-in-exile), trading shifted to London, Johannesburg, the De Beers distributive mechanisms, the American Diamond Dealers’ Club and New York’s 47th street, warring governments bought industrial diamonds, illicit trade and smuggling substituted for formal channels, Antwerp and Amsterdam were paralyzed, Hanau and Idar-Oberstein lost their contacts, and the Germans forced Jewish diamond workers to work, including in Vught and from 1943 in the Bergen-Belsen Star Camp; new centers sprouted in Palestine, England, Wales, Cuba, the US, South Africa, Brazil and Puerto Rico (PDF p.86-87). Figure 3.1’s note gives September 1943 employment as a total of 3,759 (PDF p.87). Palestine’s lead fed an urgency — time itself was an input: hurried member selection, Ben-Ami’s authoritarian handling partly a result of time pressure, and an internal opposition already calling for a more liberal employers’ association on the prewar Belgian model (PDF p.88). On the small stone: before the war Palestine’s few manufacturers took a varied supply (Sand, Melees, Baguettes) from Antwerp middlemen; the specialization Ben-Ami’s camp called for in winter 1940 fitted the alternative-center scheme — De Beers’s unsold small-stone reserves, American demand, narrow training for a quick start, the German precedent — and Mathias and Oppenheimer were persuaded by control arguments (a variety of stones would be harder to keep from the Germans via Syria; small stones meant direct DTC maintenance) and by the need for quick training (PDF p.88-89). The decision, made before the PDMA existed, placed Palestine in Belgium’s prewar slot in the international division of labor, mixed British economic warfare, Palestine government needs and capitalist profit, and made Palestine dependent on De Beers’s small-stone reserves through the sole DTC channel, so fluctuations or a De Beers withholding decision could destabilize factory relations among piecework-paid workers (PDF p.90).

The labor process is described in its four stages — assorting (sawable Seigers against unsawable Kappes), sawing (one sawyer operating ten to fifteen machines, direction marked by the manager), cutting/bruting on a high-speed lathe, and polishing in four subphases for small stones (six for slightly bigger) (PDF p.90-91). Antwerp apprenticeship ran up to three years and covered all phases; Palestine’s first workshops (experts Zvi Rosenberg, Yosef Nadel, Sam Moed, Heinrich Goldmann, Moshe Offen, Aharon Moritz) taught the whole process, but wartime supply was 70-80 percent Sand, about 20 percent Melees, the rest Baguettes, and the single-cut (eighteen facets, Acht-Kant/Metuman) allowed greater productivity than the fifty-eight-facet full-cut (PDF p.91-92). Production was restructured into the conveyor system (Shitat Ha-Sharsheret): each worker learned one phase or subphase, four to six more workers were required to complete polishing than in Antwerp, training fell from three years to three months, and apprentices trained only from sawable stones; De Vries links this Taylorization to Zionist economists’ association of Herzl and Taylor, and notes the British blessed the fragmentation as it had the exclusion of Arabs (PDF p.92-93). The worker achieved material independence quickly — earning after three months — but lost the integral character and autonomy of the Low Countries worker; a diamond worker wrote in 1943 that specialization “reduced the worker to the level of a machine” (PDF p.93-94). Under “Gain and Discipline,” the labor force was drawn entirely from the Yishuv: young workers sought, about a quarter women (as the text states), possibly workers without organized-labor affiliation preferred when about 70 percent of the Jewish labor force was in the Histadrut; all apprentices selected were Jews (PDF p.94-95). Table 3.1 (late 1943, 32 factories) gives 3,110 workers, 160 clerks, 130 foremen, 200 various, 3,600 employed in all — Tel Aviv 1,991, Netanya 1,351, Jerusalem 258 — of whom only 304 of the 3,110 workers were women (PDF p.95). Exports of polished diamonds rose from LP 700 in 1940 to LP 2,600,000 in 1943; Table 3.2 gives total employment rising from 500 in 1940 to 3,759 in September 1943 and 4,043 in May 1945, against 23,000-25,000 diamond workers in Belgium on the eve of occupation, 18,000 of them ADB members (PDF p.96).

Chapter 3 — Gain and Discipline, continued (PDF p.97-103 / printed p.79-85)

Factory concentration was a built-in principle of the PDMA monopoly: home work was perceived as uncontrollable and exposed to the danger of stones reaching the Germans, while factories let the monopoly enforce the chain system and unified pay; Table 3.3 gives November 1943 diamond workers by town (excluding clerks and managers) as Tel Aviv 1,921 (54.8 percent), Netanya 1,403 (40.0 percent), Jerusalem 178 (5.2 percent), total 3,502 (PDF p.97). Factory concentration also created potential for solidarity and collective action — most factories employed 70-100 workers — and leveled pay structures into common sources of complaint and militancy (PDF p.97-98). Employment was two-tiered: individual piecework, administered through the small white envelope (Briefke) recording the worker’s name, stone types and weight, with loss calculated after each phase and pay by stones finished regardless of time or damage; and the collective agreement the PDMA introduced in autumn 1940, unprecedented in diamond cutting, meant both to appease the Histadrut and to let other unions sign so the Histadrut would not be sole representative, with British blessing (PDF p.98-99). The agreement promised minimal security (sick days, annual leave, provident fund, cost-of-living increase, minimal pay when rough was short) but was seldom applied in full, and differing factory orders, stone quality and skill made wage levels diverge, exposing many workers to insecurity (PDF p.99-100). Earnings were nonetheless high: after an average three months a young worker could earn LP 2.5-3 per week (LP 3-4 after six months); three-quarters of workers in 1943 earned between LP 20 and 50 per month; the average daily wage reached LP 1.3 in July 1943 against LP 0.8 in food, LP 0.9 in metal and wood, LP 0.85 in textiles, and LP 1.43 in mid-1944 against LP 0.98 for a Jewish industrial worker and LP 0.4 for an Arab industrial worker (PDF p.100). Traditional fees — Platzgeld for the cutting table and Mula for hiring the machine — reduced earnings and, payable only after three to four months, tied workers to their apprentice factory; seniority became central to pay within a year (PDF p.100-101). Union activists criticized workers for accepting a climate in which high gain compensated for “lack of job insecurity” (as printed), and manufacturers complained of low added value and high labor costs (PDF p.101). Working conditions were demanding: bodily strain from long hours sitting at the polishing table driven by piecework and fluctuating supply; prolonged exposure to diamond and cobalt dust causing breathing problems and occupational lung disease, with minimal respiratory protection; eye strain from minute stones, denied as a hazard by manufacturers and experts; mental fatigue, boredom and neurasthenia; and anxiety over the lost stone — workers on their knees searching under tables, liable to reimburse owners and fall into debt — rendered in Binyamin Kosowsky’s poem “It is Gone …”, which substitutes the uncut stone for the beloved of Bialik’s “Tsil Tslil” (1909) (PDF p.101-103).

Chapter 3 — Gain and Discipline, conclusion; Facing the “Triangular Thread” (PDF p.104-112 / printed p.86-94)

Discipline extended to barring unauthorized movement between factories: the PDMA pressed manufacturers in August 1941 against workers’ “wanderings,” which for workers meant bondage to a factory, hampered stratification and deferred independence, while only about a quarter of trained apprentices were contemporarily assumed to be fully absorbed; the workers nonetheless formed an artisan-workers’ elite, and the PDMA’s enclosed import-export logic dictated close watch over each small stone from envelope to polished return, sealing membership, barring domestic production and regimenting workers, so that the industry conveyed a new power phase for local capital — profit, differentiation, discipline — under the Mandate umbrella (PDF p.104-106). De Vries then sets the industry’s four foundations (the colonial umbrella, the London small-rough lifeline, PDMA regimentation, and the adapted labor process) against the Yishuv norms a PDMA member called the “triangular thread”: the three-armed national coalition of the Zionist institutions (Jewish Agency/Mapai, its Department of Trade and Industry usually held by the liberal General Zionists), the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association (which the PDMA did not join until 1943), and the Labor movement (Mapai/Histadrut, which could not control the diamond industry) (PDF p.107-108). The triad’s understanding — a variant of national-capitalism — was that private capital was free to operate but submissive to the Zionist agenda, and the institutions aspired to influence private capital especially on employing Arab workers and relations with the government and Colonial Office (PDF p.108). The PDMA’s British-created monopoly was problematic from the start: Ben-Ami’s victory over the Tishby camp left the public-Zionist presence vague, the British set the limits, and the industry — Jewish-only, Zionist in identity, a pillar of Ben-Ami’s Netanya power — sought autonomy, kept the Jewish Agency outside decision-making, weakened its London Zionist Office ties after mid-1940, and linked to the national institutions mainly through the Palestine Corporation and Anglo-Palestine Bank credit; a joint apprentice fund negotiation in late 1940/early 1941 only accentuated how limited national intervention could be, and the PDMA kept Jewish Agency arbitration in labor disputes to a minimum (PDF p.109-110). Criticism came from the Department of Trade and Industry, PMA president Arieh Shenkar and activists such as Joseph Linton, and from within the PDMA itself (Moshe Offen, the Schein brothers, Carol Pickel), blaming too slow growth, little stone variety and narrow export markets, and circulating rumors that Ben-Ami personally profited from the President’s Fund and was informally a partner in a factory; the opposition was weak, and attempts to coordinate the PDMA with Zionist structures or liberalize imports from sources other than the DTC (such as British Guiana) failed, leaving the strategy of challenging the industry’s Zionist contribution and “socializing” it to the triangular thread’s ideals (PDF p.110-112).

Chapter 3 — Splintering Labor’s Voice (PDF p.112-119 / printed p.94-101)

Against the Histadrut’s long campaigns in the private sector and its norm as central actor in industrial relations and in the predominance of Jewish employment, the manufacturers contested Histadrut hegemony — putting into practice a cherished quest of the Yishuv’s liberals and right wing (PDF p.112-113). Before the PDMA the Histadrut had served in 1937-1940 as labor exchange for apprentices and had contacted the Amsterdam (Herni Polak of the ANDB, as printed) and Antwerp (W. Daems of the ADB) union leaders over low-wage competition, an international wage balance, a forty-hour week and affiliation to the Universal Alliance of Diamond Workers; Ben-Ami disliked those ties, made a too-powerful Histadrut presence unwelcome in Netanya, and the Antwerp recruitment calls (partly financed by the Revisionist Tel Hai Fund) required applicants to give up UADW membership (PDF p.113). The PDMA’s paradoxical novelty was to fulfill the “Hebrew Labor” tenet — workers recruited were Jews, a consensus between capital and labor over the industry’s ethnic character — while rejecting Histadrut hegemony in union representation; Ben-Ami, an authoritarian, paternalist Zionist liberal, preferred a variety of union affiliations, used Netanya’s frail labor council and the presence of other organizations to limit the Histadrut, and the PDMA made splintering certain by recruiting apprentices from various organizations and requiring each union to sign any labor contract, while barring manufacturers from negotiating individually (PDF p.113-115). Representation split among five unions — Histadrut (largest, but no majority), the Revisionist Histadrut Ha-Ovdim Ha-Leumit, Hapoel Hamizrahi, Poalei Agudat Israel, and the General Zionists’ Haoved Hatzioni, with a small Communist representation later; Table 3.4 gives, for all towns, Histadrut membership rising from 410 in autumn 1941 to 1,750 in winter 1946 against totals of 1,200 and 4,590, with nonaffiliated workers rising from 220 to 1,400-1,700 (PDF p.115). Suboccupation variety, second jobs and home work also destabilized membership; many workers found unions cumbersome or feared affiliation would lead to dismissal. The implications were a hard-to-mobilize nonaffiliated contingent (crucial in later disputes), a “noncollective” individual strategy among skilled workers, and a tarnished Histadrut whose hegemony the industry signaled was challenged across the Jewish industrial sector (PDF p.116). The Histadrut reacted late: it did not control apprentice entry, lacked training funds matching the Revisionist and religious schemes, and its collective agreement pride resulted from the manufacturers’ strategy, not its pressure; only in spring 1941, at some 1,300 workers, did it appoint Pinchas Smagarinsky (1900-1966), who had no diamond background (PDF p.117). Differentiation among apprentices, accomplished workers, and the independently organizing foremen, clerks and work managers deepened the splintering; sporadic strikes in 1941-1942 and the nonaffiliated workers’ own Supreme Committee (Ha-Vaad Ha-Elion, established early 1941, a mixture of individual workers and Communists) forced the unions toward coalescence, while the Histadrut, facing manufacturers, “minority organizations” and the unaffiliated, campaigned against the minority unions, financed needy trainees, planned a professional school with the Jewish Agency, tightened selection of Histadrut youth to implant cells in the factories, and tried collective bargaining in individual factories without the PDMA (PDF p.118-119).

Chapter 3 — Zionist Legitimacy (PDF p.119-124 / printed p.101-106)

The PDMA’s autonomy provoked stereotypes among Zionist political and industrial elites: the industry was criticized as lacking national allegiance, producing luxury items mainly for the American middle class, and steeping its well-paid workers in an acquisitive spirit anathema to Zionist values — a Labor periodical writer in summer 1942 holding that “The only Kosher person in this occupation is the worker,” in a Hebrew wordplay between cleanliness, legitimacy and skillfulness (PDF p.119-120). De Vries reads the marginalizing images, springing mainly from the Jewish Agency’s Department of Trade and Industry and the Histadrut’s trade union department, as affirming that state-backed capitalism was taking root: private capital’s central role had been advancing since the mid-1920s despite ambivalence, and Ben-Gurion’s mid-1920s phrase for its suspicion was “national egoism” (PDF p.120). Ben-Ami reported to the British in October 1942 that some viewed the industry with disfavor as a “bastard industry” and a wartime “luxury” venture, but achievements belied the skeptics; as the Jewish Agency realized the industry’s wartime performance it relaxed its estrangement, and for Ben-Ami Netanya’s industrialization was his Zionism — earlier land acquisition and Jewish ethnic exclusiveness now widened by modernization, international networking and world trade (PDF p.121). Technological innovation, forced by the small number of arrivals after May 1940 and by local production of cutting machines, was couched in national vocabulary; the industry’s ethnic closure — “No Arabs, Muslims, or Christians, no other ethnic or religious group, found its way into the ranks of manufacturers and workers” — contrasted with the prewar Low Countries social mix and was related to the national splitting of Palestine’s economy and the British role in sustaining those divisions, and was culturally manufactured through factory names from the biblical landscape (Ophir, Tarshish, Yahalom, Nofekh, Bahat), Hebrew translation of tools and processes (Ben-Ami’s “Hebrew revolution,” from coediting Doar Hayom with Eliezer Ben Yehuda in the 1920s), and workers’ bulletins such as Hatzohar and Hasapir (PDF p.122-123). The manufacturers reproduced the 1920s debate over the public or private road to state building, justifying independence, labor-process adaptation, union plurality and paternalism as part of the Zionist project, and added utilitarian claims (high productivity, foreign-trade income, Allies’ war effort, absorbing refugee cutters) presenting Palestine as legitimate heir to Amsterdam and Antwerp and to the German industry; De Vries closes the chapter that this language created meanings that would later legitimize the unshackling of capital and the weakening of the Zionist Labor movement, and that capitalism’s legitimization was both an internal Yishuv affair and tightly linked to exogenous, imperial forces (PDF p.123-124). Illustrations 3.1-3.2 show diamond cutting and a Tel Aviv expert polisher, sourced to Goldmann’s The Diamond and its Making (1946) and Hobman’s Palestine’s Economic Future (1946) (PDF p.125-126).

Chapter 4. The Challenge and Its Constraints — In Antwerp’s Absence (PDF p.127-138 / printed p.109-120)

The chapter opens with Ben-Ami’s 12 January 1944 letter to John L. Fletcher asking for facilities for direct contact to convince the Belgians Palestine would not be a rival and could cooperate in postwar plans (PDF p.127). De Vries explains the spurt that made “limited expansion” puzzling: the crucial precondition was the absence of Belgian competition — Antwerp’s paralysis enabled other centers, COFDI could only contain Palestine’s advance, and German products disappeared from American markets under Allied economic warfare, while South Africa and Brazil could not surpass Palestine’s small-stone quality or price (PDF p.128-129). Palestine used De Beers’s success to the full: DTC world sales rose almost 300 percent by 1945 against 1939 (Table 4.1 gives totals of LP 3.7 million in 1938, 5.9 in 1939, 6.1 in 1940, then jewelry/industrial/total of 5.4/2.0/7.4 in 1941 and 15.0/5.4/20.4 in 1943, in million pounds sterling), fed by war industries’ need for industrial diamonds, states’ dollar needs, and the syndicate’s low-priced 1930s reserves; the Belgian Congo (Forminière), Sierra Leone (SLST) and South Africa stayed outside the war and shipped continuously to London (PDF p.129-130). Palestine’s role was gem-quality only — lower stones and crushed powder were ordered back to the syndicate — and it was a “designed customer,” feeding directly from London and only indirectly from the African mines; one estimate gave Palestine annual purchases of LP 1.5 million of the syndicate’s LP 15 million gem sales in 1942-1943, and 30-50 percent of its small-stone (Sand and Melees) turnover (PDF p.130). Table 4.2 gives rough imports from the DTC rising from 11,000 carats / LP 25,000 in 1940 to 472,000 carats / LP 1,139,000 in 1943, the eight-cut share falling from 80.74 to 64.17 percent; the direct PDMA-syndicate link lowered purchasing costs as American polished prices rose almost 70 percent, and profits soared to 30-40 percent against a 10 percent prewar Belgian average (PDF p.131). American demand — the “diamond effect,” the De Beers/Ayer & Son campaign of 1937-1938 strengthening the diamond engagement ring, speculators, and diamonds as an inflation hedge — surpassed even Allied industrial demand; Palestine benefited, encapsulated in the 1943 slogan “You cannot ration romance,” because the Low Countries were paralyzed, its small-stone workmanship and technology were favorably evaluated, its wages were low by US standards, and New York’s Jewish dealers campaigned to boycott German trade and focus on Palestine (PDF p.131-133). Locally the war boom (British Army demand, the Middle East as Allies’ supply center) made industry surpass agriculture and workers more militant; the diamond industry became by 1943 the world’s largest single source of small gem diamonds (PDF p.133-134). Table 4.3 gives factories/workers/total employed rising from 6/420/500 in August 1940 to 33/3,341/3,759 in September 1943 and 33/3,650/4,043 in May 1945, against Jewish workers (exc. spouses) rising from 120,000 to 152,000; Table 4.4 gives diamonds in 1943 an unmatched 111.6 personnel per plant (32 plants, 3,571 personnel) against a Jewish-sector average of 21.2 (PDF p.134-135). Between 1941 and 1944 more than LP 1.5 million was invested and machines rose from 2,937 to 6,841; net labor productivity per worker rose from LP 244 in 1942 to LP 718 in 1945, and by 1945 the industry was some 8 percent of all Palestine industry (PDF p.135-136). Exports went almost entirely to New York (Table 4.5: 58,655 carats / LP 2,604,857 in 1943, 88.3/88.6 percent to the USA); rough imports were 10.5 percent of Palestine’s raw-material import value in 1943, polished exports 20.3 percent of its entire export in late 1943, and Table 4.6 gives diamonds rising from 0.9 percent of merchandise export in 1940 to 42.3 percent in 1945, against agriculture falling from 78.6 percent in 1939 to 20.6 percent in 1945 (PDF p.136-137). A temporary slowdown followed US entry to the war in winter 1942; some 15,000-20,000 persons in Netanya, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were fed by diamond production (Table 4.7 gives Netanya’s population rising from 253 in 1931 to 4,900 in 1944, all Jews in both years as printed), and contemporaries were divided over “mushroom growth,” exogenous reliance and luxury production amid the fate of Europe’s Jews (PDF p.138).

Chapter 4 — The Politics of Supply (PDF p.139-143 / printed p.121-125)

The industry’s lifeline was supply: two vectors clashed — Palestine breaking the largely undefined agreed limitations, and Belgian circles in London seeking Antwerp’s recovery of world supremacy — which is why Ben-Ami spent so many war months in London securing supplies (PDF p.139). Palestine received supplies as alternative to Antwerp, barrier against diamonds reaching the Germans, buyer of De Beers reserves and dollar-earner; COFDI could not easily disrupt this, and British support showed in including Palestine in the late 1941 Cairo trade exhibition, while the Belgians focused on building recovery reserves and the British themselves supervised PDMA member selection and reiterated “limited expansion” (PDF p.139-140). The context changed: US entry to the war made diamonds part of Anglo-American military/economic cooperation (a joint committee from 1943 on De Beers’s wartime role) and made Belgian Congo minerals, such as uranium for the Manhattan Project, essential to the American war economy, requiring good relations with the Belgian government-in-exile; the Belgian industry split between the occupied part adapted to Nazi interests and the free part of London refugees, Huysmans and Congo production; and German “Aryanization” of the Belgian industry in 1942, the proliferation of cutting centers, looted-diamond sales in the US (combated by a Joint Boycott Council committee from late summer 1941) and informal trade through Egypt, Sudan and Turkey reaching the Germans all raised regional-control stakes, so Palestine’s challenge now also burdened British efforts to stem Middle East traffic to Germany and provoked the Belgians to use the Congo as a lever (PDF p.140-141). Fletcher and Walsh warned the PDMA against buying outside the DTC or marketing locally/regionally; from August 1941 new membership applications were rejected, yet 1942 growth showed “limited expansion” unrealizable and containment needed (PDF p.142). In July 1942 the Colonial Office ordered new Defense Regulations: compulsory elaborate bookkeeping with full monthly returns under chartered accountants in all factories and PDMA offices, under the new controller of Light Industries — first John Leslie Fletcher — applying full control on each stone from arrival to shipment; Mathias warned at the MEW in September 1942 that “every effort must be made to allay fears on the part of the Belgian Government that moves within the Empire may greatly interfere with the post-war industry in Antwerp (Palestine’s policy is rather frightening),” and a November 1942 standstill order set manufacturers at a maximum of thirty-three until the war’s end (PDF p.142-143). Neither measure pacified the Belgians: COFDI (printed “CODFI”) became ever more vocal in 1943, openly using the Congo minerals lever, and keeping good relations with the Belgians gradually overshadowed Palestine’s role for both the MEW and De Beers (PDF p.143).

Chapter 4 — Adamant London (PDF p.144-147 / printed p.126-129)

In August 1943 the Diamond Syndicate suddenly decreased small-stone supply and recommended diversifying from eight-cuts/Sand to Melees: the ratio was to reverse from 75-80 percent eight-cuts to 80 percent Melees and 20 percent eight-cuts, and average polished size from 70-80 stones per carat to 5-15 stones per carat, entailing less labor, retraining and higher American prices. The reasons given were that the 1940-1943 Sand stocks from South African, Belgian Congolese and Sierra Leonean mines had dwindled, the syndicate’s obligations to the Belgian industry (Congo-mined stones sent to London would go mainly to them), and that Sand supply to Palestine was a war measure (PDF p.144). The turnabout could have been anticipated — Oppenheimer and Mathias had recommended against single-stone specialization in mid-1940, and Belgium’s liberation would not tolerate the competition — but the shock signaled British trust in the PDMA cracking and a British-Belgian-cartel coalescence to limit expansion: “the reign of the small stone” was about to end. The Palestine government established the Diamond Control Board (DCB) in August 1943, chaired by Geoffrey Walsh with Fletcher, Ben-Ami, Yehoshua Mazur, Oscar Fischer and David Andreson, soon joined by Albert Ehrenfeld, reporting daily, inspecting import/export, advising the PDMA and dealing with labor unrest (PDF p.144-145). Control would now be enforced through the type of stones allocated and a forced change in the labor process; simultaneously the government allowed marketing of stones in Palestine itself, an incipient liberalization to moderate the PDMA monopoly. De Vries ascribes the suddenness to a calculated move, mainly Belgian influence using Congo supply as the precondition of Belgian postwar Sand recovery, which prevented Zionist activation against the decision and stunned the PDMA (PDF p.145-146). The effects were deeper British intervention through the MEW-DCB axis (with manufacturers soon searching for alternative Sand sources such as British Guiana, a heated contention in 1944-1945), factory adaptation and retraining with unemployment for some and a more privileged stratum able to handle varied stones, a strengthened and separately organizing work-manager function, renegotiation with an empowered Histadrut, and PDMA instability in which the opposition blamed Ben-Ami’s lack of foresight, demanded investigation of his private share in the PDMA budget and more freedom of action, and treated centralization as a burden; in late 1943 the DCB allowed an independent exporters’ organization, the first merchants who were not cutters or manufacturers allowed to export in three years (PDF p.146-147). In December 1943 COFDI (printed “CODFI”) announced great victories over the Palestine and Brazil industries; De Vries closes the section by arguing the attempts to regulate were more effective in diversifying stones than in debilitating growth — the British refrained from harming their “special native,” Belgian circles expected the experts back after the war, and the factories’ adaptive capacity limited containment (PDF p.147).

Chapter 4 — The Politics of Supply, continued (PDF p.148-152 / printed p.130-134)

The late-1943 reorganization was only the start of procrastinating negotiations over supplies. American intelligence (Office of Strategic Services) reports that the Palestine government failed to control the industry, and that smuggling of gem and industrial diamonds from South Africa via Egypt to Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, ending in Germany — whose war machine direly needed industrial diamonds — flourished, led in January 1944 to a special British control system in Egypt; Palestine’s diamonds now seemed a potential liability as well as revenue (PDF p.148). COFDI (printed “CODFI”) pressed the Belgian government-in-exile to accumulate more Congo reserves and threatened that continuous Congo industrial-diamond supply would depend on further limiting supplies to other cutting centers (PDF p.148). Winter 1944 brought an ominous breakdown of trust between the MEW and the PDMA leadership: the British suspected misreporting of exports and illegal retention of rough and dust meant for return to the DTC, despite auditors’ examination of every manufacturer’s books and deposit of unsuitable diamonds in the PDMA’s safes in the Palestine Corporation, and rumors spread that manufacturers troubled by the effective supply reduction were buying rough outside the syndicate (PDF p.149). British responses ranged from stricter accountability to preconditioning supplies on immaculate stock accounting, reflecting a potential distancing from the support given since winter 1940, against the growing importance of the Belgian Congo mines and a Middle East alliance system preferring Arab interests over the Jewish National Home (PDF p.150). In mid-January 1944 Ben-Ami renewed the application (rejected in November 1943) to send PDMA representatives to London, arguing Palestine was too weak to face the London coalescence of De Beers, the syndicate, the Belgian government-in-exile and the MEW, and that postwar structures must not be decided without Palestine: “It is clear that it will be seriously prejudicial to the Palestine diamond industry if present plans and post-war structures are decided upon without associating us in the final crystallization of the plans” (PDF p.150-151). The PDMA’s confidential document warned that the low-quality Melees forced reorientation of marketing from the US to India and falling profits, would cause unemployment among Sand-skilled workers, and argued Palestine should be regarded as inheritor of the German, not the Belgian, industry and part of a European system to forestall German recovery — threatening that a further-limited Palestine would buy rough outside the syndicate (PDF p.151-152). The efforts were to no avail: trust in Ben-Ami, suspected of meddling in supply orders for personal gain, waned, the small extra Sand allowed was far from enough, and urgent PDMA telegrams in late February and early March 1944 conveyed looming catastrophe and a growing internal rift (PDF p.152).

Chapter 4 — Accountability and Vindication (PDF p.153-159 / printed p.135-141)

De Vries reads the PDMA as a “capitalist collectivity”: members expected to share a common corporate good, define themselves outwardly as capital entrepreneurs committed to the Zionist cause and independent of local institutions and diamond circles abroad, and inwardly decide egalitarianly while conceding execution to the president — achieved through selection, regimentation and British backing, with Ben-Ami’s dual strategy of not intervening deeply in each factory balanced by a show of force outward (PDF p.153-154). The opposition, organized in summer 1940 and operating through the Diamond Club and the Jewish Agency’s Department of Trade and Industry, turned to exposing Ben-Ami as a liability, led by Moshe Offen, Marc and Ferdinand Schein, and Eliyahu and Yehoshua Mazur; it protested Netanya preference and non-consultation in January 1942 and attacked the PDMA’s “totality of functions,” demanding a return to the Belgian separation of importers, manufacturers and exporters (PDF p.154-155). Suspicion crystallized over the May 1942 Hennig & Co. offer: LP 80,000 of rough at LP 20 per carat, declined during the looming strike, re-offered at LP 27, with London answering that the cheaper price was a mistake; rumors that Ben-Ami and Prins profited some LP 30,000 were denied and the syndicate confirmed the mistake, but in September 1943 a diamond expert informed the Jewish Agency that the chairman received a 2 percent brokerage on each consignment, half for the Association and half as private profit (PDF p.155-156). The stone change intensified demands for manufacturers’ freedom of action, market diversification to India, Brazil and the Middle East, and an end to the PDMA’s exporting function; the DCB’s late-1943 creation of an independent exporters’ organization was a step that way, but free importing — including from British Guiana — was still barred (PDF p.156). The opposition’s October 1943 suit to an internal PDMA inquest charged a conflict of interest, “methods of terror” and actions of “a criminal character”; nothing came of it or of Ben-Ami’s libel countersuit, and the government initially backed Ben-Ami, Walsh arguing it would not meddle and Ben-Ami calling the accusations baseless reflections of political opposition to British policy (PDF p.156-157). As quarrels reached such volume in winter 1944, Walsh appointed a DCB inquiry subcommittee — Fletcher, the Jerusalem lawyer Salomon Horowitz, and the banker David Andreson — which after three months of testimonies (March-May 1944) reinstated Ben-Ami, cleared Hennig and Prins, praised the manufacturers’ utility and the Mathias-Ben-Ami axis, and recommended his “benevolent despotism” be replaced by a more democratic structure: authority relegated to a business manager, offices removed to Tel Aviv, regulations rewritten toward a full-fledged company under the British Companies’ Ordinance (PDF p.158-159). The report also drew the limits of Ben-Ami’s power, paved the way to split the PDMA into two manufacturers’ organizations and transfer power from Netanya to Tel Aviv, warned all involved of the limit of their freedom of action, and showed the industry’s power structure still depended on the colonial state (PDF p.159). Illustrations 4.1-4.3 show the Orah factory trademark and the PDMA export trademark (1944) and a Netanya diamond cutter (1946) (PDF p.160-162).

Chapter 5. Labor Unrest — Actors and Issues (PDF p.163-167 / printed p.145-149)

Chapter 5 opens with a diamond worker’s June 1941 charge in Hedei Netanya that the bar on moving between factories without the employer’s permission — with cases of one owner buying a worker from another at high price — was “slavery in the full sense of the word which brings us back to Feudal times,” against manufacturers’ almost fantastic profits and workers’ payments for tools and seat (PDF p.163). Capital-labor relations were equally ambivalent: the PDMA selected the labor force and kept union power at bay and could discipline workers, but employment relations turned extremely tumultuous (PDF p.164). Table 5.1 gives strikes/strikers in the Yishuv and the diamond industry, 1940-1944: diamond strikers were 1,400 of 4,185 Yishuv strikers in 1941 (33.45 percent), 2,613 of 9,258 in 1942, 5,017 of 15,220 in 1943, and 4,166 of 7,805 in 1944 (53.37 percent), the data collected by the Histadrut (PDF p.164). In 1943 61 percent of work days lost in strikes were in diamond strikes, rising to 73.5 percent in 1944; each diamond worker lost 13.76 days in 1943 against 0.73 for each Yishuv worker (PDF p.165). The PDMA sought authority over labor by interdicting free movement between workshops and fixing a general wage level as infrastructure for a collective agreement securing minimum earnings for pieceworkers dependent on stone supply (PDF p.165-166). Larger factories such as Ophir insisted on distancing unions from wage determination and apprentice selection. The first strike, March 1941 — fifty-five workers at Daskal’s Even-Hayesod factory in Netanya over harsh conditions and apprentices’ difficulties — drew Netanya and Tel Aviv solidarity with none of the five unions initially involved, forced the unions to cooperate in negotiating a collective agreement, and raised demands that recurred throughout: annulment of the apprenticeship fee and full wages after three months, reduction of the Platzgeld, annual leave, medical insurance, cost-of-living allowance, workers’ participation in dismissal decisions, and teaching all phases of cutting (PDF p.166-167). The manufacturers conceded a reduced apprenticeship fee, medical and accident insurance and one week’s leave, but opposed wage raises and cost-of-living allowances; negotiations ran on two tracks, with the four minority unions and separately with the Histadrut. The August 1941 strike mobilized 800 to 1,000 workers; some manufacturers allowed home work to balance losses, others negotiated without the PDMA, and the PDMA answered with the industry’s first lockout (PDF p.167).

Chapter 5 — The Pickel Strike, the Unorganized, and the Road to a General Strike (PDF p.168-172 / printed p.150-154)

The lockout settlement gave a wage increase 10 percent less than demanded, lockout compensation, and a joint arbitration committee; Ben-Ami reported the negotiation concerned “hegemony over work and over workers” (PDF p.168). In November 1941, 150 workers at Akiva Pickel’s Yahalomim factory in Tel Aviv struck for a 30 percent increase, abolition of the Platzgeld and the promised lockout compensation; the Histadrut established its Diamond Workers’ Union (DWO), with schemes to recruit kibbutz workers, establish a Histadrut training school and subsidize accommodation. Jewish Agency arbitration ended the strike in two weeks with significant gains, which the PDMA first refused to apply industry-wide before yielding to pressure (PDF p.168-169). Militancy in winter 1942 came mainly from the unorganized — half the labor force, selected by the PDMA without the unions, mostly in Tel Aviv, some close to the Palestine Communist Party (PKP) — who organized in January 1942 under the Supreme Committee and struck six Tel Aviv factories; the PDMA refused to negotiate during a strike, the Histadrut refused to lead it, and after three weeks the DWO, representing a third of the organized labor force, obtained Ben-Ami’s promise the strikers would not be harmed and persuaded the committee to call it off (PDF p.169). March 1942 negotiations on a new agreement, advised by Benyamin Avniel of the PMA, again ran two tracks and excluded the Supreme Committee; the PDMA demanded a commitment to refrain from industrial action for a two-year agreement, which the NWF (printed “NWA”) and the Histadrut opposed (PDF p.169-170). Under “The First General Strike,” the three thorniest issues were free movement between factories, the Platzgeld and machine rent (LP 2 monthly), and a minimum wage with cost-of-living allowances of 45 to 70 percent; the manufacturers rejected all three and the proposed neutral arbitration (PDF p.171). Spring 1942 circumstances forced a showdown: MEW fears of diamonds reaching Germany and of invasion led Fletcher to order stricter accounting and limit factories to two weeks’ diamonds, US demand fell, and absorption of apprentices contracted (PDF p.172). After David Remez transferred strike management from the DWO to the Tel Aviv labor council under Aharon Becker, and the PDMA refused to budge on workplace fees while intending to lower some wages, the Histadrut called the strike; on 12 June 1942 some 2,600 workers stopped work in the 33 factories in Netanya, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Ramat Gan (PDF p.172).

Chapter 5 — The First General Strike and Rapprochement (PDF p.173-177 / printed p.155-159)

The widened demands — two weeks’ annual leave, greater cost-of-living allowance, a provident fund, recognition of the hard and nerve-wrecking nature of cutting — reflected workers’ realization of the industry advance and manufacturers’ profits, and the Histadrut’s attempt to educate the PDMA to the “triangular thread” norms of consensual industrial relations, neutral arbitration and Histadrut-Mapai hegemony (PDF p.173). The five-week strike paralyzed the factories, returned uncut diamonds to the banks’ safes, lost some 83,000 working days, and was fought largely in the press (PDF p.173-174). After a month, the PDMA’s proposed “Zabla” arbitration was rejected, then a committee of Yishuv dignitaries accepted; once the unions gave up strike pay the strike ended, with an agreement valid until March 1943 providing wage increases of 40 to 60 percent, a fixed minimum wage for apprentices, a progressive cost-of-living scale, extended holidays, an unemployment insurance fund, and arrangements for worker transfer (PDF p.174). For the Histadrut the strike showed the limits of its power, pushed from below into a strike it did not really want; for the PDMA it taught the need for collective bargaining and arbitration, and the PDMA then formally affiliated to the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association and accepted the Yishuv cost-of-living system — a veering to acquiescence with the “triangular thread” (PDF p.174-175). Under “Labor-Capital Rapprochement,” sporadic strikes continued (Sam Moed’s factory in November 1942 over searches after theft accusations; Hakochav over a Yishuv tax deduction), and Ben-Ami asked in October 1942 that the diamond industry, excluded from the Trade Disputes Order, be brought within its scope as a war-effort industry (PDF p.175-176). In December 1942 Ben-Ami, Smagarinsky, Eliezer Shostak of the NWF and Zeev Fisherschein (Zohar) of Poalei Agudat Israel agreed the problem lay with individual manufacturers despising PDMA authority, and that workers should be forced to affiliate to one of the unions; the stone diversification forced the PDMA to seek labor cooperation for the new agreement due March 1943 (PDF p.176). The Histadrut’s winter 1943 DWO scheme proposed Histadrut control over apprentice selection in return for restraining the unaffiliated, but the bipartite committees in Tel Aviv and Netanya became tense contestation sites, compliance was partial, and strikes re-erupted — seventy workers at Ophir over an uncompensated one-day lockout, Ophir’s sawyers over the stone change, a month-long stoppage in Ramat Gan over unpaid 1942 strike-day wages (PDF p.177).

Chapter 5 — The June 1943 Agreement and Its Undoing (PDF p.178-180 / printed p.160-162)

Negotiations from mid-March 1943 took three months on the double route; thaw came from declining American polished prices, strikes during the talks, government direction that unions notify the diamond controller of disputes, and the unaffiliated realizing the unions were about to compromise (PDF p.178). The June 1943 agreement abolished workplace and tool-usage fees — one of the main features of the traditional Belgian industry — annulled training fees and older debts, assured pay during declining supplies, uplifted (as printed) the controls over workers’ movements, and raised basic wages and cost-of-living allowances, with employers participating in medical insurance and provident funds; contemporaries perceived a significant victory for the workers (PDF p.178-179). Yet strikes hardly narrowed: at Dankner’s Almaz factory in mid-July 1943 against a forced no-strike obligation, at Feldman’s Jerusalem factory by Poalei Agudat Israel workers, by some 120 organizing clerks, and a half-hour industry-wide solidarity strike on 12 August. Causes were manufacturers’ difficulty fulfilling the agreement, decreasing polishing quality registered by American buyers, growing international concern for Antwerp’s recovery, and unaffiliated refusal of the agreement’s compromises (PDF p.179). R. K. Saunders of the government Labor Department warned that 100,000 workdays were lost the previous year and the figures relayed to London could influence its attitude (PDF p.180). In autumn 1943 the manufacturers turned back on the agreement — the promised 46 percent cost-of-living allowance refused and other items violated — the immediate outcome, De Vries argues, of the change in supplies and the need to retrain Sand workers for Melees; in early October the DWO refused further negotiations unless the June agreement was fully complied with (PDF p.180).

Chapter 5 — Propensity to Strike (PDF p.181-187 / printed p.163-169)

De Vries explains the workers’ strike propensity through a social pact: young, quickly skilled workers, rooted in tradition and pride in quality, balanced long hours, regimentation and worry over losing stones against relatively high wages partly protected by a collective agreement, feeling commonality through the labor process more than union affiliation (PDF p.181). Prewar Low Countries and US diamond unionism — Henri Polak, Piet van Muyden, W. V. Daems, Frans Schoeters, William Jacobs, Meyer Andries — was reformist and gradualist, a “labor aristocracy” building consensus with employers; those legacies found less expression in Palestine, De Vries suggests, because the arrivals were experts not union activists, and because the PDMA blocked Histadrut hegemony (PDF p.181-182). Manufacturers, exposed to irregular London supply and PDMA distribution and tempted to cut labor costs by reducing stone distribution, cutting apprentices or tampering with pay, yet bound by the collective agreement’s guarantee during supply decreases, often digressed from PDMA pay policies or locked out factories; their young workers, earning after three months and flexible but dissatisfied with the agreement, were susceptible to spontaneous action (PDF p.182-183). Multiplicity of strikes related to breakdown of agreement negotiations and workers’ desire to share the industry’s prosperity; their impact forced manufacturers after three to four years to attenuate objection to labor organizations and accept a branch-wide collective agreement without precedence in Palestine, while for the Histadrut the strikes were a from-below challenge that made it recognize the limits of its hegemony and divert its best forces to other industries (PDF p.184-185). The diamond workforce became the leading force in the veering from national-segregationist aspects of strike action to economic and social ones — an average of 34 percent of the strikers in the Yishuv — in a Jewish-only industry that never experienced Arab-Jewish labor-market competition (PDF p.186). The association between supply instability and unrest also created an “imperial connectivity” tying African diamond miners’ experiences to Palestine’s cutters, without any supranational workers’ organization (PDF p.186-187). Under “The Long Showdown,” Table 5.2 gives the general strikes of 1942-1946: June 1942, 2,500 workers affected and 82,500 days lost; December 1943 (partial), 2,000 and 24,000; March 1944, 3,250 and 182,000; January 1946, 4,320 and 56,160, sourced to the Histadrut’s The Diamond Worker (PDF p.187).

Chapter 5 — The Long Showdown, continued (PDF p.188-189 / printed p.170-171)

Before the stone change, slow supplies decreased work and piecework pay and workers demanded more work or compensation; the supply crisis from the end of 1943 changed the order — supplies decreased, employers violated the collective agreement, and strike action followed without renewal of supplies really mattering, as workers and unions concluded the struggle for supplies in London could no longer justify social peace (PDF p.188). In early November 1943 the cutters were informed November pay envelopes would not include the war bonuses of the past eighteen months — 46 percent of salaries over LP 3,500 in addition to regular allowances of 100 percent of the rise in the cost-of-living index; Netanya workers affiliated with the Revisionists and the IZL and LEHI underground organizations struck for forty-eight hours without the Histadrut, the Jewish Agency mediated to no avail, minority-union workers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem joined, and the strike ended after two weeks, the workers achieving nothing, when the Histadrut did not join and the PDMA promised to reconsider its retreat (PDF p.188). In early March 1944 the factory committees ultimatum demanded full compliance within a week, the 46 percent allowance, Jewish Agency arbitration, strike-day pay and 4 percent of wages for a strike fund if a strike broke out; the unions were forced to join, and Jewish Agency arbitrators Itzhak Grinboim and Avraham Wertheim proposed reducing the allowance to 20 percent monthly for three months only, which the PDMA accepted at once; the workers split, Netanya stopping for two days against postponement while Tel Aviv allowed another mediation chance, in what was depicted as a rebellion of the workers and their committees against the union secretaries, mounted from fear of further supply reduction and dismissals (PDF p.189).

Chapter 5 — The Long Showdown, conclusion (PDF p.190-191 / printed p.172-173)

The workers’ committees demanded the workers themselves decide: a referendum organized by the labor councils and diamond unions in Tel Aviv and Netanya — the first of its kind in the industry — drew 2,861 of 3,600 diamond workers, of whom 1,953 (1,524 in Tel Aviv, 429 in Netanya) voted to strike and 859 (684 and 175) for an agreement (PDF p.190). The mid-March 1944 strike, a corollary of factory adaptation to the stone change and of the London supply negotiations, was for the PDMA leadership “like sticking a knife in the back” of its London delegates; for the workers it restored rights they felt had been wrested from them, and in De Vries’s reading it reflected the price both sides paid for keeping the Zionist institutions at a distance (PDF p.190). Neither side expected its length: workers were hit materially and mentally, informal home work grew, and a shared fear the industry might be dismantled after the war — the shared economic nationalism of the “triangular thread” — brought the sides closer (PDF p.190). After five weeks to renew the arbitration and four more to conclude it, the 46 percent cost-of-living allowance was reduced to 40 percent, manufacturers paid half the wages lost in forced unemployment, and the unions replaced the fixed minimum wage demand with a graded scale (PDF p.191). The nine-week conflict involved 33 factories, more than 4,000 workers and 170,000-180,000 workdays lost — one of the biggest strikes in modern Palestine’s history — paralyzed Netanya’s purchasing power, taught the Histadrut its organizational weakness among industrial workers, strengthened cooperation among the five unions and the Histadrut’s power among diamond workers, and deepened the industry’s rapprochement with the Zionist institutions, whose Department of Trade and Industry strengthened ties with Hennig & Co. in summer 1944 (PDF p.191-192). Illustrations 5.1-5.2 show a diamond cut (Goldmann, 1946) and Netanya factory workers, 1946 (PDF p.192-193).

Chapter 6. Liberation and Liberalization — Contrasts at War’s End (PDF p.195-206 / printed p.177-188)

The chapter opens with the December 1945 inquiry report’s judgment that an industry “born and nurtured in such abnormal circumstances is ill equipped to face world competition” without guidance and control, while sheltering the 33 factories established when the expansion embargo was placed was no longer justifiable (PDF p.195). De Vries frames the industry as a turbulent adaptation, not a straightforward transplantation: a capitalist venture with strong Zionist commitments, driven by war, backed by the cartel, dependent on Palestine’s colonial ruler, in the midst of war and the genocide of Europe’s Jews (PDF p.195-196). After the long strike and Ben-Ami’s clearing, adaptation to bigger stones progressed: factories and workers were unchanged between 1943 and 1944 while rough imports grew from “LP 1,1125,000” (as printed) to LP 1,550,000 and polished exports from LP 2,600,000 to LP 3,300,000, with $22 million of American dollar income in 1942-1944 (PDF p.196). Against that success the MEW recognized a failure of control: Joseph Lewis Reading’s June 1944 mission found British economic warfare ineffective — too many diamonds reached the Germans via Syria and Turkey — and forced the PDMA to return all unsuitable material, crushed powder and unmarketable stones, to the syndicate (PDF p.197). The industry had outgrown its assigned role: four thousand employees, economic nationalism, and the 1944 catch phrase of “inheriting” the German industry rather than competing with Antwerp made British limitation harder to justify amid the German extermination campaign (PDF p.197-198). The 1940 strategy — a monopoly entrusted to Ben-Ami, backed in his autonomy from the Zionist institutions — was becoming irrelevant under pressure from manufacturers and merchants demanding freedom of action and workers seeking a larger share, while from autumn 1943 the industry softened toward the “triangular thread,” using Zionist institutions for London politics and factory arbitration (PDF p.198). The wartime state-capital bargain — Treasury revenue, anti-German economic warfare and cartel cooperation for the British; authorization, export and exclusive profits for the manufacturers, within a framework that limited free-market buying, excluded Arabs and capped licensed manufacturers — was “supportive and defending and at the same time regimenting and limiting” (PDF p.198-199). The British therefore turned to “normalization”: undoing the abnormal wartime conditions in which a monopoly had been sine qua non (PDF p.199). Around this turn De Vries sets summer 1945’s downturn and unemployment, Attlee’s July 1945 Labour government, and Palestine’s approach to a postcolonial situation in which its economic character would be determined (PDF p.199). The war ended twice for the industry: Antwerp fell on 4 September 1944 and the Belgian government returned to Brussels five days later, shifting supply politics toward a plundered Antwerp whose Jewish population rose only from 800 at liberation to 2,000 in August 1945, against 29,500 in 1940; this was COFDI’s (printed “CODFI”) “finest hour,” its reserves feeding recuperation from winter 1945 (PDF p.199-200). Ben-Ami telegrammed Oppenheimer that Belgium’s liberation “has placed bulk of markets [for] our finished stones in state of suspense,” warned the unions of crisis and proposed working three days a week; Walsh warned competition would entail dismissals (PDF p.200-201). The Belgians treated Congo mining — also the source of uranium for American atomic bombs — as a lever, and expected the Jewish experts and merchants of Palestine, London, Cuba and New York to return; De Beers, for whom the Congo was the main source of profits, preferred Belgium’s recovery to Palestine’s steady growth (Palestine bought LP 1.5-2 million of rough a year) and expected Palestine to downsize and keep thriving on Melees while the American Sand market reoriented to Belgium (PDF p.201-202). A December 1944 expert urged cutting production costs, reducing the particularly high wage rates, concentrating workshops and lengthening the few months’ apprenticeship so Palestine could handle larger, more valuable cuts and industrial diamonds (PDF p.202). British ambivalence — Sierra Leone, a stake in the Congo, American opposition to cartels, the cartel’s price image — assured continued support but curtailed excessive expansion, the same logic Mathias and the Colonial Office had drawn in 1940 (PDF p.203). The December 1944 London conference (Ben-Ami and Albert Ehrenfeld; Mathias, the American advisor Sidney Bull and Fletcher on control) judged the Palestine control system successful against leakage to Germany and Japan, resolved control would not be relaxed until the war ended and Belgium and Holland recovered, and conceived Palestine as replacing the prewar German industry — assured of De Beers supplies and allowed a small amount of rough from non-syndicate sources (PDF p.203-204). The conference advanced the concept of deregulation, crystallized partly by the British Economic and Industrial Planning Staff: the “special native” was to plan its own restructuring, with manufacturers, organizations, the British and even the restricted merchants participating (PDF p.204). The January 1945 agreement supplied Palestine a variety of rough beyond the Melee and Sand quotas, allowed the PDMA to expand membership with supplies assured to new members, let factories train a limited number of cleavers, and liberalized marketing to Middle Eastern and other Asian countries and sourcing notably from South Africa — placing Palestine, in the manufacturers’ perception, on an equal footing with any other diamond industry, without compromising Antwerp’s recovery (PDF p.205). Antwerp’s lag helped: Goldmuntz returned only in March 1945, the Belgian Diamond Office transition completed in July 1945, only 5,600 cutters had resumed work by end of spring 1945 against thousands before the war, and the exchanges fully resumed only in early 1946; Palestine doubled polished exports in May-December 1944 and rose from 79,000 carats in 1944 to 138,000 in 1945, and its workforce rose from some 3,800 in summer 1943 to 4,000 in spring 1945 and 4,500 a few months later — the “peace scare” contrast of growth and foreboding (PDF p.205-206).

Chapter 6 — Incipient De-Control (PDF p.206-212 / printed p.188-194)

The immediate impact of liberation and the war’s end was the coalescence, in the second half of 1945, of forces around normalization and the industry’s architectural restructuring, the British-Belgian-De Beers axis foremost (PDF p.206). Mathias’s June 1945 Belgium visit secured Belgian agreement to one-channel supply through the syndicate and London as the world distribution center, in return for full British commitment to Antwerp’s recuperation and prewar hegemony; its logical consequence was restraining Palestine, which Mathias told the Belgians was restricted to 3,500 workers — about half Germany’s prewar number — and under no illusions about further expansion, citing limited suitable rough, the risk decontrol would unleash small competitors, the commitment to the Low Countries, and growth elsewhere; Belgium would send an official delegation to recall its expatriates (PDF p.206-207). The British and De Beers concurred in the consensual approach: Palestine was a loyal, efficient consumer, a backing against American antitrust proceedings and against Belgian use of the Congo lever, so its runaway expansion should be restrained but the monopoly not abolished — “normalization” was the only resolution (PDF p.207-208). Pressure also came from those kept outside: the Jewish Agency’s industrial planning committees; Arab merchants of the Nablus-based Johar Company pressing to free non-Jewish entry; and Jewish dealers of the Tishby-Weiss/Diamond Club camp, whose Diamond Traders Association counted fifty-eight licensed exporters in summer 1945 and demanded free trade severed from PDMA control (PDF p.208). Within the PDMA the opposition, upholding the inquiry’s democratization message, campaigned to transform the association’s constitution, decentralize it and abolish compulsory membership (PDF p.208-209). The PDMA’s June 1945 proposal answered with attenuated regulation — state control transformed into regulation through a special diamond-manufacturing regulatory board, manufacturers still licensed and in one association, purchasing still centralized though non-syndicate sources allowed: “a gradual transfer to deregulation,” not abolition (PDF p.209). The opposition, led by Moshe Offen, Zeev Nagler, Asher Daskal and Zvi Rosenberg, replied that compulsory membership had been a temporary war measure: “allowing the destinies of capitalists, experts and workmen to depend on the whims and ambitions of a group of persons who are mainly guided by what they regard as their own interest” (PDF p.209-210). Merchant Norbert Guttenberg argued in autumn 1945 that in peacetime diamonds are “a 100 percent non-essential commodity” and control benefited only the existing factory owners at the expense of traders and workers; the Histadrut, suspicious of the PDMA’s proposal, feared deregulation would lower wages, splinter the industry into small units, revive domestic work and family and child exploitation, and make collective action impossible (PDF p.210). De Vries explains the British hesitation — they pondered why give up a Sterling Bloc resource, why not keep Palestine as a warning to the Belgians and as Germany’s inheritor, and Oppenheimer’s sympathy — as a wider transitional phase in Europe and Palestine (PDF p.210-211). From spring 1945 the British aired deregulation and probed the opinions of the whole industry, not only the monopoly; the DCB’s controllers (Walsh, Fletcher, Ehrenfeld) advanced an inquiry committee, established 22 August 1945, to decide deregulation’s extent and mode only after hearing all forces in Palestine, London and Antwerp — its findings becoming policy when the British gave the report formal blessing after Walsh’s spring 1946 Antwerp visit (PDF p.211). Meanwhile a sudden, dramatic reduction of rough supplies was announced under Antwerp’s pressure and a Congo mining slowdown; polished exports fell from LP 3,325,117 to LP 2,808,433, the PDMA discouraged new applicants, the British again rejected the Johar Company’s application, and cleavers, ex-servicemen and refugees were turned away (PDF p.211-212). At the September 1945 International Diamond Conference in London, aimed at a World Society of Diamond Manufacturers, Palestine deployed its whole rhetorical arsenal — legitimate successor of the Germans, now the Holocaust’s full extent was clear — and the syndicate promised six months’ supplies, but made clear Palestine must specialize further in stones bigger than Sand, on which Antwerp’s recovery depended (PDF p.212). In Brussels in mid-October 1945 Ben-Ami signed a convention with the Belgian manufacturers coordinating opposition to a German revival and similar wage structures, and obliging Palestine not to accept new apprentices; the Histadrut, flabbergasted, now supported deregulation, and Ben-Ami himself realized the PDMA could not remain a state-backed monopoly forever (PDF p.212-213).

Chapter 6 — Deregulation (PDF p.213-221 / printed p.195-203)

The inquiry committee — chaired by Walsh, with Fletcher and the accountant L. D. Watts, and B. G. Bourdillon as secretary — wrote its report at the end of December 1945 from some sixty testimonies; most deliberations were lost in the November 1945 Tel Aviv fires and the August 1946 King David Hotel bombing that killed Walsh and Bourdillon (PDF p.213). The report held the industry had grown in “extraordinarily favorable conditions due entirely to the war”: absence of European competition, the close control necessitated because rough was easily transported and of great potential value to the enemy, supplies forwarded that would normally have gone to the older centers, its emergence as a serious “dollar-earner factor,” supply confined to the one syndicate source and distribution to “one narrow channel” (the PDMA), and closure to new manufacturers yielding “extremely good profits” and “high wages to the workers”; hence “the aim of the Government should be the eventual freedom of the diamond industry from all control,” with regulation maintained through a transition (PDF p.213-214). De Vries reconstructs the control web — quotas, imports and exports, licensing and selection, formalized in the Defense Regulations — and the committee’s question of ending the state’s wartime umbrella without anarchy that would endanger the industry and Belgium’s recovery (PDF p.214). Witnesses divided into PDMA representatives keen to adapt the monopoly; experts kept aside or unwilling to accept its rules, standard-bearers of occupational tradition who opposed both monopolies and called for licensed specialized exporters and non-syndicate sourcing; newcomers; and merchants seeking a free postwar trade — the PDMA camp agreeing on efficiency but wanting softer control, so the committee’s final word was eventual freedom, the PDMA transformed from compulsory to voluntary, imports opened beyond the PDMA and new factories permitted, but “there should be must be a transition period” (as printed) of regulation (PDF p.215). The unpublished report became a battleground: the Exporters’ Association of Palestine Polished Diamonds (79 members in spring 1946), the Palestine Diamond Club (125), the Diamond Traders Association (39 importers) and the Palestine Cleavers’ Organization (39) pressed on against the government’s claim that freeing the industry would bring chaos, uncontrolled home production and unemployment (PDF p.216). Walsh’s own European report admired the Belgian model — a Diamond Club keeping professional standards cooperating with a government Diamond Office inspecting imports and exports, harnessing the industry to Belgium’s recuperation while in practice leaving the De Beers monopoly unchallenged — and in early June 1946 the government made the committee’s recommendations public (PDF p.216-217). Deregulation in Palestine mainly took the form of freer rough imports and gradual separation of importing from cutting, but the publicity made liberalization irreversible: doing away with the PDMA monopoly and admitting new manufacturers and capital owners, freer trade exemplified by the Tel Aviv diamond exchange, and exporters organizing separately — a transition from state-sheltered capitalism to a more independent one, changing the basic assumption since the mid-1930s that diamond production and dealing were never free of the state (PDF p.217). De Vries stresses the British administered their own weakening, and that the process ripened in spring 1946 as the Anglo-American committee deliberated Palestine’s political future; its two deep effects were freer importing — decentralization, weakening Netanya’s stronghold position, resuming the quelled merchants’ trading culture — and a freer labor process reverting toward the Belgian model (PDF p.217-218). Pluralized power followed: the traders were legitimized, Ben-Ami’s “old guard” tried in spring 1946 to monopolize all rough imports and preserve power, the campaign against it peaked and virtually caused Ben-Ami to back away from too-personalized dealing with the syndicate, helped by the growing black market since early 1946 (PDF p.218). In late March 1946 the Palestine Diamond Exchange was founded under Ben Schafferman (1896-1974) as a Tel Aviv stock company of 180 importers, manufacturers and traders, meeting at the Diamond Club, the Palatine café and the Bank Igud hall, its 31 March 1946 memorandum listing twenty goals from managing a bourse and arbitration courts to honest trade principles — closing the circle of adopting the Belgian and Dutch models (PDF p.219). Traders could now revive their 1938-1940 global contacts; some even looked to deal again with Germany’s cutting industry, others intertwined profit with Zionist state building (PDF p.219). Deeper effects followed: a wave of factory-sale offers as licenses faced losing their value, putting workers at risk while facilitating the Histadrut’s emergence as a buyer setting up diamond cooperatives through its holding company; and domestic work back in full force — layers of middlemen encouraging small-scale artisan home work in Netanya and Tel Aviv, PDMA members themselves “sinning,” factories contracting, and by early or mid-1946 manufacturers sending stones from Palestine to Belgium for cheaper cutting (PDF p.219-220). De Vries closes Chapter 6 that deregulation reemphasized British rule’s centrality — it fitted British liberal visions and state goals (Belgium’s recuperation, cooperation with the cartel in the Congo and London, hampering Germany’s revival, good American relations in the emerging Cold War) — and, as the government signaled the limit of its protectiveness while its dismantling of its rule in Palestine “seemed close than ever” (as printed), freeing the industry was also a state project blurring private industry and the state; the economic nationalism of the “Atlee” (as printed) government and Belgium’s national project had their Palestine form in the rising presence of the Zionist institutions and the Histadrut: the more the British signaled distancing, the more invigorated Zionist-public intervention became, months before the British withdrawal (PDF p.220-221). Illustrations 6.1-6.2 show Netanya factory workers in the early 1950s (photographer Zoltan Kluger) and a Tel Aviv cutter in May 1949 (PDF p.222-223).

Chapter 7. Crisis and Restructuring — Reversal of Fortunes (PDF p.225-232 / printed p.207-214)

The chapter opens with Yosef Yambor’s 5 November 1946 Mishmar column on the diamond as “a peculiar creature” whose American consumption, unlike bread or radios, cannot be computed, with a possible new New York stock exchange crisis and Belgian competition to be taken into account (PDF p.225). In early September 1946 some manufacturers sounded the alarm: polished prices in the US had declined unabated since early summer, “some 50,000 thousand carats” (as printed) from Palestine waited unsold in New York, and Albert Ehrenfeld, soon to become chief government advisor on diamonds, confirmed the American market was flooded and the whole Netanya and Tel Aviv cutting operation about to stop; the press reported declining factory income, unpaid wages and cessation of work, robberies increased, ex-servicemen besieged the PDMA, and by early October all were aware the industry was sinking into catastrophe (PDF p.225-226). Table 7.1 gives the reversal, peaking in January-March 1947: factories 33/34/30-45/30/*50, workers 3,750 (1944), 4,000 (1945), 4,500 (1946), 2,000 (1947), 800 (1948), 2,800 (1949), rough imports falling from $12,600thousandin1945-1946to$1,260 thousand in 1947 and polished exports from $16,520thousandto$1,680 thousand, the interim workplace growth reflecting crisis splintering into smaller units and small cooperatives (PDF p.226). The crisis decreased Palestine’s export value, increased Jewish business bankruptcies, expanded unemployment, cut industrial unrest from 16.9 workdays lost per striking worker in 1946 to 3.1 in 1947, destabilized Netanya’s diamond-dependent economy, and deepened deregulation’s trend by bringing Zionist institutional intervention in the private industry to a new level — defining the Mandate-to-Israeli transition as economic as well as political and military (PDF p.227). Its causes were uncontested and not local: first, the war-to-peace transition across the whole chain from Sierra Leone and Congo mining to the new centers (Netanya, San Jose, Havana) and the old (Antwerp, Amsterdam, the American zone in Germany), with returning European labor — Jews who came back from Cuba, Latin America and Palestine, and Christians replacing those killed in the Holocaust — and Palestine’s increasing dependence on Belgian progress, its project having been built on Antwerp’s absence (PDF p.228). Second, the change in American demand: consumption diverted to essentials and diamonds declined as investment and inflation hedge, so by spring 1946 the flooded market and falling prices were irreversible, New York dealers cut imports from Palestine, pieceworkers were left empty handed, and India, the other main destination, was beset with political disturbances in 1947, putting the project “as risk” (as printed) (PDF p.228). Third, Belgium’s return: the syndicate’s distributive reorientation weakened Palestine in supply politics, Antwerp’s cheaper, lower-quality stones flooded the American market, Belgian manufacturers could buy rough outside the syndicate more cheaply, and Belgium’s domestic workforce rose in late 1946/early 1947 to 6,000 in Antwerp and 9,000 in the rural areas on piecework with a minimal tariff, no unemployment wage and half the social benefits of Netanya and Tel Aviv — so Palestine’s workers’ achievements, epitomized in the annual collective agreement, became a serious competitive obstacle, while more than half the Belgian produce was sold on the black market, partly government-encouraged, at 20 percent better prices (PDF p.229-230). Britain, guided by the Congo and European integration, supported Belgium’s recovery even at the cost of the wartime centers’ survival; deregulation had been presented as maturation without the state’s caring umbrella, but forces in Europe and the United States made that maturation seriously questionable (PDF p.230). In late summer 1946 owners sold properties and shares to inexperienced buyers seeking quick recovery, factory incomes declined, PDMA quarrels over rough allocation intensified, larger factories disintegrated, exports to the US and India were drastically cut, banks grew cautious, the syndicate required payment promises, and the collective agreement’s 80 percent idle-period wage mounted losses; the black market expanded, theft became widespread, home work spread, and manufacturers facing weakened workplace authority aspired to close the industry until the troubles passed (PDF p.230-231). The crisis lasted until spring 1947: reserves dwindled and were withheld, regular factory operation ceased, and Netanya felt it more harshly than Tel Aviv (PDF p.231). Capital weakened without evaporating — factories sold, merged, or shared with Histadrut-inspired workers’ cooperatives; some 1940 Antwerp arrivals returned to Belgium, others sought New York, and many owners without a pre-1940 diamond background left the occupation; dismissed cutters sought other work and returned months later at recovery’s first signs (PDF p.231). The informal layer became explicit: illegal home work, sprouting in strikes, lockouts and supply contractions and intensified by liberalization, became widespread as workers leaving factories lived off collapsing factories’ rough reserves, experts became domestic workers and surviving factories distributed work to homes and makeshift ateliers, the British and PDMA minimally able — and often keen — to let it keep the industry alive, reverting toward the prewar Low Countries home-based and cooperative pattern (PDF p.231-232). The tumult fragmented ownership, splintered the PDMA’s social basis and weakened capital in three expressions — factories contracting into smaller units and losing large-order capacity, the drive to sell factories and machinery lowering entry costs so owners per unit multiplied amid tense production and wage negotiations, and active factories’ declining capacity to finish cutting, export, profit and pay wages — while home industry and the black market shattered the PDMA’s regimentation, its members obtaining rough on the black market and diverting exports from the US to local and regional Middle Eastern marketing, endangering its relations with the syndicate (PDF p.232-233).

Chapter 7 — National Intervention (PDF p.233-235 / printed p.215-217)

De Vries locates the ripening transformation in the industry’s relations with the British and the embryonic Zionist-state institutions: wartime capital-state symbiosis had been ambivalent without severance, and deregulation itself was state-directed, but before the crisis relations deteriorated — receding British backing in London supply politics, decided siding with Belgium and the Congo, weakening DCB intervention in late 1946 — though the British kept their interest in the industry’s dollar income for Palestine and the Sterling Bloc and still “waived” (as printed) the Palestine flag as a reminder and threat to Antwerp (PDF p.233). The political context changed: in early 1946 British soldiers and policemen searched the Tel Aviv and Netanya factories for IZL and LEHI members and hidden arms; in summer IZL raids on factories aimed to steal diamonds to finance anti-British operations; and the King David Hotel bombing of 22 July 1946, killing Walsh and Bourdillon, added to the instability (PDF p.233). Diamond robberies of factories, merchants and even workers’ cash wages became common: many were committed by right-wing underground members who worked in the factories — using the lack of Histadrut control over labor-force selection — resented the industry’s excessive profits and treated robbery as a tax for the national anti-British cause, some warning they meant the British insurance companies, not manufacturers or workers; LEHI even offered the PDMA protection in return for the insurance amounts, an agreement the Haganah discovered and opposed, though the Haganah then placed protection over the small Tel Aviv diamond exchange while robberies persisted and insurers threatened to stop services (PDF p.234). Robberies, terror and exposure estranged the British: the close intervention of 1940-1945 became external policing and futile regimentation in 1946-1947, creating a vacuum reminiscent of the prewar Belgian-hegemony period, most threatening when the crisis peaked in winter 1947 (PDF p.234). In this context the “triangular thread” resurfaced: the Jewish Agency’s industrial planning had alluded to the industry’s importance without significant presence, the industry held to its independence and British ties, and even the Zionist call after the King David Hotel bombing not to cooperate with the British on the DCB went unheeded, lest the British let Arabs enter and undo Jewish exclusivity; the change came in October 1946, with the crisis and a shared sense of needing to consider preemptive factory closure — Haaretz titling a report “The diamond industry is expecting a Holocaust” (PDF p.234-235). A committee on the collective agreement — which neared its December termination, its renewal made practically impossible by the crisis — embodied the institutional turn: shortening the work week or temporary closure would destabilize profits and pay, and without national intervention the manufacturers could not fulfill their obligations to the syndicate and the workers; its members, Eliezer Siegfried Hoofien of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, Eliezer Perlson, deputy mayor of Tel Aviv, and Yosef Sh. Shapira of the Palestine electricity company, reflected the industry’s integration into Zionist decision-making frameworks — what began in 1939 as rift and enmity between a Colonial Office-protected private sector and the Yishuv forces had come full circle (PDF p.235). After the PDMA’s and unions’ testimonies the committee defined two alternatives: temporary closure with unemployment pay, harboring irreversible harm and great losses to skilled workers at top industrial wages; or operating at capacity with a shortened work week and agreement pay, keeping the industry earning (PDF p.235).

Chapter 7 — National Intervention, continued (PDF p.236-238 / printed p.218-220)

The Jewish Agency committee defined its two alternatives as temporary closure with unemployment pay, risking irreversible harm and great losses to workers who had reached top industrial wages, or operating at capacity with a shortened work week and agreement pay; it recommended that in the last two months of 1946 the factories reduce work to three and a half days a week, workers to be paid 60 percent of regular wages without full unemployment compensation for idle days — practically a pay cut of a third — to compete with the Belgians, who had reduced to three days (PDF p.235-236). The PDMA accepted and drew closer to the Jewish Agency, whose help it direly needed to pay its debts to the syndicate and to obtain Agency loans to purchase rough and pay wages, while the unions tarried; the PDMA and the Agency cooperated on national-economic grounds to delegitimize the unions, jointly justifying the violation of the employers’ obligations by the possibility of total collapse (PDF p.236). The Histadrut answered through public opinion — Belgian competition was also a healthy restraint on capitalists’ profits, and the PDMA monopoly was to be abhorred — and proposed organizing the domestic workers, for which the rightist liberal press condemned it as “national treason”; on 6 November 1946 the PDMA locked out the factories to press the unions to accept the committee’s proposals (PDF p.237). The three-week lockout of the industry’s 4,500 workers negated the committee’s recommendations, increased the manufacturers’ losses and debts, and shook trust in Ben-Ami’s leadership; both sides softened, the Jewish Agency mediated and revised its own recommendations, work resumed without agreement at the end of November 1946, and the Agency was willing to allocate half a million dollars to help the industry purchase raw materials — but in late December Hennig & Co. messaged that no further stones would be sent before all previous debts and payments for orders already made were paid (PDF p.237-238).

Chapter 7 — Labor’s Moment (PDF p.238-248 / printed p.220-230)

The cessation of supplies and the stalemate brought the industry to a standstill at the beginning of January 1947, the crisis’s peak; De Vries then sets the Histadrut’s invigoration in three linked developments (PDF p.238). First, the international: at the Universal Alliance of Diamond Workers (UADW) conference in Antwerp in early September 1946, chairman Piet van Muyden urged the centers “not to consider each other as competitors,” and the Histadrut delegation joined the conference secretariat in rejecting a splintered Palestine delegation and gaining recognition — without the other Palestine unions’ consent — as the only legitimate representative of Palestine, seconding resolutions for international cooperation, control of new apprentices, and leveling of hours and wages, and against reviving the German industry; the resolutions refrained from proclaiming Palestine’s right to be considered the legitimate heir to the prewar German industry, which the NWF and minority unions read as a betrayal (PDF p.238-240). Second, strike action: after some of the industry’s fiercest disputes in 1945-1946, including the month-old early-1946 strike and the March 1946 clerks’ and managers’ strike, the crisis halved Palestine’s strikes — some one hundred in 1946, sixteen of them in diamonds, against three diamond strikes in January-September 1947, with diamond strikers falling from above five thousand in 1946 to little more than three hundred in 1947 — and the abating of strikes magnified the Histadrut’s role in restraining the workers and brought it closer to the PDMA, which hailed its end-1946 joint committee with the four other unions to fight the black market (PDF p.240-241). Third and most profound, cooperatives: against the lone pre-crisis Bukhara cooperative, the Histadrut’s holding company Hevrat Haovdim, jointly with AMPAL, became a key buyer of factory shares as the crisis peaked in winter 1947, and by spring 1947 the six diamond cooperatives (and their three hundred workers) constituted a fifth of the factories — “a healthy capitalist-laborer element,” in Ben-Ami’s words — part of a wider 1946-1947 revival of urban producing cooperatives (PDF p.241-242). The crisis’s peak was a ten-week shutdown of the factories while the informal industry in homes and makeshift spaces boomed — ‘Mulot Shchorot’ (black cutting tables), especially in Tel Aviv — and three systems came under threat: the manufacturers’ monopoly, the collectivity created by the workers’ spatial concentration in factories, and the PDMA-union system of communication and conflict resolution (PDF p.242-244). The Jewish Agency committee found the sides far apart — the Histadrut demanding resumed factory operation, pay for idle days, compensation for the unemployed and equal PDMA membership for its cooperatives; the PDMA unable to commit on debts, pay or a collective agreement — and its February 1947 resolutions, calling for immediate resumption and compensation but a 25 percent wage reduction against 1946, annulment of all social benefits and of employer unemployment compensation, and freedom to dismiss without union consent, were rejected by both the PDMA and the Histadrut (PDF p.244-245). The turning point came from the February 1947 decision to turn the Mandate over to the United Nations and British military rule, low US polished prices, and the syndicate’s refusal since January to supply rough without payment of the manufacturers’ debts, strained further by expanding non-syndicate purchases — Table 7.2 gives January-March 1947 rough imports as 12,055 carats / LP 94,317 through the DTC against 22,127 carats / LP 104,230 from outside it (PDF p.245-246). Advised by Albert Ehrenfeld, the Jewish Agency allocated the industry half a million dollars from Zionist funds and guaranteed loans by the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the Palestine Corporation, to buy on the free market and pay the syndicate debts; work resumed on individual factory-based agreements and toward the end of March 1947 the syndicate renewed supplies, the Agency serving as a surrogate for the British (PDF p.246-247). British withdrawal became evident: Mathias’s mid-March 1947 recommendation to aid the Low Countries’ industries and curtail the others, especially Palestine, was adopted by the Colonial Office in May; in summer 1947 violence peaked — Netanya under martial law on 14 July, the bodies of the two hanged British sergeants found near Feldman’s deserted Netanya factory, and Ben-Ami arrested on 5 August with thirty-five other Zionist leaders, collapsing the web of relations he and Walsh had woven since the early 1940s (PDF p.247). In July 1947 the British boasted to the UN special commission of the “All-Jewish industry” that had replaced citrus fruits as “the country’s most valuable export,” affirming their role in shaping it while hiding their part in its crisis; Ben-Ami, freed in October 1947, saw an industry in disarray, its ranks dwindling, between recovery and a looming civil war — the contrast between the take-off of 1941-1945, “the fat years” in his expression, and its pale state in 1947-1948 (PDF p.248). Illustrations 7.1 shows workers at the Yahalomei Zfat diamond cooperative in Safed, 1949 (PDF p.249).

Chapter 8. Reproducing the Pact — State of Transition (PDF p.251-258 / printed p.233-240)

The chapter opens with Jacob van Amerongen’s record of 8 March 1949 on the renewed crisis — world markets deteriorating, German development renewed with lower wages, the producer in Israel left with no profit, enterprises kept open only by hope of government assistance (PDF p.251). De Vries sets Palestine’s decline in the historically recurring shifting of cutting centers and defines the transition from Mandate rule to Jewish sovereignty as fourfold: the state-like role assumed by the Jewish Agency; the British retreat following the November 1947 UN partition resolution, completed mid-May 1948, manifested for the industry in Palestine’s exclusion from the Sterling Bloc in February 1948; the Arab-Israeli war of spring 1948 to the armistices of summer 1949, which prolonged the crisis recovery and embedded the industry in Israeli state building; and the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 — the industry having been not just a “war-industry” but a state-capitalist sector, whose reciprocity the Israeli “managed economy” continued (PDF p.251-253). Against favorable world conditions — DTC sales doubling between 1947 and 1951, syndicate imports to the US resuming wartime levels — Palestine/Israel found it hard to recover: Table 8.1 gives US polished-diamond imports from Palestine/Israel falling from $17,685thousand(27.5percentofthetotal)in1945and$24,972 thousand (21.2 percent) in 1946 to $4,298thousand(8.1percent)in1947and$4,139 thousand (7.3 percent) in 1948, recovering only to 13.0 percent in 1949 and 11.7 percent in 1951, with employment falling from 4,100 in 1945 to 800 in 1948, while Belgium climbed to half of US imports in the early 1950s (PDF p.253-254). De Vries attributes the contrast to the crisis’s lingering effects — home production’s harm to quality and reputation, the workforce’s contraction against Antwerp’s expansion, Belgian superiority in obtaining rough and in exchange rates and wages, the closure of the Indian market from early July 1947, and the syndicate’s favoring of Antwerp to secure Congo diamonds — so Palestine faced again limitations similar to the Belgian hegemony of the 1930s, the PDMA itself still recovering from the crisis and Ben-Ami’s internment amid distrust and organizational limpness (PDF p.255-256). The upheaval of late 1947 to summer 1948 added disrupted air communications, the destabilized Clipper exports after the Jordanian Legion’s June takeover of Lydda airport, and more than half of the industry’s rough in the period coming from informal and illegal sources; at the war’s outbreak in May 1948 the syndicate stopped supplies and 1,200 of the 2,000 factory workers were called up, the remaining 800 confined in the thirty factories under a special defense arrangement, rough imports of LP 2.5 million between July 1947 and July 1948 running three times the LP 0.7 million value of polished exports (PDF p.256-257). By the end of the 1948 war the industry was a fifth of its 1945-1946 peak size and salaries averaged 40 percent lower; Table 8.2 gives diamond cutting by town in 1946 and 1951 — factories fragmenting from 33 with 4,592 workers (average 139 per factory) to 103 with 1,846 workers (PDF p.257-258).

Chapter 8 — The Pact (PDF p.258-266 / printed p.240-248)

Against this background a new pact emerged in spring 1948 between the state, the industry and the workers (PDF p.258). In February 1948 the Jewish Agency leaders resolved to help the industry against LEHI attacks on the factories and set up an advisory committee on diamond affairs; Albert Ehrenfeld was appointed diamond controller with Jacob van Amerongen (later Arnon) as his deputy, and in April 1948 the two established the Department of Diamond Control under Minhelet Haam, incorporated on the state’s establishment in May into the Department of Trade and Industry headed by Peretz Bernstein, with an advisory committee on diamonds that practically replaced the British DCB; by the end of May 1948 the State of Israel had formally replaced the British in regulating the industry (PDF p.259). The manufacturers, now a contracted, more professionally focused group of small factories, sought the new state’s umbrella; in the latter part of 1949 the manufacturers’ association’s monopoly over receiving rough supplies from London ended on the syndicate’s recommendation, a new “Diamond Cutting Works Federation” was in process, the transfer of the industry’s institutional power from Netanya to Tel Aviv was completed (in 1952, 66 percent of the 103 factories and 70 percent of the 2,195 diamond workers), and Ben-Ami’s power declined, ending with his resignation from the association’s presidency in early 1950 (PDF p.260). The 1948 war made the manufacturers’ Zionism explicit — the barring of Arabs from the industry, greatly helped by the British, and the moral justification to inherit the German industry among its ingredients — and they held together by the state and its state-building project (PDF p.261). The workers were the pact’s weakest actor: production units rose from 33-35 in 1940-1946 to 130 in 1952, splintering solidarity and weakening strike propensity; at the war’s outbreak the one thousand registered workers were a fifth of the 1944-1946 peak labor force, a third of them in the cooperatives; the Histadrut’s strengthened 1947 presence, based on cooperatives at 25 percent of PDMA membership, was still thwarted in Netanya, and by the decade’s end organized labor’s voice in the industry was a shadow of its presence during the massive strikes (PDF p.261-263). The pact was first and foremost economic: diamond control licensed importers and exporters, planned an aggressive campaign against the black market, allocated credit and foreign currency, inspected factories regularly, and released no parcel of rough unless the importer committed to transfer a specified hard-currency amount to the Israeli Treasury from exports within three to five months; the state exceeded British support by exempting diamond workers from military service — recruitment replaced by obligatory confinement to the workplace — balancing the fall from 2,000 factory workers in May 1948 to 800 in August by increased admission of new immigrants (PDF p.263-264). In 1949 the state offered to buy the manufacturers’ unsold diamonds, granted increased export premiums, and perfected currency switching through Van Amerongen; the arrangements were to be handled in 1950 by Chevrat Pituach, a private company under state control whose owners were the two controllers, Ehrenfeld and Van Amerongen, joined by Jack Brin and Yosef Pick, which in the 1950s found new rough sources in Africa and Central America and became a lever for establishing factories in Israel’s new development towns (PDF p.265). Closely associated was Germany: Palestine and Israel campaigned, with the Belgians, for an international boycott depriving the revived German industry — some four hundred cutters formally working in the American and French zones at the end of 1948, reproducing prewar low-wage and dumping tactics — of rough diamonds, Israel a crucial actor by late 1948 and the boycott intensified by the manufacturers’ associations of Belgium, the Netherlands, the US, Israel and South Africa in summer 1950; the boycott’s failure, largely because the Americans helped the Germans and because of Israel’s search for reparations, hardly devalued the cooperation’s reciprocal gain, and the campaign played a role in ushering in the secret Israel-West Germany restitution negotiations finalized in September 1952 (PDF p.265-266).

Epilogue (PDF p.267-273 / printed p.249-255)

The Epilogue reads the pact’s late-1940s and early-1950s pillars as national: the diamond industry was a major ingredient in the new state’s economic nationalism, mobilized to state building and to making the managed economy viable, and part of an immigrant-absorptive economy — absorbing immigrants from North African and Middle Eastern countries, Poland and Hungary — while migration of diamond experts and manufacturers from Belgium and elsewhere was encouraged, prospective immigrants allowed to bring their reserves of rough diamonds without formal screening, and highly skilled cleavers were direly needed (PDF p.267). In a few years the industry joined the state-planned founding of development towns, with diamond-cutting factories in Israel’s peripheral south and north from the mid-1950s, mixing the towns’ economic needs with the industry’s search for low-cost workers and the “productivization” of the immigrants (PDF p.268). The circle opened in the early 1940s with suspicion of the industry’s loyalty was closed: the national legitimization of private capital was complete by the early 1950s, part of the gradual unshackling of private capital and the acceptance of organized labor’s frail status — entrepreneurial capital revered to the point of becoming level with, if not surpassing, other social forces as the main builders of Zionist sovereignty (PDF p.268-269). The manufacturers’ commitments — military-oriented production, confining workers during the war, self-mobilization against economic illegality — and their refusal of the always-available options of closing the Israeli industry or transferring to Antwerp or New York are read as more than capitalist support for state building, though whether the Holocaust, the Belgian experience or the wish to sustain an ethnic occupational specificity explains them is difficult to ascertain (PDF p.269). Figure 8.2 maps the industry in Palestine/Israel, 1940-1949; at the start of the 1950s Antwerp’s supremacy was revived with some 16,000 workers but only a fraction of its pre-1939 thousand Jews, Germany recuperated to 3,000-4,000 workers in 1951 against the Netherlands’ 1,400 and the US’s 1,700, the wartime diasporas contracted, and Israel, at some 2,000 workers, reached 5,000 only in 1960, similar to the peak of spring 1946 (PDF p.270). De Vries returns to his trigger — the strike propensity of the diamond workers — and to the centrality of three state structures: the British colonial regime, the state-like Zionist institutions and Jewish Agency, and the state of Israel, each enabling the industry’s survival; against trust-based explanations of Jewish predominance in diamonds, he argues the Israeli merchant community and the state’s involvement were a corollary, not the precondition, of the production center and its backing by De Beers and the British government (PDF p.270-271). The manufacturers’ dual identity — tied to the British empire’s Africa-Europe-Middle East network, and increasingly committed to Zionist state building — and the workers’ portentous experience close the book: piecework and high wages distanced the diamond workers, collective bargaining lingered, and the balance of power between capital and labor was clearly tipping in capital’s favor; the reciprocal state-capital system that flourished after the British left enabled private capital to become a powerful force in Israeli society and harbingered the decline of organized labor, under Labor’s political hegemony, in a historical continuity that deserves further scholarly attention (PDF p.272-273). Illustration 8.1 shows a diamond cutter at a Tel Aviv factory, May 1949 (PDF p.274).

Appendices (PDF p.275-281 / printed p.257-263)

Table A.1 explains the names of diamond factories in 1930-1950 Palestine — biblical and gemstone names (Bahat, Bareket, Even Sapir, Even Shoham, Hayahalom, Nofekh, Tarshish, Yashfeh), descriptive names (Almaz, Almog, Anbar, Even Chen, Haeven, Hakochav, Kohinoor, Maskit, Nova, Ophir, Orion, Rikuz, Orah, Shamir, Yahel, Zaharir, Zenith) and abbreviations (Paldico, Palnat) (PDF p.275-276). Table A.2 lists the establishment of diamond factories in Palestine, 1937-1941, with owners — from Daskal & Rosenberg (1937, Petah Tikva, moved in 1939 to Netanya as Ophir) and the Pickel Brothers (1937, Tel Aviv) through the twenty-three factories established in 1941 in Tel Aviv, Netanya and Pardes Katz; source: PDMA to Emil Schmorak, 28 May 1941, CZA S8/315 (PDF p.277-278). Table A.3 gives the origins of the main owners of diamond factories in November 1941 by town — Belgium dominant in both Tel Aviv and Netanya lists, with Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and Palestine also appearing; source: CZA S40/269/2 (PDF p.278). Table A.4 lists the PDMA’s member factories in November 1944 by town — Tel Aviv 16, Netanya 13, Jerusalem 2, Ramat Gan 2, total 33, with addresses; sources: the Government of Palestine’s Palestine Trade Catalogue (1944), LA IV-250-49-170 and NCA G/119/52 (PDF p.279). Table A.5 lists PDMA member factories in November 1946 by town, with printed counts of Tel Aviv 20, Netanya 11, Jerusalem 2, Ramat Gan 1 and a printed total of 33; source: NCA G/101/760 (PDF p.280). Table A.6 lists the diamond cooperatives in Palestine/Israel, 1946-1949 — twelve cooperatives from Ovdei Yahalomei Bukhara (1946, Tel Aviv, 34 member-workers) to Yahalomei Zfat (1949, Safed, 15), totaling 407 member-workers, Tarshish of Netanya the largest at 80; sources: Itshak Avineri, ed., Cooperation in the State of Israel (1948) and Merkaz Hacooperatsia, The Production and Service Cooperation in 1948-1958 (1960) (PDF p.281).

Notes to Introduction, notes 1-20 (PDF p.283-284 / printed p.265-266)

The Notes begin after a blank page (PDF p.282). Notes to the Introduction, notes 1-20 : note 1 on the formation of De Beers and the DTC; note 2 defining a sightholder; notes 3-6 on trade, commodity chains and the Kimberley and Belgian literature; notes 7-11 on Newbury, African strategic minerals, Laureys and the diamond dispersion, including the Report of the Proceedings of the UADW’s first post-liberation congress (Antwerp, 2-6 September 1946); note 12 on the trust literature (Greif, Bernstein, Berger, Richman); notes 13-20 on diamond ethnography, state and capital in Mandate Palestine (Shalev, Metzer, Aslanian), Gaskin, Ben-Gurion and Lavsky on Jews and capitalism, the 1946 economic surveys, the DWO bulletin Misgav, Moeller and Shenkar on national capital, and Rosenfeld and Carmi on the state-made middle class (PDF p.283-284).

Notes to Introduction, conclusion; Notes to Chapter 1 (PDF p.285-292 / printed p.267-274)

Note 20 concludes with Amit-Cohen on private initiative and Shamir on the Jewish bourgeoisie; note 21 cites Gross and Metzer on Palestine in World War II; note 22 notes that for the Arab community the historiography argues much more Government of Palestine and Colonial Office involvement (Smith, Nadan); note 23 gives the economic histories of Szenberg and Estheron (PDF p.285). Chapter 1’s notes 1-7 cite the first encompassing versions (Government Report 1946, Goldmann, Halperin and Schnitzer, Nathan, Gass and Creamer), Kfar Yona and the Friedman interview, the Bodenheimer 1916 memorandum (CZA, A15/699) and Shlomo Weinstein’s return, Rothblum’s 1943 memorandum, Shapira on Jews in the trade, and the commodity-chain mapping in Grodzinsky and Bruton (PDF p.285). Note 8 gives the immigration figures: of 452,306 Jews who immigrated in 1919–1948, 1,186 came from Holland and 521 from Belgium, of whom 302 and 244 arrived in 1939–1945, against total Jewish immigration of 81,808 in those years, sourced to Sikron (PDF p.286). Note 11 defines the four c’s, the carat (100 points, 0.20 grams) and the size terms Sand (under about 0.10 carats), Smalls, Melees (8 to 14 points or below 20) and Sizes (above one carat); note 12 gives Belgium’s diamond exports to the US rising from 324,000 carats in 1936 to 399,000 in 1939 while Holland’s fell from 108,000 to 77,000 (PDF p.286). Notes 13-22 cite Aronheim’s 1943 thesis, Ben-Porat on the Israeli bourgeoisie, the February 1935 authorization of a diamond factory without a customs reduction, Ball, the Jewish Central Information Office, Newbury and the plunder literature (Teitelbaum-Hirsch, Laureys, Caestecker, Saerens) (PDF p.286-287). Note 23 gives biographies of Moritz, Rosenberg (born Bychkov, 1902), Daskal and Nadel (born 1914, opened the Barik factory in 1941); note 24 narrates the first three factories of 1937, the September 1938 customs freeing and Moed (born Bialystok, 1875; his Tel Aviv factory employed some 120 workers) (PDF p.287-288). Notes 25-28 cite the Universal Alliance correspondence, the apprentice-fund meeting of 7 February 1938, the Diamond Club’s founders (with Norbert Guttenberg, Shlomo Jamil, Yosef Lifshitz and Asher Daskal) and its 6 March 1938 meeting (PDF p.288). Note 29 records that the British were prepared to reduce customs three years before approving it (executive council minutes, 3 July 1935) and that the customs were partially reinstated in 1944; notes 30-35 give Netanya’s formal village (1939), township (1940) and first-town (1948) status, its 1937 Jewish population of 3,000 against Tel Aviv’s estimated 150,000, Ben-Ami’s sources, the definition of “Diamantaire,” the March and November 1939 Ben-Ami agreements, and the five factories operating by the end of 1939 with their workforces (42, 40, 55, 20 and 5 workers) (PDF p.289). Note 36 explains the navicert as both anti-confiscation certificate and a DTC weapon against Forminière; note 37 gives Huysmans’s biography (1871–1968, secretary of the Second International 1905–1922, mayor of Antwerp 1933–1940, later Belgium’s prime minister); notes 38-44 cite the CZA, S8/315 correspondence, Misztal and Richman on trust, Mathias as a colonial figure who created global links, the winter 1940 lobbying correspondence, Tishby’s biography (born Yanov, 1885), Shenkar (1877–1959) and Levontin (PDF p.289-290). Note 45 gives the biographies of Geoffrey Walsh (born Southampton, 1884; imperial customs service from 1906; Palestine economic advisor from 1938; established the Diamond Control Board in 1944; died in the King David Hotel bombing, July 1946) and John L. Fletcher (born 1898; assistant director of customs in Palestine in “1946–1945” as printed; director of customs 1946–1948; then British Guiana) (PDF p.290-291). Notes 46-50 cite the February 1940 meetings, Linton (1900–1982), George Prins’s biography (son of Maurits Prins and Emma Lehmann, brother-in-law of Wilfrid Israel; Hennig & Co. established in 1890 by Isadore Hennig, the main route for rough from the “TDC” as printed to the PDMA), and the March 1940 applications: comparing the 146 prepared applications with the Yad Vashem Shoah Victims’ database disclosed many who perished in the Holocaust, and only a few of those who signed the commitment to immigrate did so in practice (PDF p.291). Note 51 gives Mathias’s full biography (born Williamstown, Victoria, 1891; Australian Military Forces 1916–1921; Colonial Service 1921–1934; Sierra Leone colonial treasurer 1930–1934; SLST government director 1934–1949, SLST having been established in 1934 by CAST; Board of Trade Diamond Advisory Committee 1939–1945; deputy diamond controller 1942–1945; gem diamond controller 1942–1949; OBE 1934, CBE 1941; died Simon’s Town, 1981) and notes 52-64 cite his 27 March 1940 report and its copies, Cox on economic warfare, the parallel spring 1940 Anti-Nazi Boycott committee control in New York, MacMichael’s 20 May 1940 cable, the African mechanism (Reno, Zack-Williams), Knight and Stevenson on the Williamson mine, and Shalev on capital’s dependence on the Mandate state (PDF p.291-292).

Notes to Chapter 2 (PDF p.293-297 / printed p.275-279)

Notes 1-7 cite Amit-Cohen on coastal private capital, De Vries on the Nesher cement workers, Finegold and Gaskin, and the March-July 1940 Mathias, MacMichael and Ben-Ami correspondence (PDF p.293). Note 8 fixes the PDMA’s authorization in mid-June 1940 and its formal announcement on 5 August, from the Control Committee minutes of 4 June 1940 (NCA, G/80/521) and the Samaria District Commissioner’s letter of 19 July 1940; note 9 explains the Ottoman Law of Societies (taken from French law in 1909) and lists the six factories (three Tel Aviv, two Netanya, one Petah Tikva); note 10 names the three other Responsible Directors (Carol Pickel, Mendel Morgenstein, Moshe Offen) (PDF p.293). Notes 12-16 cite the PDMA’s first general assembly (24 April 1941), the Nesher, Dead Sea Salt and electricity concessions as comparators, the PDMA as both monopoly and employers’ association (Shirom), the Jewish Agency’s criticism drawn on Rothblum, and Gross on monopolies in British economic policy (PDF p.294). Notes 17-24 repeat and extend the Mathias report, MEW, home-industry, Prins and customs-notice citations, including the Diamond Control Sub-Committee’s confidential report of 21 June 1944 by Solomon Horowitz, John L. Fletcher and David Andreson (PDF p.294). Notes 25-33 cite the September 1942 censorship and MEW correspondence, Reno’s “shadow-state,” the January 1943 diamond control ordinance, Aharon Cohen’s membership application, and Appel on the crisis (PDF p.295). Note 34 states the exclusionary policy was shaped in Mathias’s and Ben-Ami’s reports and correspondence and that Arab firms first attempted entry only at the end of the war (Johar, 6 August 1945, ISA/RG 5/5062/41); notes 35-41 cite Mazur, the late-1942 ban on new licenses, Burt’s 13 January 1943 memorandum, the member lists, and the Mazur brothers’ biography (Eliahu Mazur, 1889–1973, Warsaw Jewish community leader; Yehoshua Mazur, 1900–1976, doctorate on government economic intervention; their Tel Aviv factory established June 1941) (PDF p.295). Notes 42-46 cite the Ben-Ami–Ferdinand Schein correspondence of September 1942, the factories’ dependence on the PDMA for motor permits, and the Belgian exile literature (PDF p.296). Note 47 gives Romi Goldmuntz’s biography (born Krakow, 1882, died Antwerp, 1960; his 1902 workshop employed six hundred in 1920; with his brother Leopold a leading DTC sightholder; moved to Cognac at the occupation, arrived in London in late July 1940 and with Huysmans and Herman Schamisso — born Strasov, 1890, arrived Belgium 1907, returned 1945, died 1957 — established COFDI); note 48 adds COFDI’s indirect Forminière support, the Belgian government-in-exile as a major Forminière shareholder, and Governor-General Pierre Ryckmans (1891–1959, headed the Belgian Congo 1934–1946); note 49 records that the COFDI project “was ran” (as printed) by Huysmans, “Golmuntz” (as printed), Schamisso and a Jewish Board of Deputies representative, with the secretarial work done by “Huysman’s daughter” (as printed) (PDF p.296). Notes 50-56 cite the Belgian circles in London, the June 1941 customs notice, the Diamond Industry Protective Committee formed in June 1941 by the Joint Boycott Council, the comprador definition and why De Vries does not apply it to Palestine (the PDMA’s avowed Zionism and non-economic purposes), and Fletcher’s notices of May and July 1942 (PDF p.296-297).

Notes to Chapter 3 (PDF p.297-304 / printed p.279-286)

Notes 1-5 cite Rothblum’s two December 1941 reports, Smagarinsky’s survey of 11 February 1942 (printed “Smagrarinsky”), the arms-tools and new-centers literature (Presser, Reitlinger, Hilberg, Laureys) and G. Sh. to the Histadrut Executive (PDF p.297). Notes 6-13 cross-refer to the stone terms, the Mathias report, Ben-Ami’s DCB memorandum of 28 February 1944, the cutting-technique histories and the April 1942 description in TNA: PRO PIN 13/487 with Gurevich and Mendelson (PDF p.297-298). Note 14 defines the eight cut (18 facets against the full 58; under 1 or 2 “points”) and the Baguette, and notes cleaving was absent from the chain here and would emerge in Palestine after 1945 (note 15) (PDF p.298). Notes 16-24 cite the Taylorization literature (Kalev, Shenhav and De Vries), the conveyor-system sources, the Anglo-Palestine Bank reports of December 1944 and the appendixes (PDF p.298). Note 25 states that girls entering apprenticeship were less than a fifth of the total, that many workers were religious (in particular in Jerusalem), that no clear Ashkenazi-Sephardi divide could be discerned though many Yemenites were drawn to the industry, that the Bukhara cooperative formally stipulated a nonskill trait for selecting workers, and that only after the mid-1950s would the share of North-African and Arab workers rise significantly (PDF p.298). Notes 26-35 cite the home-work bar, the collective-agreement literature, the April 1943 negotiation minutes, and note 32’s wage context — a census of Yishuv workers in early 1943 showed only about 8% of some 20,000 Jewish workers examined earned above LP 3 per week; LP, the Palestine Pound of 1,000 Mils, was issued by the Palestine Currency Board in 1927 and pegged to the British Pound (PDF p.298-299). Notes 36-40 cite the workers’ bulletins Hatzohar and Hasapir, the occupational-health literature (cobalt lung; occupational asthma), the nervous-condition case of Arieh Kobrin and Menachem Herschkowitz, and the Kosowsky poem note (“Pink Pank” replacing the “Tsil, Tslil” sound allusion; Cenga the diamond-holding tool) (PDF p.299-300). Notes 41-51 cite the movement-bar circulars, Goodrich’s frontier of control, Rendel’s “The Triangular Thread” (Yediot Lachaverim, 5 March 1942), Horowitz and Lissak, Sternhell, Schmorak’s biography (1886–1953, headed the Jewish Agency’s Department of Trade and Industry until 1946) and the Anglo-Palestine Bank (established 1902; general manager Eliezer Siegfried Hoofien, 1925–1947; renamed Bank Leumi in 1950) (PDF p.300-301). Notes 52-59 cite the apprentice fund and Diamond Club correspondence (one citation printed “CAZ, S8/315”), Rothblum’s biography (1876–1947), Ben-Ami’s opposition to PDMA-independent factories in Safed and Jerusalem, Brodetsky (1888–1954), De Vries on strikes in 1920s Palestine, and note 58’s political map (Ben-Ami identified with the General Zionists; the PMA’s and often the PDMA’s labor-relations advisor the Revisionist Binyamin Avniel, 1906–1993) with the Daems-Polak correspondence of 1939 (PDF p.301). Notes 60-65 cite Polak’s fierce opposition of 21 March 1940, the NWF’s establishment in 1934, the labor councils’ histories, the 4 December 1940 cost-of-living agreement, and the unions’ foundations (Histadrut 1920; Hapoel Hamizrahi 1922; Poalei Agudat Israel in Poland 1922 and Palestine 1925; “Haoved Htzioni” as printed, 1936) (PDF p.302). Notes 66-70 cite Hershberg (1947), the Smagarinsky appointment file trail, and note 69’s biographies of Pinchas Smagarinsky (later Shamgar; born Loyew, in today’s Belarus; Moscow Socialist-Zionist circles; immigrated 1929; Givat Chen founder; Raanana and Holon labor councils; led the DWO’s organization) and Eliezer Zourne (1905–1960; born Dobnu; Hashomer Hatsair, Kibbutz Ein Hachoresh; Mapai-nominated Netanya Labor Council secretary 1940–1945), with the November-December 1942 arbitration minutes (PDF p.302-303). Note 71 gives Moshe Schnitzer’s biography (1921–2007; born in Romania, immigrated 1934, learned sawing and cutting at Pickel’s, work manager in 1944, edited Hayahalom, coauthored Diamonds (1946), founded the Society for the Development of the Diamond Industry in Palestine in 1945 with Shlomo Vinikov, and was a founder of the diamond bourse and its president 1967–1993); the managers’ organization was established in November 1941 and held its first assembly in October 1943 (PDF p.303). Notes 72-84 cite the Supreme Committee correspondence of January 1942, Y. L.’s “Diamonds” (Hapoel Hatsair, 25 June 1942), T. A.’s October 1943 note, the Hebrew-terminology articles by Ohel, the Misgav title’s meaning (“stronghold” and “exaltedness”), Rothblum’s “Wish Them Godspeed!”, the PDMA’s 9 March 1943 annual general meeting, and Ben-Gurion and Lavsky (PDF p.303-304).

Notes to Chapter 4 (PDF p.304-310 / printed p.286-292)

The notes heading prints the chapter title as “The Challenge and Its Constrains” (as printed) (PDF p.304). Notes 1-6 cite COFDI to the DCB (3 May 1943), Mathias’s post-war issues memorandum (20 May 1943), the MEW Diamond Committee minutes, Guttenberg and Ehrenfeld to the DCB, the other-centers literature including the UADW congress report, Newbury, the Belgian Congo’s wartime role as chief supplier of strategic materials to the Allies, and the “exponent demand” (as printed) for US industrial diamonds (PDF p.304). Note 7 gives rough diamonds as 7.5 percent of Palestine’s total raw material import in 1942 and 10.5 percent in 1943; note 12 gives US industrial diamond sales rising from 3.6 million carats in 1941 to 7.8 million in 1942 and almost 10 million in 1943; note 18 states the industry was directly responsible for Netanya’s growth from 3,000 inhabitants in 1939 to 6,000 at the end of 1942; note 19 records one source reporting the US imported from Palestine some $9 million of polished diamonds in 1943 (PDF p.305). Notes 22-34 cite J. L. Reading’s report on his 13 May to 23 June 1944 visit (Section E on Palestine, TNA: PRO FO 837/313), the cartel literature (Spar, Roberts), CEPAG, the censorship reports, the OSS report “Gold, Diamond and Narcotic Smuggling in Palestine and the Levant States,” No. 1390, 22 October 1943, the June 1944 capacity and supply report, and the July 1942 Defense Regulations file trail (PDF p.306). Notes 35-38 cite Cooper on contract labour in Namibia, the September 1943 MEW, Prins, Abrahams, Hennig and DTC correspondence, and note 38’s record that the first DCB meeting was held on 17 October 1943 (PDF p.307). Note 39 gives Albert Ehrenfeld’s biography (1896–1957; born in Antwerp, moved to Amsterdam in 1914, immigrated to Palestine in 1936, founder of the Palestine Corporation and Bank Igud; chief advisor on diamonds to the Palestine government in 1947 and Israel’s first Diamond Controller in 1948) and Oscar Fisher’s (1875–1947). Note 40 quotes the DCB Notice of 28 December 1943 in full (PDF p.307). Notes 41-45 cite Ben-Ami’s 2 September 1943 letter to Ernst Oppenheimer, Rothblum’s “Supplement No. 1,” the outstanding general assembly of 19 October 1943, Walsh to Burt (18 January 1944) and Mathias’s Report on Diamonds of 14 March 1947 (PDF p.307). Notes 46-55 cite the OSS smuggling report and Lomax correspondence, the other centers (Rio de Janeiro, Puerto Rico, the Dutch East Indies, South Africa, the US, Cuba, Venezuela, British Guiana), note 50’s record that some manufacturers suspected the syndicate was told to send Palestine low-quality rough to mar its US reputation (never substantiated), the January 1944 Ben-Ami-to-Fletcher quotation file trail, Ehrenfeld’s February 1944 DCB memoranda (one citation printed “CZA, S40/269/21944”), the NWF executive minutes of 3 March 1944 and the Clarification Committee minutes of 27 October 1943 (PDF p.308). Notes 56-65 cite the inquest trail (Ferdinand Schein to the committee, 23 November 1943, original in German; the PDMA’s Supreme Court minutes of 10 October 1943; Schein’s defense statement and countersuit against Ben-Ami) and the DCB’s third meeting of 29 February 1944 (PDF p.309). Note 66 quotes the inquiry subcommittee’s designation — to examine the PDMA’s articles and whether members could exercise their proper rights in the Association’s management — from the Palestine Post, 12 March 1944; note 67 gives Solomon Shalom Horowitz’s biography (1880–1956; arrived in Palestine in 1922, joined and from 1929 ran Harry Sacker’s law firm) and David Andreson’s (1875–1944; general manager of the Amsterdamsche, later AMRO, Bank; settled in Palestine in 1939; Anglo-Palestine Bank board and Diamond Industry Arbitration Board, 1942–1944); note 68 records that the new PDMA regulations adopted at the end of 1944 completed the change from an association under Ottoman law to a company under British law, and that 1944 is mistakenly considered the PDMA’s year of establishment, in fact four years earlier; notes 69-70 cite the DCB fourth meeting of 9 June 1944 and the Government Sub-Committee Report, 1944, 3 (PDF p.309-310).

Notes to Chapter 5, notes 1-57 (PDF p.310-314 / printed p.292-296)

Note 1 notes the tumult was ignored by Palestine’s industrial-relations historiography but widely discussed by contemporaries; note 2 gives the strike-day totals: total lost work days in the Yishuv in 1943 were 107,623 and in diamonds 65,713, and in 1944, 247,700 and 182,000 respectively, citing Government Report 1946, the Histadrut’s The Diamond Worker in Palestine and Etkin (PDF p.310). Notes 3-8 give the 1940-1941 file trail for the first strikes (Shapira diary, Preuss, Daskal and the Even Hayesod committee correspondence; the PDMA meetings with the NWF, Hapoel Hamizrahi and Agudat Poaeli Israel in May 1941; the August 1941 strike trail in NCA, G/47/154 and G/54/253) (PDF p.310). Note 9 records that one effect of the strike was manufacturers announcing in PDMA applications that to prevent strikes they could recruit workers from family and relatives; notes 10-13 cite the Pickel strike trail, the November 1941 arbitration deed and Grinboim correspondence, and the collective-bargaining demands in Misgav (PDF p.311). Note 14 gives the PKP’s history (founded 1919, ousted from the Histadrut in 1923, joined the Comintern a year later, readmitted in 1941, dissolved in 1943, reemerged in 1948 as the Communist Party of Israel) and its diamond activist Eliyahu Gozansky (1915–1948); notes 15-18 cite the Supreme Committee’s January-February 1942 calls, the PDMA secretary’s 3 February 1942 letter to the DWO, and note 18’s record that the Supreme Committee was excluded from negotiations despite the British giving it legal authorization in late February 1942 (PDF p.311). Note 19 names the February 1942 negotiation representatives — Eliezer Shostak (NWF), Pinchas Smagarinsky (Histadrut), Zeev Fisherschein (Agudat Israel), Asher Federhar (“Hapoel Hanizrahi” as printed) and one unnamed (Haoved Hatzioni); notes 20-24 give the March-June 1942 trail, including Fletcher to the PDMA (11 May 1942), the Controller of Light Industries’ 29 June 1942 order on control of rough and industrial diamonds, and the note that in June refugee diamond cutters in London went on strike (PDF p.312). Notes 25-31 cite the Ben-Ami Report quotations, the workers’ committees’ resolutions of 7 June 1942, the census of diamond workers of 12 June 1942, the strike reports, the British warning that the nearing dispute violated the strike law, and the July 1942 agreement (PDF p.312). Notes 32-35 cite the Histadrut DWO Circular 1 of 26 August 1942 and note 35’s account of the 4 December 1942 PDMA-PMA affiliation agreement (PMA backing in industrial relations and credit guarantees; the manufacturers made members also of the PMA though the PDMA maintained autonomy) and the 11 November 1942 cost-of-living agreement following the all-Yishuv “Histradrut-PMA” (as printed) agreement (PDF p.313). Notes 36-40 cite the joint committee of 3 November 1942, the arbitration whose verdict was reached on 1 December 1942 — “only now did the July 1942 strike formally end” — note 39’s figures (in 1942, 137,640 work days were lost in strikes in Palestine, of which 83,000 were in the diamond industry alone, Palestine Post, 25 August 1943), and the biographies of Eliezer Shostak (1911–2001; Betar head in Rovno, NWF secretary from 1936) and Zeev “Fishershein” [Zohar] (1905–1973) (as printed) (PDF p.313). Notes 41-47 cite the PDMA’s 9 March 1943 assembly and intensified mediation committees, the Wahl case, the Ophir arbitration verdict of 22 March 1943, note 45’s record that the PDMA originally employed Binyamin Avniel from the PMA to run the negotiations but soon transferred authority back to Ben-Ami, Smagarinsky’s mid-March 1943 demands, the low wages paid to women (Shulamit Amanuti, 12 April 1943), and note 47’s record that the unaffiliated were now organized by the Initiative Committee [Vaadat Hayozma] (PDF p.313-314). Notes 48-55 cite R. K. Saunders (Inspector for Labor for the Southern Region) to the Jaffa-Tel Aviv Labor Council (1 May 1943), the 13 June 1943 signing meeting minutes, the July-August 1943 instability after the agreement (one diary citation printed “LA/IV-208–1-34021-a”), the Saunders quotation meeting of 2 August 1943, and the September-October 1943 executive and labor committee minutes (PDF p.314). Note 56 cites Bonnell on the social pact; note 57 begins the legacy literature — Henri Polak, A Short History of the Diamond Cutting Industry (London, 1950) with the “forward” (as printed) by Piet van Muyden, and William Jacobs, “History of the Organized British Diamond Workers” (PDF p.314).

Notes to Chapter 5, conclusion; Notes to Chapter 6 (PDF p.315-322 / printed p.297-304)

Chapter 5 note 58 cites Paltin on manager-worker relations and the Jerusalem Labor Council volume; notes 59-68 cite the Dapei Hamenahel editorial, Hatzohar and Hasapir (1943), Gurevich on wages, Government Report 1946, the December 1943 PDMA executive and labor committee minutes, Avniel on the manager’s role, Shalev, and De Vries’s own “Drawing the Repertoire” and his 1946 civil servants strike article (PDF p.315). Note 72 explains the IZL (founded 1937, linked ideologically to the Revisionist movement; its members joined the British Army’s Palestinian Units on the war’s outbreak) and the 1940 split that gave birth to LEHI, and records that many members of both organizations worked in diamonds in Netanya and Tel Aviv because the Histadrut did not control entry to the branch (PDF p.315). Notes 69-82 give the March-May 1944 file trail: the Jewish Agency meeting of 6 March 1944, the arbitration summary, the referendum minutes in Netanya of 15 March 1944, the record that a few hundred workers were sent by the Histadrut to work and be housed in 19 Kibbutzim, the draft agreement of 14 May 1944 and the agreement of 21 May 1944 (PDF p.315-317). Chapter 6’s notes 1-11 cite Ehrenfeld’s confidential PDMA memorandum to the DCB of 27-28 February 1944, the June 1944 capacity and supply position paper, Mendelson’s November 1944 survey, the MEW Diamond Committee’s sense of failure since late 1942, J. L. Reading’s 13 May to 23 June 1944 report, Aronheim’s January 1945 “Free Competition or Market Control,” the freedom-of-action committee of 28 June 1944 and the Tel Aviv opposition’s September 1944 claim that the inquiry report’s recommendations were never implemented (PDF p.317). Note 12 records some 1,500 Jews living in Belgium on liberation and about 5,000 in 1947 (PDF p.318). Notes 13-22 cite Oppenheimer’s telegram to Ben-Ami of 20 September 1944, the 13 September 1944 meeting with the union secretaries, the Dover House meeting of 3 January 1945 and the London memorandum, with the eighth DCB meeting dated 7 February 1944 (as printed) (PDF p.318-319). Note 23 records the February 1945 Couzens committee on ex-servicemen; note 26 records the first Antwerp diamond assembly of February 1945 with 355 members of the 1,645 in 1939; note 27 gives the late-summer 1945 distribution of diamond cutters — Palestine 3,500, Amsterdam around 200 at work, the US around 2,5000 (as printed), Puerto Rico 340, Cuba 800-900, South Africa 300-400, France 400-500, England around 350 (PDF p.319). Note 34 records that Jamal al-Husayni’s Palestine Arab Party and the Arab Chamber of Commerce aided Johar’s turn, and that despite deregulation the British would not annul the exclusion of Arabs from the diamond industry (PDF p.319). Note 39 gives Norbert Guttenberg’s biography (1911-1975; born in Vienna, studied jewelry in Germany, diamond cutting in Antwerp and commerce in London, immigrated to Palestine in 1938, among the founders of the Diamond Club, one of Palestine’s main diamond merchants from the early 1940s, and a founder of the 1946 Tel Aviv diamond exchange) (PDF p.320). Note 42 quotes the Palestine Post notice of 2 August 1945 announcing the inquiry committee’s terms of reference (PDF p.320-321). Note 45 records that Major Henry C. Biggs, of the Middle East Supply Center, replaced John Fletcher in May 1945 as controller of light industries; note 47 records the London conference’s establishment of the World Society of Diamond Manufacturers under J. C. Ginder; note 48 gives the inquiry committee personnel — L. D. Watts, on the staff since 1928 of Whinney Murray & Colonial Chartered Accountants, of which the PDMA was a customer, and secretary B. G. Bourdillon (born 1910), killed with Walsh in the King David Hotel bombing of July 1946 (PDF p.321). Note 53 records the report’s conclusions came out in English on 6 December 1945 and in Hebrew on 11 December (as printed); note 61 lists the bourse’s founders and quotes its 31 March 1946 Memorandum of Association goals, and records Ben Schafferman (1896-1974) as the bourse’s president in 1946-1951 (PDF p.321-322).

Notes to Chapter 7 (PDF p.323-327 / printed p.305-309)

Note 1 records that since demobilization some 650 ex-servicemen were absorbed in the industry (PDF p.323). Note 5 gives the flooded American market: the monthly rate of imported polished diamonds to the US was 14,000-15,000 carats in 1943-1944, grew to 30,000 in 1945 and reached 56,000 in the first quarter of 1946 alone, while world cutters grew from 30,000-40,000 before the war to again 40,000; declining sales were partly responsible for the advertising campaign in which Frances Gerety of N. W. Ayer coined “A Diamond Is Forever” in April 1947 (PDF p.323). Notes 9-15 cite the Jewish Agency inquiry committee’s October 1946 sessions, its report of 28 October 1946 (Hoofien, Gering and Horowitz), the PDMA’s outstanding assembly resolution of 31 October 1946, and Ehrenfeld’s December 1946 reorganization paper (PDF p.324-325). Note 17 records the British Police figures: robberies and attempted robberies on diamond factories and merchants rose from 345 in 1942, to 520 in 1944, and to 800 in 1946; note 19 stresses inaction in the face of the IZL and LEHI heists did not necessarily reflect a British change of attitude; note 20 records Fletcher’s nomination as DCB chairman instead of Walsh on 14 October 1946 and the consistent British rejection of allowing Arabs into the industry (PDF p.324). Notes 22-33 cite Golda Meirson (Meir) and Schmorak to Horowitz of 22 October 1946, the UADW’s first post-liberation congress at Antwerp, 2-6 September 1946, and its officers’ letter to all Palestinian diamond workers (PDF p.325). Note 38 explains Hevrat Haovdim (established 1923) and AMPAL (established 1941 as a Bank Hapoalim subsidiary); note 39 records the Histadrut’s crisis help — absorption in other occupations and public works, loans, and Kibbutzim for the hardest hit — as one function of its cooperatives; note 41 explains Mulot Shchorot, “black mills,” from the Flemish Molen, the power-driven cutting table operated outside the factory (PDF p.326). Notes 42-44 record the inquiry committee’s nine October 1946 sessions, that it represented the “triangular thread” mix, and that the Histadrut’s holding company was to become in diamonds what it had aspired to since the 1920s — owner and employer at once (PDF p.326). Note 50 records the crisis peaked in spring 1947 partly because the British curfew and falling American prices allowed only a small number of factories to operate; note 53 records Mathias was by then the UK’s Gem Diamond Controller and still an SLST board director; note 56 records the Diamond Club reopened in May 1947 as the Association for Diamond Trade Development in Palestine, and that of the 25 factories in September 1947, 11 were cooperatives, with 2,000 workers (500 at home, 1,500 in factories, 650 among them in cooperatives) (PDF p.327).

Notes to Chapter 8 (PDF p.328-332 / printed p.310-314)

Note 2 explains Minhelet Haam, established by the Zionist Executive on 12 April 1948, which on 14 May turned into Israel’s Provisional Government (May 1948 to March 1949), and cites Bernstein’s 27 April 1948 decree and the Diamond Controller’s circulars of 7 May, 10 June and mid-June 1948 (PDF p.328). Note 13 records the diamond workforce did not regain its 1945 peak for a long time: 2,300 in 1955, 2,600 in 1956, 3,000 in 1957 and 3,600 in 1958, reaching 4,500 only in 1960 (PDF p.329). Note 18 gives Jacob van Amerongen’s biography (1913-1995; Amsterdam-born cleaver and polisher, economics graduate, chief accountant at Asscher’s from 1934, arrested June 1943 and sent to Westerbork, released after a month with three hundred other diamond workers and went underground, arrived in Palestine March 1948 and became a leading Israeli civil servant in diamond purchase and control); note 20 gives Peretz Bernstein’s biography (1890-1971; born in Meiningen, Dutch Zionist Federation executive 1924-1930, settled in Palestine in 1936, edited Haboker 1937-1946, replaced Schmorak as head of the Jewish Agency’s Department of Trade and Industry in 1947-1948, minister of commerce and industry 1948-1949 and 1952-1955) (PDF p.329). Note 23 explains the DTC’s recommendation followed the decline of De Beers’s income from selling rough to Israel against Belgium and Holland; the PDMA had been sole recipient of rough under a special allocation schedule, and from now on the DTC would send rough to individual manufacturers directly; the note adds the demonopolization did not alter the exclusion of Arab manufacturers and workers — “On the contrary, the 1948 war only cemented it” (PDF p.330). Note 24 records the Diamond Cutting Works Federation nominated Eliezer Mazur (1892-1970) as president and later turned into the Israel Diamond Manufacturers Association, first general assembly mid-April 1950 (PDF p.330). Note 35 gives Jacob (Jack) Brin’s and Josef Pick’s (1914-1984) biographies; notes 36-42 cite the UADW reports on Germany (February 1949, February 1950), the Belgian Diamond Industry Syndicate’s The German Diamond Industry (1949), and Ehrenfeld’s and Arnon’s 1950 European reporting; note 49 gives diamonds’ share of Israel’s exports growing from 18.1 percent in 1949 to only 26.1 percent in 1951; notes 50-53 cite Richman, the diaspora-networks literature, Rosenfeld and Carmi on privatization, and the Tel Aviv Labor Council and Diamond Workers’ Union volume of 1953 (PDF p.331-332). There is no separate Notes to the Epilogue heading; the Chapter 8 notes end at note 53 (PDF p.332).

Bibliography — Archives; References A-Wischnitzer (PDF p.333-349 / printed p.315-331)

The Bibliography opens with an Archives list of 23 archives, from the Ben-Ami Private Papers (Family Archive, Haifa), Central Zionist Archive and Israel State Archive in Jerusalem, and Netanya City Archive, to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, The National Archives in London, Rhodes House Library in Oxford, and Yad Vashem and Yad Yaari (PDF p.333). The References then run alphabetically; they cover Aalders through Wischnitzer (PDF p.349), the entries recorded in the reading notes in order, including the author’s own works, the Government of Palestine reports of 1944-1947, the Histadrut’s The Diamond Worker in Palestine (1946), and the periodicals runs (for example Davar 1928-1955, Haaretz 1930-1955, New York Times 1928-1951, Hayahalom 1943-1994) (PDF p.334-349).

Bibliography — References concluded; Index (PDF p.350-370 / printed p.332-351)

The References conclude on a single page with Worger on Kimberley mine workers and monopoly capitalism, Yarnitzky’s The Diamond (1990, in Hebrew), the diamond periodicals — Yediot, A Bulletin of Diamond Workers (1946), the Israeli diamond manufacturers’ information bulletin (1959–1966), the diamond factories’ bulletin (1957–1959), the PDMA circular Yediot Lachaverim (1942) and the Histadrut labor-council bulletin Yediot Moetzet Hapoalim Bamoshavot (1943–1945) — Yogev on the diamond trade and on Anglo-Dutch Jews, Zack-Williams on Sierra Leone, Zoellner’s The Heartless Stone (2006), Zur on the IZL in Netanya (1980, in Hebrew) and Zwet Slotenmaker on Amsterdam as a city of diamonds (PDF p.350). The Index then runs in full from adaptation of work methods, advertising, Africa and Antwerp through the book’s central actors and structures — Ben-Ami, the PDMA (its monopoly, centralization, membership and crisis), De Beers, the Diamond Control Board, exclusion (including the Arabs entry’s exclusion subentry), the Histadrut, the Jewish Agency, limited expansion, Netanya, state and capital, strikes and their propensity, supply politics, Tel Aviv, trade unions and workers — to Weiss, the War of 1948, the Yishuv, the Zionist movement and Zourne (PDF p.351-369). Its locators are to the printed pages and notes. Several Index entries print locator sequences out of order or repeated, and three headwords or cross-references print slips — “Atlee, Clement” (PDF p.352), “Schein, Ferdinanrd” (PDF p.365) and “triangualr thread” (PDF p.367), with the Israel Diamond Manufacturers’ Association cross-reference printing “Palestine Diamond Manufacturers’ Assocation” (PDF p.359) — each recorded under Open questions. PDF p.370 carries only the open-access license line; the volume ends there.

Key passages

• “I cannot see any reason why a prosperous secondary industry in the cutting and polishing of diamonds should not be developed in Palestine, but if the scheme is to succeed, there should be a very strict limit to its immediate extension” — Frederick A. Mathias, report, 27 March 1940 (PDF p.33 / printed p.15).
• “To become a member,” maintained the “Internal Regime of the Club,” “one must have a good repute [Shem Tov], negotiate in good faith and behave toward others as comrades [Rei’m]” — the Diamond Club’s internal regime, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.41 / printed p.23).
• “progress must be slow and patience exercised by those in Palestine” — Mathias, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.53 / printed p.35).
• “the industry shall be strictly controlled, not only in respect of supplies of raw material, but also in the disposal of finished products” — Fletcher, ordering the PDMA, June 1941, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.80 / printed p.62).
• “reduced the worker to the level of a machine without him being able to acquire for himself full and wide knowledge of the profession” — a diamond worker, 1943, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.94 / printed p.76).
• “The only Kosher person in this occupation is the worker” — a writer in a Labor movement periodical, summer 1942, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.119 / printed p.101).
• “Some viewed it with disfavor as a ‘bastard industry,’ rather off the beaten track of ‘normal’ industrial development” — Ben-Ami, report to the British, October 1942, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.121 / printed p.103).
• “every effort must be made to allay fears on the part of the Belgian Government that moves within the Empire may greatly interfere with the post-war industry in Antwerp (Palestine’s policy is rather frightening)” — Mathias, at the MEW, September 1942, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.143 / printed p.125).
• “slavery in the full sense of the word which brings us back to Feudal times” — a diamond worker, “At the Diamond Workers’ Front,” Hedei Netanya, June 1941, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.163 / printed p.145).
• “Negotiation was hard and tiring,” “its details were not connected to conditions or to wages—but to hegemony over work and over workers” — Ben-Ami to his colleagues, on the August 1941 lockout settlement, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.168 / printed p.150).
• “We see in this illegal and wild strike,” “an intention on the part of the workers to prove that they and only they can determine what was right and what was wrong” — a PDMA functionary on the March 1944 strike, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.190 / printed p.172).
• “An industry born and nurtured in such abnormal circumstances is ill equipped to face world competition … without some measure of guidance and control” — Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee Appointed by Government to Examine the Question of Post-war Regulation of the Palestine Diamond Industry, 1946, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.195 / printed p.177).
• “The Liberation of Belgium,” “has placed bulk of markets [for] our finished stones in state of suspense which has considerably added to [the] difficulties of our industry” — Ben-Ami, telegram to Ernst Oppenheimer, September 1944, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.200 / printed p.182).
• “allowing the destinies of capitalists, experts and workmen to depend on the whims and ambitions of a group of persons who are mainly guided by what they regard as their own interest” — the PDMA opposition, 1945, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.210 / printed p.192).
• “In peace time diamonds are a 100 percent non-essential commodity” — Norbert Guttenberg, diamond merchant, autumn 1945, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.210 / printed p.192).
• “The diamond is a peculiar creature.” — Yosef Yambor, “Boom and Tide in the Diamond Industry,” Mishmar, 5 November 1946, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.225 / printed p.207).
• “We must guard against one thing,” “not to consider each other as competitors” — Piet van Muyden, chairman of the UADW, at the Antwerp conference, September 1946, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.238 / printed p.220).
• “Any attempt to decrease the labor wage to such a degree that this reduction could balance most of the other negative factors would bring wages to such a level that would not allow the workers to pursue working in the industry” — the Jewish Agency committee on the crisis, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.244 / printed p.226).
• “Further deterioration in the situation of the world diamond markets is recently felt, in particular in the United States of America” — Jacob van Amerongen, Record on the crisis in the diamond industry, 8 March 1949, as quoted by De Vries (PDF p.251 / printed p.233).
• “the importation of diamonds cut and polished in Palestine by persons or firms other than manufacturers will now be permitted subject to certain limitations” — DCB Notice, Export of Diamonds Cut and Polished in Palestine, Palestine Post, 28 December 1943, signed J. L. Fletcher, as quoted in Chapter 4 note 40 by De Vries (PDF p.307 / printed p.289).
• “To found and manage a diamond bourse” — the Memorandum of Association of the Eretz Israel Diamond Exchange, 31 March 1946, as quoted in Chapter 6 note 61 by De Vries (PDF p.322 / printed p.304).
• “examine the articles of the Manufacturers Association with a view to ascertaining whether members of the Association are enabled to exercise their proper rights in the management of the affairs of the Association, and to advise the DCB accordingly” — the DCB inquiry subcommittee’s designation, Palestine Post, 12 March 1944, as quoted in Chapter 4 note 66 by De Vries (PDF p.309 / printed p.291).

Evidence the work relies on

As presented in the work: archive material in the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel, including correspondence between the De Beers cartel and its central selling organization, the British Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Palestine Diamond Manufacturers’ Association, the Palestine government’s economic advisor and light industries office, and Israel’s Ministry of Trade and Industry; the PDMA archive in Netanya; the archive of the General Dutch Diamond Workers’ Union (ANDB) in Amsterdam; Zionist Labor movement archives; the daily, labor and diamond trade press; and the Ben-Ami private papers (PDF p.15-16, p.29). Chapter 1 cites Frederick Mathias’s 27 March 1940 report (TNA: PRO CO 852/289/1) (PDF p.33), the Diamond Club’s Internal Regime (PDF p.41), the immigrant manufacturers’ commitment signed in Antwerp (PDF p.50), and Figure 1.1’s employment figures sourced to Avraham Friedman (1947), Niv Poaeli Hayahalomim (January 1947) and Laureys (PDF p.38). Chapters 2-3 add: Table 2.1’s sources, CZA S40/269/2 and the Jewish Agency’s Census of Palestine Industry compiled by David Gurevich (Jerusalem, 1943), 210-19 (PDF p.73); Table 2.2’s sources, including Ben-Ami’s October 1942 report to the Secretary of State for the Colonies (TNA: PRO CO 852/457/2) and Netanya archive files (PDF p.77); Ben-Ami’s October 1942 letter to the British on the six-monthly quota (PDF p.76); Fletcher’s June 1941 order to the PDMA (PDF p.80); David Rothblum’s “Wish Them Godspeed!”, Dapei Hamenahel (January 1944) and his 21 September 1943 memorandum to the Jewish Agency (CZA, S40/269/2) (PDF p.63, p.85); Figure 3.1 and Table 3.2, the latter sourced to “The Diamond Industry,” The Israel Economist Annual 1949-1950 (Jerusalem, 1950): 148 (PDF p.87, p.96); Table 3.1 and Table 3.3, sourced to D. Gurevich, Workers’ Wages in the Jewish Diamond-Polishing Industry in Palestine, 1944 (Jerusalem, 1945), 6, and NCA G/131/1117 (PDF p.95, p.97); and Binyamin Kosowsky’s poem “It is Gone …” (PDF p.103). Chapters 3-4 add: the PDMA’s August 1941 circular against workers’ “wanderings” (PDF p.104); Table 3.4’s sources, Pinchas Smagarinsky’s 11 February 1942 review (LA/IV-208-1-2941), the Netanya Diamond Workers Unions secretariat report of 14 November 1944 and the Union of Diamond Workers Central Committee meeting of 9 December 1946 (PDF p.115); Ben-Ami’s October 1942 report to the British and his 12 January 1944 letter to John L. Fletcher (ISA/RG 5/1463/19) (PDF p.121, p.127); Table 4.1, sourced to Albert Ehrenfeld’s Israel Economist Annual articles of 1952 and 1954 (PDF p.129); Table 4.2, sourced to “The Diamond Industry,” The Israel Economist Annual 1949-1950, 149 (PDF p.131); Table 4.3 and Figure 4.1, sourced to NCA G/101/760 and 124/1027, Gurevich’s Workers’ Wages, Ben-Ami’s “Die Diamantindustrie in Palastina,” Schweizer Goldschmied 5 (May 1948) and Gershon Cwydrovich in Hameshek Hashitufi (30 January 1948) (PDF p.134); Table 4.4, sourced to the Industrial Censuses of 1937 and 1943 via Gurevich, Gertz and Zanker, Statistical Handbook of Jewish Palestine 1947, and Shlomit Mishka (1948) (PDF p.135); Table 4.5’s Government Report 1946 and Ian W. Gaskin’s 1992 Oxford D.Phil thesis (PDF p.136); Table 4.6, based on the sources cited in Nachum Gross, Not by Spirit Alone (1999), 321 (PDF p.137); and Table 4.7, the Government of Palestine’s Statistical Abstract of Palestine 1944-1945 (PDF p.138). Illustrations are sourced to the Government of Palestine’s Palestine Trade Catalogue. Part IV. (Jerusalem, 1944), Paul Grodzinsky’s Diamond Technology (London, 1942) and Emil Schmorak’s Palestine’s Industrial Future (Jerusalem, 1946) (PDF p.60-61, p.83-84). Chapters 4-5 add: Table 5.1’s sources, Yeshayahu Etkin’s “Sixty Years of Striking in Israel, 1921–1980” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1982), Aharon Blich’s “Jewish Trade Unionism in Palestine” (1945) and Sikumim 18 (1946) (PDF p.164); the June 1941 Hedei Netanya diamond worker’s article (PDF p.163); Ben-Ami’s January 1944 letter to Fletcher and the PDMA’s confidential document to the British (PDF p.150-152); the DCB inquiry subcommittee testimonies and report of March-May 1944 (PDF p.158-159); and Table 5.2, sourced to the Histadrut, The Diamond Worker, 12-13 (PDF p.187). Illustrations 4.1-4.3 are sourced to the Government of Palestine’s Palestine Trade Catalogue. Part IV. (1944) and CZA PHR/1174093 (PDF p.160-162). Chapters 5-7 add: the workers’ referendum and March 1944 strike record (PDF p.190-191); the Government of Palestine’s Report of a Committee Appointed by Government to Examine the Question of Post-war Regulation of the Palestine Diamond Industry (1946), from the inquiry committee established 22 August 1945, chaired by Geoffrey Walsh with John L. Fletcher and L. D. Watts and B. G. Bourdillon as secretary, written end of December 1945 from some sixty testimonies (PDF p.195, p.213); Ben-Ami’s September 1944 telegram to Ernst Oppenheimer (PDF p.200); the January 1945 London conference agreement (PDF p.205); the Memorandum of Association of the Eretz Israel Diamond Exchange, 31 March 1946 (PDF p.219); Yosef Yambor, “Boom and Tide in the Diamond Industry,” Mishmar, 5 November 1946 (PDF p.225); Table 7.1 and Figures 7.1-7.2, sourced to Avraham Friedman, “The Diamond Industry in Palestine’s Economy,” Hameshek Hashitufi (23 February 1947), Oved Ben-Ami, “Die Diamantindustrie in Palastina,” Schweizer Goldschmied 5 (May 1948): 32-33, and Hayahalom 154 (June 1988) (PDF p.226-229); and Haaretz’s report “The diamond industry is expecting a Holocaust” (PDF p.235). Illustrations 5.1-5.2, 6.1-6.2 are sourced to Goldmann’s The Diamond and its Making (1946), CZA/PHR/1174096, NCA 0939.01 (photographer Zoltan Kluger) and CZA/PHPS/1325364 (PDF p.192-193, p.222-223). Chapters 7-8 and the Appendices add: Table 7.2, sourced to the PDMA, Activities of Palestine Diamond Industry, January to March 1947, submitted 9 July 1947, NCA G/85/572 (PDF p.246); the Jewish Agency committee’s February 1947 report and testimonies (PDF p.244-245); Table 8.1 and Figure 8.1, sourced to Albert Ehrenfeld’s Israel Economist Annual articles of 1953 and 1955, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry’s Israel’s Industrial Future: Outlook 1960-1965 (1965) and Hayahalom 154 (June 1988) (PDF p.254); Table 8.2, sourced to the minutes of the first meeting of the central committee of the National Organization of Diamond Workers, 9 December 1946, LA/IV-208-1-4551, and the 1952 Israel Industrial Census as summarized in Yaakov Arnon, Haaretz, 8 June 1955 (PDF p.258); Jacob van Amerongen’s Record on the crisis in the diamond industry, 8 March 1949, ISA/RG/48/90/23 (PDF p.251); Table A.2, sourced to the PDMA to Emil Schmorak, 28 May 1941, CZA S8/315 (PDF p.278); Table A.3, sourced to CZA S40/269/2 (PDF p.278); Table A.4, sourced to the Government of Palestine’s Palestine Trade Catalogue (1944), LA IV-250-49-170 and NCA G/119/52 (PDF p.279); Table A.5, sourced to NCA G/101/760 (PDF p.280); and Table A.6, sourced to Itshak Avineri, ed., Cooperation in the State of Israel (1948) and Merkaz Hacooperatsia, The Production and Service Cooperation in 1948-1958 (1960) (PDF p.281). Illustration 7.1 is sourced to CZA/PHKH/1280083 and Illustration 8.1 to CZA PHPS/1325365 (PDF p.249, p.274). The Notes to Chapters 1-5 add: Moshe Sikron’s immigration figures (Chapter 1 note 8, PDF p.286); the Mathias report file trail (TNA: PRO CO 852/289/1 and ISA/RG 5/5062/40) and the March 1940 applications file (NCA, MEM/183/305) (Chapter 1 notes 49, 51-56, PDF p.291-292); the Control Committee minutes of 4 June 1940 (NCA, G/80/521) (Chapter 2 note 8, PDF p.293); the OSS report “Gold, Diamond and Narcotic Smuggling in Palestine and the Levant States,” No. 1390, 22 October 1943 (Chapter 4 note 28, PDF p.306); the DCB Notice in the Palestine Post, 28 December 1943 (Chapter 4 note 40, PDF p.307); the Clarification Committee and PDMA Supreme Court minutes of October-November 1943 (NCA, G/94/694-695) (Chapter 4 notes 55-65, PDF p.308-309); and the strike-day totals and 1940-1943 labor file trail in the Lavon Institute and Netanya archives (Chapter 5 notes 2-55, PDF p.310-314). The Notes to Chapters 5 (concluded), 6, 7 and 8 and the Bibliography add: the March-May 1944 referendum and agreement file trail in NCA, G/120/982, G/67/389 and LA/IV-250–49–175-b (Chapter 5 notes 69-82, PDF p.315-317); the Dover House meeting and London memorandum of January 1945 (ISA/RG 5/5062/40) and the inquiry committee’s draft and final reports (NCA, G/66/380; LA/IV-250–49–333) (Chapter 6 notes 21-22, 48-53, PDF p.318-321); the Jewish Agency inquiry committee sessions and report of October 1946 and its February 1947 letters (CZA, S40/269/1) (Chapter 7 notes 9-15, 42-50, PDF p.324-327); the OSS report “Gold, Diamond and Narcotic Smuggling in Palestine and the Levant States,” 1390, 22 October 1943, held at Göttingen (Bibliography, PDF p.346); Minhelet Haam’s 1948 diamond decrees and circulars (NCA, G/49/178) (Chapter 8 note 2, PDF p.328); and the Bibliography’s Archives list of 23 archives in Israel, Amsterdam, London, Oxford, College Park and Silver Spring, Maryland (PDF p.333).

Analysis

De Vries’s method is archival and actor-centered: he follows the manufacturers, workers’ organizations, the cartel and the colonial officials across 23 archives in Israel, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands (PDF p.333), and reads the industry’s formation at the intersection of the transnational commodity chain and the Mandate state’s wartime interests. His central analytical move is to bring the state back into a literature that explained Jewish diamond predominance by communal trust alone, and to show British policy as simultaneously enabling and delimiting — the “logic of limited expansion” — rather than either simply supportive or simply obstructive; the same state-capital relation is then followed through three successive state forms, the British colonial regime, the state-like Jewish Agency and the state of Israel, each enabling the industry’s survival (PDF p.270-271). The account’s limits are those he names: manufacturing and workers had been neglected in favor of merchants, and the spectacular wartime performance had been explained without the manufacturers’ organization, production culture or European ties (PDF p.23-24); and the Epilogue leaves open whether the Holocaust, the Belgian experience or the wish to sustain an ethnic occupational specificity explains the manufacturers’ refusal to close or transfer the Israeli industry (PDF p.269). The Notes, read in full, support the text chapter by chapter with archival file references and biographies, and where the notes and the text give different figures, dates or spellings both are recorded under Open questions, not reconciled. The Bibliography and Index close the apparatus: the Index’s headwords for exclusion, limited expansion, state and capital and the triangular thread (printed “triangualr thread”) state, in the book’s own reference form, the structures the argument is built on (PDF p.356, p.361, p.366-367).

People, organizations, places and events

People: David De Vries, Jacob van Amerongen, Peretz Bernstein, Oved Ben-Ami, Frederick Mathias, Akiva Weiss, Nachum Tishby, Ernst Oppenheimer, George Prins, Harold MacMichael, Camille Huysmans, Asher Daskal, Heinrich Goldmann, Chaim Friedman, Romi Goldmuntz, Pinchas Smagarinsky, Salomon Horowitz, David Remez, Ben Schafferman, Albert Ehrenfeld, Geoffrey Walsh, John L. Fletcher, Norbert Guttenberg Organizations: De Beers, Department of Diamond Control, Chevrat Pituach, Diamond Trading Company, Diamond Club, Jewish Agency, Histadrut, Hennig & Co., Sierra Leone Selection Trust, Palestine Diamond Manufacturers’ Association, COFDI, Palestine Manufacturers’ Association, Diamond Control Board, Diamond Workers’ Supreme Committee, Diamond Workers’ Union, National Workers’ Federation, Palestine Diamond Exchange, Diamond Traders Association, Johar Company, Diamond Inquiry Committee (1945) Places: Netanya, Antwerp

Concepts

Limited expansion, State-Capital Pact, Diamond commodity chain, Conveyor system, Small-stone specialization, Triangular Thread, Politics of Supply, Capitalist Collectivity, Imperial Connectivity, Diamond Deregulation

How it relates to other sources

De Vries’s account of the Histadrut allocating workers and keeping factories free of disputes under the national-capitalist partnership model (PDF p.41) sits alongside the Histadrut’s exclusionary labor role described in The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate and The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine; De Vries adds, from the industry’s own record, that the diamond industry’s Jewish-only character was a formal British–entrepreneur agreement of spring 1940 (PDF p.58), that the Histadrut did not control entry to the branch — which is why many IZL and LEHI members worked in diamonds (Chapter 5 note 72, PDF p.315) — and that demonopolization in 1949 did not alter the exclusion of Arab manufacturers and workers, which the 1948 war only cemented (Chapter 8 note 23, PDF p.330). Against Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, whose relational history follows Arab and Jewish workers together, De Vries’s industry is one in which, as he states, no Arabs, Muslims or Christians found their way into the ranks of manufacturers and workers (PDF p.122); the two accounts are held side by side, their different scopes noted, without resolving the different emphases. His account of private capital’s legitimization and organized labor’s weakening under Labor’s political hegemony (PDF p.272-273) extends the Mandate-period state-and-capital analysis in The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation: What is Colonial about It? backward to a wartime industry created by the colonial state itself.

Open questions

• The Library of Congress cataloguing entry prints the subtitle as “state, captial, and labor” (PDF p.6) against “State, Capital, and Labor” on the title page (PDF p.5) — recorded as printed.

• Chapter 1 dates the Friedman-Fisher group’s transfer of manufacturing from Antwerp to Palestine to 1910, in a passage that introduces the group as formed during World War I (PDF p.34) — recorded as printed. The Chapter 1 notes do not clarify the dating: note 3 gives Friedman’s interview with Moshe Offen in Yediot Lachaverim 4 (30 March 1942) and 5 (23 April 1942) as a source on Friedman, and note 4 records that after the failure Weinstein returned to Antwerp and re-immigrated to Palestine in 1940, without dating the transfer (Chapter 1 notes 3-4, PDF p.285).

• The Abbreviations list gives NLC twice, as Moetzet Poalei Netanya / Netanya Labor Council and as Netanya Labor Council (Histadrut affiliated) (PDF p.17).

• Figure 1.1’s underlying employment figures for other centers are in the figure itself, not reproduced in the text copy (PDF p.38).

• The Haifa customs official overseeing the PDMA’s formation is named “John L. Fetcher” and, a paragraph later, “Fletcher” (PDF p.66) — both spellings confirmed against the original PDF; the later overseer paired with Walsh is “Fletcher” (PDF p.80).

• Table 2.2’s Dec 1939 entries as printed (Petah Tikva 1, Netanya 2, Tel Aviv 3, checked against the original PDF’s column layout) sum to 6 against the printed Total 5 (PDF p.77); the other three columns sum to their printed totals.

• Ben-Ami’s October 1942 account of the quota gives sixteen new establishments authorized in 1941 in addition to seventeen already in existence, a total of thirty-three (PDF p.76), against Table 2.1’s 26 factories in November 1941 and 32 in May 1942 (PDF p.73) and the text’s thirty-three factories by mid-1942 (PDF p.72) — recorded as printed.

• Figure 3.1’s note gives the September 1943 total as 3,759, whose listed components (92 owners, 165 technical personnel, 154 clerks, 2,806 male workers, 354 female workers) sum to 3,571 (computed from PDF p.87).

• Table 3.2’s May 1945 row gives Workers 3,650 and Other Employees 399 against a printed Total Employed of 4,043; the components sum to 4,049 (computed from PDF p.96). The other rows sum to their printed totals.

• Table 3.3 prints Jerusalem’s share as 5.2 percent; 178 of the total 3,502 is 5.1 percent (computed from PDF p.97).

• The text states that throughout the war about a quarter of all the workers were women (PDF p.94), against Table 3.1’s note that of the 3,110 workers in late 1943 only 304 were women (PDF p.95) and Figure 3.1’s note listing 354 female workers for September 1943 (PDF p.87) — recorded side by side.

• The text prints “financial pr political considerations” (PDF p.90) and “high gain compensated for lack of job insecurity” (PDF p.101) — both confirmed against the original PDF and recorded as printed.

• The late-1943 employment totals differ across the tables as presented — Table 3.1: 3,110 workers / 3,600 employed (32 factories, PDF p.95); Table 3.2: 3,341 workers / 3,759 employed, September 1943 (PDF p.96); Table 3.3: 3,502 workers excluding clerks and managers, November 1943 (PDF p.97) — different sources and definitions are given for each; not reconciled here.

• Table 3.4’s Winter 1946 all-towns column sums to its printed Total 4,590 only at the top of the nonaffiliated range (1,400-1,700), and the Tel Aviv Winter 1942 column to 1,300-1,320 against a printed Total 1,300; Hapoel Hamizrahi’s Netanya Winter 1942 cell is blank in the original PDF (PDF p.115) — recorded as printed.

• Table 4.1 is titled 1938-1945 but prints rows only to 1943, with Jewelry/Industrial splits only from 1941; its 1942 components (6.25 + 4.25) sum to 10.5 against the printed Total 10.7 (computed from PDF p.129, confirmed against the original PDF).

• Table 4.3’s printed totals do not match its components for August 1940 (420 + 60 = 480 against Total 500) and March 1944 (2,875 + 455 = 3,330 against Total 3,601) (computed from PDF p.134, confirmed against the original PDF); its May 1945 row repeats the Table 3.2 mismatch noted above, and its August 1940 workers figure (420) differs from Table 3.2’s 1940 figure (400) (PDF p.96, p.134).

• The text prints “manger” for manager (PDF p.104), “A the same time” (PDF p.109), “Herni Polak” for the ANDB leader (PDF p.113), and “CODFI” for COFDI (PDF p.143, p.147) — each confirmed against the original PDF and recorded as printed.

• De Vries states that Camille Huysmans “ran the exiled government and COFDI” (PDF p.140) — recorded as stated; the work’s earlier account gives COFDI’s establishment to Goldmuntz and Schamisso with Huysmans’s help (PDF p.79).

• The August 1943 passage states Ben-Ami “heeded the warnings” that the exiled Belgians could steer the syndicate against Palestine, in a paragraph arguing the suddenness was calculated and the PDMA stunned (PDF p.145) — recorded as printed.

• The text prints “CODFI” for COFDI again (PDF p.148), “corroborating with” for “collaborating with” (PDF p.159), “Havoved Hatzioni” for Haoved Hatzioni (PDF p.167), “NWA” for the NWF (PDF p.170), “diamond bruiters” (PDF p.172), “manufactures’ freedom of action” (PDF p.156), the controls over workers’ movements “were uplifted” (PDF p.179), “the regulated punctuation of mining” (PDF p.186) and “Sierra Leonine” miners (PDF p.186), and “COFDI’s activities on expanding diamond supplies to Palestine” (PDF p.150; the intended sense appears to be “over” — reading uncertain) — each confirmed at byte level in the text copy and, for “CODFI” and the November bonus figure, against the original PDF, and recorded as printed.

• Table 5.1’s percentages check against its own figures (1,400 of 4,185 = 33.45 percent; 2,613 of 9,258 = 28.22; 5,017 of 15,220 = 32.96; 4,166 of 7,805 = 53.37) (computed from PDF p.164, confirmed against the original PDF), and Table 5.2’s intensity figures check against its workers-affected and days-lost figures (computed from PDF p.187, confirmed against the original PDF) — no mismatch found in either table.

• The five-week general strike’s toll is given as “some 83,000 working days” lost (PDF p.173-174) against Table 5.2’s 82,500 days lost for June 1942 (PDF p.187); the June 1942 strikers are given as some 2,600 (PDF p.172) against Table 5.2’s 2,500 workers affected and Table 5.1’s 2,613 diamond strikers for all of 1942 (PDF p.164) — recorded side by side.

• The November 1943 war bonuses are described as “46 percent of salaries over LP 3,500 in addition to the regular allowances of 100 percent of the rise in the cost-of-living allowance index” (PDF p.188, confirmed against the original PDF) — recorded as printed; the phrasing of the LP 3,500 element is not further explained in the work.

• R. K. Saunders of the government Labor Department is quoted warning that “Last year 100,000 workdays were lost” (PDF p.180) against “some 83,000 working days” lost in the five-week general strike of 1942 (PDF p.173-174) and Table 5.2’s 82,500 days lost for June 1942 (PDF p.187) — recorded side by side; the text does not say whether Saunders’s 100,000 covers all diamond strikes in 1942 or only the general strike.

• The Histadrut’s diamond organ is named the “Diamond Workers’ Union (DWO)” at its establishment (PDF p.168) and “the Diamond Workers’ Organization” in the January 1942 strike account, in the PDMA secretary’s protest addressed to Smagarinsky at that organization (PDF p.169) — both namings recorded as printed.

• The March 1944 referendum’s printed figures do not sum: 1,953 votes to strike plus 859 for an agreement is 2,812, against 2,861 participants stated of 3,600 workers; the town splits do sum to their totals (1,524 + 429 = 1,953; 684 + 175 = 859) (computed from PDF p.190, confirmed at byte level in the text copy).

• The March 1944 strike is given as involving more than 4,000 workers and 170,000-180,000 workdays lost (PDF p.191) against Table 5.2’s 3,250 workers affected and 182,000 days lost for March 1944 (PDF p.187) — recorded side by side.

• The text prints rough imports in 1943-1944 growing from “LP 1,1125,000” to LP 1,550,000 (PDF p.196, confirmed against the original PDF), “CODFI” for COFDI (PDF p.200, p.205, confirmed against the original PDF), “exponent increase” and “exponent profits” (PDF p.190, p.198), “there should be must be a transition period” (PDF p.215), “The later was deeply protected” for “The latter” (PDF p.217), “Strengthen pluralized foci of power was a crucial effect” (PDF p.218), the dismantling of British rule “seemed close than ever” (PDF p.220), the “Atlee government” for Attlee (PDF p.220), “some 50,000 thousand carats” waiting unsold in New York (PDF p.225, confirmed against the original PDF), the loss of the American market putting the diamond project “as risk” (PDF p.228), and the British having “still waived the Palestine flag” (PDF p.233) — each confirmed at byte level in the text copy and recorded as printed.

• Palestine’s polished exports are given as falling “from LP 3,325,117 to LP 2,808,433” in the supply-reduction passage (PDF p.212), with the years not named in that sentence; the same chapter gives polished exports of LP 3,300,000 for 1944 (PDF p.196) and Table 7.1 gives polished exports in thousands of US dollars, a different currency and series (PDF p.226) — recorded side by side.

• The workforce is given as 4,000 in spring 1945 rising to 4,500 a few months later (PDF p.206) and Table 7.1 gives 4,000 workers for 1945 and 4,500 for 1946 (PDF p.226); Mathias in June 1945 described Palestine as “at present restricted to 3,500 workers” (PDF p.207) — recorded side by side.

• Figures 7.1 and 7.2 are captioned with their sources but their plotted values are not reproduced in the text copy (PDF p.227, p.229).

• The text gives the diamond workers’ conflict level as “an average of 34 percent of the strikers in the Yishuv” (PDF p.186). From Table 5.1 (PDF p.164): the simple mean of the 1941-1944 percentages (33.45, 28.22, 32.96, 53.37) is 37.0 percent, the pooled 1941-1944 share is 13,196 of 36,468 = 36.2 percent, and the pooled 1940-1944 share is 13,196 of 39,785 = 33.2 percent (computed from PDF p.164) — recorded as printed alongside the computed figures.

• The text prints “Histarut’s DWO” for the Histadrut’s DWO (PDF p.239), the UK rough-import figure in Table 7.2 as “13, 735” (PDF p.246), van Amerongen’s epigraph with the industrialists suffering “these loses” (PDF p.251), “Ehernefeld” (PDF p.259) and “Eherenfeld” (PDF p.260) for Ehrenfeld, “Isreal” in the development-towns passage (PDF p.268), “Ferdinanad Schein” in Table A.2 (PDF p.277), “Hakocahv” and “Pinchesky” in Table A.5 (PDF p.280), “Nathanya Diamond Manufacturers” and “Montefiori Neighborhood” in Table A.4 (PDF p.279), “De Beers Consolidated Mined Limited” in note 1 to the Introduction (PDF p.283) and “H. L. van der Lann” in note 8 (PDF p.284) — each confirmed at byte level in the text copy and, for the Ehrenfeld, Isreal, Histadrut and Mined slips, against the original PDF, and recorded as printed.

• Chapter 7’s text refers to the diamond cooperatives table as “appendix table A.7” (PDF p.242); the Appendices print the cooperatives table as Table A.6 (PDF p.281) — recorded as printed.

• Table A.5’s printed town counts (Tel Aviv 20, Netanya 11, Jerusalem 2, Ramat Gan 1) sum to 34 against its printed Total =33; the names listed in the original PDF layout number 19 for Tel Aviv and 33 in all (computed from PDF p.280, confirmed against the original PDF) — recorded as printed.

• Table 8.1 is titled 1945-1951 but prints no 1950 row (PDF p.254); its printed percentages for 1945, 1947 and 1948 (27.5, 8.1, 7.3) differ by 0.1 from the percentages computed from its own figures (27.6, 8.0, 7.4, computed from PDF p.254) — recorded as printed. Its 1946 employment figure (5,000) sits alongside Table 7.1’s 4,500 workers for 1946 (PDF p.226) and the text’s 130 production units in 1952 (PDF p.261) against Table 8.2’s 103 factories for 1951 (PDF p.258) — different sources and years are given; not reconciled here.

• Table 7.2’s Outside DTC components sum exactly to its printed Outside DTC totals in both carats (22,127) and pounds sterling (104,230) (computed from PDF p.246), and Table 8.2’s and Table A.6’s components sum to their printed totals (computed from PDF p.258, p.281) — no mismatch found in those tables.

• The text states Ehrenfeld and Van Amerongen were professionals “not well versed in the trade but schooled in relations with state bureaucracies” (PDF p.259) in the same passage that gives both deep backgrounds in diamonds and diamond banking and trade — recorded as printed.

• Figures 8.1, 8.2 are captioned with their sources but their plotted values are not reproduced in the text copy (PDF p.254, p.270).

• The Notes print “Geofrey. T. Mills” (PDF p.285), “Barabara A. Misztal” (PDF p.290), “Anrwerp” (PDF p.287), “Mombassa” for Mombasa (PDF p.290), the “TDC” for the DTC (PDF p.291), Fletcher’s assistant-director service as “1946–1945” (PDF p.291, confirmed against the original PDF), “LLoyd” in George Ambrose Lloyd’s name (PDF p.292), “heareafter” (PDF p.294), “CODFI” for COFDI (PDF p.296, confirmed against the original PDF), “Golmuntz” and “Huysman’s daughter” (PDF p.296, confirmed against the original PDF), the footer “Notes to Chapters 2 ans 3” (PDF p.297), “Smagrarinsky” (PDF p.297), “Smagarisnky” (PDF p.299, p.302, p.313), “Sahpira” (PDF p.300), “CAZ” for CZA (PDF p.301), “Assocation” for the PMA’s name (PDF p.301), “Haoved Htzioni” (PDF p.302), “Yhoshua Ophir” (PDF p.302), the Chapter 4 notes heading “The Challenge and Its Constrains” (PDF p.304), “Bij het Everlijdem van Albert Ehrenfeld” (PDF p.307, confirmed against the original PDF), “inn the Diamond Trade” in the quoted DCB Notice (PDF p.307, confirmed against the original PDF), “Principle Secretary of State for Colonies” for Oliver Stanley’s title (PDF p.308), the archive citation “CZA, S40/269/21944” (PDF p.308, confirmed against the original PDF), “Hapoel Hanizrahi” (PDF p.312), “Assher Federher” (PDF p.312), “Histradrut-PMA” (PDF p.313), “Fishershein” for Fisherschein/Zohar (PDF p.313), the diary citation “LA/IV-208–1-34021-a” (PDF p.314) and the “forward” by Piet van Muyden for a foreword (PDF p.314, confirmed against the original PDF) — each confirmed at byte level in the text copy and recorded as printed.

• Chapter 5 note 2 gives total lost work days in diamonds in 1944 as 182,000 (PDF p.310), the same figure Table 5.2 gives for the March 1944 general strike alone (PDF p.187), alongside the text’s 170,000-180,000 days for that strike (PDF p.191) — recorded side by side.

• Chapter 5 note 37 cites a twelve-page arbitration verdict dated 24 November 1942 and states the arbitration reached a verdict on 1 December 1942, when “only now did the July 1942 strike formally end” (PDF p.313) — both dates recorded as printed.

• Chapter 3 note 25 states girls entering apprenticeship were less than a fifth of the total (PDF p.298), alongside the text’s “about a quarter” women (PDF p.94) and the table figures recorded above — recorded side by side.

• Chapter 1 note 49’s 146 applications prepared in March 1940 (PDF p.291) sit alongside Chapter 1’s fifteen manufacturers and some experts willing to commit in Antwerp (PDF p.49-50) — different populations as printed; not reconciled here.

• Chapter 1 note 45 states Walsh established the Diamond Control Board in 1944 (PDF p.290), against the main text’s establishment of the Board in August 1943 with Walsh as chairman and Chapter 4 note 38’s first DCB meeting on 17 October 1943 (PDF p.144-145, p.307) — recorded side by side.

• The Notes and Bibliography print “Vereeingung der Palestijnsche Diamant Fabrikanten” (PDF p.319), “Yediot Moetzet Hapoalism Bamoshavot” (PDF p.316), “PDMA’s Eexecutive” (PDF p.325), the “spatial strcutrue” of the industry (PDF p.326), “War, Keynsianism and Colonialism” (PDF p.328), “Gerlad” Aalders (PDF p.334), “Barabara A. Misztal” (PDF p.345, repeating the slip in the notes at PDF p.290), the “Jewish Bourgeosie” (PDF p.347), Belgian attitudes to “Britian” (PDF p.348), the “Unites States” Wage and Hour Divisions (PDF p.349), Koistinen’s Arsenal of World War II dated “1950–1945” (PDF p.322, p.343), Nathan, Gass, and Creamer cited at “510–51” (PDF p.318), and the US cutter figure “2,5000” in the late-summer 1945 distribution (PDF p.319) — each confirmed at byte level in the text copy and, for the DCB meeting date and the US import and cutter figures, against the original PDF, and recorded as printed.

• Chapter 6 notes 22 and 25 date the eighth meeting of the DCB to 7 February 1944 (PDF p.318, p.319, confirmed against the original PDF), in a sequence of January-February 1945 documents — recorded as printed.

• Chapter 6 note 44 lists among August 1945 planning documents “Draft Notes of the meeting of the PDMA’s planning committee, 19 August 1946” (PDF p.321) — recorded as printed.

• Chapter 6 note 53 states the inquiry conclusions “came out in English on 6 December 1945 and in Hebrew on 11 December” (PDF p.321), alongside the main text’s account that the committee wrote its report at the end of December 1945 and the draft report’s date of 11 December 1945 in note 48 — recorded side by side.

• Chapter 6 note 12 gives some 1,500 Jews in Belgium on liberation and about 5,000 in 1947 (PDF p.318), alongside the main text’s figures of Antwerp’s Jewish population rising from 800 at liberation to 2,000 in August 1945, against 29,500 in 1940 (PDF p.199-200) — different scopes (Belgium against Antwerp) as printed; not reconciled here.

• Chapter 6 note 35 states the Exporters’ group “would be active in 1947 in the establishment of the diamond exchange in Tel Aviv” (PDF p.320), against the main text’s founding of the Palestine Diamond Exchange in late March 1946 and notes 54 and 61 in the same chapter (PDF p.219, p.321-322) — recorded side by side.

• Chapter 7 note 2 cites Hayahalom 154 as “(June 1988)” (PDF p.323), against “(June 1998)” for the same issue in Chapter 6 note 61 and in the sources of Tables 7.1 and 8.1 (PDF p.322, p.226, p.254) — recorded as printed.

• Chapter 5 note 68 and the Bibliography give Peter Alexander’s book title differently: “Worker, War and the Origins of Apartheid” in the note (PDF p.315) against “Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid” in the Bibliography (PDF p.334) — both confirmed at byte level and recorded as printed.

• Chapter 6 note 26 prints “The first assembly of the diamond convened in Antwerp in February 1945 with 355 members (of the 1,645 in 1939)” (PDF p.319, confirmed against the original PDF), with no noun after “diamond” — reading uncertain (it may be a bourse or exchange, but the text does not say); no page states it as the diamond exchange on the strength of this note.

• The Index prints “Atlee, Clement” for Attlee (PDF p.352, confirmed against the original PDF), alongside the text’s “Atlee government” (PDF p.220); “Palestine Diamond Manufacturers’ Assocation” in the Israel Diamond Manufacturers’ Association cross-reference (PDF p.359, confirmed against the original PDF); “Schein, Ferdinanrd” (PDF p.365, confirmed against the original PDF), alongside the text’s “Ferdinanad Schein” in Table A.2 (PDF p.277); “triangualr thread” for the triangular thread (PDF p.367, confirmed against the original PDF); “Biggs, Henry, C.” (PDF p.353) and “Shapira, Yosef, Sh.” (PDF p.365) with their punctuation as printed; and the Hevrat Haovdim locator as “308n8” (PDF p.358, confirmed against the original PDF), where the Hevrat Haovdim note in Chapter 7 is note 38 (PDF p.326) — each confirmed at byte level in the text copy and recorded as printed.

• The De Beers entry’s “support of Belgium” subentry is printed with no locators (PDF p.355).

• The Index prints several locator sequences out of order or repeated, recorded as printed and not corrected: the Allies entry’s “4, 26, 21, 37” (PDF p.351); the Antwerp diamond-industry entry’s “11, 19, 18, 19” (PDF p.351); the De Beers entry’s Belgium locator “125n61–62” (PDF p.355); the Germany entry’s “153, 54, 155” (PDF p.357); the industrial diasporas entry’s “78 123” with no comma (PDF p.359); the Jewish Agency Department of Trade and Industry entry’s repeated “21, 21–24” (PDF p.359); the Jewish underground entry’s “229, 241, 229–30” (PDF p.360); the manufacturers entry’s repeated “49, 49” (PDF p.361); the Middle East entry’s “7, 46, 10” (PDF p.362); the supply politics entry’s repeated ranges “121–25, 126–34, 138–39, 140, 182, 121–25, 126–34” (PDF p.366); the Tel Aviv workers entry’s “211, 202” (PDF p.366); the trade in diamonds entry’s “253, 253–54” and the trust entry’s repeated “253, 253” (PDF p.367); the United States Jews entry’s “35, 123, 104” (PDF p.367); the wages entry’s “81–83, 79–83” (PDF p.367); the work culture entry’s “104 166” with no comma and the workers entry’s expertise locators “13, 2–3” (PDF p.368); and the Zionist movement entry’s “101–105, 102–103” (PDF p.369).

• The Index’s archives entry gives a locator at printed p.317 (PDF p.351), which falls in the Bibliography, alongside 11 and 59–60 — recorded as printed.

Coverage

Read in full, PDF p.1-370 of 370 (parts 1-9 of 9): front matter, Introduction, Chapters 1-8, Epilogue, Appendices Tables A.1-A.6, Notes to the Introduction and Chapters 1-8, Bibliography (Archives list and References A-Z) and Index; PDF p.370 carries only the open-access license line.