Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948

Summary

Zachary Lockman explores the interactions among Arab and Jewish workers, trade unions, labour movements and labour-oriented parties in British-mandate Palestine, drawing mainly on Arabic and Hebrew sources, against the conventional Dual Society Paradigm and for a Relational History in which Arab and Jewish communities were mutually formative (lines 224-275). Part 1 also opens Chapter 1: pre-First World War Zionism, emerging in the heyday of European colonialism, was a colonising and settlement movement as well as a nationalist one, and its discourse rendered Palestine’s Arab population first invisible and then essentially marginal to a land represented as by definition Jewish (lines 396-454). Part 2 completes Chapter 1: that representation is traced through Herzl, Ahad Ha’am’s ignored dissent, and the socialist-Zionist theoreticians Nahman Syrkin and Ber Borokhov, and then into practice, where the Second Aliya’s encounter with cheaper Arab labour in Palestine’s labour market transformed the Conquest of Labour into Hebrew Labour, economic separatism and Constructivism (lines 455-601). Part 2 also opens Chapter 2: in the 1920s Yitzhak Ben-Zvi’s The Arab Movement (1921) codified the denial of a Palestinian Arab people and of Palestinian nationalism’s authenticity, the Histadrut was founded as an exclusively Jewish organisation over the Socialist Workers’ Party’s alternative, and David Ben-Gurion outlined the Joint Organization policy of separate but linked Arab and Jewish unions (lines 790-908). Part 3 completes Chapter 2: the 1924 Ein Harod debate (Kaplansky’s parliament proposal defeated by Ben-Gurion’s Arab-worker path), the Po’alei Tziyon Smol controversy over joint organisation, the Nesher Cement Factory struggles of 1924-25, the Histadrut’s 1925 Haifa organising attempt through Ittihad al-‘Ummal and the General Workers’ Club and its October 1925 strike, the admission demands of George Nassar and others, Hayyim Arlosoroff’s South African case against joint organisation, the drift to “benign neglect” ratified at the Histadrut’s third congress in July 1927, and Ben-Gurion’s reevaluation after the August 1929 violence (133 Jews and 116 Arabs killed), followed by Chapter 2’s 67 notes (lines 909-1362). Part 4 gives Chapter 3 in full: the Palestine Railways workforce and its union, the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers — founded as the Jewish Railway Workers’ Association in 1919, won by the left at its September 1923 fifth congress, and made briefly a joint Arab-Jewish union in late 1924 on a tacit non-Zionist understanding — collapsed in early 1925 over its continuing Zionist affiliations, as its Arab members felt deceived, above all over Hebrew Labour; the Palestine Arab Workers Society emerged in Haifa as the first purely Arab labor organization in Palestine, followed by Chapter 3’s 61 notes (lines 1363-1816). Part 5 gives Chapter 4 in full: from 1925 to 1939 the PAWS and the Jewish-led union — renamed NURPTW in 1928 and the International Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Employees in Eretz Yisra’el (IU) in 1931 — competed for Arab railway workers and repeatedly cooperated through joint committees (1926-28, 1934-36), Arab unionists insisting any unity be in a genuinely international union unattached to the Histadrut and Jewish unionists insisting on national sections, parity and Histadrut membership; the spring 1935 mobilization won a High Commissioner meeting and minor concessions before the joint committee dissolved in February 1936, the 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine then ended the IU’s Arab membership while personal ties among Haifa workshop veterans persisted, and Hashomer Hatza’ir emerged through Efrayyim Krisher as the union’s new left opposition, followed by Chapter 4’s 60 notes. Part 5 also opens Chapter 5: after August 1929 the Histadrut renewed “Arab work” under Mapai — the secret Haifa club reopened under Philip Hassun in fall 1930, the January 1930 PAWS congress of Arab workers, Ahavat Po’alim’s suppression in July 1930, and a Histadrut Arab Department under Yehuda Burla from the end of 1930 (lines 1817-2270). Part 6 completes Chapter 5’s main text: the 1931 drivers’ strikes, the Palestine Labor League’s creation in 1932 under Eliyahu Agassi and Abba Hushi and its Haifa and Jaffa campaigns against the rival Palestine Arab Workers Society and Arab Workers’ Society, the Nesher Cement Factory quarry and Iraq Petroleum Company strikes, Reuven Zaslani’s double life as labour organiser and intelligence operative, and the radicalisation culminating in Michel Mitri’s anti-Hebrew-labour pickets and the April 10, 1936 Haifa gathering toward an all-Palestine Arab labor federation — followed by Chapter 5 notes 1-44 (lines 2271-2724).

What the file is

• The file is the University of California Press e-book of Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, © 1996 The Regents of the University of California), in the UC Press E-Books Collection Archive, preferred citation ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6b69p0hf (lines 1-30). The original is saved as raw/1996-lockman-comrades-and-enemies.html, its text copy as raw/1996-lockman-comrades-and-enemies.txt (4,538 lines, about 187,196 words as supplied).
• Contents: Acknowledgments, Abbreviations, Introduction, nine chapters — 1. Zionism and Palestine before the First world War [as printed]; 2. Labor Zionism and the Arab Working Class, 1920–1929; 3–4. The Railway Workers of Palestine (I) and (II); 5. Arab Workers and the Histadrut, 1929–1936; 6. The Arab Revolt and Labor Zionism, 1936–1939; 7. Workers, Labor Movements, and the Left During the Second World War; 8. Labor Activism and Politics, 1945–1948; 9. Conclusion — and Bibliography (lines 30-56).
• The e-book places each chapter’s notes after its main text, each note followed by a “Back” link in the text copy. The site footer in the text copy carries ”© 2026 The Regents of the University of California” for the archive site, against the book’s own © 1996 (lines 1-30 and the end of the text copy); see Open questions.
• Dedication: to his father Michael Lockman (1912–1994) and his daughter Talya Mara Lockman-Fine (lines 24-28).

Section by section

• Acknowledgments (lines 58-79): research carried out mainly in Israel (preliminary trip funded by a Harvard Graduate Society grant, extended stay in 1987 by Fulbright, UK research by the Social Science Research Council), heavily at the Histadrut archives (Lavon Institute, Tel Aviv) and the Hashomer Hatza’ir archives at Giv’at Haviva; fellowships at Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center (1991–92, focus “Colonialism, Imperialism and the Colonial Aftermath”), the Woodrow Wilson International Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Conversations with Musa Budeiri, David De Vries, Lev Luis Grinberg, Reuven Kaminer, Michael Shalev and Salim Tamari, and comments from, among others, Joel Beinin, Beshara Doumani and Rashid Khalidi, are acknowledged, as is the unpublished Haifa manuscript of Yosef Vashitz.

• Abbreviations (lines 80-223): archive abbreviations (AA Histadrut archives, CZA Central Zionist Archives, ISA Israel State Archives, CO Colonial Office papers, FO Foreign Office papers, and others) and organisation terms used throughout the book, including AHC, AURW, AWC, PAWS, PCP, PLL, URPTW, MAPAI and MAPAM; a map of mandate Palestine (1920-48) is captioned.

• Introduction (lines 224-330): the book explores, from Arabic and Hebrew sources, interactions among Arab and Jewish workers, unions, labour movements and labour-oriented parties in the mandate period — British rule from the end of the First World War to 1948, when Israel was established in most of the territory and the remainder fell under Transjordan and Egypt. One path is the thought and practice of Zionism’s left wing toward Palestine’s indigenous Arab population, especially Arab workers; a central premise is that the Zionist movement and the Jewish society it helped create in Palestine “were shaped in crucial ways by their interactions with the Arab society they encountered “on the ground” in Palestine itself” (lines 230-232). The subtitle begins in 1906 because Jewish socialists newly arrived in Palestine then first began to address relations with Arab workers, though Chapter 1 reaches back to the 1880s. Labor Zionism is defined broadly as all organisations, institutions, parties and ideologies part of, connected with, or oriented toward the Jewish working class and labour movement in Palestine while also part of the broader Zionist project; the book reconstructs its efforts to organise Arab workers under its tutelage, the debates and contradictions, and the involvement of the at first exclusively Jewish, later Jewish-Arab, anti-Zionist communist movement. Arab workers “were not passive objects of propaganda or organizing efforts by either Zionists or upper-class Arab nationalists, but historical actors in their own right” (lines 236-240).

• Introduction, “The “Dual Society” Paradigm” (lines 242-268): under Ottoman rule 1516 to the end of the First World War “Palestine” (Filastin) denoted a region of al-Sham, not an Ottoman province; from 1920 to 1948 it was a distinct unified entity ruled by Britain under a League of Nations mandate, “in essence, a new and somewhat disguised form of colonial rule”, with an Arab majority and a Jewish minority. The literature is characterised by disproportionate attention to elites and diplomatic, political and military history, a great disparity between research on the Yishuv and on Palestine’s Arab community, and work from within Zionist or Palestinian nationalist narratives. The Dual Society Paradigm treats the two communities as primordial, self-contained and monolithic, developing separately; its classic statements are S. N. Eisenstadt’s Israeli Society (1967), in which, as Talal Asad pointed out, Palestinian Arabs play virtually no role, and Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak’s Origins of the Israeli Polity, quoted for “two separate and parallel economic and stratification systems of different levels of modernization”; Michael Shalev is quoted calling the resulting narrative “profoundly conservative”. The paradigm also informs most Palestinian and Arab scholarship, in which Arab society appears as a preexisting entity threatened and in 1947–49 largely destroyed by an expanding Yishuv, and it allows only one significant mode of interaction, conflict — which, Avishai Ehrlich is quoted arguing, is not perceived “as a continuous formative process which shaped the institutional structure and the mentality of the Israeli social formation (as well as that of the Palestinian Arab society)”. Its persistence is explained in part by few scholars knowing both Arabic and Hebrew and by the grip of mythologised national pasts.

• Introduction, “The Emergence of A Relational Paradigm” (lines 270-280): a recent challenge by Israeli, Palestinian and foreign scholars moving to social, economic and cultural history and to Relational History — both communities constituted and shaped within a matrix of interactions and by shared processes including capitalist development from the mid-nineteenth century, labour and land markets, Ottoman law and administration, and British colonial policies. The turn followed Israel’s 1967 conquest of the remainder of mandatory Palestine. Lockman accepts Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s warning against subsuming Palestinian history within a Zionist narrative — Abu-Lughod is quoted: “the Palestine of 1948 was a very different Palestine from that of 1917 and the difference is not solely the result of the impact of either imperialist or Zionist” (line 280) — and Abu-Lughod’s assertion that “the social and cultural evolution of the Palestinians in modern times is in desperate need of study”, while holding that Arab development, including national identity, was also shaped by the Zionist project and British colonialism.

• Introduction, “Discourse, Workers, and Narrative” (lines 282-310): the chosen domain covers competition in overlapping labour markets, mixed workplaces, debates within unions, and Jewish labour efforts to organise Arab workers, together with the contested discourses in which identities and representations were formed; culture/meaning and the economic are inextricably bound, against economistic reductionism in some relational work. Two chapters are devoted to the Palestine Railways workers: the Palestine Railways, a mandatory government agency, employed Arabs and Jews side by side and was one of the country’s largest employers, about 2,400 workers in 1924 and a war-swollen peak of 7,800 in 1943, including (in 1943) some 1,200 Arab and Jewish workers at the Haifa workshops, until then Palestine’s largest concentration of industrial wage workers; a Jewish railway workers’ organisation was established as early as 1919 and Arab railway workers went on to play a key role in founding and leading the Palestinian Arab labour movement. Class is treated as a relation constituted by other social relations, not an essential category. The focus on workers has a concrete reason: from roughly the early 1930s to the mid-1970s the Zionist movement, the Yishuv and, from 1948, Israel were largely dominated by labour-Zionist parties and institutions professing socialism while upholding the nation, with the working class as vanguard. The book’s narrative form is defended as a detailed counternarrative complementing the usual scholarly and nationalist narratives.

• Introduction, “Sources, Terminology, and Politics” (lines 312-330): the catastrophic disruption of Palestinian Arab society in 1947–49 destroyed many archives, libraries and personal papers, and the dispersions of 1948 and 1967 scattered interviewees, while Yishuv and Zionist archives were well organised, survived and remain accessible, and Jews in Palestine had a much higher literacy rate; the history of the Yishuv is therefore much better documented, a difficulty this research “has not escaped”, though material on the Arab workers’ movement survived in Jewish labour archives (leaflets, correspondence, reports). “Labor Zionism” is used broadly, including Po’alei Tziyon, Ahdut Ha’avoda, Hapo’el Hatza’ir, MAPAI, Po’alei Tziyon Smol and Hashomer Hatza’ir. “Palestinian Arab” is used for the mandate period to avoid anachronism, a distinctly Palestinian Arab national identity having begun to emerge in that period in significant measure because of the confrontation with Zionism; Eretz Yisra’el is left untranslated in quotations from Hebrew sources. Lockman’s purpose “is not to judge but to understand”, distinguishing subjective motives from historical outcomes, and he expressly does not argue things would have turned out better “if only” there had been more cooperation or class solidarity.

• Introduction notes (lines 331-395): earlier versions of material appeared in Lockman’s “Railway Workers and Relational History” (Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 3, July 1993, 601–27) and “Exclusion and Solidarity” (in Gyan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism, Princeton, 1995, 211–40). Note 11 surveys the relational turn at length: Baruch Kimmerling, Gershon Shafir — whose Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (1989) the Introduction and Chapter 1 draw heavily on — Michael Shalev and the split labour market approach of Edna Bonacich, Lev Luis Grinberg, Tamar Gozanski, the Israeli “new historians”, Ella Shohat and Shlomo Swirski on Ashkenazi-centred analysis, Elia Zureik’s The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (1979), work by Musa Budeiri, Mahir al-Sharif and ‘Abd al-Qadir Yasin, Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains (1992), Roger Owen’s edited volume (1982), Talal Asad, Stanley Greenberg, Derek Penslar, Rachelle Taqqu’s unpublished 1977 dissertation on Arab labour, Barbara J. Smith, Jeff Halper, Joel Beinin, and work on women and gender by Elise G. Young and Sheila Katz.

• Chapter 1, “Zionism and Palestine before the First world War” [as printed] (lines 396-420, chapter continues): the chapter explores how pre-war Zionists in Europe and Palestine, especially socialist Zionists, perceived Palestine and its Arab inhabitants, arguing Zionist thought and practice were shaped from a very early stage by the need to come to terms with a substantial Arab population, and that perceptions were also shaped by the heyday of colonialism in which Zionism emerged in Europe. Under Ottoman rule Filastin was a vaguely defined region of al-Sham whose residents identified by confessional, ethnic, kinship and professional groups, locality and Ottoman subjecthood, in districts under Damascus, Sidon or elsewhere; from the nineteenth century “Palestine” gained significance through European use and influence, opening the way, with later colonial conquest, to Palestinian Arab nationalism. Jewish attachment to Eretz Yisra’el/Eretz Hakodesh was for centuries religious and largely outside history: a sovereign Jewish state was virtually unimaginable within traditional normative Judaism, only the messiah ending exile. Jewish nationalism is therefore thoroughly modern; the term Zionism surfaced only in the 1890s, from Tziyon. In eastern Europe Zionism was one response among others (traditional loyalty, assimilation, socialism, emigration) to crisis and antisemitism, including pogroms in 1871 and 1881. Hibbat Tziyon, crystallising after the 1881 pogroms, promoted immigration and settlement in Palestine as a return; of approximately 2.4 million Jews who left eastern Europe between 1881 and the First World War, some 85 percent went to the United States, another 12 percent elsewhere in the west or to South Africa, and less than 3 percent to Palestine (Chapter 1 note 1, as Lockman gives the figures). The Hibbat Tziyon settlements, moshavot, were rescued from collapse by Baron Edmond de Rothschild and other philanthropists, who assumed control with large-scale finance, technical assistance and paternalistic supervision.

• Chapter 1 (lines 421-454, continues): by 1900 there were twenty-two moshavot with a total population of about 5,000, most organised on the Algerian colonial model preferred by Rothschild and his agents, with European Jewish farmers employing local Arab peasants; yet most Jews in Palestine, including most of the First Aliya (1881–1903), lived in towns. Neither Hibbat Tziyon nor the Zionist Organization founded in 1897 by Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was monolithic; Zionism rested on the premise that the Jews’ plight came from lack of political power in dispersion, and most Zionists held only sovereign power in their own land could resolve “the Jewish problem”. Section “Zionism, Palestine, and Colonial Discourse”: unlike most European national groups, Jews were everywhere a dispersed minority, so Zionism “was—had to be—not simply a conventional nationalist movement but a colonizing and settlement movement as well”; it quickly fixed on Palestine, marginalising territorial alternatives, including Herzl’s for a time. The well-known but perhaps apocryphal Nordau episode is given: Max Nordau is said to have discovered Palestine was already inhabited and exclaimed to Herzl, “But then we are committing an injustice!” Zionist representation drew both on Jewish texts, in which the Hebrews were central and non-Jews relegated to marginal status, and on the contemporary European colonial discourse of European superiority and the right to rule and settle among peoples deemed less advanced, overlapping older images of “the Orient”. At the turn of the century the similarities to other colonisation projects were a selling point, not an embarrassment: Zionist leaders studied Algeria, Rhodesia and Kenya, and the movement’s financial arm was originally the Jewish Colonial Trust; only after the First World War did it dissociate itself and stop using such terms, at least in languages other than Hebrew. Section “Early Zionism, Palestine, and Its Inhabitants”: against the older view that pre-war Zionists were simply unaware Palestine was inhabited and had an “Arab problem”, Lockman argues the Arab presence shaped Zionist discourse through silences and representations. Two themes: the Arabs rendered invisible — in Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896), for example, Palestine appears empty — and, supplementing it, the Arabs represented as “essentially, ontologically, marginal to the land and its destiny”, their relationship to the country fundamentally different from and inferior to the Jews’; Palestine was represented “as by definition a Jewish land, whose eternal essence was Jewish”, and its non-Jewish inhabitants, for most Zionists, as a heterogeneous amalgam with no definite national characteristics, with shallow roots, who could be resettled elsewhere or reduced to a residual minority in subordination to a new Jewish majority. Chapter 1 continues in part 2.

• Chapter 1 (lines 455-489): the slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” is glossed: the land lacked not inhabitants but a people — the Arabs did not constitute a distinct people with a legitimate claim, whereas the dispersed Jews were a single nation with permanent and exclusive rights. Herzl in 1898 saw the inhabitants as a “mixed multitude”; his diary envisioned discreet purchase, land never resold to non-Jews, and landless peasants “spirited” across the border via employment outside Palestine; Altneuland (1902) depicts an overwhelmingly Jewish Palestine whose former Arab inhabitants are virtually absent yet said to have benefited. Yusuf al-Khalidi’s 1899 letter — sympathy for relieving Jewish suffering, but a warning that settlement and sovereignty could only be achieved by force against local resistance — was answered by Herzl only with the economic benefits of immigration and rising land prices, Palestine being the “historic homeland” only of the Jews, while Herzl could recognise educated young Egyptians as the “coming masters” of Egypt. Subordination and displacement were made thinkable by the inhabitants’ non-European status within colonial discourse and “scientific racism”: in The Jewish State the Jewish state would form “a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism”. Lockman’s point is that Herzl and his colleagues thought of themselves as liberal humanists and reconciled that humanism with European superiority as their wider culture did; anticolonial resistance itself later helped change European attitudes. The dissenting case is Ahad Ha’am: his 1891 “Truth from Eretz Yisra’el” reported a densely settled, cultivated country and unjust, cruel treatment of Arabs by colonists, his 1911 warning noted a developing Arab national consciousness, and his alternative was small-scale gradual settlement as a “spiritual center” — few heeded him, political Zionism’s charter quest continued, and the patron was eventually found in wartime Britain; the Second Aliya synthesis absorbed Arab marginality, now conditioned by the need to reconcile Zionism with socialism’s universalist claims and by immigrants’ concrete problems in Palestine.

• Chapter 1, “Socialist Zionism and the Arabs of Palestine” and “Borokhov, Borokhovism, and Palestine” (lines 490-535): socialist Zionism’s forerunner is Moses Hess; its first major theoretician, Nahman Syrkin (1868–1924), synthesised ethical-utopian socialism with Zionism in “The Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State”, briefly headed the Russian socialist Territorialists after 1905, and returned via Po’alei Tziyon in 1909 to become the intellectual godfather of Mapai’s social-democratic labour Zionism — and none of his pre-war works mentions Arabs at all: Palestine was to be acquired by purchase, diplomacy or pressure, best by aiding Macedonians, Armenians and Greeks against the Ottomans, with partition and population exchanges, since Eretz Yisra’el was “very sparsely populated” and Jews already 10 percent. Ber Borokhov (1881–1917) supplied Po’alei Tziyon’s Marxist foundations: “conditions of production” and the nation-state as prerequisite to class struggle (“The National Question and the Class Struggle”, 1905), and “Our Platform” (1906), in which the “abnormal” Jewish masses would inexorably migrate to Palestine — the only territory where they would “not encounter organized and united resistance and displacement”, its entry prohibitions being mere sultanic arbitrariness. The natives, Borokhov argued, had “no independent economic or cultural character”, were “not a single nation, nor will they constitute a single nation for a long time”, and “will soon assimilate economically and culturally to the Jews”; a footnote dismissed Arab nationalism, since Palestine’s peasants supposedly had nothing in common with the Arabs. Entry restrictions would be removed by antisemitic or later democratic European governments; the population’s wishes did not enter the vision. Pre-war European social democracy generally shared the premise of European superiority and tutelage over non-Europeans. The World Union of Po’alei Tziyon’s third congress (summer 1911) attributed Arab and Turkish opposition to antisemitism, held Zionist aspirations parallel to the development of the productive forces via inexorable “stychic” processes, and distinguished friendly “popular elements among the Arab inhabitants” from hostile elites — the germ of the land-to-those-who-make-it-productive defence and of the good Arab masses / pernicious nationalist elite distinction.

• Chapter 1, “The Encounter in Palestine”, The “Conquest of Labor”, The Struggle for “Hebrew Labor” and “Economic Separatism and Working-Class Formation” (lines 536-601, chapter main text ends): the workers’ movement in Palestine itself propagated the same discourse — Po’alei Tziyon’s 1906 Ramla program made the local worker’s “lowly state” the reason capitalist development required immigrant workers, and its Jaffa program declared the goal “political autonomy for the Jewish people in this country”; demands in 1906 to organise Arab workers, even to found a Jewish-Arab workers’ organisation, came to nothing, and after 1908 Arab opposition attained no significant agenda place. The Conquest of Labour (kibbush ha’avoda) began as self-proletarianisation and national regeneration, but Borokhov’s prognosis failed: private and national capital did not suffice, moshavot agricultural jobs were largely monopolised by cheaper Arab wage labour preferred even by Jewish employers, newcomers could not subsist on Arab wages, and many (perhaps most) Second Aliya immigrants left Palestine, either returning to Europe or (more often) continuing on to the United States. Conquest of labor thus became the campaign to replace Arab workers in the Jewish sector — Hebrew Labour, which in the decade preceding the First World War came to occupy a central place in labor-Zionist discourse and practice — easy for Hapoel Hatzair, anxiety-provoking for Marxist Po’alei Tziyon until Yitzhak Ben-Zvi’s 1912 essay made national interest precede class solidarity as a life-or-death matter; a delegate’s counter-proposal to organise the Arab worker, and members’ lone organisation of the 1907 Petah Tikva Arab citrus strike (broken by Ottoman police), were exceptions, and the alternative strategy of raising Arab wages to Jewish levels was dismissed by the majority as a delusion and as incompatible with a homogeneous Jewish society and state. Exclusion was reframed as defence: organised (Jewish) labour against a Jewish-employer “boycott” and unorganised (Arab) labour. Hebrew labor’s limited success had to be supplemented by a separate, exclusively Jewish high-wage enclave — the Histadrut’s own enterprises from 1920, the Kibbutz and the Moshav — in what Michael Shalev called a “practical alliance between a settlement movement without settlers and a workers’ movement without work”, abandoning orthodox Borokhovism for Constructivism, on which labour Zionism achieved hegemony, signalled by Ben-Gurion’s 1935 elevation to the Jewish Agency executive chairmanship. Unlike other European settlement projects, the Jewish society built did not crucially depend on exploiting Arab wage labour: settlement excluded or displaced rather than exploited it. The pattern was ultimately made possible by the Balfour Declaration (November 1917) and British colonial rule, which held the indigenous majority — still two-thirds of the population in 1947 — in check.

• Chapter 1 notes (lines 602-789): 45 notes. Notes 1-8 give the emigration-figure source (Encyclopedia Judaica, 1972), Anderson and Hobsbawm on nationalism, Eisenzweig and Kimmerling on Zionist space, Said’s Culture and Imperialism and The Question of Palestine (with “European” extended to settler states overseas), Rodinson’s unmet call for research on European Jews’ images of Palestine and the Orient, Said’s Orientalism and Rodinson’s Europe and the Mystique of Islam, Shafir and Penslar on borrowings from European colonisation projects, and Flapan’s unargued 1917 starting point. Note 9 calls Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial (1984) “a notorious work of pseudoscholarship” and cites Porath’s and Finkelstein’s critiques. Notes 10-16 document the Herzl passages: the “mixed multitude” diary entries of October 9 and 29, 1898, the June 12, 1895 entry with the Jewish National Fund’s later stricture that its lands never be leased to or cultivated by non-Jews (Lehn with Davis, The Jewish National Fund, 1988), Schölch on al-Khalidi, Mandel’s The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, the al-Khalidi letter in Walid Khalidi’s From Haven to Conquest, and The Jewish State in D’Avigdor’s translation. Note 17 (long) faults Gorny’s reading of Altneuland as only Herzl’s “universalist, humanist essence” and Shapira’s Land and Power “defensive ethos”/“offensive ethos” frame for not situating Zionist attitudes within colonial discourse. Notes 18-22 cite Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, Ahad Ha’am’s 1891 and 1911 articles and his Altneuland review, Kornberg’s At the Crossroads, and Yitzhak Epstein’s short-lived 1907 “A Hidden Question” debate. Notes 23-37 cite Syrkin’s and Borokhov’s Ketavim texts page by page, Slutzki on the MPSI at the Histadrut’s founding, and Mandel. Note 38 explains the self-designation “Hebrew” (‘ivri), not “Jewish” (yehudi): rejection of Diaspora passivity, identification with the mythologised ancient Hebrews and the Maccabees, and a claim to the land stronger than the indigenous Arabs’, as prototypes of the New Jew. Notes 39-43 cite Gorny on conquest-of-labor ideology and Shafir (the chapter “obviously draws on Shafir’s perceptive analysis”, broadened discursively), Ben-Tzvi’s 1912 essay (published as “Avner” in Ha’ahdut), Shalev on split labour markets and Shapira on citrus-plantation Hebrew labor, and Shafir, Land, 198 for the “practical alliance” quotation. Note 44 (long) gives the kibbutz’s economics (socialised reproduction costs, asceticism) and its mythic place — never more than about 5 percent of the Jewish population, yet the paragon of Zionist virtue, compared with Berque’s Algerian “red-roofed farmhouse”. Note 45 is Lockman’s own Balfour Declaration entry in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (1993).

• Chapter 2, “Labor Zionism and the Arab Working Class, 1920–1929” (lines 790-795, chapter continues): after the British conquest, the Hashemite-led Arab nationalist movement, the Balfour Declaration, the mandate and organised Arab nationalist opposition — underscored by violence in Jerusalem (1920) and Jaffa (1921) — ignoring the Arab question was no longer possible; early mandate texts incorporated prewar discourse into more systematic positions, of which Yitzhak Ben-Zvi’s 1921 essay The Arab Movement is read closely as the source of labour Zionism’s discourse on the Arabs for decades.

• Chapter 2, “The Arabs of Palestine In Labor-Zionist Discourse” and “Delegitimizing Palestinian Arab Nationalism” (lines 796-836): Ben-Tzvi, co-founder in 1919 of Ahdut Ha’avoda (world Po’alei Tziyon’s right-wing Palestinian affiliate), central to recasting Borokhovism into MAPAI’s social democracy, Va’ad Le’umi member and Arabic-knowing scholar, opened by admitting the subject had been a “hidden question” and rejecting the impression that the Arab movement rested on popular foundations or had the character of a liberation movement. His argument: no single Arab nation exists; Palestinian nationalism is inauthentic and entirely negative, an artificial creation of large landowners, moneylenders and clerics — the effendis feared immigrants settling unused state lands and Jewish settlement undermining their domination of a peasantry that actually benefited, since the peasant “does not suffer from Jewish immigration, but from the pressure of his effendi”, and welcomed the British regime and expanded employment. To answer the self-determination objection, Ben-Tzvi denied a distinct Palestinian people: only bedouins were of pure Arab stock, the rest “Arabs in language and culture but by origin and race are mixed and composed of different elements”, divided by “purely objective criteria” into eleven religious-ethnic communities, of which the largest, Sunni Muslims, was not yet a nation — a mosaic that also made the Jews (perhaps 10 percent) appear the country’s second largest, most active and constructive group. Hence “there is as yet no place for a single Arab national movement among all the inhabitants of Eretz Yisra’el”; he offered no concrete policy, only the vague appeal to common workers’ interests, labour, progress and social justice. Lockman: these themes persisted for decades — denial of a Palestinian people, nationalism as an effendi creation, all opposition attributed to “outside agitators” working on passive, manipulable masses who were yet always liable to explode into irrational violence, leaving no space for rational self-motivated opposition; the central thrust, despite later binationalist exceptions, was denial of a Palestinian claim, implicit in the demands for unlimited immigration and land acquisition and, explicitly from 1942, a Jewish state.

• Chapter 2, The Histadrut and the “Arab Question” (lines 838-858): the issue surfaced at the Histadrut’s founding congress (Haifa, December 1920; elections drew less than 4,500 voters of a Jewish population of some 80,000). Ahdut Ha’avoda and Hapoel Hatzair envisioned the Histadrut not as a European-model union federation but as the exclusively Jewish instrument for settling Palestine and building a Jewish commonwealth. The Socialist Workers’ Party — Po’alei Tziyon’s left-wing affiliate, orthodox Borokhovists and radicals moving toward a break with Zionism, self-described Jewish section of the Comintern yet still committed to a Jewish homeland (“Bolshevik-Zionist”) — proposed instead a nonparty trade union federation of all the workers of Eretz Yisra’el in separate national sections, a separate Jewish settlement organisation, and an international Jewish-Arab workers’ council (a soviet) to seize government; its support among recent immigrants, its trade-union militancy and its proud use of Yiddish against Ahdut Ha’avoda’s Hebrew-only line are all recorded. The proposals received very little support and were referred to the Histadrut council; the constitution made no mention of Arab workers and “all the workers in the country” meant Jewish workers alone.

• Chapter 2, It is clear that we must organize them, but… (lines 858-878): the question returned at the Histadrut executive committee, December 30, 1920, over the exclusively Jewish Railway Workers’ Association’s congress, the railway workforce being overwhelmingly Arab. Berl Katznelson saw no danger in Arab railway workers organising and cooperating but feared they might want to join the RWA and destroy its Jewish and Zionist character; Eliezer Shohat: “From the humanitarian standpoint, it is clear that we must organize them,” but “from the national standpoint, when we organize them we will be arousing them against us.” The committee procrastinated — solidarity affirmed, no practical decision — leaving Joint Organization in mixed workplaces (railways, telephones and telegraph, Public Works, ports, mixed municipalities, later military bases, and private firms such as the Iraq Petroleum Company, the Haifa refinery, the Dead Sea potash works and Nesher) as the immediate problem, structurally entangled with Hebrew labor, since raising Arab wages could undermine Jewish employment in the same workplaces, while low Arab wages held Jewish wages down in a single labour market. The section also traces the emerging urban Arab working class: between the 1922 and 1931 censuses the Arab population grew by some 40 percent, Jaffa’s by 63 percent (27,429 to 44,638) and Haifa’s by 87 percent (18,240 to 34,148), with a skilled stratum forming especially in Haifa; labour Zionists’ new conception of the Arab worker as natural ally coexisted in tension with the image of the Arab worker as competitor and threat, and Palestinian workers’ own voices made the monologue a dialogue.

• Chapter 2, “Ben-Gurion and the Arab Working Class” (lines 880-908, continues): David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973; arrived 1906; Histadrut secretary from the end of 1921; Jewish Agency executive chairman 1935–48; prime minister 1948–53 and 1955–63) first set out his theses in August 1921: the basis of Arab-Jewish worker relations must be “joint economic, political, and cultural work” for Jewish redemption and “the emancipation of the Arab working people from enslavement by its oppressors and exploiters, the dominant landowners and propertyowners”, the “conscious and cultured Jewish worker” leading the Near East’s liberation and educating the Arab worker — premises Lockman calls a socialist-Zionist Mission civilisatrice. Proposals: Arab workers in mixed trades organised into unions linked to the Jewish unions, equal-terms Histadrut employment of Arabs on government public-works contracts, joint workers’ clubs, and kibbutz contact with neighbouring Arab villages. The impetus was chiefly the railway workers (Arab railwaymen pressing since mid-1921, some reportedly interested in joining the Histadrut; fear that Jewish railwaymen would turn to left rivals advocating a fully integrated union), with small episodes elsewhere (the Jaffa/Tel Aviv woodworkers, and the Jewish bakery workers who in 1922 declared their union “international” and registered Arab members, quickly suppressed by the Histadrut leadership). In January 1922 Ben-Gurion grounded the policy in the Jewish worker’s economics: in government enterprises wages and conditions were set by “the worker with lesser culture and fewer needs”, so “the creation of a single common front for all the country’s workers… is the obligation and right of the pioneers of labor culture in Palestine—it is the mission of the Jewish workers”; his 1924 railway-union formulation reserved common work matters to joint action while requiring “complete autonomy and equality” in each nation’s specific spheres — separate unions or autonomous national sections, and no Arab membership of the Histadrut. Politically, the conception rearticulated the rejection of Palestinian nationalism in class language: the real conflict was Arab workers against their Arab oppressors, and the alliance would uplift Arab workers into genuine proletarians who would grasp Zionism’s progressive character — in the mid-1920s Ben-Gurion argued Zionism could not succeed without it. Chapter 2 continues in part 3.

• Chapter 2, “Zionism, Democracy, and Arab Workers” (lines 910-926): at Ahdut Ha’avoda’s third congress (Ein Harod, May 1924), Shlomo Kaplansky proposed demanding an immediately democratically elected parliament with broad powers, accepting an Arab majority and safeguarding the Yishuv through agreement with the Palestinian Arab nationalist leadership. David Ben-Gurion defeated the proposal: Zionism as state-building; no common language with the effendi leaders of the Arab movement; Arab self-determination and national autonomy affirmed in principle but no Arab right to rule the country or prohibit its construction by those who would work it; agreement instead through the Arab worker — “The fate of the Jewish worker is linked with the fate of the Arab worker. Together we will rise, or together we will fall” — the Arab worker cast, in Lockman’s reading, as a deus ex machina whose rootedness served chiefly to contrast nationalist inauthenticity. The congress overwhelmingly endorsed Ben-Gurion; the January 1922 Histadrut council principles of national sections and preservation of the Jewish Railway Workers’ Association are recalled as the “separate but equal” settlement.

• Chapter 2, “The Controversy over Joint Organization” (lines 928-950): through 1922-23 the Histadrut procrastinated over an Arab organiser (scarce Arabic-speaking Ahdut Ha’avoda cadres, scarce funds, ideological doubts). Late 1923 Po’alei Tziyon Smol — cohered, with the Palestine Communist Party (Comintern-recognised 1924), from the Socialist Workers’ Party’s 1921 disintegration — won the railway workers’ union (URPTW), declared it international in 1924 and demanded “separation of functions”. Ben-Gurion countered with an all-Palestine workers’ alliance of autonomous national organisations. The Ahdut Ha’avoda side charged “liquidationism” and blamed failures on Arab backwardness; the Smol side blamed leadership obstructionism; both shared the premise of Palestinian nationalism’s nonexistence or illegitimacy, Arab workers’ interests being defined as purely social while Jewish workers’ national institutions were taken for granted.

• Chapter 2, “The Struggles at Nesher, 1924–25” (lines 952-968): Haifa (almost 25,000 in 1922, one-quarter Jewish, doubling by 1931) as main port, industrial centre, “Red Haifa” and cradle of the Arab working class. The Nesher Cement Factory, established 1924-25 by Michael Pollack near Yajur (lands sold 1872 to the Sursuq brothers and Salim al-Khuri, later to Zionist institutions; factory site seemingly on Balad al-Shaykh land), was built by 200 Jewish workers at 20 piastres for eight hours and 80 Egyptians at 10 piastres for nine to ten hours. In the 1924 construction strike the Egyptians joined against Histadrut officials’ wishes; the settlement excluded them, the Jewish workers voted 170 to 30 not to return without them, the Histadrut pressured them back, and most Egyptians were deported. In 1925 the Histadrut’s strike to displace Egyptian quarry workers (contractor Musbah al-Shaqifi) failed and quarry work remained Arab until 1936-39, while it simultaneously supported a nearby Yajur quarry strike (25 Egyptians, 2 Palestinians, 7 Jews) — no contradiction, Lockman argues, where Hebrew labor was not at issue. Ben-Gurion justified displacement as conforming to “the class interest of the Arab worker in Palestine”.

• Chapter 2, “Organizing Arab Workers” and “The Carpenters’ and Tailors’ Strike” (lines 970-1004): preempting Po’alei Tziyon Smol, the communists (Arabic journal Haifa from fall 1924; December 1925 election list at some 8 percent) and the newly founded Palestine Arab Workers Society (Haifa, spring 1925) — the communists having been expelled from the Histadrut in 1924 but retaining some Jewish support through advocacy of class struggle and union autonomy (line 974) — in a Fourth Aliya boom (Jewish population 94,945 in mid-1924, 121,725 in mid-1925, 149,500 in mid-1926; Tel Aviv 22,000 to 40,000), the Histadrut in 1925 launched Ittihad al-‘Ummal (April 1925, usually about 500 copies, subsidised, reoriented from summer 1926, ceased early 1928; its name had also been that of a workers’ newspaper published the previous year by the short-lived Egyptian labor federation aligned with the nationalist Wafd party, and after Ben-Tzvi and Dr. Nissim Malul its editors were, when Malul moved to Baghdad, his wife and later another Arabic-speaking Jew, line 982) and hired Avraham Khalfon and Philip Hassun, who opened the General Workers’ Club in Haifa in July 1925. The workers themselves pressed for the October 1925 strike of some 100 carpenters and thirty tailors; Al-Karmil warned of a Zionist trap even while sympathising, Maronite clergy urged a separate Muslim-Christian union, and negotiations hosted by Najib Nassar ended the strike after two weeks with a nine-hour day, a half-hour lunch break and seven paid sick days.

• Chapter 2, from the strike’s aftermath to the section We cannot be your slaves (lines 1006-1024): Ben-Gurion congratulated Khalfon but warned him not to go too far, lest Hajj Amin al-Husayni collect the workers he had taught to strike. The strike was the attempt’s high point: downturn to 1929, nationalist and communist hostility, Tel Aviv unemployment at 40 percent in February 1927, Solel Boneh’s bankruptcy and budget cuts ended it; Khalfon moved in spring 1927 to the Haifa municipality, Hassun remained amid debts, and the newspaper ceased in early 1928. Po’alei Tziyon Smol pressed its Jaffa circle: George Nassar, who supported Zionism “precisely because I am a good Arab”, led the December 1925 delegation refused admission by Ben-Gurion — “We cannot be your slaves” — and Smol petitions before the 1927 congress were said to carry some 700 Arab signatures, including Nazareth building workers the Histadrut had failed to help.

• Chapter 2, “Palestine, South Africa, and Native Labor” (lines 1026-1038): Hapoel Hatzair’s Hayyim Arlosoroff, in his 1927 “On the Question of Joint Organization”, claimed a purely economic realism: joint organisation could not raise general wages, the Arab ally was a fantasy, and in one labour market Jewish wages would fall to the Arab level, ending immigration; South Africa’s white workers had instead secured a “color bar”. The only way out was a separate high-wage, high-productivity, exclusively Jewish sector beside a low-wage Arab sector. Alongside the enclave, political means: minimum-wage lobbying the British resisted, differential relief wages, and demands such as 50 percent of unskilled Haifa port jobs at Histadrut rates; the 1928 government wages commission reported unskilled daily wages of 12–15 piastres (rural Arab), 14–17 (urban Arab), 28–30 (unionised Jewish) and 15–30 (nonunion Jewish).

• Chapter 2, ‘From “Historic Mission” to Benign Neglect’ (lines 1040-1086, chapter main text ends): by the later 1920s the mainstream was committed in practice to Hebrew labor and the separate enclave; Ben-Gurion’s October 1926 fifth-congress insistence that Jewish success was inconceivable beside a “downtrodden and unorganized Arab worker” and Ben-Tzvi’s “international Eretz Yisra’el workers’ alliance” scheme both dropped the earlier “historic mission” of actively organising Arabs; Ben-Tzvi’s proposal was (like Ben-Gurion’s) designed to deflect criticism from the left by demonstrating Ahdut Ha’avoda’s commitment to creating a framework for Arab-Jewish workers’ solidarity, while protecting the party’s right flank by barring Arabs from Histadrut membership, preserving the Histadrut’s Zionist character, and ensuring that even Jewish workers in mixed unions would be able (through their separate national sections) to participate in the effort to construct a separate Jewish society in Palestine (line 1044). The shift accompanied a renewed moshavot Hebrew labor campaign, ideological convergence toward the Mapai merger, and Histadrut growth from 4,433 members (1920) to some 25,000 (1928). At the third congress (July 1927) Hassun’s obsequious greeting and Ahmad Hamdi’s plea (“Such separate organizations are dangerous”), sponsored by Smol for some 600 Arab workers, drew Ben-Gurion’s retort that “the Jewish workers in Palestine are the Zionists”, closing: “We believe that to the extent that our strength in the country grows, so will grow the strength of the working class which Hamdi and his comrades hope will liberate this country” (line 1066); the adopted resolution made cooperation conditional on “recognition of the essential value and rights of Jewish immigration to Palestine”, proclaimed an international alliance entailing no change to the Histadrut, and committed nothing to assisting Arab organising — the equation reversed, the enclave’s success now to benefit Arabs by example. No new resources followed; the club closed in 1928 or 1929, only one spontaneous Arab strike drew Histadrut support after the fact, and Hacohen’s May 1929 proposal to organise Arabs to show the Public Works Department that “the path of pushing down wages for Arabs is not strewn with roses” went unfollowed, though international social-democratic criticism kept the sphere nominally alive. In August 1929 a week of violence killed 133 Jews and 116 Arabs (mostly by British police and soldiers); Ben-Gurion began telling colleagues it was a mistake to downplay Arab nationalist sentiment and that Zionism had to agree with the national movement, even the effendis — abandoning, not irreversibly, the Arab working class as Zionism’s natural ally and the rationale for tutelage organising; 1930s efforts would proceed on different goals, in a different framework and ethos.

• Chapter 2 notes (lines 1090-1362): 67 notes. Note 1: the title The Arab Movement itself denied nationalism’s authenticity. Note 2: Ben-Tzvi’s claim that most Arab peasants descended from the ancient Jewish rural population, seemingly contradicting his ethnic-incoherence argument. Note 3: the Jews as “second in number but first in building [up the land]”, rhyming in Hebrew. Note 4: Shapiro on Ahdut Ha’avoda’s 5,600 votes a few months before the Histadrut founding elections. Note 5 (long): ‘ovdim against po’alim, “From Class to People”, “organization” not “federation”, centralisation through the Tel Aviv apparatus (“the Kremlin”) and party-list workers’ councils, trade union affairs as one department beside national tasks, and executive control by the mid-1920s of Hevrat ‘Ovdim and Kupat Holim. Notes 6-10: founding congress protocol in Asufot 1, no. 14 (1970); Slutzki on the SWP; SWP delegate votes of 19.5 percent (Jaffa/Tel Aviv), 16 percent (Haifa), 6.8 percent overall; List on the language question; EC/H, December 30, 1920. Notes 11-15: Shapira and Glazer on Hebrew labor campaigns; Sussman on wage linkages; A Survey of Palestine (1946) with the census-by-religion caveat; Taqqu on labour migration and Seikaly on Haifa; al-Budayri, Taqqu, al-Junaydi and Yasin on the Palestinian working class. Notes 16-22: Ben-Gurion’s theses in Kuntres no. 91 (1921) and Anahnu veshkheineinu (1931), 61–62; the Jaffa bakery union’s expulsion and conditional reversal; EC/H and S/EC/H minutes; Kuntres nos. 106, 165, 172; the 1927 Histadrut report, 155. Notes 23-24: Ben-Tzvi’s 1921 warning of Egyptian union “agitators”; the second congress (February 1923) on “comradely relations”. Note 25: the PKP acronym and the communist-movement studies (Budeiri, Dothan, Greilsammer, Samara, al-Sharif). Note 26: Margalit’s Anatomia shel smol (1976), the only major Smol study, with the fractious-tendency caveat. Note 27: Studni on the autumn 1922 Haifa carpentry strike, with a reliability warning. Note 28: Ahdut Ha’avoda’s 41 and 47 percent at the first two congresses, its September 1924 local losses. Notes 29-33: Shapiro; Kuntres no. 166; Golomb in Kuntres no. 192; Survey, vol. 1, 148; All That Remains, 151–54, 202–3. Note 34: the Nesher sources, with the official Histadrut account omitting the 1925 strike’s anti-contracted-labour purpose and Studni omitting the second strike, and a little-known Grands Moulins strike. Notes 35-49: Ben-Gurion in Anahnu veshkheineinu, 107; List on the communists; Survey, vol. 1, 141; Histadrut minutes of March-April 1925; the 1927 report, 156; Repetur and the Khalfon interview of January 29, 1976; Al-Karmil, October 10 and 21, 1925 (niqaba’s guild connotation); Ittihad al-‘Ummal, October 21, 1925; Filastin, August 19, 1927, and its June 4, 1926 and August 19, 1927 attacks on Histadrut organising. Notes 50-59: Abramovitch, Besheirut hatnu’a, 263, for Nassar; S/EC/H, December 11, 1925; AA 490/1–2; Taqqu, “Arab Labor,” 76–77; Smith, Roots of Separatism, 155–59; CO 733/161/6 and 733/165/2; Anahnu veshkheineinu, 131–33; Kuntres nos. 280, 211, 280 and 282 (Yudelevitch). Notes 60-67: Erem’s congress acknowledgment on Polish national sections; AA minutes of the third congress, 13–15; Anahnu veshkheineinu, 138–39 (emphasis in original); the Kibbutz Faction/Hashomer Hatza’ir note, correcting Krisher’s claim that its position was “basically accepted”; the Mabruk factory strike (Kuntres no. 338, June 1, 1928); the Nazareth club’s police raid and Ben-Tzvi’s concern it might serve nationalists or Smol, with contact lost (S/EC/H, December 14, 1927, January 8, 1928); S/EC/H, May 31, 1929; the “Left Bloc“‘s Derekh Hapo’el, February 10, 1929.

• Chapter 3, “The Railway Workers of Palestine (I): The Struggle for Arab-Jewish Unity, 1919–1925” (lines 1364-1376, chapter continues): the railways’ history from Yosef Navon’s 1888 Jaffa–Jerusalem concession (line completed summer 1892) and the Ottoman Hijaz Railway (1900–1908, Haifa branch 1905, Haifa–Acre spur 1913) through wartime military extension — Ottoman lines from ‘Afula via Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarm to Lydda, built with conscript labour, mainly Arab peasants, and the British al-Qantara–Haifa line making Lydda the main junction — to the mandatory Palestine Railways, Telegraph and Telephone, which closed little-used lines, upgraded others and in 1942 extended the coastal line to Beirut and Tripoli; by the mandate’s end 290 miles of railroad carried in 1946–47 1.9 million tons of freight and some 900,000 passengers. The Palestine Railways was one of the country’s largest wage-labour employers: nearly 7,800 workers at its 1943 wartime height, most unskilled Arab peasants on track work, more than 1,200 in 1943 relatively skilled and permanent in the Haifa workshops.

• Chapter 3, “The Early Railway Workforce” (lines 1378-1396): little is known pre-war — Europeans in many skilled jobs, a small number of Jews, the permanent majority Muslim and Christian Arabs with Turks supervisory/clerical and Armenians among the minorities; Syrian Muslim railway workers settled in Haifa’s Wadi Salib after 1905, and several founders of the Palestinian Arab trade union movement were Syrian-born Hijaz Railway veterans. Postwar: Greek workshop foremen, all-British senior officials, unskilled labour initially largely by British-conscripted Egyptians; an Arab railway workers’ mutual aid society from about 1920, a registered benevolent society by 1923, whose skilled workers and foremen would in 1925 help organise the first purely Arab labour union while until then refraining from overt union activity or contact with Jewish railway workers. From 1919 Jews, mostly Third Aliya immigrants, were channelled into railway jobs by the Zionist Commission and the Ahdut Ha’avoda and Hapo’el Hatza’ir employment offices for livelihood and for the conquest of labor: the Railway Workers’ Association (RWA), established 1919, had the conquest of labor on the railways as its main task, wage and condition improvements secondary. The first wave mostly quit — of a few hundred hired, the union leadership recalled in January 1921, only a few remained — setting the chapter’s framing contradiction: Jews could be kept only by improvements won through cooperation with the Arab majority, whose strengthening would make Hebrew labor harder, “a contradiction which labor Zionism never successfully resolved”; the Zionist Executive’s circumvention — lobbying to replace the Egyptians with Jews or at least local Arabs — won a British commitment by 1922 to phase out Egyptian labor but opened no significant jobs for Jews.

• Chapter 3, “The Arab and Jewish Railway Workers: First Contacts” (lines 1398-1422): the RWA’s first congress (Jaffa, November–December 1919) preceded the Histadrut’s founding; the young union was weakened by turnover, by Socialist Workers’ Party–Ahdut Ha’avoda struggles and by conflict with the Zionist Commission’s appointed supervisor, and was financially dependent on the Commission (wage supplements, workers’ kitchens, Hebrew and English classes); its third congress (some thirty delegates, some 600 Jewish railway workers) joined the Histadrut as a unit and barely addressed Arab relations, Ben-Tzvi usually mediating for it because management and government refused it recognition. From summer 1921 Haifa Arab railway workers — the workshops, then being transferred from Lydda, being the largest single concentration of industrial wage labour in Palestine — approached Jewish unionists about cooperation and even Histadrut membership; Bulus Farah’s quoted portrait of the workshops (Arabic the common language, Jewish workers learning Arabic, arguments over Zionism, imperialism and the Soviet revolution) is called “too rosy”, though a unique atmosphere and a new skilled, educated Arab stratum receptive to unionism are accepted. The RWA leaders first dampened the Arab interest, then referred it upward; the January 1922 Histadrut council formula — national sections, the Jewish RWA preserved in the Histadrut — came under fire from the Haifa-workshops left (Po’alei Tziyon Smol and the communists), whose support Lockman explains by the railwaymen’s position: classic urban proletarians in a mixed industrial city, for whom the colonial state was plainly the employer paying starvation wages, resentful of the Histadrut’s domineering centralism, keeping their own strike and mutual aid funds, yet financially dependent on the Histadrut that paid their secretary.

• Chapter 3, “Worker Militancy and Arab-Jewish Relations” (lines 1424-1450): the fourth congress (Haifa, February 1922) endorsed national sections with the proviso that Arabs be accepted as full members until a separate Arab section existed. The renamed URPTW, impelled by the 1922 layoffs (daily paid staff had no security or dismissal compensation), intervened for the first time for dismissed Arabs as well as Jews and complained of harassment by supervisors, some Jewish; the Histadrut executive rejected the strike both workforces supported — Ben-Tzvi arguing that even a miraculously complete strike would demand firing the Jewish official Moshlin: “From every standpoint the thing is a total loss”. In 1923 management cancelled contracts, raised the maximum workday to sixteen hours and revoked the religious choice of rest day; General Manager R. B. W. Holmes’s January 1923 refusal of severance pay — the dismissed Jews, as emigrants [sic] under the Zionist Commission’s aegis, were “in a better position than your brother workers whose habitation has always been Palestine” — heightened anger, and Arab participation in union meetings and petitions grew. Through the Histadrut the union secured Avraham Khalfon for Arab recruitment: club and coffeehouse talks brought in the foremen Ibrahim al-Asmar and ‘Ali al-Batal, whose example made involvement seem safe. The left advanced amid the 1923–24 crisis; the fifth congress (Haifa, September 1923; twenty-one Jewish delegates for 200–250 unionised Jewish railwaymen of a workforce of about 2,000, al-Asmar and al-Batal the first Arab observers) adopted Smol’s separation-of-functions resolution with a referendum-on-disaffiliation threat, and bylaws declaring the union “based on class struggle” with no mention of national sections — a left victory, though the union remained weak, unrecognised and Histadrut-funded.

• Chapter 3, “Struggling for Unity” (lines 1452-1490): at the union council of March 1924 six Arab representatives participated actively; Ilyas Asad demanded the word “Jewish” be removed from the membership card — “if they agree there will be a strong bond between us and all the Arabs will join” — and the other Arab delegates demanded severance from the Histadrut; Ben-Gurion, alarmed and angry, answered with national autonomy within joint work on common matters and warned the union would be weak without the Histadrut; the council’s contradictory resolutions both demanded Histadrut-funded services and a separate trade-union confederation, and set up a joint negotiating committee; the Haifa Workers’ Council secretary warned Tel Aviv it would “likely be necessary to split the railway workers’ union”. By spring 1924 forty Arabs had joined the Jaffa-Lydda branch and the mostly Egyptian al-Qantara branch was revived, but the Haifa negotiations stalled on the Arabs’ written insistence that they could not join a union with purposes “more important than the interests of the railway, postal and telegraph workers” and their proposal of a new union free of outside influence, which the leadership rejected. The communists pressed the same demand from inside; the union expelled seven Jewish communist railwaymen for a year over their unauthorised May 1924 Haifa PCP-branch meeting with Arab leaders, yet refused the Histadrut’s general purge — “We do not expel members for their opinions” — blaming the communists instead for poisoning the Arabs’ minds; Moshe Ungerfeld answered that the Arabs had seen the Histadrut’s name on the membership cards themselves: “There is a sickness among you and you do not know how to cure it, so you look for others to blame.” Lockman treats the incitement frame (mesitim, hasata) and the cultural distance — Jewish workers calling Arabs simply “der Araber”, rarely learning Arabic, as Yehezkel Abramov complained — as mechanisms that made Arabs’ rational objection to a Zionist union hard for even left Zionists to see. The purge was completed inside the union when its central committee suspended its one communist member; the PCP, Comintern-recognised in February 1924 and now openly anti-Zionist, amid the Soviet 1924 campaign, redoubled its Arab outreach with little immediate success.

• Chapter 3, “Arab-Jewish Unity and the Question of Zionism” (lines 1492-1532): with Smol’s influence rising, the June 1924 central committee took Arab organising on itself (Arabic leaflets, branch committees); what opened the way to unity was abandoning national sections for a purely unitary, territorial union, on a tacit understanding — no written agreement is evidenced — that the union would be declared international, Arabs would enter its leadership on parity, and the union would be non-Zionist, an understanding the two sides held differently, the Arabs’ adherence likely conditional on the union’s fighting for the Histadrut’s transformation and seceding if that failed. By the end of 1924 the union comprised some 529 members of a workforce of almost 2,400, roughly half Arab and half Jewish, and in October 1924 it launched its campaign to restructure the Histadrut, beginning with changing its name. In November 1924 all elected bodies were agreed half Arab and half Jewish; at the first joint central committee meeting Hasanayn Fahmi asked whether the union was connected with Zionism and whether its Jewish members were Zionists, received what Lockman calls a “disingenuous and evasive” answer, and days later published in al-Nafir a call for Arab railway workers to leave the union as really Zionist — only a minority followed then. The first-ever interview with the General Manager (helped by Britain’s Labor government) signified seeming recognition, though formal recognition was years away. The January 1925 council in Haifa (twenty-five voting delegates; Ben-Gurion, Ben-Tzvi and Arlosoroff attending for the Histadrut) was dominated by the Histadrut question: Arab delegate Ahmad al-Nimr called the executive committee’s promises on joint organisation “like the promises of Balfour”; Ben-Gurion’s speech was translated by Khalfon, who admitted fifty years later that he “altered Ben-Gurion’s speech completely” and watered it down, Ben-Tzvi sensing it and kissing him in the break; the council voted eighteen to seven to proclaim a territorial, international union and to demand the Histadrut congress require all unions to be international, the majority an alliance of the Arab delegates and Jewish Smol adherents; the Histadrut leaders rejected the decisions as invalid because Arabs had contributed to the majority, Abramov protesting the unfairness; all delegates, Arabs included, confirmed Moshe Ungerfeld’s expulsion, and seven Arabs were elected to the central committee.

• Chapter 3, “Narratives of Failure” and “The Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society” (lines 1534-1572, chapter main text ends): the January 1925 meeting was in retrospect the high point of joint organisation in the sector; most Arab members left within months and an exclusively Arab union emerged in Haifa, the main issue being the URPTW’s continuing Zionist affiliations. Lockman tests three narratives: the Jewish leadership’s blame of the communists (slander, forgery, violence; thirteen communists permanently expelled in August 1925) fails because communist agitation long predated the departure and because in December 1924–early 1925 the PCP’s Haifa was exhorting Arabs to stay in the union and capture it — “By withdrawing from the union we strengthen the position of the Zionists within it”; the management divide-and-rule account (selective increases, clerks bought off, a dismissal defying the union) is also judged not a large-measure explanation. The Arabic sources are unanimous on the Zionist affiliations, and specifically on felt deception — murawaghat (“prevarications”) and khida’ (“duplicity”) — with Haifa’s April 1925 article naming the translator Khalfon as currying “favor for Zionism in the performance of his duties”; the issue that made Zionism concrete was Hebrew labor, the Histadrut still using Jewish foremen to get Jews hired, as Bulus Farah’s memoir charges over the supervisor Moshlin. The disillusioned unionists then merged with the mutual-aid-society group — ‘Abd al-Hamid Haymur, ‘Id Salim Haymur and Sa’id Qawwas, Syrian-born Hijaz Railway veterans who had never sought association with Jews — whose end-of-February 1925 meeting of some 200 Haifa railwaymen elected a committee; by summer 1925 the merged movement had registered as the Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society (PAWS), almost exclusively Haifa Arab railway workers but aspiring to be the Arab counterpart of the Histadrut, its leadership drawn from both groups (Ilyas Asad, ‘Ali al-Batal and Farid Kamil from the negotiators; Qawwas and the Haymur brothers from the mutual aid society). Lockman concludes a separate Arab union was probably inevitable; the URPTW’s survival as a joint union would have required a transformation — severed Zionist links, Hebrew labor renounced, a largely Arab organisation — beyond even the most radical Smol activist; from 1925 to the mandate’s end two unions, one exclusively Arab and one overwhelmingly Jewish and Zionist, were active among the railway workers, cooperation and estrangement both continuing.

• Chapter 3 notes (lines 1574-1816): 61 notes. Note 1: Glass on Navon Bey and Cotterell, The Railways of Palestine and Israel (1984). Note 3: the Palestine Railways general manager’s report for 1942/43–1945/46 (1946), 147; the Haifa workshops were often called the Qishon workshops. Note 4: Vashitz on Wadi Salib, with Lockman’s caveat that Vashitz cites no source; Katinke, Me’az ve’ad heina (1961), on the wartime Hijaz Railway. Note 5: Yasin, 118–19, and al-Junaydi, 15, citing Tahbub’s al-Haraka al-‘ummaliyya w’al-niqabiyya fi filastin, 1920–1948 (Kuwait, 1982), a book Lockman was unable to find. Notes 6-10: the AA oral-documentation interviews with Abramov (April 9, 1972) and Shvartzman (March 20, 1972), Farah, 40–46, the Zionist Commission–RWA correspondence, the third congress report in Kuntres no. 65 (January 21, 1921), and Smith on Egyptian labor. Notes 11-16: EC/H, December 30, 1920; Kuntres nos. 65, 66; Farah, 41; S/EC/H, October 28, 1921; the 1927 Histadrut report, 155, with the note that the Jewish postal and telegraph workers numbered some 200 and their union was always dominated by the railway workers; S/EC/H, January 19, 1922, and Bilitzki, 66. Note 18: the fired workers’ statement signed by eleven Arabs and nine Jews (AA 104/25alef), with the warning that Studni’s “Nitzanei ha’irgun hameshutaf” (1975) is not altogether reliable. Note 20: Holmes to Minsky and Susman, January 27, 1923; the Jewish unionists’ mandate argument against the layoffs. Note 24: the left’s about 13 percent at the February 1923 Histadrut second congress elections and the communist Fraktziyyat Hapo’alim’s 3 of 31 Haifa Workers’ Council seats in July 1923. Note 25 (long): the fifth congress’s rejection of the Histadrut demand against direct international links, and the report in the union’s Hakatar whose parallel Arabic edition al-Qatar was much briefer and left out most contentious debates, “suggesting some nervousness among the Jewish unionists about allowing their Arab comrades full access to the disagreements among the Jews”. Note 33 (long): the Hagana’s explosives thefts from Haifa railway storehouses, usually on Fridays, and the Jewish communist who apparently informed Arab coworkers. Note 35: the sole vote against the April 1924 purge was a Smol railway delegate from Jerusalem. Note 38: patahnu lahem et hamo’ah, and Lockman’s own 1992 article ” ‘We Opened the Arabs’ Minds’ ”. Note 41: in the Ahdut Ha’avoda-controlled Jaffa-Lydda branch a separate section was in fact created for recruited Arab workers. Note 42: the membership-figure sources and Lockman’s judgment that the union’s claim of about 350 Arabs joined in four months “seems too high”. Note 46 (long): Milhemet Hapo’el’s May 1925 claim that Fahmi’s al-Nafir letter was a communist forgery, which Lockman judges unlikely. Note 48: the “plundered the Arabs” remark rests only on the Ahdut Ha’avoda reporter’s allegation in Kuntres no. 202; the delegate denied it and charged libel before a Histadrut court. Notes 49-52: the Khalfon interview of January 29, 1976; Ben-Gurion’s speech in Anahnu veshkheineinu, 76–80; the Abramov oral interview of May 14, 1987; Kuntres nos. 202, 203. Notes 53-61: the August 6, 1925 joint statement (AA 237/9) and Ittihad al-‘Ummal, September 1, 1925; Haifa nos. 4, 6, 15, 16; the PCP’s early-1925 pamphlet al-Shihab al-sati’; Gur-Sade in Kuntres no. 213; Farah, 42–43; S/EC/H, October 25, 1925.

• Chapter 4, “The Railway Workers of Palestine (II): Cooperation and Conflict, 1925–1939” and “One Workforce, Two Unions” (lines 1830-1860): relations between the PAWS — whose stable core and largest component would for many years be Arab railway workers in Haifa — and the older, Jewish-led URPTW “were never uncomplicated and rarely smooth”; necessity and rank-and-file pressure at times induced cooperation, workplace competition and political tensions at other times set them against one another, while a web of personal, social and political relations among veteran workers and activists promoted cooperation and a knowledge of the other side that helped railway workers avoid “the maelstrom of intercommunal hatred and violence”. Spring/summer 1925 did not immediately divide the workforce ethnically: at its founding the PAWS had only about 150 members and few resources, felt threatened by the Histadrut-backed URPTW’s greater material benefits, and saw some spring 1925 joiners return to the Jewish-led union within months; to hold members it emphasised its Arab and patriotic character — Jewish communist railway workers who sought to join as committed anti-Zionists were rejected because the bylaws allowed only Arabs — and asked progressive Arab nationalist professionals in Haifa to provide members medical and legal services at reduced cost. Farid Kamil, formerly on the URPTW central committee, argued in the PAWS for the apolitical, internationalist trade unionism Arab leaders had originally demanded, proposing Jews be accepted as full and equal members; he failed, resigned or was expelled, and the PAWS would in subsequent years adopt his perspective: willing to dissolve itself into a new unitary organisation of all railway workers, providing it was truly international and unattached to the Histadrut. The URPTW continued to regard itself as the sole legitimate representative of all railway workers and the only authentic union at the Palestine Railways, retaining a not insignificant number of Arab members; its 1926 claim of 780 members, 422 of them Arabs, is “obviously very inflated” (it counted everyone registered since 1922 who had not resigned in writing), and a total of 300–400 in 1926, most of them Jews and not all dues-paying, “seems a safer estimate”; at least one original Arab central committee member, Ibrahim al-Asmar, remained. The URPTW and Histadrut attacked the PAWS as separatist, exclusionary, a union in name only, a tool of effendis and clerics, a product of communist incitement and a quasi-religious organisation, and persisted in raiding its membership — least successfully in Haifa, with somewhat greater success in Jaffa and Lydda. PAWS secretary ‘Id Salim Haymur’s article in Filastin, June 4, 1926, “The Indigenous Workers between Zionism and Communism”, portrayed the Arab union as the target of both the “Zionist union” and the Jewish communists; Lockman finds some allegations plausible (Arabs exempted from dues to attract them) and others far-fetched (that “traitors” al-Asmar and Philip Hassun were paid 15 piastres per Arab recruited; that Zionists plied innocent Arab workers with wine and Jewish women to dance with); ‘Id Salim complained the PAWS had no more than ninety members a year or so after its formation. The URPTW was also weak: Jews were 12.7 percent of the Palestine Railways workforce, 405 of 3,182, though almost 30 percent at the Haifa workshops (408 Muslim, 264 Jewish and 228 Christian workers); veteran Jewish “workmen” (apprentices of 1919–20, assistants in 1923, workmen in 1925) earned 28–30 piastres a day, new apprentices — all Arabs, forced to work a six-month trial without pay — and most foremen were Arabs, and management was not anxious to hire more Jews. Some Jewish workers left railway work altogether, the union appealed to the Histadrut to channel more Jews in, and disillusionment weakened the left as Po’alei Tziyon Smol, having voted the communists’ expulsion in summer 1925, lost support to Ahdut Ha’avoda.

• Chapter 4, January 1926 council to the 1928 joint committee (lines 1860-1880): at the January 1926 union council Ibrahim Suwaylih, a Jerusalem Arab who had remained in the URPTW, proposed returning to separate national sections; the council rejected his proposal but abandoned the union’s autonomy claim by agreeing its structure should be decided by the Histadrut congress, and endorsed Ahdut Ha’avoda’s formulation that internationalism “requires joint unionism (ha’igud hameshutaf) and the guaranteeing of the free development of every people on the basis of equality and autonomy”. At the July 1926 meeting with the Histadrut secretariat the union’s leaders appealed largely in Hebrew labor terms — “the union’s importance lies in the conquest of government jobs by Jews” — and the Histadrut promised an increased subsidy and stepped up efforts to get more Jews hired, as did the Zionist Executive’s lobbying in Palestine and London; al-Asmar sat on the union’s central committee at that Hebrew labor discussion, does not seem to have uttered a word, likely knew little if any Hebrew, and “was probably invited mainly for propaganda purposes”. Section “Recurring Dreams of Unity”: in June 1926 the two unions agreed in Haifa to press jointly for a law protecting workers’ rights; at the end of July 1926 the government refused to recognise the URPTW, and a mid-July decree revoking seven days of annual vacation and eight days on official holidays united workers in outrage — a campaign marred when the leaflet for the joint Eden cinema mass meeting in Haifa appeared signed by the URPTW alone, contrary to the agreement the PAWS had insisted on, which the Arab union protested in a Hebrew-language leaflet addressed to “all the workers of Palestine”. Recession, layoff threats and a five-day Haifa workshops week from fall 1926 to spring 1927 kept cooperation necessary; only 250 dues-paying members, nearly all Jewish, voted in the summer 1927 sixth congress elections, at whose opening ‘Id Salim Haymur and ‘Ali al-Batal greeted the delegates for the PAWS. The sixth congress voted by a small margin for joint organisation on the basis of national sections; February 1928 bylaws formally established separate sections, reversing January 1925, and renamed the union the National Union of Railway, Post and Telegraph Workers in Palestine (NURPTW). In fall 1927 the two unions formed a joint committee over the new Palestinian currency’s cut in real wages, under a signed agreement defining its composition and prohibiting either union issuing leaflets in its own name; by May 1928 the Jewish unionists abolished it because it was strengthening the PAWS and enhancing its legitimacy, deciding instead to recruit Arabs directly while blaming the Arabs for its collapse, and a further Arab-initiated unity effort foundered on the NURPTW’s refusal to merge into a new union without national sections — even as its leaders privately pressed for more Jews to be hired under Hebrew labor, an “unceasing search for new ‘victims’”. A September 1928 joint protest meeting over layoffs and short hours ended in uproar; the PAWS leaflet (Arabic and Hebrew) accused the NURPTW of bad faith, cited the funeral incident in which Arab mourners of a Jewish coworker — yahudi ‘arabi, an “Arab Jew” in the Arabic version — were told the deceased was none of their business, and insisted that there was “no possibility of cooperation as long as the NURPTW is not a genuine workers’ organization”, while still distinguishing the Jewish rank and file from their leaders. In March 1929 the General Manager met NURPTW representatives for the first time in four years (recognition still refused; demands included a forty-eight-hour week and an end to heavy fines), and in 1929 the Jaffa-Lydda branch established an Arab section claimed at one hundred dues-paying members, which functioned only a few months before, on the Jewish unionists’ account, management transferred its leaders and the August 1929 bloodshed dashed rejoining hopes.

• Chapter 4, “Competition and Cooperation in the Early 1930s” (lines 1889-1912): the late summer 1929 violence did not spread to the Haifa railway workshops, where ties built over years preserved peace, but from 1936 the dream of a single organisation faded toward cooperation between two independent, ethnically unmixed organisations. From January 1930 the PAWS’ Haifa railway component often called itself the Arab Union of Railway Workers (AURW), in theory a distinct component as the PAWS sought to become a federation, in practice with vague boundaries (by 1934 in English correspondence the Railway Arab Workers’ Trade Union; Lockman uses AURW and PAWS respectively for clarity). In 1930 the NURPTW expanded Arab membership (Haifa and Jerusalem sections; non-Jewish clerks under the Greek Michael Qyubik co-opted onto the central committee; an al-Qantara link frustrated by the AURW), but new recruits insisted on sharing decision making; leading to the May 1931 seventh congress, Qyubik and Arab colleagues demanded national sections be abolished and the union disaffiliate from the Histadrut, and after the congress — held in Tel Aviv to deter AURW “enticing” — decided Jewish members would stay in the Histadrut while non-Jewish members should join the Histadrut’s general workers’ clubs until an “international workers’ federation” was established, and renamed the union the International Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Employees in Eretz Yisra’el (IU), Qyubik quit with eighty fellow clerks and some Arab blue-collar workers. The IU still claimed 253 Arab members of 657 at the beginning of 1932 (Haifa 408 members, 187 Arabs; Jerusalem 83, 31 Arabs; Jaffa-Lydda 108, 9 Arabs), probably inflated; the Colonial Office estimated 300 Jewish and 210 Arab members. The AURW now demanded the IU divest itself of its Arab members and renounce representing all railway workers, refusing even to talk with IU Arabs, whom it regarded as traitors and puppets; rivalry was exacerbated by PAWS–Palestine Labor League competition in other workplaces. In 1932 the main arena was the running department (wage cuts of 28 percent, transfers to lower grades; mostly Arab, previously in neither union), where the AURW blocked the IU secretary’s parity proposal — the IU insisted on parity as implying equal status, Arab unionists rejected it because most workers were Arabs — and in the end neither union brought these workers fully under its wing. Fall 1932 and spring 1933 layoff waves affecting hundreds forced cooperation again; “unclassified” employees rose from 2,765 in March 1933 to 3,749 a year later, fell to 3,443 by March 1935 and rose again to 4,138 by March 1936, while skilled workers still earned as little as 20–30 piastres a day, with unpaid overtime, no sick pay and heavy fines without appeal.

• Chapter 4, the 1934 joint committee, “Mass Mobilization and Its Aftermath” (lines 1912-1948): skilled Jewish workers kept leaving — by August 1934 only 184 Jews remained, less than 6 percent of the workforce — and the Histadrut cut the IU subsidy, so the AURW could afford to ignore the few remaining IU Arabs and a new joint committee formed in Haifa at the beginning of 1934 over a government circular promising improvements, led by ‘Id Salim Haymur and IU secretary Michael Dana, issuing memoranda and holding mass meetings in a large Arab coffeehouse, with leaflets in Arabic and Hebrew. By May 1934 Haymur proposed a merger, supported by the rank and file, by Jewish locomotive mechanics and by the IU’s remaining Arab members; in August 1934 the IU grudgingly accepted the principle of a single union while insisting on leadership parity regardless of membership composition. By January 1935 the IU was ready to break the committee up — Dana privately: “now we have the opportunity to strike at the Arab union” — but militancy elsewhere delayed the plan: at the end of February 1935 hundreds of Arab and Jewish Iraq Petroleum Company workers in Haifa struck, and on March 4, 1935 a thousand railwaymen at the Café Centrale voted to strike unless their demands were fulfilled; the government announced a special committee under Major Campbell, District Commissioner of Jerusalem. Over 700 railway workers, among them 113 Jews, joined the May Day strike; faced with a strike deadline the High Commissioner issued the May 17, 1935 communiqué, which disappointed the workers; he then took the unprecedented step of meeting a delegation — four Arabs (including Haymur and Farid Kamil) and three Jews (including Menahem Diner and Yehezkel Abramov) — on June 17, 1935, announcing some additional minor concessions while insisting he could not forget the taxpayers’ interests. Throughout, the IU and Histadrut kept seeking more Jewish hires (fifty Jewish Agency immigration certificates for railway workers’ families; lists of Jewish railway workers in Iraq; a July 15, 1935 circular with sanctions — “A worker who leaves his job on the railway will not be hired anywhere else unless he can produce a letter proving that he quit with the approval of the IU”): some 120 to 150 Jews were hired in 1934–36, bringing the Jewish share from 12.6 percent in 1933 and 8.2 percent in 1934 back to just under 10 percent by 1937; at the end of 1935 the railways employed 3,171 Palestinian Arabs, 345 Jews and 1,307 “others”, and 52 percent of Arab employees earned less than £P50 a year against only 5 percent of the Jews. A week after the High Commissioner meeting Dana again pressed to dissolve the joint committee and “attack the Arab union”; Histadrut leaders, fearing newly recruited Arabs might “flood” the union, refrained. A spontaneous late July 1935 running department strike was induced back to work by both unions, discrediting their leaders; the committee ceased functioning effectively that summer, and at the end of February 1936 the AURW formally declared it dissolved — its March 1936 Arabic statement accusing the IU of bad faith, sabotaging the running strike, using sympathetic Jewish foremen to take Arab jobs for Jews, “enticing” Arabs with loans and health care it could not match, and claiming sole representation, all attributed to the IU’s Zionist character and its priority to building the Jewish “national home”; Lockman: some accusations were exaggerated or tendentious, but many were accurate. Within weeks Haifa workshop Arabs and Jews were discussing restoration, and in April 1936 the AURW formally proposed both unions be dissolved and replaced by a unitary organisation; the IU stalled, insisting on parity in all institutions and Jewish members’ right to belong to the Histadrut, and proposed reconstituting the Haifa joint committee instead.

• Chapter 4, “The Railway Workers During the Arab Revolt” (lines 1948-1972): mid-April 1936 clashes escalated into a six-month Arab general strike, the first stage of the 1936–39 revolt; the IU’s remaining Arab members quit, leaving it entirely Jewish and never again able to attract Arabs, and many key AURW and PAWS leaders were arrested and detained for long periods, leaving Arab railway workers without effective representation — yet as late as November 1936 Arab workers were still pressing for a single union. Arab railway workers did not join the general strike except for ten days in August 1936, risking permanent dismissal and Jewish replacement; Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), addressing the royal commission, demanded Jews constitute 30 to 33 percent of all government department workforces and credited a few dozen mobilised Jewish engine drivers with helping liquidate the August walkout, but management refused preference to Jews and the Jewish proportion declined somewhat during the revolt. Eight Jewish railway workers were killed in the course of the revolt, all apparently by armed insurgents from outside the workforce; Lydda’s Jewish railway workers and clerks were eventually transferred to Tel Aviv (as were Jaffa’s Jewish postal workers), Jewish auxiliary police patrolled the lines, and British forces forced Arab hostages to sit on a wheeled platform at the front of locomotives to discourage mining. Arab railway staff were “being brutally treated” by both sides (British railway officials, fall 1938), with instances of security forces arresting, beating or shooting at loyal Arab employees without cause, prompting a brief Lydda protest strike in October 1938; sabotage, falling traffic and revenues brought layoffs and short hours, which the government sought to limit at Ben-Tzvi’s urging. The revolt greatly increased residential and social segregation in mixed cities, yet personal contacts persisted and some Arab workers protected Jewish coworkers — Yehezkel Abramov’s fellow veteran Efrayyim Schvartzman reported being twice saved by Arabs and warned of a planned attack on the workers’ train at Safariyya — and in spring 1938 a joint Haifa delegation to management was attempted.

• Chapter 4, “Hashomer Hatza’ir and the Railway Workers” and conclusion (lines 1972-1992, chapter main text ends): Hashomer Hatza’ir — a Zionist youth movement from Galicia federated in 1927 as Hakibbutz Ha’artzi — had by the early 1930s emerged as the strongest force to Mapai’s left in the Histadrut, a loyal opposition situated between MAPAI and Po’alei Tziyon Smol, primary emphasis on immigration and kibbutz settlement rather than class struggle, criticising MAPAI’s bourgeois-Zionist cooperation, bureaucratised Histadrut and lack of interest in joint organisation, and staking a halfway position on Hebrew labor (rejecting “100 percent Hebrew labor” and Smol’s opposition alike; Arab workers permanently employed by Jews to keep their jobs); it would later propose Arabs and Jews share the land as equals, rejecting exclusive sovereignty and partition alike. Initially kibbutz-oriented with little interest in urban workers, by the mid-1930s its members — concentrated in poorly paid jobs such as railways and ports — were a vigorous left opposition, and in 1936 it created the Socialist League for non-kibbutz supporters. Efrayyim Krisher (born Galicia 1909, immigrated 1934, sent to the Haifa workshops under the Histadrut’s recruitment call, formally a kibbutz member until 1941 but a railway activist until his 1970s retirement) was by spring 1935 on the Haifa branch committee urging militancy and unity with Arab workers; in January 1937 he was reelected with the greatest number of votes and chosen Haifa branch secretary by the left-dominated committee, but MAPAI used Histadrut bureaucracy to nullify his election. In summer 1939 eighth congress elections MAPAI held only a three-vote Haifa edge (of 105 cast) over Hashomer Hatza’ir and the Socialist League, and Hashomer Hatza’ir won a solid workshops majority, though MAPAI retained union control through other branches; the IU had only 401 dues-paying members (186 railway, 215 postal and telegraph), no Arab members at all, and Jews were only 8 percent of the railway workforce. Conclusion: unification “was never really in the cards” — Arab unionists favoured unity in principle on terms Jewish unionists could never accept without compromising Zionist commitments — yet the dream endured under repeated rank-and-file pressure, nourished by the web of personal relations in Palestine’s oldest, largest and most stable mixed workforce; in the end the Zionist-Palestinian conflict would engulf these workers too, culminating in “the virtual elimination of Arab workers from the scene”.

• Chapter 4 notes (lines 1994-2242): 60 notes. Notes 1-2: Ed hakatar, July 1925; al-Karmil, October 21, 1925, and Filastin, June 4, 1926. Note 3: Kamil to the URPTW, late October/early November 1925 (AA 237/24). Note 5: Milhemet hapo’el, May 1925, and Kuntres nos. 213, 227, with Lockman’s note that the quasi-religious allegation may have stemmed from the PAWS’ origins in a charitable society similar to Muslim and Christian societies in Palestine. Note 9: Shapiro, Formative Years, chs. 6–7, suggesting Ahdut Ha’avoda’s mid-1920s drive to reassert party control, the URPTW a prime target. Note 11 (long): the October 17, 1926 meeting (AA 237/32gimmel) and Kisch, Palestine Diary (1938), 227 — the URPTW leaders argued Jews were discriminated against and asked the Zionist Executive to subsidise Jewish wages, support housing and pressure the British to dismiss non-Palestinian Arabs. Note 19: when in 1930 Jewish unionists heard the PAWS was negotiating possible recognition for its Arab railway union, they pressed the Histadrut to prevent recognition (AA 208/280alef, November 4, 1930). Note 22 (long): the Abramov oral interview (May 14, 1987) and the record of Histadrut efforts to maintain or increase the Jewish percentage, sometimes at Arab workers’ expense — including an April 1930 suggestion to transfer work to Jewish outside contractors so Arab workers could be laid off, and displeasure at management training already-employed (usually Arab) workers for skilled jobs; management, backed by the government and Colonial Office, generally rejected the pressure, insisting Arabs were hired simply because they were cheaper (CZA, S9/1424a; S25/7208, /7209). Note 24 (long): Edim [as printed], March 19, 1929, and the shifting official grounds for refusing the NURPTW recognition — “probably best explained by a desire to avoid any diminution of control over the workforce of a key state enterprise”. Note 30 (long): the term “international” (bein-le’umi), attributed to Ben-Gurion himself, is curious by North American usage, was translated on the union’s stationery into Arabic as ‘amma (“general”), and “employees” replaced “workers” to accommodate white-collar joiners; the note’s second paragraph introduces a PCP leaflet attacking the Histadrut and IU leaderships in “Third Period” language, whose quoted text does not appear in the text copy. Note 36: the Histadrut housing-loan program was clearly designed to bolster Hebrew labor, and including a few Arabs might produce a positive political impact (EC/H, June 12, 1933). Note 44: D. G. Harris to the Palestine Royal Commission, December 30, 1936 (CZA, S25/4618). Note 51: the Royal Commission Minutes of Evidence (1937), 219 (December 29, 1936), with a slightly different “Precis of Evidence” version of Shertok’s testimony. Note 52 (figures): in April 1938–March 1939 alone there were 690 cases of attacks on railway personnel and property, including numerous derailments, and thirteen Arab and Jewish railway workers were killed while on duty and 123 wounded (ISA, R/16/39, Palestine Railways Report for the year ending March 31, 1939). Note 57: Margalit, Hashomer Hatza’ir: me’eidat ne’urim lemarksizm mahpekhani, 1913–1936 (1971). Note 59: the Krisher oral interview (May 13, 1987), Krisher’s “Ha’irgun hameshutaf” and Lahav on the Hashomer Hatza’ir faction in Haifa, 1934–1937. Note 60: the 1939 election record and the Histadrut central control commission to CC/IU, December 6, 1939.

• Chapter 5, “Arab Workers and the Histadrut, 1929–1936” (lines 2244-2270, chapter continues): after August 1929, which compelled all Zionists to give more serious attention to the “Arab problem”, Ben-Gurion and colleagues began to talk of agreement with the Arab community’s leaders, and the Histadrut renewed attention to Arab workers under MAPAI, formed in 1930 by the merger of Ahdut Ha’avoda and Hapo’el Hatza’ir. MAPAI’s platform addressed Arab workers only in Hapo’el Hatza’ir’s vague terms — “the united party… establishes comradely relations with the Arab worker and fosters relations of peace and understanding between the Hebrew people and the Arab people” — while the Histadrut executive’s December 1929 funding letter to the Palestine Zionist Executive revived Ahdut Ha’avoda’s rationale: agreement “cannot be effected through political compromises with those sections of the population that aspire to destroy our undertaking in Palestine, but rather through a systematic cultural-economic activity among the masses of the Arab workers in town and village”. In January 1930 the Zionist Executive agreed in principle to subsidise Arab work; pending outside fundraising the Histadrut allocated £P20 a month from its own budget to reopen the Haifa club, with Philip Hassun — the only person available, despite leaders’ doubts about his organising abilities — insisting the Histadrut connection be kept secret, since very few Arab workers would join an openly Histadrut club; the club opened in fall 1930. Section “The Renewal of “Arab Work””: the January 1930 PAWS congress in Haifa — 61 delegates claiming to represent some 3,000 workers, almost half from Haifa and nearly half of those railway workers, with smaller Jerusalem, Jaffa and other contingents, communist sympathisers helping organise but the conservative noncommunist founders in control — resolved to set up a nationwide Arab labour movement, declared opposition to Jewish immigration and Zionism and support for Palestine’s independence as an Arab state, and called for Arab workers to receive a share of government jobs equal to the Arab proportion of the population. Hassun urged the organisers beforehand to avoid politics and refrain from attacking the Histadrut and Zionism; the Haifa Workers’ Council issued an Arabic leaflet in the name of a fictitious “Advisory Committee of Haifa Workers” welcoming the congress while hoping Arab workers would be protected from “corrupting hands and misleading thoughts”; and George Nassar, who appeared to ask to address the congress for his pro-Zionist position, was denied permission and expelled as a Zionist agent, thereafter working for many years at ‘Etziyon, a Histadrut-owned woodworking enterprise. The congress proved an isolated incident — the PAWS remained largely restricted to Haifa and railway workers — but it made a coherent Arab work program seem urgent, reinforced in late spring 1930 by Po’alei Tziyon Smol’s two factions (Moshe Erem’s orthodox Borokhovist, European-oriented, Yiddishist faction and Ze’ev Abramovitch and Yitzhak Yitzhaki’s Palestine-oriented, Hebraist faction), each of which on May 1, 1930 announced a separate solidarity organisation with nonparty liberals, merging a week later as Ahavat Po’alim (“Workers’ Brotherhood”). Ahavat Po’alim pressed the Histadrut to admit Arabs and foster joint organisation while publicly protesting restrictions on Jewish immigration — its first membership meeting recognising both the Arab working masses’ full right to free social and national development and the right of unlimited Jewish immigration, a formulation whose immigration plank “inevitably infringed” the Arab rights it recognised. Hakibbutz Ha’artzi–Hashomer Hatza’ir also berated MAPAI for inaction but divided over joining (Me’ir Ya’ari against; its left wing for taking the organisation out of Smol’s control); in mid-July 1930 the mandatory government dissolved Ahavat Po’alim, regarding Smol-sponsored initiatives as Bolshevist and anti-imperialist — rumours the Histadrut had secretly requested the suppression were vigorously denied by it and no evidence has surfaced. At its May 1930 council the Histadrut declared solidarity obligated helping Arab workers satisfy their “economic and cultural needs” while adding “every step toward advancing [the organization of Arab workers] will facilitate the struggle for existence of the Hebrew worker and the Hebrew economy built on Hebrew labor in this country”, explicitly rejecting transforming the Histadrut into a territorial organisation open to Arabs. At the end of 1930 it established a special Arab affairs secretariat/department under its executive committee, its one full-time staff member Yehuda Burla (1886–1969), the Jerusalem-born teacher and first modern Hebrew writer on Jews of Middle Eastern origin, as Arab Secretary (1930–32) from Tel Aviv headquarters, supervised by Ben-Tzvi, Dov Hoz (1894–1940) and, increasingly in Haifa, Abba Hushi (1898–1969), secretary of the Haifa Workers’ Council from 1931 and Haifa’s mayor from 1951 until his death. The Department was always short of money — Arab work enjoyed low priority among sceptical leaders — and its appeals to the Zionist Executive and (from 1929) the Jewish Agency played on common economic interests and on Burla’s January 1931 warning: “If we do not see what is coming and take the initiative, others will appear and organize the [Arab] masses against us”. In Haifa the reopened club claimed 138 members in February 1931, almost all skilled workers (carpenters, stonecutters, blacksmiths, earning 15 to 40 piastres a day) — Hassun deliberately excluded unskilled and unstably employed workers, with officials’ endorsement, for fear the club would be seen as an employment agency for jobs in Jewish enterprises; it also served the IU’s Arab members, offered Hebrew, English and Arabic courses, lectures, a football team, Kupat Holim access for 15 piastres a month and a revolving loan fund (Jewish Agency and Histadrut credit cooperative capital) from which some fifty workers had borrowed up to £P5 by February 1931 — but its meagre budget soon forced cutbacks, and officials never lost sight of organising Arab workers’ political implication of weakening Palestinian Arab nationalism. Section “The Drivers’ Strikes” begins: in July 1931 and again in November, Arab and Jewish taxi, bus and truck drivers launched joint strikes which paralysed motor transport in Palestine — not really worker solidarity, most participants being petty proprietors, but a whole industry mobilised against the mandatory government. Chapter 5 continues in part 6.

• Chapter 5, “The Drivers’ Strikes” (lines 2271-2300): drivers were a new social category, mostly single-vehicle owner-drivers, whose shared grievances were directed at the government — gasoline at a claimed 405 milliemes a tin in Palestine (205 of it tax) against 240-260 in Syria, Iraq and Egypt, a £P10-12 annual licence fee (free in Egypt and Syria), high tire duties, arbitrary fines, and the Road Transport Act of 1929. Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani, a Nashashibi-aligned Jerusalem lawyer, and Shraga Gorokhovsky (later Goren) of the Histadrut’s Cooperatives Center formed an Arab-Jewish strike committee on June 29, 1931; both the Histadrut leadership (fearing loss of control and political dimensions) and the Husayni-led Arab Executive (uneasy at the blurred lines and at a Nashashibi constituency) were privately opposed but could not defy sympathetic public opinion. A licence-fee hiatus postponed the July strike; the Vehicle Owners’ and Drivers’ Association (parity executive, al-Dajani chair, Gorokhovsky vice-chair) accepted an inquiry committee and held a 24-hour stoppage in August. Filastin led press attacks on al-Dajani for cooperating with Jews (September 18, 1931 editorial), which he answered “somewhat disingenuously” by denying a joint association existed; when the government rejected the inquiry’s recommended concessions, some 2,000 drivers struck for nine days (November 3-11, 1931), paralysing the roads, and won a partial victory months later (licence fees reduced, spare-parts duties raised). Al-Dajani then secretly sought Jewish Agency funding for a “Palestine Arab Workers’ Party” — Shertok interested, a Histadrut-drafted charter, nothing came of it — and became a leader of the National Defence Party founded in 1934. The strikes produced no lasting joint organisation but brought intensified government regulation (fixed routes, harder licences) that squeezed out small owner-drivers and left motor transport increasingly segregated.

• Chapter 5, ““Arab Activism” in Crisis” and “On the Haifa Waterfront” (lines 2301-2332): the Histadrut’s ambivalence was shown in September 1931 at Benyamina, where it formally endorsed a strike by some thirty Arab workers of Jewish farmers but the MAPAI-controlled Workers’ Council withheld active support — it wanted those workers replaced by Jews — and the strike collapsed; Hashomer Hatza’ir denounced the leadership, MAPAI supporters blamed the Arab workers. Burla’s expansive December 1931 memorandum (clubs in all major towns, village organising, a bank-subscribed loan fund, an Arabic newspaper) was out of touch: by early 1932 Arab work was at a virtual standstill, Jaffa, Jerusalem and Lydda clubs suspended, the Haifa club barely operating. Abba Hushi saw the club as only transitional to organising Arab workers into Histadrut-linked unions and its secretary Philip Hassun as an ineffective “legacy”; Hassun, unpaid for months, in debt and pleading to close the club, charged Hushi had publicly threatened to beat him up over the accounts, but Ben-Gurion and Ben-Tzvi sided with Hushi and Hassun was dismissed in June 1932, his later fate unknown. New funds raised in England by Israel Sieff bolstered Hushi’s takeover. At Haifa’s old port (the new deepwater harbour opened at the end of 1933), Jews remained few — some two dozen, almost all skilled or supervisory, against some 450 Arabs at the end of 1929, many of the Arabs Hawrani migrants from French-ruled Syria, “hawrani” entering colloquial Palestinian (and later Israeli) Hebrew as a synonym for “poor” or “ragged”; Histadrut lobbying (Jews pay some 50 percent of taxes, so entitled to 50 percent of jobs in government enterprises) and Pardes pressure yielded only twenty-eight Jewish stevedores, porters and lightermen by May 1932, though Jews secured a large proportion of new-harbour construction jobs.

• Chapter 5, the lightermen’s strike, the PLL and “Travails of Hebrew Labor” (lines 2332-2360): as with the railways, Jews could be placed and kept at the harbour only if Arab wages and conditions improved; when Arab lightermen struck in April 1932 over daily (rather than monthly) employment and seniority-blind dismissals, their Jewish coworkers — many Hashomer Hatza’ir members — refused to strikebreak, the PAWS proved of little help, and the strikers authorised Hushi to negotiate; after four days they won only a verbal promise of monthly employment after two weeks, yet were grateful, and joined a Histadrut-sponsored Harbor Workers’ Union in which Hushi and MAPAI insisted on separate national sections against the Hashomer Hatza’ir Jews’ wish for a fully international union. The Arab members became the first cell of the Palestine Labor League (PLL), chartered May 1932: a small Histadrut auxiliary given the grandiose name intended in the 1927 third-congress resolution for a binational federation that was never formed. Its creation foreclosed Arab full and equal membership of a transformed Histadrut (Smol’s long-standing demand) and consigned Histadrut-organised Arab workers to a separate, Jewish-official-run, Histadrut-funded, MAPAI-line organisation — until 1959, when the Histadrut allowed Arabs full membership. Day-to-day organising was entrusted to Eliyahu Agassi (born Baghdad 1909, in Palestine from 1928, Arabic- and English-fluent, gentle and respectful), who would play a central role for more than four decades. For Agassi and Hushi organising Arabs and Hebrew labor were complementary, not contradictory: Agassi’s later “sacks of flour” metaphor reserved the Jewish sector for Jews while claiming a fair share of government and international sector jobs, and even as the base among Arab harbour workers was built, Hushi from 1933 organised the immigration of Salonika Jewish dockworkers to displace Arabs, arranged Pardes porterage contracts, and formed the Histadrut’s Manof labour company at the new harbour; by April 1936 some 200 Jews had regular harbour jobs. The wider Hebrew labor campaign is assessed: the 1929-30 moshavot campaign (denounced by European social democrats and, on imperial-security grounds, by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to Ben-Gurion in July 1930) and its early-1930s successors aroused great Arab resentment but failed on their own terms — at the beginning of 1936 Arabs were still 35 percent of the labour force in Jewish agriculture, 20 percent in Jewish-sector transportation and 12 percent in construction — largely because the 1932-35 boom (Jewish immigration over 42,000 in 1934 and almost 62,000 in 1935; the Jewish population roughly doubling to 375,000, about 27 percent; orange exports from £P727,647 in 1930-31 to over £P3 million by 1934-35; industrial output up 61 percent, imports 130 percent, exports 77 percent, electricity consumption 335 percent in 1932-35) kept Arab wages low and Jewish workers unwilling to take poorly paid grove, port and railway jobs.

• Chapter 5, “Arab Workers, the Histadrut, and the Paws” [as printed] and “The Nesher Quarry Workers” (lines 2361-2405): the July 1932 Khayyat case — 150 IPC-installation and Customs Office building workers on a twelve-and-a-half-hour day, whose stonecutters struck ineffectively on PAWS advice and whose scaffold erectors then turned, through their one Jewish coworker, to the Haifa Workers’ Council — is Lockman’s occasion to reject the “gullible dupes” characterisation: Arab workers, aware of the Histadrut’s Zionist commitments, exercised agency in seeking help from any quarter, including Zionists and colonial officials, in their grossly unequal battle with employers, and “manipulation”/“collaboration” labels embedded in nationalist discourse are inadequate. The PAWS, willing to cooperate with the Histadrut as Jewish workers’ representative but adamantly rejecting its right to recruit or represent Arab workers, countered the PLL’s institutional advantages by allying with prominent lawyers, above all its legal counselor Hanna ‘Asfur; Lockman notes such lawyers (al-Dajani, Fakhri al-Nashashibi) did sometimes use the labour movement for political ambition, but rank-and-file workers and PAWS leaders could “use” them in return, while the PAWS wielded the potent weapon of the Histadrut’s Zionism and Hebrew labor. PLL episodes followed: the seven Haifa bakery workers’ failed strike (eighty/eighty-five-hour week; the owner backed by Haifa’s German community) and short-lived cooperative bakery; the General Workers’ Club’s reopening in October 1932, its reading room excluding the Palestinian Arab press as likely “only to poison the minds of the [Arab] workers”; a Vacuum Oil cell and Jaffa/Tel Aviv contacts. At the Nesher Cement Factory quarry — factory Jews at 30-35 piastres for eight hours, contractor Musbah al-Shaqifi’s Arabs at 8-12 piastres for twelve or thirteen hours, in company shacks, bound to the contractor’s store — some 150 quarry workers struck at the end of September 1932 and, strikingly, asked the Nesher-Yagur Workers’ Council, which in principle opposed their employment, to negotiate for them; with Histadrut pickets and village outreach they won after eighteen days a nine-hour day, 12.5 piastres rising to a promised 15, freedom from the company store, and an elected committee, forming a Histadrut-allied organisation of some 140. Al-Shaqifi then reneged, hired new PAWS-member workers and favoured them against the PLL veterans, and in April 1933 locked out the 130 PLL workers; despite the seventy Jewish factory workers’ refusal to handle strikebreaker-supplied materials and six weeks of struggle, British-official arbitration restored almost all strikers and some economic demands but did not require recognition of the PLL, and harassment, firings and PAWS pressure destroyed the PLL’s Nesher base within months — the PCP had demanded an independent strike committee and equalised wages, Smol that the Histadrut fight for conditions, not only reinstatement. The PAWS fared little better: its January-March 1936 strikes of the 325 quarry workers against the same contractor (16 piastres, an eight-hour day, an end to heavy fines, the right to live with their families) ended inconclusively against al-Shaqifi’s dishonoured agreements.

• Chapter 5, “The PLL in Haifa”, the moshavot strikes and the August 1934 council (lines 2406-2450): Lockman analyses the PLL’s failure to consolidate — short-lived nuclei (Shell Oil barrel makers, Acre, Nazareth), PAWS rivalry sometimes allied with Arab employers, the Arab workforce’s character (recent, largely illiterate, village-tied, seasonal, high-turnover recruits; cheap unskilled labour abundant; skilled workers in good times simply quitting oppressive employers), and above all the Histadrut’s low priority: minuscule resources, “in effect, Agassi was the PLL”, a purely reactive stance waiting to be approached by already-striking groups. Smol warned in March 1933: “With us, if we bring them into our camp as equals; without us and against us, if we stand apart or become an obstacle to their organization”; the PCP charged the PLL existed to give the conquest of labour “an internationalist cover”; Hashomer Hatza’ir attacked both Smol and MAPAI. By spring 1933 Arab-work funds were exhausted, Burla had left, Hushi was threatening to quit the work, and through 1934 the PLL claimed no more than 200 members around Haifa. In June 1934 some 250 Arab citrus workers (Palestinians, Egyptians and Hawranis) struck at Nes Tziyona for 12 to 17 piastres, with similar moshavot strikes following; Smol contacted the strikers first, the Histadrut dispatched Agassi, then — fearing support would concede Arabs’ right to Jewish-sector employment, while opposition would damage it — ambivalently endorsed the strike without implementing its leaflet and strike-fund decisions; the strike petered out in a week, some workers winning increases, and its workers’ own organisation thereafter alternately approached the Histadrut and nationalist-linked Arab organisations. At the August 1934 Histadrut council Dov Hoz, for the MAPAI majority, warned against “activity of a missionary character”, claimed most Nes Tziyona strikers were outside migrants threatening Palestinian Arabs as well as Hebrew labor, and put Hebrew labor first; Hashomer Hatza’ir proposed protecting and organising “permanent” Arab workers (Palestinian, two years in one place); Smol ridiculed the permanent/temporary distinction and demanded a Histadrut open to all workers including Hawranis. The council declared Arab work would be intensified (and only the Histadrut might organise Arabs) without committing to the moshavot; the September 1934 Arab affairs committee (Hoz, Hushi, David Hacohen, Nata’ Harpaz, Reuven Zaslani, and Ya’akov Riftin as its sole Hashomer Hatza’ir member, Smol excluded) rejected Riftin’s proposal to organise permanent agricultural workers into the PLL — Hacohen: in the moshavot “I am fighting for my life against the Arab worker” — settling Arab work’s strictly urban focus.

• Chapter 5, “The Dockworkers of Jaffa” and “Labor Organizing and Intelligence Work” (lines 2431-2456): the PLL’s arena shifted to Jaffa via a defeated Greek-owned leather factory strike and a returning Egyptian stevedore’s contacts. Jaffa’s stevedores (up to eighteen-hour days in the citrus season) and lightermen (paid a manipulable share of boat receipts) sought higher wages, overtime and income control, and protection against Hawrani and Egyptian low-wage competition through local preference — a goal the Histadrut shared, since excluding migrants kept Palestine’s wages high and facilitated Hebrew labor; only Smol extended internationalism to the migrants, while MAPAI and Hashomer Hatza’ir agreed they should be displaced, barred and expelled, the Histadrut meanwhile tending to exaggerate “infiltration” and to declare Arabs at targeted sites non-Palestinians to justify displacement — even as MAPAI doctrine denied Palestinian Arabs a distinct nationality. The PLL’s Jaffa club, Kupat Holim clinic, loan fund and especially injury-compensation legal actions built its reputation; it claimed about one hundred stevedore members by fall 1934, though seasonality forced annual re-establishment, and officials envisioned becoming “the rulers in the port of Jaffa”. Agassi’s 1934 contacts extended to Maspero cigarette workers and to al-Majdal’s weavers (about 1,000 men and 500 women under some sixty loom owners; their August 1933 strike won the men’s one-piastre-a-day demand at the price of abandoning the women; a delegation seeking the Histadrut reached Smol instead, possibly misled that Smol activists were Histadrut officials), but only a cooperative was offered and contact was lost. To coordinate the quickening Jaffa work the Histadrut hired Reuven Zaslani (later Reuven Shilo’ah) — Jerusalem-born 1909, Hagana member, Hebrew University Oriental studies student who never finished his degree, sent at not yet twenty-two to Baghdad as a teacher-cover for underground Zionist youth organising and Jewish Agency propaganda and intelligence work under Shertok (1931-32), then translator-secretary to the RAF intelligence chief in Palestine as the link between British intelligence and the Hagana, again dispatched to Iraq in May 1934 ostensibly as a journalist (surveying northern Iraqi Jewish communities; Lockman discerns an early instance of the later Zionist/Israeli strategy of alliances with minorities disaffected from Arab nationalist forces) and expelled by the Iraqi authorities in July 1934, whereupon he became coordinator of the Hagana’s Arab intelligence and simultaneously secretary of the Histadrut’s Arab Department. His double life as labour organiser and intelligence operative is “symptomatic of the contradiction at the heart of labor Zionism’s policy and practice toward Arab workers”; his later career was entirely in intelligence, organising and presiding over Israel’s intelligence and security agencies under the name Shilo’ah until his death in 1959.

• Chapter 5, “Arab Workers and Hebrew Labor In Jaffa” [as printed], “The Jaffa Dockworkers and the PLL” (lines 2457-2495): the PLL’s Jaffa successes alarmed Arab unionists, and in summer 1934 Fakhri al-Nashashibi — nephew and assistant of Raghib, amid the Arab Executive’s collapse, rival elite parties’ formation (the National Defense Party, December 1934) and Raghib’s failed Jerusalem reelection — proclaimed the Arab Workers’ Society (AWS) in Jerusalem (end of July 1934), opening branches at Bayt Dajan (August) and in Jaffa under Michel Mitri (October), backed by the pro-Nashashibi Filastin. The AWS seized on the Histadrut’s 1934 urban Hebrew labor campaign — mobile picket bands sometimes forcibly expelling Arab workers, clashes, police called by employers, fights between Jewish pickets and police, and a “buy Jewish” boycott propaganda depicting Arab workers as “cheap”, “unorganized” and “alien” — which achieved only limited success amid prosperity but greatly inflamed relations; Fakhri demanded British action against the pickets, called for Arab pickets and boycotts, and staged the December 1934 “first Arab picket” (in reality a protest march in Jerusalem). At the Majdal Yaba (Migdal Tzedek) quarry — some thirty local and 400 other Arab workers supplying Tel Aviv’s building boom — the Tel Aviv Workers’ Council (insisting the workers were “bedouins” or Hawranis) agreed with the operators a “Hebrew stone” plan to build inventory, send the Arabs home on a pretext and replace them with Jews; the Jaffa AWS, tipped off possibly by Jewish communist sources, warned the workers, who held the site for seventeen days until management agreed to retain all the Arabs. In Jaffa the MAPAI organisers confronted Hebrew labor head-on: at the November 1934 PLL club meeting the invited PAWS Jaffa secretary denounced the Histadrut for stealing Arab jobs and cited Haifa harbour’s “disaster”; Zaslani and Agassi demanded proof rather than addressing the charges, but after he left the stevedores themselves pressed for an explicit promise that the Histadrut would not bring Jewish workers into Jaffa harbour — which could not be given, facilitating Hebrew labor there being one of the PLL’s chief purposes — and settled for a vague promise protecting permanently employed workers plus a guarantee of their union’s independence within the PLL. The claim that the organisation had been “strengthened and inoculated” proved overconfident: AWS and PAWS leafleting, Ibrahim al-Sawi’s alleged dictatorial behaviour, the stevedores’ refusal to sign the PLL branch’s registration application or to mention the PLL/Histadrut in their January 1935 contractors’ letter. Lockman reads the stevedores as neither docile (the labour-Zionist depiction) nor duped (the nationalist one): aware of the rivalry, of contractors’ retaliation against identified union members, and of Hebrew labor’s implications, they cooperated on their own terms. Port Manager L. K. Pope opposed an eight-hour day for Arab labour (“more contented and happier when they work”) and chaired the committee that found the stevedores had no serious grievances; after the failed end-of-February 1935 port-development strike (Michel Mitri negotiating), contractors, with British officials’ support or acquiescence, broke the union by denying work to members — fourteen dockworkers dismissed by Mahmud al-Qumbarji petitioned in June 1935 — and the October 1935 discovery of Hagana arms smuggled in a cement barrel at Jaffa destroyed most remaining PLL links; by the end of 1935 almost all stevedores and lightermen had left the PLL for Arab unions’ orbit, and the Jaffa dockworkers joined the April 1936 general strike en masse.

• Chapter 5, “The “Even Vesid” Affair and the IPC Strike” (lines 2491-2518): Hushi complained at the end of 1934 of the Histadrut’s passivity and hostility to Arab work (“Some 1500 Arab workers have passed through the club and only a very small number of them remain today”) and both he and Agassi urged targeting specific work sites; David Hacohen proposed transforming the PLL into a labour contracting agency — a Histadrut company bidding on public works and employing only PLL Arabs, also supplying Arab workers to Jewish urban enterprises — a conception many Arab workers already held of the PLL as an employment agency. The Even Vesid quarry and kiln near Haifa, jointly owned since 1929 by the Histadrut’s Contracting Office and Arab businessman Tahir Qaraman and employing Arabs and Jews in roughly equal numbers at grossly unequal wages (Arabs 12 piastres a day, Jews 25 for more or less the same work), exposed the contradiction: when its Arab workers struck in April 1935 (minimum 15 piastres, eight-hour day, weekly rest day, a disliked foreman’s removal) the PAWS led the strike, the Histadrut denounced it as politically motivated and kept the quarry running with Jewish workers and PLL-recruited Arab strikebreakers, and in the end an embarrassed Histadrut backed down and granted a wage increase; Hashomer Hatza’ir excoriated the leadership, Hacohen admitted Even Vesid’s profitability and its Jewish jobs depended on cheap Arab labor, a Hebrew-labor-only Jewish quarry owner demanded “buy Jewish” protection from its competition, and Lockman concludes such PLL-supplied Arab labor in Jewish enterprises risked obstructing MAPAI’s long-term goal of total Hebrew labor in them. The Iraq Petroleum Company strike — erupting February 22, 1935 after announced layoffs and wage cuts, spreading within a week from some 150 skilled workers to some 600 of the IPC’s 800, almost all Arabs, demanding rescission of the cuts, a 15-piastre minimum, an eight-hour day and six-day week and overtime pay — saw PAWS-Histadrut cooperation at its height: the PAWS had most workers’ support with ‘Asfur negotiating, the PLL represented some one hundred organised IPC drivers, management’s attempt to exclude Agassi from talks was refused by the PAWS leaders, and the Histadrut backed the strike and its fund; but as PAWS leaders (representing mainly skilled workers) felt their demands largely met and grew suspicious the Histadrut sought control via the drivers and the strike fund, Fakhri al-Nashashibi intervened, largely ignoring the PAWS, secretly negotiated, and persuaded the committee to accept an agreement in trust in the company’s “good intentions”; most returned March 11. The Histadrut denounced him as a sell-out who had agreed to what amounted to a company union, the communists held Agassi, Hushi and the Histadrut equally responsible for “betraying” the IPC workers, Filastin hailed the outcome, and in following months the IPC reneged on many promises and largely destroyed the PAWS’ organisation among its workers. The “great” IPC strike, though only a partial victory, strongly impacted Arab workers across Palestine and was seen by many contemporary Arab and Jewish observers as marking a new stage in the emergence of a class-conscious Arab working class.

• Chapter 5, “The Gathering Storm” and conclusion (lines 2519-2548, chapter main text ends): the PLL lapsed into virtual quiescence — Arab Committee unmet from May 1935 to February 1936, its plan unimplemented, the Arab Department too poor even for Arabic propaganda — chiefly because of the radicalising political climate: the Yishuv’s rapid growth making a Jewish majority and statehood seem feasible, land purchases making dispossession palpable, the Hagana arms discovery confirming fears of seizure by force, pro-Zionist-perceived government policies, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and Germany’s Rhineland reoccupation underscoring British weakness, and the 1935 end of prosperity — rising Arab unemployment, Haifa and Jaffa shantytowns whose destitute residents were a constituency for Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, whose guerrilla band took to the hills in 1935 and who was killed by police near Jenin in November 1935, his funeral dramatically raising pressure on the elite politicians; Egypt’s November 1935 demonstrations and the Wafd’s return, and Syria’s fifty-day January 1936 general strike forcing negotiations toward independence, inspired younger Palestinian activists to emulate them. The Histadrut nonetheless escalated its Hebrew labor campaign as Yishuv unemployment rose, provoking an unprecedentedly militant response led by the Jaffa AWS under Michel Mitri — who had taken over after Fakhri lost interest in 1935, built a claimed 4,700 members, cooperated with Istiqlal’s left wing and even Arab communists, and refused the Histadrut’s September 1935 offer of organising experience and funds conditional on distancing himself from the nationalist movement. Mitri’s December 1935 letter to the Jaffa District Commissioner stated the demonstration’s purposes as “to ask for the relief of unemployment, to protest against Jewish picketing, the Judaization of the Port and the policy of immigration according to the absorptive capacity of the country”; after the march was prohibited, the AWS convened a national Arab trade unionists’ conference in Jaffa and in February 1936, turning the Histadrut’s own arguments on it, campaigned against the award of three Jaffa schools’ construction to the Histadrut’s Contracting Office, then picketed the sites with the Histadrut’s own tactics — the government eventually requiring 50 percent of the jobs for Arabs (though not 50 percent of the wage bill), Mitri demanding 100 percent Arab labor and a spring 1936 leaflet calling for mass picketing “until the jails are full of [Arab] workers” with designated alternative leaders. At Majdal Yaba management, with the Histadrut’s blessing — its secretariat approving wholesale dismissal without consulting its own Arab Department — again tried to replace all Arabs with Jews, and the workers’ vigorous response again frustrated the offensive; Riftin’s April 1, 1936 article saw only missed opportunities, MAPAI having given Mitri his weapon by insisting on total Hebrew labor, and warned of difficult times with al-Qassam’s “heroic struggle” legend growing. On April 10, 1936 representatives of the Arab labor movement’s various segments gathered in Haifa to lay the foundations of an all-Palestine Arab labor federation — ‘Abd al-Hamid Haymur and Sami Taha for the PAWS, Mitri and George Mansour for the AWS, Khalil Shanir for the PCP, Hamdi al-Husayni and Akram Zu’aytar for the radical Istiqlalists — manifesting the convergence of the fledgling Arab trade union movement with the nationalist movement’s most radical segment and the Arab communists. Lockman’s conclusion: accounts depicting April 1936’s outbreak as entirely spontaneous and unexpected are inadequate; the uprising had antecedents in the worker militancy the AWS campaign both built on and stimulated, which linked worker grievances to the national question, itself fuelled by al-Qassam’s resort to arms and by shantytown poverty and despair. The strike and revolt would paradoxically paralyse the Arab labor movement, let Hebrew labor achieve unprecedented gains, and undermine the PLL’s prospects, while the revolt’s defeat helped determine the struggle for Palestine’s ultimate outcome a decade later.

• Chapter 5 notes (lines 2550-2724, notes 1-44 of the chapter, by order in the text copy, which gives them unnumbered): note 1 quotes Shapira, Hama’avak, 72; note 2 is the December 12, 1929 EC/H letter (CZA, S25/2961); note 4 explains ‘avoda ‘aravit — racist Hebrew slang for shoddy work, but in labour-Zionist usage simply activity among Arabs to organise them under Histadrut tutelage; note 5 records the conservative Muslim al-Sirat al-mustaqim’s allegation that the January 1930 PAWS congress was a Zionist plot and the PAWS leaders’ insistence in Filastin that they were strongly anti-Zionist; note 7 records that in 1944 Nassar refused a paid Histadrut Arab Department post, preferring to remain a worker; note 9 (long) gives Samuel Hugo Bergman’s controversy with Moshe Erem within Ahavat Po’alim — “To use joint organization in order to realize the political aspirations of one people means destroying any possibility of joint organization” — Bergman arguing Jewish immigration weakened one people’s political power while strengthening the other’s, that Arab workers would naturally ally with the Arab bourgeoisie, and that only a purely economic basis, free of politics, could ground joint organisation, which Lockman calls also a delusion; note 13 contrasts Domb’s and Ramras-Rauch’s accounts of Burla’s post-1948 posts (kept in Open questions); note 18 cites al-Khalili on drivers in Arab popular culture and Grinberg’s unpublished seminar paper on the 1931 drivers’ strike organisation, with which Lockman does not entirely agree; note 20 adds that motor transport, though it hurt Palestine Railways revenues, gave the mandatory government a substantial new revenue source exceeding road expenditure; note 28 records the al-Dajani family’s earlier secretly sought Zionist support (the 1922-23 “National Muslim Society” funding and the 1923 Palestinian Arab Nationalist Party); note 29 is the May 24, 1972 oral interview with Shraga Goren (Gorokhovsky); note 35 is the dictionary source for “hawrani”; note 36 cites the March 22, 1932 meeting of Histadrut leaders with the High Commissioner and the TUC archives; notes 37-38 cite Lina Dar’s study of the 1932 Haifa port joint-organisation attempt; note 40 records the Agassi interviews (May 6, 1987; February 22, 1972) and that Agassi worked in the Arab Department until the 1960s, then set up and directed its Arabic-language publishing house, retiring in 1975; note 43 records Ben-Tzvi’s frustrated 1914 Salonika recruitment trip and the few Salonika port workers who arrived around 1922; note 44 cites Dar and Taqqu. Chapter 5’s remaining notes (from note 45) fall in part 7.

Key passages

• “the Zionist movement and the Jewish society it helped create in Palestine were shaped in crucial ways by their interactions with the Arab society they encountered “on the ground” in Palestine itself” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 230-232).

• The dual society model “posits the existence in mandatory Palestine of two essentially separate societies with distinct and disconnected historical trajectories” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 254-256).

• Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, as quoted by Lockman: “the Palestine of 1948 was a very different Palestine from that of 1917 and the difference is not solely the result of the impact of either imperialist or Zionist” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 280).

• Max Nordau, as Lockman reports the perhaps apocryphal episode: “But then we are committing an injustice!” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 434-436).

• Herzl, in The Jewish State as quoted by Lockman: the future Jewish state in Palestine would form “a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 470-472).

• Ber Borokhov, as quoted by Lockman: “The natives of Eretz Yisra’el have no independent economic or cultural character” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 514-516).

• Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, The Arab Movement (1921), as quoted by Lockman: “there is as yet no place for a single Arab national movement among all the inhabitants of Eretz Yisra’el” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 824-826).

• Eliezer Shohat, at the Histadrut executive committee, December 30, 1920, as quoted by Lockman: “From the humanitarian standpoint, it is clear that we must organize them” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 864-866).

• David Ben-Gurion, to the Histadrut council, January 1922, as quoted by Lockman: “the creation of a single common front for all the country’s workers to deal with their common affairs is the obligation and right of the pioneers of labor culture in Palestine—it is the mission of the Jewish workers” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 896-898).

• David Ben-Gurion, at Ein Harod, May 1924, as quoted by Lockman: “The fate of the Jewish worker is linked with the fate of the Arab worker. Together we will rise, or together we will fall” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 922).

• Al-Karmil, during the October 1925 strike, as quoted by Lockman: “We fear,” al-Karmil declared, “that the purpose of inducing the Arab workers to strike is (1) to incite them to rebellion; (2) to cause a disturbance in the business activity of Arab enterprises; (3) to raise prices so that it will be easier for Jewish goods to combat and compete with the Arabs and take jobs from them” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 998).

• George Nassar, to Ben-Gurion, December 1925, as quoted by Lockman: “We cannot be your slaves,” he told the Histadrut leader. “We want to be members and subject to [Histadrut] discipline” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 1022).

• Ahmad Hamdi, greeting the Histadrut’s third congress, July 1927, as quoted by Lockman: “Such separate organizations are dangerous. Let not [distinctions between] East and West, Zionism and Arabism, Torah and Qur’an, cause divisions among us” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 1058).

• The Histadrut third congress resolution, as quoted by Lockman: “the basis for common action is recognition of the essential value and rights of Jewish immigration to Palestine” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 1068).

• Ilyas Asad, to the URPTW council, March 1924, as quoted by Lockman: “I ask all the comrades to remove the word “Jewish,” and I am sure that if they agree there will be a strong bond between us and all the Arabs will join” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1456-1458).

• R. B. W. Holmes, General Manager of the Palestine Railways, to dismissed workers’ representatives, January 27, 1923, as quoted by Lockman: “you are, therefore, in a better position than your brother workers whose habitation has always been Palestine and who have no Society to look after their welfare” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1436-1438).

• Moshe Ungerfeld, to the URPTW central committee, 1924, as quoted by Lockman: “There is a sickness among you and you do not know how to cure it, so you look for others to blame” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 1484).

• The URPTW central committee circular, October 1924, as quoted by Lockman: “Now that we are confronted with the living fact of our union being truly international, it is impossible for it to be part of a General Organization of Hebrew Workers” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 1504).

• The Jewish central committee members, to Hasanayn Fahmi, November 1924, as quoted by Lockman: “Just as we do not ask you who you are, to which party you belong, what are your political opinions, so you have no right to ask us about these things.…” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 1516).

• Avraham Khalfon, in his January 29, 1976 interview, as quoted by Lockman: “Because if I had translated what he said, I was sure that 90 percent of the Arabs would have fled” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1526-1528).

• “a railway worker”, in the PCP’s Haifa, January 1925, as quoted by Lockman: “By withdrawing from the union we strengthen the position of the Zionists within it” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 1544).

• The PAWS leaflet, fall 1928, as quoted by Lockman: “Our extensive experience in joint work with the leadership of the NURPTW has made it clear to us that this leadership is not interested in unity between Arab and Jewish workers, because of its Zionist character” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1876-1878).

• Moshe Shertok, to the Palestine Royal Commission, December 29, 1936, as quoted by Lockman: “we mobilised a few dozen Jewish engine drivers whom we placed at the disposal of the Government and they were ready to step into the breach” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1950-1952).

• Efrayyim Schvartzman, in his March 20, 1972 interview, as quoted by Lockman: “Even during the disturbances there were numerous instances of Arab railway workers saving Jews many times from very difficult situations” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1962-1964).

• Yehuda Burla, to the Jewish Agency, January 1931, as quoted by Lockman: “If we do not see what is coming and take the initiative, others will appear and organize the [Arab] masses against us, in order to make us fail” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 2262-2264).

• Filastin, editorial of September 18, 1931, as quoted by Lockman: “anyone who has cooperated with the deceiving Zionists to give it up and instead strive to form an Arab association in which no non-Arab has any role, and God will forgive what has gone before” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 2286).

• David Ben-Gurion, to the Histadrut executive committee after the April 1932 lightermen’s strike, as quoted by Lockman: “From what the comrades in Haifa have told me, some fifty Jewish workers may be able to get work at the harbor, and thereby help the Arab workers who are there” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 2335).

• The Palestine Communist Party, on the PLL, as quoted by Lockman: “The purpose of the PLL, which has been resurrected in Haifa, as well as of the International Union of Railway Workers, is to organize a certain portion of Arab workers in an organization whose function is to provide the Histadrut’s efforts at conquest [of labor] an internationalist cover” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 2409).

• L. K. Pope, Port Manager at Jaffa, to the Director of Customs, Excise and Trade, as quoted by Lockman: “I am not in favour of an 8 hour working day for Arab labour. Such labourers are in actual fact more contented and happier when they work than they would be were a considerable portion of their waking hours to be spent lounging in the Cafés and markets of the Town” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 2485).

• Michel Mitri, to the District Commissioner of Jaffa, December 1935, as quoted by Lockman: “to ask for the relief of unemployment, to protest against Jewish picketing, the Judaization of the Port and the policy of immigration according to the absorptive capacity of the country” (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 2531).

Evidence the work relies on

• For the range read, the Introduction’s historiographical evidence: Eisenstadt, Israeli Society (1967); Horowitz and Lissak, Origins of the Israeli Polity (1978); Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy in Israel (1992); Asad (1975); Ehrlich (1987); Abu-Lughod, “The Perils of Palestiniology” (1981); and the relational literature surveyed in Introduction note 11, credited author by author in the Section by section entry above (lines 242-395).

• The book’s wider evidentiary base as stated in the Acknowledgments and Abbreviations: Histadrut archives (Lavon Institute), Hashomer Hatza’ir archives, Central Zionist Archives, Israel State Archives, Colonial Office and Foreign Office papers, Trades Union Congress archives, interviews with veterans of the struggles discussed, and Arabic- and Hebrew-language sources (lines 58-223; 312-320).

• Chapter 1’s figures for Jewish emigration from eastern Europe, 1881 to the First World War (approximately 2.4 million; 85 percent to the United States, 12 percent elsewhere, less than 3 percent to Palestine), and for the moshavot by 1900 (twenty-two, about 5,000 people), are given by Lockman with Chapter 1 notes 1 and the text at lines 418-422; the notes for this part of Chapter 1 fall in part 2’s range.

• Chapter 1’s evidence in the part 2 range is chiefly the primary texts read closely: Herzl’s diaries (entries of June 12, 1895, and October 9 and 29, 1898) and The Jewish State and Altneuland; the 1899 al-Khalidi–Herzl exchange (in Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, and Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest); Ahad Ha’am’s 1891 and 1911 articles; Syrkin’s “The Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State” and Borokhov’s “The National Question and the Class Struggle” and “Our Platform” in their Ketavim; the World Union of Po’alei Tziyon’s 1911 congress resolution; and Ben-Tzvi’s 1912 essay (as “Avner” in Ha’ahdut) — all as cited in Chapter 1 notes 9-37 (lines 636-754).

• Chapter 2’s evidence in the range read: Ben-Tzvi’s The Arab Movement (1921), read closely at lines 796-836; the Histadrut’s founding-congress and executive-committee record (December 1920), including the SWP’s counter-proposals and the December 30, 1920 railway discussion (lines 838-868); Ben-Gurion’s August 1921 theses, his January 1922 Histadrut council statement and his 1924 railway-union speech (lines 884-904); and the census figures for Arab urban growth between 1922 and 1931 (Arab population up some 40 percent; Jaffa’s up 63 percent, from 27,429 to 44,638; Haifa’s up 87 percent, from 18,240 to 34,148) and for the Histadrut’s founding electorate (less than 4,500 voters of some 80,000 Jews) at lines 842 and 874-876. The full citations of Chapter 2’s notes 1-20 fall after the chapter and are recorded when that range is read.

• Chapter 2’s evidence in the part 3 range is chiefly the labour-Zionist record read closely: the Ein Harod congress record (Ahdut Ha’avoda, Have’ida harevi’it, 1924, and Kuntres no. 172, Chapter 2 note 21), Histadrut executive and secretariat minutes (EC/H and S/EC/H, 1921-29), the Histadrut’s 1927 report to its third congress (pp. 155-158), Ben-Gurion’s Anahnu veshkheineinu (1931), the AA interview with Avraham Khalfon (January 29, 1976), and the Arabic press — Al-Karmil (October 10 and 21, 1925), Ittihad al-‘Ummal (October 21, 1925) and Filastin (June 4, 1926; August 19, 1927) — together with the Survey of Palestine figures and the 1928 wages commission levels (lines 912-1362 and notes).

• Chapter 4’s evidence is the same union and Histadrut record extended to 1939 (AA files 237/21, 237/24, 208/280, 208/576, 208/815, 237/26; EC/H and S/EC/H minutes, 1925-39), the Arabic press (Filastin, June 4, 1926, and February-June 1930-35; al-Karmil, October 21, 1925), the AURW’s March 1936 Bayan ‘Amm, the Palestine Railways general manager’s reports for the years ended December 31, 1931, and March 31, 1933, 1934 and 1935, the Royal Commission Minutes of Evidence (1937), 219, the Palestine Railways Report for the year ending March 31, 1939 (ISA, R/16/39), Colonial Office and Foreign Office files (CO 733; FO 371/18957 CID reports, 1935), and oral interviews with Yehezkel Abramov (May 14, 1987), Efrayyim Schvartzman (March 20, 1972) and Efrayyim Krisher (May 13, 1987) — all as cited in Chapter 4 notes 1-60 (lines 1994-2242). Chapter 5’s opening evidence (lines 2244-2270) is the MAPAI platform and December 1929 Histadrut letter as quoted, the PAWS’s own congress account Mu’tamar al-‘ummal al-‘arab al-awwal (Haifa, 1930) (Chapter 4 note 27) and the Histadrut council and Arab Department record; Chapter 5’s notes fall after the chapter and are recorded when that range is read.

• Chapter 5’s evidence in the part 6 range is the Histadrut and Jewish Agency record (AA files 208/320alef, 208/320bet, 208/321, 425/13, 490/4, 490/5; CZA files S25/2961, S25/3120, S25/10.664, S9/1679; EC/H and EC/KA minutes, 1929-35; the Histadrut council minutes of May 24-26, 1930, and August 1934), the Arabic and Hebrew press (Filastin, June-November 1931 and 1934-36; Davar, December 13, 1932; Hashomer Hatza’ir, June 1932), Colonial Office files (CO 733/206/8; CO 733/161/6, 165/2), Kisch’s Palestine Diary, the oral interviews with Shraga Goren (May 24, 1972) and Eliyahu Agassi (February 22, 1972, and May 6, 1987), and the secondary literature cited in Chapter 5 notes 1-44 — Lesch, Porath, Biger, Dar, Taqqu, Shapira, Zait, al-Khalili and Grinberg’s unpublished seminar paper — all as cited in lines 2271-2724 and Chapter 5 notes 1-44.

• Chapter 3’s evidence is the union and Histadrut record (AA files 104/25alef, 208/14alef, 237/1, 237/9; EC/H and S/EC/H minutes, 1920-25; the congress reports in Kuntres nos. 65, 66, 114, 135, 142, 165, 192, 194, 202, 203, 213; the Histadrut’s 1927 report, pp. 64, 155), the Palestine Railways general manager’s report for 1942/43–1945/46 (1946), 147, the AA oral-documentation interviews with Yehezkel Abramov (April 9, 1972) and Avraham Khalfon (January 29, 1976) and the oral interview with Abramov of May 14, 1987, Bulus Farah’s memoir Min al-‘uthmaniyya ila al-dawla al-‘ibriyya (1985), 40–46, and the Arabic press and party publications — the PCP’s Haifa (nos. 4, 6, 15, 16, 1924-25), al-Nafir, Hakatar/al-Qatar (January 1924) and the PCP pamphlet al-Shihab al-sati’ (early 1925) — all as cited in Chapter 3 notes 1-61 (lines 1363-1816).

Analysis

• Method, for the range read: relational history applied to workers and discourse together — structural economic relations (labour and land markets) and the representations through which actors understood and justified their identities and actions are treated as simultaneously discursive and material. The narrative is offered as a counternarrative complementing, not replacing, elite-political narratives.

• Limits Lockman himself states for the range read: the relational approach risks losing each community’s specificity and subsuming Palestinian history in a Zionist narrative (Abu-Lughod’s warning); and the source base is asymmetric — Palestinian Arab archives were largely lost or destroyed in 1947–49 while Zionist archives survived — so the book devotes more space to left-Zionist thought and practice than to Arab labour activists, an imbalance further research may alleviate but is unlikely to rectify completely (lines 276-280, 312-320).

• The argument of Chapter 1 as begun: Zionism must be disaggregated, understood as a modern nationalism that was necessarily also a colonising/settlement movement, and its representations of Palestine’s Arabs understood within contemporary European colonial discourse rather than as simple ignorance (lines 422-454).

• Chapter 1 as completed (part 2): the representation is shown at work across the movement’s range — Herzl, Syrkin (for whom the Arabs are simply absent), and Borokhov (whose Marxist system required their nonexistence as a nation) — and its dissenters (Ahad Ha’am, Epstein) were marginal, which Lockman takes to show a way of knowing serving the project’s needs rather than a remediable lack of information. The chapter’s second movement is material and relational: labour Zionism’s defining practices (Hebrew labor, the separate high-wage sector, constructivism, Histadrut hegemony) are explained not by the founders’ imported ideology but by the encounter with Arab labour and Arab society in Palestine itself, underwritten in the end by British colonial power (lines 455-601).

• Chapter 2 as begun (part 2): mandate-era labour-Zionist discourse is reconstructed from its own programmatic texts (Ben-Tzvi 1921, Ben-Gurion 1921-24, the Histadrut’s founding debates) and read against the movement’s practice; Lockman’s method holds the two together — the denial of a Palestinian people and the joint-organization policy are presented as two faces of one strategy, in which Arab workers were cast as allies on condition the alliance served Zionism first (lines 790-908).

• Chapter 2 as completed (part 3): the chapter’s arc is from mission to neglect — the Arab working class first cast as the deus ex machina that would reconcile Zionism with democracy and self-determination, then, as the exclusively Jewish enclave grew strong enough to stand as its own rationale, written out of the redemption script, the 1927 resolution reversing the earlier equation. Lockman’s method keeps Arab actors inside the account as agents, not objects: the Nesher Egyptians’ solidarity and deportation, the Haifa carpenters’ and tailors’ own strike pressure, Nassar’s and Hamdi’s admission demands, and the nationalist press’s counter-mobilisation all shape what labour Zionism could and could not do, and the August 1929 violence is presented as the shock that forced even Ben-Gurion to concede the national movement’s depth (lines 909-1362).

• Chapter 4 (part 5) extends the test across fourteen years: the same structural contradiction — a Jewish-led union that needed Arab cooperation to win improvements while prioritising Hebrew labor and Histadrut affiliation — recurs in each cycle of joint committees (1927-28, 1934-36), and Lockman’s account credits both leaderships’ stated reasons and the rank and file’s repeated pressure for unity, while judging particular accusations against the record (the PAWS’ 1928 and the AURW’s 1936 charges are each weighed, the latter found exaggerated in part but accurate in large part). The chapter’s closing analysis locates the endurance of the unity dream not in ideology but in the dense personal relations of Palestine’s oldest, largest and most stable mixed workforce, and its Hashomer Hatza’ir section shows a new left inheriting Po’alei Tziyon Smol’s solidarity advocacy from inside, not outside, the Zionist institutions (lines 1817-1992).

• Chapter 5 (part 6) completes the book’s fullest test of the tutelage strategy in practice: the PLL is judged not by its charter claims but by its record — a reactive, underfunded, single-organiser operation whose every gain (Haifa harbour, Nesher, Jaffa port) dissolved within months, because its organising purpose was inseparable from the Hebrew labor campaign it was meant to facilitate, a contradiction Arab workers themselves named in the room (the Jaffa stevedores’ demand for a promise the organisers could not give). Lockman’s agency argument is made twice, on the Khayyat building workers and on the Jaffa stevedores: cooperation with the Histadrut is read neither as the labour-Zionists’ docility nor as the nationalists’ duping or collaboration, but as workers turning rival organisations’ competition to their own ends on their own terms. The chapter’s closing move is causal and preparatory: the 1936 outbreak is given antecedents in the AWS’s campaign, al-Qassam’s movement and shantytown poverty, against accounts of pure spontaneity, and the revolt’s paradoxical consequences — Arab labour paralysis, Hebrew labor gains, the PLL’s undermining — are stated before Chapter 6 treats the revolt itself (lines 2271-2548).

• Chapter 3 (part 4) tests Chapter 2’s discourse against a single workplace’s record: the method is close reconstruction from the union’s own congress and council records, Histadrut minutes and interviews, checked against the Arabic sources (Farah’s memoir, the PCP’s Haifa, al-Nafir) precisely where the labour-Zionist sources’ own explanations — communist incitement, management divide-and-rule — are weighed and found insufficient. The chapter’s analytic centre is the charge of deception: Lockman shows the joint union resting on a tacit, differently understood non-Zionist bargain, sustained in part by evasion (the Fahmi answers) and mistranslation (Khalfon), so that its collapse is explained by the Arab actors’ own reasoning about Zionism and Hebrew labor rather than by manipulation — the relational method applied at workshop scale (lines 1363-1816).

People, organizations, places and events

Zachary Lockman, Theodor Herzl, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Gershon Shafir, Michael Shalev, Baruch Kimmerling, Edmond de Rothschild, Hibbat Tziyon, Palestine Railways, Histadrut, Mapai, World Zionist Organization, Ahad Ha’am, Yusuf al-Khalidi, Altneuland, Nahman Syrkin, Ber Borokhov, Po’alei Tziyon, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Ahdut Ha’avoda, Socialist Workers’ Party, David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, Hapoel Hatzair, Jewish National Fund, Kibbutz, Moshav, Po’alei Tziyon Smol, Palestine Communist Party, Palestine Arab Workers Society, Nesher Cement Factory, General Workers’ Club, Shlomo Kaplansky, Hayyim Arlosoroff, Avraham Khalfon, Philip Hassun, George Nassar, Al-Karmil, Ittihad al-‘Ummal, Filastin, Haifa, Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, Bulus Farah, Ibrahim al-Asmar, ‘Ali al-Batal, Ilyas Asad, Hasanayn Fahmi, ‘Abd al-Hamid Haymur, Sa’id Qawwas, Moshe Ungerfeld, Yehezkel Abramov, Arab Union of Railway Workers, International Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Employees in Eretz Yisra’el, ‘Id Salim Haymur, Farid Kamil, Efrayyim Krisher, Hashomer Hatza’ir, Socialist League, Iraq Petroleum Company, Moshe Sharett, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Ahavat Po’alim, Yehuda Burla, Abba Hushi, Palestine Labor League, Meir Yaari, Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani, Eliyahu Agassi, Reuven Zaslani, Fakhri al-Nashashibi, Raghib al-Nashashibi, Hanna ‘Asfur, Musbah al-Shaqifi, Arab Workers’ Society, Even Vesid, Michel Mitri, George Mansour, Sami Taha, Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Haganah, National Defence Party, Brit Shalom

Concepts

Labor Zionism, Zionism, Dual Society Paradigm, Relational History, Eretz Israel, Settler Colonialism, Conquest of Labour, Hebrew Labour, Constructivism, Joint Organization, Mission civilisatrice, New Jew, Arab Question

How it relates to other sources

• With Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir: the same author’s later critical engagement with Gershon Shafir; this book’s Introduction and Chapter 1 draw heavily on Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (1989), as Lockman states in Introduction note 11, whereas the 2012 article argues against Shafir’s periodisation and economism. The two Lockman works stand as his own earlier and later positions, both attributed.
• With Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900: Beshara Doumani is among the readers thanked in the Acknowledgments and his “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine” (1992) is cited in Introduction note 2 among the surveys of the field; both works argue against treating Palestine’s communities in isolation from their interactions and larger processes.
• With The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate: Mansour’s contemporary Arab labour account is part of the field this book reconstructs relationally; Lockman’s Introduction insists Arab workers were historical actors, not passive objects of Zionist or upper-class Arab nationalist organising.
• With Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics: Wolfe traces the Conquest of Labour to Hapo’el Hatza’ir’s 1905 resolution and the Jewish National Fund’s funding of a Jewish-only isolate; Lockman’s Chapter 1 supplies the fuller discursive and labour-market history behind the same policy — its transformation from self-proletarianisation into the replacement of Arab workers, its Ben-Tzvi rationale of 1912, and its supplementation by the Histadrut’s own high-wage sector — agreeing on the policy’s exclusionary character while grounding it in the encounter in Palestine rather than in a founding resolution alone.

Open questions

• The UC Press e-book archive site footer in the text copy is dated © 2026 against the book’s © 1996; the 2026 date is the archive site’s, as printed at the end of the text copy.
• Printed slips kept as printed: Chapter 1’s title “Zionism and Palestine before the First world War” (lower-case w) in both the table of contents (line 38) and the chapter heading (line 396, there with capital Z in “Zionism”); MAPAM expanded as “United Worker’s Party” (line 188); the Nordau exclamation episode is flagged by Lockman himself as “perhaps apocryphal” (lines 434-436).
• Emigration figures (computed from Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 418-420): 85 percent plus 12 percent plus “less than 3 percent” sum to less than 100 percent, as Lockman gives them; no reconciled total is stated in the range read.
• Chapter 1’s notes 1-45, cited in lines 396-601, were read in part 2 (lines 602-789) and their full citations are recorded in the reading notes and the Section by section entry above; this closes the part 1 open item about notes 1-8.
• Printed slip kept as printed: Chapter 1 note 24 gives “MAPAI’S leading thinker” with a capital S (line 700).
• Two different Borokhov claims are each cited to “Zionism and Territory”, Ketavim, vol. 1, 148 (Chapter 1 notes 29 and 31, lines 720 and 728), as printed; the citations stand side by side as given.
• Jews as a share of Palestine’s population are given as 10 percent in Syrkin’s pre-war text (“Jews are even today 10 percent of the population”, line 498) and as “perhaps 10 percent” for the time Ben-Tzvi wrote in 1921 (lines 820-822); the two figures belong to different dates and are kept as given, not reconciled.
• Chapter 2’s notes 1-67 were read in part 3 (lines 1090-1362) and their citations are recorded in the reading notes and the Section by section entry above; this closes the part 2 open item about notes 1-20.
• Two accounts of the Nesher strikes diverge from the events as Lockman reconstructs them, as he himself notes (Chapter 2 note 34): the official Histadrut account omits that the 1925 strike’s purpose was to prevent contracted Egyptian labour, and Studni’s account omits the second strike altogether; Studni’s accounts are also flagged in note 27 as not always reliable. The accounts are kept side by side as given.
• Ben-Tzvi’s two claims about Arab peasants are kept side by side as given: that they are ethnically mixed and not a single nation (lines 816-836), and that most were descendants of the ancient Jewish rural population who adopted their conquerors’ language, culture and religions (Chapter 2 note 2), which Lockman notes would seem to contradict the first.
• Krisher’s assertion that the Kibbutz Faction’s 1927 proposal was “basically accepted” by the third congress is recorded by Lockman as “in fact not at all the case” (Chapter 2 note 63); the assertion and the correction are kept side by side.
• Chapter 3’s membership figures are flagged by Lockman himself as “not entirely reliable”: the end-of-1924 total of some 529 Jewish and Arab members (line 1500) stands beside the union’s own claim, in Chapter 3 note 42, that about 350 Arabs had joined in the previous four months, which “seems too high”; the figures are kept as given, not reconciled.
• Two accounts of Hasanayn Fahmi’s al-Nafir letter are kept side by side: Lockman treats the letter as genuine and the Jewish central committee’s answers as evasive (lines 1516-1518), while the Po’alei Tziyon Smol publication Milhemet Hapo’el (May 1925) suggested the letter was a communist forgery and that Fahmi denied writing it — a suggestion Lockman judges unlikely, for the reasons given in Chapter 3 note 46.
• The Jewish delegate’s January 1925 remark dissociating the “proletarian Zionists” from the “bourgeois Zionists” who “plundered the Arabs” rests only on the Ahdut Ha’avoda reporter’s allegation in Kuntres no. 202; the delegate later denied he had ever said it and charged the reporter with libel before a Histadrut court (Chapter 3 note 48). The allegation and the denial are kept side by side.
• Chapter 3 note 41 records that in the Ahdut Ha’avoda-controlled Jaffa-Lydda branch a separate section was created for Arab workers recruited to the union, against the main text’s account of the union’s abandonment of national sections for a purely unitary, territorial structure (line 1494); the local exception and the general account are kept as given.
• Printed slips in the part 5 range, kept as printed: the word “entice” appears twice in the text copy as ” tice”, with its opening letters lost — “to “ tice” them away” (line 1896) and “its campaign to “ tice” Arab workers to join” (line 1932); Chapter 4 note 24 cites Edim, March 19, 1929, while note 25 cites Hedim, February 27, 1930, for what appears to be the same periodical; the British officials’ fall 1938 passage as quoted reads “arrested, beaten, or shot at” (line 1954).
• Chapter 4 note 30’s second paragraph introduces a PCP leaflet attacking the Histadrut and IU leaderships in “Third Period” language, but the leaflet’s quoted text does not appear in the text copy — after the introduction’s colon the copy passes directly to note 31 (lines 2106-2112). The gap is recorded as it stands in the copy.
• Railway-worker death figures in the revolt are kept side by side as given, without reconciliation: the main text states eight Jewish railway workers were killed in the course of the revolt (line 1952), while Chapter 4 note 52, citing the Palestine Railways Report for the year ending March 31, 1939, states that in April 1938–March 1939 alone thirteen Arab and Jewish railway workers were killed while on duty and 123 wounded, in 690 cases of attacks on railway personnel and property. The two figures differ in population (Jewish only; Arab and Jewish), period (the revolt; one reporting year) and circumstance (killed in the course of the revolt; killed while on duty), as each source presents them.
• Union membership figures in Chapter 4 are each flagged in the text as inflated or estimated, and are kept as given: the URPTW’s 1926 claim of 780 (422 Arabs) against Lockman’s safer estimate of 300–400; the IU’s beginning-of-1932 claim of 253 Arabs of 657 against the Colonial Office estimate of 300 Jewish and 210 Arab members (lines 1844, 1900).
• The 1943 Haifa workshops figure is given as “more than 1,200” relatively skilled, permanent industrial workers in Chapter 3 (line 1376) and as “some 1,200 Arab and Jewish workers” in the Introduction (lines 290-292); both are kept as given.
• Printed slips in the part 6 range, kept as printed: Zaslani was dispatched to Iraq in May 1934 “obstensibly” as a journalist (line 2453); the IPC strikers demanded the “recision” of the wage cut (line 2507); Hassun’s letter as quoted reads “on the altar of the Histadruth viz;” (line 2309).
• Chapter 5 note 13 gives two different accounts of Burla’s post-1948 posts — Domb states he directed the cultural department of Israel’s Ministry of Religious Affairs, Ramras-Rauch asserts he directed the Arab affairs department in the Ministry of Minorities — with Lockman’s suggestion that perhaps he held both posts at different times; the accounts are kept side by side.
• Lockman’s account has Michel Mitri alive and leading the Jaffa Arab Workers’ Society through the spring of 1936 and attending the April 10, 1936 Haifa gathering (lines 2528-2540), which stands against The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine’s statement that the Mufti’s group assassinated Mitri in the early 1930s; the Mansour booklet’s editors’ introduction gives his assassination by British forces in December 1936. The three accounts are kept side by side on Mitri’s page.
• The AWS’s claimed membership under Mitri — “some 4,700 members” (line 2528) — and Mitri’s claim of “more than a thousand” unemployed AWS members in December 1935 (line 2531) are the organisation’s own claims as Lockman reports them, not independently verified figures in the text.

Coverage

lines 1-2724 of 4538 read in parts 1-6 of 10. Remaining: part 7 (lines 2725-3178), part 8 (lines 3179-3632), part 9 (lines 3633-4086), part 10 (lines 4087-4538).