The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate

Summary

George Mansour, formerly Secretary of the Arab Labour Federation (Jaffa), argues — in excerpts from his 1937 booklet compiled from material submitted by the Arab Labour Organisations and based largely on his evidence to the Royal Commission — that Arab labour is at one with the rest of the Arab population in opposing Zionist immigration, because the Mandate Government is charged with establishing the Jewish National Home, the Jewish Agency crowds out Arab grievances, and the Histadrut’s Conquest of Labour — penetrating Jewish labour into every sphere of work and expelling Arab workers by picketing and pressure, as in Haifa Harbour, the Tel Aviv stone trade and the Majdal Yaba quarries — displaces Arab workers while the Government grants the Labour Schedules that make the resulting vacancies into record immigration; Mansour further rebuts, point by point, the Royal Commission’s claim on page 129 of its Report that Arab advance was largely due to the National Home, and charges that the Commission ignored the economic factors that played a tremendously important part in the disturbances of 1936 (The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, PDF p.2-16 / printed p.191-205).

What the file is

Excerpts, prepared by the editors of the journal issue, from The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate (The Commercial Press, Jerusalem, 1937), reprinted in Settler Colonial Studies 2, 1 (2012), “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine”, ISSN 1838-0743, printed p.190-205. 16 PDF pages, about 6,020 words in the text copy. PDF p.1-2 (printed p.190-191) is the journal editors’ unsigned biographical and interpretive introduction; the booklet excerpts run from PDF p.2 (printed p.191) to PDF p.16 (printed p.205) and end with an ellipsis, mid-argument, so the booklet’s conclusion is not in the file. Editorial ellipses mark cuts throughout the excerpts, and bracketed glosses and notes in the excerpts are the journal editors’ insertions. The booklet is headed “Compiled by George Mansour, formerly Secretary of the Arab Labour Federation (Jaffa), from material submitted by the Arab Labour Organisations” (PDF p.2). The text copy is clean, with page markers and printed pagination; two passages (PDF p.9, PDF p.10) are laid out word-per-line in the text copy and are read in printed order. Printed slips are recorded under Open questions, not corrected.

Section by section

• Editors’ introduction (PDF p.1-2 / printed p.190-191). The unsigned introduction gives George Mansour’s biography (b. 1905 – d. 1963): baker, then school teacher in Nazareth; family moved to Jaffa in 1927, work in trade then manufacturing; Secretary of the Arab Workers Society, a labour organisation founded in 1934; a central figure in the 1936 General Strike, writing and distributing communiques and leaflets and organising rallies, marches and pickets; arrested late 1936; after the assassination of the society’s leader Michel Mitri — attributed by the editors to British forces, December 1936 — he testified before the Royal Commission in January 1937; frustrated by the Peel Commission Report, he published the booklet, based largely on that evidence and addressed to British public opinion; appointed to the Palestine Office in London until the Second World War; on returning, unable to revive his labour work under continued harassment and repeated arrests; left for Baghdad as a teacher and organiser of popular committees in solidarity with Palestine; after the war and the Nakba, labour organising, journalism and education in Egypt, work with the Arab Higher Committee, and a move with the Committee to Beirut in 1959. The editors read the text as an account of the socio-economic implications of Zionist colonisation and Jewish immigration for the indigenous society and the labour market in particular, and as a reply both to Zionist propaganda about Arab labour consciousness and to British claims for the National Home’s benefits in health, economic development, agriculture and urbanisation.

• Introduction (PDF p.2-3 / printed p.191-192). Opens with the House of Commons Debate on Palestine of July 21st, 1937: Earl Winterton rejects the view that Arab opposition is confined to a few effendis and landlords, and answers Mr. Stephen’s “He represents nobody but himself” with “He represents the only organised Arab labour in the country” (PDF p.2). Mansour states his aims: to show why Arab labour is at one with the rest of the Arab population in opposing Zionist immigration, to call attention to the inadequacy of the Royal Commission’s treatment of Jewish and Arab labour, and to insist that economic factors played a tremendously important part in the disturbances of 1936, an aspect totally ignored by the Commission, while the fundamental issue is political (PDF p.3).

• Arab labour organisations (PDF p.3-4 / printed p.192-193). No industrial revolution or European-style labour movement in the Near East; the most developed beginnings in Palestine are the Arab Labour Federation in Jaffa — Mansour Secretary, the late Michel Mitri President, membership about 7,000, headquarters in Jaffa, public meetings of as many as 2,000, assisting workers and fellahin against Government and employers — and the Palestine Arab Workers Society in Haifa, both rudimentary with branches throughout the country. The special obstacles: the Government is charged with “placing the country under such political, administrative, and economic conditions as will ensure the establishment of the Jewish National Home” (PDF p.3), assisted by the Jewish Agency with its financial resources, propaganda and direct approach to the highest officials; Arab grievances through official channels generally end there; the Arab Higher Committee had no legal standing; international agreements on hours and conditions are ignored for Arab labour; labour organisers are treated as a nuisance and, if influential, as suspected nationalist agitators or potential communists; and agents, Arabs and Arab-speaking Jews, are paid by the Jewish labour organisations to watch the Arab unions and prevent Arab workers joining them.

• How the National Home affects Arab Workers (PDF p.4-5 / printed p.193-194). The case of Haifa Harbour: until towards the end of 1936 the Harbour authorities’ labour was almost entirely Arab; the Government refused the Jewish Agency’s efforts to have Jewish labour employed directly because Jewish labour was more expensive, while itself using Hauranis from Syria at 100 mills per day, or even 70 for 10 hours work on Mr. Epstein’s evidence to the Royal Commission; the Agency finally persuaded the Administration to introduce Jewish labour on payment in bulk, with labour saving devices supplied and paid for by the Agency or the Jewish labour organisations, so Jewish labourers do more work with less labour and receive higher wages for less work, and Arab workmen are displaced; the Government, which controls the national funds of the Arabs, provides Arab workers no such devices, so they remain in primitive conditions while the immigrants who supplanted them gain equipment and training.

• Arab Progress (PDF p.5-10 / printed p.194-199). A point-by-point rebuttal of the Royal Commission Report, page 129, where the Commission bases its claim that Arab advance in the social services was largely due to the National Home on evidence heard, by its own statement, from the Jewish representative only; Mansour demands Arab witnesses and independent economic experts, and notes the Report announces seven points while the text mentions six. Point 1 (PDF p.5-6): Jewish capital’s “general fructifying effect” on the whole country is irrelevant; the issue is its effect on the Arab economy. Point 2 (PDF p.6-7): Arab industry and citriculture were not financed “thus”; Jewish capital reached Arab hands primarily through land sales, the greater part went to absentee Syrian landlords, the sales drove the populace to despair of legitimate redress, the Commission gives no statistics for Arab industry’s alleged expansion, and the Jaffa orange was cultivated, esteemed and flourishing before the War and could finance its own development; slower development would have avoided the over-production crisis caused by developing everything unnaturally quickly to facilitate immigration. Point 3 (PDF p.7): Jewish example did not compensate Arab cultivation for land lost; Arab development owes to Arab initiative, the Department of Agriculture, the German Christian Colonists and the Monastic Orders, who do not dispossess; the banana industry at Jericho flourishes remote from Jewish settlement; and, on Government data in the Palestine Review of 14/08/1936, Arabs greatly increased their area of olives, figs and vines while Jews decreased theirs; given equal opportunity the Arab peasant is superior as an agriculturist, some half million Arab peasants living on the land when the Mandate was established. Point 4 (PDF p.8): the port of Tel-Aviv employs no Arab labour whatsoever and is intended to supplant Jaffa; the 1936 strike was only the immediate cause of its inauguration, the Administration sanctioned it as a punitive action against Jaffa, and a half-hearted joint-port attempt was abandoned when the Jewish Agency made clear there could be no question of it. Point 5 (PDF p.8-9): on Hadassah and Jewish institutions serving Arabs, Mansour quotes Dr. Canaan’s Conflict in the Land of Peace (1936), page 84, with 1934 dispensary and hospital figures for Jerusalem and Haifa showing Jews received far more medical help from non-Jewish institutions than non-Jews received from Jewish ones (figures under Evidence and Open questions). Point 6 (PDF p.10): the Arab population increase of 1922-1931 in Haifa (86 per cent), Jaffa (62) and Jerusalem (37), against Nablus and Hebron (7) and Gaza (a decrease of 2), proves no beneficent effect, since those are the cities where increase would be expected anyway — port of Jerusalem and centre of the citrus trade, second port and pipeline terminus, and capital — swollen by landless workers drifting to the big towns and by Government neglect; Tel Aviv, the most conspicuous urban area affected by Jewish development, has no Arabs at all; and no passing money from land sales, rent and services compensates for the loss of a great part of the most fertile land.

• Attitude of the Histadrut towards Arab Labour (PDF p.10-12 / printed p.199-201). The most influential party in the Jewish Agency is the General Federation of Jewish Labour [the Histadrut], comprising practically all the Jewish Labour Organisations; within it Mapai — Mr. Ben Gurion, Mr. Shertok and Mr. Berl Katznelson of Davar among its figures — whose programme, on the Administration’s Memoranda for the Royal Commission, is the widest possible Jewish immigration and the Conquest of Labour. Mapai’s Zionism takes precedence over its socialism at all occasions: Zionism could not exist a day in Palestine without British imperialism, which it therefore allies with there while opposing it elsewhere; and if the natives were raised to the European standard, the peasantry prosperous, local industry flourishing or an autonomous Government in place, there would be no justification for a Mandate, land sales, competing industries or a rival Zionist Government. Officially, on the Government Memoranda, page 114, the Labour party strives to co-operate with Arab labour in non-Jewish undertakings, with limited scope; in Mansour’s gloss, the Histadrut accepts no responsibility for Arabs, no Arab has the right to a job a possible immigrant might occupy or to work in Jewish undertakings, displacement in the ports is good, and a sincere good will would have meant employing one quarter Arab labour at the same wage for the same work and teaching Arab workers its skilled processes — instead the Histadrut never employed a single Arab if it could help it, paid forced Arab employees half the wages of its own men, and ousted Arabs wherever it could.

• The Conquest of Labour (PDF p.13-16 / printed p.202-205). The Palestine Communist Party, opposed to Zionism as an imperialist movement, published the newspaper Ha Or with an Arabic supplement exposing Zionist aims, through which a circular of the Labour Council of Tel Aviv to the building trade (Ha Or, 7, 23/11/1934) became known to the Arab public: complaining that Arab workers have increased and industries have been Arabised, that hundreds in the zifzif [gravel] and stone trades earn tens of thousands of pounds monthly, and announcing a campaign, an agreement for Jewish stone from the Majdal Yaba quarries, a special controller’s seal on invoices, inspectors, and the duty to use the Jewish product only and to refuse to unload stone of Arab provenance. Mansour explains the circular’s supposed shortage of Jewish workers as an artificial product of the building boom that began in 1933, reversed by the crisis precipitated by the Abyssinian War in autumn 1935, and used by the Agency as a pretext for demanding an enormous labour schedule and introducing Jewish labour into new occupations while retaining posts already held. At Majdal Yaba [Migdal Zedek] — Arab property leased to Jews soon after the War, employing about 30 villagers and some 400 Palestinian workers in 1934 — the plan to accumulate stone heaps, dismiss the Arab workers as if there were no demand, and introduce Jewish workers was defeated for the moment after the Arab Labourers’ Federation of Jaffa warned the workers not to leave and they refused a party of 150 Jewish workers for 17 days; at the end of the 1936 disturbances the police, under a Jewish police officer, arrested 97 Arab workers, and another 400 Arab workers were deprived of their livelihood. The excerpts close on the tremendous extension of picketing in 1934 — pickets sent wherever Arabs worked for Jewish contractors or sold Arab material, in Hadar Ha Carmel, Rehavia, Kfar Saba, Bait Vegan and elsewhere, driving Arabs away by force if necessary, unchecked by the Government, the arrested picketers described in the Jewish press as martyrs and heroes — creating the vacancies for Hebrew workers that the Government’s Labour Schedules filled, making 1935 the record year for immigration and preparing the disorder of 1936; and on the charge that the Histadrut’s professed desire to raise Arab standards is untrue, its aim being to drive Arab workers away or keep them in their present condition as a contrast recruiting Jewish workers to the Histadrut.

Key passages

• “to give the English reader some idea of why Arab labour is at one with the rest of the Arab population in its opposition to Zionist immigration” (editors’ introduction, quoting the booklet’s purpose, PDF p.1 / printed p.190).
• “He represents the only organised Arab labour in the country” (Earl Winterton in the House of Commons, July 21st, 1937, as quoted, PDF p.2 / printed p.191).
• “The large import of Jewish capital has had a general fructifying effect on the economic life of whole country” (the Royal Commission as quoted, PDF p.5 / printed p.194).
• “These statistics show clearly that the Jews have received infinitely more medical help from non-Jewish institutions than non-Jews have received from Jewish institutions” (Dr. Canaan, Conflict in the Land of Peace, page 84, as quoted, PDF p.9 / printed p.198).
• “the so-called conquest of labour, namely the penetration of Jewish Labour into all spheres of work, industry, trade, the public services and most of all into agricultural work” (the Administration’s Memoranda for the Royal Commission, as quoted, PDF p.11 / printed p.200).
• “As part of its programme, the Labour party is also striving to co-operate with Arab labour in non-Jewish undertakings” (Government Memoranda for the use of the Royal Commission, page 114, as quoted, PDF p.12 / printed p.201).
• “You must absolutely refuse to work with stone of Arab provenance” (Labour Council of Tel Aviv circular, as reproduced from Ha Or, 7, 23/11/1934, PDF p.14 / printed p.203).
• “By such means, which often included violence and other illegalities, were created the ‘vacancies’ for Hebrew workers, to fill which the Government obligingly granted the Labour Schedules, which made 1935 the record year for immigration and, incidentally, prepared the way for the disorder of 1936 and the accompanying economic crisis” (PDF p.16 / printed p.205).

Evidence the work relies on

• Mansour’s own evidence to the Royal Commission (the Peel Commission) in January 1937, on which the editors say the booklet is largely based, and material submitted by the Arab Labour Organisations, per the booklet’s title heading (PDF p.1-2).
• The House of Commons Debate on Palestine of July 21st, 1937, quoted for the Winterton-Wedgwood-Stephen exchange (PDF p.2).
• The Report of the Royal Commission, page 129, quoted for the six points on Arab progress, and the Commission’s own statement that those conclusions rested on evidence submitted by the Jewish representative (PDF p.5).
• Mr. Epstein’s evidence before the Royal Commission for the Haurani wage of 70 mills for 10 hours work at Haifa Harbour; no first name is given in the excerpts (PDF p.5).
• Dr. Canaan, Conflict in the Land of Peace (Jerusalem, Syrian Orphanage Press, 1936, per the editors’ bracketed citation), page 84, quoted at length for 1934 medical figures: Government dispensaries and clinics in nine named towns treated 76,985 patients in 1934, 8,172 or 10.63% of them Jews; Jewish dispensaries and clinics in Jerusalem treated 55,877 new patients, 1,654 of them non-Jews; non-Jewish clinics and dispensaries in Jerusalem treated 77,328 new patients, 21,906 or 28.3% of them Jews, and, excluding the English Mission Hospital, 61,355 out-patients of whom 6,727 or 10.85% were Jews; in Haifa, non-Jews were 12% of those treated in Jewish dispensaries and clinics against Jews at 17.3% in non-Jewish institutions, and at Haifa Hospital 34.46% of patients in non-Jewish hospitals were Jews against 0.7% Arab admissions to Jewish hospitals (PDF p.9).
• Census returns of 1922 and 1931, as quoted from the Royal Commission, for Arab population increase in Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Nablus, Hebron and Gaza (PDF p.10).
• A Jewish writer in the Palestine Review of 14/08/1936, on the strength of Government data, for the increase of the Arab area of olives, figs and vines against the Jewish decrease (PDF p.7).
• The Memoranda prepared for the use of the Royal Commission by the Administration, quoted for Mapai’s programme of widest possible immigration and the conquest of labour, and the Government Memoranda, page 114, quoted for the Labour party’s official co-operation formula (PDF p.11-12).
• The Labour Council of Tel Aviv’s circular to the building trade, as published in the Communist Party newspaper Ha Or, 7, 23/11/1934, reproduced at length (PDF p.13-14).

Analysis

Mansour’s method is testimony turned into polemic for a British readership: a parliamentary exchange establishes that he speaks for organised Arab labour, a structural account of the Mandate, the Jewish Agency and the Arab organisations establishes why Arab grievances have no official channel, one worked case (Haifa Harbour) shows displacement in operation, the Royal Commission’s beneficence claims are then dismantled one by one on the Commission’s own quoted wording, and the Histadrut sections close with a documentary exhibit — the Tel Aviv Labour Council circular — and its worked example at Majdal Yaba. His strongest evidence is documentary and quoted: the Commission’s admission that its Arab-progress conclusions rested on Jewish evidence, the Administration’s own memoranda defining the conquest of labour, and the circular’s seal-and-inspector boycott machinery. His rebuttals repeatedly turn on relevance rather than on rival statistics: a fructifying effect on the whole country does not answer the effect on the Arab economy, and urban population growth does not distinguish Jewish development from the ports, the capital and landlessness as causes. The limits are those of an advocacy booklet surviving here only in editors’ excerpts: the ellipses remove an unknown amount of the 1937 text, the booklet’s conclusion is absent, several displacement claims are asserted without figures (a gap Mansour himself charges against the Commission on Arab industry), and the medical statistics are quoted from Canaan rather than compiled by Mansour. The journal editors’ framing — settler colonialism, the antithesis of Zionist propaganda — is their 2012 reading, kept separate above from Mansour’s own text.

People, organizations, places and events

George Mansour, Michel Mitri, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Arab Labour Federation, Palestine Arab Workers Society, Histadrut, Mapai, Jewish Agency, Arab Higher Committee, Palestine Communist Party, Peel Commission, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Haifa, Jaffa, Safad, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza

Concepts

Conquest of Labour, Jewish Labour Only, Labor Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Imperialism, Zionism

How it relates to other sources

• With The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine: Kanafani already cites Mansour’s report to the Peel Commission and the Jaffa federation’s 1936 census of workers; Mansour supplies the testimony itself, in excerpt — the Haifa Harbour displacement, the point-by-point answer to the Commission’s page 129, and the Majdal Yaba and picketing accounts behind the Jewish Labour Only policy Kanafani treats as a central mechanism of dispossession. The two sources conflict on Michel Mitri’s assassination; see Open questions and the Mitri page, where both accounts stand.
• With Zionist Colonialism in Palestine and Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East: Sayegh’s account of only Jewish labor employed in Zionist colonies, vigilantly ensured by the Agency and the labour federation, and Rose’s account of the Histadrut picketing orchards under Jewish Land, Jewish Labour, Jewish Produce, are the later statements of the practice Mansour documents from inside 1934-1937 — the Tel Aviv circular, the controller’s seal, the pickets of 1934.
• With The Jewish State: A Century Later: Dowty presents Labor Zionism’s choice on the Arab question as socialist separatism, assumed with little explicit thought of exclusion and carrying progressive connotations of self-reliance at the time; Mansour, writing in 1937, presents the same separatism from the receiving end as a deliberate conquest, and argues Mapai’s Zionism took precedence over its socialism on all occasions. Both accounts stand, attributed, on the Labor Zionism and Mapai pages.
• With Palestine: A Socialist Introduction: the collection’s description of the Histadrut as the primary agent for the boycotting of Arab labor and produce is the mechanism Mansour’s excerpts document in the Mandate period itself.
• What is new: the fullest first-person Arab labour testimony in the wiki — the Arab organisations’ own membership and structure as they stated it, the Haifa Harbour bulk-payment and labour-saving-device mechanism, the verbatim Tel Aviv Labour Council circular of 23/11/1934, and Mansour’s causal chain from picketing to Labour Schedules to the record immigration of 1935 and the disorder of 1936.

Open questions

• Michel Mitri’s assassination: the journal editors state that Mitri, leader of the Arab Workers Society, was assassinated by British forces in December 1936 (PDF p.1). The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine states that the Mufti’s group assassinated Mitri, president of the Federation of Arab Workers in Jaffa, in the early 1930s. Mansour’s own excerpts call Mitri only “the late Mr. Michel Mitri” (PDF p.3) and give neither a date nor an attribution. The accounts conflict on the killer and the date and are kept side by side; nothing in this file resolves them.
• The names of Mansour’s organisation vary within and across the file: the editors call it the Arab Workers Society, founded in 1934, with Mansour as Secretary (PDF p.1); the booklet heading calls him formerly Secretary of the Arab Labour Federation (Jaffa) (PDF p.2); the text calls the Jaffa body the Arab Labour Federation, with Mitri as President (PDF p.3), and the Majdal Yaba section calls it the Arab Labourers’ Federation of Jaffa (PDF p.15). Kanafani names a Federation of Palestinian Arab Workers and a Federation of Arab Workers in Jaffa. Whether these are one organisation under varying names or successive bodies is not resolved in this file.
• The Royal Commission is said to mention seven points on page 129 of its Report while, as the editors note in brackets, only six points are actually mentioned in the text (PDF p.5); the excerpts treat six.
• The author of Conflict in the Land of Peace is “Dr. Canaan” in Mansour’s text and “Taufik Cannan” in the editors’ bracketed citation (PDF p.8); both spellings are as printed.
• Canaan’s percentage as quoted, 3.25% for the Arab share of patients in Jewish dispensaries in Jerusalem, does not follow from the figures quoted with it: 1,654 of 55,877 is about 2.96% (computed from the figures as quoted, PDF p.9). The percentage is kept as printed.
• Printed slips, as printed: “lost contract” for contact (PDF p.3), “quid profits” for quick profits (PDF p.7), “all marshes and land” in the sentence on Zionist claims for the land (PDF p.7), “mangers” for managers (PDF p.15), and “bridging pressure” in the sentence on the Arab Higher Committee (PDF p.4).
• The excerpts are the journal editors’ selection: ellipses occur in almost every section and the excerpts end with an ellipsis at printed p.205, so what the 1937 booklet contained beyond the selection — including its conclusion and any demands or programme it closed with — cannot be known from this file.
• Mr. Epstein, whose Royal Commission evidence gives the 70-mill Haurani wage, is given no first name or office in the excerpts (PDF p.5).
• Mansour’s Majdal Yaba figures give some 400 Palestinian workers employed at the quarries in 1934 and then “another 400 Arab workers” deprived of their livelihood after the 1936 disturbances (PDF p.15); whether the second figure is the same workforce restated or an additional count is not made clear in the excerpts.

Coverage

PDF p.1-16 of 16, read in full.