The Palestinian and Jewish Working Class and Its Organizations, 1918–1939

Translators’ Introduction

Omar Talibi first published “The Palestinian and Jewish Working Class and Its Organizations, 1918–1939” in 1972, in Shu’un Filastiniyya, the journal of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s research center.1 In this article, Talibi develops a historical analysis of the conditions and organizational capacities of the Arab and Jewish working class in Palestine during the Mandate period in relation to Zionist policies regarding settlement and labor organization. By examining the exclusionary policies implemented by British colonial authorities and Zionist organizations, the article offers an overview of the socioeconomic dynamics and the political challenges faced by Palestinian labor organizers. While research has revealed only scant details into Talibi’s individual trajectory, his writing sheds light on the process that led to the separation between “Jewish” and “Arab” workers, the colonial state’s unsuccessful attempts to exclude natives from the labor market, and the shortcomings of the Communist movement in Palestine. This English version of Talibi’s article is a translation by the Arabic Working Group at the University of California, Santa Cruz.2

In translating Talibi’s work, we hope to draw upon the work of Palestinian anticolonialists to better understand interrelated forms of exclusion, exploitation, and resistance in the concrete context of the Zionist settler colonial project. Recent scholarship addressing the Palestinian struggle shows a growing tendency to adopt a particular theoretical approach to settler colonialism derived from the studies of Patrick Wolfe, augmented more recently with the insights of Indigenous scholars in North America. In such accounts, Zionist settlement depended upon achieving the “conquest of labor,” meaning the rigorous exclusion of Arabs from the Jewish labor market. Whatever the merits of this approach, with its emphasis on land and elimination rather than labor and exploitation, it has nevertheless tended to obfuscate questions of proletarianization and working-class struggle. This has led, in our view, to an overly neat separation in certain scholarship between questions pertaining to class struggle and the “logics” of settler colonialism. We might argue over the adequacy of such formulations in the context of Australian, Canadian, and U.S. American colonial history, but Talibi’s analysis suggests that our understanding of the Palestinian struggle for liberation requires us to account for specific histories of working-class and agrarian struggles and organizations in the context of the colonization of Palestine.3

Talibi’s focus on the Mandate period in this article is especially salient, since this period is often taken as the “purest” moment of Zionist settler colonialism in terms of the Jewish conquest of labor, in comparison to earlier decades and the period between the 1967 war and the First Intifada (1987–1993). Yet, as Talibi’s analysis indicates, the Jewish conquest of labor was never close to complete; if Palestinians were frequently made marginal or surplus to Jewish capital, they were not ever superfluous, as Wolfe’s framework suggests (“In the settler-colonial economy it is not the colonist but the native that is superfluous”).4 In fact, Palestinian workers have remained critical in the development of the Israeli economy after 1948.5 Thus, the prevailing scholarly emphasis on the elimination of the native, at the expense of labor exploitation, not only is an analytical shortcoming but also obscures the link between the political, economic, and military violence of the occupation and the extraction of Palestinian labor-power by different means. The keen need for this kind of analysis is evident in Talibi’s abstract, where the journal makes an explicit call for further contributions to Palestinian labor history in the Mandate period.

The timing of Talibi’s own piece—the early 1970s—is additionally significant. It comes at the start of a wave of critical scholarship in Arabic and English on Palestinian proletarianization and its theoretical significance in the crucial decades following 1967 when the Israeli state consolidated its control over Palestinian lands.6 This article was also written at the tail end of a particularly robust few decades of debate, and indeed turmoil, among Arab intellectuals on the left. As scholars point out, communist parties across the region were largely discredited due to their acceptance of the 1947 U.N. partition plan for Palestine. They had to contend with alternative visions emanating from pan-Arab, Ba’athist, Nasserist, and Third World movements in the Middle East and North Africa.7 While these debates were undoubtedly rooted in struggles for influence in the region, Arab intellectuals also reflected on underdevelopment and imperialism outside a Eurocentric frame, meanwhile accounting for the specific class formation bequeathed by colonial (or semicolonial) rule in the aftermath of the Sino–Soviet split.

In recent decades, scholars have turned their attention toward genealogies of the Arab left, undertaking critically important work in translating Arabic language texts and centering how local intellectual production, as well as other modes of political engagement, have been excluded from debates in the realm of “theory.”8 In this spirit, we maintain that even fifty years after the publication of this piece, Shu’un Filastiniyya’s call for renewed attention and research into the status and role of Palestinian labor and labor organizing throughout the twentieth century has been only partially answered. In some cases, the existing literature in English exemplifies a recurring tendency to focus on Jewish workers at the expense of Arab workers, the former benefiting from their overrepresentation in industrial sectors and superior organizational infrastructure.9 The burgeoning application of settler colonial studies paradigms to Palestine meanwhile risks removing Palestinian labor and labor organizing from the research agenda altogether. Some scholars nonetheless strive to avoid the double pitfall of separating Jewish and Arab workers, or erasing the latter altogether, in their analyses. The best-known example in English is surely Zachary Lockman, whose 1996 work, Comrades and Enemies, sheds light on many of the processes mentioned in Talibi’s article, from the progressive development of Arab class consciousness to the intense contradictions shaking the quasi-socialist branch of the Zionist movement.10 The importance of returning to Arabic sources, however, is underscored in the critical review of this book by the eminent historian of the Palestinian left, Musa Budeiri.11

Talibi’s article should not, therefore, be read merely as an addition to this scholarship but rather as a different starting point, one that takes for granted the relevance and resilience of the Arab working class, which is the central object of analysis. From this militant viewpoint, the Zionist Histadrut trade union was above all a colonial machine, determined to push for the implementation of the policy of “Jewish labor.” It was nevertheless forced to cope with the inevitable presence of Arab workers and their extraordinary resistance and was forced to create two Arab branches. Equally, the supposedly socialist settlements of the kibbutzim are interpreted here in the context of Israel’s international propaganda efforts, decades before Gershon Shafir’s celebrated account.12 Meanwhile, as Talibi demonstrates, Arab labor organizers slowly built up their capacity throughout the Mandate period, in spite of organizational weaknesses, racist policies implemented by colonial authorities and Jewish labor organizations alike, and competition from poor migrant workers. The Palestinian Arab Workers’ Association, established in Haifa in 1925, spread to a number of cities across Palestine and eventually represented more than thirty-five thousand Palestinian workers during World War II.

Talibi also offers a detailed account of the history of the Palestinian Communist Party, the only major organization in this era that sought to unite Palestinian and Jewish workers in struggle. He advances a critical reading of both the party’s earlier phase as a radical offshoot of the Zionist left—currents with which the party would eventually break as it joined the Third International and attracted more Arab cadres—and of its later alliances with Palestinian nationalists as it participated in the 1936–1939 Great Palestinian Revolt. Overall, while Talibi takes stock of the institutional weaknesses of the Palestinian workers’ movement, particularly in relation to the structural advantages held by labor Zionism, he nonetheless strives to develop an assessment of the processes of organization and consciousness-raising that allowed for the successful mobilization of Palestinians during the 1936 strikes. In so doing, he provides us with a welcome alternative to the narrative of erasure that has often dominated critical academic accounts of the Palestinian labor movement.

“The Palestinian and Jewish Working Class and Its Organizations, 1918–1939,” by Omar Talibi

Palestine, and the Middle East generally, constituted part of the colonized world, owing to a backwardness that reveals itself in diminished levels of productivity by comparison with industrialized countries. As a result, the average per capita income in the Middle East in 1939 was less than one-quarter (or even one-seventh) of the average income per capita in the West.13 The difference also manifests in the wage gap: Jewish immigrants from the West commanded wages corresponding to the standard of living in advanced capitalist countries, far higher than those paid elsewhere in the region. Jewish workers, who had to compete with inexpensive local workers, were therefore forced to oppose the employment of Arab workers in Jewish economic branches, leading to the formation of a closed Jewish economy that had no real economic competition from the neighboring Arab world.

Due to the concentration of capital and the high ratio of specialized labor in the Jewish economic sector, the Yishuv contributed 59.7 percent of national income in 1944, despite the fact that it represented less than a third of the residents [in Ottoman Palestine]. Indeed, the Jewish population’s share was growing in most economic sectors, especially in modern sectors such as industry, trade, construction, and transportation. Generally, by 1944 the income per capita for Jews had reached 300 Palestinian junayh,14 while the same number was only 165 junayh for Arabs, as Table 1 makes clear.15

Table 1. Average income for Palestinian and Jewish residents in Palestinian junayh (1944)

There is little doubt that the British Mandate authorities were favorable toward Zionist demands for wage increases for Jewish workers. Furthermore, European Jewish workers were organized in the Histadrut, unlike Arab and many Eastern Jewish workers,16 who were disorganized in general and especially during the late Mandate period. The latter were therefore unable to obtain equivalent wages. The enormous disparity in wages of the two groups (Arab and Jewish) corresponds clearly with the disparity in wages between Europeans and the original inhabitants of the colonies (see Table 2).

Table 2. Daily wages paid to adult workers (male) in Palestinian milimat (1944)

This dual structure of wages endured throughout the Mandate period. For instance, in 1946 an Arab or Eastern Jewish carpenter earned 850 milimat per day, whereas his European colleague took home 1,100 milimat.17 However, we must hasten to say that the alluring comparison between Zionism and classical colonialism is a false one. This is due to the strange inclination that the Zionist venture adopted after the second wave of migration,18 whose slogan was “Jewish Labor”—namely, that the Zionist implantation in Palestine took the form of replacing the Arab population with Jewish workers. Zionism’s self-conception is a product of this: it embraced the process of creating a Zionist working class and then refused to employ the Arab proletariat. In this sense, Jewish migration may be classified [as belonging] within the colonial system, given its dependence on the process of expropriating the Palestinian Arab population, a dispossession conducted with the oversight of colluding British authorities. However, this process of plunder was not accompanied by a social separation resembling that of settler colonies19 like Algeria or Black Africa, where the economy of the colonial sector is entirely based on the exploitation of the original inhabitants. Indeed, the Jews in Palestine began transforming themselves into a new Hebrew nation on the traditional capitalist model: a ruling bourgeoisie and a proletariat.

Of 212,000 Jewish immigrants in the country in 1934, 28.8 percent were engaged in industry and crafts, whereas the number employed in the Arab industrial sector was 21,000.20 A comparison of the distribution of the economically active population reflects the industrial and modern character of the Jewish population and the agricultural structure of the Arab society (see Table 3).

Table 3. Occupational division of the population, 1931

The two essential forms of Zionist colonialism, which reveal its distinctive nature, are the principle of purchasing land through the Jewish National Fund and the maxim of “Jewish labor.” The growth of Jewish industry was then, to a large extent, dependent on the activity of the Zionist union, the Histadrut.

The Histadrut was founded as the General Union of Jewish Workers in Palestine in Haifa in 1920 and included 4,433 members. It contained, from its first moments, singular features. According to one of the leaders of the Zionist labor movement: “The matter before the Histadrut is not only organizing the Jewish [working] class, but also creating, forming, and implanting it in Palestine.”21 In other words, the Histadrut did not only aim to protect the interests of Jewish workers, but it had the more specific and urgent aim of achieving Zionist colonialism in Palestine. [The Histadrut] is both a nationalist union and a flexible tool wielded by Zionism. According to its platform, it “adopts an obligation to form a new model of Jewish workers as a result of the colonization of Palestine.” In accord with this conception and orientation, the Histadrut grew rapidly from 15,275 adherents in 1926 to 25,378 adherents in 1930. In 1936 this figure was 85,818.

Indeed, its activities extended to every economic sphere and became the backbone of the Zionist project. In keeping with its Zionist aspirations, the Histadrut undertook a series of wide-ranging initiatives aiming to create the economic base of the future Zionist state. The Jewish labor movement thus surrounded itself with a dense network of institutions and public services: a fund for the sick and elderly, a labor exchange, a construction firm, a company for selling agricultural products, a cooperative for wholesales, a network of schools for workers, etc. The task of planning economic activity was entrusted to a special body, called the Society of Workers. The Histadrut’s economic activity, however, was not limited to this. There were also a series of subordinate networks and institutions, such as the workers’ resettlement agency Nir, a kind of mutual workers’ cooperative, as well as a housing cooperative, a banking network, and an insurance company running on financial contributions from the Zionist movement abroad. This is without even mentioning the Histadrut’s oversight of the main organization for Jewish defense, the Haganah.22

The Zionist union, owing to these activities, was able to occupy a position of leadership in a short time. If it is not quite correct to say that it held a monopoly, the Histadrut was nonetheless the most important employer after the government. It also drove a policy of entrenching the Jewish working class, the formation of which was so necessary an economic foundation that the Histadrut created productive cooperatives, provided work opportunities to immigrants, and guaranteed the marketing of Jewish products. The cause of this octopus-like expansion of the Histadrut into areas completely alien to unions and the concept of unions is fundamentally attributable to Zionist colonial policy.

We therefore find slogans that reflect this policy, such as “Jewish labor” or “Jewish production.” Such slogans aim to promote the sale of products of the Zionist economy within the Jewish sector at the expense of Arab production, attempting to undermine the latter, which could compete through more profitable (lower) cost prices. But just as “Jewish work” effectively denotes the expulsion of Arab workers from Jewish projects, “Jewish production” translates, in reality, to a boycott of Arab products. One result of this policy, for example: a mere rumor that a Jewish café in Tel Aviv hired Arab workers in 1944 instigated a hostile gathering of thousands of protesting Jewish workers. If the Arab fellah [peasant] challenged the Jewish boycott and tried to sell his agricultural products in the Jewish market, he faced the same resistance and was violently driven out.23

The Histadrut was the principal instrument of racial economic discrimination against the Arab fellahin [peasants]. Every member of the Zionist union was required to commit to paying two sets of dues.24 The first was for the sake of “Jewish labor,” flowing into the strike fund and thus supporting the Histadrut’s efforts to prevent the employment of Arab workers—not only in Jewish institutions but also in British and public services. The second set of dues benefited “Jewish production” and helped organize the boycott of Arab production. It is important to mention that no party of the Israeli “left,” including the Mapam Party, opposed, even superficially, the exclusion of Arab workers from jobs or the boycott of goods produced by the Arab fellahin. Not one of them refused to pay these racist dues to the Histadrut.25

The Jewish worker thus competed with unorganized Palestinian workers of rural origins who, facing poverty and misery, accepted wages that were effectively symbolic. This was not free and fair competition. Its conditions obstructed the Arab Palestinian worker from forming a working class in this country in the typical way and according to historical laws.

This discriminatory policy of the Histadrut against Palestinian workers exactly resembles the racist, colonial policy practiced by unions of the Second International in the colonies. Already at the 1907 Conference of the Second International, known as the Stuttgart Conference, delegates from labor parties in most European colonies had spoken of the “danger” represented by local workers in competition with European and American workers!

The Histadrut’s racist practices against Arab workers were not, as it may seem, in the interest of the Jewish proletariat in the first instance. They mainly served the Jewish industrial bourgeoisie, emergent in Palestine between 1918 and 1939. In this sense, the Histadrut seems closer in its ideology and its general politics to a class compromise, which, in the final analysis, favors the Jewish bourgeoisie. In fact, Jewish workers were prevented from striking on the pretext that this would undermine the ultimate goal of Zionism. The capitalists, and especially the British, never missed an opportunity, exploiting with great skill the economic and racial discrimination against Palestinian workers. Perhaps the most blatant example of this cynical exploitation is the conduct of the Anglo-American Tobacco Corporation, which undertook two distinct [marketing] schemes: one to supply the Jewish market with Maspero and the other to supply the Arab market (with Qarman, Deek, and Salti).26 Each undertaking demagogically linked the marketing of cigarettes with, variously, Zionist and Arab national sentiments, guided by circumstances and the conditions of supply and demand.27

The Palestinian workers, who were forcibly excluded from the labor market, had no choice but to crowd, shoulder to shoulder, for the scarce work available in the weak Palestinian economy, and especially in the agricultural sector. Because these massively exploited workers were not organized, this chaotic competition for jobs caused wages to decline steadily. The small number of mixed unions—established in the 1920s and confined to the administrative and public services sector in the mixed cities, densely populated by both Arabs and Jews—remained marginal and totally ineffective in defending the interests of the Arab workers or the real interests of the Jewish workers themselves.28

In two exceptional cases, the Histadrut accepted Arab workers into its ranks. Having failed to exclude Arab labor, it set up Arab branches (numbering no more than two, all said). The first was established in Haifa in 1929 and the second in Jerusalem in 1934.29

The Histadrut targeted municipal, administrative, and large-scale construction workers employed by non-Jewish capital. These were precisely the worksites in which the Histadrut had not completely succeeded in excluding Arab workers. The Histadrut here wanted to kill two birds with one stone. It sought first to camouflage its racist nature and second to impose Zionist principles, the very essence of this union, on any Arab workers that joined. However, it succeeded rarely and only partially. The majority of Arab workers were conscious of the racist and colonial character of this Zionist union, which rejected even their abstract right to compete with Jewish workers in the labor market.

During World War II, the Histadrut changed tactics—without changing its nature—in order to combat the influence of the Palestinian national unions. It announced that it would accept the employment of a specific ratio of Palestinian workers in the jobs operated by its branches. As a result, it was able to activate its Arab branch, giving it a monopoly on the employment of Arab workers. But this tactical deception could not stand up in practice: the public works projects under the Histadrut (known as Solel Boneh)30 exercised racial discrimination [that was reflected in the difference] in wages between Arab and Jewish workers.31

In the period between the two World Wars, there were three Zionist leftist parties. “These parties cannot be considered independent labor organizations in the true sense of the word,” Nathan Weinstock writes. “This is due to their embrace of the Zionist program, and even the Zionist organization itself, as well as their integration into the Zionist community and the close relations binding them to the Histadrut. The best way to understand this is to observe the labor tendencies at the core of a decentralized Zionist apparatus. The workers’ wing of the Zionist movement suffers from national gangrene, sharing permanently in a sacred union with the bourgeoisie.”32

The programs of these Zionist parties did not include any demands related to the independent interests of the working class. Their leaders were pulled along by the train of the Zionist organization toward the construction of a Jewish national homeland.

A further shared feature of the Zionist labor and bourgeois parties is their membership in the World Zionist Organization (WZO), of which they were simply a Palestinian branch. What explains the affiliation of leftist Zionist parties with the WZO is the priority they gave to Zionist national goals over effective class struggle. That they limited themselves to Jews clearly articulates their blatant Zionist essence, since labor parties and unions generally do not attribute significance to the nationality of workers beneath their banner. This is merely more proof that these parties prioritize Zionist ideology over socialist principles.

The Zionist labor movement was dependent on the Histadrut, whose elements were mainly formed in collective settlements. The socialist illusions attached to the kibbutzim were dispelled by realities and developments on the ground. This movement “never represented a threat for the Zionist bourgeoisie, quite the contrary.”33 The Zionist bourgeoisie deployed it as propaganda in international leftist spheres. The Jewish Agency, composed of the largest Jewish capitalists in the world, pledged to fund these “socialist oases in a capitalist desert.” It appears that the Jewish agricultural settlements had already formed defense battalions during the 1936–1939 revolution. These battalions raided Arab villages under the pretext of preventing the possibility of an attack by Palestinian revolutionaries.

In so doing, the settlements played a distinct terrorist role, exemplified by the mobile units led by Yitzhak Sadeh. “It was the workers’ wing of the Zionist movement that put pressure on the Haganah to renounce its policy of passive defense in the face of the 1939 revolution,” writes Weinstock. “The elite fighters in Haganah units participated in the Jewish-British campaigns organized by Captain Wingate.34 In 1939, special units of the Haganah conducted a series of raids against Arab villages. Wingate’s teams continually liquidated Arab ‘suspects,’ although their main purpose was to guard the pipelines of Iraq Petroleum on behalf of the British Empire. . . . Thus, the distortion of the Arab struggle for national liberation against Zionism, in the final instance, and the demagogic statements of Arab feudal lords, together reinforced the collaboration of Jewish workers with British authorities.”35

Arab workers established the Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society in Haifa in 1925, and it did not take long for branches to appear in other cities. Arab workers had carried out solidaristic activities since 1920, when workers on the Haifa railway began collecting donations to help sick workers and the families of those who had died. In 1925, railway workers applied to register their own charitable association. Their request was granted in August 1925, three months after the workers had submitted the application. The basic charter of the society was a collection of goals concerning labor organizing, social life, and living conditions, in accordance with the law, without making any claims on political or religious matters.36 The railways union remained a pivot of the unions of the society, as the sector (railroads) became a site of conflict with the policy of the Zionist union, which sought to employ Jewish workers in the administration and specialized jobs, at the expense of Arab workers.

The society was quickly able to secure material gains for workers, such as an increase in wages and a limit on working hours, while also contributing to certain cultural and nationalist activities. It held its first conference on January 11, 1930, in Haifa, in which 610 delegates participated, representing 3,020 members from different parts of the country.37 It later opened a free night school to educate illiterate workers. The period in general was marked by a large number of strikes aimed at improving the living conditions of workers. Soon, the society had branches in ten Palestinian cities, totaling some eleven thousand members.38 Agricultural workers, however, and especially seasonal workers, were not organized at all. There was fierce competition between them and the Hawarna, coming in from Syria in search of the even the lowest-paid jobs.39 Workers coming from the Egyptian countryside, even more immiserated, posed precisely the same form of competition.

With the uprising of 1935, the condition of Palestinian workers became increasingly miserable. The policy of “Jewish labor” led to more layoffs for Palestinians—not only from Jewish institutions but from public services and institutions as well. The mass layoffs were a manifestation of general national crisis. The participation of Arab workers in the six-month strike of 1936 contained an obvious class character, in addition to being a mass nationalist movement. The Mandate authorities, for their part, did not stand idly by in the face of the mass layoff. They arrested many Arab union cadres from the Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society, while ignoring every one of their demands. The society was forced to close its doors during the general strike and, by any assessment, was deeply affected by the strike. By 1936, its numbers did not exceed five thousand. It is certain that the society was completely paralyzed for two years, until 1938, when its union leaders were released in the context of revolutionary decline, increasingly ferocious repression, and worsening economic conditions in the Arab sector. This state of affairs persisted through to the eve of World War II, and the number of society members decreased to roughly two hundred at the beginning of 1940.40

However, with the conditions of World War II, the labor movement gained objective and subjective possibilities for revival, which were clearly expressed in the 1943 conference of workers in army camps.41 Twenty-eight thousand workers were present as delegates at the conference, and the society was able to open nearly thirty branches in different parts of Palestine, and its membership reached 35,217 workers.42

It is especially significant that the [Palestinian] Arab Workers’ Society was able to participate in the World Trade Union Congress, held February 6, 1945, instead of the Histadrut, which had been a member representing the labor movement in Palestine. This political success was of great concern to the Histadrut, which tried in vain to underplay the importance of the [Palestinian] Arab Workers’ Society and to lobby against it among other members of the congress.43

The vertical division between Palestinian workers and Jewish workers was almost complete. Arab workers were involved with their own unions, except for a few who were affiliated with the branches of the Histadrut designated for Arabs, which were mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, Jewish workers had their own union, the Histadrut, and their own parties, the leftist Zionist parties.

The only organization that brought together Palestinian workers and Jewish workers was the Palestine Communist Party. The highest-ranking cadres of this party were mostly Jewish, which explains the party’s low Arab membership. The prevailing national and religious ideology among Palestinian workers was an additional reason for their alienation from the Communist Party. Because of these two factors, the few Palestinian Communists were “isolated” and ostracized.44 The Jewish workers belonging to the Communist Party often emigrated from Palestine as soon as they became aware of their embarrassing status as colonists, because they had often immigrated under the influence of Zionist propaganda. Their return to the countries from which they had migrated was their only way out from the contradiction they confronted as Communists and enemies of colonialism.

From another perspective, the Mandate government forcibly expelled anyone who was proven to be a Communist Jew. “Entry into the Palestinian territories [was] forbidden for immigrants suspected of Bolshevism.”45 However, the leadership of the Communist Party was not an internationalist leadership. It was subject, on the one hand, to the influences of the prevailing Zionist ideology and, on the other, to the Zionist pasts of a large number of party militants, who often passed through leftist Zionist parties in their trajectory toward the Communist Party. Here we find the cause of the fluctuating number of the Communists, which constantly eroded the strength of the party.46

The fundamental weak spot of the Palestine Communist Party was its formation, resulting from the merger within the core of the Socialist Workers Party—a merger that took place in 1919–1920 between the far left of Poale Zion in Palestine and a large number of small groups that had separated from Poale Zion in Eastern Europe.47 The Socialist Workers Party declared that it ideologically supported “the Zionist proletariat.” Its approach was therefore not fundamentally different from the program of Zionist leftist parties. It is no coincidence that the party did not immediately join the Third International, while it participated in the founding conference of the Histadrut, where it won seven of the eighty-seven seats. The party also favored the use of Yiddish, but the need for effective propaganda led it to abandon [this language] and use Hebrew instead.

The Zionist leadership, on the one hand, and the Mandate authority, on the other, concluded that the Socialist Workers Party was responsible for the incidents of May 1, 1921,48 and as a result fourteen of its leaders were expelled from Palestine to the Soviet Union. The theoretical cohesion of the party was weakened, and the unresolvable internal conflicts within its ranks, along with the police repression it was beginning to face after the exile of its leaders from the country, led to the party’s inability to survive in the face of its general crisis. Thus the party deteriorated both qualitatively and quantitatively in under three years. Party membership in 1924 fell to eighty individuals, when almost three hundred individuals (Arabs and Jews) had been members in 1921.49

After that date, the party went underground, and its members became wanted [by the authorities]. But in the context of the sequence of events that were violently shaking Palestine, the party’s internal disagreements erupted on the basis of several factors: the conflicting national (Arab–Jewish) foundation of the party, the influence of nationalist sentiment on its Arab members, the subordination of an important section of its Jewish membership to Zionist influences, and, finally, the submission of the party as a whole to Stalin’s volatile policies. The most important explosion in the party was the split of 1922, which ended in 1923 with renewed unity on new foundations. In fact, the party conference of 1923 ratified a new line, totally hostile toward Zionism. The conference statement rejected “proletarian Zionism,” which had been the slogan of the party in prior years, and cut all ties with the Poale Zion left. At this conference, the name of the party was changed from the Socialist Workers Party to the Palestine Communist Party. After the party announced this name change, it was admitted to the council of the Third International in Moscow as a full member.50

These ideological transformations led to the fundamental reorientation of the party, with its new policy toward the Palestinian Arab populace, under the slogan “It’s up to the party to escape the Jewish Ghetto.”51 The “labor wing” was expelled from the Histadrut—that is to say, the communist opposition present within it as the last line of opposition to Zionism—resulting in the “Arabization” of the Communist Party as well as its affiliation with the Third International.52 The Histadrut then announced that, in the future, it would reject all internal opposition blocs that adopted a similar line.

The party therefore oriented itself toward the Arabs and the Eastern Jews who had been consistently neglected in previous years and whose parties and unions had remained separate from those Jews who had recently arrived from Eastern and Western Europe. Likewise, the party oriented its propaganda toward the peasantry and agitated against the sale of their land to Zionists.53 However, the weak point of the party remained an issue: its thin Arab membership.

In the year 1928, the party split again. However, this split did not affect the party as a whole because severe economic crisis was driving large numbers of people into its ranks. Rather, the more serious split occurred the following year as a direct culmination of the party’s attitude toward the events of 1929, which it described as “an anti-imperialist revolution that agents of imperialism transformed into a rebellion against the Jews.”54 It is clear that this assessment of the events of 1929 [i.e., as initially anti-imperialist] was a result of pressure placed on the party by the secretariat of the Third International. In fact, the party was initially so frightened by these events that it ordered its militants to join self-defense units side by side with the Haganah, a decision taken with the agreement of the Czech Communist leader Šmeral, an emissary from the Third International, who was living in Palestine during the events.55 The secretariat of the Third International had implicitly condemned [Šmeral’s] stance by denouncing the position of the Communist Party toward these events.

In fact, the Third International had interpreted the events of 1929 as a genuine peasant revolution, despite the fact that it was led by a few reactionary powers in its early stages. The secretariat of the Third International suggested slogans that the Communist Party should promote, like “Occupation of the land, formation of revolutionary councils by peasants and nomads, agrarian revolution, etc.” A statement of the Third International meanwhile criticized the Palestine Communist Party for its inability to root itself among the Palestinian Arab peasant masses. The Third International asserted that this failure afflicting the party stemmed from bad faith on the part of the leadership. It therefore reissued its instructions to leadership to “Arabize the Party from top to bottom.”56

It is well known that Lenin, at the 1920 Baku conference of communist parties57 from Africa and Asia, had directed bitter criticism against the Egyptian Communist Party because its leadership originated not from the majority but from various minority sects. Lenin demanded that communist parties in Asia and Africa uplift leaderships from the national majorities, rather than national minorities, because this was one of the conditions that would enable them to become mass parties, not sect-based or minority parties that were isolated from the broader popular masses.

From another angle, a resolution of the International cautioned the Palestine Communist Party against cooperating with Poale Zion, which had “merged with fascism.” The International had also indicated the necessity of forming a union58 among all the communist parties in every country of the Arab world.59 During this period, the Palestine Communist Party had consistently supported the Palestinian nationalist movement, to the extent that it became an extension of the Independence Party, which represented the most progressive orientation in the Palestinian nationalist movement, despite the fact that its leadership was predominantly of a feudal or familial character.

Throughout the revolution of 1936–1939,60 the Communist Party brandished the slogan “Join the movement for Arab liberation.” Membership in the party numbered one thousand. The party supported the Mufti and the leadership of the Palestinian nationalist movement61 without any critical reservations. The party called on the Yishuv (the group of Jewish people in Palestine before the coming into existence of Israel) to participate in an uprising against Zionist migrants. On top of that, militants of the party attempted to vandalize Histadrut buildings in Haifa and Tel Aviv. A circular issued by the Central Committee of the Party stated, “Members of the Palestine Communist Party, acting on orders given by the Party’s Central Committee, threw bombs at the labor union in Haifa.”62

This new party line pushed Jewish Communists into mass withdrawal from the party, especially in 1937, when the party’s support for al-Hajj Amin al-Husseini created a dangerous split within [its ranks]. Among other consequences of this [split], entire branches revolted against the party, as was the case with the Tel Aviv branch, which was expelled from the party on accusations of lacking discipline. Equally, the party’s uncritical policy with regard to the nationalist parties led a number of Arab cadres to abandon it and join the Independence Party. For their part, British authorities continued to expel Jewish members of the party from the country, at a time when they saw no rationale for doing the same to any Zionist socialist leader.

On the eve of the Second World War (1939), the Jewish members of the party numbered about three hundred individuals. In addition, there were a handful of Arab cadres.63

Overall, the trajectory of the Palestinian and Jewish labor movement between the two World Wars (1918–1939) is characterized by numerical and qualitative weakness in its organizational and fighting capacities. However, in spite of all its weaknesses, the high point of the Palestinian working class remains its effective participation in the glorious strikes of 1936, which lasted for six full months.

Author Profiles

Jack Davies is a PhD candidate in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and holds a master of arts from the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He studies the history and theory of the settler colony, particularly its lineages in political economy and its contemporary expressions in relation to North America, Australia, and Palestine.

Muriam Haleh Davis is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her monograph, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria was published by Duke University Press in September 2022.

Martin Devecka is an associate professor of classics and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He specializes in cultural history of the ancient world. He is the author of Broken Cities: A Historical Sociology of Ruins (2020) and is currently working on a book about zoology and citizenship in the Roman Empire.

Robin Jones is a third-year PhD student in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is interested in the relationship between the trajectories of twentieth-century Marxism and the global wave of uprisings that began around 2011. More specifically, he has conducted research on dissident communist movements in Syria during the 1970s and their relevance to the 2011 Syrian Revolution.

Thomas Serres is an assistant professor in politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His forthcoming book, entitled The Suspended Disaster: Governing by Crisis in Bouteflika’s Algeria, is currently under contract with Columbia University Press, after the French version was published with Karthala in 2019.

Becker Sharif is a physics graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is active in labor organizing through UAW. Becker is fluent in Arabic, as he learned Arabic through his grade-school education in the Middle East. He is interested in Palestinian history and struggle.