Double podcast episode about the class struggle in Palestine during the British Mandate (1920-48). We discuss the organisations built by Palestinian workers, the 1936-39 revolt, and a number of joint strikes by Arabs and Jews which happened against the backdrop of rising tensions which culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba.

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Episodes

For these episodes, we spoke to Palestinian scholar and activist, Leena Dallasheh. Her research focuses on the history of Palestine/Israel, with a particular interest in Palestinians who became citizens of Israel in 1948. For more information about Leena and her research, you can check her website.

E86: Class struggle in Palestine, part 1 – Working Class History

  • Part 1: the Balfour Declaration and establishment of the British Mandate, the campaign for ‘Hebrew Labour’, the Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society (PAWS) vs the Palestine Labour League (PLL), the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), the 1936-39 Great Palestinian Revolt

E87: Class struggle in Palestine, part 2 – Working Class History

  • Part 2: the Palestinian labour movement during World War II, new Palestinian workers’ organisations, the split in the PCP, joint struggles by Arab and Jewish workers, war and Nakba

More information

Media

Ships arriving at the Port of Jaffa, 1921-23. Credit: Frank Scholten/Public domain.
Members’ rulebook for the Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society (PAWS), Haifa, 1932. PAWS was one of the earliest Palestinian labour organisations. As well as representing its members at work, it also took a firm line against Zionism and was one of the main labour organisations during the British Mandate. Credit: Palestinian Museum Digital Archive (reproduced under fair use).
Jewish citrus packers, early 1930s. The citrus industry was one of the major industries in Mandate-ruled Palestine and became one of the sites of conflict during the ‘conquest of labour’ campaign, whereby the Histadrut tried to enforce the employment of Jews throughout the economy. Credit: Pikiwiki/Wikimedia Commons.
Palestinians vote as part of the participation in the 1936-39 Great Palestinian Revolt. Credit: Library of Congress/Public domain.
Derailed train during the 1936-39 Great Palestinian Revolt. The derailing of trains was a common tactic pursued by Palestinians during the revolt. Credit: Library of Congress/Public domain.
Two Palestinians being used as human shields by British troops at the front of a locomotive during the 1936-39 revolt, in order to deter sabotage on the railways. Credit: Chaim Kahanov and Zecharia Oryon/Wikimedia Commons.
The first issue of Al-Ittihad (Unity), first published on 14 May 1944. Al-Ittihad was the newspaper of the Palestinian left, starting out as the organ of the National Liberation League and then the Arab Workers’ Congress, both of whom we discuss in Part 2. Now the newspaper of the Israeli Communist Party, it is still published today and is the oldest Arabic newspaper in Israel. Credit: Palestinian Museum Digital Archive (reproduced under fair use).
Expulsion of Palestinians during the massacre in Tantura (now two Israeli-Jewish villages: Dor and Nahsholim). One of many massacres and expulsions which took place during the Nakba. (Credit: Benno Rothenberg/CC by 4.0 International).
May Day demonstration in Ramle, near Tel Aviv, 1949. The Arabic banner says: “We call for the unity of the international working class in Israel. For fraternity, peace, and national equality. And the right to work for the workers and land for the peasants.” The Hebrew banner says: “Long live May 1, day of [international] working-class solidarity.” Credit: Kluger Zoltan/Government Press Office (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED). Arabic translation by Hossam el-Hamalawy.
May Day demonstration in Ramle, near Tel Aviv, 1949. The Arabic banner on the right says: “We demand the release of the detained trade unionists and democrats. We demand the reuniting of victimised Arab families and the return of refugees. We demand the abolishing of military restrictions and racial discrimination.” The Arabic banner on the left is the same as in the previous photo above. The banner in the foreground, in Yiddish, says: “Work and bread for Ramle workforce.” Credit: Kluger Zoltan/Government Press Office (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED). Arabic translation by Hossam el-Hamalawy.

These episodes have been released as part of our collaboration with Collecteurs as part of the Falastin digital exhibition, in Chapter 2.

Sources

Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman, Fernando López Ojeda and Jeremy Cusimano.
  • Edited by Tyler Hill
  • Episode graphic: public domain/Library of Congress.
  • Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.

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Transcript

Part 1

Matt: For almost three decades after World War I, Palestinians were locked in a struggle against both the British empire and growing Zionist settlement. That period also saw the birth of the Palestinian labour movement, fighting for better conditions at work while also resisting British and Zionist colonial projects. An era that ended in catastrophe, it also saw a successful united general strike of Jewish and Palestinian workers, and an anti-colonial uprising involving possibly the longest ever general strike. This is Working Class History.

[Intro music]

Matt: Before we get started, just a reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. For example, our patreon supporters can listen to an exclusive bonus episode now, in which we discuss the curious relationship of British authorities to the Palestinian workers’ movement, the labour movement in Nazareth before, during and immediately after the Nakba, and Zionist dishonesty in relation to the slogans of the pro-Palestine movement. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes.

These episodes form part of the Falastin digital exhibition with Collecteurs, as part of Chapter 2, a collaboration with over 300 volunteers in Palestine and around the world. You can check out the exhibition on the link in the show notes.

We’d actually been preparing an episode on Palestine for some time and were finalising a meeting with a Palestinian academic in London when the October 7 attack took place. Since then, Gaza has been subject to what can only be described as war crime after war crime with the explicitly stated intention of committing genocide. The numbers, well-known and always rising, are so staggering as to be numbing. The individual tales of horror so horrifying as to be beyond words.

Since this round of attacks began, people have rightly underlined that this conflict did not begin on October 7: aside from the fact that even before October, 2023 was already the deadliest year for Palestinian children in the West Bank, many have also mentioned the years 1967 and 1948: 1967 being the year when, as a result of the Six-Day War, Israel occupied a number of territories, including the Gaza Strip, leading to the displacement of around 300,000 Palestinians, while 1948 was when the State of Israel was founded off the back of the expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians in what became known as the Nakba, or ‘the catastrophe’ in Arabic.

However, to properly understand the events of those years, it’s important to go back even further – to before the founding of the State of Israel – to understand how the processes of displacement, settlement and colonisation developed long before ‘48. 

But, from our perspective, what’s also interesting about this period is how even in these most difficult conditions, a nascent Palestinian workers’ movement began to emerge to fight for their class interests against British colonialism and Zionism, and even in the face of a hostile, often conservative, Palestinian political class. Despite its small size, the workers’ movement even managed (on occasion) to bridge the growing divide between Jews and Arabs, giving brief glimpses of what a possible society in Palestine based on multiethnic solidarity and cooperation might look like; a possibility which, as we unfortunately know all too well, has yet to come.

Up until World War I, Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire, through which Turkey ruled much of the Middle East. However, this all changed after the Ottomans ended up on the losing side of the war and their empire – including Palestine – was divided up by the victors.

Leena Dallasheh: During World War I, the British made conflicting promises regarding Palestine. One was to the French with the Skyes-Picot Agreement which divided the Arab provinces of the Middle East between France and Britain. France could have assumed that Palestine could have been a part of the area that it was receiving. The British also made a promise to the Arab leader of the revolt who was Sharif Hussein, the Ottoman governor of the Hejaz, that they would allow an Arab state. The third promise was the Balfour Declaration which was a promise made to the Zionist Organisation that the British Government would support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the end of the war. 

Matt: This is Leena Dallasheh, a Palestinian scholar and activist researching the history of Palestine/Israel with a particular interest in the labour movement in Nazareth and the Palestinians who became citizens of Israel after 1948.

Leena Dallasheh: So at the end of the war, basically, the British had promised Palestine to three different parties, none of which were actually the original people of Palestine, the Arab Palestinians who lived there at the time in Palestine. When the Balfour Declaration was issued, about 5% of the population of Palestine was Jewish and 95%, the vast majority, were Palestinian Arabs. They promised political rights or what they called a national homeland (so they could avoid the problems of a state intentionally) to the Jewish people. The Palestinians were only mentioned in negation; that their social and religious rights would not be undermined and they were only mentioned as the non-Jewish population.

Matt: A couple of years after the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations (which was the forerunner to the United Nations we have today) signed a charter which included an article creating what became known as ‘Mandate’ territories: basically, countries previously ruled by the empires that had lost World War I and would now be administered by those who had won. 

Leena Dallasheh: They created this category called the Mandate which, according to the League of Nations, basically claimed that one of the European countries would assist those people ‘not yet able’ to govern themselves. This was the framework of the British control of what is now Jordan and Iraq along with Palestine and France in Syria which then was divided into Syria and Lebanon. 

Matt: Of course, there was one significant difference between the Mandates for countries like Iraq and Syria, and the one in Palestine.

Leena Dallasheh: The distinct form that the British Mandate took in Palestine resulted directly from the Balfour Declaration because in this case, unlike the other cases, the people whom the British promised to aid towards independence were the Jewish minority who, as I mentioned, were still less than 10% in Palestine even after the emigration before and during World War I. The Mandate incorporated verbatim within it the language of the Balfour Declaration; that is ‘His Majesty’s Government views with favour the creation in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’ 

Within this constitutional framework that created the British rule in Palestine, they also reproduced the formula in which the political rights of Jews were contrasted with the protection of the social and religious rights of the non-Jewish population as the Mandate also reproduced from the Balfour Declaration. So the constitutional framework was one that was created to basically facilitate the creation of a Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians. It recognised the Jewish institutions and gave them a role within the British Mandate system. It did not recognise any Palestinian political force or any Palestinian role. It prevented, throughout the Mandate, the creation of any representative democratic institutions because the Palestinians would be a majority and that was something that neither the British nor the Zionist movement had agreed. The British Mandate facilitated Jewish immigration to Palestine throughout its years from 1922 when it officially started until the end of 1947 when it officially ended. I will highlight the British also facilitated land sales from the Palestinians, particularly from absentee landlords. This was a structure that was created during the late Ottoman period in which people from the Ottoman Empire, generally what is now Syria and Lebanon, were able to make claims to huge swathes of land in Palestine. During the years of the Mandate, the Mandate actually facilitated the sale of lands from those absentee landlords to the Zionist institutions, thus turning a large number of Palestinians into landless peasants or basically, eventually, channelling or forcing them to be channelled into becoming a paid labour force which is a part of the proletarianisation process in Palestine. 

Matt: Proletarianisation is the process of creating a working class, which is fundamental to the functioning of capitalism. So this means a class which has been dispossessed of independent means of survival and production – so, land, factories and so on – and so has to sell its ability to work for a wage to those who do own those means of production.

Leena Dallasheh: The British Mandate system also facilitated the creation of quasi-state institutions or the Yishuv which is the name that was used for the Jewish Zionist entity in Palestine. By 1947, when the war started, there were basically state structures in place including an army, an education system and a health system; whereas, for the Palestinians, there was not a possibility to develop any of these things and Palestinians were basically treated as colonial subjects. Any attempt to engage the British Mandate authorities was limited by what historian Rashid Khalidi calls the Iron Cage; that is the constitutional structure that the British created meant that for the Palestinians to have any say in the British Mandate and in their own governance, they had to accept the premise of the British Mandate which is the Jewish state or the Jewish national home which basically negated their ability to have a political entity in Palestine.

Matt: There are a number of possible reasons why the British state did all this, but safe to say none of them were related to any desire to protect Jews. So, for instance, while the Balfour Declaration took its name from British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour, it’s worth remembering that when he was Prime Minister just twelve years earlier, Balfour was pivotal in passing the 1905 Aliens Act, which was designed specifically to prevent the entry into Britain of Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Some years earlier, he had even used the word “invasion” to describe the possibility of Russian Jews arriving in England, stating that it would be “an intolerable abuse of the system of emigration.”

These kinds of sentiments even informed some of Balfour’s support for the Zionist project itself. As he once wrote, part of Zionism’s value was that it would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.” In other words, Zionism would solve the issue caused by too many Jews living in Europe, by moving them to Palestine.

However, the reasons behind the Balfour Declaration were actually a lot more complicated than just Britain wanting to reduce or get rid of its Jewish population.

Leena Dallasheh: A couple of years ago with the 100-year memory of the Balfour Declaration, there were several academic conferences and a lot of discussions about why the British made this promise. We don’t actually have a definitive answer. We have several answers that can explain it and one of them is antisemitism and the desire to get Britain rid of its Jewish population. But one of the considerations was also a strategic consideration. Usually, when I teach history, I tell my students that when you ask a question of why the British Empire did something, the answer is often ‘India’. 

In this case, one of the explanations is the Suez Canal. The British controlled Egypt and this was the other side and, in fact, creating a patron state in that area guaranteed a long-term dominance because in 1919, the Egyptians had already had a revolt. There was already huge discontent against the British. Having a population that was very reliant on the British, a colonial force, exactly as in the Ulster case, was very useful. 

Matt: When Leena mentions Ulster here, she’s referring to the Irish province which historically had a majority Protestant population. The bulk of it makes up what is commonly known as Northern Ireland, which is still occupied by Britain. Leena’s mention of Ulster here is a reference to a comment made by Ronald Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem, who said that Britain needed the Zionist movement to form a “little loyal Jewish Ulster”; that is, just as the Protestant community was intended to maintain loyalty to Britain in Northern Ireland, the Zionist movement would do the same in Palestine.

Now, to build this community, Zionists had to encourage large numbers of Jews to move to the region. And one of the foundational myths of Zionism is that before European Jews arrived in Palestine, there was nothing there: the so-called ‘land without a people’ for ‘a people without a land’, and it was the Zionists who ‘made the desert bloom’. Of course, the reality was completely different.

Leena Dallasheh: British rule of Palestine began as Palestine was undergoing massive socioeconomic changes that are not, as used to be claimed, only tied to the Zionist movement in Palestine. It was already undergoing very serious economic changes during the late 19th century and early 20th century with accelerated agricultural production for regional and international markets. Very well-known among these is the citrus industry which was already in significant growth when the Zionist movement started competing within the field. Citrus, in fact, remained one of the significant export branches in Palestine and employed a very significant number of labourers within it. The labourers tended to be mixed but with a Palestinian majority, depending on whether it was in the agricultural end, packaging or marketing, but the citrus economy and other export economies also created very lively ports, initially Jaffa and later on Haifa which were also important industrial locations. The British also relied on the very extensive railway system and the railroads also employed a very significant number of workers. The British Government, at the clerical level, also employed a lot of workers in Palestine. But with the increasing mobilisation of the Labour Zionist movement, who were trying to push Palestinians out of not only the Jewish economic sector but also the British Mandate sector and pressuring the British Mandate to employ mostly Jewish labour but that was never conclusive. 

Matt: It might be important here to go into a bit more detail about what ‘Labour Zionism’ is: basically, it represents the ‘left’ of the Zionist movement who believed that the creation of a Jewish state couldn’t just be achieved by cutting deals with imperial powers like Britain, but also needed the effort of the Jewish masses, either working in the cities or setting up kibbutzim, which were a form of collectivist rural community.

However, Labour Zionism was only really on ‘the left’ in relation to the rest of the Zionist movement. Any claim to ideals of working-class solidarity and internationalism were ultimately undermined by its commitment to the national-colonial project, particularly in relation to the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians were by definition excluded from the kibbutzim and, as we’ll discuss in Part 2, Labour Zionist organisations were the dominant military and political groupings during the massacres and displacements which led to the founding of the State of Israel. While today it is Israel’s far-right government that is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, it should be remembered that most of the major political actors and institutions that originally carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948  (such as Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion) came out of the Zionist left.

One of those institutions was the Histadrut, the Jewish trade union federation established in Mandate-ruled Palestine in 1920. However, to characterise it as simply a trade union would be a gross simplification.

Leena Dallasheh: In all honesty, calling it a union is a very generous exaggeration if you ask me because it was really a quasi-state and by the beginning of the State of Israel, the Histadrut was a major force within Israel. That wasn’t a coincidence because the Histadrut was able to build a whole economic sector for itself. It became the largest employer in the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and later in Israel. It monopolised whole sectors of the economy. It provided social and cultural services throughout the Yishuv including healthcare and education. It was at the centre of the Zionist project. It might have been a union but it had a state next to it or a state that had a union next to it. In either case, it was an instrumental part of the Zionist project and came out of Labour Zionism or basically, out of the understanding that even though there’s this claim of social Zionism, the priority is Zionism. 

Matt: If you think there seems to be a contradiction here between being the main Jewish union federation and also the largest employer within the Jewish settlement in Palestine, you’d be right. In our podcast episodes on Anti-Zionism in Israel, veteran Israeli anti-Zionist socialist Akiva Orr explains how, in the 1950s as a young merchant seaman, he took a pay dispute to his Histadrut union representative. As Akiva explained, not only had his union rep never been a merchant seaman or been elected by the members, but “From 8-12, he acted as the seamen’s union secretary, had a lunch break and then he sat on the board of directors of the shipping company!” (you can listen to more from Akiva’s story in episodes 17 and 18 on anti-Zionism in Israel).

However, while the Histadrut might have been comically class collaborationist in relation to Jewish workers, its relationship to Palestinians was far worse. One of the key ways this played out was with the so-called ‘conquest of labour’, sometimes known as the campaign for ‘Hebrew Labour’.

Leena Dallasheh: The conquest of labour was an idea of basically enabling exclusive Jewish labour in not only the Jewish industry but also in the Mandate-led industries. This ideal of Labour Zionism comes to the ground and encounters the reality that it is not sustainable. In fact, in the first waves of immigration, the vast majority of the people who emigrate to Palestine actually turn around and leave because they are unable to live in Palestine. In part, that’s because they cannot compete with the Palestinian workers because they were rooted in the place, they had social networks that subsidised the production of labour and they were able to work for much lower wages. People had small plots of land. They had extended families. They had support units. They had existing homes so they were able to work more cheaply which made them a draw for some of the industries but also a target for the Zionist movement.

The early Jewish enterprises in Palestine were profit-centred so they obviously would end up hiring Palestinian workers who were the cheaper option. The alternative that Labour Zionism comes out with, which is manifested by the Histadrut, is creating its own industries and in those, excluding Palestinians. The Kibbutz model, which is lauded as a socialist model, was actually rooted in an exclusionary, antiuniversal understanding of excluding Palestinians from work in Palestine. The Histadrut, throughout, is invested in this project. They picket Jewish industries and Mandate industries demanding exclusive Jewish labour and the firing of Palestinian workers. They undermine them in every turn possible. Nimrod Ben-Zeev writes about construction and quarries in his research and he shows how the Histadrut was instrumental in pushing out Palestinian workers in Nesher, for example, in the cement factories. The Histadrut, in that sense, plays an instrumental role in undermining the Palestinian working class. 

Matt: As part of the Hebrew Labour campaign, the Histadrut would set up pickets outside workplaces employing Palestinian workers. During these pickets, Histadrut activists frequently attacked both property and Palestinian workers themselves. For instance, during a campaign at a number of Kfar Saba citrus groves in 1934, Histadrut picketers would enter the groves and forcibly take tools from Palestinian workers, they blocked entrances and roads leaving Palestinian villages, and they threw rocks at Palestinian workers.

Violence was even more common in cities, where Histadrut activists acted as ‘flying pickets’, moving from one workplace to another, first trying to persuade employers to sack Palestinian workers and then, when that didn’t work, resorting to violence.

Unsurprisingly, however, the Palestinian working class were not passive victims to such attacks.

Leena Dallasheh: Certainly, there were confrontations and violence that were part of this process from the beginning which is only natural to think about because imagine if you are a worker who comes to work and is faced with people trying to prevent you from walking into your workplace. It was also a part of the overall tension that was brewing in Palestine from the early 1920s or that already had roots within the pre-Mandate era. Palestinians understood the Zionist project very clearly and they understood that it was a project that sought to take over their country, take over their land and exclude them from the political entity that would be created but also from access to resources. The tensions brewed over the years and the conquest of labour was one of the focal points of confrontation for a while. 

Matt: Throughout the period of the British Mandate, Palestinian workers also built a variety of organisations to fight for their rights, both on the shopfloor and in a broader, more political sense. One of the first such organisations was the PAWS: the Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society.

Leena Dallasheh: The Palestine Arab Workers Society or PAWS (Jam’iyyat al-‘Ummal al-‘Arabiyya al-Filastiniyya) was the first Palestinian trade union created in 1925. It was Haifa-based. It started in Haifa and it remained very significantly a Haifa-based organisation throughout the years of its existence. It was started by the railway workers and as I mentioned, this became one of the big employment centres for both Arab and Jewish workers. This is also one of the places where they worked together pretty intensively for most of the years of the Mandate rule. There was an attempt at joint unionisation which was very short-lived after which the Palestine Arab Workers Society was created. Even though it was created in 1925, it was very slow-growing and even though it aspired to, it really didn’t really grow out of the railway workers for a long time. In 1930, it had its first national congress and that was actually quite a significant event in the sense that, in a way, it initiated the Palestinian labour movement in a very significant way. The conference was very much organised and mobilised by Palestinian communist labour organisers. There were very few at the time but they were still very significant and, in fact, they were able to gain some prominence even among the elected officials of the union at that conference. The conference also declared the form that the Palestinian labour movement would take which is one that was centred on a political and economic agenda. This actually would become a feature of the Palestinian labour mobilisation throughout which is to say that while worrying about factory-level rights, the labour union was also anticolonial and invested in the Palestinian national movement demanding rights for the Palestinians.

In the 1930s, there was a rise of nationalist mobilisation and anticolonial fervour in Palestine that is multifaceted and multilocational. I guess you could say they were peasants, youths, workers and intellectuals. Palestine, in the build-up to the 1930s, was very, very mobilised and as part of that, there was also a rise in labour mobilisation and consolidation of the labour movement that is expressed in a series of strikes from the beginning of the 1930s at Shell, the oil refineries, by drivers, transportation, railway workers, by workers in different factories.

Matt: In her study on the Palestinian labour movement, Rachelle Leah Taqqu explains that the 1930 conference was attended by 59 labour representatives from across Palestine: Haifa railway workers made up the core of the organisation, but there were also bakers, painters, stonemasons and other construction workers from around the country. The conference passed resolutions to set up a number of affiliated trade unions, a newspaper, evening classes and a loan fund for workers as well as anti-Zionist motions opposing Jewish immigration into Palestine and the preference given to Jewish workers in government employment.

Politically, the PAWS was not radical; while communists were heavily involved in the 1930 conference, the union lacked internal democracy and was ultimately controlled by more moderate trade unionists. PAWS also frequently appealed to business leaders for help in disputes: two examples can be seen from 1935 where Palestinian notables were called on to mediate strikes and settled the disputes by significantly reducing workers’ demands while making calls for national unity.

In the years to come Palestinian communists would debate whether to stay in PAWS and reform it, or to set up new union organisations (and we’ll come back to this in Part 2). Yet its very existence as an explicitly anti-Zionist Palestinian labour organisation both put the issue of Palestinian labour on the political map, and posed a threat to the Histadrut and the Zionist project more generally.

As such, discussions within the Histadrut began around the question of organising Palestinian workers without losing the Zionist character of the Histadrut itself. And so, while mobilising activists to forcibly remove Palestinian workers from their jobs as part of the so-called ‘conquest of labour’, the Histadrut also set up the Palestine Labour League, or PLL, to organise Palestinian workers into unions (though, obviously, not as equal members and certainly not for benevolent reasons).

Leena Dallasheh: At the same time, it actually creates a labour movement for the Palestinians. Obviously, it excludes the Palestinians from membership in the Histadrut but it creates the Palestine Labour League (PLL) which would become later the Israel Labour League as a union in an attempt to co-opt and manage the Palestinian workers. That started in 1932 and it had some people who joined it and then during the revolt it disappears and it came back in the ‘40s. As I said, in the ‘50s, it became a significant forum of Israeli co-option and control of the Palestinian labour movement but that’s a part of the way that the Histadrut viewed its relationship with the Palestinians; never from the perspective of universal worker solidarity but always from a place where they wanted to guarantee that Palestinian workers did not undermine or compete with the Jewish workers and, where possible, are replaced by Jewish workers.

Matt: The decision to set up the PLL was certainly not out of a sense of universal worker solidarity. In the years preceding it, discussions within the Histadrut and Labour Zionism more broadly had always seen a kind of lip-service to unity overcome by anxiety about the threat it posed to the colonial project: as one Labour Zionist put it, “From a humanitarian standpoint, it is clear that we must organise them, but from a national standpoint, when we organise them we will be arousing them against us. They will receive the good that is in organisation and use it against us.”

This soon proved to be a classic case of colonial thinking: Palestinian workers did not need Labour Zionists to organise them, but began organising themselves, which was clear not just in the 1930 PAWS conference, but also in the gradually increasing assertiveness among Palestinian workers. In the early 1930s, strikes increased in frequency, often called by Palestinian workers who would only afterwards seek support from either Jewish or Palestinian labour organisations and a 1932 strike by Arab construction workers in Haifa led both the District Commissioner and local Inspector of Immigration to predict a new wave of Arab labour militancy.

By this time, the Histadrut had committed to setting up the PLL and there was never any question that it would be anything other than an instrument of the Histadrut: Histadrut officials drew up its charter and it was Histadrut officials who ran the PLL on a day-to-day basis. Its budget came almost entirely from Histadrut sources and it remained loyal to the Histadrut line on any given issue. As Palestinian workers were organising themselves anyway, it was clear to the Histadrut that it would be better if they did so within structures that it would control.

Yet despite considerable Histadrut resources, the PLL was never really able to outperform the PAWS: as Taqqu notes in her research, by the mid-1930s, the two organisations were more or less neck and neck, and it was not uncommon for workers in the League to then go over to the PAWS. But the overriding experience of Palestinian labour organisations in this period was basically of instability: the transience of the Palestinian labour market meant that even when workers won their disputes, the unions they’d built (whoever they were affiliated to) would often largely disappear with future strikes breaking out again among unaffiliated workers. 

Mixed into this lively world of Palestinian labour organising was a growing cadre of Palestinian communists.

Leena Dallasheh: I’m very passionate about the Palestinian communists and this is my next project. The Palestine Communist Party was rooted in Social Zionism originally. It was people who came to Palestine as a part of that. They were disenchanted with it, broke with it and eventually, in March 1924, the PCP (or PKP which is the Yiddish name that it was known by) was recognised by the Comintern.

Matt: The Comintern that Leena mentions here is the Communist International, which was the international organisation uniting the world’s Communist Parties under the leadership of the USSR. 

Leena Dallasheh: The Comintern conditioned the recognition with what became known as the Arabisation policy; that is for the Palestine Communist Party to be a truly territorial party, it had to become a majority-Palestinian party or majority-Arab party because the vast majority of Palestine at the time was Arab. The directive from the Comintern was basically that the Jewish cadres had to integrate Palestinian workers into the party and support them both against Zionism and British imperialism. It was a very rough start. Remember, these were European Jews who mostly did not speak Arabic but also one could suspect were not very excited about the prospect of being replaced by Palestinians. So the process was very slow not only because of that but the flip side of that was the Palestinians were very suspicious of those new immigrants who came as a part of the Zionist movement. Even if they weren’t, in fact, Zionists by this point, for the Palestinians they were associated with the Zionist project. There was a lot of suspicion and it was very slow-growing and by the end of the 1920s, very few Palestinians had joined the Communist Party. They were mostly working-class but they were actually a very dedicated cadre to the extent, as I mentioned, that at the 1930 conference, the Palestinian communist labour organisers were very influential.

From the beginning, they were vocal against land sales. They were part of the mobilisation against it and writing against it. They publish a newspaper in Arabic that goes on and off during the ‘30s and much more consistently in the ‘40s. They’re definitely trying to frame themselves and get engaged in Palestinian society as a part of an anticolonial struggle. For the Palestinians, that meant objecting to immigration and land sales. The communists were very vocal about the issue of land sales, especially because it actually fit very well as a class issue which led to the dispossession of peasants to landlessness. They’re outspoken about that and they’re outspoken against the Hebrew Labour issue. They’re very outspoken about British colonial policies.

Matt: Within the Comintern, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had the ultimate authority for deciding the organisational or political lines that individual parties had to follow, with deviation from those lines putting those parties at risk of disaffiliation or even being dissolved entirely (as happened in 1938 to the Communist Party of Poland which resulted in much of its leadership being killed during Stalin’s purges).

However, it would be wrong to claim that the Comintern was kept together just by coercion; many parties willingly followed the Comintern line out of a desire to follow the advice of what many considered to be the world’s first ‘workers’ state’. And in the case of the PCP, it was adherence to the Comintern line that essentially kept it together and encouraged it to reorient itself to try to become a predominantly Arab political party.

Leena Dallasheh: A lot of the struggles for increasing Palestinian participation in the Communist Party actually also stemmed from the Comintern’s own policies. Musa Budeiri argues that the PCP, at least until 1935, was completely subservient to the Comintern’s dictates. The Comintern, in the 1920s and 1930s, was mostly hostile to what it considered to be bourgeois nationalism and, thus, it was very hard for the PCP to actually engage with the Palestinians even though, by the 1930s with the rise of the labour movement, it was able to become more influential and more active but it was also facing a lot of hostility. Even though it played an instrumental role in the PAWS 1930 conference, in the years that followed, it was very much pushed out and excluded because of this suspicion. 

The 1935 Comintern change of policy towards the Popular Front meant that the PCP could become more greatly involved with the Palestinian national struggle and have more access to Arabs but, at the same time, there was further isolation from the Jewish workers. The Jewish workers were already a small minority within it and not particularly very popular because they were anti-Zionist and anticolonialist. By 1936, basically, the party was fully in support of the Palestinian Arab Revolt and it meant that it was increasing its strength and ability to become more and more accepted and integrated into Palestinian society.

Matt: The Popular Front policy was a move away from the initial Comintern policy which rejected the idea of collaboration with social democratic and capitalist political parties. However, with the rise of fascism in Europe, and the failure of the workers’ movement to stop it, they changed to the idea of Popular Fronts, which then encouraged collaboration with broader forces, like bourgeois nationalist and anti-colonial movements, including in Palestine.

Broadly speaking, as the PCP gained influence among Palestinians, it lost it among Jews. And while communist influence among Palestinians was never huge, they did develop a good base within the broader Palestinian working class: so, as well as being instrumental in organising the national PAWS conference mentioned previously, they also organised party cells among workers at the Palestine Electric and Iraq Petroleum companies, organised the Transport Workers’ Union in Jaffa and took part in counter-protests against Hebrew Labour pickets.

All of this meant that, by the mid-thirties, communists had a firmer base among Palestinians than they had previously. This, combined with their stance against both Zionism and the British Mandate, meant that the Palestine Communist Party was in a good position for the events of 1936, sometimes known as the Great Palestinian Revolt.

Leena Dallasheh: With the rise of the Palestinian mobilisation on a kind of bottom-up level, it escalates in 1936 to a six-month general strike that was actually instigated by the Palestinian masses and the Palestinian national leadership which was conservative and elitist in nature but was actually forced into joining this effort. 

Matt: The rising tensions over increased Zionist settlement, the exclusion of Palestinian peasants from land via land sales, and the constant attempts to remove Palestinian workers from their jobs via the so-called ‘conquest of labour’, all contributed to the strength of feeling which led to the revolt. But there was a series of events which really brought these tensions to a head.

First, in October 1935, Arab dockers in the port of Jaffa discovered a large stockpile of weapons being smuggled into Palestine, most likely destined for Zionist paramilitary groups. Included in this arsenal were 25 machine guns, 800 rifles and 400,000 rounds of ammunition. For Palestinians, this was proof that Zionists were preparing an armed takeover of Palestine, resulting in a number of localised protests and general strikes.

The following month, ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam, an Islamic preacher who had been organising guerrilla bands to ambush British police and Jewish settlements in rural Palestine, called for an armed uprising. Soon killed, his funeral became the focus of a huge outpouring of popular sympathy and a political demonstration whose size shocked observers.

Yet despite al-Qassam’s death, the guerrilla groups he had started continued. A few months later, in April 1936, Qassamite guerrillas killed two Jews during a roadblock. In response, Jews in Tel Aviv marched through the streets attacking Palestinians and their properties while in nearby Petah Tikva, two Palestinians were murdered by Jewish assailants.

It is in this context that what became known as the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936 breaks out, the first phase of which is the six-month general strike mentioned by Leena. 

Leena Dallasheh: The Palestinians announced a six-month strike with three very clear demands: end Jewish immigration, end land sale and democracy with the end of British colonialism. A general strike that was remarkably adhered to by the Palestinian masses. The Palestinian economy and related aspects were shut down pretty much for six months which is also part of what the Zionists movement and the Histadrut used to undermine Palestinian workers in the next level.

Matt: The general strike saw walkouts in and boycotts of both British and Zionist-run sections of the economy as well as the non-payment of taxes. Historians have claimed it was the longest ever anti-colonial general strike, and perhaps even the longest general strike in history anywhere. In tandem with the strike, ‘national committees’ sprang up in major cities to coordinate the struggle, with the Nablus committee being the one that had originally called the strike. Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders tried to catch up with the revolt by endorsing the strike and forming the Arab Higher Committee as part of an attempt to pull together the various factions of the Palestinian political class. 

The strike was massively adhered to: the Arab drivers’ union shut down motor transport, Nesher quarry workers organised in the PAWS walked out, and the Jaffa port was stopped by port workers. However, it was during the strike that the function of the Histadrut’s ‘conquest of labour’ really crystallised: for instance, while the Jaffa port (with its largely Arab workforce) had been shut down, the port at Haifa (which had a more significant Jewish workforce) remained working. Even Palestinian port workers in Haifa were reluctant to join the strike, arguing that if they did, they would simply be replaced by Jewish workers.

Indeed, the Histadrut used the strike as an opportunity to further its colonial ends, mobilising kibbutz members to act as scab replacements by doing the work of striking Palestinians. At the Nesher quarry, the contract of Palestinian contractor, Musbah al-Shaqifi (himself no friend of Palestinian workers) was terminated and transferred to the Histadrut’s Contracting Office. At another quarry in Majdal Yaba, the Histadrut coordinated with British authorities to fire all 400 or so Arab workers and replace them with Jewish workers. Meanwhile, the British military were sent to protect scabs and Royal Navy engineers were deployed to break a strike by rail workers.

Despite the combined forces of the British empire and the Zionist movement, the strike was solid enough to have shocked the British who subsequently tried to find the underlying causes for the strike.

Leena Dallasheh: After the six-month initial strike, there was pressure from the Arab countries, who were, again, patrons of British colonialism, to stop the strike. The British sent a commission, the Peel Commission, as a fact-finding mission to Palestine and issued its recommendation for the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state and an international section with the idea that the Mandate was not workable. As part of the commission’s decisions and discussions, even though it was hostile to the Palestinians, it was a clear understanding that British rule was the reason for the unrest among the Palestinians. 

Matt: The Peel Commission recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states that was ultimately hostile to the Palestinians. For instance, rather than set up an independent Palestinian state, the Commission recommended that the Arab portion be annexed by Transjordan. Moreover, the population transfer that partition would have entailed was extremely uneven: as the Peel Commission itself acknowledged, only 1,250 Jews lived in the area allotted to the future Arab state while about 225,000 Arabs lived in (and would therefore have to be moved to make space for) the area assigned to the future Jewish state. There were also concerns that much of the more cultivable land was being given to the future Jewish state while the Palestinians were being left with barren mountains.

The Zionists, for their part, were willing to accept the Peel Commission, despite its offer of less land than they wanted, seeing it as the best they could achieve given the current balance of power. In the words of Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, it was “a basis for negotiations, not a final map.”

Leena: The Palestinians reject the Peel Commission’s recommendations and the second phase of the revolt after the Peel Commission was an armed struggle that was centred in the countryside. It was mainly led by Palestinian peasants who carried arms and tried to sabotage and attack both British targets and Jewish settlements.

Matt: This next phase of the revolt was even more uncontrollable than the six months that preceded it: armed rebellion spread all over the country and, as Palestinian-American historian, Rashid Khalidi explains, in September 1937 British forces lost control of much of the countryside to armed groups and were briefly forced to withdraw from Jafƒa, Jericho, the Old City of Jerusalem, and a number of other major cities while less accessible rural areas remained out of British control for even longer. As one British military commander put it in 1938: “the situation was such that civil administration of the country was, to all practical purposes, non-existent.”

As well as using the military, British authorities also enlisted armed Zionist groups; an experience that would prove valuable for those groups in 1948 (which we discuss in Part 2). Eventually, the revolt was crushed. 

Leena Dallasheh: The British used massive force to quash the Palestinians, including aerial bombardment which they had already used in Iraq in 1920-21, collective punishment, mass imprisonment, executions and suppression of Palestinian rights. The British brought tons of military force from the colonial sphere to quash this. By the end of the revolt in 1939, the Palestinian society was socially, economically and politically devastated.

Matt: To capture the scale of that devastation it is worth returning to quote Rashid Khalidi at length:

The cost to Palestinian society was great. Hundreds of homes were blown up (perhaps as many as two thousand), crops were destroyed, and over one hundred rebels were summarily executed simply for the possession of firearms, or even ammunition. Curfews, administrative detention, internal exile, and other punishments were liberally applied, and particularly cruel means were employed by the British, such as tying villagers to the front of locomotive engines to prevent rebels from blowing up trains. An entire quarter of the Old City of Jaƒfa was dynamited (under the rubric of “urban renewal”) after the British failed to bring it under control. Total Arab casualties during the revolt were approximately 5,000 killed and 10,000 wounded, while those detained totalled 5,679 in 1939. The number of those exiled or forced to flee is unknown, but is probably in the thousands. In an Arab population of about 1 million, these were considerable figures: they meant that over 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.

However, the ramifications of the defeat of the revolt would be felt far beyond the end of the revolt itself.

Leena Dallasheh: The Palestinian leadership is either imprisoned or exiled. The Palestinian economy has been shattered, both by the British practices and the outcomes of the struggle. In-fighting also undermines the Palestinians. The situation is so dire to the extent that the historian James Gelvin says that Palestinian society, by 1948, had not recovered from the aftermath of the revolt. It was not able to rebuild itself to be ready for the war that broke out in 1948.

[Outro music]

Matt: That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. Join us in Part 2 where Leena will tell us about how the Palestinian labour movement got organised during World War II. We also tell the story of a general strike involving both Arab and Jewish workers as well as the catastrophic events which made up the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and led to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Part 2 is available now for early listening for our supporters on patreon.

We also have a bonus episode where we discuss the curious relationship of British authorities to the Palestinian workers’ movement, the experience of the labour movement in Nazareth and the dishonesty of Zionists in relation to the slogans of the Free Palestine movement. Available now, exclusively for our supporters on patreon.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

If you’d like to learn more about workers’ struggles in Mandate-ruled Palestine, check out the webpage for this episode where you’ll find images, a full list of sources, further reading and more. We’ve also got a great selection of books available about Palestinian and Israeli history in our online store, and you can get 10% off them and anything else using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Links in the show notes. 

Thanks also to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda and Jeremy Cusimano.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Tyler Hill.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 2

Matt: Welcome back to Part 2 of our double-episode on the class struggle in Mandate-ruled Palestine. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet then I recommend you go back and listen to that first.

[intro music]

Matt: Before we get started, just a reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted merch and other content. For example, our patreon supporters can listen to an exclusive bonus episode now, in which we discuss the curious relationship of British authorities to the Palestinian workers’ movement, the labour movement in Nazareth before, during and immediately after the Nakba, and Zionist dishonesty in relation to the slogans of the pro-Palestine movement. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes.

These episodes form part of the Falastin digital exhibition with Collecteurs, as part of Chapter 2, a collaboration with over 300 volunteers in Palestine and around the world. You can check out the exhibition on the link in the show notes.

As a content note for our listeners, this episode contains some descriptions of war crimes.

At the end of Part 1, we finished with Palestinian scholar Leena Dallasheh’s discussion of the crushing defeat of the Great Revolt in 1939, which devastated Palestinian civil society, killing, wounding, imprisoning or exiling about 10 percent of the adult male population. The Palestinian labour movement was also affected, essentially contracting back to its original base in Haifa where, even there, it remained largely dormant.

However, with the outbreak of World War II, things changed drastically.

Leena Dallasheh: In the 1940s, there was a massive proletarianisation in Palestine that was tied to British wartime interests. There are the army camps that recruit tens of thousands of workers within them which become a hub of labour mobilisation but there is also a lot more economic development in Palestine because of the closures due to the war. In a kind of ironic turn of colonial developments, the fact that Palestine could no longer import actually enabled what the British had been preventing which was the development of local industry. There was a growth in the labour movement significantly in the 1940s during the war and with that, also a very significant increase in labour mobilisation that is tied partially to the structures within the Palestinian society. By the end of the revolt, the traditional, national leadership was mostly exiled from Palestine and there was a political space for new forces and the labour movement became a very prominent part of the new political force in Palestine. Particularly the communists and their influence within the labour movement, tried to shift the way that nationalist politics is expressed and in a way that combines the two.

Matt: To give an idea of the economic upswing the war brought about, British and Allied military expenditure in Palestine (for things like clothing, food, ammunition, construction, repair and maintenance etc) totalled about £P1 million in 1940. By 1943, it was 12 million. Industrial exports went from less than half a million in 1940 to 11 million in 1945.

This economic upswing resulted in tens of thousands of Arabs and Jews getting jobs not just in new or newly active factories and workshops, but also the various military bases that sprang up around Palestine. By 1943, around 35,000 Arabs and 15,000 Jews were employed directly by the British military at over 100 bases while thousands more were employed in the various construction projects needed to service those bases.

This expansion of the working class in Palestine meant that labour activists (particularly among Palestinians) began to mobilise again both within the Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society (or PAWS, who we discussed in the previous episode) and other, sometimes new, organisations.

Leena Dallasheh: The 1940s is an attempt at a different Palestinian politics and within that, the labour movement becomes very, very significant. PAWS, which continued to exist formally, is revived but it also is joined by other movements. The communists in the early 1940s had a lot of tension within them because one section of the Communist Party believed that what they should do was radicalise the Palestinian labour movement through PAWS. What they want to do is become involved in PAWS itself and radicalise it from within. In fact, they tried very hard. PAWS, at the time, is very undemocratic. From its creation, other than the 1930 conference, there were never elections, it was very much controlled by one man for most of its years. He was conservative and, in fact, at some point, he tried to play into the British desire to have a non-politicised union which the Palestinian communists tried to undermine and push for radicalisation. 

One faction of the Palestinian communist movement in 1942 decide to give up, led by Bulus Farah. They create a new union, the Federation of Arab Trade Unions and Labour Societies. The vast majority of the communists actually remain in PAWS and try to radicalise it from within. In those years in the forties, there was a massive increase in the number of trade unions all over Palestine in all kinds of industries. Some industries have had traditional labour unions like the railway and oil refineries but now all kinds of other industries join smaller industries but also dozens of local union branches are opened all over Palestinian towns. Within that, the Nazareth Union was created in October 1942, initially, as part of PAWS but led by Palestinian communists. It was actually communist-affiliated. They’re able to do a lot of mobilising on multiple levels. They mobilise workers in the camps but they also mobilise workers in small factories in Nazareth or Haifa and they also mobilise within both British and Jewish-owned but also Palestinian-owned industries.

Matt: Bulus Farah, who Leena just mentioned, was a Palestinian communist who had worked at the Haifa railway workshops since he was just 15. He joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and, in 1934, went to Moscow’s University of Toilers of the East, where communists from across the colonised world gained political training.

The Federation of Arab Trade Unions and Labour Societies (sometimes abbreviated as FALT, or FATULS) that Farah’s group was instrumental in setting up quickly established itself as a force within the Palestinian labour movement. Workers joined FATULS at a number of large workplaces in and around Haifa, such as Shell and the Iraq Petroleum Company as well as at the port and on the military camps.

Both PAWS and FATULS would grow significantly in the coming years. It’s hard to get an accurate picture due to unions inflating their numbers, overlaps in membership etc, but an estimate of about 20,000 Palestinian workers organised into trade unions by the mid-forties seems about accurate.

As the forties progressed, a working-class cultural and political sphere began to develop in Palestine. As well as annual events celebrating May Day, International Workers’ Day on May 1, local Palestinian unions also began organising workers’ theatres, sports committees and social events. A number of producer and consumer co-operatives, as well as a credit union, were set up by local union branches. FATULS also began to publish a weekly newspaper, Al-Ittihad (or Unity in English), to which left-leaning PAWS branches would contribute articles. As we’ll go into later, it’s important to note that many new PAWS branches were led by other Palestinian communists, not part of Bulus Farah’s faction.

Palestinian workers were also becoming increasingly assertive. On 30 April 1944, the Histadrut’s Palestinian section, the Palestine Labour League (who we discussed in Part 1), organised an event to celebrate May Day and open a new club in Jaffa. In response, members of the local PAWS branch packed out the meeting, clapped, shouted and constantly directed questions at the speakers until the meeting eventually had to be abandoned. Afterwards, a leaflet was produced titled “From Arab Workers to the Jewish Workers”. Addressing their “Brother workers”, the leaflet criticised the Histadrut’s ‘Hebrew Labour’ policy discussed in Part 1. The leaflet read: “Imagine to yourselves what you would say if these same people who yesterday expelled you from your job came to you today talking about May Day, even while declaring that tomorrow too they will put you out of work”. Written in Hebrew, it showed an obvious belief and desire among Palestinian leftists to find allies among the Jewish working class. 

The Palestinian labour movement was on the rise; but so too were frictions within it, especially between the new, more radical PAWS branches and their decidedly less radical leadership.

Leena Dallasheh: The tension within the Palestinian labour movement grows, especially because the communists seek to politicise it; whereas, Sami Taha and PAWS are trying to maintain more of a labour-focused neutrality, if not fully, but at least it’s criticised by the communists to be such. 

Matt: Sami Taha (like so many Palestinian trade unionists) had come up working at the Haifa railways, and later as an office clerk. In the 1940s, still in his twenties, he became the leading figure within PAWS, though was frequently criticised for his undemocratic and conservative leadership style.

Leena Dallasheh: Eventually, in 1945, the communists created a new union, the Arab Workers Congress (AWC). This union has a very clear political line. It is very avidly anticolonialist. It is very engaged in the national and political life of the Palestinians. Actually, both PAWS and the AWC are involved in the struggle for holding municipal elections and particularly for holding democratic municipal elections because the British Mandate laws only allowed voting for a group that paid a particular level of municipal taxes which meant that, in the case of Nazareth for instance, in the 1946 elections, only 9% of the residents of Nazareth could vote. It was males over a certain age, and taxpaying, so was only 9% of the population. The union became very involved in the struggle to hold elections, to expand the right to vote. In the communist case, it’s a very clear anticolonial struggle and in one of the leaflets, in Nazareth, that they published, they say, ‘The British are forbidding us from any other political participation so we will use the municipal councils to mobilise for our democratic rights and do anticolonial mobilisation.’ For them, there is a clear agenda that ties the national interest with the workers’ interest. 

They published a newspaper called Al-Ittihad (The Unity) in which they were able to express their political opinions and increase politicisation. I know from some of the interviews I have that some of the people who later joined communist mobilisation actually joined it through reading Al-Ittihad in the buses on their way from Nazareth to Haifa because Nazareth was very much a hinterland town. It had some industry and it had a lot of British Mandate workers or people who worked in the civil administration for the British Mandate. It served as a commercial town for the villages around it but it didn’t have any real industry and very few factories. A lot of it was more workshops but a very significant number of Nazareth workers travelled every day from Nazareth to Haifa to work on the railways and in the refineries. It is that working class that is consolidated and led by the union and becomes very focal and vocal in local Palestinian politics.

Matt: The establishment of the Arab Workers’ Congress in 1945, then, saw FATULS merge with left-leaning PAWS branches, proving that the more radical wing of the labour movement was strong enough to strike out on its own rather than being tied to the more moderate PAWS.

The AWC was an almost instant success: in October 1945, it took part in the World Trade Union Conference in Paris, where along with other Arab delegates, it successfully blocked both the passing of a pro-Zionist resolution and the election of the Histadrut delegate as the representative for the Middle East. Soon after the Paris conference, the AWC held its second national congress to approve its constitution where, alongside its goal of organising Arab workers in Palestine, it also stated its intention of “working for the cooperation and solidarity of all Palestinian workers irrespective nationality, colour, religion or political belief” and to cooperate with all organisations working “for Palestine’s freedom and independence, for the establishment of a democratic government where all its citizens would enjoy equal rights.” This second congress was also notable for the higher number of women delegates, two of whom were elected to the union’s central committee.

Palestinian communists had been at the forefront of setting up the Arab Workers’ Congress. However, by this point they were not acting as part of the Palestine Communist Party as that had now completely broken up into a number of groups, the main division between them being along national lines.

Leena Dallasheh: There’s very significant tension between the Jewish and the Arab communists. During the revolt, there were several fractions within the PCP and some of the Jewish members were very unhappy about the support for the rebellion, especially as there was a lot of violence in the rebellion and the revolt with some of it targeting Jewish settlements and not only the British. The Comintern was able to keep that party as a unified party until 1943 when the Comintern itself was dissolved as a part of the Soviet wartime policy of concession to its war partners. Once the Comintern is dissolved, there is nothing holding the two groups together and the Palestinian Communist Party, in fact, breaks into two parts. 

The Jewish group a very small section and initially a very small part of the Palestinians with the then leader, Musa, which remains as the PCP and the Palestinian communists created a new organisation called the National Liberation League (NLL) which is actually not a self-defined communist party but a nationalist party, as the name suggests, with a clear socialist orientation. The National Liberation League became very embroiled in both Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian labour unions.

They’re never very big. They’re always a small group but it is a very dedicated group. It is a group of people who are able to mobilise far beyond their size and they’re able to offer some really interesting political insights. In the 1940s, especially with the ability of the Palestinian communists to act more independently and more directly engage the Palestinians, they became a really vocal, strong voice among the Palestinian community. I mention that there is a particular historic moment in which there is the void created by the absence of the nationalist leadership during the revolt but also a rise of labour mobilisation and Left politics that the Palestinian communists spearhead in the framework of the National Liberation League. They also helped create the League of Arab Intellectuals. They are very instrumental in creating the Arab Workers’ Congress. And within these frameworks, they try to shift the discourse into a clear anticolonialist discourse that is very much mass-based. They try to promote mass-based politics. They try to promote the politicisation of the Palestinian national movement. In the mid-40s, they had a huge campaign trying to say that the reconstruction of the Palestinian national movement has to be democratic and has to include all factions of the Palestinian society including the labour movement, the working classes, the poor groups and not only the elite. 

They tried to become involved in the Palestinian struggle but also challenged the Palestinian national leadership and they were marginalised all along. Even when the Arab Higher Committee was reestablished in 1946, they actually incorporated PAWS (Palestinian Arab Workers Society) but they excluded them from the newly reestablished Palestinian national leadership and they still continue to be very persistent in their attempt to engage it but also in their attempt to kind of politicise and push for their vision.

They also have a very unique political vision of one state that is democratic in which all the people who live in it have equal rights. They reject the absolutely exclusionary worldview of both the Zionist movement and the Palestinian nationalist movement that refuses to allow for a compromise. They come from a socialist understanding that if you centre your world in an idea of working-class solidarity that will actually rule and become the one that makes the world a better place for everyone, then the nationalist division is not necessarily a breaking point. So, for them, Zionism is the enemy and not Jews. They’re very clear about this distinction. They’re attacked about it but they are also very consistent about that. Until post-48, they didn’t recognise national rights for Jews in Palestine but they recognised the rights of those Jews living in Palestine to be equal citizens. That revision for me is one that can help us imagine a future and not only a past; one that can incorporate a place in which the understanding of rights and solidarity is very different than what has been shaped since 1948. 

Of course, the Palestinian communists were forced to accept partition in the middle of the war in 1948. They were forced to then toe the line of their Jewish colleagues who were in a position of power in the 1950s and ‘60s and accept the fait accompli of the Nakba. They try to create a space at least for the Palestinians who become citizens of Israel to be able to survive in their own country and stay on their land. Up until November 1947 and even after the Soviet Union betrayed the idea of one state and supported partition and the Zionist claim to Palestine, they were able to maintain a vision that is very different from the reality that we can imagine now.

Matt: The ‘Nakba’ refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and comes from the Arabic word meaning ‘catastrophe’. We discuss the Nakba in more detail later in this episode. 

As Leena pointed out, the National Liberation League consistently distinguished between Jews and Zionism. For instance, a January 1945 article in Al-Ittihad stated clearly that

we distinguish between the Zionist movement as an exploitative movement and the Jews, and the Jewish workers specifically, as a minority [in Palestine]. In calling for an independent national regime, the Arab workers seek to liberate the broad masses of the people, Arab and Jewish, from the noose of exploitation and Zionism, and they declare that an independent national regime will ensure all just national rights to the Jews and the other minorities settled in Palestine.

These were not just empty words: while it is important not to overstate how frequent such events were, towards the end of the Second World War, instances of cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian workers were growing. On 2 February 1944, for instance, following the injury of an Arab worker at the Haifa railway workshops, a wildcat strike broke out involving all 1400 workers (approximately 200 of whom were Jewish). A strike committee was formed consisting of three Arabs and two Jews who presented management with a list of demands including not just the hiring of a permanent physician at the workshops, but also demands for pay rises, cost-of-living adjustments and compensation for workplace accidents.

The workers then occupied the workshops with Palestinians and Jews spending the night talking and singing around campfires. The local PAWS branch sent food which Arab workers shared with their Jewish colleagues. Food also eventually arrived from the Histadrut, which Jewish workers also shared, but this was delayed as the Histadrut leadership were vehemently opposed to the strike and put pressure on its members to end it as soon as possible.

Later that year, Palestinian and Jewish postal workers also embarked on a number of local joint strikes and, in the summer of 1945, organised a national conference which elected an executive committee made up of three Arabs and three Jews. Met with suspicion by both the Histadrut and PAWS, it was welcomed in Al-Ittihad, which wrote that “the cooperation between Arab and Jewish telegraph and postal workers is clear proof of the possibility of joint action in every workplace”.

Small-scale cooperation like this occurred with increasing frequency (though, again it must be stressed, beginning from a very low bar). However, it was the general strike in April 1946 that really stands out as an example of solidarity and cooperation between Arab and Jewish workers.

Leena Dallasheh: The 1946 strike is a very interesting event because it’s an anomaly in many ways. In 1946, it’s important to stress the point that things in Palestine were deteriorating really badly. The national struggle was on the verge of exploding and things were bad. The boycott was declared by the League of Arab States in 1946 against Zionist enterprises. The Zionist movement is increasingly targeting the British colonial administration. Things are very hard in Palestine on the ground and the national tension is palpable and clear. At the same time, because of the end of the war, the work camps are now closing with thousands of workers being fired and there are struggles of those workers. 

Things are very hard but this particular strike starts with Arab and Jewish postal workers in Tel Aviv. It’s agreed upon between the Histadrut and PAWS as a limited strike and because of all the factors that are going on and because, in the post-war economy, the wages are severely impacted, within a very short time, it actually grows exponentially. Within days, the mid and lower-level civil servants and white and blue-collar employees join the strike and they’re able to basically paralyse the Mandate administration and they compel the government to grant serious concessions to the strike. In that sense, the strike is a success and leftist forces, both Arab and Jewish, actually consider this a victory for Arab and Jewish workers and evidence that working-class solidarity could succeed. 

At the same time, it’s also worth mentioning that both conservative sides, the Histadrut and PAWS, worked very hard to prevent the expansion of the strike to the refineries which is something that would have made the strike much more effective and large-scale but something that was not in the interests of both the Arab leaders and there is some evidence that Sami Taha’s PAWS got requests from the Arab countries to prevent the spread of the strike. And the Histadrut was worried about the implications for the national conflict. On the one hand, the strike is this glimpse of the possibility of co-struggling and joint work and the Palestinian communists lauded it as a significant moment; a moment that showed the possibility of working together but as one that proved the limitations of what was possible at that moment.

Matt: While the attempts of both the Histadrut and PAWS to stop the strike from spreading were successful with regard to oil and camp workers, the strike still spread rapidly to other workers to include not just the postal service and civil servants but also rail, public works and port workers, with around 23,000 involved in the strike at one point. By the end of the month, the strike had won significant improvements on pay, cost-of-living adjustments, and pensions. 

Arab and Jewish communists declared the strike a “blow against the ‘divide and rule’ policy of imperialism, a slap in the face of those who hold chauvinist ideologies and propagate national division.” In a similar vein, the Arab Workers’ Congress described the strike as “historic […] the first time in Palestine that Arab and Jewish workers have united to show that there are no differences between them and that they have a common enemy.”

The 1946 general strike was not the last instance of joint action: as late as May 1947, between 40 and 50,000 Jewish and Arab military camp workers participated in a one-day strike against redundancies. However, though this period saw an unprecedented rise in joint action between Jewish and Palestinian workers, ultimately, it was still too embryonic a movement to alter the course of events in Palestine. Despite the rapid proletarianisation that had taken place since the start of the war, the Palestinian working class was still very small: for instance, in 1944, in an Arab population of over 1.2 million, the Palestinian labour force outside of agriculture still only numbered around 100,000 workers. The Arab working class was also extremely dispersed: so while we’ve discussed large employers like the railways and oil refineries, it’s important to point out that, by 1947, almost 58% of Palestinian industry was made up of small enterprises employing fewer than 10 workers. While much of the Palestinian national leadership had been destroyed in the repression of the 1936 revolt, the Palestinian working class was not yet large and strong enough to take its place.

All this is before having to contend with the fact that the vast majority of those Jewish workers that Palestinians had been taking joint action with were, by virtue of the fact that they were in Palestine, committed to varying degrees to the establishment of some form of Jewish state. And their principal labour organisation, the Histadrut, was absolutely ideologically committed to one based on the exclusion of Palestinians and had been working towards that objective for almost three decades.

Zionist paramilitary attacks increased in both frequency and intensity in this period following World War II: senior British military personnel were assassinated and numerous bombings took place, including one at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the British colonial administration, which killed 91 people. The pull towards war and the expulsion of Palestinian people was gaining pace.

Leena Dallasheh: By 1947, the British were exhausted from the war and they were also exhausted from dealing with the resistance in Palestine, particularly the Zionist targeting, that they decided to give up the Palestine Mandate. They turned to the United Nations which had replaced the League of Nations and they asked it to resolve the issue. The UN appoints a committee (UNSCOP) which basically investigates and decides that Palestine should be partitioned into three parts; an Arab state that is 42% of historic Palestine, a Jewish state of 56% and the rest international. 

Matt: It is worth pointing out that at this time, even despite decades of Jewish immigration, 70% of the population were still Palestinian Arabs.

Leena Dallasheh: I will highlight that the decision came very shortly after the Holocaust with a lot of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust and very little consideration for the Palestinians who were being victimised. The Zionist movement accepted the Partition Plan, even though research has shown now that it was only a strategic acceptance and that the Zionist movement never intended to actually accept the borders of the Partition Plan. War broke out pretty much immediately after the Partition Plan on November 29th. It started with fighting in the cities and spread. 

The war is typically divided into two parts which is called civil war from November until May 14th and the declaration of the State of Israel. It was a war between the Haganah and the Yishuv forces and Palestinian irregulars with some volunteers from the Arab countries. After the declaration of the State of Israel in May ’48, the Arab states declared war and between then and ’49, that was what could be called the formal war. The war was unequal and, as I mentioned, the British had allowed the Yishuv to create state institutions including an army. The Palestinians were not equipped and did not have the manpower or the arms that the Yishuv had. Even though it continued to claim that it was a David versus Goliath war and that Israel was the David that had to face all the Arab countries, research has shown that Israel had more military power, more soldiers, more trained forces and more arms and the Arabs were untrained, unarmed and also divided. 

Matt: The Haganah that Leena mentions was the main Zionist paramilitary force during the Mandate rule of Palestine. Other paramilitary forces in the Yishuv included the Irgun, a more extreme group who split from the Haganah in 1935 (and who Albert Einstein compared to the Nazis, describing them as right-wing, chauvinist terrorists), and Lehi, sometimes known as the Stern Gang, a 1940 split from the Irgun that had actually sought out cooperation with the Nazis.

By the time of the 1948 war, Zionist paramilitaries could rely on a force of 50,000 troops which had amassed a small air force and navy as well as tank, armoured car and heavy artillery units. Zionist forces also enjoyed extensive training from the British who helped form the Palmach, an elite fighting force set up in 1941 in case the Nazis invaded Palestine. Haganah forces also gained experience during the repression of the 1936 revolt, when their troops were attached to British detachments to carry out punitive actions against Palestinian villages. The Haganah also had an intelligence unit, which for years had been mapping out Palestinian villages, studying the best ways to attack them, and keeping tabs on leaders and militants (such as those who had taken part in the revolt).

In contrast, during this first phase, Palestinians only had around 7000 irregular fighters soon joined by a few thousand volunteers from neighboring Arab countries. Of course, in the next phase of the war, after the State of Israel was declared in May 1948, tens of thousands of troops from Arab armies would enter the war, but they were still significantly outnumbered by Zionist forces. It also meant that, for almost six months following the UN’s Partition Resolution, Palestinians were facing a well-armed and trained army with a makeshift force of only a few thousand.

Leena Dallasheh: The Arab countries, once they enter the war, fight for their own interests which are very divided and not about saving the Palestinians. For instance, the Jordanian agreement with the British and the Zionist movement to basically take over the Arab part of Palestine and prevent the creation of a Palestinian country. But in this process, the Zionist movement, the Yishuv and then later Israel conducted large-scale expulsion of the Palestinians.

There’s an argument about whether this counts as ethnic cleansing or not and particularly, the question that is most contested is whether there was an overall Israeli or Zionist and later Israeli plan to expel the Palestinians. I view this as less relevant because there is a very significant, thorough documentation of large-scale expulsion of Palestinians by the Irgun and the other Jewish forces and then later by the Israeli Army by one of the most staunch advocates that it was not ethnic cleansing, Benny Morris. Benny Morris has one of the most elaborate research about the events that led to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem and he details the massacres, the expulsions and the terrorising that took place during the war. He concludes that it was a result of war and not intention. If you look at the scale, along with the history of transfer ideology that the Zionist organisation had, along with the fact that 45% of the people of the planned Jewish state would have been Palestinian Arabs and most importantly, the fact that Israel prevented the return of the refugees and it was a strategic decision from early on and immediately during the war to prevent the return of any of the refugees, then there is no question how the Palestinian refugee issue was created. It was created by direct acts of expulsion but it was also created by massacres.

Matt: Benny Morris is probably one of the foremost Zionist historians today. As Leena mentioned, he has produced extensive research (though always from a deeply ideologically Zionist perspective) on the atrocities that took place as part of the Zionist state-building project. His book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisted, explains as a matter of fact that the expulsion of the Palestinians was

inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism – because it sought to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population; and because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which, in turn, persuaded the Yishuv’s leaders that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure.

Of course, Morris also sprinkles in a hefty dose of disingenuousness to his frankness about Zionist ethnic cleansing: so, while he acknowledges that the displacement of the Palestinians was “inbuilt into Zionism”; that leading Zionists such as Israel’s first Prime Minister had made both public and private statements and written letters and diary entries underlining the need to reduce the Arab population in Palestine; that massacres and mass expulsions took place; that Plan Dalet existed, a military plan that included the destruction of villages with the stipulation that “the villages which you will capture, cleanse or destroy will be decided according to consultation with your advisors on Arab affairs and the intelligence officers”; and that these were essential to the founding of the State of Israel; all of this does not amount to a premeditated programme for ethnic cleansing. Rather, the ethnic cleansing was supposedly an unplanned and unfortunate outcome of the war.

It’s also worth noting that, in 2004, Morris stated that this ethnic cleansing was justified, unironically comparing it to the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans saying, “Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.” 

Here, Leena describes some of those harsh and cruel acts.

Leena Dallasheh: There were large-scale massacres against the Palestinians. Deir Yassin is very well-known but Deir Yassin is only one of many. At Deir Yassin, 109 Palestinians were killed by the right-wing militias but Deir Yassin was used by the Haganah to terrorise the Palestinians. They spread the rumours. In fact, for a long time, it was claimed that 250 people were killed because that number was exaggerated and spread to cause people terror, to make them run and leave. There was a massacre in Lydda at the Dahmash mosque in which 250 Palestinians were killed. There were massacres in Tantura. There were small-scale massacres in villages where the Israeli Army would come and line up a few young men and shoot them in the centre of the village in order to make people run away. There were such massacres in Eilabun and in Majd al-Kurum. There were dozens of massacres but those were not the only ones. As I mentioned, there were actual expulsions where they put people on trucks and forced them to leave but there was also the expulsion of Lydda in which they forced 10,000 people to march in mid-July in the heat from Lydda to Ramallah under the threat of power. Many people died in what I would describe as the ‘Trail of Tears’ for those who know American history.

But the outcome of these actions is that by the end of the war and the Armistice agreement in 1949, 750,000 Palestinians had become refugees. Israel had control of 78% of historic Palestine and the rest of historic Palestine was divided. Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip. Some 150,000 Palestinians became citizens of Israel.

Matt: The ‘Trail of Tears’ that Leena mentioned refers to the forced displacement of around 60,000 Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, many thousands of whom died.

The events of the Nakba were the brutal culmination of decades of political, economic and military preparation on the part of the Zionist movement and any examination of them should put paid to the idea that Zionism is anything but a settler-colonial project. But the attempt to confuse this quite simple reality has unsurprisingly become an important plank of pro-Israeli propaganda. In an article in the New Statesman last November, British author, Howard Jacobson, claims that “Zionism wasn’t a colonial enterprise […] the founding of Israel wasn’t an act of colonial depredation. Fleeing from pogroms isn’t colonising. […] A refugee isn’t a colonist.”

Jacobson is obviously hiding the ball here, ignoring the issues complicating his argument that we’ve touched on in these episodes, such as the formation of Zionist paramilitary groups that carried out massacres against Palestinian civilians. But he also ignores the fact that Zionists themselves often figured their project in explicitly colonial terms: for instance, in 1902, one of the founders of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote to Cecil Rhodes, who had just colonised an area of Southern Africa which would become known as Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), describing Zionism as “a colonial idea”. In a similar vein, Vladimir Jabotinksy, whose Revisionist Zionism was extremely influential on Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party, wrote in 1923 that “Zionist colonisation, even the most restricted, must [be] carried out in defiance of the will of the native population” (the native population, of course, being the Palestinians). These quotes show the absurdity of attempts by Zionists to use words like ‘indigenous’ or ‘national liberation’ to dress their project up in progressive language when historic Zionists were so explicit about it being a colonial project.

In the end, the State of Israel was founded on 14 May 1948, but the atrocities would continue for another year and, indeed, periodically until the present day in a process that is sometimes referred to as ‘the ongoing Nakba’. It is no surprise that Israeli leaders have invoked the Nakba in relation to the latest genocidal campaign in Gaza.

The newly-formed State of Israel was quickly recognised by Western powers, and within a few days it was also recognised by the Soviet Union: this followed the USSR’s support for the UN’s partition plan the previous year, which (much to the dismay of Arab communists) broke with the Soviet Union’s historic support for a united Palestine lived in by both Jews and Arabs. Furthermore, in late March 1948, just weeks after the approval of Plan Dalet, the Haganah even started receiving weapons from Czechoslovakia as part of a deal brokered by the Soviet Union.

This deal was made with help from the now entirely Jewish Communist Party, which in 1947 briefly changed its name to the Communist Party of the Land of Israel (thus taking on the Ancient Jewish and modern Zionist name for the region that communists had always rejected). Meir Vilner, a communist activist since the 1930s, even signed the Israeli Declaration of Independence on the party’s behalf. And, after the founding of the Israeli state, veteran Palestinian communists who had managed to remain in Israel and wanted to join the Communist Party first had to engage in public self-criticism regarding their supposed ‘mistakes’ related to their recognition of the Jewish nation.

Ultimately, the Palestinian workers’ movement during the British Mandate was faced with an insurmountable task: in a context of British colonial rule and faced with the hostile institutions of a hostile settler community, Palestinian workers created organisations to defend themselves on the job and, by the 1940s, they had developed a distinctly democratic, working-class pole within the anti-colonial movement. And, while fleeting and embryonic, the labour movement was also a place where Arab and Jewish workers were able to come together on the basis of class solidarity, pointing towards an alternative future to one based on capitalism and settler colonialism. More often than not, it was the Palestinian communists who were most able to articulate that alternative future.

Leena Dallasheh: For me, centring Palestinian communists and the Palestinian labour movement does that in a way that is very different. I don’t know but there is something that is very hard not to be cynical about when thinking about Zionists who are envisioning a shared world; whereas, anti-Zionists trying to envision this world… in the aftermath of the revolt, the Yishuv was quite crushing of the Palestinian society. The Palestinian society was really crushed in the aftermath of the revolt but they were able to say, ‘No, let us be clear with the terminology. We are opposed to Zionism. Zionism is our enemy but Jews are not. We can have solidarity with Jewish workers and we can build working-class solidarity that takes us out of this impasse which is anti-colonial, anti-Zionist and one that aspires for a true democratic society.’

[Outro music]

Matt: That’s it for our double-episode on the class struggle in Mandate-ruled Palestine. Patrons can join us for our bonus episode in which we talk to Leena about the curious relationship of British authorities to the Palestinian workers’ movement, the experience of the labour movement in Nazareth and the dishonesty of Zionists in relation to the slogans of the Free Palestine movement. Available now, exclusively for our supporters on patreon.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

If you’d like to learn more about workers’ struggles in Mandate-ruled Palestine, check out the webpage for this episode where you’ll find images, a full list of sources, further reading and more. We’ve also got a great selection of books available about Palestinian and Israeli history in our online store, and you can get 10% off them and anything else using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Link in the show notes. 

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Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Tyler Hill.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

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