|
|
|
|
Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, editors
13. Arab Workers and Arab Nationalism in Palestine
A View from Below
Zachary Lockman
On a hot July day in 1932, the one hundred and fifty construction workers employed by the contractor 'Aziz Khayyat on the northern outskirts of Haifa, in British-ruled Palestine, decided that they had had enough. These workers, nearly all of them Palestinian Arabs, were part of the large workforce engaged in developing the Iraq Petroleum Company's oil dock, storage facilities, and related structures in Haifa's burgeoning industrial zone, where crude petroleum from the oilfields of northern Iraq was to be pumped onto tankers, and in building the Customs Office nearby, intended to service Haifa's new deep-water harbor, which would open the following year. British administrators regarded the petroleum installation and the new harbor as central to their plans for the economic development of Palestine, which Britain had controlled since the end of the First World War under a "Mandate" from the League of Nations--in fact a thinly veiled form of colonial rule.
Khayyat's workers spent twelve and a half hours a day on the job, including an hour off for lunch, and they were no longer willing to put up with such a long working day, especially onerous in the hot summer. Not a few of these workers had some familiarity with, or even direct experience of, trade unionism. For example, some of the forty stonecutters employed by Khayyat were members or former members of the Palestinian Arab Workers' Society (PAWS), Palestine's oldest and largest organization of Arab workers, and so their first move was to turn to it for advice and support. PAWS had been founded in 1925 by a group of Arab railway workers, some of whom had briefly joined the (until then exclusively Jewish) Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers, only to quit a few months later after reaching the conclu sion that their Jewish colleagues put their Zionist commitments ahead of their commitment to a joint union that would encompass all the railway workers, Arabs and Jews. 1 The leaders of the PAWS aspired to build an influential countrywide organization, an Arab counterpart to the Histadrut, the "General Organization of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel," which had been founded in 1920 and had become a powerful force in the Jewish community in Palestine and the Zionist movement. But they had so far been unable to realize their vision, so that in the early 1930s the core of the PAWS' membership still consisted of Haifa-area railway workers, around whom a fluctuating periphery of workers drawn from a variety of trades gravitated, including some of the stonecutters employed by Khayyat.
On the advice of the PAWS, the stonecutters' leaders told Khayyat that they would henceforth work no more than eight hours a day. Khayyat replied that he had no work for anyone unwilling to accept a twelve and a half hour working day, to which the stonecutters responded by declaring a strike and walking off their jobs. They did not, however, post pickets and try to stop work at the site; instead they simply found new jobs elsewhere. Khayyat was easily able to replace the stonecutters who quit, leaving the issue unresolved and the rest of Khayyat's employees still dissatisfied. The PAWS, whose leadership tended to be cautious, failed to take any further action, suggesting only that the remaining workers at the site hand over membership dues and join up.
The scaffold erectors now took up the demand first raised by the stonecutters. They organized a meeting at which they announced that they too wanted an eight-hour day and elected one of their number, a man named Jurji, as their representative. But when Khayyat fired Jurji and threatened the rest of them with dismissal, they backed down. It was at this point that the scaffold workers accepted the advice of the one Jew among them, a Histadrut member, to seek the help of the Haifa Workers' Council, the local organ of the Histadrut.
Abba Hushi, the abrasive and dictatorial but energetic Council secretary who envisioned himself as the labor boss of Haifa, a city that was well on its way to becoming Palestine's main industrial center and seaport, had for years been pressing the Histadrut leadership in Tel Aviv to devote greater resources to developing contacts with Arab workers and organizing them under its tutelage. Hushi was convinced that this would serve the goals of Zionism, by "insulating" Arab workers from Pales-tinian Arab nationalism and facilitating the Histadrut's struggle to secure more jobs for Jews, often through displacement of Arab workers. Earlier in 1932 Hushi and his colleagues had organized a union of Arab port workers in Haifa, which became the first component of the Histadrut's new organization for Arab workers, known in English as the Palestine Labor League (PLL), in Hebrew as Brit Po 'alei Eretz Yisra'el, and in Arabic as Ittihad 'Ummal Filastin. Now Hushi hoped to bring 'Aziz Khayyat's employees into the Histadrut's embrace as well.
Hushi told the Arab workers who came to see him that the stonecutters, the PAWS, and the scaffold workers had gone about things all wrong: one could not go on strike without proper preparations, and if one did launch a strike one didn't just find another job somewhere else. After this scolding--quite characteristic of both the man and his movement--Hushi offered to instruct their one Jewish coworker to approach Khayyat and threaten a strike if Jurji was not rehired. Hushi also asked the workers to contact the PAWS and convey the Haifa Workers' Council's desire for cooperation. Three days later the Arab workers' delegation returned and told Hushi that the PAWS leaders had rejected cooperation with the Histadrut, because the latter was a "Zionist organization which wants a strike so that it can remove the Arab workers from this workplace in order to replace them with Jews, just as [according to the secretary of the PAWS] the Histadrut had done after the lightermen's strike at the port of Haifa." (The lightermen handled the boats--"lighters"--which carried cargo between the quays of the old port of Haifa and the ocean-going vessels anchored offshore.)
This accusation was not ungrounded: the Histadrut was indeed a Zionist organization and was moreover strongly committed to achieving what it termed "Hebrew labor," i.e, exclusively Jewish employment in all Jewish-owned enterprises in Palestine as well as maximal Jewish employment in every sector of the country's economy, a goal that certainly entailed displacing Arab workers. But Hushi brought an Arab lighterman who belonged to the PLL to a meeting with 'Aziz Khayyat's workers in order to refute the PAWS' accusation, and the refusal of the PAWS to cooperate with the Histadrut made the latter look reasonable.
However, the Histadrut was unable to take advantage of these circumstances in order to develop its relations with these Arab construction workers and try to recruit them into the PLL. For just as these workers had contacted both the PAWS and the Histadrut to achieve their ends, they had also appealed for help to the District Commissioner, the British colonial official responsible for overseeing local administration. The District Commissioner rejected the workers' demand for an eight-hour day, insisting that Palestine was not like England or other European countries where such a demand might be plausible, but he did secure the agreement of Khayyat and other contractors to reduce the working day by one hour, to eleven and a half hours. Some of the building workers favored accepting this proposal, while others rejected it as inadequate. We do not know for sure how things ultimately turned out, but because there is no further evidence of unrest among this particular group of workers it seems likely that most if not all of them ultimately accepted Khayyat's offer or quietly found jobs elsewhere.
For my purposes here the actual outcome of this episode is in any case not crucial. I tell this story in order to introduce several arguments about how historians and others have portrayed the origins and development of Palestinian Arab nationalism during the Mandate period. First, most studies of this particular nationalism have approached it from above, by examining what various members of the educated Arab upper and middle classes in late Ottoman and then Mandatory Palestine wrote, said, and did. This is true not only of most Palestinian and other Arab scholars but also of Israeli scholars such as Yehoshua Porath, as well as of most foreign scholars. In contrast, the ways in which members of the great peasant majority of the Arab population of Palestine, and of the growing urban working class (many of them dispossessed peasants who had migrated from the countryside), gradually came to see themselves as belonging to a distinct people that was both Arab and Palestinian (and other things besides); how this (always complex) new form of identity was related to older conceptions of kinship, village and regional ties, religion, and links with regions now outside the boundaries of Palestine; the contention over the meaning(s) of nationalism and over the symbols through which it would be expressed--these dimensions of the development of this nationalism have received relatively little attention.
Second, I would suggest that this focus on elites is partially rooted in, and has tended to reinforce, a view of Palestinian Arab nationalism (and Arab nationalism in general) as monolithic, as a single and distinct object with an essential meaning. This is true not just of Palestinian and other Arab nationalist ideologists and activists themselves who, like all nationalists, have an obvious interest in portraying their nationhood as an essential identity with ancient roots that was "recovered" in the modern era, rather than something that was constructed relatively recently out of materials old and new. It is also unfortunately true of many scholars of Palestinian nationalism, and of other forms and offshoots of Arab nationalism in general. The elitist, idealist, and essentialist assumptions that inform much of the literature on Arab nationalism have served (as James Gelvin has nicely put it) to give that nationalism "a homogeneity and coherence in retrospect that it never achieved in actuality."
The episode I have just related may serve to illustrate how (various conceptions of) Palestinian Arab identity, and the actions that flowed from embrace of those conceptions, have been construed in ways that tend to make complexity, contestation, and constructedness disappear. There is little room in conventional narratives of Palestinian Arab nationalism for such an episode, not only because it concerns impoverished and nonliterate workers rather than educated middle- or upper-class people but also because it shows them doing something that seems a departure from the official nationalist line, i.e., seeking assistance from an obviously Zionist labor organization in the hope of improving their lives. Yet when we take a close look at the his torical record, and especially at segments of it that involve the lower classes and have largely been ignored, we often find that things are more complicated, messier, and more contradictory than one might think from most of the scholarship, and especially that portion of it embedded (consciously or not) within a nationalist paradigm.
We find, for example, that it was possible for Arab workers who were certainly not unaware of the Histadrut's Zionist priorities to nonetheless deem it expedient to seek its help in their unequal struggle with their Arab employer, just as they also sought the assistance of colonial officials as well as the PAWS, a wholly Arab labor organization openly aligned with the national movement. From within an Arab nationalist framework, such actions could only be understood as the outcome of these workers' ignorance--they were "duped" into cooperation with Zionists because they lacked an adequate grasp of their authentic national identity and proper knowledge of the truth about the Zionist threat--or of bribery, or (at worst) of perfidy, of willful, traitorous collaboration. Similarly, from within a Zionist framework, Jews in Palestine or elsewhere who expressed sympathy with Palestinian Arab grievances and support for Palestinian Arab rights were defined as either sadly ignorant of the self-evident correctness of Zionism or as pathological "self-haters" who had betrayed their own "authentic" (i.e., nationalist) Jewish selves. This is not to suggest moral or any other kind of symmetry between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism; it is simply to point to a certain paradigm, a certain system of categorization, that is characteristic of nationalist discourse.
It is certainly true that some Arab workers in Palestine did not immediately grasp the full import of the Zionist project for the fate of the country's Arab majority, and, as I have documented elsewhere, left-wing Zionists had self-interested (if also complex and even contradictory) motives in their dealings with Arab workers and were not above misleading them about their true aims and affiliations. 5 Yet it will not do to accept uncritically the (bourgeois nationalist) portrayal of the actions of these workers as deviant--meaning deviant in relation to some (bourgeois nationalist) norm--or to attribute that purported deviance to ignorance, manipulation, individual pathology, or "collaboration," none of which are unproblematic categories. These ways of posing the problem implicitly deny lower-class Palestinians any capacity for agency, for making their own sense of complex circumstances and acting to further their interests as they defined them. They also take for granted, and operate from within, nationalism's conception of itself as a unitary and internally unconflicted ideal that represents the authentic core of personhood in all circumstances, superior to or even excluding all other identities, sentiments, interests, loyalties, and aspirations. And they reinforce the elitist assumptions and perspective of most discussions of Arab nationalism in Palestine.
We need, I think, to try to imagine other ways of approaching this partic ular nationalism, but also nationalism in general, by starting from the premise that like religious faith, gender, race, class, etc., nationalism (or national identity) is not a thing but a set of relations and forces that in each particular case unfolds and takes shape within a specific historical conjuncture, social context, and discursive arena. It is moreover always the object of struggles among various sociopolitical forces over its meaning and over what is to be "done" with it. Thus it always means different things to different people in different contexts, it is always "used" in a variety of ways, and it therefore cannot be treated as a unitary or self-evidently coherent ideal object. Efforts to grasp what it means to real people living in specific historical conjunctures must therefore also presume their perspectives and actions to be contingent, complex, and sometimes even contradictory. We must start, in other words, from what various segments of an inevitably heterogeneous "people" actually think, say, and do, instead of gauging their conformity to or deviation from what a nationalist ideology formulated by members of the middling and elite strata defines as their proper identity and mode of behavior.
In the hope of contributing to this volume's collective effort to rethink Arab nationalism, I would like to illustrate and expand upon some of these arguments by relating and discussing several episodes from the Mandate period that involve Palestinian Arab workers. By offering at least glimpses of how the national question impinged on various groups of workers in Haifa and Jaffa, and how they "handled" that question in the context of their working lives, I hope to do several related things.
For one, I would like to show that although conventional accounts of Palestinian Arab nationalism tend to focus on "high" culture, politics, and diplomacy (i.e., what the upper and middle classes were saying and doing) and thereby largely ignore the lower classes, the diverse segments of the lower classes were nonetheless always present and by their agency compelled the nationalist movement to take them into account and at least go through the motions of addressing their concerns. It is fairly well-known that a vigorous Palestinian Arab labor movement (one wing of which was led by communists) emerged in the 1940s and sought to assert itself within the Arab community, but I will argue that one can trace the presence and agency of Arab workers, and their importance for nationalism, back to the 1920s.
Second, I will argue that the willingness of Arab workers in Palestine to cooperate with Zionists under certain circumstances is not fully, or even usefully, explained as a product of ignorance, manipulation, deception, or collaboration, at least not in any simple sense of those terms. Rather, it requires us to adopt a more complex and flexible conception of national identity, one that treats it not as a unitary thing or a fixed model, but as a complex of ideas, sym bols, sentiments, and practices that people from various sociopolitical groups appropriate selectively and contingently.
Toward that end I will, last of all, discuss a largely unknown episode from the run-up to the popular revolt against British rule and Zionism that erupted in the spring of 1936, in the hope of suggesting one route by which Arab workers came to embrace a radical nationalism and exercise agency in its behalf. By presenting episodes centered on largely illiterate working people who are unlikely to have ever read a nationalist tract, I hope to at least complicate the conventional nationalist narrative and point to flaws in its underlying premises. In the conclusion I will address some of the broader implications of what I have tried to do here.
In the fall of 1925, seven years before the Haifa construction workers employed by 'Aziz Khayyat sought allies wherever they could find them to escape their onerously long working day, one hundred or so Arab carpenters employed in some twelve small Arab-owned workshops in Haifa, along with about thirty Arab tailors also employed in small enterprises, went on strike to demand an increase in their meager wages, a shorter working day, and an end to abuse by their employers. The carpenters and tailors had been discontented for a long time, but their grievances were transformed into organization and then action through the medium of a "General Workers' Club," which the Histadrut had established for Arab workers the previous July in a busy, largely Christian, Arab section of the "old city" of Haifa.
As I have already noted, Arab and Jewish railway workers in Haifa had been involved in efforts to form a joint union for some years, and it was the collapse of the recently formed joint union a few months earlier that led to the establishment of Palestine's first Arab labor organization, the PAWS, in the summer of 1925. It was in large measure to counter the PAWS, which hoped to expand its membership beyond the railwaymen, that the Histadrut made its first foray into organizing Arab workers by opening this club. The club's secretary was a young Arab tailor named Philip Hassun, but he worked under the supervision of Avraham Khalfon, a Jew from a family long established in Palestine who had been hired as the Histadrut's chief organizer of Arab workers in Haifa.
The club seems to have met a need among Haifa's Arab working class, for it quickly attracted the attention and interest of a substantial number of skilled craftsmen, mainly tailors and carpenters. It offered evening classes in the Hebrew language and in Arabic literacy, lectures by members of various left-wing Zionist parties, and Arabic newspapers from Palestine and elsewhere. Through the club a number of Haifa workers also gained access to a special vocational training course at the Technion, the Jewish technical insti tute that had been founded in Haifa shortly before the war. But the club's main activity was organizing, which it pursued through the creation of new unions for tailors and carpenters.
The initiative for strike action came for the workers themselves, who pressed Hassun and Khalfon to help them organize a strike if their employers would not agree to raise wages and institute the eight-hour day. Khalfon at first resisted this pressure because he did not think the workers were ready for a strike, but in October, with the approval of the Histadrut executive committee, he agreed to take action. On behalf of the General Workers' Club he sent letters to the owners of the workshops in which the unionized carpenters were employed, setting forth the workers' demands and requesting a response within ten days. It should come as no surprise that it was Khalfon who signed the letters; because he was not himself an employee he was safe from the kind of reprisals which the workers would have faced had they spoken up for themselves. However, the employers, never before faced with this kind of organized action on the part of their workers, simply ignored the letters. The carpenters and tailors responded by launching a strike, under the leadership of Khalfon and Hassun and with the backing of the Histadrut.
The strike was peaceful at first, but clashes ensued when the employers tried to bring in strikebreakers from the nearby town of Acre. The police intervened and arrested a number of the strikers, but the well-connected Khalfon was able to free them, by posting bail for them and by sending the alcoholic English police inspector in charge a case of his favorite brand of whiskey. Nonetheless, as the strike went on, it became increasingly clear that the clashes and arrests were exhausting the meager resources at the workers' disposal, despite financial support from the Histadrut and the (Jewish-led) railway workers' union. There was also growing pressure on the workers from the local Arab press and local church officials. Haifa's oldest Arabic newspaper, al-Karmil, was strongly anti-Zionist, and while expressing sympathy for the workers' demands it also expressed fear that the strike would serve Zionist rather than Arab nationalist interests. "We fear," al-Karmil declared,
Local Christian clerics echoed al-Karmil and other Arab newspapers. The spiritual leader of Haifa's Maronite community, Father Francis, called in twenty of the strikers to warn them against cooperating with the Jews, whom he said were spreading Bolshevism in Palestine, and he called on them to form their own Muslim-Christian union, which would be free of Jewish influence.
According to the Histadrut's account of the meeting, the Arab workers replied that the Socialist International had delegated the task of organizing workers in the Near East to the Histadrut and they must therefore affiliate with it. 8 The Socialist International had of course done no such thing, but the claim does convey the sense of proletarian mission civilatrice with which socialist Zionists in Palestine were often imbued. The strikers were also said to have told Father Francis that there was nothing to fear from the Jewish workers because the latter would not accept the meager wages paid to Arab workers. This may have been true in tailoring and carpentry, but of course one of the Histadrut's chief goals was to secure more jobs for Jews, regardless of whether Arab workers would be displaced in the process.
After meeting with a delegation of strikers, Najib Nassar, the editor of al-Karmil, invited the two sides to meet at his newspaper's offices and resolve their conflict. The strikers insisted that Khalfon and Hassun accompany them to the meeting. Nassar was unhappy that the two officials of what his newspaper referred to as the "Zionist workers' association" had come, but they were ultimately allowed to remain as observers. After several hours of negotiations an agreement was reached by which, after two weeks, the strike was brought to an end. The workers achieved gains that, given the miserable conditions that had prevailed until then, were not insubstantial: a nine-hour work day, a half-hour lunch break and seven paid sick days a year.
How are we to make sense of this episode? It can be interpreted simply as an instance of Zionist manipulation: these guileless Arab carpenters and tailors were duped into joining unions controlled by the Histadrut and striking against their employers, fellow Arabs, thereby serving the aims of Zionism. These craftsmen may not in fact have had a very clear or complete understanding of the aims of the Histadrut or of the Zionist project of which it was becoming a key institution. Moreover, in certain ways the unions and the strike probably did serve Zionist interests--or more precisely, the interests of the "labor-Zionist" camp within the Zionist movement. The Histadrut's relationship with these Haifa workers allowed it to portray itself, to its exclusively Jewish membership as well as to the international labor and social-democratic movements whose support and sympathy it sought, as the true champion and defender of the Arab masses in Palestine. It hoped thereby to bolster its campaign to delegitimize Arab nationalism, which left-wing Zionists insisted was inauthentic, a fraudulent tool of wealthy and grasping Arab landowners and obscurantist clerics that lacked any real social base. Histadrut leaders also certainly hoped that if they helped organize Arab workers they could keep them out of the "clutches" of Arab nationalists. Moreover, in the 1920s not a few left-wing Zionists believed that an effort to help Arab workers to organize and win higher wages and better working conditions would aid the Zionist cause by reducing the "threat" that cheap, unorganized Arab labor posed to Jewish immigrants' ability to compete for decently paid jobs in Palestine.
But there is more that needs to be said about this; we need to try to see things from the perspective of these impoverished and exploited carpenters and tailors, instead of treating them as mere pawns manipulated by others. It is important to remember that their grievances predated their contacts with the Histadrut and its organizers. Though the General Workers' Club was certainly a Zionist-controlled "front organization," these workers responded positively to its establishment because it seemed to them to meet a genuine need. It provided social and educational services of a kind to which they had had no previous access, and it addressed itself to them specifically as workers. Moreover, the club initially had no competitors, for the PAWS was at this early stage very small and weak and had little presence beyond the railway workshops. There is also no evidence that by joining Histadrut-sponsored unions these carpenters and tailors in any sense embraced Zionism; rather, one can see that move as a tactic, one that certainly had broader implications and consequences but that was very much rooted in a particular set of circumstances, including a lack of any good alternatives.
So instead of portraying these craftsmen as either mere dupes or collaborators, we must try to see them as responding to the conditions in which they found themselves, including ruthless exploitation by their employers and the Arab (nationalist) elite's profound lack of interest in the plight of the lower classes, as well as its antipathy to class conflict. It is also important to remember that it was in large measure the initiative and militancy of these and other workers that compelled other segments of their community, in particular middle-class nationalists, to begin to take the workers' concerns more seriously. In its account of the strike's settlement al-Karmil expressed hope that in every trade a "guild" of employers and workers could be established to deal with the workers' grievances and thereby "block the involvement of Zionists in the affairs of Arab workers." 10 Nassar, and the Palestinian Arab bourgeoisie as a whole, were with few exceptions quite conservative on social issues and did not initially have much interest in the needs or interests of the emerging Arab working class. But events like the October 1925 strike pushed them toward greater awareness of, and interest in, workers' grievances, demands, and efforts to organize. 11
As it happened, the October 1925 strike marked the Histadrut-backed club's greatest success. A barrage of nationalist criticism dissuaded most Arab workers from coming anywhere near it, while an economic downturn in many trades and an influx of migrants from Syria, many of them refugees from the anticolonial uprising there, weakened the capacity of local craftsmen and workers to organize and wage successful struggles for higher wages and better working conditions. The unions of carpenters and tailors soon disintegrated and the Histadrut found it impossible to win footholds in other trades. By 1927 the club was moribund, though the Histadrut had by no means given up on its project of organizing Arab workers under its tutelage.
Until this point I have been discussing workers in Haifa, but henceforth I will focus on Jaffa. Though Haifa's deep-water harbor opened in 1933, Jaffa's port remained important, especially as an outlet for Palestine's booming citrus exports. The Arab stevedores and lightermen who worked there, employed through Arab labor contractors, had accumulated grievances that made them receptive to the idea of organization. Though paid a fixed daily wage, in the busy citrus export season the stevedores might be compelled to work up to eighteen hours a day; they were therefore interested not only in a higher daily wage but also in compensation for overtime. Rather than a daily wage, the lightermen received a share of the receipts of the boat on which they worked, which gave the boat owner or contractor for whom they worked control over their income and plenty of opportunity to shortchange them. They wanted some reform of this system to make their income more predictable and enhance their control over how much they worked and earned. Both lightermen and stevedores were engaged in dangerous work and suffered numerous accidents for which they were only rarely compensated by their employers.
At the same time these workers (who were mostly Palestinians from Jaffa itself or from the towns and villages of its hinterland on the coastal plain) had enjoyed some job security (though employment at the port fluctuated seasonally). They now saw their jobs and wages threatened by migrant workers coming from the Hawran region in Syria (and to a lesser extent Egypt) who were attracted to Palestine by the country's relative prosperity and were taking over jobs at the port. The stevedores and lightermen hoped that by forming a union they could protect their wages from the downward pressure threatened by the presence of these low-wage competitors and secure their jobs through enforcement of the principle of local preference in the allocation of work. 12
Though nominally a countrywide organization the main base of the PAWS remained in Haifa, so that before 1934 there was no effective Arab trade union presence in Jaffa. This left the field open for the Histadrut to try to organize the discontented port workers there through its Palestine Labor League. Early in 1934 Eliyahu Agassi, a Jew of Iraqi origin who was the Histadrut's chief organizer of Arab workers, began to develop ties with a group of Jaffa stevedores and support their efforts to organize a trade union. PLL opened a club near the port, which offered these workers medical services, a loan fund, and legal assistance. The latter was particularly important, because although the government of Palestine had promulgated legislation requiring employers to compensate workers for work-related injuries, few Arab workers knew about the law or possessed the means to take advantage of it. The first cases in which Histadrut lawyers sued Arab employers on behalf of injured Arab stevedores made a strong impression on Arab workers in Jaffa and enhanced the reputation of the PLL and the Histadrut there. Histadrut leader Dov Hoz also intervened on these workers' behalf with the British officials who ran the port and sought support from dockworkers' unions in Britain.
By the fall of 1934 the PLL was claiming about one hundred Jaffa stevedores as members of an affiliated union, and after lengthy negotiations some of the lightermen were also beginning to join. The fact that many port workers left Jaffa and returned to their home villages during slack seasons made it difficult to sustain the Jaffa stevedores' union: it had in effect to be reestablished when the citrus export season began in the late fall. But for Histadrut officials the PLL's apparent success in organizing these workers during 1934 made it possible for them to envision a situation in which, as one of them put it, "we will be the rulers in the port of Jaffa and will be able to do great things there, both politically and economically." Among other things they hoped to use their base among the Arab workers there to get Jews hired on as port workers. 13
The PLL's successes in organizing Arab workers in Jaffa during 1934, especially the dockworkers, alarmed Arab trade unionists and their nonworker nationalist allies and stimulated much more vigorous and effective efforts to counter the Histadrut. The summer of 1934 witnessed the emergence, initially under the patronage of a prominent politician from an elite family, of a new Arab labor organization, which became quite active in Jaffa. The politician was Fakhri al-Nashashibi, nephew and devoted assistant of Raghib al-Nashashibi who had been mayor of Jerusalem since 1920 and led the opposition to the Husaynis and their allies within the Palestinian Arab elite. Despite occasional tactical resorts to ultranationalist rhetoric, the Nashashibis led the more pro-British and pro-Hashemite segment of that elite, while the Husaynis and their allies, led by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, took a stronger anti-British, anti-Zionist, and distinctly Palestinian stance. Both factions still believed, however, that they could block the Zionist project and achieve Palestine's independence through negotiations with the British.
Relations between the two camps deteriorated sharply in the early 1930s. The Arab Executive, on which all the major factions and leading elite families had been represented, was formally dissolved in August 1934, opening the way for the creation of rival political parties, each linked to a particular family or faction. As the Nashashibis and their allies moved toward the creation of their own political organization, Fakhri al-Nashashibi came to see in Arab workers a potential constituency that could be organized for the benefit of his faction. He therefore proclaimed the establishment in Jerusalem of an "Arab Workers' Society" (AWS), with himself as president. In October 1934 an AWS branch was established in Jaffa, under the leadership of Michel Mitri, a young Palestinian engineer who had grown up in Latin America and received his education there. The AWS was strongly supported in its efforts by the pro-Nashashibi Filastin, which hailed Fakhri al-Nashashibi as "protector of the workers" and began to devote unprecedented attention to labor affairs. 14
To build support, the AWS quickly seized on an issue of concern to many Arab workers: the Histadrut's campaign for Hebrew labor and the complementary effort to induce Jewish consumers to boycott Arab products (especially agricultural produce) and "buy Jewish." In the spring of 1934 the Histadrut had launched a largely unsuccessful campaign to compel Jewish citrus farmers to dismiss their largely Arab work force and hire Jews instead, in keeping with its principle that Jewish-owned enterprises should employ only Jews. When that effort in the countryside yielded only meager results, the Histadrut decided to shift the campaign to the cities, deploying mobile bands of pickets who moved from one construction site to another, in Tel Aviv and other towns, and sometimes went beyond picketing by trying to forcibly expel Arab workers from their jobs. These tactics led to clashes between Jews attempting to keep out or drive out Arab workers, and Arab workers trying to get to or stay at their jobs. Employers would frequently call in the police to restore order and protect their Arab workers; this in turn led to fights between Jewish pickets and the police, and arrests of Jews for disturbing the peace. 15
This campaign in the cities achieved only limited success. This was a period of prosperity and low unemployment for the Jewish community in Palestine, and in the absence of a large mass of unemployed Jews desperate for jobs the Histadrut found it almost as difficult to enforce the hiring of Hebrew labor in the cities as it had in the countryside. But its campaign did succeed in inflaming Arab-Jewish relations and heightening the anxiety and resentment with which many Arabs regarded Zionism and the Jewish community in Palestine, especially in a period when Jewish immigration was surging dramatically owing to the Nazi seizure of power in Germany and increasingly virulent anti-Semitism elsewhere in Europe. To alert the public to what was going on, the Arab press, along with the Palestine Communist Party's clandestine or front publications, were quick to translate and publish the Histadrut calls for the imposition of "Hebrew labor" and the boycotting of Arab produce, manufacturers, and shops, and news of clashes at urban building sites spread quickly.
Fakhri al-Nashashibi and his new AWS sought to capitalize on growing concern about this issue by publicly demanding that the British authorities take forceful action against the Hebrew labor pickets. The AWS also called on Arab workers to adopt weapons from Histadrut's arsenal by setting up their own picket lines and boycotting Jewish products and produce. In December 1934 Fakhri al-Nashashibi set up in Jerusalem what Filastin, his biggest booster, described as "the first Arab picket." This was in reality not so much a picket line as a march by al-Nashashibi and some of his followers through the streets of Jerusalem, in the course of which buildings being put up by Arab contractors were visited and the employment of Jews at those sites (generally as skilled workers) was protested. 16 The AWS does not in fact seem to have carried out any sustained picketing in this period, though as we will see Michel Mitri would use this tactic to great effect in the spring of 1936.
The Jaffa port workers whom Eliyahu Agassi (assisted by his colleague Reuven Zaslani, who under the name Reuven Shilo'ah would later become a founding father of Israel's intelligence and security apparatus) had helped organize were quite aware of, and concerned about, the issue of Hebrew labor. Agassi and Zaslani were compelled to recognize that these workers were quite uneasy about their links with the Histadrut, which was increasingly perceived as an organization devoted to taking jobs away from Arab workers. In November 1934, in an effort to seize the initiative from their opponents in the struggle for the support of the Jaffa dockworkers, the two Histadrut organizers went so far as to invite the secretary of the Jaffa branch of the PAWS to a meeting of some fifty Arab workers, most of them stevedores, at the PLL's club, for a direct confrontation over the issue.
According to Zaslani and Agassi, who submitted a report on the meeting to the Histadrut and to the Jewish Agency's Political Department, the PAWS leader denounced Histadrut for stealing Arab jobs, reminded the stevedores of the "disaster" that had occurred at Haifa harbor (i.e., the introduction of Jewish workers after the organization of the PLL-sponsored port workers' union there), and asked if they wanted to allow the Histadrut to bring about the same outcome in Jaffa as well. In their response, Zaslani and Agassi did not directly address the substance of their opponent's charges but instead sought to put him on the defensive and undermine his credibility by demanding that he provide proof of his allegations.
The Jewish unionists felt they had made their case successfully, but they had not counted on the rank and file workers speaking up for themselves. After the PAWS secretary left, the stevedores reiterated his allegation that the Histadrut was seeking to bring Jewish workers into the port, take it over, and deprive the Arabs of their livelihood. They pressed Agassi and Zaslani for an explicit promise that the Histadrut would not seek to bring Jewish workers into Jaffa harbor. Zaslani and Agassi could not of course make such a promise, since the Histadrut did in fact hope to secure more jobs for Jews at Jaffa's port as elsewhere; indeed, one of the PLL's raisons d'être was to facilitate that effort. In the end the stevedores had to settle for a much vaguer promise that no Histadrut member would take a job from any permanently employed Arab port worker. Zaslani also had to promise that the stevedores' union would remain independent even after it affiliated with the PLL. 17
Agassi and Zaslani concluded their report by stating that "one may say with confidence that as a result of this meeting our organization in Jaffa has been strengthened and innoculated" (emphasis in the original). This statement soon proved to be rather overconfident. The PLL's Jaffa branch remained under constant pressure from Arab labor organizations: a few days after this debate, Zaslani reported to Agassi that both Fakhri al-Nashashibi's AWS and the newly active Jaffa branch of the PAWS were leafleting the stevedores affiliated with the PLL and that this activity had led at least one member of the union's leadership to resign. Ibrahim al-Sawi, who was receiving money from the PLL and acting as its main agent among the stevedores, was said to be displaying dictatorial behavior and angering union members. Moreover, the port workers were now insisting on keeping some distance between their union and the PLL: they had refused to sign their names to the application of the PLL Jaffa branch for registration as an officially recognized organization. For the same reason, the letter the Jaffa stevedores' union sent to the various labor contractors at Jaffa's port in January 1935 contained no mention whatsoever of the PLL or the Histadrut, though it was Zaslani who forwarded a translation of the letter directly to L. K. Pope, the port manager at Jaffa. 18
The stevedores' tough questions at the meeting and their insistence on independence from the PLL indicate that they were not quite as unaware, guileless, and docile as labor-Zionist leaders (but also, it should be said, bourgeois Arab nationalists) tended to depict them. Agassi would later speak of his effort to instill "proletarian consciousness" (hakara po'alit) in these workers, by which he meant labor Zionism's conception of how Arab workers should think and behave, including rejection of nationalism and sympathy for Zionism. 19 In fact the stevedores, and other groups of Arab workers elsewhere, seem to have had their own sense of who they were and what they wanted, a sense that did not necessarily fully coincide with what either the Histadrut or Arab nationalist activists proposed. The stevedores understood that several rival labor organiza tions were seeking to win their support and sought to turn that rivalry to their advantage; they also knew that identifiable union members were subject to threats and harassment from the labor contractors through whom they were employed, hostility from the British officials who administered the port, and even permanent deprivation of their livelihood. They were obviously well aware of the Histadrut's commitment to Hebrew labor and that policy's implications for their own livelihood. As a result, though they were not in principle unwilling to cooperate with the Histadrut, whose clout and resources they knew to be considerably greater than those available to any Arab labor organization, they sought as much as as possible to do so on their own terms, despite extremely adverse conditions.
British officials at Jaffa's port hoped to avoid any labor trouble and preserve the status quo until the end of the citrus export season, but growing tensions eventually erupted into open conflict. At the end of February 1935 some sixty Arab workers employed at the port expansion project went on strike, originally to protest the dismissal of a comrade who had been fired after a dispute with his foreman and then to demand an eight-hour day, a six-day work week, and higher wages. AWS leader Michel Mitri quickly appeared on the scene and sought to negotiate on the workers' behalf. Though the strike ended in failure after a week, it was a clear manifestation of growing discontent. The contractors' efforts early in 1935 to break the stevedores' union by harassment and, for a time, by refusing to employ union members led to persistent friction and sometimes violent conflict on the docks. To restore order and deflect questions being raised by Labor Party members of parliament, the British authorities in Palestine appointed a committee to investigate labor conditions at the port of Jaffa. Because the committee was chaired by the British port manager, its report predictably declared that the stevedores had no serious grievances and that no immediate government action was called for--and in fact no further official action was taken before the outbreak of the 1936 general strike. 20
During the latter part of 1935, the PLL's base of support at the port of Jaffa largely disappeared. This was in part the result of stepped-up repression: with the support or acquiescence of British port officials, the contractors sought to break the dockworkers' union by various means, including the denial of work to union members and other "troublemakers." Poignant evidence of the use of this tactic has survived in the form of a petition bearing the signatures or thumbprints of fourteen Jaffa dockworkers who had been dismissed by their boss, Mahmud al-Qumbarji (or al-Onbarji), at the very end of June 1935. But as we have seen, the stevedores and lightermen themselves grew increasingly wary of the PLL and the Histadrut, as competition from the Arab unions and rising political tensions exacerbated by the Histadrut's Hebrew labor campaign helped increase the costs of cooperation with it well beyond any actual or potential benefits to Arab workers. Then in October 1935 a barrel purportedly containing a shipment of cement accidentally broke open while being unloaded at Jaffa and was found to contain arms and ammunition being smuggled into Palestine for the Hagana, the largest of the semiclandestine Zionist military organizations. The discovery created an uproar in the Arab community and went a long way toward destroying what was left of the PLL's base among the Jaffa dockworkers. By the end of the year most of the stevedores and lightermen had severed their links with the PLL, or simply allowed them to lapse, and gravitated into the orbit of Arab trade unions. When the general strike (about whose antecedents I will have more to say later on) erupted in April 1936, the Jaffa port workers immediately joined in, shutting the port down for many months. During the years of the revolt the port workers were generally seen as staunch nationalists. 21
A nationalist reading of this episode might portray the Jaffa port workers as originally having been duped (or, in a few individual cases, bribed) into collaboration by the Histadrut organizers with whom they were in contact, and then later having "woken up" to reality and become good nationalists. But this portrayal does not fully account for what went on. The stevedores and lightermen seem to have been aware of Agassi and Zaslani's Zionist affiliations and loyalties virtually from the start; yet they were ready to avail themselves of what the Histadrut had to offer even as they sought to maintain their independence. And they were willing to maintain relations with the Histadrut and endure harsh repression, including loss of livelihood, out of loyalty to their union, though in nationalist eyes that union was tainted by its links with the Histadrut. They seem to have been able to regard themselves as authentically Arab (and as their attitude toward Hawrani and Egyptian migrant labor suggests, authentically Palestinian) even as they accepted certain kinds of support from Zionists. So rather than trying to pigeonhole these Jaffa port workers as either victims of ignorance and manipulation or loyal nationalists, we should perhaps try to understand their actions and sentiments contingently, so as to allow room for complexity and even contradiction. In the right circumstances the Jaffa stevedores and lightermen would display excellent nationalist "credentials," suggesting that it makes little sense to classify them as mere "dupes" or "collaborators" earlier on. Such crude dichotomizations make it difficult to adequately account for the complexities of people's beliefs and actions or for transformations in what they believe and do.
As the political climate in Palestine grew increasingly tense during the latter part of 1935, broad segments of the Arab community became increasingly receptive to a more radically anti-British and anti-Zionist stance than the old-line elite politicians were initially prepared to embrace. In this shift Arab workers played a significant though little-known part, a part I discuss in order to extend and complicate the conventional narrative of the run-up to the outbreak in the spring of 1936 of the Arab general strike, which soon became a popular anticolonial insurrection.
As I have already noted, the years since 1932 had seen a surge in Jewish immigration and a dramatic increase in the size of the Jewish community in Palestine, heightening Arab fears: for the first time, a Jewish majority and Jewish statehood appeared feasible, perhaps even imminent. Reports of large-scale Zionist land purchases made the threat of dispossession ever more palpable. The discovery that arms and ammunition were being smuggled into Palestine for the Hagana seemed to confirm longstanding Arab fears that the Zionists were preparing to seize the country by force. Government policies, which Arab public opinion perceived as pro-Zionist, also exacerbated Arab resentment and anger. At the same time the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and Germany's reoccupation of the Rhineland made war among the European powers seem imminent and underscored Britain's apparent weakness.
Moreover, the years of prosperity had come to an end in 1935, leading to rising unemployment and social discontent. Shantytowns sprang up around Haifa and Jaffa, inhabited by thousands of destitute migrants from the countryside. The residents of these shantytowns provided a constituency for radical nationalists, notably Shaykh 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam of Haifa, who called for moral renovation and denounced the factionalism and ineffectiveness of the elite politicians. Al-Qassam, a popular preacher, eventually organized a small guerrilla band that in 1935 took to the hills in the hope of sparking an armed revolt against British rule and Zionism. In November 1935 al-Qassam was killed in a gun battle with police near Jenin, but his death and funeral aroused strong nationalist and religious sentiments and dramatically increased pressure on the politicians to put aside their debilitating factional squabbles and take a much more aggressive stance toward Palestine's British overlords. Palestinian Arabs were also well aware of, and inspired by, nationalist upsurges in neighboring Egypt and Syria.
The supercharged political climate and high unemployment among Arab workers at the end of 1935 notwithstanding, the Histadrut leadership came to the conclusion that the end of the construction boom and rising unemployment among Jews justified another escalation of the Hebrew labor campaign. Given the circumstances, this escalation not surprisingly provoked an unprecedentedly vigorous and militant Arab response. Once again the AWS in Jaffa took the initiative, under the creative and effective leadership of its young president, Michel Mitri. Mitri had taken over the organization after Fakhri al-Nashashibi lost interest in labor affairs during 1935, and had built it into a strong local force that claimed some 4,700 members. In some respects Mitri was a forerunner of the new kind of Arab labor leader who would emerge during and after the Second World War. An educated man with knowledge and experience of the wider world, he was a capable organizer who knew how to seize on an issue and use it effectively to build his movement. He also understood the importance to the labor movement of building broad-based alliances with other forces. For example, he was quite willing to cooperate with radical nationalist and leftist forces in the Arab community, including members of the left wing of the pan-Arab nationalist Istiqlal (Independence) party and even with Arab communists.
In December 1935 Mitri sent a letter to the District Commissioner of Jaffa claiming that more than a thousand of his organization's members were unemployed and requesting permission to hold a protest march through the streets of Jaffa. Mitri's explanation of the purposes of the demonstration suggests that Arab unionists clearly perceived a connection between Arab unemployment, Hebrew labor, and Zionism: "to ask for the relief of unemployment, to protest against Jewish picketing, the Judaization of the Port and the policy of immigration according to the absorptive capacity of the country." The District Commissioner prohibited the march, but Mitri and his colleagues proceeded to escalate their campaign against Hebrew labor. Mitri sought to build support for that campaign by convening a national conference of Arab trade unionists in Jaffa.
In February 1936, using the same arguments that the Histadrut advanced in defense of Hebrew labor, Mitri protested the awarding of a contract for three schools in Jaffa to the Histadrut's contracting office, which generally employed only Jews. He pointed out that the buildings were located in a predominantly Arab city, that Arabs were never given contracts for construction in Jewish areas, that the Histadrut had forcibly driven Arab workers away from Jewish building sites, and that unemployment among Arab workers was very high. When no relief was forthcoming, AWS members adopted the Histadrut's own tactics: unemployed Arab workers began picketing building sites where Hebrew labor prevailed, in particular the three schools under construction. This led to clashes in which Arab workers were arrested by the police.
The pickets seem to have been well aware of what was at stake. One of those arrested told the judge before whom he was brought that "we Arab workers are unemployed. We asked the government to remove Jewish workers from Arab enterprises but it took no interest in our just demand. So we went to the site and tried to expel the Jewish workers from jobs to which we have more right than anyone else, and the police arrested us." The strategy seems to have produced results: the government eventually agreed to require that 50 percent of the jobs at the school construction sites be given to Arab workers, though it rejected the demand that Arabs also be guaranteed 50 percent of the total wage bill. But Mitri was not satisfied and, emulating the Histadrut leadership, demanded 100 percent Arab labor. A leaflet issued by the AWS in the spring of 1936 conveys the pitch of militancy its campaign had attained: it called for mass picketing of construction sites "until the jails are full of [Arab] workers" and designated alternative leaders for the AWS in the event that Mitri and his colleagues were arrested. 22
On 10 April 1936, with tensions rising and Arab public opinion demanding that the nationalist politicians set aside their differences and close ranks, representatives of the various segments of the Arab labor movement in Palestine gathered again, this time in Haifa, to lay the foundations of an all-Palestine Arab labor federation. Among those attending were 'Abd al-Hamid Haymur, the veteran Haifa railway worker who was secretary of the PAWS; Sami Taha, who would later emerge as that organization's preeminent leader; Michel Mitri and George Mansur, leaders of the AWS in Jaffa; Khalil Shanir, one of the Palestine Communist Party's top Arab leaders; Hamdi al-Husayni of Gaza, a radical young journalist who belonged to the Istiqlal party and had links with clandestine Arab nationalist groups preparing for armed revolt; and Akram Zu'aytir of Nablus, another radical Istiqlalist in contact with members of al-Qassam's guerrilla band holed up in the hills around Nablus. 23 This gathering manifested the convergence of the fledgling Arab trade union movement with the most radical segment of the nationalist movement and with the Arab communists, signalling not just a desire for labor unity but also a sense that the Arab labor movement must play an important role in the more militant phase of the national struggle that seemed about to begin.
In fact the storm broke sooner than expected, and the vision of a vigorous and united Arab workers' movement was swept aside in the tide of popular energy that engulfed the Palestinian Arab community when the general strike erupted in the second half of April 1936. Yet the Haifa conference, and the convergence of sociopolitical forces that it manifested, suggest that accounts that depict the outbreak of the general strike and revolt as entirely spontaneous and unexpected are inadequate, since they fail to take into account the kinds of grievances, struggles, and developments discussed here that prepared the ground for that explosion. The revolt had antecedents, for example, in the rising tide of worker militancy which the AWS campaign against "Hebrew labor" both built on and stimulated. At the same time, that campaign strengthened the links between worker grievances and militancy on the one hand and the national question on the other, links that were further reinforced by the labor movement's new ties with radical nationalists anxious to mobilize the populace at large. These dynamics were in turn energized by the example of al-Qassam's resort to arms the previous fall and the popular sentiments it unleashed, and more generally by the poverty and despair in the shantytowns and working-class neighborhoods of Haifa and Jaffa that had nourished al-Qassam's movement.
That this episode of worker mobilization in the streets of Jaffa around the Hebrew labor issue, its rapid evolution into something much broader, and the way it fed into the outbreak of the revolt have received little scholarly attention tells us something. 24 It underscores the elitism that has characterized much of the published research on Palestinian Arab nationalism and its narrow focus on the actions, pronouncements, and writings of a small number of politicians and intellectuals. It also points up the literature's implicit reliance on an understanding of nationalism as a unitary form of identity, which was first formulated by intellectuals and politicians and crystallized in certain key nationalist texts, and was then disseminated to, and passively absorbed by, the lower classes.
It is of course not at all surprising that nationalist discourse strives to make diversity, complexity, and internal conflicts disappear, or that it represents the nation as an ancient entity imbued with a singular essential identity, vision, and goal--rather than as a relatively recent construct comprising heterogeneous elements that triumphs by absorbing, subordinating, or suppressing other forms of identity, to the disproportionate benefit of particular sociopolitical forces. By obliterating potentially complicating differences, or at least by subsuming them in the larger category of the nation and insisting that that category supersedes all others, nationalist movements increase their prospects of winning mass support and mobilizing it to achieve their goals. It is equally unsurprising that nationalist movements feel compelled to struggle against, and if possible extirpate, forms of behavior they define as "collaboration."
But if we cannot reasonably expect nationalist ideologists and activists to be very critical (or even aware) of the essentialism and elitism that inform their vision of the world, or to recognize (much less celebrate) the irreducible heterogeneity of "the nation," we certainly can and should expect historians not to see the world as nationalists do, at least in terms of the paradigms of historical analysis they deploy. As I argued earlier, we need to pay greater attention to the ways in which nationalisms are historically constructed, initially by certain sociopolitical forces with their own agenda(s), by means of selective appropriations of elements and interpretations of the past within a specific historical conjuncture and in relation to (and competition with) many other discourses and practices of identity. To accomplish this, however, we also need to extend our analysis beyond local elites to encompass the rest of the population, in order to explore how various subordinate social groups accept or reject, in whole or in part, the forms of identity their social superiors seek to dissemi nate, forms that are, moreover, always contested. This in turn implies that we cannot treat "ignorance," or "collaboration," or even "resistance" for that matter, as simple, transparent, uncomplicated categories, which is just what nationalist ideologies do as a matter of course.
This is not to suggest, as have the late Elie Kedourie and others, that Arab nationalism was little more than a fraud perpetrated by a handful of confused and frustrated intellectuals, aided and abetted by British colonial officials. For this school of thought, non-Western nationalisms were "invented" in the most negative sense of the term, i.e., deliberately made up out of whole cloth. I am arguing, however, that it is more helpful to think of them (as of all nationalisms) as having been assembled in diverse and complex ways from elements old and new in specific historical and social contexts, and genuinely embraced by various sociopolitical forces. This implies further that we need to rethink (and, I would argue, reject) the sharp distinction that many students of nationalism have drawn between purportedly liberal, territorial, and individualistic (i.e., "good") western European (and by extension United States) nationalisms and the illiberal, organicist, and statist (i.e., "bad") kind of nationalism allegedly typified by nineteenth-century Germany, which is presumed to have served as the model for Arab and most other Asian and African nationalisms. This dichotomy is rooted in a dubious interpretation of modern European history, focuses on the writings and speeches of small groups of intellectuals and politicians while neglecting who the rest of the population thought they were and what they did about it, and thus offers little help in understanding nationalism as an historical phenomenon, in Europe or anywhere else.
With regard to Palestine, my basic argument is that historians need to unpack Arab nationalism in that land much more thoroughly than has hitherto been done. This involves, among other things, exploring in greater depth the ways in which all segments of the indigenous Arab population, and not just its literate minority, did not merely absorb but actively appropriated this new form of identity and the practices that went with it, combining them with other elements drawn from other discourses of identity and other practices. This will in turn require abandonment of certain premises that have informed much nationalist but also much scholarly writing on this particular nationalism (but on most if not all other nationalisms as well, including of course Zionism), especially the assumption that this specific national identity had a singular meaning that was primordial, uniform, and dominant. By presenting a number of vignettes involving Arab workers in Palestine, I have tried to show that it is more helpful to understand that identity as complex, contingent, and variable, expressing not some authentic self awaiting discovery but a set of sentiments, symbols, and practices that could and did mean different things to different people, and could and did lead to different (even sometimes apparently "antinationalist") kinds of actions in certain circumstances.
In part, this is a plea for much more attention to the social and cultural history of modern Palestine and to "history from below," all of which have been sorely neglected in favor of elite-focused political and diplomatic history. But it also seems to me that we need to explore new ways of looking at, and writing about, modern history, and perhaps particularly the histories of colonized peoples in the colonial and postcolonial periods--ways that at least try to step outside not only the colonialist and Orientalist paradigms but also the conventional nationalist framework of historical understanding. This is not to invalidate the importance to people of their national identities, which are often (not least for Palestinians) crucial to their sense of themselves and that still give definition to struggles to end alien and oppressive rule and achieve a greater measure of freedom and a better life. The point is rather to attain a fuller understanding of the complex meanings that the nation, national identity, and nationalism have had for diverse groups of people in actual historical contexts, as well as the different uses to which people have put that assemblage of ideas, sentiments, symbols, and practices.
Notes:
Note 12: I discuss this issue in "Railway Workers and Relational History: Arabs and Jews in British-Ruled Palestine," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993): 601-627, and more fully in Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (Berkeley, 1996), chapter 3. Back.
Note 2: This episode is detailed in Arkhiyon Ha'avoda Vehehalutz, Makhon Lavon Leheker Tnu'at Hapo'alim (the Histadrut archives, hereafter cited as AA), 208/321, Haifa Workers' Council to Histadrut executive committee, July 1932. See also the Palestine Communist Party's Arabic-language organ Ila al-Imam, May 1933. Back.
Note 3: Exceptions in the English-language literature include Rashid Khalidi's work on Palestinian peasant resistance to Zionism; Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning; and Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis, 1996). Some Palestinian scholars and activists have sought to incorporate nonelite strata into the historical narrative-for example, 'Abd al-Qadir Yasin, Musa Budeiri, and Ghassan Kanafani-but much more remains to be done. Back.
Note 4: Gelvin, "Demonstrating Communities," 23. Back.
Note 5: See my "Railway Workers," cited earlier; " 'We Opened Up their Minds for Them': Labor-Zionist Discourse and the Railway Workers of Palestine, 1919-1929," Review of Middle East Studies 5 (1992): 5-32; and "Exclusion and Solidarity: Labor Zionism and Arab Workers in Palestine, 1897-1929," in Gyan Prakash (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton, 1994), 211-240. Back.
Note 6: To insist that we need to unpack and analyze the complexities of Palestinian nationalism is not to deny its historical reality as a form of identity, nor to invalidate the national aspirations of the Palestinian people today or their right to self-determination. Nor am I suggesting that historians should treat Palestinian nationalism any differently than we treat Zionism or any other movement or ideology. Back.
Note 7: al-Karmil, October 10, 1925. Back.
Note 8: See Ittihad al-'Ummal, October 21, 1925. Back.
Note 9: AA, Center for Oral Documentation, transcript of interview with Avraham Khalfon, January 29, 1976, 12. Back.
Note 10: October 21, 1925. The Arabic term that al-Karmil used for "guild" was niqaba, which was already by this time the standard term for a labor union in Egypt but in Palestine still apparently retained its older guild-related connotations. Back.
Note 11: See for example Filastin, August 19, 1927. Back.
Note 12: On this question see Rachelle Taqqu, "Arab Labor in Mandatory Palestine, 1920-1948" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1977), 95. Back.
Note 13: Central Zionist Archives (hereafter CZA), S25/2961, Zaslani to Hoz, October 14, 1934 (emphasis in the original); AA, Center for Oral Documentation, transcript of interview with Eliyahu Agassi, February 29, 1972; CZA, S25/3107, Zaslani to Hoz, September 24, 1934. Back.
Note 14: See Filastin, July/October 1934. Back.
Note 15: See Anita Shapira, Hama'avak Hanikhzav: 'Avoda 'Ivrit, 1929-1939 (Tel Aviv, 1977), 229-33, and Stephen Glazer, "Propaganda and the Histadrut-Sponsored Pickets for 'Hebrew Labor', 1927-1936" (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, 1991). Back.
Note 16: Filastin, December 18, 1934. Back.
Note 17: CZA, S25/2961, "Din veheshbon shel Agassi veZaslani," November 20, 1934. Back.
Note 18: AA 250/436, Zaslani to Agassi, November 25, 1934. Back.
Note 19: AA, Center for Oral Documentation, interview with Eliyahu Agassi, February 29, 1972. Back.
Note 20: On the strike of February/March 1935, see Filastin, March 5, 6, 8, 1935, and Jabra Niqula, Harakat al-Idrabat bayna al-'Ummal al-'Arab fi Filastin (Jaffa, 1935), 10-14. On the findings of the 1935 Jaffa labor committee, see Taqqu, "Arab Labor," 96-98, and CO 733/292/3, High Commissioner to the Colonial Secretary, April 11, 1936. See also Israel State Archives, Jaffa Port, 28/1, 158/35, January 16, 1935; on political and security concerns, see FO 371/17878, C.I.D., July 14, 1934. Back.
Note 21: AA 208/4495; AA 205/6, meeting of the Histadrut's Arab Committee, November 11, 1936; CZA, S25/2961, Agassi to the Political Department, February 15, 1937. Back.
Note 22: See George Mansur, The Arab Worker Under the Palestine Mandate (Jerusalem, 1938), 59-61; Filastin, February 21, 1936; al-Difa', February 23, 1936; AA 490/2, AWS leaflet; George Mansour, testimony before the Peel Commission, in Great Britain, Palestine Royal Commission: Minutes of Evidence Heard at Public Sessions (London, 1937), 343. Back.
Note 23: al-Difa', April 12, 1936. Back.
Note 24: For example, Yehoshua Porath fails to discuss the politically significant convergence between Arab labor and Arab nationalism described in the preceding section, either in his book on the 1930s (1929-1939) or in his "Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement," in Menahem Milson (ed.), Society and Political Structure in the Arab World (New York, 1973), 93-144. Back.
Email this citation