Strike Action and Nation Building: Labor Unrest in Palestine/Israel, 1899-1951 9781782388104

Table of contents :
Contents
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Emergence of the Strike, 1899–1917
2 The National Construction of Strikes, 1918–1930
3 Strike Action and Politicization, 1931–1940
4 War and the Normalization of Strikes, 1941–1946
5 From Social Act to Social Right, 1947–1951
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Strike Action and Nation Building

Strike Action and Nation Building Labor Unrest in Palestine/Israel, 1899–1951



David De Vries

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015 David De Vries

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data De Vries, David, 1954–  Strike action and nation building in Palestine/Israel, 1899–1951 / David De Vries. — First Edition.     pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-78238-809-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-810-4 (ebook)  1. Strikes and lockouts—Political aspects—Israel—History. 2. Strikes and lockouts—Political aspects—Palestine—History. 3. Nation-building—Israel— History. 4. Nation-building—Palestine—History. I. Title.  HD5412.2.A6D4 2015  331.892’9569409041—dc23 2014040083

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-1-78238-809-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78238-810-4 ebook

To Relli and Ruti

r

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

ix

Acknowledgmentsxi List of Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction1 Chapter 1.  The Emergence of the Strike, 1899–1914

12

Contexts 13 Contesting Paternalism 16 The Prewar Surge 18 National Dimensions 21

Chapter 2.  The National Construction of Strikes, 1918–1930

25

The 1920s Surge 25 Causes 28 Nationalism in Strike Action 32 British Intervention 37 Yishuv Mediation 38 Histadrut Regulation 41

Chapter 3.  Strike Action and Politicization, 1931–1940

46

Politicization 46 Contexts 48 Party Politics 53 Anti-Colonial Politics 59 Strikes Resurface 61

Chapter 4.  War and the Normalization of Strikes, 1941–1946 Strikes Contested 67 An All-Time Peak 72 The Primacy of Material Causes 74 Ungovernability 76 The Exception that Proves the Rule 85

67

viii

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Contents

Chapter 5. From Social Act to Social Right, 1947–1951 Interlude 94 Decline 97 Reclaiming Rights 99 Epilogue 110

93

Appendix

116

Notes

121

Bibliography

145

Index

158



Tables and Figures

Tables I.1.

Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1899–1951 (by Periods)

5

1.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1899–1917

13

2.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1918–1930

26

3.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1931–1940

49

4.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1941–1946

73

5.1. Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1947–1951

94

A.1. Strikes in Palestine/Israel 1899–1951 (by Year)

116

A.2. Strikes in Palestine/Israel 1899–1951 (Averages)

117

Figures I.1.

Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1899–1951

5

1.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1899–1917

13

2.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1918–1930

26

3.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1931–1940

48

4.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1941–1946

73

5.1. Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1947–1951

94

A.1. Number of Strikers (w) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

118

A.2. Lost Workdays (d) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

118

x

• Tables and Figures

A.3. Average Size of Strikes (w/n) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

119

A.4. Average Duration of Strikes (d/n) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

119

A.5. Average Intensity of Strikes (d/w) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

120



Acknowledgments

A great many people contributed to the realization of this book. The ideas and themes it contains arose out of a course on the history of strikes in Palestine and Israel that I teach at Tel Aviv University. Students of this course did archival work and wrote assigned papers that contributed invaluably to the initial conceptualizing of the research. I would like to thank Yinon Cohen, with whom I first taught the course and who greatly helped to sharpen the ideas presented in the book. I am also grateful to Michael Berkowitz for his constructive suggestions and great support of the project. To assess and analyze the huge body of sources and data on labor disputes and strikes in Palestine’s and Israel’s history would have been virtually impossible without help from many. I would like to thank the research assistants Moran Bodenkin, Nizar Dagash, Lior Hecht-Yacoby, Avi Klein, Yifaat Moas, and Neta Yodovich for their outstanding work collecting archival data, organizing the wealth of primary materials, and producing clear tables and drawings from the quantitative chaos of numbers of labor disputes and strikes. Special thanks are reserved for Rivi Gillis, whose pertinent advice and assistantship have been tremendous. Special thanks are also extended to Ruvik Danieli for editing parts of the manuscript, and to Ruti De Vries for the design of the book’s cover. I deeply appreciate the encouragement and inspiration offered by my good friends and colleagues Shani Bar-On, Deborah Bernstein, Karin Hofmeester, Tali Kristal, Hadas Mandel, Guy Mundlak, Sjaak van der Velden, Klaus Weinhauer, and Mahmoud Yazbak. For their generous support I would like to thank the Labor Studies Department in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tel Aviv University, and the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 156/10). Thanks are also due to the team at the Remarque Institute at New York University for hosting me as a visiting scholar and for facilitating the finalization of the book. Last

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Acknowledgments

but not least I am indebted to Marion Berghahn and her team at Berghahn Books for the articulate commentaries and for the patient work.

Notes on the Sources Almost all primary sources, historical press, and secondary literature used in the research for this book are in Hebrew. The titles of all the references to these sources are given in translation. Articles and reports in daily newspapers are cited in the endnotes. Strike and labor disputes are placed in the index under industry and location.



Abbreviations

Abbreviations in Notes CO CZA GFJL ISA JA JI LA PMA TNA

Colonial Office, London Central Zionist Archive, Jerusalem General Federation of Jewish Labor, the Histadrut Israel State Archive, Jerusalem Jewish Agency Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, Tel Aviv Labor Movement Archive, Pinchas Lavon Institute, Tel Aviv Palestine Manufacturers’ Association The National Archives, London

Abbreviations in Tables and Figures n w d w/n d/n d/w

Number of Strikes Number of Strikers Number of Workdays Lost Due to Strikes Average Size of Strikes Average Duration of Strikes Average Intensity of Strikes



Introduction

In March 1924 the Comrades’ Court of the Haifa labor council summoned Israel Litvak, a worker at the Rosenfeld printing workshop, to a trial.1 The council—the local representative of the Histadrut,2 of which Litvak was a member—was suing him for violating a strike action undertaken by his fellow printing workers: he had returned to work before the end of the strike and the ensuing legal action against the strikers at the Haifa District Court. The council, its secretary David Cohen claimed, “made it clear to him that this act devalues the prestige of the Histadrut and harms the strike. Without it we may have ended the strike more successfully, for this act satisfied the employer.” The secretary continued: “This is a breach of a brotherly alliance. I want to emphasize that we asked member Litvak to wait at least until the trial was over. He claimed that he cannot wait because of family reasons. I think that member Litvak, who places his private affairs above those of the Histadrut, cannot be found among us.” Constituting insult to and betrayal of Litvak’s fellow strikers and the Histadrut, the act, according to the council, deserved severe punishment. “I waited ten weeks,” Litvak answered: I could not anymore. I was in a difficult condition. Anyway I said that if the strike ended I must return [to work]. I did not betray the Histadrut, but went with all the others. … Everybody concurred that I shall return to work after the end of the trial. I don’t know what is demanded from me. … The strike was carried out by the workers and not by the Haifa labor council. The owners did not use the fact that I reentered work before the trial. Because the strike was lost I did not have anything else to do. The other members did not want to return to work. I always opposed the strike. But I was ashamed to say no. … On returning to work I did not have any special terms with Rosenfeld [the employer].

The demands, concluded Litvak, “were not so just, and this was a mistake in my opinion that a strike was declared. … When I entered work I was

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Strike Action and Nation Building

a bachelor. Now I have a family.” The tribunal panel rejected Litvak’s arguments and decided to oust him from the Histadrut. His appeal was rejected as well, and other town labor councils were asked not to admit him to their ranks or ever assist him in finding a job.3 The Litvak hearing, one among hundreds of cases dealt with at the Haifa Comrades’ Court during the 1920s, represented a thorny issue for the labor movement. On the one hand the prosecutor—the body that organized Haifa’s Jewish workers—wished to express the ideals of solidarity of the Jewish workers’ community that had evolved in this Arab-dominated town. The violation of these ideals, on the other hand, was couched in a very explicit manner. It was claimed to have helped the Jewish private employer to both resist workers’ collective action and representation, and persist in employing Jewish strikebreakers or “cheap” Arab labor, disregarding the problems of Jewish immigrants and unemployed, and disseminating the image of militant Jewish workers and the Histadrut as unreliable and irresponsible. The council’s leaders thus perceived Litvak’s misconduct as both anti-labor and anti-Zionist: he had violated solidarity and aided the employment of non-Jews, allowed Jewish employers the freedom of action, and at the same time destabilized the image of the Histadrut as a viable practitioner of Zionist goals in Palestine’s urban labor market. Not only was his interpretation of his economic hardships and his consequent action different from the strikers’, but he had in practice violated the social codes of Haifa’s labor community as a whole. Thus the Rosenfeld strike, which had originated as a social conflict, turned into a political transgression, and Litvak’s actions into markers of the boundaries of the community. Strikes and strike-related events such as the case above have always attracted the attention of historians and social scientists. Since becoming the dominant form of social protest in the mid nineteenth century, they have been considered a telling indicator of the state of employment relations, workers’ collective behavior, and society’s approaches to social rights and democracy.4 Strikes’ correspondence with business cycles, together with the well-established pattern of an increase in strikes during economic booms, underscores their illumination of material aspects of social relations.5 Their correlation with the state of trade unions’ power, and of labor movements in general, tells us much about the relations between workers and their representative organizations, as well as the latter’s capacity to mobilize their social bases for action and exert political pressure.6 Furthermore, as reactive behavior against the breach of “social contracts” that may evolve in any workplace, strike action pinpoints the extent of workers’ moral outrage, as well as expressions of solidarity, its limitations, and the way strike violators are treated.7 As succinctly put

Introduction •

3

by Laura Lee Downs, historians have been drawn to the study of strikes because they … suggest the possibility of grasping (however momentarily) at the elusive phantom, the autonomous self-expressions of working people. This prospect holds special appeal for labor historians, whose quest for working class subjectivity is so often constrained by the silence that surrounds their subaltern subjects. As a strike unfolds, the once muffled voices of ordinary women and men ring with a startling, sharp clarity. The historian hitherto condemned to searching the silence for random bits and clues, is abruptly faced with the task of interpreting the sudden cascade of language and desire unleashed in the collective decision to take shop floor grievances onto the streets.8

More widely still, strikes tell us much about society. The propensity of certain groups of workers and occupations to strike more often than others (see, e.g., the case of miners and dock workers) has long served to unravel the histories of occupations and of communities.9 Similarly, the effects of strikes—on the strikers, employers, and the public at large— expose entire sets of social, political, and cultural norms concerning the legitimacy of social action, authority, and hierarchy in the workplace, as well as protest as a citizen’s social right.10 This variety of interest in strikes is also expressed in the methodologies applied: the focus ranges from a singular influential strike to strikes in one locality or community; from cyclical strike waves to comparative and global studies; and from macro and quantitative approaches to strike patterns, through “from below” analyses of workers’ expressions, to anthropologically oriented cultural studies that seek to unravel codes of behavior and adversarial languages.11 Though these approaches have in common a fascination with strikes as prisms for wider political, social, and cultural processes, and though many studies associate strikes with local, regional, and international politics, the association between strikes and nation building has remained relatively understudied. Strikes feature but little in the vast literature on the relations between nationalism and socialism, where the emphasis is on ideology, party politics, leadership, and thought. The much richer literature on labor strife in the history of imperialism and colonialism has contributed immensely to understanding the trajectory of strike action in nation- and state-building conditions. However, this literature has a relatively narrow impact on the analysis of such trajectories in individual cases. Palestine and Israel in the first half of the twentieth century are a case in point.12 Striking has long been a discernibly momentous phenomenon in Israeli society. This is as true today as it was in the 1970s and the 1930s. Despite

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Strike Action and Nation Building

many forces that have weakened its recurrence—the Arab-Jewish conflict, the decline of Israeli organized labor, the exponential increase of precarious workers in the Israeli labor market—striking has been relentless. The achievements and impact of striking (e.g., on the level of wages) may not always have been immense, but workers in Israel persist in using the strike weapon for both economic improvement and influence on relations of power in the labor market and hierarchies of authority in the workplace. The Israeli “repertoire of collective action” (to use Charles Tilly’s famous term) takes many forms besides strikes: protests, demonstrations, disputes, various weak and strong oppositional practices, and collusive negations of authority.13 Strikes, however, despite their periodic abeyance and the negative resonance they often hold in public opinion, have persistently been at the top of that repertoire. This is still the case today, even when other forms of collective action and non-movement social protest seem, in the Middle East in particular, to resonate more powerfully.14 Strikes’ prime status on the Israeli “labor conflict scene” can also be extrapolated from society’s ambivalence toward their legitimacy and high cost. Contemporary Israel’s ongoing public deliberations on the nature and intentions of striking, and Israeli politicians’ and legal authorities’ recurrent attempts to devise restraints on the recurrence of strikes and limit their use, have likewise maintained this social form of conflict’s position at the forefront of public attention. True, many workers in Israeli society past and present have remained distant from the strike and avoided participating in the collective and negotiation cultures that strikes usually cultivate.15 Still, the many workers who tend to strike and re-strike keep reminding Israeli society of the strike weapon’s availability, its attraction for certain groups of workers, the irritation it causes, and occasionally also its relative effectiveness. Israeli society has often witnessed a periodic decline in strike intensity, a reminder of strikes’ characteristic “cyclical behavior” in many regions and countries. But society remains fully aware of the availability of this means, the propensity to use it, its cost, its power to refuel solidarity, and its varying social resonance. More significantly, and contrary to conventional wisdom, this social embeddedness of the strike is hardly recent. The strike has been shaped over many decades, and despite its noted absence from the historiography, its present centrality and weightiness are deeply rooted in Israel’s past in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine.16 Much as today’s practitioners of the strike and its opponents are oblivious to the history of strike action, they are still unknowingly re-creating and reproducing a social practice and vibrant ritual whose historically shaped codes have withstood the test of time against the odds. Strikes are never alike and have never been so, though deceptively, like the endless variety of military battles, they look

Introduction •

5

Figure I.1. Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1899–1951 (by Periods) 140 120 100 80 60 40 20

1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Sources: Sikumim for the 1930s–1950s (periodic reports published by the Histadrut, LA Library); Aviad Bar-Haim, “The System of Labor Relations in the Jewish Settlement in Palestine during the British Mandate” (MA thesis, The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1972); Yeshayahu Etkin, “Sixty Years of Striking in Israel, 1921–1980” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1982).

Table I.1. Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1899–1951 (by Periods) Strikes

Strikers

Lost Days

(n)

(w)  8,281

1899–1917

 26

1918–1930

306

(d)

Average Size (w/n)

Average Duration (d/n)

Average Intensity (d/w)

111,674

 27.1

 365.0

13.5

1931–1940

783

22,080

179,124

 28.2

 229.0

 8.1

1941–1946

621

54,020

847,971

 87.0

1365.0

15.7

1947–1951

278

31,427

267,684

113.0

 963.0

 8.5

Source: See Figure 1. Note: Data on strikes and lost workdays from 1899-1917 is missing. It is estimated that of the 2014 strike events, fewer than 100 were lockouts. As the distinctions between the two are not clear, here they are lumped together.

the same. Furthermore, recent strike activity in Israel and elsewhere has evidently been attuned to the changing contexts and spirit of the times. Meanwhile, strikes are also situated within long-evolving social and behavioral structures and historically molded assumptions and understandings. For this reason this book focuses on their history and on their pre-1948 origins in particular. More than 2,000 strikes broke out in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century—an annual average of about thirty-eight strikes (see Figure I.1 and Table I.1 above and the tables in the appendix). The immen-

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Strike Action and Nation Building

sity of that number, compared to the figures for countries and economies of similar size during that period, cannot be ignored, especially considering the following facts. First, almost no strikes were recorded in Palestine in the nineteenth century. The first broke out only in 1899, in a Jewish agricultural school. Second, during the “takeoff ” in strike activity—roughly between 1922 and 1947—the majority of the population was Palestinian Arab, but the overwhelming majority of strikes were staged in the Jewish community (the Yishuv17), in Jewish workplaces, and by Jewish workers. Third, compared to this mostly Yishuv social turmoil, only a handful of strikes occurred in the British public sector (e.g., the colonial bureaucracy or the railways) or in workplaces owned by international capital, such as in the oil industry. Fourth, despite the expansion of a large Zionist public sector in the Yishuv economy, almost all the strikes took place in the Jewish private capitalist sector, the motor of Palestine’s industrialization. Fifth, many strikes during this period were orchestrated by organized labor, that is, the Zionist socialist labor movement and its elaborate organizational organ, the Histadrut.18 However, many strikes started without Histadrut authorization and lacked funding, and most were short-lived, as in the case of the World War II–era diamond cutters, the occupational group with the greatest propensity to strike.19 In another example (which concludes the book), the seamen’s strike of 1951 turned into a watershed event in Israeli history, partly because the strikers positioned themselves against both the Histadrut and Mapai, the ruling labor party of the new government of Israel.20 Finally, a significant share of the strikers in this period of nation building and national conflict with Palestine’s Arabs were recent Jewish immigrants into Palestine, most of who settled in urban areas, where employment was found mainly in the private sector of the economy. In comparison with other migrant-absorption countries of similar size in terms of population, urban population, and labor force, the frequency and volume of the strikes in Palestine was surprisingly high. These basic features of the strike phenomenon in pre-state Palestine and Israel are puzzling. Why did so many strikes occur in a community so deeply engaged in nation building and national conflict? How did they surmount so many strike-preventive factors, such as the anti-strike stances of British officials and Jewish Yishuv leaders? If organized labor was, at least politically, so dominant in the Zionist project—vis-à-vis capital owners and private employers—why did strikes become routine, particularly in Jewish private workplaces? Why was social tension so vibrant in a society lacking political sovereignty? Why were strikes—and the temporary spaces of negation they reflected—more central to the country’s repertoire of collective action than any other form of protest and social strife? Why did strikes peak during World War II (see Figure I.1 above), despite the

Introduction •

7

British authorities’ enhancement of the anti-strike arsenal? And why was the early institutionalization of the State of Israel in the early 1950s accompanied by highly resonant strike action? Strikes have long interested historians and industrial sociologists of Palestine and Israel.21 Their proliferation in a relatively small, conflict-ridden society has always been part of divisive social imagery and political contention. The enhanced presence of strikes, the culture of negotiation they have produced, and their cyclical downturns and peaks have attracted the attention of labor leaders abroad and international labor organizations. The Ottoman rulers, the (British) Palestine government, and the State of Israel have consistently observed them and sought means to contain them. Moreover, political and organized labor in Yishuv society—which occasionally co-opted strikes and strikers to advance political, material, and bureaucratic interests—was often bewildered by their from-below energies and increasingly routine and ritualized nature. The historiography of the period, however, has drawn only a partial and fragmentary picture of this prevalence of strikes, their political and legal treatment, and the diverse interest they aroused among contemporaries.22 Despite the considerable extent of the social, economic, and labor historiography of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, it has largely neglected this intensive recurrence and richness of strike action. It has tended to focus more on the national ideology of labor than on the form and effectiveness of workers’ collective action; more on labor institutions than on the social history of protest; more on the national division into segmented and segregated labor markets than on the workers’ and employees’ experiences in the momentary spells when a culture of demand presentation and negotiation prevailed. Moreover, although the research of individual strikes during the British Mandate has expanded their conceptualization within the evolution of the Arab-Jewish national conflict and in the context of Zionist nation and state-building has remained incoherent. In this historiography, three main approaches to the association between nationalism and strikes can be discerned. The first locates strikes, mostly in Palestine’s Jewish sector, in the system of relations between the Labor-Zionist movement, the Jewish employers, and the liberal Revisionist movement. It focuses on the internal social politics of the Yishuv and is characterized by its treatment of the Yishuv as a bounded political and social system. Whereas this approach justifiably emphasizes the centrality, to the strikes, of the question of the national preference for Jewish workers (known as the issues of “Hebrew Labor” and “Conquest of Labor”), it ignores the extent to which nationalism was also present in strikes over improvement in workers’ pay and conditions. It thus tendentiously pre-

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Strike Action and Nation Building

cludes understanding of the strike phenomenon in the Yishuv in its necessarily larger contextualization in the British presence and the national conflict.23 The second approach, highly critical of the first, places strikes—particularly those during the period of British rule—in a relational context, arguing that workers’ collective action in both the Arab and Jewish sectors can only be understood in terms of Zionism’s impact on labor and the centrality of national ideology to the split labor-market strategies of the Zionist labor movement. This approach fruitfully associates national ideologies with labor practices, but it still confines this association to the manipulative strategies of the Zionist-oriented Histadrut and underrates unorganized and underrepresented workers’ varied experiences of strikes.24 Finally, the third approach, much distant from the first two, dissociates strikes from nationalism altogether. In focusing on the dynamics of strikes as insular occasions reflective of social injustice, group interests, or workplace-bound worker-employer tensions, this approach tends to isolate instances of strike action as momentary expressions of labor’s quest for expansion of its organizational power, straightforward tensions in the labor market and workplaces, or status-related problems of particular groups of workers and professionals.25 Without discarding the insights of the approaches outlined above, the following discussion proposes an alternative perspective. The emergence and presence of strikes did not merely signify the prevalence of social tension and open social conflict; rather, their marked invigoration, cyclical peaks, unrelenting character, and political resonance exposed an extremely vibrant facet of a society otherwise deeply immersed in nation building, colonial encounter, and national conflict. Therefore, instead of narrowing the discussion to the orchestration of strikes, particularly during the Mandate period, by a politically hegemonic labor movement, the book approaches strikes from a perspective much underrated by the historiography: the maturation of private capital and the private sector in Palestine’s urban economy, a process encouraged by the British Mandate authorities and Zionist movement, and largely unhampered by the labor movement. In becoming a habitual, vibrant feature of Palestine’s social structure, the book argues, the strike was an expression of both the challenge to the empowerment of private capital and the labor movement’s weakness in the labor market and workplaces. Viewing strikes as richly telling sites of social, cultural, political, and economic contention and as extensive sources of historical information, the discussion below approaches the intersection of strikes, nation building, and national conflict as a dynamic negotiation between social actions and evolving social structures. Strikes, the book argues, were used to ad-

Introduction •

9

vance nationally oriented labor market segregation, mobilized for political purposes, and expressed protest against state structures’ interventions in industrial relations. However, after a formative period in which collective action was overshadowed by national issues of economic separation and market segregation along ethnic lines, “routinized” strikes increasingly revolved around issues of economic improvement, workers’ rights, and the freedom to act against employers. With the growth of an urban and industrial manufacturing sector, issues of economic improvement, workplace rights, and anti-authoritarian stances prompted the “denationalization” of strikes. This occurred in parallel to the regime and political transitions that beset Palestine and harbingered the growing power of private capital in post-1948 Israeli society. The twofold process—of strikes first being “nationalized” and politicized, then “denationalized” and normalized—explains the proliferation of strikes in Palestine and Israel and their evolution as a central, routine means of social protest in society. Moreover, this trajectory goes a long way toward explaining why workers’ protest, workplace disputes, and actual striking were deeply impacted by the political developments that have transformed Palestine since the early twentieth century.26 My aim in this book is therefore to approach the multitude of strikes in Palestine and Israel in the first half of the twentieth century as a phenomenon that has become routinized and embedded in society in contexts that were seemingly not conducive to unrelenting strike action. To explain how that transformation occurred, I approach the strikes as a phenomenon that requires a social or collective biography, analyzing a large number of individual strikes, keeping in mind their variety and particularities, and narrating historically the trajectories of the strike phenomenon as a whole.27 These strike stories and trajectories are based on two kinds of empirical material. The first is the strikes themselves as clearly defined events of work stoppage that produced a wealth of descriptive, experiential, interpretative, and legal information. The second type of source is the larger discussion sparked by the strike phenomenon—richly varied references and allusions made by examiners, advisers, bureaucrats, scribes, bystanders, strike beneficiaries, and strike victims. Both types of materials were found primarily in archives: the National Archives in London, the Israel State Archive in Jerusalem, the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, and not least the Labor Movement Archive at the Pinchas Lavon Institute in Tel Aviv. Smaller archives consulted included the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv, the Yad Tabenkin archive in Ramat Efal, the archive of the Municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo, and the Yad Yaari archive in Givat Haviva. A no less significant repository (for both types of sources) was the contempo-

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Strike Action and Nation Building

rary press—from the weekly and monthly periodicals of the early period, through the extremely rich daily newspapers of the Mandate period, up to the highly informative leaflets and bulletins produced by the Histadrut and various labor unions and organizations involved in strike action. Complementing the archival and press materials were reports and publications produced by the Palestine government, the Zionist movement, the Histadrut, and employers.28 These sources made it possible to combine the various types of materials and ultimately depict the strikes’ trajectories. Quantitative material about strikes, strikers, strike demands, and strike results began to be collected in the early 1920s, mainly by the Histadrut and the Palestine government that reported on Palestine to the League of Nations and the International Labour Office. The gathering and publication of these materials achieved great sophistication in the 1930s and 1940s, and was further elaborated in the early 1950s by the Histadrut and the Israeli government. For the purposes of the discussion below, I used these quantitative sources first as base material for drawing the trends (see Appendix for further visualization). I then compared them with qualitative evidence on strikes from the archives, press, and printed materials. Relating these numbers to the workplaces and occupations affected by the strikes, and to the names and titles of relevant organizations and strikers, resulted in an approximate estimate of 2,014 strikes for the entire period from 1899 to 1951.29 Next, I constructed “strike histories.” Many short strikes produced only “thin” stories, so society’s response to them remains unknown. Similarly, the relatively small number of strikes among Palestinian Arabs constrained any findings about the ethnic and rural/urban divisions of strike action. Furthermore, archived primary sources relating to small workplaces and workers’ committees hinted that the contemporary press did not cover all labor disputes but only those that turned into full-fledged strikes. The relative paucity of archive and press sources produced by and relating to private workplaces and employers further hampered a full view of the negotiations and arbitrations occasioned by strike actions, let alone society’s reactions to them. Finally, the absence of strikes in Palestine’s and Israel’s collective memory—that is, despite the vibrancy of the phenomenon—made it necessary to focus the construction of strike narratives mainly on contemporary primary sources. The latter, consulted for the first time for the purposes of this book, are singularly rich and offer, in terms of the history of modern Palestine, an unmatched micro-historical view of the outbreak and “lives” of strikes, and of contentious politics in general. Building on these individual stories, the formal details of each strike, and the analysis of their expressive social and cultural language, I drew the main trajectories of the phenomenon: the strikes’ attunement

Introduction •

11

to the business cycles of the Palestine economy, their expression of the primacy of private capital, their interplay with nation building, and their transformation into a routine societal phenomenon. The book explains these trajectories via five concepts, developed separately in each chapter. The first is the notion of emergence, which locates the arrival of the strike phenomenon in Palestine in the last phase of Ottoman rule over Palestine and emphasizes the looming versatility of the strike as a form of conflict. The second concept is national construction, which denotes the maturation of the strike phenomenon as a useable means of pursuing national aims and a recognized social form of action in the Yishuv as a nation-building society. This maturation, I argue, began in the period of the British conquest of Palestine and ended in the late 1920s, when strike action came to be considered a full-fledged part of the society’s repertoire of collective action. The third concept, politicization, roughly dominated the 1930s. It refers to the waning of the national dimension of strike action and its growing use for the political purposes of both Jews and Arabs. Normalization, the fourth concept presented in the book, describes the apex of the strikes in the first two-thirds of the 1940s, their full-fledged social habitualization, and the “evaporation” of national and political elements from the strikes. The book closes with the concept of democratization, which denotes the strike’s emergence from the watershed events of 1947–1951 as part of the workers’ realigning relations with the new sovereign state of Israel. Epitomizing this phase was the highly resonant seamen’s strike of late 1951, which both closes the circle that opened with the strike’s emergence half a century earlier and looks forward to its ripening in the 1950s and beyond.

 1

The Emergence of the Strike, 1899–1917

In our economic war we must take into consideration the conditions in Palestine. In working the land, where great competition by the Arabs disallows us the ability to use radical means in order to improve our state, we must satisfy ourselves with palliatives. … However, in those occupations where conditions are fit, it is our duty to protect the interests of the workers and alleviate their conditions, first by more convenient means; and when found useless, we shall then resort to the radical means—that is to strikes. —Yosef Aharonovich, “War of Classes and War for Survival,” Hapoel Hatsair, 2 June 1908 A small strike, indeed a tiny strike began already last Friday at the Levy & Co. printing shop. The cause for the strike is the demand by the printing shop’s owner that a few workers to sign a letter that forbids them to pay an after work night visit to the workers’ club. Altogether the strikers number only four. But considering that the matter can presumably develop further and evolve into trouble, in particular as the great strike of all the printing workers in Jerusalem has not yet been erased from our memory, the matter therefore requires attention from start. And everyone whose opinion is considered must make the effort to reconcile the strikers and the owners, so they will not allow it take more serious form. —Editorial, “The Strike at the Levy Printing Shop,” Moria, 18 November 1910

The Emergence of the Strike

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13

Contexts The first strike to break out in Palestine was apparently in 1899, at the Jewish agricultural school of Mikveh Israel. Between 1900 and 1905, another three strikes were registered at a printing shop in Jerusalem, a winery on the Rishon Lezion plantation, and an agricultural farm in Sejera, in the country’s north. Their frequency then swelled, with twenty-one strikes breaking out from 1906 to 1914, mostly in Jewish factories and in Jewish agricultural plantations. The surge was curtailed by the outbreak of Figure 1.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1899–1917

Figure 1.1 Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1899-1917

140 120 100 80 60 40 20

1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1.

Table 1.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1899–1917 Year

Strikes

Year

Strikes

1899

1

1909

4

1900

1

1910

2

1911

3

2

1912

1

1903

1913

2

1904

1914

3

1905

1915

1

1901 1902

1906

1

1916

1907

3

1917

1908

2

Source: See Figure I.1. Note: Data on the strikes of 1901, 1903, 1904, and 1905 contain only partial information on participants and duration. No strikes were recorded in 1916 and 1917.

14

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Strike Action and Nation Building

World War I in 1914. Then, just four years later, a renewal of strike action followed on the heels of the British occupation of Palestine and postwar intensification of Jewish immigration.1 The historiography of Palestine regarded the emergence of strikes in the prewar period as a sporadic phenomenon with little effect on either workers’ material conditions or employers’ labor policies. This historiography devoted attention to particular and seminal strikes, and to the role of strikes in forging the leadership of Hapoel Hatsair and Poalei Zion, the workers’ parties that from the mid-1910s served as the foundations of the Zionist socialist labor movement.2 However, the paucity of strikes in the prewar period and their comparatively greater impact in the 1920s led the labor historiography to assume that it was the preindustrial and pre-urbanized character of the Palestine economy that dictated the inefficacy of strike action, along with the scant attention politicians in the Yishuv paid to the strike as a central, meaningful form of social protest and conflict.3 But these assumptions ignore the evolution of a major feature during this early emergence phase of the strike, and of the labor movement in Palestine as a whole: the versatility of the strikes and their growing capacity to serve a variety of economic, social, and political purposes. As argued below, this prewar emergence of the strike as a malleable multipurpose tool laid the basis for the novel awareness, among Jewish wage earners, workers’ organizers, and labor ideologues, of the availability of the strike, the question of its legitimacy, and its imagined qualities of conveying social anger and advancing material demands for workers and politicians alike. The concept of the strike in Palestine emerged in four main contexts— European, British, Ottoman-Palestinian, and Jewish. The strike had evolved gradually in Europe since the late eighteenth century (and later in the United States of America), progressively becoming widely known in industrializing regions of Europe as a modern form of collective action in which craftsmen and workers stopped work to force employers to comply with their demands. In this process, complexly associated as it was with the particular histories of local trade unions, labor movements, and the First and Second Internationals, three types of strike emerged. The most prevalent type—cherished by many mainstream labor movements and adherents of Socialist Reformism4—was the economic strike. Focused on “moral economy” struggles to preserve workplace and employment rights, and on material improvements in areas such as wages, working conditions, and the right to organize, the economic strike came to serve a variety of workers and labor organizations. The second type of strike was the political protest against authoritarian regimes and imperial presence. The third was the general strike, idealized by George Sorel and Rosa Lux-

The Emergence of the Strike

•

15

emburg as a mix of economic and political struggle that also delivered a strong revolutionary message. When the strike emerged in Palestine in the first decade of the twentieth century, these three mostly European types of strikes were already well developed and ideologically formulated. None had found their way to the country before the turn of the century, mainly because of the slow pace of development of manufacturing and the absence of any significant local urban labor organization. However, their utility and sophistication gradually became known to the early labor activists in Palestine—and to the press, which often covered strikes in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Poland, and Western Europe.5 Strike action in the pre–World War I British Empire was the second context in which the concept of the strike emerged in Palestine. Nineteenth-century Britain was a formative hub in the evolution of the strike as a form of social protest. The harsh political treatment of British trade unions and collective action in both Britain and the Empire served as a significant reference point. Particularly relevant was the British mix of a liberal political tradition that legalized trade unions in Britain, but made picketing and striking difficult, and conducted an authoritarian policy in the Empire. Long before the onset of British rule in Palestine, Jewish Marxists and socialists in Germany, Russia, and Poland took this “voluntarist” tradition as a reference point from which they extrapolated the full meaning of state intervention in industrial relations.6 A third and no less important context was the surge of strikes in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Strikes in Egypt, the Turkish coal mines, and the Thessaloniki tobacco plantations (in which Jewish strikers were partly involved) received press coverage in Palestine. The cabbies’ strike in Egypt in 1911, for example, which expressed a mix of a materially driven issues and nationalist anti-British sentiment, resonated widely in Palestine’s major towns. Moreover, as we shall see shortly, the effect of the Young Turks’ revolution in 1908 made the Ottoman context specifically relevant to Palestine.7 Even more relevant to the evolution of the strike concept in Palestine was the context of Jews’ participation in strike action in Russia and Poland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As shown by Ezra Mendelsohn and other historians, diverse contemporary writers such as Elhanan Leib Lewinsky, Ber Borokhov, and Yosef Haim Brenner referred extensively to this massive involvement.8 Concentrated mainly in the textile, garment, and shoemaking industries, the Jewish involvement in the strikes was part of a radicalization process taking place in various towns and cities in Eastern Europe, later spreading also to the concentrations of Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side in New York and in London’s East End.9

16

•

Strike Action and Nation Building

The significance for Palestine was, however, twofold. First, the strikes played a significant role in the development of Jewish labor organization in Russia, which in turn impacted the formation of the labor parties and labor movement in the mid-1910s in Palestine itself. Second, some of the more important founders and ideologues of the labor parties in Palestine were participants in these strikes. Notable among them were Manya Wilbushewitch Schochat, who prior to her immigration to Palestine had been active in strikes in Odessa and Minsk; Izhak Ben-Zvi (Shimshelevich) and his wife Rachel Yanait, who were involved in the 1905 general strike in Kiev;10 and David Ben-Gurion, who co-founded the Marxist Poalei Zion party in Palestine and was involved in the tailors’ strike in Plonsk in 1905. Because of their deep involvement in labor organization in Palestine from 1905 to 1908, these activists can be regarded as early practitioners and formulators of the strike—especially Ben-Gurion, who was an enthusiastic Marxist active in the Plonsk strike when he first became aware of the tension between what the strikers considered the just causes of the strike (e.g. long working hours) and its potential price—the harm it might cause to Jewish master tailors in competition with non-Jewish tailors. Against this background, an ambivalent attitude toward the owner and employer emerged in Palestine in 1906–07 during debates over the logic of struggling against the Jewish private employer, whose economic contribution to the Zionist project was perceived as paramount. As we shall see later in the book, that ambivalence would persist throughout the Mandate period.11 As in many other cases of transplantation and import of strike action from Europe to other countries, the impact of these four contexts on the first strikes in Palestine cannot be easily gauged. And because the first strikes broke out before the emergence of the political parties, neither can we detect exactly how they conveyed to the early practitioners of the strike the basic terminology of striking as a form and practice of social action. To explain how this imagined reservoir of ideas and legacies turned into multifarious practices of action against employers, we need to integrate them into the strikes themselves and into their “collective” trajectory.

Contesting Paternalism The emergence of strikes between 1899 and 1904 was part of the social transition the country was undergoing. First of all, Palestine was experiencing growth in manufacturing, exemplified by the development of basic metal works that supplied machinery for agriculture and transportation. The growth of printing shops underscored rising levels of immigration, population, and literacy. The population’s Arab majority lived mostly in

The Emergence of the Strike

•

17

rural areas, while the new Jewish minority was developing on agricultural plantations and in small towns, gradually turning the latter into mixed societies. In this initial pre-industrialization phase, urbanization, still slow, was concentrated mainly in the older towns of Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Haifa.12 Furthermore, the basic units of production in the towns were sort of closed enclaves, structured on familial authority and employing small numbers of wage earners without any top-down inspection by the Ottoman state. Employment relations were paternalistic in nature, based on informal and often individual agreements, and workers had no significant form of organized representation or external backing. The communal institutions of the town, ethnic group, and neighborhood served as formal avenues of redress in times of labor conflict, much more than any trade union or workers’ party. In these circumstances, workplace social tensions were downplayed by personalized tracks of conflict resolution, owners’ opposition to workers’ representation, the very real fear of challenging the owner and employer, and the lack of formal legal labor protection by either the Ottoman regime or the customs of local Jewish communities in the plantations and towns.13 The rarity of strikes well reflected this “paternalistic atmosphere.” It was present in the first strike, at the Jewish agricultural school of Mikveh Israel at the end of 1899. Established two decades earlier by Alliance Israélite Universelle, the school was renowned for its tight disciplinary atmosphere and the low wages it paid its mentors—upper-level pupils who tutored the younger ones. The mentors started the strike to protest the Alliance’s sudden decision to cut costs by stopping their payments. Warned by the school’s administration that Turkish soldiers would be called in to arrest them, the mentors left the school altogether and found refuge at a nearby Jewish farming plantation. The headmaster then rescinded the decision, fearing that the Turkish Kaimakam (governor) would blame the administration for allowing the “revolt” to happen and close the school. Shortly afterward, the mentors resumed their studies and work. Staged by a few youngsters in an authoritarian educational establishment and lacking any organizational backing, the short episode marked the emergence of the strike in Palestine as a novel means of protest against moral injustice and workplace paternalism.14 The pattern was reaffirmed in the three strikes that followed. Involving altogether only seventy workers, these strikes focused on what the strikers defined as the owners’ “inhumane” treatment of the workers. In 1900, a five-week strike at the winery on the Jewish plantation of Rishon Lezion forced the management to compensate dismissed workers. In the 1902 strike at a printing shop in Jerusalem, forty Sephardic religious workers, backed by a small printing workers’ association, attempted to gain free-

18

•

Strike Action and Nation Building

dom of movement between printing workshops.15 Despite winning a certain reduction in work hours, the strike failed, and the recently established small workers’ union was dismantled. The failure was repeated in the Sejera strike of the same year, where agricultural workers and guards at a Jewish agricultural settlement in the Lower Galilee protested low wages.16 These early strikes evidently had in common their preindustrial character. They occurred in small workplaces where employment relations could best be described as authoritarian and paternalistic, and where the employers depended heavily on the workers and their particular skills. In this, the strikes accorded with their Ottoman context—they were few, lacked organizational backing and the wide resonance the local press would later give strikes, and were often opposed by the old institutions that ran the Jewish community where they took place. More than anything else, then, these early strikes bespeak their marginality in the labor lives of Ottoman Palestine.17 That marginality is crucial to our understanding of the birth of the strike phenomenon. It underscores the contrast between the owners’ liberty of action—occasionally expressed through physical violence—and the strikers’ futile search for external backing. It also highlights the institutional weakness of the Yishuv, which was unable to offer public means of arbitration and intervention in the enclave-like world of the private workplace. This was the background for a new phase in the evolution of the strike phenomenon, far beyond its anti-paternalistic character.

The Prewar Surge Between 1906 and 1914, strikes’ intensification—in number, participants, workplaces, and people affected—indeed heralded a new phase (see Figure 1.2 and Table 1.2). This phase gave rise to some of the basic characteristics of the phenomenon of strikes: their concentration in the Jewish private sector of Palestine’s economy, their increasingly urban character, and essentially their conversion into the main means in the workers’ repertoire of collective action. The prewar surge also reflected the growing integration of the strikes’ “anti-paternalistic agenda” with bread-andbutter issues. Three processes shaped this new phase. First and foremost, demographic and economic changes in Palestine increased the number of workplaces in the towns and on Jewish agricultural plantations. The expansion of the Jewish artisanal sector and the labor force it employed was evident in the enhanced production of wine in Rishon Lezion, growing activity in the small printing houses of Jerusalem and Jaffa, and rising demand

The Emergence of the Strike

•

19

for mechanical repair of agricultural and water-related machinery. The related strengthening of ties between plantations and consumers in small towns resulted in a new urban economic infrastructure—as well as a hotbed of social tensions reflected in the increasing concentration of strikes in Jewish-owned manufacturing and small-scale industry.18 Though agricultural workers made up a large segment of the Jewish labor force, it was mostly workers in printing and machine-shop and soap manufacturing in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa that were increasingly using the strike as a lever against employers. Significantly, the activists and strike organizers of the Poalei Zion party did not dominate this sector. Meanwhile, the concentration of strikes in the Jewish community was not the domain of just one ethnic group: Ashkenazi, Kurd, Sephardi, and Yemenite all took equal part in this phase. The tension over labor conditions dictated by Jewish owners and employers was the highest in manufacturing, due to the latter’s paternalist approach to employment relations and often harsh policies regarding the length of the workday, regimentation of the work process, workers’ representation, and dismissals.19 While the changing economic conditions created new occasions for strikes to develop, the establishment of two workers’ parties early in the 1900s provided labor with new agency in the political arena. The Marxist Poalei Zion party—headed by David Ben-Gurion and Izhak Ben-Zvi, both with a background in radical Jewish politics prior to their immigration to Palestine—favored strikes as part of its Marxist precepts of the necessity of social struggle. And although the moderate Hapoel Hatsair, a Zionist Socialist party, disliked strike action, from the start it saw the strike as an expression of moral outrage and protest against injustice. These two parties’ debates on the legitimacy of striking, conducted between 1907 and 1912, were the basis on which the labor movement’s attitude towards strikes would later develop. This is shown, for example, by the winery strike in Rishon Lezion in 1907, when the notions of moderate labor struggle and strike restraint were first formulated by a group of Hapoel Hatsair activists (the Amlanim, or “toilers”) and by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, later the founder of the Revisionist movement.20 Moreover, in this new phase strikes and strike organization began to influence the shaping of the leadership of the Zionist Socialist labor movement in Palestine, as seen in the unionization of agricultural workers in 1911 and in the Kinneret farm strike of the same year, a formative event in the political biography of Berl Katznelson that played a key role in his rise to leadership of the labor movement.21 A regional perspective arises from the third process—the impact of the social unrest besetting the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey in particular, after the Young Turks’ revolution. Since half of all the twenty-five pre–World War I strikes in Palestine broke out between 1908 and 1912, some cross-

20

•

Strike Action and Nation Building

over effect of the Ottoman wave is quite likely. The Palestine press covered many strikes in the Empire, and during this period local labor leaders took particular interest in enforcement of Ottoman labor legislation and its potential impact on “class struggle” in the Empire, in Palestine in particular.22 The Law on Work Stoppages (Tatil-i Eşgal Kanunu) was passed on 27 July 1909 by the recently elected Turkish parliament. Promulgated a year after the Young Turks’ revolution, and following a wave of strikes in the Empire and the Turkish railways, the law sought to regulate unionization in public and foreign enterprises, and to make strikes conditional on a prior process of mediation. Based on the French police law of June 1800, the Ottoman anti-union law of 1845, and the French anti-strike law of 1892, the Ottoman law made strikes in the public sector illegal. Thus Palestine, for the first time in its history, became part of a labor-law system that recognized strike action as a potential source of disruption and instability. The fact that the law would largely be left unchanged in Palestine for the next thirty-three years, until the British Palestine Government enacted a similar draconian ordinance in January 1942, gives this historical context its particular significance.23 The surge in strike action, along with labor leaders’ invigorated reference to the impact the experience had on workers, demonstrated that the 1909 antistrike law was a feeble restraining mechanism. However, by providing a wider framework of state restraints on pubic-sector strikes, it connected striking locations in the Empire to each other. This regional strike wave seems to have been related to the impact of war. The effects of the war in the early 1920s and in the mid-1940s, described below, likewise suggest such a relation.24 These changes primarily affected strike action by widening the agendas of the strikes and integrating challenges to authority by claiming the right of workers to challenge authoritarian practices in the workplace and defy the accepted paternalism of the employers. These challenges proceeded in two main ways. One, exemplified by the strike at Levy’s printing shop in Jerusalem in 1908, was to focus the strike’s demands and rhetoric on the basic injustice done to the body of workers through abuse of power or disregard of their material plight. The second was to stress the freedom to organize and the self-declared right to take part in the decision-making processes of the workplace—mainly regarding employment of Arabs instead of Jews, dismissals that seemed unjust to the strikers, or unpaid compensation. These methods might not seem unique, but in the context of Palestine in the period under discussion, they demonstrate the parallel formation of work hierarchies and work culture. Though still distant from the more massive confrontations of later periods, these challenges thus exposed an incipient economic and social environment.

The Emergence of the Strike

•

21

During this early phase, economic issues concerning fairer wages and improved working conditions occasionally colored some strikes, such as the 1910 strike at the Stein metal foundry in Jaffa. Moreover, Jewish workers’ ethnic and nationalist demands for control of the workplace seemed increasingly to impact the use of the strike as a form of collective action. However, the strikes’ oppositional, anti-paternalistic and anti-authoritarian character was clearly their predominant feature. Challenges to the violence employers exercised against young immigrant workers, to the employer’s self-proclaimed right to dismiss workers at will, and even to employers’ enduring resistance to workers’ representation and organization all seemed to coalesce into a new culture and language of opposition to authority. This oppositional energy was largely impervious to the Ottoman law against strikers, and the workers’ parties and organizations sought to recruit it for their purposes. The partial, intermittent and fragmented solidarities that comprised this still weak force were influential to attracting organizers to the strike form or threatening those who feared it. For this reason, mobilizing these energies—and, no less so, controlling them and streamlining their direction and orientation—would become a key point of interest and contention in the next two decades. 25 The strikes, though a small-scale phenomenon that hardly troubled the Ottoman rulers, conveyed a spirit of negating authority and contesting workplace discipline—an energy that would soon be tapped by the labor movement and much feared by others, even within the movement. It was perhaps one of the main effects of the growth of the Jewish community in Palestine as an amorphous urban community, later derided by the same labor movement that sought to recruit its potential energies. Moreover, the marked contrast between the strikes’ fewness, short duration, and failure on the one hand, and their resonance in the press and in the Jewish community on the other, was significant. Feebly organized, restrained by the law and even opposed by some labor activists, the strikes in the period under discussion were in fact expressions of local and small-scale solidarities, collective energies of protest, and often rage that the organizers of workers could hardly control or navigate.

National Dimensions Despite the limits of strikes in Palestine in the early years of the 1900s, a novel feature emerged within the economically and socially anchored negation of authority in the workplace: the growing conspicuousness of the national dimension in strike action. The first expression was the rhetorical coloring of strike action in national terms, that is, Zionist-based

22

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Strike Action and Nation Building

considerations and justifications, and the use of national rhetoric by both strikers and employers during strikes. This was the case in the Rishon Lezion winery strike of March 1907, which clearly grounded the demand for wages in the need to cater to workers deeply involved in the Zionist project.26 The strike started with six workers (out of some fifty employees) protesting their dismissal. Since the rest of the workers did not back the strike, the strikers recruited workers from other plantations to help shut down the winery. Thus a workplace conflict turned into a wider public issue regarding the right of the winery’s managers to decide dismissals independently, involving also the debate between the two labor parties on the legitimacy of the strike and the ensuing violence. Hapoel Hatsair opposed the workers’ threats to use violence, while the more militant Poalei Zion backed opposition to it perceived as unjust, arbitrary steps by the management. The workers lost the strike, and the Zionist-oriented moderate approach of Hapoel Hatsair won the day. Moreover, the management’s victory signaled to workers and the parties that they were weak and unable to influence workplace relations in the private sector, especially now that national consensus was becoming a cherished goal. To boot, Ze’ev Jabotinsky had voiced the concept of compulsory arbitration during the strike. The fact that the lines of debate over strike prevention, arbitration and social conflict within Yishuv society were drawn quite early on, in preindustrial contexts, and almost parallel to the emergence of the strike phenomenon itself, underscores the latter’s fundamental inseparability from the Zionist nation-building project.27 The combination of moral outrage at employer paternalism with national ideology also appeared in the better-known strike at the Kinneret farm in 1911. Owned by the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), the farm employed only a few Jewish workers, who accused the manager of both humiliating treatment and intent to replace them with Arab workers. The strikers’ rhetoric depicted the manager as countering their Zionism. Though the strike against the manager led to more active involvement by the JCA, the manager was reinstated, and in an act of defiance the workers quit.28 A second, more significant expression of national issues in strike action was the emerging use of strikes to advance segregation by forcing Jewish private employers to commit themselves to ethnic preference, employ only Jews, and create a practical separation between Jewish and Arab workers. Defined as part of the Jewish “Conquest of Work” project, this was plainly evident in the Sejera strike of 1914.29 In 1914 the JCA-owned farm in Sejera, managed by Agudat Netaiim, employed a mixed labor force of Arabs and Jews. The Jewish guards, affiliated with the paramilitary organizations Bar Giora and Hashomer, objected to the employment of Arabs, and a

The Emergence of the Strike

•

23

strike broke out. The air of violence that accompanied the strike drew attention to the aggravated conflict over the issues of ethnic exclusivity and the legitimacy of radicalizing the strike.30 This “Zionization” of the strike weapon emerged within the larger context of strike action in pre–World War I Palestine, depicting the private Jewish employer as not only capitalist but also socially egoistic, in nationalist terms. At this point, on the eve of British rule over Palestine, this blatant expression of the Zionist stance of the Jewish labor movement—namely, the preference for Zionist nation building over solidarity with Arab workers—began to prevail.31 The third and literally most direct expression of the growing presence of the national dimension in strike action was the striking undertaken to achieve cultural-national goals, exemplified by the teachers’ strike in 1913 at the Haifa technical institute and the school system of the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden. The strike, which was actually initiated by education students at the technical institute, coupled a generational revolt against the old-style authoritarian management of the German system with the clear demand that Hebrew—one of the main tenets of Zionist ideology— replace German as the teaching language. The national elements of the teachers’ strike (which ended in victory in winter 1914) were perhaps the reason for its power and legitimacy. The same Zionist argumentation used to justify the need for Jewish guardsmen applied also to the Yishuv’s need for teaching conducted in Hebrew. Both cases seemed distant from demands for pay or other material conditions and focused almost entirely on the character of the autonomy being created in Palestine—its boundaries were to be protected by Jews, and its young reared in the national language. Moreover, as in the strikes a decade earlier, a strong anti-paternalistic rhetoric emerged, this time wielded by education students against teachers who taught in German. In many later strikes involving Jewish teachers (most notably in 1925 and 1942), references to the national status of teachers in the Zionist project and justifications for improvement of their material lot would lean on the legacy of this strike.32 Despite their small number, strikes in the prewar period are illuminating. First, they indicated a growing awareness, in the Yishuv in particular, that economic change and the growing activity of private capital in Palestine would henceforth be accompanied by protest and contestation. Second, in the face of the Ottoman government’s weak response to strike action, the different sides in labor disputes deepened their understanding of the regime’s intervention in employment relations in general. This would become even more significant later on, when regime intervention in strikes was interpreted as an infringement on the autonomy of the community as such. The third implication followed: given their politicization

24

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Strike Action and Nation Building

and growing use for national purposes, strikes provoked the initial drawing of the contours of an internal Yishuv debate on the legitimacy of strike action, particularly during the nation-building period. In itself, the debate demonstrates how available and usable the strike weapon had already become in a variety of economic, political, national, and educational issues. As we shall see in the next chapter, this early extension of the strike to the “national” and the “political” was the field on which some of the fiercest labor battles of the 1920s would unfold. Moreover, it meant that even in this formative period of the labor movement in Palestine, it was already impossible to force a particular use or a single agenda on the strike. This unruly potential of the strike as a form of social action would gain significance in later years. Finally and closely related, was a fourth implication: the significance of involvement in strike action to the ascendancy of labor politicians and party bureaucrats in the organizational nuclei, at both the party and union levels, of the Zionist Socialist labor movement. As a form of collective action to advance material, organizational, and national issues, the strike in Palestine had become more available to advance demands and increasingly versatile in its myriad usages. Still, in quantitative terms strikes were yet to become routine. The Jewish workers and organizers who resorted to striking before the war were still looking back at its primal forms, with little awareness of the resonance strikes could have with employers, the regime, and society in these largely preindustrial conditions. Indeed, the prematurity of strike action in the early phases of Palestine’s economic expansion and social stratification magnified the drastic change that was soon to come.

 2

The National Construction of Strikes, 1918–1930 The worker living off his work knows that the strike is a double-edged sword, and causes waste of energy and material and public losses; and without sensing extreme necessity he would not stop his work and endanger himself and his fellow workers. —David Ben-Gurion, “Work Contracts and Strike Fund,” Kuntres, 13 February 1925 The strike is but the conspicuous and tangible expression of a multitude of causes, whose power is real and persistent, even though they evade the indifferent eye. —Dov Levin, “The Teachers’ Strike (On the Question of the State of Education),” Hachinuch, 8, 1, May 1925

The 1920s Surge World War I totally curtailed strike activity in Palestine. The country’s disconnection from external sources of capital, the decrease in international commerce, and the locust epidemic of 1915 caused economic paralysis, work shortages, and further instability in employment relations. Furthermore, the confiscation of goods by the Ottoman army, the military recruitment of many Palestine residents, and the deportation of part of the population led to a general decline in standards of living and a conse-

26

•

Strike Action and Nation Building

quent narrowing of labor organizational activity and workplace protest. Arab protests against the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and British support for a Jewish national home exemplified the political use of strike action but had little effect on the general silencing of strikes.1 Against this background of a wartime lull in strike action, a transformation was taking place. In the twelve years between the British occupation of Palestine in 1918 and the end of the 1920s, 306 strikes broke out, most of them by Jewish workers. Figure 2.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1918–1930 Fig gure 2.1 Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1918-1930 140 120 100 80 60 40 20

1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1.

Table 2.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1918–1930 Year

1918

Strikes

Strikers

(n)

(w)

Lost Workdays (d)

Size

Duration

Intensity

(w/n)

(d/n)

(d/w)

 1

1919

 1

   40

   560

40

560

14

1920

 3

   44

   591

15

197

13

1921

 9

  233

 3,775

26

419

16

1922

 9

  200

 2,017

22

224

10

1923

21

  576

 6,705

27

319

12

1924

46

1,585

24,065

34

523

15

1925

61

2,638

33,302

43

546

13

1926

21

  382

 8,863

18

422

23

1927

20

  562

13,469

28

673

24

1928

22

  886

 4,279

40

195

 5

1929

45

  602

 7,363

13

164

12

1930

47

  533

 6,685

11

142

13

Source: See Figure I.1. Note: Data on strikers and lost workdays in 1918 is missing.

The National Construction of Strikes

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27

In these years the annual average of twenty-five strikes equaled the total number of strikes in the previous two decades (see Figure 2.1). Moreover, the annual average of eight hundred workers involved in the strikes far surpassed the number of workers involved in those earlier strikes. During the decade the intensity of strike action rose and fell, but the overall surge attests that strikes, more than any other form in the available repertoire during this early phase of British rule, had now become routine as a ripened social form of collective action. Indeed, in the 1920s, strikes and the myriad issues and conflicts they expressed totally altered Palestine’s labor conflict scene: they were now a habitual feature of the labor market and the workplace, with a fully shaped core identity as a mainly urban, Yishuv-focused, private-sector phenomenon. Furthermore, they— alongside the Arab-Jewish conflict and the institutional building of the Yishuv—increasingly engaged large sections of the Jewish urban population, entirely transforming the way local society thought about and dealt with strikes.2 The historiography of Palestine in the first decade of British rule—and, notably, the historians of the labor movement—has largely neglected the extent of the phenomenon.3 Historians who did deal with the 1920s strike surge were largely selective, focusing on events engaging the top labor leaders; strikes involving Zionist, segregationist, and highly politicized issues; or those few marginal strikes in which Arabs and Jews cooperated. Common to all these interpretations was the institutional explanation of the strike surge: the Histadrut’s centrality to the strikes, the roof organization of the labor movement, and employers’ failure to create a collective anti-labor front. Consequently the full significance of the strike phenomenon in the social history of Palestine and the Yishuv has remained underrated.4 Much as we can accept the assumption that the surge was an outcome of the economic effects of the change from Ottoman to British rule and of the establishment of the Histadrut in 1920 (a few months after British civil rule began),5 we are still left with an inadequate explanation of the sheer volume of strike action. Thus, this chapter argues that we should instead look at the drama of the strike phenomenon’s outburst in the 1920s in terms of how the strike’s multi-functionality, shaped in the previous two decades, embedded it in the Yishuv’s social fabric. Three processes in particular should be borne in mind. The first was economic and social change, which aggravated conflicts in the urban labor market and Jewish private workplaces in particular. The second process was the renewal, and intensified use, of the strike for national purposes, and the growing presence of national issues in strike action. And the third was the emergence, in the latter half of the 1920s, of new groups of private-sector workers that became major protagonists of the strike phenomenon. As a corollary to these processes, the strike itself be-

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came a widely debated public issue and a thorny problem at the heart of life in the Yishuv as a nation-building society; consequently, mechanisms for preventing and restraining strikes proliferated. The latter were a clear expression of the immersion and institutionalization of the strike phenomenon in Yishuv society.6 To explain the process, we need first to turn to the surge itself.

Causes The explanation for the surge in strikes lies first and foremost in the complex of political, economic, and social processes under way in Palestine following World War I. After the British had committed themselves, in the Balfour Declaration, to establishing a national home for the Jews in Palestine and proceeded to conquer the country, a number of processes ensued. First, immigration of Jews into Palestine intensified, increasing the Jewish population from about 60,000 in 1918 to 165,000 in 1930 (17 percent of Palestine’s population). The immigration and accompanying investments by the Zionist movement spurred growth in inflows of private and public capital from abroad, working skills, and a labor force consisting of many young workers with a professed commitment to the Zionist project. Between 1922 and 1930, the Jewish labor force increased from 23,000 to 60,000 workers, laying the foundations for a local Jewish working class. Most of the Jewish immigrants and new workers settled in the towns, particularly Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Tiberias. They were mainly employed in road construction, building, manufacturing, small- and medium-scale industries, and clerkship. Thus the demographic structure of Palestine’s urban sector was transformed, affecting in turn the towns’ spaces, social stratification, and power structures.7 The transformation of urban society, and especially the urbanization of the Yishuv, created a new social basis—a class of male and female workers who (despite many immigrants’ ideological glorification of the rural life) were absorbed into the town economy and visualized their future in town society. The immigrants-cum-workers, known in the historiography as the main core of the third and fourth waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, strongly influenced the establishment of the Histadrut and its integration of the representational activities of the older workers’ political parties. Achdut Haavoda, the labor party established in 1919 on the foundations of the older Poalei Zion (led by David Ben-Gurion), now became the hegemonic power in the Histadrut and the town labor councils. As such, and particularly after its merger in 1930 with Hapoel Hatsair and the establishment of Mapai, it could try to steer collective action by im-

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migrants and workers who became Histadrut members. Between 1922 and 1930, Histadrut membership rose from 8,400 to 28,500 (48 percent of the Jewish labor force) This increase, which provided a social basis for the labor movement and bottom-up backing for the labor politicians and bureaucrats who led it, took place mainly in Jewish urban concentrations, the focus of the 1920s surge in strikes.8 Regime change, immigration, and imported capital also created a new group of Jewish urban capital owners and employers. Motivated by the Zionist project and encouraged by the new economic opportunities in Palestine, they too focused their activities in the towns, building up manufacturing, industry, commerce, and various kinds of services. By creating economic infrastructure, often with the political backing of the Zionist movement and buoyed by the British interest in economizing on imperial expenses, they transformed the urban job market. Moreover, employment relations now began to change, partly due to the sheer enlargement of the artisanal, manufacturing, and industrial frameworks in each town and partly due to the emergence of new organizations of capital owners and employers—in particular the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association, established in 1921. Palestine’s employment relations scene in the mid 1920s was therefore decidedly different from that of the Ottoman period.9 The aggravated conflicts between urban workers and employers contrasted sharply with actions in the preceding period, mainly because they originated in the pressure that Jewish immigrants put on the Jewish sector as a source of employment. Other sources of employment (the Palestine government, the Zionist movement, or Arab employers) were seldom available, and Jewish private capital owners found it difficult to expand employment without diminishing their profits and therefore tended to prefer cheaper Arab workers and competitive Jewish immigrants. The conflicts erupting against this background revolved mainly around two issues. The first was the growing gap between wages and living standards in the towns, and the second was intermittent threats to job availability and the job security of higher-skilled workers. These issues came to define what proletarianization and consequent social stratification meant for the Jewish immigrants and for the nascent labor movement. The social responses to these issues varied from exerting social pressure on Zionist and Yishuv institutions to joining the Histadrut and its protest activities to engaging in organized and unorganized labor disputes. However, strikes were the most influential factor in creating a new atmosphere of social distance and potential collective action in the towns.10 The strikes expressed both issues and thereby spoke to developments on Palestine’s urban labor scene: the new focuses of workers’ disaffection, the channeling of the new local labor councils into collective action,

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and the new terminology depicting the strikes. In this terminology, the strikers’ demands afforded a distinction between defensive and offensive strikes. Defensive strikes focused on decreased wages, dismissals of workers, delayed payments, and unfair treatment of workers. These demands underscored not only employers’ attempts to reduce labor costs but also their opposition to workers’ intervention in these issues and the absence of protective labor legislation in Palestine. Offensive strikes centered on improvement of wages and work benefits as well as consent to workplace representation and particularly recognition of the Histadrut, which wished to control it.11 The variety of demands and their links to Histadrut-backed workers’ representation demonstrated that the towns—Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem most of all—were becoming intense sites of social contestation. Moreover, the basic norms and rules of employment relations were still being shaped, so the translation of material demands into organizational ones was quick and the difference between them increasingly vague, in contemporaries’ eyes. This was the case, for example, regarding the strike in the Rosenfeld small printing shop in Haifa in autumn 1923. Starting as a protest against worsened working conditions and payments, it quickly turned into a demand to consent to intervention by the Haifa labor council, which backed the strike. Another example was the strike at the Singer sewing company in Jaffa and Jerusalem in 1926, which coupled contestation of the French-based management’s opposition to labor organization with a strong attack on working conditions. A similar linking of demands emerged in metal and electrical workers’ 1928 strike against the Palestine electricity company and the company (owned by Shalom Pachter) that supplied its materials: they combined a call for better remuneration of skilled workers with a demand for consent to job permanency.12 The trajectory of the strikes in the 1920s confirms that they were attuned to the changing economic conditions in the towns and the organizational capacities of labor and capital. During the first phase of the surge, between the onset of British military rule in 1918 and the economic recession of 1923, no fewer than forty-four strikes broke out (see Table 2.1), reflecting the transition from the grave wartime conditions to the economic recovery of the early 1920s. The strikes involved around 1,100 workers and resulted in ca. 14,000 lost workdays. The longest strike (and one of the longest throughout the Mandate period), which lasted five months, took place in 1920 at the Shulman-Lewinstein sweets factory in Tel Aviv, where workers protested wage cuts and the owners’ refusal to grant permanency to higher-skilled workers. The most strike-prone sectors during this first phase were small-scale manufacturing—carpentry, printing, and bakeries—where union organization was either barely existent or in its

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initial stages. Despite relatively low unemployment rate, the booming urban economy and continuous immigration enabled employers in these branches to find replacement workers for the strikers—a move backed by the Palestine government, which sparked further anger.13 In 1923, increasing unemployment and a recession that mainly hit the construction sector in the towns kept the growing sector of construction workers from striking, so the number and intensity of strikes remained at the average of the transition phase. However, that was about to change. In 1924–25, 107 strikes broke out, involving 4,223 workers and bringing the number of lost workdays to a record 57,367. Furthermore, factory workers in small-scale manufacturing and at newly established industrial plants increased their dominant presence in the strikes, focusing their demands on “offensive issues” such as wage increases and recognition of workplace representation. This was clearly visible in 1925, when a wave of strikes swept the industries of Haifa and Tel Aviv.14 Moreover, construction workers, who had been less present in earlier strikes, now became a significant factor in the surge, reflecting the growing centrality of construction to the Yishuv economy. Finally, the strikes evinced the growing power of the Histadrut and the close association between employment relations at the workplace level and wider Yishuv recognition of the presence and power of the Histadrut in the towns.15 The surge peaked in 1924–25, during the economic boom of the fourth wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine. The association of the boom with the surge in strikes reflected the logic of the workers (which was not always accepted by the more restrained leadership of the Histadrut), who reasoned that employers’ boom-related gains would allow them, more than in any other period, to comply with demands. A domino effect followed. The best-known example involved teachers employed by the Zionist public sector, whose strike over material issues in 1925 occasioned heated debate in the Yishuv on both the right to strike and the association of strikes with the wage policies of Zionist public institutions. Moreover, the strikes in industry and manufacturing also inspired, albeit on a small scale, Histadrut-aided strikes by Arab workers (in carpentry and tailoring) and even joint strikes of Arabs and Jews, such as those at the Nesher cement factory and the Nur matches factory in 1927. The new phenomenon of Arab and Jewish workers joining forces in class cooperation was naturally limited to joint workplaces in manufacturing and small-scale industry in the mixed towns of Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, and perhaps Jerusalem. But they also began to threaten the largest joint workplace, namely, the government-administered railways.16 The decrease in strike action in the Yishuv during the deep recession from the autumn of 1925 through the winter of 1928 reaffirms the associa-

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tion between strikes and the economic cycle (see Figure 2.1 and Table 2.1). Massive unemployment in the towns, the emigration of many Jews from Palestine to other countries, and the Histadrut institutions’ incapacity to serve the needs of the unemployed deterred workers from undertaking collective action and significantly reduced the number of strikes. The sixtythree strikes that did break out during these three years involved far fewer workers than ever before and only half as many lost workdays. However, the fact that strike intensity—the average number of workdays lost to strikes—was slightly higher than in preceding years demonstrates that striking had become routine. More significantly, it shows that despite the decrease in the number of strikes, the Histadrut and a growing number of town workers used the strike to pressure Jewish employers not to employ Arab workers. In turn, the Histadrut kept using strikes to demonstrate its unmitigated power of representation in the labor market to the Jewish unemployed.17 The lull in strike action did not last long. Once economic recovery had begun, strike action surged again in late April 1928. In 1929–30—a period of violent conflict in Palestine—some ninety-two strikes broke out. They involved relatively fewer workers (1,135) and fewer lost workdays (14,048), but as indicated by the strike intensity (12.4), strikes were undoubtedly back on the scene after the harsh recession. These strikes at the decade’s end reflected not only economic recovery but also the strategy among many workers—not always consented to by the Histadrut—of translating the private sector’s recovery into gains. This was exemplified by the strikes’ focus on printing workshops, the Nesher cement factory, and the electricity company. In the final analysis, the picture of this decade of strikes confirms that they were clearly concentrated in the Yishuv, the towns, and the private sector. Their surge therefore reflects the accelerated urbanization of Yishuv society and the aggravation of tensions and conflicts between workers and private employers, which, as we shall see shortly, the ruling British presence and the institutionalization of Yishuv society were unable to restrain.18 However, the transformation of strike action in the 1920s cannot be explained without reference to a parallel and inseparable process that, having begun before World War I, took a new turn following the establishment of the Histadrut: the growing use of the strike for Zionist aims.

Nationalism in Strike Action The political and national uses of strike action that emerged before World War I ripened in the 1920s, bringing the association between Zionism and

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strikes ever closer. It was exemplified early in the decade and from 1926 to 1928 by strikes breaking out in protest of Jewish private employers’ preference for cheap Arab labor in agriculture and construction, and it was further confirmed by the marginality of joint cross-national strikes of Jews and Arabs. As demonstrated in the case of Haifa, three aspects were central to this strengthened association between Zionism and strikes.19 First, compared to the pre–World War I period, the number of strikes that addressed labor market segregation along lines of national preference increased significantly, primarily because of the increase in the number of Jewish urban employers seeking to save on labor costs by preferring Arab over Jewish workers. This was true not only in the leading sectors—construction in towns and citrus growing in rural areas—but also in smallscale manufacturing like printing and carpentry and larger factories such as the Nesher cement plant and the Grandes Moulins flour mill, both in Haifa. Meanwhile, Jewish employers faced difficulties in obtaining credit, coping with rising prices of raw materials, and withstanding the competition among them, which also had an effect. Clearly the recessions of 1923 and 1926–27 and the resulting spread of unemployment among Jewish workers in the towns aggravated the trend. The Histadrut and its town labor councils therefore saw launching and leading strikes demanding preference for Jewish workers as a lever to both increase workers’ loyalty and present themselves as the prime nation-building force in the Yishuv.20 The second aspect of the association between Zionism and strikes was the growing use of Zionist rhetoric in strikes that focused on material improvement. Demands were framed in terms of the Jewish employer’s obligation to participate in Jewish workers’ attempts to be absorbed in the economy and increase their chances of survival in Palestine. The leaders of the town labor councils contended that without improved working conditions and better living standards, not only would Palestine become unattractive to future Jewish immigration, but the incentives tempting desperate workers to emigrate from the country would grow as well. By consenting to workers’ demands, the employers would both display a more humane approach to those they employed and meet their “Zionist obligation” to facilitate a working environment conducive to the workers’ fulfillment of their role in the Zionist project. This was demonstrated by the 1925 strikes in the Jewish factories of Nesher, Shemen, and Grands Moulins in Haifa. Though initiated by workers seeking to improve their living standards and chances of job permanence, the strikes used a rhetoric focused on creating a work environment conducive to the absorption of future Jewish immigration.21 Furthermore, the rhetoric of strike demands emphasized the close connection between workers’ demands for improvement and the labor

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movement’s discourse on the country’s modernization. Employers’ positive response to workers’ demands would sever them both from paternalist traditions and the influence of British colonial employment practices. At the same time, it would effectively make them partners in creating in Palestine’s towns an alternative working environment where distinct enclave-like rules applied. Such a distinction was stressed particularly in strikes that contrasted the absence of labor legislation with the need to establish “modern” employment and working procedures in the Jewish sector. Labor’s challenge to a backward legal context might be risky and futile, but it was the Jewish employers’ Zionist role to foster workplace humanization and modernization within the enclosed boundaries of the Yishuv. Employers’ opposition to strikers’ demands was thus perceived as working to blur the Yishuv’s national distinction and its necessary boundaries as a national enclave. As in the case of ethnic segregation, here again strike action became inseparable from the labor movement’s self-image as a Zionist “educational force” directing its collective action not only at employers’ economic calculations, but also at the contradiction between their “capitalist egoism” and professed Zionism.22 The strikes— both those demanding preference for Jewish employment and those focused on improving working conditions—thus appealed both outwardly and inwardly: outwards to the employers, who were expected to align themselves with the aims of Labor-Zionism in order to improve the odds of Jewish workers’ survival in Palestine and modernize the country; and inwards to the workers themselves as exemplifying the creation of new standards for future Jewish workers through strike action.23 The third aspect of Zionism’s presence in strikes is its relation to the labor movement’s organizational cohesion and strength, revealed by a close look at the case of the Histadrut in Haifa in the second part of the decade. To begin with, the attitudes of the Jewish private employers influenced striking far more than did the pressures exerted upon them by the labor movement’s Zionist-oriented exclusionary platforms, as demonstrated by the success of many strikes focused on improvement and the persistent failure of those focused on the demand for preferential Jewish employment.24 Secondly, the strikes’ relatively short duration and low intensity reflected not just organized labor’s mobilization problems and increasing unemployment, but also employers’ capacity to resist the strikers. The record of the strikes in Haifa and the resilience of Jewish employers injected strike action with an element that was crucially reflective of its Zionist coloring, namely, the labor movement’s accommodation to the power of employers. In the process of building on a compromise approach, strikes played a crucial role by epitomizing the reality of how social conflict could limit cooperation and threaten the national cohesion of the Yishuv. Labor’s

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pragmatism was significant here: when strike action could not reorient the policies of employers, compromise became preferable to absolute defeat in struggle. In its concern to coalesce the forces, organized labor recurrently opposed the rank and file in agreements it reached with employers. Accommodation had its cost, however, as it was not only a means of achieving certain things for the workers, but also the reason why their collective action had to be disciplined.25 A close examination of the outbreak of strikes in Haifa reveals invigorated tensions between diverse groups of Jewish workers within the local Histadrut community and the social heterogeneity of the latter. Whereas competition between the workers was often expressed in exclusionary organizational practices, the tension between better-off workers in manufacturing and industry in particular, and the Histadrut labor council, which saw restraining competition as imperative, was reflected in the council’s almost absolute lack of control over workplaces or over direct relations between workers and employers. This was illustrated by relations between the council and workers in manufacturing and industry during the 1923 and 1925 strikes, when the labor bureaucrats faced a large stratum of workers that sought to materialize sectional interests, thereby threatening the council’s attempts to create an organizational collective. As we shall see below, these tensions also inhered in striking activity later in the decade.26 Basically, the Haifa labor council was threatened by what was perceived as unrestrained militancy. Furthermore, workers’ anger sometimes boiled over, creating an atmosphere of violence that intimidated employers and even the Histadrut leaders themselves. Strikers’ attempts to collaborate with Arab workers were no less problematic for the Histadrut, as they signaled a certain strengthening of leftist forces among the workers and within the labor council bureaucracy itself. Significant too was workers’ readiness to conclude agreements with employers without involving the council bureaucrats. Thus, the strikes presented the leaders of the Haifa council with a dilemma: on the one hand, the strikes served to demonstrate their power; on the other, their uncontrolled agitation put at risk the delicate relations between the Histadrut and the employers, the employeraccommodating image the Histadrut was trying to market, and the efforts to stall British involvement in the affairs of the Jewish community. As this dilemma characterized many strikes, it turned into a representational crisis, adding to organized labor’s political and economic weaknesses.27 In this context, an essential aspect of the presence of Zionism in strike action came to the fore: the national construction of the strikers themselves. The most prominent practice of the labor leadership was to gain immediate control over spontaneous strike action and restrain militancy. In the

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1923 printing workshop strike, this meant intensively involving organized labor’s bureaucrats in mobilizing the strikers and wresting representation from the strikers themselves. In other cases, workers were asked to publicly declare their adherence to strike action and avoidance of strikebreaking. In the 1925 strikes in industry, strike leaders, who mostly represented the “strong workers,” were brought to council meetings where politicians and bureaucrats lectured them on responsibility in strike management, careful organization of strike action in workplaces, and proper conduct of negotiations with employers.28 Though the Haifa labor council was dominated by a mainstream LaborZionist party, leftist factions attempted to use strike events to radicalize the council. Such radicalization was reflected in attempts to ally Jewish strikers with Arab workers to challenge the council’s authority in relations with employers and provoke clashes with the British police. The disciplining imposed on strikebreakers was now effected against radicals as well: both were accused of destabilizing the organization of strikes and causing them to fail. This embrace of strike control and the marginalization of radical workers and leftist politicians were couched in strong national argumentation and rhetoric. It depicted strikebreaking as harming not just collective action but also the image of the worker as a reliable agent of Zionism. It metaphorized radicalism as a betrayal of the Zionist cause of immigrant absorption and accompanied its campaign to subdue the Left with Zionist rhetoric about the need to create consensus with employers. When workers opposed compromise with employers and mediation by Yishuv politicians, the council’s bureaucrats threatened to oust them from the Histadrut and deprive them of their right to social services.29 Ideology and action were therefore mutually related, and many of the ideological expressions in strikes grew out of the interplay between contextual features and the dynamic agency of the strikers and their local leaders. This interplay makes it necessary to reconsider the presence of ideology in strikes as a dynamic in which strikes gradually became more national in orientation. In this sense, the political regimentation of militancy closed a circle. It linked the centralization of the Histadrut with the search for cross-class alliances on a national basis, and it placed workers’ weaknesses in the context of the need to build the labor movement as a national economic and political power. It also crystallized one of the most enduring features of Labor Zionism: the de-prioritization of the social and the subordination of workers’ interests, as exposed in the strikes, to the cause of nation building. This national masking of collective action, which harbored constraints on its repertoire, would contribute crucially to the growing gap between organized labor’s political consolidation and the waning of its image among workers as a social movement.30

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British Intervention The immersion of strike action in Palestine’s social fabric was mostly a corollary of the striking itself, its proliferation, the growing number of participants, and its widening occupational spread and spatial geography. However, society’s reaction to and involvement in the strikes were no less significant in the process. By society I mean the Palestine government, communal institutions, and workers’ organizations, as well as the press and public opinion and, last but not least, the thinking about strikes as reflected in articles and books. This two-dimensional presence of the strike phenomenon—the strike in itself, and the strike as having been reacted to—constituted the embedding process, and these two dimensions are essential to understanding the extent of its changing presence in the 1920s.31 The British authorities’ reaction to the strike surge quite early on confirms the extent to which striking was hardly a passing phenomenon. The strikes at the Anglo-Egyptian Bank in Jaffa and in the Rishon Lezion winery in 1920 broke out during the change from military to civilian rule and caught the attention of the authorities. Though the British left the Ottoman strike law untouched and claimed neutrality or impartiality in labor disputes, they began perceiving strikes as a possible source of social unrest and a threat to the operation of private employers. The growing number of strikes in 1922 and early 1923 in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and Haifa provoked a more focused approach. The strikes were now associated with the image of a potential Bolshevik-oriented Jewish labor movement, and with fears that they would spread to Arab workplaces. Clearly, the notion of protecting the capital owners and employers originated in both the outcry from Jewish employers for governmental support and British and Imperial traditions.32 In practice, the British initially adopted a policy of implementing the British voluntary approach to industrial relations—refraining from interventionist labor legislation and encouraging workers, employers, and their respective representatives to initiate and institutionalize arbitration. Following the spread of strikes in 1924, a government committee was established to support arbitration, and in the winter of 1925, in the wake of a wave of industrial strikes in the towns, the British formally supported efforts in the Yishuv to create arbitration and mediation mechanisms. Through this support, the government also gave greater cognizance to the Histadrut’s independent actions within the Yishuv, though stipulating that it refrain from intimidating employers and strikebreakers.33 On the ground, however, the British felt they had to be more active. To begin with, they delivered a clear message to all Arab and Jewish work-

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ers employed by the government itself that striking was forbidden. The unwritten sanction was the same as that used against communists—dismissal or outright deportation from Palestine. Needless to say, fear of striking in government workplaces was one reason for strikes’ concentration in the Jewish sector and the rarity of Arab workers going on strike. Second, between 1923 and 1925 the authorities expanded the resort to force, exemplified by the growing presence of the police in breaking strike picket lines and the incarceration of strikers. The semblance of voluntarism and the effective deterrence of workers from striking demonstrate that the British authorities perceived strikes as a form of social action that was taken for granted.34 Above everything else, however, the British were increasingly convinced that some legal action was becoming essential. In late 1926 a new ordinance—the first formal British ordinance regarding labor disputes— was formulated; it took effect in the winter of 1927. In it the government restated the right to set picket lines but also forbade strikers to influence others. In a borrowing from British laws, intimidation of the employer or strikebreakers could now be considered a criminal offense (if so interpreted by the police) punishable by a heavy fine and imprisonment.35 In practice, this legal intervention did away with the ambivalence between impartiality and firm treatment of strikers in order to protect employers. This was exemplified as early as 1927 by the harsh treatment of strikers and picketers in strikes at a citrus plantation in Petach Tikvah and at the Nur match factory in Acre.36 Ultimately, the change in British policy did not restrain the invigoration of strike action at the decade’s end, particularly in view of the Arab merchants’ strike in 1929 and the uptick in strikes by Jewish workers in 1930. However, the change indicated that “social unrest” was no longer confined, in the terminology of the British officials, to skirmishes and disturbances, carrying nationalist undertones, but had now come to include strikes as well. Realizing that the British were becoming more attuned to protest ‘from below’, the Histadrut itself was now deterred by the change in policy and the restrictions it presaged.37

Yishuv Mediation By limiting its treatment of strikes to the enactment of the Prevention of Intimidation Ordinance, the government expressed its policy of allowing communities themselves to deal with strikes with only a limited measure of statist intervention. As we shall see below, in the coming years the balance between the two would gradually tip in favor of government inter-

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vention. For now, though, we must turn to communal reactions and gauge how they operated within these limits. The British authorities’ presence in employment relations in nongovernmental economic sectors signaled to workers in Palestine that the government was ambivalent. It gave clear backing to private capital, openly discouraged extensive strike action, and supported community-based arbitration. At the same time, however, the government also distanced itself from civil society, seemingly taking a noninterventionist approach.38 Consequently, this ambivalence encouraged independent action, in particular attempts by the Yishuv to enforce some measure of strike regulation. The responses to the rise in strike action in the Yishuv in the 1920s are another indication that something was changing in employment relations and that the strikes’ impact extended beyond the workplaces. As we have already seen, notions of pre-strike arbitration and dispute resolution had been developed before World War I, especially by the non-Marxist leaders of Hapoel Hatsair. Upon the revitalization of strikes after the war, various approaches to strike prevention and institutional arbitration resurfaced, influenced by new governing institutions in the Yishuv and the emergence of the Histadrut itself.39 The new awareness was reflected in a growing body of quantitative information on labor disputes and strikes collected and debated by the Histadrut, associations of manufacturers and industrialists, and the British authorities. The reports of the Palestine government to the League of Nations and the International Labour Organisation on their activities in Palestine began to include references to labor disputes, and the Histadrut’s department of information and statistics began to depict the reality of workplace conflicts to the Yishuv. Consequently, labor disputes and strikes—their prevention and restraint, the negotiations they entailed, and the legal knowledge they necessitated—also prompted the emergence of new advisers and experts in mediation and arbitration, both at the Yishuv institutional level and in the bureaucracies of the Histadrut labor councils.40 Nevertheless, no one seriously attempted to create an all-Yishuv mechanism for mediation and conflict resolution until 1922–23, in the wake of a surge of strikes in carpentry and construction in particular.41 The peak of these efforts was the “Committee of Fifteen” established by Yishuv institutions following the strike wave of winter 1925 in the major industries in Haifa and in construction in Tel Aviv.42 The various committees, and the extensive press coverage of their work in general and the strikes in particular, saw the strikes in the context of larger issues concerning the Yishuv in the first decade of British rule: the search for the right social and economic approach to building the Jewish community in Palestine and safeguarding its political future, the tension between employers’ gains and

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their social role in nation building, and the question of the legitimacy of the labor movement’s claim to hegemony in workers’ representation and job allocation. However, when these debates and negotiations pertained specifically to strikes and their growing presence in the fabric of Yishuv society, they exposed not only the extent of the strikes but also their close association with Zionism.43 The debate crystallized around three approaches. The first approach— largely associated with the Revisionist Right and with capital owners and employers who followed the political and social ideology of Ze’ev Jabotinsky—rejected striking altogether. Strikes were contrary to the Zionist national interest: by harming employers they sabotaged nation building, and by promoting the power of the labor movement in the labor market and the workplaces they split the Yishuv community and kept Jewish capitalists from operating freely. If allowed at all, they should be postponed until after the attainment of political sovereignty in Palestine, when social experimentation would be legitimate.44 The second and opposite approach was presented by Achdut Haavoda, the majority party in the labor movement and Histadrut and the key promoter of the combination of Zionism and socialism. If the working class had a national destiny, in the words of Histadrut secretary and party leader David Ben-Gurion, then the strike was not only the workers’ basic right but also a way of educating employers to do away with their “national egoism.” The problem was not the national illegitimacy of strikes, but the antinational delegitimation of workers’ rights to organize and act collectively to safeguard their jobs and workplaces and improve their conditions. Employers’ recognition of these rights and consent to collective agreements were of paramount importance nationally and allowed the labor movement and the Histadrut to carry out their Zionist goals.45 In between these approaches, the Yishuv’s liberals (who in the 1920s became known as the Civic Circles)—municipal activists, liberal-minded employers, and newspaper editors—struck a middle-of-the-road attitude: striking was a legitimate right, but all efforts had to be made before it erupted to bring the sides to arbitration and conflict resolution. Strikes, especially when they proliferated, might endanger the operation of the economy and the social consolidation of the nation, but instead of rejecting their inherent liberal status they should be avoided through mediation.46 The institutional logic that followed from these approaches focused on the nature of the required arbitration—either to restrain strikes or to shorten their duration. The Revisionists, following the basic economic idea of Fascism, called for the elimination of strikes and lockouts during the nation-building period and for compulsory arbitration. The labor movement agreed with the idea of arbitration, but on condition that employers

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first recognize workers’ right to organize and be represented within the framework of a collective agreement. The liberals in the middle largely supported agreed arbitration, holding that any strike should be preceded by some form of mediation.47 In practice, none of these ideas bore fruit. In the late 1920s the Jewish Agency was still trying to promote—with government backing—the idea of establishing an arbitration institution. In parallel, the labor movement tried in 1929 to advance the idea of a labor court—without success. Just as the Committee of 15 and other mediation organs had failed to institutionalize some form of conflict resolution mechanism, these ideas too were unable to overcome the ideological and political divides besetting the Yishuv. The expanding use of strikes was a much stronger reality than any of the institutional capacities the Yishuv needed to handle them. The Committee of 15 was more successful at making its institutional presence felt than at reducing strikes in any substantial way. The reason for the failure was twofold. Primarily, the capital owners and employers could not agree among themselves on what approach they should take to collective bargaining or how far they should go to compromise with labor. Disunity was mostly expressed between industrialists on the one hand and construction contractors and home owners on the other, especially regarding the issue of labor’s demand for involvement in the hiring and dismissal of workers.48 The second reason was that some within the Histadrut, notably the better-off workers in manufacturing and industry, opposed the intention expressed by the labor movement’s political leadership, that is, to agree to some institutional arrangement that might harm their freedom to strike. Both reasons demonstrate the extent to which the 1920s surge in strikes was driven and maintained by particular organizational tensions, and by groups of better-off workers—mainly in manufacturing and industry—who viewed strike restraint as highly problematic.49

Histadrut Regulation When it came to devising institutional channels for strike prevention and arbitration, the weakness of Yishuv institutions naturally reflected the Yishuv’s own slow institutionalization of authority. However, it also signaled to the labor movement that being part of the community hardly meant that employers could be forced to alter employment and workplace policies. And if neither the government nor the community could at this stage be considered regulatory authorities in regard to strikes, it fell to the labor politicians and the bureaucracy of the Histadrut itself to attempt to do things their own way.50

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Whereas the strike’s embeddedness in Yishuv life was mirrored by growing British intervention and numerous attempts by politicians to institutionalize arbitration, it was even more evident in the ambivalence of the Histadrut itself. From the start of the surge, the Histadrut expressed a dual approach that many regarded as contradictory. On the one hand it cherished the right to strike—that is, use of the strike to improve workers’ lot, or from a Zionist position to force employers to prefer Jewish over Arab workers—and, no less significantly, its instrumentality as a lever of power. On the other hand, the Histadrut wished to control the strikes and restrain unruly workers. Having realized early on that the urban Jewish workers were dependent on the private sector, it did not want to aggravate relations with capital owners and employers or increase British involvement in the affairs of the Jewish community. Moreover, the political leaders of the Histadrut and of Achdut Haavoda in particular, championed a firm anti-leftist policy opposed to communists in the towns and to what were perceived as incessant attempts by the Communist Party (PKP) to radicalize workers and initiate joint strike action with Arab workers.51 The variety of measures the Histadrut employed to regulate strikes testifies to the complexity created by the strikes. Although it formally supported cooperation with Arabs in strikes in joint workplaces, in many manipulative ways it upheld a segregationist approach toward Arabs employed in Jewish workplaces.52 Using the bureaucratic machineries of the local labor councils, it cultivated solidarity in strikes and with striking workers and dealt firmly with strikebreakers, but it also unhesitatingly sabotaged wildcat strikes. And above all, when attempts at restraint failed, particularly in the strikes initiated by better-off workers in manufacturing and industry, it “jumped on the bandwagon” and co-opted the leadership of the strike. In other words, labor movement bureaucrats were intensively involved in both mobilizing strikers and wresting representation from the strikers themselves. This pattern was made ever more evident by the Histadrut’s role of the in arbitrations to end strikes, and by the advantage it held over the strikers themselves in terms of funding strikes and negotiating with employers.53 In the final analysis, the Histadrut’s vacillation intensified as its quest to accommodate Jewish private employers grew, for it strove to limit the workers yet not to entirely alienate them. As we saw earlier, this consensual “national rapprochement” was best demonstrated by organized labor’s principled consent to arbitration, and by its own version of the preconditions for its successful implementation. However, in the latter part of the decade, the more the unabated nature of the surge in strikes became clearer to Histadrut functionaries, the more they feared the limits of their own power vis-à-vis the groups of workers that maintained the surge.54

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The problems facing the Histadrut included not only the seething tension between employers in manufacturing and industry and their workers, but also the town labor councils’ growing tendency to become radicalized and side with local workers. In the late 1920s, better-off workers, particularly in industries in the towns, allied themselves with the councils—the former providing a social base in return for the latter’s adherence to its interests—spurring the Histadrut leadership to expand its bureaucratic quest to centralize strike action. These attempts at centralization peaked during the Histadrut’s Third General Convention, which, besides advancing organized labor’s concepts of collective agreement and arbitration, also affirmed the concept of a centralized decision-making process in the declaration and handling of strikes. Part of an attempt to curtail independent action and monopolize negotiations between labor and capital, centralization meant that in each town the labor council alone would be authorized to declare a strike.55 The decision to centralize strike action—largely accepted by most Histadrut leaders—can be interpreted in two ways. In the logic of bureaucratic centralization, it was intended to facilitate focused attacks on capital. Meanwhile, others saw it as an attempt to curtail the increasingly thorny problem of the Histadrut’s weakness in private workplaces and lack of control over the workers in privately owned industries. Whereas the first interpretation stemmed from socialist-type institutionalization, the second was more attuned to what was happening on the ground, in urbanizing towns and among the masses of immigrants-cum-workers who more and more formed their main social base. The latter were apparently profoundly impacted by the growing presence of the rightist Revisionist movement among workers. However, the strikes that closed the decade demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the 1927 measure, particularly the Histadrut’s failure to further steer strike activity toward Zionist objectives and avoid conflicts with private employers. Though the power of the labor councils as the key labor organizing force in the towns was expanding, it did not translate into the Histadrut power center’s parallel bureaucratic control over them, their daily contacts with workers, or even their independent negotiations with employers. This sense of local power gave the groups of workers maintaining the strike surge a certain sense of independence and leverage.56 No wonder Moshe Beilinson, one of Mapai’s leaders and editor of the Histadrut daily, wrote worrisomely that The strike is a hand weapon—a double sword. It rocks the economy. It unnecessarily sharpens relations between worker and employer. When its scale is large it can entail the intervention of the police, the government and the court. It tests the organization of the workers which may weaken before the strike provides any gains. Occasionally the strike incites a blood feud,

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between the organized workers and the unorganized or those with weak organizational consciousness. A strike means additional suffering, often excruciating want to the worker and his family. A strike means the impoverishment of the organization’s funds—while the means at the disposal of the workers are scarce and must be safeguarded for other causes. A strike ending with the worker’s defeat is a severe blow to the organization and might wrest from it its workplace and organizational positions it had conquered after hard toil and heavy losses. Special conditions are necessary to attain a strike’s complete and full success. Mostly it ends in compromise; and then its material sum-total is as if it did not justify the sacrifices it entailed, in particular when we include the employer’s losses among these sacrifices, and when we take into consideration the entire economy as well.57

Seen in perspective, the various attempts at strike regulation constituted a higher, much more sophisticated level of coping with strikes both legally and socially. However, they seemed to cater more to private capital’s demands for its own protection than to labor’s demands for protective legislation. And they apparently were much weaker than the social and economic tensions that the strikes unraveled, that is, much weaker than the polarization between those who upheld the freedom to strike and those who wished to restrain or annul it altogether. This is perhaps the deepest meaning of the 1920s strike surge—the growing awareness in Yishuv society that a new urban economy and society was emerging, characterized by a discrepancy between the conflicts it occasioned and an institutional and legal incapacity to handle them.58 This was well demonstrated by the Friedman-Edelstein strike in Tel Aviv in the summer of 1930—a strike extensively covered by the press that seemed to close the circle that had opened with the British occupation of Palestine. Protesting the owners’ refusal to recognize the workers’ committee or allow intervention in the harsh treatment of employees, the workers in this small textile factory responded to dismissals and the employment of replacement workers with a picketing line outside the factory. After long and futile negotiations, the factory owners called in the police, who physically dispersed the line and arrested two strikers for allegedly violating the 1927 intimidation ordinance. The case was brought before a court that meted out severe punishment to workers whom it deemed to have harshly intimidated strikebreakers. The factory owners seemed to take for granted that the government would side with capital by providing clear legitimacy to terminate these workers’ employment altogether.59 In the perspective of the first three decades of the century the 1920s thus entirely transformed the place of the strike in Palestine’s urban society. Strike activity soared, and workers could well sense that in it, they had a substantial lever with which to confront private employers and their anti-strike approach. The use of strikes to advance Zionist purposes

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was institutionalized. The social base composed by the main protagonists of the strike phenomenon—the economically and socially “stronger workers”—expanded. And the strikes themselves gave rise to widespread concerns and anxieties, thus propelling the establishment of multifarious frameworks to contain them. These aspects clearly show that strikes had become something routine, a socially tacit assumption, which is a primary reason why strikes in situations of national conflict and nation building are so interesting to look at. However, the 1920s also saw the strike gradually becoming available for not only national uses but also political struggles. The politicization process was slow, and its expression was mainly ideological and rhetorical. The next decade would see this use transformed.

 3

Strike Action and Politicization, 1931–1940 In the libelous and inciting campaign conducted in Palestine and in the Diaspora by the Revisionists, the Farmers’ Association and some of the formal representatives of the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association against the organized Jewish worker, a considerable if not the main element is the issue of the work stoppage by the worker, the weapon he uses in his struggle to attain demands from the employer. Fairy tales and false numbers are disseminated willfully in order to smear the Hebrew labor movement in the eyes of Jews in the Diaspora, and to portray it as a sabotaging movement that is destroying the [country’s] young industry, provoking labor disputes for nothing and for no serious reason. —Mordechai Nemirovsky [Namir], “The Truth on the Strikes and Their Causes, 1921–1932,” Davar, 9 January 1933

Politicization From the perspective of the twentieth century’s first three decades, it can be argued that strike action in Palestine’s Jewish community grew exponentially, embedding itself deeply in the Yishuv’s social fabric. It grew into a multifarious form of social action, provoking strong reactions in society (as the above citation testifies) and blurring the subtle lines between its various economic, social, national, and political uses. By the end of the 1920s, the strike had come to hold the leading role in Palestine’s repertoire

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of collective action. This primacy says a lot about Yishuv society and its social structure and material and nonmaterial conflicts. In particular, the multifunctional character of the strike weapon points to the Jewish capital owners’ and employers’ power to withstand the strikes and hold firmly to their resistance to Histadrut-backed collective agreements, workplace representation, and the delegitimation of their preference for low-cost Arab workers; and thus to the employers’ victory in what has been called the labor movement’s “futile struggle” on behalf of Hebrew labor. But it also reflects the effective limits of the use of strikes, which the labor movement was increasingly becoming aware of in the Zionist-oriented and segregationist struggles it led.1 Against this background, in the 1930s the strike phenomenon underwent a further change: the “politicization” referred to in the title of this chapter. The 1930s, and the first half of the decade in particular, saw a marked exacerbation of tensions between employers and workers, and a significant rise in the frequency of strike action. However, as will be argued in this chapter, within the strikes’ dominant and increasingly routine concentration on economic improvement and workers’ power vis-à-vis the employers, a widening—of the political use of strikes, the presence of politics in the strikes themselves, and the political implications of the strike phenomenon—was also discernible. The fact that this politicization of the strike was not confined to the Yishuv but was also present among Palestine’s Arabs, and that it sparked a new awareness of labor issues in the circles of the Palestine government, confirms the routinization of the strike phenomenon itself.2 The historiography of social and political conflicts in 1930s Palestine has highlighted two strikes. One, at the Froumine biscuit factory in Jerusalem in 1932, was (prior to the seamen’s strike of 1951) regarded politically as a watershed event. The second—the Arab general strike of April– October 1936 that paved the way to the Arab Rebellion—is enshrined in Palestine’s collective memory as perhaps one of the most formative events in Palestine’s history. The two strikes were entirely different in size, in the contexts in which they broke out, and in their significance to the communities where they occurred and to Palestine society as a whole. What they did have in common, however, was their highly political nature.3 Political uses of strikes had emerged before World War I in the battles over Jewish employers’ preference for Arab workers. As we saw in the previous chapter, similar uses also colored the Zionist-oriented and segregationist strikes of the 1920s, as well as attempts by the Histadrut and the town labor councils to make their presence felt in private workplaces. What is striking about the 1930s is that politics became dominant—among the Jewish majority of strikers and, as many historians have demon-

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strated,4 Arab workers too. Indeed, from the perspective of strike action per se, the politicization in the 1930s meant that the Arab and Jewish communities shared a radicalization in political relations between Labor Zionism and the Revisionist Right in the Yishuv, in Arab political action against the British and Zionism, in the growing extremism of political language, and—in the latter part of the decade—in the change of policy by the British authorities. Indeed, Namir’s aggressive language in the epigraph to this chapter reflects a deeper climatic change, not only in the meaning that the strike held for the strikers and their political backers, but also in society’s reactions to strike action. Thus a new phase began in the 1930s, the main issue being whether and when strike action could be considered legitimate social and political practice. As we shall see at the end of the chapter, the question of strike legitimacy was hardly confined to one community or another, as it went to the heart of British labor policy and its perception of strike action in particular.

Contexts A first sign that strikes were progressively becoming a habitual part of life in Palestine was the stormy opening of the decade: almost six thousand workers participated in some 144 strikes from 1930 to 1932. In 1932 alone, about thirty thousand workdays were lost to strikes. In that early surge, three strikes had broad social resonance: the strike at the Friedman-Edelstein textile factory in Tel Aviv, the joint Arab-Jewish drivers’ strike of 1931, and even more prominently, the 1932 strike at the Froumine biscuit factory in Jerusalem, which occasioned fierce political violence in the Yishuv.5 Figure 3.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1931–1940

Fig gure 3.1 Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1931-1940

140 120 100 80 60 40 20

1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1.

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49

Table 3.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1931–1940 Size

Duration

Intensity

(w)

Lost Workdays (d)

(w/n)

(d/n)

(d/w)

  796

12,385

14

214

16

 49

1,934

29,617

39

604

15

 49

1,883

15,300

38

312

 8

1934

 77

1,860

18,062

24

235

10

1935

 75

1,974

18,470

26

246

 9

1936

 49

  753

 7,745

15

158

10

1937

 86

4,129

13,081

48

152

 3

1938

119

2,336

18,460

20

155

 8

1939

128

3,098

20,841

24

163

 7

1940

 93

3,317

25,163

36

271

 8

Year

Strikes (n)

1931

 58

1932 1933

Strikers

Source: See Figure I.1.

The number of strikes in the 1930s is clearly higher than that in the previous decade: 687 strikes in 1930–39 compared to 259 in 1918–29. Also, the average of 69 strikes a year in the 1930s was much higher than earlier yearly averages (9 in the previous three decades from 1899 to 1929, and 22 between 1918 and 1929). The 1930s also saw increases in the numbers of strike participants, duration of the strikes, and their economic cost according to a rough measure based on loss of workdays due to striking. The average strike intensity (lost workdays per striker) in the 1930s was 9, compared to 14 in the previous decade—a far from insignificant change, considering the growth during the decade of the workforce in both Arab and Jewish workplaces, and of the numbers of Histadrut members and strike participants (see Figures A.3, A.4 and A.5 in the appendix). In international comparison (much used in the Labor and Revisionist movements’ fierce debates over the legitimacy of strikes), Palestine showed a certain moderation in strike activity. But when we take into consideration that the strikes took place primarily in the Jewish sector in the larger towns of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, and that almost all were in the private sector of the Jewish economy, the increase in strikes seems even more striking.6 Furthermore, the composition and extent of strike participation changed as well as many more Jewish skilled workers, factory workers, and white-collar employees joined in strike action. In the first half of the 1930s, more Jewish women workers than before participated in strikes, in particular in textile manufacturing. Moreover, many more Arab workers participated in strikes than had done so in the 1920s, especially in Haifa,

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where employment relations in the newly built modern port and at the oil refineries sparked workplace tension and conflict. This was in part due to the growing participation of Arab workers in the urban labor market, and to the increased employment of Arabs by the Palestine government and international capital, particularly in the Haifa area. Even the number of joint Arab-Jewish strikes rose slightly, particularly in transport-related branches of the economy. The fact that the Arab Rebellion of 1936–39 began as a strike fed into the awareness that the strike phenomenon was spreading beyond its Jewish epicenter.7 In the historiography of Mandate Palestine, the 1930s are known as a period of tremendous demographic, economic, and political changes. The trebling of the Jewish population following the rise of Fascism in Europe and immigration from Nazi Germany, the economic take-off in the first part of the decade, the Arab Rebellion, and the rejection of the 1937 Peel Commission Partition Plan were all significant contexts backgrounding what was going on in workplaces and in employment relations. Rightwing ideologies’ growing impact on the attitude toward strikes in European countries may have played a role as well, particularly with regard to compulsory arbitration.8 Compared to the first three decades of the century, the economic expansion in Palestine was indeed unprecedented. There was a spurt in small-scale manufacturing related to the building industry, such as production of bricks and metal. Larger-scale infrastructures were established, for example, the Haifa port in 1933, and oil refineries in 1934. Industries involving food, such as chocolate, saw significant growth, as did more skill-specific branches like the production of porcelain dentures in Tel Aviv. These manufactures and industries now increasingly had access to new financial services provided by new banks, the Tel Aviv stock exchange (opened in 1935), and a growing number of insurance companies. The latter would significantly serve the diamond-cutting industry that emerged at the end of the decade and in a few years would become Palestine’s largest export industry.9 The significance of this systemic economic expansion was threefold. First, it intensified urbanization. Building on the urban-sector expansion of the previous decade, the new demographic and economic forces of the 1930s finally established Palestine’s towns as the main attraction for the growing population. They were now the main focus of economic activity and the Palestine economy’s main point of contact with other economies in the region and far beyond. The rural sector was also expanding, but it could hardly match the towns’ overwhelming growth in terms of economic indicators such as firm size, capital accumulation, and share of exports. Moreover, the older agricultural plantations were themselves

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increasingly urbanizing, leaving the rural settlements—the pride of the Zionist project—as only a small-scale part of the economy.10 The second corollary of the 1930s economic expansion was social. The middle-class immigration from Central Europe increased the proportion of imports of private Jewish capital to imports of public and national capital from 77 percent in 1931–32 to 92 percent in 1933–34. The existing group of capital owners, manufacturers, and industrialists now mushroomed. Growing numbers of merchants, professionals, business entrepreneurs, and dealers joined this group to form the solid basis of a middle class, turning the main urban concentrations in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem into hubs of economic consumption and leisure. The greater implication, however, concerned employment relations. The expansion of the middle class increased the number of potential supporters of the Revisionists and their influence in the labor market. The number of workplaces less influenced by the Histadrut and less covered by collective bargaining increased drastically, and the social stratum of capital owners and employers who upheld a liberal or even a conservative approach to industrial relations and labor disputes widened. One indication of the latter was the employment of Arabs in the Jewish private economy in the early 1930s, which increased despite the hard-fought battles of the late 1920s and the great political pressure the labor movement consistently attempted to exert on employers’ organizations. Only in the latter part of the decade did the employment of Arabs decrease slightly, mainly because the Arab Rebellion induced Arab workers to leave Jewish-owned workplaces.11 The third expression of the expansion was change in the urban labor force. Not only did it grow exponentially, but its structure was transformed by the addition of significant numbers of women workers, laboring youth, and skilled workers. These changes were evident in both manufacturing and industry and led the labor force to ratchet up the pressure for better working conditions and employment arrangements. One interesting impact of the change was that it increased not only the membership of the Histadrut and the rank and file of the local Histadrut labor councils, but also the share of the labor force uncovered by collective bargaining and lacking Histadrut-affiliated workplace representation. The impact of Mapai and the labor movement on the mechanism of Jewish immigration brought about an expansion of the Histadrut but did not necessarily increase Histadrut influence in the private workplaces. The rise in strikes in the boom years of the first part of 1930s should be understood against this background.12 However, the increase in strikes also exposed another context. As we saw in the previous chapter, in the late 1920s one of the effects of the tension between using strikes for workers’ improvement struggles and using

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strikes for political power was the ripening of the strike itself as an accepted form of employment relations and negotiations between employers and workers. Having witnessed the variety of uses to which workers, unions, committees, and labor councils were putting strikes, the capital owners and employers gradually realized that the strike had become a routine form of negotiation and resistance. Meanwhile, the better-off factory workers and employees of Zionist institutions had realized through striking the extent of power they held, even when strike action was only partially successful. After three decades, then, the strike could be said to have turned into a formal lever of challenge and conflict between labor and capital. Moreover, Histadrut leaders realized by now that their power in the workplace was far from certain, especially in the early 1930s, when employers increasingly recruited workers not affiliated with the Histadrut; workers associated with the Revisionists; women workers, who could be paid less; and young workers who had not experienced any long-term association with Histadrut institutions. It was no wonder therefore that the labor councils—the emissaries of the Histadrut in the towns—were keen on increasing institutional centralization and the detection of workplaces suspected of employing strikebreakers.13 These processes intensified with the economic boom of 1932–34, demonstrating the periodization of the strikes. Strikes increased dramatically during the boom, then declined drastically in its wake during the economic downturn of the mid-1930s and the Arab Rebellion, gradually surfacing again and showing persistent increase in the last few years of the decade (see Figure 3.1 and Table 3.1). The change could be felt as early as 1937, when 82 strikes broke out compared to 45 in 1936, but this was hardly noticed because public attention was focused on the Arab rebellion. By 1939 the change was plainly evident; strikes had tripled and strikers quadrupled since 1936. Moreover, strike intensity, that is the average number of workdays lost per striker in 1939, was three times that of 1937. The 235 strikes that erupted in 1938–39 alone constituted a third of all strikes in the 1930s, pointing clearly to their reemerging energy and persistence. The change was well reflected in Tel Aviv, which in 1939 was the site of 40 of Palestine’s 128 strikes, confirming the revival of social unrest in the towns. The strikes’ attunement to changing economic cycles and political conditions may not have been new, but now it became a permanent feature of the strike phenomenon in Palestine.14 The greater attunement of strikes to the business cycle meant above all that everyone involved in planning and managing strikes focused chiefly on events in the private sector and among its workers. This was part of the understanding, which had dawned back in the 1920s, that the capitalist sector was central to Palestine’s economy and to the Yishuv and

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the Zionist project in particular. If strikes were associated with economic booms and tides, and not only with Jewish workers’ position vis-à-vis Arab workers in the labor market, then material conflicts between workers and employers would determine the nature and future of Yishuv society. A similarly crucial outcome of that attunement was the awareness among British officials that in parallel with political tension and anti-colonial protest, the economic sphere was persistently producing unrelenting social turmoil that needed to be addressed separately from politics. Offering political solutions to Palestine’s problems or enhancing governmental intervention in the country’s economy could help improve the effectiveness of Mandate rule, but such measures could hardly cope, so it seemed, with the problems posed by the labor market and the workplaces.15 The strengthening of the association of strikes with changing economic conditions therefore indicates that the strike phenomenon increasingly had causes and dynamics of its own. However, the close relations between politics and economics in Palestine determined the extent to which strikes were also closely attuned to other types of contexts and influences. Here the national dimension was crucial, particularly the growing awareness among the Histadrut leadership and the workers themselves that the strike was an ineffective means of persuading Jewish employers to change their employment policy by preferring Jews over Arabs. The British intervention in the Palestine economy (e.g., in the Haifa port) and the increasing employment of Arab workers by international companies (e.g., in oil refining) further emphasized the strike weapon’s weakness as a means of expanding Jewish employment. For the strike in the 1930s, these Zionist-oriented and segregationist purposes were irrelevant: another dimension of politics was being introduced into the strike scene instead.16

Party Politics The expansion of strike action in Jewish workplaces in the first half of the decade highlighted a twofold process: the use of strikes to persuade and force Jewish employers to prefer Jewish over Arab employees decreased, while the use of strikes in the political strife between the Yishuv’s Left and Right rose significantly. Both uses were political and focused on power in the labor market, the workplaces, and various Yishuv institutions. The first use, as we saw in chapter 2, had been prevalent in the 1920s, when the labor movement was advancing itself as a social movement claiming political leadership and the Revisionist right was still politically and socially weak. The second use, contrarily, increased when strike action in the Yishuv had, after the stormy 1920s, become accepted as a routine form of

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social contestation, and the labor movement had begun to realize that its segregationist struggle was failing. Moreover, the increase came when the Right political camp in the Yishuv was gaining strength and, in the eyes of many, becoming associated with the rise of the Fascist Right in Europe. The nature of the politicization of strikes in the Yishuv in the 1930s was shaped by these contextual differences.17 The politicization of strikes in the Yishuv was a three-tiered phenomenon. It was exemplified mainly by the enhanced attempts by the Histadrut, and especially by the labor councils in the towns where Mapai was the dominant political party, to control the labor market and the Jewish-owned workplaces. The labor movement’s struggle to get Jewish employers to improve working conditions and prefer Jewish workers over Arabs continued, but its character had changed. Using the councils, unions, and workers’ committees, Mapai and its activists in the Histadrut now regarded the workplaces as essential loci of political power that were therefore deserving of focused attempts to gain influence on and increase resistance against the employers’ strategy of employing unorganized workers.18 Such workers might not want to be politically or organizationally affiliated, or might be associated with the Revisionist movement. In that case, controlling the workplace meant gaining a majority position in the workers’ committee at a particular workplace, or controlling a coalition of interest groups among various types of employees. Strikes in the early 1930s clearly reflected the Mapai-driven quest for such control, the best-known examples being the strikes at the Friedman-Edelstein textile factory in Tel Aviv, the Berman bakery in Jerusalem, the Nesher cement plant near Haifa, and the construction site of the Haifa port. However, these examples demonstrate not only the labor movement’s weakness in the private workplaces, which its political opponents could exploit, but also the dependency of Mapai—the leading party in the Histadrut and the pretender to political hegemony in the Jewish Agency—on the rank and file. Evidently, it was impossible to dissociate the political use of the strike weapon from either the claims these workers wished to advance (concerning wages and working conditions) or the threat of their being distanced from the Histadrut altogether.19 The second tier of politicization was the contention between the Revisionist movement and the labor movement in these political campaigns. Since the early 1930s the Revisionists had successfully translated their growing political influence into mobilizing private-sector workers in the Yishuv to disrupt the labor movement’s attempts to control the labor market, job allocation, and especially negotiations with employers. Revisionists’ opposition to strikes during nation building and their campaign to institute compulsory arbitration in the Yishuv were gaining support in

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55

liberal circles. The Revisionist role in the politicization of the strike was therefore tremendous. Not only were employers inspired to withstand Mapai’s attempts to exert influence in the workplaces and in summit negotiations with employers’ representatives, such as the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association, but the Revisionist campaign was focused on what was to all intents and purposes a systematic nullification of strike action itself. It saw strikebreaking as an act of national defense against the harmful effects of strikes on the Zionist project—an act that had the added benefit of destabilizing both the power of the Histadrut and the functioning of trade unions and labor councils, where labor’s politicians were in control. The most notable example was the breakup of the strikers’ ranks in the Froumine strike in Jerusalem, where the employer, workers who opposed Mapai, and strike violators took concerted action to break the strike. In other examples of strike violations, such as at building sites in Petach Tikvah and Haifa in 1933–34, the process itself was sophisticated, using a variety of organizational and more violent means to force the disintegration of the strike. For the labor movement, these cases demonstrated a need to not only protect the right to strike but also safeguard its freedom of action vis-à-vis both the Revisionists and the private employers. The entire process—ideologically and in practice—signaled the extent to which strike politicization in the first part of the decade was relational, with one political force mobilizing the strike to achieve workplace control, and the other systematically cultivating strike violation.20 It was therefore the third component—the mutual verbal and physical violence surrounding the strikes—that made politicization so central to the evolution of the strike phenomenon in Palestine. The extent of aggression was unprecedented. In the 1920s in the Yishuv, most physical violence springing from labor market and workplace tensions had targeted communist activists or been vented against Yishuv institutions by unemployed workers demanding material alleviation. Now a violent atmosphere loomed within the workplace and, more prominently, on the picket line in encounters between Beitar21 activists and Histadrut bullies (associated with the Histadrut “Hapoel” troops). It is no wonder that many in the top political echelons of Mapai and the Histadrut felt they were incapable of regulating this urban scene. The respective depictions of strikes in the Right and Left press of the 1930s also reflected the politicization of strike events and provoked further anger. Entirely new terminologies arose around the strikes, of workers disrupting the normal workings of the Zionist capitalist on the one hand, and of strike violators betraying the class cause on the other. The press war conducted by the political leaders themselves—Ben-Gurion on the left and Jabotinsky on the right—signaled a new phase in journalistic coverage of strikes and labor relations in gen-

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eral. Even more than the strikes themselves, Jabotinsky’s famous calls to break down Histadrut control, and Ben-Gurion’s association of the Right with Fascism, became enshrined in the Yishuv’s collective memory.22 Not only was the growing behavioral and verbal extremism of the strike event a symptom of the politicization process, but it also reflected a new conceptualization of the strike. The older constituents of the debate on strikes—the legitimacy of the strike during nation building, the protection of employers and workers from intimidation by strike organizers, and the need to resolve disputes through prior arbitration—remained as central as ever. The novelty was in their association with political power, in strikes’ new status as clear markers of political division, and in the verbal and conceptual handling of the strike as part of politics in the Yishuv and, effectively, the Zionist movement as a whole. The new conceptualization emerged in 1934–35 in the negotiations between Mapai and the Revisionists, in particular between the leaders David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabtoinsky. In fact, these negotiations replaced the workings of the Yishuv-initiated committees that operated in the 1920s, and they reflected not only the political radicalization of strikes but also larger processes that shaped the political atmosphere in the Yishuv at the time. Among these were the rise of the Fascist Right in Europe, the political battle within the Zionist movement and the associated election campaign of 1932–33, the assassination of Chaim Arlosoroff, and the strengthening of extreme right-wing groups in Palestine itself. These processes clearly played a part in associating strikes with political struggle and power, peaking in the famous negotiations between the two political movements in London in 1934. Significantly, the strike and strike violation were among the leading issues in these talks.23 As the extensive historiography on these issues demonstrates, the London negotiations were far more than a discussion on the nature of the strike phenomenon. They focused on relations between the political movements and on the nature of the employment relations regime during nation building. When they did concern strikes, they raised a series of substantive and technical questions relating to the legitimacy of the strike; the status of strikers, employers, and strike violators; and last but not least, the capacity of the opposing political forces in the Yishuv to reach social consensus and social peace. The two sides approached the issues from different angles: Ben-Gurion emphasized the right to strike, the workers’ need to maintain the strike weapon against the power of employers, and the potential rift caused by the act of strike violation; Jabotinsky, for his part, reiterated the harm strikes did to the Zionist cause, the unacceptability of Mapai’s quest for power and domination, the need for compulsory arbitration, and the justification for weakening collective action against Jewish employers.24

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Despite these divisions, the sides achieved common ground through the conceptualization of a working arrangement, with neither side giving up its initial stance. In this arrangement the movements committed themselves to ongoing negotiation, collaboration on a legal code on labor and employment issues, and most importantly, agreement on the start of a strike. Agreement meant that a majority of workers in a specific workplace could declare a strike, though without ignoring the wishes of the opposing minority and only after attempting to persuade the employer to accept arbitration. The details of what constituted a majority and minority were left open: Ben-Gurion suggested defining a minority of workers as 25 percent of the workforce, Jabotinsky as 15 percent—both sides were well aware how difficult it was for Revisionists to enter the workplaces. Perhaps more relevant to the topic of politicization discussed in this chapter is the unspoken assumption between the two political leaders that their agreement could affect the phenomenon itself. This assumption was naturally rooted in their charisma, their self-awareness of the status each had come to hold in his respective movement, and the solidity of the bureaucratic structure each had carefully cultivated in his party and among his followers. Perhaps more than anything else, these expectations at the political top are indicative of the politicization of strike action, and of the need each movement’s leader felt to provide a political resolution to what had become an uncontrollable form of social action and an intractable cause of social rift. However, it was exactly here that the leaders were proven wrong.25 After the agreement was initialed in London in October 1934, it was presented to the movements in Palestine. The Revisionists were suspicious of the proposed agreement, claiming it left Mapai with too much power and was essentially an attempt to convince them not to secede from the Zionist movement. However, out of respect for the wishes of the Revisionist leadership and Jabotinsky in particular, they gave their blessing to the agreement. The labor movement faced a thornier problem: the draft agreement had to be affirmed by a plebiscite among Histadrut members affiliated with a variety of parties and movements, some strongly opposed to Mapai. Many among the latter warned of the dangers of limiting the right to strike, leaving too much power with the employers, and allowing the Right to campaign against strikers. As it turned out in a plebiscite held in March 1935, Histadrut members rejected the agreement by a vote of 16,474 to 11,522, and the entire edifice of the understanding reached in London collapsed.26 The cause of the agreement’s failure, as well demonstrated in the historiography, was the Histadrut rank and file’s opposition to Ben-Gurion’s willingness to accept limitations on strike action, which not only impinged

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on the freedom to strike but gave employers significant leverage. In fact, the rank and file in the labor movement, in particular activists among the stronger workers, told their leadership that they would not accept the limitations, and that imposing them was not a prerogative of the politicians on either side of the political divide. In other words, the rank and file were not necessarily opposed to the political rapprochement that the agreement was meant to reflect, but they would not tolerate strikes being turned into a political issue in the first place. For this reason the rejection of the London agreement was a formative event that became one of the reasons why the Revisionists seceded from the Zionist Organization in 1935. Nonetheless, it left the strike issue open. The vacuum would soon be filled by an attempt on the part of the Jewish Agency to tone down workplace tension through a joint labor committee established in 1935. Yet this attempt failed as well, signaling the extent to which strikes remained a thorny issue.27 The rejection of the London agreement pointed to instability in the social basis of Mapai’s leadership. However, its main significance lay in the political leadership’s recognition of the strike’s meaning and importance to the rank and file. To tamper with the ethos of the freedom to strike now—after three decades during which this form of collective action had become embedded in the Yishuv—seemed much less probable than before. Market and workplace segregation—the struggle for Jewish employment of Jews rather than Arabs—this may already have been a lost battle, but guarding the right to strike was not. We can therefore see the rejection of the agreement as another formative phase in the institutionalization of the strike. Unsurprisingly, the most vocal members of the rejectionist camp were the local labor councils, union activists, and shop stewards that traditionally were more attentive to the workers. The rejection of the agreement did not seem to have a direct effect on strikes as such. The Revisionists turned into to separate organization and distanced themselves from direct challenges to the labor movement. The economic boom kept encouraging workers to strike, to pressure the employers to agree to collective bargaining and allow the workers a share in their gains from the boom. The control of strikes was now left entirely in the hands of the Histadrut and its local labor councils, which not only orchestrated some strikes but also failed to restrain those it did not support. When a change in striking patterns finally did occur, it was due if anything to the start of an economic downturn and the coming of the Arab Rebellion.28 The fierce debates leading to the London agreement and its rejection harbored two main implications for the strike phenomenon. The first concerned strike violation. The fact that violations of strikes and strike violators were at the core of the debates and were persistently referred to as a thorny problem shows that strike events were progressively turning out to

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indicate an internal rift in the Yishuv. The strike violations that had begun in the 1920s had grown prevalent, as the workings of Mishpat Chaverim— the internal Comrades’ Court of the Histadrut—made ever clearer. In the 1930s, however, they came to be perceived as indicating not individual opposition to strike action at the workplace level, but serious threats to labor unity per se, from both within and without the labor movement. Herein lay the politicization of strike violation itself and its association with the Revisionist Right’s quest to weaken the power of the Histadrut in the Yishuv. The Histadrut’s incapacity to lessen the extent of the strike threat, either through bureaucratic sanctions or through rapprochement with the Revisionists, meant that strike events would persist as potential sites of contestation between workers and employers, and of challenges to the Histadrut’s internal authority.29 The second implication of the agreement’s failure was the persistence of the strike—as both an individual event and a spreading social form of contention—as the primary focus of political disagreement and rift in the Yishuv. This would remain the case even during slowdowns in strikes, and even at times of political cooperation between the labor movement and the Revisionists. Practically nothing could allay the mutual fears, and neither side was willing to withdraw from its entrenched position—one cherishing the strike as a prime marker of labor’s freedom of action, the other delegitimizing the strike as potentially injurious to the nation-building cause. This is one reason why the strike, despite its taken-for-granted presence, would remain an intractable issue, at least ideologically and politically, for many years to come.

Anti-Colonial Politics The rejection of the London agreement underscores the extent of the politicization of strikes and at the same time also the sharp decline in the Zionist-oriented use of strikes against the employment of Arabs in Jewish workplaces. Such strikes did not entirely disappear, but in the context of Palestine’s economic boom and the aggravation of intra-Jewish political strife they were completely outweighed by improvement-oriented and politically oriented strikes. This growing denationalization of strike action in the Yishuv (to which we shall return at the end of the present chapter) evolved, however, in parallel to another, no less important process: the expansion of political expression and the use of strikes among Palestine’s Arabs.30 This process, as explained at the beginning of the chapter, was associated with the growing deployment of strike action by Arabs in urban areas, mainly Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. The main reasons for this change

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involved Arabs’ growing participation in the urban labor force: new employment opportunities for Arabs, created by Palestine’s industrialization; the growing activity of international capital in Palestine (e.g., oil refining); economic developments related to the building of the modern port in Haifa; and, last but not least, the widening awareness of Arab workers and Arab union leaders of the availability, usability and relative effectiveness of the strike. How this awareness evolved was clearly related to major loci where Arab urban labor force participation increased: transport, the ports, and oil refineries. More significant, however, was the growing mix of material and political issues in the strikes. This was clearly reflected by two different aspects of strike politicization.31 One aspect of politicization was the growing participation of Arab workers in joint strikes with Jews. This was evident first and foremost in strikes of in the early 1930s that broke out spontaneously and with relatively little prior organization, for example, the drivers’ strikes of 1931 and the strike at the Nesher cement quarry at the end of 1932. Another form of joint action was strikes organized or led by the Palestine Workers’ Alliance, the Histadrut-backed workers’ organization. In strikes at the Haifa port, in the cigarette industry, and at a mosaic tile factory, joint action was relatively short-lived and, despite considerable coverage in the press, affected far fewer workers. The rarest form of joint cross-national action was strikes organized by more extreme left-wing political entities. Their scarcity stemmed naturally from the illegal position of communist organizations, or may have been due simply to workers’ fear of attracting notice of the British authorities or of endangering their workplaces.32 Apart from the drivers’ strike, which also involved lower middle-class employees, most of these strikes were short-lived and the number of participants was relatively small. Consequently they had little impact on the employers, despite their resonance among left-wing political activists and in the press. What these strike forms had in common, however, was that they erupted in workplaces that did not experience persistent pressure by Jewish workers to prevent the employment of Arabs. This was why joint strikes broke out less in the Jewish citrus groves and more in the port; less during economic downturns and more during economic booms; less on the Jewish agricultural plantations and in Jewish-dominated Tel Aviv, and more in the mixed urban concentrations of Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre.33 Joint Arab-Jewish strikes were therefore a weak aspect of strike politicization. The strikes could provoke widespread rhetoric on cross-national solidarity, and on its potential political influence, but their extent and impact among workers in the mixed towns in the 1930s was limited. The heightening of political tension in Palestine in 1935 curtailed joint action altogether, highlighting the barriers, constructed by both Jews and Arabs,

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to crossing the national divide. Effectively, joint strikes would recur (as we shall see in the next chapter) only in the wake of World War II.34 A second stronger expression of strike politicization among Arabs began to emerge in late 1935. Rising political tension and the spread of violence in Palestine, which revolved around growing Jewish immigration, economic advancement, and land acquisition, prompted Arab political leaders to make basic preparations for a general strike. In practice, the general strike began only in late April 1936 with a formal call to put an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine. A month later the strike, in which Arab drivers and grocers in the towns were also active, came to include nonpayment of taxes as an act demonstrating opposition to Jewish immigration. In parallel, armed rebellion began to spread sporadically. In many ways, the general strike of April–October 1936 consisted of small, locally based strike events. Material difficulties hampered concerted action, and the weakness of the political organizers of the strike was compounded by the British and Jewish responses. A notable expression of the fragmented nature of the strike was the difference between the total cessation of commercial activity in the Jaffa port compared to the partial slowdown of work at the port of Haifa. Nonetheless, the strike did have an extensive impact.35 The effects of the Arab general strike were complex. On the one hand the strike was politically motivated, and its mobilization of urban society for anti-colonial and anti-Zionist protest diverted attention from its tremendous material effects on the livelihoods of Arab merchants and workers, on the economic enclosure of the Yishuv, and on the military expenses of the Palestine government. On the other hand, the tense atmosphere and the violence that began to be associated with strikes not only aggravated relations between Arabs and Jews, but also caused deep rifts within the Arab community. This effect was exemplified by the growing number of cases of strike violations by merchants and workers alike. Just as strike violation had struck a sensitive nerve in the Yishuv, here also the atmosphere of suspicion, the harsh treatment of violators, and the rampant notions of transgression and treason often destabilized the social cohesion the anti-colonial campaign so direly needed. In this sense, the Arab general strike exemplified a politicization of the strike that at once reflected both anti-colonial political sentiment and the internal political relations in the Arab community itself.36

Strikes Resurface A variety of anti-colonial and anti-Zionist moves followed the end of the Arab general strike in October 1936. Economic boycott, sporadic skir-

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mishes, and above all the use of violence entirely transformed the character of the rebellion, the experiences of those who actively participated, the Yishuv, and the government. Not only did Arab society in 1937–38 face a search for new strategies of protest and resistance; it also had to contend with the harsh material and social impacts of the rebellion on the community itself.37 Against this background, the Yishuv was experiencing a gradual economic recovery and, more relevant to the discussion here, a renewed outbreak of strike activity. The main contexts of the strikes’ reemergence were the economic recovery and the perception among town workers that the British authorities had shielded the Yishuv during the rebellion. But the eased atmosphere was also conducive to the cementing of a crucial feature of the strikes in the latter part of the 1930s—the complete loss of their national dimension. As we saw earlier, the process had begun by the late 1920s and, despite some major labor disputes over the employment of Arab workers in the Jewish sector in the early 1930s, the issue of segregation had gradually disappeared. Any surviving national dimension of striking had less to do with the campaign to prefer Jewish workers in Jewish private workplaces than with the Revisionists’ portrayal of the strike phenomenon itself as sabotaging the Zionist cause. Jewish capital owners employed Jewish immigrants and workers more often during the Arab Rebellion, further decreasing the need to use strikes against employment of Arabs. And in the Histadrut-organized strikes on the agricultural plantations in the late 1930s, the issue was more the Histadrut’s quest for power in the institutions of the plantations than the “national egoism” of the Jewish employers as such. Clearly, both the great weight of the political dimensions of the strikes of the mid 1930s and the labor movement’s recognition of its failure to control the agricultural labor market contributed to the distancing of the strikes in Palestine from the Zionist-oriented uses prevalent in the 1920s. That this happened in the context of economic recovery at the decade’s end and continual increase in the industrial labor force in the Jewish community further buttressed the dominance of material issues in strike action. The reemergence of strikes reflected the gradual economic recovery that followed the mid-1930s downturn and the Arab Rebellion, as demonstrated by three types of groups involved in the strikes. The first was a diverse group of workers who simply felt that economic conditions were now ripe for pursuing improvement. Among them were women workers in the paper industry, bakery employees, teachers, hospital workers, Arab port workers, and even butcher-shop owners, all sharing a similar sense of the changing atmosphere. Though occupationally diverse, most of the workers in this group had in common their employment in the private

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sector as well as a sense that it was the right time to protest the economic policy of the Palestine government, in particular its siding with capital. Similarly, in its quest to control the emerging strike action, the Histadrut made attempts throughout 1939 to restrain the teachers and channel their anger against the Yishuv institutions away from striking and toward arbitration. The Histadrut’s expansion of its presence in strikes at this time points to the growing awareness among its leaders of the danger of the organizational and representational problems it faced, mainly among workers in the towns.38 The second group was in the agricultural sector, where new strike action emerged in contrast to most strikes’ urban focus at the decade’s end. The replacement of Arab workers by Jews in the Jewish citrus groves— itself a reaction to the rebellion—created an expanding Jewish labor force working in harsh conditions and for much lower pay than other workers in the Yishuv economy. Here strikes were orchestrated mainly by the Histadrut, which sought to regain the power over job allocation it had lost in the fierce battles with the Jewish farmers in 1927–33.39 The third group involved in the reemergence of strikes was closely associated with the expansion of the labor force, partly through immigration. The emergence of new industries in Palestine was a corollary to the rise of Fascism in Europe and a marked expression of Palestine’s ongoing industrialization. Salient among them was the diamond industry, which arrived mainly from Antwerp and had begun to absorb many young apprentices in the Yishuv. The strike in a diamond workshop in Petah Tikvah in 1939 over wages and working conditions was a harbinger of what would later become Palestine’s most strike-prone industry.40 The most important feature of the renewed striking activity (340 strikes in 1938–40) was its overwhelming emphasis on wages and improvement of working conditions, and the marked absence of national or political strike issues. Economic issues now dominated the strikes, much more than did Jewish capitalists’ employment of Arab workers, or the struggle to persuade employers to agree to workplace representation. However, the meaning of this resurgence of strike action and demonstration of reverberating social conflict stemmed much less from the strike’s routine presence in society than from its perception as uncontrollable. The flourishing, at the decade’s end, of knowledge relating to strikes—in particular the wealth of quantitative evidence collected and publicly presented—testifies to the extent to which this imagery was widespread, expressing the concerns not only of Yishuv institutions and the Histadrut’s town labor councils, but also the government itself.41 Labor’s concern was obvious. After the rejection of the London agreement and the Revisionists’ resignation from the Zionist Organization in

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1935, the political debate in the Yishuv over strikes and compulsory arbitration was partly attenuated. The arena was left to the workings of a labor committee42 set up by the Jewish Agency, and to partly related discussions between Mapai and the Revisionists on the question of power in the labor exchanges of the plantations and agricultural sector. In the towns, where almost all labor disputes and full-fledged strike action took place, the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association and the Histadrut jointly created some channels of arbitration. However, these were minimally effective, could do little to socialize the conflicting sides to help prevent the eruption of strike action, and mostly reasserted the power of the Jewish private employers vis-à-vis the Histadrut. The rise in strike action at the end of the 1930s signaled to employers that the Histadrut either was too weak to control its rank and file, or was simply orchestrating action from behind the scenes and thus merited public rebuke. Outcries from the Right and liberal circles in manufacturing and industry reiterated the message that compared to Europe, Palestine was experiencing too many strikes, and that the Histadrut was inciting more workers to strike in order to regain its lost positions of power. The Histadrut, for its part, preferred to leave the question of its control over the town workers in the shadows and confined its response to rejecting the numbers presented by the right wing in defense of the right to strike. This was another reflection of the changing nature of the strikes as they increasingly focused on economic and social conflict and distanced themselves from questions of national segregation and from politics per se.43 In 1937, during a lull in the unrest and violence, the Palestine Criminal Code (1936) came into effect. Under articles 74, 75 and 211 of the Code, the Palestine Commissioner could declare a state of emergency when a serious industrial disturbance in the public sector threatened to disrupt Palestine’s trade relations with other countries. A person encouraging such a disturbance could be imprisoned for a year, and those intimidating others to stop working and encouraging violence in the workplace could be imprisoned for two years.44 Because it provided for treating strikes in the public sector as potentially criminal events, the British perceived the Code as sufficient for the purpose of handling labor unrest. Eventually it paved the way for the anti-strike legislation of World War II. However, the fact that it was enacted during the crushing of the rebellion meant British labor policy was undergoing a change that was part and parcel of the politicization process. Far from relating only and specifically to strikes, the change of attitude among British officials in the late 1930s in fact reflected their growing perception of the labor market and the workplaces as potential loci of social disorder, and of strikes as potentially usable levers in the hands of politi-

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cians. The change stemmed not only from the stormy events in Palestine during the rebellion, the resurfacing of strike action in 1938–40, and Jewish industrialists’ calls to ban strikes; but also, no less significantly, from developments in the British Empire, where labor unrest and labor as a problem for imperial control were more and more seen as burning issues. Furthermore, it signaled a new willingness, on the part of the Colonial Office and the Palestine government in Jerusalem, to intervene in Palestine’s economy and society. As the next chapter will show, the materialization of this new interventionism after 1940 would be closely associated with the handling of strikes.45 As a result of these changes in Palestine, by the late 1930s the strike was perceived significantly differently than a decade before. The distance it had traveled over four decades could no longer be measured only quantitatively. Its growth, especially since the economic surge of the mid 1920s, had made it a routinized social phenomenon that no one interested in the social structure and social dynamics of Palestine (including the authorities) could ignore. Many became ever more conscious of the strike as a taken-for-granted dimension of daily life in and outside the workplace. Strikes were endlessly covered in the press and statistically surveyed more and more, and by more sophisticated means, by many political forces including the Palestine government, Jewish Agency, and Histadrut. The strike was part of social life: widely known now as an available lever in workplace conflict and in politics at large, notwithstanding its failures and ambivalent impacts, it could hardly be ignored. Against this background, then, it is not surprising that at the turn of decade the Revisionist movement and the industrialists renewed their vociferous attacks on the strike as a legitimate form of social protest.46 Nor is it surprising that the British, whose attempts at legal regulation of strike action since 1927 hardly mattered to the strikers, were now rethinking their approach. As in Western countries, the strikes in Palestine were closely associated with industrial development, the growth of the industrial workforce, the introduction of industrial managerial conceptions, and last but not least the social awareness that strikes befitted urban development and urban society. In many ways, those who in the late 1930s still bemoaned the routinization of strikes were ideologically and culturally lagging behind economic change, or simply wishing to avert its further impact. But even those who approached strikes not from a rightist and conservative perspective, but from a liberal and even labor-supportive perspective, were also suspicious of the potential recurrence of strike intensity during economic booms. Thus, after four decades of strike action in Palestine, a dual picture emerged. On the one hand, the strike had become a taken-for-granted

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phenomenon, an immensely varied form of social action lending itself to many forces and uses and provoking myriad reactions at various levels of society. At the same time, however, it had progressively come to harbor internal contradictions. Its use in the cause of workplace segregation, as a lever for gaining organizational and political power, and as a carrier of political messages masked what most strikes were practically about. Striking now was much more vibrant in employment relations than in politics, in protecting and gaining workers’ rights and benefits than in nationalist battles, and in relations between workers and private employers than in skirmishes between politicians and among rival labor organizations. Those who reacted to that vibrancy—from government officials to labor politicians—sensed that gap, but by choosing to divert attention to the role of strikes in political contention and organizational strife, they helped to conceal the true nature of the strike phenomenon as a major element in society’s repertoire of collective action. That gap was indicative of how hard it was for the labor movement and the Histadrut as an umbrella organization to translate their political power in Yishuv society into social power among town workers, in the private workplaces, and in relations with private employers in manufacturing and industry. Moreover, it revealed the discrepancy between the political and military presence of the British in Palestine, and the relatively weak British influence over employment relations in both the Arab and Jewish communities. The realization of this discrepancy in Palestine mirrored a growing awareness among colonial officials across the British Empire of labor as a potential problem.47

 4

War and the Normalization of Strikes, 1941–1946

The worker knows that the country has to be built now … within a capitalist regime. But he also knows that such capitalist regimes have various levels. There is the level of China and the level of India, and there is the level of the organized worker in civilized countries. The worker in the latter believes that the purpose of the economy is not only to make its owners richer, but also to provide for the workers in a decent manner—of course, within the limits of the capabilities of the economy. And if the employer abuses the right that his ownership endows him with, and deprives the worker of his wages, or degrades his human worth, or denounces his organization, and eschews negotiation and peaceful mediation—then the worker will not recoil from using the last weapon he has in his hands—the weapon of the strike. But he will do so only when he has no other alternative. —David Ben-Gurion, “Arbitration and Strikes,” Davar, 20 December 1932 For fifteen years all talk on Shlom Bayit [home peace] in labor relations in Palestine—but there is no peace. For a decade and a half all the Yishuv talks about collective agreement and compulsory arbitration—but there is no agreement and no arbitration. —Binyamin Avniel, Problems of Labor Relations in Palestine, 1943 (p. 91)

Strikes Contested World War II left indelible marks on Mandate Palestine, but none seems more paradoxical than the tremendous resurgence of strike action. On

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the one hand, the war propelled an economic boom and created an atmosphere conducive to enhanced strike action. But at the same time, the strikes sparked great turmoil in relations between workers and employers, seemingly in complete indifference to the momentous contexts in which they happened—the increasing political tension between Arabs and Jews, the severance of Palestine from Europe, the mobilization of the Middle East for the fight against Germany, and the decimation of millions of Jews. It was as if the strikes, always attuned to and impacted by social and political contexts, struck their own course and sustained a life of their own. Since the 1920s and 1930s, a “strike culture” had been evolving, its recurring backdoor negotiations and dramatic scenes at the picket line exhibiting all the features of a routinized social ritual. Now, in the context of the war, the strike phenomenon became normalized.1 Strike normalization has to be understood in three senses. First, in contrast to the two preceding decades and returning to pre-World War I patterns, the material dimension of strike action in 1941–46 was overwhelmingly dominant. Second, the normalization of the wartime strikes meant they were free of the “national” and the “political.” And third, normalization meant widespread recognition, by both the British authorities and the political economic elites in the Yishuv, of a chronic gap between the thrust and energy of the strike phenomenon on the one hand, and the institutional capacity to contain it on the other. In these senses, it could be argued that in the 1940s strikes came into their own. Now recognized as part and parcel of the Yishuv’s social structure, they were taken for granted as a social form of action. The strike surge that propelled the normalization process was heralded by multiple political challenges in the early 1940s. Efforts to curtail the “habitualization” or “routinization” of the strikes came mainly from two quarters. The first was the Revisionist movement together with liberal and right-wing labor-relations advisers to the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association. In a series of newspaper articles, brochures, and books that appeared in 1939–42, writers such as Binyamin Avniel and Hen Ben-Yeruham advanced the argument that strikes in the Yishuv in the 1930s had been an overwhelmingly political lever in the hands of the Histadrut, which enjoyed exaggerated political power and consequently felt free to use strikes against Jewish private employers to express its political hegemony in the Yishuv and force private employers to cooperate. Based on comparative analysis of strike numbers for the first half of the 1930s, and study of the political implications of the failure of the London agreements, these writers argued that the Histadrut, being so powerful, should well use its powers (proven very effective in Yishuv politics) to restrain strikes and force unruly workers to agree to arbitration. And if strikes were mainly

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a political expression of power, restraining them was essential to allow capital in manufacturing and industry to materialize its capacities for the good of the Yishuv as a whole.2 Labor’s rebuff of these attacks (through its press organs Davar and Hapoel Hatsair, and in Am Oved publications3), rather than denying the political dimensions of the strikes, approached them from a completely different perspective. The strike, argued labor activists such as the labor statistician Walter Preuss and Histadrut and trade union activist Aharon Rabinovitch, should be thought of as the most extreme weapon at the workers’ disposal and therefore used with the utmost caution and restraint. Politically, the significance of strikes lay in exposing the shortcomings of the Palestine government in social matters and labor legislation, or the bureaucratic weakness of the Histadrut as it struggled to contain the stronger workers who sought to materialize sectoral interests. In both cases more, not less, political power was needed to quell labor unrest—in the form of either British intervention to protect workers, or widespread recognition of the Histadrut as the main representative of the workers in Palestine.4 In practice, the political challenges to strike action had minimal impact. Expressed mainly via the printed word, they were not likely to soften the ideological divisions between Mapai and the Revisionist movement, or the ideological convictions of various proponents of strike action, be they workers’ committees, labor bureaucrats in the labor councils, or political activists on the extreme left of the labor movement and in the Palestine Communist Party. As we shall soon see, neither could they make any impact on the most strike-prone workers—those in manufacturing and industry, on whom the Histadrut and its labor councils depended in order to exert any influence in the private sector of the Yishuv’s economy.5 If anything, these debates early in the decade reflected the proliferation of what can be described as “strike expertise”: the rise, since the 1930s, of a group of specialists and knowledgeable advisers who began carving out a specific area of knowledge on labor disputes, collective bargaining, and strike practices; adverted to the experience of strikes in other countries; and even took pride in using strike “legalese.”6 The presence of this group was felt mainly in the employers’ associations and union bureaucracies of the Histadrut and its rival organization, the Revisionist National Workers’ Union. It had far less reach in party politics or party bureaucracies, where the use of strikes for political purposes was unusually developed and sophisticated. The focus on negotiation techniques and mechanisms for calculating the cost of living and working conditions made this group instrumental during the various stages of each strike event, but it was much less useful in ideological and political bickering. Therefore, the attack on

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strikes in the early 1940s, the debate it provoked, and the growing presence of strike experts evinced a decline in the political use of strikes as it lost the central place it had held in party politics only a few years earlier. Political parties and factions continued to battle over influence in the workplace, but compared to the strike experience of the 1920s and 1930s, the strike as a social form of collective action was now overwhelmingly depoliticized.7 The second, more serious political challenge to the strike in the early 1940s came from a power long denounced by many workers and Histadrut activists for not involving itself more deeply in employment relations—the Palestine government itself. Unlike the internal political and national-oriented attempts to delegitimize strike action, this attack was an outcome of the war itself. As we saw in the previous chapter, the tense period of the Arab Rebellion and the growing pressure to restrain political protest and violence in the late 1930s prompted the Palestine government to devote more attention to the question—largely untouched since 1927— of how to restrain strike action. The outbreak of war, along with the rising importance of the Middle East in the British and Allied war economy of the early 1940s, enhanced the association between emergency conditions and labor issues such as the restraint of strikes. This was reflected in the appointment in autumn 1940 of Richard Massie Graves, the former head of the British labor department in Egypt, as a special adviser on labor questions to the Palestine government; and in the founding in June 1941, for the first time since British Mandate rule began, of a labor department. The same month Graves, the first head of the new department, announced the government’s intention to legislate a ban on strikes.8 The idea behind the ban was to ensure minimal disruption of the war effort, securing in particular the continuity of the direly needed production and economic activity in Palestine. Industrial peace, especially in industries that provided the British army with essential products, seemed imperative. Moreover, in the eyes of the colonial officials, strike restraint accorded not only with the harnessing of Palestine’s labor force to the war effort and its economic management, but also with prevention of any risk to colonial interests.9 To implement this logic, the labor department turned to a seemingly already effective British precedent. It based the proposed ordinance in Palestine on the “Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order of 1940,” otherwise known as Order No. 1305. Issued in Britain in July 1940 by the Ministry of Labor and National Service, the order was meant to secure uninterrupted production in Britain by banning strikes and lockouts unless their prospective participants notified the Ministry of Labor of their intentions beforehand, so that it could take steps to settle the disputes.10

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The proposed ordinance made it compulsory to notify the government district commissioner of any labor dispute. The commissioner, with the assistance of the labor department, would try to mediate between the sides for three weeks. If that failed to resolve the conflict, the dispute would be brought before the High Commissioner for another two-week attempt at mediation. The High Commissioner could then establish an arbitration committee or return the dispute to the sides, which must try to resolve their differences. Failure to comply with this process in any dispute that turned into a strike, in essential services in particular, would be declared a criminal offense, and the actors involved (including their representative organizations) would be liable to a heavy fine.11 Prior negotiation and formal authorization were therefore the means by which the government sought to contain strike action and keep industrial unrest to a minimum. In the spirit of the Ottoman strike law of 1909, the ordinance enabled the government to limit strikes significantly without outlawing them altogether. It therefore reflected a shift in focus, on the part of British labor and legal functionaries, away from the intimidation of employers and workers unwilling to join in strikes and toward the essence of the potential harm—strike action itself. This change was obvious in the solid backing the ordinance gave to the employers’ quest for uninterrupted production and trade; and in the endowment of the High Commissioner and the District Commissioners with new powers as arbiters in employment relations, advisers in conflict resolution, and interpreters of potential threats to ordinary economic activity.12 The announcement of the ban in summer 1941 caught the Yishuv unprepared, and the anger it provoked was reminiscent of the reaction in the Yishuv to the British ban on immigration and land acquisition in the 1939 White Paper. Few in Palestine had anticipated that the large-scale recruitment of Arabs and Jews into the British army, and the close association between Palestine industries and the demand for products created by the army, would develop into such deep intervention in the delicate tissue of social relations between capital and labor in the Yishuv community. It was only natural, then, that the early drafts of the ordinance of summer 1941 quickly turned into a political issue, as is clear from the extent of the Yishuv’s press coverage of the proposed ordinance, the reactions it elicited, and the endless debate it occasioned in Mapai and the Histadrut, as well as at various institutional levels and across the political spectrum. Even compared to the reaction to the Revisionists’ and industrialists’ challenge to the strike, the outcry was indeed unprecedented. Clearly, the attack on the freedom to strike aroused a wide range of anti-British and anti-colonial sentiment.13

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Judging from the harsh criticism of the proposed ban in the Yishuv and particularly the labor movement, a number of aspects seem to have been significant. First, the ban was perceived not just as government intervention in employment relations in the Yishuv, but as unilateral support of employers and private capital at the expense of workers and the Histadrut—that is, a continuation of the 1927 ordinance that forbade the intimidation of employers. This perception was manifested mainly in labor’s criticism against modeling of the ordinance on the British experience, which in contrast to Palestine seemed to safeguard protections not only for employers but also for workers. Second, the strike ban seemed strictly political. It was perceived as a government pronouncement that Yishuv institutions were incapable of handling social conflicts independently, and that the political leaders of the labor movement were unable to control the rank and file or promise restraint of strike action in general. To many in the labor movement, it seemed as though a political force external to the Yishuv was now confronting Mapai’s mid-1930s failure to overcome its rank-and-file membership and affirm the London agreement on strikes and arbitration. As such, that force saw strikes as mainly contestations over material issues with little relation to the notion, prevalent in the 1930s, of using strikes for political power and political protest. By conceptualizing strike action as a recurring form of collective action requiring government intervention and control, it thereby contributed immensely to the normalization of the strike phenomenon itself.14

An All-Time Peak The strike ordinance came into effect in Palestine in January 1942, and in view of the conditions wrought by the war, and the government’s expanding intervention in civil society, the limitations on strikes were expected to have teeth. After all, the legal advisers of Mapai and the Histadrut who had succeeded in attenuating some of the ordinance’s harsher measures could now advise the Histadrut not to orchestrate strike action. Moreover, recognizing the ordinance’s significance for quelling industrial unrest during the war, both the Histadrut and the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association endorsed Britain’s role in fighting the Germans and the consequent need for intervention in and mobilization of civil society. Furthermore, the ordinance paralleled the emergence within the Yishuv of new channels of collective bargaining and industrial consent between capital and labor; these may well have contributed to expectations—especially in the industrial concentrations in Palestine’s towns—that the arbitration mechanisms

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Figure 4.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1941–1946

Fig gure 4.1 Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1941-1946

140 120 100 80 60 40 20

1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1

Table 4.1. Strikes in Palestine, 1941–1946 Year

Strikes (n)

1941

 80

1942

 94

Strikers

Size

Duration

Intensity

(w)

Lost Workdays (d)

(w/n)

(d/n)

(d/w)

 4,185

 45,954

 52

  574

11

 9,258

135,071

 98

1,437

15

1943

131

15,220

111,134

116

  848

 7

1944

 93

 7,805

225,539

 84

2,425

29

1945

117

 4,808

 99,145

 41

  847

21

1946

106

12,744

231,128

120

2,180

18

Source: See Figure I.1.

created by the ordinance would be effective. However, the wartime strike surge attests that the exact opposite occurred.15 Strike action had begun to intensify before the war: the number of strikes rose from 74 in 1938 to 103 in 1939, and the number of workplaces affected rose from 85 to 144 respectively. The change was still far from dramatic, however. In 1940 and 1941 the number of strikes actually shrank back to 80 and 85 respectively, and the number of workplaces involved in the strikes declined to 108 in 1941. This slowdown is in fact the reason why it was argued above that Graves’s anti-strike proposal of June 1941 was far less a response to a dramatic rise in strike action than a preventive means in a larger British scheme for managing the war economy and the mobilization of society.16

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The turnabout came in 1942 (see Figure 4.1 and Table 4.1; see also Figures A.3, A.4 and A.5 in the appendix). Although the number of strikes that year—109—marked an increase of only 29 since 1941, when there had been 80 strikes, the number of strikers jumped from 3,803 to 8,540. More significantly, strike intensity (the average lost workdays per striker) soared, going from 9.5 in 1941 to 16.1 in 1942.17 The immensity of the change was felt for the rest of the war period. In 1943 a record number of 143 strikes were recorded, followed by 119 strikes in each of the years 1944 and 1945. Moreover, strike intensity rose from an average of 7.4 in 1943 to a record peak of 18.8 in 1944, declining slightly to 16.8 in 1945. In 1946 the decline continued, but that does not alter the fact that Palestine’s urban workplaces had never before been as turbulent as they were in 1941–46. Not only did the ordinance prove ineffective, but there apparently was also a huge discrepancy between the reality of workplace conflict and the legal-bureaucratic means and industrial arrangements developed to handle it.18

The Primacy of Material Causes The causes of the dramatic surge in strike action hark back to the main aspect of the normalization process that took place in the 1940s—the strikes’ growing focus on material issues (wages in particular) and their parallel disentanglement from national and political aims and content. This process evolved in a context of change wrought by the war in the Palestine economy, in the towns in particular. As the economic historiography of Palestine has demonstrated, in the late 1930s the country’s economy was still in a slump, with a low rate of growth in real national product and rising unemployment.19 The outbreak of war sparked a transformation, renewing the economic growth patterns of the early 1930s. The main cause of the change was the British army’s expanding presence in the Middle East, which created large-scale demand for Palestine products and services and consequently lowered unemployment significantly. The major beneficiary was the Yishuv’s industry, which in a relatively short time had become the main engine of Palestine’s wartime economic takeoff. Prominent in this process were the expansion of the private sector, the growth in size of industrial plants and workforce, and marked changes in economic structure, namely, the decline of agriculture and construction, and the rise of the services sector and industry. Particularly strong growth was observed in private industrial activities like diamond cutting, metal and potash production, and food industries producing goods such as juices and chocolate.20

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From a labor perspective, the economic transformation was Janus-faced: it brought about full employment but at the same time led prices of essential commodities to soar. Rising inflation was soon followed by a rise in the cost of living and an ominous decline of real wages and workers’ purchasing power.21 Furthermore, new government-backed arrangements between the manufacturers and industrialists and the Histadrut, which granted workers a cost-of-living bonus that could ease the problem and ensure industrial peace, proved bureaucratically too cumbersome to be enforced and wound up relentlessly contested by manufacturers.22 The resulting pressure pushed three main groups of workers to lead the wartime surge. The first, representing a variety of skills, occupations, and workplaces, were workers who sensed that a boom was the right time to press employers to improve pay and working conditions. The strikes in the veteran industries, such as carpentry in the town of Rishon Lezion and false teeth in Tel Aviv, and in newer “war industries” like diamond cutting, well reflected this pattern. These cases reaffirm the attunement of strike action to business cycles, discussed in the last chapter. Finally, they also reflected the impact of factors external to the Palestine economy. Some industries where strikes flourished were central to Palestine’s exports, emphasizing the presence of regional and global causes in the strikes.23 The second group of workers was closely associated with the first: they likewise increasingly sensed their centrality and instrumentality to the war economy, and the extent of the booming industries’ dependence on their services. This was the case, for example, in strikes in food and metal production, but also in diamond cutting, which during the war turned into one of Palestine’s main export industries. Therefore, many of the demands that typified these workers centered on organizational issues: employers who failed to pay wages or objected to workers’ representation in matters pertaining to workers’ hiring and dismissal. The sense of labor’s collective power was founded on both the high wartime demand for industrial labor and the two-decade evolution of an enhanced presence of “strong” skilled workers in strike action. There was a direct link between the self-confidence of the Nesher cement workers who conducted a long strike campaign in the late 1920s (mentioned in chapter 2) and the self-justification and sense of legitimacy of strike action expressed by the wartime industrial workers. Moreover, some groups of workers went on strike in emulation of other groups who had already won some gains. The higher the inflation, and the wider the gap between income and purchasing power, the more widespread such imitation became, ever more reflective of the weakness of the arrangements between the employers and the Histadrut and their inability to restrain the rise in strikes.24

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The third group, who after 1942 were probably the most important, were those hit by the decline in real wages and purchasing power. A long strike by Jewish schoolteachers in 1942 and a series of short labor disputes among government white-collar employees in 1943 and 1944 were typical of this reaction to the impact of the wartime inflation, and of the selfjustified anger against the economic and employment policies of government and Yishuv institutions. In these cases, demands for an increase in real wages and application of a negotiated cost-of-living bonus were merged with calls for a series of social benefits—paid annual leave, sickness leave, dismissal compensation, payment for extra work hours, and the like.25 This mixture of actors emerged during the economic boom and became ever more dominant during the transition years of 1945–46, when the demand for labor shrank. A prominent example of this mixture was the cooperation between Arab and Jewish government employees in a dramatic joint strike in spring 1946. Moreover, many smaller groups of workers (e.g., soldiers employed in government camps) also used strikes to protest the decline in purchasing power, seeing strikes as a preventive measure against potential declines in income and organizational power, one that could effect change in material conditions. Seen in a wider perspective, this preemptive strategy was one of the novelties of the wartime strike surge.26 Finally, the wartime strikes’ focus on material issues, along with the near complete absence of nationally and politically motivated strikes, was a prime constituent of the normalization of strike action. This was evident in the increased number of short strikes and the blurred differentiation between labor disputes and strikes in industrial workplaces. The wartime press coverage conveys the impression that many small strikes were left unrecorded, and that many others received only fleeting mention, largely because they bypassed the strike-declaration and strike-resolution mechanisms enshrined in the anti-strike ordinance. General, all-industry or all-branch strikes seem to have increased as well, particularly in diamond cutting, factory-based carpentry, and chocolate manufacturing. However, and emphasizing the normalization, single-factory-based strikes and cessations of work on a particular production line within a factory were the most widespread.27

Ungovernability Both the wartime surge in strikes and their dominant material dimension point to another influential element in the normalization of strikes between 1941 and 1946: the question of social control and workers’ spaces

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of liberty. The importance of the issue stems from its long history. Three points in time can serve as a relevant introduction. The first was in 1927, when the leadership of the Histadrut attempted to centralize the processes of deciding on and starting a strike by any group of its worker-members. As we saw in chapter 2, the attempt was only partially successful and had hardly any effect on manufacturing and industry workers, such as those at the Nesher cement plant. The second point was the failure of the London agreements in 1934. As argued in chapter 3, that failure stemmed in part from the widespread outcry against the tendency, among some labor leaders in Mapai and the Histadrut, to comply with the proposed limitations on strike action and with compulsory arbitration. The interesting point here is the social composition of those who rejected the agreements— mostly urban workers, with a solid social base of industrial workers. At the third and final point in time in 1937–38, workers and unemployed in Tel Aviv struggled against the labor council that represented the Histadrut at the town level. The challenge to the council centered on aid to the unemployed and did not involve the question of workers’ liberty to go on strike; but an indirect association nevertheless still held because the rank and file in the town was averse to the Histadrut bureaucracy. These events commonly involved complex relationships between Histadrut leaders and town workers. Local Histadrut leaders on the labor councils often identified with the workers and sided with their wish to enforce work stoppages. As we saw earlier, the leadership’s difficulties in controlling and disciplining workers was clearly visible in its inability to orchestrate and manipulate the strike action of the “strong” workers. During the period of the war and the strike surge, the problem grew to new proportions.28 Two signs that the problem was reaching a climax were already apparent in 1942. One was the increase in “unauthorized strikes”; the other was the Histadrut’s repeated attempts to steer strikes it did not want, especially in the private sector. At the peak of the strikes in 1943–45, the Histadrut’s weakness in the private workplaces and the impotence of its special department for monitoring strikes demonstrated the unlikelihood of its ever realizing its longtime aspirations to central control. This was particularly true with regard to industrial workers who were members of the Histadrut yet felt that its weakness vis-à-vis the private employers legitimized independent action. The issue also encompassed, however, many workers who were not affiliated with Histadrut but rather with either the Revisionist Movement or the Communist Party, which had long waged fierce battles with the Histadrut over control of workplace representation and independent negotiations with employers.29 This was hardly new. The concentrations of strikes in both the mid 1920s and the mid 1940s coincided with periodic booms in the Palestine

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economy. These two peaks were also reached at extremely ambivalent moments for the Histadrut. The first found the recently established Histadrut in its first serious encounter with its incapacity to gain control over the Jewish workers in Palestine’s urban concentrations. Seldom were the strikes during this peak in 1924–25 initiated by the Histadrut and its urban controlling organs, the town labor councils. Moreover, to maintain its position as the main and hegemonic representative among the urban workers, the Histadrut had to try and usurp the leadership of strikes, so as to secure a significant position also vis-à-vis the private employers. The World War II peak seems to have mimicked this early syndrome. In the course of the previous two decades, the Histadrut and labor councils had worked hard to organize urban labor and enjoyed great success in building organizational communities based on Zionist-oriented goals and workplace battles. However, its bases among stronger workers— skilled, permanentsalary-earners—were hardly secure, particularly because during the war the latter found political support within Mapai itself, from a leftist faction (Sia Bet or Faction B) that split from the party in May 1944. The peak of 1942–44 found the Histadrut facing a largely uncontrolled industrial labor force and employers strengthened by the current economic boom, which seemed almost déjà vu, reminding many of the Histadrut’s trade-union functionaries of the earlier mid-1920s ordeal. Taken together, the two peaks thus point to a puzzling phenomenon in the social history of the Yishuv. On the one hand, the Histadrut grew in numbers, almost three-quarters of the Jewish labor force was affiliated with it, and the labor councils in the major urban concentrations of workers ran a sophisticated structure of community, institutions, and services. On the other hand, the two strike peaks also illuminate an increasingly yawning gap between this institutional spread and the Histadrut’s real representational capacity. The strikes were both a symptom of this gap and an expression of the workers’ persistence in pressuring the Histadrut from below to act more robustly against employers. They were therefore early precursors of the long-term weakness of organized labor in Palestine and Israel, and perhaps a chief cause of its decline in that they highlighted the gap between its political power and social frailty.30 In the final analysis, the growing weakness of the Histadrut and its inability to control strike action during World War II was reflected in the surge in strikes it did not authorize, and in the growing association between the prevalence of strong workers in the strikes and the strikes’ dominant material dimension. In the process, the frailty of the government’s anti-strike law was exposed as well. From 1942 to 1946, when the ordinance was valid, the sheer scope of the strikes made it hard for the government’s arbitration committees to decrease strike action. And the fact that a

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huge strike (i.e., the civil servants’ strike of April 1946) hit the government bureaucracy itself demonstrates the extent to which government-backed corporatist arrangements failed to balance the routinization of the strike phenomenon. As we saw earlier in the chapter, the attacks on the strike well identified this sense of uncontrollability, and developments during the course of the war confirmed it in practice. This was well reflected in the case of the diamond cutters.31Among the growing number of participants in strikes during the war, diamond cutters stood out as an epitome of the Histadrut’s limited control over the strike phenomenon. And as they became the most strike-prone workers in Palestine during the war and a major factor in the prevalence of strikes over material conditions, a closer glance at the diamond industry provides a better understanding of the entire normalization process. Diamond cutting and polishing emerged in Palestine as a result of the Nazi occupation of the Low Countries and involved a mix of international and local forces. As the war engulfed key diamond production centers, the De Beers diamond mining cartel, the British government, and Belgian exiles associated with the diamond industry steered the flow of diamonds away from Europe. Though Britain was concerned with blocking German industrial production, it also saw diamond cutting as a ready source of U.S. dollars to sustain the war effort. Officials of the Jewish Agency and Jewish entrepreneurs suggested the Yishuv as a replacement for the Low Countries, partly because of the traditional and trusted ethno-religious basis of the diamond industry. However, instead of working with the Jewish Agency, the British chose to create a diamond production monopoly in Palestine and selected Netanya’s Mayor Oved Ben-Ami, a liberal capitalist affiliated with the Yishuv’s liberal right, to manage it. Consequently the diamond industry in Palestine was tightly controlled and its expansion limited by the government so as not to endanger the revival of the Belgian diamond industry after the war. 32 A further decision by the Ministry of Economic Warfare in London and entrepreneurs in Palestine was to centralize all imports of rough diamonds and exports of polished stones. De Beers in London was to serve as the sole supplier of stones, all production was to be exported (mainly to the United States), and all workers in the industry had to be authorized. No less formative was the decision that all work was to be centralized in the framework of a factory. Cottage industry and familial induction systems, which were among the hallmarks of the industry in Belgium, were barred, and expert cutters’ and inductors’ free movement between workshops was likewise restricted. Contrary to tradition, Palestine specialized in one type of stone (the small stone or Sand), which catered to the cartel’s need to dispose of large

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reserves of such stones created by the paralysis of the Low Countries. The specialization turned Palestine into one of the world’s leading suppliers. Moreover, whereas in Antwerp it took at least three years to apprentice a cutter, and apprenticeship usually covered all types of stones and all cutting skills, the labor process in Palestine was fragmented into a chain system in which the apprentice learned just one phase of the process. The apprenticeship was shortened to six months, speeding up the cutter’s entry to production and earning. This regimentation of the industry and its mobilization for the war effort turned the network of diamond manufacturers and factories into a powerful organization that accepted only select new manufacturers and controlled the wages paid. In practice it became an extremely profitable entrepreneurial community espousing a cultural mélange of profit, nationalism, and the fight against Fascism. Supervised from above by the Palestine government and strengthened by a common sense of capitalist purpose, the industry handily exploited the persistent American demand for polished stones and the absence of competition from occupied Antwerp.33 Any explanation of the diamond workers’ relatively high propensity to strike must start with an overview of the relations and arrangements that evolved between these forces and the workers as a social pact. On one side of the pact was an expanding stratum of workers. They were mostly young and attracted to work in a venture that seemed much more promising materially than other available jobs. They quickly became highly skilled, and unlike the majority of industrial workers in Palestine, they learned skills rooted in tradition, knowledge, precision, and dexterity. On the other side of the pact were the diamond manufacturers, the providers of this economic opportunity and novel attraction in Palestine. The regimented employment structure they created was conducive to heightened efficiency and productivity. For the workers, long hours of work and the stress on their immobile bodies and strain on their eyes were coupled with constant worries over losing or harming stones. These concerns were balanced by relatively high wages protected by an all-industry collective agreement, a strong sense of workplace solidarity, and pride in their skill and in the worldwide reputation of the quality of their work. The workers therefore felt their commonality much more through the labor process, work experience, and strong allegiance to the manufacturers than through union affiliation and the presence of union activists. 34 The diamond workers’ proneness to strike was due less to a tradition of militancy than to the fact that the social pact with the factories was regularly beleaguered and often violated. After all, the legacy of strike action among diamond cutters and polishers in prewar Europe and the United States was hardly one of adversity and militancy. The cutters and polishers

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in Amsterdam and Antwerp had not expressed their radicalism through strike action so much as through robust organization, the attainment of improved pay and working conditions, piecemeal organizational (and educational) action, and sober demonstrations of power. What the leaders of the diamond workers’ unions in Amsterdam, Antwerp, London, and New York had in common was labor’s reformism and gradualism. They spent much of their organizational energy on building consensus with manufacturers and employers, and less on fighting them. This pattern defined them as a sort of a “labor aristocracy,” a term that usually connotes highly skilled jobs and workers. The employers’ respect for the leaders of the diamond workers and their organizations testified to both a sense of occupational commonality and a need to maintain industrial peace and large areas of consent.35 It is difficult to say why this reformist and non-radical legacy found less expression in Palestine, where so many of the traditions of the industry kept on informing daily life in the diamond workshops. Perhaps it was because those who arrived in Palestine were diamond experts rather than workers or union activists, and therefore the continuity of labor traditions of collective action was disrupted. It may have also been affected by the manufacturers’ insistence on not allowing the Histadrut to become the hegemonic representative of the workers and overshadow all other, minority unions. Whatever the reasons the diamond manufacturers, who were eager to reproduce the Belgian model of employment relations, repeatedly bemoaned the fact that its legacy of restraint had failed to take root. In the manufacturers’ perception, the social pact was under constant threat because of their own fragility. On the one hand, they depended on a regular supply of rough stones from London. The irregularity of the actual supply, however, a corollary of the war conditions as well as the distributive policies of De Beers, itself influenced by fluctuating demand for raw materials, and of the British policy toward the Belgian pressure to contain the expansion of the new cutting centers. The irregularity of the stone supply manifested itself sometimes in varying sizes of stones sent for cutting in Palestine, but mainly in the factories’ constant thirst for more raw materials. On the other hand, the manufacturers’ reserves were constantly in danger of dwindling because of overproduction, low-level replenishment, or uneven distribution of rough diamonds arriving from London. Each manufacturer was therefore inclined to keep reserves to preempt irregularity.36 Furthermore, to guarantee supply the manufacturers also had to cut costs by slashing the distribution of stones to the workers, decreasing the number of apprentices in their factory, or simply tampering with workers’ pay. While employing such measures, the manufacturers needed to avoid

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harming the workforce they took so much care to cultivate, and on whose trust and loyalty they so depended. They also had to take into consideration the collective agreement in the industry, which guaranteed workers’ pay during times of short supply of stones or forced temporary closure of the factories. The manufacturers often preferred not to harm their workers and instead digressed from the collective agreements. In more extreme cases, the manufacturer might choose to temporarily lock out the factory, drastically decreasing activity and reviving it only when profit levels again allowed. All in all, then, the manufacturers were incessantly calculating the extent of their exposure to sales levels in the United States, to London’s policy regarding the distribution of stones, and to the collective arrangements. Their autonomy and freedom of action, so cherished by all the liberal-oriented diamond manufacturers, was therefore limited, and on encountering these limits they opted to cut labor costs, for otherwise it would not be profitable for them to go on. This was a permanent source of pressure on relations with the workers that was often enhanced by the manufacturers, who exaggerated the extent of these dangers to the press.37 In this way, the world of booming diamond production was not just attractive as a source of income, occupational achievement, and mobility for young diamond workers in Palestine. It was also unstable and fluctuating, laden with threats to shatter the system of trust and coalescence of interest they shared with the manufacturers, the experts that taught them their skills, and the workplace that provided them with a sense of social order and economic future. The outside backing that might have been gained from the presence of a solid workers’ union and labor movement was missing. More significantly, the organization of the workers in the diamond factories was splintered among five or six unions, each affiliated to a different political party and politically oriented social movement in Yishuv society. The multiple representational structures, along with the strong presence of Revisionist and Communist supporters in the industry, precluded the Mapai-backed Histadrut from attaining sole domination in the factories and discouraged the traditional restraining barriers that the mainstream labor movement usually placed on the unrest of the urban workers.38 The diamond workers’ youth is a crucial factor in explaining their strike propensity and the limits of the Histadrut’s organizational control. Upon entering an apprenticeship at a young age, the workers expected to start earning after three months. Despite the regimentation and arduous working conditions, they enjoyed the benefits that accrued to them from their piecework. Willingness to work for hours on end, lack of familial commitment (other than to parents whom they could relatively easily provide for), and flexibility to adapt to changes in supply and sizes of stones all

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made them also susceptible to spontaneous action. They might be members of one of the five or six unions, but they were hardly satisfied with the collective agreement in the industry and had little respect for the unions’ restraining attempts. To the Histadrut activists they seemed an unruly lot, wholly dedicated to work and not easily recruited to union work, distant from values of loyalty to a labor movement, and much more inclined toward organizational independence than toward traditional unionization. The government’s labor department was aware of these traits and associated the workers’ propensity to strike with the contestation among the unions and the entry of many unaffiliated workers as a result of the industry’s expansion. These explanations may have had a ring of truth, but they ignored the relation between the entry of unorganized workers and the worker-selection policy of the manufacturers. Furthermore, they overlooked the relation between the large number of unorganized workers and the fact that when unemployment was low, more organized workers preferred not to enter the industry despite the high pay because they disliked its arduous working conditions.39 Clearly, the proliferation of strikes in the diamond industry was related to the breakdown of negotiations on collective agreements and to the workers’ consciousness of the increasing prosperity of the industry and desire to have a share in it. The young workers took the recurrent disruptions of supplies and consequent changes in work schedules for granted as a feature of their work experience, which turned stoppages into a routine. Manufacturers who wished to keep rough stones in reserve instead of distributing them for cutting were quickly accused of breaching their commitments to the apprentices and workers. Fluctuations in supply and intermittent attempts to cut labor costs and to void collective agreements of their original contents made the manufacturers seem unwilling to share their high profits from the industry. The workers’ pride in acquiring a craft, in their technological adaptability, and in the culture of the skill they cultivated deeply affected this impression. The impact of the diamond workers’ persistent propensity to strike, and of the labor organizations’ inability to restrain it, was hardly confined to employment relations. First of all, the strikes in the diamond industry added to the manufacturers’ anxiety about the steadiness of supply of raw material from London as an element of instability, whereas the image that the manufacturers wished to market, in particular to the British authorities and the Diamond Syndicate, was of a viable industry standing in the service of the war effort and the Empire. Second, the recurrent strikes exposed the weakness of the government and the manufacturers’ organization and their inability to fully control the industry, thus adding to the threats posed by the movement of experts between the factories and the

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persistence of home production. Third, the strikes forced manufacturers to take the chronic unrest into account in their business-expansion strategies. This was clearly evidenced by their growing willingness, after three or four years of operation, to attenuate their principled objection to the presence of the labor organizations and—unprecedentedly, in Palestine— to a branch-wide collective agreement.40 The strikes had a deeper organizational effect. They not only thwarted the diamond manufacturers’ attempts to prevent a meaningful presence of workers’ representation in the labor process, but also added a from-below challenge to the organizations themselves. Naturally the Histadrut responded by stepping up its efforts to widen union influence over workers, unite the organizations under its umbrella, and discipline the workers through the cultivation of loyal workshop workers’ committees. However, the recurrence of strikes only emphasized the partial effectiveness of these attempts and made the Histadrut recognize the limits of its power. Consequently Mapai and the Histadrut broadened their search for accommodation with the diamond capital owners and employers, even at the expense of alienating many of the workers.41 This sense of limited power produced negative images of diamond workers among the union leadership of the Histadrut, who associated them with all the wrongs of capitalism and unorganized labor. Focusing on the “pathology” of the workers’ attraction to personal profit and defiance of organization, the images reproduced the traditional arsenal of social animosity that Socialist Zionism cultivated against capital and the unaffiliated. The imagery never excluded a Zionist-oriented rationale for the labor movement’s need to cooperate with Jewish industrialists and capitalists; nor did it weaken the Histadrut’s quest to widen its base by tempting those objecting to organization. Nevertheless, the uncontrolled militancy in the diamond industry signified to the Histadrut that its ambivalent language toward capital and the unorganized was ineffective. It testified to the wider challenge posed to the Histadrut by workers whose working conditions and power in the workplace had been improved by the wartime boom, and who consequently were prepared to defy the authority of the Histadrut and collective interests.42 The tactics that the labor leadership used to contain these better-off workers could not work in the diamond industry because of the piecework character of the labor process and because the manufacturers took care to keep workers’ representation at bay. There was nothing left for the Histadrut but to recognize its failure and divert its best efforts to other industries. The impact, however, was wider. When the diamond workforce was created in the early stages of the war, the balance was already tipping away from the national politics of the labor market toward the social poli-

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tics of relations between capital and labor. By playing a major role in strike action, the diamond workers became a leading force in this gradual veering of relations from the national-segregationist aspects of strike action that were prevalent in the 1920s, to economic and social ones. This brings us to the final aspect of the normalization process.43

The Exception that Proves the Rule The centrality of the limits of labor-bureaucratic control to the normalization process of the war period testifies to a structural change in Palestine’s strike phenomenon. The strikes of the 1920s and 1930s could hardly have been used for national segregation or party-political power, had the Histadrut not orchestrated them, manipulated rebellious workers, and framed strikes in general in accordance with its Zionist, power-driven agendas. Traditional means of control that had been refined over a long time became questionable and ineffective in the 1940s. It is no wonder that the national and political uses of the strike now became rare, though they did not disappear completely. Indeed, the marginalization of these uses only underscores the long way the normalization process had come. Joint Arab-Jewish strikes are a case in point. As we saw in chapter 2, cross-national cooperation in strikes had begun in the 1920s. Such strikes were limited, though occasionally the Zionist-oriented Histadrut orchestrated and manipulated them. As many historians have demonstrated, their marginality was due to the Zionist agenda of the labor movement, or to the fact that they could evolve only where Arabs and Jews shared a workplace, such as in government-funded public works, the railways, and government bureaucracy. Cooperation in strikes rose slightly during the boom years of the early 1930s (see chapter 3), but it remained limited and was drastically curtailed by the deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations during the 1936–39 Arab Rebellion.44 World War II renewed cross-national cooperation in strikes. The war brought the mobilization of the Arab and Jewish communities into the British army, the expansion of the Arab and Jewish workforce in the British military camps, and an intensification of Arab union activists’ and Jewish Communists’ activities among industrial and government workers. This increase in cooperation was again limited; it had barely any impact on the statistics of the wartime strikes and left labor department officials quite indifferent to the cooperation phenomenon. The latter’s significance therefore lay much less in the political dimension of cooperation in strikes than in the thrusts of the joint collective action, namely, material issues and the challenge to the government’s employment and remunerative policies.45

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In April 1946 Palestine experienced one of the largest strikes since the beginning of British rule. It was unprecedented in terms of the number of strikers, the strike’s length, and its paralyzing effects. For the first time, masses of low-grade civil servants, with an overwhelming Arab majority, used the weapon of a general strike in Palestine’s public sector. Moreover, in contrast to any earlier collective action in either the Jewish or Arab sectors, the strike featured comprehensive cross-national cooperation combined with joint action by office and manual workers. That such an unusual strike occurred in the turbulent year of 1946 and in the midst of the Anglo-American Committee’s deliberations on the future of Palestine makes the event and the cooperation it entailed even more dramatic.46 Despite workers’ growing militancy during the war and a similar postwar strike wave across the British and French Empires, the strike came as a surprise. Politicians in Britain and Palestine were not expecting such focused militancy from government civil servants or such enthusiastic, cross-national, grassroots cooperation. Arab and Jewish activists in political parties and labor unions were confounded by their lack of influence over the strikers, and found it difficult to position the strike and its symbols of resistance and solidarity within their understanding of ethnic relations in Palestine’s public sector. Both the Arab and Jewish press wavered between enthusiasm and confusion in the face of what seemed a non-conflictual coalition of nationally oriented workers. Even more significantly, the episode ended with the government’s uncharacteristic submission to a sector of employees traditionally considered weak due to neglect and lack of organizational voice. Few expected such a complete about-face by the administration, and few, upon the outbreak of the strike, could have visualized such an outcome in this confrontation with a government that had long promised (in the context of the anti-strike ordinance) to treat its challengers harshly.47 Anger against the government had festered during the war as its employees suffered economic deterioration. However, the organization of government employees—the Second Division of the Civil Service Association—was weak, so not much happened except on two or three occasions, theatrical in themselves, when office employees came to work unshaven for a day, and another when they sat still at their desks for sixteen minutes. After the war ended, the employees reiterated their economic demands: adjustments to their cost-of-living allowances, a simplified grading system for junior officers in the government workplaces, and compensation for the decline in their real salaries and their economic losses during the war. However, government procrastination left them empty-handed. The spontaneous outbreak in the spring of 1946, apparently influenced by a postwar strike wave in both Britain and the Empire at large, expressed

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anger at this procrastination. But shortcomings in its preparation and the strikers’ lack of strategy for a long struggle again revealed the absence of strike organizers and labor politicians from either the Histadrut or the Arab workers’ unions and organizations. Furthermore, fearing government reaction, the leaders of the employees’ association even tried to prevent the outbreak of the strike.48 The strike was started by some five hundred postal workers in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, began spreading to government offices in Jerusalem and Haifa, and only a week or so later attracted railway workers to join, adding several hundred strikers. It took a few more days for the entire civil service to join in, this time finally led by the employees’ association. Near its end still other workers threatened to join in, mainly municipal workers and Arab and Jewish clerks in the British military departments. This cumulative effect underscored not only the event’s spontaneity, its “from below” and grassroots nature, but also the absence of the labor politicians. Furthermore, the persistence of cooperation throughout the three-week duration of the strike encouraged the leaders of the association not to give in to the pressure and threats of the government.49 The persistence of cooperation and the government’s role in bringing the strikers together has to be seen in the context of two contradictions. The first was economic. The government’s interests during the war, the progress of the war, and its economic cost led the Palestine government to begin an unprecedented intervention in Palestine’s economy. This meant not only intensive legal activity, such as the passage of the ordinance banning strikes in essential and war-related industries, but also deep preoccupation with running inflation, declining living standards, and shortages of essential commodities. However, although this economic interventionism was partly aimed at alleviating the conditions of the population, some of whom were mobilized by the British army; it stood in sharp contrast to older governmental principles of economizing and avoiding too much investment in Palestine from the pockets of British taxpayers. The tension between the principle of imperial economic soundness and the requirements of the new interventionism led the British to curtail support for certain parts of the population. Most government employees were monthly salary earners and enjoyed relative job permanency, so the agreements on cost-of-living adjustments did not extend to them. Furthermore, because they were the hardest hit in terms of declining real wages and purchasing power, they suffered most from lack of government action to control inflation and the black market in essential commodities.50 In 1943 the tension between the interventionist principle and the neglect of employees started to generate some joint action among employees, but this expression of a cross-national coalescence of economic interest was to

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no avail. Even after the war ended and a new Labor government emerged in England, the civil servants’ demands for alleviation of their economic tribulations remained unanswered. By winter 1946 political tension was growing, and their economic deterioration was so drastic that they had nothing to lose by setting themselves against the government. Cooperation and joint action from below was therefore a direct corollary not just of the employees’ wartime economic decline, but also of the ecology of the government workplace. In this office environment, government employees were expected to be deferent, trustworthy civil servants both appreciative and expressive of the colonial power’s benevolence, finding gratification not in economic reward but in merely holding an office. The impact of the war strengthened the sense of neglect by the government. When they compared themselves to industrial workers who received wage and allowance increases, to clerks outside the government who received higher salaries and increased cost-of-living allowances, and to higher officials who enjoyed ameliorated conditions, the civil servants felt increasingly deprived. Their social standing, as expressed in their proximity to power and loyalty to service, could not compensate for the decline in living standards or assuage their growing desperation. Furthermore, they interpreted their impoverishment, their shrinking ability to afford accommodation, and their families’ appalling state of health as paying the cost of the government’s long-standing economic policy of maintaining a low-cost administration.51 This interpretation of their economic plight increasingly revolved around references to loss of dignity and to British managers’ authoritarian attitudes, marking a sort of cultural breach in the atmosphere of the civil service workplace. These pressures and the violation of the reciprocal relations between the civil servants and the government turned the coexistence of Arabs and Jews into a coalescence of interest focused on the government as a common adversary causing their economic plight and the destabilization of their social status. Sensing a breach of the “social contract” that had evolved in the civil service, they became united not just as employees of a workplace where they shared a common loyalty to public service, but as consumers suffering the effects of war and government inaction.52 The second contradiction related to representation. On the one hand, government interventionism meant the encouragement of organized labor so as to prevent industrial unrest during the war. This was in line with an older government principle of sound trade-unionism and reliance on organized labor for peak-level contracts and prevention of wildcat strikes. On the other hand, this changed governmental attitude to organizational pluralism stopped at the doors of government offices. The government re-

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stricted civil servants’ formal affiliation with external labor organizations, and the Second Division Association, which since the late 1920s had occasioned significant Arab-Jewish cooperation, remained outside the orbit of both Histadrut and Arab union activities.53 The character of the Association reflected British attitudes to unionism and industrial relations in the United Kingdom and the Empire. In accordance with the thinking in interwar Britain, government involvement in industrial relations and labor legislation was to be minimal. Cooperation was sought between the “State” and private capital, as well as with strong workers’ sectors, so that industrial peace was attained by siding with “responsible,” “sound” unions. Consequently, the government logic held, civil servants’ employment should not impose too many costs on government. When it came to improving working conditions, preference was accorded mainly to high officials, whereas low-grade employees were expected to be efficient and restrained in their demands. The leadership of the Second Division Association, made up equally of Muslims, Christians, and Jews and headed by the Christian Haifa customs officer Labib Fuleihan, was expected to be nothing but a government department, a reliable and subdued association with minimal affiliation to organized labor. In fact, the government, by never recognizing the principle of collective bargaining in the administration, had left it to government committees to set the pay and working conditions, subject to the approval of the Colonial Office and the Treasury in London. The civil servants’ organization therefore had only limited power and was expected not to affiliate with any outside unions, especially if the latter espoused the right to strike. By treating the organization of the clerks as part of the administration, and by weakening the influence of organized labor, the government shaped both the coalescence of interest among the civil servants and the moderation of their organization. It was not merely the drop in employees’ real wages and their status anxiety that drove Arabs and Jews to cooperate with each other, but also a distinct sense that the organized forces could not overcome the government’s intransigence and the civil servants’ organization could not adequately represent them.54 This consciousness of the organizational incapacity to redress their economic and status grievances lay behind the strike. The common interests of the Arab and Jewish civil servants were based on the shared economic conditions and common sources of social prestige offered by the government bureaucracy, but also on an enclave-like organizational culture that demarcated them from the nationally oriented, more organized manual workers. That culture posed a contrast to militant action, and as was the case with nonmilitant civil servants in other parts of the Empire, it promised a solid social foundation on which the administration could rely in

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face of political tension. However, this balanced system of relations was shaken by the government’s own doings, producing a coalition of interests that defied the national-oriented politicians and the divisions among the labor organizations. The pressure to express outrage via a general strike thus originated from the rank and file, reflecting transformed relations both within the Second Division Association and between the latter and the government. The strike was an act of desperation spurred by the economic effects of the war, in open defiance of the ban on strikes. But it also expressed protest against a resilient employer that had failed to respond to long-standing grievances and loss of dignity. By ignoring the effects of the war on its employees, differentiating between sectors of workers, and keeping the Association a moderate organ, the government shaped a workplace coalescence of interest aimed at once against the government, the better-off industrial workers, and the employees’ organization itself.55 Three pictures recur in the archival and press depictions of the strike. One is the strikers’ street procession, the second is the presence of the British police and often the army, and the third is the presence of crowds or the public. The impact of the strike would have remained muted but for the joint processions in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, which intensified as the strike unfolded. The presence of mounted police and the almost total absence of violence by strikers framed the drama of the strike in an atmosphere of potent silence and defiance of imperial authority. The cross-national sympathy of the public—from the congregational scenes in front of Jerusalem’s government buildings to the mixed neighborhoods in Haifa—did not surprise the strikers. The Arab and Jewish press, though ambivalent about cross-national cooperation, joined in this street-level sympathy by closely observing both the negotiations and the crowd support for the strikers. Meanwhile, the fleeting street culture of sympathy with this cross-national event merely underscored the weakened presence of the Zionist-oriented labor politicians. It demonstrated how the urban space, so commonly considered a crucial dimension of political control and national division, could precipitate a sense of solidarity, albeit a temporary one.56 The strike resonated widely, paralyzed the government, and ended with gains to the employees. However, despite sparking the imagination of many commentators on the political left in Palestine, the political effect of the strike was limited. The strikers did not intend to make any political use of the strike, and the rare phenomenon of cooperation moved the two national communities only slightly. In this sense, this form of joint cross-national strikes reached its climax with the civil servants’ strike. At the same time, however, it demonstrated how far the strike had departed

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from the political uses expressed in the Jewish pro-segregation strikes of the 1920s and the Arab anti-colonial strikes of the 1930s.57 The government’s annulment of the anti-strike ordinance in late April 1946 had little effect on their persistence:58 strikes did not decrease significantly in number in the latter part of the year. Moreover, their resonance was even amplified, as seen in strikes by 400 workers at the chocolate factories in Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv in May 1946 and by 600 workers at the Dead Sea Works in late July. In both cases, and in many other strikes that followed the war’s end, a similar contestation recurred: workers stressed the gains private industry had enjoyed during the war, demanded material improvements to compensate for the decline in their real wages, and largely ignored the restraining attempts of the Histadrut.59 Both these strikes were lengthy, and the large number of strikers raised the average of workdays lost. Moreover, they stressed the Histadrut’s and Jewish Agency’s inability to mediate between the workers’ committees and the managements. This was further exacerbated by the pressure the government and the Jewish Agency were under in this period as they dealt not only with the heated debates on the political solution to the Palestine conflict, but also with postwar economic rehabilitation and reintegration of veteran soldiers in the workplaces. It is little wonder that the strikes over material issues became more numerous among Arabs as well and were accompanied by a number of joint strikes with Jews. As we saw earlier, workers’ crossing of the national divide had long testified to the prevalence of economically motivated strikes, and to their capacity to mitigate what might otherwise be a highly political collective act.60 Affirming the process was a strike at the spinning mills at the urbanizing plantation of Petach Tikvah in late 1946 that touched upon the thorny relations between the labor and Revisionist movements. Histadrut-backed workers at the two spinning mills (Siv and Hasharon) started the strike against their Revisionist-backed employers for dismissing them unjustly and replacing them with Revisionist workers. The wider political backing the two sides enjoyed stemmed from the more principled question regarding the Revisionist Right’s refusal to cooperate with the labor movement in running general labor exchanges, on the grounds that the exchanges would be manipulated to cater mainly to Histadrut members and job seekers. The strike turned violent, with Revisionist strikebreakers struggling against workers whom the Histadrut-backed Petach Tikvah labor council had sent to guard the strikers.61 For many observers, the event’s transformation into a party political struggle recalled the fierce battles between Right and Left at the Froumine factory in Jerusalem in 1932, and the grave political tensions that accompanied the debates over the London agreements in the mid 1930s. How-

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ever, the exceptionality of this politically oriented strike demonstrates how marginal the use of strikes in party political struggles had become by the 1940s. Over the decade strikes had matured into a routine phenomenon, not just by focusing on material issues but also by effectively reducing politically and nationally oriented strikes to a minimum. It was as if the strike phenomenon, in the closing years of the British Mandate over Palestine, finally freed itself of the national, political, and even ideological constraints placed on it in the 1920s and 1930s. It could now focus on its primary nature as a temporary, usually short-lived struggle against Jewish private employers often backed by the British authorities, for the purpose of protecting material status, improving organizational positions in the workplace, and securing material gains. For that reason we now turn to the political changes taking place in Palestine at the end of the Mandate and their effects on the strike phenomenon and its depoliticized character.62

 5

From Social Act to Social Right, 1947–1951

There are spheres of life in which the Histadrut cannot allow small groups of workers to decide on their own working and organizational norms and thereby determine the fate of the state. Gentlemen, whoever demands the freedom of strike and is not just paying lip service must know that that freedom is bought at the price of supreme national responsibility. Whoever talks in the name of the freedom of strike in disassociation from the basics of supreme national responsibility is in fact demanding the right to lawlessness. Whatever our differences of opinion may be—in philosophy, in worldview, in political orientation—as long as we all stand on a Zionist foundation, on the basis of statist responsibility, it is inconceivable that two hundred workers in the electricity company can lock out the electricity in the entire country and paralyze the state’s economy; inconceivable that six hundred [maritime] workers can of their own mind disconnect the state from all ties with the external world. In this case our mission is crystal clear. —Pinchas Lavon (General Secretary of the Histadrut 1949–50, minister in Ben-Gurion’s government in 1951), Divrei Haknesset, 10 December 1951 How did we emerge from the strike? In my eyes there are many important material achievements, and they were at the root of the struggle. No less important in my eyes was that we raised the stature of the seamen in the country and we did not get down on bended knees. —Nimrod Eshel, in Lissak, Moshe. Ed., Forty Years to the Seamen’s Strike: A Colloquium, 1992 (p. 46)

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Interlude The transition from British rule over Palestine to Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel in 1947–48 saw strike action drastically decline, and then, from spring 1949, begin to multiply, a trend that continued well into 1951. Though strike action never regained the volume and intensity it had in the early 1940s, the renewed strike vibrancy and the particular contexts in which it occurred raise many questions. Why did strikes resume in such force just as society was emerging from a turbulent war and the new state was in its initial stages of institutionalization? Which groups of workers led the resurgence to face a new government led by Mapai, the leading force in the Jewish Agency and in the labor movement? And what does this renewed action teach us about the relationships between strikes and nation building, which had now turned into state building? Figure 5.1. Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1947–1951

Fig gure 5.1 Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1947-1951

140 120 100 80 60 40 20

1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1.

Table 5.1. Strikes in Palestine/Israel, 1947–1951 Year

Strikes

Strikers

Lost Workdays (d)

Size

Duration

Intensity

(n)

(w)

(w/n)

(d/n)

(d/w)

1947

54

3,589

49,693

 66

  920

14

1948

52

3,141

 9,095

 60

  175

 3

1949

52

9,363

63,458

180

1,220

 7

1950

57

7,308

50,901

128

  893

 7

1951

63

8,026

94,537

127

1,501

12

Source: See Figure I.1.

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Any explanation of the renewed strike activity of this period must take into account the differences in the impact of the preceding wars. World War I silenced strikes in Palestine completely because the social bases of manufacturing and industrial workers were still small and the war paralyzed Palestine’s urban economy. The Arab Rebellion of 1936–39 produced a similarly depressing effect, as did the invigorated presence of British soldiers and police in Palestine’s towns. World War II, however, had an opposite effect: strike action reached its peak, and the war-related economic boom and independent strike action among a variety of workers also fueled strike action in the year after the war ended.1 The 1948 war was entirely different, foremost because it was preceded by long months of British preparation for retreat from rule over Palestine. During this long period between late 1946 and early 1948, the volume of strikes began to contract. Secondly, strike action declined because of the war’s human and material cost in terms of social mobilization of Arabs and Jews, the number of casualties to both societies, the expulsion of many Arabs from towns and urban workplaces, and not least the economic destruction that the war entailed. Finally, 1948 was distinctive because of what happened immediately afterward: the establishment of sovereign rule over Palestine by the Jews, the initial stages of the institutionalization of the State of Israel, the absorption of significant numbers of Jewish immigrants, and the consequent economic slowdown. The complexity of this transition period encompassing both war and regime change had a huge contextual effect on Palestine’s and later Israel’s labor relations systems.2 With regard to the strike phenomenon, three developments deserve emphasis. The first was change in the state sector. Not only did the source of state authority change, but the government of the new state was also now dominated by Mapai. As a result, Israeli state institutions underwent a change of sovereignty while also gradually becoming a huge employer. The second noteworthy development, closely related to the first, was the empowerment of the Histadrut. This largest union umbrella organization, in which Mapai was the dominant party, became the chief labor and economic lever of the new state and the domicile of dramatically expanding unions of state public-sector employees. The third development was a pact struck between the new Mapai-led government and Jewish private capital, which focused on the state’s dependence on capital for its economic recovery and on capital’s expected gains from its participation in the state-building effort. Given the state’s often tense, complicated relations with both the Histadrut and private capital, this emerging corporatist infrastructure impinged on the country’s labor relations and thus on strike activity.3

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These developments made public-sector strikes against the state much more likely than they had been during the British Mandate period. Many Jewish workers once employed in the private sector, as well as many newly absorbed immigrants, became state employees, affiliated themselves with expanding unions in the public sector, and thus turned into a potentially powerful force that the new state had to contend with. Meanwhile the Histadrut, which through political channels was now very close to the sources of power and authority, found it difficult to orchestrate strikes now that it was expected to serve as a strike-restraining force. This was especially true in view of the expectations of private capitalists, and of owners of private industry in particular, that their pact with the government—based on the jointly felt need to advance Israeli state-building—would be reflected in the restraint of strikes and sophistication of arbitration mechanisms.4 Confronting this restructuring of power in the industrial relations system were workers who benefited from the expanding state sector and, more significantly, private-sector workers who felt it was the right moment to impact the formation of the new rules and norms in labor relations in the new state. Whereas mostly private-sector workers, such as diamond cutters, had stood at the forefront of industrial action during the peak striking years of World War II, now more variegated groups of potential strikers in both the private and state sectors took the stage. With the collapse of the restraints of the war period and the tremendous changes in the country’s government, these groups began to compare each other’s working and pay conditions, their respective organization and leverage ability, and, more significantly, their relative distance from the Mapaiassociated centers of political power. These activities presaged their emergence as the main carriers of strike action at the turn of the decade and in the early 1950s.5 Against this complex background of institutional, economic, and social change and the striking activity of these groups, another change was discernible in the character of the strike phenomenon. Throughout Palestine’s years under British sovereignty, the bulk of strike activity had not addressed the government. Despite the continued validity of the Ottoman ruling against strikes in essential services, and despite the short-lived anti-strike law promulgated by the government during World War II, the government was never really expected to promise to legally define the right to strike and practically ascertain its protection—not even during the Arab anti-colonial strike of 1936, when the hard-pressed British authorities felt a need to add a separate formal treatment of strikes to existing ordinances and legal codes. The right to strike was therefore much more an element of the Yishuv’s internal ideological contentions and party poli-

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tics than a wider constitutional issue for the colonial sovereign to contend with. In that sense, the notion that strikes were a constituent of an evolving democratic culture was an intra-Yishuv matter. And it surfaced either in Mapai and Histadrut opposition to the concept of compulsory arbitration advanced by the Yishuv’s liberal right and industrialists, or in workers’ insistence on initiating strikes independently of the Histadrut. In the context of changing sovereignty, however, it took on a totally new face.6 Whereas during 1941–46 there had been a normalization of strikes, evident in strikes’ almost complete focus on a “materialist agenda” free of national and politically oriented issues, now the agenda of the strikes would become more diversified and nuanced, progressively bringing in more principled questions of rights, fairness, and democracy. Put differently, strikes in the latter part of the 1940s and in the early 1950s would advance not only bread-and-butter issues but also broader, more principled norms, including the question of the legitimacy of the strike itself. To differentiate it from the earlier normalization phase, I have chosen to term it democratization, whereby the issues advanced in strikes, during the early institutionalization of political sovereignty in the State of Israel, became grounded in universal notions of rights, democracy, and legitimacy. In the course of the prior four decades, strikes had established themselves as an embedded and outspoken feature in society, but now, in the new context of state sovereignty, they would enhance claims for workplace rights, organizational democracy, and the formal legitimacy of the strike in the new state. That this universalization of the strike and its reflection of “democratic impulses” from below emerged in the contexts of war, social upheaval, and regime change merits further examination.7

Decline In 1947 the booming strike action of previous years declined significantly (see Figure 5.1 and Table 5.1). Compared to the 117 strikes and lockouts in 1945, their number decreased to 54 in 1947, and strike intensity fell from an average of 21 lost workdays per striker in 1945 to 14 in 1947. The number of strikers in 1947 was exceptionally high due to an Arab workers’ strike in the government’s department of public works in May 1947 and a joint Arab-Jewish strike in British army camps the same month. But the trend of declining intensity continued, reaching a record low of 3 in 1948, largely because of war mobilization. Correspondingly, the average duration of strikes in 1948 plummeted compared to 1947.8 The decline pointed to a strong association between worsening economic conditions and reduced demand for labor. This was especially so in Jewish

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industry and in government employment in the army and bureaucracy. Even though Arab workers struck more in 1947 than ever before—largely due to intensified union organization and British demilitarization—the overall trend of decline in strikes and strikers was clear-cut. The decreased demand for labor was in part a product of economic competition with European economies that were continuously rehabilitating themselves from the ravages of the world war. Significantly, however, the decrease also paralleled an earlier rise in unemployment in Palestine as soldiers returned to civilian life and Holocaust survivors arrived in the country. More troubling still were the growing political destabilization brought about by debates over the future of Palestine, worsening relations between the Palestine government and the Yishuv and between Arabs and Jews, and increasing awareness of a possible British retreat from Palestine. The government initiative in late 1947 to establish industrial courts, albeit without forcing the sides to bring their disputes for deliberation seemed to confirm the trend of weakening British intervention in the economy and in employment relations since the war years. As during the political discord of 1936–39, tensions between capital and labor seemed to ease in the political contexts and changing political atmosphere of the late 1940s, and the enthusiasm of workers in manufacture and industry—the main carriers of strike action in earlier years—died away.9 The contraction of strikes continued during the long war between Arabs and Jews in 1948–49, further corroborating the association between striking and political and security conditions in the closing years of the British Mandate. In 1947 and 1948 there were only half as many strikes as during the World War II years. Furthermore, between 1947 and 1948, Arabs’ participation in strikes declined. The economic suffering wrought by the war and the particular harm to the Arab urban population contributed to the disruption of the unionization process among Arabs after World War II, and the channeling of social wrath for political purposes.10 The political and security situation affected the overall decline by reducing not only the number of strikes but also their size, frequency, and duration (see Figure 5.1). Apart from the decline, however, the strikes in 1948 exhibited some interesting features. First, although they continued to center on industry, there was an intriguing rise in strikes in public services—namely, those provided by Jewish institutions during the transition from British rule to Jewish sovereignty. This was the beginning of a long-term structural change (which is beyond the focus of the current discussion) toward growth of strike action in Israel’s public sector, unheard of during the Mandate. The change was due to the expansion of the Jewish public sector as well as the fact that it was the public sector that absorbed incoming Jewish immigrants, largely through the labor exchange of the

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Histadrut, on which the party in power depended heavily. Herein lay another reason for the declining volume of strike action: the growing power of the Histadrut during the state-building period. Also interesting is the fact that despite the war conditions, the strikes in 1948 focused on wages.11 Regardless of the temporary loss of the momentum of the boom years, strikes did not entirely disappear, not even during the trying period of the war. The reason was twofold. First, some groups of workers interpreted their participation in the war effort (through enhanced production and provision of essential services) as entitling them to retain some claim to the right to strike. Second, although the Histadrut turned into an essential factor in mobilizing workers and workplaces during the war, and though it repeatedly emphasized the importance of strike restraint for the war effort, its power to enforce its approach was often limited.12 Two strikes in 1948 provide a case in point. The first broke out in April 1948 among clerks in the Palestine electricity company who were demanding compensation in four installments for unpaid salaries in 1947. The company’s management, which was itself mobilizing its production toward the war effort, preferred eight installments and began negotiating with the Tel Aviv labor council, the local representative of the Histadrut. The clerks disagreed and went on strike, completely disregarding the Histadrut’s call to refrain from striking. Only the Histadrut’s threat of disciplinary measures against clerks who were Histadrut members convinced the latter to shorten the strike.13 A similar case of workers using the strike in wartime for material self-protection was the Tel Aviv bakeries strike in November 1948. Here the workers protested against the bakery owners’ delay in paying a costof-living allowance previously agreed upon with the Histadrut. The owners’ immediate response to the strikers was to shut down the bakeries in a tit for tat that quickly caused bread shortage in the Tel Aviv area. A few days later, the new labor relations department at Israel’s ministry of interior convinced the sides to end the stoppage and return to negotiations. Evidently the pressure of the war and the sense of the presence of a new sovereign government were crucial factors not only in preventing strikes, but also in shortening their duration. Also discernible was the Histadrut’s dual and ambivalent position in the new state as an expanding employer as well as a workers’ representative and orchestrator of strikes.14

Reclaiming Rights The new government’s growing presence in strikes was a clear by-product of the wartime running of the Yishuv and the early institutional drive of

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the State of Israel. However, nothing reflected that presence more than the upsurge in strikes. The countertrend became evident in the latter part of 1949, when the number of workers participating in strikes trebled compared to the previous year. It continued into the early years of the 1950s: in 1951 the number of workdays lost to strikes was almost double that in 1947 (see Table 5.1). Although dumbfounded by this renewal of workers’ agitation in a period of early recovery from the war, many contemporaries clearly identified its direct association with government policies. In May 1949 the government announced a new economic policy of austerity. Its aim was to contend with the dire economic conditions wrought by the war and the growing influx of Jewish immigrants into Israel by artificially lowering the population’s standard of living. Foods and various commodities were rationed and their prices placed under a strict system of control. Employers, now hard put to raise commodity prices, were consequently less able to pay their workers’ cost-of-living allowance. Furthermore, with the consent of the Histadrut, the Mapai-led government decided to intervene more deeply by cutting the allowance altogether to ease the pressure on employers and curb workers’ expectations of adjustment of their wages to inflation. The strike wave was clearly a corollary of the consequent decline in workers’ real wages and standard of living.15 The first sign of unrest came in the chocolate industry, where a strike of some eight hundred workers paralyzed production at the Liber and Elite factories for almost two months. Close to 40,000 workdays were lost in that strike and paying the workers for those days quickly turned into a thorny issue. The workers, initially backed by the Histadrut, claimed that since the responsibility for the strikes was not theirs alone, the employers should participate in funding the cost of the strike. The employers rejected this argument, whereupon the Histadrut, wishing to quickly conclude the dispute, began pressing the workers to soften their position. The matter was finally resolved by arbitration that promised the workers a significant part of the compensations they demanded. However, the significance of the affair lay must less in its material aspects than in the workers’ claim that the Histadrut, in its attempt at rapprochement with the employers, almost cost the workers something they were entitled to. This advancement of the notion of entitlement, addressed to both employers and the Histadrut, harbingered the wider meaning of the evolving strike wave of this period.16 That wave brought different groups of workers together. The 1,000 workers at the Ata-Textile factory in Israel’s north, backed by the Haifa labor council, demanded the management’s consent to renew the collective agreement, payment of the cost-of-living allowance it was supposed to promise, and a general pay raise. Teachers in Jerusalem stopped work

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in protest of nonpayment of their salaries. Postal workers warned the government that a strike would break out unless their demands were met regarding payment adjustments. In all these cases, the demands sprang from the growing sense, among private- and public-sector workers alike, that agreements would not be fulfilled, and that changing economic conditions were about to somewhat weaken the arrangements that provided them some protection. Key in this process was the mounting tension between workers and the Histadrut over the latter’s subservience to the government as well as the backing the political left provided the workers.17 The most notable example of this tension was a nine-day strike by 170– 200 workers at the metal factory of Magen-Chetwood in Petach Tikvah in June 1949. The strike, which broke out with the encouragement of the leftist Mapam and Maki (Communist) parties, lacked the authorization of the Histadrut. The latter immediately declared it a wildcat strike and therefore unlawful. The formal cause of the strike was the employer’s unwillingness to reinstate a worker who had been recruited to the war and wished to return to work. The employer preferred to employ another worker who cost him less, and also rejected the workers’ demand that he pay for the lost strike days.18 The Petach Tikvah labor council and the Histadrut backed his refusal because the workers’ committee that ran the strike was closely associated with the two leftist parties. Moreover, Mapai and the Histadrut leadership became alarmed because many of the workers in the factory, despite supporting Mapai, agreed with the strike.19 The strike therefore turned into a large-scale political contention encompassing the issues of the rights of the returning soldier, strike pay, obedience to the labor council, and Mapai’s dominance. Moreover, it fitted well with both the political left’s campaign against the government’s new economic policies and, from the other side, Mapai’s aspiration to contain strike action during the economic austerity. The affair ended when the Histadrut agreed to recognize the validity of the demands and the legitimacy of the leftist-oriented strike committee, and consequently convinced the employer to accept arbitration. The returning soldier was reinstated and a partial pay for the strike days was agreed upon.20 The wider significance of the affair and of the strike wave in general, lay in the workers’ growing awareness of the presence of a new sovereign government, the close alliance between that government and the Histadrut, and the potential that alliance bore for siding with private employers at the expense of the workers. Many workers facing this alliance in both the public and private sectors of the economy saw strike action as a lever for protecting material rights—such as soldiers’ rights, strike pay, and political pluralism at the workers’ committee level—while also guarding the very right to strike and its legitimacy, despite government

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and Histadrut opposition. For this reason a variety of groups of skilled workers and semiprofessional employees, such as teachers and nurses, now joined the strike wave, aspiring to protect and advance their interests by exercising this notion of the right to strike during state-building. Interpreting the Histadrut’s wavering over strikes as a weakness that impaired its capacity to fully guard that right, these various workers refueled the strike wave, often without planning or cooperation between them, forcing the government to respond.21 The nationwide nurses’ strike in July 1950 is a case in point. Nursing, which had always been central to the social mobility of women in the Yishuv, was in dire straits despite its prestige and professional attraction. The occupation was persistently understaffed and had fallen into a sort of crisis in the months leading up to the strike, due to the heavy pressure of Jewish immigrants on the medical services, a shortage of nurses and training programs, and retirement of nurses because of stagnating remuneration and distance from their families. This crisis was reflected in the partial representation of the nurses through the clerks’ union, and the government’s expectation that the nurses would participate in creating the care infrastructure of the new state and maintain industrial peace.22 Against this background, nurses in the government, municipal, and Hadassah hospitals organized themselves as a section within the clerks’ union so as to press their demands: a 42-hour, six-day workweek during the summer months, higher family allowances, longer vacations, and— their main demand—the shortening of each shift to six or seven hours. Clearly, the material dimension of the demands masked the striking nurses’ underlying drive: to get the new state to reaffirm its recognition of the rights of an occupational group with distinctive skills. Moreover, the government was expected to fulfill its part in the pact with the nurses: to translate its recognition of the nurses’ contribution to state-building and the personal price they had paid in war and immigrant absorption into significant improvement of their working conditions. For the nurses, the time was ripe to strike, not just because the state depended totally on their services but also because they felt pressured, as professional workers, to set norms and shape society’s perception of their status.23 In the context of state-building, the institutional response to the two thousand striking nurses made the event all the more important. The Histadrut and the clerks’ union initially supported the demands because they focused on improving working conditions and drawing family allowances. In the face of the nurses’ persistence, however, they quickly changed position, harshly criticizing the nurses’ demand to shorten working hours and exerting heavy pressure on them to stop the strike. At this stage Golda Meir, the labor minister, declared that the strike had to be

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broken, accusing the nurses of contradicting the essence of their work, which was to care for the sick, and of acting in their own self-interest at a time of poverty and austerity. Accepting the nurses’ right to strike, she argued, did not mean they could bring the entire country’s medical and caring services to a standstill; it was therefore incumbent on the Histadrut to outlaw the strike. This statist response was reminiscent of the use of national arguments in the strikes of the 1920s. However, it also rested on the idea that strikes, particularly in essential services, could be banned without even resorting to compulsory arbitration first. Thus the nurses’ strike exemplified the escalating tension between the Mapai-led government and Histadrut on the one hand, and groups of semiprofessional and skilled workers on the other, who demonstrated a capacity to mobilize widespread public solidarity in 1949–51.24 The strike ended after five days, when the Histadrut agreed to present the strikers’ demands to the government on condition that they resume their work in the hospitals and clinics. Subsequently the government consented to grant the demands regarding vacation and pay. However, it procrastinated in accepting the demand for a shorter workweek, pointing to the shortage of nurses in Israel. Many nurses, bitter about the way the strike had ended, turned against the male-dominated clerks’ union, which they claimed served the Mapai politicians in the Histadrut. A few weeks later the nurses created an independent union within the Histadrut that would renew their campaign in the coming years, when questions concerning the professionalization of nursing and gender-oriented discriminatory pay policies would serve as the motivation for strike action. This gender dimension intersected with class and nationality in ways that are beyond the scope of the present discussion.25 Strikes, as those by the nurses and other groups of workers during the early 1950s demonstrate, came to reflect not only a struggle for levers to protect or advance rights, but also a stance on how to survive and thrive in a world that perceived the Histadrut as an ambivalent representational force deeply tied to and dependent on the Mapai bureaucracy, and a mouthpiece for a state-building government. These groups drew their power less from adherence to state-building, to which they were undoubtedly committed, and much more from their work and skill, their identity as an interest group, and their specific occupational solidarity. The most expressive example of this process, and the one with which this book ends, was the 43-day seamen’s strike in autumn 1951. From any perspective on the history of strikes in Israel, it is the most noticeable. The most researched individual strike in Israel’s history of industrial relations, it has also come to occupy a major place in society’s collective memory—from which strikes are usually missing. Moreover, the impor-

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tance accorded it in the historiography is the reason why it is one of the few strikes referred to in more principled discussions—on the history of Israel’s democracy, the history of the political rivalry between the left and center in Israeli politics, and the history of Israel’s place in the Cold War. Evidently, what made the strike such a memorable event was the brutal attitude of the Mapai government toward the strikers, exemplified by the manipulation of union politics, police violence, and the recruitment of some of the strike’s leaders for military service. With the new sovereign government’s harsh treatment of the strikers, and the social mobilization of sympathy for the strikers that it provoked in many quarters, the strike came to mirror and touch upon certain delicate aspects of the nature of democracy in the new state after the 1948 war.26 For this reason we must recap the larger trajectories drawn in the discussion so far. The strike had emerged in Palestine half a century earlier as part of a growing awareness among Jewish workers of the strike weapon as a multipurpose tool for defending workers’ rights and attempting to improve material conditions. Before World War I it evolved very slowly, within hostile legal and political climates where the protection of workers’ rights was practically nonexistent. It gradually took shape in a mix of the struggles of workers and their political organizers against the paternalism of the employers, protest against harsh employment policies, and a persuasion campaign to induce Jewish employers to prefer hiring Jews over Arab workers. This mixture gained power after World War I and in the course of the 1920s—in the context of regime change, the advance of the Zionist project, urbanization, and the growing power of private capital—because it combined both social and national campaigns as the Histadrut attempted to manipulate the strike to acquire positions of power in the labor market and in workplaces. By the 1920s it was becoming clear to workers in towns that it was not only the Palestine government that provided no protection to workers, but also the Yishuv itself and even the labor movement. Caught between the private employers’ far superior power in the Yishuv economy and the high priority the Histadrut placed on promoting national-segregationist campaigns in the labor market and workplaces, the labor movement was clearly unable to fulfill Jewish town workers expectations’ regarding representation and protection. The growing stratum of factory workers who confronted the private employers daily felt this deficit strongly. Against this background the number of strikes soared, the Histadrut’s partial control of strike action was becoming notorious and its bureaucratic attempts to restrain the workers were minimally effective. On the eve of Mapai’s emergence as the dominant political force in the Zionist nation-building process, the reality of partial orchestration of strike

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action and incapacity to moderate workers’ agitation was gradually being grasped. Striking took another turn during the economic boom of the early 1930s. As conflicts between workers and employers escalated and strikes (among both Arabs and Jews) over material improvement intensified, the uses of the strike weapon for political purposes expanded. In contrast to the 1920s, it was used much less to achieve the ethnic segregation of the labor market than to solidify political power in the Yishuv economy and society. As we saw earlier, the change helped to clarify the boundaries between those who upheld the right to strike and those who aspired to delegitimize it. Furthermore, the rejection of the London accords between Mapai and the Revisionists demonstrated that the Right’s fierce ideological attack on the strike, and the Histadrut’s relentless attempts to restrain strike action from within labor ranks, were but a reflection of the strike’s embeddedness in employment relations in the private sector, particularly among town factory workers. The power of private capital—exemplified by the paucity of collective agreements and lack of serious consideration of the workplace presence of workers’ committees—was well felt by these workers. Neither the imperatives of the Zionist project nor Mapai’s campaign for power could quell the latter’s resort to striking. If anything, it was not these national, ideological, and political forces that restrained the strikes in the 1930s, but rather the economic tide of the mid decade and the onset of the Arab Rebellion. The tension over the spread of strikes seemed to ease in the latter part of the 1930s but reemerged in full force in the early 1940s. The wartime peaking of strikes reflected the gap between Mapai’s political influence in the Yishuv on the one hand, and the weakness of the Histadrut in the labor market and workplaces on the other. Moreover, it underscored the discrepancy between the town workers’ participation in the war effort (at home and at the front) and the returns they expected from the government and their employers in workplaces. Neither the anti-strike law of 1942 nor the corporatist arrangements between the Histadrut and the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association could stop the expansion of strikes, an inability that clearly revealed strikes as further embedded in society, normalized, and distanced from national and political agendas. The cumulative effect of this process became evident in the postwar period and the watershed events of 1948. Despite the reduction in strike intensity (see Figure 5.1 above and Figures A.3, A.4 and A.5 in the appendix), all corners of society strongly sensed that strike action was an available, legitimate means of exerting economic and social pressure. Unsurprisingly, the accumulation and publication of quantitative information on labor disputes and strikes burgeoned during this period.27

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The reenactment of that awareness in the context of changing sovereignty over Palestine and the enormous material pressures of 1949–51 spurred employees to a novel type of action. On the basis of a threedecades-long tradition of strikes as a regularized, routinized social form of collective action, various groups of workers now began to present their rights and their strategies for protecting them to the state-led Mapai and the Histadrut itself. Strike action, formally recognized by the new government as a right but in practice derogated and negated in the name of state-building, lay at the heart of these strategies. It was perceived as an inalienable right that could not be undermined by either the task of state-building or the need to maintain the alliance between state, employers, and the Histadrut. The seamen’s revolt was the culmination of that mindset, largely because of a transformation that took place in the course of the strike.28 The strike originated from two issues. One was material: starting in mid 1951, the seamen had contested the right of the Shoham commercial ship owner (later ZIM, co-owned by the government and the Histradrut) to curtail foreign currency allocations when its ships docked in foreign ports. The second issue concerned organizational democracy: the seamen were protesting against their undemocratically elected union and Mapai’s dominance in the union’s opposition to their aspirations for a democratic union, organizational autonomy, and militancy. Material demands, the Histadrut’s bureaucratic control (through the Haifa labor council), and party politics in union matters coalesced into a highly contentious political issue.29 In early June the seamen established an autonomous organization led mostly by non-Mapai members and, on one of the ships, independently negotiated the issues of foreign currency and improvement of a variety of working conditions. A strike broke out, and on the ship’s return to Haifa the government handed five seamen draft notices from the Israeli army. The argument was that the seamen were exempt from conscription only as long as they were at sea. Seamen on another ship that was approaching the coast launched a sympathy strike, and policemen were quickly sent to force them off the ship. The seamen responded by suing the Mapaicontrolled seamen’s union and the Haifa labor council in a Histadrut court. The council and the union subsequently filed a countersuit against the seamen. In October 1951 the Histadrut court began its deliberations, but on orders from Mapai addressed only the claims of the council and the union, totally ignoring the seamen’s. Just as the court was about to decide in the seamen’s favored, however, it was adjourned. At this stage Mapam, the largest leftist party in opposition to Mapai in the government, mobilized support for the seamen. In response to these legal machinations

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and the Histadrut’s refusal to grant their autonomous union full independence, the seamen assembled on 4 November 1951 and decided to resign. This was the beginning of the “great strike,” which involved some nine hundred seamen and practically paralyzed the entire commercial navy and Israel’s naval connection to the world.30 The 43-day strike mobilized two forces. On one side stood the state, the Mapai-led government, the Histadrut, the Haifa labor council, and the center and right-wing parties in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament). On the other side were the seamen, the political opposition consisting of Mapam and the Communist Party, and many supporters among kibbutz members, writers, poets, journalists, and artists. The division clearly reflected the politicization of the strike, which had turned from a social conflict into a debate over the centralist orientation of the Israeli government and its reflection in the debate over union democracy and the treatment of popular discontent. Furthermore, the issue of union democracy and political control quickly turned into a more principled rift over the essence of Israel’s democracy as such. Mapai perceived the seamen-Left camp as a subversive threat and challenge to the government, one that was undermining efforts to tackle Israel’s dire social and economic problems. On the opposing side, the seamen and their supporters on the Left insisted that the threat to democracy came from Mapai and its emissaries in the government and the Histadrut. The strike was essential to both rationales, one side claiming that it was basically illegal because it challenged Israel’s democracy, and the other arguing that the strike epitomized democracy and its right to voice opposition to injury to workers’ dignity, political control of unions, and government-led bureaucratic centralism.31 The central role of the strike itself in the entire affair, however, was due not just to its duration and the divisive climate it shaped, but primarily to the way it was suppressed. First, the Haifa labor council established a committee to organize workers who volunteered to replace the seamen on the ships. Second, the army and the defense ministry prepared draft notices for the strike’s leaders. Third, the navy and the police were ordered to prepare for a takeover of the ships. The actual breaking of the strike began in late November with the issuance of draft notices to thirty-four seamen including the strike leaders, followed by the brutal evacuation of the ships. On 14 December, known in Israel’s history as Black Friday, matters came to a head when the police raided the Haifa port, violent clashes erupted on the ships, and the seamen were forced off of them. Next, the strikers’ leaders and the Histadrut signed an agreement, under which the strikers were to return to work and the Histadrut to press for the conscripted strikers’ release from military service. On 24 December the seamen ratified the agreement and decided to call off the strike.32

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The crushing of the strike transformed its initial politicization. The deployment of the police and army shifted the spotlight to the attack on the strikers, their principled resort to striking, and—despite the state’s recognition of the formal right to strike—its relative legitimacy. That the government saw the strike as needing to be violently suppressed only reaffirmed the process whereby, in the early stages of Israeli statehood, strikes became part of the contestation over social rights—not simply the right to protest against workplace paternalism, employers’ policies, and workers’ subordination to management authority, or to bicker over the delimitation of working and legal arrangements; but the right of strike itself as a universally based code and value. From the perspective of three decades of development, this completed the transformation that paralleled the routinization of the strikes: the contestation went from material, national, and politically based arguments about the legitimacy of strike action, to the entrenchment of the strike’s status as an inalienable right that was not to be surrendered to the retaliatory powers of the sovereign state.33 The immensity of the seamen’s strike slowly became apparent in the following weeks. The harsh language used by the participants, each side’s extreme image of its opponents, the suspicion that wider political forces were operating behind the scenes, and more significantly the violent evacuation of the strikers from the ships and the military conscription of some of their leaders—all provoked harsh criticism of and ambivalence toward the Mapai government, the Histadrut, the strikers, and even the event itself. This confounding effect had two main corollaries. First, and rather expectedly, it prompted other sectors of workers—particularly better-off workers, state-sector employees, and professionals—to emulate the seamen by sustaining agitation over their rights and material welfare. Second, and less predictably, tensions increased between these groups and the Histadrut. Though the process was hardly new and had already intensified during World War II, it posed a novel contrast to the expectations Mapai and the Histadrut had held in the early 1950s for a comfortable climate of relations between trade unions and the political party in power. Although the labor movement’s political and union leaders could secure such a climate of consensus in negotiations with employers, many in the rank and file at the workplace level seemed largely to ignore it. This had less to do with leftist ideas spreading among the workers than with the sense of power shared by many groups of workers who felt that they were part of the state-building process and that the state needed them. It is no wonder, then, that derogative descriptions of the seamen lingered on in government circles and large segments of the press after the strike and also served in critical portrayals of the many strikes that followed.

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The rhetorical linkages that strikers in the early 1950s drew between strikes and universal rights closed the circle that had opened half a century earlier in the protests against the violation of basic rights in the workplaces, even though the visualized “enemies” had changed. The national and political dimensions of strike action that had been so central from the twentieth century’s first decade to the 1950s now seemed somewhat of an aberration. Moreover, the strikers were deeply aware that their claim for a universalized notion of strike did not originate merely in theory, but also in a sense of justice that had evolved over a long period, in the course of which the meaning of striking, what it offered, and what could be accomplished by using it had gradually crystallized. It was this awareness that buttressed their opposition to the government’s attempts to limit their strike actions and justify the constraints with national and state-building considerations. What these early 1950s strikers stressed, therefore, was how dramatically the national and political uses of strikes, and the perception of strikes as a lever of ethnic domination of the labor market or a lever for acquiring political power, had dwindled in parallel to the demise of Palestine’s Arab community. What they stressed was in effect the essence of the strike: an accepted form in urban society of acquiring and defending rights in the labor market and the workplaces. This was why the early 1950s strikes all too naturally aroused so much fear in government circles, in the Histadrut (on which the government depended greatly), in various corners of the Israeli political elite that had clambered up through the Histadrut bureaucracy, and among privatesector employers whose cooperation in state-building the government so direly needed and expected. As we saw earlier, the panic and bewilderment were hardly new. They first emerged in the wake of the strike wave of the mid 1920s and in reaction to what was perceived as disobedience among factory workers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. That panic came and went, occasionally provoking organizational and bureaucratic moves by the Histadrut that peaked, as we saw in the last chapter, during the strike boom of World War II. But whereas the earlier fears of “uncontrolled” strike action were associated with social control, cross-class alliance, and nation building, strike opponents in the early 1950s propagated a notion of strike action as running counter to the new authority of a new sovereign state. In government circles, strikes were perceived as associated with the empowerment of the political Left and even with Cold War politics. Nevertheless, leaders of the new state such as Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir well recognized that the panic was deeply rooted in the earlier period’s fear of the uncontrollability of the town workers—and indeed, of the institutional incapacity to materialize social engineering and discipline among workers in the ever expanding urban sector. Before

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the establishment of the new state, the strike was perceived as hampering the work of the capitalist, seen as the creator and dynamo of the Yishuv economy. Now, however, the threat was to the young institutions of the state. Rhetoric invoking fear of the economic harm that strikes entailed was now voiced not only by capital owners and employers in the private sector, but by the state itself. A sort of a common mental space between the state and private capital seemed to have formed, reproducing in terminology and practice both the earlier labor-capital cooperation in the Zionist project and earlier understandings between British and Jewish private employers.

Epilogue Inasmuch as the concern over unrelenting strike action was rooted in the history and social perception of strikes in the first half of the twentieth century, the government’s suppression of the seamen’s strike introduced a novel effect. Both the Histadrut’s attempts to orchestrate and restrain strike action in the 1920s and 1930s, and the British efforts to impose prestrike arbitration during World War II paled in comparison to what the strikers and many bystanders perceived as outright curtailment of basic workers’ rights. True, the repressive measures were perceived as transgressing a norm, and only rarely did the Israeli government ever again resorted to violence to subdue strikers through use of the army and police (e.g., in a strike at the Eilat-Ashkleon oil pipeline in 1975 and a strike by air traffic controllers in 1977). But it was exactly that transgression that placed the strikes and the reactions to them in a larger context of tension over the nature of the democracy being formed in the new Israeli state by a government preoccupied with asserting its authority over other political parties and the Histadrut, and cooperating with private employers. At the heart of that tension over democracy in the new state lay its ambivalence toward the strikes and toward the claims made by various groups of workers: a principled recognition of the right to strike on the one hand, and on the other, outright rejection of that right’s supremacy over the principle of Mamlakhtiyut—Ben-Gurion’s notion of the supremacy of nation and state over civil society. This was exemplified in the government’s cooperation with the Histadrut and private capital in the highly resonant strike action of the Ata-Textile workers in 1957, and in the debates preceding the enactment of Israel’s first law on the settlement of disputes the same year. The strike’s deep roots in society and the legitimate status it had gradually acquired emphasized the extent to which the state’s ambivalence lagged behind.

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Returning to the question, posed at the outset of this study, of why the intersection of strike action and nation building is worth looking at, let us consider the insights generated by strikes’ routinization and embeddedness in society. These insights revolve around five principal actors and the characteristic tensions they provoked: strikes, labor, society, capital, and the state. First, the strike’s transformation into a social routine meant that within the larger structures that have dominated the history of Palestine— the Arab-Jewish conflict, the Zionist nation-building project, and the evolution of an urbanizing, industrializing market economy—a new option emerged and matured: collective action to express protest and opposition, garner material and political gains, and guard rights and advance them. The more habitual the strike became, the more factors and forces were attracted to using it, opposing it, supporting its message, or negating it altogether. Strikes’ normalization, their overwhelming focus on material issues, and their progressive elevation to the status of a social right always available for use—even at times of military crisis, political tension, and economic emergency—pointed to the widening presence of that option, as well as to the strike’s power to attract a wider variety of users, expand the ranks of its supporters, provoke the forces aspiring to regulate it, and overcome those who sought to contain it. Myriad forces attempted to use the strike for national purposes, to achieve political domination of the labor market in the Yishuv, or to express ideological preferences in the Zionist project. None, however, was able to constrain the energy of this routinization of the strike phenomenon. When strikes did decrease, it was due much less to these forces than to economic downturns, tense security conditions, and wars, although these latter too were only sporadically able to check the strikes, as attested by the 2,014 strikes recorded in the period under discussion (not counting the huge number of disputes that did not turn into full-fledged strikes). Though this persistent agitation does not challenge the primacy of the politics of national conflict and nation building, it does revise our knowledge regarding the quotidian life of those politics, in which the strike made its presence felt and progressively became a protagonist. In that sense, strikes may be thought of as dots in a pointillist painting. Up close we see hundreds of little dots, but as we back away a transformation occurs, and a complete picture of the phenomenon with full color and tonal range appears before our eyes. The second insight relates to the labor movement. Mapai and the Histadrut were among the main forces seeking to orchestrate and contain strikes. In historical perspective, this dual policy was part and parcel of a larger social engineering project that the Zionist Socialist labor movement was engaged in. In the framework of that project, the labor movement

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built itself as both a political force and a community in which economic, social, and cultural institutions worked to mobilize support, exert influence, and demarcate internal codes of behavior and external boundaries. Regulation of strike action was the fulcrum of that engineering logic because it touched directly upon the amorphous character of Palestine’s urban scene, and on the enormous problems labor faced in keeping urban workers in line, particularly the more skilled and relatively secure ones. Hence, ungovernable strike action and workers’ agitation kept on reminding Mapai and the Histadrut of the gap between political hegemony in the Zionist movement and the Yishuv on the one hand, and social power on the ground, in the labor market, and in workplaces on the other. The significance of the reality exposed by the strike phenomenon is twofold. First, it sheds light on the imperfection of labor’s vaunted hegemony, on the complex meaning of membership in the labor movement, and on the distance between the political and bureaucratic elites in the labor movement and the movement’s social bases. That distancing climaxed in 1943–51, a period that shaped new relationships between these elites and the workers. Second, it diverts the spotlight to the workers themselves, their agency, and the meaning that strike action held for them. In increasingly adhering to the strike as an available form of social action, and persistently refining the strike as their legitimate lever and strategy, many town workers—the carriers of the strike phenomenon—drew upon social practices largely unaccounted for in the dominant historiography. That historiography’s traditional emphasis on ideology and politics, and its persistent dearth of research on the social strategies of workers, could allot but little space to what seems to have been one of their primary means of expression. The primacy of nation building in the labor history of Mandate Palestine focused attention on the nationalism of the workers and on the preference for nationalism over social reform in the policies and practices of the labor movement. Meanwhile, a less prominent vein of scholarship addressed the “social noise” strikes were making, as well as their liberation from the tight grip of the national and political uses of strike action. Nationalism was an essential component of workers’ contentious politics and their mobilization during this period, but it also served in drawing the boundaries to workers’ collective action. National identity’s Janus-faced nature in the dynamics of workers’ protest—mobilizing and cementing yet also limiting—highlights the complexity of the intersection between solidarities that are based, at one and the same time, on national affiliation, participation in state-building projects, social outrage, and group interests. The third insight relates to why it is also important to look at strikes from the point of view of the history of society, Yishuv society in partic-

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ular. The strikes embodied the Yishuv’s town life no less than did the urban concentration of immigration; the spread of manufacturing, industry, and services; and the sprouting of Jewish lower-middle and middle class urban cultures. The routine of the strikes, their periodic emergence and disappearance, the tumult they sparked, and the fierce debates on their legitimacy that they provoked in political party and Histadrut offices, all testified to the social and spatial changes Palestine was undergoing. Furthermore, the town society’s growing awareness of strike action and the acceptance of the strike as a taken-for-granted phenomenon help explain the extent of social conflict in the urban areas and reveal that market and labor relations were no less central to it than were the national or ethnicitybased animosities and rivalries that ordinarily fueled the urban conflict scene. This is why the Yishuv institutions’ attempted interventions in labor conflict paint such a contradictory picture. On the hand, these interventions necessitated cooperation between Yishuv institutions and the Histadrut, and between party leaders across the political and ideological spectrum. These cross-class negotiations and alliances facilitated interventions, particularly in the form of arbitrations, backdoor negotiations, and crucially, creation of a climate of hostility toward strikes in the Yishuv. This undoubtedly contributed to the institutionalization of the Yishuv as a communal framework and authority in the nation-building process. On the other hand, the Yishuv’s presence in labor conflict was often insubstantial. Notwithstanding a few cases in which Yishuv institutions helped prevent labor disputes from turning into full-fledged strikes or facilitated the completion of negotiations between strikers and employers, the Yishuv’s attempts at strike resolution were hardly effective. From the perspective of the history of strikes, the institutionalization of the Yishuv was therefore partial and uneven, and thus further contributed to the discrepancy between the vibrancy of the strikes and the institutional response to them. The establishment of the State of Israel ushered in dramatic change in the form of institutional presence in labor mediation and strike prevention, as well as close cooperation between the government and the Histadrut in labor legislation, which tells us much about the role strikes played as sites of unrest where action and counteraction, mediation, and suppression would eventually turn into laws and institutions. Fourth, the vibrancy of the strike phenomenon steers our attention to what the strikes convey about the Yishuv’s employers and capital owners. The fact that most strikes occurred in Jewish private workplaces is itself an expression of the centrality of capital and a market economy to the Zionist project, the economic absorption of Jewish immigrants, industrialization in the towns, and the shaping of labor and industrial relations. The attune-

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ment of the strikes to the business cycle—increasing in boom years and declining during slumps—likewise places private capital and its various strategies at the center of these employment relations. Since manufacturers and industrialists were a formative factor in the attempted weaving of corporatist arrangements into the Yishuv economy, strikes were significant as both cause and expression of the weakness of these arrangements. As a relational phenomenon, the strikes pointed to the power of capital but also its instability, its independent strategies but also its dependence on colonial and state structures. The latter, after all, were instrumental in facilitating private capital’s centrality to the economy and its resilience in withstanding strikes and strikers. In the Yishuv, furthermore, both the opposition to strikes and the ideological and political resources mobilized to lessen the phenomenon and institute compulsory arbitration reflect the importance of private employers as the social basis on which the negation of strikes was built. Indeed, in the 1950s this became crucial upon the enhancement of relations between state and capital, as employers increasingly saw the new government as an essential hearer of their grievances against striking workers. Private employers’ opposition to strikes would become even more crucial in later years, given the expansion of the Israeli economy’s private sector and the recurrent ambivalence of state intervention. A fifth insight, closely related to capital’s association with political power, concerns what the strikes tell us about colonial rule and the state. Even though relatively little striking activity occurred in the British government sector and most strikes in the Arab community were basically anti-colonial, the British authorities increasingly intervened. Intervention complemented their wider policy of supporting the strongest economic sector in the economy—the private employers. In the 1940s, the protection of private capital, in particular Jewish employers, merged with what the British defined as exigencies of the war to produce anti-strike legislation. However, this intervention did not fundamentally alter the traditional British mindset, which cherished a voluntarist approach to employment relations. Voluntarism implied a logic of limited intervention that was indecisive, in particular when security conditions eased. On the one hand it allowed the sides to disputes to freely negotiate on their own, thus emphasizing the wisdom of nonintervention, which the British had partly inherited from the Ottoman Millet system. On the other hand, it marked the limited impact of the British presence to the detriment of the same strong sector they sought to protect. And as the strikes demonstrated, that limitation became all too exposed after World War II, a harbinger of the long process of British withdrawal from Palestine society.

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The strikes of the transition period to Israeli state sovereignty are similarly informative. They show how the emergence of public-sector strikes made the government an active actor in industrial relations and consequently an influential factor in events in the private sector as well. Moreover, because this series of strikes emphasized the social right inherent in strike action, they turned the legitimacy of the strike into a more formal issue that concerned both state and society, one that both private capital and Histadrut had to accommodate. Against this background of the routinization of strike action in Israeli society, Israel introduced its first legislative regulation of the handling of labor disputes, thus transforming the state intervention that had prevailed under the Ottoman and Mandate regimes. Was this transformation a precursor of what would happen to strikes in later years? After all, the attunement of strikes to economic booms and slumps would persist, strong workers would continue to overshadow other groups of workers in maintaining and perpetuating the strike phenomenon, and occasionally the state would remind strikers of the emergency powers it held to replace them in strikes in essential services. More significantly, in the course of the privatization processes in the Israeli economy and the concurrent demise of the labor movement in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the private sector would reemerge as a prime site of recurring strikes where, as in the Mandate years, the discourse over the legitimacy of strike action was frequently tested. For all the reasons for an interest in strikes, perhaps the best is that they are still going on.



Appendix

Table A.1. Strikes in Palestine/Israel 1899–1951 (by Year) Year

Strikes

Strikes

(n)

(w)

Lost Workdays (d)

(n)

(w)

Lost Workdays (d)

1899

 1

1926

 21

   382

  8,863

1900

 1

1927

 20

   562

 13,469

1928

 22

   886

  4,279

1929

 45

   602

  7,363

1903

1930

 47

   533

  6,685

1904

1931

 58

   796

 12,385

1901 1902

 2

1905

Year

Strikes

Strikes

1932

 49

 1,934

 29,617

1906

 1

1933

 49

 1,883

 15,300

1907

 3

1934

 77

 1,860

 18,062

1908

 2

1935

 75

 1,974

 18,470

1909

 4

1936

 49

   753

  7,745

1910

 2

1937

 86

 4,129

 13,081

1911

 3

1938

119

 2,336

 18,460

1912

 1

1939

128

 3,098

 20,841

1913

 2

1940

 93

 3,317

 25,163

1914

 3

1941

 80

 4,185

 45,954

1915

 1

135,071

1942

 94

 9,258

1916

1943

131

15,220

111,134

1917

1944

 93

 7,805

225,539

1918

 1

1919

 1

1920

 3

1921

 9

1922

 9

1945

117

 4,808

 99,145

  560

1946

106

12,744

231,128

 44

  591

1947

 54

 3,589

 49,693

  233

 3,775

1948

 52

3,141

 9,095

  200

 2,017

1949

 52

9,363

63,458

 40

1923

21

  576

 6,705

1950

 57

7,308

50,901

1924

46

1,585

24,065

1951

 63

8,026

94,537

1925

61

2,638

33,302

Note: Data on strikers and lost workdays from 1899–1917 is missing. Source: See Figure I.1

Appendix

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117

Table A.2. Strikes in Palestine/Israel 1899–1951 (Averages) Year

Size (w/n)

Duration Intensity (d/n) (d/w)

Year

Size (w/n)

1899

1926

 18

  422

23

1900

1927

 28

  673

24

1901

1928

 40

  195

 5

1902

1929

 13

  164

12

1903

1930

 11

  142

13

1904

1931

 14

  214

16

1905

1932

 39

  604

15

1906

1933

 38

  312

 8

1907

1934

 24

  235

10

1908

1935

 26

  246

 9

1909

1936

 15

  158

10

1910

1937

 48

  152

 3

1911

1938

 20

  155

 8

1912

1939

 24

  163

 7

1913

1940

 36

  271

 8

1914

1941

 52

  574

11

1915

1942

 98

1,437

15

1916

1943

116

  848

 7

1917

1944

 84

2,425

29

1918

Duration Intensity (d/n) (d/w)

1945

 41

  847

21

1919

40

560

14

1946

120

2,180

18

1920

15

197

13

1947

 66

  920

14

1921

26

419

16

1948

 60

  175

 3

1922

22

224

10

1949

180

1,220

 7

1923

27

319

12

1950

128

  893

 7

1924

34

523

15

1951

127

1,501

12

1925

43

546

13

Note: Averages for 1899–1918 are not noted due to partial data on strikes. Source: See Figure I.1.

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Appendix

Figure A.1. Number of Strikers (w) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

Figure A.1 Number of Strikes (w) in Palestine/Israel, 1919-1951

16000 14000 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1.

Figure A.2. Lost Workdays (d) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

Figure A.2 Lost Workdays (d) in Palestine/Israel, 1919-1951

250000 200000 150000 100000 50000

1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1.

Appendix

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119

Figure A.3. Average Size of Strikes (w/n) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

Figure A.3 Average Size of Strikes (w/n) in Palestine/Israel, 1919-1951

200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1.

Figure A.4. Average Duration of Strikes (d/n) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

Figure A.4 Average Duration of Strikes (d/n) in Palestine/Israel, 1919-1951

3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500

1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1.

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Appendix

Figure A.5. Average Intensity of Strikes (d/w) in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1951

Figure A.5 Average Intensity of Strikes (d/w) in Palestine/Israel, 1919-1951

35 30 25 20 15 10 5

1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

0

Source: See Figure I.1.



Notes

Introduction  1. Comrades’ Court, Haifa labor council, 147, 9 March 1924, Labor Movement Archive, Pinchas Lavon Institute, Tel Aviv (hereafter LA), IV-250-27-1-1891.  2. See footnote 18 below.  3. David De Vries, “The Making of Labour Zionism as a Moral Community: Workers’ Tribunals in 1920s Palestine,” Labour History Review 65, no. 2 (2000): 139–165.  4. Richard Hyman, Strikes (4th ed. London, 1989); Dick Geary, European Labour Protest 1848–1939 (London, 1981); Norman McCord, Strikes (London, 1980); James E. Cronin, “Strikes and Power in Britain, 1870–1920,” International Review of Social History 32, no. 2 (1987): 144–157.  5. Roberto Franzosi, The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy (Cambridge, 2006), 1–24; Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History (Leiden, 2008), 174–207.  6. Giulio Sapelli, “Introduction: Strikes from 1789 to 1889,” in Strikes, Social Conflict and the First World War: An International Perspective, ed. Leopold Haimson and Giulio Sapelli (Milan, 1992), 5–12.  7. Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 15–18; Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Analysis (Aldershot, 2008), 17–48.  8. Laura Lee Downs, “Women’s Strikes and the Politics of Popular Egalitarianism in France 1916–1918,” in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein (Champaign, IL, 1993), 114.  9. Peter Turnball, “Dock Strikes and the Demise of the Dockers’ ‘Occupational Culture,’” Sociological Review 40, no. 2 (1992): 294–318; Colin Crouch, Industrial Relations and European State Traditions (Oxford, 1993), 149–154. 10. William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia 1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1989); Diane P. Koenker, “Collective Action and Collective Violence in the Russian Labor Movement,” Slavic Review 41, no. 3 (1982): 443–448.

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Notes to pages 3–7

11. Michelle Perrot, Workers on Strike: France, 1871–1890 (New Haven, 1987); Lisa A. Lindsay, “Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women, and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 783–812. 12. On the complex relationship between labor and nationalism see Stefan Berger and Angel Smith, eds., Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity, 1870–1939 (Manchester and New York, 1999). 13. For the notion of repertoire of collective action see Charles Tilly, “Getting It Together in Burgundy,” Theory and Society 4 (1977): 479–504. See also Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA, 1978). 14. Mark Traugott, Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action (Durham, NC, 1995), 1–14. 15. This is especially the case with unorganized Jewish and Arab workers, Palestinian workers from the occupied territories, and the growing numbers of African, Asian, and Eastern European workers in the Israeli economy. 16. Ottoman Palestine refers to Turkish rule from 1516 to 1917. British rule began as a military occupation in 1918 and in 1920 turned into a civilian regime that continued until 1948. The British Mandate of Palestine, a legal commission for the administration of the country confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations on July 1922, came into effect on September 1923. The Mandate for Palestine expired on 14 May 1948, and sovereignty was assumed by the State of Israel. 17. The Yishuv refers to the Jewish community in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The Old Yishuv refers to the community before the first wave of Jewish immigration arrived in Palestine in the early 1880s. The New Yishuv refers to the Jewish polity in Palestine during the late Ottoman rule and the British Mandate. 18. In the first decades of the 1900s, the labor movement was associated with two political parties: Poalei Zion and Hapoel Hatsair. In 1919 part of Poaeli Zion turned into Achdut Haavoda, which in December 1920 joined forces with Hapoel Hatsair to establish the Histadrut—the short form of Histadrut Klalit shel Ha’ovdim Ha’ivrim Be’eretz Israel (the General Federation of Jewish Workers in the Land of Israel). In the 1920s the labor movement and the Histadrut were dominated by Achdut Haavoda. Since 1930 the dominant force has been Mapai, a party union of Achdut Haavoda and Hapoel Hatsair. See Yonathan Shapiro, The Formative Years of the Israeli Labour Party: The Organization of Power, 1919–1930 (London, 1976). 19. See chapter 4. 20. See chapter 5. 21. See, e.g., Jay Tab, Yosef Ami Yanai, and Gil Shaal, Labor Relations in Israel (Tel Aviv, 1961); Dan Giladi, The Yishuv During the Fourth Aliyah Period, 1924–1929: Economic and Political Analysis (Tel Aviv, 1973); Anita Shapira, Futile Struggle: Hebrew Labour, 1929–1939 (Tel Aviv, 1977); Avraham Michael and Raphael Bar-El, Strikes in Israel: A Quantitative Approach (Ramat Gan, 1977). 22. For systematic quantitative treatments of the strike phenomenon in Mandate Palestine, on which the figures and tables in the present book are based, see

Notes to pages 7–10 •

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

123

Aviad Bar-Haim, “The System of Labor Relations in the Jewish Settlement in Palestine during the British Mandate up to the End of World War II” (MA thesis, Department of Sociology, The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1972); Yeshayahu Etkin, “Sixty Years of Striking in Israel, 1921–1980,” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1982). The historiography and quantitative evidence on labor disputes and specific strikes in particular subperiods of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine are referred to in the chapters that follow. Bar-Haim, “The System”; Giladi, “The Yishuv”; Giora Rosen, “The Trade Union of the General Federation of Workers During the Second World War, 1939–1945,” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1974); Shapira, “Futile Struggle”; Yaacov Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement 1925–1948 (London, 1988). Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley, CA, 1989); Michael Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy of Israel (Oxford, 1992); Deborah S. Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine (New York, 2000); David De Vries, “Drawing the Repertoire of Collective Action: Labour Zionism and Strikes in 1920s Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 38, no. 3 (2002): 93–122; Lev Grinberg, “A Historical Slip of the Tongue, Or What Can the Arab-Jewish Transportation Strike Teach Us About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35, no. 3 (2003): 371–391. Arieh Yodfat, “Labor Relations and Working Conditions in the Beginning of Tel Aviv, 1911–1914,” Measef 2 (1972): 188–192; Yehuda Slutzky, “A Discussion of the Problems of Labor Relations at the Early Days of the Second Aliyah,” Hatsionut 3 (1973): 198–213; Yehoshua Kaniel, Continuity and Change: Old Yishuv and New Yishuv During the First and Second Aliyah (Jerusalem, 1981), chap. 5; Bat Sheva Margalit-Stern, “Rebels of Unimportance: The 1930s’ Textile Strike in Tel Aviv and the Boundaries of Women’s Self-Reliance,” Middle Eastern Studies 38, no. 3 (2002): 171–194. Throughout the book, the terms routinization and habitualization are used interchangeably to denote strike action that, during the period under discussion, became a regularized social behavior progressively embedded in the social structure and a phenomenon taken for granted by society. See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY, 1966), 70–85. Various methodologies and sources inspired this approach: Perrot, Workers on Strike, 1–11; Edmund Burke III, Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (London, 1993); Roy Church and Quentin Outram, Strikes and Solidarity: Coalfield Conflict in Britain, 1889–1966 (Cambridge, 1998), 1–16; Ileen A. DeVault, “Narrative Serially Constructed and Lived: Ethnicity in Cross-Gender Strikers 1887–1903,” International Review of Social History 44, Supplement (1999): 33–52; Gershon Shafir and Mark Levine, “Introduction,” in Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel, ed. Mark Levine and Gershon Shafir (Berkeley, CA, 2012), 1–20. Covering five decades of strike action with an emphasis on the trajectories of the strike as a phenomenon came at the expense of fully developed micro-

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Notes to pages 10–15

stories and analyses of particular strikes. For this reason the book refers only in part to the wealth of archival material and contemporary press relating to individual strikes. 29. For extensive description and problematization of the quantitative sources on labor disputes, strikes, and lockouts see Etkin, “Sixty Years,” 218–274.

Chapter 1  1. The Hebrew word for strike is Shevita, associating cessation of all work with the Jewish tradition of rest as noted in Leviticus 23. In the wake of the printers’ strike in Jerusalem in 1901, revivalists of Hebrew suggested calling the strike Imur, to associate it with having a say or a claim; however, the strikers and the press did not adopt it. See Mordechai Nemirovsky, The Worker in Manufacture (Tel Aviv: 1943), 274; Izhak Ben-Zvi, Workers during the Second Aliyah (Tel Aviv, 1950).  2. Israel Kolat, “Ideology and Reality in the Labor Movement in Palestine, 1905– 1919,” (PhD thesis, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1964), 256–258.  3. Slutzky, “A Discussion of the Problems,” 198–213; Lockman, Comrade and Enemies, chap. 1; Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 74–92.  4. For definitions of the strike phenomenon see Van der Linden, Workers of the World, 174–207. For the influence of Socialist Reformism on Zionist Socialism see Nachman Syrkin, Essays on Socialist Zionism (New York, 1935).  5. Editorial, “Strikes,” Hazman, 11 July 1905; Editorial, “Proposal of a Law on Workers’ Strikes”, Hatzfira, 17 July 1905; Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, 1970), 82–115; Hartmut Kaelble, A Social History of Western Europe: 1880–1980 (New York, 1990) 84–95.  6. John Saville, “The Trade Disputes Act of 1906,” Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 1 (1996): 11–46; Chris Howell, Trade Unions and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations Institutions in Britain, 1890–2000 (Princeton, NJ, 2009).  7. Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge, 2001), 78–89; John T. Chalcroft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (New York, 2004), 181–187. On the development of protest at the end of the Ottoman era see Yuval Ben-Bassat, Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine (London, 2013), 28–33.  8. Elhanan Leib Lewinsky, “The Strike: A Story without an End,” Hatzofeh, 1905; Dov Ber Borochov, “The Jubilee of the Jewish Labour Movement” (1912), in Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation: Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism, ed. Mitchell Cohen (Chicago, 1984), 105–110; Yosef Haim Brenner, “Around the Point,” Hashiloach, September–December 1904; Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 88–98.  9. See, e.g., the involvement of Jewish weavers in the Paterson silk strike of 1913 in Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia, 1988),

Notes to pages 15–19 •

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

125

30–35. See also the involvement of Jewish girls in the tobacco strike in Salonica the same year in Gila Hadar, “Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika: Gender and Family in the Context of Social and Ethnic Strife,” in Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History, ed. Amila Buturović, and İrvin Cemil Schick (London, 2007), 127–152. Margalit Shilo, “Rachel Yanait Ben Zvi,” in The Second Aliyah, ed. Ze’ev Tsachor (Jerusalem, 1998), 91–99. Yosef Aharonovich, “War of Classes and War of Survival: On the Question of Tactics of Jewish Workers in Palestine,” Hapoel Hatsair, 2 June 1908; Shabtai Teveth, David’s Zeal, vol. 1, Young Ben-Gurion (Tel Aviv, 1976), 73 and 111–114. Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (Princeton, NJ, 2008), chap. 6. Kolat, “Ideology and Reality,” 155–157; Kaniel, Continuity and Change, chap. 5. On management-worker relations see, e.g., the case of the Rishon Lezion winery in Zeev Gluskin, Memoires (Tel Aviv, 1946). A. Chermoni, “The First Strike in Palestine,” Davar, 23 December 1949. The reference here to the strikers’ religious and ethnic identity emphasizes its relevance to the study of strike action as a part of the social history of Palestine. This was noted, e.g., by Kaniel, Continuity and Change, chap. 5. See also “The Strike at the Levy Printing Shop,” Moria, 18 November 1910; Izhak Bezalel, You Were Born Zionists (Jerusalem, 2008), 50–56; Efi Advela, “Class, Ethnicity and Gender in Post-Ottoman Thessaloniki: The Great Tobacco Strike of 1914,” in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930, ed. Billie Melman (New York, 1998), 421–438. On the 1902 strike at the Sejera farm see Yosef Shapira, Labor and Land (Tel Aviv, 1961), 83. On the first strikes see Nemirovsky, The Worker in Manufacture, 279–281; Izhak Ben-Zvi, “Beginnings,” in The Second Aliyah Book, ed. Bracha Havas (Tel Aviv, 1947), 591–592; Aharon Ever-Hadani, A History of the Winegrowers Association (Rishon Lezion, 1966); Kaniel, Continuity and Change, chap. 5. Nachum Gross, (ed.), A Banker to an Emerging Nation: The History of Bank Leumi le-Israel (Ramat Gan, 1977), chap. 2; Jonathan Frenkel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, 1984), 416–427. Izhak Ben-Zvi, “Thirty Years of the Jerusalem Printers’ Union,” in Writings of Izhak Ben Zvi (Tel Aviv, 1936), 102–105; Kaniel, Continuity and Change, chap. 5. Meir Chazan, “The Beginning of the Moderate Vision in Hapoel Hatsair, 1905–1917,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 12 (2002): 239–269. In 1907 members of the Poalei Zion party, without their party’s authorization, organized a strike by Arabs against their Jewish employer, a citrus grove owner on a Petach Tikvah plantation. The owner called the Ottoman police, who beat the strikers and broke the strike. The owner also threatened to bring in replacement workers from Egypt. See Slutzky, “A Discussion of the Problems”; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 51–52. As far as is known, Arab workers in Palestine did not strike again until the protests against the Balfour Declaration at the end of World War I.

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Notes to pages 20–23

22. On the regional context see Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton, NJ, 1987), chap. 3; John Chalcroft, “The Cairo Cab Drivers and the Strike of 1907,” in Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp and Stefan Weber, eds., The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (Beirut, 2002), 173–198. On the Ottoman strike wave see Yavuz Selim Karakisla, “The 1908 Strike Wave in the Ottoman Empire,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 26, no. 2 (1992): 153–177; Mete Tunçay and Erik Jan Zürcher, Socialism and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1923 (Amsterdam, 1994), 48–52; Dogan Cetinkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement: Nationalism, Protest and the Working Classes in the Formation of Modern Turkey (London, 2013), 30–35. 23. Israel Bar Shira, A Handbook of Palestinian Labor Law (Jerusalem, 1929); Izhak Ben-Zvi, “The Government and Labor Laws,” in Writings of Izhak Ben-Zvi (Tel Aviv, 1936), 67–75; Ahmed Baran Dural and Uner Ertem, “Development of the Working Class in the Ottoman Empire,” European Scientific Journal 8, no.11 (2012): 215–235. Forty-eight years later the State of Israel would annul the 1909 law and replace it with the Settlement of Labor Disputes Law of 1957. 24. On the eve of World War I, political and labor leaders—David Ben-Gurion, Izhak Ben-Zvi, Moshe Sharett, and David Remez—were studying law in Istanbul, partly in order to acquaint themselves with Ottoman labor law. See Teveth, David’s Zeal, vol. 1, 236–238; Assaf Likhovsky, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 84–105. 25. Kolat, “Ideology and Reality,” 257; Teveth, David’s Zeal, vol. 1, 113; Shmuel Avitsur, “The L. Stein Factory: Early Attempts to Establish a Modern Industry,” in Ottoman Palestine, 1800–1914: Studies in Economic and Social History, ed. Gad Gilbar (Leiden, 1990), 159–178. 26. Frenkel, Prophecy and Politics, 424–425. 27. Slutzky, “A Discussion of the Problems”; Teveth, David’s Zeal, vol. 1, 108–114; Kolat, “Ideology and Reality,” 157; Chazan, “The Beginning of the Moderate.” 28. Mamashi, “The Strike in Kinneret,” Hapoel Hatsair, 31 March 1911; Anita Shapira, Berl: The Biography of a Socialist Zionist: Berl Katznelson 1887–1944 (Cambridge, 1984), 35–49. 29. Gur Alroey, “The Servants of the Settlement or Vulgar Tyrants? A Hundred Years of Hashomer Association: A Historical Perspective,” Cathedra 133 (2002): 77–104. On intra-Jewish ethnic segregation in the case of the Jerusalem women jewelers’ strike against Bezalel, see Yael Gilat, “Yemeni Jewish Silver-Craft in the Israeli ‘Melting Pot’: Its Role and Meaning in Israel’s Visual Culture 1906–1960” (PhD thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2003), 156–158. 30. On the Sejera strike and the growing use of the strike form of action to force employers to employ Jewish workers and guardsmen, see Haachdut, 28 April 1914; T. Galili, “This is not the Way,” Moria, 1 May 1914; Yaakov Meir, “The Strike in Sejera,” in The Second Aliyah Book, ed. Bracha Havas (Tel Aviv, 1947), 373–379; Kolat, “Ideology and Reality,” 237; Frenkel, Prophecy and Politics, 416–427. 31. Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley, CA, 1989), chaps. 3–4.

Notes to pages 23–29 •

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32. “On the Teachers’ Assembly,” Hapoel Hatsair, 14 and 21 November 1913; Rachel Elboim-Dror, Hebrew Education in Eretz Israel (Jerusalem, 1986), 310–343; Margalit Shilo, “The War of Languages as a Popular Movement,” Cathedra 74 (1995): 86–119; Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism 1897–1918 (Chicago, 1997), chap. 10.

Chapter 2  1. The last strike before the lull was in mid 1914 at the Altman edible oil workshop in Jaffa. In October 1915 a labor dispute at the Migdal farm near Tiberias stopped short of a full-fledged strike. The first strike after the war was led by women workers at the Goldberg citrus grove in Petach Tikvah. See Ada Maimon (Fishman), Fifty Years of Women Workers’ Movement (Tel Aviv, 1955), 44–46. On Arab protest see Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement. Volume one: 1918-1929 (London, 1977), chap. 2.  2. Mordechai Nemirovsky [Namir], “The Truth on the Strikes and Their Causes, 1921–1932,” Davar, 9 January 1933; see also the tables in Etkin, “Sixty Years”.  3. Walter Preuss, “The Strikes in the Country (1919–1925), Their Value and Their Results,” LA/IV-36-2 and Kuntres, 5 and 12 June 1925; Giladi, The Yishuv, 151–155.  4. Zeev Tsachor, On the Road to Yishuv Leadership: The Formative Years of the Histadrut (Jerusalem, 1981), chaps. 2–3; De Vries, “Drawing the Repertoire,” 93–122; Omri Metzer, “From Economic Resources to Political Power? Representation of Jewish Industry in Divided Mandate Palestine,” (PhD thesis, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 2011), 35–126.  5. Bar-Haim, “The System.”  6. The absence of this process in Palestine’s labor historiography is striking, given the extensive historical treatment of seminal individual strikes such as the labor dispute in the citrus groves in Petach Tikvah in 1928 and the strike in Palestine’s electricity company the same year. For the contrast see David De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy in 1920s Palestine: The Origins of “Red Haifa” (Tel Aviv, 1999), chaps. 4 and 6; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, chap. 2; Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, chaps. 4–6. On urbanization and strikes see Dick Geary, “Protest and Strike: Recent Research on ‘Collective Action’ in England, Germany and France,” in Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung im Vergleich, ed. Klaus Tenfelde (Munich, 1986), 363–387.  7. Walter Preuss, “The Jewish Worker in Palestine’s Industry,” Kuntres, 9 November 1928; David Gurevich, Statistical Abstract of Palestine (Jerusalem, 1930), 172–173; Sikumim, 10 July 1938; Moshe Lissak, Studies in Israeli Social History (Jerusalem, 2009), 40–154.  8. Shapiro, The Formative Years, 70–74; De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 71–110; Barbara J. Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920–1929 (Syracuse, NY, 1993), 135–184.  9. Ofen, “The Strike at the Stein Factory,” Kuntres, 11 December 1919; Igal Drori, Between Right and Left: The Civic Circles in Palestine in the 1920s (Tel Aviv, 1990),

128

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

•

Notes to pages 29–32

chaps. 1–3; Jacob Metzer, “Jewish Immigration to Palestine in the Long 1920s: An Exploratory Examination,” Journal of Israeli History 27, no. 2 (2008): 221– 251; Metzer, “From Economic Resources,” 40–50. Adifa, “The Women-Workers’ Strike in Tel Aviv,” Hapoel Hatsair, 22 December 1922; David De Vries, “Proletarianization and National Segregation: Haifa in the 1920s,” Middle Eastern Studies 30, no. 4 (1994): 860–882; Yehuda Gradus, Shaul Krakoverm and Eran Razin, The Industrial Geography of Israel (New York, 2002), 30–42. See the information on strikes in 1920 at the Anglo-Egyptian Bank and the Rishon Lezion winery in Kuntres in May and November 1920; R. Harari (Department of Commerce and Industry), “Report on the Economic Situation in Palestine at the Close of the Financial Year 1920–1921,” TNA, CO 814/1; Walter Preuss, “The Strikes in the Country (1919–1925), Their Value and Their Results.” Kuntres, 5 and 12 June 1925. On the various forms of strikes see Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (Cambridge, 1974), chap. 4. “Clerking Workers’ Union on the Singer Workers’ Strike,” Davar, 17 August 1926; “From Day to Day: Principled Strikes in Palestine,” Doar Hayom, 23 August 1926; “The Singer Strike,” Davar, 17 September 1926; “Around the Strike at the Pachter-Hofman Factory,” Davar, 14 March 1929; David De Vries, “The Politics of Labour Relations in Palestine in the Early British Mandatory Period: An Anatomy of the Rosenfeld Strike, Haifa 1923,” in Haifa: A Local History, ed. Yossi Ben-Artsi (Haifa, 1998), 181–146. “The Strike at the Berman Bakery Ended” Davar, 3 May 1928; Ilan Shchori, The Dream Turned to a Metropolitan: The Birth and Growth of Tel Aviv (Tel Aviv, 1990), 304–312. Saadia Shoshani, “The Strike at the Goralski-Krinitzi Factory in Tel Aviv,” Doar Hayom, 20 March 1923; Gershon Chanoch, “After the Strikes,” Hapoel Hatsair, 9 March 1925; Shabtai Teveth, David’s Zeal, vol. 2, The Life of David Ben-Gurion: Man of Authority (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1981), chap. 23; De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 152–201. “Report: The Strike Against the Mizrahi,” 18 May 1925, Abba Hushi Archive, Haifa University, File 14; De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 71–151 A Senior Teacher, “On the Teachers’ Strike,” Doar Hayom, 15 December 1924; M. Karmon, “An Open Letter to Mr. Kaplansky,” Doar Hayom, 26 April 1925; “After the Teachers’ Strike,” Doar Hayom, 4 May 1925; D. Kimchi, “After the Teachers’ Strike,” Haaretz, 7 May 1925; Moshe Smilansky, “The Teachers’ Strike,” Hapoel Hatsair, 11 May 1925; Dov Levin, “The Teachers’ Strike,” Hachinuch 8, no. 1 (1925): 1–17; Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, 132–134; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 93–96. “158 Strikes in Three Years,” Doar Hayom, 16 March 1927; “The Strikes in Palestine in 1929,” Davar, 19 February 1930; “The Strikes in Palestine in 1930,” Davar, 11 March 1931; David De Vries and Shani Bar-On, “Politicization of Unemployment in British-Ruled Palestine,” in Unemployment and Protest: New Perspectives on Two Centuries of Contention, ed. Matthias Reiss and Matt Perry

Notes to pages 32–37 •

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

129

(Oxford and London, 2011), 199–219. On the intensity of strikes in the 1920s, see table in the appendix. Gurevich, Statistical Abstract, 173; Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfeld, “Immigration, Urbanization and Crisis: The Process of Jewish Colonization in Palestine during the 1920s,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 12, no. 1 (1971): 41–57. Moshe Beilinson, “The Position of Nur Workers,” Davar, 23 May 1927; Deborah S. Bernstein, “Challenges to Separatism: Joint Action by Jewish and Arab Workers in Jewish-Owned Industry in Mandatory Palestine,” in The New Israel, ed. Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled (Boulder, 2000), 17–41. Shapira, Futile Struggle, 15–37. De Vries, “Drawing the Repertoire,” 106–110. David Ben-Gurion, “The National Destiny of the Working Class” (1925), in idem, From Class to Nation (Tel Aviv, 1933), 231–234. Shapira, Futile Struggle, 32–43; Steven A. Glazer, “Language of Propaganda: The Histadrut, Hebrew Labor, and the Palestinian Worker,“ Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 2 (2007): 25–38. When the mere staging of a strike was considered a show of force despite failure to attain gains the distinction between successful and failed strikes was blurred. On the awareness of failed strikes see Moshe Tash-Ski, “Haifa,” Kuntres, 24 August 1923; Meeting minutes of the Grandes Moulins’ workers with the Haifa labor council, 4 September 1923, LA/IV-250-27-1-615; David Cohen, “Notes and Remarks,” Kuntres, 12 October 1923; Grandes Moulins Management to the Zionist executive, 15 December 1924, CZA, S8/1324. De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 267–285. This was the case, for example, at the Nesher industrial plant, where workers criticized the labor council’s inability to force Nesher’s managers to consent to improvement demands. See David De Vries, “Work and Authority Struggles among Industrial Workers in Palestine: The Workers of the Nesher Cement Factory in the 1920s,” Yahadut Zemanenu 8 (1993): 177–215. Minutes of the Haifa labor council, 30 April 1923, LA/IV-250-27-1-650-c; Histadrut executive, 1 August 1923, LA/Library, 27/23/441; Haifa labor council executive with the Grandes Moulins workers, 13 August 1923, LA/IV-250-271-615; Meeting of the labor council with representatives of workers in Haifa’s industries, 10–11 February 1925, LA/IV-250-27-1-617. Giladi, The Yishuv, 151–155; De Vries, “The Politics,” 31–46; De Vries, “Drawing the Repertoire,” 115–117. De Vries, “Work and Authority,” 177–215. Anita Shapira, “The Rise and Decline of the Labour Movement,” in idem, Visions in Conflict (Tel Aviv, 1989), 355–374; Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State: Nation, Class, and the Shaping of Modern Israel (Oxford and New York, 1987), chap. 11. For society and strikes see Hyman, Strikes, chap. 3; Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness, The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History (Armonk, NY, 2009), 16–42.

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Notes to pages 37–40

32. “Formal Announcement,” Doar Hayom, 23 December 1920; Leonard Stein, at the Zionist Organization in London, to Frederic Kisch at the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem, 14 June 1923, CZA, S/25/633; De Vries, “The Politics,” 139–165; Shalev, Labour and the Political, 138–144 and 178. 33. Mordechai Mironi, “Compulsory Arbitration: Eighty Years of a Debate,” Shenaton Mishpat Haavoda 1 (1989): 120–123; Metzer, “From Economic Resources,” 65–67. 34. Smith, Roots of Separatism, 140–142; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 93–96. Note also the authorities’ parallel awareness of the need for labor legislation in David Ben-Gurion, “On the Compensation Ordinance,” Davar, 26 November 1926. 35. Ben-Baruch, “The First Labor Laws in Palestine,” Doar Hayom, 3 November 1926; “First Labour Laws in Palestine,” Palestine Bulletin, 3 November 1926; Haim Gavrieli, “The First Labor Laws in Palestine,” Kuntres, 26 November 1926; “Memorandum of the Histadrut Executive on the Prevention of Intimidation Ordinance,” Davar, 2 December 1926. The ordinance was based on the British Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act of 1875, Trade Disputes Act of 1906, and Trade Unions Act of 1927. It would be later incorporated in the Palestine penal code of 1934. See Bar Shira, A Handbook, 187–190; M. Yishai, “Workers and Labor Laws in Palestine,” Davar, 20 June 1929; Likhovsky, Law and Identity, 98–99. 36. “Eight Nur Strikers Arrested for 15 Days,” Davar, 21 February 1927; “The Situation at Nur: A New Verdict,” Davar, 4 March 1927; “The Nur Act Resonates in London,” Davar, 18 July 1927; “The Riots in Petach Tikvah,” Doar Hayom, 18 December 1928; Shapira, Futile Struggle, 37–40 ; Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, 133–135; Likhovsky, Law and Identity, 98–99. 37. De Vries, “Work and Authority,” 177–215; Guy Mundlak, Fading Corporatism: Israel’s Labor Law and Industrial Relations in Transition (Ithaca, 2007), 64. 38. Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929 (London, 1978), 140–165. Smith, Roots of Separatism, 138–142; Shalev, Labour and the Political, 166–175. 39. Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist, 359–362; Mironi, “Compulsory Arbitration,” 120–128. 40. De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 286–310. 41. “A Committee for Labor Affairs (Between Employers and Workers),” Doar Hayom, 24 June 1923; Igal Drori, “The Civic Circles in the Yishuv in Palestine in the 1920s,” (PhD thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1981), 63, 82, 177; Shalev, Labour and the Political, 138–139; Metzer, “From Economic Resources,” 53–58 and 62. 42. Teveth, David’s Zeal, II, 313–316; De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 180–187; David De Vries, “The Workers of Haifa during the 1923 Crisis: Tension between Leadership and Rank-and-File, and the Molding of Bureaucratic Idealism in the Labour Movement in Palestine,” Hatsionut 17 (1993): 196–201. 43. Drori, “The Civic,” 63–68; Metzer, “From Economic Resources,” 63–65; Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Leiden, 2011), 298–299.

Notes to pages 40–44 •

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44. Yaakov Shavit, From Majority to a State (Tel Aviv, 1978), chap. 6; Yaakov Goren, The Decisive Conflict: Between the Labor Movement and the Revisionist Movement in Palestine, 1925–1931 (Ramat Efal, 1986), 83–95; Neomi Shiloah, “Citizens’ Interest Groups in Eretz-Israel During the 1930s,” (PhD thesis, Haifa University, 1996), 91–114. 45. Mironi, “Compulsory Arbitration,” 125–127; Sternhell, Founding Myths, 235–239. 46. Drori, “The Civic,” 62–83, 165–192. 47. “At the Revisionist Workers’ Convention,” Davar, 28 February 1928; Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist, 361–365; Drori, “The Civic,” 67 and 178; Mironi, “Compulsory Arbitration,” 123–125. 48. Walter Preuss, “The Failure of the Committee of Fifteen,” Davar, 16 August 1925; Metzer, “From Economic Resources,” 82–83. 49. Meeting minutes of the Pachter-Hofman Workers’ Committee, October– December 1928, LA/IV-250-27-1-649; Nissan Set, “On the Strike at the PachterHofman Factory,” Davar, 3 April 1929; Teveth, David’s Zeal, vol. 2, chap. 32; De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 278–285; Metzer, “From Economic Resources,” 127–138. 50. On the weakness of the Histadrut in the towns see Israel Kolat, “Achdut Haavoda: From a Labour Society to a Workers’ Party,” Asufot 13 (1969): 3–22; De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 152–201. 51. Report on the Shulman-Lewinstein strike in 1920 in Doar Hayom, 26 November, 23 December 1920, 23 March 1921; Hapoel Hatsair, 26 November 1920; De Vries, “The Politics”; De Vries, “The Making of Labour.” 52. Zachary Lockman, “Exclusion and Solidarity: Labor Zionism and Arab Workers in Palestine, 1897–1929” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, NJ, 1994): 211–240. 53. Heshel Frumkin, “Compulsory Arbitration,” Davar, 6 August 1931; Metzer, “From Economic Resources”, 128–135. 54. Histadrut Executive, The Third Histadrut Convention: Report and Minutes (Tel Aviv, 1927). 55. “On the Issues of our Third Convention,” Davar, 25 March 1927; De Vries, “Work and Authority.” 56. Moshe Beilinson, “Upon the Printing Strike in Jerusalem,” Davar, 12 March 1929; De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 273–295; David De Vries, “Abba Hushi and Labour’s Images of Urban Power at the Turn of the 1920s,” Yahadut Zemanenu 14 (2001): 225–261; Sternhell, Founding Myth, 238. 57. Beilinson, “Upon the Printing Strike in Jerusalem.” 58. Dan Giladi, “Private Enterprise, National Capital and the Political Formation of the Right,” Ovnaim 5 (1965): 90–103; De Vries, “Proletarianization,” 878–882; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 93–97. 59. “Assault on the Right to Picketing,” Davar, 13 June 1930; “On Police Behavior in the Friedman-Edelstein Strike,” Davar, 25 June 1930; “The Workers of Tel Aviv and Jaffa on the Friedman-Edelstein Strike,” Davar, 13 July 1930; Lippa Mundlak, “The Friedman-Edelstein Strike,” Davar, 15 July 1930; “The Friedman-Edelstein Strike Ended,” Davar, 29 August 1929.

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Notes to pages 47–51

Chapter 3  1. Shapira, Futile Struggle, 345–352.  2. De Vries, “Drawing the Repertoire”; Jane Power, “Different Drummer, Same Parade: Britain’s Palestine Labor Department, 1942–1948,” (PhD thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2007), 61–67.  3. On strike politicization see Shorter and Tilly, Strikes in France, chap. 12; Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion, 13–18; Jacqueline E. Briggs, Strikes in Politicisation (Aldershot, 1998).  4. E.g., Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, chap. 5; Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, 124–139.  5. Lippa Mundlak, “The Friedman-Edelstein Strike,” Davar, 15 July 1930; Israel Schuchman, What Caused the Froumine Strike? (Jerusalem, 1932); Grinberg, A Historical Slip, 371–391. It should be noted that strikes beginning in 1930 and spilling over to 1931, such as at the Edelsten-Friedman factory in Tel Aviv and at the Shaarei Zedek hospital in Jerusalem, highlight the fact that strikes are often divided by decades for analytical purposes.  6. Walter Preuss, “Magic Tricks in Government Statistics,” Davar, 7 November 1930; Histadrut Executive, The General Census of the Jewish Workers in Palestine (Tel Aviv, 1937); Binyamin Avniel, Labor Problems in Palestine (Jerusalem, 1941), 79–105; Walter Preuss, “Do They Strike More in Palestine than in Other Countries?” Hapoel Hatsair, 17 March 1941. For the urban concentration see Bar-Haim, “The System,” and Etkin, “Sixty Years”.  7. Rochelle L. Taqqu, “Arab Labor in Mandatory Palestine, 1920–1948” (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1977); Lina Dar, “The Attempt of Jewish-Arab ‘Joint Organization’ at the Haifa Port in 1932,” Measef 14 (1984): 45–79; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, chap. 5; Margalit-Stern, “Rebels of Unimportance.”  8. Krämer, A History, chap. 11; Yoav Gelber, A New Homeland (Jerusalem, 1990); Anita Shapira, The Zionist Resort to Force (Stanford, CA, 1992), chap. 5; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 252–253. On compulsory arbitration in European history see Gaston V. Rimlinger, “Labour and the State on the Continent, 1800–1939,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, ed. Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard (Cambridge, 1989), chap. 7.  9. Gross, Banker to an Emerging Nation, 159–169; David De Vries, Diamonds and War: State, Capital and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine (New York and Oxford, 2010), 21–33; David De Vries, “From Porcelain to Plastic: Politics and Business in a Relocated False Teeth Company, 1880s–1950s,” Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History 14, no. 1 (2013): 144–181. 10. Gross, Banker to an Emerging Nation, 159–170; Bezalel Amikam, The Development of the Jewish Settlement in Eretz Israel in the Period of the Fifth Aliyah, 1929–1936 (Jerusalem, 1980); Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge, 1998), 154–159. 11. David Gurevich, Statistical Handbook of Jewish Palestine, 1947 (Jerusalem, 1947), 375; Zvi Sussman, “The Determinants of Wages for Unskilled Labor in the Advanced Sector of the Dual Economy of Mandatory Palestine,” Economic Devel-

Notes to pages 51–55 •

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

133

opment and Cultural Change 22, no. 1 (1973): 95–113; Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion. Volume two: 1929-1939, London (1977) chap. 7; Lilly Weissbrod, “Economic Factors and Political Strategies: The Defeat of the Revisionists in Mandatory Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 19, no. 3 (1983): 326–344; Metzer, The Divided Economy, 145–159. Eliezer Kaplan, “Our Operational Method [Lecture at the Histadrut 4th Convention],” Davar, 14 February 1933; Histadrut Executive, The Fourth Convention of the Histadrut, 1933–1934 (Tel Aviv, 1934); Meir Avizohar, Broken Mirror: National and Social Ideals as Reflected in Mapai (Tel Aviv, 1990), 107–123. Yechezkel Lufban, “The Teachers’ Strike,” Hapoel Hatsair, 17 April 1931; Yaacov Halperin, “On the Teachers’ Strike,” Hapoel Hatsair, 29 January 1932; Haifa Labor Council, The Histadrut in Haifa, 1933–1939 (Haifa, 1939). “Strikes in the Yishuv,” Haaretz, 13 August 1941. See also tables in Bar-Haim, “The System,” and Etkin, “Sixty Years.” Joseph L. Cohen, “Labour Legislation in Palestine: A Plea for a Modern Code,” Labour Magazine 11 (1932): 84–86; Power, “Different Drummer,” chap. 5. Alsheich, “The Strike of the Palestinian Workers at the Oil Company,” Hapoel Hatsair, 1 and 8 March 1935; “The Iraqi Oil Company Strike,” Davar, 25 March 1935; Shapira, Futile Struggle, 307–344; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 229–239. On strikes and politics see Anita Shapira, “The Debate in Mapai on the Use of Violence, 1932–1935,” Studies in Zionism 2, no. 1 (1981): 99–124; Avizohar, Broken Mirror, 97–103. Histadrut Executive, Fourth Convention; Haifa Labor Council, The Histadrut in Haifa, 53–82; Shapira, Futile Struggle, 192–213. “Resolutions on the Strike at the Shaarei Zedek Hospital,” Davar, 24 April 1930; “Disgraceful Abuse,” Davar, 10 April 1930; Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, chap. 4. “Who Organizes the Strike Storm in Tel Aviv?” Doar Hayom, 26 August 1932; K. Ben-Akiva, “The Construction Workers’ Strike in Petach Tikvah,” Hapoel Hatsair, 10 March 1933; K. Ben-Akiva, “On the Ending of the Strike in Petach Tikvah,” Hapoel Hatsair, 19 May 1933; Petach Tikvah Labor Council, “At the End of the Petach Tikvah Strike,” Hapoel Hatsair, 19 May 1933; “A Serious Quarrel at the Building Strike in Haifa,” Haaretz, 11 January 1934; Jerusalem Labor Council, The Histadrut in Jerusalem, 1933–1941 (Jerusalem, 1941), 25–32. On the ethos of strike violation see Ze’ev Jabotinsky, “Yes, Break It! [Ja Brechen],” Haynt, 4 October 1932 (In Yiddish. Hebrew version in Hazit Haam, December 1932); David Ben-Gurion, “Arbitration and Strikes,” Davar, 20 December 1932; Eran Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy (Madison, WI, 2004), 63–64. Esther Stein-Ashkenazy, Beitar in Eretz-Israel 1925–1947 (Jerusalem, 1998), chap. 4. On strike rhetoric see the exchange over the strike at the Barzelit metal factory: “On the Strike at Barzelit”, Haaretz, 11 October 1934; Moshe Grabovsky, “On the Strike at Barzelit,” Haaretz, 18 October 1934. Yechezkel Lufban, “Ja Brechen, Nicht Brechen,” Hapoel Hatsair, 25 November

134 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

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Notes to pages 55–61

1932; David Ben-Gurion, “The Revisionist Slander,” Davar, 16 December 1932; Avizohar, Broken Mirror, 97–148; Shapira, “The Debate in Mapai”. Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist, 88–89 and 359–362; Avizoar, Broken Mirror, 149–169; Shabtai Teveth, David’s Zeal, vol. 3, The Burning Ground (Jerusalem, 1987), 101–109. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, “Strikes in Palestine,” Hayarden, 21 November 1934; Shavit, From Majority, 211–215; Yaacov Goldstein and Yaacov Shavit, The Agreement between D. Ben-Gurion and V. Jabotinsky and Its Failure, 1934–1935 (Tel Aviv, 1979), 31–54; Goren, The Decisive Conflict, 117–135. Avizohar, Broken Mirror, 164–169; Goldstein and Shavit, The Agreement, 86–130. “Jabotinsky’s Announcement and Ben-Gurion’s Response,” Davar, 14 February 1934; “The Branch and the Root,” Davar, 30 November 1934; Minutes of the Mapai Council meetings, 4–5 January 1935, Yad Tabenkin Archive, 8-16/ D5-68; M. Karmon, “The Wind Storm around the London Agreement,” Doar Hayom, 28 February 1935; “For the Labor Agreement,” Davar, 22 March 1935; Goldstein and Shavit, The Agreement, 97–139; Mironi, “Compulsory Arbitration,” 128–131. The committee was known as Vaadat Haavoda. See earlier mediation attempts of the Jewish Agency in LA/IV-32-12-c; Izhak Grinboim, “On the ‘Labor Disputes’ and on the Clashes,” Haaretz, 19 January 1934; D. Zel-Zion, “On Organizing Labor Issues in Palestine,” Doar Hayom, 8 March 1934; “The National Council on the Teachers’ Strike,” Haaretz, 5 October 1934; Abba Hushi, “Organizational Problems,” Davar, 2 June 1935. Israel Shiv, “Is It That Terrible?” Hapoel Hatsair, 3 December 1934; “Strikes and Lockouts in 1939,” Davar, 8 March 1940. Preuss, “Do They Strike?”; De Vries and Bar-On, “Politicization of Unemployment”. For Zionist-oriented strikes in early 1936 see, e.g., the case of the bakeries strikes in Jerusalem in winter 1936: “The Strike at the Avikhail Bakery in Jerusalem,” Davar, 7 January 1936; “The Association of Bakeries Owners on the Avikhail Bakery Strike,” Doar Hayom, 8 January 1936. See also Porath, The Palestinian, vol. 2, chaps. 5–6; Mustafa Kabha, “The Palestinian Press and the General Strike, April–October 1936: Filastin as a Case Study,” Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 3 (2003): 169–189. Asaf Michael, “The Arab Workers in 1933–1934,” Davar, 30 April 1934; Taqqu, “Arab Labor”; May Seikaly, Haifa: Transformation of a Palestinian Arab Society 1918–1939 (London, 1995), 135–142; Weldon C. Matthews, Confronting an Empire, Constructing a Nation: Arab Nationalists and Popular Politics in Mandate Palestine (London, 2006), chap. 7. Shapira, Futile Struggle, 284–292; Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, 137–139; Grinberg, “A Historical Slip.” Aharon Toren-Hibler, “On the Strikes’ Law,” Haaretz, 6 June 1934; Zvi Grinberg, “The Story of the Arab Workers’ Strike at the Nesher Quarry,” Davar, 23 March 1936. Eliyahu Golomb, “Labor Agreements,” Davar, 11 June 1930; Izhak Ben-Zvi, “The Lesson of the Drivers’ Strike,” Davar, 20 November 1931; “After the

Notes to pages 61–64 •

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

135

Strikes of Arab Workers in Nes Ziona and Petach Tikvah: Debate at the Histadrut Council,” Davar, 9 August 1934; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 222– 237; Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, chap. 6; Krämer, A History, chap. 12. M. Dana, “The Railway Strike and Its Lesson,” Davar, 6 September 1936; Porath, The Palestinian, vol. 2, chap. 7; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, chap. 6. Porath, The Palestinian, vol. 2, 286–296; Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (Berkeley, CA, 2009), chap. 4. Strikes reemerged in the Yishuv as early as in 1936. See, e.g., the case of Jerusalem in Jerusalem Labor Council, The Histadrut in Jerusalem, 40–54; Yosef Luria, “On the Strikes at the Zefat and Haifa Schools,” Davar, 21 October 1937; the Central Parents’ Committee of Primary Schools in Tel Aviv, “Upon the Threat of the Strike at the Schools,” Davar, 1 November 1937; Misparim: Annual of the Tel Aviv and Jaffa Labor Council, 6–7, June 1939. “The National Committee Describes the Dangers of the Teachers’ Strike,” Haaretz, 21 January 1938; “Haifa on the Eve of a General Strike in the Meat Branch,” Davar, 18 February 1938; “Eleven Shoe Factories Lock Their Workers Out,” Davar, 2 March 1938; “A Strike at the Primazon Factory,” Davar, 11 April 1938; Michael Asaf, “The Arab Worker in the Passing Year,” Davar, 29 April 1938. “The Petrol Transporters’ Strike Continues,” Hatzofeh, 2 June 1939; “Rehovot Workers in Struggle against Wage Decrease,” Davar, 5 June 1939; Gershon Zack, “A Strike that Did Not Break Out,” Davar, 20 December 1939. Nachum Tishbi in Jerusalem to Numa Torzcyner in Antwerp, 13 January 1939, Netanya City Archive, G/111/897; Arbitration Verdict, Pickel Diamond Factory in Tel Aviv, August 1939, LA/IV-250-72-1-1847. Government of Palestine, Statistical Abstract of Palestine, 1935–1941; Sikumim: Periodical of the Histadrut Statistics and Information Department, 1938–1941; Aharon Blich, Trade Unionism in Palestine (Pinchas Lavon Institute, Unpublished Manuscript, 1945). Zeev Aharonovich, “Labor Agreements,” Davar, 4 June 1937; Shapira, Futile Struggle, 265 and 335–340; Shavit, From Majority, 217–223. Government of Palestine, “Statistics of Labour Disputes in Palestine, 1938,” Labour Disputes Bulletin 9 (1939); Walter Preuss, “Labor Disputes in Palestine and Abroad,” Hapoel Hatsair, 16 September 1938; “Labor Disputes in 1938,” Davar, 3 March 1939; “Strikes and Lockouts in 1939,” Davar, 8 March 1940; Government of Palestine, Statistical Abstract 1939–1941 (Jerusalem, 1942). In 1931 the Palestine government established a Labor Legislation Committee, but it did not introduce any alterations to the formal treatment of labor disputes. In March 1934 the government announced an amendment of the 1927 Prevention of Intimidation Ordinance that prohibited labor disputes from being initiated in protest of hiring on the grounds of workers’ religion and race. The amendment redefined what constituted an industrial dispute and in practice forbade Jewish workers from picketing against the hiring of Arabs. For the change in 1936–37 see A. Gorali, “The New Criminal Code,” Davar, 10 May 1937; “At the Trial of the Trade Union Secretaries,” Davar, 22 October 1937. See also the verdict in Davar, 30 November 1937; Likhovsky, Law and

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Notes to pages 64–70

Identity, 98–100; Avraham Doron, “Labor and Social Insurance Legislation: The Policies of the Palestine Mandate Government,” in Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, ed. Avi Bareli and Nahum Karlinsky (2003), 519–552, in particular 528–532. 45. Memorandum of the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association to the 21th Zionist Congress, August 1939, Volkhonsky Collection, Tel Aviv University Archive. On the incipient planning of the new interventionism in labor issues in particular, see Power, “Different Drummer,” 10–12 and 138–144. The new policy was associated with the White Paper of 1939. See Jacob Metzer, “Jews in Mandatory Palestine and Additional Phenomena of Atypical Settler Colonization in Modern Time,” in Settler Economies in World History, ed. Christopher Lloyd, Jacob Metzer, and Richard Sutch (Leiden, 2013), 169–202. For an imperial perspective see Peter Weiler, “Forming Responsible Trade Unions: The Colonial Office, Colonial Labour, and the Trade Union Congress,” Radical History Review 28–30 (1984): 367–392. 46. “A United Exchange,” Hamashkif, 13 November 1939; “Under the Sign of Strikes,” Hamashkif, 12 February 1940. 47. Frederick Cooper, “The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 406–435.

Chapter 4  1. Robert R. Nathan, Oscar Gass, and Daniel Creamer, Palestine: Problem and Promise. An Economic Study (Washington, 1946), 289–290.  2. Hen Ben-Yeruham, The Nation and the Class: Criticism of the Left Road (Tel Aviv, 1942); Binyamin Avniel, Problems of Labor Relations in Palestine (Jerusalem, 1943), 91–114.  3. The publishing house owned by the Histadrut.  4. Aharon Rabinovitch, “Strikes”, Davar, 9–10 March 1941; Aharon Rabinovitch, “The Foundations of Trade Unionism,” in Deeds and Trends: Chapters in Histadrut Study Month, ed. Meir Bogdan (Tel Aviv, 1942), 56–77; Walter Preuss, “On Strikes and Lockouts and Social Services: An Answer to Mr. Avnieli”, Davar, 28 November 1942.  5. David De Vries, “Adamant and Multifaceted: Diamond Workers’ Strikes in World War II Palestine,” Workers of the World: International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflict 1, no. 2 (2013): 215–229.  6. Haifa Labor Council, Problems in Trade Unionism: The Right to Strike (Haifa, 1941); Abba Hushi, Trade Unionism in Practice (Haifa, 1947).  7. Walter Preuss, “On Strikes and Lockouts.” See also the continuing debate between Avniel and Preuss in Davar, 11 January 1944, and CZA, S71/2094. On the working of these experts see Rosen, “The Trade Union”, 212–226; Omri Metzer, “Jewish Private Manufacturing in Mandatory Palestine and the Cost of Living Allowance, 1939–1943,” Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel, 21 (2013): 117–142.

Notes to pages 70–74 •

137

 8. On the labor disputes ordinance see Rosen, “The Trade Union,” 122–168; on the department see Power, “Different Drummer,” 137–151.  9. Power, “Different Drummer,” 205–219. 10. Draft letters of the Histadrut to a government labor adviser in July 1941, LA/ IV-250-27-3-168b; Nina Fishman, “‘A Vital Element in British Industrial Relations’: A Reassessment of Order 1305, 1940–1951,” Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 8 (1999): 43–86. 11. “Labor Disputes Ordinance”, Davar, 25 July 1941; Binyamin Avniel, “The Labor Disputes Law,” Hamashkif, 12 August 1941; Richard Graves, “On Labor, Strikes and War,” Hatzofeh, 10 July 1942; “A Heavy Fine in the Delfiner Strikers’ Trial,” Hatzofeh, 17 February, 1943; Meroni, “Compulsory Arbitration”; Power, ‘Different Drummer,” 205–219. 12. Blich, Trade Unionism, 248; Rosen, “The Trade Union,” 122–168; Mironi, “Compulsory Arbitration,” 132–142; Power, “Different Drummer,” 204–219. 13. Correspondence on the strikes law in CZA, S/25/7195, and LA/IV-250-27-3168b; Minutes of the assembly of industrial workers against the strikes and lockouts law, 17 July 1941, LA/IV-250-27-3-168b; Ari Ankorion, “Criticizing the Strikes’ Law,” Hapoel Hatsair, 18 July 1941; “The Law Against Strikes and Lockouts,” Haaretz, 20 July 1941; “Opinion on the Strikes and Lockouts Law,” Haaretz, 22 July 1941. 14. Debates on the strikes law in various Mapai institutions in the Labor Party Archive, Beit Berl, 2-022-1942-38, 2-23-1942-38, 2-003-1932-134; Memorandum of the Histadrut to the Palestine government on the strike law, 10 July 1941, LA/IV-104-205; “On the Labor Law and the Lockout in Okava Factory [in Rishon Lezion],” Davar, 16 July 1941; “Need for Anti-Strike Law,” Palestine Post, 24 July 1941; “Strikes and Lockouts to Be Prohibited: Defence Regulations Amendment,” Palestine Post, 1 January 1942; “The Law of Strikes Prevention,” Hatzofeh, 1 January 1942; Report on Grave’s lecture on labor relations in Palestine in “The Strike Weapon is used too often in Palestine,” Hamashkif, 31 December 1942. 15. “Strikes to Test the Harming Power of the Strikes Law,” Hamashkif, 30 January 1942; Richard Graves, “On Labor, Strikes and War,” Hatzofeh, 10 July 1942; “One Year After the Strikes Ban Law,” Hapoel Hatsair, 31 January 1943; Rosen, “The Trade Union,” 153–158; Shalev, Labour and the Political, 168–172. 16. “Strikes,” Hamashkif, 9 November 1942; Etkin, “Sixty Years.” 17. “Strikes and Lockouts in the First Half of 1942,” Davar, 6 August 1942; “The Price Increase Wave: The Main Cause for Labor Disputes,” Davar, 17 August 1943; Preuss, “On Strikes”; Etkin, “Sixty Years.” 18. Aharon Rabinovitch, “The War on the Wages of the Industrial Worker,” Davar, 17 March 1943; “Strikes and Lockouts in 1943,” Hatzofeh, 8 May 1944; “Labor Disputes in 1943,” Hamashkif, 18 July 1944; “Strikes and Lockouts in 1944,” Davar, 23 May 1945; Walter Preuss, “Social Strikes Increased and Their Success Enhanced,” Davar, 13 February 1946; “Strikes and Lockouts in 1946,” Davar, 9 April 1947; Bar-Haim, “The System”; Etkin, “Sixty Years.” 19. “Work Pay is Still the Main Cause for Labor Disputes,” Davar, 9 February 1944.

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Notes to pages 74–77

20. Nachum T, Gross and Jacob Metzer, “Palestine in World War II: Some Economic Aspects,” in The Sinews of War: Essays on the Economic History of World War II, ed. G. T. Mills and H. Rockoff (Ames, IA, 1996), 59–82; De Vries, Diamonds and War, 111–120. 21. The first cost-of-living allowance collective agreement was signed as early as in 1939 between the Palestine Manufacturers’ Association and the Tel Aviv labor council. Other such agreements were signed between the Histadrut and the manufacturers’ association in 1940–41. Following the Histadrut’s establishment of a trade union department in 1940 and the backing of the British authorities, these agreements became routine. See “The Persistent Rise in Costs of Commodities,” Davar, 11 February 1943; Shalev, Labour and the Political, 166–172; David De Vries, “British Rule and Arab-Jewish Coalescence of Interest: The 1946 Civil Servants Strike in Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36, no. 4 (2004): 613–638; Metzer, “From Economic Resources,” 311–318; Metzer, “Jewish Private Manufacturing,” 117–142. 22. See, e.g., the short strike in January 1941 at the American Porcelain Tooth Company (owned by the Bloom family), which revolved around the owners’ refusal to pay the cost-of-living allowance. For the dispute and the involvement of the Jewish Agency in the arbitration, see CZA S9/2198 and S8/1082; De Vries, “From Porcelain to Plastic.” 23. “The Diamond Workers Prepare to Strike,” Hatzofeh, 2 March 1944; “In the Diamonds Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 5 May 1944; “The Diamonds Strike,” Hatzofeh, 7 May 1944; “The Diamond Workers’ Strike,” Davar, 25 May 1944. 24. “The Demands of the Nesher Workers Were Only Partially Met,” Al Hamishmar, 30 April 1944; “A Strike of Unloading Workers at Dead Sea North,” Al Hamishmar, 9 May 1944”; Alexandra Kalev, “The Institutionalization of Productivity Councils in Israeli Industry, 1945–1955: A Critical Sociological Perspective to the History of Management in Israel” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1998), chap. 2; De Vries, Diamonds and War, 115–119. 25. “The Conclusions of the Inquiry Committee on the Teachers’ Strike in January–February 1942,” Hatzofeh, 17 November 1942; “The A.B.G Workers on Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 4 April 1944; Menahem Gerson, “The Teachers’ Strike”, Al Hamishmar, 23 October 1944; “Why Do I Strike?” Hatzofeh, 5 November 1944; Uri Dan, “Pay Attention, This is a Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 15 November 1944. 26. Sources on the strike at the Tirza Wood Factory in Rishon Lezion in May– August 1946, CZA, S9/2268. 27. “How the Histadrut Shirks its Responsibility on the Strike at the Delfiner Factory,” Davar, 15 January 1943; “The Strike at the Delfiner Factory,” Davar, 4 February 1943. 28. Binyamin Avniel to the Histadrut Executive regarding the Tirza wood factory strike, 29 August 1941, CZA, S9/2268; Rachel Tokatli, “Political Patterns in Labor Relations in Israel,” (PhD thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1979). 29. “Protest Strike of the Diamond Workers,” Davar, 2 January 1946. 30. On the impact of the split of Faction B from Mapai see Yael Yishai, Factions in the Labor Movement: Faction B in Mapai (Tel Aviv, 1978), 158–159; Uri Izhar, Be-

Notes to pages 78–87 •

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

139

tween Vision and Power: The History of Achdut-Haavoda-Poalei-Zion Party (Ramat Efal, 2005), 61–65. Government of Palestine, “Trade Disputes in 1943,” Department of Labour Bulletin 6 (January–March 1944): 2–3. The discussion of the diamond industry is based on De Vries, Diamonds and War, esp. 145–174. De Vries, “Adamant and Multifaceted.” “Palestine Industry in Light of the Diamond Workers’ Strike”, Palestine Illustrated News, 16 December 1943; S. Horowitz, J. L. Fletcher, and D. Anderson, Report of the Diamond Control Sub-Committee, Confidential Report, 21 June 1944, CZA, S40/269/1. Jerusalem Labor Council, “The Diamond Workers and their Union,” The Histadrut in Jerusalem, 92–94. Naftali Paltin, “Relations between the Manager and the Workers,” Hayahalom 2, no. 9 (1945): 9. David Rothblum, “Wish Them Godspeed!” Dapei Hamenahel 1(1944): 6–7. Hasapir, 1943; Hatzohar, 1943. David Gurevich, Workers’ Wages in the Jewish Diamond-Polishing Industry in Palestine in 1944 (Jerusalem, 1945). Histadrut Executive, The Diamond Worker in Palestine (Tel Aviv, 1946). Arieh Kalisher, “The Diamond Workers in their Strike,” Misgav 7 (1944): 9–10. “Diamonds,” Hapoel Hatsair, 25 June 1942. The weakness of the Histadrut was also reflected in its wavering between supporting wage increase demands and containing the workers by consenting to joint productivity councils. See B. Scheingross, “The Lesson of the Cluson Workers’ Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 5 March 1946. See also the discussion of the strike at the Cluson steel company in Haifa in August 1945 in Kalev, “The Institutionalization,” 62–64; Shalev, Labour and the Political, 137–144 and 166–172; De Vries, “Drawing the Repertoire”; Tamar Gozansky, ‘Arise, ye Workers from your Slumber’: Life and Collected Works of Eliahu Gozansky (Haifa, 2009), 45–98. Zachary Lockman, “Railway Workers and Relational History: Arabs and Jews in British-Ruled Palestine,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 3 (1993): 601–627; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 185–182; Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, 85–91 and 136–139. “A Strike at the Metal Wires Factory,” Al Hamishmar, 3 April 1944; Eliyahu Biletzky, In Years of Emergency: The Period of the Camps, 1937–1947 (Tel Aviv, 1956); Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 292–303. Gabriel Baer, “Jewish and Arab Workers—Divide or Unite?” in Towards Union in Palestine: Essays on Zionism and Jewish-Arab Cooperation, ed. Martin Buber, Jehuda L. Magnes, and Ernst Simon (Jerusalem, 1947), 76–83. The discussion of the strike is based on Taqqu, “Arab Labour,” 250–281; De Vries, “British Rule,” 613–638. “A Sixteen Minute Strike,” Davar, 4 December 1944; Memorandum, 27 May 1944, Second Division of the Civil Service Association Bulletin, 15 June 1944, LA/ IV-236–622; TNA, CO/733/468/27; Second Division Association to Chief Secretary, 8 June 1943 and 17 July 1943, TNA, CO/733/457/15; Second Division of

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49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59.

60.

•

Notes to pages 87–91

the Civil Service Association Bulletin, 15 June 1944, and the instructions for the “Silent Strike,” 12 December 1944, LA/IV-236–622; Employment Committee, First Interim Report, 27 October 1944, TNA, FO/921/312. Chief Secretary to the Colonial Office, 10 and 25 April 1946, ISA 733/457, 75156/156/46. Second Division Association to Chief Secretary, 17 July 1943, TNA, CO/733/457/15; Second Division of the Civil Service Association Bulletin, 15 June 1944, LA/IV-236–622. Avi-Rut, “The Government Civil Servants in Tel Aviv,” Shurot 44 (1944), 9–10. Memorandum, 27 May 1944, Second Division of the Civil Service Association Bulletin, 15 June 1944, LA/IV-236-622. Y. Shohami, “The Problem of the Jewish Clerk in Palestine,” Hapoel Hatsair, 27 March 1946. Pepperman to Leo Cohn at the Jewish Agency, 11 November 1945, CZA, S9/7751; Haifa Jewish Telegraphists to the Jewish Agency, 19 December 1945, CZA, S25/7751. “Post and Telegraph Workers’ Strike,” Davar, 10 April 1946; “The Public Debate Has Not Ended Yet,” Davar, 18 April 1946. “Entire Civil Service in Palestine is Paralyzed by the Employees’ Strike,” Hatzofeh, 17 April 1946; Second Division Association Strike Communiqué 4, 19 April 1946, LA IV250-72-1-1671; “On the Eve of Ending the Strike,” Hatzofeh, 23 April 1946; Z. Radet, “The Civil Servants’ Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 24 April 1946; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 332–335; De Vries, “British Rule,” 627–631. “Policemen and Army at Nur,” Al Hamishmar, 6 February 1946; “Unacceptable Discrimination,” Davar, 20 May 1946; Baer, “Jewish and Arab,” 76–83; “Strikes and Lockouts in 1947,” Davar, 17 February 1948; Taqqu, “Arab Labor,” 250–281; De Vries, “British Rule,” 613–615. Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 327–347. In the United Kingdom, Order 1305 was annulled only in 1951. See Fishman, “A Vital Element.” “300 Liber Workers on Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 31 January 1946; Head of the labor department at the Manufacturers’ Association to the Histadrut Executive, 28 April 1946, CZA, S9/1962; Matityahu Mendel, “Why Was the Manufacturers’ Association Troubled?” Davar, 18 June 1946; “The Elite Dispute to Arbitration?” Al Hamishmar, 27 June 1946. On the strikes in Solel Boneh and Kur, both part of the Histadrut holding company, in spring 1946, see also the Labor Party Archive, Beit Berl, 2-402-1946-5; Yehoshua Volinsky, “What Is the Lesson of the Strike at the Kur and Solel Boneh Plants?” Al Hamishmar, 7 April 1946; Ran Or-Ner, “Salt of Earth. Zionist Industrialization by Private-Public Entrepreneurship: M.A. Novomeysky and Palestine Potash Ltd., 1919–1949” (PhD thesis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2004), 127–132. Hans Rubin, “The Strike at the Elite Factory”, 14 July 1946, CZA, S9/1962; “Why Do the Dead Sea Workers Strike?” Davar, 23 August 1946; “The Potash Company Responds to the Claims by the Dead Sea Labor Council,” Al Hamishmar, 3 September 1946; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 327–347.

Notes to pages 91–99 •

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61. “The Labor Dispute in Petach Tikvah Escalates,” Hatzofeh, 13 December 1946; “The Strike-Breeching Front Widens,” Al Hamishmar, 13 December 1946. 62. “Employers’ and Strike-Breakers’ Provocation Caused Bloodshed in Petach Tikvah,” Davar, 15 December 1946.

Chapter 5  1. On the notion of strike waves see James Cronin, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain (London, 1979), 47–58; Sjaak Van Der Velden, “Introduction,” in Strikes Around the World, 1968–2005, ed. Sjaak Van Der Velden, Heiner Dribbusch, Dave Lyddon, and Kurt Vandaele (Amsterdam, 2007), 12–19.  2. Nachum T. Gross, “Israeli Economic Policies, 1948–1951: Problems of Evaluation,” Journal of Economic History 50, no. 1 (1990): 67–83.  3. Haim Barkai, The Genesis of the Israeli Economy (Jerusalem, 1990); Mundlak, Fading Corporatism, 61–70. Mapai, under Ben-Gurion’s leadership, won the majority of votes in Israel’s first two elections of 1949 and 1951.  4. See the example of the diamond industry in 1948–51 in De Vries, Diamonds and War, 240–248.  5. Shalev, Labour and the Political, 248–258.  6. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, liberal notions about employment relations were represented by the Progressive Party, Herut, which originated in the Revisionist movement and the Manufacturers’ Association.  7. For the widening of aims beyond material self-interest see Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley, CA, 1989), 206–209. For definitions of collective discontent see John Godard, “Strikes as Collective Voice: A Behavioral Analysis of Strike Activity,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 46, no. 1 (1992): 161–175.  8. “A Protest Strike Tomorrow of 40,000 Army Workers,” Davar, 19 May 1947; “On the Strike at the Public Works Department,” Davar, 20 May 1947; “A Warning Strike of the Army Workers,” Hatzofeh, 21 May 1947; Yechezkel Wiener, “The Struggle of the Jewish Worker in the Army Economy,” Davar, 23 July 1947; Walter Preuss, “Strikes and Lockouts in 1947”, Davar, 17 February 1948; Hans Rubin, “Strikes and Lockouts in 1947”, Al Hamishmar, 7 March 1948.  9. Hans Rubin, “Labor Disputes Courts,” Al Hamishmar, 26 January 1947. 10. Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 335–355. 11. On the Histadrut during the war see Yitzhak Greenberg, “The Military Labor Brigade: The Attempt to Militarize the Labor Force during the War of Independence,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 8 (1988): 275–397. 12. Statistical Bulletin 9 (1949): 29; On the approach of the Histadrut during the war see Aharon Becker, The Workers in Israel 1949–1969 (Tel Aviv, 1970); Yitzhak Greenberg, “Golda in the Histadrut: An Emissary and a Mission,” in Golda: Growth of a Leader, 1921–1956, ed. Meir Avizohar et al. (Tel Aviv, 1994 ),

142

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

•

Notes to pages 99–101

137–141; Hagai Tsoref, “The Policy of Golda Myerson (Meir) in the Ministry of Labor: 1949–1956 in the Light of her Socio-Economic Worldview” (PhD thesis, Haifa University, 2010), 314–317; Moshe Naor, At the Home Front: Tel Aviv and the Yishuv Mobilization During the War of Independence (Jerusalem, 2009), 92–97. “The Workers of the Electricity Company Are on Strike,” Hatzofeh, 16 April 1948; “Work Renewal at the Electricity Company in Tel Aviv,” Davar, 21 April 1948; Naor, At the Home Front, 98–101. “The Lockout of the Bakeries in Tel Aviv,” Davar, 5 November 1948; “The Bakeries’ Strikers Will Not Receive Strike Pay,” Al Hamishmar, 16 November 1948; “A Strike in a Bakery Violates the Agreement,” Al Hamishmar, 14 December 1948. Labor relations and dispute arbitration in particular were handled by the new government of Israel’s ministry of interior until June 1949, when a department of labor relations was established in the ministry of labor, headed by Golda Meir. See Jonathan Fine, The Birth of State: The Establishment of the Israeli Governmental System 1947–1951 (Jerusalem, 2009), 243–245; Tsoref, “The Policy of Golda,” 299–301. On the evolution of labor legislation in the early state period see Israel Bar Shira, “Labor Legislation in the State of Israel,” Chikrei Avodah 2 (1948): 59–78. “Labor Relations in 1949,” Yarchon Haavoda 1, no. 2 (1949): 20–23; Walter Preuss, “The Labor Exchanges in the Economic Campaign,” Yarchon Haavoda 1, no. 3 (1949): 2; Gross, “Israeli Economic Policies,” 67–83; Orit Rosin, “The Austerity Policy and the Rule of Law: Relations between Government and Public in Fledgling Israel,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4, no. 3 (2005): 273–290; Guy Seidman, “Unexceptional for Once: Austerity and Food Rationing in Israel, 1939–1959,” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 95 (2008): 95–130. “The Strike at ‘Elite’ and ‘Liber,’” Haaretz, 19 January 1949; “The Crisis in Israel’s Labor Relations Worsens,” Herut, 1 March 1949; “What the ‘Elite’ and “Liber’ Strike Taught,” Davar, 19 April 1949; “A Thousand Workers Laid Off in the Sweets Industry,” Maariv, 16 May 1949; See also correspondence on the strike in LA/IV-250-64-1-165; “Strikes and Lockouts in 1949,” Davar, 1 February 1950. “A Strike was Declared at Ata-Textile,” Davar, 8 March 1949; “The Ata-Textile Workers Are on Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 8 March 1949; “Ata Workers’ Demands Were Met after a Six-Day Strike,” Davar, 15 March 1949 ; “What Are Postal Workers Striking Over?” Al Hamishmar, 27 March 1949; “What Is Behind the Postal Workers’ Strike?” Herut, 4 April 1949. See also Gil Shaal, “Labor Relations in Israel,” Yarchon Haavoda Vehabituach Haleumi 10–11 (1954): 1–4. “170 Magen-Chetwood Workers Are on Strike and Demand Strike Pay,” Al Hamishmar, 30 June 1949. Mapam (Mifleget Hapoalim Hameuhedet, United Workers Party) was established in early 1948 as a merger between Marxist Zionists in the Hashomer Hatsair movement and Achdut Haavoda-Poalei Zion. Maki (Hamiflaga Hakomonistit Haisraelit, Israeli Communist Party) originated in 1948 when the older Communist Party (PKP) merged with the Arab National Liberation League.

Notes to pages 101–106 •

143

19. Declaration by the Petach Tikvah Labor Council on the Strike at Magen-Chetwood, June 1949, LA/IV-36-12c; Declaration of the Workers’ Committee on the strike at the Magen-Chetwood factory, June 1949 LA/IV-36-12c. 20. “The Strike of the Magen-Chetwood Workers Continues,” Al Hamishmar, 1 July 1949; “The Strike at Magen-Chetwood,” Davar, 3 July 1949; “The Partnership between the Employers and Mapai’s Faction Plots against the MagenChetwood Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 4 July 1949; “Declaration of the Petach Tikvah Labor Council on the Magen-Chetwood Strike,” Davar, 4 July 1949; “The Government will not Tolerate Political Strikes,” Hatzofeh, 5 July 1949; Shlomo Ben-Nachman, “Upon the Strike at Magen-Chetwood,” Al Hamishmar, 8 July 1949. 21. For instances similar to the Magen-Chetwood strike see, e.g., the strike of bakery workers in July 1949 that broke out despite Histadrut opposition. See “The Bakery Workers’ Strike: Breeching Histadrut Authority,” Davar, 12 July 1949; on the strike wave see also “Thousands of Workers in Protest and Warning Strikes in Tel Aviv,” Al Hamishmar, 20 July 1949; “On the Strikes,” Davar, 22 July 1949; G. Aharoni, “Strikes in Services,” Hed Hamizrah, 16 December 1949; “Special Strike Rights Given to the Teachers’ Union,” Al Hamishmar, 24 January 1950; “Nurses Decide to Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 22 February 1950; “The Histadrut Opposes Striking by Nurses,” Maariv, 22 February 1950. See also Eyal Kafkafi, “Two Types of ‘Mamlakhtiyut’: The Case of the Relationship between the General Federation of Labor and the Teachers’ Union,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 6 (1996): 358–401. 22. “The Nationwide Nurses’ Strike—Against the Will of the Histadrut,” Davar, 7 July 1950; “The Nurses Debate the Histadrut’s Ultimatum,” Maariv, 10 July 1950. 23. “On the Nurses’ Strike,” Davar, 11 July 1950; “The Nurses’ Strike Stopped,” Al Hamishmar, 11 July 1950. 24. “Upon the Ending of the Nurses’ Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 12 July 1950; “183 Plants Joined the Strike,” Al Hamishmar, 27 September 1951; Tzoref, “The Policy of Golda,” 314–317. See also Tamar Hermann, “New Challenges to New Authority: Israeli Extra-Parliamentarism in the 1950s,” in The First Decade of Independence, ed. Ilan Troen and Noach Lucas (New York, 1995), 105–124. 25. “The Nurses Stop the Strike and Return to Work,” Haaretz, 12 July 1950; “The National Nurses’ Organization and the School Nurses,” 21 September 1950, LA/IV-208-1-5177b; Yaakov Ben-Ari, “The Nurses: A Tired, Deprived and Disappointed Lot,” Al Hamishmar, 9 September 1951. 26. Yehuda (Judd) Ne’eman, Ja Brechen: The Seamen’s Revolt (Israel Television, 1981); Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel 1948–1965 (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 73–76. 27. This was partly apparent in the early discussions on a new labor disputes law, and in a broad political consensus on its purpose of containing strikes. Only in 1957 was the law finally issued. See “Preparation of the Law to Settle Labor Disputes Is Nearing Its End,” Davar, 24 April 1952. 28. The negation was part of the terminology of Mamlkahtiyut, which referred to the political, social, and normative sovereignty of the state. See Nir Ke-

144 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

•

Notes to pages 106–108

dar, “Ben-Gurion’s Mamlakhtiyut: Etymological and Theoretical Roots,” Israel Studies 7, no. 3 (2002): 117–133. “The Strike of the Seamen Workers,” Davar, 23 July 1951; D. Y. Zakai, “The Strike on the Sea,” Hatzofeh, 29 July 1951; Zvi Segal, “The Seamen’s Union, 1933–1953” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1976); Eyal Kafkafi, “Turning to the Left as a Justification for Breaking a Strike: The Case of the Seamen’s Strike,” Tura 3 (1994): 221–247. “The Seamen’s Representative Blames,” Al Hamishmar, 7 October 1951; “The Seamen Were Ordered to Enlist,” Al Hamishmar, 7 October 1951; Dov Shoval, “A Great Change Is Happening Here,” Al Hamishmar, 8 November 1951; Supporters of the Seamen Assembly, Therefore the Sea Agitated: The Seamen’s Struggle Affair (Haifa, 1952); Moshe Lissak, ed., Forty Years to the Seamen’s Strike: A Colloquium (Ramat Efal, 1992); Nimrod Eshel, The Seamen’s Strike (Tel Aviv, 1994). On Mapam’s opposition see Avi Bareli, “Mamlakhtiyut, Capitalism and Socialism during the 1950s in Israel,” Journal of Israeli History 26 no. 2 (2007): 201–227. “The Seamen Continue Breeching Histadrut Discipline,” Davar, 13 November 1951; “The Seamen Address a Manifesto to the Yishuv,” Al Hamishmar, 16 November 1951; “The Seamen’s Strike,” Maariv, 28 November 1951; David Giladi, “A Conversation with the Unknown Seamen,” Maariv, 30 November 1951; “The Tamar Crew Was Forced Off the Ship,” Al Hamishmar, 30 November 1951; Yaakov Perach, “A Masquerade,” Al Hamishmar, 14 December 1951; Yitzhak Sadeh, “On the Seamen and to the Seamen,” Al Hamishmar, 21 December 1951. “The Seamen Union Manifesto,” Al Hamishmar, 25 December 1951; “The Dispute with the Seamen Was Liquidated,” Davar, 27 December 1951; Dan Omer, “The Reorganization of the Nation’s Grief,” Prosa 28 (1979): 32–42; Dov Khenin and Danny Filc, “The Seamen’s Strike”, in Fifty to Forty-Eight: Critical Moments in the History of the State of Israel, ed. Adi Ophir, special issue, Theory and Criticism, nos. 12-13 (1999): 89–99. Yehoshua Gilboa, “Half a Year after the Seamen’s Strike,” Haaretz, 20 July 1952; Mordechai Namir, Two Years in the Life of the Histadrut, 1951–1952 (Tel Aviv, 1953), 41–45; Shlomo Rechav, “On the History of One Campaign: Twenty Years to the Annulment of the Ben-Gurion – Jabotinsky Agreement.” Al Hamishmar, 12 April 1955.



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r

Index

Achdut Haavoda Party, 28–29, 40, 42, 122n18, 131n50 Acre, strikes in, 31, 38, 60, 129n19, 130n36, 140n57 advisors, on labor disputes, 9, 39, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 136n7 agriculture, 16–17, 18–19, 28, 33, 50–51, 62, 63, 64, 74 Arab citrus workers’ strike (1907), 125n21 Goldberg citrus grove strike (1918), 127n1 Kinneret farm strike (1911), 19, 22, 126n28 Migdal farm strike (1915), 127n1 Petach Tikvah citrus grove strike (1927/8), 38, 63, 127n6 Sejera strike (1914), 13, 18, 22–23, 125n16, 126n30 strikes in plantations, 10, 13, 18, 19, 33, 60, 62, 63, 64 Winery strike (1900), 13, 17 Winery strike (1907), 18, 19, 22, 125n13, 125n17 Winery strike (1920), 37, 75, 128n11 Aharonovich, Yosef, 12, 125n11 Alliance Israélite Universelle, 17 Amsterdam, 81 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946), 86

anti-colonial protest, 15, 47–48, 53, 59–61, 91, 96, 114, 127n1 Antwerp, 63, 80–81, 135n40 apprentices, 63, 80, 81, 82, 83 Arab community in Palestine, 2, 6, 16–17, 60–62, 66, 109 Arab Rebellion, 47, 50, 51, 52, 58, 59–65, 70, 85, 95, 96, 105 Arab-Jewish labor market competition, 12, 20, 22, 32, 33, 42, 47, 59, 63, 135n44 employers, 27 General strike (1936), 47, 61–62, 134n30 labor unions, 60, 98 Merchants’ strike (1929), 38 Palestine Workers’ Alliance, 60 workers’ strikes, 6, 10, 11, 38, 47–48, 49–50, 59–60, 62, 91, 97, 98, 105, 114, 125n21,127n1, 134n32, 134–35n34 workforce, 2, 37, 42, 49–50, 53, 60, 71, 98, 122n15 See also Conquest of Work campaign Arab-Jewish conflict, 4, 6, 7, 27, 47–48, 60–61, 68, 95, 98, 109, 111 Arab protest against the Balfour Declaration, 26, 125n21 Peel commission partition plan, 50

Index  • 

Arab-Jewish joint strikes, 23, 27, 31, 33, 35, 36, 42, 48, 50, 60, 76, 85–91, 97, 123n24, 125n21, 129n19, 132n7, 134n32, 134–35n34, 140n57 arbitration, in strikes, 10, 18, 22, 37, 39, 40–43, 57, 63, 64, 67, 71–73, 96, 100, 101, 113, 138n22, 142n14 Labor arbitration committees, 37, 39, 41, 56, 58, 64, 69, 78, 89, 130n41, 130n48, 134n27, 138n25 See compulsory arbitration, Defence (Trade Disputes) Order Arlosoroff, Chaim, assassination of, 56 Army Army camp workers’ strike (1947), 76, 97, 98, 139n45, 141n8 British, 30, 37, 61, 66, 70, 71, 74, 76, 85, 87, 90, 91 122n16 crushing of the Arab Rebellion, 95 Israeli army in the seamen strike, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110 Ottoman, 17, 25, 26 artificial teeth industry American Porcelain Tooth Company strike (1941) 75, 138n22 Avniel, Binyamin, 67, 68, 136n7, 138n28 bakeries Avikhail bakery strike (1936), 62, 134n30 Bakers’ strike in Tel Aviv (1948), 99, 142n14 Bakery workers’ strike (1949), 143n21 Berman bakery strike (1928), 30, 54, 128n13 banking, 50 Anglo-Egyptian bank strike (1920), 37, 128n11 Bar Giora organization, 22 Bar Shira, Israel, 126n23 Beilinson, Moshe, 43–44

159

Belgium, 79, 80, 81 Ben-Ami, Oved, 79 Ben-Gurion, David, 16, 19, 25, 28, 40, 55–57, 67, 93, 109, 110, 126n24, 141n3 See Jabotinsky, London agreements Ben-Yeruham, Hen, 68 Ben-Zvi, Izhak, 16, 19, 126n24 Ben-Zvi, Rachel Yanait, 16 Borochov, Dov Ber, 124n8 breaking of strikes, 1–2, 36, 55, 61, 133n20, 141n61, 141n62 See solidarity Brenner, Yosef Haim, 15, 124n8 Britain Balfour Declaration (1917), 26, 28, 125n21 Colonial Office, 65, 70, 89 Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act (1875), 130n35 employment and industrial relations policy, 15, 34, 66, 70, 96–97, 114 Ministry of Economic Warfare, 79 Ministry of Labor and National Service, 70 Order 1305: Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order (1940), 70, 137n10, 140n58 Trade Disputes Act (1906), 124n6, 130n35 Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act (1927), 130n35 See Government of Palestine, army, labor legislation British Empire, strikes in, 15, 65, 66 building industry, 28, 31, 33, 39, 41, 50, 54, 55, 60, 74 building workers’ strike (1933), 55, 133n20 building workers’ strike (1934), 133n20 Kur/Solel Boneh strike (1946), 140n59

160 

•  Index

Mosaica tiles factory strike (1935), 60, 134n32 Stonemasons’ strike (1925), 128n15 business cycle and strikes, 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 25, 31, 32, 51, 52, 53, 58, 59, 60, 65, 68, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 84, 85, 95, 99, 105, 111, 114–15 carpentry Goralski-Krinitizi carpentry strike (1923), 128n14 strikes in, 30, 31, 33, 39, 75, 76 Tirza factory strike (1946), 138n26, 138n28 capital attitudes to strikes, 40, 41, 44, 47, 52, 110, 114 British support of, 37, 39, 44, 63, 72, 114 Government of Israel support of, 89, 95, 96, 110, 114 import of, 28, 29, 51, 80 international capital, 6, 50, 60 private capital, 6, 8, 9, 11, 23, 25, 29, 50, 51, 52, 62, 67, 69, 79, 95, 104–105, 113–14 relations with labor, 6, 23, 30, 34, 42, 43, 52, 55, 63, 71, 72, 84–85, 95, 98, 110, 115 See employers, Diamond Manufacturers’ Association, Palestine Manufacturers’ Association cement industry Nesher cement strike (1925), 31, 33 Nesher cement strike (1928), 32, 54, 75, 77, 129n26 Nesher cement strike (1932), 54, 60, 75, 77 Nesher cement quarry strike (1936), 134n33 Nesher cement strike (1944), 138n24 Civil Service Civil servants’ strike (1943), 76

Civil servants’ strike (1944), 76, 140n51 Civil servants’ strike (1946), 76, 78–79, 85–91, 139n46, 139n47, 139–40n48, 140n49, 140n55, 140n56 clerks, 28, 49, 87, 88 Second Division of the Civil Service Association, 86, 87, 89, 90, 139–40n48, 140n50 Union of, 89, 102, 103, 140n53 See Civil servants’ strike, Electricity company clothing industry A.B.G fashion strike (1944), 138n25 Jews in garment industry strikes, 15 See also textiles coal mining, strikes in, 15 Cohen, David, 1 Cold War, 104, 109 collective action in strikes, 2, 4, 6, 7–9, 11, 14, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 29, 32, 34–36, 47, 56, 58, 66, 70, 72, 81, 85, 86, 106, 111, 112, 122n13, 141n7 general strikes, 14, 16, 90 spontaneous strike action, 35, 60, 42, 83, 86–88, 101 See discipline, solidarity collective bargaining, 40, 41, 43, 47, 51, 58, 67, 69, 72, 80, 82, 83, 84, 89, 100, 105, 138n21 collective memory, 10, 12, 47, 56, 103 colonialism, 3 See Britain, anti-colonial protest Communist Party of Israel, 101, 107, 142n18 Communist Party of Palestine (PKP), 38 42, 55, 60, 69, 77, 82, 85, 142n18 National Liberation League, 142n18 compulsory arbitration, 22, 40–41, 50, 54, 56, 64, 67, 68–69, 70, 71, 77, 78, 97, 103, 110, 114, 130n36, 131n53, 132n8, 133n20, 137n11 See also arbitration

Index  • 

Conquest of Work campaign, 7, 22, 32, 42, 46, 47, 52–53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 62, 126n30 See Arab community in Palestine, employers corporatism, 79, 95, 105, 114–15 See cost-of-living allowance, employers, Government of Palestine, Histadrut, State of Israel cost-of-living allowance, 75, 76, 86, 87, 88, 100, 136n7, 138n21, 138n22 See standards of living, corporatism, employers democracy and strikes, 2–3, 11, 97, 104, 106, 107–108, 110, 111, 115 See right to strike diamond industry, 50, 63, 74, 75, 79–85, 139n32, 141n4 De Beers diamond cartel, 79, 81, 83 Diamond Manufacturers’ Association, 79, 139n34 diamond workers’ strike (1939), 63, 135n40 diamond workers’ strike (1943), 139n34 diamond workers’ strike (1944), 138n23, 139n41 diamond workers’ strike (1946), 138n29 employment relations in, 81–85 general strikes in, 76 strike propensity of diamond cutters, 6, 79–85, 96 See Tel Aviv, Netanya discipline, in strike action, 21, 35, 84, 101, 109, 144n31 Downs, Lee Laura, 3, 121n8 See historiography and methodology duration of strikes, 5, 13, 21, 26, 34, 40, 49, 73, 87, 94, 97, 98, 99, 107, 117, 119 economic booms and tides See business cycle and strikes

161

edible oil manufacture Altman workshop strike (1914), 127n1 Shemen strike (1925), 33 education (strikes, chronological) Mikveh Israel strike (1899), 13, 17, 125n14 War of languages strike (1913/4), 23, 127n32 teachers’ strike (1924/5), 23, 25, 31, 128n16 teachers’ strike (1931/2), 62, 133n13 teachers’ strike (1934), 62, 134n27 teachers’ strike (1937/8), 135n37, 135n38 teachers’ strike (1942) , 23, 76, 138n25 teachers’ strike (1944), 138n25 teachers’ strike (1950), 100–101, 102, 143n21 Egypt Cabbies strike (1911), 15, 124n7, 126n22 Labor department, 70 replacement workers from, 125n21 Electricity Company Electricity company strike (1928), 30, 32, 127n6 Electricity company strike (1948), 93, 99, 142n13 emergency, state of, 64, 70, 111, 115 employers attitudes to Arab-Jewish labor market competition, 2, 20, 22, 29, 32, 33, 42, 47, 51, 53, 60, 62, 63, 104, 125n21 organizations, 29, 39, 69, 78 relations with labor, 1, 7, 8–9, 14, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 27, 30–31, 33–36, 38, 40–43, 44, 46–47, 51–60, 63–64, 66, 68, 71, 75, 77–78, 81, 84, 90–92, 100, 101,

162 

•  Index

104–106, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 125n21, 126n30, 138n22 See capital, Conquest of Work campaign, corporatism, Diamond Manufacturers’ Association, Palestine Manufacturers’ Association, paternalism in employment relations Eshel, Nimrod, 93, 144n30 ethnicity ethnic and national segregation, 7, 9, 22, 27, 33, 34, 42, 47, 53, 54, 58, 62, 64, 66, 85, 91, 104, 105, 126n29, 128n10 ethnicity and strikes, 10, 17, 19, 21, 23, 86, 109, 113, 124–25n9, 125n15, 126n29, 135–36n44 See Arab-Jewish labor market competition European strike traditions, 14–15, 16, 64, 80 See compulsory arbitration, Fascism Farmers Association, 46, 63 See agriculture Fascism, 40, 50, 51, 54, 56, 63, 68, 79, 80 See compulsory arbitration flour industry Grandes Moulins de Palestine strike (1923), 33, 129n24, 129n27 France French strike law (1892), 20 legislation (1800), 20 strikes in the French empire, 86 fruit and vegetable preserves industry Primazon workers’ strike (1938), 135n38 Fuleihan, Labib, 89 See Civil Servants’ strike funding of strikes, 6, 25, 42, 44, 100 Germany, 15, 23, 50, 68, 72, 79

Government of Israel See State of Israel Government of Palestine attitudes to labor disputes, 6–7, 15, 20, 32, 37–39, 42, 44, 48, 60, 61, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70–72, 86–91, 97, 110, 114, 126n23, 135–136n40, 136n45 Defence (Trade Disputes) Order (1942), 70–72, 78, 91, 96, 105 134n33, 135–136n40, 137n8, 137n10, 137n11, 137n14 economic policy, 8, 29, 34, 53, 70, 73, 74, 79–80, 83, 86–90, 98, 110, 138n21 as employer, 6, 39, 53, 114 interventionist policy, 9, 15, 23, 37–39, 42, 43, 53, 65, 69, 71, 72, 87–88, 98, 114–115, 136n45 Labor department, 70, 71, 83, 85, 132n2, 139n31 Labor legislation committee (1931), 135–36n44 labor policy, 48, 64, 70–71 Palestine Criminal Code (1934), 38, 64, 71, 130n35, 135–36n44 Prevention of Intimidation Ordinance (1927), 38, 44, 56, 71, 72, 130n35, 135n44 rule, 8, 11, 14, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 35, 39, 53, 62, 66, 70, 92, 94, 95, 96–98, 114, 122n16, 122n17 White Paper (1939), 71, 136n45 Workmen’s Compensation Ordinance (1927), 130n34 See also army, capital, civil service, Histadrut, labor legislation, police Graves, Richard Massie, 70, 73, 137n11, 137n15 Hebrew Labor See under Arab-Jewish labor market competition, Conquest of Work campaign

Index  • 

Haifa, 2, 17, 19, 28, 50, 51, 89, 90, 128n10, 129n27, 130n42, 134n31 Haifa district court, 1 Haifa labor council, 1, 30, 33–36, 100, 106–107, 121n1, 127n6, 129n24, 129n27, 130n42, 133n13, 133n18, 136n6 port, 50, 53, 54, 60, 61, 107, 132n7 strikes in, 19, 23, 30, 31, 33–36, 37, 39, 49–50, 54, 55, 59, 60, 87, 90, 106–107, 121n1, 128n12, 129n24, 129n27, 132n7, 133n16, 133n20, 134n33, 135n35, 135n37, 135n38, 136n6,139n43, 140n54,143n26 big strikes wave (1925),33, 39–40, 123n24, 127n3, 128n14,129n24, 129n27 Hapoel Hatsair Party, 14, 19, 22, 28, 39, 69, 122n18, 125n20 Hashomer organization, 22 Hashomer Hatsair, 142n18 See Mapam Hebrew Labor See under Conquest of Work Herut Party, 141n6 See Revisionist movement Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden (Aid Association of German Jews), 23 Histadrut attitudes to strikes, 1–2, 6, 27, 29, 31, 35–36, 39, 41–45, 54–59, 62–63, 65, 72–73, 75, 86–87, 91, 99, 100–103, 104–105, 106–110, 111–12, 139n43, 140n59, 143n21 bureaucratic centralism in, 24, 35–36, 39, 41, 42, 43, 57, 59, 69, 75, 77, 85, 105, 106–107, 109 Comrades’ Court, 1–2, 59, 106, 121n1 department of Statistics and Information, 39, 69 establishment, 27, 28, 122n18 Hapoel troops, 55 labor market strategies, 4, 8, 33, 56, 60, 68, 98–99, 104

163

membership, 28–29, 49, 51 organization and power, 6, 28, 31, 39, 51, 54, 55, 59, 66, 68–69, 78–79, 93, 95, 96, 101, 106–110, 112, 131n50 press, 10, 69, 136n3 relations with employers, 30, 32, 51–52, 64, 95, 105, 113, 115, 138n21 relations with the Government of Palestine, 38, 70–72, 75, 91, 113 relations with the Revisionist movement, 54–59, 68, 91–92, 97 relations with the State of Israel, 99, 100, 101–103, 106–110, 141n11, 141n12 relations with workers, 30, 32, 41–45, 51, 52, 53, 64, 75, 77–78, 81–84, 85, 93, 99, 100–101, 106–110, 139n43 Trade union department, 138n21 Zionist ideology, 34–35, 36, 40, 43, 54, 86, 104, 122n18 See Arab-Jewish joint strikes, capital, Conquest of Work, corporatism, employers, Labor Zionism, Histadrut Labor councils See under names of towns historiography and methodology, 2–3, 4, 7, 8, 9–10, 14, 15, 27, 28, 47–48, 50, 56, 74, 85, 104, 112, 121n4, 121n5, 121n7, 121n10, 122–23n22, 123n27, 123–24n28, 124n29, 127n6 See multi-functionality of strikes Holocaust, 68, 79, 98 images of labor and strikes, 2, 7, 14, 34, 35, 36, 37, 46, 63, 83, 84, 90, 108, 127n2 131n56, 132n6, 135n43 See legitimacy, rhetorical expression in strikes immigrants, 2, 6, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 43, 50, 51, 61, 62, 63,

164 

•  Index

71, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 113, 122n15, 122n17 Proletarianization of, 29, 128n10 imperialism, 3 improvement struggles See wages and strikes industrialization, 6, 17, 60, 63, 113 See capital, town society industrial courts, 98 See labor court intensity of strikes, 4, 5, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 49, 52, 65, 73, 74, 94, 97, 105, 117, 120, 128–29n17 International Labor Organization, 7, 10, 39 Istanbul, 126n24 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, 19, 22, 40, 55–59, 133n20, 133–34n22, 143n26 See also Ben-Gurion, London agreements, Mapai, Revisionist movement Jaffa, 17, 18, 19, 28, 135n37 strikes in, 21, 30, 31, 37, 59, 60, 61, 87, 90, 127n1, 131n59 See Civil servants’ strike Jerusalem, 9, 17, 18, 19, 28, 51, 65, 125n15, 135n37, 139n35 strikes in, 12, 13, 17, 20, 30, 31, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 59, 87, 90, 91, 100, 124n1, 126n29, 131n56, 132n5, 133n19, 133n20, 134n30, 135n37 jewelry manufacture Bezalel jewelers’ strike (1911), 126n29 Jewish community in Palestine, 122n17, 123n25 attitudes to labor disputes, 6, 7, 14, 22–24, 27, 29, 31, 34, 44, 46–47, 54–55, 58–59, 68–69, 71–72, 90 Committee of Fifteen, 39–41, 131n48 Jewish Agency, 41, 54, 58, 64, 65, 79, 91, 94, 134n27, 138n22, 140n54

Labor Committee, 134n27 mediation in labor disputes, 18, 32, 36, 38–41, 63, 65, 98 See Mapai, Revisionist movement Jewish Colonization Association, 22 Jewish radicalism, 15–16, 124n5 Kiev strike (1905), 16 Minsk strike (1895), 16 Odessa strike (1903), 16 Paterson strike (1913), 124–25n9 Plonsk strike (1905), 16 Katznelson, Berl, 19, 126n28 Kisch, Frederick, 130n32 Labor councils of the Histradrut See under names of towns labor court, 41, 98, 141n9 Labor Department See Government of Palestine labor force, 6, 18, 19, 22, 28, 29, 49, 51, 60, 62, 63, 65, 70, 74, 78, 85 labor legislation British, 30, 34, 37, 38, 43, 44, 64, 65, 69–73, 89, 114, 130n34, 130n35, 133n15, 134n33, 135n44, 135–36n44, 137n8, 137n10, 137n11, 137n14 Israeli, 113, 115, 126n23, 142n14, 143n27 Ottoman, 20, 126n23, 126n24 See Ottoman empire, Government of Palestine, State of Israel labor movement See under Labor Zionism labor process, 80, 83, 84 labor unions, 10, 44, 54, 55, 60, 69, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84,85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 95, 96, 98, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 123n23, 124n6, 125n19, 128n12, 130n35, 135n41, 135n44, 136n45, 136n4, 136n6, 136n7, 138n21, 139n35, 143n21, 144n29 See Histadrut, unorganized workers

Index  • 

Labor Zionism, 2, 4, 6–8, 14, 19, 21–23, 28–36, 40, 42–43, 54, 62, 68, 78, 111, 112, 122n12, 129n30, 131n52 See Arab community in Palestine , Ben-Gurion, Conquest of Work, Histadrut, Mapai, Revisionist movement, Socialism Lavon, Pinchas, 93 League of nations, 10, 39, 122n16 legitimacy of strike action, 3, 4, 14, 19, 22, 23, 24, 40, 44,48, 49, 56, 59, 65, 70, 75, 77, 97, 101, 105, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115 See breaking of strikes, images of strike action, rhetorical expression in strikes, right to strike Levin, Dov, 25, 128n16 Lewinsky, Elhanan Leib, 15, 124n8 Liberal Zionism, 7, 40, 41, 51, 54–55, 64, 65, 68, 79, 82, 97, 141n6 See arbitration, Revisionist movement Litvak, Israel, 1–2, 121n1 lockouts, 5, 40, 70, 97, 124n29, 134n28, 135n43, 136n4, 136n7, 137n13, 137n14, 137n17, 137n18, 140n57, 141n8, 142n14, 142n16 London, strike in, 15 London agreements (1934), 56–59, 63, 68, 72, 77, 91, 105, 133n17, 133n20, 134n23, 134n24, 134n25, 134n26, 144n33 See Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, Mapai, Revisionist movement lost workdays due to strikes, 5, 26, 30, 31, 32, 48, 49, 52, 73, 74, 91, 94, 97, 100, 116–18 Low Countries, 79, 80 See Amsterdam, Antwerp, Belgium Luxemburg, Rosa, 14–15 Mamlakhtiuyt, 95–96, 102–103, 106, 110, 143n21, 143–44n28, 144n30 See Ben-Gurion, State of Israel

165

Mapai (Workers’ Party of Eretz Israel) attitude to labor disputes, 43–44, 54–59, 64, 69, 71, 77, 84, 97, 101, 103, 105–107, 134n26, 137n14 establishment, 28, 122n18 factions, 78, 139n30, 143n20 in government, 6, 94, 95, 100, 104, 106, 108, 111–112, 141n3 hegemony, 51, 54, 56, 57, 72, 82, 96, 104, 105 ideology, 133n12, 133n17 See Ben-Gurion, London agreements, politicization, Revisionist movement Mapam (United Workers Party), 101, 106, 107,142n18, 144n30 matches manufacture Nur match factory strike (1927), 31, 38, 129n19, 130n36 Nur match factory strike (1946), 140n57 meat industry Butchers’ strike (1938), 62, 135n38 mediation, in labor disputes, 20, 36, 37–41, 67, 71, 91, 113, 134n27 See arbitration, Histadrut, Jewish community in Palestine, Labor committees Meir, Golda, 102, 109, 141–42n12, 142n14, 143n24 Mendelsohn, Ezra, 15, 124n5 metal and iron industries, 16, 30, 50, 74, 75 Barzelit factory strike (1934), 133n21 Cluson steel strike (1946) 139n43 Magen-Chetwoood metal-safes factory strike (1949), 101, 142n18, 143n19, 143n21 Metal wires factory strike (1944), 139n45 Okava razor blade factory strike (1941), 137n14 Pachter-Hofman iron factory strike (1928/9), 30, 128n12, 131n49

166 

•  Index

Stein foundry strike (1910), 21, 126n25 Stein foundry strike (1919), 127n9 See Electricity Company Middle East, 4, 68, 70, 74 middle class, 51, 60, 113 See employers, liberal Zionism moral outrage in strikes, 2, 14, 17, 19, 22, 35, 55, 63, 76, 86–87, 98 See legitimacy, rhetorical expression in strikes multi-functionality of strikes, 4, 14, 24, 27, 46, 47, 60, 104, 128n11 Nationalism and socialism, 3 in strike action, 7–8, 21–24, 32–36, 40–41, 43–44, 53, 55, 59–61, 64, 76, 78, 85, 90, 92, 97, 99–112, 114–15, 135–36n40 See Arab community in palestine, Conquest of work, labor Zionism, legitimacy, Mamlakhtiuyt Nemirovsky (Namir), Mordechai, 46, 124n1, 125n17, 127n2, 144n33 Nes Ziona, 134–35n34 Netanya, strikes in, 79–85, 135n38, 138n23, 138n29, 139n34, 139n41 See diamond industry New York, strike in, 15 normalization of the strike phenomenon, 9, 11, 68–92, 97, 105, 111 See routinization nursing and hospitals Nurses’ strike (1950), 102–103, 143n21, 143n22, 143n23, 143n24, 143n25 Shaarei Zedek hospital strike (1930), 62, 132n5,133n19 oil refining industry, 6, 49–50, 53, 60 Eilat-Ashkelon Oil Pipeline strike (1975), 110

Iraq Petroleum Company strike (1935), 133n16 Ottoman empire labor laws, 17, 20, 126n23, 126n24 Law on Work Stoppages (1909), 20, 21, 37, 71, 96, 126n23 Police regulation law (1845), 20 rule in Palestine, 4, 7, 11, 17, 23, 25–27, 29, 114, 115, 122n16, 122n17 strikes in, 15, 18, 19–20, 23, 122–23n22, 124n7, 124–25n9, 125n15, 125n21, 126n22 Young Turks’ revolution, 15, 19, 20 See labor legislation Palestine Manufacturers’ Association, 29, 39, 46, 55, 64, 68, 69, 72, 105, 136n45, 138n21, 140n59, 141n6 See capital, diamond industry, employers, Government of Palestine paper industry, 62 paternalism in employment relations, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 67, 104, 108 See capital, employers, moral outrage in strikes, printing industry Petach Tikvah Petach Tikvah labor council, 91, 101, 133n20, 143n19, 143n20, 143n21 strikes in, 38, 55, 91, 101, 125n21, 127n1, 127n6, 130n36, 133n20, 134–35n34, 135n40, 141n61, 141n62, 142n18, 143n19, 143n20, 143n21 picket lines in strikes, 15, 38, 44, 55, 68, 131n59, 135n44 See police Poalei Zion Party, 14, 16, 19, 22, 28, 122n18, 125n21, 139n30, 142n18 See Ben-Gurion, Achdut Haavoda Party Poland, 15

Index  • 

police, 36, 43, 44, 90, 95, 125n21 suppression of strikes, 38, 104, 106–108, 110, 131n59, 140n57 See picket lines politicization, of strikes, 9, 11, 23–24, 27, 45, 46–48, 53–61, 65–66, 70, 92 See Mapai, Revisionist movement, Government of Palestine, State of Israel ports and shipping, 50, 53, 54, 60, 61, 107, 132n7, 135n35 dock workers’ strikes, 3, 60, 61, 62, 121n9, 132n7 Seamen strike (1951), 6, 11, 47, 93, 103, 106–110, 143n26, 144n29, 144n30, 144n31, 144n32, 144n33 Shoham-Zim Company, 106 See Government of Palestine, Haifa, Jaffa, State of Israel postal employees in the Civil servants’ strike (1946), 87, 91, 140n55 postal workers’ strike (1949), 101, 142n17 potash industry, 74, 140n59 Dead Sea workers’ strike (1944), 138n24 Dead Sea workers’ strike (1946), 91 140n59, 140–41n60 press coverage of labor disputes, 10, 15, 18, 20, 21, 37, 44, 55, 60, 65, 69, 82, 108, 124n1 prevention of strikes, 22, 28, 38, 39, 41, 64, 70, 87, 88, 99, 113, 130n35, 135n44, 137n14 See arbitration, Government of Palestine, Histadrut, Jewish community in Palestine, police, labor legislation, State of Israel Preuss, Walter, 69, 127n3, 127n7, 131n48, 132n6 printing, 16, 18, 19, 30, 33 Levy printing strike (1908), 13, 20, 125n19 Levy printing strike (1910), 12, 125n15

167

Printing workers’ strike (1929), 131n56, 131n57 Printing workers’ union, 125n19 Rosenfeld printing strike (1923), 1–2, 30, 32, 35–36, 121n1, 128n12 Zukerman printing strike (1901/2), 13, 17–18, 124n1 Productivity Councils, 138n24, 139n43 propensity to strike, 3, 4, 6, 80, 82, 83 See diamond industry public sector, strikes in British, 6, 64, 85, 86, 97, 141n8 Israeli, 95, 96, 98, 101, 115, 142n17, 143n21 Zionist, 6, 28, 29, 31, 52, 140n59 See Government of Palestine, labor legislation, railways, State of Israel quantitative aspects of strikes, 3, 10, 24, 39, 63, 65, 85, 105, 122n21, 122–23n22, 124n29, 127n7, 132n6, 132n11, 135n41, 135n43, 141n12 See duration of strikes, intensity of strikes, size of strikes, strikes and strikers Rabinovitch, Aharon, 69, 136n4, 137n18 railways Railway strike (1936), 135n35 strikes in, 6, 20, 31, 85, 87, 139n44 See Arab-Jewish joint strikes, Civil servants’ strike Ramat Gan, strikes in, 91, 100, 140–41n60, 142n16 rhetorical expression in strikes, 3, 10, 20, 21, 22, 23, 33, 36, 45, 48, 60, 84, 108, 109, 110, 133n21 See legitimacy Rehovot, strike in, 135n39 Remez, David, 126n24 repertoire of collective action, 4, 6, 11, 18, 27, 36, 46, 66, 122n13, 122n14, 123n24

168 

•  Index

replacement workers, 31, 44, 63, 125n21 See breaking of strikes Revisionist movement Beitar youth movement, 55, 133n21 relations with Mapai, 43, 48, 51, 53–59, 63, 64, 69, 71, 91, 105, 123n23, 131n44, 132–33n11, 133–34n22 Revisionist National Workers’ Union, 69, 77, 82, 131n47 and strikes, 7, 19, 40, 46, 49, 52, 54–58, 62, 65, 68, 91, 133n20, 141n1 See Jabotinsky, London agreements, Mapai, politicization right to strike, 2, 3, 20, 31, 38, 40, 42, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 89, 96–97, 99–111, 115, 131n59, 136n6 See democracy, legitimacy Rishon Lezion, strikes in, 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 37, 75, 125n13, 125n17, 128n11, 137n14, 138n26, 138n28 routinization of strike action, 6–9, 11, 24, 27, 28, 32, 45, 47, 48, 52, 53–54, 63, 65, 68, 79, 83, 92, 106, 108, 111, 113, 115, 123n26 Russia, 15, 16, 121n10, 124n5, 125n18 Salonica Jewish women in tobacco strikes, 15, 60, 124–25n9, 125n15 Schochat Wilbushewitch, Manya, 16 Sharett, Moshe, 126n24 shoemaking Shoe factories’ strike (1938), 135n38 strikes in, 15 silk manufacture Delfiner’s silk factory strike (1943), 137n11, 138n27 size of strikes, 5, 26, 47, 49, 73, 94, 98, 117, 119

skilled and strong workers, 18, 28–30, 36, 45, 49, 50, 51, 58, 69, 75, 77, 78, 80–83, 89, 102, 103, 112, 115, 132n11 See Histadrut, propensity to strike society and strikes, 3, 4, 27, 28, 32, 37, 40, 44, 46–48, 61–63, 66, 94, 97, 103, 105, 109–113, 115, 123n26, 129n31 Socialism, 6, 14, 15–16, 19, 39, 124n4, 124n8, 142n18, 143n26 Socialist Zionism See Labor Zionism solidarity among workers, 2, 4, 21, 42, 80, 103, 106, 112, 123n27, 141n7 Cross-national, 23, 60, 86, 90, 112, 131n52 See breaking of strikes, collective action standards of living, 25, 29, 33, 75, 87, 88, 100 See cost-of-living allowance Sorel, George, 14 State of Israel, 7, 11, 94, 95, 97, 100, 113, 122n16, 122n17, 125n12, 126n23, 141n6, 142n14 Austerity regime, 100, 101, 103, 142n15 Department of Labor Relations, 99, 142n14 economic policy, 95, 99–100 Government’s attitude to strikes, 93, 101–110, 115, 142n14, 143n27 Government’s relations with employers, 95–96 Government’s relations with the Histadrut, 95–96, 99–110 Knesset (Israel’s legislature), 93, 107 labor policy, 102–110 Mapai’s hegemony of government, 96, 111–12 Ministry of Interior, 99, 142n14 Ministry of Labor, 142n14 public sector, 96, 99–110

Index  • 

Settlement of Labor Disputes Law (1957), 126n23, 143n27 See labor legislation, Mamlakhtiyut, Mapai, War of 1948 state intervention in employment relations See Government of Palestine, State of Israel strikes and strikers, by years, 5, 13, 26, 48, 49, 73, 94, 116–17, 122–23n22, 123n25, 128–29n17 sweets, biscuits and confectionery manufacture, 50, 74, 76, 100 Chocolate industry strike (1946), 91, 140n59, 140–41n60 Chocolate industry strike (1949), 100, 142n16 Froumine biscuit factory strike (1932), 47, 48, 55, 91,132n5 Shulman-Lowenstein strike (1920), 30, 131n51 tailoring and sewing Plonsk strike (1905), 16 Singer company strike (1926), 30, 128n12 Tailors’ strike (1925), 31 Tel Aviv, 28, 50, 51, 128n13 strikes in, 30, 31, 37, 39, 44, 48, 49, 52, 54, 60, 75, 87, 90, 91, 99, 123n25, 128n10, 128n14, 131n59, 132n5, 132n7, 133n20, 135n37, 137n11, 138n23, 138n25, 138n27, 138n29, 139n41, 140n51, 140n59, 141– 42n12, 142n13, 142n14, 143n21 Tel Aviv labor council, 77, 99, 135n37, 138n21 textile industry ATA-Textile factory strike (1957), 100, 110, 142n17 Friedman-Edelstein strike (1930), 44, 48, 54, 131n59, 132n5 Hasharon spinning mill strike (1946), 91, 141n61, 141n62 Jews in textile strikes, 15

169

Siv spinning mill strike (1946), 91, 141n61, 141n62 Textile women workers strike (1934), 49, 123n25, 132n7 Tiberias, 28, 127n1 Tilly, Charles, 4, 122n13, 128n11 See collective action town society economy, 8, 9, 14, 17, 18, 28, 32, 33, 42, 44, 50–51, 60, 74, 91, 95, 104, 109, 111 population, 6, 10, 16, 18, 21, 27, 28, 29, 31, 50, 98, 100, 129n18 strikes in, 15, 27, 29, 43, 44, 55, 59, 61, 63, 65, 77–78, 82, 90, 104–105, 109, 112–13, 127n6, 131n50, 131n56, 132n6 urbanization, 17, 28, 32, 43, 50–51, 104, 111, 127n6 See immigration, labor force. See also under names of industrial branches and towns transportation, 16, 50, 60 Air traffic controllers’ strike (1977), 110 Drivers’ strike (1931), 48, 60, 61, 123n24, 134n32, 134–35n34 Petrol transporters’ strike (1939), 135n39 unemployment, 2, 31, 32, 33, 34, 55, 74, 77, 83, 98, 128n17 Protest by unemployed, 77 See Arab community in Palestine United States of America, strikes in, 15, 129n31, 141n7 unorganized labor, 8, 29, 44, 54, 83, 84, 122n15 See Histadrut voluntarist approach in employment relations, 15, 37, 38, 114, 121n4 See Britain, government of Palestine wages, 4, 7, 14, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 29, 30, 54, 63, 67, 74–76, 80–82, 83, 86–89,

170 

•  Index

91, 96, 99–101, 103, 132n11, 135n39, 137n18, 137n19, 138n25, 139n39, 142n14, 142n18 See cost-of-living allowance, standards of living War of 1948, 94–95, 97–99, 104, 105, 109, 141n11, 141–42n12 Waves of strikes, 3, 5, 20, 31, 33, 37, 39–40, 86, 100,101, 102, 109, 126n22, 127n3, 129n24, 129n27, 137n17, 141n1, 143n21 women workers in strikes, 3, 49, 52, 62, 102–103, 121n8, 122n11, 123n25, 124–25n9, 126n29, 127n1, 128n10 working class, 3, 12, 20, 28, 31, 36, 40, 55, 103, 121n5, 121n8, 122n15, 124n5, 124n8, 125n11, 125n15, 126n22, 126n23, 129n22, 129n30, 136n2 See collective action, Histadrut, immigration, middle class, labor unions, unorganized labor

World War I, 13–14, 19, 23, 25–26, 28, 30, 32, 33, 39, 47, 104, 121n6, 122–23n22, 123n23, 125n21, 126n24, 127n1 World War II, 6–7, 61, 64, 67–88, 92, 95, 96–98, 109, 110, 112, 114, 122–23n22, 123n23, 132n9, 136n5, 137n11, 138n20 Yishuv, See Jewish community in Palestine Zefat, 135n37 Zionist movement, 28, 29, 56, 57, 58, 63, 129n24, 130n32, 136n45 See Jewish community in Palestine, public sector, Revisionist movement Zionist ideology and strike action, 2, 8, 21–24, 32–36, 40, 43–45, 47, 55, 56, 62, 84–85, 93, 105, 110, 111, 134n30 See Arab-Jewish conflict, capital, education, Labor Zionism, nationalism