Oaklandsocialist interviewed Zachary Lockman, author of the book “Comrades and Enemies”. This important book reviews relations between Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine, starting in the 1920’s. Video of interview is below, followed by a full transcript. Lockman has a lot of important information, especially on the historic role of “labor Zionism”. Our slideshow, The historic role of labor Zionism is largely based on this book.

John Reimann
So we are talking here with Zachary Lachman who is the author of this book, “Comrades and Enemies”. And that’s a kind of an interesting title, “comrades and enemies” seems to be contradictory. Maybe you could explain what you mean by that title and the basic theme of the book?

Zachary Lockman
Sure, well, I chose the title because it was, in fact, at least at first look contradictory. It’s hard to be both a comrade and an enemy at the at the same moment. So that the title is in fact contradictory. And I chose it because comrade and enemy are not terms usually see together. The book explores the relationship over an extended period of roughly 40 years from the period before the First World War down to 1948, when Palestine was was partitioned between Jewish and Arab labor movements and and workers, especially workers who interacted with one another and in various mixed workplaces. And it’s a complicated relationship which went through a variety of different phases. We can explore some of these questions in more detail, but basically, it explored a certain contradiction in that the Jewish labor movement in Palestine is a labor movement, or labor Zionism as it’s often referred to, which combined, a faith commitment to Zionism with a belief in socialism, had a very ambivalent relationship towards the developing Arab working class in Palestine. There were those who wanted to organize Arab workers, there were those who wanted to exclude them from employment in the Jewish sector of Palestine economy in order to create or preserve more jobs for Jews. There were big debates about this within the labor Zionist Movement. On the other side, the nascent Arab working class, especially from the 1920s onward, which began to develop trade unions, which began to try to improve conditions for workers, by and large, shared the opposition of Palestinian Arab majority to Zionism, because they saw it as a movement of foreigners, which was seeking to displace them or dispossessed them in their own homeland and create a Jewish majority in a Jewish state. On the other hand, there were circumstances in which there was an opportunity for, even a need for some degree, of cooperation in places where both Arabs and Jews work together. And this created a complicated set of stories and relationships that stretched on until 1948, when the vast majority when half the Arab population of Palestine was was displaced, was driven out or fled from their homes, and it’s the warfare and then found themselves refugees unable to return home.

John Reimann
You know, you refer to socialists, Zionism or Zionist socialism. And it seems to me, you know, socialism poses that all workers have to combine, regardless of background against all capitalists, and Zionism poses that all Jews, workers and capitalists have to combine. So it seems to me to be a complete contradiction in terms. What are your thoughts on that?

Zachary Lockman
So we can certainly see it that way. But but there were lots of people who did not see it that way, right, who did not see it as a contradiction. And there are many cases, in fact, where socialist movements adopted a nationalist coloration, or organize specific groups that work are based on ethnicity or other factors. For example, one of one of the most important Jewish social movements in Eastern Europe, until the Second World War when the masses of European Jews were murdered, was the organization known as the Bund was a Jewish socialist movement, with very widespread support. And it organized Jewish workers specifically. Now, we said we are collaborating with regard to cooperate with Russian workers before the Russian Revolution with Polish workers and so on to create a democratic and socialist Russia, Poland, etc, in which Jews will be an equal minority, but they were organizing first and foremost as Jews and in the language of the Jewish masses in Yiddish, right rather than other languages. So it’s not unheard of, in the case of Zionism, right. This was a diverse movement from the very beginning, alongside what we might call bourgeois Zionists like Theodore Hertzl and, and the preeminent leader of The Zionist movement on the international arena Chaim Weissman who became Israel’s first president in 1948. You have religious Zionist who combine of the faith of Judaism and its orthodox form with Zionism, even as the vast majority of Orthodox rabbis denounced Zionism, as false Messianism. And you’ll also have people who are influenced by the socialist currents that were so powerful among the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. They combine this with their Zionism. And so they argue that the future Jewish society, the future Jewish state in Palestine, should not be just another capitalist society and other capitalist state where the rich, oppress and exploit the poor, it should be socialist, and Jewish workers will be the vanguard of this project of immigration and settlement and create a new kind of society. So looking back, of course, we can say that this was rather an illusion. And when it came down to it in the institutions that that the labor Zionist movement created in Palestine, in the Jewish community in Palestine, which were very influential in the State of Israel, which this movement dominated into the 1970s the Zionism was a lot more important than the socialism. And it was these people, people like David Ben Gurion and his allies and various other groups parties factions on within the labor Zionist camp who created the State of Israel basically, and who oversaw the dispossession of the Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian Arab society in 1948. And they were always ready to give priority to Jewish immigration Jewish settlement, even as they created certain institutions, which salva which remained today the kibbutz in a somewhat modified form, the Labor Federation, the history route, and so on, you know, which are which are much weaker than they once were. And, Israel, of course, is a very different place than it was 40, 50. 60 years ago. They left an imprint nonetheless. And in their time, they convinced themselves certainly that they could be good socialists in a certain kind of way. As well as, as well as committed Zionists. Even though they pursued policies, which were often quite hostile to Arab workers, and the emerging Arab trade union movement.

John Reimann
You know, you mentioned the Bund. And it seems to me that one issue is, when you look at social democracy, and the Social Democratic parties, all of them in some ways, it seems to me tried to square the circle, and see some sort of common interests with their own capitalist class. And so most of them ended up supporting their own capitalist class in World War One. So, would you agree that labor Zionism was in his own way, in part, an expression of that contradiction?

Zachary Lockman
Yes, but they were in very different circumstances, right? This this labor Zionist Movement, when it’s got its start in the first years of the 20th century. And when the first members of this movement right in Palestine, right, there was very little of a Jewish capitalist class and there was very little of a Jewish working class. So they came with the vision of creating a Jewish working class and Palestine. Now, they were going to do this, they hope with capital from the Zionist movement, donations collected abroad, which would be channeled, they hoped into institutions, they controlled into creating the kinds of forms of settlement, collective settlements, like the kibbutz cooperative settlement settlements, like the moshav and other things. And into industrial development eventually, which would be controlled by the history of truth, the labor, Zionist Federation of Labor, and serve the interests of of that movement, and not purely that of capitalist investors. Right? I mean, Zionism was not a high profit kind of enterprise, for Jewish investors or for any kind of investors. Right? It was a nationalist enterprise. And of course, the Zionist movement collected donations from people from Jews in many parts of the world, including rich Jews. But people weren’t doing this because they expected to make big money from this. They did this because they were imbued with a a certain nationalist vision. So you’re right, of course, the outbreak of the First World War and the fact that the leaders of most of the socialist or social democratic parties in in Europe, voted for the war supported their war efforts in Germany and France and Britain and elsewhere, was a huge disaster for the International socialist movement, which for years had said, workers will not kill other workers on behalf of their capitalists. And in fact, that’s what most of them ended up doing. And the few parties which refused to do this, like the Bolshevik Party, and others, end up being the nucleus of the New International communist movement. So this doesn’t bear very directly on on Palestine. Although the Zionist movement in the First World War receives the endorsement of Great Britain, whose military forces are at that moment in 1917, when the Balfour Declaration is issued, so declaring Britain’s support for the creation of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. At that very moment, British and allied military forces are conquering Palestine from the Ottomans, which makes it impossible for the Zionist enterprise to get off the ground in which in a way it would never have, without that British support the support of the biggest imperialist power on earth, and without the fact that Palestine was now in effect part of the British Empire.

John Reimann
So couldn’t it be argued then, that until a significant Jewish capitalist class developed in Palestine, that Zionism really worked under the protective wing of the British capitalist or British colonialism?

Zachary Lockman
Absolutely, they were linked to? Yeah, absolutely.

Right. So from the beginning, and this is true of Theodor Herzl who founds Zionism as a modern political movement, right from 1897 onwards, and his successors after he dies. Their top priority. Of course, they’re supporting settlements in Palestine, it’s on the small scale, but they’re the top priority of the leadership was to find a patron to find one of the major European powers as a patron. They talk to the German government. Hertzl went to visit the government of the Tsar in Russia. They lobbied the British government, on and on, they were not successful, until the circumstances of the First World War when Britain’s government felt it useful for the war effort for a variety of reasons we can discuss if it’s worth doing, to embrace Zionism, and, and again, to endorse publicly the establishment in Palestine of what the British termed a national home for the Jewish people, whatever that meant, exactly. So Zionism in 1917 finally found the great power patron, the imperialist power patron that it had been looking for for a long time. And it was the fact that the British ruled Palestine, established a colonial regime in Palestine at the end of the First World War and down to 1948. That made significant Jewish emigration, land purchases, settlement and state building possible. Right, and it was British bayonets that suppressed Palestinian Arab opposition to Zionism because from the beginning, of course, Palestinian Arabs who are the vast majority of the population in Palestine, and still two thirds of the population in 1947, oppose Zionism. Because they understood that this was a project designed to create a Jewish majority and a Jewish state in Palestine, which would mean their their dispossession or their subordination to what they perceived of as an alien majority of immigrants against their wishes. And so it was British guns that crushed Palestinian efforts to resist this.

John Reimann
You know, in in your book jumping to another question, in your book, you talk about the Arab workers. Nowadays, we talk about Palestinian people. So could you explain that terminology that you use in the book?

Zachary Lockman
So after 1948, and it was somewhat gradual process, Palestinian became the common name for the Arab people of Palestine. Before 1948 people use different things. Usually Palestinian wasn’t used on its own. People usually use the term Palestinian Arab. So various organizations, national movement, etcetera, refer to themselves as Palestinian Arab. Right. So, you know, this is a complicated thing, right. There are many countries across North Africa and the Middle East in which the majority of the population speaks Arabic. And in the late 19th century, a new cultural Arabism emerged and a proto nationalism and eventually a full blown Arab nationalist movement, which said, the Arabs are a nation. And they should have independence as a nation not be subject to the Ottoman Empire, not be subject to the various colonial powers, which divided up the Middle East after the First World War and so on. So there’s a common Arab nationalism. But of course, there also developed what we might call local nationalisms, territorial nationalisms, which are somewhat different in places like Syria from Lebanon and Palestine and Jordan, eventually in Iraq, most of which were new states, whose boundaries were drawn by the British and French and keeping with their own imperialist interests. So even though they’re, of course, people, they speak dialects of the same language, the the written language, in the language used in higher registers as a common language called Modern Standard Arabic.

Zachary Lockman
There’s also local differences and efforts to unite these states politically have not succeeded. It’s sort of like Latin America, where after the the, the yoke of Spanish colonial rule was overthrown, there were all sorts of projects to create much bigger states. And most of those ultimately failed. And instead you have Colombia and Venezuela and Argentina and so on as separate states, speaking more or less a common language, this is to leave out the indigenous populations from from the story. And, of course, the Palestinians, the Arabs of Palestine faced a challenge that was not there for the for the people of Lebanon or of Syria, or of trans Jordan or of Iraq, right, all those places were under colonial rule, whether British or French. And there were long struggles from the end of the First World War when they demanded their independence, but refused it until generally, depending on the case, you know, several decades later, in some cases, until after the Second World War, that they won their independence from colonial rule.

Zachary Lockman
So this was an issue of course, for the Arabs of Palestine as well, from the beginning, they demanded their independence as the majority population, their right to self determination, as Woodrow Wilson had supposedly promised them. They were denied. But they faced not just colonial rule, they face this under the protection of the colonial regime, an influx of Jews from Europe, who were not there to blend in with the local population, but were there to build up a separate new Jewish society, which would be the basis of a future Jewish state and a future Jewish majority. Right. So this is this, this settler colonial issue is something that was not faced in Iraq or Syria or Lebanon. It was faced in Algeria, a process which had begun much earlier, when the French began conquering Algeria in 1830. And it was only 1962 When Algeria won its independence after a very long and bloody struggle. So that difference in Palestine puts the Palestinians in on a very different trajectory. And of course, it was a trajectory that in 1948, led to the partition of Palestine, the establishment of Israel and three quarters of what had been British ruled Palestine, and again, the displacement of half of Palestine Arab population, who lose their land, lose their homes, and end up as refugees either in Gaza or in the West Bank or beyond the borders of Historic Palestine on a massive route. The Palestinians call it the catastrophe right their Naqba. And Israel remains gains control of three quarters of what had been Palestine amidst the fighting of that period.

John Reimann
You know, up until the rise of Hitler, the immigration of Jews of European Jews into Palestine was really just a trickle. Would you agree that many of the Jews that came there came there as much for economic reasons, as for any ideological reasons of building a Jewish homeland and that sort of thing?

Zachary Lockman
Well, I’m not sure he put it quite that way. Because, you know, if you look at the numbers from before the First World War, and very early waves of Jewish emigration of Zionist immigration, something like half of those who came left and either went back to Europe or they went on to Western Europe, or they went to the Americas to the United States and elsewhere, because economic conditions were difficult, right? This is one of the challenges – that the labor Zionist Movement had to create enough jobs, enough employment, so that people would would actually stay because they understood if people couldn’t, if it wasn’t economically viable for people to stay, they would move on, I would put a little bit differently, which is as you know, if you look at the mass out migration of Jews from Eastern Europe from about 1880, until the United States and various European countries shut immigration in the mid 1920s, right, in the United States was 1924 and other countries about the same time, millions of East European Jews moved. They migrated to escape oppression to escape poverty, right, most of them ended up in the United States. That’s where the American Jewish community comes from, by and large. If you look at the percentage who chose to go to Palestine, it’s something like 2%, of that vast wave of out migration.

Zachary Lockman
So I don’t think most of those people went in search of economic opportunity, the economic opportunities were much better in France, or Britain or the United States or Latin America, or South Africa, some of them went because they were imbued by a vision of participating in a movement of Jewish national revival and Zionism in one form or another, whatever they understood by this, but their numbers were small. So the large influx of Jews into Palestine comes when people have no other choice and nowhere else to go. So the size of the Jewish community in Palestine, the issue have expanded dramatically in the early 1930s. Because there were few other places to go to escape the Depression because the Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933. And because Poland, where a large percentage of the Jews of Europe lived at the time, had an increasingly nationalist and anti semitic government, which was trying to push Jews out. And at that point, there was no war, there are a few other places to go, that were willing to admit, for poor Jewish refugees in Palestine, that there were limits imposed by the British on Jewish immigration, but there was still a possibility of, of getting there. Right. And similarly, after 1948, there was an influx, of course of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, significant number.

Zachary Lockman
But there was an even larger wave or several waves of Jewish emigration from predominantly Muslim countries, predominantly Arab countries. Because these very ancient communities, which had been very integrated into their societies, for a very long time found their position no longer viable, they were squeezed between Zionism on the one hand, and an Arab nationalism, which tended to see them as, as collaborators or As Zionists, or as responsible, in some sense for what happened to the Palestinians. And so they were they, in their vast majority picked up and left, right from Egypt, from Iraq, from North Africa a little bit later on and so on. And many of them most of them went to Israel. Some went to France, but others from North Africa, but many of them went to Israel, such that within a few decades, and that is the case today, half of Israel’s Jewish population, more than half of Israel’s Jewish population is of Middle Eastern origin rather than European origin, even though they remain somewhat safe, subordinate in terms of education levels, in terms of class location and various other things compared to the the east, the European Jewish establishment in Israel.

John Reimann
From my understanding, historically, there was very little conflict between the Jewish and the Arab population in Historic Palestine until the advent of Zionism. And so it seems to me then that what you’re saying is that the the rise of Zionism in Palestine created a conflict not only in Palestine between Jews and Arabs, but in the entire Arab world.

Zachary Lockman
I think that’s by and large, true. Zionism had very little interest in the Jewish communities of the Middle East in North Africa. It was a European movement. It was focused on the the plight of Jews in Eastern Europe and, and and Zionism emerged as one of multiple responses to the deteriorating situation of Jews in Eastern Europe, where the majority of the world’s Jews lived in the later 19th century. Again, persecution oppression, pogroms in Czarist Russia, and on and on and again, many people voted with their feet and left. Others clung to traditional ways. Others embrace socialism, and the vision of getting rid of the Tsarist regime and creating a democratic Russia in which all the oppressed peoples and oppressed classes of the tsarist empire would would achieve equality and freedom. So people have many responses. Zionism was was one of them.

Zachary Lockman
In Palestine itself before the advent of Zionism, Jews were a very small minority, maybe 5% of the population. Many of them were Arabic speaking, some of them had been in the country for a very long time. There is a strong religious Jewish community, people who came to study and be buried in the Holy Land, and so on. But, you know, no political ambitions, no vision of of national revival or creating a Jewish state. So, we don’t want to paint too rosy a picture that everything was always wonderful, right. There were instances for Jewish communities in predominantly Muslim societies of harassment and persecution and discrimination. There were such. If we had to generalize, I think it’s safe to say that the situation of the Jewish minority in predominantly Muslim countries, was a lot better overall than the situation of the Jewish minority in predominantly Christian countries in Europe where there is expulsion, harassment, pogroms on and on, which was not typically the case, Segregation, all sorts of things. But for Palestine itself, right, once you begin to get significant numbers of Jewish immigrants coming not to integrate into local society, but to build a separate, self contained Jewish society, as a stage in the development of a Jewish majority, and eventually a Jewish state in Palestine, there is, of course, going to be tensions and hostilities at the political level, but sometimes between new Jewish settlers and the Arab villagers who live next door, who have very different ways of dealing with the land and ideas about land ownership and so on local tensions, but they get subsumed, certainly, eventually, by, by political tensions. By the end of the First World War, the British, from the Arab point of view, have promised Palestine to the Jews, even though Jews are maybe 10% of the population. And there is a Palestinian Arab national movement, which says, “we have the right to self determination in our own homeland, just like any other people, just like the Czechs, the Poles, and the Hungarians whom Woodrow Wilson allowed to have states. Why can’t the Arabs have states of their own that are independent, we can rule ourselves. And these these demands these, this this movement, ultimately from 1936, and armed revolt by Palestinian Arabs against British colonial rule and against the Zionist enterprise, it protected and fostered, breaks out, the British eventually crush it. But it’s clear that it tensions any possibility of coexistence between Arabs and Jews is going to not be viable, given the larger political struggle over control of this land, which of course, culminates in the events of 1948.

John Reimann
You know, you wrote a book that’s nearly 400 pages long, that focuses almost entirely on the working class. But yet, in Palestine, amongst the Arabs, it was the the small farmers, that was the great majority. So why did you focus on the working class in this book?

Zachary Lockman
Well, you’re certainly right, that that workers in you know, modern industrial enterprises in urban construction, but wage workers in agriculture, right, Palestine was famous for its Java oranges, right, somebody picked those oranges, and various other kinds of enterprises. You know, were a minority of the population, the great majority of the population, as you say, were were peasants or small farmers, either on their own small plots or or working for larger landlords, Arab landlords. So, it was a largely agrarian society, although in the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, right, the cities developed a great deal became significant urban centers, Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, a number of others at a smaller scale. So, there was a large thriving era of middle class intellectuals, journalists, lawyers and so on business people and so on. So, this you know, is this society which was changing and would have changed, you know, even without the the impact of Zionism and the capital of brought to Palestine. So, I chose to focus on this group, in large part because from the 1930s into the 1970s, the dominant political, social, cultural, economic camp within the Jewish community in Palestine and the State of Israel after 1948 was the labor Zionist camp. Right from the mid 1930s, when Ben Gurion, who’s head of the Histadrut, becomes the chair of the executive of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, the sort of central institution of the Jewish community in Palestine, as a leader in the World Zionist movement, and his allies control key institutions, economic institutions, companies, insurance companies, banks, industrial enterprises, and on and on, and, of course, many of the forms of Jewish agricultural settlement, the kibbutz movement, the motion of em, the cooperative settlements, on and on, they constitute a power. So it’s no coincidence that in 1948, when Israel is established, and Ben gurion becomes its first prime minister, because he’s the preeminent leader of the most powerful camp, so to speak, within the Jewish community in Palestine, and it’s the, the Labour Party and its various forms, it’s not called that until much later, but in the 50s 60s, into the 70s. It’s the labor Zionist Movement for the Labor Party and its allies, who dominated Israeli politics who lead every single government. Right?

Zachary Lockman
This changes in 1977, when for the first time, the Israeli right led by Menachem Bagin wins an election for Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and with its allies create constitutes a government without the labor Zionist camp. So in that whole period, that and even before that the labor Zionist Movement had to deal with the question of Arab workers there very few Jewish workers. There’s a very small Jewish working class. It’s in a precarious position. And there are very vigorous debates, which I tried to reconstruct, within the labor Zionist Movement, about how to relate to Arab workers. And it was a practical as well as a political question. Right? Again, it was clear, you’re not going to get immigrants, Jewish immigrants to Palestine to stay unless they have employment. Right. So then there are debates. So where do those jobs come from? Do we take them away from Arab workers? This was a central demand of the labor Zionist Movement for decades: Jewish employers should employ only Jews, even though Arab workers will work for lower wages, whether in the citrus groves picking oranges and lemons, in construction, in the Palestine railways, an agency of the British Mandate government and so on. The Zionist movement should push that should demand that only the Jewish employers employ only Jewish workers.

Zachary Lockman

Now, there were some on the Jewish Zionist left who oppose this and said, “No, no, we should try to organize workers, Arab workers, increase their wages. So they won’t be a competition for us. If they get the same wage as us there’s no reason that employers will will prefer Arabs to Jews.” right?

So there are vigorous debates about this, ultimately, the labor Zionist movement settles on a policy of exclusion, basically, again, that demand that Jewish employers employ only Jews. And they tried to get the mandatory government, the government of Palestine, the British colonial regime to employ as many Jews as possible. Of course, this created tension, because it meant that there were efforts to drive Arab workers out of their jobs. And of course, they resented that and resisted that. So it’s that tangle of of issues. And it gets us back to your original question about comrades and enemies. Right, because on the one hand, the labor Zionists talked about, you know, class unity across class across national lines across ethnic lines, they call themselves socialists. At the same time, they were pursuing policies, which tried to drive our workers out of their jobs, and gain those jobs for for Jews. Right. And, and they saw themselves as a central as the central component of the Zionist enterprise, and against, you know, other political forces within the Jewish community, who weren’t interested in socialism who had other visions of developing the Jewish community and policies, the Zionist movement. So, there’s a set of issues in there, which I tried to explore. Finally, let me say, you know, by the ’30s and ’40s, there’s a substantial Arab working class in Palestine and their new political forces, especially during the war period, the period of the Second World War and afterward,, there’s a growing Communist presence right trying to organize workers with a somewhat different vision for the relationship with Jews in Palestine then the then the Arab, the official, so to speak, Arab nationalist movement has. They believe they’re communists, right? Theybelieve in internationalism, They’re opposed to Zionism, of course. But they know they have a different line. So that too, is an interesting development. It doesn’t alter the outcome in 1948, which is perhaps, which was perhaps inevitable, that Zionism would lead to the dispossession of much of the Arab population of Palestine. But, you know, no historical outcome is is foreseeable or foreordained. So I hope to explore the visions that people had, even if in in the end, they they proved it ends.

John Reimann
I couldn’t help but think about my own experience. I was in the carpenters union for decades. And there, you saw the union leadership have a very contradictory attitude towards non union, construction workers, this is true across all the building trades, where they, on the one side, sought to combine with the unionized contractors, against the non union contractors. But also, they sought to help to raise the wages of the non union, carpenters or construction workers, so that the non union contractors would have, you know, could would have increased the difficulty in competing with the union contractors? And it seems to me that what you’re describing is something similar with regard to Arab workers and Jewish workers.

Zachary Lockman
Yeah, I there are definitely some similarities, right? When there were debates about this before, but especially before the First World War, but especially in the 1920s, there were people at the sort of far left end of the Zionist spectrum, who said, “you know, we shouldn’t try to exclude Arab workers; we should try to organize them, because they’re our fellow workers.” But of course, they also were arguing “if we are gonna, if we help them organize and raise their wages, they won’t be a competition for us, they won’t be taking jobs that we could have.” Right? So that contradiction people live with, they lost out and ultimately those who said “no, no, we should build an entirely separate relatively high wage, Jewish economy and Palestine as disconnected as possible from the labor force and from other factors in the in the Palestinian Arab economy, and try to make sure that every job in the Jewish sector of Palestine economy goes exclusively to Jews, which may mean protests, which may mean, you know, threatening employers whatever.” And that’s the strategy that went out and provided the basis for developing, you know, fairly self sufficient Jewish economy in Palestine that withstands the Arab Revolt of 1936 ’39. And then go on to conquer most of Palestine in 1948. So yeah, this is an issue which comes up in labor movements and class issues in many places, with of course, the specificities the specific character characteristics of what what was going on in Palestine, between Arabs and Jews in this period?

John Reimann
The way my union leadership always thought was, “we’re going to organize them, but they as well as our own members don’t have real agency themselves.” It seems to me that that was the attitude you describe in the book, that was the attitude towards the Arab workers. “At times we’re going to organize them. But we must do everything we can to prevent them from actually organizing themselves.”

Zachary Lockman
Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, many, maybe most of the Jews coming to Palestine from Europe, you know, shared in, in what we today call, you know, European colonial attitudes, they saw the Arabs as backward as ignorant, as needing to be civilized. Many early Zionists paid no attention whatsoever to the Arabs of Palestine, somehow they would just disappear or they’d move elsewhere. Or conversely, they would come to realize that Zionism was good for them. Right. And this was a powerful theme and Zionist rhetoric about the Arabs of Palestine. “The Jews are bringing investment, they’re bringing capital, they’re bringing development, they’re creating jobs. This is good for the Arabs. And if only they understood that, they wouldn’t be opposed to Zionism and if they’re not on If they don’t understand that it’s because of outside agitators, right?” It’s the outside agitator theory of history.” It’s people who hate Jews inciting them against Zionism, even though Zionism is in their own interest.” And so of course, even those who favored organizing Arab workers or supporting their organization of Arab workers, didn’t want them to be political, in any sense. Didn’t like it, when, of course, those Arab workers share the perspective of the vast majority of the Arabs in Palestine, that Zionism was a threat. And even if in some cases, they benefited from support, in very specific circumstances of Jewish workers and labor organizations, they also understood that, you know, there were ways in which these people, the the Jews or the Zionist movement was a threat to their future in this country.

Zachary Lockman
So, you know, lots of contradictions, at some point, the Zionist labor movement, set up and ran a sort of, what can you call it a front organization, called the Palestine Labor League in English, to organize Arab workers under its auspices, and used its ability to provide jobs to recruit people, but they did this very consciously to prevent Arab workers from developing ties to the Arab national movement, which was, of course opposed to Zionism, and later the Palestine Labor League was opposed to the communists, as well. And, and it was clearly a sort of subordinate organization designed to, you know, organize specific groups of Arab workers to serve the Zionist cause, basically. And, of course, eventually, most Arab workers figured this out. And whatever benefits they might gain from that connection were outweighed by by the understanding that they were being controlled, manipulated, used for a project in which which was not in their interest.

John Reimann
You know, you spent quite a good deal of time in your book, discussing developments in the railways in the railway unions. And you describe how the Arab workers in the main not entirely but in the main were extremely reluctant to join the railway union, because of the exclusion as policies of the history drew to which the railway union was affiliated. And within that union, and within the industry, there was one force which you mentioned that that advocated that the union, leave the history that was the communist. But the thing that that was interesting to me was that although their attitudes seemed to correspond to the views of the majority of Arabrailway workers, they did get some support, but they did not become a mass force within amongst the Arab railway workers. Do you agree with that? And if so, how do you explain that?

Zachary Lockman

Well, again, complicated story. And as you mentioned, there were debates among the Arab workers. In the railroad workers in particular, which is one of the single largest concentration of wage workers, the people who maintain the railroads who repaired the locomotives and the other railway equipment. There were big workshops in Haifa and elsewhere where large numbers of workers came together, Arabs and Jews. So of course, they had common interests, right, if they were going to get higher wages, if they’re going to resist the massive inflation at the Second World War bring, very unsafe and difficult working conditions. They had to cooperate. People understood this. But of course, for most of the Arab workers, the so called International Union, that the Jewish workers belonged to, was affiliated with the Histadrut, which the Arab workers understood correctly was an arm of the Zionist movement. And of course, they were not happy about this. They said, “Well, of course, we’ll cooperate and we can have a common union, but it can’t be affiliated with the Histadrut.” The Communists who really come into their own in the 1940s, you know, support this. And, and in the Communists, to be fair, had inroads become a major player in on the labor scene in the 1940s, organized in many places, you know, are in their press, you know, dealing with workers issues, and, again, have have complicated inter relations with with Jewish labor leaders and Jewish workers. And there’s some Jewish members of the Communist movement, you know, in various points, there were a number of different communist factions at different points. You know, why any particular group gained support in one particular workplace, you know, has to do with lots of local conditions and circumstances. You know, the the war brought massive economic development to Palestine, Palestine becomes a major base for British forces, I

John Reimann

I was referring to the 1920s and early 30s.

Zachary Lockman
Okay, well, the communists are very weak in that period, right there is a small, almost entirely Jewish Communist Party that eventually emerges in by the mid 1920s. Moscow with a common turn, the Communist International pushes it to “Arabise” to become a predominantly Arab party because Palestine is a predominantly Arab country. It has a low level of activity, it’s subject to a lot of repression, right, the British in Palestine as elsewhere in the empire spends a lot of effort trying to find communists, arrest them, deport them, suppress communism. So, they’re not a big player in that period. And then you have the revolt of 1936-39, which drives a very deep wedge between Arabs and Jews and between Arab and Jewish communists, such that the new communist movement that emerges during the Second World War, we’re talking about a largely Arab movement. There is a Palestinian Jewish communist formation. But the impetus the momentum is with Arab Communists who are building a new kind of labor movement among among workers. And, and it’s only after 1948 that there’s again a unified now Israeli Communist Party, which includes both Arabs and Jews, which goes on to be a very significant force in small remnant of Palestinians who were left within the borders of the state of Israel after the 1948 War. It emerges as the main defender of the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and remains a force and in the Palestinian Israeli community to this day, although it gets informally as an Arab Jewish party, although it doesn’t get all that many Jewish votes.

John Reimann
But didn’t the communists support Israeli independence? And I would imagine that would have had really undercut their support among, Arabs or Palestinians.

Zachary Lockman

Absolutely. So the international communist movement in the Soviet Union, right, the Communist International until it was dissolved in 1943. Always oppose Zionism. It said, Zionism is, you know, a form of bourgeois nationalism. And it’s an instrument of British imperialism, right? It’s being imposed on Palestine by by force. So ideologically, the communists always rejected Zionism. And this was the policy of the Soviet Union in the deliberations of the United Nations and elsewhere. In 1947, when Britain turned over the Palestine issue to the new United Nations and said, you know, “we want to be out of here, you deal with this.” Facing a growing Zionist insurgency in Palestine, it was clear that the, the future of this country was was at stake, imminently. And then in 1947, the Soviet Union reversed itself and said, basically, you know, we would like a united Palestine in which Arabs and Jews coexist and share power. But if that can’t happen, second best option is partition. And the communists recognize the existence in Palestine of a new Jewish national community. They never accepted the Zionist claimed that all Jews everywhere are a nation, but they said there’s emerged under the auspices of British imperialism, a distinct Hebrew speaking Jewish national community in Palestine, whose rights have to be recognized alongside those of the Arabs of Palestine. And the Soviet Union endorsed, partition.

Zachary Lockman
And beyond that, it was to a large extent, weapons from the Soviet bloc, which enabled Zionist forces and then the new army of the State of Israel to win its wars in 1947-48. And again, conquer three quarters of what had been Palestine and diplomatic support from the Soviet Union as well for Moscow’s reasons they wanted to get the British out of the Middle East, they wanted to inflict a blow on British client states in the region. And they knew that there was, you know, a strong Zionist left in Palestine and in Israel, which was broadly sympathetic to the Soviet Union. So they had hoped that would perhaps turn into something. So you’re quite right. And from there on, you know, the Soviet Union, however different old and frayed and hostile its relations with with Israel became because it came to see Israel as an ally of the United States and of the Western countries. It always insisted that Israel as a state had a right to exist. And into the 1960s and 70s. The Soviets, even as they supported the Palestine Liberation Organization, always argued that, you know, that the rights and of Jews in Palestine as a distinct national community had to be recognized, and that Israel was a legitimate state, which is not something that Palestinians were interested in hearing, particularly until they two accepted partition. But that was the the communist stance from 1947 Onward.

John Reimann
You know, one view is that Stalin simply saw Israeli independence as a means of undercutting the power of British imperialism. And he’s just completely willing to sacrifice the interests of the Arab workers, or the Arab masses towards that goal.

Zachary Lockman
Yeah, that’s not unreasonable. He, Stalin, had his own calculations, and again, basically did 180 degree turn in policy, to embrace partition, which which the communist movement the Soviet Union had always rejected. You know, the statements of Gromyko, who was then representing the Soviet Union at the United Nations, you know, also said, “well, the Jews, of course, suffered terribly during the Second World War, millions of them were murdered by the Nazis. So in some sense, you know, having a Jewish state in Palestine is a recompense for this.” Right. So he, they they adopted that perspective. But yes, you know, Stalin had his motives and getting the British out of the Middle East or defeating the British, who were operating through their clients state, in what was then called Trans Jordan today, Jordan, the commander of whose army was a British officer at the time, and in many ways, was a very significant fighting force, which is why Jordan ended up in control of a piece of Palestine, which then came to be called the West Bank in 1948. So yeah, there were Soviet motives there. And, as you noted earlier, right, this cost the communists a lot, because of course, the overwhelming sentiment among the Arabs of Palestine, but across the region, was that partition was an abomination, was unacceptable, because it denied the right of Arabs of Palestine to self determination in their own homeland, and divided gave half their homeland to somebody else who’s whose arrival and presence they had vehemently resisted. And the Communists suffered a lot for having endorsed partition, they fell in line like, like good Communists in those days, with with the line from Moscow, but they suffered a lot and were accused for decades afterwards of of having facilitated or gone along with or justified what happened in Palestine in 1948.

John Reimann
You know, before passing on, I can’t help but comment, that it’s kind of ironic. What you quote Gromyko was having said, When the Soviet state itself, in one period conducted its own anti semitic policies. But our time is kind of limited. From what I know, from what you said, and I’d like to just, before we finish, pass on to the final question is, why is this history relevant today? And what is the role of the Palestinian working class and the working class of the Arab region as a whole? Today, given the enormous crisis and the disaster that we’re seeing in Israel, Palestine and in Gaza?

Zachary Lockman
Sure, well, I mean, to talk about the region as a whole is maybe beyond the scope of what we can hope to do. In most of the Arab countries, the working classes is deeply suppressed. And authoritarian states do their best to control the working class and and have adopted models of development which mean exploitation and oppression and do not allow any form of independent organizing or, or class class struggle. In Palestine itself, again, it’s a complicated situation, right. There was a time after Israel conquered the remainder of Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, when hundreds of 1000s of Palestinian workers from Gaza and from the West Bank went to work as cheap labor in Israel, in construction and factories and all sorts of things. That came to an end with the First Intifada that in In the late 1980s, in Israel then began importing like many countries migrant labor from elsewhere. People may have noticed that some of the some of the people abducted after the October during the October 7 attack and taken back to Gaza were Thai workers, workers, from Thailand, of whom there are a great many working in Israeli agriculture as as exploited, underpaid labor. And there’s still some but much many fewer Palestinian workers going to work in the in a much larger, richer Israeli economy is as exploited labor.

Zachary Lockman
And at the same time Israel has systematically since 1967, strangled the economies of the West Bank and Gaza and made them subordinate to its own economy. People have called this development such that it’s been there is an Arab working class there are trade unions, but they are weak and in a very difficult position in in the West Bank and in Gaza and unable to be very active on behalf of of the working classes in those place. And the Palestinians living in Israel who now number a million and half who are citizens of Israel are members of the Histadrut, if you go to an Israeli hospital, the pharmacists and a lot of the doctors and nurses are Palestinian citizens of Israel, right they’re very much part of the Israeli economy but largely in separate sectors are in lower wage sectors are in particular areas that Israeli Jews no longer are predominant in, so like all Palestinians, the Palestinian working class across Palestine in its various segments are deeply fragmented, deeply, often exploited, and find it very difficult to, to engage in even basic trade union activity much less, much less broader, a broader defense of their class interests. And Gaza of course, I don’t know what can or needs to be said at this point. The horrors unfolding there in the aftermath of October 7 are, I think, evident to everybody. These are poor people. These are people who are the descendants of refugees, overwhelmingly from 1948, the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, great great grandchildren of people who were dispossessed in 1948 and confined to this small piece of Palestine under extremely difficult conditions, and are now being seeing their their world destroyed around them.

John Reimann
Okay, well, on that note, there’s probably two or three more days of issues to be discussed. But I’d like to thank you very much for your time. Thank you. And to be continued.