Oaklandsocialist presentation to forum of Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign:

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Comrades, a few weeks ago, Israeli columnist Amira Hass wrote a column in the Israeli daily paper “Haaretz” in which she asked “What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to support this systematic and mass erasure?… What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to remain unshocked by the fact that in about two months we’ve killed around 7,000 children (a provisional figure) with the help of America’s improved bombs?”

To answer that question, we have to go back to the early history of Zionism, which in its earliest origins created a system of European, Jewish supremacy, and sowed deep, deep divisions in the working class of Palestine and in essence labeled the Palestinians as “others”.

I am going to discuss the history of Zionism, and especially what was called “labor Zionism”, through a socialist lens. This history not only laid the roots for Israel today, it also holds lessons for present day movements elsewhere, including the issue of identity politics.  We will also see how global events played themselves out in Palestine. That includes global revolution (the Russian Revolution) and counter revolution (the rise of the Nazis).

By the end of WWI, a young-ish Hungarian born bourgeois Jew, Theodore Herzl, had established the Zionist movement. Herzl believed that gentile (that is, non-Jewish) society was inevitably anti-semitic and that the answer was for Jews to create their own homeland. In practice, that meant that all Jews – capitalists, small business people and workers alike – were united. Today, Zionists claim Israel/Palestine is theirs based on the word of god, but at one point Herzl considered the idea of a Jewish homeland in South America. Ultimately he settled on Palestine as the Jewish homeland, but more specifically a homeland for European Jews. Originally the Jewish homeland was conceived as being under Ottoman rule and then after WW I under British rule. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration the British imperialists declared Palestine as a Jewish homeland, in the political sense.

British imperialism saw an increased Jewish population in Palestine as being a population base through which they could rule, just like they used or got some support from the Protestants in Ulster in Northern Ireland to rule. In fact the first British military governor of Palestine, Sir Ronald Storrs, put it very clearly. He saw the potential for a growing Jewish population in Palestine to be “our loyal little Jewish Ulster”. 

Another wing of political Zionism other than that led by Herzl that developed in the post WWI era was Zionist “revisionism”, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. He called for an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Jabotinsky ended up as an outright fascist whose supporters paraded around in Nazi-like brown shirt uniforms. He was quite clear. He wrote that “Zionism is a colonizing adventure, and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.”

During the Russian civil war (following the 1917 Revolution), Jabotinsky offered to collaborate with the Ukrainian counter revolutionary general Simon Petliura, of Cossack heritage. Jabotinsky offered his forces to patrol anyJewish regions that Petliura’s army conquered. Petliura’s armies had led pogroms in Ukraine that slaughtered some 30,000 Jews from 1917 to 1920. (About 60,000 Jews were killed in pogroms in Ukraine during those years overall.) Jabotinsky’s offer to collaborate with Petliura created such a scandal within the World Zionist Organization that Jabotinsky actually withdrew from it rather than be investigated. We will see where his so-called Zionist revisionism forces led in a later period. 

Jabotinsky’s traitorous role towards the Ukrainian Jews was not unique in Zionism and today he is a highly revered figure in Israel.

At that time the Jews were scattered throughout Europe, America and SouthWest Asia and North Africa, with the majority in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and Russia. They did not live in one contiguous land mass. They spoke different languages, ate different foods and in essence had different cultures. In other words, the Jews were not a people-nation in the same sense that the Kurds or the Uighurs are. As far as Palestine being their “homeland”, any Jews who were not living within Palestine had had their links with that part of the world broken thousands of years earlier. Therefore, the Zionist project did not correspond to the material conditions of Europe’s Jews and as a result Zionism was just a fringe movement among them.

As with all other peoples, the Jews were divided by class. The working class majority followed another political tendency – social democracy. It was the Jewish Bund, a Jewish social democratic party, that the majority of Europe’s Jews supported. As social democrats, the Bund had a class-based analysis. They saw society as basically divided up between capitalists and workers whereas the Zionists saw all Jews – workers and capitalists alike – as being united. And in every single nationalist movement that seeks to unite workers and capitalists, the capitalists dominate and control the movement. That is exactly what’s happened with Zionism.

Now, let’s turn to what was happening in Palestine in those early years. It’s important to stress that there had been Jews in all of the region long before Zionism arose and contrary to what we’ve been told there were no major conflicts between the Jews and the Arabs.

Also, at that time, the particular experiences that molded the Arab majority into Palestinians was just beginning, so they, themselves, referred to themselves as Arabs rather than Palestinians.

In Palestine, the Arab majority was called Fellahin – rural small farmers who either worked their own small plots or worked for a large landowner. The issue of Jewish settlers steadily encroaching on the Arab land was a huge one. However, for reasons of time, I won’t be able to deal with that issue. Instead, I am going to focus on developments within the working class – wage workers. That’s because I believe that under capitalism it is the working class that is the key force for change. And that was reflected in the fact that a dominant Zionist force in Palestine was labor Zionism as we will see.

In Palestine under British rule, the Zionist project faced a problem, because to have a Jewish homeland settled by Jews from Europe – and Zionism was a European-based project – it must attract Jewish workers from Europe. And to attract those Jewish workers, it was necessary to provide them with a standard of living that was above what the workers in the Arab world had at that time. But no capitalist, British, Arab, Jewish or anybody else, is going to offer pay above what they have to. And the extremely low wages that they could get away with paying Arab workers served to drag down the pay of Jewish workers also, which meant it was nearly impossible to attract Jewish workers from Europe. So the Zionists had two different strategies to deal with that: One was to establish what amounted to two different economies – one low value and low pay economy for Arab workers and a higher value and higher pay economy for Jewish workers. It was a form of economic apartheid. The other strategy was at times to help Arab workers raise their pay in order to raise the floor for all workers, Jewish and Arab alike. For this, some form of unionism was needed, and that was the basis of what was known as labor Zionism. 

But the very term “labor Zionism” is inherently contradictory. That’s because a labor movement necessarily means uniting all of “labor” – all workers – regardless of race, gender, nationality, etc. While on the other hand, Zionism was an explicitly Jewish project aimed at building a Jewish homeland at the expense of non-Jews, meaning Arabs. In the workplace it meant building a Jewish work force that often necessarily involved replacing Arab workers with Jewish workers. So, it was impossible for Zionists to build a real labor movement, to build real unionism. And that was the contradiction that labor Zionism represented. It was an absolutely essential ingredient to the Zionist project, which absolutely had to betray real worker solidarity.Backed by the British imperialists, the labor Zionists had a lot of influence and power with the Jews coming from Europe. 

In 1920, the labor Zionists held the founding conference of the Histadrut. The Histadrut was a so-called union federation, basically an alliance of various workers’ unions..

The Histradut’s full name was the “General Organization of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel”, and they meant Hebrew workers exclusively. There were struggles around Arab exclusion, but it was not until 1959 that the Histadrut accepted Arab, which is to say Palestinian, workers as full members. In other words, the Histadrut literally was a form of Apartheid or Jim Crow unionism, which means it wasn’t really unionism at all. At times the Histadrut did organize Arab workers, but as we will see, they always did so under the control of the European Jewish supremacist Histadrut leadership.

As a result of the role of labor Zionism, to this very day, the Israeli working class has a very weak tradition of genuine unionism and solidarity between Jewish and Palestinian workers. This helps explain in part the enormous divide between today’s Palestinian and Jewish workers and the low level of class consciousness.

David Ben-Gurion, who was Israel’s first prime minister and was Labor Zionism personified, said that the creation of a labor front was – quote – “the mission of the Jewish workers”. Not the common task of both groups, just the Jewish workers.

That said, the Histadrut did at times organize Arab workers to struggle for better pay, but what they did not do, and what they always opposed, was the self organizing of the Arab workers themselves. 

 While labor Zionist leaders saw raising the wages of the Arab workers as being in the interests of the Zionist project, they also saw all Arab organizing as a threat to their Zionist project. 

In part, Arab self organizing was a threat because it went against the Histadrut’s organized efforts to replace Arab workers with Jewish workers. Also, in part, because it risked fomenting Arab nationalism, which Zionism opposed. 

The Histadrut also operated as a capitalist employment agency. It was directly involved in setting up some of the Kibbutzim, or farms. These were farms owned by the Jewish Agency, a capitalist entity formerly known as the World Zionist Congress. The Histadrut also set up a Jewish construction employment agency to hire Jewish construction workers in the building of a deep water port in Haifa.

Not all Jewish workers were totally and hopelessly racist. There were a couple of political parties that expressed a drive for unity, but both of these parties tried to square the circle; they tried to align Zionism – the creation of specifically Jewish homeland – with working class unity.

The only working class party in Palestine that unequivocally rejected Zionism and tried to help Arab workers organize was the Palestine Communist Party, which belonged to the Third International. The Palestine Communist Party in part owed its existence to the revolutionary wave that swept the world working class following the 1917 Russian Revolution. But the Palestine Communist Party party had to swim against every single other political tendency in Palestine. And also by the early 1920s, that revolutionary wave was receding and in my opinion this also weakened  the Palestine Communist Party.

So, now, as I begin to wrap up, let us look at how these dynamics played out in the railway industry, which was very important in Palestine at that time. The Histadrut founded the Railway Workers Association (a railway union) in 1919. Although this union belonged to the Histadrut, it also directly recruited Arab railway workers as full members. And therein lay the problem: The Arab workers reacted to the fact that the Histadrut, the parent body,only accepted Jewish members. So, while some Arab railway workers did join the union, the apartheid position of the Histadrut was a barrier to major recruitment into the railway union.

In the 1920s, there was a struggle within the Railway Workers Association for it to leave the Histadrut. Only the Palestine Communist Party advocated leaving the Histadrut. This was an uphill battle partly because the Histadrut played a major role in financing the railway workers union. The Histadrut leadership ultimately expelled the communists and then got them fired from the railways.

For obvious reasons, the Arab railway workers distrusted the labor Zionist leadership of the union. As a result, they then came under the influence of Arab middle class nationalists and formed a railroad workers union exclusively for Arab workers – the Palestine Arab Workers Society (PAWS). Ultimately, this proved to be no solution either.

In order to counter the Palestine Arab Workers Society, the Histadrut set up an organizing effort for Arab workers called the Palestine Labor League, and the PLL. Through the PLL, they partly succeeded in undermining any organizing of Palestinian workers outside of their sphere of control (such as PAWS, the middle class nationalist group). 

During this entire period there were efforts at class solidarity by Jewish workers in one work place after another, for example among Haifa Jewish port workers. But without a central organization, these efforts were defeated time and again by the Histadrut. And even if they had had a central leadership, the balance of forces by that time was against them.

 One final example of the racist role of labor zionism and the Histadrut in decimating working class consciousness in Palestine is that of the construction and then operation of the Nesher Cement Plant, which still exists to this day.

The plant was constructed from 1922-1924. The Histadrut succeeded in getting the construction crew to be all Jewish.

When Nesher opened in 1925, the plant employed only Jewish workers. But the quarry that supplied the raw material employed both Jewish and Egyptian Arab workers. The Histadrut tried to and did ultimately get that crew to be all Jewish.

Now here global counterrevolution played a decisive role in Zionism taking hold. In February of 1932, Hitler came to power in Germany. This resulted in a massive increase of Jewish immigration into Palestine. From the 4,000 Jews who immigrated in 1931, the number of Jewish immigrants swelled to 62,000 in 1935 alone.

There followed an economic boom in Palestine. The Histadrut campaigned for the replacement of Arab workers at the ports, in agriculture, and in construction. In all those industries, those campaigns included picketing work sites and even assaults on Arab workers.The legacies of labor Zionism and the Histadrut in particular are nothing but European Jewish supremacist apartheid and intentional misuse of the terms “labor” and “unionism”.

In conclusion, To sum up and stress my main points once again:
1) The Jewish people were not a national minority and consequently Zionism never had a mass base among European Jews prior to the rise of Hitler.

2). In placing Jewish workers under the control of Jewish capitalists, Zionism always was a reactionary and pro-imperialist movement.

3) Zionism both represented and relied upon British imperialism in this period.

4) In Palestine, Zionism completely perverted and undermined any true working class solidarity.

5) In doing so, Zionism created deep divisions between the Arab and Jewish working class, and this  devastated class  consciousness at that time and continues to do so to this day.