Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948.

• Author: Finkel, David

Reviewed by David Finkel

In what now seems a bygone age, November 1946, an internationalist Marxist group wrote that:

As demonstrated by every other democratic revolution of our epoch, the only class in Palestine that will prove itself capable of leading a thorough-going revolutionary struggle against British imperialism is the Palestinian proletariat. The proletarian class struggle against economic exploitation unites all toilers and serves as the bridge across all reactionary nationalist barriers.

This revolutionary optimism, however misplaced it may be read in retrospect, was not completely lacking in material foundation. The immediate postwar period in Palestine had witnessed a resurgence of union struggles, sometimes based on joint Arab and Jewish worker action, as worker militancy recovered from the brutal suppression of the 1936-39 nationalist uprising (in which Jewish labor was systematically recruited to replace Arab strikers).

Placing their hopes in this development as the alternative to the hegemonies of Zionism and half feudal, half bourgeois Arab nationalism over their respective communities, the Marxists continued their argument:

The inspiring unity of the Arab and Jewish railroad workers in their recent strike is an example of how the proletarian class struggle can cut through all national barriers. (The strike of the civil service employees which followed likewise demonstrated this.)(*)

It is of course impossible for us to read such texts without some knowledge of what followed. Only a year later ETZEL (Irgun) terrorists would throw a bomb into a crowd of Arab workers outside the Haifa oil refinery; a sequence of reprisal and counter-reprisal communal massacres would ensue, and soon thereafter historic Palestine - and any possibility of a peaceful, democratic, let alone working class solution - would be consumed in the upheaval of the creation of the State of Israel.

Yet however fragile, or even nonexistent, that possibility may have been, anyone who desired it had no choice but to act as if it were possible. Zachary Lockman validates the fact, even under the shadow of the impending catastrophe, of "an unprecedented level of joint struggle among Arab and Jewish workers in pursuit of common economic goals, along with strenuous (if ultimately futile) efforts by various Arab and Jewish political forces to seek a peaceful resolution of the deepening political crisis. Lockman writes:

In retrospect, it seems highly unlikely that events could have taken a different course. But for Arabs and Jews in the Palestine of those years there could be no way of knowing precisely what the future would...