Strikes are fundamental to the history and sociology of any labor movement. Therefore, David De Vries’ most fundamental objective is to remind readers of the prominent place of strikes in Zionist nation building. To do so, he offers a quantitative survey and structuralist historical sociology of the 2,014 recorded strikes in Palestine/Israel from 1899 to 1951, covering the late Ottoman, British Mandate, and early Israeli statehood periods. Strike Action and Nation Building divides the history of strikes into several chronological subperiods. Within each, De Vries characterizes the principal groups of striking workers and the nature of their demands.
Labor Zionism was the hegemonic force in the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) and subsequently the State of Israel from the early 1930s until 1977. One aspect of that hegemony is the vast literature in Hebrew and English on Jewish workers, Labor Zionist political parties, collective and cooperative agricultural settlements (kibbutzim and moshavim), and the General Organization of Hebrew (i.e., Jewish) Workers in the Land of Israel (the Histadrut). De Vries identifies three schools in the history and industrial sociology of strikes in Palestine/Israel (pp. 7–8). The first, the dominant trend in the Zionist historiographical tradition, treats strikes as a “system of relations” and struggles internal to the Yishuv, primarily involving the Histadrut and its component political parties, the Revisionist Zionist movement (the forerunner of the Likud), and Jewish employers in the private sector. The second treats collective actions of both Jewish and Palestinian Arab workers in the framework of the Labor Zionist drive to split the labor market and exclude Arab workers from Jewish-owned sectors of the economy (in Zionist parlance, the “conquest of labor”). The third approach treats strikes narrowly as motivated by local workplace issues, narrow group interests, or struggles to establish and maintain organizational power or professional status, with no reference to the Arab–Zionist struggle.
De Vries argues that his book is distinct from these schools because it emphasizes that most Jewish strikes took place in the urban Jewish private sector. He demonstrates that strikes, while quite rare in the early 20th century, became routine over the course of the British Mandate. Counterintuitively, De Vries argues that this was not due to the strength of Jewish workers, but rather their weakness in relation to urban private sector employers. By 1930, the Histadrut claimed 28,500 members, 47.5 percent of the Jewish wage labor force of 60,000—a very high level of union density. In 2010 only 11.4 percent of US workers belonged to a union; in more labor-friendly Canada the proportion was 27.5 percent. How, then, were Jewish workers weak in relation to capital?
A high proportion of immigrants to Palestine in the 1930s were middle-class Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in Central Europe and Germany. Most of them were not Labor Zionists; many had never been active Zionists. Private Jewish capital as a proportion of total capital imports increased from 77 percent in 1931–32 to 92 percent in 1933–34 (p. 51). Some of the immigrants who brought capital with them and opened businesses were sympathetic to the Revisionists, whose economic ideology was derived from European-style antilabor liberalism.
To facilitate the influx of Jewish capital, the Histadrut and its dominant party, Mapai (precursor of the contemporary Labor Party), consistently subordinated “workers interests . . . to the cause of nation building” (p. 36). The Histadrut self-consciously understood itself as a state in the making (medina ba-derekh). Consequently, its primary function was never simply that of a traditional trade union federation, although it was that too. The Histadrut was a business conglomerate, a major employer, a health insurance provider, and an array of cultural institutions.
Labor Zionist hegemony was based on the indispensible role of Jewish workers in populating and expanding the frontiers of the Zionist settlement project, undertaking the hard manual labor necessary to build the physical infrastructure of a state, and establishing the largest Zionist militias—the Haganah and Palmah—the ultimate guarantors of the viability of the state of Israel. The urban middle classes and capitalists of the Yishuv and the Jewish diaspora were not willing to assume these roles. However, many of them were willing to finance them and render political support as long as Labor Zionists minimized class struggle. David Ben-Gurion understood that maintaining the political leadership of Mapai and the Histadrut (and not coincidentally his personal preeminence) required accommodating Jewish capital.
In 1934–35, Ben-Gurion attempted to reach an agreement with Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky to regulate strikes, relations between labor and capital, and by implication, the relationship of the two political forces more broadly (pp. 56–57). The leaders initialed an agreement. But a March 1935 plebiscite of Histadrut members rejected it by a vote of 16,474 to 11,522. Thus, De Vries’ argument that Jewish workers were weak really means that the capacity of Mapai and the Histadrut to restrain them from striking against urban Jewish private sector employers was limited.
This slippage is possible because his history of strikes does not include the voice of a single worker or any of the rich archival evidence (of which he is well aware) documenting strikes in great detail. Omitting workers’ voices also allows De Vries to make neat distinctions among economic, national, and organizational/representational motives for strikes. But matters are rarely so compartmentalized in the lived experience of working people. As De Vries himself suggests, during the upsurge of strikes during World War II there was no clear difference between workers motivated by material interests or by a sense of empowerment because their labor was critical to the war effort. The third group of strike-prone workers he identifies—those who suffered declining real wages and reduced purchasing power—also had material reasons to strike (pp. 75–76).
The most important innovations of the 1940s, which De Vries notes, are political—more frequent (but still uncommon) cooperation between Jewish and Arab workers and the formation of a left faction in Mapai that split from the party in 1944. These developments likely intensified strike action. Indeed, among the reasons for the split in Mapai was the leadership's reluctance to sanction strikes.
De Vries correctly asserts that the number of strikes by Jewish workers is far greater than the number of strikes by Arab workers during the period he studies and that the number of joint strikes is relatively small. He acknowledges the 1931 strike of Arab and Jewish drivers, the Arab general strike of April–October 1936, and the 1946 strike of Arab and Jewish lower level civil service employees. Only the latter receives a substantial discussion (pp. 86–91). De Vries is not hostile to Arab workers. But ultimately, Strike Action and Nation Building is consistent with the “dual economy” model of Mandate Palestine—a nationalist conceptual framework that has been criticized for over two decades.
De Vries ends the book in 1951, not the more obvious endpoint of 1948, in order to include the forty-three-day seamen's strike of fall 1951, the best known and politically most significant strike in the history of the Jewish labor movement (pp. 106–8). It constituted the climax of the strikes of the late 1940s and early 1950s over both economic demands and what De Vries calls “democratization” (p. 97). The seamen rebelled against the undemocratic character of their union and their subjection to centralized control of the Histadrut. Mapai, the Histadrut, and the Mapai-led government fiercely opposed the strike. The left–Labor Zionist Mapam and the Communist Party supported it. The government broke the strike by drafting thirty-four strike leaders and unleashing a violent police assault on the Haifa port and ships occupied by strikers.
However, De Vries’ characterization of this period and his focus on the struggles of Jewish workers obscure the character of Labor Zionism as a settler movement. While Jewish workers were striking for “democratization” in the early statehood period, the Histadrut, Mapai, Mapam, and the military government imposed on most of Israel's Arab citizens from 1949 to 1966, collaborated in undermining even narrowly economic struggles of Arab workers. They conspired to break the Arab Workers Congress—a communist-led union formed in 1945. The Histadrut actively opposed the organization of Arab workers in any framework other than the Israel Labor League, which it fully controlled. At the same time, it refused to accept Arabs as members until 1959.
De Vries argues that strikes to promote the “conquest of labor” were largely a thing of the past by the 1930s. The poststatehood history of the Histadrut demonstrates that even though the “conquest of labor” was never fully accomplished, the ideology and practice of excluding Arab workers persisted. Today it has morphed into a comprehensive exclusion and marginalization of the Palestinian Arabs who comprise 20 percent of Israeli citizens.
