From split labour market strategy to political co‐optation: the Palestine Labour League

Abstract

Jewish immigration, aimed at creating a Jewish settlement in Palestine, and eventually a Jewish National Home (JNH) began in the latter part of the nineteenth century and expanded rapidly after the establishment of the British mandate, in the aftermath of the First World War. Jewish immigrants, in search of employment, confronted Arab labour in similar search. While Jewish labour was in need of work, being immigrants with no other means of making a living, Arab labour was in similar need due to the inability to sustain itself adequately in the rural sector of Palestine with its deteriorating state of agriculture. The availability of these two groups of workers, with their very different history and differential ability to secure the value of their labour in the market, created a complex split labour market in Palestine. Jewish immigrant labour, who had had previous experience in wage labour and in labour organization, and who was able to elicit the cooperation of other sectors of the Jewish settlers' community, was able to obtain a higher value for its labour and yet, was at the same time, under threat of displacement by much cheaper Arab labour. As a result, consolidating its organization to maintain its relative advantage, Jewish labour aimed at acquiring the monopoly over labour in the sector of the market owned by Jews. This policy was known as the 'Hebrew Labour' policy and became one of the central organizational themes and rallying cries of the Jewish settlers' community in general and of Jewish labour in particular. The propagation of 'Hebrew labour' has until recently been taken for granted by the historiographers of the period. This is primarily the case for those writing from a Zionist perspective, who tended to contain themselves within the boundaries of the Jewish settlement - the Yishuv. The notion of the boundaries of the Jewish settlement is in itself highly problematic as discussed by Kimmerling' and Horowitz.2 To the extent that explanations were offered for the demand for 'Hebrew labour', they were primarily ideological ones - the commitment of Jewish pioneers to physical labour as an integral part of the goal of national redemption. Recently students of the formation of Israeli nation and society have