The Arab worker under the Palestine Mandate (1937)

Abstract

Palestinian trade unionist George Mansour (b. 1905---d. 1963) initially worked as a baker, then as school teacher in Nazareth before his family moved to Jaffa in 1927, where he worked first in trade and then in manufacturing. As Secretary of the Arab Workers Society, a labour organisation founded in 1934, he was a central figure in the 1936 General Strike, helping to write and distribute communiques and leaflets, and organise rallies, marches and pickets. After his arrest in late 1936, and after the assassination of AWS's leader Michel Mitri by British forces in December 1936, Mansour testified before the Royal Commission in January 1937 about the grievances of Arab labourers in Palestine. Frustrated by the Peel Commission Report, he published 'The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate'. Based largely on his evidence to the Commission, this booklet was designed to appeal to British public opinion and 'to give the English reader some idea of why Arab labour is at one with the rest of the Arab population in its opposition to Zionist immigration'. After his testimony and due to his strong relationships to trade unionists in Britain, he was appointed to the Palestine Office in London, where he remained until the Second World War. Returning to Palestine, he was unable to revive his labour work as a result of continued harassment and repeated arrests. He left for Baghdad, where he worked as a teacher and organised popular committees in solidarity with Palestine. After the war, and the Nakba, he spent time in Egypt working on labour organising, journalism, and education, as well as working with the Arab Higher Committee (AHC). He then moved with the AHC to Beirut in 1959, spending the last years of his life doing trade union work. This text provides a lucid account of the wider socio-economic implications Zionist colonisation and Jewish immigration to Palestine had on the indigenous society in general, and on the labour market in particular. As an articulate representative of the budding Arab Labour Federation and Arab labour movement, Mansour was the antithesis of Zionist propaganda. This propaganda insisted on the underdevelopment of Arab labour consciousness and portrayed the Arab working class as a whole as a tool of their feudal Arab masters. It asserted that there was little ground on which to organise jointly with Jewish labour. However, as the text illuminates, the Histadrut's strategic decision against joint organisation and its 'conquest of labour' strategy was necessitated by Arab labour's increasing linkage of economic and political demands and its realisation that the Zionist labour movement's political goals marginalised and displaced Palestinians both as workers and as natives of the land. Another target of Mansour's testimony are British claims regarding the positive impact the development of a Jewish national home in Palestine had in areas such as the provision of health, economic development, in particular on the agricultural sector, and urbanisation. Dismissing such claims as founded on Zionist propaganda, the evidence given by Mansour exposes British support for Zionism. The following excerpts from The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate were prepared by this issue's editors.