Palestine and the British trade unions

MEMO’s important book “The Battle for Public Opinion in Europe” analysed changing perspectives in Europe towards the Palestinian struggle. A look at the trade unions in Britain reveals that a similar process is underway. Given that these bodies are the largest social movement in the country, with approximately 7 million members, the change is not unimportant.

On closer examination, the policy shift is particularly notable. Strong support for Zionism and the Israeli state characterised the union position for almost the whole of the 20th Century. Equally, from its earliest days, the Labour Party, funded by the trade unions, was the strongest supporter of the Zionist project amongst British political parties.

In his authoritative study, “The British left and Zionism”, Paul Kelemen wrote: “In August 1917, two and a half months before the Balfour Declaration committed Britain to support the setting up of a ‘Jewish home’ in Palestine, the Labour Party took the first step to adopting a new near identical policy in its War Aims Memorandum. The document drafted by a subcommittee of the party’s executive included a proposal that Palestine should be set free from Turkish rule in order that this country may form a Free State under international guarantee, to which such of the Jewish people as desire to do so may return and work at their own salvation.” (p12)

This policy was endorsed by the Labour Party conference in December 1917, shortly after the Balfour Declaration. It may be thought that this was simply the work of politicians. Not so, for the trade unions registered 90 per cent of the vote at the conference. In addition, there were prominent trade union leaders at the heart of Labour’s leadership, such as Arthur Henderson and Ernest Bevin, who had a direct part in framing policy on Palestine.

The “socialist” case for this support was not so surprising. Most of the parties of the Second International had come to accept the supposedly progressive argument for colonialism. The imperial bargain for this acceptance was the tolerance by the ruling class of trade union and socialist party agitation on domestic matters; colonial super-profits, meanwhile, allowed for concessions at home to be funded.

The Zionist project was seen as a logical extension of the civilising mission of European society. This could also be presented conveniently in labour movement circles as a particularly progressive example. The pioneers amongst the Jewish settlers in Palestine were drawn from the Israeli Labour Party, a sister of its namesake in Britain. The organisation of the labour market in the settlements was under the control of the Histadrut, the trade union centre of the Zionists.

Even Zionism’s discriminatory practices were presented in a progressive light. The Jewish National Fund, for example, permitted land leases for “the cultivation of the holding only with Jewish labour.” The Histadrut made sure that its role was to ensure that this policy was enforced. This was presented as preventing labour from being undercut, and raising living standards for all workers.

The labour movement in Britain believed in the advanced nature of Zionism over Arab or Palestinian nationalism. The Palestinian rebellion of 1936 was not supported. The assumption was that there could not be a conflict of interest between Arab and Jewish workers. Instead, it was argued by Harold Laski that the source of the problem came from “the effendi and such trouble makers as the Grand Mufti.” (Kelemen p31)

A small minority, including Stafford Cripps, Michael Foot and the British Communist Party, opposed this view. The dominant position was expressed most strongly in 1939 when Labour’s Front Bench opposed the Cabinet White Paper, which sought a Palestinian state in ten years and a limitation on Jewish immigration for five years. At the 1939 Labour conference this opposition was endorsed with only two votes registered against.

The position at the end of the Second World War was hardly more favourable. The statement adopted at the 1944 Labour Party conference read: “…there is surely neither hope nor meaning in a ‘Jewish National Home’, unless we are prepared to let Jews, if they wish, enter this tiny land in such numbers as to become a majority. There was a strong case for this before the War. There is an irrefutable case now, after the unspeakable atrocities of the cold and calculated German Nazi plan to kill all Jews in Europe… let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in.”

This can only have been carried at the conference because the trade unions voted for it.

It is obvious that the experience of the British labour movement was also reinforced by the impact of the Holocaust. Sections of the armed forces were involved directly in liberating the Nazi concentration camps, along with Russia’s Red Army from the East. It is impossible to imagine the effect that this had upon those who experienced it, but it meant that the case for a sovereign Jewish state became absolutely conclusive in the eyes of many progressives.

The late Tony Benn had an outstanding record in supporting the movements for colonial freedom from the 1950s. Yet as a former member of the wartime Royal Air Force, he could not let go of his support for the Israeli government until Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the resultant expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila.

Critics of Israel on the left were effectively silenced when the government of the USSR became the first government in the world to recognise the nascent State of Israel in 1948. Stalin may well have regarded the foundation of Israel as a blow to British imperialism but, in truth, its conflict with Britain was purely momentary. The damage to the Palestinian people because of the Soviet government’s position is of another order. A large section of the international anti-colonial movement was disorientated by Moscow’s move.

In these circumstances, there was no effective support for the Palestinians from the international, or British, labour movement. It took Stalin’s death, the Egyptian victory at Suez in 1956 and the subsequent turning to the USSR by Nasser before the left within the labour movement became more supportive of the Palestinians.

However, this support would definitely have been a minority inside the labour movement in Britain, Europe and North America. When I first started arguing the case for the Palestinians in 1973, as an activist in the Transport and General Workers’ Union, the position was seen by other union members as very threatening. The image of the Palestinians being presented then was based on aircraft hijackings and the Black September operation at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

Obviously, the Israeli government position was more or less supported by the labour movement in the 1967 and 1973 wars. The TUC Congress carried motions of support for Israel in 1967 and 1976.

A first shift may well have begun when the UN General Assembly debated the issue after 22 years of treating the Palestinians as purely a refugee problem. Yasser Arafat’s 1974 address to the UN and the subsequent majority vote for Palestinian self-determination and national independence was an important change in international perception of the issue.

As has often been the way, the Conservative Party proved to be more adept at recognising the significance of this development for British commercial interests in the Middle East. Reginald Maudling, then Shadow Foreign Secretary for the Tories, told parliament in 1975 that the PLO “is the voice of Palestinians.”

Margaret Thatcher’s government voted for the European Community declaration in 1979 which supported the Palestinian “right to self-determination”. Labour leader James Callaghan opposed this in parliament, and suggested that the Palestinians should be placed under Jordanian jurisdiction.

Between 1974 and 1981 there were only 3 resolutions placed before the Labour Party conference on the Middle East. Two these were from Poale Zion, a Marxist-Zionist movement. Out of the 268 Labour MPs in the 1979 intake, 140 were members of Labour Friends of Israel. George Galloway and Ken Livingstone were exceptions amongst Labour politicians at the time in their readiness to support the Palestinians.

Without doubt, Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon had a big impact. At the TUC Congress that year a motion from the Fire Brigades’ Union (FBU) deplored the invasion and supported Palestinian self-determination. Despite General Council opposition this was carried.

Two weeks later 46 emergency motions critical of Israel were placed before the Labour Party conference. A National Executive Council statement was carried, which was broadly critical of the Likud government and supportive of the Israeli Labour Party call for a judicial enquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Further, the conference also carried two radical resolutions: from Dundee East came the call for an independent, sovereign Palestinian state, without making this conditional upon Israel’s “security”. The other, from Norwood, demanded recognition of the PLO and supported the establishment of a democratic secular state in Palestine.

A number of union conferences also passed pro-Palestinian resolutions: the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO), the FBU, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers-Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section (AUEW/TASS), the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT 82), the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT). This was a growing influence, but still a minority. My own experience was probably more typical. At the 1990 Union of Communication Workers conference (UCW), a motion was debated in support of the Palestinians. The left delegates supported the motion strongly in debate, but received only about 10 per cent of the vote.

In many ways, the issue was subject to a left/right divide inside the labour movement. Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were (and remain) all enthusiastic supporters of Israel and carried much support with them.

The Oslo process generally slowed down the debate inside the British labour movement. The assumption was that this process gave some parity to the Palestinians; that it brought them into a political process and away from violence; and that it had an independent state guaranteed at the end.

The grinding inertia of the process did not really create much disillusion within the labour movement until the eruption of the Second Intifada in 2000. The media coverage renewed interest, with some unions increasing their involvement in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).

A major fillip occurred through the growth of the anti-war movement against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Palestinian slogans were raised and speakers referred constantly to the Palestinians at mass public demonstrations. Of great significance was that the trade unions broke with the Blair government on this issue. The TUC General Council voted on two occasions against the Iraq war.

A new generation of union leaders had reached positions of authority after the rise of Bennism. These leaders were also influenced by the growing diversity of multi-cultural Britain, with its impact on workplace union organisation. An anti-imperialist sentiment achieved a majority position inside much of the trade union movement.

The shift from opposition to the Iraq war to support for Palestine became hardened with each failure of Israel’s aggressive policy: in Lebanon in 2006, Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2008/9, and the attack upon the Freedom Flotilla’s Mavi Marmara in 2010.

The TUC Congress was marked by a series of pro-Palestinian motions: in 2009 from the FBU, with a General Council statement, and in 2010 a composite motion from the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA)/the GMB/Unison/the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS)/the FBU. In 2011 there was another composite from Unite and the PCS and in 2012 the CWU submitted a motion. An emergency motion from the General Council condemned Israel’s summer 2014 war in Gaza and the events in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The size of this shift was conveyed by Martin Bright in an article in the Jewish Chronicle on 14 September, 2012: “Supporters of Israel are losing the battle of ideas in the UK. This has probably been true for some time if only they would admit it. But after this year’s TUC conference there is no longer any question about it, on the left least… When David Taub was appointed as Israel’s ambassador to the UK he made it his personal mission to reach out to the trade union movement. But they have no intention of listening… this motion was passed unanimously. The consensus in large swathes of the left is quite simply this: Israel is the oppressor and the Palestinians, the oppressed…”

Earlier, in 2010, the Reut Institute published a document “Building a Political Firewall against the Assault on Israel’s legitimacy”. The document represented a very serious attempt to analyse the growing strength of the Palestinian solidarity movement in all its key features. Its conclusions were chilling for supporters of the Israeli government: “The TUC comprises 58 affiliated unions representing nearly seven million people. With a constituency of this size, and given the relative political prominence of trade unions within British society, a trade union brace of PSC-led campaigns can substantially impact the British mainstream.” (p39)

The authors of the document could not avoid a conclusion which looked decidedly like sour grapes. “The PSC’s work in the trade union arena is a particularly potent example of the ability of a relatively marginal advocacy organisation to make a substantial impact.” (p36)

The shift in the union and labour movement on Palestine is extremely clear when the whole history of the relationship is examined. Moreover, this becomes even clearer when the relatively conservative character of the unions is taken into account.

It is extremely difficult to win a policy change of this magnitude inside the British trade unions. It takes a great deal of time and effort to achieve. That same conservative character means that it is going to be extremely difficult to overturn a change once won. A powerful platform for Palestinian solidarity has been secured. It is up to all trade unionists to ensure that this is henceforth delivered effectively.

The author is head of policy at the Communications Workers Union (CWU) in the United Kingdom

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.