Democratic Palestine : 16 (ص 12)
غرض
- عنوان
- Democratic Palestine : 16 (ص 12)
- المحتوى
-
Occupied Palestine
The Palestinian Working Class
On the occasion of May 1st, International Workers’ Day, we begin an article about the Palestinian work-
ing class in occupied Palestine.
The vast majority of Palestinian
workers today live and work in the
occupied homeland. There they are sub-
ject to double-edged oppression -
national as well as class. The Palesti-
nian working class, like any working
class, was formed by capitalism's
development. In Palestine, this occurred
primarily via Zionist settler-colonialism.
This means that the class oppression
suffered by Palestinian workers can
hardly be disengaged from the national
oppression exercised by the Zionist
occupation against the Palestinian
people as a whole.
Zionist occupation policy par-
titioned Palestinian workers into various
categories: those living in the area of
Palestine occupied in 1948, renamed
‘Israel’; those from the 1967 occupied
territories who commute daily to work for
Israeli employers, some with permits
and some illegally; and those who work
for Palestinian employers, themselves
hard pressed by Zionism’s strangulation
of the Palestinian national economy.
Cutting across these categories are
Nazareth workers demonstrate ag
10
women who are accorded an especially
low status on the labor market.
Regardless of these categories,
certain common realities stand out. In
general, Palestinians were driven to
work in Israeli enterprises due to
Zionism’s land confiscation and
monopolization of the economic struc-
tures. Short of creating a pure Jewish
state, Zionism’s invasion served to mold
those Palestinians who were not expel-
led from the homeland into a cheap,
mobile, labor reserve - assigned to
menial labor scomed by Jews, deprived
of social benefits and forbidden to
unionize. Zionism sought in fact to
create an Arab lumpenproletariat. The
extent to which this succeeded on the
economic level can be seen in the fol-
lowing figures: «The average per capita
income for the West Bank is one-third of
the Israeli average, for the Gaza Strip, it
is one-sixth» (Al Fajr, May 20, 1983).
However, this Zionist aim did not suc-
ceed in political terms. Palestinians’
determination to preserve their national
identity and resist the occupation, has
ainst unemployment and inflation.
not been undermined by the fact that
large sectors were driven into the Israeli
labor market. Palestinian workers under
occupation can better be described as
semiproletarianized. Due to adherence
to the land - a political as well as
economic question - many remain living
in villages and join their families in tilling
what is left of their land between periods
of wage labor employment. Their wage
labor serves to sustain their families
under the steadily worsening conditions
of occupation, which is in itself a form of
steadfastness.
Unionization
The unionization of Palestinian
workers is also to a high degree a politi-
‘cal matter. This is true both in the 1948
and 1967 occupied territories, although
conditions vary. The original Palestinian
trade union movement, which grew
rapidly in the period of the British Man-
date, was banned with the establish-
ment of the Zionist state; its cadres were
dispersed and exiled. The Histadrut
(originally the General Federation of
Hebrew workers) was founded as part of - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 16
- تاريخ
- مايو ١٩٨٦
- المنشئ
- الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين
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