A historical slip of the tongue, or what can the Arab-Jewish transporation strike teach us about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

This article has employed a dialectical methodology: by analyzing the initial success and ultimate failure of an exceptional case of Jewish-Arab cooperation it has attempted to comprehend some structural roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the one hand, in 1931, as a result of the high rate of unemployment among Jews, there were many calls by the Zionist radical left for joint labor actions with Arab workers. Yet despite the existence of this ideological appeal for "international proletarian" solidarity, and the presence of numerous left-wing workers in Jewish agriculture, there were no significant cases of Jewish-Arab cooperation in the rural areas.⁵⁹ On the other hand, among the drivers cooperation developed almost spontaneously, without prior planning, ideology, or a cadre of left-wing activists seeking cooperation. Both these facts clearly indicate that there were structural factors in the urban economy that facilitated cooperation between Jewish and Arab merchants in their struggle against state economic policies. Among salaried workers (especially in the rural sector), there were structural constraints that prevented cooperation despite the presence of social agents, and encouraged ethnic divisions and violent clashes⁶⁰.