The Histadrut, and the Property Question the AWL Apparatus Erased
The Drift, Part Three
The third in a Red Mole series tracing the Shachtmanite drift in British Trotskyism, from the 1939–40 split in the American Socialist Workers Party to the operational politics of Ideas for Freedom 2025. Part One was ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’. Part Two was ‘How “Consistent Democracy” Lost Its Verb’.
TL;DR
The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has, since the 1980s, advocated ‘links with the Histadrut’ as the proper terrain of working-class internationalism on Israel-Palestine. The AWL’s own briefing for British trade unionists, Why trade unions should not break their links with Israel’s Histadrut, written by Harry Glass and Ira Berkovic, sets out the position. The briefing concedes much of the historical record: the Histadrut was founded in 1920 as ‘an exclusivist Jewish labour organisation’, it functioned as ‘a state within a state’ controlling around a third of the Israeli economy, it was simultaneously the major employer and the major union, it has been ‘reactionary’ in its attitudes to Arab workers, its press releases supported the 2008–9 attack on Gaza. What the briefing does with these concessions is the structure this article engages. The historical record is acknowledged and the political conclusion runs the other way: the Histadrut is a trade union and must therefore be linked with rather than boycotted. The briefing rests its practical case on the 2008 cooperation agreement between the Histadrut and the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, and that agreement, examined in full, turns out to demonstrate the argument rather than answer it. The apparatus the AWL inherited in 1988 disqualified the property-form question as politically relevant. The briefing operates inside that apparatus. It can register the Histadrut’s institutional history as background to a trade-union assessment. It cannot let the institutional history condition the assessment, because doing so would require the materialist analysis the apparatus discarded. This article engages the briefing directly, follows the cooperation record to where it actually leads, and closes on the analytical resource the Fourth International has held since 1948 and the AWL has not. It is the third of three articles closing the Drift series. Part Four will engage the political economy of the post-war Western settlement. Part Five will engage the October 2025 Gidley-Mang pamphlet.
I. The framework and its briefing
The AWL’s position on Israel-Palestine has been stable for almost forty years. It is articulated as a ‘Two States’ programme: Israeli and Palestinian peoples have equal national rights, neither has the right to dominate the other, the path to a just settlement runs through joint working-class action across the green line. The political work, on this framework, is to build links with progressive forces inside Israel: Israeli left organisations, Israeli peace movements, and centrally, the Histadrut as the major institution of organised Israeli labour.
The AWL has set out the position in a briefing for trade unionists, Why trade unions should not break their links with Israel’s Histadrut, written by Harry Glass and Ira Berkovic. The briefing is the considered AWL position, presented to the British labour movement, anchoring the case against the BDS movement in Britain through the 2010s and after. It is the document the framework has produced when asked to defend itself in operational terms.
The briefing is also, read carefully, the demonstration of the structural argument this series has been making. It concedes the historical record more openly than its critics have generally given it credit for. What it does with the concessions is the move Part Two of this series traced to its origin in 1988. The briefing acknowledges what the Histadrut is, treats the acknowledgement as background, and proceeds to a political conclusion the historical record does not support. There is a particular experience in reading a document like this: the concessions arrive one after another, each one apparently fatal to the case, and then the case survives them all, intact, as though the facts had been noted and filed rather than reasoned from. The article that follows walks through the briefing’s argumentative structure and shows what the apparatus is doing.
II. What the briefing concedes
The briefing’s account of the Histadrut’s history acknowledges most of what historians of the Israeli labour movement have established. The Histadrut, it concedes, ‘was founded in 1920 as the General Confederation of Hebrew Labour in the Land of Israel as a exclusivist Jewish labour organisation’. It ‘did play an important part in the creation of the state of Israel’. It was ‘one of the central institutions of the society, arguably a state within a state’. It ‘was a major employer, controlling at one point around a third of the economy and employing over three-quarters of workers’. It ‘owned or part-owned the Solel Boneh construction firm, the dairy enterprise Tnuva, Koor manufacturing firm and Bank Hapoalim’. Its holding company, Hevrat Ovdim, ‘managed large swathes of industry’.
The briefing is also explicit about the racial structure of the institution. The Histadrut excluded Palestinian Arabs from membership for decades. When it began to admit them, they ‘were however restricted to an Arab department headed by a Jewish official’. Even after the 1966 name change to the General Confederation of Labour in the Land of Israel, the Histadrut ‘did not campaign against the exclusion of Palestinians from some strategic industries, where military service was a condition of employment’. The briefing acknowledges that ‘in its attitudes to Arab workers within Israel, the Histadrut has often been reactionary’.
The briefing extends the concession to the contemporary record. The Histadrut’s ‘press releases supporting the attacks [on Gaza in 2008–9] were wrong and we said so’. The Israeli-Jewish ruling class, the briefing acknowledges, ‘exploits some Palestinian and Israeli-Arab labour’. The Histadrut ‘is bureaucratically run and politically reformist’. None of this is hidden. The briefing’s case is built on the assumption that British trade unionists who have read the historical record can still be persuaded to maintain links.
The political conclusion the briefing draws is that the record does not warrant breaking links. The Histadrut retains a ‘fundamentally trade-union’ character despite its institutional history. Reactionary attitudes towards minority workers are ‘sadly all too common in the history of the workers’ movement across the world’, not unique to the Histadrut. The institution today is ‘roughly analogous to the British TUC or American AFL-CIO’. The political work for British trade unionists is to maintain links and pressure the Histadrut from within.
III. What the briefing does with the concessions
This is where the apparatus does its work. The briefing acknowledges the historical record, frames it as background, and proceeds to a political conclusion that the historical record does not support. The argumentative moves are specific and worth tracking.
The first is the analogy. The Histadrut, the briefing says, is ‘roughly analogous to the British TUC or American AFL-CIO’. The analogy carries the conclusion. If the Histadrut is analogous to the TUC, then the political relationship British trade unionists should have with it is the relationship they would have with any major foreign trade union centre, and the institutional history becomes a question of bureaucratic conservatism, of racism in the labour movement, of social-partnership models of capitalist administration. These are problems many trade union centres have. Whatever is specific to the Histadrut is, in the analogy, no longer doing analytical work.
The analogy does not survive scrutiny. The TUC has not displaced an indigenous population from its land. The TUC was not founded as the labour wing of a colonisation project. The TUC did not exclude an entire ethnic-national group from membership. The point about membership is worth getting exactly right, because the briefing leans on a date and the date will not bear the weight. Palestinian Arab citizens were barred from Histadrut trade unions until 1953. They were admitted to membership in 1959, the year the briefing treats as the end of exclusivity. They were not entitled to vote in the organisation’s own elections until 1965. Six years, then, between admission and the franchise, and in the intervening period the membership was administered through the Arab department under a Jewish official the briefing has already conceded. The organisation that granted Jews full national-minority representation from the outset gave its Palestinian members a vote only in the second decade of the state. That is not the TUC. It is the institutional expression of a settler-colonial economy managing a subordinated population, and the analogy holds the two together only by treating the difference as residual historical detail.
The second move is the displacement of the property question. The briefing acknowledges that the Histadrut ‘was a major employer, controlling at one point around a third of the economy’ and that this made it ‘much more enmeshed into the state apparatus’ than a typical trade union. Its response is that ‘the involvement of trade-union bodies in various aspects of state administration, including administering welfare services or even overseeing employment, is not uncommon in social-partnership models of capitalist administration. They are models that socialists oppose, but they do not mean that trade unions that engage in them cease to be trade unions.’
The move is structural. The Histadrut’s role as major employer is acknowledged, then framed inside the category ‘social-partnership models of capitalist administration’, a category in which trade unions and states cooperate. The framing absorbs what is specific to the Histadrut, the simultaneous role as employer and employee representative inside a state structured around dispossession of the indigenous population, into a more general phenomenon that does not warrant boycotting anyone. The argument requires that the specific be assimilated to the general; the assimilation requires that the property regime in which the specific operates be treated as background.
The third move is the engagement with COSATU. The Congress of South African Trade Unions, the briefing notes, ‘has indeed been a vocal advocate of boycotting the Histadrut’ and has ‘drawn the analogy with apartheid’. The briefing calls the analogy ‘false’, because ‘the class structure of Israel is different from apartheid South Africa’. The argument runs: ‘In Israel, the Israeli-Jewish ruling class exploits some Palestinian and Israeli-Arab labour, but its economic power rests fundamentally on exploiting Israeli-Jewish workers. In apartheid South Africa, a tiny white caste ruled and exploited the majority black working class.’
This is the briefing’s closest approach to the property-form question, and the tell is what it does next. The concession is real: the Israeli ruling class ‘exploits some Palestinian and Israeli-Arab labour’. It registers, for one clause, that there is a property regime with differential relations to Israeli-Jewish workers and to Palestinian and Israeli-Arab workers. The acknowledgement is then deflected by a demographic argument about South Africa that does not engage what has just been conceded. The structural question that follows from the concession, the relationship between the differential exploitation and the Histadrut’s institutional history, is never put. It cannot be put, because putting it would require the analytical apparatus the AWL discarded in 1988.
The fourth move is the appeal to authority, and it is the move on which the practical case rests. The briefing observes that the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions and Israeli labour organisations such as Workers’ Advice Centre / Ma’an, Kav LaOved and Koach LaOvdim ‘do not support the boycott of the Histadrut’. A 2010 Unison delegation, ‘dispatched to Israel/Palestine specifically to “critically review”’ the union’s links, found that the Palestinian and Israeli unions and NGOs it consulted ‘all stressed that the Histadrut was a legitimate trade union’ and ‘did not call on Unison to sever its relations with the Histadrut’. The metric is the political judgement of the contemporary partners. The PGFTU does not call for severing links; therefore the AWL does not. The briefing concedes that ‘the official BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign is backed by a significant layer of Palestinian civil society’ and that its trade-union arm ‘has support from many organisations, including affiliates of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions’, and answers that ‘just because a particular demand has a lot of organisational backing does not make it right’. Palestinian civil society’s BDS call is engaged through the filter of the partners’ assessment of it.
IV. The cooperation record, and what it actually shows
The framework’s authority-claim has a concrete substance, and to its credit the briefing does not hide from it. In August 2008, under the auspices of the International Trade Union Confederation and the personal brokerage of Guy Ryder, the Histadrut and the PGFTU signed an agreement in Brussels. It built on an earlier 1995 framework and settled the arrears that had frozen during the Second Intifada. Under it, the Histadrut agreed to transfer at least half of the representation fees deducted from Palestinian workers employed by Israeli firms to the PGFTU, and it made a one-off payment, a little over three million dollars, designated as settlement of the dues accumulated since 1993. The transfer happened. Both the Histadrut and its sharpest critics agree it happened. Any honest treatment of the framework has to start there, and the fashionable claim that the whole relationship is a fiction cannot be sustained: money moved.
What matters is the character of the money that moved. The Trade Union Friends of Israel understood the agreement’s function precisely, and said so at the time: it ‘seems to have cut the legs off most attacks and calls for boycott’. The one-off settlement returned a fraction of what had been taken. The Labor for Palestine backgrounder of December 2025 calculates the transferred sum at around eleven per cent of the deductions levied since 1970; the figure is an advocacy calculation and should be read as one, but the order of magnitude is not seriously in dispute, because the deduction stream itself is documented. Under a 1970 Israeli government decision, the Interior Ministry’s payments section took 0.75 per cent of the gross salary of every Palestinian worker employed in Israel, roughly seventy thousand workers in recent years, and transferred it to the Histadrut under the name of service fees. Ma’an, the Jewish-Arab union whose legitimacy the AWL briefing itself invokes, puts the annual total at more than forty million shekels. Many of those workers were employed where no collective agreement existed, so there was no service to pay for and no legal basis for the deduction. The state skimmed union dues from Palestinian workers and handed them to an organisation that did not represent them, and the 2008 agreement’s achievement was to route half of a portion of that skim to the federation that did.
Then the arrangement collapsed, and it collapsed in a way the 2012 briefing could not have anticipated and its later defenders have not reckoned with. In February 2020 Ma’an petitioned the National Labour Court, not over the boycott, not over politics, but over the plain illegality of deducting representation fees from workers who were represented by nobody. Rather than defend the deductions, the payments section suspended them in May 2020, and when the unions and the ministry could reach no agreement on a replacement, it announced in September that it would stop collecting the fees altogether. The court removed the petition that November. The mechanism the AWL held up as evidence of a functioning trade-union relationship was terminated at its source, because an independent union demonstrated in an Israeli court that it had never been trade-union at all. Ma’an’s own verdict on the fifty-year arrangement was four words: an improper arrangement, buried.
The scholarship has caught up with the point the apparatus cannot reach. Nimrod Ben Zeev, writing in 2023, shows that the Histadrut’s contemporary structure, its membership rules, its collective agreements and its relationship to the state, works to institutionalise a racialised and segregated construction sector in which Palestinian and migrant workers do the dangerous, low-paid labour without union protection under the supervision of unionised Jewish managers and engineers. This is not 1920 and it is not the Nakba. It is the Histadrut now, described in the present tense in a peer-reviewed journal, functioning as the institutional form of a segregated labour regime. The AWL briefing’s category, a trade union with a reformist bureaucracy and some historic racism, cannot hold that. There is a version of the counter-argument that says the segregation is the Israeli state’s doing and the Histadrut merely operates within it, and that version is not nothing; the honest reply is that an institution which administers the segregation, deducts from its victims, and organises their supervisors is not operating within the regime so much as constituting part of it. The line between the two is exactly the line the apparatus was built to blur.
One further fact sits underneath the authority-claim and is rarely stated in Britain. The PGFTU leadership that accepts the transfers is not the whole of Palestinian labour. Its own constituent political blocs backed the formation of the Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS in 2011, which called on international unions to sever all ties with the Histadrut. The federation the AWL treats as its interpretive authority is internally split, its leadership in the bilateral relationship and its base in the boycott coalition, and the relationship itself the PGFTU has described, in its own words, as one ‘of unequals’. The briefing selects the leadership’s operational stance and calls it the Palestinian position. It is a Palestinian position. It is not the only one, and the briefing’s own criterion, the judgement of Palestinian trade unionists, points in both directions at once.
V. What the framework demonstrates
The briefing’s structural function in this article is to demonstrate, in the AWL’s own articulation, what Part Two argued. The 1988 break with the workers’-state framework was not a sociological correction. It was the discarding of the analytical resource that lets the FI tradition engage the property-form question as the condition of political possibility. One of the consequences is the framework the briefing articulates: a framework that can register the Histadrut’s institutional history, concede the racial exclusion, acknowledge the differential exploitation of Palestinian labour, recognise the bureaucratic-conservative character of the institution, follow a fee-transfer agreement through to its collapse in an Israeli court, and let none of it condition the political conclusion.
The framework is consistent with itself. It is internally rigorous. The trade-union character of the Histadrut, on its own terms, is the analytical category that organises everything, and its response to reactionary attitudes, to social-partnership entanglement, to racial exclusion, to a deduction stream ruled illegal, is the same in each case: maintain links, pressure from within. The framework is not stupid and it is not ignorant of the record. It is doing exactly what the apparatus inherited in 1988 permits it to do. What it cannot do is treat the Histadrut as the institutional expression of a labour movement organised, since 1920 and continuously, around the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population, and treat that history as constitutive rather than background.
The Fourth International has the resource the AWL abandoned, and it is not exotic. It is the tradition’s foundation. At the 1948 World Congress the FI adopted a resolution rejecting the Zionist solution as a reactionary utopia and holding the repudiation of Zionism to be the precondition for uniting Jewish and Arab workers, while granting Jews full rights as a national minority within a single Palestine. The quarrel was never with the national existence of Jews; it was with Zionism, with partition, and with the colonial character of the labour movement that partition required. Pierre Frank, writing in La Vérité that same year, put the property question at the centre in a sentence the AWL’s apparatus can no longer produce: Zionist immigration had cast the Jewish worker in Palestine in a role ‘quite similar to that of white workers in the colonies’, exploited and yet functioning as an instrument of imperial domination. That is the Histadrut argument in its 1948 seed, from Trotsky’s former secretary, seventy-seven years before Ben Zeev documented its present-tense consequences in the concrete of the construction sites.
The foundation is 1948. The application to the boycott question is our own. When Palestinian civil society issued the BDS call in 2005, and when its trade-union coalition asked international unions to break with the Histadrut in 2011, the FI tradition had the analytical grounds to take the call as the movement’s own chosen form of solidarity rather than as a demand to be filtered through Israeli partners. That work is on the record: in the FI Bureau’s statements (especially since October 2023), in the writing of Joseph Daher, in the standing coverage of International Viewpoint. It does not require the framework the AWL has been refining since 1988. It requires only the materialism that framework discarded.
What this article has argued is the structural claim the briefing demonstrates. The framework cannot see the Histadrut as the materialist analysis sees it because the framework has built itself, since 1988, to exclude the resource that would let the Histadrut be seen that way. The briefing is the apparatus articulating itself in real time, on the document the framework put forward as its own best case. The historical record is acknowledged. The materialist conclusion is refused. The fee stream is defended right up to the point an Israeli court buried it.
The next article engages the broader political economy of the post-war Western settlement, to show that the materialism the AWL discarded is not specific to Israel-Palestine but is the resource the framework has had to abandon across contemporary capitalist analysis. Part Five engages the October 2025 Gidley-Mang pamphlet, which develops at length the argument the briefing already makes in full: that the boycott of the Histadrut, and BDS in general, carries an anti-Semitic logic. The briefing does not make that argument in passing. It makes it as its conclusion, and it is the argument the Left Renewal project has invested most in since. The Drift series does not stand on the Histadrut alone. It stands on the cumulative case that the apparatus the AWL inherited in 1988 has produced, across forty years, the political outcomes the materialism it discarded would have prevented.
This is the third article in The Drift, a Red Mole series tracing the Shachtmanite reframing of Trotskyist categories in British far-left politics. Part One was ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’. Part Two was ‘How “Consistent Democracy” Lost Its Verb’. Part Four will engage the political economy of the post-war Western settlement, and Part Five will close the series with engagement of the October 2025 Gidley-Mang pamphlet. The AWL briefing engaged here, ‘Why trade unions should not break their links with Israel’s Histadrut’ by Harry Glass and Ira Berkovic, is available at workersliberty.org.