Late Ottoman Roots
Under Ottoman rule, Palestine had little of what could be called a working class in the modern sense — a few hundred seasonal agricultural labourers, artisans in soap factories, mills, and pottery workshops in the towns. The 1909 Ottoman Associations Law, passed after the constitutional restoration of 1908, allowed artisans and workers to form cooperative associations to protect their interests and raise their cultural awareness, but stopped short of authorising trade unions. May Day in this period was something Palestinians read about rather than celebrated, even as Thessaloniki and Skopje held the empire's first 1 May rallies in 1909–1911. The First World War devastated the country with famine, epidemics, and Ottoman repression of Arab nationalists; what little artisanal economy existed was hollowed out before any labour movement could take shape.
The Mandate, the Nahda, and the Histadrut Wall
The British Mandate (1920–1948) created the Palestinian Arab working class almost as a by-product of its own infrastructure: the railways, Haifa port, the public works department, the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline, and the construction sites that absorbed peasants displaced from the land. It was on these worksites that an Arab labour movement, embedded in the wider Arab cultural and political nahda (revival), was born. From late 1922, Arab railway workers tried to join the Histadrut-affiliated railway union; by early 1925 they made up the majority of its members but had no place in its leadership. In the spring of that year they walked out, and on 21 March 1925 the Palestine Arab Workers' Society (PAWS) was officially recognised in Haifa — the first and oldest Arab labour union in the country. The Palestine Communist Party, recognised by the Comintern in 1924, also worked to organise Arab labour after a brief and unsuccessful attempt to push Arab workers into the Histadrut.
The structural problem was the Histadrut itself. The General Federation of Jewish Labour, founded in December 1920, was simultaneously a trade union, an employer (it owned a major construction company and many Yishuv enterprises), and the organising spine of Labour Zionism. Its campaign for "Hebrew Labour" — exclusive Jewish employment in the Jewish sector — meant that Palestinian Arab workers were not just outside the Histadrut but actively excluded from a growing share of the formal economy. As one historian of Mandate labour put it, this struggle for "100 per cent Jewish labour" did more than any other factor to produce the territorial and economic separation between Jews and Arabs. May Day rallies under the Mandate were therefore split rallies: Histadrut marches in Tel Aviv and the Jewish sector of Haifa, separate Arab gatherings organised by PAWS, the Palestine Communist Party, and from 1942 the Federation of Arab Trade Unions and Labor Societies (FATULS).
May Day 1921, and the Long Shadow of Jaffa
The first May Day in Mandate Palestine, 1 May 1921, set the tone. A small Jewish Marxist (Mopsi) demonstration marched out of the all-Jewish Tel Aviv into the Palestinian Manshiyya neighbourhood between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, after clashing earlier with more moderate Labour Zionists. British gendarmes fired warning shots; Arab residents, hearing the gunfire and not understanding the slogans, took it for a Jewish attack and responded in kind. The riot that followed killed 47 Jews and 48 Palestinians and made hundreds homeless. The Jaffa riots became a permanent feature of the Mandate's political memory — a foretaste of the cycle of communal violence that would eventually consume the country, and a date on which May Day in Palestine was forever entangled with the conflict over the country itself.
The 1936 General Strike
The Palestinian Arab labour movement reached its political peak not on 1 May but in April 1936. On 19 April, after a flare-up of violence, the Arab Higher Committee under the Mufti Amin al-Husseini called a general strike — at six months, between April and October 1936, the longest general strike in modern history. Its demands were the end of Jewish immigration, a halt to land sales to Zionists, and a national government reflecting the Arab majority. PAWS, until then largely confined to Haifa railway workers, set up community committees and aid networks across the country. The strike opened the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, which the British eventually crushed with thousands of troops, mass arrests, the death penalty for unauthorised possession of arms, collective punishment of villages, and 108 hangings at Acre Prison. The Arab economy emerged broken; many of the urban jobs Arab workers had held in transport, the ports, and public works had been transferred to Jewish workers in their absence. The labour movement was set back a generation.
War, Revival, and the Nakba
The Second World War paradoxically revived it. The Mandate authorities turned Palestine into a British supply base for the region; some 28,000 Arab workers were employed in army camps, factories, and workshops, and by 1943 unemployment had disappeared and labour was scarce. PAWS rebuilt; FATULS, founded in 1942 by communists who had split from PAWS, grew rapidly among workers in Shell, the Iraq Petroleum Company, Haifa port, and the public works department, with more than 4,000 members by 1943. May Day rallies through the mid-1940s were the largest Palestine had seen — and they coincided, briefly, with a series of joint Arab–Jewish strikes (railway workers, postal workers, civil servants) that wrung wage rises and cost-of-living allowances out of the Mandate government over Histadrut objections. In August 1946 PAWS held a congress and renamed itself the Trade Unions' Council; its general secretary Sami Taha was preparing to lead Palestinian labour into the post-war settlement when, in September 1947, he was assassinated in Haifa on the orders of the Mufti, with whom he had repeatedly refused to comply.
The Nakba ended that movement. The 1948 war, the destruction of Palestinian Haifa, Jaffa, and Lydda, and the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians dispersed the urban Arab working class along with everyone else. Of the 156,000 Palestinians who remained inside what became Israel, most lived under military government from 1949 to 1966, with movement and employment outside their villages tightly controlled; strikes were effectively impossible. In the West Bank, former members of the National Liberation League went on to form the Communist Party of Jordan — for two decades, the only organisational continuity with the Mandate-era labour movement. May Day under the Jordanian and Egyptian administrations of the West Bank and Gaza was a low-key affair, often a Communist Party rally rather than a national holiday.
Occupation, the PGFTU, and a Holiday Under Closure
The 1967 occupation transformed Palestinian labour again. Hundreds of thousands of West Bank and Gaza workers were drawn into the Israeli economy as commuting day labour — overwhelmingly in construction, agriculture, and services, including, by the 1980s, the building of the very settlements that were taking their land. The Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), traceable in its modern form to 1965 and rooted in the 1920s movement, became the principal Palestinian labour body. Its May Day rallies — in Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City — were among the few national gatherings that survived the bans, curfews, and closures of the first and second intifadas. Since the Oslo years, the PGFTU has signed agreements with the Histadrut on tax transfers and the right of Palestinian workers to sue in Israeli courts; critics argue these arrangements have done little to secure the rights of workers commuting through the checkpoints.
In the West Bank and Gaza of the 2020s, May Day is observed as an official holiday by the Palestinian Authority, with marches in Ramallah and other West Bank towns and statements from PGFTU and the smaller independent unions on wages, the construction sector, and the long battle over Israeli-withheld pension and tax funds. In Gaza, where the war that began in October 2023 has destroyed the formal economy and most workplaces, May Day this year is being marked, where it is marked at all, as a day of mourning and solidarity rather than celebration. From Haifa railway workers in 1925 to construction workers commuting through Qalandia checkpoint a century later, the Palestinian story of 1 May has rarely been a holiday at all. It has been an attempt — under Ottomans, British, Israelis, and successive Arab administrations — to assert that there is a Palestinian working class with demands of its own, in a country whose political map has spent a hundred years trying to erase it.
Illustration: Gemini