[Marxism] Histadrut: Israel's racist "trade union"

[David Walsh <davidrail68@xxxxxxxxx>]

full article:

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10379.shtml
        

Histadrut: Israel's racist "trade union" 
Tony Greenstein, The Electronic Intifada, 10 March 2009 

 
Histadrut has always been a strange creature. In most countries one joins a 
trade union which is affiliated to a national trade union federation. In Israel 
one first joins Histadrut and then one is allocated to a union. It is only 
outside Israel that Histadrut is seen as a normal trade union, the Israeli 
equivalent of the British Trade Union Congress or the American union movement 
AFL/CIO.

Less well known is the fact that Histadrut, an organization of the settler 
Jewish working class, was the key Zionist organization responsible for the 
formation of the Israeli state. As former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir 
remarked: "Then [1928] I was put on the Histadrut Executive Committee at a time 
when this big labor union wasn't just a trade union organization. It was a 
great colonizing agency." [1] Pinhas Lavon, as secretary-general of Histadrut, 
went so far as to describe it in 1960 as "a general organization to its core. 
It is not a trade union ..." [2] Israel's first prime minister, David 
Ben-Gurion, held that without Histadrut, "I doubt whether we would have had a 
state." [3]




      


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