This book explores the British Labour Party and the trade unions and how their relationship with the Jews of Palestine and Israel has evolved over the past one hundred years. It also reflects the changing attitudes of the Labour Party and the unions towards the persecution of the Jews, a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Israel and antisemitism. An in-depth examination of critical events in European and Middle East history reveals the links between British unions and their Israeli union counterpart, the Histadrut (General Federation of Labour), and sets out the circumstances in which the unions went from backing the Labour Party’s 1917 war aims declaration, which called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, through to the present day, which sees the unions promoting campaigns for boycotts and sanctions against the State of Israel.

This book examines a basic assumption behind most of the critical, progressive thinking of our times: that trade unions are necessarily tools for solidarity and are integral to a more equal and just society. Shaul A. Duke assesses the trade union's potential to promote equality in ethnically and racially diverse societies by offering an in-depth look into how unions operate; how power flows between union levels; where inequality originates; and the role of union members in union dynamics. By analyzing the trade union's effects on working-class inequality in Palestine during 1920-1948, this book shifts the conventional emphasis on worker-employer relations to that of worker-worker relations. It offers a conceptualization of how strong union members directed union policy from below in order to eliminate competition, often by excluding marginalized groups. The comparison of the union experiences of Palestinian-Arabs, Jewish-Yemeni immigrants, and Jewish women offers a fresh look into the labor history of Palestine and its social stratification.

Organizing Matters demonstrates the interplay between two distinct logics of labour’s collective action: on the one hand, workers coming together, usually at their place of work, entrusting the union to represent their interests and, on the other hand, social bargaining in which the trade union constructs labour’s interests from the top down. The book investigates the tensions and potential complementarities between the two logics through the combination of a strong theoretical framework and an extensive qualitative case study of trade union organizing and recruitment in four countries – Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. These countries still utilize social-wide bargaining but find it necessary to draw and develop strategies transposed from Anglo-American countries in response to continuously declining membership.

Challenging the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement focuses on the efforts to oppose antisemitism, the academic boycott, and the BDS movement. The State of Israel has faced many threats, most of them military, since it was established in 1948, but the threat posed by the NGO forum at the United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in August 2001 was different. The forum unleashed the "new" antisemitism which targeted the State of Israel, as well as a non-violent, civil society-based campaign based on the South African anti-apartheid campaign of the 1980s – which was to form the basis of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement directed at the State of Israel. Featuring case studies from the United States, Great Britain, Israel, and South Africa, each chapter of this wide-ranging volume discusses examples of opposition to the divisive BDS campaign and the proposed academic boycott of Israel over the last two decades, including the fight for formal recognition of the "new" antisemitism by governments and international bodies and the use of a variety of legal measures. The rise of antisemitism within academia and wider society is also examined. This book will be vital reading for students, scholars, and activists with an interest in social movements, Israel, and Middle East politics and history.

The changes and divisions on the left over the Israel-Palestine conflict forms the central theme of this archive based study. While the Labour Party’s supported establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, as a modernising force, the communist movement opposed it, on the grounds that it facilitated imperial influence in the Middle East. In 1947, however, the British Communist Party rallied to the Zionist cause, leaving the Palestinian cause with no effective protagonists in Britain. The left’s sympathy, at the time, was overwhelmingly with the Israeli state, considering its establishment a recompense to the Jewish people for the Holocaust. It was only after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, that the new left in Britain began to articulate a critical attitude to Israel and support for Palestinian nationalism. It is a perspective which has gradually gained ground in the political mainstream.

The author examines Palestine's interwar political, social, and cultural landscape. The book sheds light on the complex forces at play in the region during this period, including colonial powers' support for the Zionist movement, the Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot Secret Agreement, the Peel Commission, the White Papers, the rise of Palestinian nationalism, the Palestinian revolution, and the internationalization of the Palestine question.