The “Other” Pro-Israel Lobby: The AFL-CIO and Israel (1952–1960)

Braving unseasonable cold and intermittent rains, 45,000 people crowded into New York's Polo Grounds on April 27, 1958, to celebrate Israel's tenth anniversary. Despite the inauspicious conditions, the crowd patiently endured a three-hour program and, according to a front-page account in the New York Times, “roared ovations at every mention of Israel.”Footnote¹ Among the notable speakers at the rally, which included New York Governor Averell Harriman, Senator Herbert Lehman (D-NY), and the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was George Meany, the president of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). After lauding Histadrut, Israel's general federation of labor, for its contribution to nation-building of the young state, Meany praised Israel for having “performed miracles” and emphasized the shared destiny of Israeli and American labor. “It is indeed fitting that today the trade union movement of Israel and that of America are both fully aware of the role they must play as citizens in a democracy,” he said. “Both of our organizations have progressed toward the goals of higher standards of living through the democratic processes of collective bargaining. Both of us realize that we now must channel some of our energies toward preserving a way of life that means freedom and peace for all the citizens of both our young nations.”Footnote²

Given the growing hostility in recent decades of segments of the American labor movement toward Israel, and their embrace of, among other things, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), it is understandable how mainstream American labor's once unequivocal commitment to Israel's security and well-being—alongside its highly romanticized and somewhat skewed perceptions of Israel—have faded from our historical consciousness.Footnote³ This article seeks to redress this omission by reminding us that up until a few decades ago, the tables were turned as organized labor, led by the AFL-CIO, played an important role in forging the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel and helped establish the founding myths surrounding Israel that still sustain it to this day.

There is no shortage of scholarship mapping the development of the so-called “pro-Israel lobby” in the United States. Yet much of it remains centered on the activities of Jewish organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) or the American Jewish Committee (AJC).Footnote⁴ When scholars do look beyond the Jewish community to explain the pro-Israel lobby, it is usually through the religious bonds of Christian Zionism associated, prior to Israel's founding (and during its early decades), primarily with organizations from the mainstream Protestant establishment like the American Christian Palestine Committee (ACPC), or alternatively since the 1970s, with the rise of the evangelical right.Footnote⁵ More recently, however, scholars have broadened the scope to look into the left-liberal alliance's progressive stance on Israel, focusing on left-wing elites, politicians, intellectuals, and student activists.Footnote⁶

Dov Waxman has observed that what distinguishes members of the pro-Israel lobby is “an unwavering commitment to the survival of Israel as a Jewish state” and a “bedrock concern for securing Israel's existence.”Footnote⁷ If we subscribe to this definition, then it is difficult not to highlight the important role played by the American labor movement in helping establish U.S.–Israel relations. Study of Labor Zionism in America has mostly been relegated to the period prior to the founding of the state and especially to President Harry Truman's historic decision to recognize Israel in 1948, while neglecting the more formative decades afterward when U.S.–Israel strategic ties were cemented.Footnote⁸ “Most American labor leaders never considered themselves Zionists, but they saw in Histadrut a progressive labor organization that shared its global vision of an international labor movement. Therefore, Histadrut was worthy of substantial support,” labor historian Adam Howard once wrote.Footnote⁹ Howard and the handful of scholars who have broached this relationship have primarily focused on the Jewish-led garment unions, such as David Dubinsky's International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and Sidney Hillman and Jacob Potofsky and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), or umbrella organizations such as the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) and the American Trade Union Council for Histadrut (ATUCFH). While the story of Jewish Labor Zionism is an important one, it is incomplete, as it overlooks the decades-long commitment to Israel displayed by national industrial unions that made up the AFL-CIO, like auto, steel, railway, electrical, radio and communications workers, even seafarers and teamsters—the majority of whose members were non-Jewish and working class, often residing far from the cosmopolitan metropolitan clusters and coastlines.

This article seeks to supplement the rich historical narrative of the pro-Israel lobby and its role in fostering U.S.–Israel relations by demonstrating how the AFL-CIO, one of the most influential social, economic, and political organizations in postwar America, contributed to consolidating the special relationship from its onset. Engaging archival materials in English and Hebrew in the United States and Israel, as well as the internal discourses within the federation, I offer a fresh assessment of the AFL-CIO's profound, yet not unproblematic, impact on U.S.–Israel relations during their initial decade. In doing so, I combine two ostensibly separate historical discourses—of U.S.–Israel relations and of organized labor within the United States—and weave them into one narrative that demonstrates how they mutually reinforced each other. I do so in a two-part argument: in part one, I offer the first comprehensive critical account of the AFL-CIO's support of Israel during the crucial transition period when, despite an initially aloof and at times even hostile Eisenhower administration, the strategic and ideological foundations of the special relationship were forged.Footnote¹⁰ It was during this critical decade of the fragile relationship that the AFL-CIO came to Israel's defense by offering unwavering support at a time when the White House mostly offered admonition and rebuke,Footnote¹¹ and the American Jewish community was not yet organized or unified enough to effectively advocate on Israel's behalf as it would in later years.Footnote¹² While the AFL-CIO may not have always influenced policy directly, it did help lay the groundwork among large segments of American society for long-term popular support of Israel, cementing Israel as a leading left-liberal cause.

In part two, I argue that organized labor's support of Israel and Histadrut should be understood not only from an international perspective but through the lens of its own domestic needs. Turning the lens inward, therefore, to explore how foreign and domestic policy converge to reinforce each other, as transnational scholars of U.S.–Israel relations have increasingly been doing, this article reveals the subtle manner in which Israel and Histadrut, actively and passively, also “served” organized labor in America.Footnote¹³ By reassessing the AFL-CIO's support of Israel in the context of its growing domestic challenges, and couching this study in the historiography of organized labor alongside that of U.S.–Israel relations, I suggest that its relationship with Israel was often reciprocal and mutually advantageous. In Israel, the AFL-CIO constructed an idealized model for social democracy that was anticommunist and ostensibly democratic, onto which it could project its own longings for power and influence and find inspiration and validation. Israel and its vibrant labor movement effectively offered American labor a romanticized foreign space for reimagining social democracy cleansed of its own troubled record on civil rights and human rights.

This argument runs counter to the prevailing narratives that exclusively locate organized labor's support for Israel in the Cold War's exigencies of communist containment and “labor imperialism,” central to much of the scholarship about American labor and the Cold War, or alternatively, in the so-called “shared values,” such as liberalism, social-democracy, Judeo-Christian heritage, and the pioneering experiences of settler-colonial nations, to which scholars of U.S.–Israel relations traditionally point.Footnote¹⁴ While critics have argued that “the Zionism of these [American] labor officials was closely linked to their support for U.S. imperialism, anticommunism,” and considered Histadrut pawns in America's imperialist ventures, this article suggests that rather than only serving American or Israeli foreign policy interests, organized labor's support of Israel also served its own domestic ones.Footnote¹⁵

Although scholars of U.S.–Israel relations often invoke “shared values” as an explanation for what binds the two nations, they disagree as to what exactly those values are. Speaking at an AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco in 1959, Pinhas Lavon, Histadrut's influential secretary-general, observed that American labor's special relationship with Israel was built on principles of “faithfulness and freedom”: “Faithfulness to the common principles of democracy” and to “the dignity of the worker as the backbone of the nations and as the bearer of full responsibility for its welfare.” He stressed Israeli and American labor's shared destiny, explaining that “we are all ultimately in the same boat, and what happens to one affects deeply and intimately all of us.”Footnote¹⁶ Lavon was right, but not merely in the inspirational manner he intended: unlike romanticized accounts of Israel as the “great democratic bastion,” “workers’ paradise,” or David to the Arab Goliath that permeated the ranks of American labor, and more broadly, American society in those years, the United States and Israel were in the same boat also when it came to employing systematic violence against indigenous peoples, population expulsions, property expropriation, and economic exploitation associated with settler-colonial regimes. Recent scholarship has reconsidered the framework of U.S.–Israel ties through the paradigm of settler-colonialism, demanding a more skeptical view of the democratic values that connect the two countries. In doing so, it highlights the problematic role that organized labor in both countries played in facilitating these broader structures of oppression, violence, and exploitation.Footnote¹⁷ Since a key stage in settler-colonialism is assertion of control over resources and labor and the subordination of indigenous populations to settlers’ political and economic regimes, Histadrut's ambivalent role in helping carry out some of these actions cannot be overlooked. Demonstrating how this has been expunged from the AFL-CIO's mythologized record of Israel is also a goal of this article.

A few clarifications and qualifications are in order. First, my focus is primarily the AFL-CIO (rather than its affiliated unions) and leading non-Jewish officials like its president George Meany and vice president Walter Reuther. This does not imply that they had a unified stance. On the contrary, Meany and Reuther differed, sometimes bitterly, on many issues, to the effect that such mounting disagreements eventually drove Reuther's United Auto Workers (UAW) to split from the AFL in 1968.Footnote¹⁸ But given the host of contentious issues dividing them, Israel, ironically, remained a rare popular cause around which they could rally and cooperate. Second, while the AFL-CIO represented the largest and most powerful union bloc in America, other unions, like the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers and Arab American labor activists, remained highly critical of Israel.Footnote¹⁹ Third, I have chosen to mostly focus on a limited time frame during Eisenhower's first term, considered the nadir of U.S.–Israel relations, which witnessed the AFL-CIO merger (1955) and the formation of a single, uniform labor front on behalf of Israel.Footnote²⁰ Given Eisenhower's disavowal of Jewish political support (he went so far as to pledge on the eve of the 1956 elections that “We would handle our affairs exactly as though we didn't have a Jew in America”), the role of the AFL-CIO as an alternative source of pro-Israel advocacy makes a study of this crucial period especially fecund.Footnote²¹ Later developments, important as they may be, remain beyond the scope of this study. Finally, this article does not imply that Jewish organizations and their Christian Zionist allies were not the central force behind the pro-Israel lobby—they usually were. Rather, it seeks to highlight how, at certain moments and under certain conditions, the advocacy of organized labor was an important supplement that had considerable, albeit forgotten, influence in mobilizing popular support for the special relationship in its early years.

Part I: Present at Creation

Long before AIPAC and other pro-Israel Jewish organizations refined and institutionalized their lobbying operations, organized labor already had an influential voice in American politics. Walter Hixson has shown that as early as the late 1940s, immediately following the founding of Israel, Jewish-American lobbying groups committed to becoming “Israel's Armor.”Footnote²² Yet despite their vigorous advocacy, organizations like AIPAC (and its previous manifestations) remained in their early years, in the words of another scholar, “a single, small, and weak organization, with minimal support among American Jews, let alone from American policy makers.”Footnote²³ Other Jewish organizations, like the influential AJC, had yet to commit to the Zionist cause.Footnote²⁴ The AFL-CIO, on the other hand, was at the apex of its power during the 1950s: at a time when one out of four workers in non-agricultural employment was unionized and with 15 million members, the AFL-CIO's membership was nearly three times that of the entire Jewish population in the United States and was far more widely spread.Footnote²⁵ Its political influence was accordingly broad and felt at the national, state, and local levels. “The AFL-CIO is often called the ‘people's lobby’ and I believe that is true,” Meany declared, calling the federation “the single most effective political organization in this country.”Footnote²⁶ Looking at the AFL-CIO's pivotal role in elections, especially through fundraising and its Committee on Political Education (COPE), scholars of postwar politics have concluded that “labor is the best organized, best-funded lobbying machine on Capitol Hill.”Footnote²⁷ This was true both in organizational terms and through extensive networks of interpersonal relations cultivated by Meany, Reuther, and other union leaders with policy makers in Washington. “For thirty-five years, from the end of World War II through the 1970s, the labor movement had occupied a preeminent place in national politics, providing one of the most important voices within the liberal New Deal order that dominated national discourse,” historian Kevin Boyle opines. “Union leaders enjoyed easy access to the White House and Capitol Hill, union activists filled Democratic Party councils, and union dollars financed political campaigns and legislative lobbying efforts.”Footnote²⁸ While the AFL-CIO's impact was predominantly felt within the Democratic Party, Republicans also understood, as even Richard Nixon conceded, “No program works without labor cooperation.”Footnote²⁹

It was amid this favorable political climate that the AFL-CIO established its adamant political support of Israel. Since both the AFL and CIO staunchly supported the creation of a Jewish state prior to 1948, it is not surprising that, after merging in 1955, a strong pro-Israel stance remained a staple of the federation's foreign policy. Frequent fundraising drives, philanthropic campaigns, and investments in Israel and in Histadrut's business ventures and infrastructure (both directly and through purchase of Israel Bonds) were notable ways that organized labor helped the burgeoning state in its early years. It founded hospitals, schools, community centers, factories, and athletic stadiums across Israel, stamping the physical landscape with its legacy: there was a stadium in Nazareth named after Meany, a street in Holon and an endowed chair at the Weizmann Institute of Science named after Reuther, a hospital in Beer-Sheba named after Dubinsky, a community center in Eilat honoring CIO president Philip Murray, and an orphanage near Jerusalem founded by the teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.Footnote³⁰

But philanthropy was only the tip of the iceberg. From its beginnings, the AFL-CIO actively lobbied the White House and Congress on behalf of Israel's strategic needs. Scholars of U.S.–Israel relations debate whether realism (“hard factors”) or idealism (“soft factors”) drive support for Israel.Footnote³¹ The AFL-CIO's lobbying efforts offer a more nuanced explanation that demonstrates the interconnectedness of both; in making the case for supporting Israel, it often pointed to America's strategic needs to contain Soviet encroachments in the Middle East. Yet to justify Israel's strategic value as a dependable ally, the federation also pointed time and again to Israel's democratic norms and institutions rather than its (still limited) military capacities as a major selling point. A short time before the AFL-CIO merger, Reuther called Israel “this great democratic bastion of the Middle East” and warned the Eisenhower administration from arming its enemies. “To supply arms to Israel's enemies in the face of their declared objective of wiping her from the face of the earth, is to seriously weaken the cause of democracy in the Middle East,” a CIO resolution declared.Footnote³² This complementary but dual realist–idealist approach would become rooted in the AFL-CIO's Israel policy for decades to come.

Already in its inaugural convention in New York City in 1955, the AFL-CIO's founding resolutions echoed the three most urgent goals of Israeli foreign policy at the time:Footnote³³ guaranteeing its territorial integrity by urging the United States and its allies to reaffirm the 1950 Tripartite Declaration, enabling Israel “to obtain arms and all other means necessary for the maintenance of its territorial integrity,” and establishing a mutual security pact with the United States.Footnote³⁴ Framing Israel as a reliable strategic ally for containing Soviet communism and a lone democratic bastion in a volatile authoritarian region, the AFL-CIO called on the administration to sign “a mutual assistance pact with Israel which might serve as a model for similar agreements between the U.S. and the Arab countries.”Footnote³⁵ The AFL-CIO's early embrace of Israel and concern for its national security were all the more important during this period of tense relations. Although historian David Tal recently demonstrated a surprising continuity, in substance if not style, between Eisenhower and Truman administration policies toward Israel, Eisenhower did consciously seek to distance himself from the vocal support his predecessor offered and promised a more “balanced” approach, declaring in 1954 that “we should continue our present policy of impartiality and should not be deterred by political pressures which might generate in connection with the forthcoming elections.”Footnote³⁶ Eisenhower's first term is still considered a low point in U.S.–Israel relations that included temporary suspension of aid to Israel due to the Jordan River crisis, its reprisal raids, attempts to extract territorial concessions from Israel and a right of return for Palestinian refugees under the Alpha Plan, and the threat of sanctions in the wake of the Sinai War.Footnote³⁷ Even if the business-friendly Eisenhower and Secretary of State John F. Dulles were no allies of labor, the AFL-CIO appears to have retained more public influence under the administration than “the Jewish nuisance factor” (i.e., pro-Israel Jewish groups), which, in the words of Natan Aridan, “Dulles was determined to neutralize.”Footnote³⁸

While the United States pursued rapprochement with Nasser and Arab regimes, arguably at Israel's expense, because of the strategic necessity to prevent Soviet encroachments into the energy-rich region, the AFL-CIO consistently made the opposite point: that only a strong and secure Israel was a reliable ally that could help fend off communist penetration and contain the destabilizing effects of Arab nationalism. In making the case for unequivocal support of Israel, the AFL-CIO made it difficult for observers to determine where Israeli public diplomacy (officially called Hasbara) ended and its own policy began. Its reactions to the initial crises between Israel and the Eisenhower administration serve to demonstrate the rather uncritical attitude it exhibited from its inception and a tendency, at times, to echo verbatim, official Israeli policy. After Israel began construction in September 1953 on a project to divert the waters of the Jordan River in the demilitarized zone on its border with Syria, in what was deemed a violation of the armistice agreements, the United Nations (UN) Security Council called on it to halt, while the administration went a step further and suspended $26 million in much needed aid.Footnote³⁹ A few weeks later, the Israeli military, as part of its reprisal operations, raided the Jordanian-controlled West Bank village of Qibya in retaliation for a Palestinian Fedayeen attack that killed an Israeli woman and her two children. By one account, the deadly raid, blamed by Israelis on “Arab provocation,” demolished forty-five homes, killing sixty-nine people, many of them women and children.Footnote⁴⁰ The condemnations were nearly universal. In addition to another UN Security Council resolution that “strongly censured” Israel for violating the armistice that was advanced by an outraged Dulles, the U.S. embassy counselor in Israel, Francis Russell, sharply criticized the raid, telling Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, it “created revulsion among American people [and] was [a] violation of every moral standard.”Footnote⁴¹ Similar disapprobation was voiced after Israel's reprisal raids against Egypt in Gaza City and Syria in Lake Kinneret in 1955. In response to the former, Dulles reprimanded Sharett: Israel “works clearly and progressively against her own interests,” he said, warning Israel against the “mistaken belief that she can shoot her way … into a peace treaty with her neighbors.”Footnote⁴²

In the AFL-CIO's initial response to escalating violence, we can locate the imaginary construct of Israel as, in the words of Amy Kaplan, an “invincible victim.”Footnote⁴³ Despite its growing military strength, capability, and prowess demonstrated by the deadly toll that its reprisal raids took, Israel was still cast by the AFL-CIO as a perpetual underdog and was rarely, if ever, criticized, even when it blatantly transgressed international law or human rights.Footnote⁴⁴ Unlike the Eisenhower administration, which took great pains to retain what it considered to be a policy of “true impartiality,” American labor viewed the deteriorating situation differently. In reaction to Dulles's decision to suspend aid during the Jordan River crisis, the CIO's executive committee issued a strong condemnation of the administration, rather than of Israel itself. Calling it “shockingly strong action” and “an affront … to the cause of world democracy,” the CIO demanded “that our government take steps not to penalize the government of Israel, but to develop a constructive program for Arabs and Jews alike.” The CIO further warned that such policies “will lead to a strengthening of the arrogance and belligerence of the reactionary undemocratic leaders of those Arab nations—and, consequently, will tend to encourage them to further aggression against Israel.”Footnote⁴⁵

Their response to the reprisal raids was similar. Unlike some of the mainstream Jewish-American organizations that voiced concern and criticized what they considered a disproportional use of force, the record does not indicate similar outcry among labor officials over the deadly raids in Qibya and Gaza City.Footnote⁴⁶ Placing blame on “marauders” for provoking such acts, organized labor presented Israeli raids as acts of self-defense.Footnote⁴⁷ “I do not know what all the shouting and excitement was about, but the enemies of Israel, striving to scuttle and throttle that infant state and that greatest stronghold of democracy in the Middle East, have successfully created an instrument that might result, in a short time, in a cruel and bloody attack against the population of this state,” explained Michael Quill, president of the Transport Workers Union, who had recently returned from Israel, to a CIO convention. “We saw the young men and women in the settlements using schedules, having to go out night and day to protect those borders. They came back day after day, bringing their dead and wounded as a result of the attacks and raids of the marauders from the Jordan side.” Quill was enraged at Dulles for his criticism of the Qibya raid. “For the American government to chime in and line up in the United Nations on the side of Jordan, and issue a condemnation resolution against the people of Israel is something that labor cannot take sitting down,” he said.Footnote⁴⁸ CIO secretary-treasurer, James Carey, added:

There is a large element of justice missing from the UN's censure of Israel, just as there was a large element of justice missing in the action of Sec. of State Dulles last month when he suddenly suspended the American grant of $60 million in aid to Israel. … We do not contend that two wrongs can make a right—if indeed two wrongs were involved here—but we do contend that justice can and should be fair and equal.Footnote⁴⁹

The AFL-CIO's binary understanding of the conflict in terms of a Cold War dichotomy helps explain its reaction to the 1955 Czechoslovakia–Egypt arms deal, which threatened to overturn the balance of power in the region. Rather than contemplate the domestic political pressures Nasser faced, exacerbated by Israel's deadly raid in Gaza City in February 1955, American labor leaders considered the dramatic arms deal, which aimed to furnish the Egyptian army with a wide range of modern Soviet armaments, as proof of Nasser's Soviet tilt and aggressive intentions.Footnote⁵⁰ Meany protested the deal, calling it a “most dangerous threat to world peace and freedom.”Footnote⁵¹ From the AFL-CIO's perspective, “This deterioration is the result of the Soviet imperialist drive to exploit Arab–Israel friction and of the Communist expansionist policy in the Middle East.”Footnote⁵² This led the federation to demand that the administration arm Israel. Meany's four-point program for “blocking Soviet-Russia's war-mongering,” published in March 1956 on the front page of the AFL-CIO's flagship publication, AFL-CIO News, insisted that “only if Israel is equipped to defend herself effectively can the forces of aggression arrayed against her be deterred.” Unless the “free world” acted immediately, Meany warned, it “may be embroiled in another Korea.”Footnote⁵³ In August 1956, as tensions mounted after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company and closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping, Meany personally sent Dulles a resolution that put the onus on Moscow for “fanning the flames of war throughout the Arab world,” warned against appeasement, and called on the United States to “assure uninterrupted free navigation in the canal for all nations.”Footnote⁵⁴

In the AFL-CIO party platform statement submitted to the Democratic and Republican Party conventions that summer, Meany noted that “the free world must thwart this immediate threat to peace by supplying Israel at once with the defensive weapons it needs.”Footnote⁵⁵ This demand found its way that year into both the Democratic Party and, in a more limited manner, the Republican Party platforms.Footnote⁵⁶ While it is difficult to ascertain any direct causal link between the federation's support and subsequent government policy, Meany seems to have insinuated that his words mattered. “It should be pointed out at the outset that the AFL-CIO today is the largest single organization in the United States,” he wrote in the press release with his platform recommendations. “It represents more than 15 million American working men and women,” he warned, before adding “we earnestly urge you to say what you mean and to mean what you say. For we, and millions of other Americans will be basing our personal decision as voters equally upon the platform and the candidates and the record in this year's national election.”Footnote⁵⁷ Members of Congress listened: advocating for the sale of weapons to Israel, Senator Herbert Lehman (D-NY) read into the Congressional Record Meany's appeal to arm Israel by reminding his colleagues that, “These remarks, by the spokesman for 16 million Americans, are worthy of the most careful consideration by the Congress and by the State Department.”Footnote⁵⁸

The federation's response, or lack thereof, to the Palestinian refugee problem was telling of its broader approach. Despite paying what appears to have amounted to lip service when addressing what it referred to as “the plight of the Arab refugees,” it is not clear the extent to which American labor officials sought to understand why the plight came about in the first place.Footnote⁵⁹ When one considers how passionately the AFL-CIO advocated for universal refugee rights as a leading liberal humanitarian cause, endorsing UN involvement and prompting the Eisenhower administration into action, the surprisingly restrained manner in which it addressed the Palestinian issue was notable.Footnote⁶⁰ Even after Meany was appointed in 1956 to the State Department's public advisory committee for the refugee relief program, the federation's commitment to helping refugees was mostly focused on those fleeing communist countries—a phenomenon that intensified considerably after the Soviet invasion of Hungary that year, which sparked a formidable campaign on behalf of Hungarian refugees.Footnote⁶¹ The AFL-CIO further insisted the administration express an “unequivocal rejection of every form of colonialism,” here criticizing French treatment of Algerian refugees who had fled to Morocco.Footnote⁶² But when the administration tried to advance a regional political solution that would facilitate resettlement of most of the 1948 Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab states (rather than repatriate them in Israel, to which Israel was adamantly opposed), the AFL-CIO was opaque on the issue and seldom held Israel to the same standards that it did other colonial powers. While it urged the administration to “take a lead in the United Nations for bringing about a peace treaty … that would end border disputes and assure humane and fair treatment for Arab refugees,” it effectively curtailed the range of possibilities for addressing the refugee problem by emphasizing that “the UN cannot turn back the clock to the situation before the Arab-Israeli conflict.”Footnote⁶³

When war broke out in October 1956, after Israel allied itself with France and Britain and conquered the Sinai Peninsula, the AFL-CIO stood firmly by Israel's side, even in the face of sweeping international condemnations, including from the Eisenhower administration. In the immediate aftermath of Israel's invasion, organized labor's reaction was ambivalent. Israeli diplomats reported that on one hand there was “understanding” and “appreciation” among the labor leadership (“That is the way to handle dictators,” one official quoted Meany's initial reaction), while on the other hand, Israel's cooperation with the colonial powers caused alarm that they were becoming the “imperialists’ cat's-paw.”Footnote⁶⁴ When Israel's labor attaché to the United States, Natan Bar-Yaacov, met with Meany following the cease fire in an attempt to assuage concerns regarding Israel's collaboration with the colonial powers, he requested the AFL-CIO issue a statement favorable to Israel. But as his notes reveal, Meany took a different stand, preferring instead that for the time being, no official response would be preferable for two reasons: it would allow the federation to refrain from having to criticize Israel (“even indirectly,” through its association with Britain and France), and it would unnecessarily draw attention away from the Soviet invasion of Hungary.Footnote⁶⁵

Within weeks, the AFL-CIO silence was broken as it returned to supporting Israel unequivocally. “While the invasion of Egypt was in violation of the UN Charter, the executive committee of the AFL-CIO recognizes that it was a direct consequence of years of provocation on the part of Egypt,” a cautious news release stated in early December. Carefully distinguishing Israel's actions from “Soviet butchery in Hungary” and downplaying Israeli military aggression in Sinai, it blamed “Soviet intrigue” and arming of the Arabs, Fedayeen raids, “Nasser's arbitrary and unilateral” actions, and the blockading of Israeli shipping “in violation of all UN decisions” for instigating the war. The statement called on the United Nations to occupy the territories being evacuated, pursue a peace treaty between the warring states, and ensure free shipping for all nations in the Gulf of Aqaba.Footnote⁶⁶ In a taped address he sent in to Histadrut's convention a few days later, Meany reaffirmed American labor's solidarity and reiterated support for a mutual defense pact with Israel, calling on the administration to extend the recently secured Baghdad Pact to Israel. He said, “We are with you in unbreakable determination to halt the tides of communist subversion,” he promised his Israeli colleagues. “Rest assured that you are not alone.”Footnote⁶⁷ So committed had Meany appeared that week to advocating on Israel's behalf (he also participated in a fundraising dinner and hosted a luncheon for Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir) that one Israeli diplomat called it Meany's “Israel week” (Figure 1).Footnote⁶⁸

During the diplomatic crisis that ensued, culminating in the threat of international sanctions if Israel did not withdraw from the conquered territories, the AFL-CIO bolstered its support. In December it held a testimonial dinner for David McDonald, president of the United Steel Workers, to raise money for Israel: with admissions set at a $1,000 Israel bond, more than $1 million dollars were netted.Footnote⁶⁹ When Eisenhower committed a few weeks later to defending any country in the Middle East resisting communist aggression, Meany was quick to back him—but demanded security guarantees for Israel. “It is, therefore, imperative that the Eisenhower Doctrine should include a clear-cut affirmation that the United States considers Israel an indispensable force for peace, freedom and social progress in the Middle East and would not permit any attempt to destroy Israel as an independent nation,” the AFL-CIO announced.Footnote⁷⁰ After Israel was given an ultimatum to withdraw or face sanctions, another front-page headline in the AFL-CIO News declared: “Meany Asks Guarantees for Israel.”Footnote⁷¹ Reporting at length on Meany's remarks at a ceremonial banquet in New York, during which he received the Histadrut's prestigious Humanitarian award, the article called on the United States to guarantee Israel's security and reframed Israel as the victim rather than the aggressor. “Was there any doubt that the Israelis were forced to take up arms in protection against ‘Fedayeen’ raiders and against the blocking of Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba in the Suez Canal?” Meany asked, voicing strong opposition to imposing sanctions on Israel, which, in his words, “seeks only an undisturbed opportunity to build a better life for its people.”Footnote⁷²

Conveying solidarity directly through UAW channels, Walter Reuther sent Lavon a personal cable in which he blamed Egypt for the outbreak of hostilities and promised to “use all our influence” to persuade the administration to pursue direct negotiations. “The growing belligerence and increased terroristic activities against Israel by Dictator Nasser's Fedayeen raiders, encouraged by Soviet scheming and arms, finally made defensive military action on the part of your nation inevitable,” Reuther wrote him.Footnote⁷³ He was not alone: during the diplomatic crisis, many unions within the AFL-CIO lobbied the administration and Congress independently on behalf of what they considered Israel's right to self-defense.Footnote⁷⁴ After the 1,250,000-member United Steelworkers passed a resolution a year later strongly endorsing Israel's security demands, the Jewish Labor Committee wrote to Israel's ambassador in the United States, Abba Eban, to suggest that this was “especially significant” because it “shows grassroots support,” and stressed that “this is not one of the unions generally considered a ‘Jewish’ union.”Footnote⁷⁵ Moshe Bar-Tal, Histadrut's representative in the United States, summed up the diverging attitudes that American workers and policy makers harbored toward Israel during the Sinai crisis: “The American labor movement continues to be loyal to us, and I wish we could say the same thing about the U.S. government.”Footnote⁷⁶

Personal Relationships and the Special Relationship

The frequent personal interactions and close friendships that developed between Israeli diplomats and AFL-CIO officials raise a delicate question regarding boundaries: how coordinated was organized labor's pro-Israel advocacy? Unlike Israeli diplomats' dealings with Jewish-American organizations, which saw them regularly consult with, coordinate, and even direct the agencies' political maneuvers, their relationship with the AFL-CIO was more circumspect.Footnote⁷⁷ Closely monitoring the internal politics within the American labor movement and acutely aware of the challenges it was facing at home, Israeli diplomats regularly produced lengthy reports about the AFL-CIO and appeared to be informed of every minor development within its ranks.Footnote⁷⁸ It was this knowledge that made them cognizant of the potential roadblocks to the relationship and led them to pursue a cautious approach. Although Meany, described by his Israeli counterpart Histadrut chief Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, as “a household word in Israel,” was well-known and much admired by Israelis, Israeli labor representatives in the United States recognized that he was “very sensitive to outside pressure” and approached him with trepidation and respect.Footnote⁷⁹ Accordingly, they sought to avoid the appearance of overconfidence in their dealings with American labor officials, going so far as to caution Israeli diplomats from meddling in the federation's internal affairs, “lest we lose the support of the entire movement toward Israel and its problems.”Footnote⁸⁰ Ronnie Fraser has highlighted the diplomatic role that Histadrut's foreign representatives played, often serving as an extension of the official state apparatus. His study of Histadrut's relations with the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) revealed a systematic cultivation of close interpersonal ties and a strategy of inviting politicians and union officials to visit Israel, concluding that both movements “were dedicated supporters of their respective Socialist Governments who unashamedly used them to promote national interests.”Footnote⁸¹

A similar pattern played out in Histadrut's relations with organized labor in the United States. It is evident that there was cooperation, even coordination, with Israeli officials in many areas. This included the sharing of sensitive information about the AFL-CIO's activities in international labor forums and their confidential meetings with officials from the Arab world. After sending the foreign ministry confidential reports received from Victor Reuther (who was in charge of international affairs for the UAW) about meetings held with officials from Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon, Bar-Yaacov explicitly instructed colleagues not to reveal the source of his information.Footnote⁸² Irving Brown, AFL-CIO representative in Paris, not only promised that American labor officials would “do everything in their power” to prevent anti-Israel resolutions at an International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) conference in Casablanca, but immediately afterward shared with an Israeli colleague what he labeled a “strictly confidential report” about the proceedings.Footnote⁸³ Israeli ministers of labor and Histadrut's secretary-generals were often invited to speak at AFL-CIO conventions, and the records indicate that senior AFL-CIO officials, like general-counsel Arthur Goldberg (prior to being appointed Secretary of Labor), Walter and his brother Victor Reuther helped lobby for, amend, and occasionally insert passages into AFL-CIO resolutions or appealed directly to senior U.S. government officials at the request of their Israeli associates.Footnote⁸⁴ Goldberg even received confidential materials from Israel's embassy in Washington, DC, as part of its Hasbara campaign.Footnote⁸⁵ So supportive of (and compliant with) Israeli requests had AFL-CIO officials appeared that Israel's labor attaché had to reprimand colleagues for complaining after they apparently did not get the attention or exact phrasing they sought at one of the federation's conventions. “For some reason there exists an illusion among some of our people that the American labor movement will agree to and accept everything we request of it,” Bar-Yaacov wrote the foreign ministry. He cautioned, “The convention proved again that this assumption is false, and that if, indeed, there is support for us, we can preserve it only through constant work and lively relations with all elements within the movement.”Footnote⁸⁶

Despite the close relations, there were still occasional spats and notable disagreements, usually regarding Cold War dynamics and collaboration with unions from countries in the developing world affiliated with the Soviet bloc. After Eban, acting deputy prime minister, endorsed integrating the People's Republic of China into the UN, he received a harsh rebuke from Jay Lovestone, head of the federation's international affairs department, who suggested acerbically that Eban had “studied how to irritate friends and undermine friendships.” This resulted in Eban registering a complaint with Meany and Walter Reuther over such “discourteous” behavior.Footnote⁸⁷ Other moments of discord, usually mild in nature and limited in effect, occurred over Israeli involvement in international organizations like the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the ICFTU, where they cooperated with trade unions from communist countries to the chagrin of Meany and Lovestone, who fiercely opposed any collaboration with communists.Footnote⁸⁸

Israel's own leaders, many of them former Histadrut officials, cultivated close friendships with senior AFL-CIO figures like Meany, Reuther, and Goldberg, who all enjoyed the affectionate label “our close friend” in official Israeli records.Footnote⁸⁹ David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, hosted Meany and Reuther (separately) at his desert retreat in Sde Boker and described them in endearing terms. In a letter to Meany, Ben-Gurion thanked the AFL-CIO for its “loyal support” and “trusted friendship,” and commended Meany that under his leadership “that friendship has grown steadily stronger.”Footnote⁹⁰ Meany wrote back conveying gratitude for the “personal privilege” of meeting him and hailed “that magnificent progress that you and your courageous people are making.”Footnote⁹¹ On the pages of Davar, Histadrut's popular daily newspaper that served as Israeli labor's mouthpiece, Meany was a familiar figure, whose nearly every word and action were regularly reported.Footnote⁹² Upon his visit to Israel in 1961, a flattering profile appeared under the headline “Leader, Fighter, Innovator,” which hailed Meany as one of the most successful labor leaders in American history, portraying him as a staunch anticommunist and defender of civil rights.Footnote⁹³ For his eightieth birthday, Davar ran an article specifically wishing him good health, and after Meany passed away in 1980, his friend, Yeruham Meshel, who had served as secretary-general of Histadrut, described Meany in a moving eulogy as “one of the greatest and most dedicated friends” Israel ever had.Footnote⁹⁴

Reuther, too, was a household name in