On July 11, 1979, the four-hundred-member Palestinian Union of Workers and Employees of the Jerusalem District Electricity Company (JEDC) launched an indefinite strike. Attali’ah, the weekly newspaper of the Palestinian Communist Organization, reported the action on its front page, outlining the workers’ long-standing demands to management: indexing pensions to the Jordanian dinar rather than the rapidly devaluing Israeli pound, reinstating annual salary increases, and securing overdue holiday bonuses. These bread-and-butter concerns, however, were embedded within a broader political demand with national implications: halting ongoing negotiations between JEDC’s board of directors and the Israeli Ministry of Energy to lease Jewish settlement areas within the company’s concession to the Israeli Electric Corporation (IEC) in exchange for alleviating JEDC’s mounting debt. The segregation of Jewish settlements from JEDC’s grid and their incorporation into the IEC network signified, in the union’s view, an infringement on the company’s concession and a prelude to the fundamental reconfiguration of energy provision in the Jerusalem metropolitan region. Weeks earlier, Attali’ah’s editor-in-chief, Bashir Barghouti, warned company administrators of this danger, remarking: “The Trojan horse was once carried on planks of wood; we hope that this time it will not be carried on electric wires.”Footnote ¹ The strike was not reducible to questions of wages and working conditions; it represented an instance of class struggle over the ownership and reproduction of a critical infrastructure and, by extension, over the conditions of Palestinian national self-determination.

The strike of 1979 marked a pivotal moment in Palestinian labor history that highlights the intersection of class, nation, and industry in the anti-colonial struggle for liberation. This overlooked chapter contrasts with critical studies that focus on the proletarianization of indigenous peasant workers in the settler economy,Footnote ² moves beyond accounts that reify the peasant as the sole Palestinian national signifier,Footnote ³ and extends historical narratives that elide the role of Palestinian workers in the modern project of electrification.Footnote ⁴ Centering the struggle of the electricity union workers—from engineers and technicians to administrators, payment collectors and cleaners—orients us to the neglected lives, conditions and mobilizations of a modest yet consequential Palestinian urban working class that emerged in cities and towns across the West Bank and Gaza after 1948. Their story not only illuminates settler colonial trajectories of resource capture that gradually dismantled Palestinian energy sovereignty and entrenched dependence. It also foregrounds workers as key historical actors who framed labor disputes as inseparable from the national question. Moreover, the strike and subsequent mobilizations underline the ways formations of national unity become necessary when confronting settler efforts to dismantle indigenous infrastructures. Indeed, at this historical juncture, electricity workers drew together an expanding fabric of vocational and labor unions, national and women’s bodies, families and relatives, students and political prisoners from across Palestine as well as refugees and political factions in the shatat (diaspora). Collectively, they mounted an impressive mobilization to defend a national economic institution which—by virtue of its ownership and status—became a popular infrastructure.

Founded in 1956 as a shareholder company owned by the municipalities of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Al-Bireh, Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, and Beit Jala, the Jerusalem District Electricity Company (JEDC) became the largest Palestinian industrial employer in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Its concession—dating back to the Ottoman period—granted exclusive rights to generate, distribute, and sell electricity within a thirty-kilometer radius of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In practice, JEDC supplied electricity to roughly seventy thousand Palestinian customers in towns and villages from East Jerusalem and Ramallah to Bethlehem and Jericho. It also provided power to around thirteen thousand Jewish customers in Israeli settlements, military bases, and infrastructures built within its concession area on Palestinian land occupied after 1967. A decade of settler expansion produced a rapidly expanding market, with Jewish consumption accounting for one-third of the company’s revenues. This expansion, however, placed JEDC in a precarious position. Unable to meet demand from its own fuel-powered generators, the company was forced to purchase increasing amounts of power from the Israeli electricity company, incurring mounting debts that settler authorities then used as leverage. By 1980, three-quarters of the electricity distributed by JEDC came from bulk purchases from the IEC. The continued reliance of the settlement enterprise on a Palestinian company was seen by Israeli officials as an unacceptable risk, as it afforded Palestinians a potential chokepoint to resist colonial encroachment. As Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti bluntly stated, the state’s objective was “Jewish electricity for Jewish customers”Footnote ⁵ in occupied Palestinian lands.

Amid escalating Israeli pressure and managerial dysfunction, Elias Freij—mayor of Bethlehem and chairman of the board—condemned the strike as illegal and as the politicization of the company by “communist and rejectionist elements” aligned with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).Footnote ⁶ Increasingly unpopular among workers and some board members, Freij insisted the company’s crisis was merely financial, arguing, “There is no logic in investing Arab money in illegal Jewish settlements.”Footnote ⁷ In the weeks before the strike, he withdrew from an agreement mediated by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions and ignored appeals from labor unions, national organizations, and fellow board members. In the Al Quds newspaper, he branded the workers’ demands as unpatriotic and unrealistic. Freij’s response reflected not only his political alignment but also his class position and national commitments. Like other Hashemite supporters who aspired for Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank, he advanced a managerial solution that protected Israeli creditors at the expense of indigenous labor. His proposal to lease the company’s concession to, and settle its debts with, the Israel Electric Corporation would have effectively transferred settler infrastructures and Jewish customers from the Palestinian grid to the IEC’s network. To secure financial and political backing from Jordan, Freij also accepted conditions to dismiss half of the workforce and remove PLO-aligned mayors from the board.

In the wake of the 1967 occupation and absent a Palestinian state, municipalities and infrastructure provision became key battlegrounds among competing projects: Israel’s messianic vision to redeem the land, the Hashemite Kingdom’s Transjordan ambitions, and the PLO’s rise as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. This political landscape shifted dramatically with the municipal elections of 1976, when nationalist candidates triumphed over Israeli strategies of land dispossession and indirect rule (such as the Village Leagues and the proposed Camp David autonomy plan). The elections signaled a gradual turn away from Jordan toward the PLO, drawing together an eclectic cross-class alliance of nationalist mayors, workers, students, and a petite bourgeoisie of traders and professionals from villages, refugee camps, towns, and cities. Distinct from the traditional landowning elite, this emergent bloc relied heavily on the urban working class, which mobilized through trade unions, popular committees, and students’ and women’s organizations. The electricity workers’ union and JEDC’s board increasingly reflected this shift in their ranks, with nationalist figures like mayor Kareem Khalaf now supporting both the strike and efforts by the Voluntary Work Committees to extend electricity access to villages.

For the union, the company’s challenges were fundamentally political, not merely financial: workers saw a Palestinian institution under political attack requiring national solidarity. A week into the strike, it issued an eight-page bulletin condemning Freij’s refusal to accept fair demands and warning that surrendering the concession would “result in the company being curtailed, the reduction of workers, and harm to the country, to citizens, and to the national interest.”Footnote ⁸ The workers recognized the political economy underpinning earlier management deals, particularly the 1970 accord with Israeli Attorney General Meir Shamgar, negotiated under duress after the 1967 invasion. This agreement forced JEDC to match its higher tariffs to the subsidized and lower Israeli rates, and to connect its grid to the Israeli network “for security reasons.”Footnote ⁹ If the latter set the foundation for a relation of dependency, the former anchored this relation in a structural debt that still burdens the company today. Lower electricity rates and no subsidies from the Israeli state meant the company forfeited its annual 8 percent dividend as set by its concession. The deal further imposed the presence of two representatives from the unlawful Israeli-run Jerusalem municipality on the company’s board. In return, JEDC was allowed to purchase subsidized fuel from Israel to feed its power station, procure two extra generators to meet forecasted demand, and regain company shares previously confiscated by the Israeli state under the Absentees Property Law.

Since its foundation, JEDC had carved itself out as an island of energy sovereignty with a vital territorial presence and reach across the Jerusalem metropolitan region. After 1967, however, the IEC, which had a monopoly on electricity production and distribution in Israel, began trespassing on the company’s concession boundaries while extending its own power grids across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Indeed, JEDC was not alone in confronting Israel’s attacks on Palestinian energy infrastructures. Electricity cooperatives and municipalities which had purchased their own generators and developed small grids since 1948 were prevented from maintaining and expanding this infrastructure. Gradually, they were forced by the military government to link up to the Israeli electricity company. Gaza City was linked to the Israeli national grid in December 1969, followed by Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah. Qalqilya, Hebron, Tulkarem and Nablus followed suit. Jenin was the last to fall in 1984. Israel was colonizing Palestinians on the grid, one municipality at a time, dismantling local production and generating the conditions for a permanent state of infrastructural dependency.

During the 1970s, the electricity workers union, like other unions in the West Bank, was influenced by the Communist Party. By the decade’s end, however, it became a contested space among PLO factions. The union navigated this fragmentation by framing the attack on JEDC as a national crisis, not just a workers’ issue. As Bashir Barghouti noted, “More than half of the company’s shares are owned by municipalities and the rest by small shareholders, including workers. The company’s bylaws do not allow anyone to own more than three hundred shares. JEDC is thus held by the public and the necessity of preserving it is a national necessity and a responsibility of everyone.”Footnote ¹⁰ The Union of Electricity Workers and Employees was one of Palestine’s oldest unions, and was also among the few (only three out of twenty-four) to survive Israel’s crackdown on labor activists in post-1967 Palestine. But neither the union nor the company operated freely: its secretary-general Michel Sindaha was deported in 1969 for resisting attempts at unequal incorporation of Palestinian workers into the Histadrut, the Israeli trade union federation that had historically excluded Palestinians. Likewise, Jerusalem mayor and first board chairman Ruhi Al-Khatib was deported in 1968 partly for refusing to seat two Israeli representatives on the board. As had been historically the case, the Zionist leadership criminalized trade unionism by detaining and deporting union members, activists and popular figures in an attempt to prevent unions from organizing and gaining mass support.

Solidarity for the strike extended across a broad geographical and social spectrum. More than two weeks into the strike, the union continued its actions amid powerful manifestations of labor and national solidarity, with volunteers bringing food to the workers and collecting donations from distant villages. Two major conferences were held as part of the solidarity campaign, one hosted by union of electricity workers in Jerusalem and the other by the Union of Construction Workers and Public Institutions in Ramallah. Labor unions, popular organizations, municipal representatives, students and teachers from across the West Bank attended the gatherings. Speeches in support of the workers were delivered by the likes of Adel Ghanem, Secretary General of the Federation of Workers’ Unions, Bashir Al-Barghouti, editor of Attali’ah, Hassan Abdel Jawad, President of the Bethlehem University Student Council, and Samir Othman, Secretary of the Union of Electricity Workers and Employees. Telegrams of support were sent from individuals and company shareholders of villages and towns across the territories as well as from workers of the Palestine Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Company, the Jerusalem Cafés, Restaurants and Hotels Workers’ Union, and the Hebron Unions. The Voluntary Work Committee and the recently formed Women’s Work Committee together with Arab Students in Ramallah, Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union also submitted solidarity messages. The congress in Ramallah published a statement on July 27 that emphasized solidarity with the workers’ demands and “held the company’s board of directors fully responsible for taking a dangerous path that would inevitably lead to the elimination of the company’s Arab identity.”Footnote ¹¹ It also recommended forming women’s committees in the trade unions which became the initial step in the formation of such groups in unions across the occupied territories.

Isolated and facing growing pressure, Freij threatened to dismiss striking workers on July 25. That same day, an Israeli court, at the board’s request, ordered workers to leave the company headquarters at Salah al-Din Street. The union collectively refused, escalating the conflict by threatening to halt maintenance and evacuate power stations—having until then kept essential services running. Three days later, the board finally conceded, accepting the workers’ demands. Attali’ah announced that, “With steadfastness and mass solidarity, the workers of the Jerusalem electricity company achieved their just demands.” Rejoicing in the victory of the workers, the editorial noted: “The board underestimated the power of workers and popular solidarity. They could not comprehend the ability of the working class to stand united in the face of challenges to its dignity and its just demands.” It further stated, “The board did not imagine that the workers and employees of the company would be able to remain unified and steadfast for eighteen days with the support of the masses in cities and villages across the West Bank.”Footnote ¹² The strike lasted three weeks and was described by union members as “the largest and most important strike since 1948.”Footnote ¹³ Not only were demands for working conditions met. The strike derailed negotiations with the Israeli government preserving the integrity of the concession and securing, albeit temporarily, an infrastructure critical to future prospects of development and statehood. The union thus accomplished more dignified conditions and national goals, demonstrating that these were intrinsically linked rather than separate concerns.

Israel’s repression of union leaders, alongside its legal and financial assaults on the company, intensified over the following years until December 6, 1987, when the company’s concession was cancelled by colonial legislation and Jewish settlements and infrastructure in East Jerusalem were forcefully segregated from the Palestinian electricity network. This move severed roughly forty-two thousand customers from JDEC’s grid and, in a crippling blow, prohibited the company from generating its own electricity. As Abed Abu Diab, director of personnel and former president of the company’s union, explained: “The law removes the company’s right to generate electricity and makes the Arab company a means to deliver Israeli electricity to Arab customers.” JDEC persists as a living national institution with more than a century of history. Yet, it remains a testament to colonial domination, operating today as a captive reseller of Israeli electricity, relying on the IEC for more than 95 percent of its supply and remaining vulnerable to punitive blackouts imposed by the Israeli government as collective punishment for the company’s debts.

The 1979 strike demonstrates that in contexts of settler colonialism, labor and national unity are not peripheral but constitutive of the very project of liberation. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, the strike marked a turning point for the Palestinian working class as escalating violence and the deepening contradictions of the settler-colonial political economy compelled a radical reorientation of the national liberation movement. As Israel’s annexation of the occupied territories accelerated the semi-proletarianization of Palestinian peasants—many reduced to cheap migrant labor within Israel—it was the emerging urban working class in cities and towns that spearheaded strikes and mobilizations across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.Footnote ¹⁴ This was not a case in which labor subordinated class struggle to a national alliance for political unity; rather, it was an assertion that, in a colonial context, the national struggle is itself a class struggle. As I have argued elsewhere, the history of JEDC and its workers’ union charts a distinctly Palestinian effort to seize control over national infrastructures from positions fraught with profound contradictions. Even while supplying electricity to the very settlements encroaching on Palestinian lands, workers mobilized to preserve autonomous electricity provision, reduce dependence, and assert control over a vital infrastructure that sustained a Palestinian territorial presence amid ongoing colonial dispossession. Their story situates Palestinian labor at the center of the modern project of development and foregrounds a long history of resisting the colonial dismantling of indigenous energy sovereignty—an undoing that underwrites the structural dependency defining the present political juncture in Gaza and across Palestine. Ultimately, the strike exposes the fragility of settler-colonial power in the face of the enduring force of worker solidarity and national unity.