254 A Short History oj the Middle East
the efiendis who were trying to organize them into this unaccus-
tomed social pattern. In 1931 Sidqi Pasha, who had come into
office as the result of a Palace-organized reaction against the Wafd's
bid for dictatorship, dissolved the existing trades-unions as a centre
of Wafdist political activity, and instead set up an official Labour
Office in the Ministry of the Interior, closely connected with the
Department of Public Security. On the return to power of the Wafd
in 193 6 the trades unions were once more allowed to function, and at
the outbreak of the Second World War they had sonic 20,000
members, chiefly concentrated in the larger towns. The movement
still had no political ideology of its own, however, but continued to
be the catspaw of the existing political parties. In the early part of
the war the Cairo unions were manipulated by a member of the
Royal Family, the Nabil Abbas Halim, as an instrument of pro-
Palace and anti-British propaganda, which finally resulted in his
internment at the request of the British authorities. The number
of trades-unionists in Egypt has now risen to some 150,000, and the
movement has passed distinctly under the control of Communists
or 'fellow-travellers', as a result of the heightened prestige of the
U.S.S.R. during the war and the greater facilities for Communist
propaganda since the opening of the Russian Legation in Cairo in
1943. The decline in real wages during the war on account of the
greatly increased cost-of-Hving has stimulated labour unrest and
political extremism. A group of trades-union leaders has formed a
'Workers' Committee for National Liberation* with a very radical
anti-capitalist policy. Once again genuine labour unrest has been
exploited for political ends by the Wafd in order to embarrass the
government in power. It was the Wafd-organized 'students' and
workers' committees' which staged the anti-British demonstra-
tions and murderous riots early in 1946; and eventually in July
Sidqi Pasha struck at these subversive forces by extensive arrests
and the suppression of eleven organizations, both intellectual and
trades-unionist.
Thus in Egypt the acute need for an improvement of the
workers' conditions of life has continually been exploited and
diverted by political manipulators, who have shown no sign of
genuine sympathy for the workers, to factious purposes which
offer no guarantee that they would serve the workers' interests. In
Palestine, in spite of the prevailing conflict of the Zionist and Arab
nationalisms, trades-unionism has had a less chequered and more