Yesterday’s antigovernment protests in Israel put the global spotlight on Israel’s overarching labor union, the Histadrut. But much of the coverage missed the true significance of the union’s role: its failure to make any impact on the protests and its dwindling place in Israeli society more than a century after it was created.

The Histadrut called for what appeared from the outset to be an illegal general strike. The move was taken in response to Hamas’s execution of six hostages, but public unions cannot shut down essential national services over politics. “We want a ceasefire deal” is a perfectly valid political opinion but it is not a valid basis for a general strike in Israel. An Israeli labor court agreed and shut down the strike.

It is important here to explain why the Histadrut is unlike any other labor union in the world, past or present. The most important reason is that it was created in 1920, nearly three decades before Israeli statehood. Yes, it saw itself as a labor collective first and foremost, but for a state-in-waiting. The Jews did not have state institutions, but they had prestate institutions, and those institutions are the reason Israeli governance was ready and able to take on the role of the nation-state in 1948.

The Histadrut stood on three pillars, and only one of them was that of a labor union. The other two were a medical services organization and a construction-and-supply company to enable the literal building of the state. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, was at one point the Histadrut secretary.

It was never “just” a labor union, and it has no analog in modern times. In fact, three years after its formation, it had to formally create a labor-focused pillar to go with the other two.

The Histadrut was a socialist and deeply ideological behemoth. But its socialism was of a strange flavor. At one point it owned Israel’s largest bank, its largest health-insurance fund, and it was the largest non-government land owner. Over time, and through Israeli financial crises such as those experienced in the 1980s, the Histadrut steadily gave up its holdings. Its membership declined when Israel established a national health service. Eventually the Histadrut actually became a labor union, but it took the better part of a century to get there.

On the one hand, the Histadrut therefore has a deeply honorable legacy of statebuilding. On the other hand, its relevance diminishes with Israel’s success as a state, and therefore the fact that it is a shadow of its former self is a good thing.

And that’s what we saw yesterday.

There is a pretty strong argument that yesterday’s anti-Netanyahu protests would have been more effective without the Histadrut—not because the union is politicized but because the strike was a costly mistake that made it easier to see that the larger protests didn’t have a clearly achievable goal. (That’s fine for a protest, not for a union strike.)

In the early afternoon, a labor court gave the union until 2:30 to wrap it up. And wrap it up, they did.

The Histadrut had joined the crowd, it did not lead the way. In fact, the union has been hesitant to join the mass protests and fling itself fully into the divisive culture wars that represented the last round of Israeli infighting. Last year, the country saw unprecedented protests against the governing coalition’s proposals to democratize the Supreme Court. The protests were ultimately successful in stopping the legislation, in part because of a rebellion by army reservists who refused to report for duty unless the court reform was dropped. The army’s role in this was deeply unsettling, but the moment a war was imminent, the soldiers made clear they would defend the state with their lives.

The Histadrut also, belatedly, joined the protest movement, calling a strike in late March 2023. But several outlets quickly reported that Arnon Bar-David, the head of the Histadrut, had done so at the urging of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Why? Because Netanyahu, prizing stability above all, had wanted to pressure his own coalition to ease up on its attempts to reform the judiciary.

Netanyahu and Bar-David denied the allegations, but it was indeed quite possible that the left had failed to pull the Histadrut into the protest movement and only Netanyahu succeeded in doing so—in order to torpedo his own hard-liners.

The Histadrut’s very minor roles in both protests were for the best. The protests didn’t need the unions to boost turnout, and the unions didn’t need the headache of alienating potential members over politics.

There is one last irony to note. When the protesters filled the streets yesterday in Israel, the global left cheered them on, especially when the Histadrut briefly got involved. But one reason the Histadrut was so important to Israel’s state-building was because it was able, in the first half of the 20th century, to garner a significant amount of support from the American labor unions.

Although it may sound obvious that unions would support each other, American unions at the time were highly suspicious of the Histadrut—even after it won backing from the American Federation of Labor—because it was no mere labor union; it was a nationalist enterprise. Socialist unions wanted nothing to do with nationalism, Jewish or otherwise. That changed with the support of Max Pine and other Jewish labor leaders in the mid-1920s. Ben-Gurion even said, according to State Department historian Adam Howard, that “the cooperation of the workers’ movement in America [was] actually more important than the diplomatic victory of the Balfour Declaration.”

That history is a far cry from the anti-Israel bent of much of the U.S. labor movement today. On Monday, teachers union boss Randi Weingarten blamed Netanyahu for the recent deaths of six hostages. But far from delivering a message of solidarity to Israelis, Weingarten’s outburst was an opportunistic stunt that reminds us just how far American labor leaders have fallen.