Tag: Gaza City

Like the Phoenix, Gaza will Rise from the Fire / by Ronnie Kasrils

Palestinians in Gaza celebrate the announcement of the ceasefire in May 2023. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)

Reposted from The Palestine Chronicle

The Palestinian spirit is unbreakable. Like the mythical phoenix, defiant and heroic Gaza will rise from the fire.

The aerial bombardment of Gaza’s most crowded Jabalia refugee camp piles on one massacre after another. It signifies Israeli barbarism and a fascist inability to understand the heroic human spirit to resist repression.

History has shown that the bombing of civilians – from the Basque town of Guernica in 1937 to Soviet and British cities in World War 2, from America’s destruction of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to the massacre of Gaza today – strengthens the determination to resist.

As the Israeli state’s inhumane attack on Gaza continues, with the ground-zero onslaught grinding forward, civilians are being killed at a terrifying rate – the ghetto reduced to rubble.

By the end of October, well over 8,000 of the 2.3 million people packed into the walled sliver of land have been killed. The lives of more than 3,500 children have been taken, with women and the elderly accounting for most other deaths. Entire families have been wiped out. Over 20,000 people have been wounded, many with life-threatening injuries. A Palestinian child is being killed every 10 minutes. More children have been butchered in October than in all the world’s conflicts since 2019.

People across Gaza are in unspeakable pain and anguish. People across the world are reeling from television images of frantic parents rushing bloodied infants through shattered hospital wards or people digging through collapsed rubble with their bare hands in search of loved ones.

At this rate of slaughter, over 30,000 people will be killed by Christmas, 40% of them children, 30% women, and 150,000 injured.

Netanyahu and his generals declare that their “war” could last months, so these statistics are not improbable. This is a war crime, a crime against humanity on an unimaginable scale. These crimes are backed by the likes of US President Joe Biden and Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and much of the Western media, including Zionist outposts in my own country, South Africa – shamelessly ignoring the disproportionate blood bath Israel has visited on Palestinians.

Announcing the onset of a “total war”, Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, declared in words that will shame Israel for all time: “I have ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel… We are fighting human animals.”

I do not say this lightly, but it is a plain fact that these words could have come from the mouth of a Nazi exterminator.

Seared into collective memory is Gallant’s chilling warning to the 1,1 million in the northern part of the ghetto giving them 24 hours to flee their homes. Thousands of women and children sheltering at Gaza City’s Al Aqsa Hospital, are refusing to leave even under that deadline, for as at Jabalia, there is nowhere to go.

The Gaza population under siege for 16 years, was already suffering borderline starvation with only 500 trucks allowed in each day prior to the current onslaught. After intense pressure, Israel has permitted a trickle of UN relief to deliver food, water and medicine to enter through the Rafah border crossing. No fuel has been allowed. The tiny amount of supplies permitted through Egypt’s border allows Israel to claim it is providing basic necessities while denying sustenance to most people in practice.

It is evident that many will die of thirst and hunger, bereft of care and medication. Already 12 of Gaza’s hospitals have been destroyed and 32 medical centers partially damaged or put out of service. This includes the  Al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza City where 500 people died from a direct hit by an Israeli missile. Unlike the missiles used by Israel the rockets used by Hamas or Islamic Jihad don’t have the power to destroy entire buildings. This was another Israeli war crime.

Amidst this devastation there are an estimated 55,000 pregnant women with 5,000 of them close to giving birth. There are 130 babies in incubators and 140 in ICU.

In 1948, when Israeli fascists slaughtered 240 men, women and children in the Deir Yassin village near Jerusalem, its agriculture minister, Aharon Zisling, declared in horror: “We have behaved like Nazis and my whole being is shaken.”

Fascism

The great physicist Albert Einstein, and the philosopher Hannah Arendt, an expert on the Nazis, correctly labelled the architect of that massacre, Menachem Begin, a fascist. He later became Israel’s prime minister. It is an undeniable fact that the government that is raining hell on the people crowded into the Gaza ghetto are proto-fascists driven by a racist myth: They are the chosen people and Palestine is their God-given land.

Israel is a settler colony, that has adopted apartheid practices, and its crimes have been funded and legitimated by the West since its illegitimate birth as a state in the 1948 Nakba. The US has vetoed and undermined UN resolutions and international law from that time through the 1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Today the West colludes with Israel in its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, war crimes and aggression against neighboring states.

The US currently provides $3.8 billion per year funding for Israel’s military alone. Biden has now announced a further $14 billion in support for the Israeli military with not a cent of humanitarian aid for Palestinians. The US has dispatched two aircraft carrier groups, with 2,000 marines, to “protect” Israel and has delivered more bombs and missiles for the “defensive” onslaught on Gaza. Israel likely requires an inventory of gas and flame throwers for the ground attack on the vast Hamas tunnel system now underway.

While Western support for Israel is driven by racism, there are also more personal motives at play in some instances.

Sunak’s wealthy family has enormous investments in Israel as do many others on the Zionist bandwagon, including many Western corporations. The claims made in support of Israel by most Western politicians and dutifully echoed by most of the Western media need to be rigorously assessed.

Let’s take the chorus of statements describing Operation Al-Aqsa Flood launched by Hamas on October 7 as ‘unprovoked’ and declaring that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself.

The two-billion-dollar Gaza security fence was breached, and 360 Israeli soldiers and 1,200 settlers killed by Resistance fighters engaged in a liberation struggle against apartheid settler-colonialism – although eye-witness testimony has emerged that scores of Jewish settlers died by indiscriminate shooting from their own side. Those settlers died because the Israeli state failed to protect them from guerrilla fighters who had broken out of perpetual open-air imprisonment.

The action of the mujahedeen takes place within the context of almost eight decades of brutal oppression, going back to the time of the dispossession of their grandparents. The Israeli towns, villages and kibbutzim that they raided were built on land stolen from their very own families in the 1940s, during the Nakba that had cast them into refugee limbo. Indeed, two- thirds of the residents of Gaza are refugees, many from those same destroyed villages.

Western Hypocrisy

Western media commentary has been awash with ‘fake news’. The claim that forty babies had been decapitated has been debunked, and it has emerged, as already stated, that many settlers died owing to frenzied shooting by Israeli soldiers, operating under the military’s ‘Hannibal doctrine’ that death is better than being taken captive by the Resistance.

When the West and its servile media claimed that this attack was ‘unprovoked’ no reference was made to more than the 75 years of ethnic cleansing, incremental genocide and collective punishment; the 16 years siege of Gaza; the five deadly onslaughts on Gaza since 2008, including the cold-blooded assassination of 220 protestors – 42 children among them – and injuring of 36,000 in the peaceful March of Return of 2018-19. Settlers from nearby Sderot ate popcorn and cheered Israeli snipers as they mowed down defenseless people.

Around the world people of conscience remember and celebrate the courage of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto who rebelled, guns in hand, against Nazi incarceration, prepared to die on their feet rather than passively await death like sheep. Although South Africans were declared to be terrorists when we took up arms against apartheid the armed struggle was widely recognized as wholly legitimate. Armed resistance against military occupation and tyranny is recognized as a universal right in international law and as a moral right in the theory of just war.

Hamas is a national liberation movement, engaged in an anti-colonial struggle. Israel, the USA and the wider West seek to delegitimate Hamas by conflating it with ISIS but this is a wholly bogus comparison. Hamas, unlike ISIS, is a political organization emerging from an occupied and oppressed people with a clear project to end colonial occupation.

The hypocrisy and racial double standards of the West and much of its media has become crudely evident in the difference in the response to the situations in Ukraine and Gaza.

The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, often praising her grandfather who was a Nazi general, has declared that: “Russia’s attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, in Ukraine is a war crime. Cutting off men, women, children from water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror. And we have to call it as such.” However, when Israel does all these things, and worse, it enjoys the enthusiastic support of the West.

Israel’s End Game

We should recall that when Zionism’s 19th Century founder, Theodor Herzl, sought support from European powers, he promised that a “Jewish state” in Palestine, would build an iron wall “against Asian barbarism”. He was offering to securing Western imperialist interests against the Arabs and eastwards, by a European colonial settlement in what for centuries had been a flourishing land called Palestine.

Along with racism, this explains much of the financial, military, diplomatic and servile mainstream media support for Israel. It is an extension of Western imperialism. Oil and gas, including the recent discovery of vast reserves off the coast from Gaza to Lebanon, have compounded the West’s willingness to sacrifice the Palestinian people in its support for a loyal settler colony with shared economic interests.

As Israel rains death and destruction on Gaza we need to ask what its end game is. To answer this question, we must go back to the origins of Zionism, and its desire for great lebensraum at the expense of the Palestinian people – who had cultivated the fields, developed agriculture, trade and towns, and created a thriving culture, from the times of the Canaanite Kingdom.

Herzl explained that “Once in power, we will spirit the penniless Arabs across the borders.” This was the basis for ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people begun by Ben Gurion in 1948 when 750,000 people – three-quarters of the Palestinian population at the time who vastly outnumbered Jews – were forced into exile as refugees. Gaza and the West Bank, seized in Israel’s 1967 war of expansion, created more refugees.

It seems clear that Israel’s objective in levelling Gaza and terrorizing the population is to force the survivors out into refugee camps in the Sinai Desert where they will become Egypt’s responsibility. Along with realizing the avarice for Gaza’s offshore oil and gas fields.

The extreme nature of the crisis in Gaza must not overlook that the West Bank and East Jerusalem are in turmoil. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, and its mirage of a solution, Zionist expansionism has seen settlers increasing from 250,000 at that time to 700,000 today.

This makes the two-state solution impossible. The desecration of the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque, with the mob attacks on worshippers and residents of East Jerusalem peaking this year, has compounded the worsening situation. The pogroms launched by illegal settlers screaming “Kill the Arabs” and laying waste to the town of Huwwara have shown the fascist character of the settlers.

Almost 2,000 West Bank Palestinians have been injured and more than 120 killed since October 7, with 200 murdered in the preceding months this year. Those attacks were met by courageous armed resistance in towns such as Jenin, Nablus and Hebron, which has challenged the military occupation.

As popular resistance increased prior to October 7, numerous Israeli army battalions were transferred from Gaza to the West Bank and the number of Palestinians imprisoned (or taken hostage) by Israel has almost doubled to over 6,000, including 200 women and children as young as twelve.

Some 1,600 have been detained without charge or trial. The Israelis being held by Hamas are being offered in exchange for the freeing of those prisoners, held under abominable conditions, and many for longer than Nelson Mandela’s 27 years’ imprisonment.

Israel’s policy is not to negotiate a prisoner exchange. This has been exposed by Qatari and Egyptian mediation for the four women released by Hamas. All indicated they had been well treated although the experience had been traumatic. Another woman, Yasmin Poral, held hostage in kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, explained on Israeli TV that many Israelis had been killed by indiscriminate fire from their own soldiers. She clarified that the house she was sheltering in was destroyed by Israeli tank fire. The interview was swiftly removed from online platforms.

Anti-Fascism is not Anti-Semitism

It is not at all difficult to understand the hatred harbored by Palestinians for Israel given the barbaric treatment they have endured for generations. Any credible analysis of the situation would understand this.

However rational analysis is often made very difficult by the deeply cynical response of declaring criticism of the Israeli state and the settlers it supports as ‘anti-Semitic’. It is deeply offensive for Israeli proto-fascists to misuse the historical oppression of Jews to justify the oppression of Palestine. Nonetheless this tactic has successfully suppressed reasoned discussion in a number of societies and organizations.

In contrast, many Jews, including some courageous citizens of Israel, are deeply opposed to Zionism and to the Israeli state. In the United States large numbers of younger Jews have turned against Israel. International anti-Zionist Jewish networks have been proclaiming that Palestinians have every right to resist, declaring that Israel does not speak in their name. This is an important rebuttal of Zionist propaganda, claiming that Israel represents all Jews across the world.

Righteous people mourn the loss of life of all the civilians that have died, Jews and Palestinians. This is a basic point of moral decency. Yet decency also requires the recognition that the losses on both sides are incomparable and vastly disproportionate where 95% of dead and wounded, and thousands of children, are Palestinians.

Palestinians had no hand in the Nazi Holocaust but have been made to pay the price for a crime of European fascism. They have lost their land and rights as victims of a colonial project and are the ones suffering unspeakable brutality. Throughout history slave uprisings have targeted slave owners and their families as well as the system of slavery. These uprisings were just. We must regret all loss of civilian life, especially war crimes, but that regret cannot be misused to deny the justice of the Palestinian cause and the moral and legal right of Palestinians to armed resistance.

Whither Gaza – Whither Palestine – Whither Israel? 

The gravity of the situation for Gaza, and all Palestinians, looks bleaker than ever. Or could there be a twist in the tale?

As horrendous as the situation is, Israel’s plans might not be as unchallenged as expected.  It is never wise to deploy military force on the scale involved in an emotive knee-jerk reaction, with no clear military and political objectives.

Apart from the lack of a clear strategy, at the tactical level, the prospect of the ground invasion having to contend with the intricate tunnel system the resistance fighters have developed over the years would be daunting for any military.

Attacking in urban conditions, with rubble and collapsed buildings creating problems for tanks, against a formidable opponent, is the most difficult and dangerous of all military operations. Hamas has demonstrated extraordinary mastery of guerrilla tactics as illustrated by the lessons it dished out to the Israeli army on October 7, and in previous Israeli assaults on the territory.

The Israeli army cannot afford to face any further calamities. The Israeli public will not readily forgive the political elite and a military whose inadequacies have already been so rudely exposed – in part owing to racial hubris and complacency; in part because it has become a glorified police force dealing with stone throwing teenagers.

An occupation force of a corrupt and decrepit state, despite all its boasting, cannot produce sustained high morale, especially when up against a highly motivated opponent, contemptuous of death, with a deeply felt cause. Hamas knew that a ground force invasion would inevitably follow an operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood and would have carefully prepared much more than the anticipated booby-trapped tunnels. Who knows what surprises there are in store for the invaders?

Moreover, Israel has to maintain considerable force on its northern front with Lebanon, and its feared opponent, Hezbollah. Skirmishes have already been occurring there as guerrilla fighters probe Israel’s defences.  Likewise, the West Bank resistance is likely to register a potent response, along with possible flare-ups within Israel itself.

Guerrilla fighters throughout the region have developed impressive operational capacity and daring and demonstrate a far greater threat to Israeli military prowess than the conventional Arab armies that Israel contended with in 1948 and 1967. The Israeli army’s deployment is already greatly stretched as will be Israel’s economy and military call up of its reserve force over a protracted period.

The Israeli families of those Hamas captured, are becoming extremely impatient with the Government’s reluctance to negotiate a prisoner exchange. The release of some captives with Western citizenship, through outside intervention, is placing enormous pressure on Netanyahu and his ilk. As possible prisoner exchanges like those take place, the obduracy of the Israeli state will become more objectionable. Recall that in 2011 the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was exchanged for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Hamas is holding a very strong card. And its support will grow.

Furthermore, the US-Israeli objective of propping-up the Palestine Authority (PA), of dividing Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza, between Fatah and Hamas, has long rendered Mahmoud Abbas a lame duck with no credibility, the two-state solution as futile, and the notion of only peaceful forms of struggle as inadequate.

Current events have put paid to those plans or the idea that the PA could be brought in to govern the Gaza Strip. Gaza is uniting the determination and belief of Palestinians everywhere – in the occupied territories, within Israel itself, in the refugee camps of the region, in the prisons and in the Diaspora.

That’s not the only headache for Western objectives. Both the USA and Israel are concerned at the possible setback to the Abrahamic Accord and Israel’s normalization with its neighbors, which Netanyahu was only recently boasting about in his UN General Assembly address in September.

As spineless and even treacherous as most Arab governments have been regarding support for the Palestinians over the years – Algeria, Syria and Yemen Houthi’s, along with Hezbollah, are among exceptions – the unprecedented Palestinian resistance has galvanized the Arab masses as reflected in the huge protests in the Middle East and beyond and is bound to create a dilemma for those regimes.

The last thing the USA wants is a quagmire in the Middle East, with mass uprisings against client US regimes from Egypt and Jordan to Saudi Arabia. The US simply cannot afford this at a time when their proxy war in the Ukraine is unravelling, the Kiev counter-offensive grinding to a halt, and Russia gaining the upper hand. The US has recklessly generated tensions with China.

At the same time, the alliance between China and Russia is strengthening. They are being less stand-off in their dealings with Israel and would most likely support Iran if needs be, leading to a regional test of strength with the West.

Given such factors, Israel could find that there are limits to the backing it will receive from the US and Western Europe in a volatile situation. Moreover, while buildings might be reduced to rubble, and thousands killed, Palestinians have exhibited the most extraordinary resilience and steadfastness (sumud) over decades.

Ben Gurion once said that after the 1948 Palestinian generation, ‘the old will die, and the young will forget’. These hopes were in vain. Palestinians have not forgotten, and they have not accepted permanent oppression as their fate.

Hamas and the other resistance groups in Gaza and the West Bank are part of the people, not alien entities. This is a key tenet in successful guerrilla struggles. Much depends on how Hamas contains the ground invasion and forces the Israeli army into something of an impasse. Much also depends on international reaction.

It is vital we do everything possible to forestall the slaughter, and through the power of international solidarity enable and strengthen UN’s role, and apply pressure on the US and Western Europe, to support an immediate ceasefire.

Most important of all is People’s Power – direct action in the streets worldwide as never seen before; along with the intensification of the BDS campaign to completely isolate Zionist Israel.

The indiscriminate bombing of civilians deepens resolve and invokes resistance. The Palestinian spirit is unbreakable. Like the mythical phoenix, defiant and heroic Gaza will rise from the fire.

Ronnie Kasrils, veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and South Africa’s former Minister for Intelligence Services, activist and author. He contributed this piece to The Palestine Chronicle

The AFL-CIO Squashed a Council’s Cease-Fire Resolution. What Does It Say About Labor Right Now? / by Jeff Schuhrke

A young person mourning after an Israeli attack that struck a refugee camp in Gaza City on Nov. 2, 2023. So far, more than 9,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military | Photo by Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images

Reposted from In These Times

The move illustrates larger dynamics currently at play within the U.S. labor movement as the assault on Gaza rages on. While some unions and labor activists are advocating for an immediate end to the onslaught, most officials are keeping quiet.

The Israeli military has been bombarding Gaza for weeks — dropping thousands and thousands of bombs and killing more than 9,000 Palestinians—including more than 3,700 children — and displacing some 1.4 million. 

On Oct. 16, Palestinian trade unions issued a call to action for organized labor and workers everywhere ​“to halt the sale and funding of arms to Israel — and related military research.”

The Palestinian labor coalition — including the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions — specifically called on trade unions around the world to: Refuse to manufacture weapons destined for Israel, refuse to transport weapons to Israel, pass motions in their individual trade unions demanding the same, take action against companies complicit in the siege of Gaza, and apply pressure to governments to stop supporting and funding the Israeli war machine. 

The call resonated with some union members in the United States, including Alice, a delegate with the Olympia, Washington-based Thurston-Lewis-Mason Central Labor Council (TLM CLC). The TLM CLC represents the AFL-CIO-affiliated local unions in the western Washington counties of Thurston, Lewis and Mason.

Alice (who asked that her last name not be published because she fears being targeted by anti-Palestinian groups) saw the call from the Palestinian trade unions and was inspired to draft a resolution for the TLM CLC to publicly affirm its solidarity.

After the council discussed and unanimously adopted Alice’s measure on Oct. 18, according to two TLM CLC delegates, an announcement with a link to the resolution was posted on the council’s website and Twitter account.

The resolution stated that the labor council ​“opposes in principle any union involvement in the production or transportation of weapons destined for Israel.” It also encouraged the national AFL-CIO to ​“publicly support an immediate ceasefire and equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis.”

But the following Monday, an AFL-CIO senior field representative informed the board that the resolution did not conform with the national AFL-CIO’s official position, according to interviews and emails shared with In These Times.

He specifically pointed to a press release issued by the national labor federation on Oct. 11 calling for ​“a swift resolution to the current conflict to end the bloodshed of innocent civilians, and to promote a just and long-lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” but not explicitly mentioning a cease-fire or opposing the production and shipment of weapons destined for Israel. (Some AFL-CIO-affiliated unions represent workers in the defense industry, including the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and United Auto Workers.)

By differing from the AFL-CIO’s stated position, the field representative explained, the TLM CLC’s resolution was technically void because it violates a governance rule, Rule 4(b), which states: ​“Area labor councils, as chartered organizations of the AFL-CIO, shall conform their activities on national affairs to the policies of the AFL-CIO.” He further clarified to Alice that the rule ​“has long been understood to apply to international positions as well as national.”

A screenshot of a deleted tweet from the Thurston-Lewis-Mason Central Labor Council (left) and evidence that it had been deleted based on a retweet from DSA Labor (right) | Provided to In These Times by the article’s author.

Meanwhile, the resolution had already gained widespread public attention after the TLM CLC’s statement about it was retweeted by the ,ational Labor Commission.

But Alice says that after being pressured by the AFL-CIO’s field representative, the TLM CLC deleted the statement from its website and X (formerly Twitter) account late last week. She adds that the field representative also asked her not make a public statement — including to media — about the situation, but she feels it is urgent to get the word out to encourage more local bodies within the AFL-CIO to take a stand at this critical moment. (Labor Notes also published an article about the AFL-CIO and TLM CLC.)

“We need more labor councils, we need more locals passing resolutions like this, because they can’t stop us all,” Alice says. ​“If it’s just us, they can sweep it under the rug like they’re trying to do right now. But if many, many of us across the country start doing it, then it becomes something much harder for them to sweep under the rug.”

The AFL-CIO’s intervention against the TLM CLC’s cease-fire resolution illustrates the larger dynamics currently at play within the U.S. labor movement as the assault on Gaza, which has been described and decried as genocidal, rages on.

While some unions and labor activists are advocating for an immediate end the Israeli military’s onslaught and expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, most of the top officials in U.S. labor are either keeping quiet, dancing around the central issues, or — in this case with the AFL-CIO — stepping in to police voices calling for a cease-fire and non-cooperation with Israel’s war machine.

Smoke rises in Gaza after an attack by the Israeli military on Nov. 2, 2023 | Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images

John Campbell, another TLM CLC delegate (we are using a pseudonym because he is concerned about retaliation), says Alice intentionally tried to make the resolution palatable for people with various viewpoints and that the council wasn’t ​“exactly going out of our way to say anything [outlandish] here” and that ​“I think calling for a cease-fire is pretty reasonable.”

“The fact that even what she did end up putting out, and what the membership did end up voting on — again, unanimously — the fact that that still ruffled feathers is a bit surprising, honestly,” Campbell says.

The AFL-CIO and the field representative who Alice said she interacted with did not respond to requests for comment.

Kooper Caraway, who was previously president of the South Dakota State Federation of Labor and the Sioux Falls AFL-CIO, says it is not uncommon for the AFL-CIO to step in and overrule central labor councils when they take actions on national or international issues. 

Caraway resigned as executive director of the SEIU Connecticut State Council a couple of weeks ago after backlash from state Republicans and Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont over remarks Caraway made at an Oct. 9 Palestine solidarity rally in New Haven — making him one of at least dozens of people in the United States who have lost their jobs or had job offers rescinded resulting from their advocacy for Palestinians in recent weeks.

While not commenting on the circumstances of his resignation, Caraway urges local labor bodies to ​“act locally in any way they can” to support Palestine, similar to how they did to encourage the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

“There was a lot of local action for a long time in support of the ANC [African National Congress] and supporting the South African struggle against apartheid before the national labor movement got behind that,” he says. ​“That helped build momentum nationally.”

BUILDING MOMENTUM

U.S. labor officials have a long history of being among Israel’s most stalwart supporters, using union funds to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars in State of Israel bonds from the 1950s onward.

Only in recent years have some unions become more critical of the Israeli government and more sympathetic to the Palestinian freedom movement, including during Israel’s 2021 bombardment of Gaza.

In the past few weeks, several local unions and networks of labor activists have issued statements or circulated letters expressing solidarity with Palestinians, urging a cease-fire and condemning both the unfolding genocide in Gaza and escalating settler attacks in the West Bank.

One of the latest examples is the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), whose house of delegates this week approved signing on to a letter of solidarity with other unions ​“calling for human rights, for the release of all hostages, and for a cease-fire in Israel and Palestine.” The letter also directly calls on Biden to immediately call for a cease-fire.

At the same meeting, the CTU also approved another resolution focused on the classroom and teaching and learning that called for increased measures around ​“social emotional supports for members and students during world conflicts.” This includes, among other things, professional development ​“to help members understand the historic complexity and profound human impacts of this conflict” and that the CTU ​“will gather, share, and support options and resources for supporting children and families impacted by this conflict.”

Meanwhile, after Republicans, right-wing news outlets and Starbucks smeared Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) as terrorist supporters in response to some members posting statements in support of Palestinians on social media, Workers United President Lynne Fox came to SBWU’s defense.

“At a time when we should be focused on the human tragedy taking place in Gaza and Israel, Starbucks is instead taking every chance it gets to bash its employees as supporters of hate and violence without any concern for truth — or consequences,” Fox wrote in In These Times.

On October 20, SBWU posted a statement on social media reaffirming their members’ ​“solidarity with the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.”

“We are opposed to violence, and each death occurring as the result of violence is a tragedy. We absolutely condemn antisemitism and Islamophobia,” the SBWU statement said. ​“We condemn the occupation, displacement, state violence, apartheid, and threats of genocide Palestinians face.”

Unions of academic workers at institutions including Rutgers, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Columbia and New York University have also published statements expressing solidarity with Palestine in recent weeks. The Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU)’s attempt to do the same was allegedly obstructed at an Oct. 16 membership meeting through intimidation and procedural delays, according to a press release from a group of rank-and-file HGSU members. (The HGSU did not respond to a request for comment.)

About two weeks ago, U.S. Labor Against Racism and War convened a call attended by hundreds of unionists across the country, and has organized an email-writing campaign directed at national union presidents urging them to call for a cease-fire. Since the campaign was launched at that time, more than 28,000 letters have been sent. Another national call is planned for tonight (Thursday, Nov. 2).

The National Writers Union, which also convened a call in the middle of October for labor activists to discuss the situation in Gaza, has criticized the Israeli government for violating international law and called on Western media to do a better job of covering the crisis. 

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) has called for a cease-fire. UE is also the only national union to both call for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and to endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to peacefully pressure Israel to end the occupation. Together with with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000 (and endorsed by a group of unions including the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers & Support Personnel Local 67), the UE has sponsored a petition for unions and members to demand a cease-fire. This is the petition that the CTU signed.

Labor for Palestine, a group that has been active since 2004, is also asking U.S. union members to sign onto a statement embracing Palestinian trade unions’ call to not build or transport weapons for Israel, while rank-and-file United Auto Workers (UAW) members are circulating an open letter urging the union to endorse BDS, which can be signed by UAW members or community allies. (In 2015, after rank-and-file members with UAW-affiliated graduate worker unions at the University of California, New York University and University of Massachusetts Amherst each voted in 2014 to endorse BDS, the UAW’s international executive board formally ​“nullified” the measures.)

“MORAL RESPONSIBILITY”

Calls for a cease-fire have been growing and coming from a variety of groups around the world, including coalitions of Palestinian-led organizations, Jewish American activists holding mass civil disobedience protests around the country and respected humanitarian groups like Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as the United Nations General Assembly and hundreds of thousands of protesters across the globe. The editorial board of the conservative Financial Times, one of the most pro-business publications in the world, has also recently joined the calls for a cease-fire.

Palestinian children in Gaza following an Israeli attack on the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza City on Nov. 1, 2023. More than 3,700 Palestinian children have been killed by the Israeli military over the last several weeks, and more than 6,300 other Palestinian children have been injured | Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images

Meanwhile, most U.S. union leaders have remained silent.

In These Times reached out to fifteen prominent U.S. unions and asked directly if their national leaders support the growing demands for a cease-fire and whether they support Palestinian labor’s call for an end to the arms trade with Israel. In what appears to be a sign of the larger movement’s hesitations, only the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) responded.

“We unequivocally condemn the actions taken by Hamas that purposefully targeted Israeli citizens. Civilians now on both sides of the conflict are disproportionately suffering, and the current humanitarian disaster unfolding in the Gaza strip is entirely preventable,” IUPAT General President Jimmy Williams, Jr. said in an emailed statement. ​“Israel must cease bombing dense urban areas and should immediately allow for humanitarian aid to reach the people most affected by the conflict. Targeting civilians is a war crime. Collective punishment is a war crime. It is the duty of all working people to stand up and say enough.”

“A conflict of this magnitude cannot be fixed by bombs and bullets,” Williams continued. ​“The IUPAT is proud to join the labor movement across the globe in calling for an immediate end to hostilities and de-escalation of tensions across the region.”

The AFT’s response pointed to recent tweets by the union’s president, Randi Weingarten, calling for a ​“humanitarian pause” to allow aid into Gaza and criticizing the Israeli government for not doing enough to stop settler attacks in the West Bank and harassment of Arab students at Netanya College.

Weingarten and two of the AFT’s other top officers also issued a statement shortly after Hamas had attacked southern Israel and killed 1,400 people, including more than 1,000 civilians, and the Israeli government had begun its assault on Gaza. That statement said in part that ​“Israel has every right to defend itself as it will now do,” while also expressing concern for Palestinian civilians ​“caught in the crossfire.”

Only a few other national unions have publicly said anything about the recent violence in the region, or have explained to their members why they will not be speaking out.

or example, on Oct. 17, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry denounced ​“the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas” and said the union was ​“deeply troubled by the emerging humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” calling for ​“long-term solutions that will bring safety, peace and justice to the people of the region.”

A brief SAG-AFTRA statement on Oct. 13 similarly condemned the Hamas attack, but made no mention of Palestinians or Israel’s siege and bombing of Gaza. Several high-profile SAG-AFTRA members have signed onto the Artists Call for Ceasefire Now letter to President Joe Biden, supported by Oxfam America and ActionAid USA.

In an internal message to members noting ​“the atrocities in Israel committed by Hamas” and ​“the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” officers of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) East said they would not be making any public comments due to a recent change in policy around public statements. Leaders of the WGA West similarly told members they would not make public remarks about the violence in Palestine and Israel due to a lack of consensus, but later told members they were ​“horrified” by the ​“murder of so many innocent people in Israel” and that they ​“deeply mourn the deaths of innocent Palestinians.”

Behind closed doors at an AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting last Monday, American Postal Workers Union (APWU) President Mark Dimondstein reportedly urged the labor federation to demand a cease-fire while also arguing that Israel and Palestine should be combined into a single state (APWU did not respond to a request for comment). According to the New York Times, ​“no other labor leader in the meeting offered vocal support for his position,” but the AFT’s Weingarten ​“asserted Israel’s right to defend itself.”

The relatively muted response from U.S. union presidents stands in contrast to labor leaders in other countries, particularly the United Kingdom. At a massive Palestine solidarity rally in London last Saturday, the crowd was addressed by Libby Nolan, president of the 1.3-million-member public service union UNISON, and by Mick Lynch, general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT).

“The Labour Party and the whole workers movement must show it is on the side of the peacemakers, not the warmongers,” Lynch said at the rally. ​“End the killing now, call the immediate cease-fire, and let’s create the road to a settlement with peace, social justice, human rights, freedom and dignity for all. Solidarity to Palestine.”

Caraway says there are strategic reasons why U.S. labor leaders should not only call for a cease-fire, but support the Palestinian freedom movement.

“This is one of the most pro-Palestinian generations that this country has ever seen. Millennials and Gen-Z — the same folks who are the most pro-union generation — those are also the folks who do not want the U.S. to continue sending weapons to Israel,” Caraway says. ​“It’s strategically important for the leadership of the labor movement to do their best to reflect the values and principles of the younger generation of working-class people who they seek to unionize or help organize.”

A view of part of the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza City that was bombed again by the Israeli army on Nov. 1, 2023 | Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images

But Caraway adds that there are other reasons for U.S. labor to stand with Palestine.

“There’s the old labor adage that an injury to one is an injury to all,” he says. ​“So as long as one group of working folks are colonized or occupied, or their families are facing elimination and genocide, there’s the moral responsibility of the labor movement — particularly in the country that is funding that occupation and genocide — to stand in support of the workers being attacked.”

Alice from the Thurston-Lewis-Mason Central Labor Council says this sense of solidarity is what motivated her to introduce the cease-fire resolution.

“I felt like this was something we really needed to press for,” she explains. ​“There’s ethnic cleansing going on in Gaza right now, and we have a responsibility — especially in the richest country in the world — to do everything we can to stop that.”

Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian, educator, journalist and union activist who teaches at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University in New York City. He has been an In These Times contributor since 2013. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSchuhrke.

We Need an Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza / by Phyllis Bennis

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Reposted from Counterpunch

The violence in the Middle East is bringing horrifying new levels of human suffering to both Israelis and Palestinians. We need an immediate ceasefire right now.

Both sides have committed heinous violations of international law. But if we’re serious about preventing such horrors in the future, we have to go beyond condemnation.

A lesson we ignore at our peril is that oppression undermines not only the rights, dignity, and lives of the oppressed but eventually the security of the oppressors as well. The apartheid system that’s been suffocating Palestinians for so long is now also undermining the safety of Israeli civilians.

Since 2007, Gazans have lived under siege, prohibited from leaving their open-air prison by a high-security militarized wall and platoons of Israeli soldiers.

For the last 16 years, starting long before the latest escalation, access to most goods was banned. Gazans couldn’t even get construction materials to repair the homes, hospitals, water treatment facilities, and places or worship that Israel bombed repeatedly — in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021.

Israel often denied emergency medical permits to leave the Strip, leaving many Gazans to die without care.

Electricity was already limited. A 72-year-old woman in Gaza told a reporter last January, “It is hard to imagine, but we used to experience 24 hours of electricity each day in Gaza; now we are lucky if we get six.” Now there is none.

Water was already unavailable except through expensive purchases from Israeli water companies. And food has long been scarce — by the age of two, 20 percent of Gaza’s children are already stunted.

Now that long-running siege is much worse.

On October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called for a “total siege” of Gaza. “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed,” he said. For Gaza’s already impoverished and malnourished population, that’s not just collective punishment — it’s genocide.

Hospitals are unable to treat patients. Families will starve or die of thirst. Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, filled with patients, wounded, and Gazans seeking shelter from Israeli bombs, was struck on October 17. Hundreds of people were reported killed.

Human rights experts, UN officials, faith leaders, and others warned for years that the systemic oppression that rights groups now identify as apartheid would one day be too much to stand. Resistance was inevitable.

For decades, Palestinian resistance has taken overwhelmingly non-violent forms, including the Great March of Return in 2018-2019, a peaceful Gaza protest that was met with overwhelming lethal violence by Israeli forces.

But the world didn’t answer. When the UN warned in 2012 and 2015 that by 2020 Gaza would be “unlivable” without a “herculean effort” by the international community, the world didn’t respond.

This time the resistance took a violent form, including Hamas targeting civilians in horrifying ways that are illegal under international law. Those illegitimate acts must be condemned. But that cruelty must not be used to justify more brutality against millions of innocent Gazans, half of whom are under 19 and have lived through at least five Israeli wars already.

If we’re serious about preventing violence, we need to change the conditions from which this brutality sprang. Sending more bombs, warplanes, guns and bullets won’t solve the problem.

American taxpayers have supplied about 20 percent of Israel’s military budget for years. But our government hasn’t put any conditions on how that aid is used — even as Israel enforces a brutal siege and indiscriminately bombs Gaza today.

We need an immediate ceasefire right now. And we need to hold our own government accountable — which includes stopping Washington’s enabling of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

Palestinians have been paying the price for this apartheid system for generations. In the recent attacks, innocent Israelis paid a huge price as well. It’s time to end it, starting with a ceasefire — right now.

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her most recent book is Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror: A Primer. 

Gaza Healthcare Workers Refuse Israeli Orders to Evacuate Hospitals / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

Photo credit: Ministry of Health, Occupied Palestinian territory

South Paris, Maine

Imagine there’s war where you live. A week of bombing has killed thousands. The enemy has ordered evacuation of all civilians in anticipation of more bombing and possibly an invasion. Everyone has to leave the hospital where you provide care – patients, nurses, doctors, even intensive care patients, babies in incubators, and bodies in the morgue. You may leave or else join fellow nurses and doctors who are determined to stay.

This is how it is at the Al Awda Hospital in Jabalia in northern Gaza. On Saturday, Oct 14, calls arrived from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) saying that the hospital must be vacated by 10 AM the next day, that it was going to be bombed.

The day before, day seven of the Israeli-Hamas war, the IDF had ordered that the entire population of northern Gaza, 1.1 million people, head to southern Gaza within 24 hours. Observers say an Israeli ground offensive is imminent. 

Al Awda Hospital, established in 1997, is a general hospital and the main provider of maternity services in the northern part of Gaza. It’s a training hospital for nurses. An Israeli assault damaged the hospital in 2015.

Dr Nisreen al-Shorafa, who heads the emergency room at the hospital, received a call from the IDF.  She told the official of the “inhumanity and impossibility” of moving people out of the hospital and sending them elsewhere. “We decided not to leave,” she told Aljazeera,  indicating also that she had slept only ten hours in seven days. In all, 35 nurses and doctors are staying.

According to CNN, Palestinian Health Minister Mai Al-Kaila “blamed Israel for killing 28 health care workers and damaging medical centers.”  He indicated that a general hospital and a children’s hospital have been closed, the latter having been hit by “internationally prohibited white phosphorus bombs.”

Dr. Abdullah Al-Qishawi, head of renal diseases at the Al-Shifa Hospital, warned that some 1200 patients with kidney failure may die soon due to the lack of medications and electricity. 

The Israeli military also on October 13 ordered that the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s Al Quds Hospital in Gaza City be evacuated. The deadline of 6:00AM on October 14 was later extended to 4:00 PM. Hospital officials insist that the facility will not be emptied.   

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.