Following the outbreak of Israel’s latest war on Gaza, Mellisa Barrera, an up-and-coming young actor who made a name for herself as the star of the Scream franchise, became vocal on social media, denouncing the war and resharing posts which accused Israel of perpetuating ethnic cleansing and genocide. In response to these posts, Spyglass Media, the production company of Scream, fired Barrera from the upcoming film and accused her of antisemitism despite Barrera explicitly posting, in one of her instagram posts denouncing Israel, “We don’t need more hate. No Islamophobia. No antisemitism.” 

In their statement on Barrera’s firing, Spyglass wrote: “We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion, or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.” This statement makes it very clear that their objection to Barrera’s comments were because she called the Israeli offensive what it is:  ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people. 

Calling Israel’s assault on Gaza ethnic cleansing and genocide isn’t a fringe claim but rather an accurate description of the situation that has been adopted by everyone from genocide scholars to UN officials. Under the logic put forward by Spyglass, anyone who denounces the genocide in Gaza is antisemetic and may stand to lose their job. This is the beginning of the new McCarthyism that we’ve seen used to target other pro-Palestine activists — especially in universities — which uses the smear of antisemitism to cover up what the attack actually is: an attempt to stop opposition to the genocide in Gaza. 

Barrera’s firing comes in the midst of other attacks on pro-Palestine Hollywood figures. Susan Sarandon, an outspoken supporter of Palestine, was dropped by her agents for her comments at a pro-Palestine rally — a rally where she clearly declared herself to be opposed to antisemitism. One of the top agents at the talent agency CAA was demoted for her social media posts opposing the Israel offensive, including one saying “What’s more heartbreaking than witnessing genocide? Witnessing the denial that genocide is happening.” CAA also fired Jouman (Jasmine) Barakat, an assistant at the agency, for her posts calling Israel “a fascist regime” and calling Zionists white supremacists. CAA also dropped two clients, Saira Rao and Regina Jackson for their anti-Israel social media posts. After being dropped by CAA, Rao said that Hollywood is “punishing people of color for speaking out… It’s disgusting. The genocide is indisputable. You can watch it on live TV. CAA will be on the wrong side of history.” 

In the midst of these attacks, the Hollywood unions have been silent. This mirrors the larger silence we have seen from Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) on the larger situation in Gaza. WGA has made no statement, and SAG’s only statement was in support of Israel. In a year where we saw the power of organized labor in Hollywood, this silence speaks volumes. As their rank-and-file members are attacked as part of this new Hollywood McCarthyism, the leaderships of these powerful unions sit on their hands — even as Hollywood workers organize themselves to put out statements calling for a ceasefire and as other major unions such as the UAW join calls for a ceasefire. This is unsurprising considering that the SAG leadership includes proud Zionists like Fran Drescher and Michael Rappaport. To combat this compromised leadership, Hollywood workers need to organize themselves as the rank and file of these unions to demand that unions defend members who are being attacked and join the larger trend of labor supportinging the movement for Palestine.  

These attacks are likely just the beginning of a more intensive backlash against vocal supporters of Palestine in Hollywood. It is particularly dangerous for young actors like Barrera whose careers can be destroyed just as they are beginning by these targeted attacks. This smear campaign is intended to scare Hollywood workers into silence by making it clear that denouncing the genocide in Gaza will hurt their careers. It is reminiscent of the campaign against leftists in Hollywood that culminated in the infamous blacklists of Hollywood workers during the McCarthy era which left many unable to work, destroying once promising careers. Many on social media are already warning about the danger of new blacklists of people speaking out in favor of Palestine 

To protect the movement for Palestine, we must fight these attacks back at every turn. The firing of Barrera and the attacks on Sarandon and at CAA are the shots across the bow which must act as a warning for everyone. These are attacks on the basic right to free speech and must not be allowed to pass. Hollywood workers must call on their unions to denounce these attacks and the movement must stand in unflinching support of those who are experiencing attacks for their pro-Palestine positions — be they in Hollywood, universities, health care, or elsewhere. If they touch one of us, they touch us all. The attack on Barrera makes it easier for the bosses of Hollywood to attack other Hollywood workers, especially those without the platform and recognition that Barrerra has.

The post The New Hollywood McCarthyism Emerging Around Palestine appeared first on Left Voice.

On Friday, at a press conference of labor leaders in front of the White House, United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla announced that the international UAW, meaning the entire union, had joined calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and made plans to investigate its ties to the Israeli military. The UAW represents over 400,000 workers in the U.S. (and over half a million retired workers), which makes it the largest union to do so in the U.S.. UAW International President Shawn Fain soon followed Mancilla’s press conference announcement with a post on X, expressing pride in the union’s decision.

This announcement comes after months of action by a mass international movement for Palestine in the streets, on university campuses, and within unions like Starbucks Workers United, that have helped call attention to Israel’s atrocities and helped to dramatically shift public opinion. This movement includes academic unions, many of whom are part of the UAW. UAW members at Harvard (HGSU-UAW 5118), Columbia (SWC-UAW 2710), and NYU (GSOC-UAW 2110) have been threatened with firing or eviction for pro-Palestine speech in their workplaces, and the struggles on university campuses against this neo-McCarthyism have played a role in catalyzing internal pressure on the UAW International Executive Board (IEB) from rank-and-file UAW members. It is worth noting that all three of these academic unions are in Region 9A, and that before becoming Director of Region 9A, Mancilla was the President of HGSU. Before Friday, Regions 9A and 6 were the largest governing bodies of the UAW that had signed on to a call for a ceasefire: Region 6 covers much of the West coast and also includes many academic unions, including those at the UC campuses and USC. 

This progressive move marks a large shift from top UAW leadership who, as Jacobin writer Alex Press told In These Times, have historically, “not only largely ignored its Arab Workers Caucus in 1973 when they pushed for the union to divest itself from Israeli bonds; in more recent years, it has also intervened to prevent locals from endorsing the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.” 

Beyond joining international calls for a ceasefire, Mancilla announced that the UAW’s IEB, the highest decision-making body in its bureaucracy, made up of the president, secretary-treasurer, vice presidents, and nine regional directors, will be investigating “the history of Israel and Palestine, our union’s economic ties to the conflict, and explore how we can have a just transition for U.S. workers from war to peace.”

Divesting from War and the Israeli State

This announcement by the international UAW, the parent union of all UAW locals and shop-floor unions, indicates institutional support at the highest level of the union’s bureaucracy for two things. First, that regions, locals, and individual unions that want to organize for Palestine in their workplaces may have some level of backing from the union leadership. It is essential that UAW take every step to protect members against McCarthyist attacks, as well as supporting non-members in the same institutions– that means standing against the attacks on SJP and JVP at Columbia and against all attacks on students and non-union workers as well. Second, that the international union is indicating that after years of calls to divest from Israel from the BDS movement, the UAW leadership is opening a discussion about its ties to Israel and to weapons manufacturing.

This announcement by the UAW appears to follow the framework described by labor historian Jeff Schuhrke in Jewish Currents in late November, which suggests that the success the UAW had seen incorporating the “just transition for a Green New Deal” movement into its successful 2023 strikes at the big three auto companies (and winning the unionization of new electric vehicle plants at GM) should be extended to a “conversion” plan for shifting unionized UAW workers at Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics out of the U.S. war machine and into socially productive manufacturing and engineering instead. Already, rank-and-file UAW workers are planning to reach out to UAW workers at these companies and try to do the organizing that would be required to get the shop floors of these weapons manufacturers to support divestment from weapons manufacturing. 

Schuhrke makes a false equivalency between the just transition and the conversion plans, however, in ignoring that the UAW was only able to unionize EV plants that were already planned by GM following the Biden administration’s legislation to galvanize production of EVs, a domestic infrastructure investment with the primary goal of competing technologically and geopolitically with China. Neither the Biden administration nor the Democratic or Republican parties will lead the charge in converting any part of the U.S.’s military industrial complex into “peacetime manufacturing.” The calls to arms (or away from them, in this case) must come from the rank-and-file UAW workers themselves, who are the only ones who may find both the willingness and the power to shut down these companies’ war efforts.

Importantly, Schuhrke points out, “U.S. unions long ago ceded “management rights” to the bosses, meaning that employers call the shots on what is produced when and how—and that any contest over plant conversion would require a radical expansion of unions’ limited purview.” For rank-and-file UAW workers, this means organizing to actually take democratic control over their workplaces, to the point where they decide what gets made and who it gets sold to. Like the Lucas Plan of the 1970s, where highly skilled workers at a UK aerospace company collectively put together a plan to produce socially useful systems and machines instead, UAW workers in every workplace, including weapons manufacturers, could challenge the capitalist status quo and assert their power over the production process they are a part of. 

Labor Must Stand Up 

UAW workers in weapons manufacturers cannot be the only ones fighting, and the UAW and smaller unions that have made similar calls for a ceasefire including UE, APWU, IUPAT, CTU, and others, cannot be the only ones involved in this fight. We call on all unions to follow their lead. Additionally, we call on the UAW, UE, and other signatories of this petition to go beyond joining a call for a ceasefire, and demand an end to Israeli military aid from the United States.

All workers should organize in their workplaces to disrupt any connections to the U.S. or Israeli war machines, or disrupt business as usual for the U.S. ruling class, in solidarity with Palestine. Nothing moves without workers. Flexing this power could look like university lab scientists (many of whom are now unionized with the UAW) immediately stopping work on contracts with the IDF or U.S. Department of Defense, or for the medium or long term, organizing themselves to demand their lab stop applying for grants from the DOD or licensing their discoveries or inventions to any military powers, working to divest scientific research from imperialism. It could look like unionized teachers organizing to radically change their curricula to tell the truth about U.S. imperialism and the Israeli genocide of Palestine. It could look like tech workers organizing to cancel their companies’ contracts with the IDF for cloud computing technology that the Israeli security state uses to surveil and bomb Palestinians. It could look like unionized auto workers and teachers and laborers and engineers all marching in a labor contingent in the next big protest in the streets, shoulder to shoulder with the students, writers, healthcare workers, and more who are marching in solidarity with Palestine. These workers should demand an immediate end to the siege, the end of U.S. aid to Israel, an immediate divestment of our unions and workplaces from Israel and stand against the apartheid state of Israel and for a free Palestine. 

Imperialism is incompatible with the interests of the working class. An injury to one is an injury to all, and weapons built in the U.S. meant to kill workers in Palestine do not make American workers safer, even if jobs at Lockheed Martin put food on a worker’s table this week. The U.S. working class owes a debt of solidarity to every worker around the world, and if our solidarity is with the international working class, our interests here in the imperial core must lie in dismantling the U.S. war machine that threatens the immediate safety of our comrades abroad and which is turned on activists and organizers here every day. Money spent on war is money not spent on housing, healthcare, and other needed services (the Biden administration’s new bequeathment of $14 billion to Israel alone would pay for 100,000 units of public housing). We must fight in our workplaces and join the struggle in the streets for a free Palestine and an end to U.S. imperialism.

The post The UAW Has Called for a Ceasefire. It’s Time for All of Labor to Stand Up. appeared first on Left Voice.

Originally published in Neues Deutschland

Robert Habeck cuts a noble and tragic figure. The Green vice chancellor, with his three-day beard, open collar, and permanently disheveled look, strikes many as a former idealist who has been forced to abandon his principles. Deborah Feldman, an American Jewish immigrant, recently wrote that Habeck once seemed like »the little guy, one of us, a dreamer and a storyteller, someone who went into politics because he thought he could change it.« What a disappointment! Yet what did Habeck used to dream about?

Fifteen years ago, Habeck and his partner wrote a play called Neunzehnhundertachtzehn (»Nineteen Eighteen«) for the 90th anniversary of the German Revolution, which began in his home town of Kiel. The hero of the play is a Social Democratic fixer named Gustav Noske.

Every biography says more about the author than the subject – it’s a book length reflection about what constitutes a good life. Long before throwing his hat into the national political ring, Habeck told us how he thought a responsible politician should act. This insight was worth far more than the ten Euros I paid for a used copy of the play.

If you’ve ever heard of Gustav Noske, it’s because he gave the order to assassinate Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. But this was no isolated murder. As war minister in the counterrevolutionary government of Friedrich Ebert, Noske commanded far-right paramilitaries who massacred 2.000 men, women and children in March 1919 in Berlin. He referred to himself as a »bloodhound«. The first time a German city was bombed from above? That was Noske’s proto-fascist troops using airplanes to attack the working-class neighborhood of Lichtenberg.

Habeck could have written about anyone. But he needed to tell us that Noske was actually a pretty cool guy.

The play takes place in early November 1918, two months before Noske’s career as a bloodhound begins. A revolution has just broken out in Kiel and the government needs an agent to keep things under control. As an experienced politician, Noske runs circles around the insurrectionary workers and sailors who are trying to build a new system. He proudly lies and manipulates everyone in order to keep the old system in place.

Beyond Noske, the play has little to do with the historical record. The actual head of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in Kiel, for example, was a sailor named Karl Artelt. He had organized strikes at the Kiel shipyard, and remained a committed socialist until his death in 1981. Habeck chose to replace Artelt with a young worker named Fritz, a hothead whose main revolutionary activity consists of stabbing officers with his bare hands. He claims to carry out executions »in the name of the soldiers’ council«, but in practice Fritz rejects any kind of democracy. In reality, the revolution in Kiel involved very little killing and certainly none by Artelt. 

Habeck has Noske save the day, bursting into rooms like the Kool-Aid Man to stop »bloodshed« – even though Noske was by far the most bloodthirsty figure of the German Revolution. At one point, Fritz asks Noske why he wants to preserve the old order, even though he’s nominally a socialist. Habeck has his hero explain: »Because people don’t care about justice. All they care about is getting fed, being warm, being left alone. They want orderly conditions, not justice. That’s what social democracy stands for. The struggle is not for the people. The people are a sluggish, stupid, and ultimately dangerous mass. The struggle is against the people to enforce what is best for the people«.

Here is Habeck’s famed idealism! The Green Party of today is quite similar to the SPD of a century ago in their deep distrust of the »mob« and any kind of democracy.

But what about principles? Again, Habeck lets Noske elaborate: »If you take on responsibility, it changes your personality. You do things that you would have categorically rejected before … I was always against war. But if you have responsibility and someone says, if you don’t vote for this, then our soldiers won’t get gas masks and they’ll die in the next attack, then you suddenly raise the military budget, without even wanting to«.

This is yet another historical inaccuracy. Noske was never a principled antimilitarist, like the majority of the SPD at the time, but rather a voice on the party’s right wing supporting colonialism.

Over the course of the revolution, Noske was successful in maintaining »order«. He did this by arming right-wing paramilitaries to the teeth and giving them free rein to murder some 15.000 people. These Freikorps would soon organize themselves in the NSDAP and take power themselves. The Nazis acknowledged the help they had gotten from Noske: Hitler referred to him as »oak among these social democratic plants«. Even after the war, when he wrote his memoirs in 1946, this murderer of countless Jewish revolutionaries continued to make disparaging remarks against »Ostjuden« (Eastern Jews).

Years before he had any real responsibility, Habeck was telling us that principles are only there to be betrayed once you gain power.

The post Robert Habeck Wrote a Play Praising a Right-Wing Mass Murderer appeared first on Left Voice.

At long last, one of the most notorious war criminals in history is dead. Henry Kissinger is responsible for the deaths of millions of oppressed people across the globe, and helped create the architecture of an imperialist system which continues to oppress entire countries to this day.

Kissinger served as Secretary of State under the Nixon and Ford administrations where he played a critical role in advancing the interests of U.S. imperialism through wars, ethnic cleansing, and famine. He continued to advise the U.S. foreign policy elite until his death in their unending quest to expand U.S. influence, with callous disregard for entire countries destroyed by U.S. intervention. 

It is one of the greatest injustices that Kissinger lived to 100, praised and adored by the ruling elite and enjoying a life of luxury, while so many people are not alive today as a result of his actions. A key leader during the Cold War years, Kissinger played a central role in advancing U.S. foreign policy to not only contain the Soviet Union, but also led a bloody campaign across the globe in the name of anticommunism, and ruthlessly suppressed national liberation struggles that threatened U.S. hegemony and influence in any way. Kissinger’s violence ultimately was ultimately at the service of maintaining and expanding the world capitalist order that emerged after World War II where the U.S. sat on top.

Perhaps Kissinger’s greatest crime was the role he played in Southeast Asia, where he developed policy for the U.S. war on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Under Kissinger, these wars were built on a framework of indiscriminate targeting of civilians, or, in his own words, killing “anything that moves.” This was done through chemical warfare, carpet-bombing, and massacres. Kissinger’s policies prolonged the war in Vietnam, and paved the way for the Khmer Rouge to take control of Cambodia and kill 2 million people. To this day, Laos remains littered with millions of unexploded U.S. land mines which continue to maim and kill those who come across them.

As Anthony Bourdain aptly put it, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”

Kissinger was also the architect of brutal U.S. policy in Latin America, most notably having urged Nixon to overthrow the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in 1973. The military coup dictatorship of Agusto Pinochet, which Kissinger helped install, was bloody and ruthless towards leftists, workers, and dissidents. Pinochet often used “death flights” in which he would kill people by dropping them out of planes and helicopters. Under his regime, Chile became the “laboratory of neoliberalism” where, with the help of the economists known as the “Chicago Boys,” capitalists created policies to squeeze the working class as much as possible.

Yet, these are just some of Kissinger’s most well-documented crimes. To this day, new revelations are coming out about the extent of his crimes and the lives his policies destroyed. These crimes stretch all the way from East Timor to Angola to Argentina. But it is not just his wars and coups that make up his criminal legacy — Kissinger’s legacy lives on in the violence that U.S. imperialism continues to foster to this day. He is largely responsible for the very system which keeps the majority of the world exploited, oppressed, deprived, and dominated to extract labor, resources, and fraudulent debts to maintain the stability and legitimacy of U.S. capital globally.

Beyond his time in office, Kissinger inspired and mentored some of the worst imperialists of the 21st century. These Kissinger proteges include Dick Cheney and Hilary Clinton, who continued U.S. imperialism’s brutal foreign policy and racked up their own body counts from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to regime change efforts in Honduras and Libya. They also include figures like Antony Blinken who, as this article is published, are overseeing ongoing U.S. interventions and crimes, from the proxy-war destroying Ukraine to the genocidal Israeli offensive on Gaza.

It is an injustice that Kissinger died in his home in Connecticut. He should have died rotting in a jail cell, his wealth seized and redistributed to some of the peoples most terrorized by his policies. It is not enough to be happy that he’s finally dead. It is essential to keep fighting for a world free of the shackles of imperialism and one where every one of his ilk are made to pay for their crimes. To that end, it is essential to tear down every last vestige of imperialism that, through coercion and force, continues to brutally oppress millions across the world, and oust from power every war criminal Kissinger inspired. In honor of his millions of victims, let’s fight to ensure that Kissinger’s world rots in the dustbin of history along with him.

The post The World Kissinger Built Must Die Too appeared first on Left Voice.

All over the world, bourgeois media are working overtime to accuse the Left of antisemitism. This is no easy task, given that many protests in support of Palestine are being led by Jews and others who clearly denounce any form of antisemitism. Thus, multiple media have dug up an extremely disturbing incident from over 50 years ago: the 1969 bombing of West Berlin’s Jewish Community Center, which opened in 1959 on the site of a synagogue destroyed by the Nazis.

For example, the liberal Zionist Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times writes,

I’m reminded of the German New Left militants of the 1960s and ’70s. Though they were radicalized by abomination of the Nazism of their parents’ generation, some, in a grotesque irony, ended up committing anti-Jewish terrorism themselves. A group suspected of trying to bomb a Berlin Jewish center on the 1969 anniversary of Kristallnacht wrote in a communiqué, “The Jews, who have been driven away by fascism, have themselves become fascists, who in collaboration with American capital want to exterminate the Palestinian people.”

The similarly “liberal” German weekly Der Spiegel, in a 5,000-word takedown of Greta Thunberg, makes a similar claim:

In those years, there was a deeply rooted hostility towards Jews within the militant left. The left-wing terrorist group Tupamaros West-Berlin even tried to blow up a Jewish community center in 1969, but the bomb failed to detonate due to a technical defect.

As a historian specializing in the Berlin Left, I find these short presentations shockingly bad. Both publications have enormous fact-checking departments, yet they don’t seem to have even skimmed the lengthy Wikipedia articles in both German and English. What really happened?

A Bomb in the Coatroom

On November 9, 1969, 250 people gathered at the Jewish Community Center for a ceremony to commemorate the Night of Broken Glass, or Reichskristallnacht, a state-sponsored pogrom that had taken place 31 years earlier. A bomb had been placed in the coatroom. Fortunately, it did not detonate, and it was discovered and defused the next day.

That same night, graffiti appeared in different parts of West Berlin: “Shalom and Napalm.” A flyer published in the radical left magazine Agit 883 explained that “racist and Zionist Israel, with Napalm … and German tanks, is defending the oil interests of the world police in the entire Arab region.” The authors supported Al Fatah, the Palestinian nationalist group led by Yassir Arafat, which was “showing everyone how to fight imperialism, Zionism, and the system in their own countries.”

This was the first action of a new urban guerrilla group in West Berlin that had taken its name from the Uruguayan guerrillas: Tupamaros West-Berlin. Activists like Dieter Kunzelmann, George von Rauch, Tommy Weisbecker, and others had gone to Jordan in mid-1969 and received military training at a Palestinian refugee camp. They decided to begin the armed struggle right away — by bombing a Jewish Community Center.

So far, this sounds like the New York Times and Der Spiegel got the story right: leftists really did try to carry out an antisemitic attack. But did this represent “the Left” or “the new Left” or “the militant Left”? Kunzelmann’s little group, hanging out in their “commune” on West Berlin’s Wielandstraße and taking all the drugs they could find, were not exactly leaders of the New Left. Kunzelmann was a media darling because he was an idiot with no organization and no strategy.

Immediately, the Left distanced itself from this heinous attempt at mass murderer. Frankfurt’s Palestine Committee, for example, wrote that such actions “objectively constitute a provocation.” In the face of widespread condemnation, the Tupamaros soon dissolved.

Among the signers of the Frankfurt declaration was Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Dany le Rouge, as he was then known, had been born in France to a Jewish family, went to school in Frankfurt, and then to university in Nanterre, where he became one of the main faces of the 1968 revolt in France. Reactionary politicians described him as a foreign agitator and a German Jew. In response, students chanted, “Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands!” (We are all German Jews!).

Jewish radicals played a huge role in Europe’s youth revolt, including in West Berlin. The Belgian Trotskyist leader Ernest Mandel, for example, was a keynote speaker at the International Vietnam Congress in West Berlin early 1968. Other intellectual mentors included Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Activists from Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organization,  were active in different European countries and spoke frequently at West Berlin’s Free University. When Cohn-Bendit was invited to Israel, he ostentatiously ditched his minders from the Israeli Foreign Ministry and instead traveled the country with Matzpen activists.

Then, as now, the socialist Left was hostile to Zionism, yet it included many Jewish leaders and fought consistently against antisemitism. The German “Tupamaros,” with their antisemitic views, were an isolated group.

Protectors of the Constitution?

So far, this story has gained some nuance: it was not “the Left” but rather an isolated group that tried to bomb the Jewish Community Center. But who built the bomb? Kunzelmann, generally considered the initiator of the action, lacked the technical knowledge. The police figured out quickly who was responsible, yet charges were never filed, and there was no criminal trial.

How is this possible? As a journalist revealed in 2005, the Tupamaros’ bomb was built by a man named Peter Urbach. When he testified at a criminal trial in 1971, Urbach’s cover was blown: he was a longtime agent of the West German domestic secret service, the so-called Verfassungsschutz (VS, Protectors of the Constitution). Urbach provided numerous Molotov cocktails, guns, and bombs to West Berlin leftists, including to those who later founded the Red Army Faction.

Who was behind Urbach’s activities? Who was working to push the radical student movement toward armed actions? Who knew about the plans that could have killed 250 Jews on the anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass? The state has attempted to cover up all this information. The journalist Uwe Soukup suspects that a leading figure was West Berlin’s Interior Senator Kurt Neubauer, from the far right wing of the Social Democratic Party. It’s entirely possible that the CIA, with its enormous presence in West Berlin, was pulling strings from the background. Yet no court and no parliament has ever seriously investigated what happened.

In 1971, the VS gave Urbach a new identity and sent him to California, where he lived for the next four decades until he died in 2011. The German state paid him a pension that must have totaled many millions of marks and euros — a reward for having tried to blow up the Jewish Community Center.

None of the West Berlin prosecutors from 1969 ever explained why they decided not to press charges, despite having precise testimony. It seems obvious that they were trying to protect the reputation of the Federal Republic of Germany, and it seems even more than likely that the VS applied pressure.

Founded by Nazis

The VS was founded in 1949. West Germany’s foreign secret service, the BND, was founded by well-known Nazi war criminals. The VS, in contrast, was supposed to have a more democratic profile. Within a few years, however, the VS was relying on high-ranking spies from the Nazi SS — people who helped carry out the Holocaust — to “protect the constitution.”

The VS has never broken from its brown legacy. In the 1990s, the service was paying huge sums of money to East German Nazis — they claimed that financing Nazis was the only way to keep an eye on them. While the terrorist group National Socialist Underground (NSU) murdered 10 people, it was surrounded by numerous VS agents, yet they reported nothing.

The head of the VS from 2012 to 2018, Hans-Georg Maaßen, has become one of Germany’s most prominent racist and antisemitic agitators, blaming “globalists” (read: Jews) for the “climate hoax.” Maaßen remains a member of the conservative party CDU. Does anyone believe that his views were much different while he headed this secretive agency built up by Nazis?

The example of the Tupamaros West-Berlin is instructive, but not for the reasons that the New York Times or Der Spiegel think it is. The real instigators of this attempted antisemitic mass murder were not the militant Left — it was the West German capitalist state. Just about every week, we get new evidence of German police, soldiers, and secret service agents spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories. The idea that this state apparatus filled with Nazis could “protect Jewish life” is disturbing to even think about.

Many Jews in Germany have drawn the opposite conclusion: real protection from antisemitism will not come from a state built by Nazi war criminals. No, antisemitism will end when working people around the world — Jews, Muslims, and people of all nationalities — join forces to beat the capitalist system. In the demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza, where Jewish activists are often on the front lines, we see seeds of the kind of international solidarity that will lead us to universal emancipation from all forms of oppression.

The post Fact Check: Did German Leftists Try to Bomb West Berlin’s Jewish Community Center in 1969? appeared first on Left Voice.

The brutality of the siege in Gaza is almost unfathomable. Hospitals, refugee camps, and schools bombed. Over 14,000 killed. Tens of thousands injured. Although we are in the midst of a four-day pause — one in which the Israeli state has been shooting and brutalizing Palestinians anyway — the brutality of the apartheid ethnostate of Israel, based on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, remains firmly in place.

Millions around the world are denouncing this brutality, with massive protests in the Middle East, actions that defy bans on protests in Germany and France, and massive mobilizations in the UK. We are in the midst of a global movement for Palestine that is shaking the U.S. regime to its core. Over 100,000 people recently mobilized in Washington, DC, for Palestine, and national days of action are bringing out hundreds of thousands across the country. The student movement on campuses is reminiscent of the student movements against the war in Vietnam and against apartheid South Africa, which played a significant role in ending both.

Sixty-six percent of people in the U.S. support some kind of ceasefire, not a four-day pause. Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans are negotiating even more funding for the state of Israel. Faith in the Democrats and in Biden is plummeting, especially among young people and Arab Americans, which could affect Biden’s chances of winning in November 2024. For millions of people, these polls highlight that our electeds do not represent the will of the people and that an end to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians depends on our actions.

The labor movement has a central role to play in the fight to end the siege in Gaza, as well as against the U.S. financing of Israel, an end to the occupation, and for a free Palestine. Labor has a strategic role to play in its ability to shut down the point of production, but that is precisely why labor leadership has long held ties to the Democratic Party and to imperialism, and seeks to stop anti-war labor organizing: to stop the disruptive and even revolutionary potential that the working class holds.

In a moment when labor is resurgent and there are numerous strikes, the struggle to mobilize the labor movement for Palestine is, in many ways, the struggle for the future of the labor movement. It is a fight to forge a new labor movement that is based on class-struggle unionism, not business unionism, and on working-class internationalism, not nationalism and chauvinism. The fight for labor to take up the struggle for Palestine is the struggle to strengthen the movement for Palestine, as well as a struggle for labor to break with the top-down leadership that has betrayed workers for decades.

In other words, this is a moment to forge ahead with a new combative chapter of the U.S. labor movement — which is in the interests of U.S. workers, as well as the movement for Palestine.

U.S. Labor Is Starting to Stand with Palestine

The working class is central to the struggle against the siege and for a free Palestine. In addition to speaking out against the genocide, our unions should demand that the U.S. stop funding the state of Israel — especially now that Biden has requested $14 billion more, in addition to the $3.3 billion sent yearly. This means highlighting our solidarity with Palestinians, as well denouncing the lack of funding for social services in the United States. There is always money for imperialism, but not for addressing the dire conditions of our hospitals, schools, and public services, or to forgive student debt or provide Medicare for all.

It’s also essential that our unions defend our right to speak out against the genocide in Palestine, against equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. We’ve seen McCarthyist attacks on workers around the country, and certainly there is an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. We need our unions to defend our right to free speech and to stand up for Palestine.

Although unions have been severely diminished under neoliberalism, they are still the largest organizations of the working class, organizing 14 million people. If our unions mobilized even a fraction of their memberships to the streets, it would play a central role in massifying the movement for Palestine. And, of course, the working class stands at the choke points of the capitalist economy.

While most unions have not come out on the side of Palestine, there are countless rank-and-file caucuses and sectors of workers who have passed ceasefire and free Palestine resolutions.

The newly formed Starbucks Workers United, which is a product of the recent years of unionization at over 300 Starbucks locations, in a statement titled “Starbucks Stands with Palestine,” declared, “Members of Starbucks Workers United stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s right to self determination. … We condemn the occupation, displacement, state violence, apartheid and threats of genocide Palestinians face.” As a result, the Starbucks company is suing the union, but SBWU is holding strong. Starbucks workers even cosponsored their “Red Cup Day” strike actions with Jewish Voice for Peace, linking the struggle for Palestine with the struggle for their contract.

Other statements include teachers in the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, the Chicago Teachers Union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel. It includes United Electrical (UE) and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 3000, which initiated a call for a ceasefire, as well as the American Postal Workers Union, which released a statement calling for a ceasefire.

In addition to unions taking a stand, numerous ad hoc groups of workers have also been formed. A group called Healthcare Workers for Palestine garnered over 4,500 signatures on its statement and has created a network around the country.

The big union leaderships have sided unequivocally with Israel. In an official statement, the AFL-CIO scolded the Palestinian people and did not acknowledge the 75-year occupation of Palestine. It silenced a Washington State labor council that criticized the AFL-CIO’s statement and called for a ceasefire, and it sent an email “reminding” affiliates that they are barred from taking positions contrary to those of the AFL-CIO.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten issued a statement saying that “we unequivocally stand with the Israeli people” and that the AFT welcomed “Biden’s swift response.” It even said, “Israel has every right to defend itself as it will now do” — in other words, supporting the genocide.

And the Connecticut State Council of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) fired it’s executive director, Kooper Caraway, after he made comments at a rally in support of Palestine, joining the McCarthyist witch hunt against activists standing up against genocide. Rather than protecting us from this new McCarthyism, the SEIU is joining in.

In this sense, there is a clear division. The biggest union leaderships align with Zionism, while growing sectors of the rank and file, along with unions where the rank and file is mobilized and has the most power, are aligned with a ceasefire and with Palestine.

Labor Has a Strategic Role to Play in Supporting Palestine

The power of the labor movement is not just in our ability to make statements or to mobilize people to take the streets — although thus far, the U.S. labor movement should do more of both.

But the real power of the labor movement is in the ability to shut down production and distribution — to strike. The working class makes everything run. As Lenin explains in “On Strikes,”

All wheels stand still, if your mighty arm wills it,” a German workers’ song says of the working class. And so it is in reality: the factories, the landlords’ land, the machines, the railways, etc., etc., are all like wheels in a giant machine — the machine that extracts various products, processes them, and delivers them to their destination. The whole of this machine is set in motion by the worker who tills the soil, extracts ores, makes commodities in the factories, builds houses, work shops, and railways. When the workers refuse to work, the entire machine threatens to stop.

Strikes stop the flow of capitalist profits, the flow of business as usual, and bring the whole system to its knees.

Palestinian labor unions have long understood this and put out a statement calling on unions around the world to stand with Palestine:

As Israel escalates its military campaign, Palestinian trade unions call on our counterparts internationally and all people of conscience to end all forms of complicity with Israel’s crimes — most urgently halting the arms trade with Israel, as well as all funding and military research.

If the working class of the world decided it, no arms would be sent to Israel. The working class has the power to do that. Nothing moves without workers.

We’ve already seen unions refusing arms shipments to Israel around the world, from Italy to Belgium. India’s Central Trade Union Organizations, which represents 100 million workers, issued a statement that they would refuse to plan to “export” Indian workers to replace Palestinian workers.

In the United States, there is a history of unions taking these kinds of actions. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), in large part as the result of numerous Trotskyist and anarchist members pushing for labor actions against imperialism, has taken solidarity actions in the past. Local 10 of the ILWU engaged in an 11-day action in 1984 that refused to unload South African auto parts, steel, and wine. In 2008, the ILWU shut down West Coast ports for the day with the slogan “No peace, no work.”

Workers have also stood up to labor Zionism. In 1973, Arab American workers in Detroit auto plants walked off the job in protest of the UAW’s investment in bonds from the state of Israel. UAW Local 600, which represented Ford workers, had purchased 300,000 in Israeli bonds using money from dues. The UAW owned $1 million in Israeli bonds.

We can do that again. McDonald’s and Starbucks workers could shut it down to divest from the state of Israel. The UAW, which just won major gains, could unite autoworkers and graduate students in a struggle to divest from Israel. This time, we would unite Arab Americans with anti-Zionist Jewish people, as well as the Black Lives Matter generation, which is mobilizing right now for Palestine. University workers and students could walk out and call for divesting our universities from Israel.

And workers can do more than shut it down. The working class produces — and can produce for Palestine. Imagine if workers who make medical supplies demanded that those supplies get shipped to Gaza. If instead of shipping arms to Israel, workers coordinated to ship food and the supplies needed? This is the power of the working class, and it is precisely this power that the capitalists want to rein in — using the union bureaucracy, the agents of capital in the ranks of the working class.

Zionism Is Not in the Interests of the Global Working Class, but Fighting for Palestine Is

It is important to understand that fighting Zionism is in the interests of the working class. The Zionist state of Israel is in the interests of capital; it is not in the interests of workers. The state of Israel was created by imperialist powers after World War II to act as a stronghold for Western imperialist interests in the region. Zionism serves to not only ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, but also to create a hyperexploited Palestinian working class, both in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in the Israeli state. Palestinian workers who have permits to work in the Israeli state are not allowed to join the Histadrut, the largest labor union in Israel, and are not allowed to access benefits and are paid less than the legal minimum wage. Yet many are forced to pay an “organization fee” to Histadrut. In this context, the general strike in May 2021, which united Palestinian workers in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, was significant, demonstrating a unified Palestinian labor movement.

The leaders of Histadrut went to great lengths to break any attempts at unity between Arab and Jewish workers. In the 1920s, the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers was founded by Arabs and Jews together, although Zionists linked to Histadrut’s leadership undermined it. In the early 1930s, Arabs and Jews went on strike together as well, once again with Histadrut fostering divisions and providing privileges to Jewish workers to ensure divisions and to foster reactionary, racist Zionist sentiments among the Israeli workers.

To this day, although most Israeli workers are reactionary Zionists, indoctrinated into the ideology developed by and for the capitalist Zionist state, they too are exploited and will be policed and repressed by the IDF if they stand up for their labor rights, if they refuse military service, and, most certainly, if they stand up on the side of Palestine. In the past weeks, we have already seen a crackdown against Israeli Jewish people who talk about a ceasefire or of ending the brutality in Gaza. Just as many sectors of the Black movement in the U.S. struggled to break the racist white working class with racism, so too we must have the perspective of breaking a sector of the Israeli working class with Zionism and fighting for a free socialist Palestine.

And the Zionist state of Israel is an enemy to workers around the world: Israel stands against all uprisings of the working-class and oppressed masses in the region and in the world — from standing against the Iranian revolution, to supporting the military dictatorship in Chile, to helping to train U.S. police who repressed protesters in the Black Lives Matter movement. As we know, if working-class and oppressed people in the U.S. stand up, we will be repressed by police trained by Israelis. Rather, our interests are with the working class and oppressed people in Palestine, who sent words of advice to BLM activists to deal with tear gas.

“AFL-CIA,” Business Unionism, and Labor Zionism

The “labor imperialism” of U.S. unions is an old phenomenon: Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labor (AFL) supported U.S. imperialism in World War I and stood against the Bolshevik Revolution. Union leaderships played a role in supporting U.S. imperialism in World War II, imposing no-strike clauses on a combative labor movement with the help of the Stalinist Communist Party.

After the mass purge of communists from labor in the late 1940s, and the fusion of the more radical CIO with the AFL in 1955, the groundwork was set for a stronger coordination between labor leadership and U.S. imperialism. Since then, the AFL-CIO has supported every major U.S. war, but has gone even further: it played a role in busting more progressive and left-leaning unions and supporting business unionism tied to bosses and to dictatorial governments.

The AFL-CIO has had strong ties to the CIA. The AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) was created in 1944 to subvert left-leaning and socialist led unions abroad. In 1949, it partnered with the CIA, which financed the group in exchange for passing over intelligence on foreign labor organizing. With the help of the FTUC, U.S. labor leaders attempted to subvert the Chinese Revolution, even sponsoring and funding terrorist attacks.

In Latin America, the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, trained labor leaders to fight leftists in their unions. It aided military coups in Guatemala in 1955, in Brazil in 1964, and Chile in 1973.

The AFL-CIO supported the U.S. war in Vietnam (despite rank-and-file resistance), the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, apartheid leaders in South Africa, and more — that’s why it was known as the AFL-CIA. Nearly always, this was done unbeknownst to rank-and-file workers who did not decide, vote for, or agree with this approach.

Labor unions have long been tied to Zionism. While Jewish workers in the U.S. generally held anti-Zionist positions in the 1930s (as did most Jewish people around the world), U.S.-based labor unions played a central role in propping up the state of Israel, as well as building support for it in the labor movement. The AFL-CIO has hundreds of millions invested in Israeli state bonds, profiting from the occupation there; this is a sign of how closely the federation leaders see themselves, and act on behalf of, the state of Israel.

As Michael Letwin, Suzanne Adely, and Jaime Veve argue, “The Zionism of these labor officials was closely linked to their support for U.S. imperialism, anti-communism, and racism against workers of color in the United States. This was consistent with Israel’s self-proclaimed role as ‘watchdog’ for U.S. imperial interests. Meanwhile, nearly all of the U.S. labor Left mirrored the USSR’s indispensable support for establishment of the Israeli state. In the subsequent decades, U.S. trade union leaders across the political spectrum supported Israeli wars, charged ‘anti-Semitism’ against those who criticized Israel’s close alliance with apartheid South Africa, and bought huge quantities of State of Israel Bonds, which paralleled overall U.S. government economic and military support for the Israeli state.”

This is connected to the ties between union leaderships and the Democratic Party, which is a pillar of imperialism. Labor donated $167 million to the 2016 elections, as well as countless hours of canvassing and using their staffers and workers to organize for the Democrats. As Joe Burns explains in Class Struggle Unionism, “The reliance on the Democratic Party encourages moderation, support of U.S. corporate foreign policy, and cooperation with and a reliance upon the very government that is set up to protect the billionaire class.” Especially now, the Biden administration is concerned with “dealignment” of the working class — the fading support of workers for the Biden administration — and it is seeking to rebuild those connections. It is no wonder that in his address to the country on October 20, Biden framed building more weapons as a way to support U.S.-made industry and jobs.

Why Do Unions Side with Imperialism?

This history runs counter to the idea of unions as solely progressive advocates for workers. As Jeff Schuhrke writes, “That U.S. union leaders forged a secret alliance with the CIA to undemocratically divide unions overseas may justifiably be difficult to understand. But AFL leaders and the CIA shared the belief that Left-oriented unions were literally capable of bringing about proletarian revolution.”

Unions are part of what Gramsci calls “the integral state” — extensions of the state into civil society, meant to contain the independent action of the working class in a context in which a capitalist, imperialist system is in crisis and thus cannot raise the standard of living for workers. He argued that the supremacy of the capitalist system is maintained not only by what he called the “coercive state” — that is, by the “bodies of armed men” famously described by Friedrich Engels, acting to preserve the oppressive status quo through threatened or actual force — but also by “institutions of civil society,” institutions which “build hegemony” by creating consent among the oppressed and exploited. Among such institutions, Gramsci included churches, labor unions, and schools, and today, we would include nonprofit leaderships.

Leon Trotsky highlights a similar dynamic in Trade Unions in Britain and Trade Unions in the Epoch of Capitalist Decay. He explained,

Capitalism can continue to maintain itself only by lowering the standard of living of the working class. Under these conditions trade unions can either transform themselves into revolutionary organisations or become lieutenants of capital in the intensified exploitation of the workers. The trade union bureaucracy, which has satisfactorily solved its own social problem, took the second path. It turned all the accumulated authority of the trade unions against the socialist revolution and even against any attempts of the workers to resist the attacks of capital and reaction.

In other words, the union bureaucracy, or rather the layer of well-paid union leaders disconnected from the everyday labor of workers, are on the side of the bosses, on the side of imperialism, and on the side of Zionism. It means union leaders make a conscious effort to build business unions: to pacify workers, to keep them tied to the interests of their bosses, and to run unions with little input from the rank and file. And if we look historically, anti-communism, top-down unionism, and union imperialism have gone hand in hand. This has not resulted in anything positive for U.S. labor. Rather, it has resulted in diminishing power, diminishing wages, and an erosion of unions to their lowest membership rates yet.

Does this mean giving up on unions? No. But it does mean fighting to remake unions as weapons of the working class, against the state and independent of the capitalist parties. Understanding the role of unions as part of the integral state helps us understand that the fight for combative unions at home is tied to the fight for internationalist and anti-imperialist unions; it’s part of the fight for independent unions that truly stand for workers. The struggle in our unions for Palestine is also a struggle to cut the ties between our unions and the Democratic Party. It’s also a struggle to democratize our unions, to promote rank-and-file discussion and decision-making.

There are inherent ties between business unionism, imperialism, and the Democratic Party, and we must counter it with democratic class-struggle unionism, internationalism, and international socialism.

Building a New Tradition in the Labor Movement

The labor movement is on the precipice of something new. Amid a labor upsurge, we are in a key moment to forge a new path for the U.S. labor movement. A sector of the working class has had key political experiences over the last decade, starting with Occupy Wall Street, with anger at the 1 percent. A few years later, we saw millions of people vote for Bernie Sanders — who expressed discontent with the capitalist class and the political establishment. Although Sanders represents progressive reforms to capitalism, he remains tied to the capitalist system and to the political regime. His politics refuse to break with U.S. imperialism, which is expressed in his failure to call for a ceasefire, much less stand against Zionism. Yet the millions of votes for Sanders did express a growing anger at the capitalists.

And, of course, the pandemic shaped the working class — who on one hand saw that we are essential, but as one EMT said, “When you realize your boss will kill you, it changes your relationship to work.”

The working class was also molded by the BLM movement, which brought millions of people into the streets against racism and highlighted the massive police budgets — thanks to this movement, we saw that there is always enough money for cops but never enough for people. Many participants in BLM are now denouncing the inflated military aid budget for Israel. The BLM movement created a new “intersectional” consciousness in the labor movement — especially in young sectors of labor, like Starbucks workers — who want their unions to take up fights for social justice. More and more people, especially young people in our unions, are questioning the old economistic common sense of unions and seeing the need for “bargaining for the common good” or even class-struggle unionism, as Joe Allen would put it.

We are in the midst of a wave of unionizations and some important strikes — from a wave of higher education strikes, to the writers and actors, to teachers to nurses to the autoworkers at the Big 3, who won a historic contract with some major gains. Workers all over the country are questioning tiered divisions of labor, questioning some of the divisions that became solidified under neoliberalism.

With that said, even a progressive and combative labor leadership does not guarantee a break with imperialism or a perspective of international class struggle. Shawn Fain, who notoriously wore an “eat the rich” shirt and gave strong speeches about class struggle, now appeared in a video essentially endorsing Joe Biden as the “a pro-labor” president, even as Biden supports a genocide in Gaza.

Independent Working-Class Politics against Capitalism and Imperialism

The labor movement is at a crossroads. As it becomes more combative — with increased strikes and the building of more unions — it must make a complete break with business unionism, imperialism, and the Democratic Party if it is to fight for a free Palestine and for better conditions in the workplace.

And as we witness all the rank-and-file resolutions and statements for Palestine, it is clear that there is so much potential for the rank and file to push our unions to break with imperialism.

But this will mean understanding, on the one hand, the potential of this political moment, and the connections between top-down unionism, the Democratic Party, and conciliation with the bosses and labor imperialism, on the other. Fighting labor imperialism means fighting all these pernicious elements in the labor movement.

And it means understanding that labor leaders are going to steer us right back to the Democratic Party. Democrats and Republicans, Biden and Trump, represent genocide, imperialism, and brutality toward working-class and oppressed people in the U.S. and abroad. If we do not break with our union leaders and organize independently, have no doubt that they will lead us right back to politicians supporting the slaughter of Palestinians. That means organizing the working class in solidarity with Palestine.

And it means not only organizing the working class in our unions and workplaces, but also providing a political perspective and political leadership. It means creating our own political organization, a working-class party that fights for socialism, to provide a political alternative that fights for a free Palestine and for the interests of workers in the U.S. and around the world.

The post Uniting Workers for Palestine Is a Fight for the Future of Labor appeared first on Left Voice.

We republish below a statement by members of the Haverford College Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) following the shooting of Haverford student Kinnan Abdalhamid and Brown University students Tahseen Ahmed and Hisham Awartani. These three Palestinian students were shot on Sunday, November 27 in Burlington, Vermont. The shooting is a result of rising anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia across the United States. The Haverford FJP are urging faculty and staff at higher education institutes around the world, particularly members of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, to sign on to their statement which calls for standing for free speech and academic freedom, against the equation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism.

***

We write as members of Haverford Faculty for Justice in Palestine to express our grief and outrage regarding the shooting of Haverford College student Kinnan Abdalhamid and Brown University students Tahseen Ahmed and Hisham Awartani in Burlington, Vermont, on November 25, 2023. These three Palestinian college students were shot simply for speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs. We extend our support and solidarity to Kinnan, Tahseen, and Hisham, and their families. As faculty and staff at Haverford College, we also stand with the Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and anti-Zionist students who have felt silenced and fearful of the current climate of hostility and intimidation towards critics of the Israeli state.

The shooting of these three young people is just another example of the wave of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism, and Islamophobia that is growing across the U.S., particularly on college campuses. The long-standing efforts of Zionists to suppress pro-Palestinian voices on college campuses, including the targeting of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, have created a hostile climate for Arab, Muslim, and anti-Zionist Jewish students. It is this hostile environment, that equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, that contributes to the broader surge in Islamophobic violence and anti-Arab racism. 

As scholars, teachers, and university staff, we urge institutions of higher education to support free speech and academic freedom and to combat the spread of false narratives that equate support for Palestine with antisemitism. The material consequence of this hostile climate and spread of false information is the actual physical violence targeting Brown and Black bodies, including the shooting of Kinnan Abdalhamid, Tahseen Ahmed, and Hisham Awartani.

Our goal should be to encourage students to seek out accurate information (especially outside of the biased representation in mainstream media coverage), provide historical context, and facilitate nuanced analysis, not to encourage simplistic thinking that conflates critiques of state violence with antisemitism. We stand with the tens of thousands of anti-Zionist American Jews who are saying, “Not in our name!” to the Israeli state’s genocidal violence against Gaza. We encourage colleges and universities, including Haverford College, to stand with the nonviolent international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement by supporting the academic boycott of Israel. We reiterate our support for pro-Palestinian students, particularly Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, who have come under attack for critiquing the violence of both the U.S. and Israeli state.

We urge faculty and staff at colleges and universities globally, particularly our fellow Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters, to sign on to our statement here.

In solidarity,

Haverford Faculty for Justice in Palestine:

Dr. Gina Velasco, Associate Professor and Director, Program in Gender and Sexuality

Dr. Tarik Aougab, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Dr. Lindsay Reckson, Associate Professor and Chair of English

Dr. Maud Burnett McInerney, Professor of English and Laurie Ann Levin Chair of Comparative Literature

Dr. Aurelia Gómez Unamuno, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish

Dr. Zainab Saleh, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Dr. Qrescent Mali Mason, Assistant Professor of Philosophy 

Dr. Lina Martinez Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Spanish

Dr. Danielle Allor, Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Dr. Talia Young, Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies 

Dr. Asali Solomon, Bertrand K. Wilbur Endowed Chair in the Humanities, Professor of English, and Chair of Creative Writing 

NYU FJP: 

Dr. Sonya Posmentier, Associate Professor of English

Dr. Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis

Dr. Sinan Antoon, Associate Professor, Gallatin School 

Dr. John King, Associate Adjunct Professor, ACT-UAW Local 7902 

San Francisco State University FJP: 

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, Associate Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies

Pratt Institute FJP: 

Dr. Jonathan Beller, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies

Mount Holyoke FJP: 

Dr. Iyko Day, Elizabeth C. Small Professor and Chair of English

Dr. Ren-yo Hwang, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Race and Political Economy

Dr. Andrea Lawlor, Associate Professor of English 

Stanford University FJP: 

Dr. Jonathan Rosa, Associate Professor of Education and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity

Dr. Seema Yasmin, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Primary Care and Population Health

University of Chicago FJP: 

Dr. Eman Abdelhadi, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development 

UMass – Boston, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine: 

Dr. Heike Schotten, Professor of Political Science 

New School FJP: 

Dr. Cinzia Arruzza, Associate Professor of Philosophy 

In solidarity: 

Dr. Alicia Christoff, Associate Professor of English, Amherst College 

Dr. John Schultz, Temple University 

Dr. Brandis Whitfield, Temple University 

Dr. Santana Afton, Georgia Institute of Technology 

Dr. Seppo Niemi-Colvin, Indiana University 

Dr. Ila Varma, University of Toronto 

Dr. Jayadev Athreya, University of Washington 

Dr. Denis Hirschfeldt, University of Chicago 

Dr. Nikhil Sahoo, Cornell University

Dr. Allyson Nadia Field, University of Chicago 

Dr. Britt Munro, CUNY Graduate Center, John Jay College 

The post Haverford Faculty for Justice in Palestine Releases Statement Supporting Pro-Palestinian Students appeared first on Left Voice.

Israel’s offensive on Gaza is on hold, but displays of solidarity with the Palestinian people continue. If this was not clear from the recent protests at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, it should be following the latest display of civil disobedience organized by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

On Sunday afternoon, November 26, more than 1,000 Jews and allies blocked the Manhattan Bridge from the Manhattan side, with many prepared to be arrested. The action had been organized as a follow-up to the high profile occupation of Grand Central Station one month ago.

According to a Left Voice member who participated in the action, several members of the UAW at Columbia University (including herself) were involved in the protest. This is reflective of the larger role that students and university faculty are playing in the movement, as well as the potential for organized workers to unite their struggles as union members with other fights against oppression, such as the current movement for Palestinian liberation.

While Israel was forced to agree to a pause in bombing in order to exchange hostages with Hamas and let some aid into Gaza, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been clear that he intends to continue the genocide as soon as the pause ends. Israel has announced a new phase of its offensive in which it intends to attack Palestinians in the South of Gaza — this despite the fact that Gazans were told, at the start of the siege, to evacuate to the South. Israel also continues to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank, and President Biden remains steadfast in his unconditional support for Israel, even as his administration works to contain regional escalations.

Though the genocidal offensive of Israel and the United States has not been fully defeated, the pause shows that the international movement in solidarity with Palestine has already forced some concessions that Netanyahu and Biden originally resisted. It is all the more important that the movement has not been demobilized by the pause, and continues to demand, at minimum, a permanent ceasefire which includes an end to Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza.

That said, the movement is still up against some of the most powerful institutions in the world. To successfully defeat the interests of the largest imperialist power and its most essential ally in the Middle East, we need to build a broad force that unites the different leaderships and the larger communities they represent (especially unity between Jewish and Arab organizations).

Already, leading organizations in the movement, including JVP, are being labeled as hate groups and supporters of terrorism. For now, these labels mainly exist in the form of a smear campaign to intimidate individuals into staying silent, but we shouldn’t underestimate the state’s willingness to apply them more seriously if actions of civil disobedience become too disruptive. Even without the threat of greater state repression, we are seeing protesters lose jobs, have their identities publicized, and even encounter physical violence from Zionists. As the recent shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont shows, the risks are even greater for Arab and Arab-perceived communities. These dangers cannot be defeated without a broader solidarity between all groups engaging in struggle.

We can imagine the power of rallies and marches which draw together Jewish-led groups like JVP and IfNotNow, the coalition that organized the historic march in Washington, DC and ShutItDown4Palestine initiative (which include national Palestinian organizations such as Palestinian Youth Movement), and Palestinian groups that have strong bases of support in individual cities such as Within Our Lifetime in New York. As galvanizing as JVP’s actions have been, marches led by Jews and Arabs organizing together have even greater potential to increase participation from masses of people across the country. They will also be more difficult for the state to respond to with police violence and extreme criminal charges.

It is also essential that the movement continues to pull in support from the labor movement which has a strategic power to shut down U.S. imperialism and Israel’s offensive. We have seen some efforts, particularly from the Starbucks union, which highlighted the struggle for Palestine as part of their Red Cup Rebellion. This labor action for Palestine could have been even more disruptive had it been supported by the sectors of the movement that have been organizing protests in the Jewish and Arab diaspora.

Whatever challenges the movement may currently face, it is a feat that groups like JVP continue to organize historic protests which bring new people into the movement and cut through Israel’s lie that support for Palestine is antisemitic. When history is written, it will no doubt include the time banners reading “THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING” and “LASTING CEASEFIRE” were sprawled across the Manhattan Bridge while hundreds of protesters sat down to block traffic. It should also include examples of all the movement’s leaderships — Palestinian, Jewish, socialists, students, and workers — coordinating together to make millions of people shut down the streets against attacks on our right to protest and against the genocide of Palestine.

The post A Pause in Genocide Is Not Enough: Jewish Voice for Peace Shuts Down the Manhattan Bridge appeared first on Left Voice.

Three Palestinian students were shot last night in what appears to be a hate crime. Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdel Hamid, and Tahseen Ahmed were on their way to a family dinner in Burlington, Vermont when an unidentified shooter opened fire, seriously injuring them. The three men were from Palestine but are currently studying at American universities. This attack comes in the midst of a striking rise in Islamophobia directly tied to the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. 

This violence and harrassment is directly tied to the more generalized anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian rhetoric being put forward by the media and politicians in response to the war. From attacks on pro-Palestine protests — such as when the Senate deemed them all antisemitic — to censuring Rashida Tlaib, the political class has sown the seeds of this violence by painting Palestinians and their allies as violent anti-semites and tying themselves into knots to justify Israel’s genocide. Some politicians have gone further, like Florida State Representative Michelle Salzman who responded to the rhetorical question “how many [dead Palestinians] will be enough?” by shouting “all of them” in the Florida State Legislature.   Congressman Brian Mast, also of Florida, questioned whether or not innocent Palestinian civilians existed. 

This rhetoric is in keeping with the rhetoric of Israeli leaders themselves who have declared that they are fighting “human animals”  and the forces of “darkness.” This type of dehumanization of Palestinians feeds Islamophobia across the world. 

This atmosphere of anti-Palestinian rhetoric has already led to hate crimes against Palestinians with the most striking being the murder of Wadea Al Fayoume who was stabbed 36 times by his landlord in an Islamphobic attack.  The Council on American-Islamic Relations has reported that they saw a 216 percent jump in requests for help and bias incidents following the start of the Israeli offensive against Gaza. 

As hate crimes grow in response to the Israeli war on Gaza, our movement for Palestinian liberation must take a strong stand against these attacks and the politicians who enable them. Our movement is against both Islamophobia and anti-semitism. We must also continue to fight against Israel’s bloody siege and campaign of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, demanding a free Palestine, and an end to all attacks on our democratic right to protest and voice our opposition to the genocide. Justice for Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdel Hamid, and Tahseen Ahmed, and for all victims of bigoted attacks!

The post The Three Palestinians Shot in Burlington Are Victims of Rising Islamophobia appeared first on Left Voice.

The following is a speech given by Left Voice member and CUNY PhD student Olivia Wood at the PSC-CUNY (AFT Local 2334) Graduate Center chapter’s “Rally for a Living Wage” on November 15. Read the written version and watch the video below.

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My name’s Olivia, I’m a 6th year student in the English program, and I’m a member of Rank and File Action and Left Voice. If grad assistants and adjuncts at CUNY made anywhere near a living wage, I would have my PhD already. I wouldn’t have had to work sometimes as many as 4 additional jobs in a year — two of them being additional part time CUNY jobs —  in order to support my family and pay the medical bills I have for my disability, hundreds of dollars per month of which aren’t covered by my CUNY health insurance. 

Adjunct faculty teach more than half of all CUNY classes. This is because it’s much cheaper to hire a part-time faculty member to teach a full-time course load than to hire a full-time faculty member. We are facing decades of underfunding of our university, which hurts both students and workers. This is a policy choice — a policy choice explicitly intended to deprive New York’s working class, especially New Yorkers of color, of a high quality education, a policy choice that has continued under both Republicans and Democrats. There’s always money for the military and for police, but never money for healthcare and education.

You know the things they say about us — that CUNY in general and the Graduate Center in particular is just a bunch of queers, a bunch of Marxist social justice warriors, that we’re just mooching off the public dime — they say these things to delegitimize us, to justify even further cuts, to drive wedges between us and the working class of New York. But we are the working class of New York, and we educate the working class of New York, and the working class of New York includes queers and includes Marxists, and we should never apologize for that. 

These same accusations are also being used to delegitimize campus protests for Palestine: mocking student activists for being clueless radicals, and justifying giving more money to the police to surveil us. They’re also perpetuating serious islamophobic stereotypes and calling any criticism of Israel antisemitic. All of these arguments are connected to one another — and the intended result is to gut CUNY from within. 

Sylvia Rivera gave a speech in 2001 called “Our armies are rising and we are getting stronger” — and that’s even more true now. The labor movement is growing in power, especially the higher ed labor movement, especially the grad worker labor movement. We are living in a new moment. We’re also living in a new moment for student movements — look at the campus protests for Palestine all over the country. Our university and many, many other universities are repressing both students and workers who speak out for their own rights and for justice in Palestine. That’s why after this, some folks are going straight uptown to the rally at Columbia, to stand with SJP and JVP, who have been suspended from Columbia’s campus. If they touch one of us, they touch all of us. But all of this repression is a sign of the bosses’ fear. 

As they say in the great labor movement film of my generation, Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, “if you let one ant stand up, then they all might stand up, and there goes our way of life.” Through this repression, they’re trying to keep us from standing up. But we are standing up anyways. And it’s our duty to keep standing up: to organize our coworkers and classmates in class struggle, to organize toward a strike. Because our power is in our position as workers and as students, and this power — the power to withhold our labor, the power of a strike —- is what we need to use for everything — to fight for a living wage for all of us, for free tuition, for an end to the genocide in Palestine, and more.

The post Student Workers Stand Up for CUNY and Palestine appeared first on Left Voice.

According to the United Nations, 788,800 women, girls, and boys in Gaza have been displaced from their homes; 2,056 women have become widows and have become the sole heads of households; 7,401 girls, boys, and adolescents have lost both of their parents; 50,000 women are pregnant, and 5,522 of these women have a due date in the next month.

The colonialist occupation of the State of Israel and the current bombings and displacements only exacerbate the situation of Palestinian women who already face living in a society with strong patriarchal traits. The women’s movement in Palestine had already been fighting  for their rights in their own society and culture and in the very harsh context of apartheid supported by Israel. Today the situation is catastrophic.

According to Addameer, which is a Palestinian Human Rights organization, in the last fifty years around 10,000 women have been arrested or detained and the majority are subjected to specific attacks in relation to their gender that include insults, threats, humiliating body searches, and even sexual abuse and other forms of torture. For the most part, like men in the same circumstances, these detentions are carried out as “administrative detentions,” which allows the Israeli military to hold prisoners indefinitely on secret information without charging them or allowing them to stand trial. This situation can be sustained for a period of six months, after which the arrest can be renewed for an indeterminate number of times.

Remember Their Names: The Personal Stories of Dehumanization at the Hands of the Colonizers 

If the numbers alone aren’t terrifying enough, the first-person accounts are even more moving. “The nights in Gaza have become an endless nightmare. Sleep is a luxury we cannot afford and death lurks around every corner,” says Nourhan, who participates in a youth forum for civil rights in the Palestinian territory. She is a lawyer, she is 29 years old, and she refused to leave her house until all the houses around her were destroyed by the bombings. It was then that she sought refuge in her parents’ home. But a few days later, she also had to flee during the night, in the middle of an air raid, with her entire family. “Survival is only the first step,” says Nourhan, because she is convinced that “the scars of war would persist long after the Israeli airstrikes stop.”

Nourhan’s  story is like any other in Gaza. Perhaps there are stories that are even more horrifying. Nourhan has a face, a name, some personal anecdotes that must be reconstructed, imagined, disseminated to combat the dehumanization of the Palestinian people that the Zionist State undertakes to perpetrate genocide without scruples. It is necessary to tell more stories and remember more actual names.

What is the memory of the occupied territory, of the people subjected to colonization, of those who lost the battles, of those who were displaced, eliminated, silenced, of those who do not even have the right to exist in the founding story of the State of Israel? It is the memory preserved and talked about from generation to generation, in the streets, within diaspora families, among survivors and refugees, and even in poetry.

The Exiled, Tortured, and Murdered Poets Who Sing for Freedom

Rafeef Ziadah, a Palestinian poet born in a refugee camp in Lebanon wrote:

I am three generations of mending tents and homes. / Of picking up and starting again. Suitcases and keys./ To save the leftovers because the siege looms over us and always arrives./ To sleep on airport floors./ To memorize the Immigration questions and the maps.

Her family, originally from Haifa and Jaffa, was massacred and displaced during the Nakba of 1948. As refugees in Lebanon, they had to flee again when Israel invaded the country in 1982. After living in different places in the Mediterranean region, Rafeef settled in the United States and Canada. She currently resides in Great Britain. Rafeef’s story is surely replicated by thousands of others, with other names, and other words.

But poets are not immune from torture and death either. In October 2015, poet and activist Dareen Tatour was jailed for writing a poem that went viral. She remained under house arrest until 2018, after which she was sentenced to five months in jail and six months of probation for “incitement to violence.” Her poem said:

[blockquote] In Jerusalem, I dressed in my wounds and inhaled my own pain, / I carried the soul of this Palestinian Arab in the palm of my hand. / I will not succumb to the supposed “peaceful solution” / I will not abandon this fight / until I drive them out of my land./ They will have no escape./ Resist, my people, we have to resist them.

In one of the first bombings of this new escalation in Gaza, the Palestinian feminist writer Heba Abu died. On October 21 she had posted a message that said: “If we die, know that we are satisfied and firm. And tell the world, in our name, that we are just people, on the side of truth.” That same day, shortly before the news of her murder became known, she had written her last poem:

The night in the city is dark/except for the glow of missiles/ silent,/ except for the sound of bombing/terrifying,/except for the reassuring promise of prayer/ black,/ except for the light of the martyrs./ Good night.

A Women’s Movement That Fights on Several Fronts 

In 1920, three years after the writing of the Balfour Declaration, Muslim, Christian and secular women organized to protest against this treaty. ¹The Balfour Declaration, of November 2, 1917, was the British government’s support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in the region of Palestine, which, at that time, was a territory that was part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1929 they held a congress of Arab Women of Palestine. And even before the creation of the State of Israel, they founded a clandestine organization that transported weapons and supplies to the rebels. In 1936 there was even a general strike in which women mobilized against British colonialism that was driving Israeli migration to Palestine. In the 1960s, a new generation chose the path of armed struggle. Of this Palestinian youth, perhaps the best known internationally is Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose image achieved great popularity when in 1969 she hijacked a plane heading from Rome to Tel Aviv, diverting it to Damascus, where it was blown up after all its passengers were evacuated without suffering damage. A year later, after several surgeries to modify her appearance, she participated in another similar operation that was thwarted by Israeli security forces.

In the 1980s, the unavoidable debate in the women’s movement was between the options of fighting for their civil rights and gender equality or facing the occupation and apartheid of Israeli colonialist policy. However, these disputes  were  resolved in practice. During the first Intifada, women participated in the rear and also fought against the Israeli military forces. In some way, the fight against national oppression is a space of freedom for those who also face patriarchal oppression. The women’s movement gains more visibility, mobilizations are organized for their own demands, and legislative proposals are made in favor of women. But towards the end of the decade, the strengthening of Islamic fundamentalism represents a break in the development of the women’s movement. In the second Intifada, the participation of women was reduced. While Israel detains many Palestinian men to pressure the combatants and intimidate the population, that in turn reinforces the control over their own families with the excuse of protection.

But Palestine has not been left out of the recent mobilizations of women against sexist violence that spread across the world from the #NiUnaMenos movement in Argentina to the #YoSíTeCreo of the Spanish State. In 2019, the brutal femicide of the young Israa Ghrayeb, in the West Bank, sparked a wave of mobilizations. ²Israa had fallen from the second floor of her family home, escaping from the beating from  her brother for posting a photo on Instagram with her partner, whom she would marry the following day. Seriously injured, from the hospital where she was hospitalized, she again published on social networks “I am strong and I want to live”, to which several men in the family reacted by beating her again in the same place where she was hospitalized until, finally, she died, because of the injuries. Thousands of Palestinian women, as well as those from other Arab countries, shouted in the streets against oppressive cultural mandates, chanting “There is no liberated homeland without the liberation of women” and “We are all Israa” 

Ending the Genocide in Gaza Is Also a Feminist Issue

Those of us who fight against all forms of oppression and exploitation, convinced that we must put an end to the atrocities of capitalism, patriarchy, racism and colonialism, are not alien to the fight for survival that the subjected Palestinian people are waging today against the genocide of the State of Israel.

On social networks, feminists who speak out in solidarity with Palestine, receive insults, grievances and threats from anti-rights, conservative and far-right sectors who mock when they find the word “feminism” linked to the struggle of a people which is usually reduced exclusively to some of their armed organizations and theocratic political parties – with which we do not agree – that are deeply reactionary with regard to the life and rights of women. Furthermore, the persecution and criminalization perpetrated by Zionism against any manifestation of support for the Palestinian cause is the order of the day: from censorship and smear campaigns to trials, police repression and arrests.

But none of that can stop millions of Jewish and non-Jewish people, who are rising up around the world to embrace Palestine, shouting “not in my name,” “ceasefire now,” “stop the genocide in Gaza.” And among those millions of people, we feminists want our voices to be heard on November 25, because genocide is the most brutal form of violence against women. ³Follow the news about the calls in Argentina on Instagram @panyrosasargentina. The people born from its womb are facing elimination by the brutal force of the Israeli colonialist state, armed to the teeth by North American imperialism and sponsored by the European Union. But women will continue to give birth to new generations who will “mend tents and homes” until the land that belongs to them, from the river to the sea, is free again.

Today, those of us who can afford to sleep want to awaken all our strength to say, in the streets of all the cities of the world, “Enough!”

The post Women in Gaza: “Sleep is a Luxury we Cannot Afford” appeared first on Left Voice.

More than 40 days after the start of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip, the ongoing genocide continues unabated. Millions of people have protested throughout the world in recent weeks to demand an end to the massacre and express their solidarity with the Palestinian people. These protests have been especially massive in the Arab world and in imperialist countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and other European countries.

As previously discussed, Left Voice and the Trotskyist Fraction are participating in the movement, seeking to expand it and develop self-organization, with a program to confront the imperialist governments who are key allies of the Zionist State of Israel. We want to put forward a combative and anti-imperialist perspective toward the student movement, and for the working class to intervene with its own methods of struggle, through strikes and blockades, against arms shipments, and imperialist enterprises. As internationalist socialists, we consider that the struggle for the liberation of Palestine against Zionist colonialism and imperialism a fundamental battle. At the same time, we maintain that it will not be possible to achieve full Palestinian self-determination without fighting for a socialist perspective.

In the struggle of the Palestinian people oppressed by Zionist colonialism and imperialism, we place ourselves unconditionally with the resistance of the oppressed people. We do so on the basis of a program of political independence with respect to all the bourgeois sectors in the region, since we consider that this is the only way to win the struggle for self-determination. Unlike the populist currents, which conflate the just defense of an oppressed people with its circumstantial leadership, we polemicize with the different political strategies that historically have had weight within the Palestinian resistance. In this article we discuss some of them, seeking to answer the question: how do we wage a victorious struggle for a free Palestine after 75 years of Zionist occupation? Why do we fight for a working class and socialist Palestine?

We then address four dominant strategies, which we define as the two-state solution, the armed struggle for a bourgeois Islamist-nationalist Palestine, the illusion of democratic revolution, and the struggle for a workers’ and socialist Palestine.

The Failure of the Two-State Solution

First, we will discuss the two-state solution. Institutions such as the UN support this strategy, as well as imperialist states that pay lip service to supporting this “solution.” It is associated with the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and advocated by reformist and social-democratic currents in much of the world.

The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin under the auspices of U.S. President Bill Clinton, recently marked its 30th anniversary. The great promise of Oslo was the two-state solution: a Palestinian state (in a minority part of its historic territories) living peacefully side by side with the State of Israel. Was it possible?

At the time, Palestinian intellectual Edward Said defined the Oslo accords as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.” The PLO for the first time recognized the state of Israel, renouncing its historical program of a secular democratic state throughout the historic territory of Palestine. While Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, the creation of the PNA meant legitimizing the occupation in exchange for a limited pseudo-administration of Israeli-controlled, geographically separated swathes of territory in Gaza and the West Bank, with no free access to basic resources such as water, electricity, or international humanitarian aid. 

In other words, the illusion of Palestians having a state of their own, while settlers continue to advance on territories legally allotted to Palestine. As Historian Rashid Khalidi put it: “Oslo has been a great success if you believe in colonization, ethnic cleansing and land grabbing.” The failure of the Oslo Accords paved the way for the Second Intifada in 2000, when a new combative generation, which had experienced the great frustration of the two-state solution, entered the stage. Then, in 2006, Hamas, which opposed the Oslo Accords, won the elections in Gaza.

Why was the negotiated two-state solution impossible? First of all, it can be explained by the character of the State of Israel itself. Ilan Pappé and other historians have pointed out the specificity of its establishment as a colonial state. The old European colonial states had their main center of gravity in the metropolises, while colonial armies subdued large populations and nations abroad. In the case of Israel, it was founded as a settler colonial state, whose existence depends on an ongoing occupation. In other modern settler colonial states, such as South Africa during apartheid, the native Black population was brutally subjugated for use as semi-slave labor (and constituted the main battalions of the South African working class). In Israel, on the other hand, the Zionists carried out massive ethnic cleansing, expelling most of the native population from their own territory, with the aim of constituting an ethnically and religiously “pure” state. In fact, more than four million Palestinians currently live outside Palestine, about one million less than the total Palestinian population living in Gaza and the West Bank.

At the end of World War II, the reactionary “solution” that imperialism found for dealing with Jewish oppression after the barbarity of the Holocaust was the creation of Israel, for which it had the invaluable support of the Stalinist USSR. Since then, the Zionist state became the main imperialist enclave in the region. As an artificially created state in the heart of a region with a vast Arab population sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, the Zionist state was built as a militarized fortress, financed by the United States and its NATO allies.

Pappé has also pointed out that settler colonialism involves the dehumanization of the colonized peoples. For the State of Israel, every Palestinian must be perceived as a “savage” or a “potential terrorist,” every Palestinian territory as a theater of war. The expansionist and warlike logic of Israel is part of its DNA and is therefore incompatible with the self-determination of the Palestinian people, as has been demonstrated over the last 75 years.

Hamas’ Strategy and the Role of the Arab Bourgeoisies

Secondly, let’s consider the strategy of Hamas and other groups in the region, which deploy different methods of armed struggle in the service of a bourgeois Islamist-nationalist strategy.

The historic betrayal of Fatah and the PLO in signing the Oslo accords gave way to Hamas’ victory in the 2006 legislative elections. Hamas’ control of the Gaza Strip was met with Israel’s total blockade of a population of over 2 million people, transforming it into the world’s largest open-air prison.

Hamas is a populist Islamist organization that since its founding in 1987 has gone through different political moments. Its founding charter includes the goal of an Islamic state — which it has not abandoned — although for the 2006 elections it presented itself with a more pragmatic program that could be evaluated as “reformist from the social and bourgeois nationalist point of view regarding the Palestinian conflict.”

This bourgeois Islamist-nationalist strategy has developed through various tactics of armed struggle over the years. This ranges from suicide bombings in the 1990s and 2000s, to the confrontation of its militias with the Israeli army, missile launches, and the recent incursion (together with other Palestinian resistance groups) into Israeli territory on October 7. The October 7 resistance action against the colonial occupation was partially directed against military targets, or those directly linked to the occupation forces. However, the other part of it, such as attacks on the music festival in Reim or on the non-combatant civilian population in Kibbutzim, is part of a strategy that we do not share.

We have discussed previously that unconditionally defending the resistance of the Palestinian people against Israel, beyond its circumstantial leaderships, is not in contradiction to questioning the methods, program and strategy of Hamas. Their strategy is one that focuses on seeking the unity and support of sectors of the Arab bourgeoisies, which is the opposite of fighting to develop class struggle in the Arab world. This is expressed, for example, in its affinity with the Hezbollah militias (and thus with the Iranian theocracy) and with the reactionary monarchy of Qatar.

However, in addition to being the hegemonic current of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas acts as the political administration of the Gaza Strip. Within Gaza Hamas has developed an extensive network of social assistance, schools, and hospitals that have given it an important social base among the Gazan population. In the last 15 years, it has imposed an increasing Islamization of Gaza (although Christians and secular sectors also live there) and a repressive regime against political and social dissidence, violently suppressing demonstrations or protests against poverty. In recent times, this has given rise to the emergence of youth sectors critical of Hamas.

By its methods, program and strategy, Hamas does not seek to develop the self-organization of the Palestinian people. Nor does it seek developing unity between the Palestinians and Arab workers and peasants, nor with anti-Zionist Jewish sectors. Instead, it seeks to tie the Palestinians’ destiny to agreements with the reactionary bourgeoisies and theocratic monarchies of the region.

Democratic Revolution or the Struggle for a Secular, Free, Workers’ and Socialist Palestine?

Finally, let us consider what we can call a stageist or democratic revolutionary path, as opposed to the struggle for a free, secular, workers’ and socialist Palestine.

After the resounding failure of the two-state solution, among several Palestinian, Arab, and Israeli anti-Zionist intellectuals, the idea is growing that it is necessary to fight for a single, non-Zionist state, where Arabs and Jews coexist peacefully, a secular and democratic Palestine. The proposal would be to press internationally for a “de-Zionization” of the State of Israel. Even sectors that claim to be socialists maintain that this could be a “first stage” in the democratization of Palestine, and then fighting for socialism later on. However, as we have explained above, the racist and colonialist character of the state of Israel, which acts as the main enclave of imperialism in the region, makes this idea a totally illusory goal in the framework of present-day capitalism.

Fighting against Zionism and Israel’s colonialism means not only confronting one of the most heavily armed militaries in the world, but also fighting against imperialism in the region. Fighting for a free Palestine means not only guaranteeing the right of return of more than four million Palestinians of the diaspora. It also includes the return of their lands, where today there are settlements and Israeli cities, large real estate and tourist conglomerates, and the return or rebuilding of their homes, which were taken away or destroyed. A free and democratic Palestine also means ending the apartheid regime for Palestinian and Arab-Israeli workers, who are used as “second-class” labor, guaranteeing full civil, social and labor rights for all, regardless of their national origin, ethnicity or religion. This implies questioning an important source of profits for Israel’s large economic and financial groups. In other words, to put an end to the Zionist state and the oppression of the Palestinian people, it is necessary to destroy its material bases. Neither the Israeli colonialist bourgeoisie, nor imperialism will allow peaceful progress along this road. Then, what social forces can fight for that perspective?

In an article in Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, Daphna Thier polemicizes with the idea of a socialist Palestine, pointing out that there is no possibility of fighting for such a perspective given the Zionist character of the Israeli working class. This argument is put forward by different authors, who point out that, since the constitution of the Jewish working class in Israel was based on the colonial character of the State, it will never be an ally for the Palestinian people. Indeed, the Israeli working class adheres overwhelmingly to zionism, going back to the founding of the State of Israel. This changed the dynamic that had opened up in the 1930s, when for example, the Trotskyists developed some experiences of joint organization of Jewish and Arab workers.

The Histadrut workers’ center, founded in 1920 to defend the interests of Jewish workers, became in the following decades a bastion of the defense of colonial and Zionist interests, refusing to organize Arab-Israeli workers, upholding the racist ideology of the occupying state. This can even be seen recently in the workers’ demonstrations and strikes that developed against Netanyahu and his judicial reform. They had the enormous political limit of not questioning Zionism

and rejecting any questioning of the occupation of Palestine by Israel, as was critically pointed out by anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals. However, this does not mean that it is impossible for some sectors of the working class to break with Zionism in conditions of radicalization of the class struggle in the region. This is a political struggle to be fought, since right now they act as a reactionary pole in the face of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. An indicator that this may change is that pacifist anti-Zionist sectors are beginning to emerge among the Israeli and Jewish population and intelligentsia in the world.

For the aforementioned author, however, the Zionism of the Israeli working class seems to be fixed and unchangeable. Thus, from her point of view, this means that it is only possible to seek allies for the Palestinian people among “democratic” sectors in Arab countries. That is to say, bourgeois and petty bourgeois sectors, workers and popular sectors, who would be willing to advance democratic reforms. However, this approach omits the deep class contradictions in Arab societies, with bourgeoisies that have enriched themselves through enormous business deals with imperialism and other regional powers, imposing reactionary regimes and theocratic monarchies. As we saw during the Arab Spring, the Arab bourgeoisies allied with imperialism chose time and again to bloodily crush workers’ and popular protests, blocking any kind of real “democratization” of those societies, before workers’ and popular self-organization and mobilization could develop.

The Fight Against Imperialism

The State of Israel is the United States’ most important strategic partner in the Middle East. Trump and Biden are to some extent competing to assure the American Zionist organizations that they will defend their interests unconditionally. The crisis of hegemony of the United States, especially in light of the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan only two years ago, makes it all the more important to maintain its strategic ally in a region that has gone through revolts, civil wars, reactionary wars and multiple instabilities in the last decade. Even more so in the face of Iran and the challenges to its hegemony from Russia and China.

In turn, imperialism and its multinationals are key to guaranteeing profits for the Arab bourgeoisies, who enrich themselves with the resources and natural goods of the region such as oil, gas pipelines, mining, fishing, and agribusiness, through the plundering of the peasantry and the brutal exploitation of a large native and migrant working class from Asia and Africa. The interests of the Arab bourgeoisies are intertwined with those of the imperialist powers — the United States and Europe — since the beginning of capitalist development in the region. Hence they are a social force incapable of truly confronting imperialism and Zionism, with which they have coexisted, beyond some occasional confrontations, throughout the past 75 years. In fact, they have been advancing in the “normalization” of relations with Israel, following the course of the Abraham Accords promoted by Trump, even against the majority of people across the Arab world who are in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Therefore, the struggle against Zionism cannot be separated from the struggle against imperialism. More generally, as the Arab Spring demonstrated, it is not possible to win lasting democratic change against dictatorships, reactionary monarchies, and Bonapartist regimes without uniting this struggle with the fight for structural democratic demands (such as land and housing) as well as profound social and national demands.

Returning to the question of which social forces can fight alongside the Palestinian people for their full self-determination, we cannot look to the Arab bourgeoisies. We must look to the millions of workers, peasants and popular sectors of the Middle East and North Africa, who in recent years have seen their living conditions further deteriorate, as a result of the structural adjustment plans of imperialism and the IMF, applied by increasingly authoritarian regimes.

Across the Arab world, a large part of the population sees the Palestinian cause as their own, which is why millions have mobilized in recent days. Palestine remains the “open wound” of the Arab nationalist consciousness and a focus for expressing the anger against colonial and imperialist grievances in the region. For this reason, as is commonly said, the road to Palestinian self-determination passes through Beirut and Cairo. This is not because of the support of the reactionary bourgeoisies, but because of the potential strength of the working class and peasants in the region.

In turn, millions of workers from populations oppressed by imperialism are part of the working and even middle classes in imperialist countries. The great empathy with the Palestinian struggle is also fueled by the rejection of Islamophobia and racism in these countries, which have increased in the last period. This plurinational, multiethnic, and diverse composition of the working class and popular sectors in imperialist countries is fueling the huge movement in solidarity with Palestine internationally, with massive demonstrations in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Spanish State and elsewhere in recent weeks. Smaller actions have been taken up such as dock workers’ and transport unions in Barcelona and Belgium refusing to ship arms to Israel and healthcare workers in many countries showing solidarity. These actions, although still small and symbolic, together with thousands of students and anti-Zionist Jewish organizations mobilizing, pave the way to grow and amplify the movement.

To advance the struggle for true self-determination of Palestine requires the unity of a strong international anti-imperialist movement and the revolutionary struggle of the working class in the Arab countries, together with the Palestinian people and those Jewish workers who break with Zionism. The consistent development of this struggle poses, as we have been pointing out, the construction of a workers’ and socialist Palestine, where Arabs and Jews can coexist democratically and peacefully, as part of a federation of socialist republics of the Middle East.

Originally Published in Spanish on November 18 in La Izquierda Diario.

Translation by Molly Rosenzweig

The post Palestinian Self-Determination and the Fight for Socialism appeared first on Left Voice.

Today, pro-Palestine protestors disrupted Thanksgiving Day Parades in New York City and Detroit, all sending the same message: end genocide, don’t celebrate it. 

In Detroit, protestors marched in front of the Thanksgiving Day parade route carrying banners reading: “From Turtle Island to Palestine, genocide is a crime” and “Detroit stands with Gaza,” giving a spotlight to Palestine during Israel’s ongoing atrocities.

In Manhattan, protestors disrupted the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, an annual corporate parade watched nationwide, with signs and banners reading “Genocide then, genocide now.”  Climate and Pro-Palestine activists glued themselves to the ground in front of a Sinclair Oil Corporation float, the big green Dinosaur. Protestors sat in front of the Ronald McDonalds float, calling out McDonald’s support for Israel. Afterwards, a massive crowd marched through the streets of Manhattan, denouncing Starbucks, Microsoft, and others, and demanding an end to U.S. aid to Israel and the Israeli occupation and siege, and a free Palestine from the river to the sea. In New York City, police arrested over 20 demonstrators. 

On one float stood members of the Wampanoag nation, the Indigenous group that was part of the Indigenous-European contact upon which the Thanksgiving myth of Indigenous-settler harmony was founded over 400 years ago. Several people on the Wampanoag float raised the Palestinian flag, which appeared on television screens nationwide and demonstrated the inextricable link between Indigenous struggles worldwide. Like Palestinians resisting Israel’s ongoing apartheid, settler-colonialism, and genocide, the Indigenous people of North America refuse to allow for the erasure of the history of Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery upon which the United States was founded.

The Thanksgiving protests come in the context of an announced (but not yet enforced) four-day “humanitarian pause” of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, which many have noted was conveniently scheduled over an American holiday weekend based on genocide and consumerism. According to Politico, the Biden administration was wary of such a pause because “it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.” 

The temporary ceasefire is the result of the massive mobilizations all over the world demanding a ceasefire, as well as the mobilization in Israel with people demanding that Netanyahu bring the hostages back, with some taking a pacifist approach and demanding end to the bombing.

We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that this pause will be the end of the atrocities. Israel has made clear that it intends to continue the bombings after these four days and the brutal apartheid state and occupation remains. The brief pause has nothing to do with humanitarianism, and everything to do with trying to pacify the politicized youth participating in the Palestine liberation movement in the streets.

The demonstrators today showed us that, now more than ever, we cannot turn our eyes away from the horror that continues to unfold in occupied Palestine.  The only way to truly end the occupation of Palestine is the international working class uniting to demand the end of the genocide as well as the racist apartheid state of Israel.

The post Protestors Disrupt Thanksgiving Parade With One Message: End Genocide, Don’t Celebrate It appeared first on Left Voice.

Since the start of the Israeli offensive on Gaza, there has been an upsurge in resistance to U.S. support to the Israeli apartheid state. This has been particularly strong on college campuses, with students organizing walkouts, sit-ins, and protests in solidarity with Palestine. These actions and internationalism continue the spirit and legacy of the student movement against the Vietnam War and against apartheid South Africa.

Students and academic workers have experienced massive repression from university administrations, from the government, and from Zionists both on and off of campus. SJP was banned from Florida and both SJP and JVP were suspended from Columbia University. Professors are being called into disciplinary meetings across the country.

But students, faculty, and staff are standing up against this repression and uniting to fight back. The following pledge, signed by dozens of pro-Palestine organizations and counting, states that we will unite to fight against the repression under the principle that if you touch one of us, we all rise up. It launches a network of students, faculty, and staff fighting repression on their college campuses. This unity of activists– from academic workers to students, SJP’s and JVP’s, Black Lives Matter student groups and more– is essential for the upcoming struggles against repression and for a free Palestine.

Cuny4Palestine, National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), as well as dozens of local SJP’s launched the statement, alongside dozens of anti-Zionist Jewish student organizations, including various Jewish Voice for Peace chapters. A few faculty organizations have also signed including CUNY’s Rank and File Action.

We invite students, faculty and staff to sign, share and join the struggle against repression on our campuses.To sign the solidarity pledge as an individual or on behalf of an organization, please fill out this form.

***

This is an urgent call to all university students, faculty, and staff of conscience across the United States. 

As over 12,000 people have been murdered in Palestine, and as we face strong repression by the U.S. government and our university administrations in speaking up against these atrocities, we pledge to stand together to defend our right to speak out against genocide and over 75 years of settler colonial violence, dispossession, and erasure.  

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is worsening by the day. There have been more bombs dropped in Gaza in the last three weeks than in a whole year of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. This is in a territory that is among the most densely populated in the world, largely comprised of refugees from the 1948 “Nakba” which established the settler colonial state of Israel. Roughly half of Gaza’s population are children. Humanitarian aid has been repeatedly blocked from entering Gaza by Israel, a common pattern following bombing raids on the already besieged territory. Hospitals and churches sheltering displaced people have been deliberately targeted, and journalists have been assassinated along with their families. Recently, Israel strategically bombed telecommunications in order to impose a total blackout on Gaza. 

This is genocide. In addition to its decades long funding for Israel (over $240 billion since 1948), the U.S. has been directly involved in these latest war crimes, with plans to provide an additional $14 billion on top of the yearly $3.8 billion of military funding, provision of weapons, troops, and two aircraft carriers as well as strategic support to the Israeli government.

Although Palestine solidarity organizing has been steadily growing across the world over the past two decades with the rise of the BDS movement, we are witnessing an outpouring of global solidarity with Palestine with this latest escalation of Israel’s settler colonial violence. In places like France, and Germany and Australia, protests in solidarity with Palestine have been banned and criminalized, but people are openly and courageously protesting in defiance of these bans. In the United States, we have seen massive protests and direct actions by Palestinian grassroots and Jewish-led organizations standing against the genocide in Gaza and for Palestinian liberation. Universities are a central hub of activity, with protests and solidarity statements being organized not only by Arab and Muslim students and workers, but also by Jewish students and workers, as well as people of conscience from other religious and ethnic communities.

This outpouring of solidarity has been met with an unprecedented wave of repression, both from university administrations and the state and from Zionist forces within and outside of the university. Student organizers are facing targeted harassment: billboard trucks with hateful slogans and huge photographs doxxed and vilified individual student organizers at Harvard, Columbia, and CUNY, resulting in death threats; at Brooklyn College, a city councilwoman showed up to a student protest with a gun tucked prominently into her waistband; professors at Cornell and several other schools are facing campaigns to get them fired; students are having job offers revoked and precarious adjunct faculty are being threatened with the loss of their contracts if they speak out in support of Palestine. US lawmakers are bolstering this repression — Ron DeSantis is trying to ban Students for Justice in Palestine from forming clubs at Florida’s universities, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution on October 26 denouncing student protests for Palestine as “antisemitic, repugnant, and morally contemptible,” and the Biden administration has pledged Departments of Justice and Homeland Security support for surveilling student activists. More than 100 institutions of higher education have signed on to a “coalition” that effectively criminalizes students organizing in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. We – students, faculty and staff at universities – vow to defend each other against Zionist attacks coming from within and outside of our universities. 

While the consent for these unprecedented acts of repression is being manufactured in large part through the (re)deployment of existing discourses – such as equating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, and a (re)deployment of the “War of Terror” discourse that vilified all Muslims and Arabs as “terrorists”, and that insisted that people were either “with us or against us” – these discourses are also being transformed in horrific and dangerous ways. The new discourse explicitly dehumanizes Palestinians, virtually celebrating their ethnic cleansing by Israel, and goes much further than the repression of political speech by seeking to criminalize even the public expression of grief by and on behalf of Palestinians. The humanity and strength of the Palestinian people continues to shine through and inspire us to keep fighting despite all attempts to silence our political speech and criminalize our grief. 

We vehemently reject the attempt by those in power to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. As has been pointed out by many Jewish organizations and individuals, this is an outrageous betrayal of longstanding Jewish traditions of advocating for social justice and resisting state oppression in its worst forms. Jewish people have been and continue to be some of the most ardent and active Palestine solidarity organizers on and off our campuses. 

We condemn genocide and all forms of racism including antisemitism and Islamophobia. We – students and academic workers – have the right to speak up against injustice without fear of retaliation, and the cynical weaponization of antisemitism is designed to undermine that right. We will not be silenced. 

We recognize that conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is a cynical move designed to drive a wedge between those who practice solidarity with the Palestinian people and the broader left. We reject the idea that one can be progressive “except for Palestine”. In the words of Angela Davis, ‘Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world’. 

The recent attack on the right of students, faculty, and staff to dissent is part of a long history of the criminalization of students and academic workers in the United States — a history filled with surveillance, infiltration, and repression that were  intensified during the McCarthy era and in the 60’s and 70’s when Black and Puerto Rican liberation and anti-war movements were the targets. More recently, Muslim students have been surveilled and harassed by campus authorities, police departments, and the FBI in the context of the “War of Terror,” and Black activists as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. We condemn these tactics by police and university administrations. They have no place in our universities or in our society. These tactics must stop, and we, collectively, will stop them.

Today we say enough is enough!

We know that the power of the working class and oppressed people of the world relies on our strength as a collective. Together, we are far stronger than our oppressors. Today, more than ever, we must stand united alongside the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and against the violence of Israeli settler colonialism. The Israeli settler colonial apartheid state is supported materially and politically by U.S. imperialism. We oppose this support, as we oppose the US’s imperialist war-machine in other parts of the world. 

We stand with our Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students and colleagues, our professors and our classmates, against the fear-mongering and racist rhetoric being circulated in the mainstream media by politicians and university administrations alike. These racist assaults and the rise in attacks against people perceived as Muslim/Arab/Palestinian that they have enabled, has justifiably produced fear and insecurity among our comrades.

We stand against this political repression as we stand against all racism and religious discrimination and with one another, across the U.S. and internationally — wherever those who are protesting on behalf of Palestine are being repressed by their governments and other powerful institutions. We are proud of our internationalism and of the bonds of our solidarity which stretch as far back in history as the repression we have faced. Powerful institutions attempt  to suppress us because they fear our collective strength and the moral righteousness of our cause. But our cause is righteous, and it will prevail. 

We pledge:

1. To defend the rights of pro-Palestinian campus groups- in particular Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)and  groups advocating for BDS, both of which are under constant attack;
2. To defend the right to political speech on our campuses, including speech in defense of Palestinian liberation, as well as the right to protest and engage in acts of civil disobedience, which have been central to all social justice movements in the US and beyond;
3. To defend each other from harassment, intimidation, suspensions, firings, and other forms of repression;
4. To speak out against the genocidal campaign Israel is waging against Palestinians and the broader settler colonial project of which it is a part, and to force the U.S. government to stop funding and defending this genocide and Israel’s setter colonial project.

We encourage individuals or groups to sign onto this pledge and help build a national solidarity network through which we can collectively defend ourselves against repression and harassment.

An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. If one of us is attacked, we all rise up. ¡Basta ya! 

Initial Signatories:

CUNY4Palestine
National SJP
Students for Justice in Palestine at NYU
Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies, San Francisco State University;
Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice 
Lehman SJP
John Jay SJP
Palestine Solidarity Alliance- Hunter
CUNY Law Jewish Law Students Association 
Students for Justice in Palestine – Montclair
Brooklyn College Students for Justice in Palestine 
Wayne State Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP)  
Oberlin Students for a Free Palestine
Columbia SJP
Barnard College/Columbia University JVP
Jews for a Free Palestine Oberlin
Within Our Lifetime 
Al Awda
Jewish Voice for Peace of Vermont and New Hampshire 
Palestine Solidarity Coalition – University of New Hampshire. (PSC UNH)
Swarthmore SJP
Virginia Commonwealth University SJP
Virginia Commonwealth University SJP
George Washington University SJP
American Muslims for Palestine (AMP, Richmond Chapter)
Left Voice
Uhuru Solidarity Movement
Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa! / African People’s Socialist Party (APSP)
Black Alliance for Peace
African People’s Solidarity Committee
San Jose State University SJP
Yalies4Palestine
Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
Students for Socialism at USF
Bico JVP
BIPOCanalysis Collective
Critical Palestine Studies Association
NHYM UNH
Williams SJP

To sign the solidarity pledge as an individual or on behalf of an organization, please fill out this form.

The post An Attack on One is an Attack on All: Academic Workers and Students Pledge to Fight Attacks Against Pro-Palestinian Organizers appeared first on Left Voice.

There’s an idiom in German, “Haltet den Dieb!” which literally translates as “Stop thief!” But while the expression in English is straightforward — someone is getting robbed and needs help — in German, there is a second layer of meaning: “Haltet den Dieb!” is what a thief yells out when they are about to get caught, and they are hoping to sow chaos and confusion. It refers to a criminal falsely accusing others of their own criminality. (Apparently this idiom originates from a Chinese proverb. Fascinating!)

I thought of this idiom when I read that Germany’s Bundestag (parliament) is debating a law that would require immigrants defend “Israel’s right to exist.” Otherwise, they would be subject to deportation or even revocation of their German citizenship. (Such measures, of course, have an extremely disturbing history in Germany.) German politicians argue that this is justified because migrants are “importing” antisemitism into Germany.

“Stop thief!” There is so much discussion about the supposed antisemitism of immigrants that it’s easy to overlook how the German regime drips antisemitism from every pore. I have compiled a dozen examples:

1. The far-right party AfD, which is over 20 percent in national polls, defends the Nazi Wehrmacht and calls on Germany to cease its remembrance of the Holocaust.
2. The conservative party CDU has just decided to keep Hans-Georg Maaßen as a member in good standing. The former head of the domestic secret service spreads antisemitic conspiracy theories about “globalists” being responsible for the “hoax” of climate change.
3. The CDU’s Bavarian branch, the CSU, just renewed its coalition government with Hubertus Aiwanger, after it was revealed that as a student, he wrote and distributed fliers calling for a new Auschwitz.
4. The social democratic party SPD kept the former Berlin financial senator Thilo Sarrazin as a member for over a decade, after he had written books promoting eugenicist theories, including remarks about “Jewish genes.”
5. The Green Party was full of praise for Andrij Melnyk, the former Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, despite the fact that he is a fanatical supporter of Ukrainian fascists who fought alongside Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Melnyk denied the historical facts of the Holocaust, which didn’t prevent Green leaders from supporting him.
6. The German police produce scandals on a more or less weekly basis, when internal chats full of racist and antisemitic posts come to light. The only police chat that has been published is full of memes praising Hitler and the extermination camps.
7. In the last month, these same police have censored, detained, and arrested a number of Jews for speaking out in favor of Palestine.
8. In the foreign secret service BND, a court just decided that an official could keep his job despite making remarks justifying genocide against Jews.
9. Numerous German billionaires, including the wealthiest dynasty in the country, the Quandts, inherited their wealth from Nazi war criminals. 
10. The billionaire Elon Musk is getting enormous subsidies to build a Tesla near Berlin, despite a long record of spreading ever more vile antisemitic conspiracy theories.
11. The German company Adidas continued selling merchandise from Kanye West long after he attacked Jews and praised Hitler.
12. The entire state apparatus of the Federal Republic of Germany was built up by former Nazis, most of whom never faced any accountability for their terrible crimes.

These examples are confirmed by government statistics, according to which 84 percent of antisemitic crimes in Germany are committed by right-wing white Germans. 

Yet if you listen to the German government’s Antisemitism Czars — yes, that’s the actual name for this strange bureaucracy — they refuse to look at German antisemitism. They focus entirely on immigrants. It would seem the German state only has a problem with antisemitism if they can claim it is “imported,” and can thus be instrumentalized to justify racist policies.

Antisemitism Czar

Let’s start with the Federal Antisemitism Czar, Felix Klein. As numerous critics have pointed out, Klein has neither a personal connection to Judaism nor any political experience dealing with antisemitism — before getting his current job, he was a career bureaucrat from Germany’s Foreign Office.

Now, if one were genuinely interested in antisemitism, this would be an obvious place to start: Germany’s Foreign Office played a very active role in the genocide against Jews. After 1945, most of the Nazi officials were left at their posts. It was only in 2010 (!), long after the mass murderers had passed away without facing any consequences, that the ministry began to slowly admit the vast scale of its crimes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Klein was trained by people who were trained by Nazi mass murderers. Has he ever dealt with this fact? No, he is too busy denouncing the antisemitism of Palestinian youths who wear keffiyehs. 

This isn’t a purely historical problem. As the magazine Der Spiegel reported, just last year Germany’s Foreign Office abused the Stolpersteine project that commemorates victims of the Holocaust: They had symbolic cobblestones placed for “victims of fascism” from their apparatus who, on closer inspection, turned out to be active Nazis who suffered fairly minor inconveniences due to office politics. This is typical far-right historical revisionism, intended to portray German Nazis as the “real” victims of the Second World War. Klein has, as far as I can tell, never spoken out about his employer’s long legacy of antisemitism.

With amazing cynicism, Klein has argued that antisemitism is not just a problem caused by recent immigrants, but also by the 24 million people in Germany with a “migration background.” In other words, literally everyone is responsible for antisemitism — except the German state. Stop thief!

Attacks Against Jews

The most disturbing thing about the German Antisemitism Czars, as explained by the magazine Jewish Currents, is their ongoing willingness to attack Jews who do not support the state of Israel. When non-Jewish German bureaucrats accuse Jews of antisemitism, this actually combines multiple antisemitic tropes, firstly by assuming that Jews are a more or less homogenous collective, meaning that every “real” Jew must support Israel, and secondly by blaming Jews themselves for antisemitism.

Klein has explained in interviews that Berlin’s Israeli community simply doesn’t understand antisemitism — the implication being that, as a scion of an apparatus that helped organize the Shoah, he “gets” antisemitism in a way that Jews will never manage.

As all parties in the Bundestag call for the deportation of “antisemitic immigrants,” it is worth noting that there is actually no provision in the draft law that would exempt Jewish people. For years, we have seen German police arresting Jews for antisemitism. Will Jews now be deported as well? In a radio interview, Klein was confronted with the question whether Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, two very vocal Jewish opponents of Zionism, would under his definitions be banned from German universities. He refused to answer.

Fighting against antisemitism is the duty of every democrat. Yet Klein and his colleagues are not actually fighting against antisemitism. Klein actually defended the conservative antisemite Maaßen, arguing that accusations of antisemitism shouldn’t be made lightly (!). Klein’s job is actually to give a “Persilschein,” a bill of clean health, to antisemites as long as they are German and right-wing. The “Persilschein” was a document that Nazi officials gave to each other in post-war West Germany, testifying to the fact that they were innocent of any responsibility for crimes against humanity.

A Socialist Perspective

How can antisemitism be eliminated? How can we build a society without racism or oppression of any kind? Notably, Klein thinks this is impossible, describing the fight against antisemitism as an “an ongoing, continuous task.” Bourgeois ideology treats anti-Jewish hatred as something eternal and mythical — which in itself reveals a low opinion of Jews. They desperately want to avoid a historical and materialist explanation for antisemitism, because that would mean naming names of those who are responsible.

As Jewish socialists such as Abraham Leon explained, the root of antisemitism can be found in class society, and today in capitalism. In order to end all prejudice and discrimination against Jews, as well as all forms of racism and oppression, we need to get rid of capitalism. Yet the German state and its Antisemitism Czars are all about protecting capitalism. This is why they start these racist campaigns that protect actual antisemites while providing a “respectable” cover for racist policies. It is the German state that continuously propagates anti-Jewish hatred. Yet it keeps calling out: “Stop thief!”

The post “Stop Thief!” The German State Attacks Migrants to Distract from Its Own Antisemitism appeared first on Left Voice.

Six weeks into Israel’s murderous military assault on Gaza, responsible for the deaths of over 13,000 Palestinians — the large majority of whom are women and children — the U.S.’s most well recognized “democratic socialist” has refused to even call for a ceasefire. The unwillingness of Bernie Sanders to demand a permanent halt to Israel’s genocidal campaign is increasingly putting him in conflict with the millions of young people who supported him in his presidential bids and considered him to be an anti-war alternative.

Speaking with CNN’s “State of the Union,” in early November Sanders declared “I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, [a] permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the state of Israel.” The sentiment is remarkably similar to remarks made not only by Biden and the Democratic leadership, but also by the American far Right and the Netanyahu government itself. The implication, of course, is that Israel can be a trustworthy negotiation partner, but Hamas is incapable of respecting any agreement. Almost immediately afterwards the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC congratulated Sanders on his remarks, tweeting “Thank you @SenSanders for your clear and principled opposition to calls for a ceasefire with Hamas.”

Sanders’s opposition to a ceasefire is now at odds with the views of two-thirds of the American public, including not only the large majority of Democratic voters but even 50 percent of Republican voters. His stance also contradicts Amnesty International, Oxfam, B’Tselem, and countless other human rights organizations who have called for an immediate and lasting cessation of Israel’s bombing campaign. That’s not to mention the hundreds of thousands, a great many of whom are Jews, who have taken to the streets around the U.S. under the banners of ceasefire, lifting the siege of Gaza, and ending Israel’s occupation and apartheid regime. Though Sanders has decried the “humanitarian catastrophe” and “nightmarish conditions” unfolding in Gaza, he has limited his demands to a “humanitarian pause” in the conflict, echoing the phrase of Biden and the State Department. In the current war on Gaza, the difference between a ceasefire and a humanitarian pause is not semantic. The suggestion that there can be anything “humanitarian” about a pause between bombings is nothing more than cynicism and a whitewashing of Israel’s criminal campaign. After all, Israel has already agreed to four-hour “pauses” in its bombardment of Gaza, but this has done nothing to end the misery and terror felt by Palestinians daily. A so-called “humanitarian pause” is as likely to bring relief to the people of Gaza as is the Biden administration’s suggestion that Israel should use “smaller bombs.”

Recognizing that his stance is now tremendously unpopular, Sanders was recently obliged to issue a more forceful denunciation of the Netanyahu government and the siege on Gaza. He even declared that funding to Israel should be conditioned on Israel’s respect for international law, while of course first hitting the necessary Zionist talking points that Hamas “began this war” and that “Israel absolutely has the right to defend itself.” “Not one penny,” said Sanders “will be coming to Israel from the U.S. unless there is a fundamental change in their military and political positions.” Yet given the Vermont senator’s long record of backing U.S. aid to its most trusted ally, we hope we can be forgiven for our skepticism. On numerous occasions throughout his time in the House and Senate, Sanders has signed off on additional military aid to Israel in spite of its countless human rights violations and its consistent disregard for Palestinian lives. As Doug Green wrote in Left Voice, “Sanders’ support for protecting Israel was not just in terms of words, but by votes to provide billions in military hardware and aid to the Apartheid state in 1997, 1999, 2004. When Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, Sanders voted in favor of imposing sanctions in order to remove them from power. He has also voted for resolutions in favor of Israeli military actions against Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2014.”

Sanders’s recent record does not suggest much shift. Four weeks into the current war, when Israel had already murdered 8,000 Gazans, the “democratic socialist” senator allowed for the unanimous passage of a Senate resolution condemning student activists against the war and slandering them as “pro Hamas.” It was only natural that the most notorious pro-Zionists in the Senate like Josh Hawley, Rick Scott, and Ted Cruz sign such a letter, but the support of Sanders is a slap in the face to young people who placed their hopes in his campaigns as an alternative to the longstanding bipartisan policies of militarism and war.

The Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 expressed the aspirations of millions who wanted a way out of the misery wrought by capitalism and imperialism. Under the banners of Medicare For All, forgiveness of student loans, a stop to fossil fuel extraction, and an end to U.S. militarism, Sanders mobilized young people across the country who increasingly saw capitalism at the root of their problems and socialism as the way out.

But Sanders’s unwavering commitment to the Democratic Party quickly ran this movement aground. After both primary campaigns, Sanders delivered his full support to the establishment candidate, first Hillary Clinton, then Joe Biden. During the Biden presidency, Sanders earned a key position in the Senate, becoming chair of the Budget Committee, and becoming a trusted ally of the president. This alliance has increasingly put him in opposition to the demands of the progressives who backed him in 2016 and 2020. Nowhere is this more evident than on the question of Israel-Palestine. Sanders has made concession after concession to the state of Israel, despite paying lip service to the suffering of Palestinians. In 2021, Sanders voted to deliver $1 billion to fund Israel’s Iron Dome — that on top of the $3.8 billion it already receives annually — in “exchange” for increased humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Sanders’s supporters, have already called attention to this gross hypocrisy by the Vermont Senator. In early November, dozens of activists staged a sit-in outside of the Senate offices of Sanders, Warren, Van Hollen, and others demanding a ceasefire as many chanted “Bernie Sanders you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” Police arrested 50 of the activists at the request of the Senators’ offices. More than 300 former Sanders delegates to the DNC and 375 former staff members and campaign organizers called on him to support a ceasefire resolution, reject U.S. funding of Israel’s crimes, and demand an end to the blockade of Gaza. 

The situation in Gaza is not simply a “humanitarian catastrophe,” as Sanders claims. A humanitarian catastrophe might be an appropriate term for a flood or an earthquake. But it is certainly not appropriate for Israel’s deliberate campaign of terror, one which has resulted in murder of 11,000 Palestinians, among them 3,000 women and 4,000 children. To contextualize these figures more Palestinian children have been killed in the past six weeks than in all conflicts around the world in the previous year.  No, the war on Gaza is part of  the 75-year Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, meant to drive as many Palestinians as possible from their homes and to resettle the territory. This is the aim of a siege that has cut off virtually all food, water, fuel and medicine from Gaza, and a relentless bombardment has left at least one-third of all Gaza’s homes destroyed or uninhabitable and created at least 1 million refugees.

The Democratic Party, like the Republicans, have demonstrated for three-quarters of a century their unwillingness to challenge the Israeli state, its many brutal military campaigns or its daily dispossession, oppression, and humiliation of the Palestinian people. This is not out of any devotion to the Jewish people but rather because Israel serves as an effective and reliable guarantor of U.S. imperialist interests in the Middle East, a region that accounts for close to 40 percent of the world’s oil production and serves as part of an important trade route between Europe and Asia. It is for this reason that Israel has been, by far, the largest recipient of U.S. military aid since the second half of the 20th Century.  And it is why Israel has had a virtual carte blanche to violently suppress any challenge to the U.S. imperialist order, particularly from Arab nationalism. So while several Democratic members of the House, like Rashida Tlaib have raised severe criticisms of Israel’s current war on Gaza and called for a ceasefire, they have been effectively marginalized by the party leadership. 

The Democratic Party, therefore, is fully in concord with the Republicans and the far Right in its defense of the Israeli apartheid state. That is why we saw Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries share a stage with Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at the “March for Israel,” while declaring “We are here united, Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate to say ‘We stand with Israel!’” The Democrats can offer no solution to the Palestinians in their fight for liberation. That includes even Bernie Sanders, who presents himself as an independent, but caucuses with the Democrats, ran for president twice on the Democratic Party ticket, and votes with Biden more than 91 percent of the time. Workers, young people, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people and all those concerned with fighting oppression and colonialism must break from the Democratic party and come together to discuss the creation of a workers’ party that fights for socialism. Only a party independent of the capitalists is capable of effectively fighting war and apartheid and bringing about a free Palestine.

The post Bernie Sanders Is Giving Cover to the Genocidal Policies of Biden and Netanyahu appeared first on Left Voice.

Jenin – West Bank

On November 17, 2023, three people in the West Bank were martyred and others were injured in a drone strike by the occupation targeting a group of citizens in the Jenin refugee camp, which has been under continuous invasion by occupation forces since the previous night. The Ministry of Health reported that the toll of the occupation’s aggression on Jenin is three martyrs and more than 15 injured, including four in critical condition. Eyewitnesses in the camp stated that a drone targeted a group of citizens in the Hawashin neighborhood of the camp, resulting in the martyrdom of three citizens and the injury of nine others with various wounds.

In the early morning, the occupation forces arrested a group of citizens from a house in the Jabariyat neighborhood in Jenin and detonated several vehicles. Local sources reported that the occupation forces invaded a house in the Jabariyat neighborhood, arresting a group of citizens and detonating several vehicles in the neighborhood.

The occupation had previously invaded the city and camp of Jenin, leading to intense confrontations with citizens. Two young men were seriously injured during the clashes, and all entrances to the city were closed off, isolating it from the surrounding towns and villages. Large Israeli forces, accompanied by special units and military bulldozers, entered the city from multiple axes, sparking clashes with young men.

The occupation forces spread out in several neighborhoods of the city and the surroundings of its camp, deploying snipers on the rooftops of several houses and buildings. Israeli forces imposed a siege on the city, entering with more than 80 military vehicles and bulldozers, firing bullets intensively and indiscriminately.

They raided neighborhoods such as Jabal Abu Zaher, Jabariyat, Khallet al-Souha, Talaat al-Ghubbaz, and the outskirts of the Jenin camp, as well as the vicinity of the district headquarters, Cinema Square, the Interior Square, the city center, Military Street, and Haifa Street. Israeli drones were flying over the city. There was a power outage in several neighborhoods in Jenin and the outskirts of the camp.

Israeli bulldozers began destroying infrastructure in the city and the camp’s outskirts, excavating streets, and causing damage to several citizens’ vehicles. They also resumed excavating Talaat al-Ghubbaz Street on the east side of the Jenin camp. Israeli forces disrupted communications in the city and its camp.

Confrontations erupted between citizens and occupation forces around Cinema Square, during which the occupation forces fired a barrage of tear gas canisters containing toxic substances. The occupation forces also invaded the vicinity of Jenin Governmental Hospital, stationed themselves there, and released a barrage of tear gas canisters containing toxic substances in the area, causing several citizens to suffer from suffocation due to inhaling the toxic gas.

TulKarm – West Bank

The latest Israeli aggression on the city and refugee camp of Tulkarm on Tuesday, November 14, 2023, caused extensive destruction of the streets, infrastructure, and properties of the residents. After 15 continuous hours of the occupation forces’ attack, citizens rushed to inspect the camp, only to be astonished by the scale of devastation and plunder in the streets, water and electricity lines, and sewage systems. Numerous homes and both private and public commercial facilities were destroyed.

Dozens of vehicles were seen crushed by Israeli bulldozers and vehicles in the camp and along Nablus Street adjacent to it. The occupation’s bulldozers destroyed the District Street in the city, near the southern entrance to the camp, as well as the Al-Maslakh Street extending to the camp’s eastern entrance, and the Open University Street adjacent to its northern entrance, in addition to destroying its main entrances and alleys.

The destruction reached homes and shops along the main street of the camp, UNRWA schools, and the Return Hall. Several were demolished after being targeted and bombed by missiles launched from drones. The occupation bulldozer also demolished the statue of the Key of Return, and the memorial statues for the martyrs Hamza Khreisheh and Samer al-Shafei in the Hanoun Square in the camp.

Seven young men were martyred during the aggression by the occupation’s bullets, including three during a missile strike from a drone. The number of injuries reached 18, with their conditions described as between serious and moderate. Four of them were transferred to hospitals in Nablus. Meanwhile, Israeli forces kidnapped injured individuals from an ambulance after intercepting and searching it.

With their martyrdom, the toll of martyrs in the Tulkarm Governorate since October 7th rises to 32. The occupation forces targeted the courtyard of Thabet Thabet Governmental Hospital with tear gas canisters and a group of journalists covering the aggression on the Open University Street with sound bombs.

The hospital’s squares witnessed a gathering of hundreds of citizens who rushed to bid farewell to the martyrs amid slogans and angry national chants condemning the occupation’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

Huwara – Nablus

On Sunday, November 12, 2023, settlers demanded the Israeli occupation government to erase the town of Hawara, south of Nablus, similar to their actions in the Gaza Strip. They insisted on not allowing commercial shops to open their doors along the main Hawara Street.

Settlers marched on the circumferential settlement road in south Nablus, set to open within a week. But the settlers also announced that they would continue passing through the main Hawara Street, despite the construction of this settlement road. The main Hawara Street has been closed – except to settlers – for about a month and a half, prohibiting the passage of vehicles with Palestinian plates and even Palestinian citizens walking on the main street. Any Palestinian violating this faces assault.

These aggressions follow a call in March 2023 for the erasure of the town of Hawara from existence by the extremist Minister of Finance in the Israeli occupation government, Bezalel Smotrich.

These extremist calls are part of a systematic policy aiming to worsen the conditions of the residents in Hawara, who face daily violations from the occupation and its settlers.

The post Dispatches from the West Bank appeared first on Left Voice.

Before Israel launched its offensive on Gaza in October, the U.S. labor movement was experiencing an important resurgence. This resurgence challenged the neoliberal offensive that, over the decades, has eaten away at historical benefits won by the labor movement of the 1930s, like pensions, a system that ensured wages kept up with inflation, and even the right to unionize. From the entertainment industry, to healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing, labor has been fighting hard against concessionary contracts.

The most important expression of this insurgent labor movement was the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) strike across the Big Three; GM, Ford, and Stellantis. The strike of a workforce in an industry that is responsible for three percent of U.S. GDP proved to be so powerful that both President Biden and former president Donald Trump had to address it. On the first day of the strike, every major news publication, station, and broadcast featured the strike. 

The impact of the UAW strike on the economy was noticeable, so much so that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put his position on the line to keep the government from shutting down. MSNBC published an article that warned that a “massive auto workers strike, the resumption of student loan payments and a possible government shutdown” would mean “less money for millions.” McCarthy’s decision not only cost him his job, but led to a standstill in the House that lasted nearly three weeks. 

For the global movement in solidarity with Palestine, this Congressional paralysis opened up space for the movement on the streets to build its forces. 

The labor movement has mobilized for Palestine in important ways. In Palestine, a list of labor unions released a statement asking for solidarity and making a direct appeal to the international labor movement to take direct action to “stop arming Israel.”

Immediately following the statement, an Italian dockworkers union responded to the Palestinian trade unions’ call, releasing a statement expressing solidarity with Palestine and refusing to handle any weapons shipments to Israel. At the end of October, Belgian workers refused to handle arm shipments to Israel. Earlier this month, thousands of protesters in Oakland, California blocked a ship with equipment destined for Israel for several hours, with port workers refusing to go against the protesters. Likewise, dockworkers in Barcelona refused to ship weapons to Israel two weeks ago. The Oakland port workers union, ILWU Local 10, also openly refused to unload weapons cargo destined for Israel in 2019. 

In the UK, union leaders Mick Lynch, Secretary General of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT); Matt Wrack, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU); and Daniel Kebede, General Secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), posted a video on social media pledging to attend a march for Palestine. This announcement is a major pushback against the UK government, which asked the organizers to postpone the march because it was scheduled to take place on Remembrance Day, a national holiday marking the end of World War I.

Workers at Airbus in Spain, who make military equipment and weaponry, as well as aircraft and space equipment, held a rally at the factory with a banner that said, “Airbus workers stand in solidarity with Palestine, No to arms sales to Israel.”

About three weeks ago, roughly 400 people attended a meeting organized by U.S. Labor Against Racism and War to discuss the atrocities happening in Palestine and why the labor movement must speak out against it. That meeting circulated a letter demanding top union officials to call for a ceasefire; so far, it has collected more than 30,000 signatures. 

United Electricians (UE) and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 3000 initiated a call for a ceasefire that has been endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, the New Jersey Industrial Union Council, UAW Region 6, and others. 

Graduate student worker unions across the country and Starbucks Workers United have released statements in solidarity with Palestine and opposition to the genocidal policies of the Israeli state, alongside other individual workers, union members, and locals. 

In New York City, Healthcare Workers for Palestine organized a rally of around 300 people to demand, among other things, an immediate end to the military assault against Palestine; the end of U.S. aid to Israel: access to medical care to Gaza: and no institutional retaliation against healthcare workers, students, and other workers for their support to Palestine.

In Michigan, healthcare workers participated in an action called by the Michigan chapter of the National Arab-American Medical Association “Against Gaza Genocide.” 

The executive board of SEIU Local 1021 released a statement calling for a ceasefire, as well as the American Postal Workers Union released a statement calling for a ceasefire.

The Working Class Has the Firepower to Make A Revolution 

More of the labor movement needs to take up the struggle for Palestine and fight against the genocidal policies of the Israeli government. Concretely, that means labor taking up the immediate demands of the movement for Palestine, which includes opposition to U.S. aid to Israel and to any retaliation against people criticizing Israel. It includes the demand for a ceasefire, which, in the context of the lopsided military offensive of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and widening criticism of the Israeli government use of military force, is a progressive demand. 

The actions of the working class in the U.S. could tip the scales and impose, on the Biden administration, the demands of the movement in the same way the UAW strike did, when the president was forced to publicly admonish the Big Three and agree that “record profits mean a record contract.” This means workers taking more direct action in workplaces, disrupting and actually shutting down weapons shipments and manufacturing, as well as the companies that fund the Israeli war machine, like Starbucks and McDonalds. They can participate in the mobilizations like unions in the UK to build a deeper alliance between labor and the mass movement for Palestine. 

The actions of the labor movement are not only significant, but necessary for the success of the liberation of Palestine and any struggle for liberation. 

There has been important and widespread solidarity with Palestine among other oppressed groups. People have highlighted historical examples that tie the different struggles together, like racism and Jim Crow in the United States, with the Israeli apartheid regime’s treatment of Palestinians in Israel and in Gaza. The significance of the labor movement joining this expression and understanding of solidarity with the Palestinian people cannot be overstated.

Unity among the oppressed is crucial too, but the working class is not simply another group oppressed by capitalism. The working class, which is composed of different races, ethnicities, and genders, is a group whose labor is crucial for the daily functioning of society and the source of wealth for the capitalists. Oppressed groups, like Black people, immigrant populations, the LGBTQ+ community, and ethnicities whose regions are largely controlled by imperialism, are multi-class. So while they have a shared interest in fighting against oppression, those interests are not consistent in fighting the source of that oppression, which is capitalism. This is because some within oppressed groups are capitalists themselves, and directly benefit from the exploitation of workers. 

Only the working class has the objective interest in consistently opposing capitalist exploitation. If the working class wants to secure even the unity of the working class — let alone unity between itself and the oppressed — then it must take up the issues of oppression. This is particularly important because the capitalists use oppression to deepen the level of exploitation experienced by oppressed groups within the working class, and sustain divisions that make it possible to continue capitalists’ reign.

This is why Lenin believed that revolutionary organizations dedicated to the emancipation of the working class and the overthrow of capitalism had to be the

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“tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”

Towards the Revolutionary Unity of the Working Class

For revolutionary unity against capitalism to occur between the workers and the oppressed — a unity that is necessary in order to overthrow capitalism — the workers must become a political and ideological hegemonic force, providing a political alternative to capitalism that the oppressed can be won to, participate in, and shape. Doing this not only requires challenging capitalist institutions like the Democratic and Republican Parties, but the agents of capitalism in the labor movement and the social movements, such as the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions, NGOs, and mainstream social justice organizations like the Women’s March or the NAACP (which are, in fact, NGOs with a grassroots history). 

Within the labor movement, the union bureaucracy inside the AFL-CIO, the United States’ largest union federation, squashed a resolution calling for a ceasefire and an end of U.S. aid to Israel that was passed by the AFL-CIO affiliate Thurston-Lewis-Mason Central Labor Council representing workers in Washington state. The AFL-CIO bureaucrats ruled it “out of order” and forced the affiliate to rescind the resolution. In doing this, the union bureaucracy is both protecting the Biden administration against growing popular criticism of his refusal to call for a ceasefire, and maintaining the divide between workers of different countries.

This is how the bureaucracy in the U.S. has been able to stop more direct action by the labor movement that we have seen internationally, particularly in Europe. They are an obstacle to workers in their efforts to stop the carnage taking place in Gaza, which has killed over 11,000 Palestinians. 

Confronting the bureaucracies that block international working-class unity requires a revolutionary organization that promotes the development of institutions of self-organization within the working class and the unions so that the actions and policies of the labor movement are decided and controlled from below. It also requires an explicitly anti-imperialist and internationalist perspective that points to international proletarian revolution as the solution to the capitalist crises — from mass unemployment to genocide.

Imperialism Has Never Liberated or Protected the Oppressed

The State of Israel is an artificially created nation state established by Zionists in collaboration with British and U.S. imperialism. The United States doesn’t support Israel out of an abiding love for Jewish people, but because Israel is its foothold in the most oil-rich corner of the globe and a linchpin of U.S. global hegemony. This has been compounded recently by the discovery of huge deposits of natural gas in the Mediterranean at a time when Western Europe is looking to reduce dependence on Russian fuel. Similarly, the Zionist state oppresses and exploits the working class of Israel — both Jewish and Arab, though to different extents — and crushes with particular ferocity left-wing activists who oppose Israeli apartheid.

The working class is not bound by nation states; it is international. Even Shawn Fain, President of the UAW, acknowledged this during his Facebook live addresses where he said that Toyota workers or workers in Mexico are not the enemy — the capitalists are. Hundreds of union activists and members in the U.S. have recognized that the people in Palestine, including the working class, are their siblings and that they must stand with them. Revolutionaries should not only uplift these instances of international solidarity, but raise the need for the construction of an international revolutionary organization that actively fights for the unity of the working class and oppressed for a socialist program of expropriation and socialization of the means of production. In Palestine, this means a unified, secular, socialist Palestine where Jews and Arabs can live in peace, alongside other groups and religions.

Our Revolutionary Tasks in the Imperialist Core

For revolutionaries in the United States, the liberation of Palestine means building a revolutionary organization, promoting the self-organization of the working class and the oppressed, and fighting against chauvinist attitudes, particularly against the propaganda depicting the Palestinian resistance as terrorists, or the anti-China rhetoric of Biden and Trump that has been raised around electric vehicle (EV) production. 

This is essential in a context in which many are growing increasingly disillusioned with Biden and the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to oppose the Israeli military’ slaughter of Palestinians. If there was ever an experience that makes clear why the Left must abandon the notion that the Democratic Party can be a vehicle for change and progress, this experience must be that wake-up call.

As part of the fight to create a revolutionary alternative, the U.S. Left needs to agitate for a working-class party that fights for socialism. To start, we need to create a network that can facilitate discussions on how such a party would be formed, and what its program would be. Elaborating our strategy through discussion and debate will help us form the building blocks of such a party.

Let the injustice taking place inspire us to move forward with revolutionary vigor in our fight for justice and liberation. 

The post The Labor Movement Is Key for Palestinian Liberation appeared first on Left Voice.

Israel’s brutal offensive on Gaza has shaken the world, which has watched the genocide against the Palestinian people unfold in real time. The unconditional political, financial, and military support of the U.S. bipartisan regime for this massacre, along with the McCarthyist offensive on the right to protest, has reawakened the multiracial youth in the United States. Unlike Black Lives Matter, which found its highest expression in the streets, the growing movement against the Israeli assault on Gaza has its epicenter in the colleges and universities as well. In this movement we can see echoes of the very powerful student protests against the Vietnam War that shook the foundation of the U.S. empire in the 1960s and 1970s. To succeed, the youth and students who support the Palestinian people must work to drag the American labor movement into the struggle? 

From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free

Within days of the Hamas attack and the latest Israeli bombings on Gaza, the first mobilizations for Palestinians took place in the United States. They were called by organizations such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Arab organizations such as Within Our Lifetime (WOL), and were led by sectors of the youth and the Muslim and Arab community that is made up of some three million people in the United States. These protests in the U.S. are also taking place within the context of a much larger wave of pro-Palestinian protests around the globe, from imperialist countries to those in the Arab world. And despite harsh repression and attacks on protests in countries like Germany and France, the movement in solidarity with Palestine has only grown stronger. 

On October 12, the first student walkout for Palestine was called by Arab student organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), along with spontaneous calls for mobilizations in dozens of universities across the country, made up of multiracial crowds of students. These actions shook public opinion. The bourgeois media responded either with silence or by defaming protestors as terrorists and antisemitic. The mobilizations grew just a week after they began and anti-Zionist Jewish allies began to raise their voices, saying “not in our name.” On October 14, students at Harvard responded in protest to the university administration’s official line — dictated by the White House — that the institution stands staunchly with Israel and its “right to defend itself.”  

By the end of October, mobilizations on college campuses across the country had spread like wildfire, including major demonstrations and marches at New York University, Penn State, Temple, Columbia, Berkeley, Yale, and the City University of New York (CUNY). Not long after these initial protests, the Jewish anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) took over Grand Central Station in NYC on October 27, while  filmmaker Michael Moore streamed the demonstration live to his Instagram account. Hundreds of anti-Zionist Jews were arrested that day while shouting slogans against the Israeli occupation and in support of Palestine, including: “not in our name!” “ceasefire now!” “free Palestine!” “end the occupation!” and “let Gaza live!” The protest went viral, exposing the false equivalence between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. This incredible mobilization of Jewish people did not fall from the sky. It is the current expression of a generational rupture that has been brewing for several years among the Jewish diaspora that has helped build the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement, and that increasingly rejects Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

Despite these protests around the world, Israel has been able to continue its genocidal bombing campaign on Gaza unimpeded. Every day, we wake up to see with horror that the genocide in Gaza continues: Israel has killed more than 12,000 Palestinians so far, with thousands wounded and millions displaced, not counting the atrocities perpetrated by the army and settlers organized as paramilitaries in the West Bank. Behind the numbers are names, many the names of Palestinian children. We are seeing one of the most violent and bloody faces of imperialism in its Zionist manifestation. However, we are also seeing hope in the movement in solidarity with Palestine and internationalism in the making.

The international movement for Palestine and its expression in the heart of the empire contrasts with the genocidal propaganda of the mainstream bourgeois press. It exposes the tireless McCarthyist diatribes against any kind of solidarity with Palestine, and the false accusations and weaponization of antisemitism that serve to strengthen Islamophobia and racial divisions among the working class and the oppressed. 

From the Universities to Washington

November 4 marked a high point so far of a broad vanguard movement of the multi-racial youth against Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians and the brutal occupation. That day, 100,000 people flooded Washington DC from all over the country, some as far away as the West Coast. Dozens of demonstrations were also held the same day in other cities across the U.S. including Detroit, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Portland and Cincinnati. The national scope of the movement is reminiscent of Black Lives Matter at its peak in 2020. These protests have brought together Muslim and Arab communities, the generation forged in Black Lives Matter, and a youth still awakening to political life. In the most massive protests, like the one in Washington, it was not only the youth that mobilized, but entire families, children, and many Palestinians who have family in Gaza. The demonstrators put forward demands for a ceasefire and an end to all U.S. aid to Israel and chanted the slogans that have so far marked the movement, including “Joe Biden you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” “free, free, free Palestine,” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” 

One of the most striking developments is the rise of a student movement, the likes of which has not been seen in nearly 50 years, recalling the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960’s. On college campuses, this renewed movement is being led by pro-Palestinian and Arab organizations, like the SJP and JVP, both of which have been persecuted and banned on several campuses. On November 8, social work students at Columbia University took over their department in solidarity with Palestine. Although we are not yet facing the size and scope of the anti-Vietnam War movement, these nonetheless  protests call to mind the spring of 1968, when Columbia students took over the entire campus in solidarity with Vietnam and more than 700 students were arrested by the NYPD.

On November 9, the student character of the movement was strongly evident with a huge day with multiple actions of civil disobedience by college and high school students across the country. In New York, against the backdrop of shouts from students at the New School — one of the city’s elite universities — chanting “Free, Free Palestine,” four 12-year-old Black boys raised a Palestinian flag from a basketball court. On the previous day, While students in New York and around the country kept local police occupied, activists and journalists took over the headquarters of the New York Times which they dubbed “The New York Crimes,” demanding a ceasefire and denouncing the pro-genocide coverage of one of the most prestigious mass media outlets in the world.

Despite the McCarthyist tactics of oppression being used by bosses and university administrators against protesters and their supporters, the movement is continuing to grow and develop, since the regime does not at this moment have the necessary balance of power to criminalize the movement as a whole.

A McCarthyist Offensive in the Making and a Democratic Movement in Response

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have launched an offensive against pro-Palestinian representatives in Congress. For example, the House of Representatives censured Palestinian-American Democrat and Democratic Socialists of America member Rashida Tlaib for demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza and for saying “from the river to the sea” in Congress. More than 20 Democrats sided with Republicans in supporting the censure. Employers and university officials have overwhelmingly responded to the movement by restricting pro-Palestinian speech, smearing and banning protests for being “antisemitic,” allowing and encouraging activists to be harassed by Zionists, and even firing people for speaking out for Palestine or advocating for ceasefires in healthcare and other industries. Platforms like Instagram have already removed pro-Palestine accounts, such the Jewish Voice for Peace Detroit or Eye on Palestine accounts, both with millions of followers.

States are voting on extraordinary budgets, such as the ones passed in New York and Florida, to “fight antisemitism” on campuses by investing in more surveillance and technology to create a blacklist of people who speak out in solidarity with Palestine. Just a few days ago, in response to the peaceful takeover of the social work department at Columbia, the Arab student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Jewish organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) were suspended for supposedly using “intimidation and threatening rhetoric.” The McCarthyist offensive is also a preemptive response to the movement’s advance, in which the bipartisan regime is pushing hard for repressive measures against all criticisms of Israel, claiming that they are antisemitic.These attacks on the movement have encouraged the emergence of a democratic response and defense of the protesters that has gone beyond those mobilizing in the streets and on the campuses. It includes those who are boycotting brands such as Starbucks and McDonalds for “promoting genocide,” those involved in the BDS movement, those workers, professionals, housewives, and others who are demanding a ceasefire on social media, and those making demands from their workplaces and schools. This broadder sector of the movement has raised the consciousness of millions of people in the U.S. who are now demanding a ceasefire along with slogans like “Free Palestine,” “Stop the genocide,” “Stop the occupation,” and “Stop all U.S. financial and military aid to Israel.” The movement has both parties of imperialist capital — Republicans and Democrats — against it, along with the state of Israel, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, the antisemitic far right, and the bourgeois media — yet it continues to grow.

“Genocide Joe” 

If there was one thing Joe Biden did not need in his bid for re-election and foreign policy agenda, it was a potential regional war in the Middle East along with an anti-imperialist and anti-war movement at home. The Biden administration has faced significant challenges since the Israeli-Palestinian crisis erupted, both domestically and internationally. 

After quickly endorsing Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks and backing any and all of the “fake news” put out by the Israeli government, the Biden administration has moved on to advocate for a “humanitarian pause.” Sectors of the regime are demanding that the administration recommit to the two-state solution and a possible regime change in Gaza in the hands of the discredited Palestinian National Authority (PNA).

Although such a proposal for a “humanitarian pause” is disingenuous, it is nonetheless in response to widespread international and national support in solidarity with Palestine. The movement in the United States is part of the broader international phenomenon mentioned above, ranging from Yemen, to Egypt and Jordan, to the Spanish State, France, Germany, Mexico, Costa Rica and Australia. The current pro-Palestinian movement has made it difficult for the U.S. to keep Netanyahu in line with the overriding U.S. interests in the region and to maintain at all costs the status quo in spite of declining U.S. hegemony.

Although publicly the Biden administration fully supports Israel’s heinous actions, behind the scenes it has been trying to prevent Netanyahu from escalating his response to a level that could have unpredictable consequences. In this context, the Biden administration has not been immune to the growing loss of legitimacy of Israel’s actions — questioned by dozens of countries and the United Nations — and its actions are generating a crisis that is calling his re-election bid into serious question.

In mid-October, Josh Paul, a senior State Department official, resigned over his disagreement with Biden’s blind support for Israel and the President’s endorsement of the “status quo of the occupation” (emphasis added), and on November 15, more than 500 U.S. officials signed a letter protesting Biden’s unequivocal support of Israel. In addition to the enormous anger and dissatisfaction that younger people have toward Joe Biden, recent polls showed results that are of great concern to Democrats. Biden’s support among Arab Americans — who are crucial voters in swing states — has plummeted from a comfortable majority in 2020 to just 17 percent, amid growing anger over his support for Israel’s siege on Gaza. Biden was already losing Arab American support even before the current conflict — from 59 percent in 2020 to 35 percent in 2023 — according to a poll commissioned by the Arab American Institute. This is in the context of other recent polls where Biden is four points below Donald Trump in important swing states.

At the same time, the influence of the Democratic Party and its hold on the masses and the movement is significantly weaker compared to other issues that have brought people into the streets, such as reproductive rights. The Democratic Party faces significant challenges in trying to control the movement from below. It is a different scenario than the war in Ukraine, where the administration has been successful in rallying Democratic voters, a swath of independents, and a not insignificant amount of Republicans behind its policies. With respect to Ukraine, Biden has successfully been able to ideologically frame the war as a struggle for democracy and freedom against tyranny.

Palestine is a different story. The challenges of the Biden administration, and the regime in general, have fueled the pro-Palestinian movement and are fast becoming a major issue not only for Democrats, but for sectors of the bourgeoisie who do not want the unpredictability and adventurism of a second Trump administration.

Bernie Sanders, the Union Bureaucracy and a Growing Pro-Palestinian Sentiment in the Working Class

As we have said, the movement is increasingly targeting Biden and the Democrats. Despite this, the Democratic Party did not have a terrible performance in the elections, including gubernatorial, state legislatures, and ballot initiatives, on November 7. This is not due to the party’s strength in appealing to voters, but to issues such as abortion rights that can bring out the Democratic social base to the polls.

The Democratic Party’s crisis over the pro-Palestinian movement has even reached Bernie Sanders’ base, who protested inside his office earlier this month chanting, “Bernie Sanders you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” The Vermont senator has defended Israel’s “right to defend itself,” supports Biden’s “humanitarian pause” policy, and even called the police against the protesters.

The crisis has also affected sectors within the DSA. For example, its Palestine Solidarity Working Group recently split from the organization.

The social democratic wing of the party — in particular Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar — is agitating for a ceasefire and is being persecuted by the establishment wing of the bipartisan regime. The social democratic wing may gain ground in the future if the Democratic Party needs to contain the movement. NGOs, particularly those organizing Muslim and Arab communities in the United States, are already participating in mobilizations such as the one in Washington, with a program of “No Ceasefire, No Votes.“

The labor movement is not immune to the crisis in Palestine and the domestic turmoil. This, despite it already being in a process of subjective recomposition that has been happening since before the pandemic, with the UAW strike as the high point of the workers’ struggles of the last two years. The AFL-CIO backs Biden and Israel, and its leadership blocked passage of a ceasefire resolution. Although the AFL-CIO leadership supports the Democratic Party’s imperialist agenda — as always — the rank and file in many unions (not just Starbucks, which expresses the most advanced elements of Generation U) are putting great pressure on their leaderships to come out in favor of Palestine. Dozens of rank-and-file union statements signed by thousands of workers are widely circulating. One union leader who did speak out in support of Palestine, Kooper Caraway, the executive director of SEIU Connecticut State Council, was pressured to resign for expressing support for Palestine after a near-unanimous vote by SEIU’s state council to force him out.

We have also seen actions by the labor movement, such as the Oakland dock workers actions a few days ago in support of the pro-Palestine protests, which blocked ships bound for Israel for several hours. With labor struggles developing, motivated by inflation, unionization fights and general worker discontent, Biden will attempt to intervene on behalf of labor to keep his house in order and block the possibility of the working class taking up the fight for a free Palestine. In general, the Democratic Party machinery is already in motion, albeit discreetly, given that the struggle for Palestinian liberation goes directly against the interests of U.S. imperialism, which has Israel as a staunch strategic ally. Biden’s initiatives toward the labor movement, with the strategic goal of containing the class struggle, cannot obscure the fact that for growing sectors of the population, the current president will go down in history as the executor of the genocide in Gaza.

The new left bureaucracy, like that of Shawn Fain in the UAW, has not taken a stand for Palestine. (The new left bureaucracy has emerged in the heat of a process of recomposition of the working class with a new generation of trade unionists injecting energy into the traditional trade union organizations. It remains to be seen if the anger of rank and file workers can force their leaders to break with Democratic Party policy and act independently, with an internationalist policy in solidarity with Palestine. 

Developing a Revolutionary Socialist Perspective Within the Movement for a Free Palestine

We as Left Voice are part of the international Trotskyist Fraction that is intervening in the movement in solidarity for Palestine in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and Costa Rica. In France and Germany in particular, our comrades are facing the strong repression of their imperialist governments alongside tens of thousands of activists who have taken to the streets for Palestine despite criminalization. In France, four comrades of Révolution Permanente were arrested while doing graffiti for Palestine. In Argentina, our comrade Myriam Bregman of the PTS, candidate for president for the FIT-U, was threatened and attacked by the Argentinian far right for her defense of the Palestinian people against Israel’s attacks.

In the United States, with our modest forces, our website has become one of the references at the forefront of the pro-Palestine movement, showcasing the mobilizations against the media siege and giving voice to the Arab, Jewish and multi-racial youth mobilizing in solidarity for Palestine. From our website, social media and in our work in the universities, we are agitating for a mass movement for Palestine and for the democratic right to protest and criticize the crimes of the Israeli state and all forms of imperialism and oppression, including Islamophobia and antisemitism.

As the movement itself has been saying, the financial, political, and military support that Biden and the bipartisan regime have been providing to Israel makes them complicit in the genocide being acted out against the Palestinian people now, That is why we shout, together with hundreds and thousands of demonstrators: Not a penny for U.S. imperialism and Israel to carry out its genocidal program in Gaza! Not a penny for the killing of Palestinian children! Down with Biden’s $105 billion package! End all U.S. aid to Israel!

In the student movement, together with other organizations, collectives, and activists, we are part of the CUNY for Palestine committee, with professors and students of the largest public university system of New York City. CUNY is made up of at least 400,000 students, many of them Black, Arab, Jewish and coming from working class families. At Columbia, as part of the coalition What is it: Social Workers for Palestine, we took part in the takeover of the Social Work department on November 8, denouncing the McCarthyite offensive on the movement.

Regarding the student movement in particular, it must articulate itself in a bold democratic campaign against the domestic expression (the McCarthyite reaction and repression) of Biden’s imperialist agenda towards Palestine, which is intended to prevent the emergence of a politically influential mass movement in the United States. That is why at both CUNY and Columbia we are calling for the broadest unity to defend the movement: Defend our right to protest on the streets and campuses, Down with repression against the Pro-Palestine Movement and the criminalization of Arab student organizations, Down with antisemitism and Islamophobia, Down with the witch hunt on campuses, Freedom of speech, Stop the firings, intimidation and harassment of pro-Palestine activists. 

Both Arab and anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, and the left in general, have been attacked by the government and the two imperialist parties. The movement must speak out categorically against all sanctions and censorship against Rashida Tlaib and pro-Palestinian members of Congress, against attacks on student and community organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine or Jewish Voice for Peace and left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America or the Party for Socialism and Liberation. We defend these organizations and individuals unconditionally against the attacks of the state, the far right, and Zionists, calling for unity against these attacks. Together with the anti-Zionist Jewish community, we say that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that our movement is anti-racist and against all kinds of discrimination.

The mass movement needs to develop in unity with the struggles of the working class, a movement that will not be co-opted by the Democratic Party, beaten down by repression, or burnout in the weariness of the constant street mobilizations. In order to stand up to Israel and the U.S. in their unilateral war against the Palestinian people, the U.S. working class must take up the liberation of Palestine as its own and fight with its methods of struggle such as strikes, roadblocks and picket lines. We cannot win bread and butter demands at home when our brothers and sisters in Palestine are being slaughtered with U.S. weapons.

Our Left Voice healthcare workers are part of the Healthcare Workers for Palestine committee that organizes over 100 healthcare workers. This committee has pushed for a statement demanding that the leaderships of health care workers’ unions speak out and become active in solidarity with Palestine. The statement so far has thousands of signatures. On Friday, November 3, they organized a vigil for Palestine in NYC that brought together 300 people, many of them healthcare workers. The message of our comrades was very clear, among other things, in their demand that unions break with the policy of the pro-Israel Democratic Party and take up the Palestinian cause and fight for the international working class to break with the policy of their governments to stop the genocide. 

The development of the movement is leading to different strategies for its development and for Palestinian liberation. Our position is that there are objective bases for the student movement and the workers movement to converge in an anti-imperialist struggle, to inspire the world proletariat and to stand up against the genocidal offensive of Israel and the United States on the Palestinian masses.

A sector of the Left is leaning towards relying on international diplomacy to achieve a “humanitarian” solution that contrasts with the murderous Israeli army and at the same time hoping that the social democratic wing of the Democratic Party can impact the orientation of the party. This sector is promoting the utopian idea that it is possible to fight for two states without realizing that the existence of the state of Israel as an imperialist enclave is anchored in the oppression of the Palestinian people. Another sector participates in the movement without any delimitation of Hamas, whose strategy is to oppose the State of Israel with another theocratic ethno-state, and whose methods do little to fight for the unity of Arabs and Jews against Zionism, a unity that in fact is being expressed in the streets of the United States.

We as revolutionary socialists stand in solidarity with the mass movement for Palestine, unconditionally defend pro-Palestinian organizations against the McCarthyist repression and march in unity with all those fighting against the genocide in Gaza. We are fighting and agitating in the streets, our schools and workplaces for the struggle for a free and socialist Palestine, from the river to the sea, where Arabs, Jews and Christians can live in peace, free from the yoke of Zionism and imperialism.

As during the Vietnam War, the bipartisan regime will do everything to repress and co-opt the movement to prevent student-worker unity at all costs. In that sense, we are also positing that the growing anti-Biden sentiment that extends beyond the vanguard and the accelerated experience that the vanguard is having with its leaders like Bernie Sanders, is raising the possibility that a youth and working class political alternative to the Democratic Party will finally emerge from within the movement. The youth are disgusted with the imperialist policies of the two big parties of capital that bomb the Palestinians and exploit, oppress, and repress us at home. And this growing distrust of the Democratic Party is touching the working class deeply. The strategy of Bernie Sanders — and therefore of the DSA leadership — is showing all its limits by demonstrating that the Democratic Party is an imperialist party and always will be, and therefore is the enemy of the youth, workers and the oppressed. From this experience, the vanguard has to draw lessons and work toward the construction of a working class party with a socialist perspective that is unconditionally anti-imperialist and on the side of Palestine and all the oppressed of the world.

Originally published in Spanish on November 12 in La Izquierda Diario.

Translation by Molly Rosenzweig

The post Youth in the US Rise Up in Solidarity with Palestine appeared first on Left Voice.

It’s been a bad few weeks for Biden. First, he and his administration has been spectacularly ineffective at dealing with Israel’s war on Gaza. Despite multiple visits from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and a visit from Biden himself, the U.S. has been largely unable to keep Israel under control — such as not being able to stop Israel from escalating the conflict and beginning a ground invasion. As the war has deepened, a movement for Palestine has erupted across the United States. From college campuses to demonstrations by anti-Zionist Jews to a massive march on Washington, the largest U.S. social movement since Black Lives Matter in 2020 has erupted and Biden has been unable to contain it. To make matters even worse, this movement is highlighting his administration’s role in the on-going genocide in Gaza. This movement has named Biden “Genocide Joe” and declared to him that “come November, we’ll remember” his complicity in the crimes of Israel.

As if that wasn’t bad enough for the president, a poll showed Biden losing to Trump in almost every swing state. The weakening of Biden’s re-election campaign can also be seen in the popularity of third-party candidates with 10 percent of voters in swing states saying they’d support Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy’s poll numbers are even better in another recent poll where he polled at 22 percent when matched up with Trump and Biden. That same poll showed that Kennedy led among independent voters — always a key demographic in presidential elections. Meanwhile, Cornel West, another third-party candidate running to the left of Biden, polled at 6 percent when matched up against Trump, Biden, and Kennedy — Kennedy polled 19 percent in that match-up. This data shows what many already know: that the masses are unhappy with both Biden and Trump and some are searching for an alternative. This is very bad for Biden, who needs to coalesce all the anti-Trump votes and keep his 2020 coaltion together in order to beat the former president who is gaining on Biden in key demographics like Black and Latino voters. 

Taken together, it is clear that Biden is in the midst of a crisis. A majority of Americans disapprove of his job performance, he’s behind in swing states, and losing ground with important demographics. More Democrats are beginning to question whether or not Biden should run again. With the movement for Palestine continuing to grow, it seems unlikely that Biden’s crisis will be resolved anytime soon.

A Movement against Genocide Joe

The movement for Palestine has taken on an explicitly anti-Biden character. From chants charging Biden with genocide, to protests outside (and inside) Biden events, to the tens of thousands of people who marched on the White House, it is clear that this new and developing movement recognize that Biden is their enemy — there was even a march on his personal residence. This movement has deepened the broader crisis that Biden is facing as it calls into question whether a significant sector of people who held their nose to vote for him in 2020 will do so again. All over social media (and in the pages of In These Times), activists are pledging to not support Biden in 2024 due to his on-going support of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. How wide-spread this feeling is and whether it will persist for another year remains to be seen but it calls into question two key sectors of Biden’s coalition: the Arab-American vote and the youth vote.

In a new poll of Arab Americans, only 17 percent said they would support Biden in 2024, down from 59 percent in 2020 — a staggering 42 percent drop. The same poll showed that two thirds of those surveyed had a negative view of his response to the war and the poll marked the first time in 26 years that a majority of Arab Americans did not say they preferred the Democratic Party. A different poll conducted by a Muslim advocacy group found that only 5 percent of Muslim-Americans said they would support Biden in 2024, down from 80 percent in 2020. These numbers are stark and will likely only intensify as the war continues, casualties mount, and Biden continues to back the terror. 

This data is even more concerning for Biden given that the Arab-American vote is so central in key states, such as Michigan. In order to defeat Trump (or any other GOP adversary), Biden will have to carry Michigan and it seems next-to-impossible for him to do so without support from the Arab-American community. Arab Americans also make up a sizable bloc of votes in other key swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. The centrality of Michigan to the presidential contest could be seen a few weeks ago when the UAW strike began and Biden immediately began to try and position himself as an ally to the strike in hopes of gaining an endorsement from the union and building support amongst autoworkers in Michigan and elsewhere. 

In 2020, Biden won Michigan by fewer than 200,000 votes, so losing the Arab-American vote would significantly interfere with his chances of winning the state. Indeed, recent data out of Michigan shows how deep the disgust with Biden runs, with 74 percent of Arab and Muslim Democrats saying they will consider voting third party if 2024 is a rematch between Biden and Trump. To make matters even worse, that same poll out of Michigan shows that 84 percent of Arab and Muslim Democrats will be less likely to vote for Biden if he is able to successfully pass his arms-to-Israel proposal — a proposal that he is strategically committed to getting through Congress. Unless Biden does a very abrupt about-face or finds some way to sell his toned-down rhetoric on the conflict as a reversal, it seems likely that he will bleed serious numbers of Arab and Muslim voters in 2024.

The youth vote is also an area of concern for the president. In an open letter to Biden signed by several leaders of groups that focus on mobilizing youth voters, the signers declare that, “We did not spend hours upon hours knocking doors and making calls to turn out the vote so that you could support indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and violations of international law… .” The letter goes on to warn Biden that, “You cannot win this election by only telling our generation that you are the lesser of two evils… This [war] is already becoming an issue we are hearing about from thousands of young people across the country. We cannot explain your position to the people of our generation.”

This letter is reflective of (and, in fact, a reaction to) the polls which are consistently showing a wide age gap around the question of the war, with young people significantly favoring calls for a ceasefire and the cessation of U.S. arms to Israel. The poll of Michigan Democrats showed that, among younger Democrats, 80 percent oppose the Israeli ground invasion, 73 percent oppose Biden’s Israeli aid proposal, and 43 percent will consider voting third-party if 2024 is a re-match of Trump-Biden. These numbers go hand-in-hand with the massive mobilizations that have been happening across the country where a youth vanguard — including a student movement — has arisen to decry the Israeli offensive against Gaza and Biden’s complicity in it. 

The needle Biden needed to thread to win re-election was already incredibly narrow given the overall polarization of the American electorate and the eye of that needle is narrowing considerably as the war on Gaza rages on. Biden is stuck between the devil that is the interests of U.S. imperialism and the deep blue sea of voter rage. “Genocide Joe” will need to find ways to reach the Arab, Muslim, and youth voting blocs if he is going to find a way to win a very challenging re-election campaign next year. 

2023 Elections Provide a Roadmap for Democrats in 2024

The 2023 elections provided some hope for the Democrats. Amidst the growing crisis of Biden’s re-election campaign, there was doubt about whether the Democrats would be able to mobilize enough voters to win in key races in an off-year election. However, like the 2022 midterms, the Democrats were able to win key victories such as holding onto the governorship of Kentucky and winning both houses of the Virginia legislature. Another important outcome of the November 7 elections were that voters in Ohio voted to protect abortion in the state constitution. These results suggest that the crisis of Biden might be more limited to Biden himself than being a crisis of the whole Democratic Party. Put another way, it seems that voters may be fed up with Biden but still willing to support Democrats down the ballot. 

In all three states — Kentucky, Virginia, and Ohio — a key mobilizing issue was abortion. Like the 2022 midterms, Democrats were successfully able to use support for abortion amongst the masses to turnout voters with the promise that Democrats would protect abortion. This worked very well in 2022 to stop the “Red Wave” and the fact that it worked again this year means that the Democrats now have a solid roadmap for how to hold onto power in 2024: exploit fears around abortion. 

Already, Democratic operatives and affiliated NGOs are working to get abortion on the ballot in key swing states in hopes that these referendums will help voter turnout amidst the, to put it mildly, declining enthusiasm for Biden. To put this another way, the Democrats are looking to exploit our fears about our eroding right to bodily autonomy in hopes it makes us vote for them. This is cynicism of the highest order and we must strongly reject it. Our rights should not be used as a political bargaining chip whenever one party thinks it might benefit them. The fight to protect our bodily autonomy is not safe in the hands of the Democrats, who only want to exploit it for political capital. Rather, we need to take inspiration from the movement for Palestine that is unfolding right now and the history of abortion struggles in Latin America and Ireland. The right to our bodies is ours to defend, not for the Democrats to exploit. 

Also, this strategy of weaponizing abortion to get Biden over the hump might very well not work. Trump has been moderating his position on abortion and Nikki Haley — one of Trump’s challengers who is currently on the rise — also takes a much more moderate position on abortion than other Republicans, calling to leave it up to the states. Faced with a Republican opponent who is not champing at the bit to ban abortion federally, it may be hard for the Democratic Party to make the case that Biden is all that stands between the nation and an abortion ban. 

More Than Just Biden

The crisis of Biden is but the latest manifestation of a broader crisis. The organic crisis — a term coined by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci that can be summed up as a “crisis between the represented and the representatives” — is at its highest point since Biden took office and it is clear that Biden’s attempts to re-legitimize the institutions of the regime are faltering. When a majority of Americans support a ceasefire but only a tiny minority of elected representatives do, how can the regime claim to represent the will of the people? When people are struggling to pay their bills, as student loan payments start up again, as hospitals, schools, and other public services fall deeper into states of disrepair but then billions of dollars are mysteriously found to send to fund a genocide, how can the masses trust that their government represents them? The crisis of Biden is a symptom of the larger crisis of the regime — also seen in the crisis of the Speaker of the House a few weeks ago — and that crisis isn’t going away anytime soon. 

For the movement for Palestinian liberation, it has been incredibly progressive to identify Biden as the villain of our movement. Truly, he is a war criminal who is spending billions of our money to support a genocide. But, in order to deepen and strengthen our movement, we need to understand the horrors of U.S. imperialism holistically. Put another way, that the support for Israel is more than just a failing of Biden and others who are vocally Zionist but, rather, a strategic imperative for the United States. This means that it isn’t just Biden that’s the problem. He’s part of the problem and we should absolutely not support him come 2024, but we need to look beyond just the figure of Biden and see that the war machine that he stands at the head of is a massive and bi-partisan operation. So, simply trading Biden for a different Democrat (or a Republican or even a third-party candidate) won’t solve the underlying problems. Rather, we need to fight the state and all of its tentacles if we are to truly win our demands. We must not forget Biden’s complicity, even if he does end up backing a ceasefire down the road. He has blood on his hands — so very much blood — and we can’t ever forget that.

To truly win our demands, we must think strategically about a way forward. This means that we cannot support Biden or any other Democrat. It also means opposing all money for the war machine — not one penny of our money should be spent on U.S. imperialism. It means seeing the ways that the tentacles of the state in the non-profits are trying to manipulate us into supporting more of the same. It means resisting attempts to scare us with appeals to our support of abortion and queer rights in order. It means recognizing that the state is responsible, that the bipartisan regime is responsible for the terror and horror that we are seeing unfold in Gaza right now. To fight the regime, we will need our own organization — a party of our own — that stands against all the horrors and evils of imperialism and capitalism and poses an alternative in socialism. Put another way, we need a party of the working class and oppressed which fights for socialism with the full force of our class. 

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