Protest the Crushing Death of Yet Another Palestinian Worker
Workers Crushed at Checkpoint – Unions, Get Angry!
On December 31st Ahmad Samih Bdeir was lined up at the checkpoint trying to get to his job as a construction worker. The workers have to go through a series of gangways with bars up to the ceiling. They wait hours in an area that’s a virtual cage worried about getting to work late. It was overcrowded as usual. 39 year old Bdeir couldn’t breathe. Workers around him realized he had been crushed to death. He was he second Palestinian crushed to death in 2014 at that very same al-Taybe checkpoint.
Palestinians on the West Bank are desperate to find even low paying jobs. So some 40,000 Palestinian go through the humiliating and dangerous checkpoints every day to get to work in Israel. It’s outrageous.
This is the cage at al-Taybe
As union members we say, “An injury to one is an injury to all”. Let’s get our unions to send angry letters to Israeli officials, the U.S. media and the politicians. As Americans we have a special responsibility because our tax money goes to pay for what Israel does. We send the Israeli government over $3 billion every year. It pretends to be a democracy that respects human rights, but it treats Palestinian workers much like workers were treated in old apartheid South Africa.
