Purple Up for Palestine Statement on SEIU’s Harris Endorsement and Letter to Biden
As the Zionist entity’s genocidal war on Palestine continues unabated after now 10 months and for more than 76 years, SEIU has finally met one of our demands, (something many top union officials had said would never happen): to send a letter to Biden with the demand for no U.S. aid or military funding to “Israel.”
We recognize the recent letter from 7 major U.S. unions, including SEIU, calling on Genocide Joe to end U.S. military funding for Israel as a victory that is in large part a result of rank and file organizing in locals across the country, demonstrating the power of organizing inside the labor movement for international solidarity.
However, union higher ups must do more than plea with the administration facilitating this genocide. We reaffirm our demand that the leadership of SEIU heed the calls of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions-Gaza (PGFTU-Gaza) to move beyond symbolic gestures and take material action to divest from Israeli genocide, occupation, and apartheid in Palestine.
By sending this letter just days after endorsing Kamala Harris for president, SEIU executive leadership showed that they will wag their fingers at the Biden administration and the massacres carried out by the Israeli Occupation Forces, but will continue to support corporate, imperialist Democrats at every turn.
Endorsing Harris is a slap in the face to the hundreds of SEIU members who protested her appearance at the union’s convention in May, to rank and file who have been tirelessly organizing for Palestine for months, and most of all to the victims of U.S. imperialism, displacement, and state violence in Palestine, in U.S. prisons, and all over the world.
Kamala Harris is an outspoken Zionist who made her career locking up Black and brown people and is currently second-in-command in the administration presiding over a genocide.
We as SEIU members know that she does not serve us as working people and that an imperialist is an imperialist no matter their gender or race. We reject liberal identity politics and continued collaboration with the political party creating a police state at home and committing a genocide in Palestine.
We demand what we have always demanded: That SEIU and all union leadership allow workers to apply real pressure on the Zionist entity, the White House, Congress, and capital. That means total financial divestment from “Israel” and “Israeli” bonds inside our union, severing ties with the Histadrut and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, divesting from all politicians who support the Zionist entity, and helping rank and file to organize a democratic, strong union that truly threatens capital and stands in solidarity with racialized, colonized, and oppressed people worldwide.
