Free, Free Palestine!
My name is Michael Letwin, and I’m honored to be here on behalf of New York City Labor for Palestine, UAW Labor for Palestine, and the entire Labor for Palestine National Network, which now includes more than 40 member groups across this country.
On October 16, 2023, Palestinian trade unions appealed to international labor: “We need you to take immediate action—wherever you are in the world—to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.”
Yet many still ask: Why is Palestine a Labor Issue?
- An injury to one is an injury to all. Zionism and the Israeli settler-colonial regime—and all “Israel” is occupied Palestine—is part of the same U.S.-backed system of racist state violence that brutalizes Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and working class people here in New York City and around the world. With Israel’s knee on their neck, Palestinians can’t breathe, and we unconditionally stand with them, just as they have stood with our struggles for Black and Brown Lives, Standing Rock, migrant rights, and beyond.
- Our tax dollars fund Israel. Israel’s crimes are committed with untold billions in bipartisan US military aid, tax dollars that should be spent instead on badly-needed jobs, food, housing, healthcare, education, and transportation for poor and working people at home.
- Our workplaces arm Israel. Many of our unionized factories, logistics, academia, tech, and other workplaces, including those represented by the UAW—without our consent—produce weapons, transportation, research, technology, and other materials for the genocidal Israeli regime.
- Our unions fund Israel. Our unions are already involved—on the wrong side. In the 1920s-1930s, top labor officials donated millions to the Histadrut, the Zionist labor federation that spearheaded anti-Palestinian dispossession, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, including the Nakba (Catastrophe) that established the Israeli state in 1948. For more than 70 years, they have used our union dues and pension funds to buy billions of dollars worth of Israel Bonds. Today, despite horrendous Palestinian casualties, most labor officials remain silent—or worse.
- Rank-and-file workers can stop Israeli genocide. More than 50 years ago, Arab and Black auto workers led a wildcat strike and other actions to protest UAW complicity with Israel. Today, we can follow their example in respecting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) picket line by protesting, bringing union resolutions, and—above all—by mobilizing our collective power at the workplace, as shown by dockers in South Africa, India, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, Italy, Belgium, and the ILWU on the West Coast of the United States that for the past ten years has refused to handle Israeli cargo.
For all these reasons, we applaud the seven major U.S. unions who recently called on Genocide Joe Biden to end U.S. military funding to the “Israeli” settler-colonial regime. Representing more than six million workers, these include the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), American Postal Workers Union (APWU), International Union of Painters (IUPAT), National Education Association (NEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Auto Workers (UAW), and United Electrical Workers (UE).
But words are not enough, and you can’t stop genocide by endorsing genocidal candidates. That’s why the Labor for Palestine National Network is joining thousands of other protesters this week in Chicago to make this real by charging the Democratic Party with genocide, and calling on union leaders to stop endorsing the Harris/Walz slate, which is led by Kamala Harris, #2 in the same administration that is presiding over the ongoing Nakba that has murdered at least 186,000 Palestinians in Gaza in the last 10 months, which Palestinians have an inalienable right to resist.
And amidst unspeakable U.S.-backed Israeli genocide, in Palestinian resistance—and ours, there is hope.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
