ov 23, 2025 3arabawy Podcast🎧 This episode dives into Jeff Schuhrke’s No Neutrals There, a haunting excavation of the American labor movement’s long entanglement with Zionism and empire. It traces a century of choices that tied union officialdom to colonial power while silencing the voices of workers who tried to stand with Palestine. Moving from the docks of Haifa to the ruins of Gaza, the episode reflects on forgotten acts of solidarity, the bureaucratic hunger for respectability, and the moral test facing a new generation of workers today. It is a quiet meditation on betrayal, memory, and the possibility of a different future if labor chooses courage over comfort. Follow my newsletter on Egyptian politics: https://3arabawy.substack.com
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0:01
1 secondThere is a story the American labor movement has told itself for generations. A story of flint, of CIO
0:09
9 secondssitdowns, of coal miners standing shoulderto-shoulder in the dark. But there is another story it has worked
0:16
16 secondsvery hard to forget. One that begins not on American shop floors, but on the docks of Hifa and in the factories where
0:24
24 secondsweapons were assembled for a colonial project half a world away.
0:30
30 secondsJeff Shery’s no neutrals there rips open that silence and reading it feels like standing in front of a century old
0:39
39 secondsmirror suddenly seeing all the ghosts labor history has tried to hide.
0:45
45 secondsThe book opens in the shadow of Gaza 2023, a moment when Palestinian trade unions called on the world for
0:53
53 secondssolidarity and the AFL CIO bureaucracy once again flinched.
1:00
1 minuteNot out of confusion, but out of a long well doumented tradition of aligning with empire, that moral cowardice
1:08
1 minute, 8 secondsbecomes Turkeykey’s doorway into a story that stretches back over a hundred years.
1:15
1 minute, 15 secondsSheri rewinds to the early 20th century to the immigrant Jewish workers of New York City. Bondists, anarchists,
1:23
1 minute, 23 secondssocialists who wanted nothing to do with Zionism.
1:28
1 minute, 28 secondsFor them, liberation was something you fought for where you stood on the shop floor, in the street, not in a mythic homeland promised by the powerful.
1:38
1 minute, 38 secondsBut slowly, inevitably, things changed.
1:41
1 minute, 41 secondsLabor Zionism crafted a seductive image of a socialist virtue, collective farms, egalitarian dreams, making the desert
1:50
1 minute, 50 secondsbloom. And American Union leaders steeped in their own settler mythology saw a reflection they liked.
1:59
1 minute, 59 secondsSheri draws a line that feels almost painfully obvious once he traces it. The Zionist fantasy of redeeming the land
2:07
2 minutes, 7 secondsthrough Jewish labor mirrored the American fantasy of the frontier.
2:13
2 minutes, 13 secondsThe same blindness to the people already living there. The same belief in a civilizing mission. It was the logical
2:21
2 minutes, 21 secondsextension of a movement born inside an empire.
2:26
2 minutes, 26 secondsAcross the decades, the AFL and later the AFL CIO became not just supporters but active partners of the Zionist
2:35
2 minutes, 35 secondsproject. Sherkey’s archival work shows union dues flowing to the Jewish National Fund. [snorts]
2:43
2 minutes, 43 secondsDelegations of labor leaders touring Kibotim while Palestinian villages lay in ruins just out of frame. The
2:51
2 minutes, 51 secondshistadrot treated as a fraternal ally while it enforced the racial divide between Jewish and Arab workers.
3:00
3 minutesThrough the Cold War, AFL CIO operatives used language of solidarity to build pro- US unions abroad while praising
3:09
3 minutes, 9 secondsIsrael as a model ally, a democratic socialist outpost that conveniently crushed communists and disciplined the Arab.
3:21
3 minutes, 21 secondsIn 1982, amid the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Federation declared proudly, “The AFL CIO is not neutral. We
3:30
3 minutes, 30 secondssupport Israel.” Shurkey turns that boost into a moral indictment.
3:39
3 minutes, 39 secondsBut the book is not only an excavation of betrayal. It’s also a rescue mission, a reminder that another history exists,
3:48
3 minutes, 48 secondsburied under the bureaucratic weight of the official narrative. He brings back the voices of ArabAmerican workers,
3:56
3 minutes, 56 secondsblack radicals, anti-ionist Jewish organizers, and rank and file militants who refused the easy alignment with
4:04
4 minutes, 4 secondspower. He traces the moment when workers took care risks. The ILWU longshore
4:12
4 minutes, 12 secondsworkers refusing to handle apartide cargo. Electrical workers linking US imperialism, South African apertide and
4:21
4 minutes, 21 secondsPalestinian dispossession as parts of the same machine.
4:26
4 minutes, 26 secondsSmall acts may be, but signs that solidarity was never completely dead.
4:32
4 minutes, 32 secondsSheri writes with a clarity that almost feels out of time. He does not hide his outrage when he describes how union
4:39
4 minutes, 39 secondsofficials rationalized Israeli massacres as self-defense. But he also doesn’t flatten that into caricaturur. He lays
4:48
4 minutes, 48 secondsout the patronage networks, the fear of government repression, the hunger for respectability, all the forces that
4:56
4 minutes, 56 secondspushed labor leaders to trade moral clarity for political access.
5:04
5 minutes, 4 secondswhen he returns to the Gaza war of 2023, the parallels are unmistakable.
5:11
5 minutes, 11 secondsThe AFL CIO’s deference to the Biden administration, its silence as US-made bombs crushed hospitals and apartment blocks, the old reflexes resurfacing.
5:24
5 minutes, 24 secondsAnd yet something different too. A new generation of workers beginning to rebel. graduate students, teachers, postal workers, rank and file teamsters.
5:36
5 minutes, 36 secondsThey have begun demanding ceasefire resolutions, questioning weapons shipments, trying to drag their unions
5:42
5 minutes, 42 secondsback towards an internationalism worth the name. Sheri treats these as not
5:49
5 minutes, 49 secondsisolated flashes, but as early tremors of a deeper shift.
5:55
5 minutes, 55 secondsWhat makes no neutrals there so striking is its sense of purpose. Sheri is a historian, yes, but he writes like
6:03
6 minutes, 3 secondssomeone at the picket line, not the archive. He moves between dusty resolutions and living political
6:10
6 minutes, 10 secondsstruggles with a sense of urgency that feels earned. For him, history is a weapon, not a static artifact, something
6:19
6 minutes, 19 secondsto wield against the alibis of the present.
6:23
6 minutes, 23 secondsand he refuses the romantic myth of labor Zionism. The book dismantles the idea that kibuts was ever a socialist
6:31
6 minutes, 31 secondsexperiment gone wrong. It was built on stolen land, structured through exclusion, managed as part of a labor
6:40
6 minutes, 40 secondsfederation that was also one of the country’s biggest employers. American unionists saw in it a projection of
6:48
6 minutes, 48 secondstheir own fantasies, a moral capitalism that never existed.
6:54
6 minutes, 54 secondsBut Cherokee is not only telling an American story is describing a universal pattern. The way labor bureaucracies
7:01
7 minutes, 1 secondacross the world, including the global south, align with power, silence dissent, and use the language of
7:09
7 minutes, 9 secondssolidarity as diplomatic theater. For readers from Egypt or Brazil or South Africa, the echoes are unmistakable.
7:20
7 minutes, 20 secondsIn the end, the book circles back to a simple idea. Every generation of workers faces its own test, its own Palestine. A
7:29
7 minutes, 29 secondsmoment when neutrality is revealed for what it is, complicity.
7:35
7 minutes, 35 secondsSheri ends with a sentence that lingers long after you put the book down. He writes that if labor can help bring
7:43
7 minutes, 43 secondsfreedom to a land scarred by empire, then hope for the world is not naive.
7:51
7 minutes, 51 secondsThat line carries the book spirit.
7:53
7 minutes, 53 secondsmournful, defiant, cleareyed about the past, but stubborn enough to believe in a different future.
8:01
8 minutes, 1 secondAnd maybe that’s the melancholy heart of this story. A labor movement that could have stood on the side of the dispossessed, but chose power instead.
8:11
8 minutes, 11 secondsYet also a movement that can still choose another path. If solidarity is to matter again, it has to cross
8:19
8 minutes, 19 secondscheckpoints. It has to refuse the comfort of neutrality. It has to remember the ghosts that Cherokee brings back to the light.
