Interview with Michael Letwin from Labor for Palestine (New York Graduate Worker)

Posted on May 1, 2026 by | Comments Off on Interview with Michael Letwin from Labor for Palestine (New York Graduate Worker)

Original online here.

Interview with Michael Letwin from Labor for Palestine
Editorial
1 May 2026

Michael Letwin speaking at a 2016 Labor for Palestine rally in NYC.

A third-generation political activist, and a revolutionary socialist since the 1960s, Michael Letwin is former president of UAW 2325 (1990-2003), and a cofounder of New York City Labor Against the War (2001), Labor for Palestine (2004), Jews for Palestinian Right of Return (2013), Labor for Standing Rock (2016), and UAW Labor for Palestine (2023).

1.As a long-time labor unionist and anti-war activist, you are also the co-convener of Labor for Palestine. Can you introduce this organization to our readers? When and how was it formed, how does it currently function?

Labor for Palestine was launched in April 2004 by New York City Labor Against the War and Al-Awda NY: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition to reclaim the legacy of rank-and-file working class solidarity with Palestine in the United States, as reflected in groundbreaking statements by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1969, and wildcat strikes against the United Auto Workers (UAW) leadership’s support for Israel in 1973.

LFP endorses the 2005 Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) picket line, which demands an end to occupation and apartheid, full equality for all, and Palestinian refugees’ right to return to the homes and lands from which they were expelled.

This includes support for calls from Palestinian trade unions, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and other trade unionists around the world to refuse to handle Israeli cargo, and calling on labor bodies to divest from Israel Bonds and cut ties with the Histadrut, Israel’s racist labor federation.

In January 2024, amid the rising outcry against US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and across Palestine, L4P convened the Labor for Palestine National Network, which now has 55+ member organizations, to call on our workers and labor bodies to fully embrace the Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel, and to stand in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation and return, by:

From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free!

We say that Palestine is an issue for the entire working class for the following reasons:

  • An injury to one is an injury to all. The Israeli settler-colonial regime is part of the same US-backed system of racist state violence that brutalizes BIPOC and working class people 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 more than $3.8 billion a year (or $10+ million per day) 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—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 in Israel Bonds. Today, despite horrendous Palestinian casualties, most labor officials remain silent—or worse. 
  • Workers can stop Israeli genocide. Fifty 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, which has respected Block the Boat’s community-labor picket line by refusing to handle Israeli cargo. 

2.How would you assess the current condition, strengths, and challenges of Palestine solidarity within the US labor movement? As someone active within this solidarity for a long time, how do you think it has progressed? Especially, how do you think the Palestine solidarity in the US labor movement changed or developed after the beginning of Israel’s most recent genocidal war in October 2023?

Many in US labor have joined the massive outpouring against Israel’s war of extermination in Gaza since October 7, 2023. This is a significant shift. Although Zionism never had a mass working class following, US labor officials have long supported Zionism, the Histadrut, the Zionist labor federation that spearheaded anti-Palestinian apartheid, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing, including the Nakba.

The first major postwar challenge to this Labor Zionism emerged from the Black Power movement of the 1960s. In January 1969, the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers championed the Palestinian struggle as part of worldwide resistance to racism and colonialism. In 1973, three thousand Arab autoworkers in Detroit led protests and strikes against United Auto Worker (UAW) officials’ support for Israel during the 1973 war. In 2004, Labor for Palestine was established to reclaim this foundation, and promote respect for the BDS picket line.

In the immediate wake of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza since October 7, 2023, most US labor officials remained silent—or worse. But the slow growth of labor anti-Zionism over the years, combined with mushrooming rank-and-file activism and social movements like Black Lives Matter, produced unprecedented labor outcry against the carnage. For example, seven major US unions called for a ceasefire, and later called for an arms embargo against Israel. 

However, this top-down shift failed to support Palestinian resistance to occupation, equated “the loss of life” and “warfare” between Israelis and Palestinians, and demanded the release of Israeli hostages without mentioning thousands of Palestinian hostages. They ignored the “Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel,” and omitted any reference to BDS. And they have done nothing to actually bring about a ceasefire and arms embargo.

For all these reasons, a growing number of rank-and-file labor groups have embraced the Palestinian trade union call, and many have affiliated with the Labor for Palestine National Network.

3. In terms of internal politics, how would you describe the current condition of the working class struggle in the US? What kind of problems are workers facing and how is the movement responding to them? 

The working class, both around the world and in the US, has been under intense attack coming out of the 1960s. This developed through the decline of the permanent arms economy of World War II which brought an end to a relatively prosperous era, and the energy crisis of the mid 1970s. The ruling class turned on the working class to make it pay for the crisis. This accelerated during Carter’s Democratic administration in the late 1970s, which opened the door to even sharper attacks by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, leading to givebacks at the workplace, breaking of the PATCO air traffic controllers union, which symbolized the overall attack on organized labor. In 1970, US private sector union density was nearly 30 percent. Today, it’s only six percent. This was accompanied by a growing backlash against the Black freedom struggle and other social movements.

The complacent, pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy offered little resistance to this onslaught, leaving the working class in retreat. Today this same labor bureaucracy has failed to resist Trump’s onslaught against the working class. Some unions, like the United Auto Workers, support tariffs, which divide the working class internationally and lead to layoffs at home. It has similarly done little to stop the vicious ICE attacks against documented, undocumented, unionized, and non-unionized workers. 

Yet, there are beacons of hope from below. In the last decade, we have seen a major increase in popular support for unions, and “Red for Ed” teacher strikes in Chicago, West Virginia, California, and elsewhere. These have overlapped with Black Lives, #MeToo and Palestine solidarity movements. As a result, many see all these struggles as connected. This is also reflected in the election of Zoran Mamdani in New York City with overwhelming support from young people who regard themselves as socialists of one kind or another.

There is sharp resistance to ICE in Los Angeles, in Minneapolis, and elsewhere. These are led by migrant working-class communities from Latin America that have been subject to US imperialism for more than two centuries, including US-backed fascist coups and death squads, which have driven many here. These migrant communities have a high level of political consciousness and traditions of struggle. Despite the lack of action from the labor bureaucracy, these social movements can spark rank-and-file worker resistance to ICE, the Gaza genocide, and at the workplace. 

4. You talked about Post World War II history. The US labor movement also had its very strong moments, like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Can you also talk about how that movement was crushed, and what influence the anti-communist crusade in the US during the Cold War had on the labor movement and where we are today?

Anti-communism has a long, ugly history in US history, including the execution of socialist and anarchist Haymarket martyrs fighting for the eight-hour day in Chicago in 1886. They were victims of the first Red Scare. For decades, there was system anti-labor state violence from Pinkertons, police, state militias, and the army, who would routinely murder strikers—all under the banner of racism and/or anti-communism. We often think of anti-communism in US labor coming much later  but it started way back then. 

The Socialist Party and IWW were founded in at the turn of the 20th century. So once again, there was a growing militant labor movement, which was met with ongoing  repression. For example, Eugene Debs, a leading member of theSP, was infamously imprisoned for opposing World War I, while a second Red Scare in 1919-1920 deported thousands of foreign-born activists. 

In the early 1930s, the Depression spurred renewed labor organizing including three pivotal events in 1934 that sparked creation of the CIO: the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike (led by socialists of the American Workers Party), the Minneapolis Teamsters and General Strike (led by Trotskyists of the Communist League of America), and the San Francisco General Strike (led by members of the Communist Party and other radicals).

With the onset of World War II, the movement quieted for a couple of reasons. First, the war ended the Depression by generating unprecedented jobs and wages. Second, the Communist Party and the labor bureaucracy imposed a no-strike pledge. In 1946, pent up grievances led to a brief explosion of labor militancy In 1947, the ruling class responded by enacting the Taft Hartley Act, which sharply restricted working class action like secondary boycotts. This was accompanied by yet another Red Scare, which came to be known as McCarthyism. Communists and other radicals were purged from the unions, with the enthusiastic collaboration of a union bureaucracy that was allied with US imperialism and anti-communism, in the tradition of conservative skilled trades leadership of US labor supporting colonialism and World War I. 

In exchange for supporting capitalism and imperialism, purging radicals, and surrendering union control at the workplace, the ruling class delivered a permanent arms economy with jobs and higher wages, from which Black workers were largely excluded until the civil rights movement. But during the 1960s, this all started to unravel. An increasingly high-tech arms economy generated fewer jobs. The Black freedom and antiwar movements sharply challenged the entire status quo. The labor bureaucracy, however, was at best non-responsive to all these movements, and at worst actively hostile.

The Vietnam war had a huge impact on the working class. Despite the Johnson administration’s promises to end racism and poverty, the ruling class couldn’t offer both butter and guns, so social programs were underfunded, while both inflation and taxes went up. Meanwhile, the ugly realities of the war disillusioned and radicalized young GIs, who not only refused to fight but were “fragging” their own officers. By 1971, the Pentagon reported that this GI mutiny had made US ground forces unreliable and ineffective. However, there was always backlash. Civil rights workers, Black Panthers, student protesters, Attica inmates, native people, and many others were imprisoned or murdered. 

By the mid-1970s, the economy was in crisis, leading to de-industrialization and layoffs, while the labor bureaucracy remained paralyzed, even when the Reagan administration broke the the air traffic controllers union in 1981.

5. Since we talked about the end of the 20th century, maybe we can move closer to today. In the US, before Trump, we saw the Obama administration and the Biden administration. You mentioned that the attacks on the working class have been going on since the 1970s. What was happening before Trump, in terms of workers’ rights and workers’ movements, when Democrats were in power? How did this term set the stage for the Trump administration?

The Democrats have fully participated in the neoliberal attack on the working class. Jimmy Carter bailed out the Chrysler Corporation, and deregulated the airline and trucking industries. Bill Clinton instituted the NAFTA “free trade” agreement. Despite appointing pro-labor appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, the Obama and Biden administrations largely ignored the deepening worker impoverishment, thereby opening the door to Trump. And the Democrats have offered no meaningful resistance to Trump’s unrestrained attack on the working class.

More broadly, US imperialism and Israeli genocide are thoroughly bipartisan projects. It was Obama who dramatically increased weapons funding for Israel just before he left office. 

For all those reasons and more, Labor for Palestine does not support the Democrats.

6. Turning to the Trump administration, what is the ultimate aim of the militarization, the deportation campaign, building up the ICE, and mobilizing the National Guard as a federal force over the working class, the immigrants? Is this perhaps a preparation for further wars, a civil war, or even imperial wars, to secure stability internally for these wars? What kind of class interests are behind what we are witnessing?

US imperialism is in long-term crisis. Its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and beyond since 2001 have taken millions of lives yet the US does not really control the Middle East. Despite the US-backed genocide, Israel has been unable to crush Palestinian resistance.

There is also the rise of rivals like Russia and China, with whom the US is now redividing the world, just as Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill divided the world between them at Yalta in 1945. However, there’s still going to be inter-imperialist conflict and clashes over trade, and control of oil, minerals, and spheres of influence.

In that context, Trump is escalating attacks and normalizing militarization—abroad and at home. On one level, that isn’t new, and the US has always relied on military conquest and repression. But this is a renewed militarism on steroids. No US administration would’ve openly said, when they were carrying out all kinds of coups in the 1960s or ‘70s, and supporting death squads in Nicaragua or El Salvador in the 1980s, that they were upholding the Monroe Doctrine. They would’ve said, “no, we’re not doing that, we’re just supporting democracy.” But today, it’s naked imperialism abroad and militarism at home, as reflected in the ICE terror campaign. 

Again, this had its roots in Democratic administrations, including war and genocide abroad, mass deportation, systemic state violence against Palestine solidarity, and demonizing anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. Today, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis is denouncing ICE, but he himself is an ardent Zionist who vetoed a City Council BDS resolution during the current genocide. The Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd and  many others. And beyond anti-ICE rhetoric, the Democratic governor of Minnesota just called out the National Guard to protect ICE against mass protests. Trump has run with all that and is taking it even further. That’s why we see incredible grassroots resistance in Los Angeles and in Minneapolis, and why the anti-ICE movement has the unparalleled potential to inspire and ignite resistance in the workplace and unions. Because if workers were organized to do so, we could shut down not only ICE, but also the genocide in Gaza, US War on Venezuela, and any number of other injustices. Socialists have always looked to the working class, because the working class, by virtue of the nature of its class existence, has the unique ability, not only to resist and to bring down capitalism, but also to rule society in a new and democratic way—which is the essence of socialism. As always, it’s up to the rank and file to make any of that happen.

7. All this history is also a history of the trade union bureaucracy having a stranglehold on the rank-and-file who try to actually have different policies within the unions. What would your message be to radical unionists who are facing this bureaucratic opposition in the unions Zionists or otherwise, as the bureaucratic repression of radicalism extends in unions beyond Palestine solidarity? What are the main obstacles that unionists who are trying to grow resistance in unions face? How do you think we can challenge it? 

US unions are relatively weak. Only six percent of private sector workers are unionized, and Trump has recently terminated collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of federal workers. In addition, unions are dominated by very unresponsive, ineffective bureaucracies that are failing to actively resist any of the attacks on the working class, including the massive assault on migrant workers and anti-ICE protesters. Few unions have opposed the brutal, catastrophic US-Israel wars against Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine. 

In this context, we have to build Palestine solidarity from below. First, Rank-and-file workers need to form their own Labor for Palestine groups, and connect with the 55-plus member groups in the Labor for Palestine National Network. Second, we need to take action at the workplace—even if that action is wearing a keffiyeh to work as a group, or proposing a resolution in our unions. Third, we need to always make clear that Palestine solidarity is a litmus test, just like resisting ICE, racism, and union busting. We must draw these connections all the time and not allow Palestine to be siloed or silenced. And those connections are welcome. I am proud that just last night, my union, the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys-UAW 2325, voted almost unanimously to oppose the Iran war, while drawing all those connections. The point is, there’s always a place to start. We need to learn from each other. We need to support each other. Nobody has all the answers, but together we can forge a movement to win. 

8. Finally, what do you say to those who say bringing up Palestine or anti-imperialist positions in the union distracts us from fighting for the bread and butter issues and material interests of members, that it creates tension and division within the unions, divides the membership, and weakens us at bargaining, which are presented as the primary tasks of the union?

First, it is dishonest to claim that somehow Palestine is not a union issue when for more than a century, US union officialdom has actively supported Zionist genocide and ethnic cleansing. Second, “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All” doesn’t have a Palestine exception. In fact, the one percent is allied with and complicit in the genocide against Palestine. Third, our taxes and union dues should be used for sustainability and justice at home and abroad—not for imperialism, settler colonialism, and genocide. And fourth,  solidarity with Palestine has energized unions, because a growing number of members want their union to be on the right side of justice. 

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