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U.S. LABOR
AND GAZA
New York City
Labor Against the War
March 23, 2008
New York City Labor Against the War joins the Congress of South Africa
Trade Unions in denouncing Israel's recent massacres in Gaza, the victims of
which include at least 130 Palestinians -- half of them civilians, including
dozens of women and children -- since February 27.
WHO ARE THE TERRORISTS?
Israel claims that it is
fighting "terrorism" in Gaza. This is the same hollow excuse with which the U.S.
seeks to justify war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the erosion of civil liberties
and labor rights at home.
In fact, Israel's attacks are part of a relentless, U.S.-orchestrated
campaign of collective punishment -- with complicity of the corrupt Palestinian
Authority -- to overthrow the democratically-elected Hamas government.
Long before its latest massacres, Israel had turned Gaza into the
world's "largest open air prison," assassinating activists, and cutting-off
essential goods and services to 1.5 million people. Only as a result did Hamas
abandon a unilateral two-year truce.
Even now, Israel seeks to derail Hamas truce offers by escalating
arrests, home demolitions, settlements and murder in the West Bank -- from which
no rockets have been fired.
Despite media portrayals, this violence is overwhelmingly one-sided
against Palestinians, who have no aircraft, artillery or tanks.
Thus, while only one Israeli has been killed by rockets launched from
Gaza since May 2007, Israel's modern arsenal killed 60 Palestinians on March 1
alone.
On February 29, Israel's Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Valnai,
threatened a bigger "Shoah" -- a reference to the Nazi Holocaust.
As UN official John Dugard has pointed out, Palestinian rockets are not
the cause, but the "inevitable consequence," of Israeli state terror in Gaza,
the slow-motion genocide which human rights organizations describe as "worse
than at any time since the beginning of the Israeli military occupation in
1967."
Following the latest attacks, a Council on Foreign Relations expert
explained, "You have Palestinians who wouldn't necessarily support the violence
but they are saying, 'Well, what choice do we have?'"
SIXTY YEARS OF ETHNIC CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE
Israel's war on Gaza can only
be understood as an attempt to stamp out all resistance -- including nonviolent
protest -- to Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Indeed, most of Gaza's population are survivors of Zionist expulsions
since the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948, when 13,000 Palestinians were massacred,
531 towns and villages erased, 11 urban neighborhoods emptied, and more than
750,000 (85 percent) driven from 78 percent of their country.
In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22 percent of Palestine --
including East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza -- which, in violation of UN
resolutions, remains under Israeli military rule.
Today, as a result of these policies, at least 70 percent of the 10
million Palestinians are refugees -- the largest such population in the world.
Despite other UN resolutions, Israel vows that it will never allow them to
return.
Palestinians who managed to remain within the 1948 areas -- today, 1.4
million (or 20 percent of the population in Israel) -- are permanently separated
from their families in exile, subject to more than 20 discriminatory laws,
treated as a "demographic threat," and threatened with mass expulsion.
In East Jerusalem and the West Bank, 140 illegal, ever-expanding
Jewish-only settlements and road systems dominate the water resources and
control 40 percent of the land. Palestinians are confined, separated, denied
medical treatment, and degraded by an 8-meter-high separation wall, pass laws,
curfews and 600 military checkpoints.
From 2000-2007, 4,274 Palestinians in these 1967 territories were
killed, compared with 1,024 Israelis. The military has seized 60,000 political
prisoners; it still holds and tortures 11,000.
All of these conditions have dramatically worsened since the Annapolis
"peace conference" in November.
U.S. SPONSORSHIP
Israel's war on Palestine
depends completely on U.S. money, weapons and approval.
Since 1948, Israel -- the top foreign aid recipient -- has received at
least $108 billion from the U.S. government. In the past ten years alone, U.S.
military aid was $17 billion; over the next decade, it will be $30 billion.
Israel's recent assault on
Gaza was endorsed by a Congressional vote of 404-1. Democratic and Republican
presidential candidates fall over themselves to offer more of the same.
On March 22, Dick Cheney reassured Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
of "America's. . . . commitment to Israel's right to defend itself always
against terrorism, rocket attacks and other threats," and that the U.S. and
Israel are "friends -- special friends."
This "special friendship" means that, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is
U.S. aircraft, cluster bombs and bullets that kill and maim on behalf of the
occupiers. Just one of many targets was the Palestinian General Federation of
Trade Unions headquarters in Gaza City, destroyed by F-16s on February 28.
Such support bolsters Israel's longstanding role as watchdog and junior
partner for U.S. domination over the oil-rich Middle East -- and beyond. In that
capacity, Israel was apartheid South Africa's closest ally.
After 9/11, it helped intensify the demonization of Arabs and Muslims.
It has 200 nuclear weapons, but helped manufacture "evidence" of Iraqi WMD. With
U.S. weapons and support, it invaded Lebanon in 2006.
Together, these wars and occupations have killed, maimed and displaced
millions of people, thereby creating the world's largest humanitarian crisis.
Now, Israel is the cutting edge of threats against Syria and Iran.
In other words, oppression and resistance in Palestine is the epicenter
of U.S.-Israeli war throughout the Middle East. These stakes are reflected in
the ferocity of Israel's attacks against Gaza.
LABOR'S ROLE
In Palestine, South Africa, Britain, Canada and other countries, labor
has condemned Israeli Apartheid.
Workers in the United States pay a staggering human and financial
price, including deepening economic crisis, for U.S.-Israeli war and occupation.
But through a combination of intent, ignorance and/or expediency, much
of labor officialdom in this country -- often without the knowledge or consent
of union members -- is an accomplice of Israeli Apartheid.
Some 1,500 labor bodies have plowed at least $5 billion of union
pension funds and retirement plans into State of Israel Bonds.
In April 2002, while Israel butchered Palestinian refugees at Jenin in
the West Bank, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney was a featured speaker at a
belligerent "National Solidarity Rally for Israel." In 2006, leadership of the
American Federation of Teachers embraced Israel's war on Lebanon.
These same leaders collaborate with attempts by the Jewish Labor
Committee (JLC) to silence Apartheid Israel's opponents -- many of whom are
Jewish.
In July 2007, top officials of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win signed a
JLC statement that condemned British unions for even considering the nonviolent
campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Just days ago, the JLC and the leadership of UNITE-HERE bullied a community
organization in Boston into revoking space for a conference on "Zionism and the
Repression of Anti-Colonial Movements."
Even the leadership of U.S. Labor Against the War, which receives
funding from several major unions, remains adamantly silent about U.S.
government, corporate and labor support for Israeli Apartheid.
Labor leaders' complicity parallels infamous "AFL-CIA" support for U.S.
war and dictatorship in Vietnam, Latin America, Gulf War I, Afghanistan and
elsewhere. It strengthens the U.S.-Israel war machine and labor's corporate
enemies, reinforces racism and Islamophobia, and makes a mockery of
international solidarity.
A NECESSARY STAND
More than forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came under
intense public attack for opposing the Vietnam war. Even within the Civil Rights
Movement, some dismissed his position too "divisive" and "unpopular."
In his famous speech at the Riverside Church in April 1967, Dr. King
answered these critics by pointing out that "silence is betrayal," and that "the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today . . . [is] my own government."
At the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace in November 1967,
he reiterated the most basic principles of labor solidarity: "Injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice everywhere. . . . Ultimately a genuine leader is not a
searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."
These principles are no less relevant today.
Yes, the Israel lobby seeks to silence opponents of Israeli Apartheid.
All the more need for trade unionists to break that silence by speaking out
against Israeli military occupation, for the right of Palestinian refugees to
return, and for the elimination of apartheid throughout historic Palestine.
Therefore, we reaffirm our support for an immediate and total:
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End to U.S. military and
economic support for Israel.
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Divestment of business
and labor investments in Israel.
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Withdrawal of U.S. and
allied forces from the Middle East.
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Issued by NYCLAW Co-Conveners
(Other affiliations listed for identification only):
Larry Adams
Former President, NPMHU Local 300
Michael Letwin
Former President, UAW Local 2325/Assn. of Legal Aid Attorneys
Brenda Stokely
Former President, AFSCME DC 1707; Co-Chair, Million Worker March
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NYCLAW, with Al-Awda-NY The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, is a cofounder
of Labor for Palestine.
http://www.petitiononline.com/Gaza/petition.html
http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=705_0_1_0_C
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