IJAN is building a student/youth network that will begin in the United States and hopefully grow in other regions. The student/youth network seeks to develop the leadership and participation of younger anti-Zionists and questioning Jewish youth in our work and the broader Palestine solidarity and anti-racist movements. Through campus-based organizing, we hope to engage both … Campus and Student/Youth Organizing 2009
On April 20, Michael Letwin addressed a London forum cosponsored by IJAN, Laborfor Palestine-U.S. and the British Committee for Universities of Palestine(BRICUP). Topics included the Irish Congress of Trade Unions BDS conference(above), and the role of Labor-Zionism and the Histadrut in spearheading andcamouflaging racism, apartheid, dispossession and ethnic cleansing againstPalestinians.
Ashistoric victims of state-sponsored discrimination and violence, Jews have longstood with the oppressed, including the labor, civil rights and anti-apartheidmovements. Many of us in the Labor Movement today are the descendants ofparents and grandparents who considered the struggles of working families theirlife’s work as many of us still do. Inthat spirit, the Labor Network of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network(IJAN) wholeheartedly supports the growing movement for Boycott, Divestment andSanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid.
TheBDS campaign was initiated by Palestinian civil society, including its entirelabor movement. It calls for an end to Israeli military occupation andcolonization of historic Palestine, the right of Palestinian refugees to returnto the land from which they have been ethnically cleansed since the Nakba of1947-1948, and equal rights for all throughout historic Palestine.
Thiscampaign has been endorsed by numerous labor bodies, including the Congress ofSouth African Trade Unions (COSATU), UNISON (UK), Transport and GeneralWorkers’ Union (UK), Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Canadian Union of PublicEmployees-Ontario, six Norwegian trade unions, Irish Congress of Trade Unions,Scottish Trades Union Congress, and Intersindical Alternativa de Catallunya(Spain).
The campaign gainedstill greater urgency after the Gaza pogrom launched by Israel on December 27,which left 1,400 dead and 5,000 wounded; nearly all were civilians, hundreds ofthem children. Gaza remains under Israeli siege.
Oneof the Labor Movement’s finest hours was its years of campaigning as part of aninternational boycott movement against apartheid in South Africa and insolidarity with South African working families who labored in near slaveconditions. For those of us who areJewish, fighting against apartheid was a continuation of a long Jewishtradition of fighting against exploitation and oppression. South Africans havesaid that apartheid in Gaza is worse than in South Africa, if only because theaim is clearly extermination, something else with our history we easilyrecognize.
It is notsurprising that the strongest labor solidarity has come from the South AfricanTransport and Allied Workers Union in Durban, which refused to handle Israelicargo. The Western Australia Branch of the Maritime Union of Australia hasjoined them. And most recently, the Trade Union Congress, the governing UnionFederation in Britain has endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctionscampaign.
COSATU,in turn, has "call[ed] on other workers and unions to follow suit and to do allthat is necessary to ensure that they boycott all goods to and from Israeluntil Palestine is free." They have notforgotten nor should any of us that Israel was apartheid South Africa’s
Despiteall of this, U.S. labor officialdom — often without the knowledge or consentof union members — remains a leading accomplice of Israeli apartheid.
For more than sixtyyears, it has closely collaborated with the Histadrut, the Zionist laborfederation that has spearheaded – and whitewashed – apartheid,dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians since the 1920s. Indeedthe Histadrut (as both employer and union) produced weapons for sale to the whiteSouth African government for use against Black working families, while at homeit either refused to allow Arab workers to join or shunted them off into theirown segregated section of the union.
Today, U.S. laborleaders have at least $5 billion of union pension funds and retirement plans investedin State of Israel Bonds.
In April 2002,while Israel butchered Palestinian refugees at Jenin in the West Bank, AFL-CIOPresident John Sweeney was a featured speaker at a belligerent "NationalSolidarity Rally for Israel." In July2007, Stuart Appelbaum of the Jewish Labor Committee, a Histadrut spokesman,enlisted top officials of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to condemn Britishunion support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.
In so doing, U.S. labor bodies support:
* The murderous Israeli war on and siege ofGaza.
* Exploitation of undocumented workers, thevast majority people of color — something we oppose and call racist at home.
* State-sponsored pogroms againstPalestinians – something we oppose and call racist at home.
* Residential, workplace and trade union segregationof workers by ethnicity and religion – something we oppose and call racist athome.
* The infamous apartheid wall, that separatesPalestinians from each other and from their means of sustenance – something weoppose and call racist at home.
* Wage differentials between Jewish andArab workers – something we oppose and call racist at home.
*A state and an ideology backed by the most right-wing, racist, sexist anti-laborpolitical and military leaders both in "Israel" and at home.
Thistreacherous role echoes U.S. military and financial support, without which theZionist system could not exist.
As with the wars inIraq and Afghanistan, workers in the United States pay a staggering human andfinancial price, including a deepening economic crisis, for U.S.-Israeli warand occupation.
Upholdingour Jewish heritage of fighting oppression, and reaffirming the principle oflabor solidarity, we in IJAN-Labor call on labor bodies everywhere to join us indemanding an immediate and total:
Briefing:
The Jewish Labor Committee andApartheid Israel
International JewishAnti-Zionist Network-Labor, and Labor for Palestine(U.S.),April 13, 2010
Israelwas left with no choice but to defend itself and dismantle Hamas’s ability tolaunch more missiles. . . . Israelis continuing to supply humanitarian aid of food, water and medicine into Gaza, and to allow relief agencies to supply material tothe suffering people of Gaza.
–"Jewish LaborCommittee Statement on Gaza,"January 9, 2009[i]
TheJLC put together a delegation of Irish-American trade union leaders lastNovember (including one of our honorees tonight) to go to Ireland and to stand up for the State of Israel whenIrish trade unionists were considering positions with which we disagreed.
–"StuartAppelbaum’s Remarks at October 2009 JLC Dinner"[ii]
•Overview.The Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) presents itself as a model of progressive,socially conscious trade unionism. But as a U.S.mouthpiece for the Histadrut, this false image has been a smokescreen to disguiseand promote Apartheid Israel,"AFL-CIA" support war and empire, and racism in the labor movement.
•1940s:The Nakba. The JLC was founded in 1934 to fight fascism and helpJewish refugees from Europe.[iii]But in the late-1940s, the JLC joins with Labor Zionist union officials who helppersuade both Truman and Stalin to support partition and establishment of theZionist state.[iv]
•1950s:McCarthyism. Under the banner, "Jewish Labor FightsCommunism,"[v] the JLC supports McCarthyite purges of government and labor,[vi] and undermines the campaign to defend the Rosenbergs from execution.[vii]
The JLC also supports overall U.S. Cold Warforeign policy,[viii] urgesthe U.S. to arm Israel against "Communist and Arab designs,"[ix]and declares that conflict in the Middle East, "is not simply between Egypt and Israel,but between democracy and expansionist dictatorship, between the free world andNasserism backed by Moscow.. . . Events also have demonstrated the basic identity of interest of Israel and thefree world."[x]
>> Click here to read the original in Spanish.
Today we march in solidarity with the memory of the victims ofArgentinian state terror in the monstrous years of repression and alsoas Jewish with the people of Gaza and all of Palestine, victims ofIsraeli state terror, expulsion, oppression, torture and assassinationduring the last 70 years.
Por primera vez, en Argentina, desfilan públicamente , judíos contralos terrorismos de estado. Ayer fue el Plan Cóndor , hoy es el PlomoFundido .Ambos terrorismos perfectamente pergeñados desde Washingtontuvieron como objetivo eliminar las resistencias populares que lucharony luchan por un mundo de justicia y libertad . Este es el comunicadoque se dio a conocer durante la marcha
We are calling for a week of coordinated actions across the world thatconfront Zionism and support the boycott, divestment and sanctions(BDS) call from Palestine. We are therefore mobilizing practicing andsecular Jews across the globe to honor the second intifada and the highholidays by taking action to divest economically, politically,emotionally and spiritually from Zionism and from Israel.
UPDATE: Due to a growinginterest in participation in launch in regions across the globe, we areextending the Week of Action to a Month of Action (October 1 – October 31).
Click here to find out more, to add your ideas for what these actions might look like and to bring additional ideas.
International Resistance to Zionism
In solidarity with 60-plus years of Palestinian resistance to the founding of Israel
The International Jewish Solidarity Network (IJSN) is a growing network of Jews whose identities are not based on Zionism but on long histories of Jewish participation in liberation struggles from Eastern Europe and Iraq to Brooklyn. IJSN’s participation in this conference reflects our commitment to these legacies and to our participation in current struggles against colonization and imperialism. Central to this commitment is solidarity with Arab liberation struggles against US imperialism and Zionism.