BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
X-WR-CALNAME:www.indybay.org
PRODID:-//indybay/ical// v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:Indybay-18860849
SEQUENCE:19027657
CREATED:20231204T070100Z
DESCRIPTION:Bay Area Labor for Palestine\nDecember 16 - 1 p.m.\nOscar Grant Plaza, 
 Oakland\n\nLabor Demands:\nA Permanent Ceasefire\nNo US Military Aid for 
 Israel\nEnd the Occupation\n\nWear your union t-shirt and bring your union 
 or labor banner.\n\nImmediate Ceasefire in Gaza Resolution for the 
 Executive Board, ILWU Local 10\n\nWhereas, the ILWU has always defended 
 Palestinian rights; and\n\nWhereas, In 1988 & 1991 the ILWU Convention 
 passed multiple resolutions in the Liberation of Palestinian people; 
 and\n\nWhereas, Local 10 took action in defense of Palestinian rights when 
 the Israeli army bombed the headquarters of Palestinian General Federation 
 of Trade Unions in the West Bank in February 2002; and\n\nWhereas, in 2010, 
 2014 and 2021, Local 10 did not work ships of Israeli Zim Line ships when 
 there were protests against the repression of the Palestinians, and in the 
 last case notified other locals on the Coast that this was “hot cargo” 
 from Zim; and\n\nWhereas, the repression of Palestinians in the West Bank 
 and Gaza is worse than the conditions in South Africa under apartheid; 
 and\n\nWhereas, this October 7, Hamas organized a breakout attack from Gaza 
 after which nearly 1,300 Israeli civilians were killed in an indefensible 
 attack. The UN calls Gaza an “open air prison” of 2.2 million 
 Palestinians. Under such repressive conditions it is no surprise that there 
 would inevitably be a rebellion but this in no way justifies Israel’s 
 genocidal bombing of civilians in Gaza, now approaching 10,000 mostly 
 children, women and innocent civilians; and\n\nWhereas, the Palestinian 
 General Federation of Trade Unions has made an appeal to unions worldwide 
 for solidarity with the Palestinians; and\n\nWhereas, the ILWU Local 5 
 Executive board along with other Unions like UE, UAW 2865, OEA,  have all 
 passed resolutions calling for Ceasefire in Gaza and the rest of 
 Palestine;\n\nTherefore be it resolved, that in this dire emergency Local 
 10 demand a ceasefire of Gaza & send a message to the PGFTU expressing our 
 solidarity and our determination to take action in their defense consistent 
 with our actions in the past and ILWU’s principled position of defending 
 Palestinian rights.\n\nTherefore may it be further resolved, that ILWU 
 Local 10 call on elected officials demanding a ceasefire, and an end to the 
 Israeli Apartheid.\n\nBe it finally resolved, that ILWU Local 10 send a 
 copy of this resolution to the ILWU international and district councils 
 encouraging them to pass similar resolutions. We additionally call on other 
 trade unions both nationally and internationally to support the PGFTU, a 
 ceasefire and an end to Israeli apartheid oppression.\n\nUS Labor Has Long 
 Been a Stalwart Backer of Israel. That’s Starting To 
 Change\n\nhttps://jacobin.com/2023/11/us-labor-israel-palestine-solidarity-history#:~:text=The%20US%20labor%20movement%20has,moments%20are%20becoming%20increasingly%20common.&text=Our%20new%20issue%2C%20“Aging%2C”%20is%20out%20now.\n\n\nNovember 
 11, 2023\n\n\nAuthor: JEFF SCHUHRKE\n\n\nAs the Israeli government carries 
 out what experts describe as a potential genocide in Gaza — with full 
 political, financial, and military backing from the United States — 
 millions of people around the world are mobilizing to demand an immediate 
 cease-fire and a free Palestine. Workers in the United States, including 
 numerous rank-and-file unionists and local union representatives, are 
 similarly speaking out against the ongoing siege and bombardment of Gaza 
 and pledging their solidarity with Palestinian trade unions, which have 
 called on organized labor to refuse to manufacture or transport weapons 
 destined for Israel.\n\nLabor leaders in various countries have joined in 
 these calls, but top US labor officials — especially those in the 
 AFL-CIO, the country’s top labor federation — have mostly refrained 
 from supporting a cease-fire, with a few making tepid statements about the 
 “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. After a central labor council in 
 Olympia, Washington, unanimously passed a cease-fire and Palestine 
 solidarity resolution a few weeks ago, the national AFL-CIO even stepped in 
 to quash the measure.\n\nThe flare-up over Gaza is hardly the first time 
 disagreement on foreign affairs has erupted within US labor. During the 
 Vietnam War, conservative officials like AFL-CIO president George Meany 
 unstintingly backed Washington’s adventurism, even as health care workers 
 with Local 1199 and some United Auto Workers (UAW) leaders were among the 
 earliest voices in the antiwar movement. Eventually, a majority of union 
 presidents opposed the war — helping pressure the US government to 
 finally end it — but not before millions of Vietnamese civilians and tens 
 of thousands of US troops had been killed.\n\nIt is therefore urgent for 
 rank-and-file activists to know the history of US labor’s close 
 relationship with Israel — as well as the brave cases of US unionists 
 working to alter that relationship to achieve peace and freedom for 
 everybody in historic Palestine.\n\nEmbracing Israel\n\nIn the early 
 twentieth century, most working-class Jewish Americans were non-Zionists or 
 anti-Zionists. The immigrant Jews who founded and led powerful 
 organizations like the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union 
 (ILGWU) and Amalgamated Clothing Workers had cut their political teeth back 
 in Eastern Europe as members of the socialist Jewish Labor Bund, which 
 rejected Zionism as a bourgeois, nationalist project that sidetracked class 
 struggle.\n\nAt the First Jewish Labor Congress — a 1919 national 
 gathering in New York of representatives from Jewish-led unions claiming to 
 represent five hundred thousand workers — the delegates debated Zionism 
 and passed a measure that explicitly rejected the idea of a Jewish state in 
 Palestine. Instead, the resolution called for the establishment of “a 
 free, independent republic in which no nationality, whether a minority or 
 majority people, shall have any special rights.”\n\nIn the early 
 twentieth century, most working-class Jewish Americans were non-Zionists or 
 anti-Zionists.\nBut as more European Jews moved to Palestine amid new US 
 immigration restrictions and the rise of Naziism, Jewish-American labor 
 officials grew increasingly sympathetic to the leaders of the Yishuv — 
 the Jewish community in Palestine — despite their own aversion to 
 Zionism. They established a close relationship with Histadrut, the Labor 
 Zionist organization in Palestine that simultaneously functioned as a union 
 federation and a network of cooperatives, farms, industrial enterprises, 
 housing companies, health clinics, and banks all aimed at building a new 
 economy that would absorb the influx of European Jewish settlers — while 
 deliberately excluding Palestinian Arabs.\n\nHistadrut received millions of 
 dollars in donations from US unions between the 1920s and 1940s. Some of 
 its early leaders — like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, who counted US 
 labor officials among their most reliable foreign allies — later became 
 Israeli prime ministers.\n\nBy the end of World War II, the sheer horror of 
 the Holocaust motivated non-Zionist Jewish-American unionists like ILWGU 
 president David Dubinsky to advocate for the partitioning of Palestine and 
 the creation of the State of Israel, but with no apparent regard for 
 Palestinians. They were joined by non-Jewish labor leaders as well, 
 including AFL president William Green and CIO head Philip Murray.\n\nIn 
 April 1948, the Nakba officially began as Zionist militias initiated their 
 bloody Plan D (Dalet) campaign of ethnic cleansing in majority-Palestinian 
 areas as preparation for the founding of Israel. On April 14, only five 
 days after at least 107 Palestinian villagers were murdered in the Deir 
 Yassin massacre, about thirty thousand members of the ILGWU and other 
 needle trades unions in New York staged a half-day work stoppage and 
 rallied at Yankee Stadium to demand President Harry Truman embrace 
 partition and lift the arms embargo he had imposed on Palestine so more 
 weapons could flow to Zionist forces.\n\n\n\nDavid Dubinsky and Harry 
 Truman. (Kheel Center via Wikimedia Commons)\n\nIt was partly due to this 
 intense pressure from his allies in organized labor, during his shaky 
 reelection campaign no less, that Truman immediately recognized Israel upon 
 its formal founding the next month. Under Dubinsky, the ILGWU extended a $1 
 million loan to the new Israeli government and set up a multimillion-dollar 
 bond program to fund the building of eight thousand homes in Israel for 
 incoming Jewish settlers.\n\nIn the years after the Nakba — which turned 
 750,000 Palestinians into permanent refugees — US unions donated millions 
 of dollars for the construction of public facilities in Israel, several of 
 them in previously majority-Palestinian cities, towns, and villages. A 
 partial list includes: the Walter Reuther Youth Center in Holon, George 
 Meany Stadium in Nazareth, Philip Murray Memorial Center in Elath, William 
 Green Cultural Center in Haifa, James R. Hoffa Children’s Home in Ayn 
 Karim, and ILGWU Hospital in Beersheba.\n\nIn addition, starting in 1951 
 and continuing ever since, US labor at every level purchased at least 
 hundreds of millions (more likely billions) of dollars in State of Israel 
 bonds — money primarily used to bankroll infrastructure projects. And 
 whenever Israel went to war with neighboring Arab states between the 1950s 
 and 1980s, US labor leaders wasted no time in expressing their support and 
 organizing emergency fundraising campaigns for Histadrut and the Israeli 
 government.\n\nEarly Palestine Solidarity\n\nDespite US labor’s close 
 ties with Israel, there have always been some dissenters. The earliest such 
 example occurred in April 1949, when Dubinsky received a remarkable letter 
 drafted by a group of New York ILGWU members identifying themselves as “a 
 community descendent of Arabic-speaking people.”\n\n“We would like to 
 draw your attention,” the letter’s signers told Dubinsky, “to the 
 plight of . . . the Arab refugees of Palestine who fled their homes into 
 the desert and neighboring countries. They number around 750,000. They are 
 destitute, homeless suffering human beings threatened by hunger and 
 disease.” They appealed to the ILGWU president as “a man of noble 
 character and high integrity” and “as a leader of our Union” to 
 provide funds to aid Palestinian refugees.\n\nThe twenty-nine signatories 
 included Vickie Karadashly, who apparently organized the effort, James and 
 Norman Shaleesh, Merta Khoury, and Amelia Abraham. As Karadashly explained 
 in a postscript, though the letter was initially only going to be signed by 
 “people of our race,” once fellow ILGWU members “heard of our 
 plea,” they also “gladly attached their names to our petition” — 
 names like Helen Campanelli and Irma Taverna, Jola Springer, and Mildred 
 Challenger.\n\nDubinsky responded by authorizing the ILGWU to donate $5,000 
 “for the use of Arab-refugee relief” to the American Friends Service 
 Committee, the Quaker humanitarian organization administering aid to 
 Palestinian refugees in Gaza on behalf of the United Nations. Compared to 
 the millions of dollars the ILGWU was busily giving to Histadrut and the 
 Israeli government, $5,000 was a paltry handout.\n\nCompared to the 
 millions of dollars the ILGWU was busily giving to Histadrut and the 
 Israeli government, $5,000 was a paltry handout.\nThere is little record of 
 any further pro-Palestine actions from US labor until the Six-Day War in 
 1967, during which Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip (territories 
 meant to comprise a future Palestinian state, per international law), as 
 well as Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights. In the 
 immediate aftermath, young black and Arab autoworkers in Metro Detroit 
 started voicing their support for the growing Palestinian liberation 
 movement.\n\nWhen Egypt and Syria launched the October War of 1973 to try 
 to regain the territory they’d lost six years earlier, Detroit’s large 
 community of Arab autoworkers was shocked to discover that their union, the 
 UAW, held $785,000 in Israeli bonds. On October 13, around three thousand 
 Arab protesters marched in Dearborn to the UAW Local 600 office, demanding 
 the bonds be liquidated. Soon after, they formed an Arab Workers Caucus, 
 forging an alliance with fellow UAW dissidents from the League of 
 Revolutionary Black Workers.\n\nThe Arab Workers Caucus learned that on 
 November 28, UAW president Leonard Woodcock would be honored by B’nai 
 B’rith International, a Zionist charitable organization, with its 
 Humanitarian of the Year Award at a gala dinner in downtown Detroit. At the 
 start of the October War, Woodcock had issued a public statement on behalf 
 of the union “unreservedly” condemning “the unprovoked 
 Egyptian-Syrian military attack” and expressing “our solidarity and 
 support with the State of Israel.”\n\n\n\nILGWU workers meet Lyndon B. 
 Johnson. (Kheel Center via Wikimedia Commons)\n\nThe workers used 
 Woodcock’s B’nai B’rith dinner to demand the union divest from 
 Israel. The caucus circulated seventy thousand flyers in Arabic and English 
 calling on Arab autoworkers to join in a wildcat strike on the day of 
 Woodcock’s award ceremony. In an advertisement published in the Detroit 
 Free Press, the local American Arab Coordinating Committee questioned 
 whether the UAW leadership was acting in members’ best interests by 
 spending “over ¾ million dollars” on “non-economical, low-interest, 
 foreign bonds.” The ad further noted that the UAW had an estimated 
 fifteen thousand Arab members. “Purchase of Israeli bonds is regarded by 
 these workers similarly as would a UAW investment in racist South Africa 
 would be regarded by black workers,” it said.\n\nAt Dodge Main in 
 Hamtramck, where Arab immigrants comprised upward of 25 percent of the 
 workforce, two thousand workers heeded the call for the November 28 wildcat 
 strike and halted production for the day. Other plants in the area 
 experienced slowdowns. That evening, about a thousand protested outside 
 Cobo Hall, where Woodcock was being honored. Holding signs that read 
 “Dispose of the Bonds” and “Jewish People Yes, Zionism No,” the 
 Arab protesters chanted “don’t abuse workers’ dues” and “no more 
 bombs, no more bonds.” Woodcock snuck into the venue through a back door 
 to avoid the protesters.\n\nFor his part, UAW secretary-treasurer Emil 
 Mazey issued a condescending statement a few weeks after the wildcat 
 action, saying that “a worker in any of the Arab countries who would do 
 likewise would soon find himself in jail.” He added, “American workers 
 of Arab descent ought to expend their energies helping their compatriots 
 get rid of the feudal and totalitarian overlords who are ruling those lands 
 with an iron fist.”\n\nDetroit’s large community of Arab autoworkers 
 was shocked to discover that their union, the UAW, held $785,000 in Israeli 
 bonds.\nUndeterred, the Arab Workers Caucus continued organizing. The 
 caucus sent delegates to the 1974 UAW constitutional convention in 
 California, who put forward a program urging the union to “stand firmly 
 in support of all workers and people struggling in Africa, Asia and Latin 
 America.” “In the Middle East,” the caucus’s program declared, the 
 “UAW should support the principle of establishing a secular, 
 non-theocratic, democratic state in Palestine for all people, Jews and 
 Arabs, and stand against any outside intervention.”\n\nAlthough the 
 convention’s resolutions committee ignored these proposals, by organizing 
 among the rank-and-file over several months, the Arab Workers Caucus 
 convinced multiple UAW locals to dispose of their own Israeli investments, 
 resulting in the liquidation of $48,000 in bonds by 1975.\n\nOver a decade 
 later, as the Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada swept the 
 occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, a group of US activists took out a 
 full-page ad in the New York Times with a statement demanding Washington 
 cut all military and economic assistance to Israel, which they compared to 
 apartheid South Africa. “In Israel, no less than in South Africa, minimum 
 justice requires dismantling the apartheid state and replacing it with a 
 democratic secular Palestine, where Jews and Arabs, Christians and Moslems, 
 live together with equal rights and opportunities,” the March 1988 
 statement said.\n\nThe caucus’s program declared, the ‘UAW should 
 support the principle of establishing a secular, non-theocratic, democratic 
 state in Palestine for all people.’\nOver three hundred prominent 
 individuals attached their names to the message, including a dozen local 
 union officers from around the country. The most well-known trade unionist 
 was Jim Guyette, former president of Local P-9 of the United Food and 
 Commercial Workers, who two years earlier had led the high-profile (but 
 ultimately unsuccessful) strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, 
 Minnesota.\n\nIn a statement of its own, the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council 
 dismissed attempts to liken Israel to South Africa, labeling it “a 
 calumny we categorically reject and resent” because, they asserted, 
 Israel was a democracy.\n\nAs the First Intifada continued, the supposedly 
 democratic Israeli state jailed thousands of Palestinians without charge, 
 including scores of union organizers. Among them was Hani Beydoun, a leader 
 of the Jerusalem Hotel Workers’ Union, who was arrested in 1990 shortly 
 after returning to the West Bank from a whirlwind tour of North America, 
 where he met with US and Canadian unionists and testified before the United 
 Nations about Israel’s suppression of labor rights in the occupied 
 territories.\n\nDuring Beydoun’s monthslong detention, US and Canadian 
 union members sent over two thousand letters to the Israeli government 
 demanding his immediate release — though it’s unclear when and if he 
 was let go. A resolution adopted by AFSCME Social Service Local 1108 in Los 
 Angeles noted that “it appears that the brutal detention of Brother 
 Beydoun is in retaliation” for providing “direct evidence of the 
 barbarous denial of human and labor rights of Palestinian workers in Israel 
 and the occupied territories.”\n\nEmbracing Palestine\n\nAs the Israeli 
 military bombed the West Bank in 2002 during the Second Intifada, 
 destroying the Nablus offices of the Palestinian General Federation of 
 Trade Unions, delegates of the seventy five thousand–member San Francisco 
 Labor Council narrowly passed a resolution condemning Israel for the 
 “bombing of civilian and political targets” and for denying 
 Palestinians’ right to self-determination. Though passed democratically, 
 the measure ignited fierce backlash from pro-Israel groups and was quickly 
 rescinded. Nevertheless, the episode revealed the growing cracks in the 
 nearly hundred-year alliance between the US labor movement and Zionism and 
 Israel.\n\nIndeed, while labor officialdom remained in lockstep with 
 Israel, in the last twenty years rank-and-file activists have demonstrated 
 more solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement than in any 
 previous period.\n\nIn the last twenty years, rank-and-file activists have 
 demonstrated more solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement than 
 in any previous period.\nOnly a month after the San Francisco Labor 
 Council’s resolution, on April 15, 2002, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney 
 spoke at the National Rally for Israel — a mass gathering of one hundred 
 thousand people meant to showcase popular support for Israel amid the 
 violence of the Second Intifada. Standing on the steps of the US Capitol 
 alongside the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, Rudy Giuliani, and Paul 
 Wolfowitz, Sweeney declared, “On behalf of the thirteen million working 
 women and men of the AFL-CIO, I stand with you to express our support for 
 the people of Israel in this darkest of hours.” Illustrating the overall 
 tenor of the rally, Wolfowitz — a soon-to-be architect of the criminal US 
 invasion of Iraq — was literally booed off the stage for merely saying, 
 “Innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well.”\n\nAngered by 
 Sweeney’s participation in the event, some rank-and-file unionists 
 circulated a petition criticizing him for associating “U.S. labor’s 
 name with support for the Israeli invasion of the West Bank, which has 
 resulted in the widespread death and destruction of the Palestinian people 
 and property.”\n\nMany organizers in the emerging antiwar movement after 
 9/11 understood the connections between US militarism and Israeli 
 apartheid. In April 2004, unionists with New York City Labor Against the 
 War partnered with the Palestinian-led community group Al-Awda New York to 
 form Labor for Palestine. In its founding statement, Labor for Palestine 
 called on US trade unionists to:\n\nFully support Palestinian national, 
 democratic and labor rights throughout historic Palestine, including the 
 right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and 
 land.\nDemand an end to US military and economic support for Israeli 
 Apartheid.\nDivest all labor investments in Israeli apartheid.\nAffiliate 
 with Labor for Palestine.\nThe following year, Palestinians launched the 
 global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to nonviolently 
 pressure Israel to end the occupation, using tactics inspired by the South 
 African anti-apartheid struggle. Since then, while Labor for Palestine has 
 consistently urged US unions to honor “the BDS picket line,” several 
 top officials within the AFL-CIO have gone out of their way to condemn the 
 movement and overturn or shut down pro-BDS measures democratically adopted 
 by local labor bodies.\n\nDespite what some US labor officials may want to 
 believe, there is not a pro-Israel consensus in today’s unions.\nIn 
 recent years, unions outside the AFL-CIO — particularly the United 
 Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE) and International Longshore and 
 Warehouse Union (ILWU) — have had more freedom to support Palestinians. 
 UE endorsed BDS in 2015 and, earlier this year, passed a resolution urging 
 an end to US military aid to Israel. At the Port of Oakland, members of the 
 ILWU — which has a proud tradition of opposing imperialism and apartheid 
 — have honored community-led pickets of Israeli-operated cargo ships on 
 at least three occasions: in 2010, 2014, and 2021.\n\nDespite what some US 
 labor officials may want to believe, there is not a pro-Israel consensus in 
 today’s unions. The past several decades have witnessed a slow but steady 
 uptick in Palestine solidarity activism among rank-and-file workers who 
 don’t want their unions to be complicit in injustice.\n\nIt will continue 
 to take courage and persistent organizing for US trade unionists to ensure 
 the labor movement is a vehicle for peace, justice, and freedom, as it 
 ought to be. But they can take inspiration from the generations of past 
 union members who — defying labor officialdom’s overwhelmingly 
 pro-Israel bias — spoke up and stood in solidarity with 
 Palestine.\n\n_____________________________________\n\nJeff Schuhrke is a 
 labor historian, journalist, and union activist who teaches at the Harry 
 Van Arsdale Jr School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University\n\n\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2023/12/03/18860849.php
SUMMARY:Labor 4 Palestine Rally-Permanent Ceasefire/No US Military Aid To Israel/ End Occupation
LOCATION:Oscar Grant Plaza\nNext to Oakland City Hall
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2023/12/03/18860849.php
DTSTART:20231216T210000Z
DTEND:20231216T230000Z
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR