BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
X-WR-CALNAME:www.indybay.org
PRODID:-//indybay/ical// v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:Indybay-18887340
SEQUENCE:19065149
CREATED:20260711T062500Z
DESCRIPTION:Labor historian Jeff Schuhrke presents his new book “No Neutrals 
 There,Labor Zionism, and the Struggle For Palestine”\nHe will be joined 
 by Jeffry Blankfort, journalist and photographer who founded Labor Bulletin 
 On The Middle East; Clarence Thomas, ILWU Local 10 retired Secretary 
 Treasurer; David Newton, ILWU 10 leader and Michael Letwin with  Labor For 
 Palestine\nJuly 18, 2026\n2:00 PM\nAt: ILWU Local 10\nHenry Schmidt 
 Room\n400 North Point St., San Francisco\n\nProfessor Jeff Schuhrke has 
 published a book about the role of Zionism in the US\nlabor movement. The 
 book “No Neutrals There, US Labor, Zionism and the Struggle\nFor 
 Palestine” examines the history of the role of US unions in supporting 
 the forma-\ntion of the Israeli state and the Histadrut and how debate and 
 discussion about this\nrole has been suppressed within the labor movement. 
 The ILWU Local 10 has played a historic role in boycotting the Israeli ZIM 
 shipping line from coming to San Francisco and the West Coast.\nThis 
 meeting will be hybrid. You can also join by Zoom.\nFor Zoom, please go to 
 the LaborFest.net web page and get the link.\nFor more info: 
 laborfest@laborfest.net, wwwlaborfest.net, 415-642-8066\n\nNo Neutrals 
 There\nHow Jeff Schuhrke Excavates a Century of Labor, Empire, and 
 Palestine\nhttps://3arabawy.substack.com/p/no-neutrals-there?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1657225&post_id=177360713&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=emsp8&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email\nHOSSAM 
 EL-HAMALAWY\nNOV 13\n \nThere is a story American labor history has long 
 refused to tell itself, a story about the movement’s complicity in 
 empire. It is not about the picket lines of Flint or the coal seams of West 
 Virginia, but about the docks of Haifa and the weapons assembly lines that 
 fed the Israeli state. Jeff Schuhrke’s No Neutrals There drags that 
 buried history into daylight, and in doing so forces a reckoning not only 
 with the labor movement’s past but with its soul.\n\nPublished by 
 Haymarket Books, the volume arrives with impeccable timing. Israel’s 
 2023–25 assault on Gaza, what Palestinian unions rightly called a 
 genocide, has confronted American unions with a moral test: to continue 
 arming the oppressor or to heed the call of workers under siege. Schuhrke 
 opens with that moment, the Palestinian trade unions’ appeal for 
 international solidarity, and the shameful reaction of the AFL-CIO 
 bureaucracy that moved to quash even mild dissent within its ranks. It is a 
 scene of bureaucratic cowardice, perfectly emblematic of the historical 
 pattern his book reconstructs.\n\nFrom there, Schuhrke rewinds more than a 
 century, tracing how U.S. union officialdom became one of Zionism’s most 
 reliable allies. He does not write as a polemicist throwing stones from the 
 outside. He is a labor historian steeped in the movement’s inner grammar, 
 aware of its emancipatory traditions but unsparing about their betrayal. 
 The book’s title, No Neutrals There, comes from Florence Reece’s 1931 
 miners’ ballad and from George Habash’s revolutionary dictum that no 
 one is neutral between oppressor and oppressed. Schuhrke weaves those lines 
 into a transnational argument: labor solidarity means choosing sides, and 
 for too long, American unions chose the wrong one.\n\nThe House That 
 Zionism Built\n\nAt the heart of No Neutrals There is a devastating 
 historical insight. U.S. labor’s alignment with Zionism was never an 
 accident or a misunderstanding; it was a structural choice rooted in the 
 movement’s own settler-colonial origins and Cold War 
 anti-communism.\n\nSchuhrke begins in the early twentieth century, when 
 Jewish immigrant workers (Bundists, anarchists, and socialists) were 
 remaking the sweatshops of New York. Many of them rejected Zionism 
 outright. Their loyalty was to the shop floor, not to a promised land. The 
 idea that freedom could be achieved by fleeing to Palestine rather than 
 fighting capitalism where they stood struck them as bourgeois escapism. 
 Yet, as Schuhrke shows, a gradual transformation took place. Labor Zionism, 
 with its rhetoric of collective farms and “making the desert bloom,” 
 managed to seduce segments of the American trade-union leadership.\n\nHe 
 draws a sharp parallel: the Zionist project of “redeeming” the land 
 through Jewish labor echoed the American myth of the frontier, where white 
 settlers “tamed” supposedly empty lands. The same logic that erased 
 Native Americans resonated with U.S. labor officials who imagined their 
 movement as the vanguard of a civilizing mission. When AFL leader Samuel 
 Gompers endorsed Woodrow Wilson’s entry into World War I and backed the 
 Balfour Declaration’s promise of a “Jewish homeland,” it was not 
 despite his pragmatism; it was the logical extension of it. Respectability 
 and empire marched hand in hand.\n\nSchuhrke’s archival work is 
 impressive. He reconstructs the decades in which the AFL and later the 
 AFL-CIO became fundraisers, propagandists, and de facto lobbyists for 
 Israel. Labor Zionism’s institutions, such as the Histadrut, the Jewish 
 Agency, and the Jewish Labor Committee, were embraced as fraternal 
 partners. American union dues flowed to the Jewish National Fund. 
 Delegations of U.S. labor leaders toured kibbutzim and returned preaching 
 the virtues of “democratic socialism” in Israel, blind to the ruins of 
 Palestinian villages beneath their feet.\n\nWhat makes Schuhrke’s account 
 so potent is that he does not let nostalgia soften the picture. The same 
 AFL-CIO that crushed the left at home and collaborated with the CIA abroad 
 also underwrote Israeli colonization. During the Cold War, the 
 federation’s foreign-policy operatives, from Jay Lovestone to Irving 
 Brown, used the language of labor solidarity to build pro-U.S. unions 
 worldwide. Israel, they believed, was the model: a “socialist” state 
 friendly to Washington, efficient at repressing communists, and ruthless 
 toward the Arab poor.\n\nThe author quotes an AFL-CIO declaration from 
 1982, issued amid Israel’s invasion of Lebanon: “The AFL-CIO is not 
 neutral. We support Israel.” It was meant as a boast. Schuhrke turns it 
 into an indictment.\n\nAgainst Forgetting\n\nYet No Neutrals There is not a 
 dirge. It is a recovery project. Schuhrke insists that another lineage 
 exists, a minority tradition of American workers who stood with Palestine. 
 He resurrects the voices of Arab American organizers, Black radicals, 
 anti-Zionist Jews, and rank-and-file militants who refused to let 
 “internationalism” be reduced to flag-waving.\n\nAmong the most 
 compelling sections are those recounting the 1970s and 1980s, when the New 
 York City Labor Against the War coalition and the United Electrical Workers 
 began linking U.S. imperialism, apartheid South Africa, and the occupation 
 of Palestine as facets of the same system. He reminds us that some 
 longshore unions on the West Coast, descendants of the radical ILWU 
 tradition, did take principled stands, refusing to handle apartheid cargo 
 and, later, weapons bound for Israel. These were exceptions, but they 
 mattered. They proved that solidarity across borders was not a utopian 
 dream but a worker’s duty.\n\nSchuhrke writes without academic hedging. 
 His sentences have moral clarity, the kind that feels almost old-fashioned 
 in an era of moral relativism. When he recounts how AFL-CIO officials 
 rationalized Israel’s massacres as “self-defense,” he does not 
 conceal his outrage. Yet he never slips into caricature. He wants the 
 reader to understand why union leaders made these choices, including the 
 patronage networks, the fear of government repression, and the lure of 
 respectability, as well as why they can no longer hide behind 
 them.\n\nGaza, Guns, and the Future of Solidarity\n\nThe book’s framing 
 chapter, set amid the Gaza war of 2023–25, makes clear that this is not a 
 relic of Cold War history. The same ideological reflexes that bound labor 
 to empire still operate. The AFL-CIO’s reflexive deference to President 
 Biden, its fear of losing political access, its silence while U.S.-made 
 bombs leveled hospitals, all this repeats the past in real 
 time.\n\nSchuhrke documents how a new generation of unionists has begun to 
 revolt against that silence. Graduate workers at the University of 
 California, teachers in Chicago, postal workers, and rank-and-file 
 Teamsters have pushed their unions to endorse ceasefire resolutions and to 
 consider boycotting weapons shipments. He treats these initiatives not as 
 isolated acts but as signs of an emerging moral awakening.\n\nThe 
 chapter’s conclusion reads almost prophetic. The future of U.S. labor, he 
 argues, depends on whether it can free itself from the imperial logic that 
 shackled it to Zionism. Internationalism, if it is to mean anything, must 
 include Palestine. Otherwise, “solidarity forever” will remain a hollow 
 refrain.\n\nA Historian with a Hammer\n\nSchuhrke writes with the 
 discipline of a historian but the urgency of an activist. His prose carries 
 the cadence of a union song, measured, rhythmic, but edged with defiance. 
 He moves effortlessly between archival detail and political meditation, 
 quoting speeches, resolutions, and forgotten pamphlets without losing 
 narrative flow. The introduction alone, beginning with that 2023 call from 
 Palestinian trade unions, is worth the price of the book.\n\nWhat makes No 
 Neutrals There exceptional is its refusal to treat labor history as a 
 museum piece. For Schuhrke, history is a weapon. He uses it to challenge 
 the alibis of the present, to remind readers that neutrality is complicity, 
 that the moral horizon of a movement is measured not by its slogans but by 
 the lives it chooses to defend.\n\nHe also rescues the meaning of 
 internationalism from the bureaucrats who buried it. The old labor 
 diplomacy of the AFL-CIO, stuffed shirts on overseas junkets preaching 
 “free enterprise,” is here exposed as what it was: an appendage of the 
 State Department. Against that counterfeit, Schuhrke proposes a revived 
 internationalism rooted in anti-imperialism, demilitarization, and 
 environmental justice. The book’s final pages sketch an agenda that feels 
 both visionary and concrete: divest union pensions from Israeli occupation, 
 disrupt arms shipments, defend pro-Palestine activists from repression, and 
 redirect military budgets toward public welfare. In his hands, these are 
 not slogans; they are tasks.\n\nReading Across Time\n\nFor readers outside 
 the United States, the book has an added resonance. The patterns Schuhrke 
 identifies include the alignment of labor bureaucracies with ruling elites, 
 the use of “solidarity” as diplomatic theater, and the silencing of 
 anti-imperialist voices, all of which are hardly unique to America. They 
 describe the fate of many postcolonial and neoliberal unions across the 
 Global South, Egypt included. In that sense, No Neutrals There is a mirror 
 held up to all movements that once claimed to speak for workers but ended 
 up defending their own privilege.\n\nSchuhrke’s narrative also punctures 
 the sentimental myth of “labor Zionism” as a noble socialist experiment 
 gone astray. He shows that the kibbutz utopia was never innocent: it was 
 built on expropriated land and racial exclusion. The Israeli labor 
 federation, the Histadrut, was both a trade union and an employer, 
 enforcing the color line between Jewish and Arab workers. \n\nNo Neutrals 
 There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine by Jeff Schuhrke: 
 A Review 
 Essay\n\nhttps://www.greensocialthought.org/labor-economics/no-neutrals-there-us-labor-zionism-and-the-struggle-for-palestine-by-jeff-schuhrke-a-review-essay/\n\n 
 \nExamines US labor leaders’ support for the Zionist movement for over 
 100 years, and the growing resistance inside the trade union movement to 
 such.\n\n \nWritten by Kim Scipes – in Labor / Economics\n\nOctober 31, 
 2025 – Originally Published in Green Social Thought\n\n\n\nJeff 
 Schuhrke’s latest book, No Neutrals There:  US Labor, Zionism, and the 
 Struggle for Palestine, is a major contribution by a US scholar and 
 activist in support of Palestinians’ struggle for life, liberation, and 
 independence.  Written specifically to advance the struggle against Zionism 
 against especially the top level “leadership” of the AFL-CIO and the US 
 Empire, this actually is going to be a major source for information for 
 activists across the US and the world, going far beyond the limits of the 
 labor movement.  What Schuhrke provides is a clear but nuanced account of 
 the struggle by Palestinians against Zionist occupation and colonization of 
 Palestine, while foregrounding attention on the role of supporting Zionism 
 by top level leaders of the US labor movement.\n\n\n\nSchuhrke introduces 
 the book with a broad overview of US labor politics concerning Palestine.  
 He points to the refusal of AFL-CIO officials in late 2023 to allow rank 
 and file members in the Olympia, Washington area to express their 
 solidarity with Palestinian workers; these American workers had responded 
 to Palestinian unions’ calls for direct international solidarity by 
 asking workers around the world not to make or transport weapons to Israel. 
  However, AFL-CIO “leaders” claimed that foreign policy issues are the 
 sole provenance of national level leaders and demanded the central labor 
 council remove their positions from their web site and any literature and 
 rescind any passed related resolutions.  Schuhrke then points out  that 
 this was not surprising:  national level labor leaders, starting with those 
 of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), later joined by their 
 counterparts in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and then 
 together after their 1955 merger, have supported Zionism for more than 100 
 years.\n\n\n\nHe distinguishes Zionism, a political movement, from Judaism, 
 a religion, and points out that not all Zionists are Jewish, and that not 
 all Jews are Zionists; in fact, he argues that many Jews are opposed to 
 Zionism.  The Zionists, however, have dominated the colonial movement into 
 the Middle East at the direct expense of the indigenous Palestinian 
 peoples, initially under British imperialism but especially continuing 
 since the founding of Israel as an independent state in 1948.  (Notice how 
 Israel is regularly considered a “Jewish” state when, in actuality, it 
 should be known as a “Zionist” state…?)\n\n\n\nThe issue he uses 
 throughout the book is pointing out the hypocrisy of AFL-CIO leadership, 
 who basically say union members cannot engage in “outside” politics 
 when the so-called leadership has done so for over 100 years.  And 
 importantly—based on his previous work, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold 
 Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (2024, Verso) and my 
 AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers:  Solidarity or 
 Sabotage? (2010, Lexington Books)—he argues:\n\n\n\nThe other fundamental 
 reason for American labor’s long-standing alliance with Zionism and the 
 State of Israel is that it has historically been crucial to the AFL-CIO’s 
 larger goal of supporting US imperialism around the globe.\n\n\n\nAnd he 
 uses the rest of the book to show exactly what the labor leadership did and 
 to try to explain why they did it.\n\n\n\nSchuhrke begins his historical 
 account by distinguishing between two major responses by particularly 
 Eastern European Jews to the issue of antisemitism.  More working class 
 Jews tended to unite under the policies of proletarian internationalism, 
 while better off Jews tended to unite under another approach.  They created 
 two main organizations:  the Jewish Labor Bund (“Bund” meaning union) 
 and the Zionist Organization.  He writes,\n\n\n\nThough they were each the 
 product of European modernity, the Bund and the Zionist Organization 
 embodied different answers to antisemitic oppression. While the former 
 represented a proletarian Jewish movement dedicated to liberation through 
 class struggle and socialism, the latter was a more bourgeois configuration 
 that sought Jewish emancipation through nationalism and settler 
 colonialism.\n\n\n\nSchuhrke explains the affinity of US labor leaders to 
 Zionism, and he uses the concept of “Labor Zionism” to do so.  Some 
 Zionist leaders recognized the need to build an economy that could employ 
 Jewish “working class” immigrants once they reached the Middle East.  
 In fact, a key institution in this process has been the Histadrut, which 
 portrays itself as a Jewish labor center but, as Schuhrke shows, has always 
 been at the heart of the Zionist Israeli state: the Histadrut has always 
 been much more than a Zionist labor center taking care of Jewish workers. 
 Founded in December 1920, its formal name being The General Organization of 
 Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel, the Histadrut “would function as a 
 federation of Israel’s nascent Jewish trade unions, similar to the role 
 of the AFL in the United States but—much more importantly—it would also 
 drive and direct the construction of a Jewish-only economic 
 sector.”\n\n\n\nHe suggests its importance:\n\n\n\nBesides the trade 
 unions, then, the Histadrut also established kibbutzim and moshavim, new 
 industrial enterprises, housing and construction companies, a 
 transportation network, a workers’ bank …and workers’ sick fund….  
 All of these would deliberately deny and job opportunities or social 
 services to native Palestinian workers to further edify ‘Hebrew Labor’. 
  The paramilitary Haganah was also folded into the 
 Histadrut.\n\n\n\nRecognizing this reality, that the Histadrut has been 
 part of the Zionist state-in-formation and then later, the Zionist Israeli 
 state, then all labor ties to the Histadrut today should be 
 cut.\n\n\n\nYet, one can see why pro-Zionist US labor leaders would glom 
 onto the Histadrut; it looks close enough like a labor center to seem 
 legitimate, and most American workers don’t know the difference.  Well, 
 game over:  with Schuhrke’s research, they now do!\n\n\n\nYet it makes 
 sense as to why pro-labor Zionism appealed to American labor leaders, and 
 Zionist leaders played on that American affinity, which obviously continues 
 to date, as he so clearly illuminates throughout the book.\n\n\n\nHowever, 
 as Schuhrke details, any such effort to support Jewish workers always came 
 at and continues to come at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians.  
 Why, he asks, did they only care about the Jewish immigrants and never 
 about the indigenous Palestinians, and not even working class 
 Palestinians?\n\n\n\nHe ties this lack of concern about Palestinians to 
 “settler colonialism,” comparing Jewish settlers in the Middle East to 
 white Americans who settled the American West, the latter who ignored the 
 impact of US colonialism on indigenous Native Americans.\n\n\n\nSchuhrke 
 continues the history of AFL-CIO support for Israel, upon establishment in 
 1948 and subsequently.  This includes support for Israel after the Nakba 
 (“the catastrophe”), where\n\n\n\nAll told, between December 1947 and 
 January 1949, an estimated 15,000 Palestinian Arabs were killed and another 
 750,000 were expelled from their homes [by Zionist forces-KS], where they 
 and their ancestors had lived for many centuries.  To this day, they and 
 their descendants have not been allowed to return.\n\n\n\nHe continues his 
 historical account of Israeli oppression—and US labor leaders’ 
 support—up to the present day.\n\n\n\nHe also talks increasingly about 
 efforts by US trade unionists to support Palestinian workers, challenge 
 AFL-CIO leaders, and increasingly challenge the US Empire.  This begins 
 with the Labor Committee on the Middle East, started by Jeff Blankfort and 
 Steve Zeltzer in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1980s, but has 
 continued through Labor for Palestine, which was established 2004, as “a 
 new network of unions and community groups to serve as a locus of 
 organizing and political education.”  As discussed herein, these efforts 
 have expanded inside the labor movement over the following years.\n\n\n\nAs 
 said previously, this book is a major contribution in supporting the 
 Palestinians’ struggle, challenging Israeli, US government and labor 
 movement support for Zionism.  It deserves wide circulation and 
 readership.\n\n\n\nThere are a couple of refinements I would make to the 
 book, areas that I think could be strengthened.  Zionist settler 
 colonialism is one:  I think Schuhrke is dead right on 
 this.\n\n\n\nHowever, while good, his explanation only goes so far:  he 
 doesn’t go further and address the central issue of white supremacy and 
 racism, which is at the heart of all settler colonialism anywhere in the 
 world.  (I include racism with white supremacy because one can mistreat 
 others based on skin color and other differences, etc., without believing 
 you are necessarily superior.)  Without taking it to this central level, 
 one cannot explain the intensity and perseverance of this white supremacy 
 and racism over such a long period of time.\n\n\n\nTo understand how white 
 supremacy and racism got created in the formerly British colonies/today’s 
 United States, we must go back and examine the Virginia elites’ response 
 to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676-77—where Black and white indentured 
 servants united and almost overthrew the colonial government (Jamestown was 
 burnt to the ground)—to ensure that was never replicated.\n\n\n\nThe 
 elite’s program in response to the Rebellion was to break apart white and 
 Black unity, and they did this not by elevating whites over Blacks, and 
 improving the poor whites’ lives, but to lowering Blacks below whites.  
 In the earliest days of the British colonies, especially Virginia, unlike 
 what most Americans have been taught, most Blacks did not enter the 
 colonies as slaves; about three-quarters of them got here the way most poor 
 whites did, as indentured servants; they would sell their freedom for a 
 period of around seven years of labor in exchange for passage to the 
 colonies.  (Conditions of this indenture could range from just hard work up 
 to basic enslavement, including whipping of both whites and Blacks, 
 depending on the predilections of the owner.)  Once indentureship was 
 ended, these people each gained all of the rights and privileges as every 
 other “free” person in that particular colony.\n\n\n\nHowever, after 
 the Rebellion was defeated, the elites started passing laws and ending 
 rights of Blacks—and eventually they changed Black indentured servitude 
 to chattel or lifetime slavery.  They did not do this for whites.  So, for 
 example, in 1735, after 100 years of having the vote, Black Virginians had 
 the vote taken away from them; over time, they had lost the right to bring 
 charges against whites, to testify in trials, to run for office, etc., and 
 slavers could legally separate enslaved families, etc.\n\n\n\nAt the same 
 time and especially using churches and “Sunday schools”—there 
 weren’t any public schools at the time—the elites and their delegates 
 went around and told poor whites that Blacks were “subhuman” and 
 didn’t deserve anything else but enslavement and mistreatment and, 
 ultimately, “suggested” whites themselves could suffer the same fate if 
 they didn’t accept the program of Black enslavement.  Most, but not all, 
 whites accepted this Black enslavement, educating their offspring and those 
 around them that this was good and just—and necessary.  And that this was 
 the “natural order” of things.  So, it was propagated throughout US 
 society.\n\n \n[Note:  this not only obviously hurt Blacks’ life 
 situations, but also whites’; without Black support, whites were confined 
 to the conditions the elites were willing to allow, and white conditions 
 were not improved beyond that.  Many of the troops who fought for the 
 Confederacy were extremely poor.]\n\n\nI think this is a more accurate and 
 complete understanding of how white supremacy and racism emerged and, 
 obviously, it still exists.  I think had Schuhrke known the full history of 
 this, it would have made his case of mistreatment of the Palestinians more 
 accurate and complete, and given a much stronger explanation than what he 
 provided.  He’s on the right track; he just did not go far enough.\n\n 
 \n[NOTE:  My account is based on the research of Theodore W. Allen in his 
 profound, two volume study, The Creation of the White Race, and especially 
 Volume 2.  For a review of that, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been 
 Told:  Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, and Swen Becker’s 
 Empire of Cotton:  A Global History, see my review in Logos, which is 
 on-line for free at 
 https://logosjournal.com/article/review-black-subjugation-in-america/.]\n\n\nThere 
 is one more issue worthy of further comment.\n\n\n\nWhile he discusses the 
 growing attention being paid to the Palestinian issue within the labor 
 movement, which is correct, he also suggests that this attention is broader 
 and more powerful than it really is.  In other words, there is increased 
 attention being paid to Palestine, but it seems overwhelmingly confined to 
 activists, many who come out of graduate school unions, although more and 
 more are emerging in more traditional unions.  This is important and unions 
 have not handled it as well as they could have, but with few exceptions, 
 this activism has not included the mainstream, non-activist portion of 
 almost all unions.  Unfortunately, I do not see qualitative change in 
 AFL-CIO policy re Israel any time soon, and I doubt Schuhrke does himself.  
 Yet, it appears he’s written this so that activists in the labor movement 
 can work within their unions and other organizations to expand their 
 efforts and educate co-members, with the goal of ultimately giving this 
 challenge a real chance to succeed, while helping other activists to 
 challenge the powers-to-be on their fronts.  I think Israel’s 
 post-October 7, 2023, war in Gaza has opened Zionism to more and more 
 questioning and, increasingly, repudiation; something about genocide is not 
 very appealing to the peoples of the world.  This book, as is said, is 
 “on time.”\n\n\n\nThe fact is that the one, on-going failure we left 
 activists have been not able to overcome is that we’ve been unable to 
 reach enough rank and file members so as to educate them and get them to 
 challenge labor “leadership’s” domination over the unions.  The one 
 case where activists succeeded, in California in 2004, was overturned by a 
 corrupt move by AFSCME President Gerald McEntee on behalf of AFL-CIO 
 President John Sweeney at the 2005 National Convention in Chicago; McEntee 
 changed a unanimous resolution from the 2004 California State AFL-CIO 
 convention condemning AFL-CIO foreign policy to one praising it, and then 
 not allowing people to speak for the overturned resolution; activists did 
 not have the support to stop this move.  We keep trying:  see the website 
 of LEPAIO, the Labor Education Project on the AFL-CIO’s International 
 Operations at https://aflcio-int.education/ for recent work, including 
 educational webinars.\n\n\n\nIt is the lack of democracy within the AFL-CIO 
 that has limited discussion of these and other issues, such as labor 
 imperialism, that are critical to workers and their well-being.  The 
 support for Zionism has been a project of high level “leaders,” behind 
 the backs and unknown but in the name of US workers.  It has been able to 
 preclude worker-member initiative and has worked to constrain efforts to 
 build global labor solidarity with workers world-wide.\n\n\n\nYet the 
 “success” against leftist anti-imperialists to date might be coming 
 back to kick top-level trade union leaders in the ass.  As President Trump 
 rides rampant over the Constitution, and we need organized and educated 
 unionists to stand up to stop Trump’s incipient fascism, the numbers of 
 members who will respond will probably not be enough to prevail; the 
 failure might be all-but-complete; and these official labor leaders 
 themselves might bear the burden of Trump’s assault.\n\n\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2026/07/10/18887340.php
SUMMARY:“No Neutrals There, Labor Zionism, & the Struggle For Palestine” Book Presentation & Panel
LOCATION:Henry Schmidt Room\nILWU Local 10\n400 North Point St.\nSan Francisco
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2026/07/10/18887340.php
DTSTART:20260718T210000Z
DTEND:20260718T230000Z
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
