Newsletter #94: Robin D. G. Kelley on Working-Class Democracy and Palestine
A few weeks ago, The Dig took an interlude from our rolling miniseries on modern Arab radicalism, “Thawra,” with our guest Abdel Razzaq Takriti, to highlight presentations from April’s World Academic Forum for Palestine in Houston: featuring Noura Erakat, Avi Shlaim, Ussama Makdisi, Ilan Pappé, Ghada Ageel Hamdan, and Takriti himself. The presentations showcased involve personal testimony from Palestinian refugees, trenchant criticism from the region’s leading historians, and politically engaged scholars struggling against a genocidal war.
But these were just a small sampling of the two-day conference’s presentation marathon. Among those not covered was a prescient talk on the labor movement and internationalism from the singular Robin D. G. Kelley. We reproduce a transcript of that talk here.
Kelley’s historical account of the American labor movement’s institutional entanglement in Zionist occupation and his calls for a conception of working-class democracy that is unbounded by closed identity sets of the nation-state could not come at a better time: this week, fifty thousand teachers, instructors, and researchers in United Auto Workers Local 4811 began an unprecedented political strike for disclosure of financial investments, divestment from Israeli holdings, and a defense of student and staff speech on campus in the University of California system. The “stand-up strike” method, fine-tuned among autoworkers in the fall, now comes to higher education. UC Santa Cruz is on strike today. (This Twitter account will be one of the best places to find updates in the coming weeks.)
Over the last few months, the UAW has been both the most important institutional force behind the Palestine solidarity movement and an active battleground for it, as the recent and disappointing vote to not divest UAW pensions from Israeli companies confirms.
But it is hard to oversell the leap that this represents for our emerging labor movement in the United States, or what new fronts in the fight for Palestinian liberation it could open up. It did not come out of thin air, however, but represents a fecund combination of a few important dynamics: the nucleus of rank-and-file leadership built up in the UC system, particularly UC Santa Cruz, over the last half decade; the catalytic effect of undergraduate protest across the country; and the possibilities that a union leader like Shawn Fain shakes open even among a local leadership that had only recently sided with the morbund administration caucus in the UAW.
The first of these criteria is worth parsing, concerning how the rank and file have organized, because it represents a strategic and practical orientation that might be adopted elsewhere. As the Santa Cruz cohort has written about extensively, the key to their success has been acting like a union by leading from the rank and file with an extensive network of departmental stewards, small group departmental meetings, and large deliberative assemblies. In earlier strikes, they spent less time campaigning for statewide leadership to adopt their programs or authorize strike actions — they instead turned to the rank and file and campaigned among them, therefore making ambitious jobsite actions possible. Rather than fetishizing the powers of the top brass of leadership, they grew the capacities of the union — of workers themselves — to exercise maximum strategic leverage. As Santa Cruz launches its third strike in five years, these accumulated infrastructure and experiences can be repurposed for a risky — and extraordinarily political — set of workplace demands. Even before this most recent stand-up strike, these same departmental networks were crucial both in executing a one-day wildcat on May Day (thirty-two of thirty-three department sections on campus had a majority vote in participation of the strike) and in organizing a successful campaign to refuse Department of Defense contact work in solidarity with Palestine.
As the old slogan goes, “Democracy is power,” and a union built around the people who work together, who can deliberate and take effective action with one another on the job, is one that will prove to be most effective at meeting this moment and the next.
— Ben Mabie
Working-Class Democracy and the Question of Palestine
By Robin D. G. Kelley
We all know the United Auto Workers made history by becoming the largest union in the country to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. The UAW’s new leadership under Shawn Fain was ahead of most AFL-CIO unions, which until quite recently opposed any statement in support of a cease-fire. Under Fain, it appears they might be following the lead of the left-led unions that launched the National Labor Network for Ceasefire (NLNC), headed by the usual suspects: National Nurses United (NNU), the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), the Association of Flight Attendants, the Chicago Teachers Union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the United Electrical Workers (UE), and others.
What explains the UAW’s change of position with respect to Israel? The answer: Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), the caucus that got Fain elected. Its planks called out corruption, demanding self-sustaining strike fund and limits on International UAW officers’ pay; opposed tiers (where new hires earn considerably less than those with seniority); and [called for] more local control and labor education, improved health and safety, thirty hours work for forty hours pay, emphasis on green jobs/renewable energy, social justice and equity (around race, gender, sexuality, disability, and so on), and international solidarity. Its platform reads: “UAWD supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, called for by Palestinian unions and workers, and seeks to end all UAW investments in corporations perpetuating human rights violations.”[1] Of course, the caucus would not have taken this position without the two-decade long BDS campaign or organizations like Labor for Palestine, which was founded in 2004 in solidarity with Palestinian workers.
Fain’s position was compromised after he endorsed President Joe Biden, who bears much of the responsibility for the ongoing genocide. Fain’s endorsement of Biden was inconsistent with UAWD’s pledge to remain independent of all parties, including “the corporate/Wall Street–dominated Democratic Party.” And it was a slap in the face to many of the UAW’s rank-and-file members, many of whom voted uncommitted. For some it was a betrayal — although folks I know in the caucus were not surprised. In fact, the UAW still has yet to divest from all of its Israeli bonds.
A cease-fire is the minimum. Palestinian labor unions issued a statement on October 16, calling on US workers to stop the flow of weapons to Israel by any means, including refusing to manufacture or transport weapons earmarked for Israel, take action against firms complicit in the siege on Gaza, and to press the government to end its military and financial support.
Just two days ago, organizers with Bay Area Palestine Solidarity tried to do just that by blocking the entrance to the Lockheed Martin plant in Sunnyvale, California. A white man driving a truck, apparently an employee, drove through the line of protesters and brandished a knife, threatening to kill someone.
This scenario begs the question: Why did Bay Area activists have to block workers from entering the plant? Why didn’t workers self-organize a strike or some kind of action in support of Palestinian workers? Or the more vexing question: Who is organizing workers around Palestine solidarity?
For example, on May 18, 2021, Palestinian workers inside the 1948 borders of Israel and in occupied Palestine organized a daylong general strike to protest the assault on Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem, at the Al-Aqsa mosque, and the siege on Gaza. They called it a dignity strike — mostly workers in construction, sanitation, hotels and restaurants, and transportation (taxi and bus drivers). And hundreds were fired for participating. Imagine if US labor unions expressed their solidarity?
From a working-class standpoint, international solidarity means recognizing the people of Gaza and the West Bank as part of the class — an especially exploited, oppressed, and vulnerable segment of the global working class. There is no way that stopping genocide and demanding justice for Palestinians should divide the class, and there is nothing democratic about union leaders speaking for the class, investing its dues in support of actions that contribute to the subjugation of Palestinian workers, or setting labor’s international political agenda. As a consequence, union leadership has essentially foreclosed avenues of solidarity with Palestinian workers, despite pressure from below.
Until quite recently, such solidarity was inconceivable. The problem with US organized labor has not been indifference but partisanship; organized labor has been a source of funding for the settler-colonial state. Before 1948, American unions had been donating directly to the Histadrut, the Zionist labor organization, and since 1951, they have purchased millions of dollars of State of Israel bonds. Labor and the Left — notably the Communist Party USA — regarded Israel a progressive, social democratic, and dare I say potentially socialist project, because it was ruled by the Mapai, or Labor Party, at its founding. Most of the terrorists who committed atrocities in 1948 identified as so-called Labor Zionists.
But creating the socialist Holy Land meant waging a deliberate campaign to terrorize, kill or injure, and dispossess Palestinians, raze their villages, take or destroy their property, and above all, take their land. From December 1947 to July 1949, Zionist militias seized 22 percent more land than what was agreed upon in the partition agreement, drove 750,000 people — 80 percent of the Palestinian population — from their land, destroyed or emptied over five hundred villages, and demolished homes, sometimes setting them ablaze or blowing them up knowing families were still inside. Wholesale massacres were committed, and property seized — homes, businesses, olive groves, cash, libraries, and much more. And the “workers’ state” of Israel passed laws barring Palestinians’ right to return or retrieve their property.
US labor leaders embraced Zionism. Let me give you one example: In 1964, Israel built two dams on the Jordan River diverting the water to its own farmlands, leaving river flow to Jordan (which included the West Bank) so low that it became polluted and unusable for irrigation. Israel’s theft of water was, and still is, a source of diplomatic tension and military skirmishes with Syria. That same year, UAW secretary-treasurer Emil Mazey was attending a banquet where he not only pledged that the union would buy an additional $250,000 in Israel bonds but told the gathering, “We should be on the side of Israel if the showdown comes over Jordan [River] water, and we should make sure nothing happens to Israel when they turn on that spigot.”[2]
However, starting in 1967, the Zionist union bureaucracy began to face rank-and-file anti-Zionism — or let’s call it internationalism from below. In Detroit, in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War (also referred to as the Naksa, or set back) and the city’s Great Rebellion in July 1967, black activists, including the staff of the radical black publication The Inner City Voice (ICV), joined with the Arab Student Organization to picket a speech by Abba Eban, Israel’s rep at the United Nations. They accused Israel of practicing apartheid “far more ruthlessly than the Union of South Africa.”[3]
Some of the folks who participated in that protest would go on to organize the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which contested UAW leadership’s racism and emerged out of a series of wildcat strikes in 1968 against speedups. John Watson, a League founder and editor of ICV during the 1967 protests, had taken over the South End — Wayne State University’s student paper — and ran articles on Fatah and the liberation struggle in Palestine. For that he was ultimately pushed out of his position.[4]
Still, the League built alliances with Arab American autoworkers and printed some of its leaflets in Arabic. Detroit, Dearborn, Hamtramck, and Southfield had a large and growing Arab American population from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Egypt, and Palestine. The Arab Workers Caucus (AWC) was formed within the UAW in the wake of the Fourth Arab-Israeli war in 1973. They organized a mass march of about two thousand Arab autoworkers from South End (Dearborn) to the offices of UAW Local 600, to protest the local’s decision to purchase $330,000 of Israeli bonds (without permission from the rank and file); the national UAW already owned about $750,000 worth of Israel bonds. Incidentally, Local 600 was predominantly black, and AWC members challenged the local’s leadership by asking how they would feel if the union invested in South African bonds.
The following year, the AWC introduced a resolution calling on the UAW to divest from Israel bonds, cut ties with the Histadrut, and “stand firmly in support of all workers and people struggling in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the Middle East, the UAW should support the principle of establishing a secular, nontheocratic, democratic state in Palestine for all people, Jews and Arabs, and stand against any outside intervention.”[5] Needless to say, the UAW leadership thoroughly rejected the resolution, doubling down on its support of Israel.
Now just imagine if US organized labor supported Palestinian unions? Before the Nakba, there was a robust Arab trade-union movement — the Society of Arab Workers, the Federation of Arab Trade Unions and Labor Societies, and the Arab Workers Congress, among others. In 1948, Israel banned the Arab Workers Congress. Arab workers were permitted to join the Histadrut in 1952, but all it did was collect 1 percent of their pay as dues. Palestinians who crossed the green line to work in Israel had to pay a workers’ tax and welfare deductions. By most estimates, the Histadrut spent about $110 million between 1970 and 1994.
Basically, organized labor was forced underground during the Israeli occupation. Union leaders were harassed, jailed, and deported throughout the 1970s. The unions persisted despite the repression. In fact, Land Day was inaugurated on March 30, 1976, with a general strike.[6]
At no point did US labor stand up for Palestinian workers. I recall the shameful positions taken by national union leaders in the aftermath of 9/11 and during the Second Intifada. In 2002, Israel destroyed the offices of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions in Nablus, and US labor leaders were mostly silent. One exception was the San Francisco Labor Council, which passed a resolution condemning Israel for the “bombing of civilian and political targets” and upholding Palestinians’ right to self-determination. But Zionists within the AFL-CIO pressured the council to rescind the resolution. And this occurred during the era of labor’s so-called left turn, when the triumvirate of John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson had taken over the AFL-CIO.
Sweeney, especially, was out of step with a rank and file increasingly critical of Israel. He addressed the National Rally for Israel in Washington, DC, just a month after the San Francisco Labor Council’s resolution, joining Benjamin Netanyahu and Rudy Giuliani in declaring that the “working women and men of the AFL-CIO . . . stand with you to express our support for the people of Israel in this darkest of hours.” Angry rank-and-file members responded swiftly with a petition condemning Sweeney for promoting Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in labor’s name.[7]
My basic contention is that had labor embraced the kind of boundless, borderless solidarity we might associate with, say, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — genuine internationalism — the political landscape with respect to US policy toward Israel might look very different. Indeed, it would more closely resemble organized labor’s position vis-à-vis apartheid South Africa in the 1980s: when boycott was considered a legitimate, nonviolent tactic and not a malicious act of antisemitism; when dockworkers used their power to refuse to unload cargo headed to Durban. There are noble examples of longshore workers doing the same for ships with products bound to Israeli settlements, but these actions are few and far between. In fact, think about what it means for labor leaders to tout cross-border and transnational organizing but not put resources into organizing Palestinian workers.
In the face of genocide and beyond, we must begin to think of the working class not as an interest group, not a sector, but a global movement. A genuine working-class democracy cannot be constrained by nation, and it cannot oversee an ethnostate. Labor Zionism is an oxymoron. Working-class democracy is what the Communist International was supposed to be — a world for the proletariat rather than nation-states.
Free the land, Free Palestine!
Notes
[1] “Resolution for UAWD to Educate & Organize for BDS & Palestinian Liberation as an Official Position of the UAW,” https://uawd.org/project/resolution-for-uawd-to-educate-organize-for-bds-palestinian-liberation-as-an-official-position-of-the-uaw/.
[2] “Israel, Unionists Honor Phil Hart,” Detroit Free Press, May 25, 1964.
[3] “Arab Students Picket Iban [sic] Speech,” ICV, November 16, 1967.
[4] Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 82–84.
[5] Jeff Schuhrke, “US Labor Has Long Been a Stalwart Backer of Israel. That’s Starting to Change,” Jacobin (November 11, 2023), https://jacobin.com/2023/11/us-labor-israel-palestine-solidarity-history.
[6] Nina Sovich, “Palestinian Trade Unions,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 4 (Autumn 2000), 66–79; Graham Usher, “Palestinian Trade Unions and the Struggle for Independence,” Middle East Report no. 194/195, (May – Aug. 1995), 20–24.
[7] Schuhrke, “US Labor Has Long Been a Stalwart Backer of Israel.”