Alyson Kennedy, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, issued the following statement Aug. 19.
The accord signed establishing diplomatic relations between the governments of Israel and the United Arab Emirates can lead to further steps toward the Israeli and Arab governments and leaderships of Palestinian organizations recognizing both Israel and an independent Palestinian state.
This course is explained in a 2017 statement by Jack Barnes, Socialist Workers Party national secretary, available on the Militant ‘s website.
“It is along this road that working people of all national backgrounds, religious beliefs and political allegiances in Israel and Palestine,” the statements explains, “can use and defend their space to speak, organize and begin redressing the blood-drenched legacy of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation.”
The SWP starts from “the class interests and solidarity of workers and toiling farmers across the Middle East — be they Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian or otherwise, and whatever their religious or other beliefs — as well as working people in the United States and around the world.”
It outlines what is critical for working people everywhere:
“We are for whatever helps working people organize and act together to advance our demands and struggles against the capitalist governments and ruling classes that exploit and oppress us and their petty bourgeois political servants and media apologists.
“We are for whatever renews our class solidarity and self-confidence, advancing us along a revolutionary course toward a united struggle for workers power.”
The SWP presidential ticket in 2020 is presenting a fighting program to advance toward that goal.
The party’s candidates point to the importance of struggles on the job to build a union movement in every workplace, to fight for jobs, higher wages and better working conditions. This will provide the foundation for building our own political party, a labor party that can uncompromisingly defend all the exploited and oppressed from the bosses and their governments.
We can’t rely on the bosses or their government to provide safe and healthy working conditions. Impelled by cutthroat competition, the bosses’ drive for profits ensures they have nothing but disregard for the lives and limbs of those who toil for a living. Work can be performed safely, but only when workers wrest control of production out of their hands. As we fight for this we can see what becomes possible when our class holds political power and can begin addressing how to meet the needs of all.
My campaign explains why workers and our unions must fight for a government-funded public works program that provides jobs now at union-scale pay for the millions out of work. It can be used to build hospitals, schools and the housing workers need.
Join the SWP campaign!