CHICAGO — A concerted effort is underway by supporters of Hamas to take advantage of widespread liberal media coverage of destruction in Gaza to get union officials to sign on to calls for Israel to agree to a cease-fire. This would short circuit efforts by Israel to dismantle Hamas’ ability to launch new pogroms against Jews like it did on Oct. 7.
A group of seven international unions has formed the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, which they say has the support of 200 local unions and labor organizations. They include the American Postal Workers Union, Association of Flight Attendants, National Nurses United, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, National Education Association, United Auto Workers, and United Electrical Workers.
One resolution was passed at a meeting of UAW Local 551 at the Ford Chicago assembly plant. It says, “We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle for national liberation.
“We demand an immediate end to the bombing and siege of Gaza, all Israeli hostilities and military actions, and all forms of settler colonialism and violence being perpetrated on the Palestinian people. We call for a permanent ceasefire to end the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.”
The resolution makes no mention of Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom. Backed by the reactionary rulers in Iran, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Jews and others, wounded 5,000, raped women and took over 250 hostages. It still holds about 100 of them today.
The demands proposed by the National Labor Network for Ceasefire are not in the interests of working people in the Middle East or anywhere. Calls for Israel to cease fire go hand in hand with President Joseph Biden’s demand that Israel not take its war against Hamas into the city of Rafah in southern Gaza.
Most workers in the U.S. responded with horror to Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of Jews in Israel. Explaining what happened that day — a pogrom — and mobilizing union members to combat all expressions of Jew-hatred wherever they occur is crucial for the labor movement.
I spoke with workers outside Ford’s Chicago plant March 20. None had heard of the union’s resolution.
“I think it’s important for unions to take a position against Hamas because what they’re doing to the Jews could happen to us next,” Carl Hall, an assembly worker and a member of UAW Local 551, told me. “The rich want to keep hold of their control over everything, including us.”
He agreed when I said I thought fighting Jew-hatred is a decisive question for unions. When the rulers fear that working-class struggles threaten their rule, they turn to fascist forces to crush the unions and destroy working-class political parties. Jew-hatred was the banner of the Nazis in Germany and of fascists in the U.S. and other countries in the 1930s as they sought to crush the labor movement.
Angela Neal, another assembly-line worker, had a different approach. “I think that these wars are union questions,” she said. “Working people are always the victims. We should support the Jews who are under attack. But what about the innocent Palestinians? Israel should cease fire and stop killing the Palestinians.”
I told her that Hamas has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, busting unions, arresting and torturing political opponents, and denying women equal rights. It has run the state, in its own words, as “cover” to prepare its assaults on Jews in Israel.
I pointed out that Hamas organizes its massive web of tunnels throughout Gaza, under hospitals, schools and housing projects, deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way to create “martyrs” in order to win sympathy and funding from imperialist governments abroad. Hamas does not represent the aspirations of Palestinians, but is the main obstacle to their being able to join in the class struggle alongside Jews and others in Israel, the only road to liberation. Workers in the U.S., Israel, Gaza and everywhere have a vital stake in its defeat. Demanding that Israel cease fire against Hamas leaves it intact to perpetrate more massacres against Jews.
Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas leader said Oct. 24, 2023, that the group’s Oct. 7 pogrom “is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” Asked about the cost to civilians in Gaza, he said, “We are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
Neal and I talked for a few minutes in the parking lot. She said she would think about what I raised and bought a copy of the Militant.
Wars in the imperialist epoch are an inevitable product of the natural workings of a system founded on exploitation and oppression. The death, destruction and suffering are hated by the working class, which always bears the consequences.
Union officials justify calls for a cease-fire by playing on antipathy to the effects of the growing numbers of conflicts around the world. “We cannot bomb our way to peace,” United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain said. “The only way forward to build peace and social justice is a cease-fire. … What we’re calling for today is what the global community is standing together for.”
But there is no “global community,” nor is there any “we.” On one side are the rival capitalist powers, including the Biden administration, which serves the ruling U.S. capitalist class. On the other side is the working class, which has common interests worldwide against the bosses and the governments and parties that serve them.
Nothing that Washington and other so-called democratic imperialist powers are doing in the Middle East is aimed at advancing the interests of working people there, let alone protecting Jews. All Washington is interested in is security and stability for the U.S. rulers’ own profit-driven interests, as they vie with rivals for markets and political influence.
Unions should oppose every war the U.S. imperialists carry out to try to extend their domination. Workers are used as cannon-fodder for the benefit of our class enemy — the capitalists — in these conflicts.
But the world also contains oppressed peoples and nations. Wars to end oppression are in workers’ interests. Ukraine’s war to defeat Moscow’s invasion — like Israel’s war against Hamas — should be supported by all working people. Moscow’s complete and immediate withdrawal from Ukraine, including Crimea, would create better conditions for the working class and for our struggles.
Israel’s war to defeat Hamas, free the hostages and prevent the reactionary Islamist organization from carrying out more pogroms deserves labor’s support. That doesn’t entail political support to the Israeli government. What is at stake is Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews. Today, Jew-hating violence is on the rise worldwide.
The labor movement needs its own policy on all political questions, starting from workers’ common international interests.
The Newton Teachers Association, which was on strike for 16 days earlier this year, set an example. It disassociated itself from a Massachusetts Teachers Association statement that attacked Israel for carrying out a “genocidal war on the Palestinian people.”
“The statement fails completely to hold in mind the atrocities against Israelis on October 7 and the trauma, pain, and fallout the Israeli, American, and international Jewish communities are experiencing. The motion will provoke further antisemitism,” said Newton Teachers Association President Mike Zilles.