SEATTLE — Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for president of the United States, spoke out on the importance of the fight against Jew-hatred at a rally of some 100 people in defense of the existence of Israel July 14 on Mercer Island.
Randy Kessler, regional director of StandWithUs, introduced Fruit at the rally. “We’ve seen the fighting spirit come out the last nine months,” said Kessler, from Jews and others who “support the right of Israel to exist in safety and security. One of the strongest supporters of this is the Socialist Workers Party.”
Fruit said supporters of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews couldn’t rely on the backing of Washington.
“The truth is that the Biden administration and other capitalist governments — and their U.N. — want an end to Israel’s war to eliminate Hamas,” Fruit told the rally. “They want good relations with the Arab governments, more stability in their relations with Iran, trade without their ships getting fired at on the Red Sea.
“Fighting Jew-hatred is not their concern and never has been,” she said. “That’s why Israel had to be and has to be today. There is no other place where Jews can go unconditionally.”
Fruit also addressed the shots fired at former President Donald Trump the day before.
“We must speak out against the attempted assassination of Donald Trump yesterday,” she said. “As the Jewish community knows well, violent rhetoric leads to violent action. The capitalist parties have nothing to offer the working class or the fight against Jew-hatred, but the Democrats’ vitriolic attacks on Trump and constitutional freedoms that led to that shooting are a deadly danger for working people,” she said.
The previous day, hours after the shooting, Fruit told an audience of 45 at a campaign meeting here that the factionalism in bourgeois politics is leading to an increase in political violence. “For their own partisan interests, both parties are engaged in dangerous attacks on rights that working people need today,” she said. “The various frame-ups against Trump, cooked up by the White House and Democratic prosecutors, are meant to prevent him from running for president and prevent millions from being able to vote for him,” she said. Two Safeway workers who have recently taken an interest in the SWP ticket came, and someone involved in defending Israel’s right to exist.
“Despite rhetoric about ‘hard-working families,’ neither party is interested in defending the lives and livelihoods of working people,” she said. “They are in business to ensure that the wealth of the capitalist ruling families is protected, and that the U.S. military is strong enough to defend their imperialist interests in the world.”
Fruit pointed to the crisis confronting working people. Millions face high prices and challenges getting decent, well-paid full-time jobs to cover increased living expenses. “Neither ‘Bidenomics’ nor Make-America-Great rhetoric can change this reality,” said Fruit. “That’s why more workers today are joining and organizing unions to fight for higher pay and cost-of-living protection against the ravages of inflation.
“What is needed is for working people to break with the Democrats, Republicans and all capitalist politicians, to build our own political party to mobilize and unite working people, a party of labor,” she said. “This kind of party, based on the unions, can organize the whole working class to fight together, a powerful social movement in a struggle to replace capitalist political power with a workers government. It could expose and fight against every outrage, every crime the rulers commit against us.”
Fruit said she had recently been in California, where the legislature passed a minimum wage bill for $20 an hour for fast food workers. In response, restaurant owners raised prices and laid off workers, forcing speedup on those remaining. “A labor party would demand reduced hours of work with no cut in pay to address the problem of layoffs,” she said.
“A labor party would unite and represent the interests of all workers regardless of language or nationality. It would lead a fight for amnesty, with equal rights for all, and encourage all workers to organize unions and fight for better wages and working conditions, here and worldwide,” said Fruit. “And a labor party will have to stand up to all acts of Jew-hatred. It would back unions setting up workers defense guards that will be needed to take on bosses’ thugs attacking our picket lines, as well as rightist and fascist forces as they emerge.”
Fruit noted that as communists campaign among our co-workers and in working-class communities, “we explain that Jew-hatred, a reflection of the crisis of capitalism, is a life-and-death question for the working class. We have to act against every move to slander, scapegoat and attack Jews. The physical extermination of the Jews is the banner of reaction against proletarian revolution in the imperialist epoch.”
She asked everyone at the meeting to become an endorser of the SWP campaign and help get out the word about the working-class alternative.
Reaching out across Washington
Supporters of the SWP campaign have been taking its program across the region in recent weeks, winning support for the ticket of Fruit and vice presidential candidate Dennis Richter. Supporters engaged in debate and discussion on doorsteps, in parking lots, farmers markets and outside the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 19 hiring hall here.
Over 1,800 people have signed a petition to put the SWP ticket on the ballot in Washington state. Supporters plan to file these and more with the secretary of state elections office next week.
Dozens purchased copies of the Militant, got subscriptions, bought books by SWP and other revolutionary leaders, donated to the campaign and signed up for more information. Several endorsed the Fruit/Richter ticket.
Fruit spoke to workers about the Ukrainian people’s fight to defeat Moscow’s invasion and that of the Israeli people to defeat Hamas after the Islamic thugs’ Oct. 7 pogrom. She explained there are big stakes in those battles for the working class worldwide. “We place no confidence in the capitalist governments in Ukraine and in Israel, nor in the ‘democratic’ imperialist rulers in Washington,” she said.
“But if working people win the wars they are fighting for their countries’ survival, they will open more space to organize, to unite and find allies among all working people. We need that space.”
Adeo Tolman, a crane operator on the docks, stopped to meet Fruit as she campaigned among longshoremen. When Tolman said he had supported Bernie Sanders previously, Fruit said today Sanders “is part of the left wing of that party that is supporting Hamas. The working class needs to stand up to Jew-hatred.”
“It makes you think, what did the Jews do to make so many people hate them?” Tolman said. “When capitalism is in crisis, the rulers promote the false idea that there is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world,” Fruit said. “They want those in the middle class ruined by capital to blame the Jews, not the ruling class. They will turn to Nazi-like thugs to go after the working class and try to smash the labor movement.”
Speak out against Jew-hatred!
Fruit met Militant subscriber Patrick Connell, a slingman on the docks. He said he was for the fight against Jew-hatred. “Any kind of system of any kind of racism — we got to get rid of it. It doesn’t belong in the world today.”
Fruit showed him the new book, The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. It explains the necessity of building revolutionary workers parties in the world today as a precondition to defeating Jew-hatred once and for all time.
Four copies of that book were sold at the Mercer Island rally. Reena Solita was one of those who picked it up. Her family is from the Philippines, but they spent years living in Israel. “People don’t know about the relationship between the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, and Hitler,” she said, pointing to the book’s photos showing al-Husseini meeting with Hitler in 1941 and reviewing Waffen SS troops in Bosnia in 1943. “It’s very important the book explains that.”
She now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and attended the rally “because it is important to speak up.” She said she thought Israel and the U.S. act as an “iron gate,” standing up to extremists and ISIS.
“Neither the U.S. nor Israel is an iron gate or a safe haven,” said Fruit. “The rulers of this country have their own interests — that’s why they closed the borders of the U.S. to Jews seeking refuge from the Holocaust, before, during and after the Second World War. And they will again turn to Nazis, who scapegoat Jews to help break working people and defend capitalist rule.”
For more information on the SWP campaign, email socialistworkers2024@gmail.com or call (347) 871-0282.
