“Why the Socialist Workers Party is defying the far left on Israel,” is the headline of a Jan. 21 article by contributing editor Dan Pine in the Jewish News of Northern California. The paper, first published in 1895, reaches tens of thousands of readers through its website and twice a month print edition.
Pine wrote that after an antisemitic message was scrawled near a Chabad menorah in Oakland during Hanukkah, “Rabbi Dovid Labkowski got a sympathy call from an unusual corner. Two members of the Socialist Workers Party reached out to express solidarity with Chabad and the Jewish people.
“It wasn’t the first time.”
Last summer, when vandals hurled chunks of concrete at the windows of the Chabad Oakland headquarters, Pine noted, “SWP member Eric Simpson of Oakland wrote a letter to the rabbi,” saying, “The Socialist Workers Party views the fight against Jew-hatred as a central question of world politics.”
SWP members “took to the streets of San Francisco, standing alongside thousands protesting antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel. Among them was Rachele Fruit,” Pine wrote, “at the time, the SWP candidate for U.S. president.”
“Israel is doing a very good job at trying to prevent another Holocaust,” Fruit told the Jewish News. “And we defend this. We think Israel has a right to exist as a refuge for Jews around the world.”
“Many on the far left, including other socialist groups, uniformly vilify Israel,” Pine wrote. “The Socialist Workers Party rejects that view. Instead, SWP members place the fight against anti-Semitism … at the top of their agenda.”
Those middle-class left groups “are anti-Jewish and antisemitic to the core,” Fruit said. “They are not pro-Palestinian; they are pro-Hamas, which is basically pro-Nazi. … They call themselves pro-socialist but what they are is a wing of capitalist politics. They don’t challenge capitalism as a system.”
Pine quotes an April 2024 statement by Fruit that says, “Since Hamas launched its war Oct. 7, Israel has been acting to defeat Hamas, to prevent it from carrying out its stated goal,” which it “shares with the reactionary rulers in Iran: to drive out the Jews, exterminate them and destroy the state of Israel.”
Fruit “used her candidacy to support workers rights and often campaigned by walking picket lines with striking workers,” Pine wrote.
“Our focus is what’s happening in the working class,” Fruit told him. “We went to picket lines explaining the need to fight Jew-hatred, we got a great response.”
“The Militant newspaper has run dozens of articles,” Pine said, “condemning antisemitism over the past 15 months.”
Socialist Workers Party member Maggie Trowe told the Jewish News the party rejects the notion that Israel is a colonial-settler state.
“Once Hitler came to power, the U.S. imperialists led by FDR [Roosevelt] and governments in the U.K. and Canada would not allow Jewish immigration,” she said. “Our party called to open the borders to Jewish refugees. After the war, Jewish people were living in displaced persons camps and not allowed to go anywhere. So after that, the formation of Israel was inevitable. It is the only sure refuge for the Jews.”
“The SWP doesn’t support the Israeli capitalist government,” Trowe said, “but we defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews and to defeat the Jew-hating and pogromist currents who try to annihilate Israel.”
Rabbi Labkowski told the paper that he found sympathy from Socialist Workers Party members to be heartwarming. “I’m not shocked at all,” he said of the SWP outreach, “because I think all people of conscience should be on the right side of things.”