“We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon
international civil society organizations and people of conscience all
over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment
initiatives against Israel.” This call for solidarity was
issued in July 2005 by hundreds of Palestinian organizations, including
all major trade unions. Systematic land confiscation, mass
incarceration, house demolition, and routine attacks that leave hundreds
of civilians dead have become part and parcel of daily life in
Israel-occupied Palestine. The US-sponsored “peace talks” merely
readjusted Israel’s occupation strategy: instead of deploying its army
inside Palestinian cities and towns, Israel now surrounds them with
checkpoints and walls; hinders Palestinians’ ability to work, study, and
travel; and ensures that Palestine remains economically dependent on
Israel. Recognizing that Israel has used negotiations to normalize and
sustain the occupation, Palestinian civil society adopted the
non-violent strategy of Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) against its
oppressor.
Compared to its international counterparts, the U.S. labor movement
has been slow to embrace BDS. Michael Letwin, co-founder of the
solidarity group
Labor for Palestine,
suggests this is the product of the American labor movement’s
historical and continuing institutional support for Israel. The major US
trade unions, Letwin says, have hundreds of millions of dollars in
pension funds that are invested in Israel. Senior union leaders, in fear
of alienating the Democratic Party and other political allies,
frequently denounce BDS and criticize their counterparts around the
world who support it.
On the grassroots level, however, things look different. This summer, hundreds of US labor leaders and organizers signed on to Labor for Palestine’s BDS statement.
To add to these inspiring developments, on December 4th, UAW 2865, a
union that represents 13,000 student workers across nine University of
California campuses, will become the first U.S. union to hold a
membership vote on joining the BDS movement. Similarly encouraging are
recent solidarity actions in the San Francisco Bay Area, which show
that, despite the ambivalence among some union leadership,
rank-and-filers do not hesitate to stand in solidarity with the
oppressed.
This August, during five days and four nights of demonstrations at
the Port of Oakland, a diverse group of pro-Palestine and social justice
activists under the banner of the Block the Boat coalition picketed several berths where
the Israeli cargo ship Zim Piraeus attempted to dock. Activists
returned to the port whenever workers were dispatched to unload it—in
some cases in the middle of the night. Their numbers, which fluctuated
between dozens and thousands, were not always sufficient to physically
block all entrances to the vessel. Yet the action succeeded due to the
support of Oakland’s longshoremen, members of the International
Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) Local 10, who refused to cross the
community picket lines. Even when police surrounded and split protestors
on multiple occasions, workers refused to proceed and unload the ship.
The ship eventually left port,
unable to unload most of its cargo.
Israel’s massacre of more than 2,000 Palestinians this summer enraged
Samantha Levens, an ILWU marine division rank-and-file member. Upon
hearing that community members were organizing to block the Israeli
liner, she prepared information fliers and distributed them to the
longshoremen. “We weren’t saying ‘don’t handle the cargo,’” Levens says.
“We were just giving information about the issue: what happened during
the South African apartheid, the history of ILWU honoring community
picket lines, and the position of international unions on the situation
in Gaza.” The longshoremen’s reaction was positive. Even on the third
and fourth days of picketing, she says, when members were eager to go
back to work, “I mostly saw people becoming more supportive.”
Isn’t it
ironic that ships can go as they please into ports in Israel, but can’t
come into Gaza?”
Lifelong longshoreman, ILWU member, and activist Clarence Thomas
explains: “I can’t be silent on these issues. I’m sure that there are
longshoremen in Gaza who haven’t been doing work in decades. Solidarity, Thomas says, is a key value in labor
activism: “Politics is one thing, but the aspiration and the communality
of the working class is something else,” he says, citing
numerous solidarity actions ILWU
has taken since the 1930s against oppressive regimes throughout the
world. “As an African American man, I don’t have any difficulty relating
to the plight of the Palestinian people,” he says. “I know what it
means to be racially profiled and to be targeted by a militarized
police. I’ve been pulled over many times. I had police guns pointed at
me. I understand this phenomenon.”
The strong parallels between state and racial oppression in Palestine
and the US, respectively, are at the foundation of ILWU Local 10’s
policy of not crossing community picket lines. “We will not work under
armed police escort—not with our experience with the police in this
community,”
said Local 10 president Melvin MacKay,
referring to the police’s violent dispersal of anti-Iraq war pickets in
2003. “This action was always about building worker-community
solidarity,” assesses Reem Assil, one of the organizers of the port
actions. “We hope to use it as an impetus for us to deepen work in
educating workers about the issue and connecting it to their personal
conditions.”
Following the successful pickets in August, a second ship, the Zim
Shanghai, again encountered community picket lines when it docked at the
Port of Oakland on October 25. Once again, ILWU longshoremen stood
down. As the first shifts to unload the Zim Shanghai were being met with
pickets, all but one longshoremen
refused to even take a job working
the ship. The Shanghai left port without loading or unloading any
cargo, thanks to the decision of ILWU rank-and-file members to once more
respect a community picket line. When the Zim Beijing, a third ship
scheduled to unload at the Port of Oakland, faced similar plans by the
Block The Boat coalition in October, the ship
diverted to
avoid another humiliating defeat at the hands of a determined coalition
of social justice activists and rank-and-file union members. With Block
the Boat actions now spreading to
other ports, it’s difficult to see how Israel will weather the growing storm of BDS.
Palestine solidarity is gaining traction among academic workers too.
This July, UAW Local 2865, which represents over 13,000 University of
California student workers, took an important step towards joining the
international BDS movement.
In a public letter posted on the union’s website,
the UAW 2865 Joint Council (which includes 83 elected officers)
declared its commitment “to support our Palestinian counterparts.” The
joint council pledged to bring a comprehensive BDS proposal to a general
membership vote this year, a proposal that would include a call for
academic boycott of institutions profiting from Israeli occupation and
human rights abuses. In addition to soliciting its members’ commitment
to cut contact with such institutions, the union would also call on the
UC system and UAW International to divest from companies complicit in
the occupation.
This endorsement comes as no surprise: in the past few years, UAW
2865 has joined numerous struggles against oppression, including Occupy
protests, UC student protests against fee-hikes, and last year’s strike
by UC custodians. Recently, it negotiated unprecedented protections for
its undocumented immigrant members, queer and trans members, parents,
and others.
In the midst of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the union’s social justice
committee carefully worded the call for BDS, outlining in detail the
different dimensions of the Israeli occupation. They cited Israel’s
refusal to recognize Palestinian refugees’ rights as indigenous people
(specifically, their right to return to their land), the system of
apartheid that Israel enforces in the West Bank and Gaza, and the
second-class status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. The letter also
mentions
the connection between Israel’s military industry and ethnic
cleansing, the suppression of popular movements, and the oppression and
criminalization of people all over the world. Concluding by quoting
Desmond Tutu’s “hope for a time when there are universal rights for all
humans regardless of ethnicity, gender, or national, origin,” the letter
emphasizes that BDS does not target the Jewish people but instead
targets Israel as “a colonial-apartheid state.” The letter further
highlights the unequivocal support BDS receives from Jewish
organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and the International
Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. In fact, a few days after the letter’s
publication, more than forty current and former Jewish UAW 2865 members
publicly endorsed this BDS call.
The date for the general UAW 2865 membership vote has been set for December 4th. The
official ballot language adopted
by the Joint Council includes a single yes or no vote on whether the
union should call on the US government to end military aid to Israel,
and call on the University of California and UAW International to
“divest…from Israeli state institutions and international companies
complicit in severe and ongoing human rights violations as part of the
Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people”. The ballot also includes a
checkbox where members can pledge to refuse to “take part in any
research, conferences, events, exchange programs, or other activities
that are sponsored by Israeli universities complicit in the occupation
of Palestine and the settler-colonial policies of the state of Israel”.
The Joint Council also adopted several documents to educate members
about the issues and explain the rationale for the vote; these include
a
BDS FAQ page, an
academic boycott fact sheet, and a
labor movement statement.
As in other social justice struggles, mobilization for BDS concerns
not just Palestinian rights, but also the right of workers to act and
express themselves politically. Purporting to represent UC Jewish
students, several Zionist organizations have petitioned UC President
Janet Napolitano, alleging that the Joint Council’s solidarity with
Palestine creates “a hostile anti-Semitic environment” for Jewish
students. Many Jewish students, however, find such allegations to be
spurious and see the claims as dishonest attempts to silence
criticism.
The BDS movement is a fundamentally anti-racist movement, one
that opposes racism in all of its forms, including and especially
anti-Semitism. The President’s office has yet to respond to the
petition, and one can only hope that Napolitano’s tenure will not add to
her
abysmal human rights record both as Governor of Arizona and Homeland Security Secretary.
The success of Oakland’s Block the Boat makes clear the centrality of
organized labor to the global movement for Palestinian freedom. This,
and the upcoming UAW 2865 vote on BDS, signal a sea change in US labor’s
willingness to be complicit in apartheid and ethnic cleansing. As the
larger Palestine solidarity movement picks up steam, we can expect the
grassroots labor mobilization for Palestine to bear greater and greater
fruits, until Israeli apartheid is no more.
