“We need you to take immediate action—wherever you are in the world—to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.” An Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel (October 16, 2023)
The undersigned U.S. workers, trade unionists, and anti-apartheid activists join labor around the world in condemning the Israeli siege on Gaza that has killed or maimed thousands of Palestinians—many of them children—and stand with Palestinians’ “right to exist, resist, return, and self-determination.”
The latest Israeli attacks reflect more than a century of ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, genocide, and apartheid—including Israel’s establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine.
Israel’s crimes are only possible because of more than $3.8 billion a year (or $10+ million per day) in bipartisan US military aid that gives Israel the guns, bullets, tanks, ships, jet fighters, missiles, helicopters, white phosphorus and other weapons to kill and maim the Palestinian people. This is the same system of racist state violence that, through shared surveillance technology and police exchange programs, brutalizes BIPOC and working class people in the United States and around the world.
In response, we demand an immediate end to the genocide, and embrace the recent Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel:
- To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel.
- To refuse to transport weapons to Israel.
- To pass motions in their trade union to this effect.
- To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution.
- Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding to it.
We further reaffirm the call on labor bodies to respect previous Palestinian trade union appeals for solidarity by adopting this statement, and/or the model resolution below to divest from Israel Bonds, sever all ties with the Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, and respect the Palestinian picket line for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).
Initial Signers on behalf of Labor for Palestine
To endorse the following statement as a trade unionist, please click here. To endorse as other, please click here.
(organizational affiliations listed for identification only)
Suzanne Adely, Labor for Palestine, US Palestinian Community Network, Arab Workers Resource Center; Food Chain Workers Alliance (staff); President, National Lawyers Guild;
Monadel Herzallah, Arab American Union Members Council
Ruth Jennison, Department Rep., Massachusetts Society of Professors, MTA, NEA; Co-Chair, Labor Standing Committee Pioneer Valley DSA
Lara Kiswani, Executive Director, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC); Block the Boat
Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
Corinna Mullin, PSC-CUNY International Committee; CUNY for Palestine
Clarence Thomas, Co-Chair, Million Worker March; Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 (retired)
Labor for Palestine Model Resolution: [X union/labor body]
Stand With Palestinian Workers:
Cease the Genocide Now, End All Complicity, Stop Arming Israel!
WHEREAS, October 7, 2023 saw the people of Gaza collectively reject the culmination of 16 years of a brutal land, air and sea siege devastating the entirety of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents; and
WHEREAS, the 16-year blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip has devastated the economy, leading to the closure of many companies, factories, and farms, resulting in a high level of unemployment, and reducing the government’s ability to provide basic services to the Palestinian population in Gaza; and
WHEREAS, the siege has deprived Palestinians in Gaza of their basic rights to health care, education, work, and freedom of movement, with 81.5 percent of individuals in Gaza living below the poverty line and 64 percent are food insecure; and
WHEREAS, the latest Israeli attacks reflect more than a century of ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, genocide, and apartheid—including Israel’s establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine; and
WHEREAS, the section of the Gaza border that was bulldozed through on October 7th was the site of the Great March of Return, a 2018-2019 peaceful protest which Israel responded to with deadly force, killing 214 Palestinians, including 46 children, and injuring 28,939 a reminder that all forms of Palestinian resistance—even peaceful ones—are criminalized and crushed by Israel; and
WHEREAS, as in the last 16 days alone at least [update as needed] 4,741 Palestinians have been killed and 15,898 wounded, with over a million of the densely populated enclave’s people displaced; and
WHEREAS, there have been [update as needed] 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza with these attacks resulting in at least 15 health workers killed, 27 health workers injured, damage to 25 hospitals and other healthcare facilities and three hospitals in northern Gaza evacuated; and
WHEREAS, upon announcing his intention to reduce parts of Gaza to “rubble,” Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu ordered leaflets dropped from the sky telling Palestinians in the Gaza strip, of which 50 percent of the population are children, to “leave now,” knowing full well that there is absolutely nowhere they can go; a public declaration of intent to commit the international crime of forced population transfer; and
WHEREAS, Israel has consolidated all these tactics of extermination in the current attack on Gaza, including the prohibited use of white phosphorus weapons in densely populated urban areas. In addition, Israel is arming settlers with an additional 10,000 assault rifles, which has already further galvanized attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank; and
WHEREAS, Israel justified its decision to suspend all entry of food, water and fuel into Gaza by claiming that it was fighting “human animals”; As we have seen with past examples of US led wars on Iraq and Afghanistan , such dehumanizing language is used to manufacture consent for genocidal violence; and
WHEREAS, a majority of media, politicians and employers have demonstrated an inconsistent valuation of human life, with calculated omissions effectively endorsing Israel’s ongoing perpetration of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and genocide against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza; and
WHEREAS, the tired trope of “religious conflict” has been used often to mask the reality of settler colonial violence and dispossession, essentializing and racializing both Jewish and Muslim communities and those critical of Israeli settler colonial violence have been falsely accused of anti-semitism; and
WHEREAS, the Union of Professors and Employees at Birzeit University in the West Bank, calls on all trade unions around the globe to reject the “criminalization of resistance… where all blood that is shed is blamed on the oppressed and all crimes of settler colonial invasion and dispossession are ignored entirely”; and
WHEREAS, all over the world and including our [city/workplace], workers of all faiths and backgrounds are united in their opposition to apartheid, occupation, genocide and settler colonialism; and
WHEREAS, the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism as a structure of power designed to accumulate wealth through dispossession and maintain racial hierarchy links it organically to the struggles of Indigenous, Black and Puerto Rican peoples, as well as other oppressed peoples in the United States; and
WHEREAS, the institutions of organized violence that oppress working class, Black and Brown communities in the US train and share tactics of repression with Israeli institutions of organized violence, for example through the deadly exchange program; and
WHEREAS, since World War II, Israel has been the largest overall recipient of U.S. foreign aid, with over $150 billion since 1946 and U.S. President Joe Biden has just announced another $14.3 billion in aid for Israel as part of a broader “defense” spending package that is a boon for the military-industrial-complex and is being claimed as a job promotion program for US workers who are allegedly “building the arsenal of democracy”; and
WHEREAS, the U.S. began moving warships and aircraft to the region “to be ready to provide Israel with whatever it needed to respond,” including sending two U.S. aircraft carriers as well as special operations forces to “assist Israel’s military in planning and intelligence”; and
WHEREAS, Palestinian trade unions call for workers around the globe to stand in solidarity to “end all forms of complicity with Israel’s crimes” and to “pass motions in their trade union to this effect”; therefore be it
RESOLVED, that our [union or other labor body] condemns Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people and calls for an immediate end to the bombings and destruction in Gaza as well as an end to all US military and economic aid to the settler colonial state of Israel; and
RESOLVED, that we endorse the October 16, 2023 Palestinian trade call:
- To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel.
- To refuse to transport weapons to Israel.
- To pass motions in their trade union to this effect.
- To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution.
- Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding to it.
RESOLVED, that our employer(s) publicly declare and divest from all financial ties with “the State of Israel and all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid”; and
RESOLVED, that our union pledge to respect previous Palestinian trade union appeals for solidarity by divesting from Israel Bonds, severing all ties with the Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, and respecting the Palestinian picket line for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS); and
RESOLVED, that our employer defend its workers [and students] who are routinely doxxed and attacked when voicing support for Palestine, including those who take part in the BDS campaign, and/or who otherwise oppose Israeli settler colonialism.