NYCLAW Statement: U.S. Labor and Gaza ~ Window Into Palestine

[To endorse the following statement,
please go to:
http://www.petitiononline.com/Gaza/petition.html]

U.S. LABOR AND GAZA
New York City Labor Against the War
March 23, 2008

New York City Labor Against the War joins the
Congress of South Africa Trade Unions in denouncing
Israel's recent massacres in Gaza, the victims of which
include at least 130 Palestinians -- half of them civilians,
including dozens of women and children -- since February 27.

WHO ARE THE TERRORISTS?

Israel claims that it is fighting "terrorism" in Gaza. This is
the same hollow excuse with which the U.S. seeks to justify
war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the erosion of civil
liberties and labor rights at home.

In fact, Israel's attacks are part of a relentless,
U.S.-orchestrated campaign of collective punishment
-- with complicity of the corrupt Palestinian Authority
-- to overthrow the democratically-elected Hamas
government.

Long before its latest massacres, Israel had turned Gaza
into the world's "largest open air prison," assassinating
activists, and cutting-off essential goods and services to
1.5 million people. Only as a result did Hamas abandon a
unilateral two-year truce.

Even now, Israel seeks to derail Hamas truce offers by
escalating arrests, home demolitions, settlements and
murder in the West Bank -- from which no rockets
have been fired.

Despite media portrayals, this violence is overwhelmingly
one-sided against Palestinians, who have no aircraft,
artillery or tanks.

Thus, while only one Israeli has been killed by rockets
launched from Gaza since May 2007, Israel's modern
arsenal killed 60 Palestinians on March 1 alone.

On February 29, Israel's Deputy Defense Minister,
Matan Valnai, threatened a bigger "Shoah" --
a reference to the Nazi Holocaust.

As UN official John Dugard has pointed out, Palestinian
rockets are not the cause, but the "inevitable consequence,"
of Israeli state terror in Gaza, the slow-motion genocide
which human rights organizations describe as "worse than
at any time since the beginning of the Israeli military
occupation in 1967."

Following the latest attacks, a Council on Foreign
Relations expert explained, "You have Palestinians
who wouldn't necessarily support the violence but they
are saying, 'Well, what choice do we have?'"

SIXTY YEARS OF ETHNIC
CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE

Israel's war on Gaza can only be understood as an
attempt to stamp out all resistance -- including nonviolent
protest -- to Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Indeed, most of Gaza's population are survivors of Zionist
expulsions since the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948, when
13,000 Palestinians were massacred, 531 towns and
villages erased, 11 urban neighborhoods emptied, and
more than 750,000 (85 percent) driven from 78
percent of their country.

In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22 percent of Palestine
-- including East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza --
which, in violation of UN resolutions, remains under Israeli
military rule.

Today, as a result of these policies, at least 70 percent of the
10 million Palestinians are refugees -- the largest such
population in the world. Despite other UN resolutions,
Israel vows that it will never allow them to return.

Palestinians who managed to remain within the 1948 areas --
today, 1.4 million (or 20 percent of the population in Israel) --
are permanently separated from their families in exile, subject
to more than 20 discriminatory laws, treated as a "demographic
threat," and threatened with mass expulsion.

In East Jerusalem and the West Bank, 140 illegal, ever-expanding
Jewish-only settlements and road systems dominate the water
resources and control 40 percent of the land. Palestinians are
confined, separated, denied medical treatment, and degraded
by an 8-meter-high separation wall, pass laws, curfews and
600 military checkpoints.

From 2000-2007, 4,274 Palestinians in these 1967 territories
were killed, compared with 1,024 Israelis. The military has
seized 60,000 political prisoners; it still holds and tortures
11,000.

All of these conditions have dramatically worsened since
the Annapolis "peace conference" in November.

U.S. SPONSORSHIP

Israel's war on Palestine depends completely on U.S.
money, weapons and approval.

Since 1948, Israel -- the top foreign aid recipient --
has received at least $108 billion from the U.S. government.
In the past ten years alone, U.S. military aid was $17 billion;
over the next decade, it will be $30 billion.

Israel's recent assault on Gaza was endorsed by a
Congressional vote of 404-1. Democratic and Republican
presidential candidates fall over themselves to offer
more of the same.

On March 22, Dick Cheney reassured Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert of "America's. . . . commitment to
Israel's right to defend itself always against terrorism,
rocket attacks and other threats," and that the U.S. and
Israel are "friends -- special friends."

This "special friendship" means that, as in Afghanistan and
Iraq, it is U.S. aircraft, cluster bombs and bullets that kill
and maim on behalf of the occupiers. Just one of many
targets was the Palestinian General Federation of Trade
Unions headquarters in Gaza City, destroyed by F-16s on
February 28.

Such support bolsters Israel's longstanding role as watchdog
and junior partner for U.S. domination over the oil-rich Middle
East -- and beyond. In that capacity, Israel was apartheid
South Africa's closest ally.

After 9/11, it helped intensify the demonization of Arabs and
Muslims. It has 200 nuclear weapons, but helped manufacture
"evidence" of Iraqi WMD. With U.S. weapons and support, it
invaded Lebanon in 2006.

Together, these wars and occupations have killed, maimed and
displaced millions of people, thereby creating the world's largest
humanitarian crisis. Now, Israel is the cutting edge of threats
against Syria and Iran.

In other words, oppression and resistance in Palestine is the
epicenter of U.S.-Israeli war throughout the Middle East.
These stakes are reflected in the ferocity of Israel's attacks
against Gaza.

LABOR'S ROLE

In Palestine, South Africa, Britain, Canada and other countries,
labor has condemned Israeli Apartheid.

Workers in the United States pay a staggering human and
financial price, including deepening economic crisis, for
U.S.-Israeli war and occupation.

But through a combination of intent, ignorance and/or
expediency, much of labor officialdom in this country --
often without the knowledge or consent of union members
-- is an accomplice of Israeli Apartheid.

Some 1,500 labor bodies have plowed at least $5 billion of
union pension funds and retirement plans into State of
Israel Bonds.

In April 2002, while Israel butchered Palestinian refugees at
Jenin in the West Bank, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney
was a featured speaker at a belligerent "National Solidarity
Rally for Israel." In 2006, leadership of the American
Federation of Teachers embraced Israel's war on Lebanon.

These same leaders collaborate with attempts by the
Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) to silence Apartheid
Israel's opponents -- many of whom are Jewish.

In July 2007, top officials of the AFL-CIO and Change to
Win signed a JLC statement that condemned British unions
for even considering the nonviolent campaign for boycott,
divestment and sanctions against Israel.

Just days ago, the JLC and the leadership of UNITE-HERE
bullied a community organization in Boston into revoking
space for a conference on "Zionism and the Repression
of Anti-Colonial Movements."

Even the leadership of U.S. Labor Against the War, which
receives funding from several major unions, remains
adamantly silent about U.S. government, corporate and
labor support for Israeli Apartheid.

Labor leaders' complicity parallels infamous "AFL-CIA"
support for U.S. war and dictatorship in Vietnam, Latin
America, Gulf War I, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It
strengthens the U.S.-Israel war machine and labor's
corporate enemies, reinforces racism and Islamophobia,
and makes a mockery of international solidarity.

A NECESSARY STAND

More than forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
came under intense public attack for opposing the Vietnam
war. Even within the Civil Rights Movement, some dismissed
his position too "divisive" and "unpopular."

In his famous speech at the Riverside Church in
April 1967, Dr. King answered these critics by
pointing out that "silence is betrayal," and that "the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today . . .
[is] my own government."

At the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace
in November 1967, he reiterated the most basic principles
of labor solidarity: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere. . . . Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher
for consensus but a molder of consensus."

These principles are no less relevant today.

Yes, the Israel lobby seeks to silence opponents of Israeli
Apartheid. All the more need for trade unionists to break
that silence by speaking out against Israeli military occupation,
for the right of Palestinian refugees to return, and for the
elimination of apartheid throughout historic Palestine.

Therefore, we reaffirm our support for an immediate and total:

1. End to U.S. military and economic support for Israel.

2. Divestment of business and labor investments in Israel.

3. Withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from the Middle East.

Issued by NYCLAW Co-Conveners
(Other affiliations listed for identification only):

Larry Adams
Former President,
NPMHU Local 300

Michael Letwin
Former President,
UAW Local 2325/Assn. of Legal Aid Attorneys

Brenda Stokely
Former President,
AFSCME DC 1707; Co-Chair, Million Worker March