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May 18th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Editor’s Note: The following is a statement by Labor for Palestine. Mondoweiss occasionally publishes press releases and statements from organizations in an effort to draw attention to overlooked issues.
As workers, labor, and anti-apartheid activists, we join millions around the world to unequivocally condemn Israel’s genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people: mass evictions in the Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighborhoods of Jerusalem, storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque, waves of state-sponsored violence throughout the West Bank and the ’48 areas (stolen from Palestine in 1948), and merciless bombardment of Gaza that has already killed and wounded hundreds of people, many of them children.
Recent reports by B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch only belatedly acknowledge what Palestinians have always said: this is not an “Arab-Israeli conflict,” an “Israel-Hamas war,” “communal clashes,” or a “civil war,” but rather another chapter in more than a century of Zionist settler-colonialism — as symbolized by Israel’s very establishment through the uprooting and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba (“Our Catastrophe”), whose 73rd anniversary is today, May 15, 2021.
These crimes are only possible because of $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 — with direct Israeli support — brutalizes BIPOC and working class people in the United States and around the world. With Israel’s knee on their neck, Palestinians can’t breathe since 1948, and we unconditionally stand with their resistance in all parts of Palestine, just as they have stood with our struggles for Black and Brown Lives, Standing Rock, migrant rights, and beyond.
We urge workers and labor bodies in the US to join the growing mass protests against apartheid Israel, and to support the Day of Action in Solidarity with the Palestinian Uprising and General Strike: Tuesday, May 18.
We urge workers and labor bodies in the US to join the growing mass protests against apartheid Israel, and to support the Day of Action in Solidarity with the Palestinian Uprising and General Strike: Tuesday, May 18. We uplift the Italian dockworkers who refused to ship weapons to Israel on April 14, thereby answering the urgent May 13 appeal for international solidarity, signed by Palestinian trade unions, to support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).
BDS is inspired by the worldwide divestment campaign that helped topple apartheid South Africa, and reflects decades of Palestinian boycott and mobilization against Israeli colonization. It requires not only an end to the 1967 Israeli occupation, but an end to Israeli occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and implementation of the right of Palestinian refugees to return.
On this 73rd anniversary of Nakba Day, as Palestinians courageously resist brutal Israeli attack, we urge the labor movement to respect the BDS picket line by:
• Endorsing BDS, along with UAW 2865, the Connecticut AFL-CIO, the United Electrical Workers, IWW, and other US labor bodies, and with labor organizations around the world, who have already done so.
• Ending, once and for all, US labor officialdom’s long and shameful complicity in Zionism by divesting labor bodies from Israel Bonds, and severing all ties with Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee.
• Mobilizing our collective power at the workplace, as demonstrated by dockers in South Africa, India, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, Italy, the ILWU on the West Coast of the United States who have refused to handle Israeli cargo, and AROC’s Block the Boat campaign against an upcoming Zim Lines arrival at the Oakland Port.
AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL:
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!
________________________________
On behalf of Labor for Palestine
(organizational affiliations listed for identification only)
Suzanne Adely, Al-Awda-NY; Arab Workers Resource Center; Food Chain Workers Alliance (staff); President-Elect, 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)
Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Organizing Collective, USACBI: US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel; DSA Palestine Working Group
Clarence Thomas, Co-Chair, Million Worker March; Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 (retired)
Endorse this statement here.
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