Upstream - US Labor & Imperialism Pt. 2: Zionism w/ Jeff Schuhrke (Palestine Pt. 16)

Starting point is 00:00:00 So before what we think of as the pro-Israel lobby came into existence, the AFL-CIO was kind of the major pro-Israel lobby. Again, being very powerful in this period, having a lot of close connections with U.S. government officials, often lobbying for more economic aid, for military aid to be sent to Israel. At this point, and again, really before 1967, U.S. presidents and the U.S. State Department were a little bit somewhat ambiguous about Israel. I mean, I'm not saying they were against it necessarily, but they weren't completely fully committed to propping up Israel like we all know of it in our lifetimes, right? That was something that really kind of came about a little later. So in this early period, the AFL-CIO's support for Israel was pretty crucial.

Starting point is 00:01:08 It was just a very powerful, large organization in the U.S. using its connections, political connections, to lobby on Israel's behalf. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

Starting point is 00:01:32 In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon killing tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians, Ronald Reagan reportedly called Israeli Prime Minister Manichem Began and screamed at him to stop bombing Beirut and to stop killing children. At the same time, the AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the United States, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times reading in all caps, the AFL-CIO is not neutral. We support Israel. Reagan, of course, was a rabid Zionist, but what's significant from this piece of history is that the U.S. labor movement's support for Zionism in Israel was,

Starting point is 00:02:15 from the early 20th century up to the present unwavering, and at times even more staunch than the most right-wing U.S. politicians. From materially, financially, and even militarily supporting Israel through the Nakhva, to using member dues to buy millions upon millions of dollars of Israeli bonds, U.S. labor played a crucial role in propping up the Zionist entity throughout its existence and continues to today. Today we'll be joined again by Jeff Shirky to build on our conversation with him last time, exploring how U.S. labor's prominent role in imperialism extended to its support for Zionism in Israel.

Starting point is 00:02:57 Jeff Shirky is a labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, Sunni Empire State University. He's also the author of Blue Collar Empire, the untold story of U.S. Labor's global anti-communist crusade, and No Neutrals There, U.S. labor, Zionism, and The Struggle for Palestine, which we'll be talking about today. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for biweekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes,

Starting point is 00:03:48 and stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Robert. in conversation with Jeff Shirke. Jeff, it is great to have you back.

Starting point is 00:04:21 Thanks for joining us again. Yeah, great to be back. Thank you. So last time we discussed your excellent book, Blue Color Empire, and that, I think in a way really laid the groundwork for the conversation that we're going to have today by taking like a really deep dive into the often grim history of the U.S. labor movements and focusing on, of course, the officials and like the leadership of the U.S. labor movement, particularly the AFL-CIO, their history of anti-communism, both within U.S. labor unions, and then also their support of imperialism and militarism

Starting point is 00:05:08 throughout the 20th century. And so today's conversation is going to pick up from that discussion and focus in on an aspect of that history, which you really write and focus your most recent book on, which is titled No Neutral's There, U.S. labor, Zionism, and the struggle for Palestine. So no neutrals there really does flow right out of Blue Collar Empire. Like the first book really sets the foundation for understanding exactly why, of course, U.S. labor would,

Starting point is 00:05:44 to support Israel, given its role in U.S. imperialism and the Cold War, and in certain cases, it's more conservative ideological orientation. So, yeah, let's jump in, just like we did last time. Maybe we can start with a brief overview of the book to help sort of orient us towards the main themes, and then we can get a little bit more granular. Yeah, thanks. So yeah, no neutrals there is similar to Blue Collar Empire in a lot of ways, because the main or the principal actors in the story are these high-ranking union officials, particularly, like you said, within the AFL-CIO. And yet there's also, you know, some more rank-and-file or local union leaders throughout different points of history who sort of challenge the orthodoxy of the high-ranking labor

Starting point is 00:06:34 officials. But no neutrals there. So Blue Color Empire, the book we talked about last week, was primarily focused on the Cold War period between like the mid-1940s to early 1990s. And it was sort of covering, spanning much of the globe about these explicitly anti-communist or anti-left Cold War interventions of the AFL-CIO. But no neutrals there covers a longer span of time, like the early 1900s to basically write up to the present. And it's focused specifically, like you said, on the role of U.S. labor officialdom's support for Zionism historically, including the support for the state of Israel since 1948, and how that took the form of not only sort of moral support, political, rhetorical kind of support, but actual extensive material support in the form of hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars from union treasuries going towards settler, colonel. or state, nation-building types of institutions and projects in Palestine, in the state of Israel,

Starting point is 00:07:46 that were all premised on the dispossession, expulsion, and occupation of Native Palestinian people. So, yeah, it covers that that whole broad history. And it also is kind of in the same way that Blue Collar Empire was, on the one hand, kind of a history of the AFL-CIO as an institution. and on the other hand, a history of U.S. interventions in the Cold War. No Neutral there is a history of U.S. labor, but also a history of Zionism and Palestinian resistance to Zionism and some of the key moments in the history of 20th century Zionism, the history of the state of Israel, some of the major conflicts and wars and massacres, and what role the U.S. labor movement played in all of those different points in history. Yeah, absolutely. And we've done like a 15, I think, or maybe 16. I think this is going to be the 16th episode that we've recorded on Palestine. I've read a ton of books about stuff, talk to a bunch of experts. In your book, I learned still so much new, interesting information about the history of Zionism and Israel and Palestine, and particularly like the history

Starting point is 00:09:03 of some of the labor history on both sides, which was really, really, really fascinating. So, yeah, really, really great read, really, really important book. Again, like last time, we're not going to be able to get into everything. There's a lot in the book that we, I'm sure, will not be able to touch on. So, again, I definitely recommend picking up the book for anybody who wants to dive deeper or just wants to support your work. let's start like you do in the book with the foundations. So give us a basic sense of where Zionism comes from.

Starting point is 00:09:41 And crucially, as you do in the book, which I think really helps, like, give us a sense of the class and ideological underpinnings of Zionism. If you could contrast it with the alternative to Zionism, or at least what was the alternative to Zionism back in the, the early days of Zionism, which was characterized by organizations like the Boond. What are those two sort of alternative approaches or organizations or movements, whatever we want to refer to them as in this context? What were they in their early days? And how did they differ in their approaches to Jewish emancipation? Yeah. So you have to go back to the late 19th century, the 1880s, 1890s, and central and eastern Europe, which is where the majority of the world's Jewish population lived at the time, and of course suffered all kinds of persecution, anti-Semitism, exploitation, particularly in the Russian Empire,

Starting point is 00:10:41 you know, in living in a confined area called the Pale of Settlement. Jews in Central Europe, like in Germany, had more room for social advancement, so there was like a Jewish middle class that was fairly prosperous in Germany. But in Russia, the Russian nation, empire, which includes, you know, parts of many modern-day countries of Eastern Europe, they didn't have those same kind of opportunities and were much more likely to be working class, very poor and marginalized economically, and suffering from the occasional, you know, state violence of pogroms, these anti-Semitic riots that would happen. So it was in this period of the 1880s, 1890s, that capitalism and industrialism and sort of modern ideas around socialism and democracy

Starting point is 00:11:26 started to penetrate into Eastern Europe. And this is also the period between the 1880s and then up to about World War I, 1914, at least one or two million Jews left Eastern Europe and came to the United States, fleeing that anti-Semitism and fleeing economic deprivation. And again, they were largely in this period largely working-class Jews who, when they came to the United States, ended up mainly finding, any work in the garment industry, the needle trades in cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and bringing with them socialist class-oriented politics that they had developed in Eastern Europe

Starting point is 00:12:10 and in many ways revitalizing the U.S. labor movement when they came here, especially in the early 1900s with unions like the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the ILGWU, and the amalgamated clothing workers of America, not only organizing, very poorly paid, you know, like sweatshop workers, women workers, and not only Jewish immigrants, but Italian immigrants as well. And going on strike, you know, leading some of these famous labor battles of the early 20th century, but also expanding the role of unions to cover sort of support workers beyond the workplace by building cooperative housing for union members in or like banking, like the amalgamated clothing workers established the amalgamated bank,

Starting point is 00:12:56 which is still an existing bank. So stuff like that. But back in Eastern Europe, these various groups of socialist, working class Jews in Tsarist Russia came together in 1897 and formed what you mentioned, the Bund, the Jewish labor Bund. The Bund is a word that basically means union. And so this was sort of a broad political socialist organization, revolutionary. And it was, you know, like other socialist formations, it was focused on a kind of universal ideals of, you know, overthrowing capitalism and creating a socialist society that would liberate, you know, the entire working class, regardless of religion or race or anything else. But at the same time, they wanted to maintain a sense of Jewish identity, Jewish culture,

Starting point is 00:13:45 the Yiddish language and focus on, in addition to broader forms of exploitation and oppression that affect all workers, also they wanted to focus on anti-Semitism and challenge that explicitly. So it was kind of like this, you know, on the one hand, it was a socialist group, but it was also a very specifically Jewish socialist kind of group. And the Jewish laborbund was at the heart of a lot of the anti-Zarist rebellions in the early 20th century, especially the 1905 Russian Revolution, unfinished revolution. The Jewish Labor Bund was central to the founding of Russia's Social Democratic Labor Party, which is where, you know, eventually would split off between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. And this is sort of the

Starting point is 00:14:31 groundwork for what became the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union later on. So you had that, and like I said, the Jewish Labor Bund was founded in 1897. And very interestingly, it was founded in this clandestine meeting in a workers' attic. You know, it was during the high holidays because this was like a revolutionary group. They couldn't be out in the open saying, hey, we're starting this revolutionary socialist group. But at the same time, well, the same year, 1897, I think just roughly a month or so before the founding of the Jewish Labor Bund, there had been a very different kind of meeting, founding a very different kind of organization in Basel, Switzerland. in Central Europe of a group of middle and upper-class Jews.

Starting point is 00:15:18 Because like I said, in Germany, Central Europe, there were more middle-class economically prosperous Jewish population, lawyers and bankers and things like that. And they came together and had a very public meeting in Basel, Switzerland, to found the Zionist organization. So socialism was one answer to all of the anti-Semitic oppression going on, and Zionism was another answer. And Zionism came out of other, you know, modern ideas of like nationalism, which was

Starting point is 00:15:49 very significant in Europe in the late 19th century, early 20th century on the eve of World War I with these big decaying empires, right, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, German Empire, as well as the British, you know, they were all big empires, but especially the ones in sort of Central and Eastern Europe were kind of falling apart economically not keeping up with the West and the various like, you know, what they called small nations, people who had similar languages and cultures, wanting, yearning to create their own nation states, right? And this is eventually what happened after World War I. Well, the Jews in Europe were influenced by these ideas as well. And they said, yeah, we want to have a state of our own also.

Starting point is 00:16:36 But because Jews are, you know, diasporic people, they're a minority, they're scattered wherever they are. They didn't have in Europe like a particular area where they were like a majority of the population where they could easily carve out a nation state for themselves. So naturally, Zionists in promoting Jewish nationalism and the idea of creating a Jewish state, they needed to look outside of Europe and it needed to be a settler colonial movement. They needed to find a place where they could go and settle and actually colonize it. And so they also borrowed other ideas from Europe, not only nationalism, but colonialism, imperialism, imperialism, imperialism, imperialism, imperialism, saying, well, we can carve out a space somewhere in Africa or Asia, or even South America was suggested.

Starting point is 00:17:18 But of course, for the Zionists, the ideal location to carry out their program was Palestine, you know, in the Middle East, part of the Ottoman Empire, because, at least according to the Bible, you know, it's the homeland of the Jewish people, Eretz, Israel, and the Bible. And what's also interesting there is that a lot of these founders of the Zionist organization in 1897, particularly Theodore Herzl, they were using these biblical stories as justification for, this is why we have a right to take over Palestine. But they were all atheists. They didn't believe in the Bible. And the Israeli historian Elon Pape has this great line where he says, though they didn't believe in God, he had nonetheless promised them Palestine. I think it might be Elon Pape too that refer to it as the great realtor in the sky or something like that. Right. So in 1897 you have both these two competing kind of strands, or not necessarily competing, but opposing kinds of political and ideological principles.

Starting point is 00:18:24 One, based on universal emancipation of the working class, politics based on socialism and class struggle, represented by the Jewish Labour Bund, that also was still focused on anti-Semitism specifically and Jewish identity specifically, but still in this kind of more universal socialist framework. And then the very narrowly nationalistic and settler colonial Zionist movement. And it's important to understand that, you know, in Judaism, there's a kind of a long, long tradition of a kind of yearning to return to Eretti Israel and at the end of time. and it's something that would accompany with the coming of the Messiah. And, you know, it's a religious, spiritual kind of belief,

Starting point is 00:19:06 not like a literal, political, secular program of like, yeah, we're going to actually go and do this. That was different. So initially, a lot of Jewish religious leaders, rabbis, were opposed to Zionism. They saw it as sacrilegious in a lot of ways. And before the founding of the Zionist organization in 1897, there had been a kind of proto-Zionist movement in the 1880s with small numbers of Jews from Europe moving to Palestine and beginning to set up like agricultural colonies. But it really

Starting point is 00:19:39 kicked off in the 1890s with Deodor Herzl and his book, The Jewish State, and then the 1897 founding of the Zionist organization. Yeah, and this had implications, again, in the United States. So, you know, Jews were not, Brian Large, moving to Palestine. If they were leaving Eastern Europe, they were coming to the United States or Canada to flee anti-Semitism. And those were largely working-class Jews. And like I said, bringing those socialist politics of the Bund into the U.S. labor movement and revitalizing it and giving it new energy and new ideas in a lot of ways. Whereas there was an existing like middle class, a Jewish middle class in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:20:19 of like an earlier wave of German Jewish immigrants. And many of them owned the factories and sweatshops where Jewish workers were, were living and being exploited. So there was like a class antagonism between Jews of different classes in the United States. That's super, super helpful and really, really, I think, important to kind of give us that foundation moving forward. To pull a quote out from the book that just really encapsulates everything that you just talked about, you write, though they were each the product of European modernity, the Boond and the Zionist organization embodied different answers to anti-Semitic oppression.

Starting point is 00:21:00 While the former represented a proletarian, Jewish movement dedicated to liberation through class struggle and socialism, the latter was a more bourgeois configuration that sought Jewish emancipation through nationalism and settler colonialism, end quote. And I think, I forget if you mentioned this, but just to either mention it or underscore it, Zionism was incredibly unpopular among Jews during, this time. It took a very long time. It took a lot of convincing in propaganda and time to

Starting point is 00:21:33 convince the majority of Jews to kind of accept it as the mainstream position, which I believe it still sort of holds at least maybe that might be changing now. Yeah, I mean, it seemed to so many Jews, like just kind of an absurd utopian idea, like, oh, we're going to just go to the Middle East in the middle of the Ottoman Empire and just, you know, set up a a state? And like, that's the answer, you know, like, it seemed ridiculous, unrealistic. And the, and the way that the Zionist organization, Theodore Herzl, the way they tried to say, here's how we're going to do it, was by like trying to win the favor of global imperial powers, whether the Ottoman Empire itself or maybe get the British Empire on their side or even get the U.S. government

Starting point is 00:22:17 on its side, on the side of the Zionist movement to try to make this happen. And for many Jews, They were like battling the Tsar. They were against these major powers. And yeah, this is why for the vast majority of Jews in Europe were working class, proletarians. And if they left at all, they weren't going to Palestine. They were coming to the U.S. And there were, even before the founding of the Bund, there were revolutionary socialist Jews in Russia who were also pointing to the very obvious fact that Palestine already had a population.

Starting point is 00:22:54 And they were even saying, like, what are we, you know, this Arab people already live there. If we go and try to take their home, this is just going to lead to violence and endless conflict. And of course, they were absolutely right. You had Jewish revolutionary socialist writers talking about this, writing about this in Russia in the 1880s. So there were many reasons to oppose Zionism. And like you said, it was very unpopular among Jews for a long time. So this is, of course, for anybody who's super unfamiliar with the history, well before Israel is sort of enshrined as a state. This is all we're talking right now are still on the migration to Palestine before Israel comes into existence.

Starting point is 00:23:43 So some of the early goals of the labor Zionists in Palestine, and these are the early settlers that we're talking about now, These were not just limited to the conquest of land, which is obviously a huge, important factor, but also the conquest of labor was a priority for them. And they began very early on in the history of Zionism by dispossessing Palestinians of their land and building these collective farms that we know as kibbutzim and cooperative villages, known as Moshevim, I think is how you say it. So anyways, tell us about. labor Zionism and then also like the histradute along with its various roles in the early Zionist

Starting point is 00:24:30 settler colonialism of Palestine. And then maybe if you could touch too on like the class character and ideological orientation of these entities and the role that they played in this settler colonial project. So, you know, we just talked about these two kind of competing strands of Jewish modernity and Jewish responses to anti-Semitism in Europe, the socialist working class politics, and then the nationalist bourgeois, settler colonial politics of Zionism. Labor Zionism, which kind of started after the 1905 Russian Revolution and started building up steam in the 1920s and then became kind of really the dominant current within the larger Zionist project by the 1930s, labor Zionism was an attempt to try to reconcile those

Starting point is 00:25:18 two strands to try to bring a socialist working class character to this Zionist settler colonial project known as Zionism. So it's a really significant development in the history of my book, of my story, because my story is all about, you know, labor and Zionism. There were a growing number in the early 1900s, growing number of working class socialist Jews who started to think, well, the only way we're going to be able to really achieve socialism is if we have our own territorial state and turn it into not just a Jewish state, but a Jewish worker state. So they got on board with Zion, and they differentiated themselves from the more middle-class bourgeois political Zionists, like Theodore Herzl and the people, his followers,

Starting point is 00:26:05 because their idea, as I said, was, we'll achieve a Jewish state by appealing to the great powers, imperial powers of the world. The labor Zionists, as socialists, working class Jews, they said, well, we're just going to actually go and do it ourselves. We're going to build a state, lay the economic foundations ourselves, by doing these things like creating, like you said, Kibbutzim, cooperative farms and communal villages, among other things like their own health care network, hospitals and transportation network, a banking system, housing developments, industrial companies, building an actual economy in Palestine,

Starting point is 00:26:46 themselves. And this is, especially coming after, you know, after World War I, 1917, you have the Belfour Declaration, which is where the British, the British ended up taking over Palestine after the World War I in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And the Belford Declaration, as I'm sure your listeners know, that, you know, that this was the British basically promising the Zionist organization that they would allow Zionist colonization of Palestine. But, So in that period, the labor Zionists were constructing all these sort of economic institutions, but the whole point of them was to be Jewish only and to exclude native Palestinian workers and peasants from all these jobs that were being created, from all these social services that

Starting point is 00:27:31 were being established with the idea of economically marginalizing the native population to push them out that way, not only trying to push people out through force and through violence, but through economic dislocation. So like you said, it wasn't only about the conquest of land. It was about the conquest of labor. And so labor Zionists talked a lot about this concept of Hebrew labor. Many of these labor Zionists were intellectuals in Europe and not used to doing like hard manual labor, but they saw labor Zionism and colonization of Palestine as an opportunity to transform themselves into real proletarians, into blue-collar workers, manual laborers working on farms and working with their hands. And this is kind of, and through the sweat of their brow, they would establish the foundations

Starting point is 00:28:18 for a Jewish state. So it was, this is what Hebrew labor meant. And it's important for the role of the U.S. labor movement, because as I said, there was in the late 1800s, early 1900s, many working class Jews coming from Europe to the U.S., getting involved in the labor movement, building up unions, especially in the garment industry like the ILGWU and the amalgamated clothing workers. And they were becoming influential within the labor movement. And these were people who had come out of the Jewish labor bund. They were non-Zionists or anti-Zionists. They didn't support this idea of colonizing Palestine. But because you had labor Zionists, because you had fellow socialist and working class Jews going to Palestine in this period and creating this, you

Starting point is 00:29:09 ostensibly socialist type of economy, except again, it was all inherently racist against Palestinians. It was exclusively for all these jobs and opportunities exclusively for Jews. But that was just ignored and overlooked because of the racism of workers here in the U.S. as well. And so through labor Zionism, Zionists were able to kind of win over many Jewish-American labor leaders, even though those Jewish-American labor leaders were non-Zionist or anti-Zionists, they saw supporting Jewish workers in Palestine not as a nationalistic thing, but as a form of worker-to-worker solidarity. Even though, again, it was all, I'm not saying that's what it was, really, it was settler colonialism and nationalism and racism, but because it was

Starting point is 00:29:58 couched in the language of, well, we're working class socialists just like you and we're trying to build a worker state. And this is where the histograms comes in because it was, the history was the organization is the primary organization, the primary vehicle of labor Zionism, established in 1920 in Palestine. Again, this is when Britain was ruling Palestine. And the history drew was, you know, it's often talked about as a trade union federation like the AFL CIO. And that is basically what it is today. But through most of its history, it was much more than that. It was a major employer. In fact, it was through most of it, the state, of Israel's history, it was the second largest employer in the country after the Israeli government.

Starting point is 00:30:44 Histroot was running and managing all these different farms and companies and, you know, healthcare systems and banking systems and transportation networks and so on and so forth. And so basically, if you were a Jewish settler coming to Palestine and you wanted a job and you wanted some kind of, you know, social welfare or housing or education or any health care, anything, you would have to join Histudrude and then get access to all of this stuff, all these different types of services and opportunities. And then at the same time, Histodute had its trade unions. So it was basically this engine of economic development, but or as I would say, an instrument

Starting point is 00:31:23 of settler colonialism. And again, systematically excluding and marginalizing native Palestinian workers and peasants, pushing them off their land, keeping them out of jobs and out of economic opportunities. And we can talk more about that. But early on, starting in the 1920s, after Histodrout was founded, U.S. unions, initially it was U.S. unions led by Jewish Americans who were, again, non-Zionists or anti-Zionists. But they were sympathetic to the histadroot because they saw it as a union, as a workers organization. And they started in the 1920s donating. Initially, it was like tens of thousands of dollars.

Starting point is 00:32:06 Eventually it would be millions of dollars. from union funds or from like fundraisers that U.S. unions would organize and then, you know, give that money to history to carry out all those economic activities that I was just talking about, because obviously they needed capital to do all that stuff to create farms and jobs and et cetera, et cetera. So listeners of our show will be well aware of how the U.S. labor movement has continue to fail in its even any kind of meager solidarity with Palestine, particularly since the Alaksa flood resistance campaign of October 7th. This has just become very, very noticeable to anybody who's paying anybody who's paying even a small amount of attention. In fact, a last episode in our

Starting point is 00:32:51 Palestine series with labor leader Chris Smalls, where he outlined many of the failures of the labor movement in this regard. But of course, your book goes into great length about the deep deep history of the AFL-CIO and its precursor's relationship to Zionism. So there's a number of different reasons and you've touched on sort of the basic reason that it's like, you know, just labor solidarity. There's definitely racism involved in there too. But like, why was labor Zionism ultimately so attractive to U.S. labor officials in particular? And what did that early relationship? look like. So, as I said, it kind of initially a lot of the material support from U.S. unions to labor Zionism, particularly the Histoogne, came from Jewish-American labor leaders,

Starting point is 00:33:46 even though they weren't Zionists or didn't identify as Zionists because they were convinced that this was a form of worker solidarity. But very quickly, it expanded to the non-Jewish labor leaders who were, of course, the majority of the major leaders of the main mainstream labor movement in the United States. And they also quickly got on board and accepted labor Zionism and were very enthusiastic about it. And I think part of it is the history of the labor movement here in the United States, because this is also a settler colonial country. And if you look at the very early U.S. labor movement in the mid-19th century, you had a number of high-profile labor leaders, labor reformers and socialists, people like George Henry Evans in the

Starting point is 00:34:31 1850s talking about the need for white wage workers in the cities of the east, like New York, to escape the toil and drudgery of wage labor by moving out west and setting up a homestead, getting a small family farm going, getting their own piece of land, and so they wouldn't have to work for someone else for a wage. And this was seen by many political leaders as well in the U.S. as a kind of what they call a safety valve to relieve the growing pressure and tension. class tensions that were building up in the cities of the East in the mid-19th century with early industrialization and a growing, the nascent proletariat and bourgeoisie in the growing class conflict.

Starting point is 00:35:15 Rather than have a class conflict and class struggle, the idea was, well, let's evacuate a large portion of the working class, the white working class, to these newly conquered lands out west. and this is what a lot of labor reformers and early labor movement leaders were supporting in the 19th century. But of course, that was also all premised on the dispossession, violent dispossession, an expulsion of indigenous people. So that plus, you know, there are these kind of stories and myths of working class people like building the United States, particularly the west, you know, the railroads and the mines. and creating a modern society and an empty prairie plowing the virgin soil and all these kinds of myths that make it sound like it was just empty land and nobody was there. And it's the same kind of myths, racist myths, that Israel tells itself. You know, Zionists tell themselves that Palestine

Starting point is 00:36:13 was just as empty, what do they say, a land without a people for people without land or making the desert bloom and this type of stuff. So I think U.S. labor leaders were already ideologically receptive to this. And when we talk about the AFL, American Federation of Labor specifically, and its affiliated unions, they had a long history of racial exclusion, racism against Asian workers, particularly Chinese immigrant workers, and lobbying for Chinese exclusion, and keeping out black workers or segregating them into separate segregated union locals, Jim Crow unionism. This was very common in the AFL in the early 20th century. And so when they saw what the HistroJute was all about and the way the history was treating native Palestinian workers, Arab workers, I think many labor labor labor, they didn't have a problem with it.

Starting point is 00:37:08 They didn't say, oh, how could you be doing that? How could you premise having a labor movement based on colonization? How could you premise having a labor movement based on systematic racial exclusion? They weren't asking those questions because that was what they did. This was just normal to them. So that was a big part of it. And then jumping ahead to the Cold War period, and again, as we've talked about extensively last time, how the AFL-CIO embraced this Cold War anti-communist foreign policy, Israel,

Starting point is 00:37:37 because labor Zionism dominated Israel's politics for the first roughly, you know, 40 years or 30, 40 years of its existence, because that is as important, many of the Histadroot founders and leaders became so powerful and influential because it was like this economic engine for settler colonialism. By the time the state of Israel was founded in 1948 through the Nakhpa, this ethnic cleansing campaign, many of the Histroot's leaders were also extremely powerful, influential political leaders, and they became like the first prime ministers and many other top government positions in the early state of Israel. So labor Zionism dominated the politics of the state of Israel for like the first 40 years or so of its existence. And they did have very pro-worker kinds of policies in a robust

Starting point is 00:38:31 social welfare state and good jobs with good benefits and wages, et cetera, again, though, all exclusively only for Jews. and discriminating against native Palestinian workers. To the extent that like Palestinian citizens of Israel were involved at all, they were relegated to like second class status as Histrood member. I mean, they were initially not allowed into Histrood at all or else only as segregated unions. But anyway, because the early state of Israel did have this very labor-centered economic development model, even though it was totally racist,

Starting point is 00:39:08 AFL-CIO leaders held up Israel as a model, model for the rest of the newly independent states of Africa and Asia to follow the, you know, what was then called the third world because the third world was sort of up for grabs in the Cold War contest for, you know, hearts and minds. And there was this fear that the workers of Africa and Asia would, in order to see their own economic prospects improve and see rapid economic development and modernization, that they would turn to the Soviet Union or or the People's Republic of China and embrace state socialism. And so to try to keep the workers of the third world away from that path, AFL-CIO officials working with their partners in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:39:54 government would constantly hold up Israel as this great model and say, look, you can be like Israel and look at what a great pro-worker socialistic economy Israel has, and they're not communist and are not part of the Soviet camp. So follow Israel's example. And plus, you know, the fact that slowly but surely the U.S. government, especially after 1967, came to see Israel as this crucial bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East. For all those reasons, then, the AFLCAO's support for Israel and support for labor Zionism

Starting point is 00:40:29 was tied into, you know, all the Cold War anti-communist stuff that we've already talked about. And we'll see how the U.S. labor movement's ideological support for Israel translated then into material support in just a second. But just to rewind a little bit, let's get back into the history sort of in this early 20th century period because there's a lot of interesting stuff here in the book. Tell us about the lead-up to Palestine's great Arab revolt, which I don't think we may not have actually covered this at all in the series or if we did, it was just briefly. So the Great Arab Revolt. What was the political and labor landscape like in Palestine leading up to the revolt, like what conditions led to the revolt? And how was it responded to? And ultimately, what was the outcome? So, yeah, this Great Arab Revolt started in April of 1936 and lasted until 1939, but it began as a general strike of Palestinian Arab workers started as a general strike that lasted for six months and then expanded into an armed insurrection against British imperialism and against Zionist colonization. Yeah, so this is the 1930s we're talking about the period of the worldwide

Starting point is 00:41:47 Great Depression, so already a lot of economic trouble for the whole world, including in the Middle East, period when Britain was still controlling Palestine through the British mandate. And it was also the period when in Europe, you know, in Germany specifically Hitler came to power, the Nazis came to power and were systematically persecuting Jews, initially trying to strip them of their basic civil rights and citizenship and then eventually, you know, escalating to a policy of actual extermination. But with the rise of Nazi Germany, you had large numbers of middle and upper class German Jews wanting to understandably wanting to get out of Germany. And then there was a, I think it was maybe 1935 or thereabouts an agreement between the Nazi government and the Zionist organization

Starting point is 00:42:43 and the Jewish agency, which was sort of like the de facto government of the Jewish population in Palestine, called the transnational. agreement or Havara agreement that basically allowed large numbers of German Jews to leave Germany and go settle in Palestine and transfer their wealth with them, although it would have to be in the form of German-made products being exported to Palestine. And this was actually breaking an international boycott of Nazi Germany that many Jews and their allies in the United States and around the world had organized to protest Hitler's policies. But anyway, What this meant was by the mid to late 1930s, you had many more Jews moving into Palestine,

Starting point is 00:43:28 settling there, and bringing lots of wealth and investing it into this Jewish-only economy. And so for the first time, the Jewish economic sector overtook the native Palestinian economic sector in this period. At the same time, you had a growing Palestinian proletariat, people had formerly been peasants who had forced off their lands, the rural lands by Zionist colonization and now working largely in the government sector because the British, while the histodrewd and all of its various companies and economic sectors were discriminating against Palestinian workers, the British government sector was not. So Palestinian Arabs were finding work in the railways and public works departments and the petroleum industry and the you know, telecommunications and as postal workers and on the docks too in Haifa and Jaffa.

Starting point is 00:44:30 And so Palestinian Arab workers started forming their own unions and own worker organizations like the Palestine Arab Workers Society and then a couple years later the Arab Workers Society. And they were doing a lot of organizing amongst themselves and promoting Palestinian nationalism, demanding independence from Britain and demanding an end to this ongoing Zionist encroachment and calling for limits to Jewish immigration. So all of this set the stage then for the great Arab revolt, where the histridor was kind of doubling down on its discriminatory practices and actually going around with sending roving pickets around to different workplaces,

Starting point is 00:45:12 whether it was like orange groves or construction sites, looking for any Arab workers and physically ejecting them, throwing them out, and doing these campaigns targeting Jewish employers saying don't hire any Arab workers or targeting Jewish consumers saying only buy Jewish made products. And so it was unemployment for the Palestinian Arab workers was increasing. Their economic situation was getting worse and worse. And there was growing anger and frustration not only over the Zionism, but also the fact they were under British imperial control. And this is the middle of the Great Depression. So all of these things came together. And so there was this Muslim cleric, Sheikh al-Qasam,

Starting point is 00:46:01 who was going around the countryside, calling for both like moral renewal, but also protesting against British imperialism and Zionist colonization. And he was going to try to plan an armed revolt but then he was killed by the British in late 1935. Shortly after that then, in April of 1936, is when these Palestinian workers, who, as I said, had been organizing, especially in Haifa and Jaffa, organized a general strike. And it lasted for six months, and it became this broader revolt against both, again, British rule and Zionism. And some of the folks in the rural countryside, the peasants, Felaheen, They took up arms against the British.

Starting point is 00:46:50 And then there was like a break in this with some negotiations. And then the uprising kind of started up again. And eventually it was violently put down by the British using tactics that I argue that, and many, I'm not alone, many would argue tactics that state of Israel would eventually adopt. The kinds of tactics that we've seen in Gaza over the last couple of years, of collective punishment of indiscriminate destruction as a way to crush this insurgency that was happening in the late 1930s. And actually, the British were taking the same tactics that they had used to put down the Irish War for Independence roughly 15 years earlier. So basically indiscriminately

Starting point is 00:47:36 arresting or killing any young adult male, just assuming that, well, they must be some kind of insurgent or guerrilla, going into people's homes without any kind of warrant or any reason for suspicion and just ransacking people's homes looking for evidence that they were harboring insurgents and destroying people's homes, blowing things up, creating mass fear and terror. So there was a huge amount of casualties of Palestinians killed by the British. And, you know, some of the Zionist leaders in Palestine were kind of on the sidelines watching this basically cheering it on in a way. I don't know if maybe it's not fair to say they were on the sidelines. They may have been actively involved in different ways, but they were basically saying,

Starting point is 00:48:19 well, this is what we, in order for us to eventually create our Jewish state that we want to have here, the native population has to be crushed and put down, and the British are doing it for us right now. So this was in some ways kind of a preview or laying the groundwork for the NACPA that would come just a few years later. Yeah, and we'll get into that in just a second. Just a couple points I wanted to pull out from that that I think is and is worthwhile to talk about briefly. The repression, the British repression after the Great Revolt really decimated the Palestinian, like the leadership of the Palestinian resistance to Zionism in a way that it could be argued. It was never really able to recover from. And then another thing I wanted to pull out, you mentioned Al Qasam,

Starting point is 00:49:07 just for folks who might be interested, he was the, namesake for the Al-Qasang Brigades, which is the military wing of Hamas. So an interesting thread through history there. We can see where that name comes from and that, you know, over a century of resistance behind it. So yeah, I just wanted to bring that into the conversation. And then, yeah, so let's move forward here. We will get into the Nakba. But I think it's worthwhile to talk a little bit first about the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on the efforts to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. And at this point, U.S. labor support for the creation of a Jewish state and on the Palestinian political and labor landscape during this period more broadly as

Starting point is 00:49:57 well. Yeah. So a couple of things to say about World War II in the same period, 1930s into the 1940s in the United States, the U.S. labor movement saw its most significant growth ever in this period, right? This is the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the New Deal. It's the time of the CIO, Congress of Industrial Organizations being founded and rapidly unionizing millions of workers in the mass industries like we talked about last week. And so during this period, especially coming out by the end of World War II, you had the labor movement in the U.S. becoming very strong and very politically and economically influential more so than ever before or since. And yeah, this is a period of World War II, the period of the Holocaust.

Starting point is 00:50:46 And as I say, as the labor movement, U.S. labor movement got stronger. Some of those Jewish-American labor leaders, many of them who had immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century, were now becoming very politically powerful. people like David Dubinsky, who was the president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and Cindy Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, who was very close to Franklin Roosevelt. And they still considered themselves non-Zionists, still didn't approve of Zionism, and yet they were very close with the histoogute,

Starting point is 00:51:21 because, again, they saw this as worker solidarity and stuff like that. And a lot of these Jewish-American labor leaders were trying, to get the AFL-CIO to pressure the Roosevelt administration to lift immigration restrictions to allow Jewish refugees trying to escape the Nazis, trying to escape the Holocaust, to come into the United States. So the AFL-CIO did help to some extent get exit visas for a certain number of Jewish labor leaders and Jewish socialists in Europe. They refused, the AFL-CIO leadership refused, I should say AFL and CIA, they were still separate at the time, they refused to support lifting immigration restrictions to allow millions of Jews to be able to come into the U.S.

Starting point is 00:52:09 to escape the Holocaust. And the U.S. government, of course, didn't change its policies and was, you know, there's that horrible story that's been told many times of this ocean liner, the St. Louis, which was carrying hundreds of Jewish refugees trying to, you know, escape from Europe and coming to the U.S., coming to, I think, Miami and then also parts of the Caribbean. And they were not allowed in. They weren't allowed to come to the other. They had to turn around and go back to Europe, and many of them were later murdered in the Holocaust. And so this is what was happening. And at the same time, the Zionist movement, including labor Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion

Starting point is 00:52:47 in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion would go on. He was the first general secretary of the history, and he would become the first prime minister of the state of Israel, sort of the most influential Zionist leader at this point in time, in a way really kind of exploiting the Holocaust to say, see, this is why we need to have a Jewish state. It's the only way to secure Jewish safety. And some of the non-Jewish AFL and CIA leaders, they recognized what was happening with the Holocaust. And rather than say, we should lift immigration restrictions here in the U.S., they said there should be a Jewish state, the British need to lift immigration restrictions on Jews being able to go to Palestine. Because after the Great Arab Revolt, this is one minor concession that the British made

Starting point is 00:53:30 to the Palestinians was they imposed some restrictions on further Zionist immigration colonization. But anyway, AFLCI leaders were calling on the British to allow Jews into Palestine. Basically, they were saying a Jewish state in Palestine is the only answer to anti-Semitism, it's the only proper response to the Holocaust while continuing to have this sort of anti-Semitic policy of not allowing Jews into the U.S. And among those non-Zionist, Jewish-American labor leaders, seeing how more and more Christians in the U.S. were supporting Zionism and supporting the goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, it served to kind of break down their own opposition to Zionism because they were seeing.

Starting point is 00:54:20 like, well, if all these Christians can support Zionism, then that makes us kind of look bad. And plus the fact of the Holocaust and as the war ended and the concentration camps were being liberated and the photos and the images and the newsreel footage and the testimonials were coming out, the Zionist movement was, I think, very deliberately pushing saying, see, this is why we have to have a Jewish state. It's the only answer. And it served to break down any dissent within the Jewish community in the U.S. any dissent against Zionism. So all of this was happening.

Starting point is 00:54:57 And so the Holocaust plays a big role in this. And at the same time, interestingly, you have some Palestinian and Arab leaders at that time recognizing that the Holocaust is happening and denouncing it, condemning it, but also saying, but the answer to this shouldn't be

Starting point is 00:55:14 the violent subjugation or dispossession of the people of Palestine. Like, that's not why is that the answer? You know, the sort of two wrongs don't make a right argument, you know, even then was being made. And so, yeah. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Jeff Shirky. We'll be right back. That was No Rest by the band No Rest. Please support their fundraiser for a Palestinian family. The link is in the show notes. Now back to our conversation with Jeff Shirky. So U.S. labor had a massive, massive influence, as you outlined in the book, on the U.S. political establishment when it came to the controversial UN resolution that created Israel, that created the Zionist entity, and also on the initial ethnic cleansing campaign from 1947 through 1949, which inaugurated Israel's existence, which was the knock-buburned. which you have talked about briefly.

Starting point is 00:57:18 So U.S. organized labor played a massive role in actually financing this ethnic cleansing campaign. So it wasn't just ideological support either. It also had a significant role in smuggling arms to the Haganah, which was kind of a proto-Israeli terror group that hacked its way into history, you know, by helping to enact the Nakhba and whose leaders went on to become political leaders of Israel. and U.S. labor also played a role in pushing President Truman into recognizing Israel as a state, which immediately granted it world legitimacy. So tell us about this period in a little bit more depth. I know I just outlined quite a bit, but maybe if you could get into the depth a little bit more of the role that U.S. labor played in the Nakhba and then the legitimization of the emerging Zionist entity. Yeah, so this is roughly, we're talking between 1947 and 1949, after World War II, the AFL and CIA were very, as I said, very powerful, very closely aligned with the U.S. government.

Starting point is 00:58:24 And this would obviously continue with the support for the Cold War and U.S. Cold War foreign policy. But, you know, the AFL and CIA were still separate entities. They would be merging soon, but they were still separate. But one of the areas where they were in complete agreement was on supporting ZI.O. Zionism, again, because of the support for labor Zionism, the sort of anti-Semitic idea of, like, the only answer to the Holocaust is send them all to Palestine. We don't want them coming here. All that kind of stuff. And yeah, you had many, and it's important to, again, say this was not just the Jewish labor leaders, this was especially the non-Jewish, the Christian labor leaders, were

Starting point is 00:59:03 really strongly supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. And so they were, you some of that political influence to lobby the United Nations, ambassadors at the United Nations on the eve of the partition vote in November of 1947, which was a vote that effectively gave legitimacy to the idea. Well, so the British said they were going to give up, they were going to just leave Palestine with no plan for what was going to happen after. They were basically just like we wash our hands of this, we're getting out of here. Because Israeli terrorists were bombing them.

Starting point is 00:59:38 Right, right. You mentioned Haganah and some of its breakaway groups that Ergun were waging their own insurgency against the British, basically kind of copying the Arab revolt. Only the British didn't crack down on them nearly is the same kind of repression that they had used on the Palestinians. I think I said Israeli at this point, I guess technically would be Zionist. Right, right. Yeah, the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed, I think something like set. close to 100, I think, people, most of them civilians. This was like an office for British government authorities.

Starting point is 01:00:17 And lots of other kind of terrorist campaigns and from the Zionist militias. And, yeah, while this was happening, U.S. labor leaders were pressuring diplomats at the U.N. and pressuring, as you said, the Truman administration, because Truman State Department was sort of saying, well, we need to be very careful here. This is who's going to lead to a lot of violence, et cetera. and 1948 was a presidential election, and Truman did not have it in the bag by any means. You know, people might remember the famous photo. When Truman actually won, you know, he holds up that newspaper that says, Dewey defeats Truman. Dewey was his Republican opponent

Starting point is 01:00:55 because everyone expected Dewey, the Republican, to win because it was not, you know, but Truman was kind of a long shot. But he did manage to win, in part because he was able to get the labor movement to support him and back him. some of the labor leaders, especially in New York, including Jewish American labor leaders, were thinking about maybe supporting some other candidate or trying to get Truman off the ticket. But he run them over in part by immediately recognizing Israel in May 1948 when the Zionist state announced itself or declared its independence. Immediately Truman offered de facto recognition. and this was in part because he was being pressured by his allies in the U.S. labor movement. Also, U.S. labor was like organizing protests and pickets outside, like British consulates in the U.S.,

Starting point is 01:01:48 trying to get the British to make sure that they would do everything possible to facilitate the creation of a Jewish state before they pulled out of Palestine. And Truman and the British actually imposed an arms embargo over Palestine during this period. And hard to imagine today, right? on arms embargo, but they did. And so the Zionist militias, like the Haganah, actually, and this is another important part of this history, they actually turned to the Soviet bloc for military aid. And it was actually the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc countries in the UN that were the deciding vote in the partition vote in November 1947. The Soviets, the Communist Party,

Starting point is 01:02:29 had traditionally been anti-Zionist, and it would very soon again be anti-Zionist, but just for these few years in the late 1940s critical years, they actually supported Zionism. They supported a partition of the creation of both of a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, and they were providing arms to the to the Haganah and the Zionist militias. But also, like you mentioned, there was apparently some illicit smuggling of weapons from the U.S. to the Zionist militias despite the arms embargo, and this was being carried out by the Teamsters and the ILA, International Longshoremen's Association, both, you know, mob-linked unions. They were familiar with how to smuggle things illegally. And like Jimmy Hoffa years later would like take credit for like,

Starting point is 01:03:15 yeah, I was smuggling machine guns in cheese crates or something, you know, stuff like this. And, you know, later on, we were proud of how they were like, you know, breaking this arms embargo. And some of the garment workers unions also became very supportive by like stitching uniforms for once the state of Israel was announced in 1948, the Hagana became the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, or as many would call it the IOF today. They were stitching together like uniforms for them, like free, you know, and they were to put pressure on Truman. They were calling on him to lift the arms embargo, to send weapons, U.S. weapons to the Zionist militias, to the IDF, and as well as to recognize Palestine. In, I think April of 1940s,

Starting point is 01:04:04 just a month before, again, the announcement of the creation of the state of Israel, something like 30,000 garment workers in New York City staged a half a day strike, a work stoppage, and they held this big rally up at Yankee Stadium. And this was something organized by the garment unions in cooperation with the garment factory owners. But it just shows, like, how strong this support was, that there was actually, like, a massive work stoppage in support of Zionism, in support, and this is as, this is April 1948 when I think this, roughly the same time of the Dariusin massacre, one of the most notorious, well-known massacres of the Nakhpa, because it wasn't just like as of May 1948 that all the

Starting point is 01:04:52 ethnic cleansing started it. It started as early as late 1947 with the UN partition vote and then continued all through 1948 into early 1949. And so throughout all this time, U.S. labor was doing all these things, like I mentioned, sending lots of cables and letters to Truman unions at the local level passing resolutions saying, you know, we support the creation of a Jew state, we support an end to the arms embargo, send weapons to the Zionist militias that were actively carrying out ethnic cleansing, doing limited work stoppages, picketing the British consulates, apparently smuggling teamsters smuggling guns, stitching uniforms, you know, all this type of stuff, and which is, I mean, just to bring it to the present very briefly,

Starting point is 01:05:36 whenever people say, why are unions talking about Palestine and why are they talking about this at all? It's like so disingenuous, like, look at what, let me look at the history. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, an important quote from the book, given the historic role, its top leaders have played in one-sidedly bolstering Israel, the U.S. labor movement has a special responsibility. to stand with Palestinians in their struggle for liberation. So I think that's becoming very, very clear as we go through this history that how active the U.S. labor movement was in creating this untenable situation and ultimately not just

Starting point is 01:06:20 supporting the inauguration of the ethnic cleansing campaign, but as we'll see, really supporting it as it has continued to unfold throughout the 20th and now 21st centuries. So the same influence extended into the 50s and 60s when, as you write in the book, quote, having already established a close relationship with the Histradute over the preceding decades, U.S. labor officials, both Jews and non-Jews, believed the new state of Israel could serve as a crucial Cold War ally to the United States. In particular, they were convinced that Israel's labor Zionist government offered a practical example of non-communist worker-centered economic development that could be emulated

Starting point is 01:07:09 by other countries to prevent them from being pulled into a Soviet orbit. And so you talked about this briefly a few minutes ago. And of course, we learned in part one of this mini-series that U.S. labor represented by the AFL-CIO and its CIA-funded Free Trade Union Committee were rabid anti-communists, at times even more so than the CIA and the State Department officials that they work closely with. So tell us a little bit about U.S. labor's role in lobbying on behalf of the new state of Israel during the 50s and 60s and the relationship that was forged between Israel and U.S. labor during this time. And I'm particularly interested in getting into the Development Corporation for Israel and these Israeli bonds.

Starting point is 01:07:59 Yeah. So again, coming out of World War II and going into the 50s and 60s, this is the period when the U.S. labor movement was at its strongest. Union density, you know, about one in three non-agricultural workers in the U.S. were unionized in this period. And the U.S. economy was doing pretty well, especially for industrial workers, blue-collar workers who were largely unionized. So I'll start with like the material support again in the 50s. So now you had, it was no longer just this kind of Zionist movement in British-controlled Palestine. Now it was the actual state of Israel, and they were eager to bring in more and more Jewish settlers, especially, you know, coming out of Europe after the Holocaust.

Starting point is 01:08:45 They were eager to cement their power, the Zionists in the state of Israel, and to rapidly build up the economy and the political structures of this new state on lands that had just been violently taken in the Nakhba, right? 750,000 Palestinian refugees. And basically all of historic Palestine except for the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been captured in the Nakhpa. And so U.S. labor leaders and U.S. union, then being pretty powerful and having a lot of resources at their disposal, we're giving millions and millions of dollars to the Israeli government and to the histoge route to continue all of these settler colonial or so-called nation-building projects

Starting point is 01:09:34 and many public facilities that were built in Israel during this time period. So things like sports stadiums and community centers and schools and hospitals and so on and so forth, they were given the names of U.S. Union presidents based on like whatever union made a big donation to help build whatever the facility was. So there was like a David Dubinsky sports stadium, Dubinsky being the president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and even like a James Hoffa, a Jimmy Hoffa orphanage, you know, and stuff like that. And so when this would happen, U.S. union presidents, high-ranking U.S. labor officials would come to Israel, on these high-profile delegations hosted by the history route,

Starting point is 01:10:22 they'd be shown around the different, you know, like factories and agricultural cooperatives that were being established in Israel and tour these new housing developments and see these various buildings that their own unions had given money to support. And, you know, singing the praises, wow, Israel is this utopian socialist worker-centered society. And it's so wonderful and really looking to it as, like I said, before, a model for the rest of the world to follow, and even a model for the United States to follow. But again, completely ignoring or just downplaying the reality that all these, all this like new construction, all these new buildings and stuff were being built literally on land that had just

Starting point is 01:11:06 been stolen in the really violent, horrifying ways, just not recognizing that at all and not recognizing the Palestinian refugees or sometimes like painting this rosy picture. of Palestinian citizens of Israel. People who are in their homeland overnight, suddenly given second-class status or non-status in their historic homeland because they found themselves living within the boundaries of this newly created state.

Starting point is 01:11:33 Sometimes U.S. labor officials would sort of paint this rose-colored picture of, well, they're doing great. They're doing much better than Arabs and the rest of the Middle East are, and Israel's taking good care of them, stuff like that, but completely ignoring the systematic racism that they were facing.

Starting point is 01:11:48 in so many different ways. So also in this period, especially the 50s, you know, this is before what we think of today as the pro-Israel lobby and groups like A-PAC, before they really existed, or I think A-PAC was founded in the 1960s, but it was initially pretty small and not very powerful. So before what we think of as the pro-Israel lobby came into existence, the AFL-CIO was kind of the major pro-Israel lobby, again, being very powerful in this period. having a lot of close connections with U.S. government officials, often lobbying for more economic aid, for military aid to be sent to Israel. At this point, it again, really before 1967, U.S. presidents and the U.S. State Department were a little bit somewhat ambiguous about Israel.

Starting point is 01:12:38 I mean, I'm not saying they were against it necessarily, but they weren't completely fully committed to propping up Israel like we all know of it in our lifetimes, right? That was something that really kind of came about a little later. So in this early period, the AFL-CIO's support for Israel was pretty crucial. It was just a very powerful, large organization in the U.S. using its connections, political connections, to lobby on Israel's behalf. You know, when there were various incidents, like in the early 1950s, the Kibya massacre in the West Bank where Israeli soldiers killed like 70 civilians in the small village of Kibia, or then later, I think 56 was the Suez crisis where Israel teamed up with France and Britain to attack Egypt and capture the Suez Canal.

Starting point is 01:13:27 They faced broad international, all three countries faced broad international condemnation, and Israel, France, and Britain had to pull out and basically return the Suez Canal to Egypt. But in those moments, when even the U.S. government was condemning Israel, which is hard to imagine today, right? But this was happening in the 50s. The AFL-CIO would come up and stand up in support for Israel and say, hey, criticize like the Eisenhower administration for taking a hard line against Israel. So, and then back to the material support.

Starting point is 01:13:59 In the early 50s, the Israeli government decided that a good way to get more money to invest in this nation building or settler colonialism was by selling Israeli state bonds to ask institutional investors in the West, particularly in the United States, but other countries, to invest millions and millions of dollars in Israeli state building, especially infrastructure projects, water and irrigation projects, which were quite controversial because they were often involved rechanneling water from like the Jordan River away from Jordan and other neighboring Arab countries. And David Ben Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister, this period who had started off as a labor leader, president or so-called labor leaders,

Starting point is 01:14:47 first general secretary of the histidrut. He was very close friends with a lot of U.S. labor officials and union presidents. And he started reaching out to them saying, you guys should invest your union pension money into our Israeli bonds. And this over time throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, especially became a major way of signaling, a way for U.S. labor to signal its staunch support for Israel was by buying these Israeli bonds. And I found a document in the archives from 1994, and I should say, sorry, in the U.S., the entity that was selling the bonds on behalf of the Israeli government was called the Development Corporation for Israel or DCI. And it still is. It still exists, and it sells Israeli bonds, not only to unions, but to any kind of institutional

Starting point is 01:15:39 investors. But I found a document from 1994 from the Development Corporation of Israel that said that from 1951 up until then in 1994, U.S. unions at all local, state, national levels, had purchased approximately $1 billion worth of Israeli bonds over the years. So this is money coming from union treasuries going directly into the construction of the Israeli economy of the Israeli state on stormworm land. And it would be throughout this period of the Cold War, the late 20th century, there would often be these big gala dinners and big events that unions would organize in the U.S. where they would be buying the bonds or fundraising to buy bonds and having awards.

Starting point is 01:16:28 They would have Israeli politicians, Israeli diplomats come to these big gala dinners and give awards to union presidents for being good friends of Israel and for donating a certain amount of money. And so these like bonds dinners became a really common thing for high-ranking labor leaders in the late 20th century. They were just happening all the time. And it was, again, this way of, it wasn't just about, yes, it was about the material support, obviously,

Starting point is 01:16:53 but it was also a way of showcasing and signaling, hey, look at us. We're good friends of Israel. We're buying up all these bonds and we're having these big events to celebrate the fact that we're doing this. And this kind of goes back, I think, to last time's conversation about how you wrote in Blue Collar Empire, how the AFL-CIO devoted between 20 to 25% of its annual budget to foreign activities throughout the 1960s. I'm not sure if this accounts for those bonds or not. But I mean, this is literally money coming out of union dues. And can you imagine being a unionized worker with the AFL-CIO and that like a quarter of your money that you pay towards the union dues? is going towards this kind of imperialist bullshit. I mean, and this gets into sort of,

Starting point is 01:17:40 and we'll get into a little bit of the rank and file resistance to this pretty soon. And again, as we discussed in our previous episode with you, so the Vietnam era, which we're now coming up towards in the historical timeline, this area really, I think, disabused a significant portion of the U.S. population of the belief that U.S. imperialism was a force for good. in the world. And the Vietnam era really gave a big black eye to the U.S. labor CIA State Department propaganda complex and revealed the U.S. Empire for what it truly was and is, as we're seeing more and more starkly every single day now. And the same is true for the Zionist project.

Starting point is 01:18:24 So especially after the 1967 Six-Day War, and with the rise of liberation struggles domestically in the U.S., people started to really realize that Israel was not what they had been told it was and really began seeing the Palestinian cause as a just and honorable one. And yet, despite this, U.S. labor officials double down on their support for Israel, which to anybody who listened to last episode, you should not be surprised. So tell us about this period. How did U.S. labor officials continue to live? lobby on behalf of Israel and to fundraise for Israel, often taking even like more hardline positions

Starting point is 01:19:08 than the likes of Kissinger and Nixon and even Reagan. And what did the resistance to this among the rank and file look like? Yeah. So like you said, the Vietnam War, late 60s, early 70s, with that war, there started to be cracks in the imperial edifice and the ideological apparatus around U.S. imperialism, and that included around support for the state of Israel and Zionism, although not as much, right, because even many left-leaning and progressive folks who were totally against the war in Vietnam and denouncing and protesting U.S. militarism and empire were still not willing to go there when it came to Israel. And this is something that we've still seen up until recent times with, you know, the phrase progressive except on Palestine. And that was certainly true.

Starting point is 01:20:01 there were, especially among like black radicals in the black power movement, and some in the new left and some of the more radical elements of the anti-Vietnam War movement, were beginning to question and criticize Zionism and sympathize with the Palestine Liberation movement. And this is also the period, importantly, when the Palestine Liberation Organization really took off and various left-wing Palestinian organizations and political factors, started coming together and staging major acts of resistance to the state of Israel and to Zionism and getting a lot of attention globally and becoming a presence in the United Nations. And all of this was kind of happening to really kind of shift the sort of global debate or

Starting point is 01:20:50 understanding of Zionism and the state of Israel. Because since at least the Nakba, Palestinians had been kind of just silenced and rendered invisible. Of course, they weren't invisible, but that's how they were being treated. But by the late 60s, early 70s, they were starting to once again have a voice. And this really, along with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, along with the Black Power movement, and other sort of radical left-wing social movements in the U.S. and around the world in this period, this really frightened the AFL-CIO's top officials, people like George Meaney, who would, by the 70s, he was like in his, like, 80s.

Starting point is 01:21:30 like this kind of dinosaur. And then he was replaced in 1979 by Lane Kirkland, a younger guy, but also just as politically backwards, still sort of clinging to this idea from World War II in the immediate post-war era that the U.S. labor is most successful when it's like arm in arm with the U.S. government and showing off how patriotic and loyal it was and showing off how anti-communist it was. And also in this period, the 70s, going into the 80s, is when the U.S. labor movement starts to go into decline because of early deindustrialization and automation and corporate attacks on unions and right-wing attacks on unions, and the shifting global political economy.

Starting point is 01:22:16 So these high-ranking AFL-CIO leaders like Meanie and Kirkland, I think they were thinking that, like, if only we could get back to how it was before Vietnam, then everything would be great again. this idea that like, yeah, if we could just somehow undo the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the anti-war movement and radicalism and black power and all these things that came out of that era, if we could just rewind the tape, then we could go back to when the economy was a lot better, at least for unionized industrial workers and go back to when unions were powerful and strong. That seemed to be partly like their belief.

Starting point is 01:22:56 And so, yeah, as the Palestinians, and liberation movement became more and more internationally recognized and legitimized. And in the late 70s, when Jimmy Carter came into office and was the first president to talk about the right of return for Palestinian refugees from the Nakhba and talk about the possibility, at least, of a Palestinian state, not that he was really working hard on either of those, but he was at least sort of broaching the subject that really shocked Lane Kirkland, the president of the AFL-CIO in this period. And he would go out of his way in making public statements and speeches,

Starting point is 01:23:35 explaining why there should never be a Palestinian state. It should not be allowed to be created. It would just be a terrorist state and a pro-Soviet state, and it would be horrible for the U.S. and for the world. By the way, this is also the period, late 70s of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So it really was clear that, like, U.S. Empire was taking one blow after another, and these people like Lane Kirkland and other high-ranking anti-communist hawks in the

Starting point is 01:24:04 AFL-CIO felt like labor's fortunes were tied to U.S. Empire, and if we could somehow save the empire, or prop it up, then things would be great for U.S. unions again. And you asked before, I'm just thinking now about Reagan, you asked before about how sometimes the AFLCAO officials were taking positions even to the right of Reagan. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lamedon, and was laying siege to Beirut, bombing Beirut, killing hundreds, if not thousands of civilians and bombing residential neighborhoods, all ostensibly to try to take out the PLO. President Ronald Reagan at the time, even though he was a staunch Israel supporter, he was horrified by the news reports and the video and images of children being killed by Israel in Lebanon.

Starting point is 01:24:53 And he, and this has been talked about in recent years a lot, how he, basically called up the Israeli Prime Minister, Manakam Began, and effectively told him the U.S. would stop sending weapons to Israel if they didn't end this siege. And with that, like, one phone call or basically put an end to this ongoing massacre that Israel was committing. And people have brought that up with regard to Biden. And Biden and Harris and their kind of sham talking about, oh, we're working around the clock for a ceasefire, but it's so hard. We feel really bad about what's happening and we're trying to stop it every way we can. And people were calling bullshit on that by saying, well, look at how Reagan just with one phone call, all you have to do is say we're going to

Starting point is 01:25:35 cut off weapons. But anyway, when Reagan did this, the AFL CIO's executive council led by Lane Kirkland put out like a full page ad in the New York Times saying in all caps, the AFLCIO is not neutral. We support Israel. And basically totally 100% backing Israel's invasion of Lebanon and bombing of Beirut saying it's totally justified, you know, it's fighting terrorism and they have a right to defend themselves, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, pretty bad. But like you brought up the rank and file resistance. And this is also where this really starts to take off. And, you know, the most famous stark example, which I've written and talked about a lot. And it's, I think, becoming more and more well known, 1973 when about 2,000 Arab American auto workers in Detroit staged a wildcat

Starting point is 01:26:24 strike to protest the fact that their union, the UAW, United Auto Workers, had purchased tens of thousands of dollars of state of Israel bonds, or at least the national or international AUA had, I think, something like $100,000 or $200,000 worth of Israeli bonds, but their own local that represented them in Detroit had also just purchased tens of thousands of dollars in bonds. And this was their own, like you said, their own dues money going towards the settler, colonial entity in the Middle East. And this was happening late 1973, the October war between Israel and Egypt and Syria, with the U.S. sending lots of military aid to support Israel. And in the preceding years, there had been this large wave of Arab immigrants moving to the U.S.,

Starting point is 01:27:14 specifically settling in Detroit, including from Palestine and Yemen and Iraq and elsewhere. and they were seeing the black power movement, particularly play out within the auto industry, within the auto plants in Detroit, with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Because black and Arab workers in the auto industry, even though they were union members with the UAW, they were often relegated into the lowest paying, most dirty, dangerous jobs in the auto plants and not really being well represented by the UAW officials who were pretty much all white and who were basically racist or just ignoring the needs of their black and Arab members. So starting in the late 60s, inspired by the black power movement,

Starting point is 01:28:05 black auto workers around Detroit started organizing these different caucuses, the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement and others had been coalesced into the league of revolutionary black workers and running for union office and challenging the white officials of the UAW and staging wildcat strikes of their own to protest the union and to protest the auto company's own racist and exploitative practices. So the Arab workers, Arab immigrants were seeing this and they were also just starting to get organized in their communities. And then they started organizing in their workplace as well and formed their own Arab workers caucus, which led the same. historic one-day Wildcat Strike in 1973 at the Dodge Main Assembly plant, shutting down production for the day to protest the UAW's purchase of State of Israel bonds. And then that same evening that the strike happened, the UAW's president, Leonard Woodcock, was being honored at one of these big gala

Starting point is 01:29:05 dinner events, you know, by this pro-Zionist organization that was giving him an award for being such a good friend to Israel and donating so much of the union funds. to Israel. So those same Arab workers who went on strike earlier that day, along with some of their black coworkers, picketed outside this event. And the union president, Leonard Woodcock, had to like sneak in through the back door. And then coming out of this, the Arab Workers Cau put forward like this broad program, calling for divestment of Israeli bonds, but also calling for an end to various forms of racial discrimination within the union, calling for more union democracy, including the direct election of top union officers,

Starting point is 01:29:50 having them be elected directly by the rank and file, which is something that finally went into place, finally was achieved only in 2022 in the UAW. And many unions still don't have direct election of their top officers, you know. So that was sort of an early example. And I know we could talk about others like later from the 80s and 90s onward, unless you want me to cover that now. Yeah, no, I think that would be helpful.

Starting point is 01:30:15 I just want to interspers real quick. Let's hop back over to West Asia right now and talk a little bit about what was going on in Palestine and Israel during this time, because I think it's helpful to give people some context about, you know, we know from this series, and I'm sure most of our listeners are pretty well aware of all of the different. like military aggressions by Israel against Palestinians and Gaza and the West Bank and the whole surrounding region. That history is sort of separate from what I want to ask you about right now. And I want to start by reading a very powerful passage from the book. It's a little bit long, so I'll be reading for a few minutes and I apologize to you, Jeff, for reading your own quotes back to you. But I think it's worthwhile to read it in its entirety. So you write, Palestinians experienced grinding poverty and lack of opportunity due to Israel's restrictions on economic development in the territories.

Starting point is 01:31:23 This deliberate underdevelopment served to create a steady supply of desperate and exploitable workers for Israel's own ever-growing economy. As the Israeli economy modernized and the Likud Party became more popular, old labor Zionist notions like, quote, Hebrew labor, which you talked about earlier, earlier, which had reflected the commitment of newly arriving Jewish settlers to perform manual labor at the expense of Arab workers were gradually abandoned. By the 1980s, every day some 100,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza passed through security checkpoints to enter Israel's pre-1967 boundaries and work low-wage, menial jobs at construction sites, factories, farms, restaurants, and municipal sanitation departments before crossing back after their shifts.

Starting point is 01:32:19 Because they worked inside Israel, quote, proper, part of their wages totaling millions of dollars per year were automatically deducted by the Israeli Labor Ministry as contributions to social welfare programs such as health care, sick pay, unemployment insurance, pensions, and disability insurance. But as non-citizens, they were not eligible to receive those benefits that they were paying for. On top of that, because they often worked at nominally union workplaces with collective bargaining agreements, Palestinian day laborers also had 1% of their wages deducted as fees to the Histradute. But Histradute leaders refused to represent these workers,

Starting point is 01:33:02 claiming that doing so would give the impression that they favored annexation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. as a result, Israeli employers were free to violate union contracts and discriminate against Palestinian workers by paying them lower wages than they paid Jewish employees." So just like jaw dropping in its depravity and like just, yeah, the depravity and the deprivation here are just off the charts and it was ultimately these conditions along with the brutality and violence of the Zionist entity more broadly, which led to the Intifada of 1987, which I don't think we need to really go into depth explaining what that is. I'm sure our listeners are somewhat familiar with that already. But the Intifada is perhaps most well

Starting point is 01:33:53 known for the disproportionate amount of force and violence that Israel waged upon Palestinians resisting its domination. But interestingly, there was a lot of labor action as well. So maybe we could get into that history. Give us a sense of what those labor actions look like and give us a sense of how the intifada was viewed and responded to in the United States by labor leaders, particularly at a time when Israel was beginning to be viewed in the same light as apartheid South Africa. Yeah, and obviously the context of this that I don't know if we really touched on before, and I should have brought it up earlier, is the, you know, 1967 war and the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, you know, in June 1967, which is at the same time as the Vietnam War era and another reason why more and more in the people in the U.S., especially on the left, obviously, were beginning to see Zionism differently and beginning to sympathize with Palestinians because of the military occupation

Starting point is 01:35:00 that began in the West Bank of Gaza in 1967 and continued onward until the 80s with the, you know, like everything you just described, or I guess that I described that you were reading, leading up to the first intifada. So yeah, I mean, part of the first intifada, a big part of it was economic disruption by the Palestinians because of how, on the one hand, Palestinian workers had in the in the occupied, you know, post-1967 occupied territories had become so vital to the Israeli workforce and were so heavily exploited in all those ways that you were describing. And because Palestinian consumers in the West Bank and Gaza were a major part of Israel's economy, most of Israel's exports were going into the occupied territories.

Starting point is 01:35:51 So to really put major pressure on the Israeli state to end. the occupation, there were massive strikes, including several like one to two day general strikes throughout the first Intifada. I think the earliest one was only a few days into the Intifada in December of 1987, where workers all across the West Bank and Gaza would just shut everything down for the day. They wouldn't go into Israel. They wouldn't cross those checkpoints into their various jobs in the state of Israel. And shopkeepers across. the West Bank of Gaza would shutter their stores and not sell anything because they were largely selling Israeli made products, but they would shut that down for the day as well. And so some of

Starting point is 01:36:38 the Israeli occupation of forces would sometimes like destroy the actual metal shutters, you know, on the shops. They were like tear them off to try to force these stores to reopen. But then Palestinian workers who did like metal work would like come and help fix those shutters so that the stores could stay closed and stuff like that. So there were numerous work stoppages, general strikes. Sometimes they were time to coincide with major events, like in May of 1988, the 40th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel and the Nakba.

Starting point is 01:37:13 There was a general strike then or at another time when I think Reagan's Secretary of State, George Shultz, was coming to visit Israel. They did a general strike that day. So really militant action, and it was costing the Israeli economy millions of dollars every time this happened. So I talked about the general strikes and the shops shutting down. And then in the United States, you had a kind of newer generation of rank and file union members who had come up during the Vietnam War era. And they had a very different view of the U.S. Empire and the Cold War and anti-communism and a differing view of Israel. They saw the Intifada and in many cases were sympathizing with the Palestinians, in part because, like you mentioned, they could see the parallels with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, which was at its height right then in the 1980s.

Starting point is 01:38:07 U.S. unions and including labor leaders to their credit, even though a lot of these labor leaders were doing horrible things, one area where they were generally, you know, pretty decent in the 1980s, at least some of them, was on supporting the anti-apartheid movement, supporting boycotts, supporting, you know, divestments. For example, AFSCME, the public sector union was pushing and successfully pushing for city workers and state workers, pension funds to be divested from apartheid South Africa and companies that it did business with and claimed to help divest something like $20 billion from South Africa. And the United Mine Workers and the AFLCAO promoted and organized this nationwide boycott of Shell oil because Shell was literally fueling the apartheid regime,

Starting point is 01:38:57 providing fuel to the South Africa's military and police. So there was this labor-sponsored national boycott of shell gas stations and shell products and telling union members to cut their shell credit cards in half and all types of ways of U.S. unions supporting black trade unionists in South Africa who are facing repression and being thrown in jail and sending letters and cables to U.S. diplomats and South African government officials to demand the release of these black trade unions who are facing repression and a whole number of other things like that. And just clearly seeing the blatant racism of apartheid and calling it out and fighting it and pushing back on the Reagan administration's so-called policy of constructive engagement, right? Where Reagan and initially

Starting point is 01:39:47 some of the, like Lane Kirkland and some of those anti-communist AFLCAO officials also went along with this constructive engagement, this argument that, well, you know, the apartheid regime is, they may be bad on a lot of things, but we can rely on them to be anti-communist. and to keep the Soviets out of Southern Africa and Soviet influence out. And this fear that if the African National Congress were to achieve power, that it would, you know, southern Africa would be overrun by communism or whatever. And so constructive engagement was like how the Reagan administration and other anti-communists pushed back on the anti-apartheid movement by saying instead of divesting or boycotting

Starting point is 01:40:28 or trying to economically isolate the apartheid regime, we should actually engage with. them more and invest more and, you know, and then kind of use the carrot approach to get them to change their ways on apartheid. But anyway, union members could see the parallels once the first intifada broke out and seeing the intense repression faced by Palestinian workers by Israeli troops, they could see the parallels with South Africa and started passing resolutions, local unions, passing resolutions, calling on the AFL-CIO or the U.S. government to cut support for Israel and to recognize the PLO, to try to negotiate a peaceful solution and stuff like that, and making those comparisons with South Africa deliberately.

Starting point is 01:41:17 And then the AFL-CIO executive council actually put out a statement saying, like, we reject any comparisons between Israel and South Africa. It's a horrible insult and how dare you, because Israel is a beautiful, democracy and again, completely ignoring Palestinians and the occupation, et cetera. So, yeah, if you just ignore, you know, if you just erase the whole nation of people that are being systematically oppressed, and then any country can look really great, I suppose, that was sort of the AFLCAO's policy on when it came to the comparison. But nevertheless, these comparisons did happen among rank and fileers and many unions in the late

Starting point is 01:41:56 80s, AFLCIO affiliates, passed resolutions at their national. conferences for the first time expressing sympathy with Palestinians and not necessarily passing anti-Zionist resolutions, but at least recognizing that Palestinians exist, number one, and number two, that they have a right to self-determination and freedom and really express sympathy in the face of the intifada. So this was a major turning point. I mean, not that it led to anything concrete, because then very quickly, you know, you had the Oslo Accords and this sort of so-called peace process and two-state solution, and that kind of took a lot of the, when that basically brought an end to the first Intifada and among this new wave of union organizing, Palestine Solidarity, organizing

Starting point is 01:42:40 in the U.S. labor movement, kind of started to quiet down. But one other thing I want to mention that happened in this period, in 1988, the first ever U.S. union delegation to Palestine, to the occupied West Bank, a group of local union leaders and staffers went working with. with an Arab American civil rights organization to meet with Palestinian trade unionists and Palestinian workers in the middle of the First Intifada and to actually see their perspective and listen to their stories. As I said, there had been like zillions of U.S. Union delegations to Palestine before, but always hosted by the history, always, you know, with the Zionists, always showing off how great Israel was. This was the first time in 1988 you had U.S.

Starting point is 01:43:28 Union is actually going and meeting with Palestinians. So I think that was another significant first that happened in this time period. And if that's the same delegation that I think you're talking about, and correct me if I'm wrong, but when they were leaving Israel, they were actually accosted by, I believe, an IDF or I-O-F, as we like to call them soldier, who try to like threaten them to not share anything about their experiences in terms of like the oppression of Palestinians, right? Or he wanted to know, the soldier wanted to know the names of all the Palestinian trade unions they had met with. Yeah, yeah. And they refused.

Starting point is 01:44:08 So listeners of the show might be familiar with the name Rachel Corey. I actually brought her into the latest reading that I did completely unrelated to any of this. It was a reading, a Patreon reading on a text by Gary Snyder. But Rachel Corey was a volunteer with the International Solidarity. movement and a member of the SEIU Union. She was brutally murdered by an Israeli soldier, I believe, who ran a caterpillar bulldozer over her in Rafah while she was there to participate in protests, document human rights violations and such, and at the time was trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family's home. So in response to her death, the San Francisco chapter of the

Starting point is 01:44:53 SEIU Local 535 passed a resolution calling for the California Public Employees Retirement System to divert pension holdings from Caterpillar in honor of and in memory of Rachel. But shamefully, the Jewish Labor Committee, which is an American secular Jewish labor organization that was founded way back in 1934, pressured the national headquarters of the SEIU against the resolution, and it ultimately failed to prove. pass. And of course, you write about this all in the book. And so this is a common story, though, in terms of locals trying to divest from Israeli bonds or any kind of demonstration of opposition to Israel. Labor officials almost always opposed these and struck them down. So tell us a little

Starting point is 01:45:43 bit about the boycotts and the emergence of BDS during the 2000s, the period marked by the Second Intifada and the Global War on Terror. How did elements of U.S. labor try to express solidarity with Palestinians during this time? And how was this responded to by labor officialdom? Yeah. You know, a lot of folks in the Palestine Solidarity Movement know who Rachel Corey was. They know her story. But this aspect of it about that she was a union member with SEIU Local 1199 Northwest as part of her job at a mental health clinic

Starting point is 01:46:18 in Washington State. That's not very well known, but you said I covered in the book. And actually, when she was killed, the president of the AFL-CIO at the time, this was 2003, the president of the AFL-CIO at the time, John Sweeney made a public statement, kind of expressing sympathy and condolences about her death, you know, to her friends and family. But very, you know, horribly and tellingly in his statement, he didn't, because, you know, he made a point to say she was a member, she was a union member. of SCIU, which had been actually Sweeney's union before he became president of the AFLCIO.

Starting point is 01:46:54 And so this is why he put out the statement. We're really heartbroken about the death of our union sister, Rachel Corey. But he didn't mention anything about the circumstances of her death, where she was, who killed her, how it happened. And nothing, the word Palestine, the word Israel didn't come up at all in his statement. As the New York Times knows very well, Palestinians and their supporters aren't killed. They die, right? Exactly, right. So like you said, yeah, this prompted an SEIU chapter in California to try to pass a divestment resolution to divest from Caterpillar that union officials made sure didn't pass, particularly pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian union officials stepped in to make sure that wouldn't pass by calling it anti-Semitic. And yeah, this is, this was all 2003, 2004, that this was happening. And this is at the same time as the second Intifada, the beginning of the global, so-called global war on terror after 9-11. But this is an important period because of the

Starting point is 01:47:53 so-called war on terror and the anti-war movement that grew in the U.S. at this time to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan and then the invasion of Iraq happening at the same time as the second intifada when Israel was using immense amounts of violence to crush Palestinian resistance and then, you know, building this apartheid wall and then turning Gaza into this, you know, so-called open-air prison by the end of the Second Intifada, basically setting up the situation that basically still exists today, or at least existed up until 2023. Because these two things were happening, this anti-war on terror movement and the Second Intifada, many people in the U.S., many activists and organizers, including in the labor movement, can see the clear parallels.

Starting point is 01:48:39 And it's really in this time when sort of the pro-Palestine activism and organizing within U.S. really started to crystallize. There had been the beginnings of it during the first and defada, and even earlier, like I said, with the 1970s, the Arab Workers Caucus and the UAW. But in the early 2000s, it really crystallized with the founding of Labor for Palestine, the Labor for Palestine National Network of Union activists basically supporting BDS, because also at this time, then 2005, the boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement that was officially launched by Palestinian Civil Society organizations, including Palestinian trade unions. So you have like kind of a permanent network of union activists with labor for Palestine, and you have a very clear set of demands and set of tactics from BDS.

Starting point is 01:49:28 And of course, BDS being inspired in part, at least by the South African anti-apartheid movement. And the same U.S. labor leaders who had been very, to their credit, very supportive of boycotts and divestments against apartheid South Africa in the 80s. now, like 20 years later, they were actively opposing BDS against Israel, saying, oh, this is completely different, you know, blah, blah, but how can we single out Israel? Well, you had no problem singling out South Africa, so what's the problem here? Well, you know, obviously we know what the problem is, is that they saw Israel as, continue to see Israel as a important pillar of U.S. global dominance.

Starting point is 01:50:09 Now it wasn't so much about anti-communism because the Cold War was over, but now it was about this sort of war on terror, you know, fighting Saddam Hussein, fighting the Islamic Republic of Iran, and so on and so forth, you know, fighting so-called terrorists, which is just sort of a blanket word for any kind of Muslim that's engaged in any kind of political acts. So, yeah, so you have, because of BDS and this crystallization of Palestine Solidarity organizing many unions throughout the early 2000s and right up until today started. organizing to pass resolutions in their local unions or at their local labor councils, supporting BDS, or at least supporting targeted divestment of particular companies like Caterpillar that are

Starting point is 01:50:57 profiting off of occupation and apartheid. And a lot of graduate worker unions and higher ed unions were involved in this, especially by the 2010s, like some of the UAW-affiliated graduate worker unions at the University of California, University of Massachusetts, NYU, became some of the first to pass BDS resolutions. But in many of these cases, as a document in the book, higher ranking union officials would come in and say, oh, you can't do that. You can't vote on this resolution, or if you already did vote on it, then we're going to nullify it. You're not allowed to support BDS. The AFL-CIO, national leaders, took, basically took the position of constructive engagement, the same policy that Reagan had had towards South Africa in the 80s,

Starting point is 01:51:43 which U.S. unions had pushed back against. Now, some of these exact same union officials, 20 years later, were basically calling for constructive engagement with Israel, saying, oh, well, we shouldn't isolate them. You know, we need more engagement, more investment. And that will lead to the two-state solution. And, you know, because this was, again, still with the sort of fiction of the Oslo process was still very much in play throughout much of this time period. And the AFLCAO and its affiliated unions basically endorsed these Oslo Accords and endorsed the idea of a two-state solution different from the position they had taken earlier when they were just totally against the creation of a Palestinian state and insisting that the PLO was nothing

Starting point is 01:52:24 but a horrible evil terrorist group. But now they were, by the late 90s, early 2000s, the AFLCAO had taken a different position in post-Ozlo. But they nevertheless, they were not willing to, to entertain any ideas of BDS being completely against it, calling it anti-Semitic, and violating principles of union democracy, because like I said, sometimes union locals would actually have a perfectly fair democratic vote to pass a pro-BDS resolution, or they would be gearing up to have some kind of a vote or decision or debate, and then these higher-ranking union officials would intervene and basically say, you can't do that. That's not allowed and shutting it down. And that kind of remained the dynamic for roughly, you know, 20 years or so going up to,

Starting point is 01:53:12 it kind of brings us right up to the present moment, or at least the last couple of years since October 23 in the Gaza genocide, where all of this ongoing kind of tension or conflict within the labor movement around Palestine kind of really came to a head. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we're coming close to time. So I'm not even going to be able to get into the questions about the Block the Boat campaign, which I think I'll have to direct folks to the book if they want to learn more about these really important dock worker, essentially like strikes, like refusing to load boats, particularly from the Zim lines, vessels, cargo vessels from docking or leaving ports. And we've had a few of those actually here in the Bayer and out of the port of Oakland.

Starting point is 01:54:03 And that's been going on for, you know, over a decade now. So that's, and that's the ILWU International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which is historically one of the more progressive left-wing unions. It's not part of the AFL-CIO. Yeah, yeah. And reflecting on the BDS stuff that you were just talking about, one of the most common reasons that labor officials would strike down BDS resolutions from locals is the claim that because some of the companies on the, the boycott list are represented by U.S. unions, that it would lead to, quote, direct economic deprivation for members of these unions. For example, boycotting companies like Boeing or Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or Northrop Grumman or Caterpillar for their involvement in the crimes and

Starting point is 01:54:50 injustices of Israel would harm U.S. workers is what the army goes. And I just thought that was a really interesting throughline from our last episode because we discussed then, you know, how labor, leadership really viewed imperialism as a necessary part of the well-being of U.S. workers. So I just want to tie back to the last episode there. And then so you write in the conclusion of no neutrals there, you write, U.S. Union leaders' enthusiastic support for Israel was also an extension of their broader support for the American Empire. As a reliable U.S. proxy capable of militarily defeating Soviet-backed Arab states in the oil-rich Middle East, Israel repeatedly proved to be a valuable Cold War ally, which naturally appealed to the

Starting point is 01:55:37 AFL-CIO's Cold Warriors. Besides being ardent anti-communists, labor officials were convinced that the future survival of their unions depended on the continued survival of the post-war U.S. managed international capitalist system. What's more, like their AFL predecessors during World War I decades earlier, they remained eager to prove their jingoistic loyalty to Washington's foreign policy agenda. They therefore believe that if a strong and prosperous Israel was strategically beneficial to the U.S. empire, then it was strategically beneficial to U.S. labor instead.

Starting point is 01:56:19 So I just wanted to tie the whole conversation together in that quote of yours, because I think last episode and this episode are really interrelated, and it's important to kind of bring them together here at the end as we conclude this mini-series. And at the end of the book, you delineate two options for today's labor movement in the United States, whether it will continue to consider union membership and collective bargaining as ends in themselves, or if these are means to greater ends like freedom, justice, and dignity for all humanity, as you write in the book. And so I'd love to kind of toss that question over to you to wrap up here.

Starting point is 01:57:01 do you see the U.S. labor movement as potentially being able to, on a large scale, become a force for international worker solidarity? Or do you think that it's going to remain what it really has ultimately been for over a century, at least through its leadership, as a tool of imperialism and a wedge driven into any efforts of unifying the international working class? Well, I think there needs to be new leadership then because there's clearly three. throughout this century, as I talk about in both blue-collar empire and neutrals, no neutrals there, a strong demand and willingness by many in the labor movement to break from U.S. imperialism and to demonstrate genuine class struggle and international solidarity. And it's just the problem is that they've so often been thwarted by the more conservative or anti-communist high-ranking labor officials.

Starting point is 01:57:59 So I think what happens next is, you know, it's kind of up to those of us who are in the labor movement, who are union members or who are workers who want to form unions and trying to organize unions. And I think, you know, two things clearly need to happen. One is for the labor movement has to be a lot bigger in the U.S. Because right now it's really tiny. It's only 9.9% union density. You know, it's been shrinking even with in recent years, you know, there's been this noticeable uptick of organizing and strike. and under Biden, at least, there were somewhat more pro-labor-friendly policies, but despite all of that,

Starting point is 01:58:37 the labor movement has continued to shrink. So that has to change, and part of how it changes is the existing unions, which do have quite a lot of money and resources at their disposal, but they're just unwilling to spend it on organizing. They'll spend it on, you know, get out the vote for Kamala Harris or whatever, or they'll spend it on investments in various companies, including potentially military contractors or Israeli bonds and stuff like that. But they're not willing to spend it on organizing the unorganized. And there is a whole lot of very smart, seasoned organizers out there, working class people who have been struggling for years to organize in Amazon and Starbucks and the fast food industry and, you know, various companies and have found.

Starting point is 01:59:24 They have a lot of experience and they just need, and there's a strong willingness, of course, polls keep showing that majorities of workers support unions and they wish they would have unions in their own workplaces. So it's true that labor law continues to be very much on the side of companies, but I think there is a willingness and the resources there to actually be able to unionize millions of workers and change the realities on the ground and maybe push, you know, the political establishment in a different direction to have more pro-friendly labor laws. But anyway, we need a bigger labor movement first. And this is what people in the labor movement always talk about. We need to organize. We need to organize. We need to grow.

Starting point is 02:00:05 Yes. But as I think my two books point out, it's not enough just to have a big labor movement. It needs to be, we need to talk about what kind of labor movement. What are the politics? What are the values? What are the principles? What is it going to stand for? What is it going to fight for? Is it just going to allow itself to be a tool of imperialism or is it just going to be forever on defense or is it going to actually engage in real class struggle on anti-imperialism? And I don't think that's impossible because you look at labor movements around the world, including in other hyper-capitalist imperial countries, Western Europe and so forth. And you see major labor federations in those countries that have very different kinds of leaders and very different

Starting point is 02:00:47 kinds of political orientations and they're willing to stand with Palestine by sometimes going on strikes, shutting down the shipment of weapons or shutting down, you know, the Italian general strikes that we've seen recently as examples or other kinds of general strikes or major workplace actions to protest right-wing fascist governments and policies in their own countries. So, you know, if they can do it, I think we can do it here too. It requires organized It requires political education. You know, there's work that has to be done. It's not going to happen overnight.

Starting point is 02:01:23 But, yeah, I mean, I guess you could say I have, I do have hope and faith in a class struggle-oriented, left-wing, progressive, anti-imperious labor movement, that it can happen in the U.S. not easily, but all the ingredients are there. It's just up to us, those of us who are consider ourselves part of the labor and part of the left to make it happen. You've been listening to an upstart.

Starting point is 02:01:52 conversation with Jeff Shirky, Labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry von Arstale Jr. School of Labor Studies, Sunni Empire State University. He's the author of Blue Collar Empire, the Untold Story of U.S. Labor's Global Anti-Communist Crusade, and No Neutral's There, U.S. labor, Zionism, and The Struggle for Palestine. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to No Rest for the intermission music and to Berwyn-Murr for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is entirely listener-funded.

Starting point is 02:02:36 No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for biweekly bonus. episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And for more from us, visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on social media for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast.

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Upstream - US Labor & Imperialism Pt. 2: Zionism w/ Jeff Schuhrke (Palestine Pt. 16)

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