Paul Howes, the Histadrut and Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions of Israel
In 2005, Palestinian civil society called for solidarity from the international community and people within Israel for the institution of boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel similar to those instituted against apartheid South Africa until Israel recognises the right of Palestinian people for self-determination and conforms with international law. The call is supported by Palestinian political parties, unions, associations, coalitions and organizations representing the three integral parts of the people of Palestine: Palestinian refugees, Palestinians under occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
As Australian trade unions prepare to take a motion for BDS to the ACTU, it is important for Australian workers to understand why it is essential to support boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel in solidarity with Palestinian trade unions, including the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) .
The trade union boycott works very like the consumer boycott or divestment campaign at an institutional level. It means that trade unions cut economic, social and political ties with Israel and build ties with Palestinian unions. Much the same as the huge role they took on in fighting against Apartheid South Africa, their emphasis on international workers solidarity can be a real rallying cry against Israeli Apartheid.
Trade unions need to be informed about the discriminatory nature of Israel’s Histadrut, which from its inception aimed to replace Arab workers with Jewish ones under a “conquest of labour” policy. Israel’s occupation aims to further conquer Palestinian labour through a series of joint industrial zones wherein Palestinians will essentially work as migrant workers on their own land for low wages in poor conditions without the option to organise. The Histadrut is the only trade union in Israel and continues to work on a racist framework that leaves Palestinian workers facing apartheid labour conditions in Israel itself.
To support BDS, trade unions can pass motions, measures and resolutions condemning Israeli occupation and apartheid; promote a consumer boycott among their members and citizens; change purchasing
and investment policy to ensure that trade unions are not contributing financially to the occupation; and partner with Palestinian unions.
Australians for Palestine have prepared an excellent BDS Manual for download.
The Israeli labour organisation, the Histadrut, is first and foremost a state-allied endeavour rather than a worker organisation. As Zureik says:
It is a mistake to equate the Histadrut with other, secular and universalist, trade union movements of this century. While one of the aims was to improve the conditions of the Jewish working class in Palestine, its raison d’etre was to ensure the creation of a jewish state, with Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity a secondary factor. After all, it was under the auspices of the Histadrut that the underground Zionist military force, the Haganah, was established.
…
Yago:“However, the evolving labour bureaucracy is not to be confused with those of Western Europe or the US [or Australia]. It was not the product of a mass workers movement; rather it was always an integral part of an expressedly nationalist movement. Its task was not solely to divert working class struggles, but to eliminate part of the working class (the Palestinian Arabs) from labour market competition in order to accomplish the two-pronged state building programme of the Zionist movement – ‘conquest of labour/conquest of land’.”
The Histadrut, which approved of the outrageous Israeli Cast Lead massacre of the Gazan people in 2009, also actively supported the South African apartheidists.
Iskoor steel company, 51 percent owned by Histadrut’s Koor Industries and 49 percent by the South African Steel Corporation, manufactured steel for South Africa’s armed forces. Partly finished steel was shipped from Israel to South Africa, enabling the apartheid state to escape tariffs. [7]
Other Histadrut companies such as Tadiran and Soltam were equally complicit in supplying South Africa with weaponry. [8] Histadrut also helped build the electronic wall between South Africa/Namibia and neighboring African states in order to keep the guerrillas out. [9] It was a precursor of Israel’s wall in the West Bank.
Pinhas Lavon, secretary-general of Histadrut in 1960 described it as “a general organization to its core. It is not a trade union …”
The Histadrut has also exploited Palestinian workers and their union movement.
The exploitation of Palestinian workers from the occupied territories was institutionalized by an Israeli cabinet decision of October 1970. It provided that the military administration should supervise their employment. Their wages would be distributed by the payments department of the National Employment Service. Histadrut was a partner in this arrangement. National Insurance coverage was permitted in only three areas: work accidents, employer bankruptcy and a grant on the birth of a child in an Israeli hospital. Ten percent of the wages of Palestinian workers went to a special “Equalization Fund,” which was supposed to supply the population in the occupied territories with social and cultural services. In fact, this money was used to finance the occupation. The workers did not receive unemployment and disability benefits, old-age pensions, a monthly child allowance or vocational training.
In addition, each Palestinian worker had to pay one percent of his or her wages as dues to Histadrut. Workers saw nothing in return and now a fraction of this money has been returned, as a propaganda ploy, to the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions. When the Shin Bet intelligence service used work permits as a means to coerce Palestinian workers to collaborate, with those who refused being placed on a blacklist and their work permits cancelled, Histadrut again did nothing. [39]
Although many Australian unions already support BDS, AWU union boss Paul Howes seems to be under a false impression that the Histadrut is a union like any other.
“We don’t believe that it’s in the interests of Palestinian or Israeli workers to seek to divide them in the peace process,” Mr Howes said.
In a recent address to the Zionist Federation of Australia, Howes stated:
I think I am upholding that union tradition when I support the trust-building co-operative projects that the Israeli trade union movement – led by the Histadrut – and the Palestinian trade union movement – led by the PGFTU – are promoting.
If you truly believe that a-worker-is-a-worker-is-a-worker then the function of any trade union is to ensure fair pay for a fair day’s work and a safe and healthy workplace.
This applies to an Israeli worker , this applies to a Palestinian worker.
I can’t see how you can discriminate between an Israeli worker and a Palestinian worker. (Let alone a foreign worker from Asia or Africa working in Israel)
Paul appears oblivious to historical and current exploitation of and discrimination against Palestinian workers by the Histadrut as much as he is ignorant of the fact that the main Palestinian union, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions’ (PGFTU), supports BDS.
In September 2009, the Histadrut claimed to have rectified some of its malfeasance.
In 1995 our two organisations signed an unprecedented agreement in which fifty percent of all dues from Palestinians employed by Israeli employers would be remitted to the PGFTU. Unfortunately, the
agreement was not fully implemented due to security conditions. However, under the auspices of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), headed by Guy Ryder, we successfully finalised and
implemented the agreement in June 2008. As a result, US$3.6 million has been transferred to the PGFTU, both in arrears and in ongoing payments.
Yet according to Kav LaOved and The Alternative Information Centre (AIC), “The Economy of the Occupation”, the Histadrut has returned but a pittance of the monies extracted from exploited Palestinian workers:
“The calculated amount of debt without interest is NIS 3.082 billion, and with interest the amount reaches NIS 8.350 billion. It is important to note that this calculation is accurate to 2009, in 2008 prices, and does not include central elements for which information is not available. The calculation is therefore lacking.”
And further skullduggery:
“Addititionally, the Department deducted an additional 2.74% for a Provident Fund and health tax, which were included in the same package of deductions as organising fees for the Histadrut. The health tax covered health insurance of the workers in the OPT. It is unknown to us where the money deducted for the Provident Fund went and on what authority it was deducted.
“On the basis of a circular of the Department of Payments, we know that for the Provident Fund, NIS 0.54 were taken from every worker in the construction sector for each day of work at least until 1993, ie. 3.1% of their salary. From here we calculated that from 1970 to 1993, NIS 152 million (in 2008 prices) were taken from them for the Provident Fund. We do not know if this deduction continued after 1993, but we do know that the workers did not receive a Provident Fund.
“Under the false definition of Palestinians as ‘daily’ or ‘temporary’ workers, a majority of the benefits determined in the collective bargaining agreements of the Histadrut with the employers were stolen from Palestinian workers, including increments for security, family upkeep, grants for not missing work, a 13th salary in the agricultural sector and more.
The Histradut has expressed its support for removing “security checkpoints in the context of the renewed security situation” and called upon “the Israeli government to dismantle all illegal outposts.” It also supports the abandoned Roadmap and collapsed two state solution, yet does not expressedly support the end to Israeli colonialism in the Occupied Territories. Nor does the Histadrut protect Palestinian workers in the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
“The settlement factories are manned primarily by Palestinian labourers, who work in miserable conditions”, says Fathi Nasser, legal advisor with the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU). “The employers of these factories disregard labour laws and should the worker complain, he will be dismissed”. According to Nasser, as it is so difficult to obtain authorisation to take a case before an Israeli court, providing real legal protection to these workers is very complicated.
…
The Democracy and Workers Rights Centre (DWRC) tries to protect workers by educating workers on how to use their rights. “Officially, Palestinian workers in the West Bank’s industrial zones are entitled to the protection of Israeli labour laws but employers find many ways to avoid giving Palestinians their rights”, DWRC’s coordinator of the Legal Aid and Human Rights Project, Hwayda told us. The organisation was created in response to the failure of Israel’s major labour union, Histadrut, to represent Palestinian workers.
No excuses, Paul Howes, it’s time for you to move to the right side of history. Do not put a cold-blooded thirst for the political approval of the duplicitous Australian zionist lobby before the call of Palestinian workers. You’ve shown you can stand up for justice for Australian workers. Let’s see your real mettle – can you change your mind when faced with the facts? Support BDS and help Palestinian people achieve freedom and justice.
As Palestinian Rifat Odeh Kassis from Kairos says:
If you reject BDS as a valid way to call for change, and as a right in and of itself – a right that should be defended by any true democracy – then what other means do you propose for creating peace in our region? In a time when bloodshed has been the primary tactic, negotiations are an exercise in humiliation, and voices like yours continue to suggest that Palestinians have no rights to defend in the first place, BDS is an effective, nonviolent tool that strengthens – and unites – Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers alike.
What is the alternative to peace talks to nowhere?
A very watchable lecture in 13 parts that Ali Abunimah gave at Stanford on Nov 3, 2010, sponsored by Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel (SCAI).
Also well worth reading is a well-written piece in Ma’an News Agency, where Ali Abunimah responds with logic and vision to Hanan Ashrawi while she clings to a broken two state dream.
“Ms. Ashrawi ought to know better than anyone else that it is the totally fraudulent ‘peace process,’ starting with the Oslo Agreement which should never have been signed, which bought time for the occupation to deepen its tentacles in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and to impose — with the complicity of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah — the blockade on Gaza.”
Abunimah said that when Ashrawi argues Palestinians cannot not assemble a global coalition for the one-state solution “she displays a total lack of faith in the Palestinian people and their cause. Palestinian rights and demands are not a gift of ‘global partners,’ but a birthright. When the ANC demanded democracy in South Africa, they set the terms of the agenda, they did not wait for the permission of the US State Department before asking for their rights.
“The one-state solution is the only just, moral and practical solution which restores the rights of all Palestinians — the refugees and the diaspora, the Palestinians within the 1948 territories, and those in the West Bank.”
Abunimah also noted the significance of Ashrawi having to reckon with the one-state solution: “While skeptics and critics of the single state always dismissed it as a marginal idea, they now find it gaining ground to their dismay, and having to defend a so-called two-state solution that everyone knows will never lead to the restoration of Palestinian rights.”
Towards Hope completes its successful mission to Gaza
A medical team from Australian NGO Towards Hope has completed a 10 day trip to Gaza. Co-sponsored by PCRF, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, the team assisted ‘dozens of Palestinians from the besieged Gaza Strip with expert care’, as well as ‘training for local doctors’, a source close to the mission revealed today.
The team consisted of Australian Orthopaedic (Bones and Joints) Surgeon, Dr Tim Keenan, Physiotherapist, Jaquie Hocking from Perth, a Theatre Nurse and an Anaesthetist from Italy. They operated at the Gaza European Hospital from October 10th, finishing on October 16th,
undertaking reconstructive surgery and providing rehabilitation services. It is also planned to provide some ongoing training and assistance where necessary, to enable local staff to continue such work, after the team leaves.
This is Dr Keenan’s first trip to Gaza, although he has led medical teams to Nablus in West Bank in the past.
Max Ajl makes a superb comparison of the Towards Hope / PCRF medical mission with an Israeli effort, tuned to Channel H for Hasbara.
Enough Pizza for All
MiddleEastPizzaTalks from GazaFreedomMarch on Vimeo.
As a proponent for one state with equal rights for all, Ali Abunimah is being targeted by the noxious zionist lobby for censorship. He challenges the absurd anti-democratic methodology used against him:
Typically, they throw in everything to try to defame and tar me: Hamas, Hizbullah, anti-Semitism, making Jewish students feel uncomfortable — all the usual defamatory silencing tactics to try to suppress debate and discussion about Israel’s apartheid and the alternatives that respect everyone. As they surely know, I have been an unflagging advocate of full equality and human rights for all Palestinians and Israeli Jews and others living in historic Palestine, and am guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why do they not want students at the University of New Mexico to hear this message?
As Ali has said, memorably: “Zionists tend to regard equal rights for all citizens in a nonracial nonsectarian state roughly the way Dracula views garlic.”
For political zionists, there is not enough pizza for all, nor should the cooks and kitchen staff sit at the same table with them. Like all racist ideologies, zionism can’t survive in the light of day – with the institution of full equal rights.
Further, political zionism is a form of fascism, with censorship of opposing ideas just one symptom of a larger nauseating recipe – super-nationalism, Blut und Boden, syncretised mythologies of past and future glory, nation and race/ethnicity placed above all else, promotion of a cult of unity, strength and purity, atomisation of the working class, belligerent expansionism for lebensraum, sexism, corporatism, perpetual warfare, militarism, violence, dominance of the petty bourgeois class, social darwinism, authoritarianism, rejection of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, indoctrination, propaganda, newspeak, unegalitarian regulation of private property primarily for the benefit of the community not individuals, selective populism, unegalitarian social welfare, attack of intellectuals, disagreement is treason, racist loyalty oaths, strategic victimhood and sense of besiegement, scapegoating, contempt for the weak, contradictory narratives of weakness and strength, xenophobia, and a cult of heroism. All these are expressed in Israel’s political zionism, projected externally by the ubiquitous, bullying Israel lobby, and pandered to by other invasive settler colonial and imperialist miscreants for whom questioning and censuring the zionist entity would bring into focus their own brutal crimes against Indigenous people. Israel perpetrates the crimes of settler colonialism and apartheid, propelled by the fascist ideology of political zionism.
Each form of fascism as it arises takes aspects of existing culture and grows a unique poisonous plant.
Relevant Links
Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt (Umberto Eco) (.pdf)
Italian Fascism between Ideology and Spectacle (Federico Caprotti)
Marxists on Fascism
The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology (Roger Griffin) [.pdf]
The 14 Characteristics of Fascism (Lawrence Britt)
It’s Barak’s fault
A Spectre is Haunting Israel
Israel embraces fascism and where is the Zionist Diaspora?
The eugenicist racism of religious zionism: ‘Gentile sperm leads to barbaric offspring’
Between moral outrage and historical analysis
The Boycott Law is Fascism: it is a categorically anti-democratic law whose goal is to annul any possibility of legitimate protest.
Mob defending the territory of the tribe : Jewish Women as scapegoats and targets for sexism [Google tr] [Heb]
Everywhere it seems extreme racist, nationalist and religious radicalization merger also appears.
What is Fascism?
Studying the U.S. Political Right
Conspiracism
What are the Different Sectors of the Right?
A vile logic to Anders Breivik’s choice of target : Slavoj Zizek deconstructs Breivik’s fascist ideology, with particular reference to the anti-semitism implicit in zionism and Breivik’s own anti-semitism.
Ilan Pappe “Israel, the Holocaust and the Nakba”:
‘The Israelis went the other way in two directions that complemented each other. On the one hand, they felt secure from any Western pressure and continued the dispossession of the Palestinians – until today. The limits to their actions in the past, and quite probably in the future, were well defined by the late Israeli journalist Aryeh Caspi: as long as the Israelis do not do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, they are within the legitimate and moral boundaries of civilised behaviour. The repertoire of actions within those limits was, and still is, quite horrendous, as the latest Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip testify. The other direction was to Nazify the Palestinians so as to justify further the actions against them. ‘
General definitions of fascism of Robert Paxton:
“Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.”
…
“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Excerpts from the book “Anatomy of Fascism” (Robert O. Paxton)
Would there be a State of Israel without Hitler?
Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave?
Imperialism and Settler Colonialism in West Asia: Israel and the Arab Palestinian Struggle – useful class analysis of zionism a dictatorship of the petty bourgeoisie from Europe
Nutanyahoo seizes dictatorial powers :
Seeing as the PM controls the cabinet’s agenda, he will be able to run his proposals repeatedly until they are approved or conversely “bury” decisions made by ministers, pending further discussion.
The Prime Minister’s Office’s legal advisor Attorney Shlomit Barnea Fargo expressed reservations over the clause which she said enables the PM to undermine the decisions of government-appointed committees.
She also raised concerns over the uncertainty created by the fact that no time limit was given to the option of scheduling additional discussions on ministerial committee decisions.
Secular Jewish thinkers articulated pragmatic strategies for harnessing memory and tradition in the pursuit of a national project of self-redemption: “Zionism was a bold revolution with one foot leaping backwards.” Borrowing a coinage from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Chowers writes that many Zionists “saw themselves as creating a new nowtime, a new constellation in which the ancient Hebraic times and their own epoch become profoundly attached and transform each other.”
Israel: The Logic of a Settler State
A single Palestine on the basis of secularism, democracy, and socialism would be transformed from a cornerstone of the capitalist-imperialist world order into a cornerstone of an emancipatory one. The prerequisite for this possibility is the defeat of Israel as a Zionist entity, the defeat of its inherent settler logic (and Zionism is historically just one example of settlerist ideology), and thereby the dissolution of its current social formation into one that is not irredeemably anti-emancipatory. There can be no ‘Zionist left’, no ‘liberal Zionism’, and so forth, for such propositions are incompatible with the practical logic of the settler state. The concept of Israel must die so that a Palestine may live for Jews and Arabs, Druze and Bedouin alike.
On the fascist role of the Histadrut:
Being “general to its core,” the Histadrut has effectively become the central force of the Jewish community in its many aspects. It organized the Zionist armed forces, sometimes in collusion with the British occupation, and sometimes secretly against British wishes; it created a system of social security, the only one in existence in Israel, which has become an important weapon in the domination of the Jewish masses and the organization of the workers under the authority of the Histadrut; it has opened recruitment offices everywhere, thus reinforcing its domination, while at the same time regulating tihe right to work; it possesses its own school network, its own promotion societies and its own production and service co-operatives; as an organization it completely dominates the kibbutzim and collective farms of the whole country. It is not for nothing that the Histadrut was considered the central pillar of the Zionist enterprise from its beginning, or as the Zionists say, “the state in embryo.”
On the contradictory narratives of weakness and strength:
“‘Shahar Burla, a political scientist at the University of New South Wales, argues in “Political Imaginations in the Diaspora” (Resling, 2013) that Israel presents a two-faced image to Diaspora Jews to maximize the “ultimate goal” – extracting as much financial support as possible from Jews living overseas.
On the one hand, he says, Israel portrays itself to Diaspora Jews as a strong homeland in order to elicit financial support as an “insurance policy” against another Holocaust.
But on the other hand, he says, Israel casts itself as weak, especially in the face of the Iranian nuclear threat and Islamist terror, also to trigger financial support. Burla argues that these two seemingly contradictory narratives, both underpinned by the premise of anti-Semitism, have helped ensure Diaspora Jews continue to donate vast sums via the United Israel Appeal, the Jewish National Fund and other Zionist organizations. ‘”
Israel: The Logic of a Settler State
‘It is no coincidence that as Israel has become stronger and its logic has expressed itself more fully, it has become ever more fascist and less concerned even with formal equality and democracy – as shown most recently by the restrictive laws forbidding even the commemoration of the Naqba (the original ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians), the exclusion of anti-Zionist groups from parliamentary representation, and the unification between Likud and the fascist organization of Avigdor Lieberman. As I have argued, this trend of the capital-state relation to move away from formal liberalism and into a fascist siege mentality is characteristic of a settler state frustrated in its normalization process. For settler states, this normalization process can only occur on the basis of the destruction of the social formation of its rivals, of the original inhabitants; the US and Australia only even considered reforming the racial ladder system after their physical-demographic security as a settler state and their destruction of all rival social formations was complete. So it is with Israel also, and therefore Israel as a state does not and cannot want peace, whatever individuals within it may fervently hope.’