Workers' Liberty

In this article Robert Fine looks at working-class socialist views from the late 1930s on Palestine.

On 12 November Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas postponed the Palestinian parliamentary and Presidential elections due in January 2010. He said this was because of lack of progress on US-sponsored peace talks. But part of the background to the current situation is the repression of Abbas’s political allies, Fatah, in Gaza, by Hamas.

The plain facts will impart a strong bias against Israel in any simple, straightforwardly honest report of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Today it is a David and Goliath story, with the Palestinians in the David and Israel in the Goliath role.

On 24 October Fatah’s Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas set the date of Palestinian elections for 24 January 2010.

Avigdor Lieberman is in the news over corruption allegations. But what does the political grouping around Lieberman represent? And what do Lieberman’s number one target, Arab Israelis, think about political developments in Israel?

Avigdor Lieberman leads Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home), which won 15 of the 120 Knesset seats in the February 2009 Israeli general election.

In his speech to this year’s conference of the public services union Unison, in Brighton in mid-June, general secretary Dave Prentis called on the “Labour Link” section of the union to stop funding constituency development plans, and to work only with Labour MPs who abide by the union’s values and objectives.

So long as the Jewish and Arab workers in the Middle East remain subordinate to the forces of Israeli and Arab (or Islamic) chauvinism — as they are now — the only hope for Palestinian progress towards their own state is from intervention on their behalf from outside governments.

Of those, the USA is the decisive one.

Continuing a series on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and lies about the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

The RMT rail union has called a protest outside the Israeli embassy in London on 11 May to support Arab workers threatened with the sack from Israeli railways. More details here.

East Jerusalem workers appeal for support

Twenty one Palestinian workers from East Jerusalem who have been employed by the Israeli Antiquities Authority have lost their jobs in a bid by the employer to get around the law. They are victims of the kind of outsourcing many of you will be familiar with in your own countries. They've launched an international appeal for support.

Students at Sheffield University have been in occupation of space in the Hicks Building since Monday 16 March; on 23 March the occupation spread to the university's new, extremely posh, flagship exhibition centre.

Between 5 and 13 March, I had the privilege of touring round the UK with Tamar Katz, a 19 year-old women from Tel Aviv who was jailed for three months at the end of last year for refusing to serve in the Israeli Defence Force as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians.

I write to you from inside a student occupation.

Japan

Thousands of workers have rallied in Tokyo demanding job security and wage rises.

Following massive demonstrations and a wave of student occupations against Israel’s war in Gaza, British activists have been hosting a speaker tour with Tamar Katz, one of the Shministim, Israeli high school students jailed for refusing to fight in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Shministim - A Dubious Cause !
By Ian Sternberg

Israel’s bloody attack on Gaza in December and January left over 1,000 Palestinians dead, including hundreds of children.

Solidarity with the Palestinians — but don't line up behind Hamas!

ON 13 APRIL [2002] there was a big London march "for Palestine". What happened was shocking from a socialist standpoint, and harmful to the Palestinian cause.

About 60 people, mostly young, crammed into a Green Park social centre on 15 January for a forum on the war in Gaza held jointly by Workers' Liberty and the Worker-communist Party of Iraq.

Students at nearly 20 universities across the UK have staged occupations in protest at Israel’s war on Gaza.

While many, perhaps most, Jews globally do feel some sense of identification with the Israeli-Jewish nation (its people, at least, if not the State of Israel itself), and while many Jews are understandably a great deal more sensitive to the threat posed by Hamas’s anti-semitic project than many on the British left, it is by no means the case that world Jewry is united in support for the colonialist adventures of the Israeli government in the Occupied Territories.

On 28 January Israel launched its heaviest attack yet on Gaza since its official ceasefire, sending in bombers in retaliation for a Hamas attack on an Israeli army patrol. Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said that the bombing, and an earlier ground incursion, would be followed by a heavier response.

The Shministim speak: Israeli student jailed for refusing to serve in army tours Britain, 5-14 March 2009

A debate from the website (in full here).

GUADELOUPE: The French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe has been rocked by a general strike — a total shut-down of shops, supermarkets, schools and public services.