The Grassroots Union Rebellion to Support Palestine
By 
“Why are we here?” said Brandon Mancilla, a leader with the United Automobile Workers. Mr. Mancilla faced a crowd of hundreds of union members gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue branch, huddling against the cold as they rallied for a cease-fire in Gaza.
“Cease-fire now, solidarity forever!” Mr. Mancilla, 29, said as the crowd cheered, waving union banners and Palestinian flags. “Let’s get more and more unions behind us.”
On display in that Dec. 21 protest — which came shortly after the 350,000-member U.A.W. voted to support a cease-fire — was a shift in the American labor movement’s relationship with Israel.
For decades, the most prominent American unions were largely supportive of Israel. Today, though, amid a resurgence of the American labor movement, some activists are urging their unions to call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and succeeding — a change that reflects a broader generational shift.
But many unions are divided over what stance to take or whether to take any stance at all.
Some American labor leaders have remained supportive of Israel’s war against Hamas, and moved swiftly to condemn Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7. They are dismayed by the views of a younger generation of organizers who in some cases oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
“There has been a shift in society, and that’s reflected in the labor movement as it is every place else,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Jewish Labor Committee and head of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
I’ve seen this in many unions and have been somewhat involved in these conversations myself. I am generally a bit torn about this kind of thing, as I tend to want to focus on things that bring workers together rather than tear them apart, and let’s just say that the issue of Israel and Palestine will get academics as each other’s throats like no other modern issue (on the other super divisive issues of the day such as abortion and guns, any faculty member stupid enough to support Republican positions on these things pretty much knows to keep it to themselves if they want friends or even colleagues to respect them).
But there are two other ways to think about this. First, the people who are joining unions today are people who see the union as a way to not just get a contract, but lead to social and political change more broadly. Here I am talking about Starbucks workers, faculty, graduate students, service workers, people who are joining new unions. These are politically radicalized people who often came to politics out of Occupy or the Bernie campaign or at least a sense that the nation’s economy wasn’t working after 2008. They are people outraged over police violence against Black Americans, outraged over climate change, outraged over gun violence, outraged over the repeal of abortion rights, outraged over the hate toward transgender Americans. Of course they are going to see their unions as a vehicle for larger social change. In fact, this is how they are organized in no small part. So none of this should be surprising. This is a very different kind of union worker than the Carpenters or Plumbers.
Second, unions have had foreign policies for a long, long time. The article notes that unions traditionally have been exceptionally pro-Israel. Given the absolutely critical role Jewish immigrants, many of which were radicalized in the Bund, played in the early 20th century labor movement and moving the nation’s labor movement from wishing that it was still the 19th century (hello Sam Gompers and William Green!) to recognizing that socialism or at least social democracy was the answer (hello Rose Schneiderman and Clara Lemlich and Sidney Hillman!), support for Israel among unions was almost assumed in the early decades of its existence. That’s still often the case today, as we see with American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten, who has been caught off guard with the grassroots anger at Israel among her union members.
Then there’s the other kind of union foreign policy–the leadership’s support of the CIA in the Cold War and using its money and power to undermine democratically elected governments in nations such as Guatemala and Chile. The AFL-CIO was all over foreign policy. We remember George Meany feeling more strongly about killing the North Vietnamese and Vietcong than supporting a left-leaning social democracy and thus refusing to endorse George McGovern in 1972. These are just a couple of moments in a very scary and awful history of union leadership using their members’ money to support antidemocratic ends. Even today, the AFL-CIO is extremely reticent to open up its archives (stored at the University of Maryland) for fears that the real depth of its foreign policy fuckery will come to light.
Plenty of union staffers know this history (or they know it well enough anyway to react to it). So they don’t want their organizations to be an adjunct to the American right anymore. And with Israel moving toward fascism domestically and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, it’s hardly surprising that there would be intense disgust among many rank and file members. But when you hear people complaining about unions getting involved foreign policy, what you are actually hearing is their complaining about unions getting involved in a foreign policy that is not that of the Blob. Stay in your lane is always a bullshit thing to say to anyone who cares about social change and that’s what you are getting here.
The world is changing in many ways. Unions reflect that. Moreover, a lot of these young workers who are joining unions aren’t going to join them if they are not supportive of international social justice. Again, we can debate whether it’s the right strategic move for union staffers and members to feel this way and my own personal dislike of divisiveness within unions makes me want to calm the waters on issues like this when possible. But it certainly shouldn’t be surprising. And what Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer and Randi Weingarten need to realize is that the foreign policy choices of the 1980s, when Israel was a very different nation, do not automatically translate to a very different age with a very different Israel.