Staying Neutral?

With US unions representing at least tens of thousands of workers in the weapons manufacturing industry and thousands more in the logistics sector, the American labor movement appeared to be well positioned to hamper the Israeli war machine by honoring the Palestinian trade unions’ request for solidarity. Yet most national labor officials were either hesitant about or outright hostile to any workplace activity that might materially obstruct the Gaza genocide.

This became viscerally apparent in early October 2024, as the genocide reached the one-year mark. Approximately forty-five thousand members of the International Longshoremen’s Association — the traditionally conservative union of dockworkers servicing ports along the US East Coast and Gulf Coast — staged a three-day strike to secure raises and protections from automation in their new collective bargaining agreement. Although the work stoppage seriously hindered the movement of commercial goods, the union’s leadership pledged to continue handling military cargo. This meant that despite their own strike, the longshore workers kept on loading armaments, presumably bound for Israel to be used for slaughtering civilians.

There were several reasons for US labor’s general unwillingness to take tangible collective action in solidarity with Palestine at such a crucial moment.

For one, national union presidents and AFL-CIO officials believed it to be both necessary and advantageous to maintain a good relationship with the US government — especially with Democratic president Joe Biden, a labor advocate as well as a staunch Israel ally. Although respectful and limited disagreement with the administration’s Gaza policy could be voiced, doing anything that might physically impede Washington’s aims in the Middle East would risk souring that relationship and inviting the government’s wrath in the form of legal restrictions on unions’ ability to operate.

Another reason was that many union leaders and members had conflicting attitudes about Palestine and were convinced, at least initially, that Israel’s assault on Gaza was somehow a justified act of “self-defense” after the deadly Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. For union members in military-related industries, whose jobs are ultimately tied to the perpetuation of armed conflicts, such attitudes would deter any potential eagerness to engage in solidarity action with Palestine, especially if it might jeopardize their employment.

Similarly, there was an aversion among some unionists to take risky and possibly illegal action over a seemingly “remote” foreign policy issue. Indeed, in trying to organize their unions to act in solidarity with Palestinians, rank-and-file workers often must contend with arguments that the labor movement should keep quiet and remain neutral because, it is argued, Palestine has nothing to do with US unions and weighing in on the issue only invites unnecessary controversy.

But in reality, unions in the United States have never been silent or neutral on the question of Palestine. This gets to the underlying and most significant reason for American labor’s widespread disinclination to answer the Palestinian trade union call to action: the more than one-hundred-year alliance between US union officialdom and Zionism — the settler-colonial movement that served to dispossess Palestinians in the twentieth century and continues to suppress their elemental human rights and freedom in the name of Jewish nationalism.

Labor Officialdom’s Alliance With Zionism

Although it asserts the supposed right of Jews to control Palestine, Zionism is by no means driven exclusively by Jewish people, nor should the term Zionist be mistaken as a synonym for “Jew.” Indeed, throughout the history of Zionism, Jews have been among its most vocal and dedicated opponents.

What’s more, non-Jews — particularly Christians — have always been essential players in the Zionist movement. European Protestants were issuing apocalyptic calls for the Jewish “restoration” of Palestine centuries before Jews themselves began advocating Zionism. The largest Zionist organization in the modern United States is Christians United for Israel, an Evangelical group boasting approximately ten million members, which is more than the total number of Jewish Americans. President Biden, a Catholic, repeatedly referred to himself as a Zionist during his time in the White House.

Similarly, US labor officials — among whom Jews have always been a minority — have long been proponents of Zionism and the State of Israel. There are two fundamental reasons for this. One is AFL-CIO leaders’ traditional ideological commitment to Labor Zionism, the particular current within the wider Zionist project that centers the role of Jewish workers in laying the economic foundations for building and maintaining the Israeli state.

Prior to the 1955 establishment of the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations were separate entities, each generally representing different strands of US unionism. Founded in 1886, the AFL espoused a vision of nonradical, “pure and simple” trade unionism that proclaimed loyalty to American capitalism in exchange for limited gains and protections for the most skilled workers (especially English-speaking white craftsmen). The CIO, which was launched after several unions broke away from the AFL in 1935, put forward a comparatively progressive agenda of using the collective power of all workers to create a more humane economy and more egalitarian society.

Labor Zionism, which emerged in the early 1900s and came to dominate the broader Zionist movement by the 1930s, appealed to both of these differing approaches to US trade unionism. AFL leaders could easily sympathize with Labor Zionism because, like their own brand of unionism, it substituted class struggle with class collaboration in the service of nationalism. For their part, the CIO’s more liberal and progressive unionists were drawn to Labor Zionism because its followers in Palestine were putting certain socialistic ideas into practice, such as establishing cooperative enterprises and implementing social welfare programs.

Support for Labor Zionism was one area where AFL and CIO officials were in complete agreement well before the 1955 merger. And awed by how it rapidly delivered material benefits and political power to Jewish workers in Israel — which seemed especially laudable and impressive after the horrors of the Holocaust — important figures within the merged AFL-CIO continued approving of Labor Zionism from the 1950s onward. But Labor Zionism’s apparent successes were always premised on the dispossession and exclusion of indigenous Palestinians, whose own plight was both misunderstood and deliberately ignored by US union leaders.

This points to another way that Labor Zionism struck an ideological chord with influential American laborites. During the US labor movement’s formative years in the early to mid-nineteenth century, some of its loudest champions called for lands in the Western “frontier” region of the continent to be settled by white workers so they could establish farms and escape the toil and drudgery of wage work — a vision that ultimately depended on the expulsion of Native Americans. The US labor movement, like US society more broadly, continued to be inspired by mythical stories of courageous and hardworking pioneers who moved west, braved attacks by “savages,” plowed “virgin soil,” and transformed “empty” lands into a booming modern economy by the sweat of their brow — myths that served to dehumanize American Indians by rendering their whole existence as either invisible or an obstacle to “progress.”

Even leftist elements of the American labor movement, who have acknowledged the key role of capitalist exploitation in the country’s economic development, have often failed to similarly acknowledge the centrality of settler colonialism in that story. The song “Solidarity Forever,” first sung in the 1910s by members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World and now the unofficial anthem of the US labor movement, proudly declares that “it is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade / dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid.” But what goes unrecognized in the lyrics is that those prairies, cities, mines, workshops, and railroads were plowed, built, dug, and laid very shortly after the lands on which they sit were taken from indigenous nations through merciless violence and intimidation. US labor’s close connections to the history and ongoing legacy of settler colonialism in North America served to make many of its leaders ideologically receptive to Labor Zionism and its own myths of “making the desert bloom” that were premised on the dehumanization and violent dispossession of another indigenous people.

In addition, Labor Zionist leaders in Palestine intentionally cultivated personal relationships with US union officials in the early to mid-twentieth century with the aim of securing financial and political support. Many of these same Labor Zionists later became high-ranking figures in the Israeli government after 1948, including multiple prime ministers. In those roles, they remained close friends of US labor leaders.

Labor for US Empire

The other fundamental reason for American labor’s long-standing alliance with Zionism and the State of Israel is that it has historically been crucial to the AFL-CIO’s larger goal of supporting US imperialism around the globe. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, capitalists in the United States regularly painted organized labor as an unpatriotic, foreign conspiracy as a way to turn workers and the government against unions. Relatedly, unions routinely faced state repression whenever organizing or striking to demand higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions.

In response to all of this, many officials in the AFL and later AFL-CIO believed that the safest and most pragmatic path forward for the labor movement would be to demonstrate patriotism, loyalty, and animosity toward foreign enemies. This particularly meant drumming up working-class support for US military operations abroad and officially pledging that unions would not obstruct production by going on strike during the two world wars.

During the Cold War, in which the United States staged numerous imperial interventions and wars around the world to “contain” the spread of communism and other leftist movements, AFL-CIO leaders became even more enthusiastic supporters of US empire because of their own obsessive anti-communism. Many of these labor officials had personally tangled with American communists for control of their unions in previous decades and, as the victors, saw themselves as indispensable experts in helping Washington destroy radicalism in foreign labor movements. They often regarded themselves as more dedicated, consistent, and effective anti-communists than their government counterparts.

Also, after the anti-union attacks associated with the Red Scare in the late 1940s and early 1950s — which prompted the CIO to expel eleven of its communist-led unions and then merge with the more conservative AFL — union officials had internalized the belief that exhibiting jingoism and obedience to the established order was vital to organized labor’s survival. Beyond this, they thought that an international capitalist economy dominated by the United States would mean steady employment and good wages for American manufacturing workers, who were then at the center of the US labor movement.

As the Cold War took shape, the newly established State of Israel became a crucial US ally in staving off Soviet influence in the geostrategic and oil-rich Middle East. Though it briefly received critical diplomatic and military aid from the Soviet bloc in the late 1940s, by the mid-1950s, Israel was more squarely in the Western camp. This was not a surprising development given that the state was violently founded by European settlers at the same moment when Europe was losing its long-held colonial possessions in and around the Middle East.

From Israel’s founding, the AFL-CIO’s veteran anti-communists were eager to promote the invaluable service they thought the new state could provide as a US ally in the Cold War. They especially pointed to Israel’s labor-centered economic development model, which could be held up as a successful example of noncommunist “nation-building” to be emulated across the emergent Third World, as well as in the United States itself.

AFL-CIO cold warriors believed that securing the political and ideological loyalty of labor movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America would be decisive to whether the countries of those regions moved into the Soviet camp or not. Israel’s Labor Zionism appeared to provide living proof to Third World workers’ movements that a newly independent state outside of Europe could achieve impressive economic growth and simultaneously reward workers without embracing communism or aligning with the Soviets. Anti-communist US labor leaders therefore championed a full-fledged alliance between the United States and Israel.

US Labor and Zionism After the Cold War

After the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, imperial considerations continued motivating American labor officials, along with their counterparts in the US government, to strongly support Israel. Now instead of being described as a bulwark against communism in the Middle East, the Zionist state was celebrated as a rampart against the encroachment of secular dictators like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and revolutionary Islamic movements like the one that attained power in Iran.

The US foreign policy apparatus argued that as the “only democracy” in the region, Israel was in dire need of significant military and diplomatic support so it could quash such threats before they overran the Middle East. This meant allowing (and enabling) Israel to continue systematically subjugating Palestinians even after supposedly committing to a two-state solution in the 1990s. Still eager to showcase their patriotic loyalty and commitment to the US empire to remain in Washington’s good graces, a new generation of AFL-CIO officials put their support behind this unwaveringly pro-Israel policy, or at the very least did not openly dispute it.

Enamored with Labor Zionism and determined to bolster American foreign policy objectives, from the early twentieth century onward, US labor officialdom helped build and sustain the State of Israel. It did this by taking the same type of meaningful, committed action it now refused to take in solidarity with Palestinians at the outbreak of the Gaza genocide, including enthusiastically donating hundreds of millions of dollars from union treasuries (for Zionist colonization and Israeli nation-building); relentlessly pressuring US elected officials (to supply economic and military aid to Israel); occasionally boycotting foreign cargo (that of Israel’s Arab rivals); and repeatedly issuing forceful public statements, holding mass rallies, and staging limited work stoppages (to demonstrate popular support for Zionism at critical moments in history).

Indeed, perhaps nowhere else have US unions demonstrated so much international solidarity than in Palestine, but almost exclusively in favor of its Zionist settler population and nearly always at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people. It is therefore disingenuous to argue that US labor should now suddenly be silent on Palestine or suggest that it is somehow implausible for American unions to take concrete action around Palestine. If anything, given the historic role its top leaders have played in one-sidedly bolstering Israel, the US labor movement has a special responsibility to stand with Palestinians in their struggle for liberation.