Healthcare workers clapback vs Israel’s Holocaust
A demonstration called by Health Care Workers for Palestine (HCW4pal), a group of mostly young Palestinian medical students, house staff, nurses, physician assistants, and other workers organized a crowd of several hundred. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were there distributing CHALLENGEs and flyers.
Members of HCW4pal and others have been threatened and fired, including a New York University Hospital resident, for making pro-Palestinian statements on social media. HCW4pal has been supporting those who have come under attack for speaking out against the genocide being carried out in Gaza and have continued to protest against the Israeli and U.S. policies there that have left over 11,000 mainly civilian Palestinians dead. Speakers detailed the horrible conditions in Gaza which include lack of water, food, medical supplies, and fuel and an Israeli invasion that has turned Gaza from an open-air prison to a free-fire killing zone.
HCW4pal invited a member of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) to speak to the crowd. JVP is a firmly anti-zionist organization that views Israel as an apartheid state. The speaker, having traveled to Israel and the West Bank many times between 2004 and 2015, joined JVP to organize against the racist conditions she saw there. The speaker asked the crowd to think about whose side they are on. She said that as a Jewish woman, she feels nothing in common with Anthony Blinken or Benjamin Netanyahu. Nor does she have anything in common with the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. They act in concert with Israel to limit dissent and oppress workers in Gaza and the West Bank. She pointed out that since 1987, the Israeli government has given aid to Hamas to weaken other Palestinian organizations.
She said she supports workers who are fighting back everywhere in the world. In conclusion, she said we need to unite workers all around the world and build unity between Arab and Jewish workers to get rid of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism that is the cause of all the misery we see today in Gaza. This call for working-class unity and struggle and similar sentiments by two other speakers were loudly applauded.
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Detroit: rebuilding a fighting club
We are two veteran comrades in Detroit who were re-motivated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine to organize a discussion group on current events with friends and family members. Five of the group went to Mayday in Chicago in 2022.
Afterward, the discussion group continued to meet, attendance fluctuating from four to seven. We missed Mayday in 2023 but traveled to the Party convention in NYC.
Then the auto strike happened and we went to the picket line five times, distributing a leaflet and the newspaper. A comrade from NYC provided us with the leaflet and invited us to Zoom chat about the strike. Another comrade from Kentucky, in town visiting friends, joined us on the picket line. One of our group made friends with an auto worker and is continuing that friendship. Another member of the group has a brother who is an auto worker whom we have been in touch with.
Then Israel/Gaza happened and we printed two hundred fliers and distributed them at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan at Dearborn. Two people gave us their names and phone numbers.
We have many weaknesses but we are pressing forward, organizing for MayDay 2024, and hoping to eventually see a Progressive Labor Party club in the Motor City again.
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From Brookly to Gaza, smash racism
On the day of a call for student walkouts in NYC public schools, the Student Council at my school stopped business as usual and held an urgent meeting about Gaza. Here’s what some conversations leading up to the meeting sounded like:
The week before, a Black student had reached out to me: “We really need to spread awareness of what’s happening in Gaza. Students are dead. We need to do something, anything.”
During lunch the next day, a Muslim student confided, “My parents don’t want me outside because they don’t want me to get hurt.”
Yet another remarked how “even though I’m not Muslim, my mom is worried” about her covering her hair with a scarf in public. Mom didn’t want her daughter to be a victim of an anti-Muslim hate crime.
When the genocide first started, a teacher told me her Yemeni student scribbled “Free Palestine” on his eraser during class.
Students are clearly facing the effects of this nakba (catastrophe in Arabic).
So, the Student Council meeting had 23 students, majority Black and one Muslim, and two teachers. We began by chanting our club motto, “An injustice to one is an injustice to all,” and proceeded to gather our thoughts on poster paper: what questions, facts, emotions, and opinions we had about the topic.
Some questions cropped up multiple times: why is this happening? Who started it? When will this end? How come they have money for Israel but not us? Will there be peace? What are we supposed to do now?
The conversation evolved into two camps of thought: cynical individualism versus solidarity.
Some felt isolated from the situation and felt powerless to stop it, which is in part a recognition that we are not part of the decision-making class in the world. But without an alternative, that turns into helplessness and the mindset that what we do “doesn’t matter anyway.”
At the height of the disagreement, students compared their lives under occupation by the NYPD and school system. “I’m scared for my life walking in these streets. Where were they during Black Lives Matter, but you want me to support them now?”
Others were appalled and responded, “We need to learn to have more sympathy even if we don’t know them. If you know something, at least spread the word and have a conversation so we don’t repeat history.” One even said, “This sounds like oppression olympics.”
When the student had voiced how they were scared for their lives, they were on to something. The missing connection here is that whether you are a student in Gaza or Brooklyn, you have the enemy fight and the same fight. The ones who train NYPD are the same people who have a fascist exchange session with the IDF.
Whether the ruling class is killing kids in the streets, or kids overseas, we need to shut this system down.
I showed a YouTube video linking the civil rights movement in the U.S. to the movement for Palestinians. They weren’t convinced, yet.
Clearly, we have to win students towards multiracial unity and away from all forms of nationalism. Students had ideas on what to do, which included making solidarity art, organizing a minute of silence, creating a support group for those affected, and more. Today was the first step to what we hope will be a mass fightback against racism. Stay tuned!
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Liberal fascism grows in schools:This is what growing fascism looks like
On November 8 at 11:17 am, a day before the New York City student walkout against the genocide in Gaza, Chancellor David C. Banks sent out a threatening email against political organizing. The terror campaign against anyone who speaks out is real.
Last month, a high school teacher named Mohammad Ahmad was dragged into the tabloids for correctly calling Israel a “terror state” and Banks a “white supremacist imperialist scumbag.” A pre-k teacher named Siriana Abboud was also attacked as anti-Jewish for asking parents to join protests and teaching about the history of Israel-Palestine by saying things like, “We aren’t teaching the truth if we’re silent on Palestine.” First, they are coming for Muslim workers, Arab workers, Brown workers, and any workers who call for the thing education bosses fear most: a real education told by the working class and calls for student-family-worker unity.
In the email, racist Banks stated we should not express “personal political views about political matters during the school day, on school grounds, while working at school events,” including on “social media.” He continues, “When speech and action — even on one’s personal time — undermines the mission or core function of NYCPS [public schools], we will review and take appropriate action.” He then attached the latest update on the Chancellor’s Regulations.
Yet on October 10 at 5:31 pm, this same chancellor sent out an email “unequivocally condemn[ing] these horrific” attacks against “Israeli civilians—including children.” He goes on, “the brutality and trauma wrought by Hamas upon innocent people—especially our youngest members of society—is devastating.” Of course, Hamas are capitalist gangsters slaughtering and kidnapping Israeli kids. But, not once did he condemn the bombs dropped on Gaza’s children. It’s as if Palestinian lives didn’t matter.
The Chancellor before him, Richard Carranza, in the summer of 2020, sent out an email on June 3 at 9:19am condemning the “murder of George Floyd” and was agonized” by “this abominable disregard for Black lives.” If Chancellors cared about Black children, why is New York City still the most segregated school system in this hellhole of a country? Why are Black boys and girls being disproportionately suspended, pushed out, and terrorized by metal detectors every day? Of course, these Chancellors (be they Black, Latin) are no friends of our working-class kids.
I say this to make the point that as the world spirals deeper into crisis, the ruling class will use the language of “inclusion” and “diversity” to attack antiracist fightbacks.
As the world’s children gain more class consciousness and their learning conditions become ever more unsustainable, the education bosses—a tentacle of the capitalist government—will codify fascism. They do so by distorting reality, taking more control of what/how we teach, creating an atmosphere of fear and terror in the face of mass murders, passing laws explicitly attacking our class, and thus exposing the bosses dictatorship behind this democracy.
To this, we education workers say: in the name of kids who die, smash the bosses and their state. A daunting task, isn’t it? But, the only other option is to accept, pretend, drug, and selfcare our way into oblivion. If we haven’t started the fight, we need to begin at the beginning: a conversation. If we start, we need to continue building.
As for the struggle, more details are coming next time! Fight on, comrades and friends!
Pakistan’s bosses forcing migrants out
Reuters, 10/31–As the clock ticked down to the Nov. 1 deadline Pakistan set for undocumented migrants to leave the country, Muhammad Rahim boarded a bus from Karachi to the Afghan border. "We'd live here our whole life if they didn't send us back," said the 35-year-old Afghan national, who was born in Pakistan, married a Pakistani woman, and raised his Pakistan-born children in the port city - but has no Pakistani identity documents. The Taliban government in Afghanistan said some 60,000 Afghans returned between Sept 23 to Oct 22 from Pakistan, which announced on Oct 4 it would expel undocumented migrants who do not leave. Pakistan is home to over 4 million Afghan migrants and refugees, about 1.7 million of whom are undocumented, according to Islamabad…Despite the challenges facing migrants, Pakistan is the only home many of them know and a sanctuary from the economic deprivation and extreme social conservatism that Afghanistan is grappling with, said Samar Abbas of the Sindh Human Rights Defenders Network, which is helping 200 Afghans seeking to remain.
China’s growth is limited by bosses’ desire for racial purity
The Economist, 5/3–For hundreds of years, China could boast of having more people than any other country. The title became official in the 1950s when the UN began compiling such data…A huge labour supply also helped to boost its annual gdp growth, which has averaged close to 9% over the past three decades. Last month China’s reign came to an end…the shift has troubling implications for the new number two. China’s working-age population has been shrinking for a decade…Its population as a whole declined last year—and it is aging rapidly. This is likely to hinder economic growth and create an enormous burden of care…Yet when officials in Beijing mull solutions, one seems largely absent from the discussion: immigration. China has astonishingly few foreign-born residents. Of its 1.4bn people, around 1m, or just 0.1%, are immigrants. China’s future economic and social needs resemble those that have made other societies recruit guest workers…opposition to multiculturalism is also fuelled by claims of Chinese racial purity long peddled by nationalists. Officials boast of a single Chinese bloodline dating back thousands of years.
Thousands of Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli bosses
Al Jazeera, 11/13–WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned of a “dire and perilous” situation in Gaza’s hospitals, saying more patients, including premature babies, are “tragically” dying. Gaza’s two largest hospitals, al-Shifa and al-Quds, have both closed. Israeli snipers continue to fire at anyone near al-Shifa Hospital, trapping thousands inside. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said the conditions under which civilians are evacuating in the Gaza Strip are “precarious and unsafe”. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has said “pauses” are needed to enable the evacuation of hospital patients who need urgent medical care. More than 11,100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7, although the number has not been updated since contact was lost with key hospitals on Friday. In Israel, the death toll from Hamas’s attacks stands at more than 1,200, having been revised downwards…
Babies dying in Gaza from Israeli and U.S. bombs
France24, 11/6–Shorouq is seven months pregnant with her first child. She is living in a shelter in Khan Younis in the south of Gaza. "How can I possibly give birth here?" she asks. "There's no access to healthcare and hygiene…More than 150 births take place every day…"A lot of people, especially children, are suffering from infections, including skin sores and waterborne diseases like diarrhea," says Dr Bashar Murad, director of the Al Quds Hospital in Gaza City…Diarrhea can be deadly. The World Health Organization says it is the second-biggest cause of death in children under 5 years old around the world. Shorouq is thirsty and hungry all the time. "If I'm lucky, I get one small bottle of water a day and two pieces of bread, with processed cheese and sometimes dried thyme,” she says.
- Information
Editorial: WORKERS RAGE vs IMPERIALIST GENOCIDE
- Information
- 03 November 2023 1058 hits
In Gaza, Palestine, as workers and children fight desperately to survive, our class siblings around the world fight for an end to Israeli and U.S. imperialist genocide. U.S. aid to Israel paid for much of the 12,000 tons of bombs that have hit a densely populated strip of land about the size of Philadelphia (MEMO, 10/25/23). As of October 29, the death toll from this criminal and indiscriminate bombardment stood at more than eight thousand people, nearly half of them children (apnews.com, 10/29). Hundreds more are dying by the day.
Workers’ anger has filled the streets from Cape Town to Dublin, from Caracas to New York City, from Istanbul to Kuala Lumpur. Their rage is driven by the atrocities committed by Israel’s military, which has turned an open-air prison into a death camp. While Palestine-Israel is plagued by misleaders, from Netanyahu to Hamas, the workers of the world, and especially those in Gaza, show the revolutionary potential that we need to build an internationalist communist future led by Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
In imperialist wars, workers die and only bosses win. We need one international working class, one world, and one Party to smash the bosses who are the root cause of these conflicts, from Palestine/Israel to Ukraine and Yemen. It is the task of every CHALLENGE reader to build PLP to advance class consciousness, and to put an end to imperialist war with internationalist, communist revolution. Fighting for communism means abolishing nationalism and racism because they lead workers to the same deadly path laid out by Israel and Hamas. While Israel’s capitalist leaders have far more blood on their hands, both sets of rulers use religion and nationalism to mislead workers to their doom. The idea of separate and warring nations, races, and ethnicities comes from the sick minds of the billionaire bosses. They will be abolished when workers of the world unite to smash the blood-soaked profit system once and for all.
Workers save workers
Essential workers in Gaza are showing our class in real time what communism can look like, even under siege. Rescue workers and volunteers are collectively rescuing children and families from under the rubble of Israel’s bombs. Others continue to labor in grocery stores and bakeries as buildings around them fall and crush their neighbors.
Health care workers in Palestine have gone days without sleep as they struggle to care for our class siblings. On October 21, medical workers at Al-Shifa hospital were treating 3,000 injured people in a facility with beds for 700 (Doctors Without Borders, DWB). Medical workers are performing operations in hallways, in front of family members, with little or no sedation or painkillers. (Doctors Without Borders, 10/24).
Reformist bandaids and capitalist bandits
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was opposed by masses of Israeli workers until shortly before the October 7 massacre by Hamas, uses anti-Arab racism and toxic identity politics to divide Jewish from Arab and Muslim workers. (More than two million Arab workers live in Israel.)The Israeli ruling-class ideology of Zionism rests on the racist idea of Jewish supremacy to justify a “Jewish state”—no matter how many Palestinian workers must be oppressed, exploited, or butchered to sustain it.
The key to resolving this conflict lies in multiracial unity and working-class solidarity. In the U.S., hundreds of Arab, Jewish, Asian, Latin, Black and white workers staged sit-ins at the Capitol in Washington to demand a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter. But members of the U.S. Congress, including fake-left Democrats like Bernie Sander and Aleandria Ocasio-Cortez, have goose-stepped in line behind Imperialist-in-Chief Joe Biden to support even more funds for the Israeli genocide. When asked about Israel’s relentless collective punishment of Gaza’s population, Biden callously acknowledged that “innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war” (Reuters, 10/25).
In the face of such deadly misleadership, workers must call out the racist Zionist bosses in talks with coworkers at their jobs. Teachers must struggle with their students to reject anti-Muslim racism–and anti-Jewish racism, as well. We must all take to the streets to share our internationalist, anti-imperialist, communist ideas–and to refuse to let these nationalist murderers–Democrats and Republicans alike–off the hook. That is how we will forge a brighter future.
Only bosses win when workers feud
Even before the latest Israeli invasion of Gaza, the U.S. was funneling $3 billion a year into Israel’s military. The U.S. Defense Department also has $2 billion worth of weapons and bombs at Israel’s disposal for times of crisis. Israel’s killing machine went into overdrive after the Hamas October 7 attack on Israel that killed more than 1,400 people, the vast majority of them civilians–including dozens of Arab Bedouins (NYT, 10/8/).
Hamas and other Palestinian nationalist bosses offer only death and destruction to the workers of Gaza. But as bad as Hamas may be, let us be clear: The blood on the rubble of Gaza is primarily the fault of Israeli bosses and their U.S. imperialist patrons.
The roots of genocide
The origin of Israel’s occupation of the land previously called Palestine (by British and French imperialists) goes back to the early 1900s. The development of distinct national identities among both Arab and Jewish workers, coupled with the rise of the nationalist movement of Zionism, laid the foundation for the state of Israel. But the country founded in 1948 would never have been established without the U.S. imperialists’ desire for a reliable watchdog to counter Soviet influence in the oil-rich region.
Once the U.S. bosses threw their weight behind a “Jewish state,” the stage was set for the mass genocidal displacement of Palestinian workers. Three wars – the Arab-Israeli War (1947-1949), the Six Day War (1967), and the Yom Kippur War (1973)—killed thousands of workers and fueled racist movements led by bosses on both sides. Today, without a communist alternative, workers in Gaza have no place to turn but the dead end of nationalism and the ruthless clutches of the likes of Hamas.
Nationalism is a dead end;fight for communism!
Bordering Palestine is Egypt, a country led by a group of notoriously corrupt junior capitalists. Though they once allied with Palestinian nationalists, Egypt’s bosses are now starving workers in Palestine out and blocking them from escaping the Israeli bombardment (Foreign Affairs, 10/25). Egypt is stalling until they can make a self-serving deal with Israel. This is nothing less than cold-blooded murder. Workers’ lives can’t wait!
To be in a position to end these imperialist bloodbaths, Progressive Labor Party must grow.Members and friends must build internationalist fightback with urgency. As the U.S., China, and Russia move toward open fascism and world war, today’s violence in Gaza and Ukraine could be tomorrow’s worldwide conflagration. Anywhere imperialism reigns is a potential flashpoint for war. It’s time to turn the bosses’ war into class war. We have a communist world to win!
MSNBC, CNN, and Fox are all racist mouthpieces for the bosses
Al Jazeera, 10/29–Publishing unsubstantiated claims, telling only one side of the story, and painting Palestinians as nothing more than objects in Hamas’s hands are all unprofessional mistakes Western media makes while covering the conflict between Israel and Hamas, media experts and Arab journalists say. Experts and journalists who spoke to Al Jazeera said the systemic “bias in favour of Israel” is “irreparably damaging” the credibility of news agencies…As Western media organisations “dehumanise Palestinians” and “legitimise Israeli violations of international law” as Israel bombs Gaza, it is glaringly obvious that the vital historical context of the trauma Palestinians have been through for the past 75 years is being left out, experts say. United Nations experts say Palestinians in Gaza are facing the risk of genocide…Most of the people within Gaza are the children or grandchildren of Palestinians who were expelled from their homeland during the creation of Israel in 1948 – an event commemorated annually as the “Nakba” or catastrophe.
Israeli Defense Force drops kilotons on bombs on a city
Anadolu Ajansi, 10/24–Israel has dropped more than 12,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, the media office in the Palestinian enclave said on Tuesday. “The explosive force of these explosives is equivalent to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in Japan” in 1945, the office said in a statement. “An average of 33 tons of explosives were dropped per square kilometer on the Palestinian enclave since Israel started its aggression," it added. Home to 2.3 million people, the Gaza Strip has a total area of 365 square kilometers.
Migration is driven by imperialism
Great Cities Institute, October 2023–The U.S. immigration crisis has reached a new boiling point. Apprehensions by federal agents of people crossing the U.S. Southern border is at a near-record high. For the past year, tens of thousands of asylum seekers have appeared in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Denver, many of them dispatched northward in buses by the governors of Texas and Florida. The newcomers have overwhelmed local governments as municipal leaders frantically try to provide them emergency shelter, food and other basic services...Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador summed up the current crisis best when he said recently that U.S. sanctions, especially against Venezuela and Cuba, have directly caused the recent migration surge…“The origins, go deep... sanctions cannot be maintained — blockades — and the poorest countries have to be helped,” he added. Likewise, Colombia’s new President Gustavo Petro said recently: “If we truly want to end the disastrous human exodus through the Darien [Gap], the economic blockade of Venezuela must be ended.”
Netanyahu built Hamas
NYT, 10/24/23—All means were good to undo the notion of Palestinian statehood. In 2019, Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of his center-right Likud party: “Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.”…The strategy was intended to cement the notion that there was no viable Palestinian partner for peace.
The article “No fair contract in a profit system” in the last issue of CHALLENGE (11/1), reported that there were around 4,600 workers at the Chicago Assembly Plant, producing around 2400 vehicles per day. The actual number of workers at the plant is over 5,000, who produce around 700 vehicles per shift when the plant is running at a max capacity.
