Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
POLAND
The General Alliance of Trade Unions in Poland (OPZZ), Calls On Polish Government To End Military Cooperation With Israel
The General Alliance of Trade Unions in Poland (OPZZ), the largest nationwide umbrella confederation of trade unions in Poland, comprising both of unified nationwide trade union organisations and the sectoral federations of trade unions, supports the Palestine trade union call for an arms embargo.
Statement on the need to stop Israeli attacks on the Palestinian people and initiate a genuine peace process.
Guided by the values of the trade union movement we represent – freedom and equality for all people and their right to live in peace – we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian trade unions’ call for an end to the support and legitimisation of Israeli attacks on the Palestinian people.
We call on the Polish authorities to end military cooperation with Israel until the bombing of Gaza and other military actions taken against Palestinian civilians are stopped, and for the Israeli authorities to enter into a genuine peace process with the Palestinians. We cannot remain silent in the face of the thousands of victims of the bombings, many of them children, the razing to the ground of entire residential neighbourhoods, the compounding of the humanitarian disaster by cutting off fuel, electricity, water, food and medical supplies, and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people with the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing. Enough of the deaths of innocent people of any nationality!
Peace between people of different faiths and nationalities is possible. It is time to put an end to the spiral of violence, an essential condition for which is an end to the colonialism, occupation and apartheid that Palestinians have faced for decades.
OPZZ leadership
October 23, 2023
Source: OPZZ
BRITAIN
ACR Statement on Palestine
Statement from Anticapitalist Resistance on the situation in Palestine
Israel is committing war crimes on a massive scale in Gaza. Collective punishment, siege and blockade, denial of food, water, power and other essentials, use of white phosphorous weapons against civilians, uprooting and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of residents – all of these are undoubted war crimes, and the perpetrators should face international tribunals.
ACR broadsheet on Palestine, slogans say Ceasefire Now, End the Siege of Gaza, Release Palestinian Prisoners and Boycott Divestment Sanctions
Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli troops and settlers continue their daily persecution, killing scores of Palestinians since 7 October and driving them out of several villages in preparation for further illegal settlements.
It is no excuse to point to atrocities committed by Hamas – these too are to be condemned. But we should not lose sight of the context. Israel’s behaviour in the past two weeks is a direct continuation of its criminal behaviour over the past 75 years, beginning with the Nakba of 1948 – the establishment of the Israeli state over the ruins of Palestine, the expulsion of the majority of its population, and the destruction of hundreds of towns and villages.
The suffering of the Palestinian people since then, whether as exiles and refugees denied return to their homes and land, as residents of the West Bank and Gaza living under Israeli occupation and military rule since 1967, or as very much third-class citizens in the Israeli state (where they now form 20% of the population) has provided the fertile ground in which nihilistic religious fanaticism has taken hold – strongly abetted, as documented in the Israeli press, by tacit support from successive Israeli governments.
The area between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea is now, in effect, one single apartheid state. For three-quarters of its short existence, this has been the reality of the Israeli state. And that is why the call “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” reflects a genuine aspiration for liberation from an intolerable reality and for freedom and equality, and not an antisemitic desire to eliminate all Jews from the region.
AntiCapitalist Resistance stands in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation. We fight for a future in which Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews will be able to live in genuine equality between the river and the sea.
We have launched a fundraising appeal for our work here.
29 Oct 2023
AntiCapitalist Resistance
• https://anticapitalistresistance.org/acr-statement-on-palestine/
SWEDEN
Internationalen Stop the war and terror
Stop the war and terror
Anger explod against oppression
Stop Israels occupation
Every course on human rights, every sermon about equal rights and every proclamation about the highly esteemed moral grounds of Western civilization warns us about making “the others” into strangers. Without such a transmogrification, how would the genocides accompanying the two world wars - against Armenians, Jews and Chinese, to only mention a few - have been made possible?
The first step is to make opponents and displeasing groups into representations of “the others". To impersonal strangers which successively lose their individual characteristics. The next step is ostracism, exclusion and demonization, to prevent the others from mixing with “us”. In the end if the process the others have become impossible to recognize as one of us. Added to this is violence and oppression that builds disgust, hatred and contempt, among both the perpetrators who seek to uphold and justify their oppression, and the oppressed who have been humiliated and lost their loved ones, homes and belongings as much as their freedom. Add to such a heated climate of public hatred the logic of war and genocide is imminent.
The concept of genocide was developed during the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 when the mass murderers of nazism were brought to trial before the victors of the WWII. The UN Convention on Genocide from 1948 describes genocide as the act in which national, ethnic, racial or religious groups are annihilated partly or completely. In addition to direct violence and immediate killing, the convention prohibits “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Is this not the very thing we have before our eyes today in Gaza and on the West Bank?
Hamas’ atrocities against civilians in southern Israel - at the same time an expression and an exploitation of the hatred of the oppressed - are used by the West as a pretext to accelerate the processes of “othering” the Palestinian population in particular and the Islamic populations in general.
While news media trumpets the atrocities carried out by Hamas’, the Israeli regime’s terror is at the same time portrayed as being of a much more reasonable nature - or at least understandable. When the Al-Ahli al Arabi Baptist Hospital in Gaza was blown up, causing hundreds of women and children killed, the world’s most powerful man in tems of policy, the US President Biden, immediately endorsed the explanation of the Israeli regime and declared in sports terms that it was the “the other team” which was to blame for the casualties. Despite the unclear circumstances surrounding the bombing of the Al-Ahli al Arabi Hospital, the ingratiate western medias uncritically pass on the Israeli version of the event. Swedish television even had a representative of the IDF – the Israeli armed forces, at the same time engaged in bombing Gaza City into rubble and dust – who provided a “scientific” explanation of why this bombing was not a work of Israel, but of the Islamic Jihad. Not a single doubt about the reliability of the source nor the plausibility of the explanation were uttered.
By such selective blindness and alienation, is the West mobilized behind the Israeli regime’s attempts at bombing away “the Palestinian Problem” backed by the familiar US imperialism.
At a breathtaking pace, the rift between the stories of our western media and the impressions of billions of people - outside of and in the west - of what is at stake in Gaza and the Middle East, is widening. Watching Biden’s foreign policy fall apart, Russian state media rub their hands and urges countries of the Global South to side with Russia in the war of aggression on Ukraine and World politics in general.
By the time this editorial is written, we do not know whether the war against Gaza has developed into a full-scale invasion by Israel or into a great war between Iran, Israel and the United States. But the fact that a genocide directed at Gaza’s palestinian population is taking place in front of our eyes can only be denied by those blinded with hatred of “the other”. The same applies to the Swedish right-wing government with its’ restrictment on aid to Palestine and threats to deport “sympathizers with Hamas”. That is not organized terrorists of the Hamas, but simply ordinary people protesting the massacre of Palestinian children and civilians. This is how the blindness towards genocide, which enlightened future generations will have to wrap their heads around in order to understand, is manufactured. It is therefore our duty to keep our eyes open and refuse to remain silent.
Editorial of Internationalen
Internationalen. Nummer 41,12. 10 2023
UNITED STATES
Labor for Palestine: Stand With Palestinian Workers
Stand With Palestinian Workers:
Cease the Genocide Now—Stop Arming Israel!
Labor for Palestine, October 24, 2023
“We need you to take immediate action—wherever you are in the world—to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.” An Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel (October 16, 2023)
The undersigned U.S. workers, trade unionists, and anti-apartheid activists join labor around the world in condemning the Israeli siege on Gaza that has killed or maimed thousands of Palestinians—many of them children—and stand with Palestinians’ “right to exist, resist, return, and self-determination.”
The latest Israeli attacks reflect more than a century of ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, genocide, and apartheid—including Israel’s establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine.
Israel’s crimes are only possible because of more than $3.8 billion a year (or $10+ million per day) in bipartisan US military aid that gives Israel the guns, bullets, tanks, ships, jet fighters, missiles, helicopters, white phosphorus and other weapons to kill and maim the Palestinian people. This is the same system of racist state violence that, through shared surveillance technology and police exchange programs, brutalizes BIPOC and working class people in the United States and around the world.
In response, we demand an immediate end to the genocide, and embrace the recent Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel:
• To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. To refuse to transport weapons to Israel.
• To pass motions in their trade union to this effect.
• To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution.
• Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding to it.
• We further reaffirm the call on labor bodies to respect previous Palestinian trade union appeals for solidarity by adopting this statement, and/or the model resolution below to divest from Israel Bonds, sever all ties with the Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, and respect the Palestinian picket line for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).
Initial Signers on behalf of Labor for Palestine
(organizational affiliations listed for identification only)
Suzanne Adely, Labor for Palestine, US Palestinian Community Network, Arab Workers Resource Center; Food Chain Workers Alliance (staff); President, National Lawyers Guild
Monadel Herzallah, Arab American Union Members Council
Ruth Jennison, Department Rep., Massachusetts Society of Professors, MTA, NEA; Co-Chair, Labor Standing Committee River Valley DSA; Delegate to Western Mass Area Labor Federation
Lara Kiswani, Executive Director, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC); Block the Boat
Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
Corinna Mullin, PSC-CUNY International Committee; CUNY for Palestine
Clarence Thomas, Co-Chair, Million Worker March; Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 (retired)
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