After six months of slaughter, Israel’s atrocities in Gaza are becoming more and more obscene. After the calculated killing of aid workers, US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made more critical noises—but they continue to arm and support Israel.

Penny Wong says that the government is “contemplating recognising Palestinian statehood”, but the government won’t call for a permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israel from Gaza.

Israel’s aggression is threatening to spread the war further, through bombing in Lebanon and the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria in a virtually unprecedented attack.

Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital has been completely destroyed with up to 400 people massacred after a two week siege. “Most of the bodies were unrecognisable. Families could only identify them by their clothes,” said Hossam Shabat, a Palestinian journalist who visited the site.

“There wasn’t one full body… Many had their hands and legs tied behind their backs and were flattened by a bulldozer. Many of the bodies were burned and left to be crushed to pieces.”

Eyewitnesses said that Israeli soldiers carried out executions and detained hundreds of men for interrogation.

Israel has withdrawn most troops from Gaza but Netanyahu insists that a date has been set for a ground assault on Rafah.

Aid workers

Children are continuing to die of starvation as Israel restricts the amount of aid entering Gaza.

It has banned the largest aid organisation in Gaza, the UNRWA, from entering Gaza’s north, where over 300,000 people are facing famine.

Israel’s targeted killing of seven aid workers, including Australian Zomi Frankcom, from the World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity is just the latest part of its campaign of terror that has seen 200 aid workers killed since October.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, said, “Knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli forces intentionally killed WCK workers so that donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly.”

The killing was not “tragic”, as Anthony Albanese put it. It was deliberate murder. Albanese has appointed a former Australian Defence Force chief, Mark Binskin, as a special adviser to ensure full transparency from Israel’s inquiry into the killings. It’s a joke.

Israel has killed more that 33,000 Gazans in the last six months. We don’t need an inquiry, we need the killing to stop. But Albanese won’t call for that.

Joe Biden’s hypocrisy is also on display. He calls for a temporary ceasefire and more aid for civilians, but is sending another 1800 MK-84 one tonne and 500 MK-82 half-tonne bombs to Israel as well as 25 more F-35 fighter jets to ensure its genocide can continue.

The Albanese government is also complicit, with Australian companies including Quickstep, Ferra and HTC producing parts for the F-35 jets bombing Gaza.

Albanese says he only supports a long-term ceasefire if Hamas gives up its weapons. Like Biden, he has given the green light to Israel’s continuing killing and its campaign to eliminate Hamas.

But opposition to Israel’s genocide is spreading.

There have been renewed protests in Jordan demanding the government break its peace treaty with Israel. Demonstrations have also re-emerged in Morocco and Egypt, despite the repression.

In the UK even senior Tory MPs are demanding an arms embargo on Israel for carrying out war crimes. Democratic members of the US Congress including pro-establishment figures like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi have called for the US to stop sending weapons to Israel.

We need to keep campaigning to spread support for Palestine into workplaces, unions and the broader community—and to build a wider understanding of Albanese’s complicity in Israel’s crimes.

A protest at the Victorian state Labor conference on 18 May will demand that the state Labor government cuts all ties with Israel, including its 2022 Memorandum of Understanding with the Israeli Ministry of Defence and its partnership with the Israeli weapons company, Elbit Systems. A union-backed resolution is also expected to be put to the conference.

In Sydney construction and maritime unions will stop work and march on 1 May—with a Palestinian speaker and a Free Palestine contingent on the day. As many unionists and Palestine supporters as possible should join it—to help build stronger support for Palestine within the union movement.

Campaigning to drop the charges against MUA members and officials and all those arrested at Sydney’s ZIM shipping blockades is another way to draw more unions into explicit action for Palestine.

Protests targeting military links with Israel can help expose Labor’s failure to ban weapons exports or impose the kind of sanctions that could put real pressure on Israel.

To Free Palestine we need to deepen the campaign to break the Albanese government’s support for Israel and its alliance with US imperialism.

The post Albanese keeps backing Israel even as aid workers murdered first appeared on Solidarity Online.

Spy base Pine Gap is almost certainly playing a key role feeding intelligence to Israel for use against Gaza.

Academic Richard Tanter has made a complaint to the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security, arguing that Pine Gap’s operations mean Australia could be complicit in Israeli acts of genocide identified by the International Court of Justice.

Located just outside Alice Springs, Pine Gap has played a key role in the US intelligence gathering system for 50 years.

Pine Gap controls “four United States geosynchronous signals intelligence satellites”, he writes, which intercept “foreign telecommunications and satellite phones” as well as “telecommunications towers through which many cell phone and internet connections are transmitted; air defence systems, radars and radio communications systems”, among other things.

These ORION satellites, “sit over the equator in a row, ranging roughly from where Pine Gap is through to the middle of the Indian Ocean,” he told an online forum in March. This allows them to intercept signals from a large area of the globe. “The westernmost three of those satellites cover Gaza completely.”

Israel and its spy agencies have an “extraordinarily intimate intelligence relationship” with the US, he writes, with one 2013 secret US National Security Agency (NSA) document showing that, “NSA signals intelligence was to be made available to Israel en masse and in detail, including data captured by Pine Gap-controlled ORION satellites”.

The US has passed on intelligence from Pine Gap to Israel during wars in the past. During the 1973 Yom Kippur war, “the United States unilaterally provided Israel with strategically significant Pine Gap-derived intelligence on the positions of Egyptian military forces pressing Israeli forces in the Sinai”, he notes.

“Pine Gap-derived intelligence enabled the Israel Defence Force to break through Egyptian lines, and encircle a substantial Egyptian force.”

The post Pine Gap aiding Israel’s war first appeared on Solidarity Online.

National Officers’ group complains to exec and legal about ‘anti-trade union’ actions, intimidation by union management and breach of collective agreement

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham and her management team have been accused of contempt for Unite staff’s collective agreement on grievances – and of a string of other abuses, including the use of legal action to silence and intimidate workers and avoid transparency, banning workers from their workplace under an implied threat of dismissal – and putting people into ‘special measures’ to control the union’s internal democracy.

A damning letter from Unite’s ‘Officers’ National Committee’ (ONC) explains that the group has been forced to take the ‘unprecedented’ step of going outside the usual collective agreement to notify the union’s elected executive and its legal director of their grievance, in the hope of getting some action to resolve the grim situation. It then goes on to outline the serious abuses they say they are facing – and to imply that if they are not resolved, staff will be balloted for strike action:

ONC Collective Grievance over Unite management’s interpretation of the Unite Grievance Collective Agreement and the Dignity At Work Collective Agreement.

A Collective Grievance under section 5 of the Unite Grievance Collective Agreement is required to be presented to the Director of Human Resources however because our Collective Grievance is about the way Procedures are being interpreted and changed and how the content of the employees’ grievances necessitates additionally an unprecedented involvement of the Legal Director and the senior lay officials of the Executive Council.

The ONC feels justified in making this decision because repeated representations are getting us nowhere. If employees cannot feel that the Grievance Collective Agreement is to be respected by the Union then as trade unionists we know how to respond. But out of respect for our members and to provide the Executive Council, as the ultimate employing body, with the opportunity to hear our concerns that the rights and protections of Unite workers are being undermined and denied we want to avoid a dispute.

The length of time that grievances and investigations are taking to reach a conclusion is not acceptable in a modern workplace. When employees are waiting months after submitting a grievance due to a refusal of some to participate in the process, being banned from your workplace when not even suspended, and an application of “special measures” to distort democratic structures – none of these are acceptable or are in the traditions of Unite.

The use of suspension powers should only be used with clear justification and always with a review to evaluate the impact of suspension on an individual’s mental health before the suspension stretches to weeks and months.

Using legal privilege to justify enforcing a refusal to allow an employee to present their grievance is disgraceful and anti-trade union. If we believe that part of our role is to challenge power in the workplace where that power is used to suppress workers seeking transparency, expressing their genuinely held views or seeking protection from abuse.

Threats of legal action for raising a grievance cannot be ignored or endorsed. It is contrary to ACAS guidance, a breach of our collective agreement on grievance and Dignity At Work and a denial of natural justice. For any worker to exhibit the courage to voice their concerns about their opinions of inappropriate behaviour against them or others is a right not to be denied. If it is to be crushed or swept away simply because the employer is more powerful and we do nothing about such unfairness in the workplace then who are we standing up for?
In seeking to declare a grievance invalid the employer has cited the issues of trust and confidence. This, in our view, is a further matter of deep and unprecedented concern. Loss of trust and confidence is a legitimate reason for dismissal by an employer so to reference it is to further intimidate the worker. Its use by our management is nonsensical since by definition any grievance is reliant upon trusting your employer to investigate and adjudicate on the matters raised.

These concerns raised by the ONC are based on the senior management team of the union having agreed them which is why in our view the Executive Council is the only body that can hold a special meeting to restore the integrity of the Collective Agreements entered into with the Bargaining Units of the Unite workforce.

We want the following as the resolution to our Collective Grievance. 1) All grievances raised by employees in the union should be investigated, with Unite as our employer honouring its’ obligations by following collective agreements with the bargaining units. 2) The senior management team should work constructively with the ONC to establish a new protocol to ensure grievance and disciplinary investigations should be carried out in an appropriate and timely manner to balancing the right to be heard and natural justice alongside resolving issues that lead to investigations.

Emphases added by Skwawkbox

The explosive allegations compound the long list of alleged issues with Graham’s running of Unite. Her tenure as Unite boss has also been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including destruction of evidence against her husband in threat, misogyny and bullying complaints brought by union employees. She is also embroiled in a defamation lawsuit, and a tribunal case for discrimination, brought by Irish union legend Brendan Ogle for the union’s treatment of him and comments made about him by Graham and her close ally Tony Woodhouse.

She has also been alleged by insiders to have:

• banned Unite officials and national banners from pro-Gaza protests
• banned and smeared films and books exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam
• placed an official under investigation who refused to cancel a Palestine solidarity fringe event at Labour’s 2023 annual conference
• told her chief of staff to threaten a soon-to-retire official with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians

Her supporters also prevented debate and votes on Gaza at a meeting of the union’s elected executive earlier this month. She campaigned for the general secretary position on the basis of a focus on protecting workers and disavowing political interference.

A senior union insider told Skwawkbox:

The Exec would never normally get involved in employee management matters. They would never usually get involved in employee grievances. The officers have emailed them directly to basically say we are getting nowhere with this general secretary, she is out of control using the worst of employer tactics against union employees, we know you don’t deal with our grievances but you are the union’s ultimate body and we are saying to you – do something or we will ballot.

Unite was contacted for comment:

1. It’s clear from this that ONC feels trust has broken down between Unite staff and its management – how has Ms Graham allowed things to fall apart so badly?
2. Unite would never – I hope – tolerate another employer treating staff in this manner, so why is Unite doing so?
3. What is Ms Graham’s explanation for trying to declare grievances invalid rather than resolving them – especially (and ironically) on grounds that ‘trust and confidence’ in the person(s) making the grievance(s) are the issue, which employees are regarding as attempted intimidation?
4. The ONC says that Unite is using legal privilege as an excuse for preventing workers from presenting grievances. Is this true?

The union did not respond by the deadline for publication.

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Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism in Europe but its aim of building a state with the support of imperialist powers has proven disastrous, writes Jacob Starling

In early 1905 a ferocious debate took place in Warsaw’s Great Synagogue. On one side was David Ben-Gurion, a member of Poale Zion and the future founder of the state of Israel. On the other was a young Jewish Socialist known as Shmulik, a representative of the General Jewish Labor Bund.

The subject of the debate was Zionism and the emancipation of the Jewish people.

The Bund argued that Jewish emancipation could be achieved only through socialist revolution, defeating the ruling class which stoked antisemitism and ushering in a tolerant and secular society.

Poale Zion by contrast dismissed the rising Russian revolutionary movement as a matter for Russian Gentiles and claimed that the only thing that could ensure the security of the Jewish people was a Jewish state in Palestine.

Socialism was far more popular among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe than Zionism at the time.

In 1905 the Bund had 40,000 members across the Russian Empire. Two years earlier, the Zionist activist Chaim Weizmann had conceded that Zionism’s hardest struggle was against the Bund.

Today, after the horrors of the Holocaust, it seems like Zionism has won the argument. But the brutality unfolding in Gaza shows how disastrous Zionism has been.

Antisemitism and the Jewish State

It is impossible to understand the origins of Zionism without appreciating the pervasive and intensifying antisemitism in Europe at the end of the 19th century.

In the Russian Empire, home to the majority of the world’s Jewish population, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 led the regime to begin a brutal antisemitic campaign.

Through the establishment of far-right militias known as the “Black Hundreds”, it carried out vicious pogroms against Jewish people to divert peasant unrest.

The regime published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous forged document which purported to reveal an international Jewish conspiracy, a few years later. To this day, the far right continues to repeat its conspiratorial claims that Jews control the world through a secret cabal.

In France, the 1894 trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army colonel, led to a shocking eruption of antisemitism. In 1898, violent antisemitic riots erupted in Paris and 22 professed antisemites were elected to the French Parliament.

It was the Dreyfus Affair in particular which shaped the views of Theodor Herzl, the father of Political Zionism. Herzl was an Austrian journalist who had become deeply disillusioned by the extent of antisemitism in Europe.

In 1896 he published The Jewish State, which outlined the core principles of Zionism. He argued that antisemitism was the inevitable result of Jews trying to integrate into wider society. Therefore, the only possible method of Jewish emancipation would be mass emigration to a new “Jewish State.”

Declaring antisemitism ingrained and incurable, Herzl said that he could now “understand and pardon it”. He concluded that not only was it a waste of time to fight antisemitism, but that it was in the interests of the Zionist movement to collaborate with antisemites.

Knowing that many Jews would not want to leave behind their lives in Europe, he needed to use the antisemitism in Europe to compel them to migrate.

In 1903, several months after the Kishinev pogrom in which 50 Jews were murdered, Herzl met Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Tsarist Minister who had organised the massacre.

When Plehve complained about the Bund, and the growing Jewish socialist movement, Herzl reassured him that they had a common interest in weakening it.

The Bund rightly accused him of collaborating with the regime to help it “disgorge its unwanted Jews”.

Zionists continually collaborated with antisemites. In 1933, the Zionist Congress of Germany sent the newly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler a memorandum of support. They reassured Hitler that they had a common interest in forcing Jews from Germany and that the Zionist movement would oppose the international anti-Nazi boycott.

Ben-Gurion himself opposed plans to help Jewish children emigrate from Germany to Britain.

He reasoned that if he had to pick between two options, one in which all the children in Germany could emigrate to Britain, and one in which half would die but half would emigrate to Israel, he would pick the second option. For Ben-Gurion, Jewish lives mattered less than the survival of his Zionist colony.

This reveals a contradiction at the heart of Zionism. The purported basis of Herzl’s Jewish state was that it would end antisemitism and ensure the safety of the Jewish people.

Yet Zionism has supported and refused to challenge antisemitism, increasing the danger that it poses to Jewish people.

Zionism and colonialism

Zionism’s aims would be possible only with the support of imperialism. Zionism was to be a colonial movement.

In The Jewish State, Herzl argued that the British Empire would benefit from a Jewish state in Palestine, describing it as a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”.

During the First World War, Britain and France secretly arranged to split the Middle East between them. France was to have a major stake in Palestine.

It was in this context that Chaim Weizmann pitched the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He assured him that it would solidify British control of the Suez Canal and prevent Palestine falling into French hands.

Thus, in 1917, the Imperial War Cabinet published the Balfour Declaration, promising a “national homeland” for the Jewish people in Palestine.

The fact that this “national homeland” would be founded in a land already inhabited by the Palestinians did not faze the Zionists or their imperial patrons.

According to Lloyd George himself, “Zionism … is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

Britain allowed larger numbers of Jewish settlers to migrate to Palestine, which saw the Jewish population of the area increase from 5 per cent in 1914 to 30 per cent by 1945.

The Zionists’ aims would be realised in the Nakba of 1948, when more than 850,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes in order to found the state of Israel.

As a colonial project, Zionism has always rested on racism and brutality. In a grotesque inversion of justice, Zionism claims that the security of one people can only be achieved by the disenfranchisement of another.

Zionism and “Eretz Israel”

Zionism isn’t just an inherently racist endeavour; from the outset it also pursued an expansionist agenda.

In 1918 the World Zionist Organisation submitted a map of “Eretz Israel” which extended north into the Golan Heights and South Lebanon, east into the West Bank and West Jordan, south into a small part of Saudi Arabia and west into the Gaza Strip and Eastern Egypt.

This map is based on a pseudo-historical reading of the Old Testament and claims to depict the Biblical Kingdom of David and Solomon at its greatest extent.

Although Ben-Gurion and the other Zionist leaders were largely non-religious, they recognised that religion could give legitimacy to what amounted to a crude land grab.

Understanding that the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states saw the Zionists as European colonial invaders, Israel also set out to crush Arab resistance through military might.

Even when Ben-Gurion agreed to the UN Partition of Palestine in 1947, he secretly declared that Israel would not limit itself to these borders.

In 1948, Israel seized an area 38 per cent greater than under the UN partition plan, and in 1967 it went further, occupying the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula.

Although Israel agreed to leave the Sinai Peninsula in 1979, and withdrew its settlements from Gaza in 2005, the Likud Party, to which current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu belongs, still views these as parts of Eretz Israel. And Israel’s blockade of Gaza means that its occupation of the Strip never really ended.

Although Israel aims to occupy as much land as possible, it also needs to ensure a demographic majority of Jews within its territory to maintain itself as an ethno-state.

Thus, the Indigenous inhabitants of the land must be removed, either through ethnic cleansing or outright extermination.

This was the motivation behind the Nakba of 1948 and today motivates the genocide in Gaza.

It is also why the West Bank has been held under Israeli military occupation for more than 50 years, as Israel has moved in Jewish settlers, forcibly expelled Palestinian villages and gradually colonised the area.

The socialist challenge

While Herzl’s conclusion from the Dreyfus Affair was that antisemitism was too pervasive to be defeated, the left’s response showed the opposite. In 1896, author Emile Zola released a ferocious open letter accusing the French government of antisemitism and arguing that Dreyfus’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice.

Zola was forced to flee the country, but his letter ignited an international campaign calling for the re-trial of Dreyfus.

This was a critical moment in the development of the socialist left. A popular movement forced the French Government to eventually exonerate Dreyfus. From this point on, the left would see antisemitism as one of its most dangerous opponents.

Zionism’s push for Jewish people to separate from their societies in Europe through establishing their own state in Palestine has been a dead end. It has produced ethnic cleansing and seen Israel become a violent oppressor of the Palestinians.

In the past six months, descendants of those who experienced the Holocaust have carried out a new genocide against Gaza.

Zionism has been a disastrous response to antisemitism. Anti-Jewish racism can be fought—as the history of Jewish radicalism and the left shows. It is rebuilding the socialist tradition that holds the hope for ending the colonial violence of Zionism and racism in all its forms.

The post Antisemitism and the origins of Zionism first appeared on Solidarity Online.