[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] The Crucial Role of Waterfront (Logistics) Workers in the (International) Boycott Israel Campaign

Mon Sep 29 10:47:47 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 3:17 PM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] The Crucial Role of Waterfront (Logistics)
Workers in the (International) Boycott Israel Campaign
To: "CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES at jiscmail.ac.uk" <
CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES at jiscmail.ac.uk>, Debate is a listserve that
attempts to promote information and analyses of interest to the independent
left in South and Southern Africa <debate-list at fahamu.org>, WSFDiscuss List
<WorldSocialForum-Discuss at openspaceforum.net>,
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org

*Peter sez:*

*An impressive account of the crucial role one part of US labour is playing
in the Solidarity with Palestine movement, which has implications for the
role international labour (particularly dock and port labour) could play.
This has to do with the dependence of a globalised and informatised
capitalism on the logisitics industry
<http://https://www.itfglobal.org/transport-international/ti35logistics.cfm>.
*

*This has to do with the equally crucial role played by the
Histadrut-founded Zim shipping line in support of the Zionist state.*

*Given the error of Salehi in spelling out the acronym 'Cosatu' (which is
actually a 'Congress'), I thought he had got it wrong about the role of the
state-identified (both pro-US and pro-Israel) Jewish Labour Committee of
the USA in the creation of Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine. The
latter has been energetically promoted internationally by Eric Lee, creator
of both LabourStart and UnionBook (though this tulip last flowered
late-2013). I then checked up on the individual link between the JLP and
TULIP, which turns out to be Stuart Appelbaum
<http://http://www.thejewishweek.com/features/new-york-minute/viewing-wisconsins-battle-labor-perspective>,
though his leadership of the JLP is left (diplomatically?) unmentioned on
the TULIP home page (though it can be found on a link on that site).
<http://http://www.tuliponline.org/?p=95> *

*Now read on...*

*https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/the-foes-of-israel/
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/the-foes-of-israel/> Jacobin Magazine
       9.24.14 Workers Against Israel Nothing is more crucial to the
success of BDS than the movement’s relationship with organized labor. by
Kumars Salehi*

Over the past year, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign
has finally gained some widespread political attention in the United
States: from the American Studies Association
<http://www.theasa.net/from_the_editors/item/asa_members_vote_to_endorse_academic_boycott/>’s
vote to endorse the academic boycott of Israel, to the flurry of student
votes for divestment
<http://www.bdsmovement.net/2014/fifth-university-of-california-campus-passes-divestment-motion-12132>
at the University of California and other US campuses, to the unprecedented
<http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/roger-waters-slams-scarlett-johansson-sodastream-ad-article-1.1601378>
criticism
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/24/scarlett-johansson-sodastream-statement_n_4661945.html>
that met Scarlett Johansson when she quit her role as global ambassador for
Oxfam so she could continue as global ambassador for SodaStream.

Last month’s protests at West Coast ports point not only to the momentum
with which BDS has moved forward – more quickly than most activists could
have predicted – but also to the possibility of direct action posing an
ever graver threat to business as usual for Israel, particularly when
organized labor is on board.

Until now, no one had ever kept an Israeli cargo ship from unloading for
two consecutive days; we blocked the *Zim Piraeus* for four.

From Saturday, August 16 to Tuesday, August 19, activists at the Port of
Oakland protested Israeli human rights abuses by picketing the berths where
the ship intended to offload its cargo.

Zim Integrated Shipping Services isn’t just an Israeli shipping company.
It’s the largest Israeli shipping company — the tenth largest in the world
— and it’s intimately tied
<http://www.haaretz.com/business/.premium-1.601829> to the government,
which owns a special stake in Zim (known as the “golden share”) and
requires that it keep at least eleven ships at all times, to be used by the
military in the case of national security emergencies.

Founded in 1945 by the Histadrut
<http://www.bdsmovement.net/files/2011/02/IJAN-LFP-Histadrut-briefing-illustrated.pdf>
(the main Israeli trade union body) and the Jewish Agency, Zim functioned
during the Nakba
<http://mondoweiss.net/2013/05/continuous-displacement-palestinian> as the
sole <http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/zim.shtml> maritime
connection for Zionist colonists and, subsequently, the nascent state of
Israel. The Israeli government’s ownership of Zim has given the company
monopoly power from the beginning: US loans going towards transportation,
for example, would be earmarked for Zim, prompting one member of the
Knesset in 1950 to remark
<http://books.google.com/books?id=vBWFd4vYxDMC&pg=PA101&dq=zim+recanati+knesset&hl=de&sa=X&ei=420bVMWgGMu6ogTRsIAw&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=zim%20recanati%20knesset&f=false>
that he “approve[s] the loan legislation, on condition that there is one
law for all, and that all companies are treated equally with [government
owned] Zim Shipping…. Zim has privileges which private companies don’t.”

Zim was privatized in 2004 when Israel Corp., owned by the Ofer Brothers
Group, bought the government’s stake in the company for $115 million
<http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-761023>. But the government still
retains its “golden share,” which gives it veto power over major share
sales or other corporate actions.

The Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) has called
<http://www.usacbi.org/2010/06/pgftu-message-to-san-francisco-bay-area-trade-unionists/>
on workers worldwide, and Bay Area workers in particular, to refuse to
facilitate the commerce of Zim and other Israeli companies as part of BDS.
This call was supported by COSATU
<http://www.cosatu.org.za/show.php?ID=9229>, the Coalition of South African
Trade Unions.

US unions have for the most part been slow to respond, due in part to the
deep and longstanding influence of the Histadrut and its US counterpart,
the Jewish Labor Committee
<http://laborforpalestine.net/labor-for-palestine-briefings/the-jewish-labor-committee-and-apartheid-israel/>
(JLC). Formed as an anti-fascist solidarity group in 1934, the JLC has
since the end of World War II taken the most reactionary positions on
political (and particularly racial justice) issues, from supporting
McCarthyite anti-communist, anti-Semitic witch-hunts in the 1950s, to
demonizing the black freedom movement in the sixties, to helping roll back
affirmative action policies in the seventies, to supporting the US attacks
on Vietnam and Iraq.

The organization is primarily concerned, however, with enforcing a
pro-Israel line in elite labor and Democratic Party circles, including
through its cozy relationship with the AFL-CIO. In 2009, the JLC co-founded
the group Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine
<http://revitalisinglabour.blogspot.com/2009/05/pro-israel-unionists-seek-to-undermine.html>
(TULIP), whose specific purpose is to prevent trade union support for BDS
and undermine it where it already exists.

Given this political climate, it’s remarkable that this summer’s Block the
Boat action in Oakland was able to succeed — and only due to mass community
participation and solidarity from the rank and file of the Bay Area
dockworkers’ union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)
Local 10. While the JLC and other Zionist organizations wield great
influence over the AFL-CIO, the ILWU actually broke with the AFL-CIO as
recently as August 2013. The union’s slogan is “An injury to one is an
injury to all,” and their history bears out their commitment to
international solidarity.

It was a strike
<http://www.ilwu.org/death-of-nelson-mandela-recalls-decades-of-ilwu-support-for-anti-apartheid-struggle/>
by Local 10 that kept a South African ship from offloading its cargo for
eleven days in 1984. In 1978, Local 10 refused
<http://www.ilwu19.com/history/the_ilwu_story/international_solidarity.htm>
to load weapons parts that were supposed to be sent to Chile’s brutal
military dictatorship. During the Occupy protests, the union refused to
work as part of the general strike called for by Occupy Oakland and other
activists. Local 10 member Clarence Thomas traces
<http://www.workers.org/articles/2014/08/27/west-coast-activists-block-zionist-ships>
the union’s history of honoring direct actions back eighty years: “[w]e’ve
respected community picket lines since 1935, when Local 10 workers refused
to load metal that was bound for the war machines of fascist Italy and
Japan.”

Since sympathy strikes are illegal under the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act,
the union leadership itself couldn’t take a position in support of Block
the Boat’s community picket. But the sympathies of the rank-and-file are
nonetheless clear, nowhere more so than in the 2010 resolution
<http://www.labournet.net/docks2/1006/oakland6.html> (adopted by Local 10’s
executive board) condemning Israel’s attack on the *Mavi Marmara* and
declaring support for the PGFTU call for boycott. That year saw the first
successful port action targeting an Israeli ship in 2010, when (in response
to Israel’s massacre of nine activists aboard the Gaza aid flotilla *Mavi
Marmara*) five hundred activists in Oakland prevented a Zim ship from
unloading for a full day.

Then as now, the efforts of Oakland’s community in support of the
Palestinian liberation movement would not have enjoyed such success without
the support of the ILWU rank and file. According to Block the Boat
organizer Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource and
Organizing Center (AROC), part of the reason for the successes of the Bay
Area Palestine solidarity work lies in its history of engagement with
organized labor: “The Arab and Palestinian community worked for over a
decade to establish a relationship to the labor movement in the Bay Area.”

Indeed, Block the Boat had initially been planned for August 2, but AROC
organizers pushed for it to be rescheduled to August 16 in order to give
them time to develop their relationship with the union, as well as to bring
out the Palestinian and other Arab leadership that has been central
throughout protests against the Gaza massacre. Day after day, AROC and
other activists went to the union hall to talk to the workers, to explain
why they were carrying out the action, to answer their questions, and to
ask for their support, in a continual process of engagement.

We also had the support of ILWU members who are community activists around
many anti-racist struggles. The most important relationships weren’t with
the union leadership, Kiswani says, but with the rank and file, who were
supportive throughout the action: “[W]e even received phone calls and
emails from ILWU workers providing us with vital information about the
ship, its whereabouts and its anticipated departure.”

While Block the Boat was originally planned as a one-off, the success of
the August 16 action (the *Piraeus* didn’t even attempt to dock) created
such momentum that the effort broadened beyond the initial organizing. The
community returned every day at 5 am, and then again at 5 pm. Zim tried to
wait it out — they even (apparently) tried to fake us out by making for Los
Angeles and then doubling back to dock in a different berth, operated by
Ports of America (PA).

The little cargo Zim managed to offload was, according to sources in the
longshoremen’s union, a result of the duplicity of PA, which circumvented
our picket by calling in longshoremen to work other ships before
transferring them to the *Piraeus*. In 2010, Local 10 was under contract,
which guaranteed they would be paid irrespective of their decision to
strike. This time, however, they were without a contract, which meant they
wouldn’t be paid if they refused to work. Still, every morning and every
evening, Local 10 lived up to their values and reputation by refusing to
cross our picket line.

We were told that, officially, the longshoremen wouldn’t cross because of
“unsafe working conditions.” It wasn’t our picket that made the conditions
unsafe, but rather, potential police reaction — union members pointed to a
2005 incident in which Oakland police shot workers crossing a picket line
with rubber bullets. As long as our picket line was big enough, Local 10
would respect it.

The longshoremen kept their word. As midnight approached on Tuesday, August
19, we heard from several sources that those longshoremen who had been
manipulated into working the Zim ship were planning to engage in a work
slowdown, deliberately minimizing the amount of cargo they unloaded. The
insistence of AROC and other activists that the Block the Boat coalition
take the time to cultivate a relationship with labor based on trust and
respect turned out to be crucial.

While some sloppy media reports
<http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/08/20/israeli-owned-cargo-ship-zim-piraeus-unloaded-at-port-of-oakland-following-gaza-protests-union-workers-longshoremen-ilwu-palestinians/>
alleged that the ship had successfully unloaded its cargo before leaving
the Bay, sources told us that only a fraction of the 176 Oakland-bound
containers were actually offloaded. One Port of Oakland official claimed 26
had been unloaded; other union sources said 50. These figures remain
unconfirmed, but regardless of the exact numbers, as the ship finally left
it was clearly <https://twitter.com/mazthespazz/status/502488806948225025>
still laden with red containers, while no cargo was loaded onto it.

This information has since been confirmed by companies quoted
<http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/21391> as saying they’re reconsidering
doing business with Zim in the wake of Block the Boat. It would certainly
explain why it spent August 20 moored in the Bay instead of taking off
immediately. Maybe it was waiting for us to leave before attempting to dock
at another berth. At any rate, it wasn’t a decision Zim made lightly: one
dockworker told us every twelve hours we delayed the *Piraeus* cost the
company $50,000.

That figure, too, is still unconfirmed, but what we know for sure is that
the lost revenue greatly exceeds the operating costs. After activists in
Los Angeles, Tacoma, and Seattle also succeeded in delaying Zim ships, it’s
clear that Block the Boat isn’t just a flash in the pan: doing business
with Zim can cause significant delays, and customers who don’t want to deal
with that will take their business elsewhere.

So it appears that, as a BDS tactic, Block the Boat has legs. And it’s no
surprise that it was kicked off in the Bay Area, a hotbed of Palestinian
and Palestine solidarity activism. University of California Berkeley and
University of California Davis, for example, were home to two of the
earliest chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an
organization of which I am a member. In 2002, Berkeley hosted the first
National SJP Conference. Since then, SJP chapters have been at the vanguard
of BDS campaigns (specifically focused on divestment) at universities
across the United States.

Kiswani, herself one of the co-founders of SJP at Davis, says the strength
and vision of pro-Palestinian organizing in the Bay Area is attributable,
in part, to the painstaking work of building coalitions across movements:
“The organizing that led up to the Block the Boat action in Oakland
included the leadership of AROC and that of Arabs and Palestinians,” she
told me, “but also involved the leadership of organizers that work on
issues of policing, militarization, anti-war, economic, housing, and racial
justice.”

The growing success of BDS — through divestment initiatives, Block the
Boat, or other direct actions — depends on precisely these kinds of
relationships. As this action showed, no single relationship is more
crucial to the effectiveness of BDS than its relationship to organized
labor. BDS isn’t just about isolating Israel. It’s also about normalizing
that isolation, so that every dollar Zim loses due to delays or spoiled
goods carries with it the threat of much greater losses.

Zim is already in dire financial straits, requiring a gigantic restructuring
plan <http://www.haaretz.com/business/1.602705> that would, among other
things, write off $1.4 billion of the company’s $3.4 billion debt. Israel
regards Zim as vital to national security, and not just because of its
golden share or those eleven ships. The Israeli government’s ability to
preserve its regime of ethnic cleansing and apartheid ultimately depends on
its smooth integration into the global capitalist system.

Corporations like Zim are lifelines that tie Israel to the “international
community” of global trade. The Israeli economy is heavily dependent
<http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/why-bds-movement-can-no-longer-be-ignored-1955265267>
on exports, mostly to the US and Europe: A 2011 meeting of Israeli
capitalists concluded that, if government policy doesn’t change
dramatically, Israel eventually will face isolation on the order of what
ended apartheid South Africa.

One of Israel’s largest global industries is the repression industry
<http://israelglobalrepression.wordpress.com/>. Israel plays a critical
role in supplying repressive regimes — from Pinochet to the Argentinean
junta to the South African apartheid government, from the United States to
Brazil to India — with the technology, weapons, strategies, and methods of
repression that they need to repress their own populations and gain
political and economic power through the exploitation of people and land
across the globe.

However, beyond the war economy, according to the Israel Export Institute,
“a worrying picture”: Israeli exports to the US have been declining for
five consecutive quarters, falling 7 percent
<http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-exports-down-7-in-second-quarter-1000959241>
in the second quarter of 2014. The Palestine solidarity movement is moving
from strength to strength. The protests of Zim, as the last big solidarity
action in the wake of Israel’s counterinsurgency operation in the Gaza
Strip, makes clear how ripe the situation is for an escalation of BDS
action in the US and worldwide.

The keys to escalating BDS lie at the intersections of struggles. The
progressive currents in organized labor are in many cases already
sympathetic to Palestinians. It’s up to activists to reciprocate by being
precise in our work, and ever mindful of the pressures union workers are
under and their experience of corporate power.

It’s up to everyone who stands in solidarity with Palestinians to make
connections. The Zim line imports Israeli-made ammunition
<http://truth-out.org/news/item/25844-israeli-company-targeted-by-oakland-blockade-imports-ammunition-into-us>
into the US for use by police and the military. The bullets Israel
routinely uses to kill Palestinians with impunity are the same bullets the
US uses to kill black and brown people from Oakland to Ferguson to
Afghanistan.

Zim is a key material link between the purveyors and the executors of
imperial violence, between racist state repression at home and abroad. This
year as last year, SWAT teams and military contractors from around the
world convened in Oakland for the annual “Urban Shield”
<http://www.commondreams.org/news/2013/10/24/urban-shield-epitome-state-repression-coming-town-near-you>
global training exercise and weapons expo. Like other such events, Israelis
feature prominently at Urban Shield, often advertising their wares as
field-tested on Palestinians.

This year, Urban Shield was met with fierce resistance from a coalition of
hundreds of activists, from those organizing against local police brutality
and mass incarceration to those organizing against Israeli militarism and
apartheid.

Oakland won’t be hosting Urban Shield next year
<http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-will-not-host-Urban-Shield-next-year-5738774.php>.
And a glance at the Zim Pacific line’s schedule
<http://www.zim.com/services/schedules/pages/longterm.aspx?selectService=ZCS&selectLine=ZCP&selectLinetext=Zim+Container+Service+Pacific+%28ZCP%29>
indicates there will be no Zim ships docking in California — not in the Bay
Area, and not in Los Angeles — after the next Oakland Block the Boat action
on October 25.

That’s what BDS looks like to me.

Kumars Salehi is a PhD student in German Studies and a member of UC
Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine.
-- 

   1. *EBook, November 2012: Recovering Internationalism
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>.  [A
   compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download
   formats] <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>*
   2.
*EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical
   Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/> *
   3. *Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the Global
   Emancipation of Labour <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>*
   4. *Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.
   <http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.> *
   5. *Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement
   Internationalisms. See Call for Papers <http://www.interfacejournal.net/>,
   (Deadline: May 1, 2014). *
   6.
*Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement (2005-Now!)
   <http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf>*
   7. *Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a
   Globalised, Informatised Capitalism
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/>(2011) Almost 1,000
   pages of Working Papers, free, from the 1980 <1980>'s-90's.*
   8. *Google Scholar Citation Index:*
    *http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ
   <http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ> *

   -

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