The Palestinian working class can’t be free until Israeli apartheid, occupation, and settler-colonialism end — which can’t happen without resistance of Palestinian workers and international workers in solidarity.
How workers have united in and behind Palestine this past year ⬇️
In May 2021, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers — in multiple different industries, and across Gaza, the West Bank, and ’48 — all went on general strike to protest Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, bombing of Gaza, and military and police violence.
Their strike led to hundreds of millions of dollars of losses for the Israeli economy, demonstrating Israel’s dependence on Palestinian labor and the liberatory potential of a unified Palestinian working class.
Dockworkers from South Africa to California to Italy refused to unload cargo from Israeli ships, throwing a wrench in the Israeli economy and preventing the transport of weapons and other goods that the state of Israel uses to enact violence against Palestinians.
An unprecedented number of US unions in the sectors of roofing, journalism, hospitality, UPS driving, and more have issued statements in solidarity with Palestinians, often demanding the US to end all funding to the Israeli military.
An example from Roofers Union Local 36:
Teachers unions in San Francisco and Seattle passed resolutions endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and calling for our tax dollars to fund public education, not Israeli human apartheid and war crimes.
Google and Amazon workers have put their jobs on the line to demand the companies end their $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military.
Workers make the world run, so we can leverage our labor to disrupt and change it! To more labor action in solidarity with Palestinians this year ✊🛠
The Israeli government has abandoned all pretenses for its goal of ethnically cleansing of all Palestinians from their land, accelerating its genocide in Gaza and engineering the largest land theft in the occupied West Bank in over thirty years.
Last week, war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu promised the Israeli military would expand its genocidal assault to achieve the Israeli military’s “permanent maintenance of the territory [of Gaza],” a pledge of mass death, expulsion and total land theft.
Netanyahu also made the terrifying promise that the “final stage” of the Israeli government’s genocide will be the implementation of Trump’s plan for “voluntary migration” and “selling Gaza.”
Yesterday, Palestinians located the bodies of 15 aid workers in a mass grave in Gaza. One week after two ambulances were directly shot at by the Israeli military, the bodies of these Red Crescent workers were finally found handcuffed and crushed under their ambulances, concealed in a mass grave.🧵
The @PalestineRCS recovered the bodies of eight medics, six civil defense workers, and one UN employee, all killed when the Israeli military opened fire on them in Rafah while they were en route to provide first aid. A spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza said that each retrieved body was riddled with around 20 gunshots from the Israeli military. A ninth PCRS medic is still missing.
This is the deadliest attack on Red Cross or Red Crescent workers worldwide in nearly a decade. The medics killed by the Israeli military are Mustafa Khafaja, Ezz El-Din Shaat, Saleh Muammar, Refaat Radwan, Muhammad Bahloul, Ashraf Abu Libda, Muhammad Al-Hila, and Raed Al-Sharif.
Project Esther is here. Students and faculty at universities across the country are being targeted by ICE for deportation due to their support for Palestine under the guise of fighting antisemitism. The Trump regime is pulling funding to blackmail universities into complying with authoritarian restrictions on free speech and curriculum.
The JVP Academic Advisory Council’s report on Project Esther argues that, “The architects of Project Esther aren't interested in fighting antisemitism, even in this moment of rising white nationalism – instead, they're building a machine to crush dissent by any means necessary.”
And this is only the beginning. As Project Esther, a policy proposal designed by the far-Right think tank the Heritage Foundation, reveals, the attacks on the Palestine movement are only a blueprint. The Trump regime, under the false pretext of combatting antisemitism, will then proceed to dismantle the entire progressive left.
Yesterday, we watched in horror and disgust as newly released footage showed masked ICE agents surrounding a terrified Rumeysa, a PhD student at Tufts University, handcuffing her on the street and taking her away.
Like previous abductions of people without US citizenship who expressed support for Palestine, Rumeysa’s lawyer was unable to locate her for several hours.
The Israeli military is committing genocide against Palestinians at the fastest rate since October 2023. Since the Israeli government violated the ceasefire nearly a week ago, the Israeli military has killed nearly 700 Palestinians, including at least 400 women and children.🧵
Last week, the Israeli military invaded Rafah and retook the Netzarim Corridor, dividing Gaza and further displacing Palestinians, massacring fleeing families, and targeting the injured. Evacuation notices and so-called humanitarian zones mask further Israeli bombardment. Yesterday, Israeli warplanes bombed Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, killing at least five Palestinians and injuring many more.
The Israeli military has blocked all humanitarian aid to Gaza for 22 days, longer than the October 2023 siege. With no food, medicine, water, or fuel allowed in, @UNWRA reports Palestinians have enough flour for only four more days.
“They ordered all of us, men and women, to take off our clothes and to continue walking, ordering us to only look forward. I was walking naked between the tanks, not even wearing underwear. An Israeli soldier spit in my face. I forced myself not to react as I knew they would break every bone in my body if I did” — A Palestinian man recounting his evacuation through Salah al-Din Street, Gaza
Sexual, reproductive, and gender-based violence occurs in almost all wars and genocides, and Gaza is no exception. Torture and humiliation is a tool of repressive regimes to punish and try to destroy the spirit of anyone who challenges their oppression. A new report from the UN titled “More Than a Human Can Bear” shares harrowing accounts of sexual, reproductive, and other forms of gender-based violence committed by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank since October 2023.
The report details a variety of abhorrent practices by the Israeli military and settlers against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank: the military targeting of Palestinian women and girls, military attacks on sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities, starvation as a form of reproductive violence, sexual harassment and shaming of Palestinian women, filming and photographing of sexual acts against Palestinian men and boys, sexual violence during checkpoints and evacuations and more.