The Oppression and Exploitation Of Palestinian Workers

JCL Introduction

Glyn Secker spoke to a JVL members’  seminar ‘On the Legacy of the Bund’ on 29th January 2023 about how Israeli Trade Unions had betrayed that legacy and become part of the machinery of oppression of Palestinian workers: the antithesis of ‘always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors’.

Glyn Secker describes how the Israeli trade unions turned their backs on the Bund tradition and instead become actors in the oppression of Palestinian workers: the antithesis of ‘always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors’.

• The Bund was a socialist organisation fiercely opposed to Jewish nationalist and separatist ideology. It’s core principle was Do’igkeyt: hereness, nowness, the place where we live, this is our homeland, this is where we fight to transform society, not only for ourselves but for all.
• The prophetic warnings by the Bundists that a Jewish territorial, nationalist solution to antisemitism would reproduce its own forms of racism tragically were borne out.
• Today Jewish society is shocked and deeply divided by the ascendency of Israel’s far right, yet the oppression and exploitation of Palestinian workers is not new, it dates from Israel’s foundation. However, the super-exploitation of Palestinians took off with the seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, from when the Occupied Palestinian Territories were developed into Bantustans, supplying cheap labour for Jewish employers and the Israeli economy.
• In this session, drawing on research by international labour organisations, Glyn Secker details the nature and the degree of this extreme exploitation, which is organised by the state, the employers and the Histradrut (the Israeli ‘trade union’) in a tripartite structure.
• The relevance of Bundism today, especially to us as Jews, is to act in the here and now to build solidarity in the UK with the oppressed Palestinians, because it’s upon their future that the nature of our future rest

Glyn’s slides

View David Rosenberg and Richard Kuper’s debate on the relevance of the Bund today