Letters . . . November 29, 2023

Healthcare workers clapback vs Israel’s Holocaust
A demonstration called by Health Care Workers for Palestine (HCW4pal), a group of mostly young Palestinian medical students, house staff, nurses, physician assistants, and other workers organized a crowd of several hundred. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were there distributing CHALLENGEs and flyers.

Members of HCW4pal and others have been threatened and fired, including a New York University Hospital resident, for making pro-Palestinian statements on social media. HCW4pal has been supporting those who have come under attack for speaking out against the genocide being carried out in Gaza and have continued to protest against the Israeli and U.S. policies there that have left over 11,000 mainly civilian Palestinians dead. Speakers detailed the horrible conditions in Gaza which include lack of water, food, medical supplies, and fuel and an Israeli invasion that has turned Gaza from an open-air prison to a free-fire killing zone.

HCW4pal invited a member of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) to speak to the crowd. JVP is a firmly anti-zionist organization that views Israel as an apartheid state. The speaker, having traveled to Israel and the West Bank many times between 2004 and 2015, joined JVP to organize against the racist conditions she saw there. The speaker asked the crowd to think about whose side they are on. She said that as a Jewish woman, she feels nothing in common with Anthony Blinken or Benjamin Netanyahu. Nor does she have anything in common with the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. They act in concert with Israel to limit dissent and oppress workers in Gaza and the West Bank. She pointed out that since 1987, the Israeli government has given aid to Hamas to weaken other Palestinian organizations.

She said she supports workers who are fighting back everywhere in the world. In conclusion, she said we need to unite workers all around the world and build unity between Arab and Jewish workers to get rid of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism that is the cause of all the misery we see today in Gaza. This call for working-class unity and struggle and similar sentiments by two other speakers were loudly applauded.
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Detroit: rebuilding a fighting club
We are two veteran comrades in Detroit who were re-motivated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine to organize a discussion group on current events with friends and family members. Five of the group went to Mayday in Chicago in 2022.

Afterward, the discussion group continued to meet, attendance fluctuating from four to seven. We missed Mayday in 2023 but traveled to the Party convention in NYC.

Then the auto strike happened and we went to the picket line five times, distributing a leaflet and the newspaper. A comrade from NYC provided us with the leaflet and invited us to Zoom chat about the strike. Another comrade from Kentucky, in town visiting friends, joined us on the picket line. One of our group made friends with an auto worker and is continuing that friendship. Another member of the group has a brother who is an auto worker whom we have been in touch with.

Then Israel/Gaza happened and we printed two hundred fliers and distributed them at Wayne  State University and the University of Michigan at Dearborn. Two people gave us their names and phone numbers.
We have many weaknesses but we are pressing forward, organizing for MayDay 2024, and hoping to eventually see a Progressive Labor Party club in the Motor City again.
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From Brookly to Gaza, smash racism
On the day of a call for student walkouts in NYC public schools, the Student Council at my school stopped business as usual and held an urgent meeting about Gaza. Here’s what some conversations leading up to the meeting sounded like:

The week before, a Black student had reached out to me: “We really need to spread awareness of what’s happening in Gaza. Students are dead. We need to do something, anything.”
During lunch the next day, a Muslim student confided, “My parents don’t want me outside because they don’t want me to get hurt.”

Yet another remarked how “even though I’m not Muslim, my mom is worried” about her covering her hair with a scarf in public. Mom didn’t want her daughter to be a victim of an anti-Muslim hate crime.
When the genocide first started, a teacher told me her Yemeni student scribbled “Free Palestine” on his eraser during class.

Students are clearly facing the effects of this nakba (catastrophe in Arabic).
So, the Student Council meeting had 23 students, majority Black and one Muslim, and two teachers. We began by chanting our club motto, “An injustice to one is an injustice to all,” and proceeded to gather our thoughts on poster paper: what questions, facts, emotions, and opinions we had about the topic.  

Some questions cropped up multiple times: why is this happening? Who started it? When will this end? How come they have money for Israel but not us? Will there be peace? What are we supposed to do now?

The conversation evolved into two camps of thought: cynical individualism versus solidarity.
Some felt isolated from the situation and felt powerless to stop it, which is in part a recognition that we are not part of the decision-making class in the world. But without an alternative, that turns into helplessness and the mindset that what we do “doesn’t matter anyway.”

At the height of the disagreement, students compared their lives under occupation by the NYPD and school system. “I’m scared for my life walking in these streets. Where were they during Black Lives Matter, but you want me to support them now?”

Others were appalled and responded, “We need to learn to have more sympathy even if we don’t know them. If you know something, at least spread the word and have a conversation so we don’t repeat history.” One even said, “This sounds like oppression olympics.”

When the student had voiced how they were scared for their lives, they were on to something. The missing connection here is that whether you are a student in Gaza or Brooklyn, you have the enemy fight and the same fight. The ones who train NYPD are the same people who have a fascist exchange session with the IDF.

Whether the ruling class is killing kids in the streets, or kids overseas, we need to shut this system down.
I showed a YouTube video linking the civil rights movement in the U.S. to the movement for Palestinians. They weren’t convinced, yet.

Clearly, we have to win students towards multiracial unity and away from all forms of nationalism. Students had ideas on what to do, which included making solidarity art, organizing a minute of silence, creating a support group for those affected, and more. Today was the first step to what we hope will be a mass fightback against racism. Stay tuned!
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Liberal fascism grows in schools:This is what growing fascism looks like
On November 8 at 11:17 am, a day before the New York City student walkout against the genocide in Gaza, Chancellor David C. Banks sent out a threatening email against political organizing. The terror campaign  against anyone who speaks out is real.

Last month, a high school teacher named Mohammad Ahmad was dragged into the tabloids for correctly calling Israel a “terror state” and Banks a “white supremacist imperialist scumbag.” A pre-k teacher named Siriana Abboud was also attacked as anti-Jewish for asking parents to join protests and teaching about the history of Israel-Palestine by saying things like, “We aren’t teaching the truth if we’re silent on Palestine.” First, they are coming for Muslim workers, Arab workers, Brown workers, and any workers who call for the thing education bosses fear most: a real education told by the working class and calls for student-family-worker unity.

In the email, racist Banks stated we should not express “personal political views about political matters during the school day, on school grounds, while working at school events,” including on “social media.” He continues, “When speech and action — even on one’s personal time — undermines the mission or core function of NYCPS [public schools], we will review and take appropriate action.” He then attached the latest update on the Chancellor’s Regulations.

Yet on October 10 at 5:31 pm, this same chancellor sent out an email “unequivocally condemn[ing] these horrific” attacks against “Israeli civilians—including children.” He goes on, “the brutality and trauma wrought by Hamas upon innocent people—especially our youngest members of society—is devastating.” Of course, Hamas are capitalist gangsters slaughtering and kidnapping Israeli kids. But, not once did he condemn the bombs dropped on Gaza’s children. It’s as if Palestinian lives didn’t matter.  

The Chancellor before him, Richard Carranza, in the summer of 2020, sent out an email on June 3 at 9:19a​​m condemning the “murder of George Floyd” and was agonized” by “this abominable disregard for Black lives.” If Chancellors cared about Black children, why is New York City still the most segregated school system in this hellhole of a country? Why are Black boys and girls being disproportionately suspended, pushed out, and terrorized by metal detectors every day? Of course, these Chancellors (be they Black, Latin)  are no friends of our working-class kids.

I say this to make the point that as the world spirals  deeper into crisis, the ruling class will use the language of “inclusion” and “diversity” to attack antiracist fightbacks.

As the world’s children gain more class consciousness and their learning conditions beco​​me ever more unsustainable, the education bosses—a tentacle of the capitalist government—will codify fascism. They do so by distorting reality, taking more control of what/how we teach, creating an atmosphere of fear and terror in the face of mass murders, passing laws explicitly attacking our class, and thus exposing the bosses dictatorship behind this democracy.

To this, we education workers say: in the name of kids who die, smash the bosses and their state. A daunting task, isn’t it? But, the only other option is to accept, pretend, drug, and selfcare our way into oblivion. If we haven’t started the fight, we need to begin at the beginning: a conversation. If we start, we need to continue building.

As for the struggle, more details are coming next time! Fight on, comrades and friends!