Letters of January 29

Class Analysis Needed on Zionist Kibbutzim
The article in the January 15th CHALLENGE issue on protests against expropriation of Bedouins and ethnic cleansing in Israel was on the mark.  However, when calling attention to the Zionist government’s favoring collective farms, or kibbutzim, a more precise class analysis is called for. The article refers to “....dozens of well-off Kibbutzim, Moshavim and individual farms, all exclusive to upper-class Jews.”  True, the majority of these Israeli farms have by now succumbed, or soon will, to privatization and other capitalist influences.  Like the commune movement in the U.S., establishing islands of egalitarianism in a sea of profits and private property is an impossibility.  However, be it in centers like Tel Aviv or the countryside, Israeli workers struggle constantly.  Rural workers have much more in common with the urban proletariat than is generally believed.
Workers in Israel/Palestine, nomadic or landed, like those worldwide, share equally in the class struggle.
Ruby
Court Hits Women’s Birth Control Needs
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a temporary injunction barring the administration from enforcing the Obamacare birth control requirement against an order of Colorado nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor and related groups. An anti-woman ruling coming from a woman in support of a religious group made up of women!
Capitalism will never negate sexism. Women’s bodies are the source of the next generation of workers. Less birth now means less cheap labor later. Some feminists may be surprised that the first Latina female judge would rule this way, but it stands to reason that the bosses’ courts would use religion as the ideological justification to deny birth control for women.
Religion tells the working class that to use birth control is a sin, but in a time of economic instability adding a new member into a working-class family is a decision that is harrowing and personal. The ruling class wants to make that decision of child birth beneficial to them even as they scapegoat black and Latino workers, using the stereotype that they are leeching the system by having children, particularly out of wedlock.
Religious organizations are in existence to mislead the working class ideologically and this latest ruling is an attack on women disguised as religious freedom.
An Antisexist