Tonight’s Canadian Labour Congress NDP leadership forum excluded the most outspoken candidate on Canadian complicity in Israel’s crimes. Considering the federation’s anti-Palestinian history, it’s no surprise.
The CLC excluded me from the NDP Leadership Forum because I’ve yet to submit to the NDP’s anti-democratic ‘vetting’ process that has repeatedly blocked critics of Israel.
My campaign to lead the NDP is caught in a strategic bind. On one hand, we want to pass vetting to access the party list to communicate with all members and so we can offer donors tax credits. Conversely, we fear our campaign will be summarily excluded from the race over five months before voting begins.
This concern is not irrational. Immediately after announcing my candidacy to lead the party in early July, former Jewish Defence League head Meir Weinstein, Toronto Sun columnist Brian Lilley and disgraced anti-Palestinian former BC NDP cabinet minister Selena Robinson called for me to be excluded from the race to lead the party. Others followed suit and B’nai Brith released a statement claiming I denied the Rwandan genocide.
For its part, the NDP brass has demonstrated hostility to my campaign from the outset. As a result, we’ve focused on demonstrating our support by fundraising a large amount and by far surpassing the required number of nomination signatures. We’ve also done about 15 public events, released many statements and a comprehensive platform.
While we haven’t passed vetting, the House of Labour had every right to invite the individual with the most pro-working-class platform to the forum. They chose not to, out of deference to the NDP brass and because of their establishment outlook.
But Palestine is also part of the story. Over the past two years of Israeli lawlessness and genocide, the CLC has done the bare minimum in response. They took a year and a half to call for an arms embargo and have refused Labour 4 Palestine’s push to label arms deliveries “hot cargo”. In contrast, Italian unions held a 24-hour general strike over their country’s complicity in genocide.
The CLC has an odious history of promoting the Jewish supremacist state, as I detail in Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada. At its inaugural convention in 1956 the CLC called on the “government to lend sympathetic support to Israel’s request for defensive armaments, in order that Israel may match, in quality if not in quantity, the constant flow of Soviet bloc armaments into the Arab countries and further appeals to our government to use its good offices in urging other free Western countries to do likewise.” The resolution was passed just before Israel invaded Egypt alongside colonial powers France and Britain. At the time Canada had been selling Israel weapons for several years and was under (private) pressure from Washington to send Israel advanced fighter jets.
While the CLC has a deeply imperialist history — backing Canada’s role in the killing of Patrice Lumumba, US Bay of Pigs invasion and NATO — has it ever called to arm another country like it did for Israel?
In the mid 1970s the CLC vigorously opposed admitting the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to the International Labour Organization (ILO). CLC President Joe Morris used his position as ILO committee chairman to block the PLO’s admission as an observer to the organization. During this period the CLC passed a resolution demanding Ottawa enact anti-boycott legislation against Arab countries boycotting companies doing business with Israel to pressure that country to return land captured in the 1967 war. When the UN General Assembly passed a resolution (72 votes to 35 with 32 abstentions) in 1975 calling Zionism a form of racism CLC President Joe Morris complained vociferously. He stated, “by this act, it can justifiably be argued the UN has ‘legitimized’ anti-Semitism and pogroms against Jews. Canadian labour will fight all moves to implement such a resolution and will exercise its influence to prevent further extensions of the resolution.”
In 1985 CLC president Dennis McDermott denounced a Canadian Senate report that rebuked Israel’s 1982 invasion/occupation of Lebanon and provided mild support for the PLO. McDermott, who referred to himself as a “Catholic Zionist,” said the Senate report, which stopped short of calling the PLO the legitimate voice of Palestinians, was an “exercise in bad judgment and, even worse, bad taste.” (A portrait of McDermott long hung in a library named after him at the trade school of the Israeli Histadrut.)
Histadrut representatives regularly spoke at CLC conventions, addressing all but two of them between 1956 and 1982. Its representatives were granted a status nearly on par with the US, British and ICFTU federations. At its 1964 convention the Histadrut speaker was introduced thusly: “Brother Ilan was in the Defence Army of Israel and was very well known.” Excluding non-Jewish workers for much of its history, the Histadrut “was a great colonizing agency”, in the words of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. In 1920 the Histadrut founded the Haganah, an armed Zionist militia, which later became the Israeli armed forces. The country’s second-largest employer into the 1980s, the “labour federation” owned a quarter of Israel’s industry.
Anger at decades of unwavering support for Israeli expansionism prompted a resolution to the CLC’s 1988 convention, which never made the floor. It noted: “Whereas in the past both the Federation and Congress have often been reluctant to allow debate on resolutions critical of Israel, often scheduling them so that they will not reach the floor. Therefore be it resolved that in light of the extensive killing and violation of Palestinian human rights by Israel, that the resolutions committee for the Canadian Labour Congress convention schedule resolutions so that the delegates can have the opportunity to debate this issue.”
If the Canadian Labour Congress has honestly changed its previous over-the -top support for Israel and wanted to apologize to Palestinians it should have invited the only NDP candidate willing to label Israel’s actions in Gaza a “holocaust” to the leadership forum.
To assist, donate or learn more about my bid to lead the NDP check out yvesforndpleader.ca
You must be logged in to post a comment.