Writes Mr Fraser:
Over the past thirty years the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and member unions have regularly adopted resolutions containing anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian rhetoric. A whole generation of British left-wing trade union activists has been raised on a diet of conference motions whose only mention of Israel is in connection with its "brutality" and "oppression" of the Palestinian people. The current political position held by the leaders of Britain's working class reflects a historical bias and amnesia concerning the state of Israel.
At its 2010 Congress the TUC decided to strengthen ties with the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) and reinforce its BDS campaign against Israel. One outcome is that the TUC, which once encouraged peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, can no longer be considered a friend of Israel's trade union movement, the Histadrut.
The majority of the motions on Palestine that are submitted to annual union conferences in the UK tend not to represent the views of the general membership, but instead the political positions of the activists who are usually socialist and left-wing ideologues. This left-wing minority has made sure that in 2011 most of the major trade unions and the TUC have resolutions on their books supporting the BDS campaign against Israel as well as being affiliated to the PSC. //It is not clear whether the TUC will be as actively anti-Israeli as its PSC colleagues want it to be, especially in the current economic climate. The labor movement's priority for the foreseeable future is to concentrate on trying to save jobs and pensions especially in the UK public sector. Much will also depend on developments in the Middle East, and particularly the Israeli-Palestinian dynamics.
On the eve of the San Remo Conference in 1920, which formally recognized Britain as the mandatory authority for Palestine, the Labour Party and the TUC (Trades Union Congress), the representative body for the British trade union movement, signed a letter urging British prime minister David Lloyd George to accept the Palestine mandate and thereby make possible a Jewish national home.[1] Yet ninety years later, the TUC not only finds itself advocating sanctions against the Jewish state but is also on the brink of severing links with its fellow socialists in the Israeli labor movement and calling for the delegitimization of the state of Israel. The key moment in the changeover from support for the Jewish state to support for the Palestinian Arabs came in 1982 at the time of the First Lebanon War.
It is, however, abundantly clear that from the very beginning the TUC has given priority to British interests in the Middle East over its friendship with the Histadrut, the Israeli trade union movement. Over the past thirty years the TUC and the unions have regularly adopted resolutions containing anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian rhetoric, and a whole generation of British left-wing trade union activists has been raised on a diet of conference motions whose only mention of Israel is in connection with its "brutality" and "oppression" of the Palestinian people.
The current political position held by the leaders of Britain's working class unfortunately reflects a historical bias and amnesia concerning the state of Israel. They have disregarded the facts and are willing to boycott a country that was founded by socialist pioneers and was governed by a Labor Party for most of its history. They have forgotten that Israeli society has developed from one of the most successful socialist experiments in the world with its kibbutzim and cooperatives, as well as the strong part that the Histadrut played in the national economy. It was no wonder that in the 1950s and 1960s Israel was long seen as a role model for other newly independent, developing countries. What is clear is that it is political issues rather than trade union matters that have caused the current friction between the TUC and the Histadrut.
Britain's trade unions have always reflected the views of either the activists or the leadership. The consequence is that the majority of the motions on Palestine that are submitted to annual union conferences tend not to represent the views of the general membership, but instead the political positions of the activists who are usually socialist and left-wing ideologues. It is often these same activists who attend union conferences and vote on these motions, which decide the policy and future direction of the union.
"The PSC is committed to not only building an effective campaign for boycotting settlement goods with the TUC, but also to work to take TUC policy further, together with individual unions, many of which already have policy supporting a full boycott."[2]The PSC, as part of the global BDS campaign, supports the establishment of a Palestinian state and the right of return for all Palestinian refugees as well as campaigning for a full boycott of Israel, which includes an economic, academic, and cultural boycott until Israel "respects international law."[3] They also have called for full recognition of Hamas as the "democratic government of Palestine" and while not explicitly supporting Palestinian terrorism they refuse to oppose it, preferring instead to assert the right of the Palestinians to "resist occupation."
