The theater of the absurd, from Gaza to Belfast
Over the past three days, something extraordinary happened. In Gaza, a place too often reduced to statistics and headlines, tens of thousands of people did something brave, something dangerous: they took to the streets to protest Hamas. They risked their lives, quite literally, to demand an end to the war, release of hostages, end Hamas’ repression, the misrule, the fanaticism that has turned their society into ash.
At the same time, some 3,000 miles away, another kind of protest was underway in a warm, well-lit hall at the UNI Europa Congress in Belfast. But this one was not against Hamas, although it was well in sync with Hamas’ worldview. It was against Israel. Against dialogue. Against nuance. Against the very idea that trade unions can, and must, engage with complexity to be part of any peace.
At the center of this absurd theater stood the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labor in Israel, under siege not by its own government nor the Israeli public, despite the clear messages this week form the union boss, Arnon Bar-David, that the Histadrut won’t stand idly by if the government doesn’t abide by the court ruling, but by fellow trade unionists from across Europe. Four unions travelled to Belfast to represent: the Union of Clerical and Public Services, the Israel Union of Government Employees, the High-tech Union, and the Practical Engineers Union, all representing the heart of the working men and women of Israel, and the challenge they endure. The extreme fringe and their supporters tried to have the four Israeli unions expelled from the Congress. Not because they abandoned workers’ rights, the cause of peace, but because they refused to.
These calls didn’t arise in a vacuum. They echo the slogans and scripts that are decades old, slogans that erase Israelis from history, erase the connection of Jews to our historic homeland, and scripts that assign all virtue to one side and all vice to the other. They were voiced in Belfast, but they marched to the rhythm of Hamas in Gaza.
The irony could not be more apparent. While Gazans risked Hamas’ beatings and bullets to speak out against the terror group that rules their lives, some union delegates in Europe were, quite literally, doing Hamas’ ideological bidding and casting Israel as the eternal villain, and punishing those who dare work toward peace.
But despite the noise, the Histadrut remained.
It remained because the extremes failed. And they failed because the global trade union movement, when it remembers its roots, knows better. It knows that real solidarity is not selective. That standing with Palestinian workers does not require silencing Israeli ones. That peace is not served by purges, but by presence. The Histadrut will be present in the global labor movement to amplify the voices of the workers of Israel. The leaders of the Global Union Federations have a key responsibility to stand up with a pragmatic approach, stand with those marching in Gaza, and stand with those who believe that for peace to be achieved, a radical pragmatic approach must be adopted, one that identifies Hamas as the problem, and that as long as Hamas have a stranglehold on the Gaza Strip, there can be no peace.
The Histadrut representatives talked of peace, talked of a two-state solution, talked of the Hamas war on Israel, spoke of the role of young workers, and talked of women’s rights in the workplace.
The Histadrut did not come to Belfast to whitewash. It came to say what many leaders in the region are too afraid to: that a two-state solution is the only moral horizon, and that unions have a critical role to play in getting us there. It came to represent both the conviction of justice and the right to live in security. It came with a message of the need for compromise, something the extremists in the movement cannot abide.
If the labor movement wants to remain relevant in the 21st century — not just as a moral force, but as a political one — it cannot allow its congresses to become echo chambers of hate. It must be a space for the hard, frustrating, necessary work of building peace between peoples, not just shouting in the name of one.
There is nothing radical about repeating propaganda. But there is something profoundly radical about standing in the middle, insisting that both peoples — Israeli and Palestinian — deserve dignity, freedom, and security.
Let Belfast remember this: while some were marching in line with Hamas, others — in Gaza — were finally, courageously, breaking ranks.
It’s time the rest of us do the same.
