General Industries Workers' Union of South Africa issues an urgent call to action!
General Industries Workers' Union of South Africa issues an urgent call to action!
GENERAL INDUSTRIES WORKERS' UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA
MEDIA STATEMENT: 18 OCTOBER 2023
A CALL FOR A NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION -IN PROTEST AGAINT ISRAELI CARNAGEIN GAZA AND SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE.
As the Clover Shop stewards Council and the National Office Bearers of GIWUSA, we are issuing a call to action, urging progressive trade unions, civic organisations, and student formations across the country to unite and stand against a Zionist bloody revelry in Gaza and solidarity with the Global General Strike. The Palestinian Trade Union Movement has issued a call for a global strike on the 20th October. In response to this call, the massacres in Gaza and the need to unify the groundswell of popular indignation and localised protests, GIWUSA is calling for an urgent National Day of Action.
We intend to mobilise for an unprecedented tidal wave of national solidarity actions in all major cities across to the country, commensurate to the broad scale of popular sentiment against Apartheid and colonialism in this country, as well the Israeli military crackdown, and imminent threat of genocide in Gaza and obliteration of Palestine.
Since 7 October, 2,800 Palestinians and 1400 Israelis have been killed. The attack on theIsraeli civilians is regrettable. It is the desperation borne of decades long and unrelenting deprivations, oppression and human suffering of the Palestinian people in the Gaza prison, for which we hold Israeli regime responsible.
Genocidal Zionist policy of ethnic cleansing.
A Far-Right Zionist regime of Netanyahu has exploited this to carry out a genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and to unleash terror on the Palestinians in the West Bank and inside 1948 Israel itself.
Those bearing the main brunt of this escalation are the Palestinians. It is not only them who bears the disproportional loss of life, they are the oppressed people whose who are under colonial occupation from an imperialist Israeli regime using barbaric mediaeval tactics of warlike sieges, pogroms and ethnic cleansing, combined with an equally primitive methods of 17th to 19th century-style colonialism of military occupations, racism, and its daily humiliations and dehumanisation of the Palestinians.
Amongst the dead in Palestine is included over 1000 children who are deliberately targeted by the Israeli armed forces who are bombing hospitals, schools and residential areas. In the latest attack, Israeli airforce today struck at the al-Ahli Arab hospital killing an estimated 500 people.These air strikes are reducing Gaza to rubble and graveyard, as Netanyahu is effecting his final solution of what he clearly consider a menace to his project of establishing a Zionist state over the whole of historic Palestine.
Despite the deliberate acts of mass murder, Israeli regime has also cut off water, electricity, telephone and internet connections to Gaza.
In spite of all horrifying images of Palestinian people dying en masse, and brutalised by his airstrikes, in the biggest carnage committed in recent period, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that what we have witnessed thus far is "only the beginning." Last Friday, Israel issued an evacuation order to over 1.1 million Gazans residing in the northern half of the Gaza Strip, warning of an imminent escalation of attacks in that area.Hundreds of thousands of refugees from the north were then greeted with ceaseless missile strikes in the South, with Israeli air raids hitting targets near the Rafah border crossing, schools, hospitals, and refugee settlements. This campaign to displace Gazans represents another painful chapter in the ongoing Nakba, reminiscent of the 1948 pogroms that saw approximately 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes to facilitate the creation of theState of Israel.
Reject pro-Zionist and imperialist media blackmail.
We are therefore absolutely clear on bears responsibility for this carnage and unbearable loss of life and suffering. Regardless of who fired first this time around, the responsibility for thiswar and its horrors lies squarely with the Zionist colonial state of Israel and its regime. The escalation was a response to years of tightening siege, aggressive expansion of Jewish settlements and settler pogroms against Palestinians, the daily humiliations and dehumanisation.
We refuse the blackmail of the mainstream media and right-wing opinion. It is for this reason that we are absolutely clear that when we make criticism of Palestinian resistance, as we often do in our cause of solidarity, just as we did in the struggle against Apartheid, it must be clear that our position has nothing in common with the moral hypocrisy of US, and Western
Imperialism and other Zionist allies, nor do we concede any ground to their selective application of their so called ‘international law’. We raise our points as part of our solidarity which include sharing experiences of struggle, purely from the standpoint of revolutionary class politics and internationalist working class struggle against global capitalism and its imperialism. We are particularly guided by the requirements of the struggle of the Palestinian masse for liberation, whose victory we uphold as supreme law and political faith in the revolutionary potential of the international working class, as the only force that can end the nightmare of Zionist occupation of Palestine. It is this revolutionary social force, particularly amongst the Palestinians that we call for, to lead in the struggle for an independent, democratic and socialist Palestine.
A call for urgent action.
As these war crimes are pointing to a developing genocide, the international working class cannot watch idly. Our collective humanity is being challenged by the terrible sufferings of thePalestinians, just as all that we hold dear in the principles of our movement, working class solidarity and internationalism, is being called to task of political duty to the masses of Palestine.
The bloodiest carnage of genocidal Netanyahu regime thus far, the massacre at the al-Ahli Arab hospital, is the line we draw on the sand. The ANC government has a choice to make or we have to label and treat them as Zionist collaborators. We say thus far and no further, with Israeli ambassador and corporations in the country.
Divestment from Clover.
It is for this reason that the meeting of Clover Shop steward Council unanimously resolved to place on the agenda of its meeting with Clover management today, Divestment of MILCO fromClover. MILCO is an Israeli company that took over Clover in 2019. This company operates inJewish settlements on Palestinian lands and materially support the occupation including funding of Far Right Zionist Parties linked to these settlements.
The Divestment of Milco was subject to a workers strike in 2021-2022 which last for over six months. During the strike workers clearly and unequivocally expressed themselves in opposition to the ruthless exploitation of their labour to enrich and fund a Zionist colonial project. Whereas during the strike management has refused to discuss the matter and wanted it separated from the collective bargaining issues, the position trade unions and workers vehemently opposed and in consequence refused to sign an agreement with the company to end to strike, the workers have decided to hold the company to the undertaking of its CEO in the meeting before the strike to raise the matter with the board of company directors and shareholders.
Divestment of MILCO and other Zionist corporations in South Africa would be an important test also for the ANC and its commitment to the cause of the Palestinians. We intend to escalate this matter with the government once again and to call on the ANC to live by its rhetoric on the question of Palestine and rights of the workers whose conditions and jobs have been slashed savagely since the takeover with the result that many are jobless and those working are condemned to slavery resembling conditions of primitive accumulation and classical colonialism.
A National Day of Action
We are calling for a National Day of Action where all the mass organisations and progressive forces of our movement from the length and breadth of the country can mobilise to demand an end to ongoing carnage, for national and class emancipation of Palestine. This call emanates from our understanding that our struggles against injustice are intertwined with those of the Palestinians. Zionism is today one of the most reactionary forces of world imperialism and its defeat will represent a new stage in the international working class struggle against imperialism and for socialism.
The National Day of Action aims to bring together the various voices around the country who are condemning the violence of the state of Israel. On this day, we will be united through mass demonstrations in all key cities, in a momentous display of unprecedented mass solidarity with the people of Palestine.
We will demand that our labour power is exerted in service of the oppressed and destitute masses, and not profit-hungry warmongers. The Day of Action will thus call upon the ANC government to expel the Israeli ambassador from this country, to disinvest from and expropriateZionist companies, and to provide material support to Palestinians who are fighting to wrestle control over their land from colonial forces.
GIWUSA has made this call to its federation SAFTU and propose an urgent Special NEC andSAFTU provincial shopsteward councils across the country on the 24th October 2023.
Workers boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign.
Whilst we support boycotts, sanctions and divestment campaigns against companies complicit in the crimes of the Israeli regime, as well the regime and its institutions, and make demandson governments including South Africa to take these measures, we cannot trust the ruling class, their governments and corporations to enforce. In the struggle against Apartheid SouthAfrica many states and corporations whilst formally upheld sanctions and boycotts againstSouth Africa simply set up an elaborate infrastructure to circumvent the sanctions. This infrastructure exist to this day in facilitating illicit trading to siphon hundreds of billions of rands annually out of the country, to evade taxation, paying decent wages and communities demands for corporate social investments.
We therefore call on the trade union movement to impose and enforce arms embargo and handling of targeted Israeli goods.
As the organised working class of a country that have been victim to heinous crimes against humanity under colonial, and apartheid regimes, we have an international political duty to raise our voice against the atrocities being inflicted against Palestinians loudest than everybody else. Let us use our collective strength to amplify our call for justice and to demand justice forPalestine, an end to Israeli colonialism, and an end to imperialist impunity.
In solidarity,
Clover Shopstewards CouncilNational Office Bearers of GIWUSA
We issue this call to the following organisations, as well as all others who support the call:
- South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU)
- Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
- Federation of Unions of South Africa (FEDUSA)
- The National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU)
- Abahlali Basemjondolo
- Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA)
- Mining and Environmental Justice Community Network of South Africa (MEJCON)
- Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX)
- UniteBehind
- Socialist Youth Movement
- EFF Student Command
- Pan African Student Movement of Azania
- South African Students Congress
- South African BDS Coalition
- South African Jews for a Free Palestine
- Palestine Solidarity Alliance
- Palestine Solidarity Campaign Gauteng
- Palestine Solidarity Campaign Cape Town
- Potch for Palestine
- Africa 4 Palestine
- People Against Oppression
- Wits Palestine Solidarity Committee
- UCT Palestine Solidarity Forum
- Palestine Solidarity Organisation at Nelson Mandela University
- Stellenbosch University Palestine Solidarity Forum
- University of KwaZulu Natal Palestine Solidarity Forum
- University of the Western Cape Palestine Solidarity Alliance
- University of Pretoria Palestine Solidarity Campaign
GENERAL INDUSTRIES WORKERS' UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA
MEDIA STATEMENT: 18 OCTOBER 2023
A CALL FOR A NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION -IN PROTEST AGAINT ISRAELI CARNAGEIN GAZA AND SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE.
As the Clover Shop stewards Council and the National Office Bearers of GIWUSA, we are issuing a call to action, urging progressive trade unions, civic organisations, and student formations across the country to unite and stand against a Zionist bloody revelry in Gaza and solidarity with the Global General Strike. The Palestinian Trade Union Movement has issued a call for a global strike on the 20th October. In response to this call, the massacres in Gaza and the need to unify the groundswell of popular indignation and localised protests, GIWUSA is calling for an urgent National Day of Action.
We intend to mobilise for an unprecedented tidal wave of national solidarity actions in all major cities across to the country, commensurate to the broad scale of popular sentiment against Apartheid and colonialism in this country, as well the Israeli military crackdown, and imminent threat of genocide in Gaza and obliteration of Palestine.
Since 7 October, 2,800 Palestinians and 1400 Israelis have been killed. The attack on theIsraeli civilians is regrettable. It is the desperation borne of decades long and unrelenting deprivations, oppression and human suffering of the Palestinian people in the Gaza prison, for which we hold Israeli regime responsible.
Genocidal Zionist policy of ethnic cleansing.
A Far-Right Zionist regime of Netanyahu has exploited this to carry out a genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and to unleash terror on the Palestinians in the West Bank and inside 1948 Israel itself.
Those bearing the main brunt of this escalation are the Palestinians. It is not only them who bears the disproportional loss of life, they are the oppressed people whose who are under colonial occupation from an imperialist Israeli regime using barbaric mediaeval tactics of warlike sieges, pogroms and ethnic cleansing, combined with an equally primitive methods of 17th to 19th century-style colonialism of military occupations, racism, and its daily humiliations and dehumanisation of the Palestinians.
Amongst the dead in Palestine is included over 1000 children who are deliberately targeted by the Israeli armed forces who are bombing hospitals, schools and residential areas. In the latest attack, Israeli airforce today struck at the al-Ahli Arab hospital killing an estimated 500 people.These air strikes are reducing Gaza to rubble and graveyard, as Netanyahu is effecting his final solution of what he clearly consider a menace to his project of establishing a Zionist state over the whole of historic Palestine.
Despite the deliberate acts of mass murder, Israeli regime has also cut off water, electricity, telephone and internet connections to Gaza.
In spite of all horrifying images of Palestinian people dying en masse, and brutalised by his airstrikes, in the biggest carnage committed in recent period, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that what we have witnessed thus far is "only the beginning." Last Friday, Israel issued an evacuation order to over 1.1 million Gazans residing in the northern half of the Gaza Strip, warning of an imminent escalation of attacks in that area.Hundreds of thousands of refugees from the north were then greeted with ceaseless missile strikes in the South, with Israeli air raids hitting targets near the Rafah border crossing, schools, hospitals, and refugee settlements. This campaign to displace Gazans represents another painful chapter in the ongoing Nakba, reminiscent of the 1948 pogroms that saw approximately 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes to facilitate the creation of theState of Israel.
Reject pro-Zionist and imperialist media blackmail.
We are therefore absolutely clear on bears responsibility for this carnage and unbearable loss of life and suffering. Regardless of who fired first this time around, the responsibility for thiswar and its horrors lies squarely with the Zionist colonial state of Israel and its regime. The escalation was a response to years of tightening siege, aggressive expansion of Jewish settlements and settler pogroms against Palestinians, the daily humiliations and dehumanisation.
We refuse the blackmail of the mainstream media and right-wing opinion. It is for this reason that we are absolutely clear that when we make criticism of Palestinian resistance, as we often do in our cause of solidarity, just as we did in the struggle against Apartheid, it must be clear that our position has nothing in common with the moral hypocrisy of US, and Western
Imperialism and other Zionist allies, nor do we concede any ground to their selective application of their so called ‘international law’. We raise our points as part of our solidarity which include sharing experiences of struggle, purely from the standpoint of revolutionary class politics and internationalist working class struggle against global capitalism and its imperialism. We are particularly guided by the requirements of the struggle of the Palestinian masse for liberation, whose victory we uphold as supreme law and political faith in the revolutionary potential of the international working class, as the only force that can end the nightmare of Zionist occupation of Palestine. It is this revolutionary social force, particularly amongst the Palestinians that we call for, to lead in the struggle for an independent, democratic and socialist Palestine.
A call for urgent action.
As these war crimes are pointing to a developing genocide, the international working class cannot watch idly. Our collective humanity is being challenged by the terrible sufferings of thePalestinians, just as all that we hold dear in the principles of our movement, working class solidarity and internationalism, is being called to task of political duty to the masses of Palestine.
The bloodiest carnage of genocidal Netanyahu regime thus far, the massacre at the al-Ahli Arab hospital, is the line we draw on the sand. The ANC government has a choice to make or we have to label and treat them as Zionist collaborators. We say thus far and no further, with Israeli ambassador and corporations in the country.
Divestment from Clover.
It is for this reason that the meeting of Clover Shop steward Council unanimously resolved to place on the agenda of its meeting with Clover management today, Divestment of MILCO fromClover. MILCO is an Israeli company that took over Clover in 2019. This company operates inJewish settlements on Palestinian lands and materially support the occupation including funding of Far Right Zionist Parties linked to these settlements.
The Divestment of Milco was subject to a workers strike in 2021-2022 which last for over six months. During the strike workers clearly and unequivocally expressed themselves in opposition to the ruthless exploitation of their labour to enrich and fund a Zionist colonial project. Whereas during the strike management has refused to discuss the matter and wanted it separated from the collective bargaining issues, the position trade unions and workers vehemently opposed and in consequence refused to sign an agreement with the company to end to strike, the workers have decided to hold the company to the undertaking of its CEO in the meeting before the strike to raise the matter with the board of company directors and shareholders.
Divestment of MILCO and other Zionist corporations in South Africa would be an important test also for the ANC and its commitment to the cause of the Palestinians. We intend to escalate this matter with the government once again and to call on the ANC to live by its rhetoric on the question of Palestine and rights of the workers whose conditions and jobs have been slashed savagely since the takeover with the result that many are jobless and those working are condemned to slavery resembling conditions of primitive accumulation and classical colonialism.
A National Day of Action
We are calling for a National Day of Action where all the mass organisations and progressive forces of our movement from the length and breadth of the country can mobilise to demand an end to ongoing carnage, for national and class emancipation of Palestine. This call emanates from our understanding that our struggles against injustice are intertwined with those of the Palestinians. Zionism is today one of the most reactionary forces of world imperialism and its defeat will represent a new stage in the international working class struggle against imperialism and for socialism.
The National Day of Action aims to bring together the various voices around the country who are condemning the violence of the state of Israel. On this day, we will be united through mass demonstrations in all key cities, in a momentous display of unprecedented mass solidarity with the people of Palestine.
We will demand that our labour power is exerted in service of the oppressed and destitute masses, and not profit-hungry warmongers. The Day of Action will thus call upon the ANC government to expel the Israeli ambassador from this country, to disinvest from and expropriateZionist companies, and to provide material support to Palestinians who are fighting to wrestle control over their land from colonial forces.
GIWUSA has made this call to its federation SAFTU and propose an urgent Special NEC andSAFTU provincial shopsteward councils across the country on the 24th October 2023.
Workers boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign.
Whilst we support boycotts, sanctions and divestment campaigns against companies complicit in the crimes of the Israeli regime, as well the regime and its institutions, and make demandson governments including South Africa to take these measures, we cannot trust the ruling class, their governments and corporations to enforce. In the struggle against Apartheid SouthAfrica many states and corporations whilst formally upheld sanctions and boycotts againstSouth Africa simply set up an elaborate infrastructure to circumvent the sanctions. This infrastructure exist to this day in facilitating illicit trading to siphon hundreds of billions of rands annually out of the country, to evade taxation, paying decent wages and communities demands for corporate social investments.
We therefore call on the trade union movement to impose and enforce arms embargo and handling of targeted Israeli goods.
As the organised working class of a country that have been victim to heinous crimes against humanity under colonial, and apartheid regimes, we have an international political duty to raise our voice against the atrocities being inflicted against Palestinians loudest than everybody else. Let us use our collective strength to amplify our call for justice and to demand justice forPalestine, an end to Israeli colonialism, and an end to imperialist impunity.
In solidarity,
Clover Shopstewards CouncilNational Office Bearers of GIWUSA
We issue this call to the following organisations, as well as all others who support the call:
- South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU)
- Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
- Federation of Unions of South Africa (FEDUSA)
- The National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU)
- Abahlali Basemjondolo
- Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA)
- Mining and Environmental Justice Community Network of South Africa (MEJCON)
- Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX)
- UniteBehind
- Socialist Youth Movement
- EFF Student Command
- Pan African Student Movement of Azania
- South African Students Congress
- South African BDS Coalition
- South African Jews for a Free Palestine
- Palestine Solidarity Alliance
- Palestine Solidarity Campaign Gauteng
- Palestine Solidarity Campaign Cape Town
- Potch for Palestine
- Africa 4 Palestine
- People Against Oppression
- Wits Palestine Solidarity Committee
- UCT Palestine Solidarity Forum
- Palestine Solidarity Organisation at Nelson Mandela University
- Stellenbosch University Palestine Solidarity Forum
- University of KwaZulu Natal Palestine Solidarity Forum
- University of the Western Cape Palestine Solidarity Alliance
- University of Pretoria Palestine Solidarity Campaign