60 Years Since Coup, Brazilians Call on US to Declassify its Role

Washington was not only behind the putschists, but drew up plans for a possible invasion and sent a task force to support the military plotters

By Nick Cleveland-Stout

April 1, 2024

Source: Responsible Statecraft

Image via Responsible Statecraft



April 1,  marks a solemn anniversary in Brazil: 60 years ago, the Brazilian military seized power from the government of João Goulart, marking the start of over two decades of military rule.

Brazil’s 2014 Truth Commission report is the country’s only formal investigation into this period of dictatorial rule. The commission’s 2,000-page report revealed some grisly details of the dictatorship’s human rights abuses, identified over 400 individuals killed by the military, and shed light on Brazil’s role in destabilizing other Latin American countries.

To assist with the Truth Commission, then-Vice President Joe Biden hand-delivered declassified State Department records to former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff — who herself had been imprisoned and tortured by the military regime. The records offered details about the dictatorship and Washington’s enabling of abuses, including a cable from former Ambassador to Brazil William Rountree arguing that condemning the regime’s human rights “excesses” would be “counterproductive.”

Biden’s delivery of the declassified records was symbolic, since the U.S. had supported the coup. The U.S. solidified its support for the putschists the year prior, drew up plans for a U.S. invasion if deemed necessary, and sent a naval task force to Brazil to support the military plotters. In the end, direct U.S. involvement wasn’t needed — Goulart fled to Uruguay by April 4. The coup was carried out by Brazil’s generals, but Washington celebrated it as a victory for its interests nonetheless.

On the one hand, U.S. support for the coup laid bare the hypocrisy of America’s supposed commitment to sovereignty and democracy. Gone was the Kennedy administration’s promise to reject a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” The Cold War logic of siding with anti-communist dictators for the purpose of defeating the Soviet Union prevailed. Washington may have lost China, but it won Brazil — or so the thinking went.

However, even the most cynical arguments for aligning with undemocratic regimes for a strategic purpose often failed to bear fruit, given that many of these regimes departed from U.S. policy on key issues. Many historians of the U.S.-Brazil relationship contend that during this period their ties at times more closely resembled rivals rather than close partners. Rubens Ricupero, a former diplomat and minister of finance of Brazil, writes that, “Little by little, doubts turn[ed] into disappointment, and this le[d] to gradual disengagement in relation to the regime they had helped to create.”

When it first took power, Brazil’s military dictatorship closely followed Washington’s lead. Goulart was out, as was his “Independent Foreign Policy,” a non-alignment stance that emphasized self-determination, decolonization, and non-intervention, devised by the ousted president’s predecessor, Janio Quadros. In line with Washington’s desires, the dictatorship, which rotated through five different military general-presidents between 1964 and 1985, broke off relations with Cuba and even assisted the U.S. in its occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Washington also saw Brazil as a key ideological partner in destabilizing leftist regimes across Latin America. As one Brazilian general put it, the United States wanted Brazil “to do the dirty work.” And it did. Most prominently, the Brazilian regime played a critical role in the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile,. even secretly bringing members of the Chilean military to Brazil to discuss the potential coup. Brazil under the generals also participated in Operation Condor, the secret cooperation of right-wing military dictatorships in much of Latin America to assassinate, or “disappear” perceived leftists and other dissidents during the 1970s.

Over time, the Brazilian regime’s alignment with the U.S. waned and tensions bubbled up. Dr. Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira writes in his book “Brazil-United States: An Emerging Rivalry,” that “automatic alignment with State Department guidelines could no longer continue for long, as it no longer effectively corresponded to the national interests of a developing country that aspired to become a power.”

Despite the fact that the U.S. wanted the benefits of outsourcing its dirty work, it was not willing to accept the consequences that came with greater military autonomy for Brazil. Dr. Eduardo Svartman, a political science professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, told Responsible Statecraft that one early issue that emerged was over Brazil’s request for F-5 fighter jets.

“In the eyes of American politicians, if the great threat in Latin America was communist insurgents, there was no point to sell or transfer modern supersonic fighter jets to Latin American countries when helicopters would do the job much better,” Svartman said.

The Brazilian government disagreed, believing it was important to have a modern military in order to project power in South America. The generals accordingly grew more reliant on Europe, buying several Mirage fighter aircrafts from France. They eventually pushed the F-5 sale through several years later, but it was an early lesson that the U.S. may not be their most reliable partner.

Though the U.S. remained an important supplier of critical components for Brazil’s burgeoning national arms industry, Brazil’s supply of U.S.-made arms imports decreased from 92% to 14% of its total arsenal over the course of the dictatorship.

The U.S. also grew frustrated with Brazil’s move towards positions associated with the non-aligned movement. Though Brazil was never a full member of the movement, in the early 1970s, it supported the decolonization of the Lusophone countries in Africa, emphasized non-intervention, and recognized the MPLA in Angola. Elements of the Independent Brazilian Foreign Policy had returned.

Perhaps the biggest source of tension between the U.S. and Brazil was over the development of a nuclear program. Brazil refused to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, arguing that nuclear technology was vital for its development. After the U.S. suspended the supply of enriched uranium for Brazil’s research reactors, the regime turned to West Germany and negotiated a major nuclear agreement in 1975.

In an internal report, the CIA claimed that Brazil’s nuclear ambitions posed a “fundamental challenge” to U.S.-Brazil relations. Without informing the Brazilians, newly-elected Vice President Walter Mondale tried to lobby the German government to cancel the agreement.

Washington also grew frustrated with the generals’ authoritarianism and human rights abuses. The regime passed a series of “institutional acts” — the first of which came just days after the coup — that gave them sweeping powers, including suspending the rights of opposition leaders and power to declare a recess in Congress. Ricupero writes that “with each new attack on the legal order or violation of rights, the embassy in Rio de Janeiro was forced into dialectical contortions to calm the State Department’s unrest.”

Pressure on rising authoritarianism and the nuclear issue came to a head during the Carter administration, which applied human rights as a criteria for military assistance more directly. After the Carter State Department criticized Brazil for its human rights abuses in 1977, the Brazilian government retaliated by suspending the Joint Military Commission between the U.S. and Brazil, its Naval Mission, and a long-standing bilateral military accord. According to Washington’s then-ambassador to Brasilia, Robert Sayre, “U.S.-Brazil relations just went to pieces.”

Despite a brief rapprochement with the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, Brazil became critical of Washington’s revival of more interventionist policies under his administration. Washington’s decision to side with Britain against neighboring Argentina during the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982 confirmed Brazilian suspicions that the U.S. was not a reliable partner. For the first time ever, “the hypothesis of war with the United States became an object of study in the Armed Forces,” writes Bandeira.

Brazil also opposed the so-called Reagan Doctrine, which sought to overthrow leftist governments in Central America and southern Africa. The U.S. had become not just a distant partner but something altogether new: an emerging rival. Many of these disputes between the two countries remained well into the period of democratization that began in 1985.

There is a lot that is still unknown about this chapter in Brazil’s history, and the U.S.’ relationship to the military regime. Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive who also served as the liaison between the U.S. and Brazilian governments for the Truth Commission, estimates there are still thousands of records that remain classified, including many sensitive records from the CIA and the Department of Defense.

“[T]he degree to which the United States is sitting on documentation about repression in Brazil is the degree to which the United States is not assisting Brazilian society in reminding itself about the horrors of what happened behind closed doors in secret detention centers,” Kornbluh told Responsible Statecraft. .

To start, President Biden could honor a request from 16 Brazilian civil society organizations to declassify these records. The groups’ appeal states that declassification would “provide valuable information about human rights violations committed during the Brazilian dictatorship and clarify the degree of the United States’ involvement in or knowledge of these events. This act of transparency would also strengthen the foundations of the U.S.-America relationship, fostering trust and collaboration on important issues such as human rights, democracy, and regional stability.”

The Luiz Inácio “Lula” da SiIva government is unlikely to formally request these documents from Biden himself. In an effort to appease leaders of the Brazilian Armed Forces who still hold the 21-year dictatorship in high regard, Lula controversially canceled all formal demonstrations of the 60th anniversary. But even without an official commemoration, millions of Brazilians from Manaus in the Amazon to Florianopolis in the far south are organizing demonstrations to send a message of “dictatorship never again.”

Haitian Community Defenders Fight US-Armed Death Squads and Puppet Governments

By Danny Shaw

April 2, 2024

Source: Truthout


Image by Movement of Equality and Liberation for All Haitians

As the stars illuminate the dark alleyways of Solino, Ezayi’s heavy beige Timberlands stomp across the cracked concrete. He is on a mission. The night lookouts who stand guard at the western barricades against the marauding paramilitary gangs of the mass murderer Kempès Sanon do not have money to eat. When the night watchmen don’t eat during their shift, they get weak, drink kleren (moonshine) to trick their hunger and have a higher tendency to shirk their duties, or worse still, fall asleep. The enemy armed with modern weapons by the U.S. lurks around the corner. Washington bullets lull children, parents and grandparents to sleep under whatever furniture will protect them. Family members in the diaspora from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, to Little Haiti, Miami, call at all hours of the night, just hoping to hear a familiar voice.

The Haitian Bald Headed Party (PHTK) has tyrannically ruled Haiti since 2011. Now, as the guards sleep, warlord, escaped convict and mercenary Sanon prepares his next invasion of Solino, the second-biggest neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, after Cité Soley.

Ezayi, one of the coordinators of the Brigad Vijilans (self-defense brigades), makes the rounds to amass the 1,000 gouds ($7.63) needed for the dinner for eight of the people’s soldiers. A family two kilometers away deep in the Ri Ti Cheri area of the community responds that they can give 500 gouds. He calls Marius, a comrade who moonlights as a motorcycle taxi driver, and they complete the task. Ezayi is a leader of the Movement of Equality and Liberation for All Haitians (MOLEGHAF) who some call the Black Panthers of Haiti.

Solino’s son is always focused. Someone jokes about how his girlfriend has been looking for him for the past week. He does not bat an eyelash. The old crew teases Ezayi, calling him by his nickname, “Zizi, you haven’t seen a barber in a few years.” Another longtime friend chimes in: “Don’t bother him. He has no time to smile.” Ezayi has a singular focus: the defense of his first and only love, Solino.

The situation in Haiti is dynamic and popular leadership of organizations like MOLEGHAF, Fanmi Lavalas and Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan are spinning on a dime in order to respond.
The Fourth Pending U.S.-led Invasion of Haiti in 100 Years

The U.S. State Department, who unilaterally picked Ariel Henry to be Haiti’s prime minister in July of 2021, has now decided Henry no longer fits their interests and has forced him to step down. The Miami Herald reported that the Biden administration contacted Henry midflight urging him to form a transitional government. Henry was prevented from returning to Haiti on March 5 by paramilitary gangs who attempted to take the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, opening fire and hitting a plane bound for Cuba. Just as easily as the U.S. installed Henry against the people’s will, the FBI may have detained him in Puerto Rico. Perhaps the foreign policy establishment thinks that by sacking Henry and framing him as the fall guy they can convince an angry, hungry populace that this somehow represents change.

The imperial forces responsible for over half a million illegal U.S. guns in Haiti that fuel this unparalleled violence are now preparing their next move to keep Haiti subdued. For the past 18 months, the Biden administration has sought to facilitate what will be the fourth U.S.-led foreign invasion and occupation of Haiti in the last 100 years by deputizing Kenya, Benin, the Bahamas, and other western neocolonies to carry out the occupation. The U.S. will supply the money and weapons; the African and Caribbean colonial cannon fodder will provide the bodies. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has led a meeting of the CARICOM nations, a proxy force for U.S. power in the Caribbean, to appoint a transitional government and carry out the foreign invasion. The only Haitian representatives that can be considered for the U.S.-led transitional government have to agree to the occupation. The CIA remains active as well seeking a neocolony the U.S. can deputize to carry out this invasion.

Ezayi and his community see colonialism as Haiti’s number one enemy. In a February public statement analyzing the current political situation they wrote:


The American imperialists and their allies weakened all political strategies available to the oppressed.… Then they denigrated all symbols of sovereignty, undermining all means for national life. This is one reason why, until today, there is no political party capable of challenging Ariel Henry at the head of the country. It is a form of totalitarian power, where the poor masses are subjugated under the grip of the PHTK. Even democratic words have lost their value.

On March 2, paramilitary forces stormed the Haitian National Penitentiary and another prison helping over 4,000 prisoners escape. Among the escapees, there were prisoners accused of petty crimes years ago who had never seen a judge, and there were others convicted of violent and sexual crimes. A group of Colombian mercenaries imprisoned for their involvement with U.S. intelligence and the assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse begged for their lives. Footage emerged of thousands of the escapees gathered in Vilaj de Dye, the seaside slum where the notorious PHTK-affiliated Izo is in charge. As a massive crowd chanted “Ariel: Izo has gotten rid of you,” analysts were left to wonder if this power move by the paramilitary forces was meant to buttress their ranks with more shock troops with an immanent U.S.-sponsored military invasion just weeks away.
Bwa Kale Is Personal

Bwa Kale was the impromptu name given to the organic self-defense movement that sprang up in Port-au-Prince on April 24, 2023. Gang boss Ti Makak’s Laboule death squad was moving in on Kanapé Vè, a stable, better-off-than-most neighborhood in Port-au-Prince.

The police intercepted the kidnappers and assassins and arrested them. A local crowd realized the intentions of Ti Makak’s homicidal crew, who were high on kleren, and dragged them out of the police truck, stoning and burning them. The citizen’s self-defense movement known as Bwa Kale had officially begun.

Exasperated by mercenaries raping, looting and massacring their communities, neighborhoods set to kicking the sanguinary criminals out. The decentralized movement exploded, inspiring neighborhoods across the sprawling city to take every measure to defend themselves from government-linked death squads.

Bwa Kale’s momentum was transformative for Solino. Located on the border of the Kempès and PHTK-dominated Belè, Ezayi’s neighborhood has been the number one target of the PHTK as it sought to expand west across Port-au-Prince. The families of Solino, like the Republican families of the Spanish Civil War and the Red Army families during the Nazi onslaught of the Soviet Union, have but one slogan: “No pasarán!” (They shall not pass!)

During Kempès death drive in the summer of 2023, Ezayi’s father sought to escape with his life. Like many residents swarmed by U.S. bullets and the stampede of fleeing community members, his father was murdered. It is this loss and love that contextualizes Ezayi’s superhuman, hyper focus on his singular mission — to save Solino.
A Nation Full of Leaders

Haiti’s enemies censor the very memory of ancestral resistance.

One of the many subtle racist tropes against Haiti seeks to deceive us into thinking “there is no leadership” or “all leaders are corrupt,” as the cliches go. The more accurate framing is that all United States and PHTK-sponsored leaders are bought off and manipulated. As investigative journalist Jake Johnston’s recently released book Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti shows, U.S. policy empowers and works with corrupt political leadership in Haiti because they can be relied upon to do the U.S.’s bidding. The U.S. has economic, diplomatic, military and political interests in Haiti. (Paul Farmer wrote The Uses of Haiti to address this very question.) Economists inform us, for example, that Haiti has the second-largest deposits of the rare mineral iridium in the Southeast Department. Bill and Hillary Clinton and their foundation have been two foreign personifications of foreign meddling in Haiti under the guise of humanitarian aid. It was Hillary Clinton who flew into Port-au-Prince in 2010 to offer the U.S.’s full endorsement of neo-Duvalierest Michel Martelly as president even though he had no popular support. The Haitian people teach us that in the paramilitary continuum that has led to the quagmire of today, Washington has supported three iterations of the paramilitary state, first under Martelly, then Moïse, and up until March 11, Ariel Henry. The U.S. will oversee the next handpicked successor. The media fury around U.S.-trained 2004 coup leader, Guy Philippe, indicates that Washington may work through him.

Meanwhile, those leaders who refuse to sell out to imperial interests are repressed and murdered. Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment documents the U.S.-engineered coup and 2004 military invasion that saw the democratically elected president kidnapped and 7,500 elected officials booted from office. Haiti produces leaders like it produces mangos, coconuts and children’s smiles. But like Ezayi, these anonymous global heroes are under the gun. This researcher asked every witness and family member available who pulled the trigger on March 21, 2023? Was it G-9, G-Pèp or the police? Every answer contradicted the last.

There are dozens of engineers, doctors, mothers, organic intellectuals, teachers, youth cultural workers, masons, feminists, students and cultural workers across different neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince who lead their communities every day. Haiti does not suffer from a lack of talent; it suffers from the active repression of its talent and potential. The millions of sitwayen angage (engaged citizens) were architects of the February 7, 2021, national uprising that sought to remove the Haitian PHTK’s second dictator, Jovenel Moïse, from power. There are too many organic leaders to count.

How much easier is it to subscribe to racist tropes that every politician is corrupt in Haiti than to stand with the nameless, faceless, internet-less, electricity-less, social media-less leadership that resists every day?

In one interview with a foreign reporter, Ezayi explained that the modern-day “gang phenomenon” started with Washington’s imposition of dictator Michel Martelly in 2011. The ruling PHTK bragged about being “legal bandits” above the law and employing murderous gangs to do their enforcement because unlike the military or police, they could not be held accountable. The armed bands transformed almost overnight into government death squads armed with hundreds of thousands of U.S. weapons. Veteran Haitian community organizer and educator Jafrik Ayiti has pointed out some of the smoking guns linking the gangsters in flip flops down below in the oppressed communities and the Haitian state and business interests hidden away in the pristine hills of Petyonvil perched atop the city.

It is the incorruptible leadership of regular Haitians that the imperial U.S. government and its underlings most fear — and consequently target for liquidation.

At a meeting off Avenue John Brown in downtown Port-au-Prince, Naydi, Ezayi’s right-hand man, a MOLEGHAF leader and an agronomist, laid to waste the old paternalistic colonial myth. “Look at us. How many leaders are gathered right here? We have educators, doctors, lawyers, journalists. Men anpil chay pa lou (With many hands, the burden is lighter). Pipi gaye pa fè kim. (Dispersed pee-pee does not make foam),” he told attendees. “We are all leaders or we are all dead. We don’t have the luxury of quarreling with one another about who is a leader and who is not. We are all leaders.”

While Haiti’s exploiters and enemies repress and bury such examples of popular sovereignty, the internationalist movement needs to elevate their voices and examples to build global solidarity with the nation of 12 million people.
Baz La (The Base)

Any comrades who have to do an errand outside of the 27 neighborhoods of Solino are expected to check in every hour. If Ezayi has not heard from one of his trusted lieutenants, he gets nervous and starts calling them frantically. Tèt fwèt lè bagay cho (Keep a cool head when things heat up) is one of his guiding slogans.

In Fò Nasyonal last month, he spoke at a semi-clandestine meeting one neighborhood away. “We don’t need Kenya to invade us. We don’t need Taiwan to invade us. We don’t need a fourth U.S. occupation. If these foreign powers really wanted to help us, why don’t they support us so we can defend ourselves?”

“The paramilitaries have all the high-powered U.S. weapons while we defend ourselves with machetes, bottles, Molotov cocktails and handguns, if we can get ahold of them,” Ezayi said. “They want to disempower us, yet again. They make it look like we cannot help ourselves. If the U.S. would just get out of our way — for once!”

Two men appear on a motorcycle outside the meeting. Unknown to the young comrades serving as lookouts, they ask for Ezayi and another leader. The second line of defense perceives something is wrong. Microseconds and centimeters save lives in 2024 Port-au-Prince. The MOLEGHAF security signals the security detail inside the locked doors. The unknown assailants draw guns and bogart their way into the meeting. Ezayi is long gone, scaling a wall in the back where the formatè yo (trainers of cadre) painted a Che Guevara and Jan Jak Desalin mural.

Later on, back at the base, passing a small cup of bwa kochon (pig wood) moonshine around, Ezayi explains that, “If you don’t have a plan B and C in this city, you won’t last long. Port-au-Prince is Sniper City.” Afraid of death, he chuckles with the zetwal, as he mentally outlines the 20-some-odd tasks that await before night falls.
The Stars

Ezayi knows how to deal with foreign reporters. He knows they have mastered the art of getting the scoop they want by throwing some dirty dollars around and ignoring any inconvenient details. On this day, he was not in the mood for any shenanigans. A Haitian fixer, Wachlèt, had brought two reporters from France 24 to Solino. The foreign network had paid him handsomely. More than one Haitian journalist has been murdered trying to get a hot take for foreign networks. With the goud at 131 for one U.S. dollar and skyrocketing inflation, hunger leaves the Haitian employee no choice. The fixer knew the agreement. He could make his living, but he had to invest some of the money he received from foreigners, or he would be forced out.

Ezayi had a bad feeling about these reporters. He used Wachlèt to translate. He asked them what they knew about Haiti. He quizzed them on their thoughts on France and European nations’ support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The reporters failed the test. Ezayi asked for the money, gave Wachlèt his cut, took the rest and threw it in their chests. He told them they had five minutes to exit Solino.

Ezayi stays put behind the barricades, responding to interview requests if his cell phone signal cooperates. On Radio Ibo, one of the biggest radio stations in a country where electricity is rare, took to the airwaves to ask a question of the PHTK government: “Where is the Petro Caribbean money that you stole from us? Do you know how they answer us? With massacres. Kidnappings. Rape. Human rights violations. They make us refugees in our own city. They assassinate us. This is the government we are dealing with. That is the function of these paramilitary gangs. To take power away from us. To depopulate our poto mitan, the neighborhoods that have long been the backbone of resistance.”

Later in the evening, neighbors, local kids and comrades in arms yell to him “Anfom Zizi? (What’s good?)” when he passes by. They aspire to one day fill his Timberland boots. He jumps into the next interview confident the ancestors will hear the people’s prayers.

One night, he sees two neighborhood kids begging for some loose change. He calls their attention. “Evans and Emmanuel: Get over here!” he demands. “What did I tell you about begging, you rascals? Come on, let’s go!” He put his arm on each of their shoulders and walked them to the sausage cart. “When you’re hungry, come talk to your uncles. We Haitians have never begged, and never will.”

He tells them to look up at the stars with him, dropping ancestral, love-life lessons on the 10-year-old orphans of the paramilitary war: “You see those stars up there? You see how clearly they illuminate the sky for us? The blan [the imperialists/white man] and aloufa [oligarchs] cannot see those zetwal [stars]. With all of their Hollywood, Times Square and lights, they are too full of themselves to care about the peace of others and appreciate God’s beauty.”

A Message for Haiti’s “Barbecue” Cherizier: Be Like Malcolm

Haiti on Fire, Part II
By Ron Daniels

March 31, 2024

Source: Vantage Point Vignettes


Haiti is on fire now in large part because of the terrorism being inflicted on the First Black Republic by a notorious gang leader Jimmy Cherizier, who goes by the name “Barbecue.” For months a heavily armed coalition of gangs called the G-9 Alliance under his command has controlled the majority of the Capital of Port Au Prince. But it is the most recent brazen attacks on police stations, government offices, the airport, the seaport, hospitals, pharmacies, schools and prisons where thousands of inmates were released that has catapulted Barbecue into the international news. The world is now his stage as he boldly strides around giving interviews to the BBC, CNN, MSNBC and journalists from news outlets everywhere.

Barbecue claims to be interested in rescuing the nation from a parasitical elite and corrupt politicians. He recently threatened “civil war” if the current illegitimate Prime Minister Ariel Henry does not resign. Henry is presently stuck in Puerto Rico and unable to return to the country. Under pressure, he has agreed to resign once a Presidential Counsel is formed to select an Interim Government. This development has not deterred Barbecue’s militia from “barbecuing” hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the Capital region, wreaking deadly havoc on women, children and the elderly, causing what the U.N. is declaring a humanitarian disaster.

Barbecue is a bad man, a death dealing bandit who must be neutralized, deterred, or persuaded to discontinue his horrific behavior. Is there any hope for redemption, reformation, transformation of Barbecue? He’s a former officer in the Haitian National Police, who was fired for police misconduct and brutality. He has also been accused of participating in several massacres. Barbecue has expressed his admiration for the ruthless dictator, Jean Claude “Popa Doc” Duvalier, who ruled Haiti with a bloody iron fist from 1957 – 1971. But, when I first read about the mysterious Barbecue, he was quoting Malcolm X. Apparently, he also fancies himself a modern-day Black Robin Hood, attacking the elite in defense of Haiti’s impoverished masses. This Jekyll and Hyde political persona doesn’t add up?

Haiti is on fire and Barbecue’s G-9 militia constitutes an existential threat to the current plan and process by the Montana Accord Movement and its allies (which I support) to create a path towards a genuine, Haitian conceived democracy. In a recent article in Reuters, University of Virginia Haiti politics expert Robert Fatton said even if there is a different kind of government, “the reality is that you need to talk to the gangs.” Professor Fatton concluded: “If they have that supremacy, and there is no countervailing force, it’s no longer a question if you want them at the table,” he said. “They may just take the table.” That’s not good. There must be a way out of this dilemma.

Perhaps, there is hope in the Malcolm X side of Barbecue’s persona. Malcolm never committed the kind of atrocities that Barbecue is accused of committing. But, as Alex Haley notes in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “He rose from a hoodlum, thief, dope peddler, pimp… to become the most dynamic leader of the Black Revolution.” I confess that this may be naïve on my part, but perhaps Barbecue can be induced, incentivized to dramatically and productively change his behavior. Perhaps, he is not beyond redemption. Not that he will hear it, but in my summary remarks at a recent Forum/Rally on Resolving the Crisis in Haiti at the historic Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC, I challenged Barbecue to “stop quoting Malcolm and start acting like Malcolm.”

My message to Barbecue is, in the spirit of Malcolm X, stop terrorizing the people and start defending the people; stop destroying neighborhoods and communities and start building and preserving them; become a true liberator by directing your militia to feed, cloth, educate and provide healthcare for the people like the Black Panther Party did in the era of the 60’s in the U.S. They were inspired by Malcolm.

There are likely institutions and leaders in Haiti, beginning with the faith community, that are willing to extend a hand to encourage you and your allies to engage in a process of truth and reconciliation to heal the wounds of the first Black Republic inflicted by your forces. The ultimate outcome could be an exchange of guns for jobs and social economic benefits which your transformed organization could dispense. It’s that “swords into ploughshares” thing.

Come to the Table Barbecue and use your ingenuity and leadership skills to develop social and economic programs to enhance the education, skills and opportunities of the people as part of a process of building the new Haiti. The choice is yours. Be like Malcolm and become an agent for liberation and development or become a pariah, a social outcast whose legacy will be death and destruction heaped on your own people. The choice is yours!

Resolving the Crisis in Haiti: Dr. Ron Daniels delivers summary remarks at Rally/Forum

March 21, 2024, Washington, DC — Dr. Ron Daniels delivers closing remarks at Forum/Rally “Resolving the Critical Crisis in Haiti – The Role of the Montana Accord Movement”.

Haiti on Fire, Part I: The Montana Accord Movement to the Rescue

By Dr. Ron Daniels

March 4, 2024
Vantage Point Vignettes
Comments and Commentary by Dr. Ron Daniels

Haiti, our first Black Republic, is a virtual failed state where vicious gangs tied to the parasitical elite, and gangs with their own wannabe leaders or criminal kingpins control most of the Capital of Port Au Prince and much of the country. Ariel Henry, an unelected, illegitimate, and inept “Prime Minister” has a tenuous hold over what passes for a “government.”

The well-armed rampaging gangs are terrorizing the country utilizing kidnapping for ransom, extortion, trafficking in drugs and assaulting and raping women unchecked. They are attacking police stations and killing members of the National Police, attacking prisons, and releasing prisoners and attacking and killing each other over turf. They are also in deadly competition with each other to take over the government or at least emerge as the dominant force that will be the de facto government.

Haiti is on fire and as the people suffer and demand the resignation of an illegitimate Prime Minister, what is the posture of the U.S. government and the Core Group of nations and multilateral bodies? Unfortunately, tragically the U.S. is propping up a recalcitrant, illegitimate, shaky Henry regime despite massive opposition from the people. Rather than insisting that Henry relinquish the reins of power, the U.S. and its allies are negotiating with him and preparing to finance a Kenyan-led military force to “restore order.” The U.S. and its allies are arrogantly and blatantly ignoring rather than respecting and supporting the wishes of the Haitian people. We’ve seen this movie before. Unfortunately, even heads of state in the Caribbean, who should be good-faith facilitators, have recently acquiesced to negotiating with Henry rather than demanding his immediate departure from office.

Haiti is on fire. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that there is a remarkable, broad-based civil society movement involving hundreds of organizations and leaders from across the political spectrum who have boldly and courageously come forward to devise a plan, process and strategy to put out the fire, to extinguish the raging conflagration; firefighting freedom fighters committed to advancing a “Haitian Solution” to rescue the first Black Republic from what one leader has termed the “criminal enterprise” which is spreading death and destruction across the land. This powerful, people-based effort is called the Montana Accord Movement (MAM). These courageous leaders are determined to raise Haiti from the ashes to create a sustainable, people-based democracy.

The challenge is, our challenge as allies and friends of the First Black Republic is to persuade, demand, compel the U.S. government, the Core Group and our sisters and brothers from CARICOM to insist that Henry relinquish power immediately. Equally important, the U.S. and all external international players should immediately acknowledge and support the Montana Accord Movement plan, process and strategy as the way forward toward sustainable democracy and development in Haiti. To achieve this righteous outcome, we the people must rise-up to support the Montana Accord Movement to save Haiti. Let’s do it. #SaveHaiti, SupportMAM

Review the Montana Accord Plan Here — https://akomontana.ht/en/agreeement/

 

Ron Daniels
Dr. Daniels is the founder and president of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century, a progressive, African-centered, action-oriented resource center dedicated to empowering people of African descent and marginalized communities. A veteran social and political activist, Dr. Ron Daniels was an independent candidate for president of the United States in 1992. He served as the executive director of the National Rainbow Coalition in 1987 and the southern regional coordinator and deputy campaign manager for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1988. He holds a B.A. in History from Youngstown State University, an M.A. in Political Science from the Rockefeller School of Public Affairs in Albany, New York and a Doctor of Philosophy in Africana Studies from the Union Institute and University in Cincinnati. Dr. Daniels is a Distinguished Lecturer Emeritus at York College, City University of New York.

Inside Yemen’s Capture of Israel’s Galaxy Leader Ship

By Mnar Adley

April 2, 2024

Source: Mint Press

In November, Yemen’s Ansar Allah captured the Galaxy Leader, a cargo ship owned by Abraham Ungar, an Israeli billionaire with links to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party. Images of the daring raid went viral, and the ship continues to be in Yemeni hands, with Ansar Allah even opening the ship up as an unlikely tourist attraction. The Galaxy Leader’s staff are still held in Yemen. Western attempts to get the Galaxy Leader back by force and through diplomacy have failed, as Ansar Allah has stuck to their guns, demanding an end to the attack.

Talking with MintPress, it appears that Shamsan considers the United States to be something of a paper tiger. “Today, it seems that America has lost its ability to deter and at the same time sees that the option of force is the most appropriate and what can be used to restore that image,” he said. When asked about the heightened risk of war, Shamsan was adamant that it was not Yemen making the region unsafe, but Western powers. As he told MintPress: “The biggest threat to regional and national security for all Arab countries bordering the Red Sea and in the region is the military presence of the United States and Britain.

Before the recent events, it was the Americans who practiced extortion and were behind ship hijackings, meaning that when America creates justifications and pretexts, it creates an opportunity for itself to be present in the region.”

This short documentary was written and directed by Mnar Adley, founder and director of MintPress and It was produced by Ahmed Qahtan, an independent Yemeni journalist.

A 32-Hour Workweek Is Ours for the Taking

The fight for shorter hours can unify workers everywhere.

By Sarah Jaffe

April 3, 2024

Source: In These Times



The United Auto Workers won many of their demands in their groundbreaking, six-week strike in 2023, but one of them — despite not making it into their new contracts with the Big Three automakers — has the potential to radically shift organized labor’s priorities and unify an often fractious movement in ways not seen in decades.

The demand is for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay. From the beginning of the strike, the audacious proposal captured public attention beyond the usual labor watchers because it upends decades-old expectations of what unions should want, signaling the working class has priorities beyond simply holding onto jobs.

The autoworkers had struck at General Motors in 2019, but despite plenty of energy from the rank and file, a doomed leadership led a lackluster action to a contract that was half-heartedly accepted. Before that, it had been decades of concessions. But in early 2023, democratic reforms in the union swept a new leadership team, under President Shawn Fain, into power with the slogan ​“No Corruption. No Concessions. No Tiers.” Two-tier status had been a central grievance since the UAW accepted a lower tier for new hires during rampant deindustrialization. At the time, they were told the lower tier was necessary to keep jobs at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler (now owned by Stellantis). But the companies came screaming back to profitability, and workers on the lower tier were still making less for the same work than their more-senior colleagues.

At that time, mass layoffs or concessions weren’t the only ideas floating around, just the ones that won out politically. Economist Dean Baker suggested in articles during the Great Recession that the government subsidize companies to shorten the workweek, spreading the work among more workers and hiring, rather than firing, during the recession. The Obama administration didn’t bite, unions largely didn’t get on board, and we got a long, slow recovery.

The Covid crisis put the issue of working time back on the table. Many ​“essential” workers — including a wide swath of manufacturing employees— worked forced overtime and risked their lives and health. Across the country and the world, they decided enough was enough.

“It really made people reflect on what’s important in life,” Fain told me in January. Workers were deciding, he said, that working 12-hour days, seven days a week, cobbling together multiple jobs to scrape by ​“is not a life.” And so the shorter hours demand made its way from grumbling workers to the UAW’s strike demands to major headlines (“Why a four-day workweek is on the table for automakers,” among so many others).

It was ​“like a bolt out of nowhere,” said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist of work at Boston College who has researched and advocated for shorter hours for decades. ​“It legitimated [the demand] hugely.” Suddenly, New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum was endorsing the call and urging President Joe Biden to act on it for workers across industries. ​“Americans spend too much time on the job,” Appelbaum wrote. ​“A shorter workweek would be better for our health, better for our families and better for our employers.”

Fain told me that, initially, the UAW was ​“laughed at, basically, when we put it out there.” Ford CEO Jim Farley complained to CNN that ​“if we had done that [four-day week]. … We would have gone bankrupt many years ago. … We’d have to close plants and most people would lose their jobs.”

In other words, it’s not a complete shock that the 32-hour week was not in the contracts the union won. But Fain doesn’t see it as a mere bargaining chip. Rather, it’s the start of a long-term strategy for the union, one he hopes the rest of labor will pick up: ​“I really felt it was imperative to get the dialogue going again, to try to fight for a shorter workweek and get the public thinking along those lines.”






Work-life balance was on the autoworkers’ minds as the union prepared for bargaining — long hours, overtime (whether voluntary or forced) and the ongoing mental health crisis.

“The ability for an autoworker to provide for a family or even oneself has been more and more difficult,” Charles Mitchell, a veteran Stellantis worker in Detroit, told The Guardian. ​“All the while companies are becoming more profitable and making shareholders richer while forcing mandatory 60– to 70-hour workweeks in assembly plants.”

“Our work lives and the conditions in this nation, in this world, are what lead to a lot of these mental health issues,” Fain said. ​“Jobs should bring dignity to people.” Too many people, he said, labor constantly, with no time off for their families or friends or ​“just pursuing things that you love doing.” People lose hope, he said, when all they do is work.

When he’s talking to high school students at the union’s training center, he talks about the fact that work is a process of selling your time: ​“The greatest resource that we have on this earth is a human being’s time.” The right wing, he noted, talks about a ​“right to life” when they’re talking about abortion, but that isn’t the kind of right to life he means. ​“That’s a right to birth. They don’t give a damn about life,” he continued. What he wants is ​“a real right to life, valuing a human being’s time, valuing their health and not just when they’re born, but after they’re born and when they get old and are too old to work, too young to die.”

ESSENTIALLY EXPOSED BY COVID


The AFL-CIO adopted a resolution two years ago reasserting that shorter hours should be a priority for the federation that represents 12.5 million workers and they would ​“aggressively take up the fight for a shorter workweek and earlier retirement.”

Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, introduced that resolution on behalf of his 200,000-member union. When we spoke after the new year, he told me, ​“The collective bargaining process gives unions an opportunity to raise this question up. There are other ways too, such as legislation, working with allies, taking it to the streets and so on.”

Just as Fain found lessons in Covid, Dimondstein noted the global pandemic brought us new language about postal workers and so many other working people, one that perhaps unintentionally inspired a new militancy on the shop floor: ​“We are essential, we are key and we deserve better.”

Schor, too, saw that new common sense everywhere. When her book The Overworked American first came out in 1991, the conversation was very different, but now, she said, it seems people think, ​“It’s too much. What’s happened to us, the people in this country? We’ve been asked to do something that’s not fair. People are exhausted.”

During the pandemic, as I have written many times, workers realized their bosses didn’t care if they died. ​“We lost a lot of members that went to work and caught Covid and died, and one worker dying, that’s one too many,” Fain told me. ​“But meanwhile, the leadership of the Big Three, they’re working from home for two and three years.”

Pushed not just to keep working but to do so for longer hours in more dangerous conditions, many workers began to push back. Even before the pandemic, Donna Jo Marks, a worker at Nabisco’s plant in Portland, Ore., explained, they’d worked 12 days on, then two days off. But once Covid hit, she said, ​“Sometimes we would work 28 days straight and everyone above us thought, ​‘Oh, well, you guys are getting compensated for it,’ — but at what cost?” For a little while, they got $2 an hour extra hazard pay, she said, but that stopped after a few months. ​“It just was an ugly time and people were tired and it wasn’t safe.”

ILLUSTRATION BY HOWARD BARRY


Marks and her coworkers were part of the earlier pandemic strike wave, in which formally and informally organized workers went on strike against the Covid-induced speedup of work. At Nabisco, they struck for more than five weeks and won some concessions on working time, and then, Marks explained, the state legislature passed a bill further restricting the use of forced overtime for bakery workers. Nurses, teachers, warehouse workers, farmworkers and retail workers all took action around safety and the intensification of work. Demanding safety precautions, Florida farmworker Oscar Otzoy told me in 2020, ​“We’re seen as essential workers, but we’re not taken into account with the same urgency and the same sense of protections that other workers have. And so we think that it’s time for that to happen, for them to be able to see us.”

Employers might talk about workers being part of the family, Fain noted, but their own families were hardly risking their lives on the assembly line. To him, it dramatized the class difference in America: ​“The wealthy class, the billionaire class, they have a different set of rules for themselves. And then they expect everybody else to follow another set of rules that they exploit. And we’ve been conditioned as a society to think that’s OK.”

Autoworkers, Fain continued, had worked so-called alternate work schedules for years, working two days on, two days off — but those days on were 12-hour shifts, and the days off didn’t line up with the schedules of families and friends. Workers felt like zombies, without enough rest and recreation. And so they brought up scheduling questions again and again when Fain was campaigning and preparing to bargain with the Big Three.

Fain recalled visiting the union’s education center in Michigan’s Black Lake, reading old Solidarity magazines from the UAW’s early days in the 1930s and 1940s. ​“Our leadership back then was talking about a 32-hour workweek, a 30-hour workweek, and it basically goes back to mastering technology, not letting technology master us.”

When Dimondstein addressed the AFL-CIO convention in 2022 and introduced the shorter workweek resolution, he began the narrative in 1791, when Philadelphia carpenters struck for the 10-hour day. He then spoke about the beginnings of the movement for the eight-hour day and the Haymarket leaders ​“murdered by the government for their audacity to demand ​‘eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will.’” May Day, he noted, the international workers’ holiday, came from that particular struggle. But after landing the 40-hour week, Dimondstein noted, ​“the labor movement largely abandoned the fight for the shorter workweek.”

“It shouldn’t have stopped at eight hours,” he told me in January.

1933

BUSTING THROUGH THE ​“AFFIRMATION TRAP”

The UAW’s strike this year was a notable shift in strategy for the union, back to a militancy that challenges management’s control over the work process and products. In the ​“Treaty of Detroit,” the landmark contract that the UAW won from General Motors in 1950, the union made a major decision not to contest so-called management rights. The union restricted its struggles to the size of its slice of the proceeds of workers’ labor, rather than fighting to control the workplace itself. The fight for shorter hours was one of many issues that fell by the wayside in this all-too-brief period of detente.

Fain didn’t directly take aim at the Treaty of Detroit when we spoke, but he did note the philosophy of ​“working together” with management had been a failure: ​“It’s a way for the company to make workers think they care about them. And meanwhile, they continue to cut jobs and make life harder on the workers.”

There are far fewer members in the UAW than there were at the height of its power, and more UAW members who aren’t autoworkers at all — the union represents, for example, 48,000 graduate workers and other academics in the University of California system. But the union’s strategy this year was designed to make the most of smaller numbers, holding a rolling strike across the Big Three, taking workers at facilities out on a schedule designed to maximize impact and respond to offers at the bargaining table.

It was a gamble that required more than just militancy to succeed. In order for the ​“Stand-Up Strike” to work, the union had to find a way around what Joshua Clover, in his book Riot. Strike. Riot., calls the ​“affirmation trap” — when organized labor ​“is locked into the position of affirming its own exploitation under the guise of survival.”

The trap is a side effect of deindustrialization under the philosophy of cooperation with management. When companies want to shut plants down anyway, the strike has less power: How do you strike to keep a plant going? Without the leverage that the strike provides, workers end up begging for their jobs and making concessions. But bringing the shorter workweek back into the discussion changes the equation: Rather than importuning the boss to keep everything the same, the shorter workweek reopens the question of workers’ value outside of the plant, suggesting that ​“less work” might be a goal that workers could embrace too, as long as they get a say in how that work is divided. And rolling strikes concentrated the workers’ power right where and when it would hurt the most. (As a side effect, the UAW did manage to keep a plant open, the Belvidere plant in Illinois, and won the right to strike against future plant closures.)


Fain shrugged off the Ford CEO’s suggestion that a shorter workweek would cause more plant closures: ​“They’re not going to close a plant because we want a 32-hour workweek. They’re not going to close a plant because we bargained a good contract. They’re going to close the plant because some greedy son of a bitch at the top wants more and they want to do it to somebody else, and they want to exploit them for even less.”

There’s also, of course, the question of technology: Can companies, in fact, replace workers with robots or ChatGPT? This past year was the year that artificial intelligence hype hit the mainstream, but working people across industries have been fighting against the machine since the era of the Luddites. Dimondstein recalled his early days in the postal service, with the introduction of automated equipment like barcodes for sorting mail: ​“I was on a machine of about 18 to 20 people, a mechanized piece of equipment called the letter-sorting machine. And we were replaced by optical character readers where two people could sort at least as much mail, if not more mail, as the 18 or 20 of us.”

Workers don’t want to go back to the old days, Dimondstein continued, but the real question is, ​“Who is automation going to serve? We aren’t going to stop the march of technology, but we just don’t want it to serve the profits of Wall Street and the CEOs and these corporations. We want it to make life better for working people.” Automation, he said, could be used to free up time, to pay workers to work less and have more leisure. ​“There’s the old saying, we’re living to work rather than working to live.”

So far it’s been just the opposite. Postal workers and autoworkers alike work longer hours and forced overtime, and their jobs are harder. But the new common sense around work could help to change that. Other strikes in 2023 — the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild, for example — also centered artificial intelligence in their demands.

In Juliet Schor’s research as part of a coalition including researchers from Boston College, Cambridge University and Oxford University and the organization 4 Day Week Global, she continues to find that a four-day workweek brings results to companies around the world that are ​“off the charts.” Few of the companies are in manufacturing and none are anywhere on the scale of the Big Three, but workers report being happier, more rested and healthier. Some of the companies in their trial program are now coming up on two years and nearly all, she said, are succeeding.

Legislators are starting to take notice. Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA) first introduced a bill in Congress in 2021 to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, reducing the standard workweek to 32 hours from 40 (meaning all workers who are not overtime exempt would get overtime pay after 32 hours), and he reintroduced it in 2023; Sen. Bernie Sanders has also endorsed the idea. Bills have been introduced in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New York and Maryland (where a bill was withdrawn to be reworked).

But opposition to those bills is a reminder that if workers want a shorter workweek, they’ll probably have to fight for it. And that’s precisely why the UAW’s strike demand was significant. The union put shorter hours front and center and hasn’t turned away from the issue as it turns, now, to organizing nonunion auto plants across the country, mostly in the South.

Shorter hours can be a unifying demand across plants, across the Big Three and the foreign automakers, where issues might vary but time off can provide a constant. It can link workers across industries and countries, as Schor’s research shows: automakers with postal workers, architects with brewers, legal aid attorneys with graduate students. Dimondstein noted the demand also cuts across political viewpoints.

Around the world, Fain said, workers are waking up to the fact that capitalist priorities are not serving the rest of us, and the shorter workweek can be a demand that the organization of work serve workers’ interests for a change: ​“It’s not just a UAW issue, it’s not just a union issue, it’s a working class issue. That’s why I think our campaign resonated globally. You have the concentration of wealth going into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and something’s got to give.”

The postal workers are still finalizing their demands as they head into negotiations this year, but Dimondstein said, ​“There will be some discussions [about shorter hours] going forward because I think we all have to do our part to take up this demand. It’s not going to be changed overnight, but the more we, as the labor movement, unite around core demands like this on all fronts — from collective bargaining to legislation to the streets — then the better chance we’ll have of really concretely winning.”

INVESTIGATION: The Palestinian Struggle for Labor Rights in Israel

We talked to Palestinian workers whose underpaid labor provides part of Israel’s low-cost workforce. Their stories of organizing amid ethnic cleansing shed light on how this work is a crucial lifeline for Palestinians — now severed by the devastation of war.

By Jaclynn Ashly

April 3, 2024

Source: Jacobin




Hatem Abu Ziadeh’s face beams with pride as he recounts how several years ago his Israeli employer in one of Israel’s illegal settlements was forced to give him his job back after he was fired for organizing a union among the Palestinian workers.

Ziadeh, a fifty-four-year-old who lives in the Ramallah-area town of Birzeit in the occupied West Bank, has worked as a car mechanic for more than two decades at the Zarfaty garage, an auto repair shop located in Mishor Adumim, the industrial zone of Israel’s megasettlement Ma’ale Adumim. Like all of Israel’s 279 settlements built in the Palestinian territory, Ma’ale Adumim is considered illegal under international law.

In 2013, Ziadeh stood up to his Israeli employer, insisting on minimum wage and basic labor rights to which Palestinian workers inside Israel and its settlements are entitled, but are rarely granted. With the assistance of the labor organization Workers Advice Center (WAC-MAAN), which helps organize Palestinian and Israeli workers, Ziadeh and about thirty other workers from the West Bank established a union and demanded collective bargaining rights.

Organizing Labor in the Occupied Territories

In response, Ziadeh’s Israeli employer fired him and revoked his work permit, alleging that he was a “security threat.” But after a prolonged legal battle between the employer and workers in the Israeli courts — along with a strike staged by the workers — the judge ruled that the employer was obligated to reinstate Ziadeh’s permit, allow him to return to work, and compensate him for two years of missed pay. Along with this, the court ruled that the Palestinian workers had the right to organize a union.

In 2017, soon after Ziadeh returned to work, the workers at the Zarfaty garage became the first Palestinian workers from the West Bank to ever sign a collective bargaining agreement with an Israeli employer. Since then, Palestinian workers in other shops and factories in the settlements have also successfully unionized.

Hatem Abu Ziadeh sits at a table.

 (Courtesy of Jaclynn Ashly)

“It was a very proud day,” Ziadeh remembered, sitting at a cafe outside Mishor Adumim shortly before October 7. Palestinian men were lined up at the checkpoint of the settlement’s entrance, each one checked by private security guards. “It felt like I had won the battle. And I beat my Israeli boss through his own courts.” Ziadeh chuckled at this thought as he sipped a paper cup of bitter coffee.

Now, however, life for Palestinians who worked in Israel and its settlements has turned upside down — with their hopes of better pay and working conditions crushed over the last few months. Since October 7, when Hamas carried out a complex assault against Israel, the Israeli army has obliterated the besieged Gaza Strip, killing more than thirty thousand Palestinians in what many observers say could amount to genocide.

Following Hamas’s unprecedented attack, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds and the capture of approximately 240 Israelis, as well as some foreigners, Israel closed all checkpoints in and out of the West Bank. It barred Palestinian workers from their jobs in Israel and its settlements, leaving many destitute, with no money for rent, loan payments, or their children’s tuition.

As the war drags on into its sixth month, the situation for workers is becoming more and more desperate. Thousands of workers from Gaza who had received permission to work inside Israel shortly before October 7 were detained and held incommunicado for weeks. Some endured humiliating ill-treatment and torture by Israeli forces before being either returned to Gaza or released in the West Bank. Others fled into the West Bank from Israel out of fear for their safety.

I interviewed several Palestinian academics for this story, and they unanimously emphasized that the realities faced by these workers were shaped over half a century ago, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. They highlighted how Israel’s actions strangled the Palestinian economy, leading to a heavy reliance on Israeli wages for a large portion of the Palestinian workforce. According to them, subjecting Palestinians to exploitative and abusive conditions in Israel and its settlements was a deliberate strategy employed by Israel to establish colonial domination over Palestinians.

Occupied Economy

Approximately ten thousand Palestinian workers have been allowed to return to their jobs in Israel’s settlements, albeit under tighter security measures. However, many others have been left with no income, and the unions, which some workers fought tirelessly to establish, have done little to help them.

Before October 7, around 150,000 to 200,000 Palestinians held permits to work inside Israel or its settlements, with the majority employed by the construction industry. However, many Palestinians also work informally, without a permit.

Ziadeh was allowed to return to his work at Zarfaty after about a month, but the Israeli army erected a checkpoint near the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar, located about three miles away from Mishor Adumim. Palestinians are currently prohibited from crossing this checkpoint. As a result, Ziadeh’s Israeli employer, who is now always carrying a gun, must come to pick the workers up and transport them to the garage.

“The Israelis are treating us very badly,” Ziadeh tells me. “It has become scary. If one of them sees you even smile or laugh, they will threaten to get you fired. We are always feeling unsafe, and we have to be very careful.” All the Israeli employers are now strapped with machine guns, and the Palestinian workers are not allowed to walk around inside the industrial zone.

The fate of Ziadeh, and the tens of thousands of other Palestinians dependent on work in Israel and its settlements, was sealed in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. This occupation subjected the territories to harsh military control.

Land Grabs and Tariffs

According to Leila Farsakh, a Palestinian political economist and professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, at the end of the Third Arab-Israeli War in June 1967, Israel faced a significant demographic and economic challenge posed by the large Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This challenge conflicted with Israel’s Zionist goals of establishing a Jewish majority in the lands of historic Palestine.

“Israel found itself in control of nearly a million Palestinians living between the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem,” Farsakh tells me. “These Palestinians formed the equivalent of 30 percent of Israel’s population at the time.”

In contrast to the events of 1948, when around 80 percent of Palestinians who lived on lands that became part of the Israeli state either fled or were expelled from their homes, numbering about 750,000 people, a smaller number of Palestinians in the West Bank fled during the 1967 war. By that time, two-thirds of the Gaza Strip’s population was made up of refugees who lost their land in 1948, resulting in densely populated areas. Comparatively, the West Bank, with its more rural landscape, possessed more land and freshwater resources than the Gaza Strip.

“Israel did not wish to incorporate them into the Israeli polity for fear of jeopardizing the Jewish character of the state,” Farsakh tells me. “The question of what to do with these people, both politically and economically, was central to the cost of occupation, to labor migration, and to the ability of Israel to assert its territorial claim over the area.”

The first thing Israel did was put the West Bank and Gaza Strip under the military’s control, confiscating huge swathes of Palestinian public and private lands for security and firing zones, and later for settlement construction and nature reserves. By the mid-1980s, 39 percent of the West Bank and about 31 percent of the Gaza Strip had been mapped as Israeli state land.

According to Israeli rights group B’Tselem, during the first thirty-six years of occupation, Israel seized almost two million dunums of Palestinian lands — 200,000 hectares — leasing it out to official representatives, such as the Jewish Fund or the Israel Land Administration, or to private citizens for settlement construction. Various restrictions on Palestinian trade and economic development accompanied the mass confiscation of land.

The West Bank and Gaza Strip were forcibly incorporated into a customs union with Israel, Farsakh says, with Israel imposing restrictions on the kinds of commodities that can be imported or exported from the territories, protecting Israeli agriculture. Additionally, Israeli officials unilaterally set an external tariff structure. Farsakh explains that any trade with the rest of the world had to go through Israel and be handled by Israeli agents.

Israel enforced a monetary union with the Palestinian territories, adopting Israeli currency as official tender and shutting down all but two banks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which were under Israeli supervision. Israeli authorities prohibited investments from Israel — or abroad — in the Palestinian economy. The Israeli military exercised full control over the budgets in the West Bank and Gaza, including taxation and collection.

Palestinians were forced to pay income taxes 3 to 10 percent higher than those levied on Israelis for the same range of income. Farsakh notes that, between 1967 and 1971, the Israeli military establishment issued over two hundred orders regulating Palestinian economic life and tied investment to military approvals.

Land confiscations and restrictions on trade and investment caused the agricultural sector, which had once employed a large portion of the Palestinian labor force, to collapse. According to Farsakh, the commercialized agrarian economy in the Palestinian territories absorbed nearly 40 percent of the total labor force in 1967. By 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), agriculture employed less than 20 percent of the Palestinian labor force.

“The result of this specific form of integration was to insert a small, mainly agrarian Palestinian economy into an occupying industrial economy,” Farsakh explains. “Labor flows were the first element in binding the Palestinian economy to Israel.”

During the early years of the occupation, some Israeli officials opposed Palestinian employment in Israel, fearing it would displace Jewish workers. Over time, however, most recognized that reducing unemployment in the Palestinian territories could pacify political unrest

.

A WAC-MAAN organizer discusses unionization with Palestinian workers at Mishor Adumim. 

(Courtesy of Jaclynn Ashly)

The resulting economic arrangement, which allows Palestinians to seek jobs in Israel in sectors that lack sufficient Jewish labor, such as construction, agriculture, and the service industry, was beneficial to Israeli employers in various ways, but ultimately damaging to the Palestinian national economy.

A Tale of Two Economies

For the first two decades of Israel’s occupation, during which Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were permitted relative freedom to move between territories, the portion of individuals seeking work inside Israel or its settlements surged, skyrocketing from virtually zero before 1967 to about 40 percent in 1987, when the first Palestinian intifada erupted.

Palestinians receive much higher wages in Israel than in Palestine. Unsurprisingly, they are, according to Ibrahim Shikaki, assistant professor of economics at Trinity College, “a significant part of the labor force.”

“There was a sweet spot for the Israeli firms because, on one hand, they were paying Palestinians more than what they were being paid in their domestic economy, and, on the other hand, they were paying them less than what they would need to pay the Israeli Jewish workers,” Shikaki tells me. “One of the main ways of increasing profit is by limiting labor costs — and what better way than by having a reserve army of unemployed that you can tap into whenever you want.”

This abundant supply of cheap labor enabled Israeli firms to lower production costs and generate high profits at low prices, often underselling Palestinian and imported goods. Shikaki explains that this arrangement further benefitted Israel by “pacifying the normal tension between capital and labor, between employer and employees.”

“The Israeli employer can pay that Israeli worker a little bit more and they can have more opportunities for promotion. And the employer can do that only because he is exploiting that other segment of labor, which is Palestinian,” Shikaki says.‘The Israeli employer can pay that Israeli worker a little bit more. And the employer can do that only because he is exploiting that other segment of labor, which is Palestinian.’

As Israel confiscated huge areas of Palestinian land, previously self-sufficient communities saw their livelihoods vanish, leading to a dramatic shift in class. Many self-employed Palestinians who once worked in agriculture became wageworkers in the Israeli economy.

According to Farsakh, throughout the 1980s, Palestinian workers from the West Bank and Gaza made up nearly 40 percent of all workers in Israeli construction. Palestinian citizens of Israel, who were absorbed into the state in 1948, represented another 20 percent. This meant that 60 percent of workers in Israel who were building homes for Israelis — including in the illegal settlements — were Palestinian.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Israeli labor market was much more important to the Gaza Strip than the West Bank, Farsakh notes. Palestinian labor flows to Israel represented more than 40 percent of the employed workforce in Gaza and 30 percent in the West Bank.

“Once you take away 40 percent of the labor in the Palestinian economy that means that Palestinians are producing very little,” Shikaki tells me. “And with the income that Palestinians take back home, they end up buying Israeli goods.” This means that the value that is added to the Palestinian economy — through higher wages — is, as Shikaki explains, “being recycled back into the Israeli economy.”

Checkpoint Work Queues

Following the First Intifada, Israel imposed a new system of closure for Palestinians seeking work in the Israeli economy. “Palestinian labor in Israel became a way of control and domination over the Palestinian people, in general, and specifically the workers,” explains Tareq Sadeq, assistant professor in the department of economics at Birzeit University.

Israel erected dozens of army checkpoints throughout the Palestinian territories and imposed a permit regime on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, severing their access to East Jerusalem. Palestinians who received permits to work inside Israel lined up for hours each day to travel to their jobs inside Israel. While this checkpoint and permit system was introduced soon after the First Intifada, it was institutionalized by the Oslo Accords in 1993 and perfected after the Second Intifada in 2000.

Palestinian workers enter the Mishor Adumim industrial zone.

 (Courtesy of Jaclynn Ashly)

Now, Palestinians obtain biometric ID cards from the civil administration, a branch of the Israeli army. Work permits are only issued when an Israeli employer files a permit request with the interior ministry and only after Palestinians pass an army security clearance. A lucrative black market trade in permits has subsequently developed, in which brokers extract money from workers in exchange for access to work.

Palestinians are only permitted to work for the employer listed on their permit, which contains both the worker’s details and their employer’s. They are only allowed to travel to the area of their work and must return to the West Bank before a certain hour or risk arrest.

These biometric cards are needed to cross overcrowded checkpoints, some of which were renovated a few years ago to include automatic gates. At some checkpoints, Israel has implemented automatic AI-powered facial recognition for Palestinians.

Due to the restrictions on entering Israel, an increasing number of Palestinians in the West Bank sought work in the illegal settlements. “For many workers, it became easier for them to work in the settlements because they are closer to their places of residence — sometimes working in the settlement that was established near their village or refugee camp,” Sadeq tells me.

The many limitations on Palestinian economic growth, particularly in the agricultural industrial sector, left Palestinians with limited options, leading many to choose work in the settlements for survival, Farsakh says.

“Bantustanization”

After Oslo, Palestinians in Gaza were completely barred from working in Israel, despite its population having been more dependent on work in Israel than those in the West Bank. According to Farsakh, Israel’s labor policies aligned with its political plans of relinquishing its responsibilities over the Gaza Strip.

Unlike the West Bank, which contains many important religious sites for Judaism, the Zionist movement did not have much religious and ideological interest in the Gaza Strip, leading Israeli leaders to view the territory as a mere nuisance.

“Israel’s plan has always been to use Palestinian labor to build its settlements and then eventually get rid of them,” Farsakh tells me. “It was able to do this with the Gaza Strip but not the West Bank because Israel wants to continue controlling it.”

As unemployment in Gaza rose sharply — reaching devastating levels after Israel implemented a siege on the territory in 2007 — Palestinians in the West Bank continued to work inside Israel and its settlements, thereby reducing the overall unemployment in the territory. “These changes suggest that the Gaza Strip was being separated from the Israeli economy, while the West Bank continues to be integrated,” Farsakh explains.

Following the Oslo Accords, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority brought new job opportunities in the public sector, employing about 20 percent of Palestinians. However, this sector remains dependent on external dynamics. “It is very difficult to create employment in the Palestinian economy, so you have continued dependency on both international aid that feeds the public sector and Israel that controls the Palestinian workers in Israel,” Shikaki says.

Israel also often withholds taxes collected on behalf of the Palestinians as a punitive measure. Several public workers in the West Bank tell me they have not been paid since the conflict in Gaza erupted six months ago.

Israel maintains strict control over more than 60 percent of the West Bank, known as “Area C,” prohibiting Palestinian development while Israeli settlements continue to grow. “The Palestinian economy is an economy of survival,” Farsakh says. “It is not one of independence that has the opportunity to grow and thrive. It is one that allows individual prosperity [from higher wages in the Israeli economy] often at the expense of national growth.”

This reality has created what Farsakh has termed the “Bantustanization” of the West Bank. “Israel inadvertently created an apartheid reality by trying to incorporate the maximum amount of Palestinian land in the West Bank without the Palestinian population, while relying on Palestinian labor,” Farsakh explains. “What this did was turn the Palestinian areas — encircled by checkpoints and settlements — into population reserves.”

Hope and Despair

“Sometimes we would be forced to work until late at night,” recounts fifty-three-year-old Adle Ayad, one of more than a dozen Palestinian women who, in 2019, formed a union at Mevashlim Bishvilec, a factory in the Mishor Adumim industrial zone that produces stuffed vegetables. “Our employer paid us way below minimum wage, fired us whenever he felt like it, and would cut our wages.” For years, employees were paid by the number of pots they filled with vegetables, and not according to the hours they worked.

Adle Ayad with other Palestinian women who helped organize a union at their work in Mishor Adumim. 

(Courtesy of Jaclynn Ashly)

The mistreatment of Palestinian workers in Israel and its settlements has long been well-documented, with those in settlements often facing the worst violations of their rights.

Ayad, a mother of six children from Ramallah, tells me she has “no choice” but to seek work in the settlements, despite the abusive and exploitative work environment. Her husband is a farmer and cannot support the family all year round. “I just keep my head down and do the work so I can bring home some money to my family,” Ayad says.

Following a two-day strike, Ayad’s employer finally acquiesced to a collective bargaining agreement. The agreement ensured the Palestinian workers the minimum hourly wage, holidays, paid sick days, and workplace accident insurance. While Ayad tells me she was initially hopeful about the union and its role in harnessing the collective power of the workers, since October 7 that hope has been shattered.

Ayad was allowed to return to her work three weeks after October 7, but she tells me her employer has not honored previous agreements, taking advantage of the current vulnerability of the Palestinian workers. “Our salaries have decreased since the war,” Ayad says, adding that they have returned to piece-rate pay — they are paid by the pots filled instead of hours worked. She also notes that her bosses “even calculate the boxes wrong and pay us less than what we did. When we complain, our boss tells us to go find another job if we don’t like it.”

According to Yoav Tamir, a workers’ advice center representative, tens of thousands of Palestinian workers, now left with no employment, have little recourse to change their situation. Despite all of them having a pension fund in Israel, they face a significant obstacle: they were not fired and did not quit but are now stuck behind closed army checkpoints, which prevents them from accessing the funds. “In order to get money from the pension fund, they need to stop working,” Tamir tells me. “But if they stop working then they forfeit their work permit.”

“The situation now is very dire, and most of the West Bank economy is on the brink of collapse because there is no money coming in at all and workers are not working,” Tamir says. “People have children they can’t feed, and the situation is on the verge of exploding.”

As construction has almost completely stalled throughout Israel and its settlements since October 7, Israeli authorities have verbalized their intention to replace the Palestinians with foreign workers from various countries. However, Palestinian analysts tell me this scenario of successfully replacing Palestinians with foreign labor is highly unlikely. Tamir has also stated that such a plan is “not possible.”

“One reason that makes Palestinian workers desirable for Israelis is that these work permits allow Palestinians to work — but not sleep — in Israel,” Shikaki explains. “And that for Israel means the employers do not need to pay the public and service needs it would need to with foreign labor that must move their lives to Israel.” Foreign workers have encountered widespread abuse in Israel.

“The other reason pertains to the ideology of the Israeli state,” Shikaki continues. “Israel wants to be a homogenous Jewish state. But bringing more and more people from places like India, Thailand, Moldova, Sri Lanka, is going to threaten and undermine that.” Most likely, Palestinians will eventually be allowed back into Israel and the rest of the settlements, but with much tighter restrictions and more security checks. “Slowly they are going to allow the workers to go back because [Israel] can’t survive without them,” Shikaki says.

Ayad says she now has “no confidence” in the union for which she and the other women at her job fought. However, Ziadeh tells me he is still proud of the workers’ achievements. At his garage, their Israeli employer has continued to respect their signed labor agreement. “I still believe we did a good thing for all the workers,” Ziadeh says.

Others, however, have little optimism. One worker, who requested anonymity, said simply: “What’s the point of a union if Israel can just close the checkpoints and not allow you to go to your job?”