Review of No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine
In author Jeff Schuhrke’s own words:
This book tells the story of why and how US labor became one of Israel’s most stalwart defenders and generous benefactors through the Zionist State’s tumultuous and controversial history. Importantly, this is also the story of Palestinian trade unionists and various rank-and-file union members – including Arab-Americans, anti-Zionist Jews, Black radicals, and anti-imperialists who, despite the odds, courageously organized in support of Palestinian freedom and dignity over the years and to whom today’s pro-Palestine labor activists can look for inspiration.1
Schuhrke’s main thesis in No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket Books, 2025) is that the U.S. labor movement has never been a neutral observer in the conflict over Palestine—contrary to the common claim that labor unions “should stay out of foreign policy.” Rather, Schuhrke argues, U.S. unions have been deeply complicit for well over a century: backing Zionist settler-colonialism, helping build and sustain the state of Israel, and supporting U.S. foreign-policy alignments tied to Israel—thereby undermining Palestinian rights and working-class solidarity.
The book aims not just to expose this history, but to offer a corrective: Schuhrke invites today’s labor activists to re-think union internationalism and stand in solidarity with Palestinian workers and unions, as part of a broader working-class internationalism. The book’s title refers to a line from the mineworkers’ ballad “Which Side Are You On?” “They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man, or a thug for J. H. Blair.”
No Neutrals There appeared in October 2025 as a marked upswing in support for the Palestinian cause, in the US and internationally, developed in a world shocked as never before by two years of the televised savagery of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Similarly, much of the Jewish community in the US, hitherto Israel’s reliable bulwark of support, was also shaken by rubble-strewn scenes of genocide in Gaza. Jewish organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace have staged large public demonstrations against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Perhaps the latest sign of this shift in Jewish sentiment was the November 2025 New York City Mayoral contest where fully 33% of Jewish voters cast their ballots for the victor, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, the most progressive candidate in the race who has made no secret of his support for Palestinian rights.
In Chapter 1, “Laying the Foundations” Schuhrke tells the story of two different meetings in 1897 in Eastern and Central Europe that were to have historic implications. In October 1897, thirteen working-class men and women representing Jewish socialist groups met clandestinely in Vilnius, Lithuania to form the General Jewish Labor Bund (“Bund” means union). It was a revolutionary organization with a connection to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Lenin’s party, though he often criticized the Bund for its separatism and other ideological deviations). Nevertheless, the Bund would be at the center of anti-Tsarist rebellion in the early 20th century. A month earlier, a very different public meeting took place in Basel, Switzerland attended by more than two hundred middle- and upper class Jews from across Europe, to found the Zionist Organization whose chief aim as stated in the platform they approved at the gathering was to establish a legally protected home for the Jewish people in the Middle East, specifically in Palestine. Schuhrke writes,
“The Bund and the Zionist Organization embodied different answers to antisemitic oppression. The former represented a proletarian Jewish movement dedicated to liberation through class struggle and socialism; the latter was a more bourgeois configuration that sought Jewish emancipation through nationalism and settler colonialism.”2
He adds: “eventually an attempt would be made to reconcile these competing movements in the form of Labor Zionism which would have an important influence on labor officialdom in the US, right as they started, coincidentally, seeing themselves as partners in realizing Washington’s foreign policy objectives.”
Schuhrke contends that one of the multiple factors that led to the alliance between the top US labor leadership and Zionism was the AFL-CIO’s “traditional ideological commitment to Labor Zionism, the particular current within the wider Zionist project that centers the role of Jewish workers in laying the economic foundations for building and maintaining the Israeli state.”3 Long before 1948, Labor Zionist leaders in Palestine intentionally cultivated personal relationships with US union officials, Jewish and non-Jewish.
Moreover, Labor Zionism appealed to both major sectors of the US labor movement. It appealed to the craft unions of the AFL and their non-radical, “pure and simple” trade unionism, and loyalty to American capitalism in exchange for limited gains and protections for skilled workers. It appealed to the CIO industrial unions whose social vision sought to create a more humane economy and more egalitarian society.
Labor Zionism also struck a chord with the American origin myth of the westward moving pioneers who plowed up virgin soil, transformed empty lands into a modern economy, and made the prairies and deserts bloom. As the Cold War (1946-1989) intensified, Israel became a US ally in staving off Soviet influence in the Mideast. AFL-CIO Cold Warriors believed Israel offered a non-communist model for countries in the Third World. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, instead of being described as a bulwark against communism, Israel was celebrated as a rampart against Arab dictators and Islamic fundamentalism.
In Schuhrke’s narrative the forms of US labor support for Israel have been many and varied. Political support came early. A week after the Balfour Declaration4 (1917) became public, AFL President Samuel Gompers at the AFL convention in Buffalo promoted and successfully passed a jingoist platform calling for US participation in the European war, and it included a plank calling for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.5
Direct material support from US unions to Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation, was all-important. This took the form, often enough, of the sale of Israel Bonds to unions. In 1994 the Development Corporation for Israel reported that US labor had purchased over one billion dollars in bonds over the previous four decades.6 Schurke does his best to estimate the amounts raised by such sales. Cleverly, the sales figures have ceased to be published, lest they become a target of criticism.
Turning Point
In the chapter “Labor for Palestine,” Schuhrke recounts the turning point where the decades-long alliance between top union leadership and Zionism — with little or no input from rank-and-file members — began to be questioned and challenged. In the wake of the Oslo Accords (1993) and Second Intifada (1995-2005), and in the context of the end of the Cold War (1989) and the declining power of unions, high-ranking US trade union officials “increasingly found themselves having to react to a more assertive and racially diverse rank and file demanding that US labor stand in solidarity with Palestinians.”7
This new era really began in 2002, the author maintains, in the tense atmosphere after the 9/11 attacks and during the Second Intifada, when new organizations such as NYCLAW (New York City Labor against the War) and similar committees on the West Coast began protesting President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and championing Palestinian rights. These groups in 2004 created Labor for Palestine whose founding statement demanded US unionists and labor bodies give full support for Palestinian rights including the right of return, an end to US economic and military support for Israel, and divestment of US labor investments in Israeli apartheid.8
An even more important development occurred a year later. Inspired by the South African example, in 2005 a coalition of more than 170 Palestinian civil society groups launched the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. They called on allies around the world to boycott, divest from, and sanction the State of Israel. BDS demanded an end to the occupation and colonization of Arab lands since 1967, full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and respect for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. The AFL-CIO leadership, alarmed by the quickly growing support for the BDS movement, mobilized against it. Many local union officials and rank and file members continue to support it. BDS has made significant headway in parts of Europe but in the US it remains highly controversial.
To tell the story in the six chapters9 of No Neutrals There Schuhrke had to summarize a vast amount of history: the history of Zionism from its birth in the late 19th century; the growth of Labor Zionism; the emergence of Histadrut10 and its developing connections to US union officialdom; the Second World War and the Holocaust; the birth of Israel in 1948 as a settler-colonial state implanted in the Arab world and the resulting expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and farms; the Cold War; the 1956 Suez crisis;11 Israel’s multiple wars; Palestinian resistance including two Intifadas, failed “peace processes” and peace “accords;” the slow decline of US unions and of Labor Zionism; and in recent years, especially since the war in Gaza, the growth of rank and file opposition in US unions to US labor’s alliance with Zionism.
Why is this history important? Schuhrke declares,
…studying this history can therefore help today’s US unionists understand why it is imperative that they and their organizations not try to remain neutral (or worse) on Palestine but rather take a bold and principled stand especially amid the Gaza genocide. The systematic eliminationist violence inflicted on Palestinians today—not by Israel alone, but also by the US, the UK, Germany and other western countries—at once serves as a horrifying reminder of the worst atrocities carried out by the racist and colonial regimes of the 20th century…12
Schuhrke is a careful writer. Indeed he has to be, in dealing with so sensitive a subject. The US right is determined to promote the bogus equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. He writes,
Although it asserts the supposed right of Jews to control Palestine, Zionism is by no means driven exclusively by Jewish people, nor should the term “Zionist” be taken as a synonym for “Jew.” Indeed, throughout the history of Zionism, Jews have been among its most vocal and dedicated opponents. What’s more, non-Jews particularly Christians have been essential players in the Zionist movement. European Protestants were issuing apocalyptic calls for the Jewish “restoration” of Palestine centuries before Jews themselves began advocating Zionism. The largest Zionist organization in the modern US is Christians United for Israel, an Evangelical group boasting approximately ten million members, which is more than the total number of Jewish Americans. President Biden, a Catholic, repeatedly referred to himself as a Zionist during his time in the White House.13
No Neutrals There does not take up all questions, for example, the debate about a two-state versus a one-state solution. Schuhrke notes that the Palestine Liberation Organization adopted a one-state solution in the late 1960s, “calling for the establishment of a single, secular state for both Arabs and Jews,”14 but Schuhrke leaves the debate to the Palestinians themselves.
One of the most interesting aspects of No Neutrals There is that it recounts how long many Jews of all social backgrounds resisted Zionism. For example, the only Jew in the UK War Cabinet when Balfour was foreign secretary, Edwin Montagu, advocated against creating a Jewish national home in Palestine. Montagu thought it would exacerbate antisemitism around the world by causing governments to question the loyalty of Jewish citizens. He also believed that the present inhabitants of Palestine, Muslim and Christian, would have to be driven out and Jews put in a position of supremacy.15
Similarly, David Dubinsky (born 1892 in Russia), longtime head of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, although often thought of as the epitome of a Jewish labor supporter of Israel, in fact, from his early days in the Bund, had a distaste for Zionism. As late as 1937 he was keeping his distance from it.16
The author, Jeff Schuhrke, is a labor historian and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State. He is also the author of Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anti-Communist Crusade (Verso: 2024, 352 p.).
Jeff Schuhrke is to be commended not only for writing a well-researched and timely book. In this time of genocide in Gaza when pro-Palestine voices are censored in the US mainstream media, when Palestinian activists on American campuses are threatened with deportation, when university administrations face pressure from pro-Israel donors on their boards of trustees determined to curb academic free speech, to write such a book as No Neutrals There took courage.
In his Conclusion, Schurke holds up as his ideal Harry Bridges, the renowned West Coast longshoremen’s leader. In the 1930s Bridges and his men had refused to load scrap iron bound for Japan while Imperial Japan’s armies were marauding through China. More than thirty years later, in an interview with journalist Bill Moyers, the retired Bridges defended his action from charges of “interfering with the foreign policy of your country.” Bridges boldly replied “We sure as hell were [interfering]. That’s our job. That’s our privilege. That’s our right. That’s our duty.” Schuhrke is hoping that similar boldness can be found in this generation of US trade unionists.
- First published at Marxism-Leninism Today.
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