Eric Lee

This article appears in Equal Times, the global news, opinion and campaign website about work, politics, the economy, development and the environment. Equal Times is supported by the 175 million-member International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

In the last half-decade a number of new online campaigning platforms have emerged, inspired in large part by MoveOn – the progressive American online campaigning group launched back in the Clinton era.

MoveOn, which now claims seven million supporters, has spun-off a number of similar platforms including Avaaz (a global version of MoveOn), SumOfUs (like Avaaz, but completely focussed on corporate misbehavior), 38 Degrees (a UK version of MoveOn), and GetUp (the Australian version).

In addition, there are commercial organizations like Change.org, which charge fees to campaigners who wish to keep the email addresses of their supporters.

These organizations have become the subject of a vigorous debate in campaigning circles around the notion of “clicktivism”. Some seasoned campaigners have argued that people taking a few seconds to click on a link in an email message hardly constitutes “activism” and is no substitute for more traditional forms of engagement.

Malcolm Gladwell, the acclaimed author of “The Tipping Point” took on the clicktivists in a long article for “The New Yorker” in October 2010.

Online campaigning, he wrote, is “a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo.”

Gladwell’s words – especially regarding “organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity” – should resonate inside trade unions. Unions are in it for the long haul and aspire to big changes – unlike the short-term, superficial approach of some of the clicktivists.

Recently, Change.org has been the subject of some unwelcome publicity as an internal memo from the company was leaked online which seemed to indicate that the group was moving away from its roots in progressive politics. It appeared as if Change.org might well host campaigns, or advertisements, by groups which campaign against abortion rights, for gun ownership and against unions.

As Canadian trade unionist Derek Blackadder wrote, “Unions don’t know shit. Sometimes you just have to say it. We never learn. Last year Change.org, a petition site many unions have used, announced it was going to start accepting money from corporate sponsors and running pretty much any campaigns that came its way. … What this means is that all the effort unions put into campaigns using Change.org served to increase the size of mailing lists that will now be used against us. Own your own or go home. Or at least go to LabourStart or some other solid political friend. Don`t use an online tool you can’t rely on. Like Change.org, it’ll just come back to bite you in the arse.”

Change.org is not the only group whose actions have proven to be controversial.

38 Degrees is a very successful British clone of MoveOn (its name comes from the angle at which an avalanche happens) and it claims over a million members. But it has come under fire for sometimes seeming to claim victories when in fact its online campaign was only a small part of a wider effort.

More troubling, I think, is the notion of “membership” itself. Union members are people who, in most places, pay dues and get to participate in a democratic decision making process. In many cases their identification with their unions in quite strong, and not something “virtual”.

38 Degrees and other campaigning networks sometimes claim to have a democratic decision-making process too, but it doesn’t resemble the kind of democracy we’d expect in a union.

Some time ago 38 Degrees sponsored a campaign to stop a Conservative government’s attack on Britain’s National Health Service [NHS]. When the legislation passed anyway, they sent out a mailing to all supporters asking what to do next. Should we continue fighting to preserve the NHS, they asked, or move on to other things? One cannot imagine a union asking a question like that of its members.

This is the worst kind of short-termism.

One of the newest clicktivist networks which also claims a “membership” of hundreds of thousands is SumOfUs, and unlike Avaaz or 38 Degrees, it limits its campaigns to challenging corporate misbehavior.

This is good, and on many occasions SumOfUs have found common ground with unions.

But not always, and campaigns have been launched, apparently in defense of workers’ rights, without any consultation with the unions involved.

And SumOfUs has also been criticized – by myself among others – for having, like 38 Degrees, claimed credit for victories which did not belong to it.

These various campaigning and protest platforms can be powerful allies for trade unions – but unions should also be wary of becoming over-reliant on them and should, where possible, use their own tools to do the same thing.

I’m not trying to bash these networks and say they are all worthless – the opposite is the case. Online campaigning is an important part of what we do in the trade union movement and we need allies where we can find them.

The Trades Union Congress in Britain has gone out of its way to build bridges with the new campaigners, including hosting large “NetRoots” conferences modelled on those held in the USA.

But I also think Malcolm Gladwell, Derek Blackadder and other critics of the clicktivists have a point, and unions should be cautious before rushing out to embrace this model of campaigning.

Where we can, we should develop our own tools to mobilize our members and supporters. Unions have the ability like anyone else to create an online petition, but we can also shut down a factory or even an entire country if need be, which is why our ideas about membership and activism will be quite different from those of the clicktivists.

This article appears on Stronger Unions, a news and comment blog about the UK trade union movement, managed by the TUC.

South Korea’s progress from dictatorship to democracy has not been an easy or straightforward one, as the recent Presidential election has shown. The good news was that for the first time in history, the Koreans had elected a woman, Park Guenhye, to lead their country. The bad news is that she’s the daughter of the former dictator, Park Chung-hee, who ruled the country from 1963 to 1979.

Another indication of the uneven character of the transition to democracy as been the ongoing fight by trade unions for recognition and rights. One of the Korean unions still fighting for the most basic kind of recognition is the Korean Government Employees Union (KGEU).

The government has refused to recognize the KGEU, and has sacked 137 of its members, including its president and general secretary, charging them with being members of an “illegal organisation” (the union). The union is demanding that all those workers be re-hired and the union recognised. They’re demanding that President-elect Park make real her campaign commitment to genuine social dialogue.

On 15 January this year, KGEU president Kim Jungnam announced his intention to go on indefinite hunger strike. He began the strike on the street opposite the offices of the transition team for the new president-elect.

A little bit more than two weeks into the strike, Kim collapsed and an ambulance was called. He was taken to hospital and is still recovering.

Other union leaders immediately stepped in, and all the KGEU vice presidents themselves went on unlimited hunger strike.

This was followed by a uniquely Korean form of protest – union leaders publicly shaved their heads in protest.

The struggle by the KGEU has attracted considerable interest internationally, and has won the support of Public Services International (PSI), the global union federation representing 20 million government workers in 150 countries. PSI general secretary Rosa Pavanelli has released a video statement of support for the workers.

In Britain, UNISON has spoken out strongly in support of Kim and the KGEU.

Meanwhile, over 10,000 rank-and-file trade unionists have signed up to support the campaign on LabourStart which appears in more than twenty languages.

The KGEU has been strengthened by all the international support and has just released a video by Kim thanking all those outside the country who expressed their solidarity.

The struggle continues.

This article appears today in Solidarity.

“The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves” – that’s a phrase which will be familiar to most Marxists and originates in the Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association which Marx drafted.

A century later, Max Shachtman wrote that “When speaking of socialism and socialist revolution we seek ‘no condescending saviours’ as our great battle hymn, the International, so ably says. We do not believe that well-wishing reforms – and there are well-wishing reformers – will solve the problems of society, let alone bring socialism. … We believe that task belongs to the proletariat, only the proletariat itself. That is a world-shattering idea. It overshadows all social thought. The most profound, important and lasting thought in Marxism, the most pregnant thought in Marxism is contained in Marx’s phrase that the emancipation of the proletariat is the task of the proletariat itself. It is clearly the most revolutionary idea ever conceived, if you understand it in all of its great implications.”

I thought of this “most revolutionary idea” the other day as I watched two recent acclaimed films on the same subject – Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”.

Tarantino and Spielberg have now made their films about American slavery, just as previously they both made films about the Nazi Holocaust – “Shindler’s List” and “Inglourious Basterds”.

And those four films reflect two very different approaches to the issue of emancipation.

Spielberg’s films – which are largely historically accurate, extremely well crafted, and well-intentioned – are accounts of how a gentile (Shindler) risked everything to save the Jews and how a white man (Lincoln) did the same for Black slaves.

Spielberg chose when taking on the giant subjects of slavery and the Holocaust to focus on those two men. He could have made different films, could have focussed his Holocaust film on, say, the Jewish fighters who battled the Wehrmacht in the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto. He could have chosen one of the many Black slave rebellions that preceded the American Civil War – for example, the story of Nat Turner who led an uprising 1831 that resulted in some 160 deaths.

Instead he chose to focus on brave white men (the abolitionists) and a brave gentile (Shindler).

Tarantino made a radically different choice when he decided to make films about Nazi Germany and the American South.

Tarantino’s films are fantasies – and unlike Spielberg’s are often hilariously funny, even if brutally violent.

Tarantino’s “basterds” are American Jewish soldiers sent into Nazi-occupied Europe to kill – and scalp – as many German soldiers as they can. In the end, their efforts combine with those of a French Jewish woman also seeking revenge on the Nazis.

Django too is a story not about good white men who come to free the slaves, but about a slave who frees himself. Even though Django is assisted by a white German (the magnificent Christoph Waltz, who played a terrifying Nazi in “Basterds”), it is he – and not Waltz – who deals the death blow to the slave-owners in the film.

One could make the argument that while Tarantino’s take on slavery and the Third Reich may prove more satisfying, the reality is that it wasn’t Black slaves who brought down slavery and it wasn’t armed Jews who defeated Hitler. It was a mostly (though not entirely) white army led by a white man that brought an end to the Confederacy. And it was the allied armies – particularly the Red Army – that destroyed the German Reich.

So yes, Spielberg’s view may be the more accurate one, but Tarantino’s reflects an aspiration – the hope that the oppressed, slaves and others, can liberate themselves and indeed that only they can do so.

This is, as Shachtman wrote, “the most pregnant idea” in Marxism, and while one can be fairly certain that Quentin Tarantino has never heard of the great third camp socialist, it is his films – not Spielberg’s – that most closely realize that idea.

A month ago, I published on my blog a short article entitled “Is this Netanyahu’s final month in office?”

It contained several predictions about the Israeli elections — which is always a colossal mistake, as how can one possibly make accurate predictions about such a thing?

So here is what I said:

“The right wing alliance headed up by Netanyahu has lost much of its strength. “

I didn’t make a prediction about how much, but cited polls showing them dropping from 45 seats to 36. In fact, it was even worse for them.

“Kadima will disappear. “

Very close. Kadima just squeaked past the minimum of 2% to get two Knesset seats — instead of the 19 seats polls showed it winning a year ago, or the 28 seats they won in 2009.

“Kadima’s voters have defected to two new parties – Yesh Atid and Hatnuah.”

Got that one right. Of the 28 seats won by Kadima in 2009, they’ve divided up with 19 going to Yesh Atid, 6 to Hatnuah, and 2 to Kadima. It seems as if nearly every Kadima voter from 2009 decided to try one of the three centrist parties this time.

“The major left wing parties — Labour and Meretz — have stalled. “

I pointed out that the combined Labour-Meretz vote had stalled, as polls a year ago showed them winning 22 seats and that had hardly changed — it was 23 when I wrote the article. The actual result was 21 seats for the two parties.

The last of my observations was that “Shas is not necessarily a coalition partner only for the right.” I stand by that today.

Which leads to the coalition I suggested a month ago:

“Labour and Meretz form the government with 23 seats, in coalition with the two new centrist parties which get 20 seats. They are supported by 11 seats in the Arab parties and invite Shas into the government with its 11 seats.”

That would have been 65 seats. The actual vote totals today are better.  We have 21 for Labour and Meretz, 27 for the three centrist parties, and 12 (more than I predicted) for the DFPE, Balad and the UAL (the so-called “Arab parties”).   That’s 60 seats, half of the Knesset.  Toss in Shas with its 11 seats (exactly as predicted). That would be a relatively stable coalition of 71, and would leave the Netanyahu-led opposition with just 49 seats.

It would not be the first time Shas sat in government with Labour — this was the case when Yitzhak Rabin won his spectacular victory in 1992 and again in 1999 when Ehud Barak defeated Netanyahu for the first time.  In fact, when Labour has governed the country, it has always done so in coalition with religious parties.

The key, of course, is Shas. If the central issue facing the nation is religious conversion, or civil marriage, or drafting religious students into the army, then Shas shouldn’t be part of the government. But if the main issues — the life or death issues — are the fight for a renewal of the peace process with the Palestinians and for greater social justice inside Israel, then Shas is a potential partner.

The last words of my article a month ago remain true today:

“Yes, the most likely scenario is that Netanyahu pulls together a coalition, but it’s not inevitable.”

The Israeli elections are just six days away and the consensus in Israel and abroad is that Benjamin Netanyahu will once again be elected prime minister, heading up a coalition of right-wing and ultra-orthodox political parties.  And the polls do seem to confirm this.  The latest poll on the popular Israeli website Walla shows the right-wing parties winning 49 seats out of 120, and together with a projected 18 seats for the ultra-Orthodox parties, they can scrape together a majority.

But as Walla goes on to say in their analysis, a week is a long time in politics.

Actually, they don’t say that — but what they do is look at the results of polls taken a week before the last elections.

And the comparison is, in my view, really interesting.  It even offers a ray of hope.

Just before the 2009 elections, polls showed the following:

• Kadima winning 23 seats – but in reality, it won 28, making it the largest party.
• Labour was expected to win 17 seats, but won only 13 - a historic defeat, and Ehud Barak’s last as leader of the party.
• Meretz, which polls showed getting 6 seats, won a very disappointing 3.
• The Arab party Balad was projected to win no seats at all, but won 3.

These are massive gaps between what polls project and actual results, unlike, for example, the extraordinarily accurate polling we saw in the USA in the run up to the 2012 election (and analyzed brilliantly in the FiveThirtyEight blog by Nate Silver on the New York Times website.

These are errors of tens of thousands of votes.  Each Knesset seat won in 2009 represented over 28,000 votes.  So Meretz had something like 85,000 fewer voters than polls were showing.  And Kadima had 140,000 more voters than was projected by polls.  Considering that only 3.4 million people vote in an Israeli election, those are enormous numbers.

I won’t go into the reasons why polls in Israel are so inaccurate, but with potential swings of five seats to or from the large parties, alternative scenarios begin to emerge.

Leaving out the question of whether Netanyahu really can gather up all the right-wing and religious parties (and Shas is absolutely not in his pocket, for example), what would it take to bring the center-left to power?

A shift in the polls of 7 Knesset seats.  That’s all.

If the left and center parties could pick up 7 more seats, they’d be able to form a government.  And by that I mean a government without relying on any of the religious parties, all of which have been happy to join up with Labour-led governments in the recent past.

In 2009, polls showed just two parties from the center and left — Kadima and Balad — picking up 8 more seats than predicted.

And of course the polls don’t really take voter turnout into account either.

Here’s what we know about voter turnout in recent Israeli elections:

• 2009 – 64.72% Right wing government comes to power with the second lowest voter turnout ever.
• 2006 – 63.55% Lowest voter turnout in history – Kadima and Labour come to power, Likud is crushed, winning less than 9% of the vote.
• 2003 – 67.81% Ariel Sharon, then heading up Likud, wins the election.
• 1999 – 78.7% Labour’s Ehud Barak elected prime minister, forms a government with a wide range of parties, including religious ones –  partnering with Shas, Meretz, Yisrael BaAliyah, the Centre Party, the National Religious Party and United Torah Judaism.

Those results should also serve as a reminder of the fact that in the last four national elections, Labour came to power twice (in coalition), the Likud won once when Sharon was leading it in the direction of withdrawal from Gaza and a two-state solution, and only once (in 2009) did Likud win under Netanyahu’s leadership, and even then it wasn’t the largest party (Kadima was).

To sum up:

• Israeli elections are complicated.
• Polls are no indication of what will happen on election day.
• Netanyahu is eminently beatable.
• Israelis tend to vote for governments that they see as moderate, not extremists.
• Voter turnout is what matters – the left does much better when it approaches 80%, as it did in 1999, 1996 and 1992.

Don’t give up on the Israeli center-left.  The results next week may well surprise.

I’m very pleased to announce today the publication of LabourStart’s first book - Campaigning Online and Winning: How LabourtStart’s ActNOW Campaigns Are Making Unions Stronger.

Many labour and left organizations publish books, but nearly all of them have to put up a lot of money to do so and wind up with cartons of unsold books piling up in their offices.

We’re doing this differently, using print-on-demand technology with no upfront costs for us at all.

This is the lowest-cost, lowest-risk way for small, under-financed organizations to publish books and I wonder why others haven’t done so.

I encourage you to buy a copy to see how this turns  out, to feel that it’s something you can hold in your hand, and looks quite professional, I think.  If you want to know more about how we did this, email me.

Like many of you, I’ve been a loyal user of Gmail for many years now.  When it first came out, Google’s web-based email service left all the others behind.  It was very fast and we loved it.

But I’ve decided to drop Gmail for several reasons and move on, and here are the three that have spurred me to make the decision to end 2012 by abandoning Gmail.

First, I hate the fact that Gmail by default shows us our emails in descending order by date.  If you receive many emails every day, the newest ones are displayed prominently and the oldest ones float down to the bottom of the list.  And you can’t change this, at least not in any way I could find.  Which means that you wind up reading your newest emails and answering them before you get to the bottom of the pile.  This is what we call ‘last in, first out’ and it is very bad practice.  It’s far better to answer your oldest emails first – which you can do in Gmail, but it’s not easy.

Second, I’ve never liked the way Gmail threads discussions, because it sometimes means that I miss messages or don’t answer messages if several people reply to something I wrote and it all has the same subject line.  I prefer the old fashioned way of showing individual emails.

Finally, I’m concerned about Google’s privacy policy.  When you use a free service like Gmail, you are the product – not the client.  The client is the company buying advertising, and to fund Gmail, Google’s computers read your email messages and serve you up advertisements that they calculate will interest you.  Of course there is no one sitting there at Google individually reading through your emails — but that’s not the point.

So I’ve been looking around for an alternative and for a while actually considered using Microsoft’s new Outlook.com, which has replaced Hotmail. It’s good but not good enough, and anyway, who wants to use a Microsoft product again?

So instead I’ve gone back to one of the pioneers of web-based email, Fastmail, which is now owned by Opera.  Several years ago I was a Fastmail customer because it offered exactly that – very fast email.  (It still does, even with its new, more modern interface.)

Today I’ve come back to Fastmail because it allows me to sort messages as I want to  (by date, with the oldest ones on top); it allows me to see my messages as individual ones, not in threads; and as a paying customer (and not a product) I’m not shown invasive advertising that raises concerns about my privacy.

I found the process of importing all my messages from Gmail to be a relatively simple one (though it took several hours, as I had many thousands of messages to import) and when I did turn to Fastmail‘s tech support on two occasions, I got quick and accurate responses from them.

On my Android phone, I had been using the web browser to access my emails, but have just started using K-9 Mail instead and it seems quite good for this purpose.  (K-9 Mail is a free app, available on Google Play.)

So far I’m pleased with Fastmail and encourage others to check it out.

I am usually completely wrong about predicting election results but there are certain trends in polling for the Israeli elections (which happen in another month) which may be of interest.  Taking the long view — comparing polls today to what they were showing a year ago — gives us a indication of trends which may (but also may not) continue in the next month.  Here are some of the more interesting ones:

The right wing alliance headed up by Netanyahu has lost much of its strength.  A year ago, the two parties (Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu) were polling at 45 seats (out of 120 in the Knesset).  This would have represented a gain of 3 seats over the 42 they won (separately) in the last elections.  The latest polls I’ve seen show them at 36 – in other words, a drop of 9 seats, or 20%, in just a year.

Kadima will disappear.  Like so many large centrist parties that have come before it (Dash in 1977 was the first), Kadima was never destined to have a long life as Israeli voters return in large numbers to the traditional parties.  Polls a year ago showed Kadima winning 19 seats.  Today, it’s at 0 (zero).

Kadima’s voters have defected to two new parties – Yesh Atid and Hatnuah.  These two together, in the lastest polls, have 20 seats.  So that’s where the Kadima voters have clearly moved to — instead of to the parties of the left.

The major left wing parties — Labour and Meretz — have stalled.  A year ago, they polled at a combined 22 seats; today they’re at 23.  That’s not much of an improvement, but not bad considering the defection of at least one major figure (Amir Peretz) to a new party (Hatnuah), and the appearance on the political map of several new parties competing for the vote of the pro-peace center.  Holding their own in this environment is not a bad thing.

Polls of Arab and Haredi voters are almost impossible to do accurately — and no one can begin to guess what turnout will be like.  At the moment, polls are showing 10 seats for the 3 “Arab” parties (the largest of which, Hadash, is actually a Jewish-Arab party).  This is pretty much what they got in the last Knesset elections (11), so it looks more like a guestimate than actual scientific polling.  If any of the Arab parties are blocked from running — and both UAL and Balad are under threat — votes could shift toward Hadash.  Were Hadash to reap the benefits and walk away with 10 mandates (unlikely, but possible), it could be third largest faction in the Knesset.

Shas is not necessarily a coalition partner only for the right.  Polls continue to show a strong result for the Sephardic party – 11 seats instead of the 10 they won last time.  Remember that the Rabin government formed in 1992 had Shas (and Meretz) as coalition partners.  That coalition held together for several years, allowing the conclusion of the Oslo process and the first rays of hope for peace in the region.  Shas could be wooed again into a post-election coalition with parties of the center and left.

So, is a government not headed by Netanyahu possible?  Yes, it is.

Here’s one possible scenario — Labour and Meretz form the government with 23 seats, in coalition with the two new centrist parties which get 20 seats.  They are supported by 11 seats in the Arab parties and invite Shas into the government with its 11 seats.  That’s 65 seats — denying a majority to Netanyahu and sending him off to the political wilderness where he belongs.

A slightly more optimistic scenario shows the left, center and Arab parties getting 10% more than polls currently show — so instead of 54 seats, they get 59.  Then they find partners in some small partners – e.g., Am Shalem, now polling at 3 seats, and don’t even need Shas.  That would give them 62 seats, which is a majority, albeit a very small one.

Yes, the most likely scenario is that Netanyahu pulls together a coalition, but it’s not inevitable.

This is so geeky, if you’re not caught up with the jargon please don’t read any further.

I’ve been busy creating a database for a new website. The database has a several tables, and in them, a number of fields including things like name, country, union, etc.

No matter what I did, the database was not updating.

Then when I changed the name of the field ‘union’ to ‘tradeunion’ it all worked.

And the reason? The word ‘union’ is a reserved word in My SQL 5.0

I am not making this up. Any web designer building an online database for a union may find themselves stuck, as I was, for days – until realizing this was the case.

This article appears in Solidarity.

In the course of just a few days, three news stories came across my desk that highlighted one of the problems we face in the British trade union movement.

As I write these words, the Israeli nurses’ union is engaged in a major fight with the Netanyahu government. Netanyahu is the health minister (as well as prime minister) and his government stands accused of starving public hospitals, while coming up with millions to construct new illegal settlement housing. The nurses strike deserves the support of unions everywhere, in particular unions which organise nurses.

Israel’s public sector unions solidified a major victory early this month. An agreement that ended February’s general strike has now been translated into results on the ground. The general strike had been fought over the question of precarious employment and the Histadrut won a substantial victory. This week, contract workers in the public sector will get huge wage gains and back pay thanks to the solidarity of unionised workers who shut the country down and compelled the government to make concessions.

Both examples show an independent, and sometimes militant, Israeli trade union movement that deserves the solidarity of trade unionists in Britain. Indeed, the Israel public sector unions may even have a thing or two to teach their British counterparts about how to win on issues like contract labour.

But unfortunately Unison and the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), unions which should, in theory, be promoting solidarity with the Israeli nurses and indeed with all the Israeli public sector unions, have played a rather different role recently.

Unison and PCS were among the leading unions which actively pushed the recent congress of Public Services International (PSI) to adopt a new policy supporting boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targetting Israel. PSI is also now on record supporting the slander that Israel is an “apartheid state”.

It is unusual for a global union federation like PSI to take such a strong position in opposition to Israel, even if its BDS call was limited to “firms complicit with the occupation”.

The pro-Hamas Palestine Solidarity Campaign hailed the decision as a breakthrough. I want to step back here and try to understand what is going on.

Israel is the only country in the region with a strong, independent trade union movement. It is not a perfect movement and there is much to criticise about it. But when Unison sent a delegation over to meet with Israelis and Palestinians, everyone they spoke to — including the Palestinians — encouraged the British union to keep up its relationship with the Histadrut.

No one, not even the far-left critics of the Histadrut, suggested to Unison that it disengage.

But when the report of the Unison delegation was put to the national executive, it was rejected and Unison carried on with a policy supporting boycotts of the Jewish state and its trade union movement as well.

This makes absolutely no sense.

If you oppose the right-wing, neoliberal policies of the Netanyahu government, shouldn’ t you support the struggle of the Israeli nurses? Shouldn’t you support the Histadrut’s general strike which resulted in such an important victory?

Instead of engaging with the Israeli labour movement, unions like Unison and PCS are moving away from it.

There was a time not long ago when British unions played a more constructive role. They would bring over representatives of the Histadrut and the Palestinian unions to Britain where they could meet British trade unionists — and each other. British unions saw their role as bridge-builders, taking no sides in a tragic conflict between two nations.

One doesn’t want to get all nostalgic about this — instead, I suggest we try to find ways restore some sanity and balance into the British labour movement’s view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Above all this means educating activists and members, whose only source of information seems to be the pro-Hamas camp, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Unfortunately, there is no effective alternative voice in the British labour movement today.

If members of Unison, PCS and other unions were to be made aware of the reality of the Israeli trade union movement, its struggles and its victories, I think it might be possible to have a more interesting and productive debate.

At the moment, the agenda in those unions is being dictated by supporters of Hamas, and that, comrades, is not a good thing.