SHEIKH JARRAH, EAST JERUSALEM, January 6 — Palestinian and Jewish activists, including PL’ers from Israel-Palestine and the U.S., held a rally protesting the racist eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in this neighborhood, minutes away from the center of Jerusalem. The demonstrators demanded real justice, the return of the families to their houses and the removal of violent settlers and brutal cops from the neighborhood.

Since the 1990’s, settlers, paid for handsomely by the El’ad and Ateret Cohanim NGOs (non-government organizations), used the Israeli courts to seize houses here. Despite the fact that the Palestinian residents, all working class, were the legal owners of their homes and had all the documents necessary to prove this, the court ruled for the settlers — upper-middle-class Jews — who only had very dubious documents of ownership. Obviously the Israeli court of “justice” is openly racist and prefers the “rights” of wealthy Jewish settlers over those of Palestinian or Jewish workers.

NGOs Serve Ruling Class

Both settler NGOs operating in East Jerusalem, El’ad and Ateret Cohanim, are heavily funded by Irving Moskowitz, a U.S. capitalist and “philanthropist” based in Miami, who has made his fortune from constructing private hospitals and casinos. Moskowitz pays the settlers to take over Palestinian houses and land throughout East Jerusalem so he can build real-estate projects (for wealthy Jews only) a few minutes drive from the city center, and reaps super-profits in the process.

PL’ers from both Israel-Palestine and the U.S. have visited the home of the al-Kurd family here. The family had received its home and land from UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Work Agency) in 1956. A few years later the Jordanian government, which ruled the West Bank and East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, acknowledged the family as the owners of their house.

But apparently having full land title and living on the land for 56 years wasn’t enough for the Israeli court. In the 1990’s, the al-Kurd family built a small housing unit in their yard for one of their sons. The Israeli court ruled that this construction was “illegal” and repossessed the housing unit. From 1999 to 2009 it stood empty.

In 2009, however, teenage settlers were allowed to live in this unit, rent free, and were also paid to live there! These settlers are very violent towards the al-Kurd family; they order their dogs to attack the family members. However, if the al-Kurd family dares to report these attacks to the police, they themselves get arrested, not the aggressive settlers!

The court has decided that the entire al-Kurd house belongs to the settlers’ NGO. Now there’s a standing lawsuit against the family, demanding they pay a hefty rent to that NGO for the house which they own.

Free Housing for Racist Thugs; Evictions for Workers

This is the true face of capitalism: free housing for racist thugs and evictions for workers. Be it Columbia University’s expansion into Harlem (at the expense of black workers; see CHALLENGE, 01/04/12) or Moskowitz’s take-over of East Jerusalem, the bosses use courts, cops and racism to rob the working class and make huge profits along the way.

We, workers and unemployed from all nations and ethnic groups, must unite and fight these racist bosses and their fascist state machine, be it liberal Obama’s subtle fascism or openly fascist Israeli ruler Netanyahu’s overt apartheid state. As long as the bosses control the state, they will use it against our class. The only real answer to capitalism’s horrors is for us, the working’ class, to rally behind the flag of the communist PLP and smash the bosses’ state, replacing it with a communist state of, for and by our class.

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston/New York, 2006, 

God and His Demons, by Michael Parenti, Prometheus Books, Amherst/New York, 2010.

If you are reading this, you are probably eager to see the world move beyond exploitation of the many by the few, and away from continual inter-imperialist wars for control over the world’s resources.  We are aware that many CHALLENGE readers rely, to some degree, on religion to produce such progress.  But whatever you may think about religion and God, there is an inherent problem in religion that allows our profit-seeking exploiters and war-making executioners to get away with their daily theft and murder of our friends, our families, ourselves.  The problem is that religion — whatever comfort it provides, or whatever unity it encourages among fellow worshippers — is used by our exploiters to bind us to their needs over our own.

Bibles Celebrate Murder and Mayhem 

Religions of all sorts have been used for millennia to justify war and genocide in the name of god.  They have always been used to lead us to regard other members of our exploited class as enemies rather than allies and fellow-sufferers. Over thousands of years of human history, new religions evolve out of older ones whenever a rising class needs a new weapon of mass control. 

The God Delusion and God and His Demons are both worth reading despite their shortcomings.  Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, concentrates on the logical and factual inconsistencies in the Judeo-Christian Bible. He shows the disconnect between religion and morality, describes the murder and mayhem celebrated in the Old and New Testaments, and alludes to the frequent modern-day abuse of children by religionists.  He also writes about the historical use of all religions, by clergy and other backers, to induce workers to kill other workers in endless wars for gain and profit.  Dawkins’ stated goal is to give skeptical readers enough evidence to argue against the belief in a supreme being. 

Manufactured Religious Precepts

Michael Parenti, a Marxist historian in the U.S., places a greater emphasis on the predatory nature of fundamentalist preachers and priests, and how they have enslaved women and children to do their bidding, sexually and otherwise. He offers his own long selection of quotes from the Old and New Testaments to illustrate the bloody roots of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And he exposes the horrendous hypocrisy of contemporary clergy and politicos in their use of made-up religious precepts, such as those espoused by the anti-abortion and anti-gay movements in the service of meaningless “family values.” 

Dawkins’ non-Marxist outlook, not surprisingly, fails to relate religion-fostered blindness to workers’ willing submission to exploitation by the capitalist promoters of religion.  Parenti, a Marxist, points out how leading capitalists use religion to induce the world’s workers to do their  bidding, against the workers’ own interests.

But while he exposes the racism, nationalism, and wars fostered by several major religions (including Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, among others), Parenti treads lightly on Jewish fundamentalism. Describing Jews as the historic “whipping boys” of other religions, he fails to consider how the Israeli ruling class and the Zionist movement inflict the same oppression on the Palestinian working class within Israel-Palestine. Nor does he expose these rulers’ racist support of Apartheid South Africa, shipping arms to suppress black workers. 

Perhaps the greatest failing of both Dawkins and Parenti is that neither relates the historical and present crimes of religionists to the need for the world’s working class to free ourselves from the bonds of faith. Neither advocates the mental liberation of a scientific approach to all things in life. And neither understands that only a communist-led revolution can free ourselves from capitalist exploitation and oppression.

PLP has long argued that science rather than religion offers the world’s working class a deliverance from the bondage of capitalism.  One major article deals with the history of various religions and their uses — “Religion: Tool of Bosses, Enemy of Workers.” Another explores the nature of science and its incompatibility with religion, and how science investigates the real world rather than an imagined or hoped-for one — “Intelligent Design.” These articles can be found on the plp.org website under the “Literature” tab, section “leaftlets and pamphlets.” Both of these articles fill important gaps in these two useful, well-researched books.

LONG BEACH, CA, December 12 — Seven hundred workers shut down business at the Long Beach Port. This march revealed a split between the Occupy movement’s liberal organizers and the rank-and-file occupiers, including Progressive Labor Party comrades who gave key leadership at the protest.  

The liberals’ plan, orchestrated with the Long Beach Police Department, was to funnel the march along a narrow sidewalk, with the ocean on one side and the cops on the other. But with PL leading a communist chant of “Shut it down, shut it tight, workers of the world unite!” the march quickly turned militant. PL’s friends in the movement were evident as we crossed the line of cones and took the streets leading to the port.

The kkkops responded by attempting to use their motorcycles as barricades, splitting the protest into two halves. It was a potentially dangerous situation, with one group facing a wall of cops in riot gear. But we quickly organized ourselves and led the march back and sandwiched the police!  At first, the other half of the march was hesitant to walk through the police barrier, but our comrades again led the way and soon the whole march followed.

An hour later, as the Long Beach police tried to push the protesters back onto the sidewalk, they were met with heavy resistance. The protesters stood their ground in open defiance, linking arms, chanting and singing. The standoff lasted for nearly an hour. It ended only after rank-and-file occupiers discovered that some trucks were getting into the port through a back entrance. After a brief discussion, the protest was moved to a location where we could better block all entrances. Traffic at the port was shut down for five hours before the police could disperse the crowd. Port workers who walked to the gates to watch the protest told us that they didn’t believe any work would get done that day.

While our PL leadership was critical in organizing the Occupiers to defy the liberal leadership, we were weak in organizing our own base from the jobs, schools and campuses to participate.  We also need to distribute more CHALLENGEs.

We do have a small but active base within the Occupy movement, however. After this action, more than 20 young people met with us over breakfast to debrief.  While there is a lot of potential to deepen these relationships and build the Party, we must struggle harder to make the Occupy fight more prominent in our workplaces and classrooms.  The struggle continues.

CHICAGO, December 14 — On an unseasonably warm and rainy day, about twenty PL’ers and friends gathered in front of Stroger hospital, under an overhang, to protest the deadly cuts in the Cook County public hospital system. Stroger Hospital was moving forward with planned layoffs even though the holidays were almost here. We handed out fliers while calmly holding our signs and giant photographs of patients who are losing their healthcare, including one who recently died as a result. CHALLENGEs were distributed.

It wasn’t long before the kkkops told us to move from “private property.”

“What are you talking about? This is a public hospital and I work here!” a protester snapped. Together, we decided to march twenty-five yards away, but still on county property. We marched as a group chanting, “They say cut back, we say fight back!”

After establishing a picket line, we took turns on the bullhorn, denouncing the layoffs and service cuts. A few union hacks tried to talk to the demonstrators to divert our anger, but we kept spreading the word to the hundreds streaming by. We distributed all of our fliers and made a few contacts with patients and their families who were inspired to see workers fighting for their county healthcare system.

Last week the administration laid off eight respiratory therapists. This is a direct result of the closing of Oak Forest Hospital (see CHALLENGE, 11/2/11). Respiratory therapists from Oak Forest with more seniority are being transferred to Stroger Hospital. Rather than increase the staff of respiratory therapists at Stroger to help take care of the flood of new patients, management decided to fire the therapists with less seniority.

New patients are crowding into the ER, setting records for the number seen per day. They are coming from Oak Forest and from dozens of private hospitals, where thousands of patients are no longer welcome since they lost their health insurance.

The day after the layoffs, management asked the remaining respiratory therapists to pick up night shifts and work overtime! The therapists have been actively fighting these layoffs. Most of the night shift went as a unified group to protest to the head of the Intensive Care Unit. A few days later, fifteen workers went to SEIU union headquarters to confront the union president. Workers were invited to a negotiation that morning that resulted in a week’s postponement of the layoffs. Respiratory therapy workers have been at every one of the three pickets held in front of the hospital since October.

The lead organizing force for this demonstration was a community group called Chicago Healthcare Justice, which was founded a year ago. Members have been discussing healthcare, racism and capitalism, and also participating in some rallies and demonstrations with the Occupy movement and others.

These young workers felt they were finally ready to try to lead an action. They decided to demonstrate against the attacks on health workers and patients at Stroger Hospital. Two members researched the history of Cook County healthcare as well as current spending and put it together into a fact-filled flier. The flier demonstrated that Cook County has been cutting back on services and staff since long before the Great Recession, which is used to justify current cuts. Our group then spent time at Occupy Chicago events promoting the rally, making contacts and discussing the movement’s issues. Although this action was relatively small in size, it was a huge step forward for the Chicago Healthcare Justice group.

One member of the group translated the leaflet into Spanish for distribution  by the family of one of the former Oak Forest ventilator patients, who now lives in the Medical ICU at Stroger. Protests at Stroger have maintained attention on this patient, David Moreno, and probably prevented the hospital bosses from sending him to a death-trap nursing home, as they did with some of his fellow Oak Forest patients, now deceased.

Fighting against every attack is essential but is not enough. We know this was a modest step. We also know that the only way workers have ever won anything from the bosses is by fighting back. We plan to take the momentum from this action into the new year and keep learning and fighting back together.

Those of us in Progressive Labor Party will continue pointing out the failures of capitalism and the desperate need for a better, communist world. We will struggle to win these workers to join PLP.