[ITALY] SI Cobas will strike on Friday 17 November, in support of the Palestinian people, to stop the genocide in Gaza

SI Cobas will strike on Friday 17 November

in support of the Palestinian people,

to stop the genocide in Gaza

– Interview with comrade Aldo Milani,

national coordinator of SI Cobas

The national executive of SI Cobas took a decision of the utmost importance last night: to organize a strike on Friday 17 November in solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people, to help immediately stop the massacre that the Israeli army is perpetrating in Gaza with the full support of the United States and EU countries, including Meloni and Mattarella’s Italy in the front row. We ask comrade Aldo Milani, national coordinator of SI Cobas to explain the reason of their initiative.

Aldo Milani – This decision of ours does not fall from the sky. SI Cobas has always felt that it has obligations of solidarity towards the proletarians of all the countries of the world. Our union is made up of workers of more than 35 different nationalities. Many of them come from Arab and Islamic countries. Therefore I can say that SI Cobas has proletarian internationalism in its DNA.

For more than a year, then, we have been engaged, with comrades from the Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency (TIR) and others, in a series of initiatives against the war in Ukraine which led us to a large demonstration on 21 October in front of the Italian military base of Ghedi, where dozens of NATO’s atomic bombs are stored. In that demonstration we denounced the genocidal action of the state of Israel, which dates back several decades but has in recent days has reached appalling bloody violence against the population of Gaza.

We have issued statements, called meetings, participated in many demonstrations, but – given the extreme urgency of stopping this massacre – the time has come to take a qualitative leap in our action. The strike is the most effective fighting weapon at our disposal. And we decided to use it on Friday 17 November in all logistics warehouses, factories and other workplaces where we are present. We are proud to be the first union to make this decision, which answers to the appeal launched by the Palestinian trade union movement. But anyone who wants to strike on the 17 November with us, in support of the Palestinian resistance and against the state of Israel, is welcome. And anybody is welcome as well, who would like to join us in the demonstration on Saturday 18 November in Bologna (at 3pm) on these same objectives.

In fact, many people feel the need for what you call a “qualitative leap”. The government of Israel has so far seemed unconcerned by the thousands of demonstrations, some of them gigantic, that have taken place around the world. We must, therefore, raise our sights. We must take initiatives that damage as much as possible the war logistics, the production and circulation of goods conerning Israel and its allied and sponsor countries. The Young Palestinians in Italy also asked for it today.

A.M. – The international movement of support and solidarity with the struggle of the oppressed of Palestine is impressive. Tens of millions of protesters around the world. SI Cobas, and we internationalists, feel fully part of it. The squares were everywhere proletarian squares, denying all the nonsense about the decline of the class struggle and the working class. At this moment, Gaza, in its resistance to the action of the colonial, racist and genocidal state of Israel, is truly “the homeland of all the oppressed of the world“, as the comrades of the 23 September Committee stated.

All of this, however, has not yet been enough to stop the ongoing massacre. We need something more, and we are there. Tomorrow (10 November) we will be present at the port of Genoa together with the Anti-War Assembly, which launched this initiative, and with the dockworkers’ collective, to begin to intervene in owar logistics, in connection with other initiatives similar in Barcelona, Oakland, Sydney. The following Friday (November 17th) we will go on strike, from a minimum of 4 up to 8 hours.

For us, we are aware, it is a big commitment. We have been and are under uninterrupted employers’ and state attacks for years: at the moment the hardest conflict is against the French multinational Leroy Merlin, which wants to implement 500 layoffs in Piacenza to impose a leap backwards in the working conditions we have won in years and years of struggle in its warehouses. We take on this commitment with an eye to our class brothers and sisters in Palestine, in the Arab countries and throughout the world with the hope that others, many others, will take the same decision as us. We do so on the momentum of the Ghedi demonstration, which saw particular protagonism of our workers, their sons and daughters, a particular spontaneity – I repeat: especially in the younger generations – in expressing support for the struggle of the Palestinians, which they feel as their own struggle.

Can you tell us what is your approach to the “Palestinian question”?

A. M. – I will respond summing up a few concepts that we and other internationalist comrades have expounded over all these years. Our position not only expresses a feeling of indignation and anger against those who today oppress and massacre a population for their own capitalist interests closely linked to those of the imperialist states, primarily the United States, but also tends to bring out a working-class point of view against the bourgeois classes on a global scale.

The bourgeois press, hypocritically expressing the point of view of the ruling class, mystifies the reality of the ongoing conflict. In the few cases in which it is not totally aligned with the Zionist or ultra-Zionist positions, it suggests the thesis that in Palestine two equal and opposing rights are confronting one another, and that on each side there is a reasonable wing willing to compromise and to peace (among the Palestinians, Abu Mazen and the PNA), and an extremist and intolerant wing aiming at conflict. In short, the enemies are supposed to be the “hawks” of both camps, even if so far the government of the super-hawk Netanyahu has been allowed to carry out the most heinous crimes without any consequences whatsoever. This way of framing the ongoing war unfortunately also belongs to sectors of the movement that are present in the pro-Palestine demonstrations, which tend to focus all their attention only on the role of Hamas, seen as an expression of the Arab bourgeoisie, financed by openly dictatorial and reactionary regimes on the political level.

It’s a shame, however, that in this openly bourgeois alignment into which even some “left” elements are sucked in, they forget that the very foundation of Israel as a colonialist state is dripping blood from all sides. The birth and continual territorial expansion of Israel was possible thanks to the massacre of the Palestinian Arab population, the destruction of hundreds of villages, the expulsion of their inhabitants and the confiscation of their lands, the creation of an enormous mass of refugees, the systematic repression of the population, to the arrest and often killing of thousands and thousands of children, young people and women.

How can we equate the reactionary radicalism of the Israeli settlers who demand an even more massive and brutal use of the army from their government, to expel the Palestinians at all costs from every corner of their land, and the resistance of the Palestinian masses in Gaza and the West Bank against the oppression by the state of Israel and the unrelenting aggression by the military and settlers? How can we put on the same level those who oppress, torture, kill in an attempt to carry out their project of settler colonialism, and the most lively part of the Palestinian population who, rather than a slow death at the hands of the enemy, prefer to fight and make it clear that their condition is unbearable? And even if they act so, as it has been and as it is, under an opportunist leadership with interests that conflict with the needs of the exploited Palestinian masses, this does not mean that our solidarity should be denied.

Indeed! It is a question of grasping the class substance of the war that has been ongoing for almost a century in Palestine.

A. M. – Despite many contradictions and illusions of various kinds, the current conflict reflects the will of the mass of oppressed Palestinians not to be definitively closed in an open-air prison ghetto of misery and desperation, controlled by the armed forces of the Zionist state and from those of the “Palestinian Authority”. If the current condition were to continue, it would mean the elimination of the hope of redemption of the poor and the exploited, even if a Palestinian “mini-state” were to come into being, under strict surveillance by Israel and kept alive through the shady help of some Arab state or even by US funding.

Since the infamous “peace plan” between Israel and the PLO, all the existing contradictions emerged – see the ongoing military confrontation throughout the whole territory. Forget peace! And the capitulationism of the PLO has become evident, which however cannot be adequately fought and defeated from a nationalist and confessional perspective, such as Hamas’s. But all this must not obscure the indispensable duty of any truly internationalist communist force, and of a working class union like SI Cobas, to support the Palestinian struggle regardless of its political and military direction. In any case, even the alignment of many to the criticism of the “renunciatory right” of the PLO and of the current direction of the resistance movement by Hamas, which is in some ways reactionary, does not resolve the problem because it does not affect the theoretical foundations and basic political evaluations that underlie the positions of the communists and the militants of the trade union organization SI Cobas – that is: when a war is underway, like the current one, which sees a colonialist state like Israel, protected by all the Western imperialists countries, and a population like the Palestinian one that is fighting for its own national liberation, it is not possible to discuss which side to take.

You know, of course, the objection: for you, then, Israeli society is a single bloc in which everyone, even the workers, are just as many Netanyahus…

A. M. – Let’s be clear: we internationalists have always considered with the utmost attention any sign of criticism, opposition, de-solidarization with respect to their own government and state coming from within Israeli society. We are convinced, in fact, that the solution to the Palestinian question requires the splitting of Israeli society to continue, and the conditions to be created (which at the moment do not yet exist) for the exploited of Israel to cooperate and fight together with the mass of the oppressed Palestinians, so as to be able to attack and destroy the Zionist machine from without and from within. But we return to the senders as opportunist nonsense the complaints of those who think that Palestinian resistance should be postponed until the Israeli proletariat shows itself capable of breaking its complicity with the Zionist regime.

For internationalist communists and for a classist trade union organization such as SI Cobas, the international character of the “Palestinian question”, and not only of it, translates into the commitment to draw up an action plan with coordinates that serve to give unity to the proletarian struggle against capitalist domination both on the metropolitan side (Italy, etc.) and in the “peripheral” countries. The precondition for moving in this direction is to give all possible support to the struggle of the Palestinian masses, regardless of who currently dominates their political leadership. This means making a clear choice of field: opposing imperialist oppression in Palestine and the Middle Eastern area, in the awareness that this oppression also serves to foster the subjugation of the proletariat in the metropolises. And it means denouncing the total complicity of the Meloni government and the Italian state in the oppression and genocide of the Palestinian people.

This strategic choice of open and full solidarity does not, however, equate to considering as irrelevant who and how is leading this struggle. We are convinced that the proletariat and the poor Palestinian masses can take upon themselves the tasks of a consequent democratic revolution. And we want to help make this happen. We give our contribution to this perspective by clearly drawing here a “principled” watershed through which the proletariat of Western countries begins to separate from their bourgeoisies and reformist forces. Otherwise the only two paths that remain are the opposite but complementary ones: “nullism”, the wordy indifferentism which limits itself to recording the distance of the current direction of the Palestinian resistance from the program of communism (when, moreover, the communist revolution is certainly not on the agenda in the Middle Eastern area); or the opportunism of those who subordinate themselves to the liquidationist and inconsequential nationalism of the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois Palestinian leaderships, often ending up in supporting the false solutions advanced by the USA, the EU, the UN, all aimed at perpetuating imperialist domination.

The terrible worsening of the war in Palestine, with the possibility that it will spread to the entire Middle East, the war in Ukraine that continues, other wars and outbreaks of war almost everywhere, the arms race, the European economy one step away from recession, the climate “emergencies” one after the other, the impoverishment of millions of workers, unlimited precariousness…

A.M. – In fact we are in the midst of an enormous global disorder, a great systemic crisis that the capitalists will inevitably unleash with even greater violence on the working classes. SI Cobas is dealing with this process on a daily basis in logistics, where it is most rooted, but also in other production sectors, first and foremost the metalworking sector, in which it is expanding. As a union, we negotiate the value of labor power in the daily struggle of attrition between wage workers and capitalists; but we feel with particular intensity the tasks of the fight against war and the war economy which imposes slavery-like discipline in workplaces, spreads nationalist and racist poisons against immigrants, demands increasing sacrifices “for the homeland”.

The deepening of the systemic crisis is thinning the boundaries between trade union and political issues, both for the bourgeoisie and for the proletarian class. I thus return to the starting point: together with the comrades of the Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency, of the Polo Obrero and the Partido Obrero of Argentina, and of many other trade union and political organisations from different countries and continents, we are working to weave the first threads of a new international proletarian movement founded on strictly internationalist principles and strategy. We have set ourselves as our first objective the organization of a day of inter-continental struggle against the wars of capital, among which the war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine remains in the foreground. The strike on November 17th will be a step along this path.

L'articolo [ITALY] SI Cobas will strike on Friday 17 November, in support of the Palestinian people, to stop the genocide in Gaza proviene da "TOCCANO UNO TOCCANO TUTTI".