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Workers in the U.S. can’t look away from Israel’s assault on Gaza—our labor is helping fuel the war machine.

by Paul Stauffer, In These Times

As the U.S. government helps arm and fund the genocide in Gaza carried out by the Israeli military, the connections between global capitalism and the war machine have become abundantly clear. Yet, for most U.S. workers, the atrocities facing Palestinians can seem disconnected from everyday life.

The starvation Gazans face after Israel’s systematic denial of food and water shipments, for example, isn’t directly felt by the agricultural worker harvesting chickpeas in Idaho. The airstrikes that have murdered at least 25,000 Palestinian children have all been detonated too far away to be felt by the nurse at Penn Hospital in Philadelphia. The bulldozers that crushed civilians outside Kamal Adwan Hospital don’t profoundly threaten the machinist leaving her shift at Caterpillar in East Peoria, Ill.

shawn fain stands with other union members

The fact that Israel is risking the permanent destruction of Gaza’s only water aquifer — if the military follows through on its threat to pump seawater into Hamas’s tunnel system — didn’t factor into my work as a union plumber as I pumped thousands of gallons of high-pressured potable water down sewer lines to clear blockages.

The shop is still open. We have bills to pay, so we go to work, same as always, just trying to get by in an economy where it has become increasingly harder to do so.

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