Solidarity Forever? The UAW and Israel

Not since the days of Henry Ford has such hostility emerged from the precincts of the auto industry as now is presented by the swerve against Israel by the United Auto Workers. That’s the gist of a dispatch from Jewish Insider, which reports that the UAW “has increasingly drifted away from its core mission of representing autoworkers in the workplace, driven by individuals pushing an extreme anti-Israel political agenda.”The UAW’s dedication to the perfidy of the Jewish state over bread and butter issues is a shocking descent. The issue has come into focus in recent weeks with the move by 30 percent of the 275 employees of the Israeli-owned Breads Bakery — they call themselves “Breaking Breads” — to sign union authorization cards for UAW Local 2179. Among the demands is that the chain “halt use of bakery profit to materially support the Israeli occupation.”“Breaking Breads” is far from subtle. Its Instagram profile features a Palestinian flag. Jewish Insider reports that the group “also condemned the bakeries’ participation in the Great Nosh, an annual Jewish food festival at New York City, and said it will not participate in baking cookies with an image of the Israeli flag.” Oh, and they also want, inter alia, “a living wage, safe workplace, and basic respect.”This is not the first time that UAW affiliates have put anti-Zionism above labor issues. In November the Brandeis Center reached a $315,000 settlement with the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, part of UAW Local 2325. Pro-Israel members were denounced as “snitches,” “losers,” “disgusting,” “dictators in training,” and “Zionist ghouls.” The UAW’s historic support for Israel’s Histadrut is now under fire from those who see anything Israeli as “racist.” Then there are the Student Workers of Columbia, UAW Local 2710. Ten days after the massacres of October 7, 2024, the students denounced their school’s “complicity in genocidal Israeli policy” and called on Columbia to “divest from the Israeli war machine.” The student workers scoffed, while the blood in the Negev was hardly even dry and hundreds of hostages were still at large, at “dehumanizing, unsupported claims of Israeli victimhood.”All of this is a shocking descent from the heady days of Walter Reuther, a towering figure who led the union between 1946 and 1970. In 1958 he received an award from none other than the Histadrut. At a dinner at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria — Abba Eban and Mayor Robert Wagner also spoke — Reuther declared that Israel was “a constant reminder to subjugated peoples everywhere that freedom is possible with abundance. ”

Solidarity Forever? The UAW and Israel

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