Oppose Apartheid and Genocide:Palestine’s Call for Solidarity from American Unions
Speech by Wafic Faour at Burlington’s Labor Day 2025
There are very few world events during our lifetime in which we are asked not only for our opinion, but also what we are going to about them. The genocide in Gaza is that kind of event. The brutality of what is happening in Palestine—decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide and deliberate starvation—poses to all of us the question: what are you doing about it? What are you going to do?
The Palestine solidarity movement has two requests for American unions, and specifically unions in Vermont. One is from Palestinian trade unions. They call on unions here to divest their pensions from the weapons industry and any corporation supporting the ongoing genocide, blockade, colonial settlement, and occupation of Palestine.
The second is from Vermont Labor for Palestine. It is calling on Vermont’s unions to adopt the Apartheid Free Communities pledge and organize to make Vermont an apartheid free state. The pledge reads as follows:
We AFFIRM our commitment to freedom, justice and equality for the Palestinian people and all people; and
WE OPPOSE all forms of racism, bigotry, discrimination, and oppression; and
WE DECLARE ourselves an apartheid-free community, and to that end,
WE PLEDGE to join others in working to end all support to Israel’s apartheid regime, settler colonialism, and military occupation.
We ask every member of every union to educate and pressure their coworkers and leadership to do the right thing and stand with Palestinian workers.
We all have a stake in adopting this pledge. Many billions of our tax dollars have been sent to Israel to aid and abet the murder and maiming of Palestinian women, children and men as well as the destruction of nearly all of Gaza’s infrastructure, its hospitals, sewer and water systems, universities, bakeries, farmland—everything that human beings need to live.
Meanwhile, Americans are struggling in ever greater numbers with homelessness, access to education and healthcare, and ever increasing costs of living, making us poorer and sicker as we fuel an immoral assault by the apartheid state of Israel on Palestinians, the indigenous people of the land. At the same time, the American people are being told to shut up, that it is antisemitic to support the human rights of Palestinians, and that we are no longer allowed to criticize a government as it commits a genocide using our tax dollars.
Our biggest hope to end the occupation and genocide and to protect our First Amendment rights is for all workers to unite and refuse to support this disgusting assault on humanity, which inevitably impacts not just all the people of Palestine, but all of us here at home. It is time to take a stand. This moment demands it of each and every one of us, our organizations, and our unions. Solidarity.