Israel's working people fight anti-labor measures

by Hans Lebrecht

This article was reprinted from the July 27, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

TEL AVIV - Last week, 500,000 workers conducted a warning strike against the Netanyahu government's decision to cut government spending by about $1.7 billion, almost all of it by freezing wages, reducing welfare support and old-age pensioners, and by lowering the child allowances for families.

Fifty thousand workers arrived to demonstrate in front of the Knesset. Member of Knesset (MK) Amir Peretz (Labor), the chair of the Histadrut Trade Union Federation, declared that this warning strike was only a first step. He promised more industrial action, including prolonged strikes, if the right-wing Netanyahu cabinet implements its anti-labor program.

The chair of the Jewish-Arab Trade-Union faction and member of the Histadrut's central leading body, Benjamin Gonen (member of the Communist Party (CP) central bureau) announced that the working and poverty stricken masses will fight these measures.

On the initiative of the (Communist-led) Hadash Front's Knesset group, all opposition factions motioned a vote of no-confidence in the Netanyahu cabinet (the first since the new government took office a month earlier) because of its economic measures. The government, however, was supported by a small majority.

Substantiating Hadash's motion of no-confidence, MK Tamar Gozanski (member of the CP central Bureau) stressed that the Netanyahu cabinet showed its real face, the face of a government ruled by the narrow-minded interests of big-business and stock-exchange profiteers, the face of nationalist hard-liners. It showed the face of an arch-conservative and reactionary regime that looks upon the wage earners and impoverished masses as Israel's arch-enemies. It also is a government that aims, by at least doubling the number of Jewish "settlers" in the still occupied Palestinian territories, at expropriating more Palestinian soil.

By this, as well as by freezing the implementation of the obligations signed by the former government in the Oslo accords, this government blocks the prospect of achieving real and comprehensive peace.

Gozanski sharply condemned Netanyahu's appearances during his latest visit in the U.S. Everywhere, he arrogantly presented the Israeli conflict with its Arab neighbors as a conflict between Israel's pure and celebrated democracy and the Arab autocratic regimes.

Turning to the appointment of the ill-famed hard-liner Ariel Sharon to the post of a super-powered cabinet minister of "national infrastructures," Gozanski stated this alone was proof that the Netanyahu government will return to the unfortunate policy of the former rightist Likud government (1977-92) which cost so much blood and so many victims among the Palestinians and Israelis.