May Day in Israel calls for Netanyahu resignation

by Hans Lebrecht

This article was reprinted from the May 17, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

TEL AVIV - On May 1 many thousands of Israelis demonstrated with red banners and streamers through busy main streets in Tel-Aviv, Nazareth, Akko's Kafr-Yassif suburbs and other cities in Israel. They were demanding the resignation of the corrupt anti-labor and peace-sabotaging Netanyahu government.

The demonstrations were opened by huge banners reading: "The Communist Party and Democratic Hadash Front greet May 1st, the International Solidarity Day of Workers," written in Hebrew and Arabic. Other slogans raised by the demonstrators condemned the government and big capital's onslaught on the real wages and not adjusting the wages to the consumer price index hikes. Demonstrators also protested drastic cuts in social services and restrictions on workers' rights, including the right to strike.

In Nazareth, a town with some 60,000 Arab residents, several thousand people marched through the main streets. The Tel-Aviv demonstration was headed by the member of the Histadrut Trade Union national board and Communist Party bureau member Benjamin Gonen, other Party leaders, Hadash city councilman Nasim Shaqr and members of the local "Initiative Committee for marking the 1st of May." In Kafr- Yassif thousands streamed in from Akko and the western Galilee towns and villages.

At all of the rallies speakers and marchers' slogans stressed the unity of the Arab and Jewish working class and their class solidarity with workers around the world. Many militant May Day demonstrations also took place in the partly liberated Palestinian towns and districts, including Nablus, Jenin, Qalqiliye, Gaza, Khan-Younis, and other cities.

On May 3, an impressive Palestinian-Israeli rally, organized by the trade union sections of the Communist Party of Israel and Hadash and the Palestinian Trade Union Center, took place alongside the busy Jerusalem-Ramallah highway, on liberated Palestinian territory, one mile north of the Israeli border. At the end of the rally, its participants marched toward the Israeli check-point in order to continue the Israeli-Palestinian event in Israeli- held territory. However, they were met by beefed-up Israeli occupation troops who prevented their passing into Israeli- occupied Arab eastern Jerusalem.