Trade Union Palestinian Solidarity Conference (Afternoon session)

The afternoon session began with a choice of workshops - BDS or Trade Union links and delegations. I went to the latter, led by Kevin Brown, FBU Regional Secretary.

Kevin had been part of the FBU delegation to Palestine and introduced their video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgGT6PrTmAo

He described witnessing the awful expeiences of Palestinian workers, being teargassed at a community protest against the apartheid wall and being threatened at gunpoint by Israeli settlers and soldiers. They met Palestinian fire fighters and saw and heard of their difficulties doing their jobs in an occupied country.

The delegation felt obliged to report their experiences to their members and debate with those who had reservations about it, noting that they had seen no anti-semitism at all from the Palestinian people.

They had sought to make contact with Hamas in Gaza, as they were the local administration, but felt it was essential to work through the PGFTU.

There was some debate about what we should be doing within the unions, with one delegate asking for trade union support to remove Hamas from the list of terrorist organisations. My own view was that it's right to defend the right of Palestinians to democratically elect their own government, even if we dont support them (I do not support Hamas myself, and their atacks on the PGFTU in Gaza is reason enough for that). But to build support for the palestinians within the trade unions we really had to be relating to palestinian trade unionists in the PGFTU.

I also felt it helped to make connections between our workplace and professions and those in Palestine. Workers in mental health, for example, could understand the unfair differences between prestigous conferences being organised in Israel while clinician's from the West Bank where denied travel pemits to conferences in Gaza last year, before the Gaza Community Mental Health Centre was itself blown up by the Israeli's.

A delegate who had been part of the Viva Palestina! convoy herself http://www.vivapalestina.org/ noted that there were practical difficulties with this sometimes, in her experience you had to relate to whoever you found was operating and organising on the ground. Kevin noted too that the PGFTU didn't organise public sector workers in the west bank, who under Jordanian employemet law were outside its scope.

An NUJ delegate also showed disturbing pictures drawn by palestinian children, illustrating their own trauma. It was important to them to know the outside world had seen their drawings and understood their distress.

The final plenary was addressed by Hugh Lanning, the Deputy General Secretary of the PCS Union and a representative of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign www.palestinecampaign.org/

Hugh said the question we had to ask ourselves was what are we going to do next? Within the unions, as within society, perceptions had shifted decisively from taking a 'balanced' position to one of clear solidarity with the Palestinians. They had three suggestions

1. Build a mass movement - including more individual and branch affiliations to the PSC. This could also mean more conferences like this throughout the country.

2.Change UK policies, including the EU favoured trading status for Israel. The European elections were a forum to raise this, and he noted the rapid growth of Labour Friends of Palestine too within the governing party.

3. Build a mass boycott. The question was what could each union do, it wasn't about being prescriptive to them. The important thing was to think what was the next step. We could make our own choices, but do something, don't do nothing.