Chavez Assailed by Trotskyists for Defending Israel’s Right to Exist

The Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist) has uncovered a new enemy of the Arab people–none other than Cesar Chavez, president of the United Farm Workers Union. Miguel Pendas, writing in this week’s issue of the SWP’s organ. The Militant, raps Chavez for expressing “a sense of solidarity” with Israel and deploring “the armed violation of peace in the Middle East on Yom Kippur.”

Chavez, who made this statement last Dec. in a telegram to the congregational and rabbinic bodies of Reform Judaism, also noted that “as individuals committed to the cause of freedom, concerned with the fate of victims of racial, ethnic and religious prejudice and discrimination we feel a particular sense of solidarity with Israel’s struggle to survive as a democracy in peace.” Furthermore, he wrote, “as persons of minority backgrounds, we share Israel’s aspirations to integrate people from vastly different backgrounds and to provide them all, including Jew and Arab alike, with the benefits of an advanced social system.”

Pendas is deeply disturbed by Chavez’s views and castigates him in no uncertain terms. “Brother Chavez is wrong to link the struggle of Chicanos with the aims of the Israeli State,” the Trotskyist columnist writes. “The Chicano struggle, and in particular that of the farm workers, finds its parallel not with Zionism but with the struggle for self-determination of the Arab people.”

TROTSKYIST VERSION OF HISTORY

Scolding the trade union leader for misreading history, Pendas offers his version: “Regardless of who fired the first shot in the recent Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, it is Israel who is the real violator of peace. The very existence of the Israeli State has been an ‘armed violation’ of the rights of Arabs since its creation in 1948.” Pendas continues his lesson by noting that Israel “is a settler-colonialist state” which owes its existence “in large measure to U.S. financial and military aid” and “serves as a beachhead for yanqui imperialism.”

Zionists, the Trotskyist continues, “are the pawns of the American ruling class–the very people who are now trying to crush the Farm Workers Union. They have sided with the enemies of Chicanos and all working people” Pendas concludes by noting that the Palestinian struggle for the “creation of a democratic, secular Palestine where both Jews and Arabs can live” requires “the dismantling of the present State of Israel” which has not created an integrated society “but rather an exclusive state for Jews.”

Pendas fails to mention that many Jewish organizations, including the Reform bodies to which Chavez sent his telegram, and Zionist groups in this country, have long supported the United Farm Workers Union’s struggle to organize the Chicanos and the grape and lettuce workers and have pledged not to purchase non-union picked lettuce and grapes.

Pendas also fails to mention that Chavez affirmed that “mankind must never forget the crime committed three decades ago when six million were gassed in Hitler’s crematorium” and that in this spirit urged “peaceful and rational negotiations by both sides” and urged “all our brothers and sisters in the farmworker movement and people of good will throughout the world to stand with Israel in its struggle to live and be free.” Pendas, the Trotskyist “teacher.” should recall the words of Karl Marx that even “the educator himself must be educated.” (By Murray Zuckoff.)