Beyond / Comment

American Labor’s Shameful History of Support for Zionism

The US labor movement has never been neutral: its union officialdom has a more-than-century-long history of allying with Zionism.

by Jeff Schuhrke via Jacobin on October 12, 2025

...call to action: the more than one-hundred-year alliance between US union officialdom and Zionism — the settler-colonial movement that served to dispossess Palestinians in the twentieth century and continues to suppress their elemental human rights and freedom in the name of Jewish nationalism.

Labor Officialdom’s Alliance With Zionism

Although it asserts the supposed right of Jews to control Palestine, Zionism is by no means driven exclusively by Jewish people, nor should the term Zionist be mistaken as a synonym for “Jew.” Indeed, throughout the history of Zionism, Jews have been among its most vocal and dedicated opponents.

What’s more, non-Jews — particularly Christians — have always been essential players in the Zionist movement. European Protestants were issuing apocalyptic calls for the Jewish “restoration” of Palestine centuries before Jews themselves began advocating Zionism. The largest Zionist organization in the modern United States is Christians United for Israel, an Evangelical group boasting approximately ten million members, which is more than the total number of Jewish Americans. President Biden, a Catholic, repeatedly referred to himself as a Zionist during his time in the White House.

Similarly, US labor officials — among whom Jews have always been a minority — have long been proponents of Zionism and the State of Israel. There are two fundamental reasons for this. One is AFL-CIO leaders’ traditional ideological commitment to Labor Zionism, the particular current within the wider Zionist project that centers the role of Jewish workers in laying the economic foundations for building and maintaining the Israeli state.

Prior to the 1955 establishment of the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations were separate entities, each generally representing different strands of US unionism. Founded in 1886, the AFL espoused a vision of nonradical, “pure and simple” trade unionism that proclaimed loyalty to American capitalism in exchange for limited gains and protections for the most skilled workers (especially English-speaking white craftsmen). The CIO, which was launched after several unions broke away from the AFL in 1935, put forward a comparatively progressive agenda of using the collective power of all workers to create a more humane economy and more egalitarian society.

Labor Zionism, which emerged in the early 1900s and came to dominate the broader Zionist movement by the 1930s, appealed to both of these differing approaches to US trade unionism. AFL leaders could easily sympathize with Labor Zionism because, like their own brand of unionism, it substituted class struggle with class collaboration in the service of nationalism. For their part, the CIO’s more liberal and progressive unionists were drawn to Labor Zionism because its followers in Palestine were putting certain socialistic ideas into practice, such as establishing cooperative enterprises and implementing social welfare programs.