No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine

by Jeff Schuhrke

The definitive history of the US labor movement’s complicity in Zionist settler colonialism, and a call for today’s labor militants to organize in solidarity with Palestinians.



In trying to organize their unions to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, US trade unionists are often met with arguments that the labor movement should keep quiet and remain neutral because “Palestine has nothing to do with unions” and “weighing in” only distracts from winning better working conditions. Such arguments, however, often serve as cover for top union officials who have historically been far more sympathetic to Israel and Zionism than to the cause of Palestinian liberation and self-determination.



No Neutrals There makes a timely and critical intervention by recounting the little-known history of the US labor movement’s century-long involvement in the ongoing struggle for Palestine. Scholar Jeff Schuhrke convincingly demonstrates that unions in the United States have never been silent or neutral on the question of Palestine. In fact, they have played a key role—often overlooked by historians—in the initial Zionist colonization of Palestine, in the eventual foundation of the Israeli state in 1948, in supporting US foreign policy commitments to bolster Israel’s global standing and military capabilities, and in ongoing efforts to suppress the Palestinian liberation movement.



In his compelling telling of this history, Schuhrke conclusively shows that US unions helped build and maintain the state of Israel, and also shines a light on important exceptions to this instances of US labor solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle that point the way forward for today’s labor movement.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Labor, Politics

320 pages, Paperback

Published October 28, 2025

Reviews

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schuhrke shines light on the dark, inextricably connected past that American unions have with Zionism, the ethnocultural nationalist movement to colonize Palestine and create a settler-colonial Jewish homeland. He also does an excellent job at explaining how capitalism, settler colonialism, and Zionism go hand in hand. He begins by giving a brief overview of the labor movement’s support of Israel throughout the last century before giving a history lesson on the creation of Israel and the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel during the 1948 Palestine war. The book then delves into the relationship between Israel and the U.S. — explaining how U.S. labor was involved — before getting into the complex aftermath of the Six-Day War, the messiness of the Vietnam War, and tension between U.S. labor and Israel due to Israel’s use of scabs during the International Association of Machinists strike at the Israeli state-owned airline El Al in 1984. The book then describes the Intifada, a Palestinian uprising involving both nonviolent and violent methods of resistance, which began in 1987. In his final chapter, Schuhrke highlights a change in the U.S. labor movement after the Intifada. He credits the rising diversity of union membership for this shift.

The book is incredibly timely and impressively detailed. Schuhrke proves his worth as a historian by telling a meaningful story about U.S. labor with a lesson to be learned. The book is compelling and the author does not pull any punches. Schuhrke’s determined writing style refuses to shy away from highlighting the complicity of U.S. unions. He convinces the reader that the labor movement has an obligation to stand up for Palestinians. Schuhrke eloquently writes, “If, with labor’s help, freedom can be achieved in a place and for a people long plagued by imperial machinations, colonial domination, racial and religious oppression, ecological degradation, and worker exploitation, then there can be hope for the world. It is no wonder that Palestine solidarity activists in the United States and around the globe have adopted the slogan ‘Palestine will free us all.’”

This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for the UE NEWS: https://www.ueunion.org/ue-news-featu...

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A critical contribution to the history of the US labor movement that couldn't be more timely. As in his previous book Blue Collar Empire, Schuhrke cuts through the fog of ideology around many labor histories refusal to engage with the question of imperialism. What he reveals here is almost astonishing to reckon with: that arguably the single strongest backer the colonial Zionist project of Israel has ever had in the US is the labor movement. A brilliantly researched deep dive into over a century of US labor's relationship with Israel that is full of shocking tales of the lengths US labor leaders have been willing to go to in order to support the colonial project in Occupied Palestine.

An absolute must read!

[Whitman Cler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book of the year, hands down. Incredibly well-documented. Jeff Schuhrke is becoming one of my favorite authors.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant and important

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very comprehensive and readable history book. A lot of it is spent covering the history of Zionism, Israel and Palestine in general, but I appreciated how this then contextualized the US labor history pieces. A direct rebuttal to anyone who argues that the US labor movement “has no business in international politics” etc….

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before coming across No Neutral Here by Jeff Schuhrke, I was naïvely under the impression that the labor movement was inherently a left wing movement that was militant in its domestic and international solidarity. This book has opened my eyes to realize that, historically, not only is that sort of movement not guaranteed, but that the American labor movement has largely been antagonistic towards international and intersectional solidarity: in fact, this book destroyed any notion away from this fiction. With the wrong leaders and the wrong leadership, unions can very much be an arm of capital and one’s nationalist movement, the empire, and fascistic/colonial missions domestically and abroad. This book has piqued my interest in these flaws that unions and their collectives can have. In the future, I would like to read more about what was briefly mentioned which was union’s role in the Homestead Act and the ignoring of the indigenous mass genocide by Abraham Lincoln because of it–which I think should’ve gotten more of a mention than a brief mention even though I can understand that it didn’t have to do with Palestine, but I would’ve liked some more information or a resource to learn more about this. I would also like to read about unions’ roles in Weimar Germany and supporting Adolf Hitler (there may be none, I don’t know, I just would like to see if there is anything on this). Moreover, I would just like to learn more about reactionary unions, how they got here, how they happen, and if there are ways to properly defeating them. I want to know how often labor movement maybe get coopted into reactionary politics and push out more radical politics.

As a side note, I also saw how often the mob got invested in zionist Palestinian and later Israeli bonds, and it made me wonder if this was something that the mob did to launder money in accordance with the zionists. I know that Jeff Schuhrke does not cover or talk about this angle at all, but I can’t imagine that the reason the mob wasn’t dumping billions of union and their own funds into bonds was simply out of just “good publicity” as Jimmy Hoffa stated or if this was a form of money laundering since we also know that Jimmy Hoffa illegally smuggled guns into Israel during the US blockade of all weapons entering Palestine pre 1948 Nakba and subsequently formation of the Israeli state. I’m not saying these things happened, I’m just saying it seems like something that easily could have also been happening hypothetically.

My understanding is that labor activism and militancy should have the goal of labor power and education of one’s class position in a capitalist system. The ultimate goal should be to build a national and international power structure to overthrow the capitalist structure and bring about a socialist one. The fact that unions often completely undermine and are antagonist to this goal seems ludicrous in my eyes. I don’t understand what reason you could possibly have to build a union if your goal is to marginally improve your wage conditions only to eventually hit a ceiling and be mass fired anyways since this is what Marx predicted would happen (and we pretty much saw happen with the dwindling and destruction of unions after the 1960s). Working alongside capitalist (which apparently Schuhrke explains more in his previous book, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor's Global Anticommunist Crusade, he might explain more about this dynamic, and I look forward to delving into this book and many others) with no future aim or end seems completely selfish, useless, visionless, and was clearly purposeful for some reason.

My frustrations and anger scouring through these pages and how the US labor movement built up zionism from the end of the 19th century to today was maddening to read. I am not the most well read person, historically, so reading about the Soviet Union on the one hand supporting the Palestinian Communist Party and at the same time supporting the Zionist movement decades later was complete whiplash. To see the Communist Party members in the US turn heel to support Zionism simply because Stalin did so was painful to read as well. This book completely made me realize that maybe the future of labor activism and militancy will have to revolve around squashing these arms of capital as well in order for any sort of future movement of the working class to grow and thrive. This has completely fascinated me as a subject, and I will be trying to read more about this phenomenon to be more informed about how one even tries to address and fight against this sort of terrible end.

This book did not make me think labor unions are useless: quite the contrary, it made me realize how powerful these unions were. We have to be much much more vigilant in destroying reactionary positions in the future of labor activism and militancy. The complacency of the labor movement towards the ends of the indigenous populations domestically and abroad were awful to read. That’s why we must know these things so that we can hopefully never do them again. This book gave me insight and hope that the future is not inevitable, but it tells me that the future was completely decided by those that should’ve been our comrades, completely let us down, and failed us.

[Ryan Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

8.3/10

I always like when books prove Settlers right.

American labor in its post-WW2 golden age, was blatantly white supremacist. While I’m sure you could see this from how it treated Black or Latino laborers, there is ample proof in how it supported the colonization of Palestine. The easiest explanation for why so many mainstream unions would bend so backwards for Israel throughout the 20th century is, maybe, settler solidarity. Union leadership, tolerated by the rank and file, saw its own dream of American settler prosperity reflected in the Jewish supremacist worker-oriented society of early Israel (the other explanation was Israel as a giant money laundering scheme, ex. The James Hoffa children’s home, just outside Jerusalem).

The best I can understand this solidarity with the child-murdering Israeli proletariat is that American Jews attained white status, a status granted to many choice American ethnic groups as a result of post-war prosperity. And just as these groups saw unprecedented uplifting and generational wealth, so on the other end the continued pressing down of the third world, which was mostly if not entirely “the darker nations.” So, AFL-CIO officials carrying water for the Zionist regime, whether they themselves were Jewish, saw a kinship with this upstart settler society, and were easily able to demonize the native Palestinians who, not unlike how the worse-off, non-white labor was treated in America.

The history in this book is very good, I especially liked the instances detailing particular labor struggles in the US relating to Israel. On the one hand, the struggle of Arab autoworkers in Dearborn in the 70s was a great glimpse into early anti-Zionist organizing. On the other, the instances of mainstream unions pressuring Israel, but ONLY doing it so American workers are treated better (and not to stop the never-ending Palestinian holocaust) was ridiculous to read about. There is maybe hope, if anything because American labor has, with time, come to look less and less like how it looked when “Settlers” was published.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once you look under the hood of US imperialism and Zionist colonialism, it’s impossible to become numb to the deep, unrelenting disgust it leaves you with.

Learning about how US labor wasted decades of organizing and millions of dollars propping up a genocidal ethnostate gives much needed context to the current state of decline of unionism in the US. Anti-communism and white supremacy have only and will only ever serve the interests of the elite. US labor’s attempts at aligning itself with US imperialism to reap the rewards of its conquest is short-sighted at best.

To learn that unions in this country have been the lap dogs of empire and the internal machine for Zionism is disheartening. The workers of the world can never unite when the workers of the global majority (in this case Palestinians) are an afterthought for the US’s labor aristocracy.

One day Palestine will be free and the fruits of labor will be owned by the workers, from Gaza Strip to Detroit.

[kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

this took me a while to get through and definitely isn’t the most rousing nonfiction i’ve read, but it is so full of incredibly important information. i knew almost none of this history and as someone active in both union and pro-palestine spaces, this knowledge is crucial. it is also insanely well researched. i really only wish that there was more of a “here’s what us labor can do next” or even just the author’s ideas of how things might evolve, but overall this was great.

[Kinsey Cantrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant, painstaking, well-researched history of the intricate financial and political relationships between US labor unions and the state of Israel -- an excellent rebuke to the idea that workers should "stay in their lane" and focus on domestic working conditions rather than leveraging worker power in solidarity with Palestine. I found this examination really valuable.

[Allie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most personally impactful book I've ever read. This book has permanently altered my ambitions in organizing more than I thought a single book could. Schuhrke's call for a more internationalist vision of labor organizing could not have been made any better.