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On Saturday, April 22nd, 2023, tragedy struck when Jacob Charles Lewis, aged 20, was killed in a tragic and unexpected accident. It was only a few hours prior when Jacob was enjoying the best day of his life with his older sister, April Elizabeth Lewis Bancroft, age 26, at the Taylor Swift concert at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas.

On their way home, their car broke down on the freeway, and Jacob was pushing it to the exit when he was hit by a suspected drunk driver.
Sadly, he was pronounced dead at the scene.

The driver responsible for the crash has been charged with a felony for driving under the influence and failing to stop and render aid.

The loving legacy of Lewis is being honored in the most heartwarming way imaginable. Members of Swift’s fan base banded together in his memory.

What began as a GoFundMe donation page organized by Lewis’s sister, April Bancroft, rapidly brought in over $125,000 from more than 8,000 devoted supporters.

Most contributions numbered $13, chosen in recognition of the treasured Swiftie “lucky number” 13.

In honor of their cherished son, the Lewises have created a scholarship fund for theater students in their home city of Katy, Texas. Jacob was involved in musical theater from as early as 6th grade, appearing in upwards of three or four plays every year.

April Bancroft told CNN that her brother “was able to shine and spread happiness to everyone he met.” Despite their sadness, the Lewises take comfort in the fact that Jacob and April were able to share this experience and that others have stepped in to guide the young family during this rough time. The money donated will help to honor Jacob’s memory and encourage future theater students in the region.

The immense love and support pouring in from Swift’s fan base are a testament to the strength of the “Swifties.” As April Bancroft put it, “If there are ever going to be a group of people who will get together and make something like this happen, it’s the Taylor Swift fans.” Although the family still carries immense sadness, they’ve expressed their most profound gratitude for the generosity and kind words for Jacob.

Who is Harlan Crow? Prior to ProPublica’s bombshell investigation into his financial relationship with Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, few had heard the name outside of Republican political circles and elite conservative think tanks. Yet for a period of more than twenty years, the Dallas real estate mogul subsidized Thomas’s luxury vacations across the globe: […]

Tension is mounting as Israeli state repression and settler violence are being matched by an upsurge in Palestinian resistance. Palestinian liberation movement leader Khalida Jarrar says the situation is reaching a breaking point.

Palestinians walk next to a mural of Khalida Jarrar on April 20, 2015 in Gaza City. (Momen Faiz / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Khalida Jarrar is one of the most celebrated — and targeted — leaders of the Palestinian liberation movement. A dedicated socialist and feminist, her organizing has taken many different forms over the decades, and has come at great personal cost.

Jarrar was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in 2006 and chaired the PLC’s Prisoner Commission. Prior to her election, Jarrar served as the director of Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.

Jarrar has been arrested by the state of Israel four times for her activism. The first time was on March 8, 1989 for her participation in International Women’s Day demonstrations.

In 2014, Israel issued a military order to expel Jarrar from Ramallah. Soldiers surrounded her family home and attempted to transfer her to Jericho, where she would be placed under supervision. Jarrar refused to sign the order and appealed the decision. She won, but was later arrested in April 2015. She served six months without charges or trial under administrative detention, a procedure under Israel’s separate military court system for Palestinians. Jarrar was eventually charged with “membership in an illegal organization” (Israel designates all Palestinian political parties illegal) and “incitement.” She was released after fifteen months in June 2016.

In July 2017, Jarrar was leading efforts to bring Israel before the International Criminal Court when she was arrested again. She was held on secret evidence and her administrative detention was renewed several times until her release in February 2019.

Eight months later, in October 2019, she was arrested again and charged with “holding a position in an illegal association.” While in jail, Jarrar launched a program to teach Palestinian women in Israeli prisons and allow them to receive university credits for their studies. Despite Israel’s attempts to ban the initiative, several women have been awarded degrees, and the initiative continues today. In July 2021, Jarar’s daughter Suha unexpectedly passed away at the age of thirty-one. Despite international outcry, Israel refused to allow Jarrar to attend the funeral.

Jarrar was finally released in September 2021. To date, she has spent over sixty-three combined months behind bars. Since her release, she has accepted a position at Birzeit University, where she researches the historic role of female Palestinian political prisoners.

For Jacobin, Jarrar’s son-in-law James Hutt sat down with her at her home in Ramallah to talk to her about the current upsurge in resistance, the challenges facing the liberation movement, and what she believes comes next.

James Hutt

For months now, the West Bank has seemed like it’s about to erupt. I’ve heard Palestinians use the expression that “the situation is like hot metal.” There’s been a wave of Palestinian resistance, especially in the face of escalating Israeli violence. Some people have described it like the months that precipitated the second intifada. How do you understand the current moment?

Khalida Jarrar

There are daily invasions by the Israeli army into Palestinian towns. There are daily mass arrests. Daily, we wake up to news of Israel killing people. Besides that, the West Bank is full of checkpoints and we’re witnessing the Israeli army assassinating more and more people at the checkpoints. They have invaded Jericho many times recently, especially after their raid on the nearby Aqabat Jaber refugee camp, where soldiers demolished many houses and assassinated five people. If Israel thinks these people did anything wrong it could have arrested them, like normal. Instead, it is aiming to kill. Shooting people has become very easy now for the Israeli army.

Israel has started to demolish houses in huge numbers. It has always done it, but now in such large numbers that it’s clearly a new policy. It wants to remove Palestinians from Masafer Yatta and East Jerusalem, for example. [Israeli minister of national security] Itamar Ben-Gvir personally ordered the demolition of a building in Jerusalem that’s home to one hundred Palestinians. On the other side, the Israeli bureaucracy uses the excuse that these homes have been built thirty years ago and don’t have licenses. Of course not. Israel will not give licenses to Palestinians to build or to fix their homes inside Jerusalem.

There are daily invasions by the Israeli army into Palestinian towns. There are daily mass arrests. Daily, we wake up to news of Israel killing people.

The more dangerous element is the settlers, who are of course under the protection of the soldiers. I think the settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem number around one million people now. The roads are full of settlers. Their settlements are not little villages or towns either, they are full cities. The settlers have weapons. They attack Palestinians. They steal their olives and cut down their trees. They close the roads and throw stones at cars with white West Bank license plates. They kill people.

There is an escalation of the violence with this new fascist government. All Israeli governments violate the rights of Palestinians by arresting and killing people, but we look at this new government and see people like [Israeli minister of finance] Bezalel Smotrich or Ben-Gvir, who was convicted of terrorism against Palestinians by Israeli police. Now he’s not just part of the Israeli government — he’s the minister for national security.

Ben-Gvir has threatened more laws against prisoners and wants to bring in capital punishment. As minister, he announced his support for and gave a gift to a soldier who killed a Palestinian civilian in Shuafat refugee camp. The soldier beat the man and shot him at point blank. Ben-Gvir is not a civilian or even just a settler. He is an Israeli cabinet minister. Ben-Gvir told the soldier that he appreciated what he did and the world kept silent. [Since this interview, Israel has approved a new national guard under Ben-Gvir’s command that will focus on “Arab unrest.”]

On top of the escalation of violence and the continuous violations, there is high unemployment and poverty. That’s linked to how Israel is stealing money from the Palestinian Authority (PA). According to the Paris Agreement, Israel collects trade revenues and taxes that it is supposed to give back to the PA. However, Israel has started confiscating millions of shekels each month, which affects the budget of the PA and its programs. Palestine is also an agricultural country. Israel doesn’t allow people to dig for water or plant their lands. Palestinians have no access to land in Area C, which is 68 percent of the West Bank, so they can’t build or plant on their lands in that area. On the other side, there’s no right for Palestinians to have their own factories or their own economy. Our economy is tied to the Israeli economy and the Paris Agreement keeps squeezing us.

So you have a rise in poverty, in human rights violations, in killings, and in the expansion of Israeli settlements. Palestinians have nothing to do but resist this occupation, because there is no hope for them while the occupation exists. We are learning now that the majority of Palestinian youth are resisting in their own way. There is now widespread collective resistance, and we notice this new phenomenon of young Palestinians undertaking armed resistance on their own, because they see and they live the daily violations; because there is no hope for them. The occupation kills everything for Palestinians, it kills hope, it kills the future. So what can they do? Besides that, there is no punishment for Israel for violating human rights and international humanitarian conventions. We can’t see any punishment. We only see the opposite: the punishment of Palestinians seeking their liberty and justice.

James Hutt

Where do you think it will go? Will it lead to a new intifada?

Khalida Jarrar

Look, there are elements you need for an intifada. You need collective leadership and mass organization, for example. What I see is that there is a continuous resistance. Whether it will lead to an intifada or armed struggle, I don’t know. But the situation is very critical. The occupation keeps increasing the violence, so the Palestinian people will resist. I’m sorry to say it too, but the Palestinian people are not armed. Who is armed are the Israeli soldiers. They have tanks, weapons, and aircraft. They have an army. Palestinians have very little to resist with. But the spirit of refusal you can find in the Palestinian people. So what will be the name of this moment? I can’t say if it’ll be an intifada because it requires many elements that are not found today, but there is a continuous resistance that is developing. To what? The future will answer.

There is a continuous resistance. Whether it will lead to an intifada or armed struggle, I don’t know. But the situation is very critical.

James Hutt

How would you describe the current state of the Palestinian liberation movement?

Khalida Jarrar

The internal divisions have badly affected the liberation movement, especially between Fatah and Hamas. They are the two biggest parties and they are satisfied with the current situation, with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah somewhat in control of the West Bank and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). But the majority of people want elections, which would change that. Elections are one part of the approach we need as a people. The other is a minimum agreement between all parties to work together. But the internal divisions and the private interests of each of the parties means they are more inclined to delay elections.

We haven’t had elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006.But the majority of people want change. Palestinians need to elect their leadership. It’s going to take popular pressure to make that happen.

There have been many agreements between the parties to hold elections. The last ones were supposed to be in 2021 but they didn’t happen. The president [Mahmoud Abbas] canceled them on the excuse that we couldn’t hold elections without the Palestinians in Jerusalem, whom Israel would not allow to participate. But it’s an excuse. Of course the West Bank could have elections without Jerusalem. And if we believe in a genuine democratic approach then we will find ways to include them and do it in Jerusalem.

Palestinians need to elect their leadership. It’s going to take popular pressure to make that happen.

The other question is that the liberation movement has moved toward what’s called state-building, which has different aims and activities than liberation. Part of the movement thinks about establishing an independent state and thought it could do it through the Oslo Accords, but it found out after twenty-five years that it’s just a slogan.

But now we see popular resistance from the people that will maybe force the liberation movement to adjust. It might force the parties and its leaders to evaluate and evolve, and to actually implement the national demands of Palestinians, which are: self-determination, the right of return for refugees, and an end to the occupation. So we need to switch from the aim of building a state and return to focus on liberation, and, in my opinion, it should be a democratic approach. Besides the national struggle we also have a democratic struggle, which includes social justice and equality between men and women. This is the content of liberation we need as a Palestinian people.

James Hutt

Speaking of divisions and agreements between Palestinian parties, I want to ask you about the Prisoners’ Document from 2006. That document seems like the closest the various parties have come to achieving a unified vision for a long time. Do you see anything new like that coming?

Khalida Jarrar

We have many agreements, but the main two agreements that answer the whole question and all differences between the political parties are the Prisoners’ Document and the Cairo Agreement in 2005, which was agreed upon by all parties to reform the PLO. The starting point, in my opinion, has to be the PLO, not the PA. Why? Because we are Palestinians living in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Jerusalem, and inside lands taken by Israel in 1948, with the majority of the Palestinians who are refugees. If we believe that all Palestinians should share in evaluating the political process and electing a new leadership, it should be a shared process with all Palestinian people.

The starting point is the national council related to the PLO. But it needs more pressure because everyone from the two big parties is satisfied with the status quo. Without reforming the PLO, democratizing it, and making it representative of Palestinian people all over the world, including the occupied territories, I think the liberation movement will continue to be weak.

James Hutt

Why do you think the Prisoners’ Document failed to achieve its ends? What else is needed now?

Khalida Jarrar

The document didn’t fail, but there’s no ability to implement it. The problem is not with the agreement but the implementation of it. And implementing any of the agreements, including the Prisoners’ Document, depends on convincing the big parties that we should actually do it and not just keep organizing for new agreements. The last meeting was in Algeria and nothing happened. They signed, took a photo and celebrated, and nothing happened on the ground. We don’t need new agreements; we need strength to implement the agreements that all parties have already signed.

James Hutt

Do you think the vision of liberation has changed since that point in 2006 to now, in this current context? Is the strategy fundamentally different now?

Khalida Jarrar

I don’t think it has changed. We have the same aims since the Nakba. The national demands haven’t changed. The main goal for the liberation movement is to put an end to the occupation, the right to self-determination, and the right of return. The point is how you implement these national demands and how you agree to continue as a movement. What has changed is the situation within Palestine. Now there is a gap between the people and the leadership. The majority of people are not convinced of what the leadership does. There is no way to fix this relationship except through elections, and there are no elections, so it’s a complicated issue. It’s a matter of internal struggle. It might take time, but the situation and this kind of occupation will not give us, as Palestinians, anything. They want to kick us out or kill us and put an end to any type of self-determination. This means we will continue to balance between struggling against the occupation and reforming our internal situation as a people.

We don’t need new agreements; we need strength to implement the agreements that all parties have already signed.

James Hutt

The last couple years, we’ve seen increased collaboration between Israel and the PA, with the PA even playing an active role in the repression of its own people. How much of a barrier to liberation is the PA and what needs to change?

Khalida Jarrar

When talking about the PA, you are talking about a government that has an agreement with Israel. The majority of Palestinians are against these agreements. I’m talking about the Oslo Agreement, the Paris Agreement, the Camp David agreement, and the White River Agreement — all kinds of agreements. These agreements make the national authority responsible for implementing them, so the PA has to do security coordination with Israel. However, the majority of people and the majority of political parties reject that.

In January, after the massacre in Jenin refugee camp, the Central Council of the PLO took the decision to end the PA’s security coordination with Israel, but the PA continues to do it. Now there is a huge gap between the people and the PA, and an open question about what the PA is for. Is it the authority’s role to squeeze people or to help people? Should it at least address the issues of daily life, like education and health care? Should it be reformed? Should it be related to the PLO? Should it be dissolved? Or, should we change its role to just overseeing daily life and not interfering in political or security issues? Does the PA make it easier or more difficult for the liberation movement?

Answering these questions should come from the people. You need a forum to discuss this, which should be the national council. We can elect new members. We can elect people in areas where we can hold elections and agree upon areas where we can’t. Let’s start meeting — not just to elect new leaders, but to evaluate the political process and to answer questions like these about the relationship to the PA.

James Hutt

Where are the leftist parties in all this? Why do you think they have not been more popular or more successful?

Khalida Jarrar

The majority of the leftists parties are weak except for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is the largest left party, but if you compare it to Fatah or Hamas you can see there’s a huge difference.

Why are they weak? It’s related to many elements, both external and internal. Externally, it’s like the situation of all leftist parties all over the world. Internally, it’s because you cannot differentiate some political parties from the PA and Fatah, for example. Many people don’t see that the leftist parties are different. So one of the aims is to unify the leftist parties, but we also need to evaluate and agree on political, ideological, and social goals. Maybe social and democratic terms we agree on, but politically there are still many differences between the leftist parties. There have been many attempts to unify them that still haven’t succeeded. Maybe the way to unify is on the ground, through resisting and struggling for different issues together.

James Hutt

How influential is socialism in Palestine today? How much is it guiding people, especially this new generation of youth?

Khalida Jarrar

Part of our analysis about why there are internal divisions, about why the liberation movement is divided, is because there is also a class struggle. There is a class that developed out of the Oslo Agreement that has no interest in liberation. It’s a very small class but it controls a lot of things. Socialism from my point of view is part of the solution. The socialist movement is very weak in Palestine at the moment. But when you talk about social justice, for example, or the democratic struggle, that provides an answer for the future of all Palestinians. Right now, the PA relies on the free market, and it will not solve unemployment or any of the social problems. It’s trying to implement neoliberalism, which won’t help the internal situation.

Less people are drawn to socialism today because they don’t understand what socialism is. We’ve never had an authority that wants to implement socialism. It’s a neoliberal PA. This is why the majority of problems are getting worse under it. Poverty is increasing. Unemployment is increasing. Inequality is increasing. The PA passes laws not to help the majority of people but to benefit the upper class. The comprador class is a new class, and it creates capitalist monopolies for all sorts of services and industries, like telecommunications. So we fight for the opposite. For example, we advocate for a resistant development, with cooperatives and policies that benefit youth, among others. But it’s all connected. We have a national struggle, a democratic struggle, and a social struggle, and they are all related.

James Hutt

One thing that stands out to me about these new armed resistance groups like the Lion’s Den is that they do not come from within one party. They seem to have members from all of the different parties and from people unaligned with any of them. Is that the sort of unity you’re talking about? And with the rise of groups like the Lion’s Den, do traditional political parties become less relevant?

Khalida Jarrar

The situation in Palestine is that all Palestinian people belong to parties. Not necessarily as members, but all of Palestinian society is politicized, and people are connected to parties in various ways. So underground, there is now a new phenomenon like the Lion’s Den (غرِن الأسود) and others in which people are working together. This gives you an answer. Why are people on the ground unified in struggling against occupation, but the leadership isn’t? Because of its own interests. So one of the problems is leadership. Maybe this is a new way to rebuild the liberation movement from the ground up, to use it to either pressure leadership to be unified or to reform the whole approach of the movement. I believe that the new or maybe the only approach is pressure from the bottom, up. From people working together, succeeding, and maybe this will pressure the leaders to be united, at least.

It’s not just about armed resistance either. There are many types of resistance in which people are unifying on the ground. Another example from a few years ago was when Israel installed metal detectors to restrict access to Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. People organized themselves and worked together. They developed a shared program, and they demonstrated daily and held sit-ins in front of them. Eventually they succeeded and the occupation removed them.

James Hutt

How important is armed resistance as a strategy for liberation?

Khalida Jarrar

Do you want to send me to prison? [laughter] But in general, any people under occupation have the right to struggle and resist in all ways. They have that right under international and humanitarian laws.

James Hutt

Where do you think it will go?

Khalida Jarrar

It’s impossible to say. We can’t predict the future, but what we can do is take this phenomenon and ask how and why it’s established. We notice that it affects different areas and is driven by young people. We notice that it expands, maybe in other names, across the West Bank, and maybe with people who are not directly related to political parties but who are resisting the occupation. We cannot see where it will lead. But like I said, the spirit of refusal is in people now. People are trying to find their own way, refusing to live under this occupation.

James Hutt

Something I don’t think many people in the Global North are aware of is the sheer extent of Israel’s surveillance on Palestinians. There are facial recognition cameras at checkpoints between cities in the West Bank, there are drones patrolling the skies above them, and we’ve learned that Israel can now monitor every single phone call. What is it like organizing when Israel could be watching and listening to almost anything you do?

Khalida Jarrar

That’s a difficult question, both for me to say and for you to publish [laughs]. People here have a secret mechanism they use. I can’t publish that though. But people try not to be watched, for example. It’s more difficult than before. You can’t do things publicly. You can’t use technology. But there are many ways to resist. People are always developing their own ways to organize. If there are violations and punishments from the occupation, that teaches us too. We learn from them and how they operate. We learn from being caught and punished.

James Hutt

How important is prisoner organizing and solidarity efforts in this moment? For the larger movement overall?

Khalida Jarrar

Remember that we are a people living under occupation. Over one million Palestinians have been arrested by Israel since 1967 until now. It’s very rare to find a home here without either prisoners or ex-prisoners in the family. The plight of prisoners is still dear to the people. It’s highly respected. Anything that happens inside prison affects the outside too. Ben-Gvir, for example, has threatened new punishments against prisoners. So prisoners have organized an emergency committee of all parties and made a shared program for struggle. That affects the rest of the people and the shape of the liberation movement.

It’s very rare to find a home here without either prisoners or ex-prisoners in the family.

There is now a question if Ben-Gvir can actually implement his threats. If there is a collective struggle against it, and there will be, it will be difficult for all of the new laws to be implemented. You’re talking about six thousand Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli jails, and they are organized. When Israeli guards invaded Damon Prison recently and punished the female prisoners there, all prisoners resisted and took action together. They succeed in forcing the guards to back down.

Prisons will be a focus of the coming struggle, and we will see what will happen. It will affect outside also. It might lead to a type of new struggle, one that emerges from inside prison, from the prisoners to outside. They are connected.

James Hutt

You have been imprisoned a number of times by Israel now and have faced severe repression. How have those experiences affected you, your political activities, and your outlook?

Khalida Jarrar

Look, prison will not break people. We are living under occupation. We are convinced that we have a right to represent our people and to be free. Of course, it’s hard because Israel sends people to prison just for talking about its crimes. But it’s very difficult to make people stop. We are guided by the experience of occupied peoples all over the world. No people who have been occupied will continue to be occupied forever.

This interview is part of a series of interviews with Palestinian left leaders in the West Bank.

An estimated 600,000 people rallied Thursday night outside the Knesset and beyond in favor of judicial reform. Israel National News interviewed some of the demonstrators, asking what motivated them to attend.

The post “WHY ARE YOU HERE?’ Pro-reform demonstators have their say appeared first on World Israel News.

Iran’s foreign minister visited Lebanon over the weekend, where he met with the head of the Hezbollah terror organization and surveyed the southern border with Israel.

The post WATCH: Iranian Foreign Minister scopes out Israel border during visit to Lebanon appeared first on World Israel News.

Former workers at major tech firms are coming forward to say they were paid six figures to do nothing, a strategy to hoard them from rival companies. It’s just one of many ways capitalists manipulate labor markets. The others aren’t so nice.

Desks at a new Meta office space in the Farley Building in New York, US, on September 29, 2021. (Amir Hamja / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On March 14, Meta announced it was cutting some ten thousand jobs from its workforce. In February, former pandemic darling Zoom made about 1,300 cuts to its employee pool. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, laid off around twelve thousand workers in January. And of course, Elon Musk’s personal decimation of Twitter’s workforce since he took control of the company has been providing content fodder since last year. In general, 2023 has been a bloodbath for workers in tech.

On the surface, this may seem like a straightforward story of once-bullish companies having to make difficult choices in the face of harsh economic realities. But there’s more than meets the eye. Recently some of these newly laid-off employees have come forward to disclose that they had been paid to perform little to no actual work. Instead, they were called to one meeting after another to be kept busy without any tasks assigned to them. Many of them took home six-figure salaries for doing essentially nothing.

Companies strategically made these superfluous hires in order to have a trust fund of talent available in anticipation of future expansion, and also to prevent rival companies from meeting their staffing needs. It’s a blatant case of labor-market manipulation, which in most cases is not favorable to workers.

Big Tech is no stranger to the practice. In 2014, Apple, Adobe, Google, and Intel settled a federal antitrust lawsuit for $415 million after a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation found that the four companies — along with others like Pixar and Intuit — had formed agreements to not hire each other’s employees.

But the tech industry isn’t alone. In 2021 the DOJ indicted the national dialysis provider DaVita on charges that it conspired with competitors to not recruit each other’s employees. DaVita was acquitted in 2022 after successfully arguing that it’s agreements didn’t prevent competitors from hiring their talent if certain conditions were met and presenting evidence from an economist showing career growth and wages were not stunted, even though testimony from a former employee suggested otherwise. Within firms using a franchise model, non-poaching agreements that outright ban hiring between franchises are still technically legal, hence the outcome in the DaVita case.

This type of labor-market manipulation hits low-wage service-sector workers the hardest. Big Tech’s superfluous hires actually tightened the labor market and increased wages in the tech sector, an unusual instance of industry largesse made possible by abnormally low interest rates. It almost never happens that way, and workers on the lower rungs aren’t so lucky. Non-poaching and non-solicitation agreements between companies create a monopsony in the labor market, driving down wages. Employees are not usually made aware that they exist, and have no opportunity to consent. They also have little legal recourse, as demonstrated by a series of failed lawsuits brought by employees of companies like McDonald’s, Little Caesars, and Domino’s.

An even more depressing truth is that major companies don’t necessarily need to form these types of alliances with each other in order to control the labor market to their own ends. The era of mergers and acquisitions has shrunk the number of employers looking for workers. A 2017 paper looking into monopsony concluded that most labor markets in the United States are highly concentrated, and that this is contributing to the trends of wage stagnation, a decline in workers’ ability to move between jobs and locations, a decline in entrepreneurship, and the erosion of the “job ladder,” since workers have fewer opportunities to seek promotions outside of their current company.

Of course, the most widespread form of labor market manipulation is the preservation of a large reserve army of unemployed workers. In Capital, Karl Marx demonstrates how a reserve of unemployed workers allows capital to keep wages in check, serving the accumulation of profits. The Federal Reserve is open about this strategy, raising interest rates to tame inflation with the explicit goal of driving up unemployment and lowering the cost of labor. The problem for workers is that this tactic lowers wage growth far more than it does inflation. Plus, economic downturns and recessions may inspire larger, more financially stable firms to acquire small firms that are more adversely affected by higher interest rates and lower demand, thus further increasing market concentration among employers. (Ironically, this labor-market manipulation tactic led to the recent Big Tech layoffs, ending the other manipulation tactic of superfluous employment as tech companies’ stream of cheap credit dried up.)

We are frequently assured that supply and demand drive the market’s ability to fairly set wages and prices at an equilibrium. This assumes perfect competition between firms, and that workers have all the information about wages and opportunities within a sector. In the real world, firms have little interest in an unfettered market for labor. They demonstrate as much when they use anticompetitive agreements, concentrate markets through mergers and acquisitions, and promote an anti-worker economic orthodoxy to protect profits.

Capitalists have many strategies for making sure that workers are always where they want them — whether twiddling their thumbs in tech offices, barred from seeking career advancement with a competitor, or lined up at the soup kitchen. When they say they that capitalism runs on a free and voluntary exchange of labor for wages, don’t believe them.

Forgotten for decades, Marxist novelist William Attaway’s 1941 Blood on the Forge is a brilliantly brutal depiction of the connection between racism and capitalism. Haunting and sublime, it will leave you feeling the scars of working-class life.

US Steel Duquesne works, blast furnace plant, along the Monongahela River, Duquesne, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. (Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

History’s shadow can be longer than one might think. Eight decades ago, a thirty-year-old African-American Communist writer published a bold and alarming dramatization of the social costs of capitalism and racism at the time of the Great Steel Strike in 1919. Failing to recognize common class interests, African-American and Euro-American workers were at each other’s throats.

Today, in a polarized era of anti–Black Lives Matter backlash and a union movement struggling to be reborn, it’s hard to think of another work of imaginative literature that reminds us so vividly of the deep relationship between racism and class oppression. Written in an audacious and colorful style, at times more expressionistic than realistic, William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge is a masterclass in how novels can be an alternative archive, a conduit for the preservation, transmission, and elucidation of the experience of oppressed people. In five scintillating parts, the novel follows the lives of three African-American sharecroppers, the Moss brothers, who are uprooted from rural Kentucky and hurled into the industrial inferno of Western Pennsylvania.

As with all literature, the landscape of Blood on the Forge expresses an interplay between the author’s biography and imagination. The characters and events grew partly out of field research and interviews, but also from the novelist’s personal circumstances, radical commitments, and literary sensibility. Some passages may even provide glimpses of a shadow self.

An Elusive Subject

An aura of mystery clings to the life of William Alexander Attaway (1911–86). He now seems like a promising star quarterback of the literary left’s Great Depression generation who was puzzlingly cut from the team. A plethora of personal details about Attaway have been unearthed by several scholars, especially Richard Yarborough. Yet there are ample inconsistencies, contradictions, and elisions, so much so that the architecture of his experiences and personality persists as an elusive subject.

William Attaway (Wikimedia Commons)

We know for certain that Attaway was the son of a successful doctor who moved from Mississippi to Chicago when he was age five (some sources say six). From childhood, he was much under the influence of one of his older sisters, Ruth, to whom he would dedicate Blood on the Forge. Ruth was later a well-known stage and screen actress; his other sister, Florence, became a Chicago public school teacher and administrator. All three Attaway siblings attended the University of Illinois at Urbana, but Bill — as he was universally known to friends — dropped out following his father’s death in 1931. He rode the rails, traveling throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

In 1934, Attaway completed his first novel, Children of Night, which he failed to publish, before returning to the university and graduating in 1936. After some brief contact with Richard Wright’s pro-Communist South Side Writers Group in Chicago, Attaway moved to New York, where he befriended the young painter Beauford Delaney and published short pieces in the Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, and left-wing Challenge. Unable to earn a living with his writing, Bill joined Ruth in the traveling theater company of the comedic play You Can’t Take It With You.

While he toured for two years, Attaway completed his first published novel, an on-the-road narrative about white itinerant workers. Titled Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), it was positively reviewed in the popular newspapers and the Communist Party press (the Daily Worker featured an interview; the New Masses ran a book appraisal, as well as a later commentary by Ralph Ellison). But the book didn’t sell well.

An aura of mystery clings to the life of William Alexander Attaway.

Undeterred, Attaway secured a fellowship to research the steel industry for his next book. Blood on the Forge appeared two years later to even more favorable reviews in mainstream publications, but the same poor sales. Even worse, Communist publications explicitly condemned the alleged politics of the new novel’s conclusion.

His literary career now in limbo, Attaway joined the military after the United States entered World War II, serving in North Africa. He then returned to New York to launch a career in commercial mass media and popular culture. Although he was prolific and indeed pioneering in this milieu, he never received much public attention. He would gain his most visible notoriety for collaborating with singer Harry Belafonte and authoring two books about music, Calypso Song Book (1957) and Hear America Singing (1967).

Front cover of Blood on the Forge. (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1962, Attaway married the artist Frances Settele, after which the interracial couple moved to Barbados for a decade and raised two children. He died of either cancer or heart failure (both were reported) in Los Angeles at age seventy-four.

Who Was William Attaway?

Diverse sources refer to a mosaic of occupational claims made by the six-foot-tall, one-hundred-and-eighty-five-pound, handsome, boyish-looking Attaway. He was alleged at various times to have been an aspiring auto mechanic, college tennis champion, student of medicine and law, seaman, dockworker, stevedore, salesman, union organizer, Federal Writers Project (FWP) member, actor, playwright, hobo, cabin boy, migrant farm worker, mint cutter in the fields, dress-shop clerk, laborer, captain of black troops in North Africa, participant in clandestine military operations, wounded recipient of a wartime medal, part owner of a Greenwich Village restaurant, songwriter and arranger, the first African-American author of television scripts, composer of radio dialogues, screenwriter, and more. Unfortunately, there is little documentation for much of this blizzard of largely anecdotal information; the main exceptions are TV screenplays and songs clearly attributed to him, where he often used the name “William A. Attaway,” and his co-ownership of a Greenwich Village restaurant for eight months with Belafonte (“The Sage”).

Such vagueness about time and place hardly amounts to a recipe for coherence, leaving his identity somewhat up for grabs. Where and when, for example, did Attaway develop his extraordinary musical skills? Sometimes, in the absence of precise information, there is a tendency to create an imaginary portrait of the artist. It’s doubtful, for instance, that Attaway spent much time as a “union organizer,” as many sources report without naming a union, and his alleged work for the FWP — especially the frequent contention that Attaway coauthored the 1939 Guide to Illinois — is without evidence. (Perhaps there is more puffery than outright fabrication in the latter claim, as he likely did hang out with FWP authors in Chicago and New York.)

About some matters Attaway stayed deeply private. This includes any explanation of why he joined and then left the Communist movement, very much unlike the detailed remembrances of Richard Wright. He was also vague in mentioning his very middle-class activities at the University of Illinois, where he joined the elite Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, and where a play credited to him but lost (Carnival) was performed by the Cenacle, a literature and drama society partly aimed at “promoting Negro Arts and Letters” to white audiences. Nor did he ever refer to his marriage-like relationship in the late 1940s and early 1950s with German-born Communist dancer and choreographer Miriam Pandor. Pandor, who had a studio that doubled as the couple’s apartment, was associated with George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Jose Limón, Sophie Maslow, and Alvin Ailey. She was active in the Progressive Party’s 1948 presidential campaign for Henry Wallace, using her work to address racism, antisemitism, and social injustice, eventually teaching in Cuba and writing for the People’s Daily World.

Documentation, mostly found in oral history, does locate Attaway in postwar Communist cultural circles. The recollections of former black Communists Harold Cruse, Howard “Stretch” Johnson, and John Oliver Killens, along with fellow traveler Belafonte, variously depict Attaway as a party member at times, possibly allied with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) leadership against Wright’s 1944 public criticism of the party and then dissidents in the Harlem Writers Club (in whose Harlem Quarterly he published in 1950); assisting secondary leaders who had gone underground; and active in the Literature Chapter of the Communist-led Committee for the Negro in the Arts. By the early 1950s, however, Attaway seems to have drifted out of the Marxist political picture (the same period when he ended his intimate relationship with Pandor, who eventually relocated to East Germany). His only other known radical political act was participating in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery.

All of this suggests a man of precocious brilliance who was hard to pin down.

All of this suggests a man of precocious brilliance who was hard to pin down; his college writing teacher called him “a negro Hamlet,” and there are hints in his fiction of a dark sexual past. Perhaps Attaway, known as an entertaining raconteur of his hoboing experiences, dispensed over the years a résumé, both overstuffed and selective, that proved helpful in surviving the McCarthy era — a time when he and many others had to move cautiously through multiple revisions of who they had been and what they were becoming. In 1955, for instance, Attaway probably had to keep his mouth shut about politics when he directed Winner by Decision for TV’s General Electric Theater; the program was hosted by Ronald Reagan, an anti-communist FBI informant, and based on a short story by Budd Schulberg, a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Class War With No Discernible End

Blood on the Forge kicks off with a big bang of melodramatic events. It is two weeks after the brutal death and mutilation of the Moss brothers’ mother, who collapsed while plowing the fields of Kentucky’s red clay hills and was dragged until unrecognizable by a mule. The oldest sibling, Big Mat, destroyed the animal in a furious outburst: “He came back hog wild and he took a piece of flint rock and tore the life out of that mule, so that even the hide wasn’t fit to sell.” Now the Moss family faces serious threats to their financial survival from the white Mr Johnston, owner of both the mule and the land.

Blood on the Forge kicks off with a big bang of melodramatic events.

Tensions mount in a dispute between Mat and Johnston’s riding boss over a replacement mule, and Mat explodes upon hearing a racist epithet aimed at his mother: “The riding boss fell to the ground, blood streaming from his smashed face. He struggled to get to his feet. A heavy foot caught him in the side of his neck.” Realizing that “the riding boss would live to lead the lynch mob against him,” Mat knows that he must flee. Within a few hours the Moss brothers take advantage of an offer from a white labor recruiter. Leaving Mat’s pregnant wife behind, the three board a train headed north, finding themselves “squatted on the straw-spread floor of a boxcar, bunched up like hogs headed for the market, riding in the dark for what might have been years.” From the outset we’re propelled forward, freighted with a sense of foreboding that we’re headed toward apocalypse.

Disembarking from the boxcar in a Western Pennsylvania steel-mill town on the Monongahela River, the Moss brothers are gradually introduced to a class war with no discernible end. The mill town, possibly modeled on Duquesne, offers a culture utterly foreign to these three industrial conscripts, although the racist past of Kentucky has been indelibly burned in their collective consciousness. Among their first encounters is with a young black sex worker who has a rotting, cancerous left breast. They then meet a half-mad, disabled black worker named Smothers, who hears voices from the mills that threaten retributive violence for despoiling nature: “It’s wrong to tear up the ground and melt it in the furnace. . . . It’s the hell-and-devil kind of work.” These potent images linger and flavor the ensuing events as the three brothers learn steel production by day and indulge in the sex, drink, and dogfights of “Mex Town” by night.

The Moss brothers are gradually introduced to a class war with no discernible end.

Attaway doesn’t paint a monolithic African-American mass. Distinctions in personal temperament and experience are foregrounded through the novel’s indirect narrative style, which toggles between the three Moss brothers and a panoply of settings. As Attaway explained in a “Plan of Work” submitted for his fellowship, “the strong point of the historical novel” is that “not alone does it give us the facts out of a dim past, it also permits us to experience those facts through identification with the human beings depicted.”

Mat mostly radiates a bearish gloom but can suddenly morph into a coiled cobra, ready to strike; Chinatown, with his gleaming gold tooth, brings laughter and sociability despite merciless surroundings; and Melody, the moody artist figure, creatively uses his guitar to “slick away” what ails him. What we get is an unsentimental portrait of individuals caught up in a vicious, unsparing class war, where men and women struggle to find some measure of self-determination, endure a corrosion of scruples, and mostly do whatever the situation demands to survive. Middle-class moral judgments are thrown into question as almost any action brings the risk of danger.

Mat’s decision at the end of the book to become deputized to crush a strike of mostly white workers has been taken by some as a critique of the “black nationalist” response to the labor crisis. Yet there is little in Mat’s behavior that suggests a coherent ethnic politics. More likely, he is driven by a wounded masculinity (after learning that Anna, the fourteen-year-old former sex worker with whom he is obsessed, has returned to her trade to earn money to abandon him) and a ferocious urge to turn the tables (“He, Mat, was the riding boss, and hate would give this club hand the strength it needed”). Melody is initially attracted to the strikers’ cause but is dissuaded by black politicians who insist that his own job wouldn’t exist if the union had its way; when he learns that these politicians were paid to promote the bosses’ views, he is further disillusioned from taking sides. Chinatown, who by this time has lost his eyesight in a horrific explosion that killed fourteen men, is oblivious to the dilemma.

Blood on the Forge reissue cover. (NYRB)

For readers with narrow notions of the “proletarian novel” or “social realism,” Blood on the Forge provides a crash course in showing that what has also been called “the radical novel” is perpetually challenged and shaped by its own practitioners. It is elastic and regenerative, melding together many types of writing, and in this case widening one’s emotional repertoire. Perhaps due to the blinkered pigeonholing of the conservative postwar environment, Attaway’s books were mostly ignored by critics and scholars for nearly two decades after publication, existing in a literary netherworld through pulp paperback reissues. When the political climate changed from the late twentieth century to the present, Blood on the Forge was rereleased and elevated to the object of scholarly inquiry. This has dramatically expanded appreciation of the novel beyond Attaway’s original aim, which was to rebut the popular criticisms of African American scabbing in the labor movement by revealing the fuller context.

Scholars have spotlighted Attaway’s attention to environmental matters and compared his fiction and that of Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, and Wright. Others have quibbled with the novel’s perceived stereotyping of Latinas and disturbing treatments of rape. Nevertheless, while the themes of male sexual predators, gendered power dynamics, and sexual abuse are very strong, and female characters are less developed, Attaway’s is not exactly a sexism typical of the period in which he lived. Melody, something of a stand-in for the author, is mostly devoid of male aggression. The one exception is his fixation on Anna that starts with a fear of commitment and ends with a desire to dominate and control. Throughout the novel, starting with references to Mat’s beating of his wife in Kentucky, those oppressed by racism are shown to be further weakened by misogynous illusions about gender.

What we get is an unsentimental portrait of individuals struggling to find some measure of self-determination, enduring a corrosion of scruples, and mostly doing whatever the situation demands to survive.

A Telos of History?

For those with a special interest in Communist Party aesthetics, the “Attaway Affair” deserves a separate essay of its own. The gist, however, is that the response of party-associated critics in the Daily Worker, New Masses, and even six years later by African-American playwright Theodore Ward in the postwar Mainstream, enthusiastically lauded the book’s style and young Attaway’s promise, but mercilessly attacked what they took to be Attaway’s conclusion. The first two publications were coupled with a public symposium at the Schomburg library in Harlem, where Ellison and New Masses editor Samuel Sillen confronted Attaway, and then a private debate between Ellison and Attaway at the apartment of New Yorker cartoonist William Steig.

Ralph Ellison in 1961. (United States Information Agency / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Attaway’s Communist critics argued that the novel was politically misleading to the point of uselessness (or worse) because it ended at a cataclysmic impasse, denying the reader the model of a class-conscious black proletariat, whose numbers had swelled in the 1930s and were certain to expand even more in the future. Ralph Warner, a pseudonym for a prolific drama critic, felt there should have been a “Mr. Max,” the pro-Communist lawyer in Native Son (1940), to “evaluate the social significance.” Ellison wanted a character who would embody the “fusion” of agricultural and industrial experiences and therefore a higher consciousness. Ward called the book “defeatist” and linked it to a similar take on Ann Petry’s The Street (1946).

In truth, Blood on the Forge was a work refreshingly free from the assumption that a Communist novelist must write as if holding the master key to political salvation. In fact, despite the bellyaching, there is evidence of a developing class consciousness in Attaway’s novel. There is the suggestion of interracial working-class unity when Mat feels a new pride as white workers dub him “Black Irish” to show their admiration for his strength and skill. Later, when Mat dies at the hands of a Slavic union member defending himself, he displays a glimmer of awareness that he had chosen the wrong side.

Attaway’s Communist critics argued that the novel was politically misleading to the point of uselessness (or worse).

Then again, Blood on the Forge may have been only the first stage of an uncompleted series intended to show further growth; Attaway’s 1939 “Plan of Work” explains that he had thought of “doing a sequel to this work sometime in the future.” So, even though Attaway did not wish to use literary characters to didactically illustrate a reassuring progressive master narrative, he may well have been revealing various paths wrongly taken in an attempt to provoke readers to consider alternative possibilities.

There is another explanation for CPUSA critics’ almost-choreographed response to the book’s terminus: Attaway’s incontestable antiwar conclusion, in which the blind Chinatown is paired with a blind black World War I veteran. The work was conceived during the 1939–41 Hitler-Stalin Pact, when the CPUSA admirably targeted US racism as the homegrown fascist enemy, and blacks were discouraged from supporting military intervention to save Western imperialism. However, just months before the book’s publication, the USSR was invaded by Germany and Moscow reversed its position. Under the new Communist line, the CPUSA called upon African Americans to full-throatedly promote a war effort; even black activists’ “Double V” campaign (the vow to continue the fight against discrimination along with the war against the Axis) was condemned as undercutting the necessary unity.

Attaway’s books were mostly ignored by critics and scholars for nearly two decades after publication, existing in a literary netherworld through pulp paperback reissues.

At best, committed CPUSA anti-racists fell into a strange epistemological limbo in deciding how to respond to the continuing threat of bigotry. What followed was often dismaying: the CPUSA supported the internment of Japanese Americans and besmirched the 1943 Harlem Rebellion as Hitler-inspired — pronouncements that triggered the exodus of Wright, Ellison, Chester Himes, and others. Nonetheless, one Marxist reviewer got Blood on the Forge right. George Breitman (writing as Albert Parker), a Trotskyist who later authored The Last Year of Malcolm X (1967), wrote in the May 16, 1942 Militant that Attaway compellingly linked the brutality of Southern racism and the refusal of the labor movement to take specific anti-racist action. These, he argued, were the decisive factors in the tragedy of 1919, and the novel was effective in “leaving the reader to draw the conclusion” about what this meant for action in the present.

Complexity and Precarity

Sadly, Attaway became like a runner who leads the pack and then vanishes. If his novels were read in the still-ample CPUSA milieu, not one piece of evidence surfaced in its press that anyone ever defended it or even mentioned it again. How could they after the 1947 death blow by Ward in Mainstream describing Blood on the Forge as “part of the contemporary literature of defeat”? In Attaway’s unglamorous depiction of labor, with the white unionists mostly oblivious to “the race issue” and unidealized African-American male workers abusing women, was the author provocatively aiming to shift the Overton window of politically acceptable discourse on the Left? Was he perhaps knowingly seeking an aesthetic that was a rebuke to the putative formalities of Communist cultural criticism of the time? Whatever the reason, Attaway was treading dangerously in his uncompromising attempt to illustrate the political straits of the Southern black worker who was brought North but was still enmeshed in both the older legacy and the newer forms of race hatred.

Attaway’s novel aimed to awaken consciousness by shocking rather than instructing.

In 2023, Blood on the Forge still reads as a strong reminder that organizing for black equality remains a crucial part of the class struggle, a driving force of any movement for political democracy and a socialist economy. One cannot ignore race-specific demands and the need for unions and other left institutions to lead the fight against all forms of discrimination. Attaway’s novel, which aimed to awaken consciousness by shocking rather than instructing, has the virtue of making us face the facts of history and aspects of a past that has not fully passed.

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Drill ‘will be vital to them should they ever face such a scenario in the field,’ says United Hatzalah president.

By TPS

A terrorist has opened fire on a bus full of civilians, hitting the driver. The bus crashes into other vehicles, leaving 50 people wounded, some critically.

In just minutes, with lights and sirens blaring, women from different backgrounds from all over Israel converge on the scene, wearing protective vests and helmets, in specially equipped motorcycles, ambulances and private vehicles.

The first to arrive on the scene, they cut through the fire and smoke and quickly assess the wounded. They categorize and stabilize them and arrange for transport to hospitals.

While the prospect of such an attack is very real, this scenario was a simulated, “mass casualty incident” drill, which United Hatzalah of Israel held in Janana Park in Jerusalem, on April 28, just days after Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s 75th birthday.

“We are the only Hatzalah in the world that incorporates women into the EMT team,” said Raphael Poch, United Hatzalah international spokesman and digital media manager and himself an emergency medical technician.

Hatzalah began including women in its program in 2006. Some 1,300 of its current 6,500 volunteers are women—some 20%.

Hatzalah prides itself on being the largest independent, nonprofit, fully-volunteer organization of its kind, which it says provides the fastest, free emergency first-response medical care throughout the country. It does not receive government funding.

Holzer and two of her daughters participated in the drill. One is an EMT on a Magen David Adom ambulance and a Hatzalah volunteer, and the other played a “victim,” complete with make-up to simulate real injuries. “It’s her third time, and she loves it,” said Holzer.

Two years ago, Holzer helped secure 100 “victims,” but this time, since it was for just women and girls, she only needed to help recruit 40. Children from Bet Shemesh schools love to participate, according to Poch.

With a recent rise in terror attacks, Hatzalah has been on a mission to train all its volunteers to respond to mass-casualty events, Eli Beer, the nonprofit’s founder and president, stated in a release.

“We’re proud to say that Friday’s drill was a success, and all of the female volunteers who participated were able to gain hands-on knowledge of how to respond quickly and effectively to the scenario we presented,” he added. The group worked together successfully as a team, and the experience “will be vital to them should they ever face such a scenario in the field.” Beer stated.

The drill also included one of Hatzalah’s helicopters. A pilot flew one of the critically “injured” participants to Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, where hospital staff practiced receiving a “patient” from a medevac copter.

In the simulation, victims without pulses or who weren’t breathing wore black tags. Volunteers grouped those very critically “injured” together, and instead of performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, they put CPR masks on participants to indicate how they would treat the latter.

Dr. Joel and Adele Sandberg, parents of former Facebook and Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg, who helped launch Hatzalah’s women’s initiative, attended the drill. Also present were many of those who donated 75 ambucycles and 75 e-bikes to Hatzalah marking Israel’s 75th anniversary.

“Our donors are partners in lifesaving in every sense of the word,” said Dov Maisel, Hatzalah vice president of operations.

In the next five years, Hatzalah hopes to double its number of female volunteers.

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