A recurring theme on this site has been that the Israeli state is a colonial apartheid society. This remarkable statement from the country’s main trade union federation Histradrut is pretty good evidence.

It has a long preamble in which it sets outs its good works towards Palestinian trade unionists. Among these are “a telephone “Hotline” project to facilitate communication between Israeli checkpoint guards, Palestinian truck drivers, and the PGFTU”. That must help the long hours in the sun whizz by. Like good internationalists they offer Palestinian workers “brochures printed in Arabic to outline their rights”.

Histradrut are “very much aware of the ongoing suffering of the inhabitants of Gaza” and they know who is responsible for it, though it’s not the same answer that most of the rest of us would come up with. The people who live there are “held hostage by the terror regime of Hamas” and while they do mention Hamas’ missiles there is no reference to the carnage their own government inflicted or the impact of the siege.

This may seem dogmatic but you can’t help feeling that any union federation not totally loyal to its own very nasty ruling class would be calling for an end to the siege of Gaza. Histradrut’s approach owes more to eighteenth century campaigners who wanted better treatment for slaves. It “supports the humanitarian assistance for the residents of Gaza, coordinates the access for different Confederations and unions to Gaza and ensures the success of their activity through coordination with the Israeli security forces.” Mark Regev must love them.

Their approach “proves that it is possible to offer humanitarian assistance to the residents of Gaza via peaceful means whose positive results yield assistance and aid that are meaningful.” In fact it is so great that they want everyone else to adopt it. They conclude that the real anti-humanitarians are the people who sacrificed their lives to break the siege – “The conduct of the flotilla’s organizers and their methods of action utterly contradict the cooperation and the responsibility to achieve the goal we all aspire to attain — effective humanitarian assistance for the residents of Gaza.”

Echoing Regev’s mantra Histradrut asserts, slightly ungrammatically “the conduct of the flotilla organizers, through the rejection of the Israeli proposal, was to attain provocation to strengthen Hamas, agitate the real peace efforts in the region.”

This apartheid outfit needs to be thrown out of every international body on which it sits and we should demand that every national union federation breaks links with it.