UAW Arab Caucus: UAW must move from ceasefire declaration to stopping weapons for Israel

UAW Arab Caucus to union president Shawn Fain: The union must take action to translate the UAW’s ceasefire declaration to practical interruption of the weapons our UAW siblings are making, sending to Israel, and are being used to kill our families.

Dear Shawn,

We write to you as an Arab caucus in the UAW on day 129 of the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide of Gaza’s Palestinians to ask you meet with us this week.

Yesterday, Americans watched the Superbowl, including vicious Israeli propaganda ads that lawyers have said violate FDC regulations. Thinking that people who have been steadfastly resisting our complicity as taxpayers in this genocide would be distracted by the Superbowl (as they did during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas), Israel aerial bombed Palestinian homes, mosques, and hospitals in the “Safe Zone” region of Rafah– the last place that Palestinian civilians can go. As you know, the weapons Israel is using are paid for by U.S. taxpayer money – 14.5 billion dollars was sent since October 2023 in addition to the 3.8 billion dollars the U.S. sends every year. On this same Super Bowl Sunday massacre, the U.S. Senate met in a secret session and advanced another 14.1 billion dollar package to Israel. On top of it all, many of the weapons being supplied are made in UAW unionized shops. It is abundantly clear how central our role as U.S. residents, laborers, and American voters is to Israel’s U.S.-supported ethnic cleansing campaign – and it’s never been more clear to us the role that the UAW can play in putting an end to it.

As Arab members of the UAW, we have been asking for a meeting with you since late October. In addition to emailing you ourselves, our fellow UAW members sent hundreds of emails on our behalf, and people who see you regularly have asked directly for this meeting. We’ve been given a wide range of excuses as to why this meeting hasn’t yet happened. All the while we are grieving the loss of dozens of family members, livelihoods, witnessing direct violence and incitement to violence against Arabs in the US – including those of us who are members of Local 600 in Dearborn which a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed just called the “jihad capital of America”. We are terrified that this war is intended to expand to the entire Middle East region, and harm more and more of us here in the U.S. (Americans have already been killed in Gaza and the West Bank, and Palestinians targeted in the U.S.).