“They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there,” sang Florence Reece in 1931, reminding miners that one cannot escape the moral test of solidarity.
Labor historian Jeff Schuhrke borrows this refrain for the title of his new book, No Neutrals There, highlighting that questions of justice are choices with real consequences.
The book examines labor, Palestine, and the long century of their entanglement, with a larger theme of conscience. It asks what it means for workers’ movements to betray or honour their principles when confronted by colonialism and empire.
The book opens in October 2023, as Israel’s onslaught against Gaza entered its first weeks. Palestinian unions issued an international call to refuse to build or ship weapons destined for Israel, and to prevent the machinery of blockade and slaughter from reaching its mark.
Unions across Europe and Latin America responded with pledges of solidarity, declaring that labor would not be weaponised for massacre.
In the United States, the response was either halting, censored, or nullified by the AFL-CIO leadership.
Local councils that passed ceasefire resolutions were swiftly overruled, and statements were removed from websites. Even as bodies piled up in Gaza’s streets, the largest labor federation in the country clung to equivocation and silence.
For Schuhrke, this was the latest chapter in a long story. US labor, he argues, has never been neutral on Palestine. It has been one of Israel’s most faithful allies, contributing money, legitimacy, and political pressure to build and sustain the Zionist project.
The book traces this history with painstaking research, showing how labor leaders aligned with Washington’s imperial policy abroad while policing dissent at home.
If today’s unions falter in meeting the Palestinian call, it is because they are heirs to a century of entanglement.
An archive of complicity
Schuhrke is a labor historian, and his method is archival. He follows the thread from early twentieth-century Jewish trade unionists in the United States to the postwar AFL-CIO leadership, which embraced Labor Zionism as both a philanthropic cause and a Cold War instrument.
Donations from union treasuries built settlements and factories in Israel, while lobbying efforts pressured Congress to keep aid flowing. The AFL-CIO was not merely sympathetic; it was instrumental.
Part of the book’s impact lies in revealing continuities between American myths and Zionist ones. US labor’s formative vision was steeped in settler colonial romance: the frontier farmer as pioneer, ploughing “virgin soil” wrested from Indigenous nations.
Labor Zionism, with slogans of “making the desert bloom,” echoed that myth. It promised dignity to Jewish workers but at the expense of Palestinian peasants.
What made this persuasive to American union leaders, beyond sympathy with Jewish suffering after the Holocaust, was an ideological kinship with their own history of dispossession.
The book also reminds us that Labor’s complicity was not inevitable. From its earliest days, countercurrents existed. Bundists who fled czarist Russia brought with them a tradition of socialism without nationalism, doykayt ('hereness'), insisting that justice must be sought where one lived, not by colonising another people’s land.
Arab American workers, Black radicals, anti-Zionist Jews, and internationalist unionists raised their voices over decades, often at great cost. These dissenting traditions are honoured in the book as models for contemporary organisers.
A chorus of witness
Reading No Neutrals There alongside other recent works on Palestine is instructive. Hamid Dabashi, in his blistering polemics, lays bare Zionism as an imperial ideology and calls for moral clarity.
Mohammed El-Kurd embodies the Palestinian people’s dispossession, his words sounding as urgent as sirens. Peter Beinart, once a loyal Zionist, records the tremors of conscience from within the American Jewish establishment.
Omar El Akkad, in his latest book, offers a novelist’s ledger of lament and confession, measuring the distance between ideals and sanctioned violence.
Schuhrke’s voice is different: less poetic, less penitent, and more that of an archivist of complicity. His focus is institutional — the AFL-CIO, the ILGWU, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and the vast treasuries and resolutions that supported colonisation.
If Dabashi thunders, El-Kurd testifies, and Beinart wrestles, then Schuhrke documents.
Yet, the effect is no less damning. By assembling a record of misdirected solidarity — solidarity with the coloniser rather than the colonised — he shows how betrayal can be organisational, structured, and bureaucratised.
Still, the book is more than a catalogue of failures. Examples of principled resistance are woven throughout: graduate students striking for Palestine, port workers refusing to load ships, and union locals defying their federations.
These stories, modest compared to the scale of labor’s official betrayal, matter for their courage and serve as reminders that solidarity carries risk.
The present hour
One virtue of the book is its refusal to separate past from present. The history of US labor’s alliance with Zionism helps explain why, in 2023 and 2024, as genocide unfolded in Gaza, American unions hesitated.
It clarifies why calls for a ceasefire were muted, resolutions buried, and the rhetoric of neutrality was deployed to disguise complicity.
Yet, the book also points to possibilities. Labor in the United States is weaker than it was at mid-century, but 14 million workers remain unionised, many in key industries. If organised labor withheld cooperation from the war machine, the impact would be significant.
The question is will. And will, Schuhrke suggests, is shaped by history: by the myths unions embrace, the alliances they choose, and the solidarities they imagine possible.
The timeliness of the book cannot be overstated. Published amid an ongoing genocide, it is an intervention.
Schuhrke insists that labor’s choices matter now: whether pension funds will be divested, whether contracts will protect pro-Palestine workers, and whether endorsements will be withheld from politicians who enable occupation. These are the measures of whether unions will live up to their own creed of solidarity.
Conscience without neutrality
What lingers after reading No Neutrals There is less outrage than recognition. Recognition that silence is a position, that neutrality is never neutral, and that the language of pragmatism can conceal betrayal.
For decades, American labor leaders justified their support for Israel as strategic, patriotic, and prudent. But prudence at the expense of justice is cowardice.
Schuhrke closes by reminding us that unions have, in the past, taken bold internationalist stands: boycotts against apartheid South Africa, refusals to handle cargo from fascist states, and support for liberation struggles in Latin America.
There is precedent for courage. The question is whether today’s labor leaders will remember it, or whether conscience will once more be outsourced to rank-and-file rebels.
Florence Reece sang, “Which side are you on?” while George Habash declared, “In today’s world, no one is innocent, and no one is neutral.”
To these refrains, Schuhrke adds a century of documentation, showing how US labor answered — and often failed — that question.
His book is both an indictment and a summons, calling on workers — and on all of us — to recognise that the struggle for Palestine is inseparable from the struggle for justice.
If labor, the world’s oldest instrument of solidarity, cannot muster conscience in the face of genocide, then what hope remains for any of us?
Yet, if even small unions, scattered locals, and precarious graduate students can rise to the occasion, the cause of Palestine — and with it, the cause of labor — might still be redeemed.
In that sense, Schuhrke’s book is an invitation to the present, where neutrality is no longer an option and solidarity remains the only path to dignity.
Yahia Lababidi, an acclaimed Arab-American writer of Palestinian heritage, is celebrated for his profound aphorisms, lyrical poetry, and insightful essays. His recent works — Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024) and What Remains To Be Said (Wild Goose Publications, 2025) — explore themes of politics, spirituality, and the human condition. Hailed as a modern-day master of the aphoristic form, Lababidi’s short meditations evoke comparisons to Rumi and Gibran. A global literary ambassador, Lababidi’s writings have been translated into over a dozen languages, resonating at international festivals and beyond
Follow him on Instagram: @yahialababidi