The Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee (HWRFC) in Australia met this month and unanimously passed a resolution, published below, supporting the call by the Socialist Equality Party, International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) and International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), for a demonstration in Washington D.C. on July 24 to oppose the visit to the US of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The meeting was attended by doctors, nurses, aged care and disability workers, as well as hospital services employees. It discussed the horrific impact of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which recent reports estimate has killed nearly 200,000 Palestinians, and the connection between the wars led by US imperialism and its allies abroad and the increasing government attacks on public health, education and other social services at home.
Health workers discussed the deepening assault on various aspects of healthcare by the Albanese Labor government and the Victorian state Labor government’s ordering public hospital administrations to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from their annual operating budgets.
This meeting of the Health Workers Rank & File committee (Australia) endorses the demonstration in Washington DC on July 24 opposing the genocidal war in Gaza and the decision by the US Congress to invite the war criminal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to address it. We call for the widest possible participation of all those able to attend the event.
The demonstration called by the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) and International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) aims not to beg the Congress to change its policies but to develop a mass movement of the working class against the genocidal war and its root cause, capitalism—a system in which health and lives are subordinated to private profit.
The fact that the genocide in Gaza has been supported, funded and armed by the major capitalist powers is a warning to the working class. The imperialist powers have made clear that there are no “red lines” they will not cross in their struggle to maintain their hegemonic rule.
Virtually the entire health system in Gaza has been destroyed over the past nine months. This includes hundreds of health workers who have been directly targeted, tortured and murdered as part of the Zionist project to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
As health care workers representing practitioners from a wide range of health services, we support the campaign to develop a struggle to defend humanity against the increasingly callous disregard for human life and health.
In Australia and around the world millions are striving to find a way to stop the criminal madness only to be blocked by the organisations they have turned to for aid. The unions and professional associations, where they do not openly oppose the protests against genocide, stifle the independent actions of workers and search for every reason why workers can’t use the social strength to stop the crimes being carried out against humanity.
The Australian Labor government along with the US Congress and political elites around the world continue to endorse the barbaric genocide in Gaza. We say no support for the genocide and down with its defenders!
We stand with all those who oppose the continually expanding war in the Middle East, Ukraine and the preparations for conflagrations against China and who struggle to unite workers in every country for a shared socialist future. We support the call to declare war on war!
Email: sephw.aus@gmail.com
Twitter: @HealthRandF_Aus
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