The motion before this year’s TUC congress in Liverpool on the subject of the Middle East breaks new ground by calling not only for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions targetting Israel, but also calls on the British trade union movement to distance itself from its Israeli counterparts.

It “calls on the General Council to carry out a review of the TUC’s relationship with Histadrut,” the Israeli national trade union centre, following the Histadrut’s failure to condemn Israeli military action in Gaza earlier this year.

Ironically, the union proposing the motion is the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), which on its own website boasts of its involvement in the launch earlier this year of the International Firefighter Unions Alliance (IFFUA) — a new global organisation of related unions.

Only a small number of unions participated in the founding congress of the IFFUA which was held in Vancouver four months ago and predictably those unions came from countries with strong trade union movements.  Unions attended from the four Nordic countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland), the English speaking democracies (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, the UK and Ireland), Mexico and … Israel.

That’s right — the Israeli firefighters union was one of the dozen founding members of this new alliance.  And IFFUA was set up more than two months after the very same Gaza war that supposedly made Israeli unions pariahs, unwelcome in the international trade union movement.

The FBU is calling on the British trade union movement to consider severing its relationship with the Israeli unions at the very same time as it sets up a new global alliance that includes Israeli unions in the founding group.

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Update: According to the record of decisions of the FBU conference held in 2009, the union supports the BDS campaign targetting Israel — but there’s no mention of a “review” of the relationship with the Histadrut.

Here is the full text of the resolution adopted by the union:

COMPOSITE A - PALESTINE SOLIDARITY
COMPOSITING MOTIONS 60 TAYSIDE, 61 GREATER MANCHESTER, 62 DEVON & SOMERSET AND EMERGENCY RESOLUTION 18 TAYSIDE

Despite international condemnation of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the
continued disregard of UN resolutions and rulings from the International Court of Justice, which includes the building of more settlements within the 1967 Borders, Conference believes that Israel has consistently failed to uphold its duties under international law.
Conference supports the statement, made in December 2008 by Luisa Morgantini, Vice President of the European Parliament, when supporting the EU Parliament suspension of the vote on the upgrade of EU/Israeli relations, that “Itʼs time for the Israeli Government to stop considering itself above the law and start respecting it, beginning by freezing all settlement – building activities and ending its siege on the Gaza Strip.”
Conference therefore calls on the Executive Council to support and promote throughout the Trade Union and Labour Movement a campaign to boycott Israeli Goods, disinvest from Israeli institutions and for sanctions to be taken against Israel, similar to those sanctions imposed by the international movement against apartheid in South Africa, until such time as Israel ends its occupation of Palestine and its oppression of the Palestinian people.