Towards this year’s May Day, the International Workers’ Solidarity day, several rallies will be held across Israel, in Tel Aviv, Nazareth, Kufr Yassif in the Western Galilee, and various others locations. Activists from Hadash (The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) and the Young Communist League are involved in the planning and preparations for all these May Day events, collaborating with other leftists and militant union activists. The central May Day demonstration being organized by Hadash and the CPI will be held, as every year, in Nazareth and will begin at 10:30 on Saturday morning, April 29, with a mass march along Tawfiq Zyad street in the center of that city.

In preparation for this international day of workers’ solidarity, Hadash has published a statement in which it notes that in the past year “The number of strikes and workers’ striking for their rights and in defense of organized labor has increased. Large forces are now united by their understanding of their shared interests, as part of the 99% who are exploited by tycoons who, in Israel, enjoy economic tyranny sponsored by governmental policy.”

A past May Day rally in Nazareth (Photo: Al Ittihad)

The statement by Hadash continues: “This year millions of workers around the world will march, chanting slogans in scores of different languages, but all with a single shared demand – to promote the interests of the working class against the interests of the tycoons and those who assist them. On May Day, we will march together – women and men, Jews and Arabs, university students and schoolchildren, salaried and shift workers, the unionized and the non-unionized, migrant workers and their children, members of cooperatives, refugees, unemployed and retired people – to celebrate international solidarity of the working class.”

Furthermore: “We will protest together for our shared mission: a society without exploitation; for social justice and a real increases to salaries eroded by escalating prices; against racism and all kind of discrimination; and for social, civil, national and gender equality; for organized labor, direct employment, and for the opening of workplaces for Arab women and other marginalized groups; for class unity; and against war and for a just peace with the Palestinian people by ending the occupation.”