IJLB Issues Statement on Venezuela and US Imperial Intervention
In the past, the Bund has avoided supporting national self-determination on principle. This error has led Bundists away from the working class, and into opportunist support for Imperialist powers and wars.
Editor's note: This is a statement issued by the International Jewish Labor Bund’s (IJLB) Delegate Body. Der Spekter is an independent outlet and does not represent the IJLB. To get updates from the IJLB, please fill out its intake form.
On January 11th, 2026, the Delegate Body of the International Jewish Labor Bund (IJLB) approved and published a statement in support of Venezuelan national sovereignty and self-determination, and against the US Imperialist intervention. For two reasons this statement is significant in our organization's history.
First:
This is essentially the first political statement this incarnation of the IJLB has made in the context of a binding, democratic process that includes all IJLB members and local chapters. This is a big win for the IJLB's political organization, and for its capacity to take collective action for the sake of the working class, of which the Jewish workers are an integral part.
Second:
In making this statement the IJLB has elected to support national self-determination on principle. This is key, since supporting national self-determination conditionally (i.e. on some basis of national, ethnic, religious, or cultural affinity) is the very definition of chauvinism.
In the past, this error has led Bundists away from the working class, and into opportunist support for Imperialist powers and wars. For example, in 1955 the Third World Conference of the IJLB resolved to arm “The Western world, led by America, [...] to oppose Communist aggression everywhere, including Formosa,” […] “Korea,” and “Vietnam.”
Amazingly, in the same breath that it advanced the US Imperialist Holocaust in Asia, the 1955 Conference also conceded the “extinction” of “national Jewish life” in the Soviet Union, where over two million Jews still lived. “Zionism disseminates despair and disbelief in our national survival outside of Israel,” the 1955 Conference warned. Nevertheless, it failed to critique its own Western and US American chauvinism on this same basis, not to mention from a position of principled solidarity with all workers and oppressed peoples, the vast majority of whom are not Jewish. Could this have been the Bund of Henryk Erlich; the Bund of Erlich’s 1937 “Manifesto of Bund in Poland,” which proclaimed “life-and-death struggle against fascism, against every form of nationalism, and for socialism?”
“The Bund,” Erlich wrote, in this Manifesto, “taught the Jewish worker that his power lies not in national unity with his exploiters, the rich and their minions, the clericals, but in class struggle against the capitalists without difference of nationality; and in international unity with all toilers and oppressed.”
In truth, Erlich’s lesson was not lost, and never will be lost. It is written mit blut un nit mit blay; on the pages of history, with the blood of the workers and oppressed peoples — the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; the peoples of Turtle Island, of Nuestra America; the peoples of the ghettos and gulags of the USA; indeed all oppressed peoples around the world. Thus, l’sheym Henryk Erlich, un l'kavod Der Bund, the IJLB stands with Venezuela today.
-Cassy Bishop. Philadelphia Delegate, IJLB.
The United States’ abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores on Saturday, January 3, was the latest, outrageous development in a program of US Imperialism that has ensued, in one form or another, from the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.
In the course of the January 3rd operation, the US army killed about 100 people. 32 of these people were Cuban nationals. Prior to this, since 2017, US sanctions have killed over forty thousand people in Venezuela. Since September 2025, US strikes on Venezuelan fishing boats, residences, and infrastructure have killed over 100 more. Meanwhile, even as the US was bombing Venezuela, in 2025 the US Department of Homeland Security deported at least 13,656 people into that country by force. In another case, in March 2025, the US deported 238 Venezuelan nationals without trial to the CECOT gulag in El Salvador.
We, the Delegate Body representing all local chapters and members of the International Jewish Labor Bund (IJLB), stand against these vicious, Imperialist acts. Further, the IJLB stands for the people of Venezuela, and for their struggle for national sovereignty and self-determination, which in two centuries and against unbelievable odds has has begun building Socialism on the ruins of Spanish genocide, colonialism, and slavery.
As a rejoinder to the Bundist byword doikayt, meaning “hereness”, the IJLB calls on all self-identified Bundists to stand and fight for a Promised Land that is there and theirs: for a land that we ourselves may never reach; a land not promised for us ourselves to own. We call on all self-identified Bundists to join us, to say:
Free President Maduro and Cilia Flores!
No war in Venezuela, no ICE on our streets!
Free all oppressed nations and peoples!
Fuera Yankee, y que viva Venezuela!
—Delegate Body, IJLB
January 11, 2026
