Palestinians and their supporters ‘need not apply’

Sullivan & Cromwell’s guilty record

“No Irish need apply” is a famous folk song that’s been performed by Pete Seger. Written in 1862, the song tells of an Irish immigrant who’s seeking work but is always told, “No Irish need apply.”

Discrimination in hiring is a U.S. capitalist tradition. Black unemployment rates are almost always at least twice as high as those for whites.

Right up to the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, hundreds of U.S. newspapers ran separate help-wanted ads labeled “white” or “colored.” It wasn’t until 1973 that the U.S. Supreme Court banned ads that sought only “male” or “female” applicants.

Now, it’s Palestinians and their supporters who are being targeted. Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the biggest corporate law firms, doesn’t want law school graduates who’ve protested the mass murder of Gaza’s children and their families.

According to the New York Times, “The firm is scrutinizing students’ behavior with the help of a background check company, looking at their involvement with pro-Palestinian student groups, scouring social media and reviewing news reports and footage from protests.” 

So much for freedom of speech and freedom of thought. This is like how Communist Party members and others were fired during the 1950s and later.

For over a century, Sullivan & Cromwell have been the legal mouthpieces for the Rockefellers, the world’s first billionaire family who founded Big Oil. Netanyahu’s apartheid regime massacres Palestinians and serves as a U.S.-paid mercenary for Big Oil.

The law firm has an even longer record as an agent for U.S. imperialism and colonialism. It distributed $40 million from the U.S. Treasury ― worth around $1.3 billion in today’s money ― to unknown French Panama Canal company stockholders. (“The Panama Affair” by Maron J. Simon.)

Future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles became senior partner of Sullivan and Cromwell in 1926. His brother, future CIA Director Allen Dulles, was also a partner.

A filthy record

The Wall Street law firm helped Nazi business cartels like IG Farben. John Foster Dulles didn’t want his sister, Eleanor Dulles, to marry a Jew.

As U.S. spy chief in Switzerland during World War II, Allen Dulles tried to negotiate a separate peace with the Nazis. This was done behind the back of the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million people to the fascist invaders.

In these conversations, Dulles was quoted as saying, “He was fed up with listening all the time to outdated politicians, émigrés and prejudiced Jews.” (“Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network,” by Leonard Mosley.)

But John and Allen Dulles’ old law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, must not hire any supporters of Palestinian freedom! 

Sullivan & Cromwell was also the law firm for United Fruit, which strangled Central America with its banana plantations, railroads, and steamship lines. When Guatemala’s elected President, Jacobo Árbenz, attempted to distribute some of United Fruit’s unused land to peasants, the Dulles brothers were determined to overthrow him.

Árbenz was overthrown by the CIA in 1954. One of the CIA agents involved was future Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt.

The year before, the tag team of John and Allen Dulles staged a coup in Iran to get rid of the elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. In the decades following, hundreds of thousands of people were killed in both Guatemala and Iran. 

Flag pins and bigotry

Another big law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell ― usually known as Davis Polk ― also refuses to hire Palestinian supporters.

The “Davis” in the law firm’s name refers to John W. Davis, who was the 1924 Democratic presidential candidate. He was nominated because convention delegates who were Ku Klux Klan supporters refused to vote for New York Gov. Al Smith, who was Catholic.

Davis was an unvarnished white supremacist who opposed any laws to stop lynching. When he was 80, Davis argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of school segregation.

While few people may be directly affected by these law firms’ bigotry, other employers are singling out Palestinians as well. After a couple of bigoted passengers on Delta Airlines objected to two flight attendants wearing Palestinian flag pins, Delta said it would only tolerate U.S. flag pins. 

Delta has a long record of racism and union busting. Former Delta CEO Carleton Putnam wrote the notorious “Race and Reason.”

The racist pamphlet became a bible to the White Citizens Councils, which were an uptown partner of the Ku Klux Klan. The Nazi David Duke distributes it today.

The anti-Palestinian witch hunts are just another variety of racist poison.