As the Socialist Workers Party’s nominee ahead of the presidential election, Jewish grandmother Rachele Fruit is campaigning for a society led by “the industrial labor force” – not the ruling classes and the parties that represent them.
Over drinks in Golders Green (water for her, coffee for me), Fruit – who was last in the UK in 1992 – shares her vision for a world led by workers and talks about why her party backs Israel, describing October 7 as “the worst attack since the Holocaust”.
Fruit – who names Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, and Nelson Mandela as her “heroes” – spent part of her summer in the UK, campaigning from Coventry to Redbridge to hail the “centrality of the working class”.
“We are building an international movement, an international class. We have to focus on the rights of all workers,” she says.
A champion of industrial workers, she is one herself. As well as being a political candidate, the 74-year-old works as a housekeeper at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.
It’s just one of the many jobs that Fruit has held. She has worked across “four or five industrial unions” since her first job as a clerk sorting mail in the post office. She had worked in a garment factory in Baltimore, unloaded baggage on the ramp for Eastern Airlines before she was “laid off”, worked as a meatpacker for seven years, and worked in a factory that repaired jet engines.
Today, as a housekeeper in a luxury hotel she describes camaraderie with colleagues. “There are 1,800 people in the hotel where I work. It’s a big workforce with people from different countries; most of my co-workers are Haitian immigrants so I am learning Creole. Being part of the international working class expands your world.”
Her views on workers' unity, class politics and rejection of the mainstream political parties are unsurprising.
But her vocal support of the state of Israel is – in a world where far-left groups demonize the Jewish State.
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Her views on workers' unity, class politics and rejection of the mainstream political parties are unsurprising
For Fruit, October 7 was a turning point – cementing her decision to run for office. “At that moment, I knew we had to stand up and speak out. It should have been made clear to the world that the aim of Iran – and their proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis – is to carry out a program of annihilating Israel and the Jewish people.
“Their politics are Nazi-like politics.” She adds: “Our party, our movement, had to say ‘no’. We had to say: ‘We defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for the Jewish people because there is no other refuge.” She adds: “We don’t call for Israel to stop the war. That’s that’s their decision to make.”
She pulls out a copy of her party’s newspaper, The Militant. On the front page of the August issue, is an article with the headline: ‘Defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge from Jew-hatred’. But on this, surely she stands alone amongst comrades, including the UK’s Socialist Workers Party, which has openly called for a “Victory to Palestine”.
“The Socialist Workers Party in the UK has nothing whatsoever to do with our party,” she says. “Unfortunately, they have the same name, but that’s not who we are.”
Fruits says such organizations have lost their way – focussing more on identity and race politics, than class politics. “When you see the LGBTQ community supporting Hamas, how bizarre is that?,” she says.
Fruit, who has never been to Israel, says that it would be the “workers” that would find a solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. “Israel can’t find a solution because it is a capitalist country. The only thing that can resolve the issues in the Middle East is the unity of Jewish workers, Palestinian workers, Iraqi, Iranian and Lebanese workers.”
Born to a secular Jewish family in north-east Philadelphia, Fruit’s family expected her to become a “professional” – a doctor, lawyer, or accountant.
But aged 15, Fruit – who attended Hebrew School – was impacted by the Vietnam War. In 1965, she took a bus to Washington to attend a major anti-war march, joined by her father, a high school teacher, and mother, despite their initial concerns. “They were worried, they lived through the witch-hunt in the 1950s, when communists and socialists were under attack in the US.”
At the march, she found her voice, identifying with campaigns led by the Socialist Workers Party. “They were publishing anti-war newsletters on the [soldiers’] bases and we would help distribute them”.
And she has never looked back. She has traveled across the globe, campaigning for safer railways and visiting elderly sugarcane factory workers in the Dominican Republic.
Fruit – whose elder brother Edwin Fruit heads the SWP in Minneapolis, Minnesota – will soon resume her campaign in the States.
“We campaign everywhere, we campaign in working-class neighborhoods. We don’t care if someone voted for Trump or Biden or didn’t vote. Most workers probably don’t bother to vote because they don’t see anything in their own interests.”
Still, she has never met Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump or Kamala Harris for the Democrats, saying: “They don’t allow us to debate them; they’re fighting to debate each other,” adding: “Their policies are to carry out the will of the ruling class. They profit from keeping our wages as low as they can. Our interests are opposite.”
Yet, I wonder what she would say to them if given the chance? “I’m not speaking to them; I’m speaking to the working class.”