In this US presidential election, votes for ‘lesser-evil’ candidates can be a defense of democracy

I joined the US-based Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign in 2023 because there was no equivalent campaign in Canada, although I have not been actively involved in it.

The campaign’s statement on the 2024 U.S. Elections, reproduced below, corresponds to my own thinking on how socialist solidarity activists should approach the November 5 elections. Because the US election regime is so distorted and undemocratic, the voting formula the campaign advocates applies primarily in the half-dozen “swing” states, the decisive ones in this important election.

The US Left, including those who profess to be revolutionary socialists, are deeply divided in this election. There are some, like my old comrade Cliff Connor, who call for socialists not only to vote for Democrats but to actively campaign for that party’s candidates. Others advocate a boycott of the election and simply issue abstract calls for a non-existent “labor party.” These contrasting positions are illustrated here. And there are some like Kshama Sawant, a well-known West Coast socialist, who are now campaigning for the Greens in order to “punish” Kamala Harris and the Democrats for their support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – although a victory for Trump and the Republicans hardly expresses solidarity with the Palestinians.

The Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign’s statement, below, is supplemented by an article by the campaign’s co-chair Cheryl Zuur, available here, outlining in further detail the reasoning behind its approach to the election. Footnotes below are mine. – Richard Fidler

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 Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign Statement on 2024 U.S. Elections

Millions of voters have been looking for a way to keep Trump and his MAGA horde[1] out of the White House. They want to stop Project 2025, male supremacy, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, ethno-nationalism, science denialism, Putin apologetics, and ridiculous conspiracist ideas that are the basis for MAGA. All socialists should welcome that. There is only one candidate that can keep Trump out of the White House this year - Kamala Harris. The Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign (USSC) endorses the following points:

• The Republican Party of today is fundamentally different from what it was in the past. They are openly working to turn the United States from a multi-party bourgeois democracy into an authoritarian single-party regime. This makes the GOP qualitatively different from today’s Democratic Party, which is not advocating a single-party authoritarian regime but rather maintaining the status quo, as flawed, genocidal, and unjust as that is.
• The Republicans are openly taking aim at, and vastly stepping up repression, disabling, and death of, multiple oppressed groups/identities in ways far more dangerous than either party did in the past.
• The Trump/Vance team is politically connected and theoretically aligned with multiple far right authoritarians around the world.
• Socialists and the left in general on principle must defend all historic left political gains represented in democratic rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to vote. 
• Socialists and the left in general must play a central role in helping build a movement to stop the GOP, MAGA, and the Thiel/Silicon Valley neo-reactionary “NRx” New Right.[2]

Behind the MAGA base stand strategists like Mike Flynn and Stephen Bannon and behind them are the billionaire fascistic ideologues, first and foremost Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin (who are the sponsors of JD Vance). They openly advocate strong man and even fascistic rule. In their world, anybody who doesn’t “contribute” is simply done away with, and the government is under total one-person authoritarian control. They even advocate eugenics.[3]

Trump and his party do not hide their intention to steal this election so the Trump regime can take power. This amounts to an overthrow of a basic democratic right — the very right to vote in public elections. The MAGA base openly advocates violence and retribution if their candidate is not “elected”.

It is an insurmountable contradiction for the so-called left to first minimize the differences between today’s Democrats and the MAGA Republicans and then turn around and call for organizing to resist MAGA. That is why the “left” is doing nothing serious to build a resistance.

In addition to the Trump regime taking power, the MAGA base openly advocates violence and retribution if their candidate is not “elected”. No one knows what will happen at BIPOC[4] voting polls in November and after. 

Harris and the Democrats are not talking about it much, other than Biden’s too little too late proposed SCOTUS reforms, but they know that the MAGA campaign intends, through its manipulation of the state electors, to throw the electoral results to the SCOTUS [Supreme Court], who will appoint Trump as supreme leader.

To repeat: The only candidate who can keep Trump out of the White House is Kamala Harris. However, we must have no illusions in Harris and the Democrats:

1. Harris, like the rest of her party, is committed to arming and supporting Israel. This means participating in Israel’s genocidal crimes against humanity. Any support for Harris, if it is serious about liberation, must at the same time oppose her and her party’s support for Israel. At the same time, we should note that Trump would be far worse for the Palestinian cause.
2. The Biden/Harris administration has been extremely hesitant to arm Ukraine. That country should have been getting and should now get all the arms it needs, when it needs them, and with no strings attached. We should insist that Harris reject Biden’s unjustifiably cautious, go-slow approach to supporting Ukraine. Stop sending arms to Israel, send them to Ukraine instead!
3. Within the labor movement many union leaders argue that we must not go on strike during an election because that will harm the Democrats. We reject that idea, especially now. Any labor struggle increases the class consciousness of workers, tends to bring them together, and puts all capitalist politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, on the defensive.
4. The election of Democrats in 2024 will slow down but not stop MAGA. That movement arose out of the contradictions of capitalism itself. What is needed is an independent movement of the working class, a movement that mobilizes workers and the oppressed in the streets, the work places and even in the unions to oppose the MAGA movement, starting with the MAGA threats to overturn this year’s elections. Such a working class movement could and should ultimately lead to the development of a mass working class party.

Conclusion: The Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign was the first Ukraine solidarity group in the world to support Palestine. We are the only Ukraine solidarity group that openly advocates uniting all struggles against oppression and far right authoritarianism. Such struggles should not stop at the borders to the United States. Our support includes stopping Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, despite the fact that Ukraine’s present government is led by the neoliberal Zelensky. It also includes when the defeat of authoritarianism means putting or keeping a capitalist politician in power, (such as Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma/Myanmar, despite the fact that she participated in the murderous repression of the Rohingya people) because we recognize it is better to live and organize under bourgeois democracy than authoritarian conditions.

Socialists and the left generally should support and join any movement to stop MAGA and the Silicon Valley-led New Right both during and after the 2024 elections. That is not limited to but does include keeping Trump out of the White House in 2024.

The only candidates who can stop the MAGA Republicans from gaining office are the Democrats, and the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign advocates voting for them. That is especially so since the only two “left” candidates (Jill Stein and Cornel West) apologize for Putin and advocate establishing the conditions which will lead to the victory of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Such a victory will encourage a wave of reaction and authoritarianism around the world, including in the United States. It will be easier for the working class to build its own movement under capitalist democracy than under the right wing authoritarianism that Trump would install.

 

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[1] “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), the refrain of Trump’s Republican party.

[2] “NRx” New Right: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets.

[3] The Trump-Vance campaign’s content is illustrated here: “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism,” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/trump-msg-rally.html.

[4] BIPOC: Black, Indigenous and People of Color.

Israel instrumentalizes ‘anti-Semitism’

Thomas Suárez is a London-based historical researcher as well as a professional Juilliard-trained violinist and composer. A former West Bank resident, he devoted several years to researching poorly-tapped and newly-declassified historical archives to compile his latest book: Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea. His previous books include three landmark works on the history of cartography, and Writings on the Wall: Palestinian Oral Histories. His personal web page can be consulted here.

This is an edited version of his presentation to a seminar sponsored by Weekly Worker on January 25.

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Clear the smoke and mirrors

Zionism relies on anti-Semitism and is itself a form of anti-Semitism. Thomas Suárez discusses the ability of the Israeli state to excuse its crimes and silence critics

Why are we discussing seemingly academic topics like anti-Semitism and Zionism while the Palestinians are being massacred? Seventy-five years of exposing Israel’s crimes has failed to stop it, and so its uncanny impunity must be dissected to see how it works. Key to that impunity is Israel’s weaponisation of anti-Semitism, and so defeating that weaponisation is essential if we are to defeat its weapons of steel and explosives.

I would like to preface this by explaining that I do not like the term, ‘anti-Semitism’, and think it should be dropped in favour of ‘anti-Jewish bigotry’. The use of a dedicated term for bigotry against Jews - as opposed to bigotry against anybody else - feeds into the notion of Jewish exceptionalism. It is also illogical and inaccurate in its use of the term ‘Semitic’; and above all, for reasons I will explain, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ aids Israeli impunity; it is an asset in its wielding of the smear of anti-Jewish bigotry to silence critics.

But I will continue to use the word ‘anti-Semitism’ here to avoid distracting from the larger issue at hand. That larger issue is, of course, the ongoing genocide, which requires us to address not the victims, but the perpetrator and its principal weapon: the Israeli state/Zionism and its weaponisation of anti-Semitism.

First, I think we should look at the various roles that anti-Semitism plays in the Israeli state and in its ongoing genocide.

1. Anti-Semitism is, of course, the alleged rationale for Zionism and the Israeli state.

2. For devotees of the Zionist cult, anti-Semitism is both the threat and the fetish that Zionism wields to keep them obedient.

3. The transference of historic western anti-Jewish bigotry onto Palestinian identity is core to the dehumanisation of the Palestinians that Israel requires to justify its slow and not so slow genocide against them.

4. Anti-Semitism is Zionism’s essential fuel that it must ensure never runs out, and thus:

5. The cry of anti-Semitism, real or fake, is the key money-raising tool for the Zionists, and

6. The false smear of anti-Semitism is, of course, the principal weapon wielded to squash opposition to its crimes.

7. Importantly, anti-Jewish bigots were courted by the Zionist movement, with anti-Semitism used as a positive marketing strategy. If you do not want Jews showing up on your shores, support Zionism! Because we have a huge ghetto for them far away from you.

8. And so the last point: actual anti-Semitism, white nationalism and neo-fascism, are soulmates of Zionism, as is the anti-Semitism of the rabidly pro-Israel Christian Zionist movement.

In short, anti-Semitism is integral to the Israeli state - a multi-purpose, inseparable tool. Israel is woven out of anti-Semitism.

Under the hood

Now, for a quick look at the beginning of it all, I would like to quote the correspondent for the London Standard, reporting on the first Zionist Congress in 1897:

The idea of founding a modern Jewish state which goes by the name of Zionism, finds little favour in Germany, except among the anti-Semites … the Frankfurter Zeitung sums up an article on the subject as follows: In short, the degeneration which calls itself anti-Semitism has begotten the degeneration which adorns itself with the name of Zionism.

‘Anti-Semitic’ should have been the epitaph that buried Zionism along with Theodore Herzl. But Herzl and those who followed fought back through the only tactic that could counter Zionism’s obvious anti-Semitic nature. They claimed worldwide Jewish allegiance and crowned Zionism as the standard by which good Jews and bad Jews are distinguished.

To quote Herzl, “No true Jew can be an anti-Zionist. Only Mauschel [an offensive word for a religious Jew] is one. Merely to look at him - let alone approach or, heaven forbid, touch him - was enough to make us feel sick.” So here we have the beginning of the hijacking of Jewish identity by this racial-nationalist movement, resulting in the nation-state today that calls itself ‘the Jewish state’.

Now, we accept this trilogy of words - the Jewish state - with little thought. But, even on the obvious level, the term ‘the Jewish state’ already creates a magic shield around Israel. Compare the psychological difference between ‘Why are you always criticising [whatever state]?’ and ‘Why are you always criticising the Jewish state?’

The term, ‘the Jewish state’, serves as a weapon that shoots its bullets without leaving any forensic evidence. It empowers the smear of anti-Semitism in the most insidious way, because it strikes without the overt accusation, thus leaving the victim not even the option of responding to the smear, unless he or she overtly raises the issue of anti-Semitism - which only has the appearance of vindicating the smear.

So, in order to disable this magic shield, we need to look inside to see what powers it. Under the hood, we see that ‘the Jewish state’ is a stealth term that creates a messianic gateway to the public mind, sparking its message of exceptionalism past any critical thought. There is an entire world of narrative hidden within these three words, the most powerful of which is the first one, ‘the’. Israel does not claim to be merely ‘a’ Jewish state, in the sense of countries that have a national religion. Indeed to quote David Ben-Gurion, Israel has nothing to do with Judaism, but rather with ‘being a Jew’. And nor with being just an Israeli Jew, but the ethnicity itself. According to Israel’s construct, it is the state of all Jews, as Jews - free of national borders and indeed free of individual Jewish consent on the matter.

This is anti-Semitism, and it is unique in the world. There is no analogy to it with any other nation-state, as much as Israel’s apologists try to pass Israel off as analogous to any other state with a national religion. Simple experiment to prove that. There are multiple Christian states; there are multiple Muslim states, Hindu states, Buddhist states. Now, imagine that some state somewhere in the world were to establish itself and declare that it is a Jewish state, just like Israel. Israel would go ballistic. It would say, ‘No, you can’t be the Jewish state: we are the Jewish state.’

For states with an official religion, that officialness extends to their borders and stops. Such states neither claim exclusivity on the religion or its various cultures, nor to have any claim on co-religionist citizens of other countries. Israel is the opposite. Israel is the ‘only Jewish state’ (as its apologists constantly remind us) not in the sense that there happen to be no other, but because by Israel’s construct there can be no other. Why? Because its claim over Jews is global and involves ethnicity itself, not citizenship. This nation-state adaptation of tribalism, in which the state is part of the DNA of an ethnic identity, bears no relation to states with a national religion. And it is the internal workings of its weapon of silencing critics through the smear of anti-Semitism.

Now, where else do we come across this same mentality? It is the method of common bigots. Racists blame individuals by virtue of claimed oneness with some ethnicity or nationality or ‘type’. And so, during the spread of Covid19, ‘Chinese-looking’ people were attacked because the virus came from China. ‘They’, ‘the Chinese’, caused Covid. This is classic ignorant bigotry, and we all condemn it.

Israel’s magic shield works by doing precisely this to Jews - but turning it around in order to hold Jewish identity ransom to insulate its crimes. And, instead of condemning this anti-Semitism, we run in fear from it - which is doubly tragic, because we are also running in fear from Zionism’s fatal flaw.

We would say, Israel did xyz, while a bigot would say the Jews did xyz. But that bigot is now the Israeli state and its cheerleaders, who have made state and ethnicity synonymous in order to repackage criticism of the state as anti-Semitic.

Other states deflect criticism of their crimes by ‘hiding behind the flag’, accusing dissenting citizens of being unpatriotic to the state. Israel instead hides behind the ethnicity, free of borders, accusing dissenting voices anywhere of being traitorous to Jews as Jews.

IHRA

Now, we are all familiar with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism, which in reality is not a definition of anything, but rather a tool to silence Israel’s critics and thus empower Israel’s crimes. The IHRA does, however, contain one truth: it states that it is anti-Semitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. Well, of course! - but that, ironically, is precisely what the IHRA is engineered to do. That is its purpose, and that is the inner workings of the smear.

You do not even need to unscrew the cover of the IHRA to look inside to see how it works. It is a very simple and obvious mechanism: what Israel does ‘the Jews’ do, so to accuse the state of crimes is to accuse Jews as Jews of those crimes - which, of course, is blatant anti-Jewish bigotry, and we must start saying so.

This same tactic Israel wields to silence us. It is its Achilles heel, but we have collectively been so beaten down that we have not exploited it. Israeli theft of Jewish identity makes Jews, as Jews, simply because they are Jews, the doers of its crimes. Traditional anti-Semitism, for all its horrors, is powerless to harm the integrity of Jews or Judaism, powerless to make its libels true. However, the Israeli state and Zionism - if we accept them at their word - succeed. If we accept their claims on Jewish identity, then we are common racists, blaming Jews as Jews.

The very name ‘Israel’ is of course also part of the weaponisation of the smear of anti-Semitism. For anyone from the larger western tradition (and I include secular people) the name ‘Israel’ exists apart from all other place names. Its very sound transcends the realm of the profane and touches a nerve deep within our collective cultural subconscious.

It is a place rooted in Genesis itself, and Israel - the modern nation-state - very openly exploits this to position itself as that place, the land’s ancient artefacts as the nation-state’s artefacts, and its settlers as that Biblical land’s people. As laughable as that may (and should!) sound, its power is very real, and is the reason the name was chosen.

Zionists’ use of Hebrew as the vernacular operates in tandem with the weaponisation of anti-Semitism. Hebrew was necessary for the theatre of the messianic ‘return’ to biblical lands. It, too, is an artefact serving to place the Israeli state in a protected part of our collective psyche. To criticise someone speaking Hebrew is, in this militarisation, to criticise Jews.

In sum, Zionism has hijacked Jewish individual identity and turned it into a monolithic, racial, supremacist cult. Why is this not blatantly obvious to the general public?

One key aspect, in my view is this: What, as seen by the public, are the two ‘sides’ to what they are told is a ‘conflict’? Well, they would say that ‘It’s obviously Israel versus the Palestinians (or the Arabs)’. To me, this juxtaposition is very misleading, and it hides Israel’s anti-Semitism.

Question: what is it about the Palestinians that makes Israel target them? Why does Israel place them under apartheid, ethnically cleanse them and commit genocide against them? Why? It is not because they are Palestinians per se. It is not because they are Arabs. It is solely because they are not Jewish. If they were Jewish, whether Palestinian or Arab or anything else, they would instead be welcomed by Israel and given a generous subsidy to take over a house whose owner was expelled because s/he is not Jewish.

Jews were always part of the fabric of Arab Palestinian civilisation - until the arrival of the Zionists. The Zionists extracted all Jews from Palestinian civilisation, robbing them of their Arab identity. More Zionist anti-Semitism. That the rest were by definition not Jewish - and nothing else - is why Israel has condemned them to apartheid, bantustans and camps, why the Zionist militias depopulated several hundred villages in 1948, and why it continues to depopulate them in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and, especially, in Gaza. The core goal of Zionism is a racially pure Jewish state from river to sea. Anyone there who is not Jewish is to be gotten rid of.

So, Palestinians are the targets because Palestinians are the native people river-to-sea minus the Palestinian Jews, who were all removed by the Zionists.

Describing the situation as ‘between Israel and the Palestinians’ falsely frames this racial nationalism as a real estate dispute - a conflict - and indeed provides Israel the rhetorical gymnastics through which it denies it is an apartheid regime. Accurately describing the situation as Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian non-Jews exposes Israel’s crimes against Jews - its hijacking of Jewish identity as a human shield to insulate its crimes in the name of Jews.

Thus the Israeli state is genocidal in its very nature, as its goal is and always has been to effectively erase the original ethnic identity by expulsion and the hijacking of their cultural iconography as its own. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, and in slower motion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - and, of course, within Israel itself - is all part of Zionism’s grotesquely anti-Semitic crime of hijacking Judaism into a racial supremacist cult. Israel is in effect conducting genocide and blaming it on the Jews.

Israel’s squandering of Jewish identity is also obvious if we look at the people who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and beyond - ongoing through to this moment - because they are not Jewish, and have for generations been reduced to life in camps. What do we call these camps? Unfortunately, playing right into Israel’s narrative, we call them refugee camps, shielding Israel from this aspect of its abuse of Jewish identity.

No - what is a refugee camp? It is a camp for people displaced by conflict or natural disaster, on account of which are unable to return home. But this has not applied to the Palestinians for 75 years. Since the end of 1948, they have been perfectly able to go home, have wanted nothing more than to go home, have the unqualified individual right to go home, and there is nothing stopping them from going home ... except that the Israeli state blocks them! Why? It blocks them because they are not Jewish.

So these are not refugee camps - they are Israeli internment camps for non-Jews, paid for by the ‘international community’. The term, ‘refugee camps’, obscures this crime Israel is committing in the name of Jews, making the fact that millions of people wake up every morning to the squalor of camps sound like some tragedy of circumstances. No - Israel keeps them imprisoned in internment camps, because they are not Jewish - end of story.

As an example of how cynical is Israel’s theft of Jewish identity, one of these Israeli internment camps for non-Jews, Shu’fat, is already in what is claimed to be Israel. According to Israel, East Jerusalem (where the camp is) is Israeli, as much a part of the state as any other. So, the people of Shu’fat camp do not even need to ‘return’ - they are already there!

But they are in camps. They are in camps, even though they are in Israel, according to Israel, in order to preserve Israel’s self-professed identity as ‘the Jewish state’ - a remarkably cynical term, in that its exterior demands unqualified respect, while its interior hides a neo-fascist, racist abuse of Jewish identity to empower its crimes against the Palestinians.

Smears

Since its purpose is to protect the state itself, not Jews, and since the very mission of the state is a racist one, anti-racists - that is, the vast majority of the people working for Palestinian liberation - are the targets of the smear, whereas actual anti-Jewish bigots, and even neo-fascists, are not targets because they are invariably avid supporters of the state.

I came of age in the United States during the height of the US-led war against Vietnam, and like many people of all ages at the time, I was active in the movement to stop it. Now, we were called traitors, but traitors to what? Traitors to a state of which I was a citizen by happenstance of the geography of my birth. It was an external aspect, not part of my DNA. Citizenship is like belonging to a club. Everyone - well, except the Palestinians and other stateless people - automatically belong to one of these clubs, and sometimes join another or resign from one.

But people brainwashed from birth by Zionism believe that Zionist ideology and the Israeli state are part of who they are. And it is for this reason that Israel does not allow Israeli nationality for Jews. The nationality of Jewish citizens of Israel is, by Israeli law, Jewish. Israel claims a hold on Jews by what it treats as ‘race’, and thus cannot be renounced. Israel claims to own Jews as Jews.

One example of how this plays out: in the 1980s, during former Lehi bigwig Yitzhak Shamir’s second term as Israeli prime minister, Russia finally allowed Jews to leave. Most wanted to go to the US, but Shamir, furious, called them ‘defectors’ and successfully coerced US president Ronald Reagan to close its doors in order to force them to go to Israel, where they were needed as place-holders for the state’s expansion into the West Bank.

In my view, this psychosis - this drug of anti-Semitism, to which Zionism has gotten its devotees addicted - is why we have the phenomenon of Zionist Jews faking anti-Semitic incidents, such as scrawling swastikas on the wall or their dormitory door, this sort of thing - even bomb scares - a phenomenon that I believe is more widespread than has been acknowledged.

Anti-Semitism has become a racket. For many years, organisations such as the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Community Service Trust and the Board of Deputies - or in the US the Anti-Defamation League - have been devoted to maintaining an ever-increasing hysteria over anti-Semitism, both to keep Zionism’s adherents terrified and satisfied, and to keep us silent.

Does anyone remember any of these organisations announcing, ‘Great news - anti-Semitism has declined this quarter’? Or even levelled off? No. It is so farcical that several years ago the Daily Mail reported that “Jews feel as threatened as they did in the holocaust, experts say”, and there has been no let-up since. Yet the media continue to parrot one new alarm after the other without betraying the slightest curiosity.

The struggle for Palestinian liberation demands that we counter this weapon - the militarisation of anti-Semitism. What, then, to do if you are falsely smeared with the ‘anti-Semitism’ label? Absolute rule: never respond on the terms handed you. Do not respond with protestations of your innocence; nor with any form of pseudo-apology for anything you did not do, thinking you will placate the inquisitors.

The smear is to silence you, of course; but they are also thrilled if you protest, because anti-Semitism remains the issue, you remain on the defensive, and because the words, ‘Palestine’, ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ are nowhere to be found.

In my view - and I feel strongly that I am correct in this - when the Scarlet Letter, ‘A for anti-Semitism’, is scrawled on your chest, you should instead - correctly - boomerang the charge back. And it must include the words that the smear was intended to silence:

• No - don’t blame Jews for the crimes of Israel.
• I’m arguing for simple human rights. Stop smearing Jews as bigots - as opposing equality - in order to shield Israel.
• No, the only anti-Jewish bigotry here is from those defending Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide in the name of Jews.

Similarly:

• It is not enough to say that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism: rather, Zionism is anti-Semitism.
• It is convoluted to say that criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic. Rather, adulation of Israel is far, far more likely to spring from anti-Semitism.

The militarisation of anti-Semitism has to be thrown back - exposed - for the racist outrage that it is. And here is why I maintain that the term ‘anti-Semitism’ should be dropped in favour of ‘anti-Jewish bigotry’, or any straightforward term consistent with how one would reference any other target of racism.

The smear, ‘anti-Semitic’, is a blunt weapon that not only infers Jewish (and is thus understood as Israeli) exceptionalism, but obscures precisely what act is being alleged. If instead the accuser is forced to clarify that bigotry against Jews (as opposed to Israel) is the accusation, that puts the onus on the accuser to explain why, for example, arguing for equal rights river to sea, is somehow anti-Jewish. It suddenly becomes more transparent that it is the accuser, not the accused, who is libelling Jews.

Israel - the world’s great purveyor of anti-Jewish bigotry - has created a world of smoke and mirrors out of the crime to grease the wheels of genocide. It is long overdue to clear the smoke and mirrors.

Ukrainian Letter of Solidarity with the Palestinian people

Russia’s occupation of parts of Ukraine is not fully comparable in scale with Israel’s occupation of Palestine, although they involve similar tactics of violence, discrimination, and illegal settlement (Crimea, West Bank). And the Ukrainian government’s support of Israel’s war on Gaza grossly confuses the relationship of the occupier, Israel, with the occupied and nationally oppressed Palestinians. The Ukraine-Palestine Solidarity Group has issued the following statement that addresses and clarifies these distinctions. It was first published in Commons, a left-wing Ukrainian journal of social criticism whose editorial board shares egalitarian and anti-capitalist views. (If the Ukrainian links published here are inaccessible, the text may be accessed here.)

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Ukrainian Letter of Solidarity with Palestinian people

November 2, 2023

We, Ukrainian researchers, artists, political and labour activists, members of civil society stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine who for 75 years have been subjected to and resisted Israeli military occupation, separation, settler colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, land dispossession and apartheid. We write this letter as people to people. The dominant discourse on the governmental level and even among solidarity groups that support the struggles of Ukrainians and Palestinians often creates separation. With this letter we reject these divisions, and affirm our solidarity with everyone who is oppressed and struggling for freedom.

As activists committed to freedom, human rights, democracy and social justice, and while fully acknowledging power differentials, we firmly condemn attacks on civilian populations — be they Israelis attacked by Hamas or Palestinians attacked by the Israeli occupation forces and armed settler gangs. Deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime. Yet this is no justification for the collective punishment of Palestinian people, identifying all residents of Gaza with Hamas and the indiscriminate use of the term “terrorism” applied to the whole Palestinian resistance. Nor is this a justification of continuation of the ongoing occupation. Echoing multiple UN resolutions, we know that there will be no lasting peace without justice for the Palestinian people.

On October 7 we witnessed Hamas’ violence against the civilians in Israel, an event that is now singled out by many to demonize and dehumanize Palestinian resistance altogether. Hamas, a reactionary Islamist organization, needs to be seen in a wider historical context and decades of Israel encroaching on Palestinian land, long before this organization came to exist in the late 1980s. During the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were brutally displaced from their homes, with entire villages massacred and destroyed. Since its creation Israel has never stopped pursuing its colonial expansion. The Palestinians were forced to exile, fragmented and administered under different regimes. Some of them are Israeli citizens affected by structural discrimination and racism. Those living in the occupied West Bank are subjected to apartheid under decades of Israel’s military control. The people of the Gaza Strip have suffered from the blockade imposed by Israel since 2006, which restricted movement of people and goods, resulting in growing poverty and deprivation.

Since the 7th of October and at the time of writing the death toll in the Gaza Strip is more than 8,500 people. Women and children have made up more than 62 percent of the fatalities, while more than 21,048 people have been injured. In recent days, Israel has bombed schools, residential areas, Greek Orthodox Church and several hospitals. Israel has also cut all water, electricity, and fuel supply in the Gaza Strip. There is a severe shortage of food and medicine, causing a total collapse of a healthcare system.

Most of the Western and Israeli media justify these deaths as mere collateral damage to fighting Hamas but are silent when it comes to Palestinian civilians targeted and killed in the Occupied West Bank. Since the beginning of 2023 alone, and before October 7, the death toll on the Palestinian side had already reached 227. Since the 7th of October, 121 Palestinian civilians have been killed in the occupied West Bank. More than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners are currently detained in Israeli prisons. Lasting peace and justice are only possible with the end of the ongoing occupation. Palestinians have the right to self-determination and resistance against Israeli’s occupation, just as Ukrainians have the right to resist Russian invasion.

Our solidarity comes from a place of anger at the injustice, and a place of deep pain of knowing the devastating impacts of occupation, shelling of civil infrastructure, and humanitarian blockade from experiences in our homeland. Parts of Ukraine have been occupied since 2014, and the international community failed to stop Russian aggression then, ignoring the imperial and colonial nature of the armed violence, which consequently escalated on the 24th of February 2022. Civilians in Ukraine are shelled daily, in their homes, in hospitals, on bus stops, in queues for bread. As a result of the Russian occupation, thousands of people in Ukraine live without access to water, electricity or heating, and it is the most vulnerable groups that are mostly affected by the destruction of critical infrastructure. In the months of the siege and heavy bombardment of Mariupol there was no humanitarian corridor. Watching the Israeli targeting of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza, the Israeli humanitarian blockade and occupation of land resonates especially painfully with us. From this place of pain of experience and solidarity, we call on our fellow Ukrainians globally and all the people to raise their voices in support of the Palestinian people and condemn the ongoing Israeli mass ethnic cleansing.

We reject the Ukrainian government statements that express unconditional support for Israel’s military actions, and we consider the calls to avoid civilian casualties by Ukraine’s MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] belated and insufficient This position is a retreat from the support of Palestinian rights and condemnation of the Israeli occupation, which Ukraine has followed for decades, including voting in the UN. Aware of the pragmatic geopolitical reasoning behind Ukraine’s decision to echo Western allies, on whom we are dependent for our survival, we see the current support of Israel and dismissing the Palestinian right to self-determination as contradictory to Ukraine’s own commitment to human rights and fight for our land and freedom. We as Ukrainians should stand in solidarity not with the oppressors, but with those who experience and resist the oppression.

We strongly object to equating of Western military aid to Ukraine and Israel by some politicians. Ukraine doesn’t occupy the territories of other people, instead, it fights against the Russian occupation, and therefore international assistance serves a just cause and the protection of international law. Israel has occupied and annexed Palestinian and Syrian territories, and Western aid to it confirms an unjust order and demonstrates double standards in relation to international law.

We oppose the new wave of Islamophobia, such as the brutal murder of a Palestinian American 6-year old and assault on his family in Illinois, USA, and the equating of any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. At the same time, we also oppose holding all Jewish people all over the world accountable for the politics of the state of Israel and we condemn anti-Semitic violence, such as the mob attack on the airplane in Daghestan, Russia. We also reject the revival of the “war on terror” rhetoric used by the US and EU to justify war crimes and violations of international law that have undermined the international security system, caused countless deaths, and has been borrowed by other states, including Russia for the war in Chechnya and China for the Uyghur genocide. Now Israel is using it to carry out ethnic cleansing.

Call to Action

• We urge the implementation of the call to ceasefire, put forward by the UN General Assembly resolution.
• We call on the Israeli government to immediately stop attacks on civilians and to provide humanitarian aid; we insist on an immediate and indefinite lifting of the siege on Gaza and on an urgent relief operation to restore civilian infrastructure. We also call on the Israeli government to put an end to the occupation and recognise the right of Palestinian displaced people to return to their lands.
• We call on the Ukrainian government to condemn the use of state sanctioned terror and humanitarian blockade against the Gazan civilian population and reaffirm the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. We also call on the Ukrainian government to condemn deliberate assaults on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
• We call on the international media to stop pitting Palestinians and Ukrainians against each other, where hierarchies of suffering perpetuate racist rhetoric and dehumanize those under attack.

We have witnessed the world uniting in solidarity for the people of Ukraine and we call on everyone to do the same for the people of Palestine.

Signatures (as of 2023/11/02)

1. Volodymyr Artiukh, researcher

2. Levon Azizian, human rights lawyer

3. Diana Azzuz, artist, musician

4. Tams Bilous, editor

5. Oksana Briukhovetska, artist, researcher, University of Michigan

6. Artem Chapeye, writer

7. Valentyn Dolhochub, researcher, soldier

8. Nataliya Gumenyuk, journalist

9. John-Paul Himka, professor emeritus, University of Alberta

10. Karina Al Ithmuz, biomedical engineer programmer

11. Yuliia Kishchuk, researcher

12. Amina Ktefan, fashion influencer, digital creator

13. Svitlana Matviyenko, media scholar, SFU; Associate Director of Digital Democracies Institute

14. Maria Mayerchyk, scholar

15. Vitalii Pavliuk, writer, translator

16. Sashko Protyah, filmmaker, volunteer

17. Oleksiy Radynski, filmmaker

18. Mykola Ridnyi, artist and filmmaker

19. Daria Saburova, researcher, activist

20. Alexander Skyba, labour activist

21. Darya Tsymbalyuk, researcher

22. Nelia Vakhovska, translator

23. Yuliya Yurchenko, researcher, translator, activist

And many more, see Ukrainian Letter of Solidarity with Palestinian People

See also “Why Ukrainians should support Palestinians,” by Daria Saburova, October 27, 2023

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza (II)

Palestinian Liberation and the MENA Revolutions

By Joseph Daher

October 22, 2023

The following article was originally published by Joseph Daher, a Syrian/Swiss academic and internationalist, in the journal Tempest on July 5, 2021. I republish it here believing it provides important background, particularly on Palestinian formations and their politics. – RF

* * *

Israel’s recent attacks against Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza demonstrated, once again, the brutal colonial, racist, and apartheid nature of the Zionist state. The replacement of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government by a new coalition led by ultranationalist Naftali Bennett will change nothing for Palestinians.

The new regime’s policy is no different than Netanyahu’s. Proving this reality, Bennett ordered fresh air strikes on Gaza just a few days after his assumption of power. These new acts of violence and repression prove why the international left must stand in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian resistance.

But we also must engage in the strategic debates about how to win liberation and our role in it. Socialists should see the Palestinian struggle as inextricably tied to the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) against all the region’s states, most importantly Israel. This combination of resistance in Palestine and regional revolution is the only realistic way to free Palestine and all the peoples of the region.

Israel: a settler-colonial state

The Zionist movement from its origins in Europe to its foundation of Israel in 1948 and its displacement of Palestinians today has been a settler-colonial project. To establish, maintain, and expand its territory, the Israeli state has had to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, homes, and jobs. Throughout this process it allied with, and found sponsorship from, imperialist powers, first the British empire and then the United States, which used Israel as their agent in the struggle against Arab nationalism and socialism.

Thus, the Israeli state’s support for Zionist settlers’ expropriation of Palestinians’ homes in Sheikh Jarrah must be seen as a continuation of the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) that drove over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. This process of ongoing colonization is the reason why more than 5 million Palestinians refugees live in camps and cities in the Middle East and North Africa.

Even mainstream groups now recognize the reactionary nature of Israeli colonization. For example, both Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem have recently denounced Israel’s ongoing seizure of Palestinian land. They have documented how Israel has violated international laws to back 620,000 colonists building colonies in the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They also concluded that Israel is an apartheid state that gives Jews special privileges and reduces Palestinians to second-class citizenship.

Given the utterly reactionary nature of Israel, the far right’s political hegemony over the last decade should come as no surprise. It is in some sense the logical outgrowth of the Zionist movement, its ethnonationalism, Israel’s institutional racism, and its more than seven decades of oppression and dispossession of Palestinians. These create the conditions for the flourishing of right-wing Zionist mobs that march through Palestinian neighborhoods chanting “Death to Arabs.”

Mistaken alliances with authoritarian regimes

Just like any other population under colonial occupation and apartheid, Palestinians have the right to resist, including with military means. Support for this right should not be confused with support for the political perspectives of the various Palestinian political parties. None of these parties—Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front of the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and others—offer a political strategy capable of winning Palestinian liberation.

The dominant Palestinian political parties look not to the Palestinian masses and the regional working classes and oppressed peoples as the forces to win liberation. Instead they seek political alliances with the region’s ruling classes and their regimes to support their political and military struggle against Israel. They collaborate with these regimes, and argue for non-intervention, even as those regimes oppress their own popular classes and Palestinians within their borders.

One of the key examples in the evolution of this approach was in Jordan 1970, and culminated in the events known as Black September. Despite the strength, organization and popularity of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) within Jordan— a country whose population was seventy percent Palestinian— the Fatah leadership of Yasser Arafat initially refused to support a campaign to overthrow the country’s dictator, King Hussein. In response, and with the backing of the U.S and Israel, Hussein declared martial law, and with the regional Arab governments largely passive, Hussein attacked the PLO camps, killed thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians, and ultimately drove the PLO out of Jordan and into Syria and Lebanon.

Despite this history, and its subsequent experiences in exile, the PLO pursued this strategy of collaboration and non-intervention for decades. Today, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas supports Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s dictatorship in Egypt. In another shocking example, Abbas recently sent a message of congratulations to Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad on “his re-election” in May 2021, despite Assad’s brutal repression of Palestinians participating in the Syrian uprising and destruction of the Yarmouk refugee camp.

Hamas pursues a similar strategy; its leaders have cultivated alliances with monarchies in Gulf states, especially Qatar more recently, as well as the fundamentalist regime in Iran. In 2012, Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas government in Gaza at the time, praised Bahrain’s “reforms” while the regime with the backing of its Gulf allies smashed the country’s democratic uprising. Many Hamas leaders viewed it as a “sectarian” coup d’état by the Shi’ites of Bahrain supported by Iran.

In April 2018, former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal praised Turkey’s invasion and occupation of Afrin in Syria during a visit to Ankara. He stated that “Turkey’s success in Afrin serves as a solid example” hopefully to be followed by similar “victories of the Islamic ummah in a lot of places in the world.” The occupation of Afrin by Turkish armed forces and its reactionary Syrian proxies drove out 200,000 mostly Kurdish people and repressed those who remained.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian left has for the most part implemented its own version of the same strategy. It too has withheld criticism of its allies’ repression of their people. The PFLP, for example, has not voiced any objections to the Syrian regime’s crimes and has even supported its army against “foreign conspiracies,” declaring that Damascus “will remain a thorn in the face of the Zionist enemy and its allies.” The PFLP’s relationship towards the theocracy in Iran, and the military dictatorship in Egypt follow a similar pattern.

Regimes betray the liberation struggle

Rather than advance the struggle, despotic states in the region have repeatedly betrayed it and even repressed Palestinians. As noted earlier, the Jordanian state crushed the Palestinian movement in 1970, killing thousands and expelling the PLO during Black September.

In 1976, Hafez al-Assad’s regime in Syria intervened in Lebanon against Palestinian and leftist organizations in support of far-right Lebanese parties. He also conducted military operations against Palestinian camps in Beirut in 1985 and 1986. By 1990, approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were held in Syrian prisons.

Egypt has collaborated in Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007. Iran opportunistically seeks to use the Palestinian cause as a foreign policy tool to achieve its wider objectives in the region.

While the Syrian regime has supported Hamas, it drastically cut assistance to it when it refused to support the regime’s counter-revolution against the democratic uprising in 2011. Iran only resumed formal ties with Hamas after the election of Ismail Haniyeh and Saleh al-Arouri as the new leadership.

Tehran collaborated with U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s why during the recent Iraqi uprising protesters marched under the slogan “Neither USA, Nor Iran.” These examples alone demolish the idea that Iran is a reliable ally of the Palestinian cause or that is an anti-imperialist state.

Turkey, despite Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s criticisms of Israel, maintains close economic connections with it. Erdogan has increased the volume of trade with Tel Aviv from the $1.4 billion when he came to power to $6.5 billion in 2020. Thus, the regimes restrict their support for the cause to areas where it advances their regional interests and betray it when it doesn’t.

Dead end of peace deals brokered by U.S. imperialism

With the failure of its strategy of relying on political support from, and alliance with the regions regimes, the PLO turned to an even more bankrupt approach of pursuing a peace deal brokered by the U.S. and other great powers. The hope was to secure a two-state settlement through the Oslo Accords struck in 1993.

Instead of winning Palestinian liberation, such a settlement would amount to surrender, accepting Israeli colonialism in historic Palestine, while at best winning a Palestinian rump state, and betraying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their stolen land in Israel. In the final analysis, the peace process has reduced the PA to ruling over a bantustan entirely under the control of Israel.

This disastrous result should come as no surprise. The U.S. and other imperialist powers have supported Israel as their local police force against the revolutionary transformation of the region, an event that would challenge their control over its strategic energy reserves.

Israel served this purpose repeatedly since its founding. In 1956, it participated in France and Britain’s attack on Nasser’s Egypt following its nationalization of the Suez Canal. In 1967, Israel’s Six Day War targeted Nasser’s Egypt as well as the Syrian state during their radical nationalist phase.

Since then, the U.S. has backed Israel. Washington has poured an average of $4 billion annually into Tel Aviv’s coffers, backing its colonization of Palestine and its wars of aggression against progressive governments and movements in the region. Washington supported Israel’s military intervention in Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 that oversaw the terrible massacre of Sabra and Shatila, destroyed progressive Palestinian and Lebanese forces, and installed a friendly regime in Beirut.

Israel’s victories against Arab nationalist states and its intervention in Lebanon led to the retreat of radicalism in the region, isolating the PLO. This predicament led, in 1978, to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction adopting the two-state solution, a necessary step along the path to its signing off on the 1993 Oslo Accords.

In effect, this meant the surrender of the struggle for the liberation of historic Palestine, and the transformation of Fatah into the Palestinian Authority (PA), administering the occupied territories. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, who opposed the Oslo agreement, declared that it represented “a massive abandonment of principles, the main currents of Palestinian history, and national goals” and “relegated the diaspora Palestinians to permanent exile or refugee status.”

The U.S. and Israel have supported the PA controlling Palestinians in the West Bank as well as Gaza (before the latter was taken over by Hamas in 2007). The PA has been happy to serve as Washington and Tel Aviv’s cop. For example, during the recent uprising, the PA arrested more than 20 activists for their social media posts and leadership of protests. More recently, Nizar Banat, a leading Palestinian activist and critic of the PA, was killed in a raid by its security forces on his home in Dura in Hebron.

With the PA functioning as a quisling regime, the U.S. has promoted Israel’s political and economic integration with states in the region, most recently through the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords. This normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab states further isolates the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Newly elected president Joe Biden has reaffirmed Washington’s unflinching support for Israel, whatever its crimes against Palestinians. In the midst of its most recent bombing of Gaza, a sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel passed Congress and the billions in annual aid will continue to pour in. The PA strategy of collaborating with the U.S. entails surrender to the occupier and its imperial sponsor.

The Weakness of the Palestinian Working Class

If strategies based on the region’s states and peace deals brokered by the U.S. are dead ends, what about an alternative orientation on the Palestinian working class? That too is foreclosed by Israel’s particular nature as a settler-colonial state.

Unlike apartheid South Africa, which relied on Black workers’ labor in its factories and mines, Israel has driven Palestinian workers out of any central role in its economy and replaced them with Jewish workers. As a result, Palestinian workers do not have the means to shut down the Israeli economy through strikes like Black workers did in South Africa.

That does not mean that the Palestinian resistance is powerless within the state of Israel and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The struggle of workers of other groups remains central to the movement.

The most recent wave of Palestinian struggle demonstrates its power as well as its potential to forge a new strategy to supplant the failed one of relying on support from the region’s regimes. New youth and feminist groups such as Tal’at as well as the working class have been at the heart of the recent resistance.

The workers’ general strike on May 18 was called and led from below. It shut down sections of the economy from Israel to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As Haaretz noted: “The Israel Builders Association observed that Palestinian workers had observed the strike, with only 150 of the 65,000 Palestinian construction workers coming to work in Israel. This paralyzed building sites, causing losses estimated at 130 million shekels (nearly $40 million).”

The character of the strike, while extremely important, should not be exaggerated. As Assaf Adiv, the director of the MAAN Workers Association — the only Israeli trade union that organizes Palestinians in the industrial zones of the West Bank settlements (from which Palestinian trade unions are barred)—noted the observance of the strike by Palestinians who work in Israel was in part “due to closure of the checkpoints and uncertainty on the roads of the West Bank.”

Regardless of the breadth of the participation in the strike, the Israeli economy was relatively unscathed, showing that the Palestinian working class and other social movements need solidarity from other workers, peasants, and oppressed peoples. The question is which ones should Palestinians orient on to win a secular democracy in historic Palestine.

The Israeli working class—not a strategic ally

The first and perhaps obvious strategic orientation would seem to be on the Israeli working class. But it has always placed loyalty to Israel over and above class solidarity with the Palestinian masses.

This is not just the result of ideological devotion but material interest in the Israeli state, which provides Israeli workers with homes stolen from Palestinians as well as inflated standards of living. The Israeli ruling class and state thus integrate the Israeli working class as a collaborator in a common project of settler colonialism.

Its working class institutions such as its union, the Histadrut, have played a central role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Labor Zionist leaders established the Histadrut in 1920 as an exclusively Jewish union and used it to spearhead the displacement of Palestinian workers.

Its slogan “Jewish land, Jewish work, Jewish product” neatly summarizes its ethnonationalist class-collaborationist project and underlines how fundamentally hostile it is to solidarity with Palestinians. Applying these slogans during and after the founding of Israel, it has helped ensure that land was only leased to Jews; farms and industries hired only Jews; and Palestinian farms and industries were boycotted.

On top of that, the Israeli state has militarized the incorporation of Israeli workers through mandatory conscription. This compels them to participate in the repression of Palestinians, enforce the occupation, and defend Zionist settlers’ theft of Palestinian homes and land.

Given this incorporation into the colonial project, it should come as no surprise that, with few exceptions, workers supported the most recent assault on Gaza. In just one example among many, the union of the Israeli Electric Corp (IEC) went so far as to declare that it would not repair power lines to the Gaza Strip until two Israeli soldiers and a missing Israeli civilian were returned.

Does this mean that Palestinians should not seek collaboration with progressive sectors of the Israeli working class? Of course not. Examples of small-scale solidarity exist, but they are rare.

It is hard to imagine these becoming a counter to the overwhelming pattern of ethnonationalist unity of Israeli workers with the Zionist state. A strategy focused on trying to build working class unity against Zionism between Israeli and Palestinian workers is thus unrealistic.

The regional revolutionary strategy

The key to developing a better strategy for liberation is putting Palestine in the regional context. Because Palestinian refugees in their millions are integrated in the Middle East and to a lesser extent in North Africa, their national and class struggle is necessarily intertwined with that of the region’s masses.

Those workers and peasants remember their forebearers’ fight against colonialism, confront imperialist powers that support the regimes that oppress them, identify with the struggle of the Palestinians, and therefore see their own battle for democracy and equality as bound up with its victory. That’s why there is a dialectical relationship between the struggles; when Palestinians fight it triggers the regional movement for liberation, and the regional movement feeds back into the one in occupied Palestine.

Their united revolt has the power to transform the entire region, overthrowing the regimes, expelling the imperialist powers, ending both forces’ support for the state of Israel, weakening it in the process, and proving to Israeli workers that the regional transformation can end their exploitation. Far-right minister Avigdor Lieberman admitted the danger posed to Israel by the Arab Spring in 2011 when he declared that the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak and opened the door to democracy was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.

The power and potential of this regional strategy has been repeatedly demonstrated. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Palestinian movement spurred a rise in class struggle throughout the region. In 2000, the Second Intifada opened a new era of resistance, inspiring a wave of organizing that would eventually explode in 2011 with revolutions from Tunisia to Egypt to Syria.

In the summer of 2019, Palestinians in Lebanon organized massive demonstrations for weeks in refugee camps against the Labor Ministry’s decision to treat them as foreigners, an act they considered to be a form of discrimination and racism against them. Their resistance helped inspire the broader Lebanese uprising in October 2019, which in turn has led to the popular uprisings in Iraq.

To implement a strategy based on this regional solidarity, Palestinian groups and movements must abandon the policy embraced by the PA, Hamas, and most of the left of non-intervention in the affairs of countries in the region. Such non-intervention was the precondition of getting aid from various regimes. Accepting that policy means cutting Palestinians off from the social forces that can help them win liberation.

Instead, the Palestinian struggle must recover the regional revolutionary strategy that was pursued by leftists in the 1960s. Unfortunately, most abandoned this strategy to tail the PLO in allying with the region’s reactionary states.

The strategy of regional revolution based on class struggle from below is the only way to win liberation from Israel to Saudi Arabia and Syria as well as their imperialist backers from the U.S. to China and Russia. In that fight, Palestinians and those in other countries must embrace the demands of all those that suffer national oppression like the Kurds and others who suffer other forms of ethnic, sectarian, and social oppression.

Now is the time to resurrect the regional strategy. The whole of the Middle East and North Africa is in a long-term revolutionary process rooted in the masses’ blocked political and economic aspirations. There have already been two waves of uprisings, the first in 2011 that rocked the whole region and a second in 2018 and 2019 that swept through Sudan, Lebanon, Algeria, and Iraq.

With none of the popular grievances won, no doubt a third wave is on its way. And Palestine can and must be at the center of this next wave in a fight to liberate it and the entire region.

Palestine in the revolutionary process

Only through this regional revolutionary strategy can we envision the establishment of a democratic, socialist, and secular state in historic Palestine with equal rights for both Palestinian and Jewish people within a socialist federation throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In the new Palestinian state, all Palestinians would have the right to return to their land and homes from which they were forcibly displaced in 1948, 1967, and after. In addition to this, the liberation of Palestine must also include a global project of economic development and reconstruction to guarantee Palestinians their social and economic rights.

To implement this strategy, Palestinians must forge a new political leadership committed to self-organization from below within historic Palestine and the region. They cannot do that alone but must do so through collaboration with socialists from Egypt to Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Algeria, and all the other countries.

The most important task for those outside the region is to win the left, unions, progressive groups, and movements to support the campaign for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. Forcing this on institutions and corporations in the imperialist powers, especially the U.S., will help block their support for Israel and other despotic regimes and weaken their hold in the region.

The liberation of Palestine thus passes through the liberation of all the peoples living under tyrants in Damascus, Riyadh, Doha, Tehran, Ankara, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Amman, and all the others. As a Syrian revolutionary wrote from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights in the summer of 2014, “freedom—a common destiny for Gaza, Yarmouk and the Golan.” This slogan holds out the hope of regional revolutionary transformation, the only realistic strategy for liberation.

*I would like to thank Ashley Smith and Sai Englert for their help in the writing of the article.

Further reading

“Secular democracy and the future of Palestine,” by Haidar Eid, January 28, 2022  https://mondoweiss.net/2022/01/secular-democracy-and-the-future-of-palestine/

“A Secular Democratic State in Historic Palestine: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?” by Ghada Karmi http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=1690&CategoryId=8

One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel       by Ghada Karmi  One State (plutobooks.com)

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza (I)

Gaza: between a second chapter of the Nakba and the revival of the Oslo fiction

BY GILBERT ACHCAR

October 20, 2023

There are forecasts that one hopes will be belied by reality. What we forecasted on these pages a week ago (“The ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ Threatens to Sweep Gaza Away”, Al-Quds al-Arabi, 10 Oct. 2023) on the fourth day of the new Gaza war, is one such instance. Here is what we foresaw:

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist right has been dreaming of completing the Nakba of 1948 with a new mass expulsion of Palestinians from the whole of Palestine between the sea and the river, including the Gaza Strip. There is no doubt that they now see what happened last Saturday as a shock that will allow them to drag the rest of Zionist society behind them in implementing their dream in the Gaza Strip first, while awaiting the opportunity to implement it in the West Bank. The gravity of what befell Israel last Saturday can reduce the deterrent role of Hamas’s holding of hostages, unlike what happened in previous rounds of confrontation between the movement and the Zionist state. It is very likely that the latter this time will not be satisfied with anything less than a destruction of the Gaza Strip to an extent that exceeds anything we have seen to date, in order to reoccupy it at the lowest possible Israeli human cost and provoke the displacement of most of its residents to Egyptian territory, all under the pretext of completely eradicating Hamas. It is to be greatly feared therefore that the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ will eventually sweep away the entire Gaza Strip, just as the natural flood swept away the Libyan city of Derna a month ago, but on a much larger scale.

Unfortunately, the spectacle of Gaza’s destruction has already began to outweigh that of what the natural flood swept away in Derna. What is yet more serious than the destruction of buildings is that the new massacre that the Zionist occupation army has begun to carry out in Gaza has already exceeded in size the largest previous massacres that befell the people of Palestine, while the Israeli aggression is still at its beginning, and the number of displaced people inside the Gaza Strip has now exceeded the number of those who were displaced during the 1948 Nakba. The Zionist army is truly destroying the Gaza Strip to an extent that exceeds anything we have seen to date.

This is because it is an army keen on keeping its human losses low, which is what thwarted its attempt to invade Beirut in August 1982. Ariel Sharon ordered his troops to storm the besieged Lebanese capital then and they were forced to stop the operation after realizing that they would incur heavy losses because of the difficulty of penetrating into built-up areas, where it is easy for resistance fighters to hide and surprise the enemy. The lesson was confirmed when the Zionist army launched a ground attack on Gaza in 2009. The Zionist army was not going to repeat the experience, therefore. Instead, it is using its overwhelming superiority in destructive power to flatten built-up areas as a prelude to storming them.

Destruction on a similar scale was not possible in Beirut 1982, nor in Gaza 2009 due to the absence of favourable political conditions (in 1982, Israel was subjected to great international pressure and its society was deeply divided over the invasion of Lebanon led by the duo of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon). Today, the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation—which included acts of killing committed against unarmed men and women in numbers that exceeded anything Israel had ever known before, acts that were exploited to the fullest extent by the global pro-Israel media—provided Israel with a golden opportunity to proceed with the implementation of a new chapter of the Nakba, just as Al-Qaeda’s attacks in 2001 provided the US administration of George W. Bush with a golden opportunity to realize its members’ long-held project to occupy Iraq (they agreed to start with Afghanistan after some of them insisted that starting with Iraq might be difficult to sell to the public opinion).

The massive destruction inflicted on Gaza is not limited to military considerations this time. It serves an additional goal, which is the displacement of the Strip’s population. We have become accustomed to the Zionist army’s excuse that it did warn civilians and that Hamas is responsible for their deaths because it is based in the middle of built-up, populated areas (as if it were possible for Hamas to be based outside these places without being immediately destroyed by Israeli bombing!). However, this time the call on the people to flee is not like what was witnessed in previous rounds of aggression against the Gaza Strip but falls rather transparently into the project of displacing most of Gaza’s population, in the same way as eighty percent of the Palestinians living in the lands seized by the Zionist state in 1948 were displaced out of them.

Completing what was begun in that fateful year is a dream that has haunted the Zionist far right since the Nakba. This far right, of which the Likud Party is the legitimate heir, blamed David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues in the mainstream Zionist movement of that time for having accepted a ceasefire before completing the occupation of all the land of Palestine between the sea and the river. It is worth remembering that it was that same political movement that carried out the Deir Yassin massacre, the most famous of the atrocities that accompanied the Zionist takeover of Palestine and caused the displacement of its population.

The Zionist far right remained determined to achieve its “Greater Israel” project. Thus, Sharon faced strong opposition within Likud in 2005 when he was both leader of the party and Israeli prime minister and decided to evacuate Gaza (“unilateral disengagement plan”) to satisfy the military’s desire to get rid of the burden of controlling the Strip from within. Sharon’s priority was indeed to consolidate Israel’s control of most of the West Bank and formally annex these territories at first political opportunity, while keeping Gaza and Areas A and B stipulated in the Oslo II Agreement under the control of the Palestinian Authority so as to liquidate the Palestinian cause under the pretext of granting the Palestinians an entity of their own (even if under tight Israeli supervision).

Benjamin Netanyahu led the campaign against Sharon within Likud and went so far as to resign from the cabinet in protest against the withdrawal from Gaza. Sharon soon left Likud to establish another party, and Netanyahu replaced him at the helm of the party, which he continues to lead to this day. He saw in the “Al-Aqsa Flood” not only an opportunity to divert the attention of the Israeli opposition from him and achieve a Zionist revengeful unity against the people of Gaza, but also a golden opportunity to reoccupy the Gaza Strip, while emptying it of most of its people this time, as in the 1948 Nakba. Netanyahu, who brandished a map showing “Greater Israel” at the UN General Assembly less than a month ago, clearly wants to displace most of Gaza’s people to Sinai, beyond the border with Egypt. For this, he hopes that the United States will be able to convince the Egyptian regime to take them in.

On the other hand, Washington hopes that the Zionist army will “content itself” with eradicating Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) from the Gaza Strip in order to then hand over its administration to the Ramallah Authority, thus reviving the Oslo fiction without a permanent displacement that would increase the amplitude of the Palestinian refugee issue. For, what Netanyahu aspires to would inflame the entire Arab region and cancel the “normalization” achieved between Israel and some of the Arab regimes, whereas Washington believes that what it advocates will allow the “normalization” process to move forward. Which of the two options will be achieved in the end will be determined by the speed with which the Zionist army can advance in seizing the Gaza Strip in the face of an international pressure that will escalate the more the spectacle of what is happening to Gaza’s people will overshadow the scenes of the “Al-Aqsa Flood”.

Translated from the Arabic original published in Al-Quds al-Arabi on 17 October 2023.

Source: Gilbert Achcar blog

We need to talk about Volodymyr

Ukraine, Palestine: Même Combat!

An excellent blog I follow by Irish socialist Tomás Ó Flatharta has published a guest post by Des Derwin, a supporter of Irish Left With Ukraine in Dublin. I think the comrade raises an important point that does indeed need to be addressed more explicitly by the international solidarity movement with Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion. I take the liberty to reproduce it. – Richard Fidler

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The international solidarity movement with Ukraine, together with the left within Ukraine, needs to begin having a conversation about Zelensky.

We are well aware of our political and class differences with Zelensky. They have been overlooked or put aside by the international solidarity movement, or at least left without emphasis, in the interests of supporting the defensive war effort of the Ukrainian nation. This effort is widely seen as being outstandingly led by Zelensky. I am reminded how a united left rhetorically backed Ho Chi Minh throughout the Vietnam War without the left of the left making too much of a fuss about some of his highly objectionable actions. Hence Zelensky's neoliberalism, his forelock-tugging of the West, his anti-worker legislation, his apparent tolerance for some manifestations of the far right in Ukraine, his new concession to property developers, etc., are not made an issue, except to offer solidarity to our socialist and trade union comrades in Ukraine who are fighting the anti-labour laws in particular.

However there is one area where I feel we – the international solidarity movement and the Ukrainian left – can no longer keep public silence about Zelensky. And that is Israel.

His obsequious and nauseating Twitter message of congratulations (above) to Netanyahu practically mirrored the one from the EU's Ursula Von der Leyen (below). Except for Von der Leyen's extra layer of hypocrisy in actually referring to Ukraine while representing a vigorous policy on Ukraine that should also be the policy on the occupying, invading, apartheid, terrorist state of Israel.

Standing as the leader of a nation, Ukraine, under massive assault by a criminal and internationally-condemned aggressor, Russia, while solidifying with the criminal and internationally-condemned aggressor, Israel, of another nation, Palestine, defies logic and mars the cause of a free Ukraine, stooping to declaring "common challenges" with Israel and achieving "victory over evil" (the oppressed poor of Palestine?!). But it also offers low-hanging fruit to Putinist, campist and evasionist propaganda. The most contemptible and immovable supporters of Russia in this war have published Zelensky's Twitter message of congratulation to Netanyahu. This at a time when the reportedly most rightwing Israeli government ever has stepped up its attacks, murders and occupations and passed even tougher apartheid laws.

The international left and the international solidarity movement cannot maintain silence on Zelensky's relations with the terrorist state of Israel. On a world scale the oppression of Palestine equates as an issue with the invasion of Ukraine. The values which impel us to support Ukraine and oppose Russia and Putinism are exactly the values which have led us to support Palestine and oppose Israel and Zionism. Furthermore every statement from Zelensky like his recent Twitter message to Netanyahu is a hostage to fortune and is thrown into our faces by the most rotten Putinist elements. Besides these nasty minnows, in places, like Ireland, we find ourselves in a decided minority on Ukraine in the organised radical left, while there is a substantial, honourable and long-standing movement of solidarity with Palestine, particularly again in Ireland as it happens. Each disgusting paean from Zelensky, and some other leading Ukrainians, to Israel damages our work in building solidarity for Ukraine - long damaged it seems among Palestinians by Zelensky’s identification with Israel and by Western hypocrisy on Ukraine and Palestine. And damages our work in combating the waves of pro-Russian propaganda, the outpourings of 'proxy war' dogmatism and evasion, and the deep-seated campism on the left which offers these viewpoints and talking points such fertile ground.

Last August, following Israeli news reports that Yevhen Korniichuk, the Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel, had tweeted support for Israel while it was attacking and killing Palestinians, the US based Ukrainian Socialist Solidarity Campaign published an open letter addressed to President Zelensky and sent to the Ukrainian Embassy. According to news reports, Korniichuk wrote in a tweet on August 7th, “As a Ukrainian, while our country is under brutal attack from a close neighbor – I feel great sympathy towards the Israeli public. Terror and malicious attacks towards citizens have become daily matter for Israelis and Ukrainians.”

The Ukrainian Socialist Solidarity Campaign wrote:

“We’re shocked to learn that your government supported the recent Israeli “pre-emptive” attack on Palestinians in Gaza.…We are dismayed and angry that your government would talk about Palestinian “terrorism” when it was Israel that is killing Palestinians and smashing up Gaza, just as Russia is killing Ukrainians and smashing up parts of Ukraine.

“The situation for the Palestinian people has much in common with the Ukrainian people. In both cases a right wing reactionary regime is stealing land and territory from the people. In Israel-occupied Palestine the Israeli regime is steadily encroaching on the land of the Palestinian people in the West Bank as well as in Israel itself. In Ukraine, imperialist Russia is trying to annex thousands of square miles of Ukrainian land."

Similar and more widespread statements are needed again now. There is a need first of all to ask our comrades in Ukraine, such as Sotsialniy Rukh, to publish a strong condemnation (if they haven't done so already) of Zelensky's message to Netanyahu combined with a strong statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people. And for a similar statement, or statements, from as many of the Ukraine solidarity campaigns and organisations around the world as possible.

Dublin, 9th January 2023.

Omar Khadr’s Case A Black Stamp On Canada’s Human Rights Record

Guest column by Monia Mazigh

Introduction

Dr. Monia Mazigh was born and raised in Tunisia and immigrated to Canada in 1991. She speaks Arabic, French, and English fluently and holds a Ph.D. in finance from McGill University. Dr. Mazigh has worked at the University of Ottawa and taught at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia.  In 2004, she ran in the federal election as a candidate for the New Democratic Party, gaining the most votes for her riding in the history of the NDP.

Dr. Mazigh was catapulted onto the public stage in 2002 when her husband Maher Arar, was deported to Syria where he was tortured and held without charge for over a year.  During that time, Dr. Mazigh campaigned vigorously for her husband’s release and later fought to re-establish his reputation and sought reparations. In January 2007, after a lengthy inquiry, her husband finally received an apology from the Canadian government and was offered compensation for the “terrible ordeal” his family had suffered. Dr. Mazigh has since authored a book called Hope and Despair, published with McLellan and Stewart in 2008. The memoir documents her ordeal after her husband was arrested and how she campaigned to clear his name.  -- Richard Fidler

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Canada is in celebratory mood this year, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Confederation. The Canadian government has been funding cultural initiatives here and there to promote the diverse communities living together and to bring the multicultural aspect of Canada.

Internationally, Canada is portraying itself as an open country, accepting refugees from war ravaged countries like Syria. A sort of the antithesis of the American policies recently announced by U.S. President Trump to ban refugees. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau describes himself as a feminist, taking selfies with young Muslim girls in hijab. A sharp contrast with the previous prime minister, Stephen Harper, whodefunded the Ministry of Status of Women and dehumanized Muslim women by fomenting the niqab debate.

However, amidst this festive and open atmosphere, there is a dark cloud that keeps the rays of the sun from reaching everyone. The case of Omar Khadr is a black stamp on Canada’s human rights record.

Lawyer Dennis Edney (L), client Omar Khadr and Patricia Edney meet the media outside their house where Khadr stayed after being released on bail in Edmonton, Alta., May 7, 2015.

Omar Khadr was a child when he was imprisoned by the Americans in the military base of Bagram and later airlifted to Guantanamo Camp, where he was forcibly kept for over a decade. He was subject to physical and psychological abuses. He was betrayed by successive Canadian governments: Liberal and Conservative alike wanted him to stay in jail, far away from the public eye and TV cameras. No other western country dealt with its citizens detained in Guantanamo like Canada shamefully did.

Along these years, some prominent Canadian voices rose up to denounce the treatment of Omar Khadr, but they were not enough to deter the Paul Martin government, and later the Harper government, in refusing to call for the repatriation of Omar Khadr. In fact, then-prime minister Harper and his cabinet ministers kept justifying Omar Khadr’s incarceration by the fact that he was convicted in the killing of a U.S. paramedic. Needless to say, this conviction came as the result of a plea bargain Omar Khadr had made with his American jailors to gain his transfer out of the Guantanamo prison.

Even when Omar Khadr was returned to Canada after the insistence of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he was immediately imprisoned and kept there for three more years.

These days, the case of Omar Khadr has slipped under the radar. Even some human rights activists think that the return of Omar Khadr back home would mark the end of his tragic story. But it wouldn’t. Omar Khadr never received any apology for the treatment he was subjected to in Guantanamo.

For instance, in 2008, Canadians officials flew to Guantanamo specifically to interrogate him and were never interested in his well-being. They offered to buy him a burger and some treats to get information out of him. When he understood that they were there for their own professional interests and not for helping him, Omar Khadr, became uncooperative with them. The Canadian officials pushed him to say what he clearly didn’t know. This behaviour is reprehensible and should be denounced. Unfortunately, Canada never distanced itself from the actions of its officials despite the reprimand of the Supreme Court ruling declaring that Omar Khadr’s rights were violated under the Charter of Rights.

Dennis Edney, the Canadian legal counsel for Omar Khadr, has been a hero in defending his client. Not only did he defend Omar Khadr under difficult circumstances, but he also accepted him in his home and protected him as one of his own children. Recognizing the work accomplished by Dennis Edney on behalf of Omar Khadr should be celebrated by all Canadians and not fought or hidden.

Recently, Omar Khadr had to undertake a 19-hour-long surgery on his shoulder as a result of bullet wounds he suffered when he was shot in the back by the U.S. military. This serious surgery will undeniably delay Omar Khadr’s efforts to progress in his studies and life.

Omar Khadr was stripped of his rights as a child, as a teenager and later as an adult. Today, he is trying hard to put his life back on track and get the education that was denied to him all these past years. As long as Omar Khadr file is still lingering, Canada won’t be able to hide its dark face and celebrate its record on the world scene. It is time for the Canadian government to act swiftly and let the sun shine on Omar Khadr’s life.

This article was published on the Huffingtonpost:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/monia-mazigh/omar-khadr-canada_b_15948786.html