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.

Ukraine ‘peace summit’ falters amidst growing international disunity

Russian and Ukrainian socialists issue joint appeal for solidarity, social and ecological reconstruction of Ukraine

 A peace conference initiated by Ukraine and hosted by Switzerland met June 15-16 with the participation of 57 heads of state and government, including Canada. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy had hoped the meeting would rally support for his 10-point peace plan released in October 2022, six months after the outset of Russia’s full-scale armed invasion of Ukraine and its subsequent occupation and annexation of about 20 percent of the country. However, the joint communiqué issued at its conclusion expressed “a common vision” on only three aspects: nuclear safety, global food security, and complete exchange of all prisoners of war and return to Ukraine of all Ukrainian civilians, including children, unlawfully detained or displaced by Russia.

The adopted text reiterated support for UN resolutions[1] affirming “the principles of sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all states, including Ukraine, within their internationally recognized borders, including territorial waters, and the resolution of disputes through peaceful means as principles of international law.” However, it failed to commit the participating governments to any substantial program of economic reconstruction assistance to Ukraine, let alone cancellation of its enormous international public debt. Moreover, several countries from the expanded BRICS alliance – led by Brazil, India, and South Africa – abstained. China refused to attend the conference and Russia, of course, was not invited.

Russian president Vladimir Putin sought to refocus international attention on Russia’s absence from the summit through a statement June 14 reaffirming Russia’s supposed “willingness to negotiate” -- on terms tantamount to Ukraine’s capitulation. And Zelensky alleged that China had sought to persuade some countries not to attend. Such is “multipolarity” in today’s global context.

Socialists in Ukraine, Russia and Switzerland sought to supplement the ambitions of the official peace conference from an alternative internationalist perspective based on solidarity and oriented toward a radical social and ecological transformation in Europe as a whole. They drafted a joint declaration in support of Ukrainian self-determination and in favour of the democratic overthrow of the Putin regime. The declaration, with its 12 principles for a just peace in Ukraine, is reproduced below. As its authors indicated, its purpose is to “stimulate comprehensive discussions on national self-determination, inter-imperialist rivalry, geopolitical bloc thinking, rearmament, anti-imperialist and ecosocialist strategies and in general emancipatory working-class mobilizations, particularly with progressive social movements such as the feminist movement, the environmental movement, migration solidarity and trade unions.”

They started this discussion with an online conference on June 15, at which speakers from the launching organizations presented the major content and goal of the declaration and suggested ideas for further political discussion and collaboration. A dominant theme of this discussion, which I attended, was the need for the international Left to develop a comprehensive alternative ecosocialist strategy to capitalist multipolarity and imperialist rivalry. More than one participant noted the importance of the agreement just reached by France’s left parties, hastily assembled as a “New Popular Front,” to contest the snap legislative elections called by Macron around a program that included as a “common denominator” the pledge to “defend steadfastly Ukrainian sovereignty through the delivery of needed weapons.”

-- Richard Fidler

 * * *

 Ukraine: A People's Peace, not an Imperial Peace

 Joint declaration by ecosocialist, anarchist, feminist, environmental organisations, and groups in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and for a self-determined social and ecological reconstruction of Ukraine

The Swiss government will hold an international conference for a peace process in Ukraine on 15 and 16 June 2024 on the mountain Bürgenstock, close to Lucerne. The Ukrainian government supports this conference.

 his conference is taking place in a decisive phase of the war. For months, the Russian invasion forces have been hitting gaps in the Ukrainian defences and pushing them back, with heavy losses of their own. The Russian leadership has announced a major offensive and is attacking the people in Kharkiv, a city of millions.

We support all steps towards a peace that enables the Ukrainian people to rebuild the country in a self-determined manner. Peace requires the complete withdrawal of the Russian occupying forces from the entire territory of Ukraine. With this in mind, we hope that the peace conference in Switzerland will contribute to the restoration of Ukraine's sovereignty.

The conditions for this are extremely difficult. The representatives of the Putin regime regularly declare that they do not recognise an independent Ukraine and deny the existence of the Ukrainian people. The Putin regime purses a Great Russian project, subjugates the people in the occupied territories with terror and aims to eradicate the Ukrainian culture. The ruling regime in Russia regularly commits war crimes against the Ukraine population. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched on 24 February 2022, not only calls Ukraine's independence into question. It also encourages other authoritarian regimes to threaten neighbouring populations, occupy territories and massively expel people. In order to avoid resistance at home, the Russian army is now also recruiting people from neighbouring countries and the Global South to serve as cannon fodder.

Due to the massive – and surprising – resistance of the Ukrainian population, the governments of Europe and North America began to support the Ukrainian army in its defence against the Russian occupying forces. However, they are backing Ukraine to assert their own interests in the global imperialist rivalry. The US aim to weaken its Russian counterpart while showing strength against rising China and setting the pace for the European powers which are both partners and rivals. But despite the US Congress finally approving a comprehensive aid package for Ukraine on 20 April 2024, which had been blocked by the Republican Party for nine months, the support for Ukraine has always remained selective and insufficient.

Similarly, the economic sanctions that have been imposed by the EU and US governments against Russia and the exponents of the Putin regime are selective, inadequately targeted, and insufficient. They do not prevent Russia from continuing to export oil and gas, along with other strategically important raw materials, to fill its war chest. Some European countries have even significantly increased their imports of LNG from Russia since the start of the war. Others, such as Austria, obtain over 90% of their natural gas imports from Russia. The governments of these countries are forcing gas consumers to finance Putin’s war against the Ukrainian population.

The Swiss government, the host of the peace conference, has not only been giving tax breaks to Russian oligarchs for decades, it has also refused to confiscate the assets of these oligarchs since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. As a major hub of international commodities trading, Switzerland has offered Russian capital excellent opportunities to acquire wealth for many years. Many bourgeois politicians have gladly welcomed these businesses in Switzerland. Through the sale of dual-use products, Switzerland contributes to equipping the Russian war machine. And finally, the Swiss financial sector facilitates the trade of Russian oil.

Both in the US and in Europe, there is a growing number of voices in the political and economic establishment who want to tie their support for Ukraine to certain conditions. They aim to pressure Ukraine to cede large territories and several million people to the Putin regime. Such a peace, enforced by major imperial powers, would strengthen the Putin regime and fail to provide a basis for a lasting democratic reconstruction of Ukraine.

We need a peace that is based on, as well as supported by, the interests of the people and of workers in Ukraine and Russia. Such a perspective can only succeed if trade unions, women’s organisations, environmental initiatives and various civil society organisations from both Ukraine and Russia play a leading role in the peace talks.

Occupation is a crime! We are guided by the principles of self-liberation, emancipation, and self-determination of working-class and all oppressed peoples beyond geopolitical considerations. In this sense, we also stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, who have been fighting for their self-determination for decades. Likewise, we support the Kurdish and Armenian peoples and all other peoples threatened by occupation, national and cultural oppression.

Based on our positioning, supporting the Ukrainian resistance against the Russian occupation, we want to contribute to developing a common European perspective for radical socioecological reforms and ultimately for an ecosocialist transformation of the entire European continent in global solidarity.

By submitting this declaration for discussion, we want to contribute to a transnational process of understanding and political clarification among those left-wing forces throughout Europe and beyond that share these important convictions.

 

12 Principles for a Just Peace in Ukraine in a Europe based on Solidarity and Ecology

We, the undersigned organisations and initiatives, want to promote a peace process that adheres to the following 12 principles.

1. Achieving a socially just and ecologically sustainable peace requires the unconditional and complete withdrawal of Russian occupying forces from Ukraine, returning the entire territory to its internationally recognized borders.

2. Russia is systematically destroying cities, infrastructure, and the environment to demoralise the population and trigger a large wave of refugees. Against this daily terror, we demand that the “Western” governments support Ukraine in protecting its population and infrastructure against the bombing and missile attacks of the Russian occupying power. We are in favour of massive humanitarian, economic and military support for Ukraine from the rich states in Europe. The Ukrainian population urgently needs protection from Russian bombs and rockets.

3. We oppose attempts by “Western” governments, NATO and EU exponents to pressure Ukraine into making massive concessions to the Russian occupying power. We oppose the idea that Ukraine must cede several million people to the Putin regime. It is only up to the Ukrainian people to decide how to confront this atrocious situation of ongoing and possibly increasing occupation. We support the armed and unarmed resistance of Ukrainians against the Russian occupying power.

4. We demand that all Russians who refuse military service be granted secure residence status in the countries of Europe and North America. Mass desertion is important to weaken the Russian war machine.

5. We support the political struggle of Ukrainian trade unions, women’s organisations, and environmental initiatives against the neoliberal anti-labour policies of the government under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. These policies undermine Ukraine’s socially broad-based defence against Russian occupation and render a socially just and ecologically sustainable reconstruction impossible.

6. We stand in solidarity with the anti-war movement, democratic opposition, and independent labour struggles in Russia. We also stand in solidarity with the oppressed nationalities in Russia who suffer particularly badly from the war and fight for their self-determination. It is their youth that is being exploited as cannon fodder by the Putin regime. These movements are a key factor for achieving a just peace and a democratic Russia.

7. Russia has imprisoned numerous people from Ukraine as political prisoners. Many have been sentenced to decades in prison and penal camps. We demand their unconditional release. We demand that the International Red Cross be allowed to maintain regular contact with all prisoners of war. The exchange and release of prisoners of war is a prerequisite for any just peace.

8. Russia must pay reparations to the Ukrainian people. The oligarchs of Russia and Ukraine must be expropriated. Their assets must be made available to the reconstruction of Ukraine and, once the Putin regime falls to the democratic development of Russia.

9. We demand that the “Western” governments immediately cancel Ukraine's debts. This is a crucial condition for the sovereign reconstruction of the country. The rich states of Europe and North America must set up comprehensive and broad-based support programmes for the Ukrainian people and the reconstruction of the country. This reconstruction must take place under the democratic control of the population, trade unions, environmental initiatives, feminist organisations and organized neighbourhoods in the cities and villages.

10. We oppose all projects of the European and Northern American governments, as well as international organisations, to impose a neoliberal economic agenda on the Ukrainian people. This would prolong and deepen poverty and suffering. We also denounce all efforts to sell off the property and assets of the Ukrainian population to foreign corporations. The recovery and reorganisation of agriculture, industry, energy systems and the entire social infrastructure must serve the socio-ecological transformation of Ukraine, not the supply of cheap labour, grain and hydrogen to Western European countries.

11. An effective military support of Ukraine does not require a new wave of armaments. We oppose NATO’s rearmament programmes and weapon exports to third countries. Instead, the countries of Europe and North America must provide the weapons from their existing, huge arsenals that will help Ukraine to defend itself effectively. In this sense, we demand that the arms industry should not serve the profit interests of capital – to the contrary, we want to work towards the social appropriation of the arms industry. This industry should serve the immediate interests of Ukraine. At the same time, for social and urgent ecological reasons, we underline the imperative of democratically converting the arms industry into socially useful production on a global scale.

12. We want to initiate a debate on a radical reorganisation of Europe. We want to contribute to developing a common European perspective for radical socio-ecological reforms, and ultimately for a fundamental ecosocialist transformation of the entire European continent in global solidarity. Within this framework, we support the will of the Ukrainian people to join the EU, even though we reject the EU’s neoliberal foundations that impoverish millions of people and promote unequal development in Europe. We take the perspective of an accession of several countries in Eastern Europe and South-East Europe as an opportunity to reflect together on how such a radical socio-ecological change can be initiated throughout Europe, including a common energy strategy, ecological industrial conversion, pay-as-you-go unfunded pension systems, social labour regulation, solidarity-based migration policy, interregional transfer payments, and military security along with the conversion of the armaments industry. Trade union, feminist, ecological, anti-authoritarian left and socialist forces in Eastern Europe should play an important role in this debate.

This declaration has been launched jointly by Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) in Ukraine, Posle Media Collective in Russia, Bewegung für den Sozialismus / Movement for socialism and solidarity in Switzerland. 

We invite all interested organisations, groups, initiatives, media collectives and individuals to circulate and sign this declaration by 30 June. Please send confirmation of your signing to: Joao_Woyzeck@proton.me and redaktion@emanzipation.org  Individuals, please, sign here: https://forms.gle/EAPYSoJCHpWq4bHR6

 For an initial list of organizations and individuals who have signed the declaration, see https://emanzipation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024_06_15_Ukraine_Peoples_Peace_Endorsements_Organisations_Individuals.pdf.

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[1] Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 2 March 2022, ES-11/1. Aggression against Ukraine; and Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 23 February 2023, ES-11/6. Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.

[2] Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 2 March 2022, ES-11/1. Aggression against Ukraine; and Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 23 February 2023, ES-11/6. Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.

Fighting Climate Change – Beyond Canada’s Carbon Tax

Free Transit Ottawa (FTO) organized a public meeting on March 18 on the theme “Fighting Climate Change: Beyond the Carbon Tax.”

The event was cosponsored by a range of local climate-justice movements: Ecology Ottawa, Horizon Ottawa, Justice for Workers, Fridays for Future and CAWI (City for All Women Initiative).

Speakers on the introductory panel were Emma Bider of Climate Justice Ottawa, Angella MacEwan of CUPE and the Green Economy Network, and myself representing Free Transit Ottawa.

The following text is based on my remarks. – Richard Fidler

* * *

Climate change is the most visible, most threatening expression of a larger, planetary ecological crisis, the result of a fossil-fueled economic system with its pursuit of endless growth which ensures that the exploitation of natural resources (both renewable and non-renewable) exceeds the carrying capacity of nature.

Our approach must be commensurate with the structural challenge that crisis poses to the way society is organized if we are to halt and reverse the ecological catastrophe toward which we are now hurtling – and which is fueled by our dependency on fossil fuels.

Globally, we are still fighting even to win recognition of the need to end fossil fuel dependency. The major achievement of the recent COP 28 conference – the 28^th annual meeting of the UN conference parties since the Kyoto conference in the mid-1990s – was, for the first time, a consensus agreement that we must “transition away” from fossil fuels if we are to attain the international goal of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.

Is this happening? The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in a recent study,[1] reports that half of the oil consumed by humans has been burned in the past 27 years; half of the gas in the past 21 years; and half of the coal in the past 37 years. As a result, half of the world’s 1.77 trillion tonnes of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions have been released in the past 30 years. Fourteen per cent have been emitted since the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015.

To date, renewable energies like wind, solar or thermal, have not made much of a dent in energy consumption or per capita fossil fuel use. Renewables have “only served to increase overall energy consumption.” In 2022 fossil fuels still accounted for 82.9 per cent of total world energy consumption.

But emissions from carbon production and use are destroying the global climate. So we have to find and develop renewable and substitute sources of energy. And, equally if not more important, find ways to eliminate much inefficient and socially undesirable consumption of energy. And adapt our societies to be less reliant on the market forces that drive production and consumption under our fossil-fueled capitalism, with their attendant growing social inequality and deterioration of public services.

Where is Canada in all this?

Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. More than half of its production is exported. Canada gets 90.8 per cent of its primary energy production from fossil fuels (54 per cent from oil, 31 per cent from natural gas, six per cent from coal). The remainder comes from hydro, nuclear and renewables sources.

The federal government’s Emissions Reduction Plan, the latest iteration of its Pan-Canadian Framework on Green Growth and Climate Change, promises to reduce emissions by 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030 – and to net zero by 2050.

The Plan includes a forthcoming cap on oil and gas emissions; a green buildings strategy; and the creation of clean renewable electricity grids. But it also features promotion of electric vehicles (mainly cars) and extensive funding of new (and so far undiscovered or unproven) technology such as carbon capture and storage or direct air capture, allegedly to “offset” continued extraction of oil and gas.

And then there are the new pipelines and liquified natural gas (LNG) plants, built to export Canada’s increasing fossil-fuel extraction for many years to come. [Consumption of exported gas is not included in Canada’s emissions statistics.] The government-owned TMX pipeline project has cost some $35 billion to date. The LNG plant in Prince Rupert, fed by the controversial Northern Gateway gas pipeline, has cost $40 billion to build. Four more LNG plants are in the works.

Much of the federal Plan is left to the provinces and private business to implement, with dubious results. In Ontario, Ford ended a slew of renewable energy projects and is increasing the province’s reliance on natural gas. Alberta’s Smith has sharply curtailed renewable energy projects. British Columbia’s NDP government is pursuing LNG expansion and overseeing a dramatic ramp-up in natural gas fracking. In Newfoundland and Labrador, oil and gas now account for about 25% of the province’s gross domestic product, and the province aims to double oil production.

Still central to the federal Plan is the carbon tax or its counterpart in B.C. and Quebec, cap-and-trade. “Putting a price on pollution,” says the Plan, “is widely recognized as the most efficient means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Producers and consumers alike are subject to periodic graduated carbon price payments in the hope that, through market forces, increased costs will promote more climate-friendly expenditures.

However, we need to be clear. Regulating emissions is an alternative to planning and quantifying the needed cutbacks in fossil fuel extraction and development. As many critics have noted, carbon pricing doesn’t even regulate emissions, it just puts a price on them based on an arbitrary calculation, the “social cost of carbon,” that tends to ignore the “externalities” — the cumulative emissions, feedback loops, and (in the case of carbon trading credits) the disproportionate impacts of climate change on countries in the Global South. For business, carbon pricing is just a cost of doing business. And it will always be limited to ensure that Canadian businesses are not disadvantaged by competitors’ prices and to avoid economic disruption that would motivate greater market intervention.

For consumers, however, carbon pricing tends to download moral and financial responsibility on households that burn fossil fuels for heating or transportation. The feds have tried to offset public resentment over the tax through rebates for 80% of consumers. And, more recently, public opposition has forced them to exempt Maritimers from the tax on home heating oil, and to remove the tax from farm fuels. Yet the government still insists that carbon pricing will reduce Canada’s carbon emissions by up to one-third by 2030.

Clearly, the overall objective of Canada’s official climate plan is to retain fossil fuels as Canada’s primary energy source for as long as possible, using market-based “offsets” and carbon trading to achieve “net zero.” Not surprisingly, many Canadians are resentful at moves to make them help pay for these anti-ecological and antisocial policies and programs.

What’s the alternative?

In his recent book A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, [2] Seth Klein argues convincingly that we need a radically different approach. He contrasts Canada’s listless response to today’s climate crisis with the massive mobilization the country experienced in WWII. That included adoption of an emergency mindset, mandatory measures, a reconfiguration of industrial production (e.g. jeeps and tanks, not cars) and above all no reliance on market forces; real planning, nationalizations (about 50 Crown corporations), and spending what it took to win.

A comparable mobilization is needed now, Klein urges. It would start with a national needs inventory as the basis for coordinating mass production of the equipment needed to realize our new GHG reduction targets. New factories would be built, as needed, to produce solar panels, wind turbines, electric heat pumps and electric busses at a mass scale. (The technology already exists.) A clear wind-down pathway would be adopted for all fossil fuel extraction in Canada, guided by a robust just transition plan for existing fossil fuel workers and communities that currently rely on these industries.

Along with a ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure, we need to develop a massive green public infrastructure plan, involving all levels of government. Billions of dollars would be invested in renewable energy, building retrofits, high-speed rail and expansion and electrification of cross-country railways, mass public transit, along with electric vehicle charging stations and methane capture from farms and landfills.

And because even under the best-case scenario a certain amount of global warming is already locked-in, Klein reminds us, we also now need to undertake major investments in climate adaptation and resilience infrastructure, with a focus on ensuring that vulnerable communities are better protected from climate disasters and related events (forest fires, extreme heat events, flooding, etc.). We also need to significantly invest in forest management that will lessen wildfire risks to rural and Indigenous communities, while providing thousands of sustainable jobs in resource-based communities. We need a large-scale program to repair and enhance Canada’s natural climate sequestration systems — helping nature suck carbon from the atmosphere. That includes an extensive reforestation program, and of course the preservation of existing old-growth forests.

Klein then adds an important point. As advocates of a Green New Deal have emphasized, he says, “we need more than just direct climate infrastructure investments — we also need large-scale investments in social infrastructure and the caring economy.”

“That means investments from all levels of government in zero-carbon public and non-profit housing — a bold commitment to build hundreds of thousands of new units of non-market housing. And it means federal and provincial funding for universal, public, accessible, quality child care and home care for seniors and people with disabilities. These are public services that are already virtually carbon-free and would represent a major enhancement to household affordability.”[3]

Finally, we need to set in law and regulation clear dates by which certain things must happen. “Clear targets … — embedded in law and well publicized — will send a much stronger signal to the market than any form of carbon pricing. They communicate to businesses and consumers that they must reorient their plans accordingly. If effectively enforced, these targets will push manufactures, builders, installers and extraction companies to make investment plans that align with these dates.”

That said, I would note a few things Klein overlooks. His national perspective must be supplemented by an international dimension. This means solidarity with climate-justice struggles in the global South – the peoples who are primary victims of global warming – in opposition to unequal trade relations, super-exploitation of their labour, and the pillage of their natural resources by transnational capital, and for relief from illegitimate debts. It means collaboration with countries like China in developing global trade in alternative energy resources and technologies.

Indigenous people are prime targets of attempts to coerce or coopt them into “partnering” with corporations and governments in the capitalist exploitation of their lands and resources. Solidarity with their struggles for self-determination and autonomy is essential.

The transition is itself a source of supplementary emissions that must be offset if the carbon budget is not to explode. Yet we need to reduce global energy consumption, that is, reduce productive and/or transport activities. This means challenging the capitalist growth imperative.

Does this mean de-growth? Some production or services should not degrow but be suppressed, ASAP: coal facilities and mines, oil extraction, weapons production, the advertising industry, plastics, pesticides, etc. But others should grow – such as renewable energies, organic agriculture, and essential services (education, health and culture).

Overall, this points to the “system change” that our movements have counterposed to climate change. Strategy, programs oriented to satisfying social, community needs, not subordinate to profit motive. And that, if I may say so, is a huge difference from the analogy Klein makes with the World War II mobilization. Then, ruling elites united in leading the national war effort. That unity was in their class interest.

Today, we have no such cross-class unanimity. Instead, we face what some critics call a “regime of obstruction” based on a matrix of corporate and financial control of our political and economic processes, the news and other cultural media – its power centers a combination of Calgary-based petroleum interests and Toronto-based finance and banking.[4] It’s a structural problem. To resolve it, we need to build alliances, coalitions of workers, farmers, indigenous communities, racialized minorities, students, youth and poor against the entrenched fossil oligarchy. And link decarbonization with opposition to capitalist austerity.

A key challenge – Restructuring transportation

If we break down Canada’s GHG emissions by sector, more than half are in fossil fuel resource extraction (25%) and transportation (28%).[5] How might the alternative strategy outlined here work in transportation, a service that along with housing and healthcare is integrally important to the day-to-day experiences of the people in our local communities?

Topping Seth Klein’s list of measures to get our transportation sector to carbon-zero is (and I quote) “expanding public transit, including a plan to make public transit not only more accessible and convenient, but also dramatically more affordable (minimally, that means free public transit for lower-income people, but could well involve making transit a ‘free’ publicly paid service, just like health care).”[6]

That is what we in Free Transit Ottawa propose: making public transit accessible to all, at no user charge, just like public schools, most health care, fire services, bike paths and sidewalks. A radically improved public transit system, which would be a major step toward fighting poverty and social exclusion, would also be the biggest single measure we could take to combat climate change.

What about trucks and cars? Rail expansion could reduce much highway trucking, and urban trucking can be electrified. As for cars, the private vehicles that have shaped the design and culture of our cities for more than a century – contributing to urban sprawl, loss of greenspace, wetlands and agricultural land, higher costs and waste of time for daily commuters, etc. – it is necessary not only to put bans on the manufacture, sale and advertising of new fossil fuel-burning cars, but to replace them through expansion of electrified urban public transportation and inter-city rail.

That was the point made by the workers at GM’s auto plant in Oshawa, which the company closed in late 2019 after more than 100 years of operations. Green Jobs Oshawa, the campaign led by Unifor Local 222’s political action committee, called on the federal government to take over the plant as a publicly owned enterprise and convert it to electric vehicle manufacturing, with a focus on the production of vehicles for government truck fleets such as those of Canada Post – following through on the postal workers’ union proposal for making the post office a hub for electrification and local community banking and home services.[7]

Far from replacing cars, however, Ottawa and some provinces are simply planning to electrify them. They have already arranged to invest some $50 billion on the construction of three giant factories – two in Ontario, one in Quebec – to manufacture batteries for EVs. Critics question the need for such giant subsidies to the foreign companies in question when they might well invest in battery production without the subsidies. We might ask, as well: what if such sums had been spent on expanding and electrifying urban public transit? And what about the environmental cost of extracting the minerals needed to produce these batteries? Can we really hope to reduce carbon emissions through massive development of mining, among the most energy-consuming and polluting industries?

Finally, we must bear in mind that the campaign for free and improved public transit will face serious opposition from property developers who own large tracts of land on the edges of cities, the oil and auto industries, other business sectors that favour low taxes and limited government, and the politicians who represent them.

To achieve free and accessible public transit, we will have to build a movement powerful enough to overcome this opposition. That movement will be centred on those who are transit dependent as well as environmental activists, but must also include a wide range of working and professional people, including those in Ottawa who currently work for the public transit utility, OC Transpo.[8] To build it, we will need to engage in educational activities as well as struggles for immediate reforms that lower the cost of public transport and/or increase its accessibility – joining existing struggles and initiating new struggles.

Ultimately, we need a different kind of government with the political will to lead, coordinate and consolidate the transition, a government based on the support of the victims of climate change, not its perpetrators.

 

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[1] David Hughes, Getting to Net-Zero in Canada: Scale of the problem, government projections and daunting challenges (CCPA, February 2024).

[2] Seth Klein, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency (Toronto: 2020).

[3] Ibid., pp. 183-184.

[4] Shannon Daub, Gwendolyn Blue, Lise Rajewicz, and Zoë Yunker, “Episodes in the New Climate Denialism,” in William K. Carroll, Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy (AU Press, 2021), p. 226.

[5] Followed by industry (14%), electricity (11%), agriculture (9%), residential buildings (6%) and non-residential buildings (4%).

[6] A Good War, p. 187.

[7] Delivering Community Power, https://www.deliveringcommunitypower.ca/.

[8] The OC Transpo union, affiliated with the Amalgamated Transit Workers, has publicly supported the work of Free Transit Ottawa. The national union is sympathetic as well. “ATU Canada advocates for fares to be affordable for all, and advocates for progress toward creating a fare-free transit.” https://www.atucanada.ca/blog/free-public-transit-canada.

Ukraine: Ceasefire… or capitulation?

Last August, I published a critique of left responses in Canada to Russia’s assault on Ukraine: Canadian Left Responses to War in Ukraine – a Provisional Balance Sheet. I noted that progressive opinion in support of Ukraine’s defense of its territorial sovereignty and national self-determination tended to be stronger in Quebec than in English Canada. However, a notable exception was a broad pacifist collective, Échec à la Guerre. It “claims to oppose all imperialisms,” I wrote, “but has not rallied to defend Ukraine.”

Since then, Échec à la Guerre has, if anything, stepped up its campaign against solidarity with Ukraine. Articles by its leading spokespersons have been published in daily newspapers and often replicated on social media, including on-line solidarity websites. A recent “open letter” it published, to mark the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion, was also published on websites that have sought to rally support for Ukraine, among them the international solidarity site Alternatives, and the site Presse-toi à gauche (PTàG), which is sympathetic to Québec solidaire.

However, PTàG also published in the same issue a critical and much-needed response to the article, by Camille Popinot, addressed to many key issues that have been raised among the Western left as a result of the war. Notable is its appeal to the left-wing affiliates of Échec à la Guerre to disavow its position. Here is my translation of the article. – Richard Fidler.

Ceasefire or capitulation -

Views of the Ukrainian and Russian lefts

By CAMILLE POPINOT

The Quebec “center-left and pro-independence” newspaper Le Devoir has just published an open letter signed by five pacifists, who call for a “ceasefire and immediate negotiations” in Ukraine.

The letter itself would not be worth our attention had the authors not said they were signing “on behalf of” the Échec à la Guerre Collective.

In fact, the Collective brings together left-wing political parties (Québec Solidaire, Communist Party), numerous unions (CSN, FTQ, nurses, teachers, etc.), community groups and civil-rights defenders (FRAPRU, League of Rights and Freedoms, AQOCI, MEPACQ etc.) and religious organizations.[1] In short, it includes a good number of activists in Quebec who define themselves as left-wing, trade unionists, socialists, feminists, anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, post-colonialists, alter-globalists and even internationalists – and who see themselves associated, at least indirectly, with the content of this pacifist appeal.

Ceasefire or capitulation?

The letter in question is a poor caricature of the propaganda conveyed by Vladimir Putin: the war was provoked by the United States, the West, NATO, which “are conducting a real proxy war in Ukraine.” Russia, for its part, did everything it could to negotiate and avoid conflict but it had to defend its “great power” interests. And finally -- as “the war in Ukraine did not go according to the West’s plans,” as the economic sanctions have failed, as the “situation is developing to Russia’s advantage,” -- we must avoid its spiraling into a nuclear war. It is in the interest of the Ukrainians and of humanity to impose a “ceasefire” as quickly as possible. Of course the text does not tell us how, or what the implications might be, but it must be done and be “mutually acceptable” to the security interests of Ukraine and Russia. And there you have it, you just had to think about it and write it down.

Beyond a narrative worthy of George Orwell’s Newspeak -- where those who were thought to be the attacked become the aggressors, the victims the culprits, the victories the defeats, the imperialists the colonized etc. -- the primary goal of the letter is to end Canadian military support for Ukraine. It is indeed certain that if Ukraine no longer receives any support, then it will have no choice but to negotiate a ceasefire. And the sooner we stop supporting it, the sooner the ceasefire desired by the authors of the letter will be imposed. But will it be “mutually acceptable?”

And in fact, the only problem with the execution of this master plan is that the Ukrainians – and fortunately many other people – now think it is no longer a question of a ceasefire but of an all-out capitulation. And, regardless, notwithstanding the incantations of Quebec pacifists, the Ukrainians refuse to capitulate.

Should we listen to the Ukrainians or ignore them and defend the pacifism of Échec à la Guerre?

But the authors of the letter couldn’t care less about what Ukrainians think and want. It is indeed astonishing to see with what ease, shamefully, five pacifists (who certainly claim to be post-colonialists), well sheltered from the bombs, can claim to express themselves for and in the interest of the Ukrainians, without even taking the trouble to cite just one.

As if the Ukrainians could not speak, as if their demands were unknown, as if their opinion was in any case irrelevant in view of the global concerns of the five Quebec pacifists. Ukrainians are de facto infantilized, treated like children who have reacted impulsively, who must be calmed down and to whom it is necessary to explain, and if needed impose, what is good for them.

It’s true that they don’t listen much, not even to the learned advice of our five pacifists or Western and Russian capitalists. Instead of fleeing by taxi and calmly allowing themselves to be colonized, as Vladimir Putin but also all NATO members expected, they chose to resist and continue to resist despite everything, seeming to forget that confronting them is a nuclear power.

In short, if for the authors of the letter the opinion of the Ukrainians does not count, the Ukrainians on the other hand would do well to listen to them. This is an already well-documented concept and practice of “international solidarity.”

But why does the Ukrainian left refuse to capitulate?

But let’s imagine that, unlike the five pacifist missionaries, the associative members of the Collective consider it important to listen and take into account what the Ukrainians are demanding, like any internationalist worthy of the name. They can then easily obtain information in French thanks to the valuable work carried out by a group of several left-wing publishing houses (including Quebec ones) and the work of the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU/RESU).

Left-wing political parties, unions and Quebec community groups can then see in these thousands of documents that in many aspects, Ukrainian society is not very different from Quebec society; and that, like Quebec, it is a deeply divided society. There are fascists, racists, war profiteering capitalists, villainous and concealed multimillionaires, corrupt politicians, homophobic religious people, antisemites, Islamophobes, etc. And, as in Quebec, in the absence of a truly internationalist left, it is this trend that is on the rise.

But there are also many left-wing activists, anti-capitalists, feminists and anarchists who, in all conscience, have chosen to defend the right to independence, not only with weapons in their hands but also under the command of a bourgeois and patriarchal government, the only militarily viable solution according to them to avoid being colonized and disappearing. There are trade unionists who campaign against the scandalous reform of the Labor Code while providing continued support to the soldiers in the trenches. There are internationalist activists who, despite the state of emergency, take the time to send messages of solidarity to the Palestinians, to the French or British strikers. There are anti-capitalists who campaign against the neo-liberal reforms of Zelensky, the IMF and the World Bank, for the nationalization of the arms industry, the expropriation of the oligarchs. And there are activists who, at the risk of their lives, document the reality in the occupied territories, the theft of children, the pillaging of Mariupol and its region, rapid Russification, etc.

Still, in these precious documents, the members of the Collective will also be able to see that Ukrainians are also fighting for peace, a ceasefire and disarmament. The difference, however, is that they do not accept the conditions proposed by our five pacifists or Vladimir Putin. They keep repeating it: if Russia withdraws, there will be no more war. On the other hand, if Ukraine gives in, there is no more Ukraine.

Who will disarm and who will be disarmed?

In fact, when we confronted by the army of a leader who repeats to anyone who will listen that you do not exist and who has already shown the Chechens, the Syrians or the Georgians very clearly the conditions of lasting peace and disarmament according to him, we surely recall more clearly certain lessons from history: “the whole question is to know who will disarm and who will be disarmed.”

Consequently, today, what the members of the Collective will not find in these multiple documents from trade unionists, socialists, feminists, anti-capitalists, Ukrainian internationalists are calls to put an end to military support for the Ukrainian army, to oppose Ukraine’s entry into NATO or the European Union. These activists of the Ukrainian left say over and over: it is not with a light heart that they make these political choices; it’s a question of priorities, of survival.

What if the Russian left also wanted Putin’s military defeat?

Our five pacifists could also, still with a perspective of international solidarity, turn to Russian internationalist activists. It is true that it is much more difficult to get in touch with them but, thanks to the work of ENSU activists, we have in particular the declarations of the Russian Socialist Movement. And here is an extract from a recent press release, in the hope that the members of the Échec à la Guerre Collective will be encouraged to read it in its entirety:

Putin’s regime can no longer exit the state of war, as the only way to maintain its system is to escalate the international situation and intensify political repression within Russia.

That is why any negotiations with Putin now would bring, at best, a brief respite, not a genuine peace.

A victory for Russia would be evidence of the West’s weakness and openness to redrawing its spheres of influence, above all in the post-Soviet space. Moldova and the Baltic States could be the next victims of aggression. A defeat for the regime, on the other hand, would be tantamount to its collapse.

Only the Ukrainian people have the right to decide when and under what conditions to make peace. As long as Ukrainians show a will to resist and the Putin regime remains unchanged in its expansionist goals, any coercion of Ukraine into negotiations is a step towards an imperialist “deal” at the expense of Ukrainian independence.

That imperialist “peace deal” would mean a return to the practice of the “great powers” partitioning the rest of the world, that is, to the conditions that gave birth to the First and Second World Wars.

The main obstacle to peace is certainly not Zelensky’s “unwillingness to compromise,” nor is it Biden’s or Scholz’s “hawkishness”: it is Putin’s unwillingness to even discuss deoccupying the Ukrainian territories seized after February 24, 2022. And it is the aggressor, not the victim, who must be forced to negotiate.

It is obvious that this position, like that of the Ukrainian left summarized here, reflects only part and probably only a very small part of the opinions of the Russian or Ukrainian left. But these are the positions that we relay, that we have chosen to support, by citing our sources. Let the five Quebec pacifists do the same and tell us in whose name they speak and call for an “immediate ceasefire” in Ukraine.

While waiting for their sources, we share the opinion of the Russian Socialist Movement that, in the current context, what ultimately counts is the choice of the Ukrainian people and that “it is the aggressor, not the victim, who must be forced to negotiate.” The complete opposite of what the five Quebec pacifists have chosen to defend “on behalf of” a significant collective of Quebec workers.

We then hope that the associative members of the Échec à la Guerre Collective will make it known that they firmly condemn this despicable position which goes against the right to self-determination and all the basic principles of international working-class and feminist solidarity, of internationalism.

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[1] The members of the collective are listed here: https://echecalaguerre.org/le-collectif/membres/. – RF

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.

***

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.

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)