​A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Clauss is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation: 

​Santa:  I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight.
Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney.
Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace?
Santa: I've already told you…
(Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho... That was naughty.
Soviet Police: We found a list of names.
Santa: Ah my list.
Soviet Police: These are American spies?
Santa: No, no…
Soviet Police: There was also a second list.
Santa: Oh you don't want to be on that list.
Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people.
Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing...
Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets.
“Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.”
Soviet Police: This is clearly code.
Santa: No it's not code.
Soviet Police: Then who is Santa?
Santa: That's me.
Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas.
Santa: Yes, I'm known by very many names.
 Soviet Police:  So you are spy?... How do you know my children's names?... What are you doing in Russia?
Santa: Presents, I deliver presents.
Soviet Police: Presents? For who?
Santa: Well, to all the children in the world.
Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what?
Santa: Well, nothing.
Soviet Police: Nothing? So...You are communist?
Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade?
Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.”

​This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated.
​
Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice.

While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.”

Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.

The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.

But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can.

The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa. 

Author

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). ​

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​

After that day in May, when she was still in her 20’s, she knew the same thing she suspected when she looked out of the window of her former home and saw her parents working from sunrise to sunset at the plow when she was still very young: in the Cuba of “before” (before 1959), honest people, poor people, were not worth a penny.

She decided to work, to make her own home, never again to go through the humiliation of seeing herself and her small and sick children in the muddy streets of Jagüey. She sold slippers knitted by her own hands, cleaned and ironed the laundry of the wealthiest families in the area from Monday to Monday.

Years later, after paying the price of sugar at her neighborhood grocery store, she stood in front of the vendor waiting for her change. The man, with disdain, told Zoila how could she expect him to give her back a single cent, which was all that was left over from her purchase. Without saying much, she pointed to the white-columned house halfway down the block. “That house is mine, and I built it penny by penny,” she said without a muscle trembling in her face.

Homelessness was not the only painful experience my great-grandmother lived through. Her eldest daughter Mercedes died in her arms when she was only five years old, when they were returning on horseback from the only medical center within several kilometers.

The doctor who saw her, without much examination, told her that the girl’s fever was probably a cold and gave her a couple of pills to reduce it. Zoila was suspicious that it was just that, she had already heard about the diphtheria that plagued Jagüey, and feared the worst. “Don’t worry,” said the doctor, paying no attention to her concern, “with these pills she will feel better. Thirty minutes later, the little girl died.

Then, during the seventh of her pregnancies, labor pains came in the seventh month. Zoila’s mother was the midwife for this and her other six children, once again in the living room of her home. This is how she gave birth to Sergio.

I can almost see her describing the size of the baby to me, with the old woman’s hands joined together to form a shell. “He was so tiny,” she told me, “that he fit in the shoebox that I lined with white sheets, where he slept for only two nights, and then he died, because in those days doctors did not take care of premature babies, especially if they were born to poor parents.

Another of her sons, Lázaro, died later of leukemia, also at the hands of Zoila, who accompanied him in his last hours of agony. Another of her sons, Oscar, hanged himself at the age of 20 because of the depression caused by seeing a friend die while being a victim of forced labor in the Zapata Swamp. Lazaro sang like the gods, but whose poverty could not take him very far in the singing industry.

The Revolution came to Zoila on January 1, 1959, and the children who survived the Cuba of “before” were able to study beyond sixth grade. She even managed to see her grandchildren graduate from the university. She hid the pain of the preceding years with the strength of her hands. She planted avocados, mangoes and lemons in her backyard, and then sold them on the streets of the neighborhood, which gradually turned from dirt to asphalt.

She spent her last days in the hospital of her town, built after 1959, attended by a dozen doctors who did not believe that she could remain so lucid at 104 years of age. One of them, in the last consultation Zoila would receive, in March 2015, wanted to know what kept her alive in the hardest years of her existence. “I never stopped working,” she answered.

She became a nurse two years later, in 1961, thus fulfilling a possible dream. She had a son and kept her upbringing together with her housework and the areas she worked in to assist and check the health condition of the inhabitants of several communities in the capital.

At 90 years old, photos of her mother, her son, her granddaughters, her nursing days, are the only few luxuries that hang on the walls of her house. She overcame the pain and after-effects of a recent heart attack, thanks to the will and attention of the island’s health system. A few years earlier, when she was strong and healthy, she used to sew and read for fun, and went out every day to the streets, both to buy bread and to tell anyone who would like to hear what the Cuba of “before” was like, the Cuba of her childhood and early youth.

“There are a lot of ungrateful people out there,” she sometimes grumbled after arriving from the grocery store or market. “Whoever thinks they can come to speak to me against the revolution is mistaken. Everything in life has cost me sacrifices, but I owe a lot to it. When something seems impossible, my grandmother Mirta remembers her mother: “If she could be useful at 100 years old, then I too have the strength for more”.

***
​
I remember, as if it were yesterday, the smell of the newspapers and boxes from the archives of the state-run newspaper Juventud Rebelde, the dust stirred up by the air conditioning, the narrow, dark hallway, and the rows of metal shelves. As a little girl, many times, when my mother, along with other journalists, assembled the next day’s pages of that newspaper, I hid to play in that place that was a world of indecipherable words and thoughts for me at that time.

From those days at the end of the 90s, I also remember the times I slept between two chairs in the newsroom, while she typed non-stop on a typewriter, with which I also sometimes played on, without her noticing. She helped, from her space, to build and maintain a country that at that time was going through the greatest of crises, which many of us children were protected from and barely noticed.
​
And I grew up, we grew up, accompanying each other later in other press media outlets, making sacrifices to be together. And so we continued, without ceasing to believe in the country that made it possible for my mother to become a journalist, for my grandmother to feel immortal and for my great-grandmother to see the Revolution with a new home and new hopes. Like like them I too will prevail and so will our revolution that has been built by and for the dispossessed.

​Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

​The question we are exploring today, concerning the divorce of intellectuals and the working class, is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution. The first thing I think must be interrogated is what is presupposed in the formulation of the problem in such manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual that we have in mind.
​
The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have had their lots tied to the dominant social system. They have functioned as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie – the class enemy of most of humanity – and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of contending classes. In the same manner Marx describes the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook – one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those groups of people that light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself.

These intellectuals – the traditional intellectuals – are of course not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes – those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Engels had already noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” that raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the Duboises, the Apthekers, the Marinellos, the Parentis and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, would align their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power.

What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated?

It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, leave important aspects of the conversation out. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us.

However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split. We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system.

From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship.  

Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshipping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it.

Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debts, are told that even with a PhD they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to payback the accumulated debt. They are told – specifically those with radical sensibilities – that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they must not waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously pay-walled journals or university editorial books is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down.

The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask: “do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?” “Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?”

At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the Gods of resume evaluations. “Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment? Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorialship, to teaching 7 classes for half the pay of the full professors who teach 3? Do you want to condemn your family to debt-slavery for the decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?”

Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Reproletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors.

Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of ‘radicals’ writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism.

Here it is! The young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders – a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally desired to fight against.

Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Sartre called bad faith. Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backwards rabble they must educate – and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables? Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, ‘woke’ to lgbtq and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc. etc., aren’t they backwards? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go take them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much.

I have presented the stories which are all-too familiar to those of us still working within the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people.

This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? Doesn’t a blackballed Dubois get to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School? Doesn’t Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, obtain a position as the full-time editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Political Affairs? Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, 1950s US?

The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era.

Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm; it is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure that radical scholars are not forced to tiptoe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will be sustained.

If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction.

They are the subjects of a tragedy. As Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.”

Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy – one as revolutionary and the other as academic. Within the confines of the existing institutions, there can be no consistent reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the set up of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.”

The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counterhegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions akin to those sponsoring today’s panel. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They need, just like everyone else, to have the capacity to pay for their basic subsistence. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity of financially supporting both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have convened to examine today.

Author

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). 

We are eight weeks into the war in Gaza and into a protest movement that has swept the country demanding justice for Palestinians. It is remarkable how much the political environment has transformed in the United States in general, and within the U.S. left in particular on account of the mass mobilizations organized by genuine anti-imperialist forces, both inside the United States and around the world. An honest reflection must admit, however, that eight weeks ago, many of the liberal leftists and “progressives” were paralyzed, bending to the pressures of bourgeois opinion, practically abandoning the Palestinian cause, and reserving their sharpest vitriol for anti-imperialists rather than apartheid Israel. 

From the very start, anti-imperialists rallied to the side of Palestine and so were called apologists for terrorism by mayors, governors, the White House and liberal leftist publications in one united chorus. While for a moment that meant the real, anti-imperialist left was demonized, caricatured and written off as a marginalized fringe by the liberal leftist organizations and some prominent liberal “influencers,” two months later there is now a mass anti-war movement taking the streets every night with anti-imperialist politics at the very center, and it is the liberals who are isolated.

The spineless “plague on both your houses” position held by liberal leftists and “progressives” collapsed within a week as Israel began its genocidal bombing, and as the broad spectrum of left forces and Palestinians united to demand an end to the siege of Gaza and a ceasefire. But the initial awful reaction from big sections of ostensibly “left” commentators should not be forgotten, and in fact should be learned from. It reflects a recurring line of division that will likely reappear as Israel’s siege enters a new murderous stage, especially if Palestinians begin to strike back outside of Gaza. This division is not about ideological minutiae but a fundamentally different approach to the colonial question. It speaks directly to the question of what type of movement we aim to build — either one that is tethered to a section of the liberal bourgeoisie, and so vacillates alongside it, or one that seeks to build anti-imperialist politics among the working class and is oriented towards unity with the Global South.  

To review: Four days into the genocidal bombing and siege of Gaza, with a massive ground invasion pending, the West’s most prominent left-liberal intellectuals stood up and spoke out against … the leftists on the streets for Palestine. Naomi Klein, Michelle Goldberg, and other self-proclaimed “left” writers immediately joined the ruling-class mob howling at those who had dared to demonstrate in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and their resistance, in the days after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. They declared there can be no “credible” or “decent” left that does not condemn the tactics of the Palestinian resistance — and that by “valorizing terrorism, these voices on the left are effectively choosing to stop contending for power in a serious way.”

Goldberg proposed that the left should declare instead: “We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel to not to commit atrocities in Gaza.” The sentence is a marvel. The feelings of horror are reserved for the actions of Hamas — not Israel — while Israeli atrocities are presented passively, a potential thing of the future, which could be hopefully stopped by U.S. government “pressure.” Ignored are all the core questions: what about the longstanding Israeli atrocities and the fact that the United States has always facilitated and funded Israeli crimes? And what should the Palestinians do in the meantime? Apparently, anything but fight back.

For her part, Klein called for “An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.”

Sift through the poetics of this paragraph and this is essentially a call for the left to put equal distance from all the sides of the battle, so that it can achieve pure and unadulterated morality. How decent! Perhaps the Palestinians should lay down their arms entirely so the international left can keep our hands and reputations clean. Under this liberal position (using left phrases), it is fine to retain the moral and political position that Palestinians are in the right against occupation, but to be “consistent” this must be combined with a condemnation of Palestinians when they actually rise up against that occupation. This is nonsense: the “left” as an abstraction rather than a social force that accompanies the living struggles of our time and the real people fighting injustice. The true betrayal of left principles is to lapse into pure pacifism and abstract humanism so as to create distance from the oppressed.

That distance from the oppressed was made literal in the following days, when the protests with that political line were attended by shockingly few Palestinians and scarcely a Palestinian flag in sight. Meanwhile, the anti-imperialist forces who were so demonized and declared to not be “contending for power in a serious way” united a broad coalition rooted in the Palestinian and Arab community for the largest pro-Palestinian march in U.S. history, which was estimated at 500,000 people. That unity was not built by equivocating on the central issues of Palestinian self-determination, or pandering to the mood of the liberal bourgeoisie. Doing so would have not made the march bigger but actually doomed it. Instead, it put out a clear, unmistakable message that tapped into the mass mood of struggle and defiance felt by people of conscience from all communities. 

Whatever initial isolation was necessary for anti-imperialists, the last month of mobilization has shown that a different type of broad unity can be built — not with bourgeois liberals — but by going directly to the base, and orienting to the majority sentiments of the Global South. Viewed from a global scale, it is the liberals who are isolated, and increasingly struggling to stay relevant. Look at the supposedly “decent” “left” represented by figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC: they have never been less relevant to the actual movement of history as now, when it counts the most. Sanders has stubbornly refused to even call for a ceasefire while AOC has scarcely been better – in two month’s time she has voiced support for the Iron Dome, then called for a ceasefire, and this week voted for a slanderous House resolution that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. 

Klein, Goldberg and company focused their arguments after October 7 on the killing of Israeli civilians and noncombatants as war crimes. But this was just a convenient way to mask what was really a condemnation of Palestinian armed resistance as a whole. It’s not as if they defended under the rules of war the Al Aqsa Flood operation’s killing of an estimated 280 Israeli military personnel, or its taking dozens more soldiers and even generals as prisoners of war. What they really want is for Palestinians to remain peaceful and committed to nonviolent forms of protest. A more sophisticated and explicit version of this argument was presented at length in a New York Times essay calling for Palestinians to commit to “ethical resistance.”

Of course, Palestinian groups will debate among themselves what tactics and strategies are correct to advance their national liberation struggle, as they have in each phase of struggle. But not a single Palestinian party or faction (aside from the widely hated Mahmoud Abbas) condemned the Al Aqsa Flood operation — quite the contrary. Klein, Goldberg, et al should ask themselves why not. It is because the Palestinian people have attempted every type of march, protest and petition only to see the noose tighten around their necks. 

The Great March of Return consisted of weekly marches in 2018-19 at the Gaza border. Those mass marches, peaceful apart from mere rock-throwing, resulted in 223 Palestinian killed by Israeli sniper fire and thousands wounded. There was no international hue and cry; the settlements expanded and Israeli society shifted even further towards fascism. Now four years later, the Al Aqsa Flood fighters returned to those same border fences and bulldozed them. It is no wonder why three-quarters of all Palestinians explicitly support the October 7 attacks, and 89 percent support Hamas’s military wing. 
The Palestinian people as a whole, as a nation, understand that those who made nonviolent revolution impossible made the shift to full-fledged armed resistance inevitable. So in their insistence on an international left that condemns armed resistance, Klein and Goldberg are effectively asking for an international left without Palestinians. 

Without question, the experience of war is horrific, and no images shock the conscience quite like those of civilian casualties, especially women, children and the elderly. These images seem to require no context or explanation; they instinctively shape our emotions, stir our desire for justice, and compel us to show solidarity with the victims. But this is how and why imperialist war propaganda works time and again. Even though some people can in retrospect see the folly of many wars, in the moment of crisis they are selectively presented certain images, so that feelings of empathy and grief are easily instrumentalized as pretext for an invasion. The demand in a war fever is to feel anger and grief, to set aside analysis and critical thought. Hidden of course are the years of images of civilian death and mass destruction on the Palestinian side, the stories of trauma and terrorism they’ve endured, the names of their children. The whole world has never been instructed to join in their grief and to insist on their right to self-defense and retaliation against those responsible for that terrorism. 

War is always horrific and any student of military history knows the so-called “rules of war” are routinely violated – in fact they are not really considered at all by military strategists when they make their plans. Look at the US “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq, which was just another way of saying “strike terror” into the hearts of all Iraqi society. Look at Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Rolling Thunder” operation to completely destroy the northern part of Vietnam, killing an estimated 182,000 civilians in three years. Look at even the “good wars”  like World War II, when the U.S. carpet bombed cities in Japan and Germany that had no military purpose, intentionally causing mass civilian deaths as a way of psychologically terrorizing the enemy into surrender. But no one questions the righteousness and necessity of the war against fascism. Those U.S. leaders who directed those mass civilian deaths never faced a day in court for war crimes, but instead had schools and airports named after them. 

The Vietnam Memorial in D.C. lists out the names of 58,000 U.S. service member casualties in the war, an emotional display that stretches around 500 feet. But if it had the names of the Vietnamese deaths, civilian and combatant alike, it would stretch two miles. The way the war has been presented and is understood emotionally in the United States is, again, totally selective. The fiction is thus maintained that one civilized side wages war within the “rules” and only the “barbaric” wage war with terror. In fact, all modern war contains elements of terror.

For its part, Hamas officially says it upholds the rules of war and Islamic prohibitions on the targeting of women and children, disputing the dominant narrative of October 7, and says that the breaking down of the border fences allowed undirected groups of Palestinians to enter nearby Israeli settlements. 

But regardless of what exactly transpired, and who ordered precisely what, that cannot be used to confuse the basics of the Palestinian question. It is a struggle for national liberation against colonialism. It is not a war between two conventional armies. One side has a massive, high-tech and sophisticated military with advanced weapons systems, while the other side is a collection of guerrilla forces. The Palestinians have no military bases they control, no advanced weapons systems they can buy, no control over their own borders or airspace, no internationally legally recognized force to strike back against enemy states and to defend their population. This is a totally asymmetrical war, and for years it has been rocks versus tanks with nearly all the bleeding on one side. 

To win their national liberation struggle, Palestinians have tried general strikes. They have tried to get other Arab armies in the region to intervene. They have conducted dramatic hijackings to get worldwide attention, often designed for maximum spectacle with minimal civilian losses. They have tried peace agreements and negotiations (Hamas itself only turned to armed resistance after about a decade of this). They have tried international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns. They have gone to international courts and tribunals. The First Intifada was built on mass rallies and mobilization, largely led by the left, and it was only after the Israelis conducted a campaign of mass imprisonment and assassination of its leaders that the era of suicide bombings began. The failure of all the promised peace accords produced the Second Intifada, this time more violent. And now after years of losing more and more land, being asphyxiated by the millions, a new phase has opened. But it is one continuous national liberation struggle. 

The only real analogy left is that of the Native Americans or the Algerians, whose guerrilla struggles were not to win over the settler population — seeing that as impossible — but to strike back so that they might leave stolen lands and to show their own people through force that the enemy state was not invincible. Those battles also often involved the bloody deaths of non-combatants, and the anti-colonial fighters were called “savages” in the mass media of their day. But after years of broken promises and treaties, continuous encroachment on land, misery and humiliation, such armed resistance and violent eruptions became inevitable. And looking back, is there really any confusion about what was the side of justice?
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As Israel begins a new round of murderous bombardment of Gaza, all responsibility for renewed bloodshed must be placed on the occupying power. The world sees clearly the genocidal and terrorist character of the Israeli armed forces. The task in the United States is to channel this into a mass social force that makes it untenable for the U.S. government to continue financing and arming the occupation. Out of the horrors of the present, many within the Palestinian community also believe they are entering a new phase of liberation struggle; this powerful movement must be prepared to stand with them.

THE recent Apec summit in San Francisco was largely overshadowed by the meeting between US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that immediately preceded it.

The two men met for four hours on November 16, in a mansion once better known for the US soap opera Dallas having been filmed there. For what was almost certainly the most important diplomatic encounter of 2023 its actual results appear rather modest.

They featured an agreement on Artificial Intelligence, counternarcotics co-operation, the resumption of military-to-military communications, the expansion of direct flights, and the promotion of a range of bilateral exchanges, including a high-level dialogue on tourism and streamlining visa application procedures.

An agreement to co-operate on climate change was announced just before the summit. US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry has been one of just a handful of US politicians to have retained a rational approach to China.

But what was actually significant about the meeting was that it took place at all — and in so doing, as a number of commentators have noted, established a floor under bilateral relations.

That this should rightly be regarded as a not inconsiderable achievement is in itself testimony to just how far the world’s most important diplomatic relationship has deteriorated in the last decade under the successive presidencies of Obama, Trump and Biden.

From the Chinese point of view, Xi’s visit was above all a voyage for peace. As the Chinese leader told a subsequent business dinner: “I often say that what the Chinese people oppose is war, what they want is stability, and what they hope for is enduring world peace.”

The last decade’s deterioration in relations with Washington, which began with the “pivot to Asia” proclaimed by Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was not what China wished to see.

As a socialist country still engaged in a quest for modernisation and development, China is committed to peace and has no interest in war.

It is the US that has waged wars in Korea and Vietnam, wars which were in no small measure directed against China; that has increased its supply of weapons to the renegade Chinese province of Taiwan, in flat contradiction to repeated pledges it has made since 1972; that has surrounded China with military bases; and that has rigged up a string of alliances aimed at containing China, be it the Quad with India, Japan and Australia, Aukus with Australia and Britain, or this summer’s Camp David deal with Japan and South Korea.

This, of course, is not the message you’re likely to hear from our mainstream media. A predictable, and predictably woeful, example was provided by the BBC website on November 15, the day before the summit.

Under the headline, “Xi Jinping arrives in the US as his Chinese dream sputters,” the article claims that the Chinese president was in “a more vulnerable negotiating position this time,” as compared to his last US visit five years ago. As evidence for this, it asserted that “after an initial bounce back, the post-Covid Chinese economy has turned sluggish.”

China certainly does not deny that its economy is facing certain headwinds. Probably the greatest single cause for this, although there are certainly others, is the increasingly aggressive US sanctions aimed at stifling China’s innovation and technological development.

Naturally, the BBC report makes no mention of this. Instead, it informs us that: “Some observers have contrasted China with the US, whose economy has weathered the post-Covid recovery better.”

One might understand why such observers apparently wish to retain their anonymity, given that official IMF figures estimate that the US growth rate for 2023 will be 2.1 per cent while that for China will be well over twice that at 5.4 per cent.

What is completely absent from the BBC analysis, and that of the whole mainstream media, regarding the relative weight of China and the US at the present time, is any consideration of the profound shift taking place in the international balance of forces.

The late Tony Benn used to quip that, having met Tony Blair but not George W Bush, he had met half the international community. And viewed through this prism the attempts to isolate and stigmatise China might be said to have enjoyed a measure of success.

But an assessment based on real-world criteria tells a different story. At their Johannesburg summit in August, the Brics group of major developing countries, in a process largely initiated and driven by China, more than doubled its membership with the admission of a further six countries.

More than 40 countries have expressed an interest in joining, with Pakistan the latest to officially apply. Even before its first planned round of expansion, the Brics’ GDP had surpassed that of the G7.

Less than two months later, Xi welcomed representatives from more than 150 countries, including some 23 heads of state and government and the secretary-general of the UN, to a conference marking 10 years since he first put forward his flagship Belt and Road Initiative.

In stark contrast to the “winner takes all” approach aggressively touted by Donald Trump, but actually promoted with greater assiduity by Biden, Xi told the assembled delegates at the opening ceremony: “We have learned that humankind is a community with a shared future. China can only do well when the world is doing well. When China does well, the world will get even better.”

It is little wonder that this is a more appealing message to the majority of countries in the world, that wish to develop their economies while maintaining their independence.

Even on the sidelines of the Apex summit, at the first meeting between the Chinese leader and his Mexican counterpart, President Amlo, in words that should have struck home to his US hosts, noted that, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, China was the first country to offer assistance, providing a large amount of medical supplies to Mexico.

In contrast to the steady progress of Chinese diplomacy, on November 2 187 countries voted in the UN to once again condemn the US embargo on Cuba. Only Israel joined the US in voting against, with Ukraine’s the sole abstention.

A little earlier, on October 27, after repeated US vetoes in the security council, the UN general assembly voted in favour of a ceasefire in Gaza, securing the pre-set two-thirds majority necessary for adoption; 121 countries voted in favour, with just 14 voting against and 44 abstentions. And, to US consternation, the entire global South has rebuffed its demand that they impose sanctions on Russia.
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Looking at things from this objective but generally hidden assessment of global trends will shed more light than that offered by the BBC as to who sat down in California with “a more vulnerable negotiating position.”

Venezuela’s defense of the Essequibo

Mainstream media is trying to establish the narrative that Venezuela is demanding the Essequibo only now, because oil and gas resources have been discovered in the region. This narrative intends to place the Essequibo dispute in a vacuum, as if it was a sudden whim on the part of the current government of Venezuela, which has already been demonized as a “dictatorship” for years. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, Venezuela began its fight for the Essequibo immediately after Britain illegally occupied the region in 1841. It has been a continuous battle on the part of Venezuela to reclaim its rights to its occupied territory for almost two centuries.

The early years

Venezuela’s fight for its rights over the Essequibo began in 1841 at the hands of Alejo Fortique, renowned lawyer, politician, diplomat, and Venezuela’s ambassador to Great Britain starting from 1839. In addition to his arduous tasks of resolving Venezuela’s debts and agreements with Britain (debts incurred during the independence war) and the Spanish government’s recognition of Venezuelan independence, Ambassador Fortique took up the Essequibo issue with Britain. Through sustained efforts, he was able to get then British Foreign Minister Lord Aberdeen to formally state that the piles and markers installed by Schomburgk’s team at the mouths of the Orinoco did not constitute the definitive frontier of British Guyana and that the matter would be discussed in future when Venezuela and Britain would sit down for border negotiations. This was a lie, but Lord Aberdeen did instruct the British government of Guyana to remove the markers.

Fortique’s efforts came to a sudden end when he, overwhelmed and exhausted with work, having nobody to assist him, passed away in 1845. Thereafter, the border discussions stopped for the time being, and, in 1850, the Venezuelan government signed a treaty with Britain in Caracas, accepting the latter’s proposal of postponing the border delimitation.

During the next decade and a half, Venezuela was in no position to even think about borders, as it was consumed by political strife and civil war. Only after the end of the Five-Year War (1859-1863), the new government of Juan Crisóstomo Falcón sent Antonio Guzmán Blanco as the plenipotentiary representative of Venezuela to Great Britain in 1866 to resume the border issue, but that attempt failed. Thereafter, during the Guzmán era of 1870s-80s, Guzmán Blanco, as three times president and as plenipotentiary representative of Venezuela in Europe in between his presidencies, abandoned Venezuela’s conciliatory approach on the Essequibo issue and demanded a definitive resolution. Similarly, his foreign ministers and diplomatic representatives to Britain and the United States carried out his instructions on the defense of Venezuela’s territorial rights. However, nothing resulted from these enormous efforts, because all attempts to discuss the border and all agreements proposed by Venezuela were rejected by Britain.

At the same time, Britain continued to expand the territory of British Guyana at the expense of Venezuela, crossing further west of the Schomburgk Line and appropriating lands close to Upata in the Venezuelan Guayana (currently in Bolívar state) as well as the gold mines of El Callao. In further violation of Venezuela’s territorial integrity, the colonial authorities of British Guyana installed a sentry post with the British flag near Punta Barima, and English ships began sailing openly through the main channel of the Orinoco as well as the Caroní River. English merchants set up companies in the Venezuelan Guayana and started to deal amicably with the indigenous peoples there, trying to win over their support so that Britain could later devour that territory with the least possible resistance.

In this situation of flagrant colonization of Venezuela by Britain, President Guzmán Blanco severed all ties with Britain towards the beginning of 1887, and urged the United States to activate the Monroe Doctrine.

Arbitration Award 1899: Monroe Doctrine and US betrayal

The United States proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, based on its project of Manifest Destiny, and with the theme “America for the Americans.” Although with hindsight we now know that “Americans” meant the US elites and their interests, in the late 19th century the authorities of Venezuela, just like the other recently independent republics in the southern part of the continent, had imagined themselves to be included among “Americans” of the Monroe Doctrine. In the case of Venezuela, there were reasons to consider it, given that the US had briefly assisted Simón Bolívar’s independence project against Spanish colonialism. Therefore, from the mid-1870s, Guzmán Blanco started requesting the US to intervene in the matter to help Venezuela against British colonialism, citing the Monroe Doctrine. The US authorities of that time too had recognized the dangers that a British colony could pose to US interests in the continent, especially in a region as strategic as the Caribbean, with a waterway as gigantic and strategic as the Orinoco. However, the US did not respond to the Venezuelan request at once, probably due to itself recovering from the aftermath of the civil war that pitted the north of the US against the south. Moreover, it is possible that white supremacy was also at play, with the US considering Venezuela racially inferior to Britain (there is evidence of this, which will be discussed a little later). Whatever the reason, the US invented an excuse: it agreed to be an arbiter in the territorial dispute only if both Venezuela and Britain so requested.
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However, by 1895, the US had established itself as an industrial and military power strong enough to confront Britain in its “backyard” and changed its course of action. Richard Olney, US secretary of state for President Grover Cleveland, communicated directly with Britain and asked it to accept the US as a mediator for the dispute. Britain initially rejected the arbitration offer, but the US threatened Britain with war, after which Britain was obliged to accept. This turn of events was celebrated in Venezuela: the government applauded the Monroe Doctrine and showered the US ambassador in Caracas with praise and honors. However, what the naïve Venezuelan authorities did not know was that the US–UK spat was more of a show; behind Venezuela’s back, the two imperialist powers would go on to negotiate with each other for mutual benefit, neglecting Venezuela’s interests.

Although Britain accepted the US demand of submitting to an arbitration process, it refused to have any direct discussion with Venezuela. To break the deadlock, the US convened a representative meeting of the two countries in Washington in February 1897, where Britain accepted the arbitration mechanism only on the condition that Venezuela, which it despised and considered “uncivilized,” had no representation in the process. The United States accepted the British condition, and pressured Venezuela to do the same. If the Venezuelan authorities detected in this racist and colonialist arbitrariness on the part of Britain a foreshadowing of an injustice about to be committed, they could do nothing to change it, and Venezuela was forced to sign the Arbitration Treaty of 1897 and delegate its representation to the United States.

According to a report published by the Venezuelan government in 2015 that sheds light on the original US-UK plan to rob Venezuela of the Essequibo, the Arbitration Treaty was elaborated between the US and the UK during 1895-96, without taking into consideration Venezuela’s claims and positions. The report also exposed the racist attitude of the two imperialist powers towards Venezuela that united the two and with which they justified dispossessing Venezuelans of their rights to a territory that historically belonged to them.

“Venezuela was placed on the sidelines in this matter, as if it were a ‘semi-barbaric’ or ‘semi-savage’ State,” the report recounted. “In a letter addressed to President Cleveland on December 5, 1896, the US Ambassador in London, Thomas Bayard, who was supposed to defend the interests of Venezuela, issued abject opinions about our country: ‘Our difficulty lies in the completely untrustworthy character of the Venezuelan government and people, which results in an indefinable and, therefore, dangerous responsibility for the management of their own affairs by themselves.’”

The Washington Treaty called for the arbitration tribunal to be composed of five jurists: two appointed by Great Britain, two appointed by Venezuela, and one chosen by the Supreme Court of the United States. However, since Britain had refused to allow Venezuelan participation in the process, it was established that the two jurists representing Venezuela would be US nationals, and they could not be chosen by the president of Venezuela but would be appointed by the president of the United States. Even European progressive journalists and intellectuals were outraged at the treatment that Venezuela received. Among them was a British journalist, Paul Reuter, who noted that “the conditions under which Venezuela consented to be represented, in the absence of a protectorate or any other analogous institution, by a third State, are very rarely found in an arbitral proceeding and evince a quasi-colonial sovereignty.”

The fifth jurist, appointed by the United States Supreme Court, was Frederick Fyodor Martens, who was selected as the president of the arbitration tribunal. Martens was a Russian diplomat, a permanent member of the Russian Imperial Council on Foreign Relations, had served as professor of law at a number of British universities, and was a friend of Queen Victoria. He advocated for cooperation between the Russian Empire and the British Empire in Central Asia, arguing that the two empires were destined by Divine Providence to “civilize” the region. He too had a negative stance towards countries considered “semi-savage” or “semi-civilized,” such as Venezuela, and hence was very acceptable to Britain.

According to the Venezuelan government’s 2015 report, it was Britain that had pushed for Martens’ appointment and selection as president of the tribunal. “It was probably Sir Julian Pauncefote, signatory for Britain of the 1897 Treaty of Washington, who pushed for the appointment of Martens,” the report noted. “With this, Britain achieved and secured a priori the highest representative of the tribunal, favorable to any settlement between Great Britain and Russia.” Thus, the territorial dispute between Venezuela and Britain turned into a playing field of global geopolitics towards the close of the 19th century.

The arbitration tribunal met in Paris in June 1899, held 54 formal meetings, and announced its final and unappealable decision, unanimously approved, on October 3, 1899. Known as the Paris Arbitration Award, the decision established that the mouths of the Orinoco River and the part of the Venezuelan Guayana that Britain was occupying belonged to Venezuela, but handed over the entire territory of the Venezuelan Essequibo to British Guyana, branding it an “integral part” of the British colony. Thus, Venezuela was dispossessed of 159,542 sq km of its historical territory.

The ruling further established that during times of peace, the Amacuro and Barima rivers would be open to commercial vessels of all countries, provided they complied with the regulations and paid the tariffs demanded by Venezuela and British Guyana for passage on the parts of the rivers that belonged to them. The same tariff was established for Venezuelan and British vessels. In addition, it was decided that no customs duties would be applied to the goods transported in the ships transiting the rivers, but they would only be taxed for the goods that were unloaded in the territories of Venezuela and British Guyana, by the respective governments.

It may be noted that in addition to Britain, the US was also a winner. It managed to save its image of a “neutral arbiter” by giving both sides something, although Venezuela got back only 10% of its occupied territory. Moreover, the US had managed to save its own interests, which included access to the Caribbean and the Atlantic through the Orinoco River, while at the same time it had been able to contain, to a large extent, Britain’s colonial ambitions in a region the US considered, and still considers, its “backyard.”

As soon as the Arbitration Award was announced, Venezuela openly expressed its rejection of the unjust legalization of colonization and territorial dispossession, but had no legal recourse available to overturn the result, as the ruling was unappealable.

Geneva Agreement 1966

Over the next half century, the injustice of the Arbitration Award disappeared from political discourse in Venezuela, as the country was again engulfed in internal strife with military coups and dictatorships interspersed with ephemeral elected governments, as well as dealing with the impact of World War II and the flow of refugees from Europe. The Pérez Jiménez dictatorship brought the matter back to public memory by referring to it at two international instances – at the UN General Assembly in 1951 and at the summit of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Caracas in 1954. Thereafter in 1962, towards the beginning of the Fourth Republic, President Rómulo Betancourt raised the issue in a speech, and Venezuela’s Permanent Representative to the UN Sosa Rodríguez and Foreign Minister Falcón Briceño spoke on the matter at the UN General Assembly, thus resurrecting Venezuela’s legitimate grievances about the unjust Arbitration Award.

Something important had happened during this time that gave Venezuela legal grounds to challenge the decision of the arbitration tribunal of 1899: it was the publication of the Mallet-Prevost Memorandum in 1949. Severo Mallet-Prevost was a US lawyer who had represented Venezuela at the Paris tribunal, together with three other US legal experts: former US President Benjamin Harrison; former US Secretary of War General Benjamin S. Tracy; and advocate James Russell Soley. The British side was similarly represented by four lawyers. During the formal meetings of the tribunal, the legal counsel for each side presented their arguments, followed by question-and-answer sessions by the tribunal jurists. At every meeting, it was recorded that Mallet-Prevost made detailed defense for Venezuela’s rights. After the sessions closed, the tribunal adjourned for a short period for reflection, and then, on October 3, 1899, it declared its biased decision in a brief session, without providing any argument for the decision, except highlighting that it had been unanimous.

Venezuela had lost the case, but recognized Mallet-Prevost’s labor and awarded him the Order of the Liberator for his services to the nation. He went on to become a successful and acclaimed legal expert and a partner in the New York law firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle. Later in life, Mallet-Prevost confided to a close associate, Judge Otto Schoenrich, that the US jurors had been forced to accept the Paris Award under duress, and that they considered it to be unjust towards Venezuela. He left with Schoenrich a detailed account of the happenings at the fateful tribunal, to be published at Schoenrich’s “discretion” after Mallet-Prevost’s death. He passed away on December 10, 1948, and Schoenrich published the document in January 1949.

The publication of the Memorandum caused a scandal in the United States, as it evidenced that the US side had yielded to British pressure. It also demonstrated that the process had been vitiated since before it began, as the then British Chief Justice Lord Bussel had insisted at a preliminary meeting of the tribunal in London in January 1899 that the Venezuela-Britain dispute would be resolved not on strictly legal grounds but taking into consideration “questions of international policy,” which, according to Mallet-Prevost, meant none other than British imperial interests.

The lawyer recounted that during the presentations of the legal counsels of the two sides before the tribunal in Paris in June 1899, while one of the British jurors openly supported his country’s arguments, the other one “was sincerely interested in getting at the full facts of the case and in ascertaining the law applicable to those facts,” such that Mallet-Prevost believed that “he was leaning toward the side of Venezuela.” After the end of the presentations, which lasted 26 days, the tribunal adjourned for a two-week holiday, when the two British jurors returned to London, and tribunal president Martens accompanied them. However, when the sessions resumed, there had been an abrupt and complete change in said British judge’s attitude. In Mallet-Prevost’s words, “It looked to us (by which I mean to the counsel for Venezuela) as though something must have happened in London to bring about the change.”

After all the sessions had been concluded, Mallet-Prevost was informed by the two US jurors on the tribunal that the entire procedure had been a “farce,” that Martens had explained to them that he and the two British judges would vote in favor of the British claim, and thus, even if the US dissented, with 3-2 votes British Guyana would become owner of all the Venezuelan land that it had been occupying at that time. Thus, Martens had left before the US judges two possibilities: either to express a dissenting opinion, in which case Venezuela would lose all its occupied territory; or to accept a negotiated settlement in which Venezuela would be returned the Orinoco mouth and the part of Venezuelan Guayana under occupation, while granting to Britain the entirety of the Venezuelan Essequibo. According to Mallet-Prevost, although US ex-President Harrison was initially in favor of filing a “strong dissenting opinion,” the US side finally preferred to accept the negotiated settlement “so that Venezuela did not lose everything.”

“The decision which was accordingly rendered was unanimous,” concluded Mallet-Prevost, “but while it gave to Venezuela the most important strategic point at issue, it was unjust to Venezuela and deprived her of very extensive and important territory to which, in my opinion, Great Britain had not the shadow of a right.”

When the scandal became known in Venezuela, dictator Pérez Jiménez at once revived the Venezuelan cause, and afterwards the Fourth Republic, citing the Memorandum, started demanding before the UN that the Paris Arbitration Award be declared illegitimate. The Venezuelan authorities knew that they had little time on hand, as the global geopolitical situation was changing rapidly after World War II. During the 50s and 60s, taking advantage of the post-war weakness of the European empires, their colonies all over the world strengthened their struggles for independence. In this situation, leading colonial powers such as Britain, France, and Holland found themselves forced to enter into negotiations with their colonies to grant them independence.

In Latin America, where the US was already the leading imperial power, Britain tried to avoid wars at all cost. In 1962, Britain granted independence to Trinidad and Tobago without any bloodshed, and promised to grant independence to Guyana in 1966. This complicated everything for Venezuela which, despite having passed through dictatorships and democracies and bloody civil wars in equal measures, had never wavered from its anti-colonialist position and had never attacked or invaded another country. Therefore, for Venezuela it was not going to be the same to reclaim the Essequibo territory from colonial Britain which had forcibly stolen the land and then legalized the theft through fraud, as to claim it from Guyana which after 1966 would not be a part of the British Empire, it would not be a country that had stolen anything from Venezuela, and it would surely need the region which constituted three-fourths of its territory in order to develop itself after centuries of colonial exploitation.

Facing this dilemma, Venezuela had no other option but to support the independence of British Guyana, while at the same time, at all regional and multilateral forums, Venezuelan authorities went on ratifying Venezuela’s right to recover its stolen territory. Venezuela’s perseverance on the issue led to the Geneva Agreement of 1966. During February 16-17, 1966, UK, Venezuela, and a representation of the authorities of Guyana which was on the verge of attaining independence, met in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations to define the future relations between Venezuela and Guyana. Although the representatives of Venezuela and Guyana treated each other with absolute respect, no definitive solution was reached regarding the Essequibo, and the two parties only agreed on tracing a path to resolve the dispute peacefully and in a mutually satisfactory manner within a span of four years for the date of signing the document.

Nevertheless, the reality was that the UK, which had sponsored the meeting, thus skillfully freed itself from the difficult border issue, leaving the two neighbors, both victims of British colonialism, to fight over the territory in future. In fact, the Essequibo dispute is not the only border issue that Britain left unresolved. All of its former colonies around the world have border disputes with their neighbors, which Britain had created as an act of revenge as well as to maintain control over the regions it had been forced to leave, by sometimes acting as arbiter in those very same border problems.

Signing the Geneva Agreement on February 17, 1966, Venezuela agreed to leave the Essequibo region under de facto control of the future independent State of Guyana until an amicable and mutually satisfactory solution could be reached. Thus, British will was once again imposed, and Venezuela’s anti-colonialism prevented it from opposing Guyanese independence before Britain solved the border issue. As recognized by legal experts, international law as it stands today is generally biased towards whoever de facto controls a region and not who has the deeds. Therefore, it may be said that Venezuela lost in a way in 1966, but this time the loss was based on an honorable ideological position.

However, the independence of Guyana and the unresolved Essequibo dispute changed the way in which Venezuela could be perceived from outside. From being a poor and weak country confronting a colonial power dispossessing it of its territory, Venezuela suddenly turned into a comparably richer and stronger country demanding from a poorer and weaker neighbor the majority of its territory. This remains the fundamental contradiction of the issue to this day.

On May 26, 1966, the day when Guyana gained independence from Britain, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ignacio Iribarren Borges sent a message to Georgetown recognizing the new State, but with a caveat: the recognition was limited to the territory of the new State located to the east of the Essequibo River, adding that the recognition “that Venezuela makes of the new State of Guyana, does not imply on the part of our country any renunciation or diminution of the territorial rights claimed, nor in any way affects the sovereignty rights arising from the claim arising from Venezuelan contention that the so-called Paris Arbitral Award of 1899 on the border between Venezuela and British Guiana, is null and void.”

While the UK and Guyana have continued to consider the Paris Arbitral Award as valid, Venezuela considers it null and void because of the abuse of legal procedure exposed by the Mallet-Prevost Memorandum. This contention is reflected in Article 1 of the Geneva Agreement: “A Mixed Commission is hereby established with the task of seeking satisfactory solutions for the practical settlement of the dispute between Venezuela and the United Kingdom, arising as a consequence of Venezuelan contention that the Arbitral Award of 1899 on the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana is null and void.”

The deadline of four years meant that the dispute should have been resolved by 1970. The Mixed Commission created within the framework of the Agreement was composed of two representatives each from Venezuela and Guyana, and they were to hold “no less than 18 meetings during the established period.” In addition, Article 4 of the Agreement entailed that if a fair and satisfactory solution could not be reached within the period, both countries could appeal to one of the instances provided for settlement of international disputes in Article 33 of the United Nations Charter, namely, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the UN Secretary General. However, the Agreement expressly called for both parties to agree about appealing to one of the aforementioned instances.

Port of Spain Protocol

After the signing of the Geneva Agreement, for the first time Venezuelans were broadly optimistic about recovering the stolen territory. The Essequibo issue became popular across the political spectrum, parties and movements created support groups on it, and in 1966 the government of Venezuela modified the map of the country to include Essequibo as a zone under reclamation. Unfortunately, there were even border clashes with Guyana, of which the gravest ones were the fight over the Anacoco Island in 1966, and the Rupununi uprising in 1969 which Guyana accused Venezuela of fomenting. However, the most serious incident occurred in 1967 when Guyana granted a concession to a US-Canada consortium to explore oil in the Essequibo territory, which drew harsh protest from the Venezuelan government, with President Leoni unilaterally declaring the extension and limits of the Venezuelan territorial sea in the Essequibo in July 1968, a move that was condemned by Guyana. In the meantime, the Mixed Commission went on holding meetings one after another without reaching any tangible solution, and the four years stipulated in the Geneva Agreement passed without producing any result.

In this situation of limbo, the two parties agreed to suspend the provisions of Article 4 of the Geneva Agreement and to continue the discussions for a longer period. The governments of the two countries agreed that their representative delegations would meet in Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad and Tobago, to discuss how to resolve the deadlock. The meeting took place on June 18, 1970, with the mediation of Trinidad and Tobago, and the symbolic presence of a representative of the United Kingdom. Trinidadian Prime Minister Eric Williams, a veteran independence warrior and Marxist revolutionary, played a central role in the difficult situation. He made a conciliatory proposal to Venezuela and Guyana, asking them to freeze the definitive resolution of the problem for at least 12 years, that is until 1982, while maintaining contact and improving the bilateral ties, but prohibiting Venezuela from making any territorial claims. The UK readily accepted the Port of Spain Protocol as it gave the original responsible party the definitive way to exit the sticky situation. Guyana accepted it too, given that the Protocol provided it the advantage to de facto control and administer the region according to its own interests. Venezuela, which at that time was embroiled in a maritime border delimitation problem with Colombia, also accepted it. But this was fatal for its interests, because while the Venezuelan claim was frozen for 12 years, Guyana was at complete liberty to continue administering the disputed territory, populating it, creating infrastructure, and granting mining and oil concessions to multinational companies, predominantly based in the US and Canada. This gave the United States direct access to the vast natural resources of the region, while Venezuela could only watch and protest, but could not adopt any legal or military measure as its hands were tied by the Port of Spain Protocol.

UN Secretary General’s Good Offices process

By 1982, realizing that the situation had turned extremely unfavorable for Venezuela, its government refused to renew the Port of Spain Protocol for another 12 years, and announced its return to the Geneva Agreement of 1966. The Venezuelan position received the support of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), which declared at its Foreign Ministers’ Summit in Belize in April 1982 that the two parties should “scrupulously comply with the provisions of the Geneva Agreement and seek settlements of the territorial dispute by peaceful means.” Following this line, on July 1, 1982, the Venezuelan government proposed to its Guyanese counterpart to engage in direct negotiation to solve the dispute, based on the Geneva Agreement. Guyana rejected the Venezuelan proposal despite being a party to the Agreement, and instead proposed any one of three possible ways: to take the matter to the UN General Assembly, to take it to the UN Security Council, or to submit it to the International Court of Justice. Venezuela rejected all three, arguing with a legal basis that none of the three was a qualified body for resolving territorial disputes that did not fall within the ambit of “situations of colonialism.” As a counter-proposal, Venezuela wanted to submit the conflict before the Office of the UN Secretary General, as mandated in Article 4 of the Geneva Agreement as one of the instances for the conflict resolution. However, the same article required that both parties to the conflict had to agree on the issue, and Guyana remained firm in its preference for the ICJ.

Finding all avenues blocked due to lack of consensus, the then foreign affairs minister of Venezuela, José Alberto Zambrano Velasco, tried to appeal to Guyana’s historical memory as an ex-colony similar to Venezuela. At the UN General Assembly session of September 1982, Zambrano Velasco made an impassioned speech:

The history of this humiliating mutilation cannot be forgotten by Venezuelans. All our tradition, all our instincts lead us to the desire to maintain and develop with the Guyanese people, who in truth were, like us, victims of British imperialism and who, like us, belong to the peoples who seek to achieve development, the closest relations of friendship, cooperation, and solidarity… The truth is clear, neither territorial ambition nor greed for the wealth of others fuels the Venezuelan Claim.

Finally, in March 1983, the Guyanese government announced its decision to accept the intervention of the secretary general of the United Nations to select the means of solution to the controversy. In a swift succession of events, the two parties submitted their appeals before then UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who accepted the request and appointed a special envoy, diplomat Diego Cordovez, to carry out an exploratory mission to Caracas and Georgetown and ascertain the position of the parties regarding the choice of means for a peaceful solution. After several meetings over the next three years, Cordovez came up with the plan of establishing a five-member conciliation commission or a contact group with a very complicated structure. Venezuela and Guyana both rejected the proposal for its “excessive formalism and rigidity which limited the possibility of direct contact between the governments of Venezuela and Guyana.”

In the meantime, the governments of Guyana and Venezuela continued bilateral discussions, and in late 1988 both agreed to use the UN secretary general’s good offices process. The good officer would be selected by the UN secretary general. In November 1989, Scottish philosopher Meredith Alister McIntyre was appointed as the first good officer by the Secretary General Pérez de Cuéllar. Starting from that time until 2014, three good officers passed through the process, and during this time the Venezuela-Guyana bilateral relations improved and several agreements on mutual development projects were signed, but the Essequibo situation remained the same. That is because the good offices procedure only functions if both sides are disposed to making mutual concessions in order to reach the desired agreement. As for the Essequibo dispute, this was not the case, especially on the part of Guyana which, given its de facto control over the disputed territory, went on signing concessionary contracts with multinational corporations for exploration of oil, gas, and minerals in the disputed landmass and even in the undelimited contiguous waters that are not part of the dispute. Consequently, the good offices process was abandoned for the time being after the third good officer, Norman Girvan of Jamaica, passed away in April 2014.

Almost three years later, in December 2016, then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon proposed incorporating an element of UN mediation in the good offices process, and warned that if the new method failed, the dispute would be passed over to the ICJ. In February 2017, new Secretary General Antonio Guterres appointed Norwegian diplomat Dag Nylander as the new good officer within the framework of Ban Ki-Moon’s proposal. Nylander’s term ended on November 30, 2017, and he, like his predecessors, was not able to advance the matter at all. Thus, the good offices procedure came to an end, having achieved nothing.

Defense of Essequibo in the Chavismo era

While in the binational sphere the good offices process was going on, internally Venezuela was experiencing radical changes with the arrival of Hugo Chávez to the presidency in 1999. Under his leadership, the Venezuelan government adopted several decisions that shook up the stagnated problem. In 2001, President Chávez forced the US government to abandon its project of installing a rocket launching platform in the disputed Essequibo territory. He also condemned and tried to put a stop to the activities of the US multinationals that had been unilaterally authorized by Guyana to carry out exploration in the disputed zone and its contiguous waters. Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, it seemed as if the two neighbors were set on a collision course; but Chávez was a skilled statesman. In 2004 he visited Guyana and met with Guyanese PM Bharrat Jagdeo, to whom he commented that it was time to move away from the Arbitral Award and look for new ways to resolve the dispute. Chávez declared that Venezuela would not oppose Guyana’s investment plans and development projects in the Essequibo territory that are essential to improve the life of the Guyanese people, and added that Venezuela was willing to collaborate in those projects. This was de facto equivalent to proposing that the disputed territory be directly and amicably administered by the two countries.

Chávez’s proposal could have opened a new path to finally achieve a real and mutually satisfactory and beneficial solution to the centuries-old problem, but we will never know if that would have been the case. The political conflict inside Venezuela made it impossible for the Chávez administration to develop a national consensus or a fruitful project based on this proposal. The Venezuelan right wing, itself servile to the United States and without having any shred of proposals for the country or the territorial dispute, immediately accused Chávez of having surrendered the Essequibo, and kept feeding into this narrative throughout Chávez’s lifetime. In these conditions, it was not possible for the Chavista government to take the proposal beyond the level of discourse and to the realm of reality. Therefore, even during the golden years of Chávez’s leadership and the rise of Venezuelan power and prestige in the regional and international level, the Venezuelan government had no concrete project regarding developing the Essequibo, and the status quo continued, benefiting multinational companies.

In 2015, the conflict over the Essequibo reached new and dangerous levels. Guyana, by then not recognizing the status of the Essequibo as a disputed zone claimed by Venezuela, was allowing the oil giant ExxonMobil, the second largest oil corporation in the world in terms of assets, to not only operate in Guyana’s international waters but also to intrude in the disputed maritime zone which remains undelimited, as if the entire region was the US multinational’s property.

At this point it may be useful to quickly review the maritime zones between Venezuela and Guyana. In 1968, to resolve the Anacoco Island dispute, the maritime area between the coast of the Venezuelan Guayana and the Guyanese coast was divided into three distinct zones: the Venezuelan Zone or Roraima Zone which extends from the mouth of the Orinoco and the Venezuelan Guayanese coast to the left limit of the Essequibo territory; the undelimited waters that project from the Zone under Claim (Essequibo); and the Guyanese Zone that belongs exclusively to Guyana.

With Guyana’s blessings, ExxonMobil was exploring in the undelimited waters, and had even defined various oil blocks in the maritime zone, one of which is the well-known Stabroek block that contains high-quality light oil. ExxonMobil announced that it would start extraction activities in this block in 2020, with a projection that oil production could reach 750,000 barrels per day in 2025.

Exxon’s presence and activities in the region turned the Essequibo issue into a national security issue for Venezuela, as by 2015 Venezuela was already in the midst of a US-led hybrid war. US President Obama declared Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States” and imposed several unilateral coercive measures against the country (hundreds more would come over the next few years). Chávez had passed away; the country was in the grip of a violent US-backed coup attempt; the political situation was difficult for Chavismo and the new president, Nicolás Maduro. It seemed that Exxon, which had been expelled from Venezuela and whose assets had been nationalized by Chávez, was exacting revenge on Venezuela at the opportune moment. Moreover, its presence so close to Venezuela’s international waters was an added threat to the country’s stability, as US multinationals are backed by the US military.

Regional geopolitics was turning hostile to Venezuela as well. While the retreat of the first Pink Tide and its negative impact on Venezuela has been studied a lot, the change of position of another regional bloc has remained mostly invisible at least in discussions surrounding Venezuela. CARICOM, which had been helped generously by the Chávez government through diverse development and welfare programs including the Petrocaribe, now seeing the economic and oil aid diminish due to the US blockade and the consequent decimation of the Venezuelan economy, started opportunistically aligning itself with Guyana, hoping to have its share of the ill-gotten oil wealth that would soon be available thanks to ExxonMobil. Apart from Guyana, Trinidad and Barbados also started expanding their maritime zones unilaterally, intruding into Venezuelan international waters, indicating that the governments of those countries, under US tutelage, were trying to reduce or completely block Venezuela’s access to the Atlantic.

As if all this was not enough, the multilateral instance that was supposed to be impartial and help resolve the controversy, the Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations, lent its services to safeguard US interests, in the same way that the UN has generally acted since its founding. In 2017, Guyana started requesting the UN to refer the Essequibo dispute to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a move that Venezuela opposed, rightly considering that ICJ is not the competent body to settle the dispute. Despite Venezuela’s opposition, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, hypocrite and opportunistic as he has always been as the head of the UN, transferred the matter to the ICJ on January 30, 2018, thus giving Guyana—and hence the US, because Guyana is only a proxy—a clear advantage. Although Guterres claimed that transferring the issue to the ICJ was in accordance with his interpretation of the Article 4 of the Geneva Agreement, Venezuela considered this unilateral action as a violation of the Agreement, as the referred article calls for agreement of both parties to the dispute but Guterres had not even consulted Venezuela.

On March 29, 2018, Guyana sued Venezuela before the ICJ, accusing Venezuela of attempting to violate the territorial integrity of Guyana, and requesting the ICJ to decide on the validity of the Arbitration Award of 1899. Venezuela presented its response before the ICJ in April 2019, reiterating its historical position of recovering its stolen territory, and emphasizing that it did not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ in settling this dispute.

In another example of how international law is twisted to serve the powerful, the ICJ, on December 18, 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, declared itself competent to hear Guyana’s claim, basing its decision on the Article 4 of the Geneva Agreement, an article and an agreement that the ICJ had itself violated when it accepted to take over the matter from the UN secretary general without the consent of one of the parties to the dispute, that is, Venezuela. This decision, however, unlike the Arbitration Award, was not unanimous. Out of the 16 judges of the ICJ, 12 voted in favor of the ICJ’s competency in the case while four voted against it.

At the same time, the ICJ recognized that declaring the nullity or validity of the Paris Award would not end the dispute. Rather, the ICJ will have to rule on an additional issue: the final definition of the binational border. If the ICJ determines that the Paris Arbitral Award is valid, the boundary situation between Venezuela and Guyana would be maintained as established in said award. On the contrary, if the ICJ declares the award as null and void, which is what Venezuela has considered it to be since the publication of the Mallet-Prevost Memorandum, then the ICJ will have to rule on other important aspects. The most important one would definitely be the new territorial delimitation, as the border established by the arbitrators in 1899 would no longer be valid. Another important aspect is the marine delimitation between the two countries, which would have a particular commercial impact due to the abundant oil deposits in the undelimited waters. However, since the ICJ circumscribed its jurisdiction to the land territory only, it would have to refer the maritime issue to some other competent body in future.

In the same judgment, the ICJ also declared—this time unanimously—that it does not have jurisdiction to hear the claims of Guyana arising from events occurring after the signing of the Geneva Agreement on February 17, 1966, thus establishing a critical date for the case. These include Guyana’s demand that Venezuela leave the eastern part of the Anacoco Island in the Cuyuní River and other islands in the undelimited zone, which Guyana claims that Venezuela is “occupying illegally.”

Likewise, the ICJ refused to hear Guyana’s claims that Venezuela cease its “threats or actions against persons or entities engaged in economic activities in Guyanese territory” and that Venezuela “compensate Guyana for the damages caused for all of the above.”

In March 2022, Guyana presented its arguments on the validity of the 1899 Arbitral Award. In June 2022—within the regulatory period for submitting a response—Venezuela presented its preliminary objections on the inadmissibility of Guyana’s claim. Venezuela also demanded that if the court is to decide on the validity or nullity of the Award, then it must incorporate the United Kingdom in the case, given that it was the main party involved in the declaration of the Award as well as being a signatory of the Geneva Agreement of 1966. Although this request was rejected, the ICJ agreed to review the conduct of the United Kingdom in granting the Arbitral Award. According to Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s permanent representative to the UN, this was not a defeat for Venezuela, because the court had agreed that “the United Kingdom is part of the case even if it is not present.”

While the ICJ case proceeds, Guyana’s stance has been becoming more war-like. This may partly be attributed to the election of Irfaan Ali as the president of Guyana in August 2020. Ali’s right-wing party has always declared its recognition for the fraudulent 1899 Award and non-recognition of the Venezuelan claim to the Essequibo. While portraying his country as a victim of “Venezuelan imperialism,” he has opened wide Guyana’s doors to the US Southern Command, the representatives of which regularly visit Guyana or hold joint drills in the disputed territory. Irfaan Ali, without any regard for diplomacy, has been openly threatening Venezuela with his “allies,” meaning the US government and military. In fact, the US navy has recently gifted Guyana a naval patrol vessel.

At the same time, evidence has surfaced that ExxonMobil pays Guyana’s legal expenses at the ICJ, and the company knew in advance that the case was going to be referred unilaterally to the ICJ. What is more serious, there exist conflicts of interests among the ICJ judges, including a recently elected judge who had served as legal counsel to Guyana in its case against Venezuela until November 2021, and before that had been an advisor to the Guyanese government.

While the case continues, ExxonMobil has been extracting 340,000 barrels per day of high-quality oil from wells in maritime waters claimed by Venezuela. From this exploitation, Guyana receives royalties estimated at $1 billion per year, an enormous figure for its current GDP, which has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last three years. ECLAC estimates its GDP growth at 46%, while the IMF projects it at 52%. ExxonMobil, similarly, has been profiting by stealing Venezuela’s resources. This leaves no room for doubt as to why Guyana demands that the “Zone under Claim” be removed from maps, and why ExxonMobil and the US back Guyana’s claim.

This brings us to the consultative referendum on the Essequibo currently underway in Venezuela. Cornered from all sides, threatened by US military might at its border, Chavismo saw no other way to protect Venezuela’s interests than falling back on its biggest strength—the people. On September 21, 2023, the National Assembly approved a motion to call for a consultative referendum on the Essequibo, asking the people of Venezuela to decide the Venezuelan State’s future course of action in defense of the stolen territory. It must be highlighted here that contrary to the narrative in mainstream media and that of a part of the Venezuelan opposition, the referendum does not ask whether the Essequibo territory belongs to Venezuela. That is a question that, for Venezuela, is already answered. What the referendum actually does is that it gives power to the people of Venezuela, true to the mechanism of participatory democracy mandated by the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, to set the course that the Venezuelan State must adopt in recovering the territory. Instead of waiting for an alien—and to all appearances compromised—judicial body to decide the fate of Venezuela’s righteous claim to a part of its national territory stolen by a colonial power, like alien judicial bodies had been deciding on the same all these years to the detriment of Venezuela, the government of Venezuela has done the right thing by putting the power of decision in the hands of the people.

Editorial note: Part 2 of this important series can be read here.

With the Venezuelan consultative referendum on reclaiming the Essequibo territory from Guyana just around the corner, one may wonder what it is about and why it is being conducted now. Venezuela has been accused of intending to carry out imperialist expansion and attempting to control the petroleum resources of a “foreign territory.” We are being told that Venezuela is trying to steal Guyanese territory and Guyanese oil. This hypothesis may seem plausible to many, even though Venezuela has no history of imperialist expansion in its republican life of over two centuries. It is precisely this lack of historical context that may lead unscrupulous observers to form ideas such as “Venezuela is a proto-imperialist power,” or a “wannabe imperialist power,” trying to impose itself on “smaller,” and “less powerful,” neighbors. Therefore, it is essential to look at the history of the dispute, and how it reached this point.

Essequibo dispute: the origin

Possibly the most serious border issue in Venezuela’s history, the Essequibo territorial dispute originated from the British Empire’s expansionist project in South America. Having lost its colony in the north of the Americas in the 18th century, the British Empire focused on creating a counterpart in the south from the early 19th century onwards, in order to maintain its hegemonic control in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Out of this ambition was born the colony of British Guyana, through which Britain unilaterally annexed the Venezuelan territory of Essequibo, a part of the Venezuelan Guayana, and the Tigri region of Suriname, then a Dutch colony.

British Guyana originated around the same time that Venezuela became independent. Before that, during the Spanish colonial period, Venezuela extended up to the borders of Dutch Guyana, that is, up to the left bank of the Essequibo River. Even before that, until the early 17th century, the territory that later came to be known as Dutch Guyana was also a part of the Spanish Empire, which lost the region to the Dutch in its inter-imperialist rivalry with the Kingdom of Holland. However, the borders between the colonies of the two empires were not established definitively until 1777, when the Captaincy General of Venezuela—the administrative entity within the Viceroyalty of New Granada, though independent of it—was created. Even after that, as the Venezuelan Essequibo and Guayana regions were sparsely populated and Spanish imperial power there was weak, the Dutch continued their incursions into Venezuela.

This “status quo” changed in 1814 when, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Kingdom of Holland, which was on the losing side, was forced to cede the majority of its Guyanese territory to the United Kingdom, and was allowed to keep only Suriname. In 1815, the British Empire announced its recognition of the 1777 borders, considering the left bank of the Essequibo River as the eastern frontier of Venezuela and the right bank of the river as the western margin of British Guyana; however, Britain never honored this arrangement. Even as early as 1822, when Gran Colombia—comprised by the territories now known as Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador—still existed, its ambassador to the UK, José Rafael Revenga, under Bolívar’s orders, presented a complaint regarding British incursions in the Essequibo, but the matter did not proceed further in London. During the 1930s, the British Empire started expanding its territory into the sparsely populated and barely monitored Venezuelan Essequibo, without care for the consent of its neighbor, even though Venezuela continued to consider the 1815 borders as the legal frontiers recognized by both sides.

Then, in 1840, the British Empire committed a “scientific fraud” to unilaterally annex the Venezuelan Essequibo, a tactic that it would also apply in other latitudes to dispossess other countries of their territories. The Royal Geographical Society of London named a German botanist and geographer, Robert Hermann Schomburgk, to be ostensibly responsible for delimiting the territory of British Guyana; in reality, the goal was to secretly steal as much territory for the British colony as possible. Schomburgk, eager to receive British citizenship, did more than what was asked of him: he incorporated into British Guyana the whole of the Venezuelan Essequibo, a good slice of the Venezuelan Guayana, and took the northern border of the British colony up to Point Barima and the mouths of the Orinoco River, thus cutting off Venezuela’s access to the Atlantic. He also stole a good chunk of Suriname from the Dutch, and thus expanded the eastern limits of the British colony. It should be noted here that the Essequibo region was so abandoned by the Venezuelan government of the time that they only realized in 1841—after Schomburgk had left for England—that it no longer belonged to Venezuela for all intents and purposes.

According to Venezuelan historian Vladimir Acosta, Venezuela lost its easternmost territory because it “did not occupy it in terms of population… It seems that Venezuela never understood that when confronting an ambitious neighbor, border territories have to be defended not only with previously agreed rights or treaties, or, if necessary, with weapons, which is the most problematic and least advisable, but above all with something else that, besides being fundamental, is much simpler: simply with population, occupying them in peace in anticipation of any future threats. An unoccupied or barely occupied foreign territory is a temptation for any neighboring country experiencing population expansion willing to occupy it, or for any colonialist or imperialist power wishing to do the same for ambition, rivalry, or geopolitical interests.”
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In the case of Britain, it was the latter, as its occupation of Venezuelan territory not only expanded the empire itself, but also provided it with closer access to Trinidad, which was under British occupation at that time. The seizure of the Venezuelan Essequibo thus provided the British Empire unimpeded access to the Caribbean and the Atlantic, essential for continuing its hegemonic control of the area.

​Venezuela’s other territorial losses

At this point, it may be appropriate to touch briefly on other territorial losses that Venezuela suffered at the hands of multiple imperialist powers over the centuries. Long before the Essequibo incident, Venezuela, as a Spanish colony, lost two important groups of islands to two different European colonial powers. Although Venezuela was not responsible for the loss in either case, as it was subjugated under Spain at that time, it was Venezuela that was ultimately the loser in terms of both territory and maritime potential.

In the 16th century, new colonial powers arose in Europe, such as Holland, France, and Britain, powers that developed strong naval forces and began confronting the older colonial powers of Spain and Portugal. Over the next two centuries, the Caribbean, which earlier was the main power center of the Spanish Empire, turned into a warzone for claiming control over the islands, sea routes, and even the continental landmass. The Caribbean waters and islands became a real hub for pirates and slave traders, and even today, some of those same islands function as tax havens for the modern-day pirates—the millionaires and billionaires.

This rise of piracy and wars reached its height in the 17th century, when France and Britain seized control of most of the Caribbean islands. The majority of them were smaller ones, but Britain managed to grab one of the largest: Jamaica. As for Venezuela, in 1634, a fleet of Dutch pirate ships seized the island group of Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba—historically part of Venezuelan territory, but neglected by Spain—and the Spanish Empire did nothing to protect it. Holland used the islands as its “base of operations” for smuggling and slave trade; Curaçao in particular became an important center of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. To this day, the islands remain under Dutch occupation, but these days they are referred to by the euphemism “overseas territories” of the Kingdom of Netherlands.

The other maritime loss that Venezuela suffered, as a Spanish colony, came at the hands of the British Empire, when it seized the island of Trinidad in 1797. Spain had neglected Trinidad and did not care to populate it, similar to what it had done in the Essequibo. At the time of the British invasion, there were a handful of Spaniards on the island, which was mainly populated by indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and some French immigrants. The Spanish governor of Trinidad surrendered without a fight, and Spain did nothing to recover the island. What was worse, in 1802, was that Spain signed the Treaty of Amiens with Britain, recognizing British dominion over the island, and leaving Venezuela out of the equation entirely. Britain added Trinidad to Tobago, turned it into a new colony in the Caribbean, and populated it with enslaved Africans, as well as bonded laborers from India and Africa in later years. Trinidad and Tobago gained independence from Britain in 1962, and Venezuela has never demanded the return of Trinidad from the sovereign country.

Even as an independent state, the Republic of Venezuela went on losing territories, not only in the east in its confrontations with colonial Britain, but also in the west. With the dissolution and fragmentation of Gran Colombia, both Venezuela and Colombia, the two largest countries to emerge from it, squabbled over defining the binational border. The Michelena-Pombo Treaty, signed between the governments of Colombia and Venezuela in 1833, divided the disputed Guajira region into two almost equal parts for each party. However, the Venezuelan parliament was claiming more territory in the region, and therefore rejected the treaty. The border problem continued over the next 50 years, during which time Colombia went on claiming more territory in the Guajira as well as the llanos (plains). Multiple bilateral negotiations produced no result, until finally, in 1883, Spain—the former colonial ruler of both nations—arbitrated the issue in favor of Colombia, and then-Venezuelan President Guzmán Blanco accepted it, providing closure to the neighbors’ dispute.

Hand of a person holding a small Venezuelan flag and a book entitled The Truth of the Essquibo. Photo: Matias Delacroix/AP.

Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—The Venezuelan people and Chavismo scored an important victory this Sunday when Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) made public the first report on the results of the Essequibo Referendum called by the National Assembly (AN) two months ago, on September 27, and announcing an overwhelming victory of the “Yes,” the option promoted by President Nicolás Maduro’s administration.

On Sunday night, December 3, the CNE reported the following results:
• On question 1: Yes 97.8% / No: 2.2%
• On question 2: Yes: 98.1% / No: 1.8%
• On question 3: Yes: 95.4% / No: 4.1%
• On question 4: Yes: 95.9% / No: 4.1%
• On question 5: Yes: 95.9% / No: 4.1%
All five questions on the referendum were overwhelmingly approved by the Venezuelan people, with the first and second being the most affirmatively voted. The questions can be read below:

1- Do you agree to repudiate, by all means, in accordance with the law, the line fraudulently imposed by the Paris Arbitral Award of 1899, which seeks to dispossess us of our Essequibo territory?
2- Do you support the Geneva Agreement of 1966 as the only valid legal instrument to reach a practical and satisfactory solution for Venezuela and Guyana regarding the dispute over the territory of Essequibo?
3- Do you agree with Venezuela’s historical position of not recognizing the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice to resolve the territorial controversy over the Essequibo?
4- Do you agree to oppose, by all means, in accordance with the law, Guyana’s intention to unilaterally dispose of a sea pending delimitation, illegally and in violation of international law?
5- Do you agree with the creation of the state of Guayana Esequiba and the development of an accelerated plan for the integral attention of the current and future population of that territory, which includes, among others, the granting of Venezuelan citizenship and identity cards, in accordance with the Geneva Agreement and international law, consequently incorporating said state in the map of the Venezuelan territory?

With a reported turnout of more than 10.5 million voters, representing approximately 50% of the electoral roll, the Essequibo referendum represents an important victory for the Venezuelan people, reaffirming their commitment to defend their rightful claim over the Essequibo territory, and, simultaneously, it represents a victory for Chavismo, which was able to unite the people, even including far-right opposition sectors that traditionally oppose anything related to Chavismo.

President Maduro’s reaction

From Bolívar Square in Caracas, President Nicolás Maduro, just a few minutes after the CNE report, addressed the Venezuelan people to acknowledge the participation of people in the referendum in which the “Yes” vote won overwhelmingly throughout Venezuela.

“We have fulfilled it. The referendum was held and it has been a total success for our country and our democracy. An overwhelming victory for the ‘Yes’ throughout Venezuela, with a significant level of participation,” said President Maduro.

​“We have taken the first steps of a new historical stage to fight for what is ours and recover what the Libertadores left us: the Essequibo territory,” he added.

The president applauded the bravery of the opposition parties that joined the electoral contest to defend Essequibo. Likewise, he congratulated the people of Venezuela, the Plan República, and the National Electoral Council for an election day in which all the people expressed themselves in peace while inviting the country to open new paths of unity, without political schisms, aiming to achieve a complete recovery of the country.

The voting day

CNE President Elvis Amoroso reported earlier on Sunday that at 6:00 in the morning, 75% of the voting centers were operational and, at 9:00, the figure reached 97%. No major disruptions or incidents were reported during the electoral journey, and, as Orinoco Tribune could corroborate, on the ground, the process was very efficient and without delays despite some exceptions in working-class neighborhoods.

In the afternoon, Amoroso extended the closing time from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., as many voters remained in the voting centers. Late in the night, when President Maduro was addressing the victory in front of hundreds of supporters at Bolívar Square (in Caracas), Miranda state governor Hector Rodriguez mentioned that at that time (approximately 11:00 p.m.), there were still some voting centers with people voting.

Venezuelan opposition in its labyrinth

Despite flip-flopping on the Essequibo referendum by the Venezuelan far-right opposition leadership, with the Unitary Platform calling for its supporters to “exercise their free will” instead of calling for the straight defense of Venezuelan territorial integrity, many were surprised on Sunday when they witnessed important opposition politicians exercising their democratic right to vote.

Zulia governor Manuel Rosales from the Un Nuevo Tiempo party; Carlos Prosperi from the Democratic Action party (A); Stalin Gonzalez, member of the Unitary Platform negotiation team from Justice First (PJ); former opposition primaries pre-candidate Andres Caleca; Antonio Ecarri for the Lapiz party; former opposition pre-candidate Benjamin Rausseo (El Conde); and Daniel Ceballos from Popular Will (VP) were among the opposition figures that publicized their participation in the referendum.

Meanwhile, Maria Corina Machado, a prominent figure in the far-right opposition, has found herself overshadowed by the Essequibo referendum initiative due to her own inconsistent positions. She initially called for the referendum’s suspension, citing concerns that it could compromise the International Criminal Court (ICJ) process. A process not recognized by Venezuela, following the nation’s historical stance. However, in 2018, Machado publicly denounced and opposed Guyana’s intention to take the case to the ICJ.

Within this context, Guyana’s Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo took to Facebook to emphasize Machado’s stance, showcasing a clear unity of convictions between the two parties. This situation has not positioned Machado favorably and has made the Venezuelan politician, who aims to challenge President Maduro in the 2024 presidential race, largely irrelevant.

Surprise turn of Guyana’s position

In recent years, Guyana has adopted an aggressive and provocative approach regarding the territorial dispute with Venezuela over Essequibo. This stance has involved periodic military exercises in collaboration with the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). Guyana was an active member of the now-defunct Lima Group, which, under the guidance of the White House, pursued a diplomatic campaign that marginalized and isolated Venezuela for an extended period. Additionally, there has been a notable uptick in reported xenophobic incidents targeting Venezuelan migrants. Guyana’s actions have extended to granting oil concessions, including in waters that are not part of the dispute and belong to Venezuela. President Irfaan Ali of Guyana has consistently rebuffed President Maduro’s repeated calls to seek a diplomatic resolution to the issue, among other contentious moves.

During the recent United Nations Climate Change COP28 Summit in the United Arab Emirates, President Ali unexpectedly signaled a shift in approach by seeking potential support from Cuba. His meeting with Cuban President Miguel Miguel Díaz-Canel and St. Vincent’s Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves hinted at a possible attempt to alleviate tensions. Notably, both Cuba and St. Vincent are recognized as strategic allies of Venezuela.

“I have fully briefed President Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel of Cuba and Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of Saint Vincent [and the Grenadies] on the Venezuela/Guyana Border controversy,” wrote Guyana’s president. “I reinforced Guyana’s commitment to regional peace and the rule of law. I also urged Cuba to join CARICOM in calling for a commitment from Venezuela to maintain the region as a zone of peace. The statement by Ali represented a new attempt to portray himself as the victim, instead of the aggressor, in the recent escalation.

This article was produced byOrinoco Tribune. 

Almost as important as its military campaign for Israel is its battle to control its public image. Even as it kills thousands of people in Gaza, the small Middle Eastern nation is spending millions of dollars on a propaganda war, purchasing ads on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other online apps. At the same time, an army of pro-Israel trolls has invaded the Community Notes function on X/Twitter, attempting to influence the online debate around the ongoing crisis.

Since October 7, Israel has inundated YouTube with advertisements, with its Ministry of Foreign Affairs spending nearly $7.1 million on ads in the two weeks following Hamas’ incursion. According to journalist Sophia Smith Galer, this equates to almost one billion impressions.

With its campaign, the Israeli government overwhelmingly focused on rich Western nations, its top targets being France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium and the United States. In France alone, the ministry spent $3.8 million. Other branches of the Israeli government undoubtedly also spent money on ads. The overwhelming message of the campaign was that Hamas are terrorists linked with ISIS and that Israel – a modern, secular democracy – is defending itself from foreign aggression.
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Much of the content blatantly violated YouTube’s terms of service, including a number of ads featuring gory shots of dead bodies. Another ad that piqued public attention was played before videos aimed at babies. Amid a scene of pink rainbows and soothing music, text appears reading:

Nearly all the Ministry of Foreign Affairs views are inorganic. Most of their YouTube uploads garner only a few hundred views. But the ones selected as advertisements have hundreds of thousands or even millions of views.

Israel’s YouTube campaign has been matched by expansive attempts to control the public debate on other social media platforms. In barely a week, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ran 30 ads seen over 4 million times on Twitter. Like with YouTube, analytics data shows they were inordinately targeting adults in Western Europe.

One ad contained the words “ISIS” and “Hamas,” showing disturbing imagery that gradually sped up until the names of the two groups blended into one. In case the message was not clear enough, it ended with the message, “The world defeated ISIS. The world will defeat Hamas.”
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The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also bought large numbers of advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, mobile games and apps such as language trainer Duolingo.

The Community Notes function on Twitter is an attempt to fight false information. Contributors who sign up for the feature can leave notes on any post, adding context to potentially misleading statements. The community then votes on these notes, and if enough people consider the note useful, it is presented below the original tweet.

While it has its advantages, the system is ripe for abuse and infiltration. Since October 7, an army of pro-Israel trolls has brigaded the function and is attempting to undermine and attack as many posts as possible showing Israel in a negative light or Palestine in a positive one. This has often been done in an attempt to hide Israeli war crimes.

“If you’re not a Community Notes contributor, then you may be unaware that any tweet about Gaza that poses an inconvenience to Israeli information interests is being mobbed by Israel apologists working to manipulate the narrative, including on tweets just voicing an opinion,” wrote journalist Caitlin Johnstone.
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A case in point is the attack on the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. Under a tweet from journalist Dan Cohen noting that Hananya Naftali (an aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) had boasted that Israel carried out the attack before deleting his message, Community Notes wrote that “Naftali has openly retracted his statement, as conclusive evidence has since shown the explosion was fired from a misfired rocket from Gaza.” The “conclusive evidence” offered was a statement from the Pentagon and a tweet from a former Israeli Air Force squad commander.

Meanwhile, a tweet from Lebanese political commentator Sara Abdallah breaking the news that Israel had just bombed the St. Porphyrius Church in Gaza was flagged by Community Notes. This meant that all users saw a note added reading, “False. Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza has posted they are untouched and operating as of October 9, 2023.” The problem was this was breaking news related to October 19, so any statement before that time was meaningless in assessing the news. Further undermining the community note was that Israel almost immediately accepted responsibility for the destruction.
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Pro-Israel trolls have also not been above blatant smears. On a popular post from myself where I shared a picture of Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu embracing with the words, “In the future, this image will be looked upon as one of the most shameful moments in history,” Community Notes added the message: “Alan MacLeod is a Senior Staff Writer at MintPress News. MintPress is renowned for publishing far-left disinformation and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” Other MintPress staff, such as Lowkey and Mnar Adley, have also been consistently targeted with smears and arguments dressed up as clarifications.

In the fog of war, the Middle Eastern network Al-Jazeera has been a consistent source of live reporting. The well-funded network has a large team of reporters in Palestine and the wider region and has a long history of covering the conflict.

Therefore, when Al-Jazeera released an investigation that found no evidence to support Israel’s claim that a failed Palestinian rocket launch was to blame for the damage at the Al-Ahli Hospital, the story went viral.
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This was a major blow to Israel and its apologists, who did not want the blood of hundreds of innocent doctors and patients on their hands. And so, pro-Israel users attempted to get community notes plastered all over the Al-Jazeera story, including ones that read:

“[Israel apologists] are just throwing everything they can at it to get something to stick, solely because it is viral and inconvenient,” Johnstone wrote.

This is not the first time that Israel and its supporters have attempted to hijack and manipulate public highways of information. For over a decade, well-organized and well-funded Israeli groups have infiltrated Wikipedia and attempted to rewrite the encyclopedia to defend Israeli actions and demonize voices who speak out against them.

One of the most well-known of these is the Yesha Council, which, as far back as 2010, claimed to have 12,000 active members. Yesha members painstakingly police Wikipedia, removing troublesome facts and framing articles in a manner more favorable to Israel.

Those Yesha considers the “Best Zionist Editors” receive rewards, including free hot air balloon rides. Between 2010 and 2012, this project was personally overseen and coordinated by future Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Yesha and other pro-Israel groups have ceaselessly targeted MintPress’ Wikipedia page, filling it with demonstrable falsehoods and misinformation. Wikipedia is aware of this problem but has refused to address it adequately, perhaps partly because of its co-founder Jimmy Wales’ unabashedly pro-Israel partisanship.
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Another organized pro-Israel group is Act.IL, an Israeli government-sponsored app. Users of the app (which reportedly once had a budget of over $1 million per year) are encouraged to mass report posts, leave replies in comment sections of websites, or boost and share pro-Israel messages online. The point is to create a groundswell of artificial support for Israel in crucial forums in order to influence public opinion.

One of the reasons that social media companies have not cracked down on disingenuous pro-Israeli activities could be that former Israeli government and military officials hold top positions at a great number of the world’s most important platforms.

Emi Palmor, for example, is one of 22 individuals who sit on Facebook’s Oversight Board. Palmor was formerly the General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice. In this role, she directly oversaw the stripping away of Palestinian rights. She created a so-called “Internet Referral Unit,” which would push Facebook to delete Palestinian content that the Israeli government objected to. In her new role at the Oversight Board, she effectively writes Facebook’s rules, deciding what content to promote to the platform’s 3 billion users and what to censor, delete or suppress.

Palmor is also a veteran of Unit 8200, perhaps the most controversial unit in the Israeli military. Described as “Israel’s NSA,” Unit 8200 is the centerpiece of the country’s high-tech surveillance industry. Unit 8200 spies on the Palestinian population, compiling vast dossiers on millions of people, including their medical history, sex lives, and search histories, to be used for extortion later. Individuals found to be cheating on their spouse or engaged in homosexual activities are often distorted by the military, and turned into informants. One veteran admitted that, as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” to listen out for them in conversations.

Unit 8200 graduates have gone on to produce much of the world’s most controversial spying tools, which they have sold to repressive governments around the globe.

A MintPress News investigation unearthed a network of hundreds of Unit 8200 veterans working in influential positions at some of the planet’s most important tech and social media companies, including Google, Amazon and Meta (Facebook).
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For example, Google’s Head of Strategy and Operations for Research, Gavriel Goidel, was previously a senior officer in Unit 8200, rising to become Head of Learning. Facebook Messenger’s Head of Data Science, Eyal Klein, served for six years in Unit 8200, rising to the rank of captain. And after serving in the controversial unit, Ayelet Steinitz became Microsoft’s Head of Global Strategic Alliances.

While Israel is militarily dominant over its neighbors and its captive population, it is losing the battle for public opinion in the West. Virtually every major city across Europe and North America has seen giant protests calling for a free Palestine. Meanwhile, despite near wall-to-wall support from top politicians and corporate media alike, pro-Israel demonstrations have been poorly attended.
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Governments are siding with Israel. But the people are standing with Palestine. And so, while Israel is perfectly capable of leveling Gaza, no matter how much it spends, how much propaganda it produces and how many dirty media tricks it plays, it seems it cannot convince the world to support its actions. But that isn’t stopping it from trying.

This article was produced by MintPress News.