​On November 11, 2023, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) stated that Israeli tanks were within twenty meters of the al-Quds hospital, the second-largest hospital in Gaza City. They reported that there was “direct shooting at the hospital, creating a state of extreme panic and fear among 14,000 displaced people.” Many of those killed have been medical personnel. A group called Healthcare Workers Watch-Palestine, formed in November 2023, has been keeping a list of healthcare workers in Gaza killed by Israeli attacks (226 are known to have been killed from October 7 till November 13).
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The day before, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) reported that the PRCS is “caring for hundreds of injured people and bed-ridden, long-term patients” at al-Quds. “Evacuating patients, including those in intensive care, on life-support, and babies in incubators, is close to, if not impossible in the current situation,” said the IFRC. This and other hospitals as well as medical missions and medical workers “are protected under international humanitarian law,” noted the IFRC. The legal framework they referred to is straightforward:

1. Article 19 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (Protection of medical units and establishments). “Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.”

2. Rule 25 of the International Humanitarian Law (Medical Personnel). “Medical personnel exclusively assigned to medical duties must be respected and protected in all circumstances.”

Two similar phrases in both the Article and the Rule stand out: “in no circumstances” must the protection be withdrawn, and medical workers must be protected “in all circumstances.” Humanitarian law applies to all parts of the world and all conflicts. This is now established by the Treaty of Rome (2002), which is the legal basis for the International Criminal Court. The Treaty of Rome says that it is a war crime if an army is “intentionally directing attacks against buildings,” including “hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected.” There is one exception: “provided they are not military objectives.” By claiming that the hospitals are above Hamas tunnels, the Israelis are claiming that the entire medical infrastructure in Gaza is a military target. This is a convenient way to skirt the absoluteness of international humanitarian law.

In the coming days, we can expect the Israeli propaganda machine to pump out images of IDF soldiers in the tunnels under decimated hospitals holding up guns and copies of Mein Kampf to counter the horrific real-time images of premature babies dying. While these are attempts to justify murdering healthcare workers and the patients they were caring for, they won’t hold up against International Humanitarian Law. Israel has a documented history of bombing hospitals and other healthcare facilities in Gaza, and any doctor versed in patient care quality and safety would insist that underground spaces were constructed to conduct patient care far from the shrapnel of these air strikes.

‘At All Costs’

Across the world on November 11, the American Medical Association (AMA) held a meeting of its House of Delegates while these terrible acts took place. When over 135 medical students and doctors in training in the AMA tried to hold a discussion about a resolution that would call for a ceasefire in Gaza, the AMA leadership shut them down. Those who supported the effort said that there was a “coordinated effort at the national meeting to shut the resolution down, with the Speaker not allowing delegates their allotted 90 seconds to speak about the resolution.” The AMA said that this resolution was “not relevant to advocacy.” “The AMA,” wrote the medical personnel who framed the resolution, “has a responsibility to uphold the wellbeing of healthcare workers and minimize human suffering, and it is clear that these values are not being upheld by some of the most influential physicians in the country, nor is the democratic process being respected.”

This stands in stark contrast to the AMA’s official position on Ukraine in 2022, when they threw their institutional weight behind a call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to Russian attacks on healthcare workers and facilities, emphasizing that international humanitarian and human rights laws must be and civilian and medical personnel lives must be protected “at all costs.”

Every Life Is Sacred

A few days before the House of Delegates meeting, the flagship journal of the AMA, the Journal of the AMA (JAMA), published an article by Dr. Matthew Wynia from the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado and the co-chair of the AMA’s Taskforce on Truth, Reconciliation, Healing, and Transformation. His article “Health Professionals and War in the Middle East” makes three unimpeachable points:

- First, health professionals should condemn dehumanization and acts of genocide.

- Second, health professionals should vigorously oppose both antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred.
- Third, health professionals have special responsibilities to speak out against certain war crimes. 

We concur with all three of these points, including the final sentiment by Dr. Wynia: “In wartime, our profession must remain the living embodiment of religious injunctions to treat every life as sacred, because to save a single life is to save an entire world.”

Dr. Wynia’s article in JAMA, published a few days before the AMA meeting, suggests that it would have been uncontroversial for the AMA to pass a resolution asking for a ceasefire. After all, a ceasefire would allow fellow medical workers to do their work without fear of bombardment, it would stop the killing of civilians, and it would allow for investigation into the attacks on medical facilities and medical workers. If “every life is sacred,” then a medical body must join in the call to prevent any further loss of innocent life. But this is not what happened at the AMA meeting, whose refusal to open the floor for discussion about a ceasefire resolution suggests the opposite approach.

A closer reading of Dr. Wynia’s article shows why medical professionals decided not to allow even a discussion of a ceasefire in Gaza. “Health professionals of goodwill and equally strong commitments to human rights have differing questions on these questions, which reflects the nature of the questions,” Dr. Wynia writes. Introducing moral relativism to the discussion, Dr. Wynia allows for ambiguity where there is none—none in legal terms and none in moral terms. How can “health professionals of goodwill” have a disagreement about the targeting of medical workers and medical institutions or indeed how can they disagree about the killing of civilians, including those who are injured and sick in hospitals? There is room for debate over what must be done when confronted by the evidence of attacks on medical workers and medical workers, but there is no ambiguity about their illegality and immorality.

Dying One by One

Israel has been spreading propaganda over the past several weeks about the presence of Hamas headquarters under one of Gaza’s hospitals—Al-Shifa—to inject a space of moral confusion around protecting healthcare workers and healthcare facilities. On November 5, a group of almost 100 doctors in Israel circulated a letter calling for the annihilation of all hospitals in Gaza, as if to sanction the IDF’s direct attack on the most sacred spaces of our profession. On November 11, Israel also bombarded the Al-Shifa Hospital complex with 1,700 sick and injured patients inside and about 50,000 displaced people sheltering in its courtyard according to Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, a surgeon who was stationed there at the time. Israeli attacks have completely destroyed the hospital. With the power now out in Al-Shifa, 39 newborns in incubators are now wrapped in blankets, dying one by one. Perhaps this is whom Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to when he said the “children of darkness.”

Israel’s attack on Gaza’s healthcare is an attack on the soul of the medical profession, for which JAMA has provided cover and the AMA supports through enforced silence. Why the American Medical Association can make such a blunt statement about Ukraine but want to remain silent about Palestine raises an important question: does the AMA advocate only for the issues outlined by the U.S. State Department or are these the opinions of the doctors who make up its membership?

​Author

Rupa Marya, MD, is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, and co-author with Raj Patel of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

​We have both been reporting on and protesting against U.S. war crimes for many years, and against identical crimes committed by U.S. allies and proxies like Israel and Saudi Arabia: illegal uses of military force to try to remove enemy governments or “regimes”; hostile military occupations; disproportionate military violence justified by claims of “terrorism”; the bombing and killing of civilians; and the mass destruction of whole cities. 
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Most Americans share a general aversion to war, but tend to accept this militarized foreign policy because we are tragically susceptible to propaganda, the machinery of public manipulation that works hand in hand with the machinery of killing to justify otherwise unthinkable horrors. 

This process of “manufacturing consent” works in a number of ways. One of the most effective forms of propaganda is silence, simply not telling us, and certainly not showing us, what war is really doing to the people whose homes and communities have been turned into America’s latest battlefield.

With the reality of war and genocide staring the world in the face, people everywhere are challenging the impunity with which Israel is systematically violating international humanitarian law.

The most devastating campaign the U.S. military has waged in recent years dropped over 100,000 bombs and missiles on Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, and other areas occupied by ISIS or Da’esh. An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in Mosul, while Raqqa was even more totally destroyed.

The shelling of Raqqa was the heaviest U.S. artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War, yet it was barely reported in the U.S. corporate media. A recent New York Times article about the traumatic brain injuries and PTSD suffered by U.S. artillerymen operating 155 mm howitzers, which each fired up to 10,000 shells into Raqqa, was appropriately titled A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence from the Pentagon.

Shrouding such mass death and destruction in secrecy is a remarkable achievement. When British playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, in the midst of the Iraq War, he titled his Nobel speech “Art, Truth and Politics,” and used it to shine a light on this diabolical aspect of U.S. war-making.

After talking about the hundreds of thousands of killings in Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguy, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Nicaragua, Pinter asked: “Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes, they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy.“

"But you wouldn’t know it,” he went on.”It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

But the wars and the killing go on, day after day, year after year, out of sight and out of mind for most Americans. Did you know that the United States and its allies have dropped more than 350,000 bombs and missiles on 9 countries since 2001 (including 14,000 in the current war on Gaza)? That’s an average of 44 airstrikes per day, day in, day out, for 22 years.

Israel, in its present war on Gaza, with children making up more than 40% of the more than 11,000 people killed to date, would surely like to mimic the extraordinary U.S. ability to hide its brutality. But despite Israel’s efforts to impose a media blackout, the massacre is taking place in a small, enclosed, densely-populated urban area, often called an open-air prison, where the world can see a great deal more than usual of how it impacts real people.

Israel has killed a record number of journalists in Gaza, and this appears to be a deliberate strategy, as when U.S. forces targeted journalists in Iraq. But we are still seeing horrifying video and photos of daily new atrocities: dead and wounded children; hospitals struggling to treat the injured; and desperate people fleeing from one place to another through the rubble of their destroyed homes.

Another reason this war is not so well hidden is because Israel is waging it, not the United States. The U.S. is supplying most of the weapons, has sent aircraft carriers to the region, and dispatched U.S. Marine General James Glynn to provide tactical advice based on his experience conducting similar massacres in Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq. But Israeli leaders seem to have overestimated the extent to which the U.S. information warfare machine would shield them from public scrutiny and political accountability.

Unlike in Fallujah, Mosul and Raqqa, people all over the world are seeing video of the unfolding catastrophe on their computers, phones and TVs. Netanyahu, Biden and the corrupt “defense analysts” on cable TV are no longer the ones creating the narrative, as they try to tack self-serving narratives onto the horrifying reality we can all see for ourselves.

With the reality of war and genocide staring the world in the face, people everywhere are challenging the impunity with which Israel is systematically violating international humanitarian law.

Michael Crowley and Edward Wong have reported in the New York Times that Israeli officials are defending their actions in Gaza by pointing to U.S. war crimes, insisting that they are simply interpreting the laws of war the same way that the United States has interpreted them in Iraq and other U.S. war zones. They compare Gaza to Fallujah, Mosul and even Hiroshima. 

But copying U.S. war crimes is precisely what makes Israel’s actions illegal. And it is the world’s failure to hold the United States accountable that has emboldened Israel to believe it too can kill with impunity. 

​The United States systematically violates the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of force, manufacturing political justifications to suit each case and using its Security Council veto to evade international accountability. Its military lawyers employ unique, exceptional interpretations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, under which the universal protections the Convention guarantees to civilians are treated as secondary to U.S. military objectives.

The United States fiercely resists the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), to ensure that its exceptional interpretations of international law are never subjected to impartial judicial scrutiny.

When the United States did allow the ICJ to rule on its war against Nicaragua in 1986, the ICJ ruled that its deployment of the “Contras” to invade and attack Nicaragua and its mining of Nicaragua’s ports were acts of aggression in violation of international law, and ordered the United States to pay war reparations to Nicaragua. When the United States declared that it would no longer recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ and failed to pay up, Nicaragua asked the UN Security Council to enforce the reparations, but the U.S. vetoed the resolution.

Atrocities like Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the bombing of German and Japanese cities to “unhouse” the civilian population, as Winston Churchill called it, together with the horrors of Germany’s Nazi holocaust, led to the adoption of the new Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949, to protect civilians in war zones and under military occupation. 

On the 50th anniversary of the Convention in 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is responsible for monitoring international compliance with the Geneva Conventions, conducted a survey to see how well people in different countries understood the protections the Convention provides.

They surveyed people in twelve countries that had been victims of war, in four countries (France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S.) that are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and in Switzerland where the ICRC is based. The ICRC published the results of the survey in 2000, in a report titled, People on War - Civilians in the Line of Fire.

The survey asked people to choose between a correct understanding of the Convention’s civilian protections and a watered-down interpretation of them that closely resembles that of U.S. and Israeli military lawyers.

The correct understanding was defined by a statement that combatants “must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone.” The weaker, incorrect statement was that “combatants should avoid civilians as much as possible” as they conduct military operations.

Between 72% and 77% of the people in the other UNSC countries and Switzerland agreed with the correct statement, but the United States was an outlier, with only 52% agreeing. In fact 42% of Americans agreed with the weaker statement, twice as many as in the other countries. There were similar disparities between the United States and the others on questions about torture and the treatment of prisoners of war.

In U.S.-occupied Iraq, the United States’ exceptionally weak interpretations of the Geneva Conventions led to endless disputes with the ICRC and the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), which issued damning quarterly human rights reports. UNAMI consistently maintained that U.S. airstrikes in densely populated civilian areas were violations of international law.

For instance, its human rights report for the2nd quarter of 2007 documented UNAMI’s investigations of 15 incidents in which U.S. occupation forces killed 103 Iraqi civilians, including 27 killed in airstrikes in Khalidiya, near Ramadi, on April 3rd, and 7 children killed in a helicopter attack on an elementary school in Diyala province on May 8th.

UNAMI demanded that “all credible allegations of unlawful killings by MNF (Multi-National Force) forces be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force.”
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A footnote explained, “Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area.”

UNAMI also rejected U.S. claims that its widespread killing of civilians was the result of the Iraqi Resistance using civilians as “human shields,” another U.S. propaganda trope that Israel is mimicking today. Israeli accusations of human shielding are even more absurd in the densely populated, confined space of Gaza, where the whole world can see that it is Israel that is placing civilians in the line of fire as they desperately seek safety from Israeli bombardment.

Calls for a ceasefire in Gaza are echoing around the world: through the halls of the United Nations; from the governments of traditional U.S. allies like France, Spain and Norway; from a newly united front of previously divided Middle Eastern leaders; and in the streets of London and Washington. The world is withdrawing its consent for a genocidal “two-state solution” in which Israel and the United States are the only two states that can settle the fate of Palestine.

If U.S. and Israeli leaders are hoping that they can squeak through this crisis, and that the public’s habitually short attention span will wash away the world’s horror at the crimes we are all witnessing, that may be yet another serious misjudgment. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1950 in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism.“
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We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”

​The headline is provocative: “The Kremlin’s Efforts to Covertly Spread Disinformation in Latin America.” This was a statement on the U.S. State Department website, posted on November 7, 2023. The United States government accused two companies—Social Design Agency and Structura National Technologies—of being the main agents of what it alleged is Russian-backed disinformation. The statement named the heads of both of the firms, Ilya Gambashidze of Social Design Agency and Nikolay Tupkin of Structura. On July 28, 2023, the European Union sanctioned several Russian individuals and firms, including SDA and Structura. The European Union accuses these two IT firms of being “involved in the Russian-led digital disinformation campaign” against the government of Ukraine. The statement by the U.S. State Department now alleges that these IT companies are involved in a disinformation project in Latin America.
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Neither the European Union nor the U.S. State Department offer any evidence in their various public statements. The U.S. document does, however, refer to the 2023 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, which says the following: “Russia’s influence actors have adapted their efforts to increasingly hide their hand, laundering their preferred messaging through a vast ecosystem of Russian proxy websites, individuals, and organizations that appear to be independent news sources.” Here, we get mainly the methodology—laundering information through proxy websites—rather than any hard evidence.

On May 3, 2023, the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on “The Global Information Wars: Is the U.S. Winning or Losing?” The main speaker at the hearing was Amanda Bennett, the Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an umbrella group that runs several U.S. government media projects from Europe (Radio Liberty) to the Americas (Office of Cuba Broadcasting) with an $810 million annual budget. Bennett, the former director of the U.S. government’s Voice of America, told the senators that if the U.S. government fails to “target investments to counter inroads Russia, the [People’s Republic of China], and Iran are making, we run the risk of losing the global information war.” These three countries, she argued, have “outspent” the United States in Latin America, an advantage that she said needed to be overcome by increased U.S. interference in Latin American media.

The Role of RT

In Latin America, Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institute told the Senators, Russian media has secured a decisive advantage. The facts she laid out are worthwhile to consider: “Through the first quarter of 2023, three of the five most retweeted Russian state media accounts on Twitter messaged in Spanish, and five of the ten fastest growing ones targeted Spanish-language audiences. On YouTube, RT en Español has also proven capable of building large audiences, despite the platform’s global ban on Russian state-funded media channels. On TikTok, RT en Español is among the most popular Spanish-language media outlets. Its 29.6 million likes make it more popular than Telemundo, Univision, BBC Mundo, and El País. Likewise, on Facebook, RT en Español currently has more followers than any other Spanish-language international broadcaster.” In other words, RT by itself has become one of the most influential media outlets in Latin America. Brandt’s facts are widely accepted, including by a report published in March by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism called “Despite Western bans, Putin’s propaganda flourishes in Spanish on TV and social media” and by a study from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab from 2022.

RT (formerly Russia Today) is owned by TV-Novosti, a non-profit organization founded by the state-owned Ria Novosti in 2005. RT is banned or blocked in Canada, the European Union, Germany, the United States, and several other Western countries. In fact, at the Senate hearing, there was little discussion about the entire web of RT projects. The focus was on the “laundering” of “disinformation.”

‘Most Likely’

What is striking about the U.S. State Department statement is that it names two news projects that operate in Latin America as these “proxies” without any evidence but with hesitant language. For instance, the U.S. State Department says that part of the Russian campaign is to cultivate a group of journalists “most likely in Chile,” but not definitely. This hesitation is important to underline because a few paragraphs later, the doubt vanishes: “While the network’s operations are primarily done in concert with Spanish-language outlets Pressenza and El Ciudadano, a broader network of media resources is available to the group to further amplify information.”

Pressenza, founded in 2009 in Milan, Italy, emerged out of the debates and discussions provoked by the International Commission for the Study of Communications Problems (formed by UNESCO) and its report, Many Voices, One World or the MacBride Report (1980). The MacBride report itself built on discussions about media democracy that had resulted in the formation, in 1964, of Inter-Press Services, and then later in Pressenza. El Ciudadano was founded in 2005 as part of the process of democratization in Chile in the aftermath of the fall of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1990.

Both outlets denied (in English and Spanish) that they are either funded by the Russian government or that they launder information for the Russian government. In their joint statement, signed by David Andersson (editor of Pressenza) and Bruno Sommer Catalán (editor of El Ciudadano), they say, “We believe that this kind of attack is malicious, and we insist that the US State Department withdraw this accusation as well as publicly apologize to us for maligning our reputations.” In a separate statement, Italian journalist Antonio Mazzeo (who won the Giorgio Bassani prize in 2010) said: “This affair worries me because it could prepare for the next step, the creation of a proscription list…  to put all those who do not accept to think only of war and therefore become dangerous and must be silenced.”

Author

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

​On her show last Friday, political commentator Katie Halper  played Decensored News’ recent video of journalist Sam Husseini confronting the U.S. State Department about the Genocide Convention for her guest Craig Mokhiber, asking for his reaction.
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Mokhiber is an international lawyer who served as Director of the New York Office for the UN’s High Commissioner on Human Rights before stepping down recently due to their inaction over the “genocide unfolding before our eyes” in Palestine at the hands of the Israelis.

Here is a subtitled clip of the most relevant portion of his response (video of which is also seen in the longer Halper segment above).

Mokhiber praises Sam before going on to denounce the “arrogant” and self-serving nature of the State Department’s claim that they haven’t made a “determination” of genocide in Israel’s case.

“Of course you haven’t determined, because your determination is political. And you would never determine such a thing.”

He cited the genocide in Rwanda as an example:

Remember it was the US government, and again, thanks to the leaked memos, that we learned after the genocide in Rwanda that we had the State Department INSTRUCTING all their diplomatic missions DO NOT use the word genocide, because in Rwanda, as the genocide was unfolding because if you use the word genocide we are legally compelled to do something about it. So we don’t say genocide.

So the fact that the US government has not made a determination is not surprising, and it’s not the end of the story.

You could say, however, that it shows that they aren’t taking their international legal obligations seriously.

Mokhiber noted the urgency with which the Genocide Convention should be invoked:

You know, the convention on genocide is not… it’s not just to punish genocide, but it’s also to PREVENT genocide.

So you can’t WAIT until AFTER, you know, the dust is settled and say now we’ll determine whether that was genocide or not. The obligations go much further than that.

And, thank goodness that these are, you know, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, genocide, these things are all subject to universal jurisdiction.

So, they can be prosecuted in ANY court, anywhere in the world by somebody who wants to bring a claim.

That’s why there are a lot of senior officials who have to check before they go to a country whether there’s a pending indictment, or whether there’s a risk of arrest. And I think there are gonna be a lot of names on that list in the coming months as well, because under universal jurisdiction all of these crimes can be prosecuted in— effectively in any court.

The US will continue to block the ICC; the ICC will continue to drag its feet because it does give in to political pressure from the West when it comes to Israel, and violations of— of international crimes by Israel.

He also briefly made the case for US culpability under the Genocide Convention, noting that “complicity” in genocide is one of the included crimes, in addition to “genocide itself.”

“But genocide, you know — and the Convention makes clear — you know, you can be a perpetrator whether you’re the head of a country, whether you’re an official within a country, or whether you’re a private actor.

Nobody is immune if they are participating. It outlaws not just genocide itself; it outlaws attempted genocide, incitement to genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and here’s what’s really important: complicity in genocide.

And I have argued that many of the crimes that are being perpetrated now in Gaza by the Israelis the US is very complicit through the financing, arming, diplomatic cover, intelligence support, even the mobilization of some troops I understand as well.

Asked by Halper about what role the World Court might play in this situation, Mokhiber said:
[The World Court is] different from the International Criminal Court, where you can have INDIVIDUAL criminal accountability.

In the World Court it’s state to state. So there would be a kind of accountability that would then— would help to support charges against individuals.

But there should be a claim in the World Court. Any state can bring it if they’re a party to the convention.
I think there needs to be pressure to counter-balance the pressure that has caused the International Criminal Court not to take action all these years when it comes to Israel. There needs to be pressure. And they are feeling, I think, a little pressure now as more and more voices are speaking up and saying this really does look like genocide.
Mokhiber’s four-page resignation letter was sent to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on October 28, 2023, and began (bold added):

Dear High Commissioner,

This will be my last official communication to you as Director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

I write at a moment of great anguish for the world, including for many of our colleagues. Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it. As someone who has investigated human rights in Palestine since the 1980s, lived in Gaza as a UN human rights advisor in the 1990s, and carried out several human rights missions to the country before and since, this is deeply personal to me.

I also worked in these halls through the genocides against the Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, the Yazidi, and the Rohingya. In each case, when the dust settled on the horrors that had been perpetrated against defenseless civilian populations, it became painfully clear that we had failed in our duty to meet the imperatives of prevention of mass atrocites, of protection of the vulnerable, and of accountability for perpetrators. And so it has been with successive waves of murder and persecution against the Palestinians throughout the entire life of the UN.

High Commissioner, we are failing again.

You can read his full letter here.

This was originally posted on the Decensored News website.

Author 

Decensored News

SIGNIFICANT segments of the non-Communist Western Left see the developing contradiction between the United States and China in terms of an inter-imperialist rivalry. Such a characterisation fulfils three distinct theoretical functions from their point of view: first, it provides an explanation for the growing contradiction between the U.S. and China; second, it does so by using a Leninist concept and within a Leninist paradigm; and third, it critiques China as an emerging imperialist power, and hence by inference, a capitalist economy, which is in conformity with an ultra-Left critique of China.

Such a characterisation ironically makes these segments of the Left implicitly or explicitly complicit in U.S. imperialism’s machinations against China.  At best, it leads to a position which holds that they are both imperialist countries, so that there is no point in supporting one against the other; at worst, it leads to supporting the U.S. against China as the “lesser evil” in the conflict between these two imperialist powers. In either case, it leads to the obliteration of an oppositional position with regard to the aggressive postures of U.S. imperialism vis-à-vis China; and since the two countries are at loggerheads on most contemporary issues, it leads to a general muting of opposition to U.S. imperialism.

For quite some time now, significant sections of the western Left, even those who otherwise profess opposition to western imperialism, have been supportive of the actions of this imperialism in specific situations. It was evident in their support for the bombing of Serbia when that country was being ruled by Slobodan Milosevich; it is evident at present in the support for NATO in the ongoing Ukraine war; and it is also evident in their shocking lack of any strong opposition to the genocide that is being perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinian people in Gaza with the active support of western imperialism. The silence on, or the support for, the aggressive imperialist position on China by certain sections of the western Left, is, to be sure, not necessarily identical with these positions; but it is in conformity with them.

Such a position which does not frontally oppose western imperialism, is, ironically, at complete variance with the interests and the attitudes of the working class in the metropolitan countries. The working class in Europe for instance is overwhelmingly opposed to NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, as is evident in many instances of workers’ refusal to load shipment of European arms meant for Ukraine. This is not surprising, for the war has also directly impacted workers’ lives by aggravating inflation. But the absence of any forthright Left opposition to the war is making many workers turn to right-wing parties that, even though they fall in line with imperialist positions upon coming to power as Meloni has done in Italy, are at least critical of such positions when they are in opposition. The quietude of the western left vis-à-vis western imperialism is thus causing a shift of the entire political centre of gravity to the right over much of the metropolis. And looking upon the U.S.-China contradiction as an inter-imperialist rivalry plays into this narrative.

As for China being a capitalist economy, and hence engaged in imperialist activities all over the globe in rivalry with the U.S., those who hold this view are, at best, taking a moralist position and mixing up “capitalist” with “bad” and “socialist” with “good”. Their position amounts in effect to saying: I have my notion of how a socialist society should behave (which is an idealised notion), and if China’s behaviour in some respects differs from my notion, then ipso facto China cannot be socialist and hence must be capitalist. The terms capitalist and socialist however have very specific meanings, which imply their being associated with very specific kinds of dynamics, each kind rooted in certain basic property relations. True, China has a significant capitalist sector, namely one characterised by capitalist property relations, but the bulk of the Chinese economy is still State-owned and characterised by centralised direction which prevents it from having the self- drivenness (or “spontaneity”) that marks capitalism. One may critique many aspects of Chinese economy and society, but calling it “capitalist” and hence engaged in imperialist activities on a par with western metropolitan economies, is a travesty. It is not only analytically wrong but leads to praxis that is palpably against the interests of both the working classes in the metropolis and the working people in the global south.

But the question immediately arises: if the U.S.-China contradiction is not a manifestation of inter-imperialist rivalry, then how can we explain its rise to prominence in the more recent period? To understand this we have to go back to the post-second world war period. Capitalism emerged from the war greatly weakened, and facing an existential crisis: the working class in the metropolis was not willing to go back to the pre-war capitalism that had entailed mass unemployment and destitution; socialism had made great advances all over the world; and liberation struggles in the global south against colonial and semi-colonial oppression had reached a real crescendo. For its very survival therefore capitalism had to make a number of concessions: the introduction of universal adult suffrage, the adoption of welfare State measures, the institution of State intervention in demand management, and above all the acceptance of formal political decolonisation.

Political decolonisation however did not mean economic decolonisation, that is, the transfer of control over third world resources, exercised till then by metropolitan capital to the newly independent countries; indeed against such transfers imperialism fought a bitter and prolonged struggle, marked by the overthrow of governments led by Arbenz, Mossadegh, Allende, Cheddi Jagan, Lumumba and many others. Even so, however, metropolitan capital could not prevent third world resources in many instances from slipping out of its control to the dirigiste regimes that had come up in these countries following decolonisation.

The tide turned in favour of imperialism with the coming into being of a higher stage of centralisation of capital that gave rise to globalised capital, including above all globalised finance, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union that itself was not altogether unrelated to the globalisation of finance. Imperialism trapped countries in the web of globalisation and hence in the vortex of global financial flows, forcing them under the threat of financial outflows into pursuing neo-liberal policies that meant the end of dirigiste regimes and the re-acquisition of control by metropolitan capital over much of third world resources, including third world land-use.

It is against this background of re-assertion of imperialist hegemony that one can understand the heightening of U.S.-China contradiction and many other contemporary developments like the Ukraine war. Two features of this re-assertion need to be noted: the first is that metropolitan market access for goods from countries like China, together with the willingness of metropolitan capital to locate plants in such countries to take advantage of their comparatively lower wages for meeting global demand, accelerated the growth-rate in these economies (and only these economies) of the global south; it did so in China to a point where the leading metropolitan power, the U.S., began to see China as a threat. The second feature is the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism that has emerged with virulence after the collapse of the housing “bubble” in the U.S.

For both these reasons the U.S. would now like to protect its economy against imports from China and from other similarly-placed countries of the global south. Even though these imports may be occurring, at least in part, under the aegis of U.S. capital, the U.S. cannot afford to run the risk of “deindustrialising” itself. The desire on its part to cut China “down to size” so soon after it had been hailing China for its “economic reforms” is thus rooted in the contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism, and hence in the very logic inherent to the reassertion of imperialist hegemony. It is not inter-imperialist rivalry, but resistance on the part of China, and other countries following its lead, to the re-assertion of hegemony by western imperialism that explains the heightening of U.S.-China contradictions.

As the capitalist crisis accentuates, as the oppression of third world countries because of their inability to service their external debt increases through the imposition of “austerity” by imperialist agencies like the IMF, and in turn calls forth greater resistance from them and greater assistance to them from China, the U.S.-China contradictions will become more acute and the tirades against China in the west will grow shriller.

Author

Prabhat Patnaik is an Indian political economist and political commentator. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money (2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism (2011).

​Republished from Peoples Democracy.

On September 9, 2023, during the G20 meeting in New Delhi, the governments of seven countries and the European Union signed a memorandum of understanding to create an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. Only three of the countries (India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates or the UAE) would be directly part of this corridor, which was to begin in India, go through the Gulf, and terminate in Greece. The European countries (France, Germany, and Italy) as well as the European Union joined this endeavor because they expected the IMEC to be a trade route for their goods to go to India and for them to access Indian goods at, what they hoped would be, a reduced cost.
The United States, which was one of the initiators of the IMEC, pushed it as a means to both isolate China and Iran as well as to hasten the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. It seemed like a perfect instrument for Washington: sequester China and Iran, bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together, and deepen ties with India that seemed to have been weakened by India’s reluctance to join the United States in its policy regarding Russia.
Israel’s war on the Palestinians in Gaza has changed the entire equation and stalled the IMEC. It is now inconceivable for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to enter such a project with the Israelis. Public opinion in the Arab world is red-hot, with inflamed anger at the indiscriminate bombardment by Israel and the catastrophic loss of civilian life. Regional countries with close relations with Israel—such as Jordan and Turkey—have had to harden their rhetoric against Israel. In the short term, at least, it is impossible to imagine the implementation of the IMEC.
Pivot to Asia
Two years before China inaugurated its “One Belt, One Road” or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the United States had already planned a private-sector-funded trade route to link India to Europe and to tighten the links between Washington and New Delhi. In 2011, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Chennai, India, where she spoke of the creation of a New Silk Road that would run from India through Pakistan and into Central Asia. This new “international web and network of economic and transit connections” would be an instrument for the United States to create a new intergovernmental forum and a “free trade zone” in which the United States would be a member (in much the same way as the United States is part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation or APEC).
The New Silk Road was part of a wider “pivot to Asia,” as U.S. President Barack Obama put it. This “pivot” was designed to check the rise of China and to prevent its influence in Asia. Clinton’s article in Foreign Policy (“America’s Pacific Century,” October 11, 2011) suggested that this New Silk Road was not antagonistic to China. However, this rhetoric of the “pivot” came alongside the U.S. military’s new AirSea Battle concept that was designed around direct conflict between the United States and China (the concept built on a 1999 Pentagon study called “Asia 2025” which noted that “the threats are in Asia”).
Two years later, the Chinese government said that it would build a massive infrastructure and trade project called “One Belt, One Road,” which would later be called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Over the next ten years, from 2013 to 2023, the BRI investments totaled $1.04 trillion spread out over 148 countries (three-quarters of the countries in the world). In this short period, the BRI project has made a considerable mark on the world, particularly on the poorer nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the BRI has made investments to build infrastructure and industry.
Chastened by the growth of the BRI, the United States attempted to block it through various instruments: the América Crece for Latin America and the Millennium Challenge Corporation for South Asia. The weakness in these attempts was that both relied upon funding from an unenthusiastic private sector.
Complications of the IMEC
Even before the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, IMEC faced several serious challenges.
First, the attempt to isolate China appeared illusory, given that the main Greek port in the corridor—at Piraeus—is managed by the China Ocean Shipping Corporation, and that the Dubai Ports have considerable investment from China’s Ningbo-Zhoushan port and the Zhejiang Seaport. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now members of the BRICS+, and both countries are participants in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Second, the entire IMEC process is reliant upon private-sector funding. The Adani Group—which has close ties to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has come under the spotlight for fraudulent practices—already owns the Mundra port (Gujarat, India) and the Haifa port (Israel), and seeks to take a share in the port at Piraeus. In other words, the IMEC corridor is providing geopolitical cover for Adani’s investments from Greece to Gujarat.
Third, the sea lane between Haifa and Piraeus would go through waters contested between Turkey and Greece. This “Aegean Dispute” has provoked the Turkish government to threaten war if Greece goes through with its designs.
Fourth, the entire project relied upon the “normalization” between Saudi Arabia and Israel, an extension of the Abraham Accords that drew Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates to recognize Israel in August 2020. In July 2022, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States formed the I2U2 Group, with the intention, among other things, to “modernize infrastructure” and to “advance low-carbon development pathways” through “private enterprise partnerships.” This was the precursor of IMEC. Neither “normalization” with Saudi Arabia nor advancement of the I2U2 process between the UAE and Israel seem possible in this climate. Israel’s bombardment of the Palestinians in Gaza has frozen this process.
Previous Indian trade route projects, such as the International North-South Trade Corridor (with India, Iran, and Russia) and the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (led by India and Japan), have not gone from paper to port for a host of reasons. These, at least, had the merit of being viable. IMEC will suffer the same fate as these corridors, to some extent due to Israel’s bombing of Gaza but also due to Washington’s fantasy that it can “defeat” China in an economic war.

​Author 

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Israel began as a Zionist project for imperialism, as a main base to extend its hegemony over the Arab region, and to protect its interests there, as well as to curb the rise of Arab national liberation movement, and to hold the development of each individual Arab country back.

But this mission would not negate Israel’s own ambitions to control the Arab region. The opportunity came in the June War (1967), from which Israel emerged and occupied the entire land of Palestine, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. Then, Israel exercised its Zionist dream of expanding beyond Palestine.

After the October War (1973), Israel began preparing to play a new role within the region, no longer limited to being a proxy base for international monopolies and the expansion of Zionist capital, and their extension represented by multinational companies. Rather, it has come to express the needs of the development of the Israeli economy itself, with its objective and subjective difficulties and its aspiration to expand — authentically — within the Arab region.

The growth of Israeli industry aspires to break the barriers of isolation and launch into markets that constitute a natural field for it, which are primarily Arab markets. This development has recently been embodied in Israel’s ambitions for economic control over the Arab region, and its capitalism’s ambition to participate directly in the theft of Arab wealth by obtaining its share of Arab money and Arab oil as well.

In the face of these urgent considerations, Israel proceeded to put forward “peace” slogans according to its conditions, hoping to achieve, through the new colonial method, what it had not yet achieved through the old colonial methods. Thus, a project was established in the Arab land, “Palestine,” which is like any capitalist project that tolerates profit and loss, but it has continued to achieve its economic feasibility for the imperialist countries until now.

And we must clearly distinguish within Israel. Between the imperialist phenomenon and the Zionist phenomenon, when Imperialism, in general, can be described as the movement of colonial capitalists in the world, while Zionism is specifically the movement of Jewish settlers in the Arab region.

Simha Flapan in his book “Zionism and the Palestinians,” which published in London in 1979, said, “that Israeli political thought was formed during the period preceding the establishment of Israel itself, and in the process of crystallizing this thought, a doctrine was formulated from several basic concepts:

1- The gradual construction of economic and military organizations as a basis for achieving political goals.
2- An alliance with a major power outside the Middle East.
3- Not recognizing the existence of a national entity for the Palestinians.
4- Economic, social and cultural discrimination as necessities for the renaissance of Jewish national life.
5- Peace by force.

Thus, the issue of our classification in the past of the form and essence of Israel as either a driving force for global colonialism in the Arab region, or merely one of its tools…is not completely accurate. On the basis that the first view cannot be considered to be correct, and the second view is not entirely correct.

And if Israel maintained for a long time the image of being the pampered stepchild of colonialism, it has now transformed, by successfully performing its role, into a small colonial power, especially when it now adds to the methods of regional expansion the neo-colonial methods of economic control within the Arab region.

Palestine is at the heart of the imperial project

The interest of the colonial and imperial regimes in Palestine began during the period of free trade capitalism and commercial competition between colonial industrial capitalist countries, even before the middle of the 19th century. The primary motivation for this was the importance of Palestine’s strategic geographical location for international colonial trade, which was considered the most important economic branch in the field of colonial competition in the stage of free competition and the colonial struggle to secure foreign markets.

Palestine is located in the middle of the “Arab East” and is considered the shortest land route between the colonial capitalist countries in Europe, especially Britain, and its colonies in the Far East — India and others. At this stage, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, which was suffering from weakness, economic underdevelopment, and backwardness compared to the industrially advanced capitalist countries. Therefore, during the stage of free competition, the imperialist countries tried to infiltrate the Ottoman Empire, especially to its sections in the Near East, and pave the way for dividing their legacy in this important region. These attempts took several forms, including the attempt of the imperialist regimes to get closer to the Ottoman Sultanate with the aim of obtaining privileges, such as securing trade routes and allowing capitalist commercial convoys to cross and pass through the Palestinian and Syrian lands (at that stage, the lands of Palestine, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria constituted Historical Syria).

The facts indicate that “between the years 1839 – 1854,” and with the increase of interest in Palestine, the major European powers established consulates in the city of Jerusalem. The imperialist countries also tried to adopt the various sects in Palestine and pretend to defend their interests as a mask behind which they concealed their true intentions to monopolize the center of influence in Palestine and create a material base on which it is based. Perhaps the most prominent thing that reveals the imperialist intentions behind the cover-up slogan of defending the interests of the sects is the position of British imperialism towards the Jewish community and its attempts to make it its main pillar for extending its colonial influence.

At the beginning of the forties (of the nineteenth century), many British imperialist politicians called for Jewish settlement in Palestine as a guarantee to defend British imperialist commercial interests and secure freedom of roads to India. In his book “The History of Zionism” the Zionist Nahum Sokolov highlights many examples and citations that confirm the reality and dimensions of ambitions. British colonialism was behind the idea of ​​settling Jews in Palestine even before the emergence of the World Zionist Organization on the political scene.

Sokolov mentions, for example, that British Foreign Secretary Viscount Palmerston wrote on September 25, 1840, confirming the “Syrian question,” after Britain intervened militarily alongside Turkey to repel the forces of Ibrahim Pasha. He wrote that he proposed establishing a British colony there, and added that the region needed money and work… And the Hebrews are waiting to return to Syria. Therefore — he said — if the countries guarantee the laws to achieve equality in Syria and the doubts of the Hebrews are dispelled, then the call will mobilize them and they will go out with their wealth and industry…He stressed in the end that the colonization of Syria by the Hebrews is the cheapest and surest way to supply these areas, sparsely populated and needs it.

In fact, the goal of British colonialism was never to provide the natural needs of the population of Syria and to seek help from Jewish settlement to achieve this goal. Rather, its primary goal was to remove any competing power by continuing to guarantee British imperial trade privileges and its trade routes with its colonies. From this standpoint, and to preserve its interests, it stood along with the Ottoman Empire against the young state in Egypt led by Muhammad Ali and against his forces led by his son Ibrahim.

In the period from 1831 to 1840, Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim tried to establish a large Arab state. This state extended from Egypt through Historical Syria to the borders of Minor Asia. Palmerston indicates in a letter he sent to his country’s ambassador in Naples on March 21, 1833, that the goal of Muhammad Ali is the establishment of an Arab kingdom that includes all the countries that speak Arabic. He noted that this project in itself may not cause any harm, “but it will lead to the dismemberment of Turkey, and this is what we are not satisfied with. Moreover, we see no reason to justify replacing Turkey with an Arab king in controlling the India Road.”

Palestine gained special importance on the map of conflict between the imperial regimes after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, but the imperial conflict to carve up the territories of the Ottoman Empire, including Palestine, between Britain, France, Tsarist Russia, and the German Empire, which raged at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially on the eve of and during World War I, led to the Sykes-Picot Treaty in 1916, which divided the countries of the Near East between France, England, and Tsarist Russia.

Israel and imperial financing to establish the entity

Since the first months of the founding of the Zionist entity, the capitalist countries have undertaken the task of financing it, “the United States of America – Sweden – Switzerland – Belgium – France – West Germany.” Therefore, the flow of foreign capital to Israel is considered the most important basis for the development of its economy, according to Galina Tynikina in a book entitled “The State of Israel.”

Rather, the main character of the Israeli economy was rapid growth due to the expanded import of capital, until in that period, the rate of capital formation per capita in Israel became the highest rate in the entire world, and the entire economy, including the private sector, became completely dependent on foreign aid that reached… Through channels controlled by the state, it flows into immigration, settlement, and employment projects, and thus contributes to financing the daily lives of the citizens of the new state.

In the beginning, the purpose of imperial external financing was to encourage immigration to Israel, absorb immigrants there, and develop its agriculture and industry. At every challenge facing the Zionist occupation, the imperialist countries were quick to inject the Israeli economy with German reparations, US aid, and French weapons, in addition to concluding bilateral trade agreements, loans, and donations in forms of sales of bonds and loans for import and export, loans for surplus American agricultural crops, and encouragement of direct private investment.

Thus, the prevailing opinion regarding the formation of national capital is carried out by the country itself. Israel has been assigned this vital task by the major imperialist powers. Therefore, the role of global capital in creating the so-called “Israeli miracle” must be continuously revealed. In Israel, the total resources exceed the total Gross National Product, which allowed for an intensive investment effort that led to a high annual growth rate, without accompanying pressure on consumption levels.

Consequently, we are faced with a unique phenomenon, which is the emergence of an entire state as an economic project financed by all of global imperialism, and this alone is sufficient to demonstrate the convergence between Zionism and imperialism. It’s a fact that unilateral transfers/free transfers was an important feature of support for the fusion between imperialism and Zionism, however foreign investment had a distant and tangible signification it was a manifestation of the participation of international Zionism and imperialism in the project to establish the state of Israel.

Israel and the transition to American imperialism

From the beginning, the international Zionist movement was linked to the global capitalist movement and the imperialist political center of power. At the beginning of the last century, international Zionism pinned its hopes on Germany, a rising capitalist power which was competing with the British monopoly. After the Balfour Declaration and the Allied victory in World War I, loyalty shifted to Great Britain, which opened the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration, and since World War II, the World Zionist Organization moved its headquarters to the United States and began pinning hopes on it,

On May 11, 1942, what was then called the “Baltimore Statement” was approved by the Extraordinary Zionist Conference held at the Baltimore Hotel in New York. The most important thing included in the statement was reliance on the United States of America as the main support of the Zionist movement.

Indeed, the leadership of the capitalist world then passed to the United States, which had by chance encroached on the Arab oil wells, while its major financiers had been linked to the Jewish Agency for a long time (Cohn, Lieb, Lehman, Goldman, Sachs, Guggenheim, Mullazar, Rockefeller, and Morgan). With the end of World War II and the collapse of the centers of France and Britain in the Arab East, the United States intervened more forcefully in the entire region, and was behind the United Nations decision to partition Palestine and establish Israel.

However, in the early years of Israel’s founding, the United States was keen to hide its funding of Israel for fear of provoking Arab hostility towards it. In agreement with the United States, West Germany took up the funding process in those years, whether openly with compensation or secretly with weapons, and the United States did not appear on the scene. It was revealed only with the June War, and since then, it has not hidden its special relationship with Israel nor its full commitment to it.

As for financing, the United States of America was the organizer, driver, and financier of the process of establishing Israel. Between 1948 and 1962, Israel obtained from the United States an amount exceeding USD 3,200 million, which was used to equip and expand agricultural settlements, build housing, create and renew roads, ports, and transportation, and provide food to the population.

After the June War, the United States became the main source of foreign funds in various forms. For example, the US aid provided during the five years that followed the aggression exceeded double what the United States provided in similar aid to Israel during the twenty years that preceded the war, and the aid continued and even increased, especially soft loans.

Talking about US loans to Israel contains quite a bit of excess: these loans are completely soft. The grace periods for postponing loans, periodic exemptions from previous debts, the initiative to provide new grants and loans, preferential treatment in customs tariffs, and the distinct tax treatment with which gifts granted to Israel are treated, all make American loans are like Israeli treasury bonds.

As for US investments, they played an important functional role in strengthening the Zionist economy even before the establishment of Israel, as the cooperation between those investments and the Jewish Agency was great, and we mention here the prominent role of two American companies: (the Palestinian Economic Company), which was founded in 1926, and (the American Palestinian Company), which was founded in 1942. This company is considered to be the giant monopoly that links American capitalism and Zionism. The company established many companies inside occupied Palestine in partnership with the Histadrut, or the Israeli state.

To this day, even with the change of administrations between Democrats and Republicans, US support is continuous and renewed through decisions and legislation from the US House of Representatives.

In conclusion, the relationship between imperialism, especially the US, and Israel cannot be described as good, bad, or wavering, given that Israel is considered one of the states of the United States, but it is in an advanced place, and this organic connection was not and is no longer hidden, and this is what we tried to show in the previous lines.

Author

​Wael Mustafa al Hersh is a Palestinian refugee in Syria, student activist, and political leader. He is the secretary of the Progressive Student Union Bloc which is the student arm of the Palestinian People’s Party. He researches and writes on economics and political science. He has a masters in economics and is currently in the process of writing his doctoral thesis.

Republished from Peoples Dispatch.

Over 300,000 people poured into Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, on November 4, in the largest Palestine solidarity demonstration in US history. The unprecedented demonstration comes in the wake of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. Organized by a wide range of Palestinian, Arab, and anti-imperialist groups including the Palestinian Youth Movement, the ANSWER Coalition, the Peoples Forum, Al-Adwa: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, and National Students for Justice in Palestine, hundreds of thousands rallied and then marched to the White House, demanding an end to US funding for Israel, and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
​
Protesters yelled chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” and “Ceasefire now!” Some brought long lists of names of those killed in Gaza in this past month by Israel.

This 300,000 strong march occurred in the heart of Israel’s most significant backer, the United States, despite the fact that people in the country have been faced with various forms of persecution for supporting Palestine. The Virginia Attorney General just opened an investigation into American Muslims for Palestine looking into allegations against the group for “benefiting or providing support to terrorist organizations”. Students who organize in solidarity for Palestine, especially those in local Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, have been doxxed and have had job offers rescinded.

“We’re all afraid, but this fear does not compare,” said Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, speaking from the podium at Freedom Plaza. “They want us to think that we are paying personal prices, but we have our community. They want us to think that we are alone, but we have our people supporting us. If they come for you, if they take your job, if they fire you from school, if they expel you, do not think of yourself as a casualty. You are not a casualty, you are fuel for the movement, you are part of the struggle.”

“Empire does not reward silence. It will crush us anyway, it will swallow us anyway, we will not sit in the corner quietly as they kill our people.”

The US has contributed around USD 130 billion in military aid to Israeli occupation since the creation of the state in 1948. In the wake of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the House of Representatives passed a massive USD 14.5 billion military aid package to further support the occupation. The bombs that Israel drops are largely US-made. “It is not lost on us that the US government sends its military advisors and soldiers, it’s aircraft carriers and rockets, its weapons of mass destruction to support the genocide of our people,” said Mohammed Nabulsi of the Palestinian Youth Movement. “It is not lost on us that this same government mobilizes its repressive vehicles in the US to surveil, suppress, and criminalize our communities in the movement for Palestinian freedom.”

Brian Becker, executive director of the ANSWER Coalition, brought up how similar numbers showed up many decades ago in solidarity with the struggle against South African apartheid. Despite the US government’s support for the South African government at the time “forty years ago this month… thousands of people came together in Washington DC to say that the racist fascist apartheid regime in South Africa must fall, and we will help it fall, and within a few years, it did fall.”

“We make the change, the change comes from us, and right now sisters and brothers—we are sending a message, a very strong message to Joe Biden: if you stand with genocide we hold you guilty of genocide.”

​Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, was a huge blow to the settler-colonial state of Israel: Al-Qassam Brigades captured 20 settlements and 11 military sites in merely a few hours. The attacks on Israeli civilian and military outposts destroyed the narcissistic sense of security associated with the carefully orchestrated narratives of Zionist dominance, surveillance and intelligence. In the words of Saree Makdisi, the breakout “smashed, hopefully once and for all, the very idea that the Palestinians can just be ignored, talked to, or talked about rather than talking for and representing themselves, their interests and their rights.” Earlier, it was Palestinians who had to explain their presence and prove their humanity. Now, it is they are setting the contours of the narrative. That’s why Zionists are terrified.

Unqualified solidarity with the anti-colonial violence of the Palestinian resistance has been hindered by liberal humanism, a bourgeois ideology that uses abstract slogans of peace to accelerate the genocide of Palestinians. There are two components in this ideology. First, the supreme value of human life is proclaimed as an unproblematic moral statement, which everyone has to support. While liberal humanists may admit that the Israeli occupation has given rise to Palestinian violence, they remain adamant that the death of individuals can never be justified. Judith Butler, for instance, criticizes those who blame Zionist apartheid for contemporary violence, saying that “nothing should exonerate Hamas from responsibility for the hideous killings they have perpetrated”.

In the above conception, violence is conceived as an infringement of the individual human body, whose sanctity is guaranteed by an unquestionable morality. The physiological and juridical body is innately exposed to physical, psychological and moral persecution. This kind of body has no positive project; it is entirely defined by its vulnerability to attacks, which requires protection. Christopher Caudwell traces this ethical ideology to the systemic logic of the capitalist economy. In the struggle against feudal fetters, the bourgeoisie saw freedom as the abolition of social organization, as the ability of every individual to pursue his own affairs and interests. This is articulated “in the absolute character of bourgeois property together with its complete alienability.”

On the ideological terrain, this gives rise to the “bourgeois dream – freedom as the absolute elimination of social relations,” by which is meant the absence of any restraint on the ownership, acquisition and alienation of private property. Here, private property isn’t considered as a social restraint that should be abolished, as the bourgeois project is inevitably bound to its particularistic interests. When assembled into ethics, the bourgeois dream translates into ultra-individualist pacifism, wherein the purity of the soul has to be guarded from the “heinous guilt” of the “sin” that is violence. Caudwell calls this “spiritual laissez-faire,” which uses the commercial mentality of capitalists – its concern with economic status – to proclaim the right of remaining preoccupied with one’s own soul.

When liberal humanists talk about mushy-mushy sentiments of individual human life, it is crucial to ask whether such an abstraction even exists in the horrors of Israeli barbarism. On one side, we have settlers, whose material security is guaranteed by an authoritarian state apparatus. On the other side, we have natives, whose wretchedness is maintained through incessant violence. In this scenario, I ask you: where is the pristine divinity that you label as “human life”? I can only see the all-too onerous divides constructed by Zionist settler-colonialism. Preaching a higher moral reconciliation beyond these divides, trying to organize a peaceful dialogue between two completely antagonistic camps, is a pathetic attempt that is bound to fail. In the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza, it is criminal to think that there is an ever-present and ready-at-hand reserve of morality that can calm the clamor of reality. We have to dive into reality, into its thundering materiality, if we want to shoulder the global responsibility of solidarity that has been forced upon us by the Palestinian resistance.

When an interviewer told Ghassan Kanafani that it would be better for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “to stop the war to stop the death,” Kanafani said, “Maybe to you, not to us. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights; these are something as essential as life itself.” By absolutizing life, liberal humanists ignore how such a life doesn’t exist in a settler-colonial society. The boundary between life and death is not clear-cut. Huey P. Newton said, “I tell the comrades you can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.” Liberal humanists ignore how death already walks among the Palestinians. This allows them to construe life as a personal capacity, as a possibility, that can be realized through a dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized. For the colonized, life is never a possibility. Colonialism is the violent closure of possibilities for the colonized. In the words of Mehdi Amel: “It…became impossible to define the structure of the colonized countries’ specific trajectories of becoming except within the colonial relation. What was possible before this relation became impossible after. This is what is novel in the structure of these countries’ history.”

Kanafani dispels the naive hope of humanistic possibility in the colonial context, starkly portraying the inhuman impossibility of peace talks between Israel and Palestine as “a conversation between the sword and the neck”. There is no mention here of the personal, biographical details of an abstract human life; they are replaced by impersonal metaphors. Why so? Because the liberal focus on human life conveys an ambience of integrity and security in a situation that is marked by disorder and destruction. By preserving the edifice of individual, non-violent agency, liberal humanism says that violence is optional, it is a matter of condonation or denunciation. Kanafani explodes this pious optimism by depicting Zionism as a structurally violent tool that is indifferent to our subjective feelings. Between the sword and the neck, there lies no other possibility than death.

The elision of the historical depth of Zionist violence is a core component of liberal humanism. Slavoj Žižek denounced the “barbarism” of Hamas by writing that the choice is not between Palestinian anti-colonial violence and Zionist settler-colonial violence but “between fundamentalists and all those who still believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence”. The ruse of humanist possibility allows him to frame violence as a simplistic choice, whereas the toothless policy of dialogue comes off as the superior, more complex option. According to Joseph Stalin: “the Communists regard the substitution of one social system for another, not simply as a spontaneous and peaceful process, but as a complicated, long and violent process.” Here, the order of valuation is reversed. It is violence which is accorded the dignity of historical complexity. It is liberal humanism which is faulted for uncritically regarding the peacefulness of human life as an immediate, incontrovertible fact.

Reading Žižek, one is reminded of people whom Vladimir Lenin called the “spineless hangers-on of the bourgeoisie with intellectualist pretensions”. These “tyrannized, shocked and scared” intellectuals “have been flung into consternation at the sight of this unprecedentedly acute class struggle, have burst into tears, forgotten all their premises and demand that we perform the impossible, that we socialists achieve complete victory without fighting against the exploiters and without suppressing their resistance.” Decolonization is imagined as a peaceful project that can be “introduced” into the settler-colonial society. Liberal humanists forget how decolonization is forged in the intensity of national liberation, in “the struggles, the exploiters’ gnashing of teeth, or their diverse attempts to preserve the old order, or smuggle it back through the window”. What accounts for this ignorance? It can be traced to the liberal humanist delusion that a higher unity might emerge from the Zionist machine, that there is an element that might immediately unify the colonial compartments, that there is a humanist sensibility that lies hidden beneath colonialism. There is no such sensibility. Colonial violence has to be broken.

Instead of framing resistance in terms of the individual metric of human life, we have to take recourse to discourses that stress the concrete realities of colonized society. By inflating human life into a mythical capacity, liberal humanism paradoxically reveals a fundamental disregard for the human realities present in concrete societies. In order to avoid this extra-human concept, we must begin from the anti-colonial struggle. Liberal humanists begin with spiritual wishes for peace, attempting to convince people of an ideal method of resistance that will involve the least amount of death and suffering. Marxism doesn’t have any place for such a higher level of reconciliation. Lenin notes that Marxists appraise resistance “according to the class antagonisms and the class struggle which find expression in millions of facts of daily life.” Freedom is not a ready-made skill that can be invoked “in an atmosphere of cajoling and persuasion, in a school of mealy sermons or didactic declamations”. Rather, it is formed in the “school of life and struggle,” wherein the interests of the colonizers are exposed to the counter-interests of the colonized. Lenin puts it expressively:

“The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only real teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters’ resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited. The more varied the exploiters’ attempts to uphold the old, the sooner will the proletariat learn to ferret out its enemies from their last nook and corner, to pull up the roots of their domination, and cut the very ground which could (and had to) breed wage-slavery, mass poverty and the profiteering and effrontery of the money-bags.”

In a colonial situation, resistance is evaluated not according to the ethical ideology of human life but according to the contribution it makes to the opening of historical possibilities. Amilcar Cabral notes, “Resistance is the following: to destroy one thing for the sake of constructing another thing.” This terse statement is instructive because liberal humanists think of colonialism as a malleable arrangement that can be re-jigged to allow for a better outcome. Cabral brooks none of this. He identifies the inertia of colonialism that has to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to emancipate the colonized. It is because liberal humanists think that the possibility for life remains intact under colonialism that they are unable to appreciate the fight for such a life waged by the colonized. That’s why it is so clarifying to read Cabral’s searing words on the objective of national liberation:

“At the end of the day, we want the following: concrete and equal possibilities for any child of our land, man or woman, to advance as a human being, to give all of his or her capacity, to develop his or her body and spirit, in order to be a man or a woman at the height of his or her actual ability. We have to destroy everything that would be against this in our land, comrades. Step by step, one by one if it be necessary – but we have to destroy in order to construct a new life…our work is to destroy, in our resistance, whatever makes dogs of our people – men or women – so as to allow us to advance, to grow, to rise up like the flowers of our land, whatever can make our people valued human beings.”

​Author​

Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America.

On October 30, 2023, Israeli authorities said that they had killed “dozens” of Hamas fighters in the first days of their ground invasion. Meanwhile, Gaza’s Ministry of Health has struggled to keep its website online given the lack of electricity, internet, and attacks. Nonetheless, at noon on October 29, the Ministry of Health said that the death toll in Gaza is now 8,005 (of which 67 percent are women and children). For those who doubt the numbers, the Ministry of Health has been releasing lists of the dead with their Israeli identification numbers (it is a sign of the occupation of the Palestinians of Gaza that when they are born, they must be registered not by the Palestinian Authority but by Israel). Save the Children says that more children (3,195) have been killed by Israeli bombing over these three weeks than have been killed in total across all conflict zones since 2019.
​
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said that by Sunday the 29th, 1.4 million Palestinians out of 2.3 million were internally displaced, with 671,000 taking shelter in 150 UNRWA facilities. Most of the dead by Israeli bombs and tank shells have been civilians. The ratio of dead between combatants (few) and civilians (many) is startling, far beyond what takes place in a war (in contrast, of the 1,400 Israelis killed on October 7 by Hamas and other factions, 48.4 percent were soldiers). By saying that they have killed “dozens” of Hamas militants—the purported target—and having at the same time killed thousands of Palestinians, the Israeli authorities have admitted to the world that their war has resulted in far more civilian deaths than combatant deaths.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military has sent its bulldozers to destroy homes and businesses in northern Gaza as well as in the West Bank city of Jenin. Little in this maneuver looks like a military operation since these homes and businesses are not military institutions. Given the history of the bulldozing of housing in the West Bank to create settlements and the “apartheid wall,” this bulldozing in Gaza and Jenin appears like a massive civilizational campaign of ethnic cleansing to create what the Israeli political class calls Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael Hashlema). The Israeli political class is famous for saying that they want to change the “facts on the ground” so that any negotiations with the occupied Palestinians are based on those “facts” and not on “claims.” This is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been doing for decades through illegal settlements in the West Bank: erasing the fact of Palestinian claims on their land and establishing the right of Israelis to the entire landmass from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Effectively, the Israeli political class appears to be using the conflict that began on October 7 as the pretext to do what it had planned to do for decades, namely, to erase Palestinians from historical Palestine and to erase the Palestinian nation as an entity.

Two-State, One-State, Three-State

When Palestinian political forces agreed to a “peace process” that resulted in the Cairo Interim Agreement (1994) and the Oslo Accords (1994), it adopted what was known as the “two-state solution” to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The basic outline of the Oslo Accords was that a Palestinian Authority (PA) would govern the territory seized by Israel in 1967 (East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank). The Oslo Accords, argued Gaza-based Professor Haider Eid, created a “Bantustan” (such as the “African homelands” created by apartheid South Africa). The implication of the establishment of the PA was that it would neuter actual Palestinian claims to the land (including the right of return of Palestinian refugees, established by UN resolution 194 in 1948), and—at the same time—it would allow the Israeli state to change the “facts on the ground” by the creation of more and more illegal settlements. Furthermore, after the Second Intifada (2000-2005), Israel cut off the “safe passage” requirement of Oslo that allowed Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank to travel across these zones. By 2005, Israel had annulled the Oslo Accords, although the Palestinian political class remained bound by them as the only sliver of hope for the establishment of the state of Palestine (even if it would be a small fragment of historical Palestine).

The reality of the “two-state solution” disappeared as the settlements increased in the West Bank, as Palestinian control over East Jerusalem was increasingly absorbed by Israel, as the right to return was set aside, and as Gaza was bombed almost every year. In that context, several important Palestinian intellectuals began to raise the question of the “one-state solution,” with one Israeli-Palestinian state based on a non-ethnic, secular, and democratic idea of citizenship. By 2021, a majority of scholars of the region said that the actual facts show Israel to be “a one-state reality akin to apartheid.” The idea that Israel is an apartheid state is now well-established in United Nations documents and human rights reports. This assessment demonstrates two things: first, that Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory are already “one state” and second, that it is an apartheid state with the Palestinians in a second-class category. Advocates of the “one-state solution” argue that the reality of a singular state now requires equal citizenship for all who live in Israel/Palestine. The current Israeli political class refuses to accept the idea of a democratic and secular one-state, because they are wedded to an ethno-nationalist project of a “Jewish State” that erases the possibility of full citizenship for Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

If the “two-state solution” is no longer practical and if the “one-state solution” is blocked by the Israeli political class, then all that remains for Netanyahu and others is the “three-state solution.” This is the solution that seeks to remove large parts of the Palestinian population from East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, and perhaps even from within Israel’s 1948 lines and send them to the three states of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. The bulldozers coming behind the tanks in Gaza are attempting to push the Palestinian refugees (70 percent of them are descendants of those sent to Gaza in the Nakba or Catastrophe of 1948) through the Rafah Crossing into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. This “three-state solution” is precisely ethnic cleansing, a crime under international law. For decades, the Israeli political class has been willing to conduct genocidal policies—including this bombardment of Gaza—to facilitate its ethno-national, apartheid state project that requires the erasure of Palestinians and Palestine.

In 2014, in the aftermath of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened an investigation into the situation in Palestine. Nothing much came of this investigation. During this current attack on Gaza, the prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan went to the Rafah Crossing and said that Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza may be a crime under ICC jurisdiction. Indeed, the fact of apartheid is already a crime under the 2002 Rome Statute that created the ICC. Both the “one-state reality akin to apartheid” and the “three-state solution” of ethnic cleansing are serious crimes that require investigation. Will Khan ask the judges of the ICC to frame arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his colleagues?

​Author

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

​The Remington Outdoor Company and its subsidiary Remington Arms stood on a shaky foundation in their last few years of existence. None truly felt the effects of this foundation crumbling than the manufacturing workers of these companies, specifically those working in the heart of the company at the plant in Ilion, New York. With a litany of furloughs, temporary shutdowns, and layoffs occurring since 2017, often as a means of cutting costs, the workers of Remington were often in a state of uncertainty regarding whether or not they would remain employed as the company dealt with the looming issues of bankruptcy.[1] It was in 2020 though that the uncertainty of the plant reached an apex, resulting in the disenfranchisement of several hundred workers. In late 2020 the Remington Company would prove to be one of is not the greatest failure of capitalism in the Mohawk Valley region.
           
​Adding to the pattern of shutdowns and furloughs that plagued the Ilion plant from 2017 to 2020, in September of the latter year the company announced that there would be a plant wide furlough going into effect on September 24th. The message was spread through an email that the workers received not long after reporting for duty that same day, effectively both wasting the time, gas, and other such resources of the employees while slapping them in the face with the prospect that they’ll be away from their primary means of income indefinitely.[2] The workers would only be receiving pay from Remington for another handful of days until they would be forced to navigate the maze that is applying for unemployment at a time when doing so was excessively tiresome, i.e. the Covid-19 pandemic. Though modicums of optimism were maintained that there would be a return to work soon, that optimism would soon be crushed with the onset of something even more devastating than a temporary furlough.
           
Approximately one month after the furlough’s initiation, workers at the Ilion Remington plant were met with yet another impersonal message. On October 25th, as a result of the company’s bankruptcy and the asset sales in line with the bankruptcy process, nearly 600 workers found themselves officially terminated.[3] The company communicated this through a mass phone call with a pre-recorded message a few days prior. Furloughs present their own challenges to workers, but this mass layoff left the former employees with new, more dire issues thrust upon them.
           
Former employees were thrown into even further uncertainty upon notice of termination. Effective on Halloween of that year, the 585 workers would lose all benefits and incentives including health insurance, life insurance, and other prospects vital to human life. Less than a week after being handed a sudden elimination of employment, the already disenfranchised people were having any semblance of a safety net ripped away from them. Access to the Ilion site would likewise be severely restricted and workers’ accessing their 401k accounts became a difficult task.[4] The biggest slap in the face, according to both the workers and their union, the United Mine Workers of America, is that in this mass layoff the Remington Outdoor Company would not be issuing any severance pay or paying their accrued vacation benefits. This is a direct violation of the collective bargaining agreement that had been made between the company and the union.[5] Jeff Madison, then-president of the Ilion chapter of the UMWA, put it in the best way possible, inadvertently describing how capitalism and capitalists see the proletariat as nothing more than replaceable cogs, dehumanizing them and alienating them from their labor and labor-power. “I’ve been there 19 years. Apparently, I wasn’t worth anything. They don’t want to abide by the terms of the contract.”[6]
           
Workers and the union would not simply sit idly and allow themselves to be denied what they were rightfully owed from “Old Remington.” On October 28th, the UMWA along with others supporting them in their struggle initiated a picket line in Ilion to protest the company’s refusal to honor their contractual obligations.[7] Union members utilized this picket as a means to express their discontent, highlight the reason for their fight against company negligence, push the company to honor their contracts, and, whether they intended to or not, the mechanisms of capitalism. Protesters held signs illustrating their outrage and marched throughout parts of the village with members of the Utica IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and members of various Teacher’s Associations marching in solidarity. Additional demonstrations would follow over the following few months, with solidarity efforts coming from local unions including the Teamsters, the Central New York Labor Council, and members of the New York State United Teachers Union.[8]
           
As the UMWA engaged in their struggle, the effects that this mass layoff and history of misconduct perpetrated by Remington became more and more apparent. In addition to the problem of the company not meeting their contractual obligations with the union, the sudden lack of healthcare access proved to be one of the more ubiquitous issues faced by the workers. Having their health insurance torn from them with little to no time to find new coverage presented a new danger. This new danger is one of a specifically high level, considering that several hundred working class people and their families were being deprived of healthcare when the Covid-19 pandemic was still in full swing. As cited in The Militant, one Mark Bedworth stated in an article for The Wall Street Journal;
           
“Some of the guys and girls that I work with have life-threatening conditions that they need medication for and now I don’t know how they’re going to get that covered.”[9]
           
Love and Rage would additionally draw attention to the concerns of Jennifer Angle, another union member facing the onset of Remington’s complete disregard for the well being of the people who kept their plant running for so long. Jennifer exclaims;
           
“I put my time in there. They should give me what I’m owed. My dad has diabetes; my family has health issues. Not having health insurance is a big issue.”[10]
           
This disregard for the collective bargaining agreement that the “Old Remington” agreed to is shown to be only one of many instances of the company engaging in activity that excessively exploits the workers and lines up with anti-union practices. Remington workers have throughout the years sacrificed time with their families to work extended hours, weekends, and holidays. As UMWA representative Jamie Rudwall has said, “These families have paid the price of Remington’s success.”[11] Another employee expressed that “Years ago there was no mandatory overtime. Now we are working 10 hours a day while there are layoffs.”[12] Further condemnations of Remington exemplifying the mechanisms of capitalism that created so many problems for the plant workers include “the bosses are filling their pockets and emptying ours” as stated by Jacquie Sweeney of the union.[13]
           
Remington withholds a history of shady operations, with a large lack of transparency regarding their financial proceedings in addition to their list of labor law violations.[14] According to some involved in the struggle, there had been efforts for over half a decade attempting to push jobs out of Ilion in order to continue operations in areas where union and labor protections are immensely weaker.[15] A new plant was established in Huntsville, Alabama, an explicit attempt at curtailing the power of the UMWA. This new plant exhibited the very characteristics of anti-unionism and the efforts of capitalism to cut costs and bolster their profit by whatever means. To quote the Love and Rage article;
           
“The union difference, both in the experience and skills that come with the workers in Ilion, but also in the difference in pay and benefits were stark. Remington did not live up to its promises in Alabama in terms of the number of workers hired, job security or even pay. The starting pay for many of the workers was $9.20 an hour compared to over $20 in the Ilion plant.”[16]
           
Bourgeois politicians were on the scene at some pickets and while some efforts were made for material support, for the most part they paid only lip service to the cause of the disenfranchised Remington workers. Claiming to be displaying solidarity, then-Congressman Anthony Brindisi, Senator Chuck Schumer, and current Congresswoman Claudia Tenney expressed support for the laid off workers, with Brindisi and Tenney being physically present for at least one of the UMWA’s pickets. Both Brindisi and Schumer made calls for the National Labor Relations Board to get involved in this issue, in addition to the UMWA’s calls for NLRB involvement, and published messages showcasing their support for the union.[17] Tenney, however, despite being the very candidate that the UMWA endorsed in the 2020 congressional election, expressed her support in a manner that can ultimately only be described as a pipedream. In addition to her message of support for the union in their picketing efforts, Tenney claimed that she had spoken to officials from the White House and that the message of the UMWA’s plight had reached then-President Donald Trump.[18] The NLRB would eventually begin a legitimate investigation into Remington Arms and the situation as a whole,[19] while nothing can be found regarding whether Donald Trump said or did anything about the UMWA getting the short end of the stick.
           
According to an article from Liberation News, in total the terminated Remington workers are owed over $500,000 in severance pay.[20] Despite the contractual obligations, the bankruptcy proceedings provided a loophole that would allow the company the opportunity to deny fulfilling their collective bargaining agreement. To quote;
           
“Part of the bankruptcy process allows a business to reject collective bargaining agreements as long as the business can demonstrate that it has attempted to renegotiate a contract with the union. This clause in bankruptcy law could result in the court allowing Remington to reject the collective bargaining agreement that grants the workers at the Ilion plant severance benefits.”
           
Despite Remington’s assets being sold for $160 million, this money would be going towards paying debts to other capitalists rather than to the workers who put in thousands of hours generating revenue for them. Remington was a subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Management, an equity firm that as of 2023 holds assets worth upwards of $60 billion. Despite profits from Remington being under the control of Cerberus since 2007, the firm held no legal responsibility to aid in upholding the union contracts, effectively pushing those who actually created their profit to the side and leaving them for dead. CCM at the time of the Remington situation was controlling assets worth even more than they control in 2023, with their 2020 assets equaling $70 billion, at least according to the Liberation News article.
           
The “New Remington” that formed out of the company that purchased the Ilion factory has shown little promise in presenting better prospects for employment under the Remington banner. In December of 2020, approximately 200 former employees of Remington Arms were offered jobs by the new owners. This seems innocuous on the surface, but the fact that these job offers were being made in a way that tried to go around the establish labor contract held by the UMWA.[21] The UMWA reported that any employment offers and any conditions within such offers had to be negotiated with the union. RemArms, the “New Remington” owned by Roundhill Group LLC, presented these job offers with conditions that were completely antagonistic to the existing labor contract that the workers and their union fought so hard for. Conditions laid out in these offers include making employment at the Ilion factory “at-will,” thus making it easier for the company to wrongfully terminate employees in addition to allowing the company to fire workers “at any time with or without notice.” On top of going around the union, the new company owners were seemingly trying to avoid contact with the union, as the UMWA made several attempts to reach out to Roundhill with no response for quite some time.[22]
           
It would take until April of 2021 for the Ilion plant to reopen, with the UMWA and the RemArms Company reaching an agreement for bringing workers back into the building and working towards reopening early in the month.[23] This agreement only came after several threats from Roundhill to keep the plant closed, creating the false prospect of the union engaging in a formal strike despite the union never releasing any statement calling for one or even hinting at striking at any point between October 2020 and April 2021, only further displaying the inherent anti-union and anti-worker attitudes held by the Roundhill Group and it’s CEO Richmond Italia.[24] In the initial reopening only 65 former employees returned to work under the RemArms banner, with that number steadily increasing to the plant having 230 employees by May of that year.[25] This number is of course miniscule compared to even the numbers prior to the 2020 shutdown, further symbolizing the steady decline of what was once a bastion of prosperity for the village of Ilion.
           
The “New Remington” would continue to face challenges as the Ilion plant worked to revitalize itself. Slightly under one year after finally ratifying a new contract with the union, the pattern of furloughs would keep repeating. March of 2022 would see 35 workers be placed on furlough for nearly a month citing an equipment issue with one of their manufacturing material vendors. Not unlike the time of struggle between the sale of the plant and the reopening, the union expressed concern over the lack of communication coming from RemArms.[26] On top of the return of furloughs, the production of Remington’s Model 700 would be moved from Ilion, to LaGrange, Georgia, despite reports in the past saying that manufacturing would remain in the Mohawk Valley as revealed by a leaked internal memo.[27] While workers from that line would simply be transitioned into the production of shotguns, thus protecting the employment status of those workers, this shift sees the production abilities of the Ilion plant being weakened, ultimately creating future uncertainty in the survival of RemArms in New York.
           
As far as can be seen based on the available news materials and statements from the United Mine Workers, the workers who were faced with the initial termination never received their due severance and accrued vacation pay from the “Old Remington.” The fight put on by the UMWA with support from the likes of teachers unions and the Industrial Workers of the World was valiant and one that should be admired, but unfortunately in this case the capitalists seem to have been able to use bankruptcy as a means of once more shafting the working class. This is of course a victory for the capitalists, with the various owners of Remington, whether they be directly involved in the company or they be from Cerberus, able to walk away from bankruptcy with massive wealth as the workers were left high and dry. The fall of the once prosperous Remington Outdoor Company, the ineptitude and instability of the succeeding RemArms company, and the potential for the decimation of a great deal of the Ilion and greater Mohawk Valley area proletariat that still lingers to this day upholds that Remington is to the workers, one of it not the greatest failure of capitalism in the Mohawk Valley.

Citations

[1] Keeler, Bill. "Remington Employees in Ilion Told to Prepare for Work Furlough." WIBX 950. October 18, 2017. https://wibx950.com/remington-employees-in-ilion-told-to-prepare-for-work-furlough/.

[2] Farris, Joleen. "Plant-Wide Furlough at Remington Arms; More Than 600 Affected." WKTV. September 25, 2020. Accessed through Archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20200926153913/https://www.wktv.com/content/news/plant-wide-furlough-at-remington-arms-more-than-600-affected-572525941.html.

[3] Keeler, Bill. "Here's How 600 Remington Workers Learned They Were Terminated." WIBX 950. October 25, 2020. https://wibx950.com/heres-how-600-remington-workers-learned-they-were-terminated/.

[4] Keeler. "Here's How 600 Remington Workers Learned They Were Terminated."

[5] "UMWA Responds to Remington Arms Refusal to Pay Severance to Terminated Employees." United Mine Workers of America. October 25, 2020. https://umwa.org/news-media/news/umwa-responds-to-remington-arms-refusal-to-pay-severance-to-terminated-employees/. Originally published by WKTV.

[6] Thompson, Donna. "Remington Arms Workers On Layoffs, Loss of Benefits: 'Apparently, I Wasn't Worth Anything'." Times Telegram. October 26, 2020. https://www.timestelegram.com/story/news/2020/10/26/remington-arms-workers-layoffs-apparently-wasnt-worth-anything/6043995002/.

[7] Thompson, Donna. "Remington Arms Workers In Ilion Protest Loss of Benefits." Times Telegram. October 26, 2020. https://www.timestelegram.com/story/news/2020/10/28/remington-arms-workers-ilion-rally-protest-over-lost-benefits/6056930002/.

[8] Dookhun, Ved. "NY Remington Workers March For Severance Pay, New Jobs." The Militant. December 21, 2020. https://themilitant.com/2020/12/12/ny-remington-workers-march-for-severance-pay-new-jobs/.

[9] Perasso, Jacob. "Laid Off NY Remington Workers Fight For Severance, Vacation Pay." The Militant. November 16, 2020. https://themilitant.com/2020/11/07/laid-off-ny-remington-workers-fight-for-severance-vacation-pay/.

[10] Maslauskas-Dunn, Brendan, and Elizabeth Meeks. "Nearly 600 Terminated Union Workers Vow to “Continue to Fight” Amidst “Catastrophic” Sale of Remington Arms." Love and Rage. November 4, 2020. https://loveandragemedia.org/2020/11/04/nearly-600-terminated-union-workers-vow-to-continue-to-fight-amidst-catastrophic-sale-of-remington-arms/.

[11] Thompson. “Remington Arms Workers In Ilion Protest Loss of Benefits.”

[12] Perasso. “Laid Off NY Remington Workers Fight For Severance, Vacation Pay.”

[13] Ibid.

[14] Mason, Greg. "Remington Cited For 27 Health, Safety Violations." Observer-Dispatch. April 3, 2019. https://www.uticaod.com/story/news/2019/04/03/remington-cited-for-27-health/5541481007/.

[15] Jobs were also being moved in response to the New York SAFE Act, however the efforts to move production to an area where the company could pay workers significantly less fits well within anti-union tactics.

[16] Maslauskas-Dunn, Meeks. "Nearly 600 Terminated Union Workers Vow to “Continue to Fight” Amidst “Catastrophic” Sale of Remington Arms."

[17] "Remington Workers Rally Together to Demand Company Pay Severance Benefits." United Mine Workers of America. October 28, 2020. https://umwa.org/news-media/news/remington-workers-rally-together-to-demand-company-pay-severance-benefits/. Originally published by WKTV.

[18] Thompson. “Remington Arms Workers In Ilion Protest Loss of Benefits.”

[19] "National Labor Relations Board To Investigate Remington Arms." Observer-Dispatch. November 3, 2020. https://www.uticaod.com/story/news/2020/11/02/national-labor-relations-board-investigate-remington-arms-brindisi/6134216002/.

[20] Quinn, Keegan. "Remington Workers Terminated Without Severance, Billionaire Owners Not Held Accountable." Liberation News. December 30, 2020. https://www.liberationnews.org/remington-workers-terminated-without-severance-billionaire-owners-not-accountable/.

[21] Moriarty, Rick. "Union Accuses Remington Arms’ New Owner in Ilion of Going Around It With Job Offers." Syracuse.com. December 22, 2020. https://www.syracuse.com/business/2020/12/union-accuses-remington-arms-new-owner-in-ilion-of-going-around-it-with-job-offers.html.

[22] Thompson, Donna. "Offers to Former Remington Workers Bring Confusion, Concerns." Times Telegram. December 22, 2020. https://www.timestelegram.com/story/news/2020/12/22/remington-arms-sale-roundhill-group-offer-raises-worker-concerns/3989613001/.

[23] "UMWA Reaches Letter of Agreement With RemArms to Pave Way for Reopening of Ilion Plant." United Mine Workers of America. April 2, 2021. https://umwa.org/news-media/press/umwa-reaches-letter-of-agreement-with-remarms-to-pave-way-for-reopening-of-ilion-plant/.

[24] "Remington's New Owner Talks Strike, Union Says No Way." United Mine Workers of America. February 4, 2021. https://umwa.org/news-media/news/remingtons-new-owner-talks-strike-union-says-no-way/. Originally published by the Times Union.

[25] Coe, Jackee. "Remington's New Owner Talks Strike, Union Says No Way." Observer-Dispatch. November 9, 2021. https://www.uticaod.com/story/news/2021/11/09/remington-arms-timeline-new-york/6343747001/.

[26] Schneider, H. Rose. "CEO: 35 Remington Arms Workers in Ilion Furloughed Due to Vendor Equipment Repairs." Observer-Dispatch. March 4, 2022. https://www.uticaod.com/story/news/2022/03/04/35-remington-arms-workers-ilion-furloughed-equipment-issues/9374201002/.

[27] Keeler, Bill. "CEO: 35 Remington Arms Workers in Ilion Furloughed Due to Vendor Equipment Repairs." WIBX 950. January 18, 2023. https://wibx950.com/remington-moving-model-700-production-line-out-of-ilion/.

Western leftists often explain socialism as an extension of democratic values. Across professional spheres, this belief is propagated by some of the most popular figures in our movement. For instance, the acclaimed academic Noam Chomsky described socialism as “an extension of democracy into the social sphere.” Jacobin, the largest socialist publication in the United States, has published writers who explain the Soviet Union’s shortcomings as a natural byproduct of its “rotten foundations of authoritarianism.” Even the controversial NATO-aligned streamer Vaush claimed that the Soviet Union was not socialist because “[d]emocracy is necessary under socialism.”

But this view leads to misguided conclusions. One of which is the condemnation of all revolutions that do not occur at the ballot box. Under “socialism as democracy,” any societal transformation not voted upon by the majority is undemocratic and therefore not socialist. 

History provides ample reason to doubt this supposition. Indeed, there is a long and illustrious history of progressive coups that all leftists should embrace. And this shows that revolutionaries should be open to a multiplicity of approaches to building socialism in our lifetimes. 

For instance, the legendary pan-African Marxist Thomas Sankara never campaigned to become the president of Burkina Faso. Rather, he seized state power from within the military. Though he was assassinated in a (likely French-backed) counter-coup only four years later, he made immense strides in concretely improving the living standards of the masses in Burkina Faso. Under his direction, Burkina Faso achieved self-sufficiency in food production and vaccinated 2.5 million people (60% percent of the total population), raising the national vaccination rate from 17% to 77%. Literacy rates exploded from just 13% to 73% in less than five years. Additionally, he spearheaded the “One Village, One Grove” policy in Burkina Faso, spurring a grassroots mobilization of tree planting that added 10 million trees to Burkina Faso to combat desertification.

But Sankara’s legacy is not limited to agricultural, medical, educational, and environmental victories. He was also a staunch, outspoken feminist. As a Marxist, Sankara saw clearly how patriarchy was reinforced by the capitalist mode of production, and understood that the liberation of women was an inherent component of destroying capitalism. To that end, he prohibited female genital mutilation and forced marriage, amended the Constitution to guarantee female representation in the Cabinet, and ensured the Ministry of Education would protect women’s access to education. 

Few, if any leaders have achieved a fraction of what Sakara was able to do for Burkina Faso and Africa more broadly. Why should we temper our support for him because he came to power undemocratically? His “authoritarian” seizure of the state is precisely what enabled him to achieve so much in such a short time. Nobody can contest that his government was undoubtedly progressive and, as materialists, we are bound to support progressive developments regardless of how “purely” these developments come to fruition. Our sole obligation is to liberate the working masses, and therefore we must uplift Sankara’s legacy.

Sankara is far from the only progressive leader who improved the lives of the masses through a revolutionary coup. In 1968, General Juan Velasco Alvarado seized power in a bloodless revolution and won substantial gains for the Peruvian proletariat — most notably, his large-scale campaign of industrial nationalization and redistribution of agricultural land to over 300,000 families.

Velasco also sought to free Peru from the extractive influence of Western multinationals by nationalizing a wide array of vital industries including telecommunications, energy (such as the International Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil), fisheries, and even American copper mines. His reforms were planned by the leading socialist intellectuals of the time. 

Velasco’s nationalization policies were among the most radical in Western hemisphere. His expropriation of the landed oligarchy was second only to Cuba’s. Velasco stands as a powerful example of the rapid progress that follows determined socialist leadership.

Across the Atlantic, in 1974, a group of left-leaning Portuguese military officers known as the Armed Forces Movement toppled the fascist Estado Novo regime in a military coup known as the Carnation Revolution, directly leading to the liberation of Portuguese colonies. The Portuguese regime had spent over a decade fighting the unpopular Portuguese Overseas War to maintain their colonial possessions in Africa, sacrificing thousands of their own young men in the process. Only after the Carnation Revolution could the anti-war will of the people be realized. Who can rebuke such a direct improvement in the lives of both the Portuguese and colonized proletarians? Why should we jump to condemn this movement for its “lack” of democratic purity?

One consistent trigger to these progressive coups is a capitalist sociopolitical system that is most capable of subverting revolutionary struggle in the Global South and against hyper-exploited minorities in the imperial core, because it has the full weight of Western capital pitted against the poorest and most oppressed workers. This can leave revolutionaries with almost no practical solutions to advance material conditions outside of a progressive coup.

As Marxists, we should not celebrate the liberal-democratic dogma that our oppressors use to subjugate us. In the American context, the black liberation struggle provides us with a multitude of revolutionaries who clearly articulated this predicament. For instance, both Malcom X and Chairman Fred Hampton realized that capitalist liberal democracies were directly responsible for the invention of racism and held no qualms about using any means necessary to restore dignity for the colored and working masses of the United States.


Malcolm X most clearly indicated his indifference toward liberal morality in his famous speech ‘The Ballot or the Bullet.’ Throughout his delivery, he referred to those who myopically emphasized non-violent tactics as “chumps.” Challenging the legitimacy of the American political system, he exclaimed, “Uncle Sam is guilty of violating the freedom of 22 million Afro-Americans and still has the audacity to call himself the leader of the free world.”

X was widely known for his criticism of establishment civil rights leaders, lambasting them for advocating purely non-violent struggle against an exceedingly violent enemy. He correctly reminds his audience that “liberty or death is what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English.” Here, he implicitly asks the question: Why should we rigidly confine our movement to liberal tactics?

Any listener would ascertain that Malcom firmly believed in the legitimacy of armed struggle if it were to liberate the African American masses. In this speech he positively references the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the Vietnamese anti-colonial revolution as justified reactions to an oppressive system, contrasting them with the impotent yet palatable strategies that have consistently failed to ensure a semblance of material equality to black Americans. 

Chairman Fred Hampton similarly had no issue with waging class struggle outside of democratic norms. In his speech “It’s a Class Struggle, Goddamnit!,” Hampton positively references the non-electoral victories of the Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution, and the then-ongoing anti-colonial revolutions in Mozambique and Angola. The speech is replete with defenses of armed struggle against capitalist and imperialist forces of reaction. Hampton explicitly reminds his audience that despite one’s “revolutionary” aesthetic preferences,  “political power doesn’t flow from the sleeve of a dashiki… [it] flows from the barrel of a gun.” While direct armed struggle was not the only revolutionary strategy that Hampton advocated for, clearly he and the Black Panther Party scoffed at notions of ideological purity that stood in the way of proletarian victory. They would surely reject the Western socialist notion that proletarian struggle should be confined to the ballot box. While many on the Left love to uplift the Black Panther Party’s illustrious history of revolutionary struggle and associate their own movements with it, apparently few have spent time studying Hampton’s own words. 

These widely lauded revolutionaries provide insights our movement can and should apply to the present. Since 2020, a wave of progressive coups has swept across Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, and Gabon. Seizing power from compradore governments, revolutionary juntas in the Sahel have deposed “democratic” leaders who have done nothing but facilitate and exacerbate the extractive neo-colonial relations keeping this resource-rich region in a state of destitution. These revolutionary movements realize Africa cannot utilize its vast resources until it neutralizes the influence of western capital, and recognize that liberal democracy often facilitates these interests at the expense of the African proletariat.

In the West, we are told repeatedly that Africa, particularly West Africa, is poor and underdeveloped. While it is true that this region is underdeveloped, it is undeniable that it is also one of the most resource rich regions on the planet. Some of the highest quality uranium in the world is located in Niger, but ironically its largest uranium mine is mostly owned by the French state while 90% of Niger’s population has no access to electricity. In 2010, Niger exported €3.5 billion worth of uranium to France, but only received €459 million in return. Similarly, in Gabon the vast majority of the country’s crude oil is sold abroad. For example, crude oil accounts for 96% of Gabon’s total exports to the United States. This is due to their neocolonial economy having no incentive to build adequate refinery infrastructure, leaving the value of their most profitable export at the whim of Western financial speculators.

Coup leaders like Burkina Faso’s president Ibrahim Traore have recognized that their countries face  “the most barbaric form, the most violent manifestation, of neocolonialism and imperialism”. At the Russia-Africa Summit this past summer, Traore articulated how “African heads of state must stop acting like marionettes who dance each time the imperialists pull on our strings”. When the neocolonial alliance ECOWAS threatened military intervention in Niger to restore deposed president Mohamed Bazoum, the revolutionary juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso jointly declared “Any military intervention against Niger would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali.” A bloc of anti-imperial resistance has clearly blossomed in the Sahel, a movement Thomas Sankara laid the groundwork for. While Western imperialists attempt to destroy Sankara's vision, the popular support for these revolutionary coups demonstrates that the spirit of Sankara is alive and well in West Africa.

The collection of anti-colonial movements across the Sahel are justified and deserve our support. We should not oppose them merely because they defy the dogma that power must change hands electorally. The reality is that, as leftists, we must support any movement seriously dedicated to eradicating extractive neo-colonial systems. And that is the case whether or not it adheres perfectly to Western liberal-democratic ideals, or any other pretentious sense of purity that needlessly prohibits us from supporting anti-imperialist struggles wherever and however they arise.​

​Exactly 75 years ago in 1948, the whole world watched in horror as millions of Palestinians fled their homes due to the Zionist Israeli aggression. According to the United Nations figures, Zionists have carried out massacres, 530 Palestinian villages were wiped off from the world map and 957,000 have lost their homes and become refugees living in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, resulting in a devastating "Nakba" (Arabic word meaning "catastrophe").
 
The inhuman savagery of the Israeli occupying forces against the Palestinian people has come out again and again in successive sessions of the UN. On May 15 this year, the UN for the first time officially commemorated the 75th anniversary of the "Nakba" or "catastrophe" in memory of Palestinian citizens who lost their homes under Israeli occupation.
 
The Second "Nakba" is on the Palestinian people

75 years later, the 1948 "Nakba" has been rekindled in the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. But who is responsible for the ongoing brutal aggression in the Gaza Strip?
​
The answer is America's best friend in the Middle East, Israel, which continues to control everything in Gaza by daily killings of Palestinian children and civilians, and the construction of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. The U.S. administration has long supported Israel, “the baby child of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East”, fueling its genocidal efforts against the Palestinians, resulting in oppression and persecution.
 
 
Launching "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood"

Since the dawn of October 7, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), founded in 1988, has attacked southern Israel in three ways - air, water and land by breaking through Israel's "Iron Dome" air defense system, launching "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood" in reaction to the Zionist regime’s rising tide of violence against Palestinians. Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas military) Commander-in-Chief Mohammad Al-Deif in an audio speech urged all Palestinians to confront Israeli occupation.  Obviously, even if Hamas launched the attack this time, Israel has invaded Palestine thousands of times over the past 75 years.
 
The beginning of "Operation Iron Swords"

Following Hamas' surprise attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a "long and difficult war" on Hamas on October 8  in response to its 9/11 attack, marking the start of "Operation Iron Swords". Since then, Israel has been killing unarmed Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, with UNICEF reporting deaths of at least 2,360 Palestinian children and 5,364 injuries in Gaza in the past 18 days. Unfortunately, the U.S. and the West have given Israel the green signal to continue this genocide. The question is whether the unarmed children were creating any kind of threat to the state of Israel or its citizens?
 
Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza hospital- an unspeakable shame

On October 17, the atrocities committed by the bloodthirsty Israeli occupation forces by carrying out airstrikes on Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, killing more than 600 Palestinian people, including refugees, patients and media personnel, has shocked the civilized world. Undoubtedly, the targeted attack by the Zionist forces on the Baptist Hospital is a war crime and a flagrant act of dehumanization of the Palestinian people.
 
Quite reasonably, Osama Hamdan, the representative of Hamas in Lebanon, affirmed on October 18 that the Gaza hospital massacre was “a heinous fascist crime committed by Israeli forces and sponsored by the U.S. government”, according to a report by Beirut-based media channel, Al Mayadeen. Many peace-loving countries around the world demanded PM Netanyahu should be held accountable for the nefarious Israeli airstrike on the hospital. Unfortunately, the way Israel and its Western backers have attempted to whitewash Israeli bomb and artillery attacks on Palestinians in Gaza or some parts of Lebanon in the name of self-defense is an unspeakable shame. Needless to say, Israel's bombing of civilians in Gaza goes beyond self-defense.
 
The dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza

Following Hamas' attack, Israel's blockade of Gaza is causing a humanitarian disaster. The Israeli army is committing crimes against humanity by cutting off water, gas, electricity, and food supplies to 2.3 million people living in the Gaza Strip. Israel has threatened a ground attack on Gaza, asking 1.1 million Palestinians to leave northern Gaza. Many countries around the world, including the UN and the World Health Organization, have condemned Israel's actions and warned of “catastrophic consequences” if Israel does not stop its killing machine. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, warning that the region is "on the brink of an abyss".
 
US 'rock solid' support for Israeli atrocities against Palestinians

The ongoing Israel-Hamas war has polarized the world, with the U.S. and its Western allies including India condemning Hamas attacks on Israel and supporting Israel's declaration of war. U.S. President Joe Biden assured ‘rock solid’ support for Israel which continues its blatant atrocities against the Palestinians. During his meeting with PM Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on October 18, Biden reaffirmed that Washington would provide Israel with everything it needed to defend itself. The United States has already deployed warships and aircraft to the Eastern Mediterranean to provide strength and capability to Israel. It is certain that the U.S. is complicit in Israel's crimes against the helpless people of Gaza by sending billions of dollars worth of lethal weapons to the Zionist regime. Quite reasonably, many Arab Americans are upset Biden’s Israel stance before the 2024 election. Biden's push for more than $14 billion in new aid to Israel has angered Arab and Muslim Americans.
 
Modi's unwavering support for Israel sparks debate

The iconic leader of the Indian Independence Movement Mahatma Gandhi himself supported an independent Palestine. “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French,” he wrote in an article on November 26, 1938. But in a significant departure from India's longstanding policy of diplomatic balance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 7 assured his Israeli counterpart Netanyahu of Indian solidarity in order to preserve his government’s geopolitical interests in the Arab World. Describing the entire incident as a 'terrorist attack', he wrote on the X handle, "Deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour".

However, the invasion of “Modi-ally” Netanyahu's forces in Gaza has again created differences in Indian politics. India's opposition parties, including the Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have criticized Prime Minister Modi and extended their support for the oppressed Palestinian people. It is very unfortunate that India, which has always advocated Palestine's demand for independence and sovereignty, now the ruling Modi government is now taking the side of Israel without considering the root cause of the issue
 
Israel’s occupation politics

Hamas, despite being referred to as a terrorist organization by the U.S. administration, is actually politically and socially intertwined with Palestinian society. The reality is that Israel is an occupying state. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its roots in the occupation politics of the Zionist state. In 1948, the State of Israel was created for the Jews to pave the way for American occupation in West Asia. Israel has not accepted UN Resolution 181 on the establishment of the State of Palestine and UN Resolution 194 on the return of Palestinian refugees. The people of Palestine have been besieged by Israeli occupation forces for years.
 
Support for the oppressed Palestinians

Amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas bloody conflict, most of the countries around the world, in particular, Middle East countries like Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Syria and other Arab countries have expressed unequivocal support for the oppressed Palestinians and condemned the brutality of the occupying Israelis against innocent Palestinians.

In “solidarity” with Hamas, the Lebanese Islamic Resistance, Hezbollah, attacked several Israeli-occupied military sites including Lebanese Shebaa Farms with guided missiles and mortar shells. During a mass rally in Beirut on October 13, Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem confirmed the Lebanese Resistance's readiness and monitoring the progress of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, according to a report by Al Mayadeen. On October 21, Hezbollah Executive Council Chief Sayyed Hashem Safieddine emphasized the readiness of the Resistance to confront the Israeli occupation on all fronts. “The Future in Gaza is made by the Resistance,” he concluded.
 
China’s position on the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict

On the other hand, China’s position on the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict needs to be highlighted: On October 15, during his telephonic conversation with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned against a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, urging Israel to avoid collective punishment of the Gaza people. It should be noted here that Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas in June 2023. China was one of the first countries to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization and the State of Palestine, and has all along firmly supported the Palestinian people's just cause of restoring their legitimate national rights, and has worked for a comprehensive, just and durable solution of the Palestinian question at an early date. China first recognized Palestine in 1988, stemming from its support of anti-colonial movements.

While President Biden and other Western leaders have emphasized U.S. support for Israel, President Xi Jinping has reiterated that the establishment of “an independent state of Palestine” through a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his meeting with Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly in Beijing on October 19. In a phone conversation with Israel's Foreign Minister Eli Cohen on October 23, Wang Yi firmly said that Israel has a choice between war and peace.
 
Hamas's rebellion echoes the dream of a Palestinian state

While Israel tries to legitimize its genocidal attacks against Palestinians, the reality is that the Hamas uprising is a legitimate, self-defensive, oppressed people's violence against the 75-year-old murderous occupation of apartheid Israel. No matter how much the Western world tries to call Hamas' Al-Aqsa Flood Operation against Israel as a “terror attack”, behind this operation lies the right of the Palestinians to defend their legitimate national rights - the dream of the Palestinian people to live safely in their homeland.
 
Massacring innocent Palestinian people

As a result of the ongoing armed conflict, the loss of innocent civilian lives is increasing day by day. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people around the world wave Palestinian flags to protest Israel's brutal repression of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

It is really unknown how many more innocent Palestinian lives will be lost in Israel's bullet-bomb? By the 17th day of the conflict on October 24, Palestinian casualties had risen to more than 5,800 and 70 percent of the dead were women and children. On October 18, Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi has rightly pointed out that the Zionist regime is only accelerating its downfall by killing innocent Palestinian women and children in besieged Gaza. “Every drop of Palestinian blood brings the Zionists closer to downfall, and the Zionist regime cannot compensate for its defeats with these atrocities,” Raeisi said

On the other hand, during the open debate on the Middle East situation of the UN on October 24, the head of Vietnam’s Mission to the UN, Ambassador Dang Hoang Giang expressed Vietnam’s concern over the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza Strip. He said, “It is necessary to stop activities that incite more violence and hatred between the two sides, stop the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, the destruction of homes and the expulsion of Palestinians, and respect the status quo of holy sites in Jerusalem,” according to a VNA report on October 25, 2023.
 
 
Forced expulsion of Palestinians from their land is unjust and illegal

Although the UN adopted a resolution to establish an “independent State of Palestine" alongside Israel in Arab territory, it is unfortunate that neither the UN, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation nor the 22-member Arab League played any meaningful role in establishing an independent State of Palestine in the last 75 years.

At the Cairo Peace Summit on October 21, Jordan’s King Abdullah II noted in his opening speech that the forced or internal displacement of Palestinians would be a war crime. In his speech Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas emphasized that Palestinians cannot be forcibly removed from their land. “We will never accept relocation, we will remain on our land whatever the challenges,” he said, adding, “We also oppose the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

However, it can be said that the Cairo Summit failed to achieve a solution - to reduce the violence in the Gaza Strip due to the division between the West and the Arab world. Western leaders voiced their support for Israel's military operation in Gaza to eliminate Hamas, while Arab countries sought a strong statement from the West to condemn the heavy casualties among Palestinian civilians caused by Israel's bombardment of Gaza.
 
The way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis

The mountain of violence, racism and brutal genocide that Israel has been inflicting on Palestinians for decades needs to stop immediately. It is expected that the whole world will roar in protest to stop the ongoing aggression and bloodshed committed by the Zionist Israel in the Gaza Strip which has become an open-air prison while insisting on an immediate ceasefire. As on October 24, the UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. "The first step must be an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, saving the lives of civilians through the delivery of prompt and effective humanitarian aid," he said.
 
The international community, especially the UN, should take swift action to stop Israeli brutality in Gaza, and all countries should work together through dialogue and diplomacy to establish a sovereign, independent and viable state for Palestine, living within secure and recognized borders, in peace with Israel that can lead to a permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Author

Rabi Sankar Bosu, founder of New Horizon Radio Listeners’ Club, an independent think-tank on global affairs based in West Bengal, India, is an Indian analyst and commentator on global affairs

​The crimes of German fascism are of a magnitude so enormous that they are almost difficult to comprehend. Without question the most heinous in its breadth was the Holocaust, the systematic attempt by the Nazi regime to annihilate the Jewish people that ultimately led to the mass murder of around two-thirds of the European Jewish population. It is only correct that today’s German state would see itself as having a historic responsibility towards Jews, both at home and abroad. This point should be indisputable. However, there are divergent positions on what the nature of this responsibility should entail.
​
For the modern German state, being responsible means seeing the State of Israel as the primary representative of the Jewish people. It means muting any serious criticism towards Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Germany refuses to retrospectively assess how the country was established through ethnic cleansing, and certainly doesn’t actively challenge today’s status quo in which an system of occupation and apartheid prevails.

That solidarity with the self-professed Jewish state today goes beyond placing Israeli flags outside of official government buildings, where they have flown in the aftermath of October 7. It also explains why it was inevitable that Chancellor Olaf Scholz would end up in Tel Aviv just over a week later to express his condolences and offer an increase in military support, saying Germany’s place in hard times was “by Israel’s side”. The German state’s notion of “Never Again Ever” means ensuring Israel’s stability and security as a Jewish homeland. It sees expressions of anti-Zionism as inherently anti-Semitic.

Contrary to this view espoused by the German government is that Israel does not necessarily represent the Jewish people. This perspective either holds that Zionism as an ideology is inherently racist and rooted in settler-colonialism, or at the very least that the State of Israel today is an entity that engages in dispossession and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. This view places a distinction between critique of the Israeli state and anti-Semitism.

This position allows Jews themselves a sense of agency in being able to choose to either support Israel’s actions, or to stand firmly against the crimes that are carried out in their name. For those who agree with the latter, it means “Never Again Ever” applies equally to all scenarios that take on genocidal proportions, not merely to those claiming to safeguard the Jewish people.
 
Tough Times Opposing War Crimes in Berlin

These are difficult times in Berlin if standing up for Palestinian liberation – or even simply international law – are on your agenda.

Just after the bombs began being rained down on Gaza, Bernie Sanders visited Berlin to great fanfare. However, not pleased with his presence was the Social Democratic Party’s co-leader Saskia Esken, who cancelled an appearance alongside him. Why? Because he had the nerve to make a simple, humanitarian statement: “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.” Apparently, Sanders – perhaps the most famous Jewish political figure in the western world - was displaying anti-Semitism by aligning with the Geneva Convention.

Demonstrations in support of Palestine, or those merely calling for a humanitarian pause or ceasefire, have been banned. In the German mainstream media, these protests have been billed as the work of “Hamas lovers” or “Jew haters.” In some cases, protests are literally banned minutes before they are set to begin, when hundreds have already assembled. When it comes to calling out war crimes, the German state has decided that the right to assembly that is enshrined in the country’s Basic Law can simply be ignored.

A cursory look at these illegal demonstrations over the last two weeks reveals that many Jewish organisations have also endorsed and actively participated in them, among them the Jewish Bund and Juedische Stimme. In fact, police have hauled off Jewish activists and arrested them, because Jews are not granted the agency to espouse their positions.

For those who are Palestinian, the ban on demonstrations by Berlin’s authorities means a complete targeting of their identity. When a German police officer arrests somebody for wearing a kuffiyeh, or schools in the capital ban the Palestinian scarf, they are saying the Palestinian identity is that of a terrorist.  

Palestinians are being threatened with deportation if they are proven to be supporters of Hamas, but also Samidoun - the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network associated with the Palestinian left (both organisations have now been banned). This means the possibility of Palestinians being uprooted not once (from their historic homeland), but twice (now from Germany).
 
The Other Germany and the Palestine Liberation Organisation

Although Germany’s post-war history has been shaped by attempts to deal with the crimes of the Nazi regime, this hasn’t always meant that German state entities have taken the view that the current state does towards Israel. The history of the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, offers a very different perspective.

First off, it’s necessary to understand that the GDR was created principally as an anti-fascist state, something that was considered even more important than the construction of socialism. Its top priority was indeed “Never Again Ever,” which is why a much more robust de-Nazification process happened there than it did in the western part of the country.  

The new Federal Republic of Germany set up by the U.S., Britain and France became a country where Nazi ideologues were not only allowed to join the government, but were actively sought out for participation in the Cold War. On the other side, much of East Germany’s leadership knew first-hand what is felt like to be hounded and targeted by the Nazis – we should remember that the first concentration camps, after all, were set up for communists, and that they were accused of being part of the global “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”.

In 1948, the newly created Socialist Unity Party that was operating in the Soviet occupation zone that would become East Germany the next year, backed the creation of Israel, saying "We consider the foundation of a Jewish state an essential contribution enabling thousands of people who suffered greatly under Hitler’s fascism to build a new life".

Once it became clear that the new Israeli state was actually a reactionary entity that refused the right of return for the 700,000 refugees it had created, and enacted martial law against the Palestinians who remained, the SED leadership changed its tune. It reverted to the position long-held by the communist movement in regards to Zionism, which is that it was an expression of a reactionary, bourgeois nationalism that always sought the patronage of colonial and imperialism powers.

In 1973, the GDR set up official relations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation of Yasser Arafar. That same year, it had supplied Syria with weaponry for use in the Yom Kippur War against Israel. In 1975, East Germany voted in favor of a UN resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination.

It is not merely coincidental that the PLO was supported by East Germany at the same time that another crucial liberation movement against minority rule, that of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, was also being given support from East Germany. The battle against apartheid was inextricably linked by the East German leadership to that of opposing settler colonialism in Palestine. This was all happening at the same time that West Germany held deep relations with the racist South African government, branding those who rebelled against this rule as “terrorists” - just as the Palestinians are referred to today. Given the similarities in their struggles, it’s no small wonder why Nelson Mandela once proclaimed upon the end of apartheid that, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

This history of the rival German states that existed for 40 years shows that there was no consensus on the question of whether Zionism could be seen as representing the legitimate aspirations of Jews as a whole.
 
Germany’s Dual Responsibility

It should be evident that today’s Germany has in fact not learned the lessons of history. It’s selective application of “Never Again Ever” is symbolic, but ultimately meaningless. It is complicit in Israeli war crimes, and those who espouse anti-fascist politics have a responsibility to stand against it. To fight against anti-Semitism should also mean fighting against imperialism, colonialism, and all forms of racial discrimination.

As the creation of Israel was agreed to by world powers against the backdrop of Nazi Germany’s attempt at exterminating the Jewish people, this means that the consequences – including the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab masses from what became Israel – should also be laid at Germany’s feet. It means that not only does Germany have a responsibility to the Jewish people – it also has a responsibility towards the Palestinian people. Simply put, Palestinians should not have to suffer for the crimes of Hitlerite fascism, whether at home or here in Germany. 

Driving along the Jordan River Valley in the Occupied Palestine Territory (OPT) of the West Bank is a stunning experience. The road is officially called Highway 90. The arable and irrigated land along this road is held militarily and illegally by Israeli settlers, many of whom are not actually Israeli citizens, but residents from the Jewish diaspora. A United Nations Commission report published in 2022 showed that this settlement activity is a crime against international human rights law (transfer of population into an occupied territory). Israeli settlers and the Israeli military that defend them call Highway 90 Derekh Gandhi or Gandhi’s Road. When I first drove along that road over a decade ago, I was puzzled by Gandhi’s name there. Mahatma Gandhi was a leader of the Indian freedom struggle, and had on many occasions—such as in his 1938 article, “The Jews”—offered his sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinian people. In fact, the road that slices through the West Bank—a crucial part of a proposed Palestinian state—is named after Rehavam Ze’evi, who was ironically given the nickname Gandhi.
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Ze’evi led the National Union party, which brought together all the most dangerous currents of Israeli far-right politics. As the leader of this party, and, before that, of Moledet, Ze’evi advocated the removal of Palestinians from what he considered to be Israel’s land (East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank). He supported the creation of Eretz Yisrael that would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In March 2001, Ze’evi—who would later be accused of sexual harassment and of being involved in organized crime--told The Guardian that “it’s not murder to get rid of potential terrorists, or those who have blood on their hands. Each one eliminated is one less terrorist for us to fight.” A few months later, Ze’evi showed that he did not distinguish among Palestinians, calling all of them a “cancer” and saying, “I believe there is no place for two peoples in our country. Palestinians are like lice. You have to take them out like lice.” He was shot to death by fighters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in October 2001. The name of the road that cuts across the West Bank—promised to a Palestinian state in the Oslo Accords of 1993—still bears Ze’evi’s name.

Ze’evi was assassinated by PFLP fighters because the Israeli army had killed their leader Mustafa Ali Zibri by firing two cruise missiles at his home in Al-Bireh (Palestine). The assassination of Zibri was not an isolated incident. It was part of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to “cause the collapse” of the Palestinian Authority—created to manage the Oslo Accords—and “send them all to hell.” Apart from the murder of civilians on a punctual basis, from July 2001 the Israeli government killed four political leaders (Islamic Jihad leader Salah Darwazeh and Hamas leader Jamal Mansour in July, and then Hamas leader Amer Mansour Habiri and Fatah leader Emad Abu Sneineh in August). After the killing of Zibri, the Israelis assassinated Hamas’s Mahmoud Abu Hanoud in November. “Whoever gave a green light to this act of liquidation,” wrote military correspondent Alex Fishman in Yediot Ahronot, “knew full well that he is thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority; under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line [Israel’s pre-1967 borders].”

Hot Violence, Cold Violence

For centuries, Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side-by-side in the lands that would eventually be Israel and the OPT, including along the Jordan River Valley. Since the expulsion of the Palestinian Christians and Muslims and the arrival of European Jews, the legal apparatus—or the “cold violence,” as the writer Teju Cole calls it—worked alongside paramilitary and military violence against the Palestinians to create a fantasy of an ethno-nationalist state project (the Jewish State, as it was then called). The erasure of the non-Jewish Palestinians was key to this project, either by massacres (Deir Yassin in 1948) or the wholesale removal of the Palestinian population from their land (the Nakba of 1948). The massacres and the population transfers came alongside the denial of the reality of Palestine and the Palestinian people. The heir to Ze’evi, current finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said this March, “There’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.” This is not an opinion that can be dismissed as a far-right rant. Likud member Ofir Akunis, minister of science and technology, said three years ago, “There’s no place for any formula to establish a Palestinian state in Western Israel.” The phrase “Western Israel” is a chilling statement about the Israeli consensus on full annexation of the West Bank with disregard for international law.

A focus on Gaza is essential. The Israeli “hot violence” is extreme, with the death toll of Palestinians—almost half of them in Gaza of children—over 5,000. The Israeli land invasion has been blocked, for now, by the recognition of high morale among the Palestinian resistance. The latter will fight every Israeli soldier that goes into the ruins of Gaza. Before this Israeli incursion, 450 trucks crossed into Gaza with supplies for the 2.3 million residents; it was taken as a victory when nine United Nations trucks and 11 trucks of the Egyptian Red Crescent crossed into Gaza on October 21. Amnesty International looked at only five bombings of the Israelis and found evidence of war crimes, which should alert the International Criminal Court to re-open its file on Israeli atrocities. This should include the crime of collective punishment by cutting water and electricity to Gaza, and bombing access roads to the Rafah crossing into Egypt, and by bombing the Rafah crossing itself.

Large demonstrations across the world demand a ceasefire (at a minimum) and an end to the occupation. Israel is not interested. Its defense minister Yoav Gallant told parliament that his forces have a three-point plan—to destroy Hamas, to destroy the other Palestinian factions, and to create a new “security regime” in Gaza. The Palestinian people—not just the armed factions—are resolute in their resistance to Israeli occupation. The only way for Gallant’s new “security regime” to work would be to erase this resistance, which means to remove all Palestinians from Gaza either by massacres or by dispossession. The United States is following along with this extermination plan: a U.S. State Department memorandum says that its diplomats must not use phrases such as “de-escalation,” “ceasefire,” “end to violence,” “end to bloodshed,” and “restoring calm.”

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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.