STRAY

Turkish legislators hold tense debate on bill to control stray dogs. Critics fear a mass culling

A stray dog rests outside Byzantine-era Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, Wednesday, July 3, 2024. A Turkish parliamentary commission on Wednesday began a tense debate on a bill designed to manage the country’s large stray dog population which animal … more >

By Suzan Fraser - Associated Press - Wednesday, July 17, 2024

ANKARA, Turkey — A Turkish parliamentary commission began a tense debate Wednesday on a bill to manage the country’s large stray dog population that animal advocates fear could result in the widespread killing of the animals.

The legislation, submitted to parliament by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party, is pitting groups advocating for safer streets free of the feral dogs against animal rights activists who are demanding the withdrawal of the bill.


Erdogan has stated that approximately four million stray animals are wandering the streets and rural areas of Turkey. While many of them are docile, an increasing numbers of dogs are seen roaming in packs and numerous people have been attacked.

The legislation being debated in parliament’s agriculture and rural affairs commission is a diluted version of an initial proposal that would have required the strays to be rounded up, housed in shelters and euthanized if they are not adopted within 30 days.

That proposal, which was leaked to the media, had ignited a public uproar, with animal rights activists arguing it would result in the mass extermination of unadopted dogs.

The revised proposal forces municipalities to remove the stray dogs from the streets and place them into shelters where they would be neutered and spayed. Dogs that are sick, believed to have rabies or exhibiting aggressive behavior would be euthanized.

Municipalities would also be required to build dog shelters or improve conditions in existing shelters by 2028.

The revised bill has failed to ease concerns, with activists arguing that certain municipalities may opt for the easy solution of conducting a mass culling of the stray animals instead of allocating resources toward shelters.

The parliament’s agriculture and rural affairs commission meeting began tumultuously when the committee chair demanded that media, NGO representatives and other observers exit the room, citing insufficient space to accommodate everyone. The meeting was later moved to a larger room.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for STRAYS 

Haiti: Displaced Women Face ‘unprecedented’ Level Of Insecurity And Sexual Violence

Thursday, 18 July 2024, 
Press Release: UN News

Instability in Haiti is fuelling a spike in sexual violence against women and girls as armed gangs continue their assault on the population, the UN agency championing gender equality said on Wednesday.

A new report by UN Women reveals the dire living conditions and lack of security faced by some 300,000 displaced women and girls amid ongoing political instability, escalating gang violence and the threat of the current hurricane season.

In constant danger

Women and girls account for more than half of the 580,000 displaced people in Haiti, and the UN Women Rapid Gender Assessment highlights how makeshift camps, which lack basic necessities, are putting them at particular risk of sexual and gender-based violence.

The survey was conducted in April in the six most populated and diverse displacement sites in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

It found that most camps have no lighting or locks in key areas such as bedrooms and toilets, while residents are exposed to daily threats from the gangs. The constant danger of stray bullets and other security risks further underscore the urgent need for improved protection in these sites.

Aggression against women and girls, specifically rape, is also being used in most camps as a deliberate tactic to control their access to humanitarian assistance, the agency noted.

Appeal to new Government

“Our report tells us that the level of insecurity and brutality, including sexual violence, that women are facing at the hands of gangs in Haiti is unprecedented. It must stop now,” said UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous.

“We urge the newly appointed Government to take measures to prevent and respond to the violence women and girls are subjected to, and to increase women’s participation in the camps’ management so that their security concerns are listened to and acted upon.”

She added that “humanitarian aid must be safely distributed in line with the differentiated needs of women and girls.”

Resorting to sex work

The report also revealed that nearly 90 per cent of women interviewed have no source of income in the camps.

More than 10 per cent said they had resorted to or considered the possibility of sex work or prostitution to meet their needs at least once, and 20 per cent knew at least one person who had done so.

Other findings include that some 16 per cent of respondents felt intimidated, harassed, or traumatized by armed gangs, and almost 70 per cent said they were mentally affected by the upsurge in violence. Only 10 per cent reported having access to health services in the camps.

Supporting women’s organizations and entrepreneurship

In response to the crisis in Haiti, UN Women is assisting women’s organizations to reach displaced people within host communities and camps, including through projects supported by the UN Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund, the UN Peacebuilding Fund, and the German Government.

The agency has also trained police officers to improve prevention of sexual and gender-based violence and provide services to survivors. Additionally, it continues to support women entrepreneurs, who are affected by road blockages and ongoing violence, through a project funded by Norway.

International security mission

Last October, the UN Security Council authorized the deployment of a Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission to assist the Haitian National Police in combatting the gangs.

UN Women urged all stakeholders involved in the non-UN mission to guarantee the immediate protection of women and girls, and to give Haitian women’s organizations a leading role in the management of the displacement camps.

Only two per cent of women surveyed reported having a leadership role in camp management, the agency said, stressing the urgency to both ensure their active participation in decision-making and implement immediate protection measures.

© Scoop Media

Ghana supreme court defers ruling on anti-LGBTQ bill


By Guardian Nigeria
17 Jul 2024 |

Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo leaves the Banquet Hall after the closing session of the ordinary session of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Heads of State and Government in Abuja, on July 7, 2024. - A summit of West African leaders opened on July 7, 2024 in Abuja in a tense political context following the decision of Niger, Mali and Burkina to unite within a "confederation". (Photo by Kola Sulaimon / AFP)

Ghana’s Supreme Court on Wednesday deferred its ruling on a request to restrain parliament from transmitting a highly contested anti-LGBTQ bill to President Nana Akufo-Addo for his final approval.

The ruling means debate around the bill, which has dominated Ghana’s political discourse since parliament passed it in February, will be sidelined from the campaign for December’s presidential election race.

Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo, chairing the five-member Supreme Court panel, said the court will expedite the case. But the case has been adjourned indefinitely, with no date set for further rulings.

Ghana’s Attorney-General Godfred Dame welcomed the court’s decision, telling the media: “I think the court is fair in coming by that approach.”

Two lawsuits are challenging the passage of the so-called “Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill”, which has faced widespread international criticism for curbing human rights.

Broadcaster Richard Dela Sky is contesting the constitutionality of the bill, arguing it violates several provisions of the 1992 Constitution.

Amanda Odoi, the other plaintiff, is seeking a restraining order to prevent the parliament speaker, the attorney-general, and the clerk of parliament from sending the bill to President Akufo-Addo for approval.

The bill, which stipulates jail terms of six months to three years for engaging in LGBTQ sex and sentences of three to five years for promoting or sponsoring LGBTQ activities, has drawn condemnation from rights activists but gained wide support in the conservative West African state.

Ghana’s finance ministry has warned that the country, emerging from its worst economic crisis in decades and under a $3 billion loan programme from the International Monetary Fund, risks losing close to $3.8 billion in World Bank financing due to the bill.

Akufo-Addo, who is stepping down after two terms, has refused to approve the bill, citing the multiple court cases against it.

His ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) faces a tight race against the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the upcoming presidential ballot.

The bill, commonly referred to as the anti-gay bill, has faced widespread international condemnation, including from the United Nations, the United States, and the British government.

Despite this, it has significant support among MPs and is backed by a coalition of Christian, Muslim, and Ghanaian traditional leaders.

Putin's Spies Are a Threat to Paris Olympics, Google Warns

By Hugh Cameron
NEWSWEEK

Published Jul 17, 2024

Russian hackers are gearing up to derail the Paris Olympics, according to cybersecurity experts, with prospective targets ranging from those in the stands to state officials.

New research from Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm and subsidiary of Google, argued that the events' organizers and attendees will need to remain on high-alert, given the significant risk posed by cyber-criminals with motivations both financial and geopolitical.

In a report entitled "Phishing for Gold," Mandiant determined that the Paris Olympics face "an elevated risk of cyber threat activity."

The authors, Michelle Cantos and Jamie Collier, assessed "with high confidence" that Russian state-sponsored actors posed the greatest risk to the Games, with hackers from China, Iran and North Korea also presenting a moderate threat.

Visitors take photos next to Olympic rings near Plaza de la Bastilla ahead of Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 15, 2024 in Paris, France. A new report by Mandiant argued that these Games will... More MAJA HITIJ/GETTY IMAGES

Collier, Mandiant's lead threat intelligence advisor for Europe, spoke to Newsweek about the unique vulnerabilities of the Olympic Games.

"As a high profile sporting event with a global audience, the Olympics represents an ideal stage for disruptive cyber operations intended to cause negative psychological effects and reputational damage," Collier said. "This is because the impact of any disruption would be significantly magnified."

The paper outlines the varied cyber risk that face the Games, including cyber espionage, "Disruptive and destructive" attacks, and financially motivated hacks.

As an international event attended by government officials and heads of state, Collier believes that Russian hackers will attempt to use the event for "information gathering" on foreign, senior decision makers.

However, attendees should also be wary, and such large events present ripe opportunities for cybercriminals of all stripes to target tourists with ticket scams and attempt to steal personal data.

For Collier, the worst case scenario would be a widescale "destructive" attack, such as the deployment of "wiper malware" which erases data on target networks, and which would throw the Paris Games into disarray.

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his speech at the IOC Gala Dinner on the eve of the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2014, in Sochi, Russia. Mandiant's report names Russia...

More ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Collier argued that a coincidence of factors make these Olympics particularly vulnerable.

The International Olympic Committee banned Russia from competition in February 2022, as an immediate response to the country's invasion of Ukraine which the organization deemed a "blatant violation" of the Olympic Charter. Russian and Belarusian athletes still may compete under a neutral flag.


According to Collier, this provides Putin with a "clear motivation" to target the Games and, alongside its sophisticated cyber espionage capabilities and track record of targeting previous Olympics, make it the greatest risk to the competition.

During the 2016, 2018 and 2020 Games, state-sponsored Russian hackers leaked athlete data, disrupted networks during the opening ceremonies, and conducted reconnaissance of Olympic officials, according to Mandiant.

France's ardent support for Ukraine following the Russian invasion also makes these games the perfect target for geopolitically motivated attacks, according to Collier, and France the most likely target for cyberattacks.

However, Collier said that the reaction to the report has been encouraging since it was first published in June.

"We have been really encouraged by the number of organizations involved in the Olympics that have read our report and are looking to respond to the threats that matter most to them," Collier said. "More organizations than ever now understand that identifying relevant threats helps them build a more proactive security posture."

All the World’s a Stage: How Predictive Programming Crafts Far-Right X Users’ Worldview



By Mason Krusch

15th July 2024

Introduction

This Insight investigates how far-right X users construct their worldview around fictional media and predictive programming, that is, the notion that a nebulously-defined group known as “the elite” — supposedly consisting of members of various international organisations, US and UK political leadership and intelligence agencies, and multinational corporations — forewarns international publics of its future nefarious plans using fictional media such as movies and TV shows. In particular, this Insight explores how far-right X users claim that the movies Leave the World Behind (2023) and Civil War (2024) were attempts by the elite to issue advanced warnings for the Dali’s collision with the Key Bridge as well as future debilitating cyberattacks and a second American civil war. This Insight then further probes how fictional media mould far-right X users’ worldviews by examining the origins and development of a strange and outlandish conspiracy theory pertaining to COVID-19 vaccines known as the “pureblood” movement, whose adherents espouse definitively eugenicist and neo-Nazi beliefs. This Insight concludes by assessing how such conspiratorial thinking facilitates the erosion of critical discourse and media literacy vital to the healthy functioning of democratic societies.

Predictive Programming

Ship Wrecks and Cyberattacks

The collision of the cargo ship MV Dali with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on 26 March 2024 spurred far-right X users to declare that the movie Leave the World Behind had foretold the catastrophe. Leave the World Behind, released on Netflix on 8 December 2023, follows two mutually distrustful families on Long Island as they attempt to navigate the immediate aftermath of a blackout believed to have been caused by a cyberattack.

In an early scene of the movie, one of the families witnesses a large tanker ship run aground on a beach due to, so they later learn, a cyberattack targeting maritime navigation networks. It was this scene in Leave the World Behind to which far-right X users quickly began comparing the Dali’s collision, alleging that the film’s scene had served as a warning from the elite for the real-life incident. Far-right users opined that the Dali’s collision was by design rather than an accident, adding that former US President Barack Obama, an executive producer for Leave the World Behind, must have orchestrated the Dali’s crash.


Figure 1. A post from an account which boasts 1.8 million followers, depicting former US President Barack Obama directing both the tanker scene from Leave the World Behind and the Dali’s collision.

One far-right X user declared that the apparent similarity between the Dali’s collision and the tanker scene in Leave the World Behind “can’t be coincidence.” The ostensible proof for the movie having predicted the Dali’s collision stems, so the user alleges, from the fact that the name of the tanker in Leave the World Behind is “White Lion,” while the flag of Sri Lanka (for which the Dali was bound before its collision) features a lion on it — albeit a yellow one.


Figure 2. A post from someone arguing, using loose symbolic association, that the tanker scene in Leave the World Behind foretold the Dali’s collision.

Other far-right X users have alleged that Leave the World Behind was a warning from the elite about impending cyberattacks. Approximately 33 minutes into the movie, a simulated CNN news report appears on a TV screen displaying a map depicting the extent of the film’s fictitious cyberattack. One far-right X user called on users to more deeply scrutinise the scene, suggesting that a QR code embedded in the map may contain some deeper message because “[w]e know they [the elite] have to tell us.” When scanned, the QR code in fact leads to a tourism page for the Lake Shawnee Abandoned Amusement Park from the Visit Mercer County Convention and Visitors Bureau; the meaning of this is unclear.


Figure 3. A post from a conspiracy theory account claiming that the fictional cyberattack in Leave the World Behind foreshadows a similar real-life event.

Similarly, another X user, whose account has over 885,000 followers, claimed that Leave the World Behind, along with an educational video produced by the World Economic Forum warning about the dangers of cyberattacks, indicated that the public was being “programmed” for a future “cyber pandemic.” The World Economic Forum and its founder, Klaus Schwab, are frequent targets for far-right conspiracy theorists, who opine that the organisation is plotting to take away people’s freedoms.


Figure 4. A post alleging that Leave the World Behind and an educational video from the World Economic Forum were attempts to “program” the public.

Civil War

Another recent film that has generated much discussion among far-right X users is Civil War, produced by studio A24 and released on April 12, 2024. Far-right X users allege that Civil War, which depicts the travels of several journalists en route from New York City to Washington, DC to interview an authoritarian third-term US president, is a warning from the elite of an impending real-life second American civil war that the elite themselves are apparently seeking to instigate. Although discussion of the risk of widespread political violence in the United States has increased since the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, far-right X users have openly decried the movie — even well before its premiere — as an attempt by the elite to foment civil war through predictive programming.


Figure 5. A post from a highly influential far-right X user with over 2.5 million followers asserting that Civil War is predictive programming shortly after the release of the film’s trailer.


Figure 6. A post from a far-right X user, whose account has over 331,000 followers, calling Civil War an attempt at predictive programming.

One X user insisted that the timing of the release of Civil War “was no coincidence” and that civil war is “what they [the elite] want.” Similarly, another X user whose account has over 255,000 followers claimed that “[w]hen all else fails, they [the elite] will be the ones to ‘try’ to start a Civil War.” Another user further asserted that “[t]his movie, a masterclass in ‘Predictive Programming,’ isn’t just a film: it’s a psychological warfare tool… it’s pure mainstream deception,” adding that the film’s president is “suggested to be Trump,” whose fictional death serves as “a potential spark for chaos.”

Such comments threaten the integrity of democracy by undermining public trust in government authorities and institutions. Additionally, such conspiratorial thinking risks creating self-fulfilling prophecies whereby members of the far-right view widespread political violence — even civil war — as inevitable and thus permittable. Indeed, the latter user, in the same post, concludes by declaring that “when tyranny looms, the real answer isn’t a civil war; it’s a Revolution,” an equally alarming alternative.

Purebloods: A Wizarding War against the Impure?

One strange and outlandish trend among far-right X users is the pureblood movement, whose adherents claim that their abstention from taking any COVID-19 vaccinations means that they alone have pure blood, while those persons who received COVID-19 vaccinations have tainted theirs. Emerging initially on TikTok in September 2021, the pureblood movement takes its name from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, purebloods being those persons whose ancestry consists solely of wizards and witches, in contrast to Muggles, who are born to non-magical parents. In the series, purebloods such as Lord Voldemort and Lucius Malfoy are the antagonists who set out to purge the world of non-purebloods, and Rowling has explicitly stated that the concept has Nazi undertones.

Although early users of the term on TikTok later explained that they were joking, the pureblood movement bears a close similarity to white nationalist movements, and far-right users on X have since perpetuated the notion of being purebloods in earnest. A self-described “Post Apocalyptic War Lord” and far-right X user with over 599,000 followers praised Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic for winning the 2023 US Open Tennis tournament not based on his athletic skills, but rather his pureblood status, as Djokovic was notably opposed to the COVID-19 vaccine.


Figure 7. A post lauding Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic for his unvaccinated “pureblood” status.

Searching the hashtag #PureBlood, a variety of posts appear from other X users extolling their self-proclaimed pureblood status. One X user called on fellow pureblood users to repost a fake certificate commending their efforts for “surviving the greatest psychological fear campaign in human history.” Similarly, a user whose account has over 196,000 followers posted an image of a sticker reading “PUREBLOOD. Unmasked, unjabbed, unafraid,” calling on fellow pureblood X users to join her. In this way, self-professed pureblood status serves as a definitive identity marker engendering an exclusive sense of community, social unity, and solidarity.

This exclusivity of the pureblood movement is a salient characteristic, and some far-right X users identifying with the movement have advocated for the separation of purebloods from non-purebloods. In a repost to a user sharing what is claimed to be a preprint of an article alleging that blood from vaccinated persons is tainted, an X user proposed that purebloods establish their own blood banks, harkening to the eugenicist notion that pure blood and blood which is deemed to be impure cannot be mixed for fear of contaminating the former.

An even more otherworldly variation of this pureblood theory stems from X user The White Rabbit Podcast, who claims to be a senate candidate for the far-right Great Australian Party and whose account has over 208,000 followers. The White Rabbit Podcast proposes that the ratio between the percentage of persons with rhesus-negative blood (blood that lacks the Rh antigen and which occurs in approximately 15 percent of the United States’ population and an even smaller percentage of the total global population) mysteriously corresponds with the percentage of persons who did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine.


Figure 8. A post from The White Rabbit Podcast implying that COVID-19 vaccines genetically altered recipients’ blood type.

While the conspiratorial logic is opaque and difficult to follow, this X user seems to suggest that COVID-19 vaccines genetically altered recipients’ blood from rhesus negative to rhesus positive, and that recipients of the vaccine were thus “infected” with “ape” blood by which she erroneously conflates the Rh antigen in humans with the Rh antigen found in rhesus macaque monkeys (from which the human version of the antigen took its name following early scientific research using the rhesus macaques as test subjects). Thus, in the eyes of certain members of the far-right, those deemed to be non-purebloods are not only impure, but quite literally animals. Such attitudes recall eugenicist beliefs espoused by neo-Nazis, and indeed, it is worth noting that the “88” which appears as part of The White Rabbit Podcast’s X handle might very well refer to the “88” cipher frequently used by members of neo-Nazi organisations as a code for “Heil Hitler.”

Summing It Up: What Is the Risk and What Can Be Done?

The disjointed and opaque system of logic underlying far-right X users’ conspiracy theories might, at first glance, seem to discredit their potential for garnering influence. The method to far-right X users’ madness relies, after all, on loose and apparently arbitrary associations drawn from fictional media that would seemingly have little appeal to a broader audience not already initiated into far-right beliefs. Despite their esoteric nature, however, conspiratorial posts from far-right users on X garner hundreds of thousands and even millions of views, and some far-right X accounts have just as many followers. The ease with which such posts are disseminated to wider audiences through the use of hashtags and appeals to popular and current media, in fact, facilitates their spread to new audiences.

The risk is not merely that X users come to believe in false conspiracy theories, but that the abundance of such disorienting discourse undermines users’ confidence in their ability to discern truth from fiction. Furthermore, while speculation on supposed ulterior motives behind films may, in itself, be fairly innocuous — especially since it does not necessarily involve calls for political violence — far-right X users’ use of such discourse to erode trust in government officials and institutions degrades the ability of members of the public to make informed assessments of political realities, thus weakening the integrity of democracy.

One way to mitigate this problem is for tech companies to partner with universities, schools, libraries, and civil society organisations to promote digital and media literacy education. Raising awareness of far-right and other extremist discourse, as well as teaching members of the public how to identify and report such content, empowers individuals by providing them with the knowledge and resources needed to be responsible social media users. Community leaders, in partnership with industry experts, might also stress the importance of good social media hygiene in maintaining the overall health of democracy, underscoring the cumulative repercussions of individuals’ online behaviour on community integrity while striving to inculcate the importance of normative values such as truthfulness, diligence, and resilience. Additionally, national government officials should aim to develop counter-narratives to extremist messages while further fostering constructive dialogue and emphasising the need for national vigilance in the face of rampant disinformation. Indeed, a whole-of-society approach that coordinates both private and public stakeholders at various tiers might craft the most robust approach to mitigating the spread of extremist narratives.

Mason W. Krusch is a postgraduate researcher at the Global Studies and International Relations Programme at Northeastern University (Boston, US). His work has previously been published in Small Wars & Insurgencies (Taylor & Francis) and The Defence Horizon Journal (European Military Press Association). His research interests include information operations, unconventional warfare, Nordic security, and far-right extremism and online radicalisation. He holds a MS in Global Studies and International Relations from Northeastern University and a BA in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Sheep on a high: Flock feasts on cannabis after extreme weather

by Staff Reporter
17 Jul 2024 


In a truly bizarre twist of fate, a flock of sheep in Greece found themselves feeling a bit too "ewe-phoric" after munching on a crop of weed!

Wildfires, heatwaves, and flooding had left the poor flock near Thessaly with little to graze on, so they took matters into their own hooves and made a beeline for a greenhouse producing medicinal cannabis.

The greenhouse owner had already seen his crop battered by the extreme weather, but the sheep's unexpected feast was the final blow. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry," he told TheNewspaper.gr. "First, we had the heatwave and lost a lot of production. Then the floods took almost everything. And now this - the herd got into the greenhouse and finished off what was left. I honestly don't know what to say."

In total, 100kg of the crop was destroyed, and the sheep left feeling more than a little light-headed.

Their shepherd noticed the strange behavior immediately. "They were jumping higher than goats, which never happens," he marveled.

Meanwhile, in a curious case of vanished evidence in Uttar Pradesh, India, officers were left empty-handed in a court case after 195kg of drugs mysteriously disappeared. The culprit? "Fearless mice," according to the officers, who claimed the rodents had destroyed the stock while it was in storage. Judge Sanjay Chaudhary quipped, "Rats are tiny animals and they have no fear of the police. It's difficult to protect the drug from them."

While recreational weed remains illegal in India, its extract, bhang, is perfectly legal and even used in some Hindu practices.

So, there you have it - a tale of sheep on a wild trip and some daring drug-devouring rodents!

French trade unions give up on strikes in Paris airports following successful negotiations

Airport employer group ADF, unions find common ground on additional bonuses, French media outlets say

Nur Asena Ertürk |17.07.2024 - 

Paris Orly Airport

ANKARA

Trade unions in France gave up on launching strikes in Paris airports after successful negotiations, according to media reports.

Trade unions, including the CGT, FO, CFDT, and Unsa, announced on July 8 that they were planning strikes in Paris airports on July 17.

The unions claimed bonuses for the entire staff, 1,000 additional recruits, and the possibility of taking annual leaves during the Olympic Games, the broadcaster France info said.

Airport employer group ADF and the unions on Tuesday found common ground and agreed on various additional bonuses comprising the workers’ efforts during the Olympics, the same source added. The unions thus decided not to launch strikes in the airports.

CGT demonstrations

The CGT is planning demonstrations in Paris on Thursday at noon, in front of the National Assembly, the lower chamber of the French parliament.

The aim is to call for President Emmanuel Macron to take action and allow the left-wing alliance New Popular Front (NFP) to select a prime minister and govern the country.

Macron accepted Prime Minister Gabriel Attal's resignation one week later and was harshly criticized for delaying the process and causing instability in the country.

The NFP, which is expected to get the most seats in the National Assembly, started searching for a candidate to propose as prime minister.

The intense work led to a divergence of opinion, even divisions inside the NFP, which is looking for a solid name to give Macron.

The New Popular Front could win over 180 seats. The centrist alliance, Together for the Republic, backed by Macron, finished second with over 160 seats, while Marine Le Pen's RN got over 140 seats.

The National Assembly has 577 seats, and none of the three primary alliances is expected to win an absolute majority of 289 lawmakers.

The first round was held on June 30, and 76 candidates were elected without a second round.

The RN received 29.26% of the vote alone (37 seats), a figure that rises to more than 33% when combined with its allies.

The NFP got 28.06% (32 seats), followed by the centrist Together with slightly over 20.04% (two seats).

Macron dissolved the parliament and announced early elections after the RN won more than 31% of the vote in the European Parliament elections on June 9, defeating his centrist bloc.

Australia vows to hold Russia accountable for 'downing' of MH17 flight

⁠MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down above eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 on board

Serdar Dincel |17.07.2024 - TRT/AA


ISTANBUL

Australia on Wednesday vowed to hold Russia accountable for the alleged downing of the MH17 flight.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said: “The findings of ... court unequivocally and conclusively establish Russia’s responsibility for the downing of MH17."

In 2022, a court in the Netherlands awarded life sentences to three people, including Russian citizens Sergey Dubinskiy and Igor Girkin, as well as Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko, who were found guilty of causing the crash while another Russian, Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted on all charges.

“We will not be deterred in our commitment to hold Russia to account,” Wong said, addressing families of the victims at the Australian Parliament.

The MH17 flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down above eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. All 298 on board were killed, including 196 Dutch citizens.

However, Moscow had rejected the verdict and called it a "scandalous" decision announced under unprecedented pressure by a Dutch court and denied any involvement in the downing of the jet.

Israel’s Unseen Second Front

While the war in Gaza rages on, militant Jewish settlers are pushing further into the Palestinian heartland


AUTHOR
Edo Konrad
NEWS | 07/11/2024

Scenes of devastation in the village of Duma in the West Bank following a raid by unknown assailants, 12 May 2024.Photo: Flash90 / Nasser Ishtayeh

LONG READ

On 28 February 2024, some four months into Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, dozens of young Israeli settlers saw an opportunity to set a precedent. Nearly 20 years after Ariel Sharon’s government evacuated the Jewish settlements from Gaza, a small number of them — some reportedly carrying construction materials, while at least two were armed with the kind of rifles used by the military — stormed the Erez Crossing in a first attempt to rebuild Jewish settlements.


Edo Konrad is a journalist and the former editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine.

“We came here [because] we wanted to go home. I live in a community of deportees from Gush Katif, and we wanted to go back”, one 18-year-old settler told Local Call. “I would like the government to understand [what] the majority of the people already understood: We are here. It is ours … We need to go to Gaza, destroy all the terror there, and build there ourselves”, said another.

The settlers were successful — at least momentarily. They managed to erect a makeshift outpost, not unlike the kind seen in the occupied West Bank, which they named Nisanit Hachadasha (“New Nisanit”) after one of the settlements of Gush Katif, the Jewish settlement bloc that was evacuated as part of the 2005 disengagement plan. But unlike the disengagement, in which police and soldiers forcibly removed 9,000 settlers from a colony built in the heart of the Palestinian civilian population, this time Israeli security forces stood nearby and provided protection as the settlers swarmed. It would take several hours before the police arrived to remove them.

To the untrained eye, Nisanit Hachadasha might appear as a form of marginal political theatre, not to be taken too seriously. But the event in many ways marked the culmination of a vision that has been percolating among the settler movement for decades — one that could only be realized through a paradigm-shifting explosion of violence such as all-out war or ethnic cleansing, permanently thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state and turning the settlers into the masters of the land.

Israel’s unprecedented onslaught and devastation in the Gaza Strip, which came as a response to the gruesome Hamas attacks on Southern Israel and the capturing of hundreds of hostages on 7 October, has provided the settlers with precisely such an explosion. While the mood among mainstream Israeli society is one of painful sacrifice for a “necessary” and “just” war of defence, the settlers and their representatives in the Knesset have had a hard time disguising their celebratory mood. They believe their moment to make history has come. Indeed, the question is not only whether they will succeed, but what kind of threat potential failure could pose to their entire project.
National Religious Revanchism

On the morning of 7 October, as the horrors of the Hamas attacks were becoming clearer (1,200 Israelis killed, 252 hostages taken, and half-a-dozen kibbutzim destroyed), Israel’s Settlements and National Projects Minister Orit Strock spoke before the cabinet. “First of all, happy holiday”, the far-right settler reportedly said at the top of her remarks, referring to the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. “A happy holiday this will not be”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shot back, reflecting the gap between him and the fundamentalist partners key to holding his government together.

As the war dragged on, Strock would come to symbolize what can only be described as a defiant glee that has characterized the National Religious movement since the November 2022 elections brought them to the height of their power, and certainly since the beginning of the war. In May 2024, Strock openly opposed the “terrible” ceasefire agreement, the approval of which would be tantamount to a betrayal of IDF soldiers and Israel’s war aims. In response to American efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, Strock said that the US “does not deserve to be called a friend of the State of Israel”. In early July, she told a group of settlers that Israel had entered a “miraculous” era — the miracle in question being settlement expansion.

She is by no means alone, and the settler movement is certainly not the only segment of Israeli society agitating for more carnage. The entire right wing, from Netanyahu’s allies in the media to right-wing Haredi journalists, is veritably euphoric, joyfully calling for the expulsion of Palestinians and the annihilation of Gaza as we know it.

That euphoria extends deep into mainstream Israeli society, which was shocked by the sheer brutality of Hamas’s attack, enraged by the government and army’s inability to prevent it, and now feels abandoned and betrayed by the world during the Jewish state’s most difficult hours. In this atmosphere, genocidal rap songs have topped the pop charts, large-scale civilian initiatives have been deployed to justify Israel’s ruthlessness, artists who were once associated with multiculturalism have embraced far-right talking points, calls to end the war are often seen as tantamount to treason, and anti-government protests have not reached anywhere near the numbers seen during the movement against the right-wing judicial coup last year.

Were it not for the fracturing of the Israeli public over Netanyahu’s political motivations for quashing any ceasefire deal and the army’s outwardly stated failure to neither defeat Hamas nor rescue the vast majority of hostages through military operations, it is not hard to imagine that the centre and much of the centre-left would still support Netanyahu’s deliberately vague goal of “total victory”. Yet since 7 October, Religious Zionists (the ideology of the vast majority of West Bank settlers) have been the most assiduous supporters of the war and its potential for remaking the country, both demographically and geographically.

Israeli security forces guard as Jews tour the West Bank city of Hebron, 29 June 2024.Photo: Flash90/Wisam Hashlamoun


Religious Rabbis have publicly and unashamedly celebrated the war and the possibilities it opens up for remaking the political order. Settler media outlets such as the radical TV channel Arutz 7 and the more dignified weekly Makor Rishon, widely regarded as the mouthpiece of the settler elite, have been almost unanimous in their celebratory demands for the permanent re-occupation and re-settlement of Gaza. Religious soldiers fighting in the strip — particularly “Hardalim”, far-right nationalists whose political beliefs are imbued with religious zealotry — have used the current war to remake the army in their image and influence soldiers with extremist rhetoric.

Moshe Feiglin, a far-right settler and former member of Knesset for the ruling Likud party, invoked Adolf Hitler while describing what should be done to Palestinians in Gaza. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and one of the most powerful figures in the current government, has publicly demanded permanent military control of Gaza, rejected any accountability for the events of 7 October, and told hostage families that any deal with Hamas to bring back their loved ones would be akin to “collective suicide”.

In Gaza, meanwhile, dozens of soldiers in the Gaza Strip, including officers, have been documented waving orange flags associated with the movement to resettle Gush Katif, displaying posters announcing the renewal of settlements, or calling for the re-establishment of Jewish communities there.


Never have they had this kind of influence over Israeli politics, and Netanyahu is afraid of them bringing down the government, which gives them enormous influence and power to keep the war going.

It is no surprise, then, that the attempt to build a settlement outpost in northern Gaza came only one month after 15 members of the governing coalition, including Smotrich, participated in the “Conference for Israel’s Victory” in Jerusalem, where they demanded the Israeli government promote the re-establishment of settlements in the Gaza Strip. At a time when Israeli soldier casualties were piling up in Gaza, settler leaders were filmed ecstatically dancing. On the wall of the conference hall, a giant map of Gaza could be seen dotted with the locations of potential new settlements to be built on the ruins of cities, villages, and refugee camps. What would happen to the 2 million Palestinians living in the strip was not discussed. A similar conference promoting the settlement of southern Lebanon took place in mid-June.

Within months, the so-called Lobby for the Settlement of the Gaza Strip held its first meeting in the Knesset, where Likud MK Tzvika Fogel called on Israel to “turn Shifa Hospital into a 7 October museum” and Religious Zionist Party member Zvi Sukkot, chairman of the Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samaria [West Bank], pledged that one day “our children will play in the streets of Gaza”.

On the ground, settlers and other right-wingers have channelled their power into blocking humanitarian aid trucks and at times destroying cargo to prevent their passage into the Gaza Strip, where the UN says there is an ongoing “full-blown famine”. In some of these cases, police officers simply looked on, doing nothing to stop them.

For Meron Rapoport, a veteran Israeli journalist and editor at Local Call, the settler right’s ecstasy should be taken with a grain of salt. Despite the warmongering and ongoing radicalization, the Israeli public is not interested in sending its children to protect messianic settlers in Gaza. “On the one hand, the influence of the settlers is at its height”, says Rapoport. “Never have they had this kind of influence over Israeli politics, and Netanyahu is afraid of them bringing down the government, which gives them enormous influence and power to keep the war going.” On the other hand, he says, the mainstream Israeli public remains “completely unwelcoming” to the settlers’ messianic vision, particularly after nine months of mass protests against the far right’s attempts to ram through a judicial coup that would neuter the power of Israel’s legal institutions and make it exceedingly difficult to dislodge the Right from power.

According to Rapoport, the settlers know that Israel will not expel the Palestinians from Gaza wholesale, but rather are content with levelling the area and rendering it unliveable, which he says will catalyse a Palestinian exodus. “They believe Israel will create such horrible conditions in Gaza in order to keep the chaos going. Knowing how things work in the West Bank, the settlers believe that the moment the army controls all of Gaza, they will be able to establish communities. If there is no ceasefire deal, and we’re going toward a long war of attrition in Gaza, there is a high likelihood of that happening.”

Nevertheless, he believes the settlers are facing a pivotal moment.


The Right understands that after the war, whenever that will be, the main issue will be the Palestinians after years that they were ignored by the entire world. The settlers fear that a potential future government led by Benny Gantz [Netanyahu’s chief political rival] will accept the premise of a two-state solution, flushing 50 years of work down the drain. They were a step away from realizing God’s plan of emptying the land of its non-Jewish inhabitants and returning it to its “original owners”, and all of a sudden the country is heading toward a conversation on two states? This is the greatest threat to their political project and they won’t have it.
A Long Time Coming

To understand the settler movement in 2024, one must go back not only to its roots, but to the traumas that continue to haunt it today. Up until 1967, the National Religious or Religious Zionist movement was small and relatively powerless, adjoining the ruling Labour Zionist Mapai party that dominated Israel’s political, economic, and cultural order in the early years of the state. But Israel’s breakneck victory during the 1967 War and subsequent occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula — tripling the size of the state — injected a sense of euphoria into the national consciousness. This was particularly true of the National Religious community, which viewed the West Bank, which it calls “Judea and Samaria”, as the cradle of Jewish civilization and the historical heartland of the Jewish people.

The newly occupied territories and their residents were placed under military rule. While East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights were illegally annexed, Israel maintained what would come to resemble a military dictatorship over the West Bank and Gaza. Debates over the fate of the territories kicked off almost immediately after the occupation began, along with government plans to thin out the population and put down any attempted rebellion by the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had suddenly come under an Israeli administration that denied them basic human and civil rights.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Levi Eshkol hesitated to endorse widespread settlement in the Occupied Territories, fearing international backlash for violating the Fourth Geneva Convention would complicate prospects for peace negotiations. Yet, as the settler population grew and established a significant presence in key areas, subsequent governments adopted more accommodating policies, providing incentives and support for settlement expansion.

While most of the first settlements in the Occupied Territories were built by secular Jews who identified with the Israeli Left, it was not long before the National Religious community began to organize itself for colonization. One of the earliest and most influential settler organizations was Gush Emunim, founded in 1974, which advocated for the establishment of Jewish communities in the heart of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Gush Emunim attracted support from Religious Zionists who saw settlement as a fulfilment of biblical prophecy and a means to strengthen Israel’s hold on the new territories.

The settler movement expanded rapidly across the Occupied Territories throughout the 1970s and 1980s, especially after the Likud party was elected in 1977, often with government approval and financial assistance. The new settlements ranged from small outposts to large urban developments, transforming the demographic and geographic landscape of the West Bank and Gaza. By the end of the 1980s, 200,000 Israeli Jews lived in dozens of settlements and outposts across the Occupied Territories.


The 2005 disengagement represented a watershed moment — and betrayal — for the movement, one that it has been hell-bent on rectifying ever since.

The Oslo Accords signed between 1993 and 1995 posed a significant challenge to the settler movement, as Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed, at least on paper, to Palestinian self-rule and Israeli withdrawal from large portions of the Occupied Territories. While some settlers and far-right nationalists opposed the peace process and engaged in acts of violence, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, others reluctantly accepted the prospect of evacuation from certain areas in exchange for the promise of enhanced security and normalized relations. Nevertheless, the failure of the Camp David Summit in 2000 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada soon fuelled a resurgence of settler activism and expansionism.

The 2005 disengagement, when Israel unilaterally withdrew its military and evacuated 9,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, represented a watershed moment — and betrayal — for the movement, one that it has been hell-bent on rectifying ever since. “The disengagement was a slap in the face. It was the first major crisis facing the settlement movement, particularly because it came from the Right rather than the Left”, says Aviad Houminer-Rosenblum, deputy director-general of the Berl Katznelson Center and a member of the Faithful Left movement. “After they were evacuated, the settlers began to turn inward and speak directly to the Israeli public — to ingratiate themselves with the mainstream.”

The new, mainstreamed settler movement, Houminer-Rosenblum recounts, sought to undo its image as an elitist, Ashkenazi-dominated, pampered segment of the population, and instead sought to form common cause with the Likud heartland, much of which is comprised of working- and middle-class Mizrahim [Israeli Jews who hail from Arab or Muslim countries, as opposed to Ashkenazim, or Eastern European Jews, who have historically comprised the Israeli upper classes]. “This allowed the settler movement to speak to ordinary secular people without having to use the language of messianism, redemption, or religious nationalism.”

Within just a few years, fundamentalist religious communities called “Torah nuclei” began sprouting up in Israeli cities and towns with relatively low religious populations, or in places where Jews and Palestinians live side-by-side, such as so-called “mixed cities”. The first victim of the intercommunal violence in May 2021 was a Palestinian resident of the city of Lod, allegedly shot dead by a member of the city’s Torah nucleus.

The killing — along with attempted expulsions of Palestinians from Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, attacks against worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Hamas rocket fire from Gaza — sparked days of deadly riots and lynchings between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Images of settlers being bused in from the West Bank to Lod, where they attacked Palestinian residents, were proof enough that Religious Zionism’s post-disengagement mission of “settling in the hearts” of the Israeli mainstream went hand-in-hand with a kind of violence Palestinians have been familiar with since the early days of the Zionist project.

Children playing in the Bedouin village of Ras Al-Auja north of Jericho in the West Bank, where residents were attacked by Jewish settlers and a number of sheep were stolen, 23 June 2024.Photo: IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire


“The disengagement was the big wound, and today the war and the desire to resettle Gaza is the attempt to close that circle”, Houminer-Rosenblum says.

I would be surprised if there isn’t 90-percent support among the settler movement for resettling Gaza. While the Israeli centre-left feels that its dream has been destroyed, the settlement movement feels the opposite. It is saying, “We were right all along, and now we have the opportunity to rectify the situation.” If you look at [settler] media outlets, there is wall-to-wall support for it.

By 2023, close to 520,000 settlers reportedly lived in the West Bank alone, with another 200,000 in Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, the city Palestinians claim as their future capital. Regardless of whether they will succeed or not, the settlers’ ambitions go much further than simply re-establishing Gush Katif: they want to import West Bank-style annexation, where settler-army collusion has all but become official state policy, colonization of Palestinian land is at an all-time high, and Palestinians are left almost completely defenceless.
Escalation on All Fronts

On 23 June, the New York Times published a disturbing report that hardly made a dent in the Israeli press. According to the piece, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also serves as a minister in the Defence Ministry with broad powers over the West Bank, was recorded at a recent meeting of settler leaders and supporters stating that the government was engaged in a secret effort to transfer more authority from the military — which has officially run the West Bank since 1967 — to the Civil Administration, the body that effectively runs the day-to-day of the occupation. In effect, this constitutes another step toward annexation and cementing formal control of the territory.

Smotrich, who has called for settling 1 million new Jews in the West Bank, is the most powerful proponent of annexation and mass expulsion of Palestinians in a far-right government that views 7 October as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bury any possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state. Yet if Smotrich sought to explode that possibility through politics, settlers on the ground in the West Bank have been just as effective.

Since 7 October, the West Bank has seen a surge of settler violence against Palestinians, particularly in Area C, which is under full military control. Palestinian officials say Israeli troops and settlers have killed at least 550 Palestinians in the West Bank since the war in Gaza began. According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group that tracks violence against Palestinians, settlers have expelled at least 15 Palestinian communities totalling 800 Palestinian families from their villages.

Shahd Fahoum, a data coordinator at Yesh Din, says that in the past, soldiers assigned to protect the Palestinians would stand idly by during settler attacks. But over the last years, she says, they either actively take part in joint militias, or, particularly after 7 October, are deployed as reservists in so-called “regional defence battalions”, part of an emergency call-up that allows settlers to guard their own settlements in a time of war. Under the cover of war, members of these battalions are reportedly engaging in violence, threats, and destruction of property.

Fahoum explains how the settlers’ complete militarization and the creation of joint militias has facilitated unbridled violence against Palestinians.


Today, the soldiers enter villages and towns, and start attacking Palestinians with stones and rocks. Sometimes they set fires to cars. A lot of the time, if people in the villages come to help, the soldiers will open fire at Palestinians. Sometimes the soldiers and settlers come together. Sometimes the settlers come alone and then the soldiers attack the Palestinians who come to defend their village. The Israeli media will inevitably label this as “clashes between Palestinians and security forces”, which completely erases the reality on the ground.

Law enforcement against settler violence is almost non-existent.


You see it in the numbers. In 2023, only 6.6 percent of settlers who had cases opened against them were indicted, down from around 8 percent in the past few years. When it comes to conviction, it’s even lower. When you look at the sentences of the convicted settlers, you will rarely find an acceptable sentence in proportion to the attack. Usually its community service, or time served — a slap on the wrist.

For Fahoum, the lack of law enforcement is a deliberate feature of Israeli rule over Palestinians. “We talk a lot about settler violence as if it is the problem, but it is a symptom of the problem — the real issue is the occupation and settler colonialism. The state itself sees its settlers as a good thing for its expansionist ambitions, so it makes sense that there is less law enforcement against them.”

Like Fahoum, Hagar Shezaf, West Bank correspondent for Haaretz, sees the current surge of settler violence as the culmination of a years-long process, set in motion before this government even came into power. “When I started reporting from the West Bank in 2019, the general feeling was that few people cared about what was happening in the Occupied Territories”, Shezaf says. “We were seeing the steady growth of outposts, but there was a sense that the entire enterprise was totally normalized.”

But by mid-2021, when Netanyahu was replaced by the so-called “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and Benny Gantz, things had begun to shift. First, she says, came the building of Evyatar, a wildcat settlement outpost erected near the Palestinian village of Beita, which launched a protracted struggle that led to the killing of ten residents at the hands of Israeli soldiers. The settlers of Evyatar ultimately agreed to abandon the outpost, but left their structures intact. Even today, a group of soldiers continues to guard the empty buildings, laying the groundwork for the settlers’ return.


The last 25 years have seen the steep decline of any real political challenge to the settlers’ supremacy in Israeli politics.

Shezaf also notes that Gantz, who served as defence minister at the time, effectively allowed settlers to permanently return to Homesh — one of four West Bank settlements evacuated during the 2005 disengagement, and which settlers have been trying to re-establish ever since — following the killing of a settler by Palestinian gunmen in the area in December 2021. By May 2021, Shezaf notes, settlers had taken over senior command positions in the West Bank, and began outwardly proselytizing in ways that were simply not accepted previously.

In the decades after the occupation began in 1967, Israel and the settler movement were able to establish a veritable empire that has all but erased the Green Line, swallowed up Palestinian lands, and built a matrix of control through expanding settler-only roads that connect West Bank colonies to what is sometimes known as “Israel proper”. Today, despite international campaigns to boycott the settlements, there is hardly a distinction between the Israeli economy and its settler counterpart.

By the time the current government was elected in November 2022, the path was paved for what anti-occupation group Peace Now called “probably the best year” for the settlement enterprise. Coalition negotiations birthed the most nationalistic, pro-settlement agreements in Israeli history, even going so far as to state that the Jewish people had a “natural right” to the Land of Israel and making promises to expand settlement building and retroactively legalize settlement outposts that were deemed illegal even according to Israeli law. Within months, Smotrich was effectively in charge of the settlements, a record number of housing units were promoted in the West Bank, 15 illegal outposts were advanced, and the government allocated 3 billion Israeli shekels (roughly 740 million euro) for roads in settlements — constituting around 20 percent of the total budget for such investments.
Cracks in the Facade

The last 25 years have seen the steep decline of any real political challenge to the settlers’ supremacy in Israeli politics. The Zionist Left, once the dominant force in Israeli society, collapsed with the breakdown of the Oslo peace process and the spike in Palestinian armed struggle during the Second Intifada in the 2000s. Israel’s entire political spectrum would soon shift to the right.

The Israelis who remained staunch believers in a two-state settlement may still have constituted a numerical majority, but they shifted towards a political centre that prioritized issues such as cost of living, secular-Haredi relations, civil liberties, and combating political corruption. Netanyahu would return to power in 2009 with the help of the Zionist Left and the centre under the pretext of “managing” — rather than solving — the conflict. The occupation, which had been the lynchpin of Israeli politics since 1967, would only return to centre stage following last year’s attacks.

Palestinians and left-wing Israelis do not count on the Israeli public to put an end to Israeli impunity over the settlements. But can the international community still play a role? Since early February, the US, followed by the UK, EU, Canada, and France, have slapped sanctions including asset freezes and travel bans on a number of prominent settlers and settler groups suspected of committing human rights violations.

An Israeli soldier watches over a rising smoke in nearby Duma town near Nablus after it was stormed by Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, 13 April 2024.Photo: IMAGO / Middle East Images


Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, director of research for Israel-Palestine at DAWN, says the move comes after years of pressure on the US to take action against settlers, which he calls a consensus issue in the Biden administration. “For a long time, the political will just wasn’t there”, he says, “but that all changed with the new government, which saw National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir ordering the police to not investigate settler violence, Smotrich taking over the Civil Administration, and the near-denial by the Israeli government that there was anything unusual happening on the ground in the West Bank.”

Then came 7 October and the brutal settler attacks that followed. “The White House understood that something had to be done to stop that violence in the West Bank, and this was used as an opportunity”, Schaeffer Omer-Man continues. “So what do they do? They look into their toolbox at a moment when they need to desperately show, somehow, that there are still limits to what Israel can be allowed to do, as well as to what America will support.”

Sanctions, he believes, have opened the floodgates, prompting other countries to follow suit. “The sanctions of settlers could create a backstop that has a lasting effect, especially considering the irreversible political shift happening right now vis-à-vis Israel. It doesn’t matter how many Republicans come into Congress pledging their support for Israel — lines have been crossed, and it’s going to be hard to go back to a place where people aren’t willing to cross them.”


Even if the US tried to force Israel into negotiations over the establishment of a Palestinian state, the facts on the ground are too dangerous to be ignored.

Yet for Lara Friedman, president of the Forum for Middle East Peace, the move is little more than a “valve” for an administration that is facing widespread criticism for its unbridled support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “They want to make it seem like the White House cares about Palestinian lives and international law — but within a certain limit”, Friedman says. “This way, the Biden administration can try to take the pressure off and show they are doing something in the West Bank, while continuing to give cover to Israel’s war.”

That said, Friedman believes that any attempt to draw a bright red line between the settlers and the Israeli army is a futile one.


Anyone who understands how the settlement enterprise works in the West Bank knows that it is co-led, if not actively led, by the Israeli government. Settler violence is state violence, and the fact is that at this point the Americans aren’t even bothering to respond to Israel’s erasure of the Green Line. Going after a few bad apples is good, but if you want to say that this is going to keep the Titanic from sinking, you’d better think again.

Schaeffer Omer-Man is less pessimistic about the potential prospects, saying that the way the sanctions have been written allows for them to encompass local officials, government ministers, military officials, settler organizations — even entire settlements. “They are starting with bad apples, but everyone understands that sanctions programmes tend to ensnare adjacent and connected entities”, he says. “Because the settlement project is a state project, the higher you go up, the closer you get to state institutions. After that, it becomes harder to segregate different parts of the settler economy from that of the Israeli economy.”

“This sanctions programme is not going to end the occupation or the settlements”, Schaeffer Omer-Man adds, “but it is shifting the goalposts in a way that makes a path seem more possible than it did last year. The fact that Israel’s credibility is being challenged is an opening, it doesn’t mean that it will necessarily lead to something, but it’s a crack that didn’t exist before.”

For all its precedent-setting bluster, it is unlikely that sanctions against settlers will be enough to bring about a fundamental shift in the near future, particularly when set against the Biden Administration’s inchoate policies in Gaza, let alone if Donald Trump returns to the White House. Even if the US tried to force Israel into negotiations over the establishment of a Palestinian state — whether by sheer force, by miracle, or by dangling ample incentives à la Saudi normalization — the facts on the ground are too dangerous to be ignored.

The settlement movement today is a sprawling, extraterritorial empire, a golem diligently handcrafted over decades by the most powerful actors in Israeli society. Ultimately, it is a project with too much to lose and everything to win, and any real attempt to undo its power could very well unleash violence between the river and the sea the likes of which the world has never seen.

RLS - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (rosalux.de)

 REST IN POWER

Jane McAlevey (1964–2024)

The ground-breaking labour organizer and internationalist leaves behind a powerful legacy


AUTHOR
Ethan Earle
NEWS | 07/08/2024

RLS - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (rosalux.de)
Jane McAlevey speaking at the Irish launch of her last book, Rules to Win By, hosted by the Irish trade union Fórsa, 9 November 2023.Photo: Fórsa

Jane McAlevey died on 7 July 2024 at the age of 59 following a battle with multiple myeloma. Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, Strikes Correspondent for The Nation magazine, long-time political actor, commentator, and educator, campaign strategist, and union organizer — Jane leaves us with a rich lifetime of work to study, understand, and, most importantly, implement in our own organizing in the struggles to come.

Ethan Earle is the Coordinator of Organizing for Power.

Numerous tributes to her remarkable record — four books published in the past decade, alongside a life’s work of training organizers based on well-documented campaign victories — will surely be published in the coming months. I will not attempt to do justice to the fullness of Jane’s amazing life but rather focus on how I knew her best: as a big-hearted humanist and beacon to the international workers’ movement.

Jane’s father, John McAlevey, was a World War II fighter pilot who later became an important progressive politician in New York state politics. Her mother died when she was young, and she would often accompany her father as a “campaign prop”, as she would later say, only half-jokingly. From her father, she developed a lifelong hatred for fascism and learned what it takes to fight and win in the trenches of political struggle. From her mother, she learned that life is fleeting, and not a second of it should be wasted.

Jane got to work young, as a student organizer and outspoken critic of US foreign policy. As president of the Student Association of the State University of New York, she led a campaign that resulted in a historic act of divestiture from Apartheid South Africa. After university, she travelled to Nicaragua to support the revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. There, she learned another key lesson from a Sandinista, who told her that if she was truly committed to dismantling US imperialism, she should go back to fight from within the belly of the beast. Always a close listener, Jane did just that.

Back in the US, Jane spent several years in the environmental movement, followed by a spell at the Highlander Research and Education Center, which famously trained a generation of civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Jane would later speak about how popular depictions of Parks implied that she appeared out of nowhere on that bus in Montgomery, when in fact it was the apotheosis of years of training and disciplined movement building.

While studying at Highlander, Jane had an epiphany that would stay with her until the very end: None of the most important struggles of our time — from women’s liberation to racial equality, from climate justice to an end to war — could be won without bringing majorities of working people on board. She followed this conclusion to its only logical starting point, the labour movement, beginning with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and subsequently moving onto the Service Employees International Union. Over the next two decades she would go on to work with more unions and campaigns than can be listed in the space of one article, and remained in the labour movement for the rest of her life.
Fighting for Workers’ Rights

From Nevada to Philadelphia, Los Angeles to Berlin, Jane played a critical role in winning numerous high-participation union campaigns, bringing material gains to many hundreds of thousands of workers. While her fellow travellers are the ones who should write those battles’ elegies, I will limit myself to saying that she stared down long odds, tough opponents, and nasty union-busting campaigns with courage, conviction and — most memorably — meticulous planning.

It was Jane’s deep belief that workers should never be led into a fight if they were not adequately prepared and did not stand a good chance of winning. That did not mean she was afraid of defeat — and, like any serious organizer, she did sometimes lose, both in campaigns and in the tough internal disputes that scar the trade union landscape — but she never threw workers to the wolves, and she never went down easy.

Jane’s core theory of labour organizing, as it developed through her campaign experiences, was that American trade unions had moved away from the kind of organizing developed in the first half of the twentieth century in favour of what she called “shallow organizing”. The same approach is more commonly known as mobilizing: essentially getting people to turn out to large demonstrations without any plan for what to do beyond the demonstration.

Jane argued that this trend must be reversed, for the sake of workers and the planet that we share, and that what she called “whole-worker organizing” was key to building disciplined majority-led campaigns capable of credibly threatening and executing escalatory actions — up to and including strikes — to win demands. This argument, as well as a comprehensive outline of the methods that this deep organizing entails, was laid out in a series of books that she began to write with her characteristic frenetic energy after being convinced, at the age of 45, to return to graduate school at the City University of New York under the tutelage of renowned sociologist Frances Fox Piven.


It was Jane’s deep belief that workers should never be led into a fight if they were not adequately prepared and did not stand a good chance of winning.

Jane’s first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), outlined the core tenets of her theory of change as they developed across her first decade of organizing in the labour movement. It was named the “most valuable book of 2012” by The Nation magazine, where she later went on serve as Strikes Correspondent. Her 2016 book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, was based on her PhD dissertation and provides her most thorough theoretical analysis, arguing that lasting social change can only happen when organizing is built around workers and ordinary people. It has become something of a bible in the trade union movement, used as the basis for study groups by countless thousands of unionists. Her third book, published in 2020, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy, broadened her lens, focusing on the links between the attack on the workplace and civil democracy, and how the tactics of the right wing can be overcome. Her most recent book, Rules to Win By (co-written with Abby Lawlor), was completed when she already knew her prognosis. In this final piece, she and Abby outline how to democratize union negotiations and build worker power by practicing transparent, big, and open negotiations.

Across this body of work, we see a rhythmic sway back and forth between micro-level campaign analysis and the macro-level implications of how our opponents understand and exercise power, and what it will take to defeat them. Every step of the way, this interplay is guided by the voices, actions, and concrete experiences of workers.
Organizing for Power

I met Jane in 2019, as part of an experimental attempt to run an online training based on the methods she had honed during her decades of organizing. I was working for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and a growing number of German organizers were asking for Jane’s support. At the same time, in the international progressive community we were noting an uptick in demand for proven organizing methods that did not just churn out big crowds but actually built campaigns capable of winning.

Jane was sceptical. Like any good organizer, she placed huge value on one-on-one, face-to-face meetings — but the demand was too real to deny. Two-thousand people came to that initial pilot training, and the six-week program, appropriately called “Organizing for Power” or O4P, has since trained more than 40,000 people from 1,800+ organizations in 115 countries and 19 languages. Participants join a plenary-style webinar, where an expert trainer (oftentimes Jane, but increasingly other organizers from around the world) gives a lesson on a core organizing skill: leader identification, semantics, one-on-one conversations, list work, workplace charting, and building structure tests.

At first, we invited individuals to participate on their own, but Jane, always a believer in raising expectations while “raising hell”, demanded that it be a truly organizational training, with an initial threshold requirement of four people per group, later raised to ten. Members of our team, including me, were worried that this would lead to smaller attendance, but Jane argued just the opposite: higher standards would boost commitment and foster a spirit of solidarity to battle the attrition that often accompanies longer trainings like this.

She won that argument and was ultimately proven right. Raising expectations, if done well, can lead to better results. Now, organizing groups are expected to do thorough preparatory work, meet for “campaign assignments” (or homework) throughout, and break out during sessions to do small-group work in which they practice the lessons that are taught. Our most recent “Core Fundamentals” programme, held in May–June 2024 and featuring Jane in its inaugural session, welcomed 7,500 people from 480 organizations. Meanwhile, O4P “graduates” have scored major organizing victories from Tanzania to Peru, Indonesia to Scotland.
Building on Jane’s Legacy

Over these past years, I worked with Jane on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Her work rhythm has been something to behold. I’m based in France, either six or nine hours ahead of the two places that Jane called home, New York and the Bay Area, and we would joke that this made us perfect work partners, as I could fill her 6:00 meeting slot that so few others were willing to take.

The balancing force to this enormous drive was always Jane’s enormous humanity. When a participant in one of our trainings was arrested in a country with particularly oppressive labour laws, nobody fought harder than Jane for his release. When my son turned one, Jane was the first person to send us birthday wishes — from the hospital, moreover, where she was undergoing a medical procedure related to her condition — together with a request for photos to buoy her spirit. She cared deeply about all the people in her life, all the people whose lives she had touched, and the workers of the world whom she had never met.


For foes and friends alike, Jane had something of a magical aura about her.



Some would call this the mark of a good organizer, and, of course, it was that as well. But even when the cameras were off, when there was no ground to be won, Jane would be there listening, taking notes, and asking attentive, piercing questions that would shine light for her counterpart on their path forward.

She worked almost as hard as ever during her final months, slowing down only for her necessary treatments and the long bicycle rides along the Hudson River that kept up her spirits as much as her physical condition. Over this period, all the Janes were on display: she helped to run a blitz campaign in Connecticut, published articles on contemporary labour strategy, led a multi-day training for the Irish union Fórsa, and worked to build out a team of organizer-trainers to take her place in Organizing for Power after she was gone.

She knew she was going to die, had known it for months, and raced against the clock to complete as much work as she could towards the organizing future that she knew she would not see. That, ultimately, is Jane’s legacy — a gift to all of us. The work output itself, but also her commitment to that work, and the belief that we can in fact win, but only through real discipline and real struggle.

Her track record was formidable — to her opponents but also perhaps to young organizers seeking to follow in her footsteps. For foes and friends alike, Jane had something of a magical aura about her. That said, she always sought to shed that perception. Everything she did was the result of hard work and practice — and all of it can be reproduced by those willing to put in the time that she did.

So, read her books and take her trainings, but not to deify her — nothing could be further from her mission. Take them so that you can put into practice the same methods that Jane McAlevey spent a lifetime practicing, modelling, and instilling in others. And then, as she would so often say at the end of a session: Go forth and win!


You can pre-register now for Organizing for Power’s next programme focused on Jane McAlevey’s Core Fundamentals of Organizing.