US Tech Giants Are Storing Data for Israeli Military as It Destroys Gaza

A new investigation reveals what some call US companies’ “direct participation and collaboration” in genocide.

By Brett Wilkins

August 7, 2024

Source: Truthout


Former Google employees speak about Google's Project Nimbus as pro-Palestine UC Berkeley students set up an encampment at Sproul Hall to demand an end to the war on Gaza and divestment from Israel, in Berkeley, California, on April 25, 2024.

The Israeli military is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by U.S. tech titans for “direct participation and collaboration” in what many critics around the world call Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, according to an investigation published this week.

Two Israeli publications — +972 Magazine and Local Call — on Sunday published a joint investigation revealing that the Israeli military is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data gleaned from the mass surveillance in Gaza, where nearly 10 months of bombings and ground invasion have left more than 140,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international estimates.

Multiple sources told the outlets that pressure on the IDF since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel has “led to a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft Azure.” The report states that cooperation between the IDF and AWS “is particularly close” and “even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza — strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians.”


IDF Col. Racheli Dembinsky — who spoke at a recent “IT for IDF” event near Tel Aviv — told investigative journalist Yuval Abraham that the “most important” advantage offered by cloud computing companies is advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. AI, she said, provides the IDF with “very significant operational effectiveness” as it obliterates Gaza.

Last year, Abraham published an investigation on the same two websites that showed how the IDF is using AI to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a “mass assassination factory.” In April, the journalist revealed that the IDF was using a previously undisclosed AI system that had replaced “human agency and precision” with “mass target creation and lethality.”

According to Abraham:


Many of Israel’s attacks in Gaza at the beginning of the war were based on the recommendations of a program called “Lavender.” With the help of AI, this system processed information on most Gaza residents and compiled a list of suspected military operatives, including junior ones, for assassination. Israel systematically attacked these operatives in their private homes, killing entire families. Over time, the military realized that Lavender was not “reliable” enough, and its use decreased in favor of other software. +972 and Local Call could not confirm whether Lavender was developed with the help of civilian firms, including public cloud companies.

In 2021, Israel signed a $1.2 billion contract with Amazon and Google for Project Nimbus, which provides cloud services to the Israeli government and military. The move sparked the #NoTechForApartheid campaign, in which disaffected tech workers and dozens of advocacy groups rose up against Big Tech’s complicity in Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine.

“Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid and ethnic cleansing,” the campaign explained in 2021.

Earlier this year, Google — which Abraham said was briefly listed as a sponsor of the “IT for IDF” event — fired 50 employees for protesting Project Nimbus.

IDF Col. Avi Dadon told Abraham that “of course” tech companies want to work with the IDF, because “it’s the strongest marketing.”

“What the IDF uses was and will be one of the best selling points of products and services in the world,” Dadon explained.

However, Big Tech’s alleged complicity in Israeli human rights violations is coming under more intense scrutiny lately as Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan seeks arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan also sought ICC arrest warrants for two Hamas leaders, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri and Ismael Haniyah, who were both recently assassinated by Israel.

Last month, the ICJ ruled in a separate case that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must immediately end.

Some campaigners have noted that Google is apparently violating its own AI principles, which vow that the company “will not design or deploy AI in… technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm… weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people… technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms… [or] technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

Others have noted Google and Amazon’s lack of transparency on how its systems are being used.

“Neither company has publicly disclosed what, if any, human rights due diligence they carried out before participating in Project Nimbus,” Zach Campbell, a digital rights expert at Human Rights Watch, told Abraham. “They haven’t mentioned which, if any, red lines there are in terms of what would be permissible use of their technology.”

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, U.S. policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told Abraham that while “there’s always a lot of focus on the direct military assistance the United States provides to Israel — the munitions, fighter jets, and bombs,” far less attention “has been paid to these partnerships that span both civilian and military environments.”

“It’s more than complicity: It’s direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they’re using to kill Palestinians,” he stressed.



Brett Wilkins

Brett Wilkins is a San Francisco-based writer and activist whose work focuses on issues of war and peace and human rights. He is a staff writer at Common Dreams and a member of the international socialist writers’ group Collective 20. Before joining Common Dreams, he was a longtime freelance journalist and essayist whose articles appeared in a wide variety of print and online publications including Counterpunch, Truthout, Salon.com, Antiwar.com, Asia Times, The Jakarta Post, Alternet, teleSUR, Yahoo News, Mondoweiss, EcoWatch, and Venezuela Analysis.

Across Europe, Gaza Has Become a Litmus Test for the Left

Ahead of the recent French elections, pundits widely expected voters to punish France Insoumise for its strong pro-Gaza stance. It didn’t happen. Around Europe, left-wing voters are galvanized by parties who defy the pro-Israel mainstream.

By Nessim Achouche

August 7, 2024

Source: Jacobin

Protesters in Slovenian parliament demanding sanctions on Israel, January 28th, 2024

If at Harvard earlier this year students received their degrees in the colors of Palestine, in Paris this same flag was waved by France Insoumise MPs in parliament. Each set of images remind us of a different time: the 1960s and ’70s, when left-wing parties in Europe and the United States had close relations with the anti-colonial and peace movements.

Mobilizations for peace and for solidarity with the Palestinians have surely been growing over the last ten months, as the Israeli army pursues its massacre. In many European countries, student, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist groups — as well as more traditional social justice movements and the radical wing of the trade unions — have formed the backbone of solidarity efforts.

But if the France Insoumise MPs’ action in the National Assembly made headlines, how much are Europe’s left-wing parties really bringing the Palestinian cause into the institutions? In truth, their record is rather mixed. Faced with this unique moment of popular protest at Israel’s war and their own states’ complicity, these parties’ stance is also a litmus test of their own political viability.

In Government

The recent recognition of the Palestinian state by the Spanish government was, in general, credited to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the center-left Socialist Party (PSOE). Much less has been said about the left-wing alliance Sumar, which is part of the ruling coalition together with Sánchez’s party.

Sumar can rightly claim paternity of this move: in the coalition agreement signed last year, it insisted on recognition of Palestine as a shared policy agenda. Under Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz’s leadership, Sumar insisted that this official recognition cannot be the beginning and end of Spanish government policy. More than that, it calls for cutting diplomatic ties with Israel and imposing a total embargo on weapons. These demands seem much less audible in media, mainly due to the focus on Sánchez.

The fact that the latest country to officially recognize Palestinian statehood — Slovenia — is the only other European state where the Left (the democratic socialist party Levica) is part of the governing coalition cannot be overlooked, either.

In fact, Levica, which holds three ministries in a coalition led by the liberal Freedom Movement party, has headed calls for Slovenia to be the first European country to join South Africa in its prosecution of Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Levica’s activism on this point in government echoes the demonstrations that have happened in recent months — reaching the premises of the Slovenian parliament, and even interrupting one session.

From the Streets to the Ballot Box?

For many left-wing parties, Palestine was also a key focus of June’s EU election campaign. From strong positions in their manifestos to supporting protests and direct action, they refused to limit themselves to what some of their colleagues euphemistically call a “balanced approach.” Instead, they opted to endure demonization by mass media and even the criminalization of their activities, in order to defend a pro-Palestinian line.

Ireland’s Sinn Féin has long-standing political relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization. It has consistently called for an end to the violence and occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, for recognition of the state of Palestine, and for a return to negotiations to achieve a two-state solution. In its European election manifesto, it made specific calls for a full EU-Palestine Association Agreement and building support among other EU states to join Ireland in formally recognizing the state of Palestine. Sinn Féin is also a longtime supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement as a mechanism for helping achieve this goal.

Political analyst Duroyan Fertl notes that “Because of the near-universal support for Palestine in Ireland, there is currently no tangible advantage to the Left [i.e., Sinn Féin] versus other parties on this issue, but further pressure can be applied.” That universal support could potentially be harnessed into further action at the EU level, especially if Sinn Féin wins the next national election. And yet, early this year Sinn Féin suffered backlash over its missteps on this issue. The delay in calling for the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador in Ireland, as well as Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s meeting with Joe Biden in Washington on St Patrick’s Day, prompted strong criticisms that seem to have forced the leadership to reassert a stronger position.

Sinn Féin’s support for the BDS campaign is shared by the Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB), whose EU election manifesto also mentioned this call. Like Sinn Féin, the PTB has a long tradition of supporting the Palestinian cause and has been a strong force in the regular large demonstrations across Belgium in recent months.

The PTB’s growing strength in national politics, coupled with its ardent campaign for Belgium to impose sanctions on Israel, has arguably been an important factor in shaping the national debate around the war. In particular it added pressure toward the condemnation of Israel crimes expressed by the current government and its official support for the ICJ ruling.

The same can be said for Norway and the pressure that both the Socialist Left Party and Rødt (“Red”) have built. As Peder Østring, a researcher at Oslo university, explains:

The historic recognition of Palestine by Norway was a result of this pressure, together with an active civil society. When Rødt raised the demand for recognition of Palestine in November, this did not get enough support to go through but there was a compromise saying that Norway would recognize Palestine at a later time when such an act could have “a positive effect on a peace process.”

The surprise created by the impressive EU election results for Finland’s Left Alliance draw attention to a campaign strongly focused on Gaza. In a recent interview, Li Andersson, who led its list, recognized the impact that campus occupations and the youth mobilization had on this result.

Still, it can hardly be said that this discussion on the Left is everywhere harmonious. In Spain, Podemos today sits in opposition after its eviction from the second Sánchez government last November. This party has been a strong critic of the current coalition for its “double standards,” recognizing the Palestinian state while not cutting diplomatic and commercial ties with the Israeli state that daily destroys this same population. It remains to be seen if recent news of Madrid joining South Africa in its ICJ case against Israel will leave Podemos as a recognized voice for the Palestinian cause, in a country where most people in any case tend to take a pro-Palestinian line.

In France, Emmanuel Macron’s presidency has seen a brutal surge in state repression against social movements, from the gilets jaunes to last year’s pension reform protests. Palestinian solidarity has been no exception, and early in October, demonstrations in support of Gaza were repeatedly banned and violently repressed. This spring, student occupations calling for universities to break ties and investment links with Israel received similar treatment.

Mainstream media has played an important role in criminalizing voices against the ongoing genocide, especially focusing in portraying left-wing France Insoumise as an antisemitic movement.

In this suffocating environment, France Insoumise has distinguished itself with unshakable support for Palestine, posing as a central political focus both inside and outside of the National Assembly. Its selection of Rima Hassan, a thirty-two-year-old French Palestinian lawyer, as a candidate for the European elections was part of its framing of its campaign as a vote for peace and against genocide.

The victory for the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance in July’s parliamentary elections, with France Insoumise in the lead, was the most recent demonstration that attempts to demonize its position are not working. During the campaign, accusations that France Insoumise is a “pro-Hamas” and “antisemitic” party were widespread in mainstream media, with founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s stance for Gaza labeled a way of winning a “communalist” “Muslim vote.” One TV comedian did an impression of Mélenchon wearing a djellaba and speaking Arabic, mockingly shown at Muslim prayer.

While other parties jumped on the bandwagon in attacking France Insoumise, its left-wing allies — notably the Greens and Socialists — mostly distanced themselves from this campaign of vitriol. Many media outlets predicted that these parties would be punished by voters for “colluding” with France Insoumise. Yet the ultimate result — with the Nouveau Front Populaire winning more seats than either Macron’s candidates or the far right — rebuffed attempts to isolate and toxify France Insoumise. Doggedly standing up for the Palestinian cause despite these attacks served to strengthen and mainstream its position.

False “Balance”

This is not to say that the ongoing genocide has created a new unifying cause for radical-left parties across the EU. France Insoumise is the biggest such force in Europe, yet not all parties have taken a similar line.

In Denmark, the Red-Green Alliance (Enhedslisten), has a history of support for Palestine. It has been outspoken about the crimes in Gaza and the only party to point out the Danish government’s responsibility through arms deals with Israel. But it has been slow in endorsing the regular large demonstrations, sit-ins, and student protests, in turn driving frustrations among its members. Some of the demands and language voted on during its pre-EU election congress in May — notably a sentence asserting Israel’s right to “defend itself,” months into the war — suggest that it is awkwardly “balancing” opposed positions.

Germany remains an outlier. The repressive institutional response to any display of solidarity or calls for peace has been shocking. The initial positioning of left-wing party Die Linke — including its leadership’s refusal to call for a cease-fire and to take a clear stand against Israel’s crimes — is often explained away as a response to the “specific German context.” Die Linke was built around the commitment to peace — but the shock over the Hamas war crimes on October 7 left it near-silent. Still, if the German historical relationship to Israel and its influence on reactions to the current war is well-documented, perhaps more attention should be paid to what most Germans actually think.

A recent poll showed a considerable shift in German public attitudes to the ongoing Israeli war in Gaza. If in November this “operation” had 63 percent polling support, now 61 percent are against. This trend should also be related to the massive number of German weapons daily used by the Israeli army to commit its massacres in Gaza.

We might imagine that the reality of the war and shifting public opinion would convince this left-wing party to change its stance, and back the urgent protests to oppose the war and Germany’s role in it. Has Die Linke done that? No. Its European election manifesto did not once mention Gaza, or any cease-fire call, let alone the suspension of the EU’s association agreement with Israel or a specific ban on exports of weapons. The fact that another left-wing party like MERA25 used the term “genocide” and called in its manifesto to “stop German complicity” shows that the political space for platforming Palestine solidarity does exist.

Die Linke’s choice to formally ignore this crucial issue raises many essential strategic and political questions at a time when it is constantly polling no better than 4 percent and lacks strong connections with larger organized groups or social movements in Germany. The contradiction is even more striking given that Die Linke has often spoken of a “movement” strategy that would allow the party to be seen as organically connected with a range of social issues. Its catastrophic result in the EU elections, on under 3 percent support, shows that in Germany, like elsewhere, left-wing voters will not be rallied by a deafening silence.

Confronting the Establishment

Still, across Europe, most meaningfully left-wing parties have decided to adopt a proactive stance on Gaza and to join the social forces advocating for peace and justice internationally. This has usually also meant having to mount a direct confrontation with both the ruling elites and the mass media.

Their EU election campaigns’ constant references to international law and alignment with countries in the Global South calling for a break with Israel and the United States are the sign that internationalism and anti-imperialism are returning as a central focus of left-wing politics in Europe. If the Russian invasion of Ukraine opened up divisions among the left-wing parties, the ongoing genocide in Palestine has, in the main, had the opposite effect. The few parties that decided to keep their distance from the Gaza issue and the protests, out of fears of exposing their own internal contradictions, have naturally been punished at the polls.

In recent years, opposition to the neoliberal structure of the EU was the common defining point of the radical left in its relationship to Europe and its core electorate. In the European elections, it seems that the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the complicity of the EU created a new such reference point. It remains to be seen if the results of the European elections and the longer-term effects of ties with the Palestine solidarity movement will help the Left join together at a genuinely international level. If an already weak left is seen to be stepping away from this battlefront, just as Syriza dropped the fight against austerity, we can imagine a similar end to the story — this time, at the expense of the Palestinians.

Zionism on the Brink: The Gaza War Beyond Netanyahu

By Ramzy Baroud

August 7, 2024

Source: Middle East Monitor


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L), Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Herzi Halevi (R) follow the attack by Israeli warplanes Hudaydah Port in Yemen from the operations centre in Jerusalem on 20 July 2024. [Israeli Prime Minister’s Office /Anadolu Agency]

The idea that Israel’s war on Gaza is essentially waged and sustained by and for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dominated political analyses on the subject for some time. The notion is often kept alive by public opinion inside Israel. Most polls produced since the start of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza suggest that an overwhelming majority of Israelis believe that Netanyahu’s decisions are motivated by personal, political and familial interests.

This conclusion, however, is too convenient and not entirely accurate. It assumes, wrongly, that the Israeli people oppose Netanyahu’s war in Gaza whereas, in reality, they have been quite approving of all tactics used by the Israeli army so far. For example, over 300 days into the war, 69 per cent of all Israelis support Netanyahu’s desperate assassinations, including the murder of the top political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran on 31 July. While Netanyahu’s decision to target a political leader reflects his own failure and desperation, how do we explain the Israeli people’s enthusiasm for the expansion of the circle of violence?

The answer does not lie in events on 7 October, namely the cross-border Palestinian incursion in the Gaza Envelope region and the unprecedented defeat of the Israeli army. Indeed, it is time to start thinking beyond the confines of the revenge theory, which has dominated our understanding and analysis of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

For years prior to the current war, Israel has been moving slowly to the political right and far right, the political extremism of which has surpassed that of any generation of Zionist leaders who have governed the occupation state since the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. According to an Israeli Democracy Institute poll published in January last year, 73 per cent of Israeli Jews aged between 18 and 24, identify as “right wing”. Given that the likes of current Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Orit Strook are also classified as “right-wing”, we can conclude that the majority of young Israelis identify in every practical sense as right-wing extremists.


It is these young people who form the core of the Israeli army and the settler movement.

They are the people carrying out the genocide in Gaza and the daily pogroms in the occupied West Bank, and serving as the foot soldiers for the widespread racism campaigns targeting the Palestinian Arab communities inside Israel.

A good number of analysts have tried to explain how Israel became a decidedly right-wing society and how young people, in particular, have emerged as the gatekeepers of Israel’s version of suicidal nationalism. The explanation, however, should be straightforward. Israel’s far-right extremism is simply the natural evolution of Zionist ideology which, even in its most “liberal” forms, was always predicated on ethnic hatred, a sense of racial supremacy and predictable violence.

Although ideological Zionism in all its manifestations has essentially followed the same trajectory of settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing, a conflict existed between the various strands of Israeli society. The so-called liberals – represented by the upper echelons of the military, business circles and some centrist and leftist political groups – worked to maintain the balance between a colonial, apartheid regime in occupied Palestine, and a selective liberal order that applies only to Jews inside Israel.

The far right had other ideas. For many years, the Israeli right-wing camp, led by Netanyahu himself, has perceived his ideological enemies within Israel as traitors for even daring to engage in a “peace process” with the Palestinians, even if that process was a facade from the beginning. The right wanted to ensure that the territorial contiguity between so-called “Israel proper” and the illegal Jewish settlements was not only physical, but also ideological. This is how the settlers moved slowly, over the years, from the margins of Israeli politics to the centre.

Between April 2019 and November 2022, Israel underwent five general elections. Although the focus of most remained fixated on Netanyahu’s role in dividing Israeli society, the elections, in reality, were a historic fight among Israel’s ideological groups to determine the future of the country and the direction of Zionism.

In the last election in 2022, the far-right extremists won, forming the most stable Israeli government in years. While the right was ready to reconfigure Israel permanently, including its political, educational, military and, most importantly, judicial institutions, 7 October happened.

Initially, the Hamas-led assault and its aftermath posed a challenge to all segments of Israeli society: the humiliated army, the degraded intelligence agencies, the humbled politicians, the confounded media and the angry masses. The greatest challenge was faced by the far-right, though, which was about to shape the future of Israel for generations. Thus, the Gaza war is not just important to Netanyahu, but to the very future of Israel’s far-right camp, whose entire political and ideological programme has been shattered, most likely beyond salvation.

This should help explain the obvious contradictions in Israeli society. For example, the mistrust in Netanyahu’s motives, yet trust in the war itself; the widespread criticism of his overall failure, yet the approval of his actions; and so on. This seeming confusion cannot be explained simply based on Netanyahu’s ability to manipulate Israelis. Even if the Israeli right has lost all faith in Netanyahu, without him as a unifying figure the chances for the far-right camp to redeem itself are lost, as is the very future of Zionism.

Ramzy Baroud

Ramzy Baroud is a US-Palestinian journalist, media consultant, an author, internationally-syndicated columnist, Editor of Palestine Chronicle (1999-present), former Managing Editor of London-based Middle East Eye, former Editor-in-Chief of The Brunei Times and former Deputy Managing Editor of Al Jazeera online. Baroud’s work has been published in hundreds of newspapers and journals worldwide, and is the author of six books and a contributor to many others. Baroud is also a regular guest on many television and radio programs including RT, Al Jazeera, CNN International, BBC, ABC Australia, National Public Radio, Press TV, TRT, and many other stations. Baroud was inducted as an Honorary Member into the Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society, NU OMEGA Chapter of Oakland University, Feb 18, 2020.

AIPAC Hijacks Rep. Cori Bush’s Race–and Our Elections

By Medea Benjamin

August 7, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.





Representative Cori Bush, a progressive black woman from St. Louis, MO who is a member of the “Squad” and has been a powerful voice in Congress for poor people, women’s rights, healthcare, housing–and Palestine, just lost her primary because pro-Israel lobby groups flooded the race with outside funding. Her loss is a tremendous blow to progressives and to the U.S. electoral process itself.

This is the pro-Israel lobby’s second “win” of the season. The first was the June defeat of progressive, black congressman from Westchester County, N.Y., Jamaal Bowman, who was a forceful critic of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. AIPAC and its mis-named super PAC, the United Democracy Project, barged into Westchester County to anoint an opponent—white, pro-Israel Westchester County Executive George Latimer—and then shower him with cash.

The ads against Bowman were not about Israel. Instead, AIPAC smeared the congressman’s character and criticized him as a “hot head” who was not a reliable member of the Democratic team. In the words of President of the Arab American Institute Jim Zogby, the race became “the angry, frightening young black man versus the calm, thoughtful older white guy.”

By throwing $17 million into the race, pro-Israel groups turned Bowman’s primary into the most expensive one in U.S. history. When Bowman was defeated, AIPAC declared the outcome showed that the pro-Israel position is “both good policy and good politics.” On the contrary. It showed that pro-Israel groups can buy elections and it sent a frightening message to all elected officials that if they criticize Israel, even during a genocide, they may well pay with their careers.

Buoyed by its success, AIPAC then took on Cori Bush, marching into St. Louis, MO determined to defeat a black woman who was one of the most unique voices in all of congress. Once a unhoused single mother of two, and a survivor of gun violence, domestic violence and sexual assault, Bush became a nurse and a pastor, and in the wake of the killing of the unarmed black man Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014, she became an activist on the frontlines of the movement to save black lives. After protesting in the streets for 400 days, she jumped into the political arena. In 2020 made a successful run for Congress, becoming the first black representative from Missouri.

In Bush’s two terms in Congress, she demonstrated leadership on many fronts, including reproductive justice and abortion rights. At a House of Representatives committee hearing in 2021, Bush was one of three congresswomen to share her abortion story publicly. And after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, she introduced a host of bills, including the Reproductive Health Care Accessibility Act, the Protecting Access to Medication Abortion Act, the Reproductive Health Travel Fund Act, and the Protect Sexual and Reproductive Health Act.

She also championed housing rights. When the COVID moratorium on evictions was about to expire, she grabbed her sleeping bag and lawn chair, and organized a “sleep in” on the steps of the U.S. Capitol that resulted in an extension of the moratorium on evictions.

Foreign policy was not her focus, but in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 9, 2023 and Israel’s subsequent bombing of civilians in Gaza, Bush felt compelled to speak out. Just nine days after the October 7 Hamas attack, she had the courage to introduce a ceasefire resolution in the House. She was one of only nine House members who opposed a resolution supporting Israel. She boycotted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, calling him a “war criminal.”

As a result of defending Palestinians, she found herself in AIPAC’s crosshairs. “Cori Bush has been one of the most hostile critics of Israel since she came to Congress in 2021 and has actively worked to undermine mainstream Democratic support for the U.S.-Israel relationship, “ AIPAC claimed.

AIPAC’s super PAC spent nearly $9 million, much of it coming from Republican mega-donors, to buy ads smearing Bush and shoring up contender Wesley Bell, a St. Louis County Prosecutor. The attacks were vicious, including ads that darkened Bush’s skin and manipulated her racial features. They also distorted her domestic voting record, condemning her for not supporting Biden’s Infrastructure Bill instead of explaining that her vote was part of a strategy to gain leverage for key social programs in the Build Back Better Act.

Curiously, in the cases of both Bowman and Bush, the attack ads did not even mention Israel. But if Israel is AIPAC’s singular focus, why did the ads avoid the issue? That’s because most Americans, especially in those liberal Democrat districts, agree with their positions. Most Americans want a ceasefire and disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. As Jewish Voice for Peace Executive Director Stephanie Fox said during a call to rally support for the Congresswoman Bush, “She has been a life raft for our values and principles in Congress and she has been under attack because far right extremist groups like AIPAC are scared.

Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute agrees. “Pro-Israel groups are running scared,” he said. “They are losing the public debate over policy—especially among Democrats. Most Democrats are deeply opposed to Israeli policies in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian lands. Majorities want a ceasefire and an end to settlements. And they want to stop further arms shipments to Israel.” So AIPAC hides the Israel issue and then claims the “win” is a victory for Israel.

If we are going to stop U.S. support for Israel’s genocide, prevent the Middle East from erupting in flames and reclaim our elections here at home, we have to stop AIPAC.


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Medea Benjamin n is the co-founder of CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She has been an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years. She is the author of ten books, including Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control; Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection; and Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her articles appear regularly in outlets such as Znet, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, CommonDreams, Alternet and The Hill.

To Each According to Their Need/Work

By Ted Glick

August 5, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.




“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. . . [they] were of one heart and soul and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. . . There was not a needy person among them.” the New Oxford Annotated Bible, the book of Acts, chapter 2, verses 44-45 and chapter 4, verses 32 and 34

These words, written almost 2,000 years ago, reveal one major reason why, after Jesus of Nazareth was killed by the Roman empire, his First Century teachings and life example lived on in the hearts, minds and actions of growing numbers of people in Palestine and, increasingly, beyond. The Christian organization met not just the spiritual needs of the masses of Jewish peasants but their very practical needs.

Here is how European socialist leader Karl Kautsky put it in the early 20th century in his important book, Foundations of Christianity: “Jesus was not merely a rebel, he was also a representative and a champion, perhaps even the founder of an organization which survived him and continued to increase in numbers and in strength. It was the organization of the congregation [and its practical serving of people’s survival needs] that served as a bond to hold together Jesus’ adherents after his death. It was the vigor and strength of the congregation that created the belief in the continued life of the Messiah.”

Karl Marx did more than any other person to spread the slogan summing up this early Christian philosophy of action, using the phrase, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” He wrote this in his 1875 book, Critique of the Gotha Program. But earlier socialists, Christian socialists, particularly Henri de Saint Simon, had used a similar phrase, using the word “work” instead of “need,” but with the same basic intent, in the 1820’s.

Since 1917 there have been socialist revolutions with the objective of creating societies motivated by this visionary approach. Unfortunately, and to be generous, those efforts have not been too successful. The Russian revolution clearly failed, and China is very far from being anything close to the kind of socialist society hoped for by 19th century founders of scientific socialism like Marx, Engels and others. Cuba has made heroic efforts to maintain the socialist vision and make it real, but the decades-long US blockade and other difficulties have undercut those efforts. Other smaller countries which have tried to build socialist societies in this world dominated by the ideology and the reality of mega-corporate, militaristic capitalism have had similar problems.

Does this mean this originally Christian, then socialist vision is an anachronism, no longer relevant in today’s world? I say “no,” a very loud “NO!” Indeed, it is just this vision which those of us committed to working for a very different world must hold onto and translate into daily acts and new forms of organization which embody it.

The original thinkers and leaders of scientific socialism in the 19th and 20th century—almost all of them men, by the way, a very big problem itself—believed that societies living by the words, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” or “their work,” were on the agenda of history because of the development of industry and technology. With this economic development the conditions were being laid for masses of working people to learn from experience as they were forced into large, oppressive workplaces, learn how to join together to improve their and their families’ lives. Over time, this would lead to a replacement of rule by rich capitalists and their enablers in government with a true democracy of working people, the vast majority.

But the industrial working class was very small in China and Russia, both predominantly peasant societies with much less industry compared to Europe and the US. They therefore had less experience with mass organization, a prerequisite to having any chance of systemic change.

Fortunately today, “a different kind of movement is building in the US and elsewhere for fundamental social change. And because the US is a wealthy society, it is practically possible for that movement, when it wins, to rapidly take steps toward a much more just distribution of wealth and power, much healthier social and economic relationships based on cooperation and higher love instead of individualistic competition, and protection for and healing of our threatened climate and environment as a top level priority.” 2)

What should we be doing right now to advance toward these goals? It’s clear to me that for those of us in the US, we need to be going all out to defeat the fascist threat Trump and MAGA represent by doing all we can to bring out an anti-Trump vote for Kamala Harris in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Our deeply disrupted climate cannot be made even worse by four years of Trump/MAGA domination. Conversely, their electoral defeat will strengthen and expand our building, independent progressive movement.

There is no more important work right now.

1—Foundations of Christianity: A Study in Christian Origins. Monthly Review Press, 1972, pps. 376-378

2—21st Century Revolution: Through Higher Love, Racial Justice and Democratic Cooperation, by Ted Glick

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist, organizer and writer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution. More info can be found at https://tedglick.com.


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Ted Glick

Ted Glick has devoted his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973, he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August 1974 resignation. Since late 2003, Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a renewable energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May 2006, he began working with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and was CCAN National Campaign Coordinator until his retirement in October 2015. He is a co-founder (2014) and one of the leaders of the group Beyond Extreme Energy. He is President of the group 350NJ/Rockland, on the steering committee of the DivestNJ Coalition and on the leadership group of the Climate Reality Check network.

The Tim Walz VP Pick Shows America’s Politics Are Changing

LIBERTARIAN DEMOCRAT SAYS MYOB 

OVER REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

The most significant thing about Tim Walz becoming Kamala Harris’s running mate isn’t his progressive record.

It’s that such a record is now considered an asset by top Democratic leaders.

By Branko Marcetic

August 7, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Tim Walz



The vibes have not been this good for a long time.

Only two weeks after President Joe Biden’s decision to end his campaign turned the 2024 election on its head, Vice President Kamala Harris has shocked the political establishment by choosing as her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the most progressive of the handful of names in contention. Walz has a record as governor that anyone on the Left has plenty to be pleased with, from putting in place free, universal school meals and paid family and medical leave to establishing a form of tuition-free public college and beefing up worker protections.

But that’s not what makes this pick significant.

Harris’s decision to go with Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the other name that her list had been whittled down to, is another major sign, on top of Biden’s 2020 campaign and the first year of his presidency, of a major shift in the United States’s political center of gravity since 2016, and a reversal in what passes for conventional political wisdom among the Democratic establishment.

Ever since Bill Clinton won the presidency by going out of his way to antagonize the left wing of his own party, Democrats have been guided by a simplistic philosophy: you win elections by tacking to the center on anything and everything, and ideally, you’ll do it by making sure everyone saw you giving progressives a loud and painful slap in the face.

This is not what happened here. By almost every parameter of conventional Democratic thinking, Shapiro was the logical, “strong” pick for Harris: he’s a business-friendly centrist who wants to cut corporate taxes; he bucked unions on school vouchers, a favorite policy of the Right and neoliberal Democrats attempting to dismantle public schools; and he was vehemently pro-Israel, to the point of using state power to attack dissenters on US-Israel policy and comparing left-wing, antiwar protesters to the Ku Klux Klan. He was backed by big money, sometimes far-right pro-Israel and corporate donors, and choosing him was explicitly urged by centrist pundits as a way for Harris to publicly kick progressives in the shins.

Walz, meanwhile, is unabashedly progressive. He not only passed measures that were economically left, but proved supportive of issues like gun control, abortion rights, and transgender rights. He has, to the chagrin of centrist commentators, said that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness,” expressed guarded sympathy for the message of pro-Palestinian protesters, and was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Senate’s only socialist. By the traditional Democratic playbook, all of this should have made him toxic.

And yet Walz’s left-leaning governance was reportedly his main selling point for Harris, who, despite being a career-long corporate-friendly centrist herself, seems to want to accomplish on the national level something similar to what Walz has done in Minnesota. At the very least, it was not viewed as a drawback that would undermine his demographic appeal as a white, male, rural-rooted, hunting-and-fishing Midwesterner.

In fact, Walz has in the end united an improbably diverse array of politicians associated with the Democratic Party, endorsed and reportedly backed behind the scenes by Sanders and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, respectively, while drawing eager plaudits from Squad members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, all the way to centrists Dean Phillips, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Manchin.

Meanwhile, though the Harris camp says Shapiro’s problem was in a lack of chemistry, it’s hard not to think back to the avalanche of commentary in the past few weeks that pointed out how what in previous eras might have been counted as strengths had become potential liabilities for the Pennsylvania governor: his calls to cut the corporate tax rate clashed with Harris’s plans to raise it; unions’ dislike of him threatened to undermine a key and energized part of the Democratic coalition; and his uniquely bad record on Israel-Palestine threatened to reopen a festering wound within the party that they had managed to at least partially bandage over by getting Biden to drop out, especially after reporters unearthed a shockingly racist opinion piece he had written on the subject in college, and which the now-fifty-one-year-old Shapiro didn’t even bother to address, let alone apologize for.

“I’m literally texting with a number of CEOs right now,” one MSNBC talking head told the decidedly pro-Shapiro Morning Joe panel this morning, not long after Harris had made a big push to win the favor of big business. “The business community . . . was hoping, maybe hoping against hope, that the governor of Pennsylvania would be the vice-presidential pick, and that was going to be a larger indicator or signal about how Vice President Harris would govern as president.”

Of course, we shouldn’t overstate things. There really are endless variables involved in a decision like this: Walz has a unique profile, in his strengths as a communicator, his specific demographic profile (namely, his rural, blue-collar, non-elite-educated background), and as a formerly centrist lawmaker who took on the progressive mantle late in the game, all of which blunts attacks on him as an of out-of-touch radical. And Shapiro had other liabilities beyond his centrism, including his role in a sensational case involving a possible murder that had been allegedly wrongly ruled a suicide, that the state supreme court only just decided to take up this year, and which he has been accused by the victim’s parents of “sitting on.”

Still, it’s hard to see any of this — Walz’s transformation into a progressive, his unapologetic defense of his record, and it being considered an asset over a centrist rival — happening in an earlier era of US politics. The fact that it comes after Joe Biden, one of the leading engineers of the Democratic Party’s rightward turn, briefly governed as a progressive populist is solid proof that the American political landscape has markedly changed.

At the start of this millennium, Biden himself pointed to Clinton’s winning campaigns to trash the idea “that class warfare and populism is the way we should conduct the next election.” It seems Democratic Party leaders no longer wholly agree.

Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

A New Ireland: Socialist, Internationalist and Free

By Feargal Mac Bloscaidh

August 5, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.




On Saturday 3 August 2024, I attended an anti-racist rally outside Belfast City Hall. Across the police line, howling fascist yahoos flew Union Jacks, Israel flags and the Irish Tricolour. This organised mob then went on to attack mostly Muslim-owned businesses across the city. In the aftermath, the media made a great deal of the images showing British and Irish flags flying side-by-side. Many commented that this represented a contradiction in terms, that you can’t be an Irish nationalist and simultaneously cosy up to loyalists, or indeed espouse fascism. There was certainly a degree of novelty to the mob’s constituent elements, but the notion that you cannot be Irish and racist represents a fallacy. Indeed, some media reports even called the fascist protesters from Dublin ‘republicans.’ The Sunday World reported Shankill sectarian killer, Glen Kane, giving Nazi salutes, while he ‘stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Irish flag-waving republicans.’ In fact, across the last century, many far-right Irish nationalists have claimed the tricolour, none more prominent than Eoin O’Duffy, the founder of the Blueshirts and first president of Fine Gael, the current party of government in Dublin. Indeed, lamentably, in the late 1930s right-wingers within Sinn Féin, such as the party chair, J.J. O’Kelly (Sceilg), preached anti-Semitism and sought a rapprochement with O’Duffy and, while not fascist in their politics, militarists within the IRA such as Seán Russell sought Nazi cooperation during the Second World War(Hanley, 2005).

The perversity of this position rested on the established historical fact that, in the early 1930s, the republican movement had a history of anti-fascism and radical left-wing politics, fighting O’Duffy’s acolytes on the streets and condemning Nazi racism and anti-Semitism in print. The IRA position echoes to this day in Moss Twomey’s famous remark that if it was communism to undo the conquest, destroy landlordism, restore the heritage of the dispossessed, end robbery and exploitation by a privileged minority, then the IRA is a Communist organisation (Hanley, 2001:53). Therefore, the fascist scum who waved the tricolour beside the Butcher’s apron can plausibly claim to be Irish nationalists. Their alleged republicanism holds a less secure basis in historical fact, however. The novelty of their espousal of fascism, however, is that perhaps for the first time, they have chosen to ally themselves with the British far-right as opposed to a continental and typically Catholic variety be it Mussolini, Franco or Hitler – apparently, the lingering whiff of incense has been overcome by the waft of gammon nonsense.

Those who point to a coming together of the two communities in this hate march exhibit a level of historical ignorance partially created by a half-century of mainstream misrepresentation of the northern conflict. The loyalist and Ireland First mob are united in their national chauvinism and white supremacism. Despite the contradictions outlined earlier, Irish republicanism (particularly socialist republicanism) is the only mainstream anti-sectarian tradition in Irish political history. It also represents the principal anti-imperialist and alsoanti-racist tradition, despite laudable exceptions on the liberal side in highly problematic figures like Daniel O’Connell. To understand this and to map out the Ireland we seek in the future, it is necessary to move from the specific to the general and to view history as a process. For instance, the heirs to the proto-fascist Sinn Féin of the late 1930s were not the Provisionals but rather what became the Official movement, which by the late 1960s espoused an overtly Marxist position before performing a profound ideological somersault over the course of the Troubles, eventually adopting a partitionist and pro-British outlook.

Similarly, after 1970, the Provisional movement emerged as a working-class insurgency which promoted the concept of an all-Ireland socialist republic and expressed solidarity for anti-colonial movements across the global South (McKearney, 2011:106). The current Provisional movement has triangulated its way to an acceptance of US imperial hegemony, positioning itself as an establishment proxy for neo-liberal continuity. Its long-term participation in the sectarian carve-up at Stormont, recent positions on Gaza and lamentable attempts to appease the lumpen far-right on the issue of immigration suggest that, as an organisation, it has made considerable progress down the well-worn historical path taken by those who move from a revolutionary republican position to a reformist and assimilationist constitutional nationalist one. In a recent documentary, the veteran socialist republican, Tommy McKearney, outlined his decision to break with the Provisional movement in the late 1980s: ‘The commitment into having lived a life as I did… it was a huge emotional decision to break with the IRA, but my loyalty wasn’t to an organisation, it was to the cause.’ But what is that cause and can those who adhere to it chart a different more democratic and socially just path for our island?

Tone, the McCrackens and Russell stand as founders of an anti-sectarian and egalitarian tradition which applied the universalism of the radical Enlightenment or humanism to a colonial society. The constitutional tradition, which regularly condemns republican violence, emerged from the liberal Enlightenment and accepts the colonial conquest and, in utilitarian fashion, operates on an acceptance of the sectarian paradigm on which inequality and social reproduction within a colonial situation was based. Those who seek to establish a genuine democratic republic must leave nationalism to the nationalists and adopt an internationalist perspective grounded in Ireland’s revolutionary anti-colonial tradition. These are not reified polarities but represent a spectrum or dialectic and Irish nationalism clearly could encompass aspects of reactionary politics as well – Seán South may have been a violent nationalist intent on driving out the Brits, but he was no Fenian, nor was Eoin O’Duffy, Ernest Blythe or the other filthy reactionaries who rode in on the back of the southern counter revolution.

The current discourse around nationalism, therefore, occludes the real and qualitative distinction between constitutional nationalism and republicanism. Daniel O’Connell is a nationalist hero. Yet, from a republican perspective, he amounted to little more than a utilitarian opportunist and hypocrite, whose laudable anti-slavery and religious tolerance aside, cut his clothe to suit with the British establishment’s worldview, thus carving out a niche for propertied Irish Catholics and their brahmin class in the Roman Catholic Church. Irish republicans have more in common with the English Quaker radical, Tom Paine. Indeed, Paine wrote Common Sense the year after O’Connell’s birth, while his Rights of Man (1791) became the key text of nascent popular Irish republicanism. During the 1798 Rebellion, O’Connell, a supposed opponent of physical force, joined the pro-British yeomanry, later arguing that ‘the popular party was so completely crushed that the only chance of doing any good for the people was by affecting ultra loyalty’ (Woods, 2006:138).After reading Paine’s Age of Reason in London, O’Connell rejected religion and adopted a Deist outlook, which he quickly publicly abandoned on his return to politics in Ireland out of political expediency. When Paine died a pauper in 1809 New York, his bones famously returned to England before being lost. When O’Connell died on a lavish pilgrimage to Rome during Black ’47, while the nation of beggars he led, starved and fled, his heart was interned in a gold box in Rome while his body returned for a mass funeral in Dublin. Like their hero O’Connell, many of the Irish liberals who mock the far right for their lies might remove the plank from their own eye before they attend to the fascist splinter.

Colonialism, therefore, is a process not an event and loyalism, unionism and conservatism are reactionary and anti-humanist tendencies that reject the universalism of the radical enlightenment completely. In short, sectarianism is a manifestation of racism in the colonial context of Ireland. To claim that the northern conflict was a religious one is to occlude or deliberately ignore sectarianism’s centrality to social reproduction and inequality in a colonial context. In Ireland, sectarianism functioned as racism did for the diaspora across the Anglosphere. Ireland had the misfortune to be conquered and colonised in the early stages of modern capitalist formation. When asked to write this piece, the brief stated that the argument would have to be short and accessible. With Einstein’s imperative that ‘if you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself’ in my mind, I will now briefly explain capitalism and its relevance to Ireland’s future in several hundred words. Capital is defined as a process, which is in continuous expansion, dedicated to endless accumulation. Yet, the market is meant to rest on an exchange of equivalents, price equilibriums, money in exchange for commodity etc. Marx explained capitalism’s growth through the theory of surplus-value, which focuses on production, not circulation in the market (Harvey, 2023:89). This growth, the basis of capitalism, rests on class exploitation.

Therefore, capitalism can be characterised ‘as a self-expanding circle, a spiral’ (Marx, 1993:746). This spiral form of endless cumulative growth is based on exploitation, often facilitated by mass violence in its early stages, which ultimately threatens human survival either through war or environmental catastrophe. Colonisation became an imperative as this ‘organic system’ subordinated ‘all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality… This society then seizes hold of a new territory, as e.g. the colonies …” (Marx, 1993:278). As David Harvey rightly outlines, the contradictions within capitalism are manifest within long-term cycles of boom and bust. Capitalism (or the incessant drive for growth through profits) necessitated geographical expansion or ‘spatial fixes,’ but ‘the world market is approaching saturation’, with perhaps only the African continent left as an army of reserve labour for capital to feed upon(2023:478) This Marxist or materialist conception of history insists that we ‘identify where we are at now and where we might go in the context of capital’s penchant for endless accumulation, exponential growth (the dreaded spiral), uneven geographical development and intense competition between states or power blocs for economic and political hegemony’ (Harvey, 2023:494). The rise of the contemporary extreme right must be understood in the context of a near two-decade long crisis in capitalism and the gradual decline of the US and its ‘western’ and ‘developed’ satellites, orbiting the EU and NATO. Racism is as old as capitalism itself, indeed, the modern notion of racism emerged as an ideological product of capital’s early global expansion.

Furthermore, racism ‘is inextricable from, articulated by, and articulates class.’ Ireland acted as the laboratory of English racism in the period of conquest and colonisation. Similarly, in the Victorian period, Marx and Engels identified how ‘the English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.’ The next year, Marx wrote that racism against the Irish meant the ‘ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor … In relation to the Irish worker, he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation, and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening this domination over himself’ (Miéville, 2022: 143-4). This anti-Irish racism formed the material bedrock of the Orange state after partition. Those who attempt to appease or as Connolly put it ‘truckle’ to loyalism to expose its progressive kernel are pissing into the wind. The most pernicious aspect of the Belfast fascist alliance represented the loyalist welcoming of Irish chauvinists into their white supremacist citadel. The novelty of our current position on the historical spiral is that Ireland is now ensconced in the ‘developed’ and ‘liberal’ camp and No Blacks, No Dogs and No Irish has been replaced by a novel lexicon of the hated ‘other’, encompassing BAME, particularly Muslims, refugees and asylum seekers, LGBT+ and other vulnerable minorities. Yet the ideological mechanics of the elite’s manipulation of race remain recognisable from previous cycles.

As I stood in the line facing the fascists that Saturday, I noted the courageous presence of Paul Doherty, a local SDLP councillor who has consistently stood on the front line against bigotry. I also saw the local Sinn Fein minister, Deirdre Hargey, who later took a stand that day with residents of the Lower Ormeau, facing down the mob. This then is not some reductionist diatribe which condemns anyone not of a similar mind as a social fascist or any similar nonsense. Rather it is a corrective to those ‘nice’ people who think that you can reason with fascism or that the ‘nice’ liberal establishment will protect minorities. Bertrand Russell, perhaps one of the few genuine liberal philosophers, hit the nail on the head when he argued that ‘to be a nice person it is necessary to be protected from crude contact with reality, and those who do the protecting cannot be expected to share the niceness that they preserve.’ As such, ‘nice people leave the policing of the world to hirelings because they feel the work to be not such as a person who is quite nice would wish to undertake’ (Russell, 1967: 103).

Nice liberal Joe Biden has bankrolled and excused genocide in Gaza, while nice liberal Keir Starmer has done much the same while Sinn Fein fawned over the former in the White House and the SDLP took their seats on the government’s green benches with the latter. Without a materialist conception of history and class-based position, we become blind to the symbiotic relationship between the liberal establishment and the extreme right. From Liberal Democrats in the US to the ‘philanthropic’ billionaires who fund them, nice people are responsible for the terrible state of the modern world. When push comes to shove, they will deploy fascism and hatred to protect their interests because no matter what Bill Gates or Bono will tell you about their good intentions, at the fundamental level, the drive for accumulation will trump any other tendency, including human survival. One need only recognise how the imperative of capital accumulation drives the engine of war yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Those who struggle towards a human future for Ireland and the world must cut through the miasma of liberal niceness and respectability. Issues of race and gender are vital in this process, but they cannot be allowed to facilitate the elision of class power and the refusal to call for the end of capitalism as a social system. Asad Haider argues that a logical extension of the liberal position of ‘political correctness’ suggests that ‘society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% Black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc’, leaving ‘the very fact that there is a dominant 1% of the population … unquestioned’ (quoted in Miéville, 2022: 173). Naked class power has always paraded in the vestments of respectability and progress, but liberals are fair weather friends in the fight against fascism. The liberal establishment in Ireland, Britain, Europe and the US will practice colonial fascism abroad while they clutch their pearls about political violence at home. The same commentators who condemned the attack on Donald Trump will prevaricate on Israel’s genocide in Gazaand, when the time comes, they will embrace indigenous fascism for their own exigencies – a process unfolding before our eyes. Any new Ireland cannot to be controlled by a comprador Shoneen establishment whose social policies have provided the seed bed for the emergence of the Irish far-right and whose kid-glove approach to the same fascists has allowed well-funded foreign infiltrators to astro-turf large swathes of working-class communities, sowing misinformation and hate.

This Shoneen constitutional tradition found perfect historical expression in John Redmond – who represented O’Connell’s fabricated tradition of ‘moral’ over ‘physical’ force nationalism by imploring thousands of Irishmen to die in the industrial slaughter of the imperialist First Word War while he condemned the Easter Rising. Redmondism genuflects before royalty, connives with imperialism and seeks a space at the master’s table – Fenians seeks to turn the tables! James Stephens established the Fenian movement by grafting French revolutionary socialism onto an inherent anti-colonial tradition of social resistance. In 1837, French socialists led by Auguste Blanqui swore an oath: ‘In the name of the Republic, I swear eternal hatred to all kings, aristocrats and all oppressors of humanity’ (Miéville, 2022: 187). The historical conditions have changed – the message hasn’t.

Any new Ireland must confront and defeat fascism, but this can only be achieved by identifying and remedying the root causes of its attraction for growing numbers of Irish people. This will requite a revolutionary overhaul of Irish society north and south based on mass democratic mobilisation. The historical material to inform this constitutional demand is abundant from the United Irishmen, like John Kelly the Boy from Killane, who famously died ‘for the cause of long down-trodden man’, to the radical Fenian proclamation of 1867 through to the 1916 Proclamation and 1919 Democratic Programme. The cause of Ireland is the cause of Labour. The cause of Irish freedom is the cause of humanity and you cannot triangulate your way to smashing fascism and ending its ultimate root cause, the relentless accumulation of capital based on class exploitation, ever the herald of conquest, war, famine and death.


End notes

Hanley, Brian, 2001. ‘Moss Twomey, radicalism, and the IRA, 1931-33: a reassessment’ in Saothar Vol. 26 (2001).

Hanley, Brian, 2005. ‘“Oh, here’s to Adolph Hitler? the IRA and the Nazis’ in History Ireland, 3:13 (May/Jun 2005).

Harvey,David.2023. A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, 2023)

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993).

McKearney, Tommy. 2011, The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament(Pluto, 2011).

Miéville, China. 2022. A Spectre, Haunting(Bloomsbury, 2022).

Russel, Bertrand. 1967. Why I am not a Christian (Unwin, 1967). Woods, C.J. 2006. “Historical Revision: Was O’Connell a United Irishman?” in Irish Historical Studies. 35: 17.