Sunday, November 17, 2024

Palestine: The Resistance

Saturday 16 November 2024, by Édouard Soulier




Since 7 October, Palestinians in Gaza have been subjected to the worst military onslaught in the history of the enclave, with an unprecedented outpouring of force and violence. At the same time, Israel has been on the offensive in the other occupied territories: the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and now the whole region. The aim of this offensive, in all its configurations, is to increase colonial control, in particular by evicting and destroying homes, but also by deliberately and systematically killing those who resist - the Israelis call this ‘mowing the lawn’.

When the media talk about this situation - and it’s not often - the Palestinians are often portrayed as extremely passive. It is true that on the surface the asymmetry of resources gives this impression. But Palestinian resistance is very much alive and kicking - armed resistance, peaceful resistance and legal resistance. However, one of the important aspects of Israeli colonisation is the fragmentation of Palestinian society: territorial fragmentation without geographical contiguity, administrative fragmentation and political fragmentation. This means that, de facto, each group of Palestinians does not have the same difficulties or the same opportunities for response and support.

Palestinian civil society

Palestinians have not stood idly by. On the international stage, this resistance has led to important symbolic victories: condemnation of plausible genocide and condemnation of the occupation and apartheid by the International Court of Justice, recognition of the Palestinian state with observer status at the UN General Assembly.

In particular, this presence enabled sanctions against Israel to be included in the most recent resolution of this assembly. Palestinian civil society is also represented by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign based in Ramallah, which continues the fight to delegitimize the state of Israel, its colonisation and its apartheid. At once political, ideological and economic, this campaign has scored a number of victories: AXA divestment, PUMA withdrawal and a number of event boycotts.

Organised from Palestine, the BDS campaign is the simplest point of entry for people wishing to support Palestinians outside Palestine. The leadership of the BDS campaign recommends pushing harder, particularly on banks such as BNP, because it considers that the Israeli economy is on the brink of collapse and that massive disinvestment by the banks could push it further into the abyss.

The Palestinian Authority

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has found itself in an even more uncomfortable situation than in previous years, when the slaughter and oblivion of the Palestinians was carried out with little fanfare. Regularly - and quite rightly - accused of treason and of being suppletives of the Israeli army, the PA essentially controls a few towns in the West Bank and obviously the policy of resistance in international institutions. The PA is in a delicate position because it cannot continue its direct support for the offensive on Jenin, Tulkarem and so on and at the same time leave control to the radical elements. The fact that the PA is not negotiating the release of Marwan Barghouti is linked to the fact that he would de facto take over its leadership and purges would take place in the upper echelons.

The PA has a great deal at stake in staying in office. There are two million people in the West Bank and 250,000 people working for the PA, half of them in the security forces. Most of them are in zone A - Ramallah, Jericho and so on which are relatively unscathed for the moment. Even areas close to Ramallah such as Huwara are being targeted by settlers. The Israeli offensive is concentrated mainly on the poor refugee camps where there are autonomous armed groups. On the ground, apart from the usual protests, the PA has mainly acted as police force against armed groups in the West Bank, most of which come from these refugee camps. It therefore seems difficult at this stage to consider the PA as part of the resistance. [1]

On the West Bank

However, Israel has begun an unprecedented offensive in the West Bank, no doubt judging that at this stage Western support has been secured and that increasing the land seizures can be included in the ‘Gaza balance’, i.e. as part of the general offensive against ‘terrorism’ and Hamas. For the moment, the settlers and the Israeli army are still doing the easy thing, killing demonstrators and children and destroying buildings. But organised Palestinian military resistance is more significant and, as already indicated, even the Palestinian Authority is finding it very difficult to control the will of groups around Islamic Jihad or Hamas and even from within its own ranks, such as the Al Aqsa Martyrs or other more radical groups such as the Lion’s Den.

The emergence of new Palestinian armed groups is not a recent phenomenon. Such groups were formed during the first and second Intifadas, or during any period of escalating oppression or restriction of Palestinian rights under Israeli occupation.

A new generation of Palestinian armed groups with diverse strategies, tactics and objectives has emerged since 2021, particularly in the occupied West Bank, in response to repressive Israeli policies, increased violent raids, continued settlement and the absence of a political path. [2]

Gaza

Gaza has always been a hotbed of resistance. The withdrawal of the settlements in 2005 was mainly due to the prohibitive cost of monitoring and protecting them - and also in order to focus on the West Bank. It is also the place where the Palestinian Authority had the least influence and disappeared completely after the inter-group wars of 2007 following Fatah’s desire to overturn the election result.

Since the blockade of Gaza, the main political party organising life there is Hamas, which also has a military wing. On several occasions, Gazans have organised protests against colonisation and the separation wall. Several demonstrations took place last year. But since October, the resistance has been mainly military. Fighters from several armed groups continue to intervene against the Israeli forces. The main forces are the armed groups of Hamas (Al Qassam), Islamic Jihad (Al Quds), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and also Fatah (Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade).

These armed groups regularly intervene against the forces on the ground. This can be seen in videos of fighters in which targets are indicated by red triangles. These armed groups claim success against several thousand vehicles - tanks, bulldozers and troop carriers. Official figures indicate that since the start of ground operations in Gaza on 27 October 2023, 346 Israeli soldiers have been killed and more than 2,300 wounded. [Swords of Iron: IDF Casualties. www.gov.il ]] [Given the frequency of the attacks documented by the videos, it would appear that this figure is greatly underestimated - probably by ignoring the losses of the mercenary groups deployed in the area. [3]

In addition, despite the destruction and control of several areas in Gaza, dozens of rockets were fired towards the north (Ashkelon) and towards the Naqab (Beer Sheva). More than a military result, these rocket attacks clearly demonstrate the poor control exercised by the Israeli army over the armed groups. Clearly, it is easier to destroy buildings and fire on refugee camps. However, the Israeli army is continuing its propaganda about human shields to justify its massacres, such as that at the Nuseirat refugee camp, where the bombing to kill one of the Hamas leaders resulted in 90 deaths. As usual, every accusation is a confession: there is no proof of the use of human shields by Hamas and other groups, although this has been extremely well documented on the Israeli side. In any case, such proof would be pointless to establish, given the massive and indiscriminate nature of the Israeli bombardments.

What prospects?

The main demands are for a ceasefire. The truth is that the main resistance factions in Gaza (Hamas and Islamic Jihad) have declared that they will accept any arrangement to govern the Gaza Strip after the end of the war, provided that this arrangement is Palestinian and not imposed by Israel. [4]

The Palestinian Authority has also agreed to play a role in the management of the Gaza Strip, provided that political unity is re-established with the West Bank. The Israeli government is the only one to have rejected all the proposals for the ‘day after’ and has not even specified a clear plan for that day, because it rejects the very existence of Hamas and any role for the Palestinian Authority, and refuses to include any political solution that guarantees even a fraction of the Palestinians’ national rights.

Hamas and the other resistance factions have called for an end to the aggression against Gaza from day one, but they have always come up against Israel’s refusal and inflexibility. As we have seen, Israel’s desire to eradicate Hamas is nothing more than propaganda. For even if Hamas were to disappear, new armed Palestinian groups would continue to emerge to fight against the Israeli occupation, with an emerging consensus among rights groups who regard the Israeli regime as apartheid. Moreover, the violence necessary for a military operation to dismantle or weaken Hamas could prove self-destructive, spawning new forms of armed resistance and the creation of new Palestinian groups.

Indeed, Israel’s approach to solving its security problems does not include a political solution, without which no military solution can produce lasting results. And at least in Gaza, the armed groups are paradoxically the force that is most preventing the massacres. [5]

Palestinian resistance and resilience demonstrate the impasse in Israel’s military tactics. The ongoing war of colonisation has more to do with a headlong rush than with a political solution. By setting fire to everything, Israel hopes that, in time, its territorial gains in Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank and, why not, Lebanon, will become ‘permanent’. As far as Gaza is concerned, total annihilation is probably not possible (even though the Israeli leaders obviously want it); Israel would be content with a permanent field of tents paid for by the UN, surrounded by barbed wire, corridors and buffer zones. This is why the negotiations for a cessation of hostilities must at the very least include withdrawal from Gaza in its entirety.

Having said that, armed resistance will not be enough to secure withdrawal without movement from the outside, whether it be boycott campaigns or direct pressure via mobilisation (the two are not mutually exclusive). ‘For non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none”, said Stokely Carmichael. The same goes for Israel.

L’Anticapitaliste

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Footnotes

[1] Emad Moussa, ‘Israel-PA security coordination: Protection for whom?’ New Arab, 14 October 2021.

[2] Jessica Buxbaum, ‘Amid Gaza’s devastation, Israel wages another war in the West Bank’, New Arab, 02 November 2023; Sally Ibrahim, ‘A new generation of Palestinians is emerging to resist Israel’, New Arab, 6 October 2022; Mat Nashed, ‘How Israel’s raids on Jenin only fuel Palestinian resistance’, Al Jazeera, 2 June 2024 and Mariam Barghouti, ‘How growing Israeli violence in the West Bank is fuelling Palestinian resistance’, New Arab, 12 August 2024.

[3] ‘Palestinian resistance movements fight back against Israeli occupation in Gaza’, Daily News Egypt, 22 May 2024.

[4] Dario Sabagh, ‘Why dismantling Hamas won’t end Palestinian armed resistance’, New Arab, 18 October 2023.

[5] Sébastian Seibt, ‘Israeli army in urgent need of troops amid rising casualties in Gaza’, France24, 19 June 2024.




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Germany: government breaks up

Friday 15 November 2024, by Jakob Schaefer





On 6 November, Germany’s governing coalition comprising the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens and the Free Democrat Party (FDP) broke up. The break-up came as no surprise, as the three parties are defending totally different concepts for tackling the economic crisis.

The global capitalist crisis has taken a particularly acute form in Germany. Firstly, the war in Ukraine has pushed up energy prices more than in most other economies. This is having a greater impact on employees, but also on capital operating in Germany than in many other countries. Secondly, the German state - not capital! - is bearing a large part of the burden of Ukraine’s military and economic support, which reduces the German government’s room for manoeuvre in mitigating the consequences of the economic crisis. Finally, the global crisis in the automotive industry, which is of key importance to the German economy, is currently the most serious factor.

Worsening economic crisis

Against this backdrop, the question has arisen as to how the government should respond to the recent worsening of the economic crisis. A few weeks ago, Volkswagen announced a major reduction in car production in Germany. Three out of ten factories are to be closed, tens of thousands of people are to be made redundant, wages are to be cut by 10% for all Volkswagen employees, and so on. The FDP and the right wing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) want an ‘economic turnaround’, i.e. an intensified attack on workers’ living standards (dismantling of social security systems, restrictions on the right to strike and so on). The SPD wants to support industry with substantial state resources: by capping network tariffs for industry, introducing investment bonuses, strengthening tax depreciation, and subsidising the car industry with purchase bonuses for electric cars. All of this requires massive state intervention, for which the ‘debt brake’ must be lifted.

CDU will lead next government

So far, the Christian Democrats are still demanding compliance with the ‘debt brake’, but when they are soon in government, the CDU will also borrow more and - at the very least - relax the brake. At the same time, the attacks on the social gains and rights of the working class will intensify: on pensions, on the right to strike, on health care and so on. In so doing, it will be following in the footsteps of the current government, which need only continue in a consistent manner.

The date of the new elections (in January or March) will be decided in the next few days. The result will be a government led by the Christian Democrats, either in coalition with the SPD or the Greens, or both.

There will be a further strengthening of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which is pushing for the closure of borders to refugees, reinforcing the racism rife among the population. Its refusal to supply arms to Ukraine also enjoys strong support among the population. The BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht), the right-wing splinter group from Die Linke, could emerge stronger from the elections. Die Linke will certainly find it very difficult to enter the Bundestag (it needs 5% of the vote or at least three direct mandates). The party is in the grip of a profound organisational and political crisis.

There is no alternative to the left of the reformist Die Linke party, apart from mini-groups that have no social resonance. The trade union bureaucracy will support the SPD - albeit only indirectly - and will under no circumstances take advantage of the crisis to fight for the reconversion of the car industry.

L’Anticapitaliste

  • Jakob Schaefer

    Jakob Schaefer is an activist of the ISO (International Sozialistische Organization), German section of the Fourth International. He is a retired steelworker, having served on the steering committee of the network for militant unions (VKG). He is the editor of the magazine die Internationale and author of a number of publications, some of which are available at InterSoz.org.



International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
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Capitalist politics in crisis: Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the struggles ahead in the United States

By Justin Akers Chacón
Published 
Kamala Harris

First published at Spectre.

It’s a pathetic spectacle watching the Democrats form their circular firing squads blaming each other for their total defeat in last week’s elections. It is equally disturbing watching frantic and enraged middle-class liberals gather into virtual lynch mobs, seeking to blame and shame whichever marginalized group refused to sufficiently support Kamala Harris’s right-wing, blood soaked, imperialist presidential bid. The blame extends — whether it be a forlorn Joe Biden (criticized for not self-diagnosing his own deteriorated faculties early enough and bowing out of the race) or blaming a relatively small uptick in the number of “Latinos” (an incoherent category to begin with) who didn’t vote for Harris as key to delivering the presidency to Trump.

Another target for liberal derision has been Arab and Muslim voters. These groups, however small or insignificant in the number of actual votes cast, had the audacity to vote for antigenocide candidate Jill Stein. Alternatively, many refrained from voting within an imperialist electoral edifice whose two faces of death are systematically obliterating their families, friends, relatives, memories, and homelands in a macabre and endless orgy of US-backed Zionist annihilative violence.

Today’s stalwarts of the Democratic Party — primarily white middle-class liberals and centrists — are ready to punch down and blame everyone below themselves for the Democrats’ failures; never punching up or trying to actually analyze and understand why the Democrats can only operate within the constraints determined by the prerogatives and exigencies of US capitalism and imperialism.

It’s true that large numbers of people opted to vote for someone other than Kamala Harris and the imperial Democrats. More significantly, millions of people justifiably stayed home on polling day. According to the numbers, an estimated 14 million fewer people voted for Harris in 2024 than Biden in 2020 while Trump’s vote was slightly less than in 2020.1

To understand Harris’s resounding defeat by voter abstention, we need look no further than Harris and the Democrats themselves. The Democratic Party has moved so far to the political right in the last four years that it has become practically indistinguishable from Trump and the Republicans on main policy issues. By 2024, Kamala Harris was running as the more efficient of the right-wing options — mimicking, aligning, or adapting Trump and the Republicans’ hard right policy frameworks while promoting herself as more capable than Trump.

Unlike her fellow right-wing Democrat Joe Biden, who was compelled to make “progressive” campaign promises by the Black Lives Matter rebellions, the left populism of the Bernie Sanders Campaign, and the mass protests against both Trump’s violent separating, caging, and deporting of migrants and the debacle of his handling of the pandemic. For her part, Kamala Harris offered the working class and oppressed groups nothing.

Even less than nothing, “Kamala the cop,” ran a campaign farthest to the right in the modern history of the Democratic Party: promising to build the most “lethal” imperial military the world has ever seen to conduct the next generation of war, vowing enthusiastically to continue to arm and enable the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, shifting rightwards and obfuscating on protecting full abortion access and support for trans people, and promising to “close the border” and recriminalize migrants and refugees along the same lines as Trump.

As this is the essence of Harris’s politics, many would-be liberal, left, or progressive voter constituencies who remember her previous and current record on these issues, were never courted, nor offered reasons to believe her presidency had anything to offer people, and so never jumped on her bandwagon. In the 2020 primary elections, Harris’s policy proposals were so poorly received that her popularity languished in single digit territory for the campaign’s short-lived duration, and she was one of the first candidates to drop out for lack of support.2 Her rise to the presidential ticket in 2024 could only happen by top-down appointment, bypassing a primary process that she would have surely lost. On Palestine, she was heckled and protested by antigenocide protestors everywhere she went, while the polls showed most people supported a ceasefire and an arms embargo on Israel.3 Instead of “being pushed left” by popular sentiment, she instead pushed back and silenced, shamed, and insulted the pro-Palestine movement. With all eyes on her campaign, she demonstrated that the prowar and genocidal needs of US imperialism were far more important and necessary than basic human rights and democracy.

After suppressing the voices of the left, she turned right to build an electoral alliance for her campaign. She enlisted support from the top echelons of the non-Trumpian right wing of the Republican Party. She rolled out a “Republicans for Harris” campaign that included over two hundred top-ranking political figures including George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, and a wide range of high-ranking officials, pundits, and funders.4 She courted antiabortion Republican women, who were “given permission” by Republican Liz Cheney to vote for Kamala, falsely believing that hedging her commitment to defend abortion rights provided enough ambiguity for right-wing middle class and bourgeois white women to flock to her campaign out of disgust with Trump.5 None of this worked. Instead, Harris’s message that she would rule from the right — essentially presenting a version of Trumpism without Trump — only enabled Trump to determine the political narratives heading into the election.

Like in 2016 and 2020, Trump ran his campaign on the issue of immigration, using the most violent and racist rhetoric to date. He promised that he would carry out the largest mass deportation in history and close the border to migrants and refugees. While her semantics were different from Trump’s, her policy proposals were not. In fact, Kamala Harris ran on promoting the passage of a hard right-wing Trumpian immigration proposal concocted by House Republicans in 2024.

During his first term, Trump began dismantling US asylum policy, which previously allowed people to enter the US refugee process by reaching a US port of entry and declaring for asylum. Trump’s closing of this policy blocked tens of thousands of asylum seekers. The 2020 Biden-Harris campaign promised to undo Trump’s immigration policies, to place a moratorium on deportations and, along with a 2021 Democratic majority in Congress, to pass legislation providing for legalization for millions of immigrants.6

None of this came to pass.

Instead, the administration backtracked, kept most of Trump’s punitive policies in place, and even expanded them.7 Instead, Kamala Harris’s first official act as Vice President was to travel to Central America and conduct a high-profile press conference to proclaim to refugees and asylum seekers “do not come.”8 In this act, the Biden-Harris administration affirmed Trump’s policies and doubled down on them.

By the summer of 2024, Republicans in Congress tried to pass their own immigration proposal to codify Trump’s previous efforts to “close the border” to asylum seekers and shape the false political narrative of “border invasion” into federal legislation. The bill, “S.4361 – Border Act of 2024”, was introduced into the Senate in May of 2024.9 If passed it would have granted the sitting US President “DHS emergency authority to summarily remove or prohibit the entry of certain non-U.S. nationals within 100 miles of the southwest land border. DHS may exercise this authority if DHS encounters an average of 4,000 non-U.S. nationals within a seven-day period.” In other words, the bill would give the President the authority to conduct mass deportations of those seeking refugee status.

After the election, the Biden-Harris administration quickly pivoted from the rhetorical posture as “defender of refugees” to becoming an actual mass deporter of refugees. For instance, by the end of their first year the Biden-Harris administration deported over 20,000 Haitian refugees.10 The criminalization of Haitians was later seized on by Trump during one of his many vile and racist tirades against migrant refugees. The number of deportations under Biden-Harris even surpassed the total number deported during the Trump administration during his first four years by early 2024.11

Instead of undermining Trump’s xenophobic platform by defending immigrants and refugees, providing relief and sanctuary for asylum seekers, legalizing the undocumented, ending mass deportation and detention, and explaining how immigrants were revitalizing communities and providing significant gain to the US economy, the Democrats shifted further to the right to “out-Trump” Trump.12 Capitalism’s appetite for the suppressed wages of criminalized and degraded labor is too great. So too is its need for political scapegoats amid the ongoing capitalism-fueled crises of deepening inequality and poverty.

By the summer of 2024, the Biden-Harris administration had shifted to making hardline anti-immigration into “their issue” as a way to coopt Trump’s main platform point. The Biden-Harris Administration officially endorsed the Trumpian immigration plan and appealed to the far right to work together to make it into law. Nevertheless, Trump ordered his lackeys in Congress to oppose it so as to not give the Democrats a “win”—even if it was their plan being implemented — effectively killing it.13 Not to be derailed from this march to the right flank of immigration by Trump, Biden issued an executive order in June that gave him the power to close the border by decree in accordance with what the now-dead Republican plan bestowed.14 In turn, Kamala Harris then campaigned on passing the Republican immigration bill, championing it as her own, and then doubling-down on being tougher than Trump—even criticizing Biden’s executive order for not being punitive enough!15

Undoubtedly, some of those millions that stayed home or refused to vote for Kamala Harris chose not to vote for either version of Trump’s border policy.

The defeat of the Democrats is not a reflection of hard right political shifts in the working class or the population as a whole. Rather, it is more accurate to understand the rejection of Kamala Harris and the Democrats as a rejection of that party’s hard right shifts amid a deepening confluence of overarching crises. As the preferred party for the capitalist ruling class, Kamala Harris and the Democrats could only offer what the billionaire and corporate backers of the party were willing to offer: nothing.

At this moment — amid a tanking and fragmenting global capitalist system, expansion of imperial war on a global scale, and deepening social polarization amid widening social inequality — the Democrats had nothing to offer the vast majority of the people except more austerity, war, genocide, authoritarianism, and criminalization. Trump, his far-right billionaire backers, and his radical reactionary and fascist following have even less to offer except victims and scapegoats.

There must be a complete rupture with this system of declining capitalist imperialism and its rapidly decaying political institutions. Moving forward from this moment of profound political — perhaps a terminal — crisis will depend on the mass organization of resistance movements rooted in the working class and in active solidarity with the oppressed populations that are the targets of this rightward moving ruling apparatus. In the period ahead, there will be the possibility to continue and begin building new radical and revolutionary left-wing organizations out of the class struggles that undoubtedly lie ahead. Building our capacity to resist and overturn this system is the most urgent thing we can and should be doing right now.

Justin Akers Chacón is a professor of US History and Chicano Studies in San Diego, California. He is the author of Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket, 2018) and coauthor, with Mike Davis, of No One is Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2nd ed. 2017).

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