Elon Musk Is Leading an Electronic Coup D’État

Monday 3 February 2025, by Dan La Botz

Elon Musk, the multibillionaire and advisor to President Donald Trump who now heads a team called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been taking over U.S. government agencies—the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), General Services Administration (GSA), and the United States Agency for International Development, and perhaps others—a process that at least in some cases appear to be illegal. Where officials have resisted, Trump has removed them from their positions. Musk’s take-over is tantamount to a coup, and far more effective, serious, and dangerous than the insurrection that Trump organized on January 6, 2021.

Controlling the executive branch, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, Trump apparently believes that he and Musk have the power to carry out a coup with impunity. With Trump having purged the Justice Department, the FBI, the Inspectors General, there is, in fact, no one to call out and stop these attacks on the government bureaucracy from within. The Democrats and groups such as the ACLU have been filing suit in various courts with some success, but if they end up at the Supreme Court, given that the Supreme Court ruled in July 2024 that the U.S. presidents have absolute immunity for their official actions and broad immunity for most other actions, Trump is likely to win.

Trump and Musk, who have been calling for reducing the size and cost of government, now have the power with the push of a computer key to stop the two trillion dollars in payments made by Treasury each year affecting tens of millions of people from children to the disabled to the elderly, local and state governments, and private contractors. They now have their hands on the computers at OPM that handles the records of virtually all 2.5 million government employees. And have taken over the computers at the GSA oversees government real estate, land and buildings. Musk’s team now had its hands on computer that mange almost $43 billion in foreign aid for foreign economies, education, and health, such as for HIV programs.Trump and his pliant Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth already control the U.S. military’s $820 billion budget.

We are witnessing a tech coup d’état. The Democratic Party has failed to stop Trump and Musk, and at the moment has no plan to do so. The social movements and the left are too weak and distant from power to do anything immediately and are only likely to develop a strategy when Trump’s attack on the lives of millions of Americans forces them to act.


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Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He is the author of Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991). He is also a co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.


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.

 

The Rise of the Immortal Dictator

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / February 4th, 2025

If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.

— Elon Musk (2018)

The Deep State is about to go turbocharged.

While the news media fixates on the extent to which Project 2025 may be the Trump Administration’s playbook for locking down the nation, there is a more subversive power play taking place under cover of Trump’s unique brand of circus politics.

Take a closer look at what’s unfolding, and you will find that all appearances to the contrary, Trump isn’t planning to do away with the Deep State. Rather, he was hired by the Deep State to usher in the golden age of AI.

Get ready for Surveillance State 2.0.

To achieve this turbocharged surveillance state, the government is turning to its most powerful weapon yet: artificial intelligence. AI, with its ability to learn, adapt, and operate at speeds unimaginable to humans, is poised to become the engine of this new world order.

Over the course of 70 years, the technology has developed so rapidly that it has gone from early computers exhibiting a primitive form of artificial intelligence to machine learning (AI systems that learn from historic data) to deep learning (machine learning that mimics the human brain) to generative AI, which can create original content, i.e., it appears able to think for itself.

What we are approaching is the point of no return.

In tech speak, this point of no return is more aptly termed “singularity,” the point at which AI eclipses its human handlers and becomes all-powerful. Elon Musk has predicted that singularity could happen by 2026. AI scientist Ray Kurzweil imagines it happening it closer to 2045.

While the scientific community has a lot to say about the world-altering impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our lives, little has been said about its growing role in government and its oppressive effect on our freedoms, especially “the core democratic principles of privacy, autonomy, equality, the political process, and the rule of law.”

According to a report from Accenture, it is estimated that across both the public and private sectors, generative AI has the potential to automate a significant portion of jobs across various sectors.

Here’s a thought: what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force isn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

Certainly, Trump has made no secret of his plans to make AI a priority. Indeed, Trump signed the first-ever Executive Order on AI in 2019. More recently, Trump issued an executive order giving the technology sector a green light to develop and deploy AI without any guardrails in place to limit the risks it might pose to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety.

President Biden was no better, mind you. His executive order, which Trump repealed, merely instructed the tech sector to share the results of AI safety tests with the U.S. government.

Yet following much the same pattern that we saw with the rollout of drones, while the government has been quick to avail itself of AI technology, it has done little to nothing to ensure that rights of the American people are protected.

Indeed, we are altogether lacking any guardrails for transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of law when it comes to the government’s use of AI.

As Karl Manheim and Lyric Kaplan point out in a chilling article in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology about the risks to privacy and democracy posed by AI, “[a]rtificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology of the modern era… Its impact is likely to dwarf even the development of the internet as it enters every corner of our lives… Advances in AI herald not just a new age in computing, but also present new dangers to social values and constitutional rights. The threat to privacy from social media algorithms and the Internet of Things is well known. What is less appreciated is the even greater threat that AI poses to democracy itself.”

Cue the rise of “digital authoritarianism” or “algocracy—rule by algorithm.”

In an algocracy, “Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of Facebook and Google, have more control over Americans’ lives and futures than do the representatives we elect.”

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

How do we protect our privacy against the growing menace of overreach and abuse by a technological sector working with the government?

The ability to do so may already be out of our hands.

In 2024, at least 37 federal government agencies ranging from the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs to Health and Human Services reported more than 1700 uses of AI in carrying out their work, double from the year before. That does not even begin to touch on agencies that did not report their usage, or usage at the state and local levels.

Of those 1700 cases at the federal level, 227 were labeled rights- or safety-impacting.

A particularly disturbing example of how AI is being used by government agencies in rights- and safety-impacting scenarios comes from an investigative report by The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence.”

This is what is referred to within tech circles as “automation bias,” a tendency to blindly trust decisions made by powerful software, ignorant to its risks and limitations. In one particular case, police used AI-powered facial recognition technology to arrest and jail a 29-year-old man for brutally assaulting a security guard. It would take Christopher Gatlin two years to clear his name.

Gatlin is one of at least eight known cases nationwide in which police reliance on AI facial recognition software has resulted in resulted in wrongful arrests arising from an utter disregard for basic police work (such as checking alibis, collecting evidence, corroborating DNA and fingerprint evidence, ignoring suspects’ physical characteristics) and the need to meet constitutional standards of due process and probable cause. According to The Washington Post, “Asian and Black people were up to 100 times as likely to be misidentified by some software as White men.”

The numbers of cases in which AI is contributed to false arrests and questionable police work is likely much higher, given the extent to which police agencies across the country are adopting the technology and will only rise in the wake of the Trump Administration’s intent to shut down law enforcement oversight and policing reforms.

“How do I beat a machine?” asked one man who was wrongly arrested by police for assaulting a bus driver based on an incorrect AI match.

It is becoming all but impossible to beat the AI machine.

When used by agents of the police state, it leaves “we the people” even more vulnerable.

So where do we go from here?

For the Trump Administration, it appears to be full steam ahead, starting with Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure venture aimed at building massive data centers. Initial reports suggest that the AI data centers could be tied to digital health records and used to develop a cancer vaccine. Of course, massive health data centers for use by AI will mean that one’s health records are fair game for any and all sorts of identification, tracking and flagging.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The surveillance state, combined with AI, is creating a world in which there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.

Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

It’s a setup ripe for abuse.

Writing for the Yale Journal, Manheim and Kaplan conclude that “[h]umans may not be at risk as a species, but we are surely at risk in terms of our democratic institutions and values.”

Privacy_­—Manheim and Kaplan succinctly describe it as “the right to make personal decisions for oneself, the right to keep one’s personal information confidential, and the right to be left alone are all ingredients of the fundamental right of privacy”— is especially at risk.

Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

AI surveillance is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable by doing what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

As Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO remarked, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

The ramifications of any government wielding such unregulated, unaccountable power are chilling, as AI surveillance provides the ultimate means of repression and control for tyrants and benevolent dictators alike.

Indeed, China’s social credit system, where citizens are assigned scores based on their behavior and compliance, offers a glimpse into this dystopian future.

This is not a battle against technology itself, but against its misuse. It’s a fight to retain our humanity, our dignity, and our freedom in the face of unprecedented technological power. It’s a struggle to ensure that AI serves us, not the other way around.

Faced with this looming threat, the time to act is now, before the lines between citizen and subject, between freedom and control, become irrevocably blurred.

The future of freedom depends on it.

So demand transparency. Demand accountability.

Demand an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from the encroaching surveillance state.

We need safeguards in place to ensure the right to data ownership and control (the right to know what data is being collected about them, how it’s being used, who has access to it, and the right to be “forgotten”); the right to algorithmic transparency (to understand how algorithms that affect them make decisions, particularly in areas like loan applications, job hiring, and criminal justice) and due process accountability; the right to privacy and data security, including restrictions on government and corporate use of AI-powered surveillance technologies, particularly facial recognition and predictive policing; the right to digital self-determination (freedom from automated discrimination based on algorithmic profiling) and the ability to manage and control one’s online identity and reputation; and effective mechanisms to seek redress for harms caused by AI systems.

AI deployed without any safeguards in place to protect against overreach and abuse, especially within government agencies, has the potential to become what Elon Musk described as an “immortal dictator,” one that lives forever and from which there is no escape.

Whatever you choose to call it—the police state, the Deep State, the surveillance state—this “immortal dictator” will be the future face of the government unless we rein it in now.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, next year could be too late.Facebook

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John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

 

Future Natures: On Seeing Commons Through Popular Genres

By David Bollier

February 3, 2025

Source: Bollier.org

In academic research about the commons, few scholars are as venturesome in their creative approaches than the scholars and researchers associated with the Centre for Future Natures, at the University of Sussex in England. Led by anthropologist and research fellow Amber Huff, Future Natures explores “ecologies of crisis, commons, and enclosures,” but its chief output isn’t monographs and books. It’s an exuberant array of creative works in popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, videos, and podcasts.

At Future Natures, an important focus is what it feels like to experience our crisis-wracked modern life, especially enclosures, and to illuminate the inner and social satisfactions of commoning. What does this moment of crisis and collapse feel like? What experiences and emotions are necessary for social collaboration and solidarity? How can such subjectivities be organized to create commons and new visions of the future?

To learn more about the brave scholarly experimentation going on at Future Natures, I spoke with Amber Huff on the latest episode of my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #59).

“Storytelling is really the universal in human experience,” said Huff, noting that even anthropologists, biologists and other academics, as they study the world, are in the business of creating narratives. “We thought storytelling might make a really good anchor for a transdisciplinary approach that focuses on breaking down hierarchies of expertise [in the academy], and communicating stories in accessible ways,” Huff explained.

Instead of putting out calls for purely academic contributions, for example, Future Natures invites people to contribute videos, photographs, oral histories, and podcasts. One of its more courageous ventures has been to publish comic books to explain unfamiliar topics. One introduces readers to the commons in a comic book form, for example.

Another explains capitalist value-creation, and yet another shows how the behavior of fungi can help map radical alternative futures.

While traditionalists might regard many of these gambits as not rigorous or amenable to peer review, Huff hastens to point out that “the challenges that we face today are multifaceted and multidimensional. They’re experienced in different ways by different groups of people, depending on history, social positions, situated environmental relationships, what your livelihoods are, what your educational prospects are, what your skill set is.”

Storytelling is a way to make other people’s perspectives – especially those of historically marginalized people – more visible, and to validate them. In this sense, storytelling can achieve a shift of power in how we choose to understand the world, stepping away somewhat from traditional academic forms of storytelling and amplifying the voices of people not usually heard.

Popular genres like comics and film have enduring appeal, said Huff, because in today’s chaotic times, they help us make sense of a world that is increasing abnormal, if not utterly weird. Huff asks:  “Why is it that ‘the weird’ might seem so resonant right now?” She attributes a lot of our disorientation to our shared, mass experiences of the COVID pandemic, extreme, algorithm-driven speech on social media, and angry political movements, all of which call into question our usual criteria for making sense of the world. Traditional boundaries are being breached, and new normals are being declared.

In the face of this cultural disruption, Huff believes that it’s important to motivate and mobilize people to tell their stories – and that using genres of popular culture invites people into familiar, emotionally resonant storytelling forms. Comics, novels, films, and podcasts “have been part of our lives as ways that we situate ourselves in the world, through the art that we consume,” said Huff.

One popular genre that Future Natures has explored is what Huff calls “weird ecology,” along with its relationship to the commons. One podcast episode explores the idea of folk horror stories associated with English commons, for example. A film excavates historical stories about ghosts in Grovely Wood, a former Norman hunting ground in southern England.

What do these sorts of stories have to contribute to our modern situation? Future Natures explains: “The way many of us experience the effects of rapid globalization is that it has unsettled our ordinary perceptions of time, space, ecology, causality, and agency.” Through ‘weird ecology’, “radical ecology meets weird fiction. Exploring weird ecology can help us to question our assumptions about what is ‘natural’, how ‘nature’ should behave, and the relationships or distinctions between humans and other creatures….Weird ecologies are not static geographies, but rather active spaces of encounter, participation and transformation.”

In looking at storytelling conventions to probe ‘the weird,’ Huff talked about the collaboration between Future Natures and a group called Sea Change. The group is perhaps best known for producing the film My Octopus Teacher. The film – about a burned-out scientist’s unexpected friendship with an octopus who lived near his coastal cottage – proved to be a hugely popular story in theaters and streaming services worldwide. It seemed to speak to the social alienation from other living creatures that so many people feel these days.

Huff’s account of the film provoked me to propose that Future Nature is offering f “social therapy with scholarly bite.” That may be a reductive phrase, but it is certainly part of the hybrid innovations in academic storytelling, and engagement with the modern world and commoning, that Future Natures is all about.

You can listen to my full interview with Amber Huff here.

Greece: Mobilisation for the environment, a key issue

Tuesday 4 February 2025, by Andreas Sartzekis


Greece is one of Europe’s worst examples of environmental policy. The most well-known damage is caused by fires, but recent industrial and energy policy, particularly under Prime Minister Mitsotakis, has been a disaster, also in democratic terms.


The huge annual fires have given rise to few preventive programmes. On the contrary, the Right has refused to extend the contracts of 5,000 temporary firefighters. As if the winter months were not useful for training in studying and fighting megafires, when this summer the flames reached the Athenian suburbs. The same goes for floods: while in 2023 the region of Thessaly was ravaged, with 17 deaths and lasting consequences affecting this agricultural region, the government is content to blame climate change, without any overall reflection or emergency measures.
Polluting industries without filters

In the industrial sector, every effort is being made to impose dangerous extraction facilities. The best-known example is the Skouriès gold mines in the north of the country, where, despite resistance from the local population, the Ellinikos Chryssos company is able to continue its activities, after violent repression in the past, manipulation of the miners by management and a recent lawsuit against a news website. Today, in the north of the island of Chios, the government is trying to impose a project for an antimony mine, a material that is highly dangerous to health and whose dust is likely to cover the whole island with the frequent northerly winds.
Voltaic power and wind turbines, a smoke and mirrors approach

Voltaic and wind farms are everywhere in Greece. This is in line with a project whose stated aim is for green electricity to reach 80% of total production, instead of the current 30%. But behind this virtuous objective, it is a catastrophic capitalist project that Mitsotakis wants to impose in the hope that in the medium term, Greece will become an exporter of green energy. We’re right in the middle of this offensive, with plans for floating voltaic farms in the Gulf of Ambracique, which has been classified as a national park and Natura 2000 site. Faced with this project, fishermen are joining forces with environmental organisations and scientists to organise resistance.
Organising resistance

Resistance is much more widespread when it comes to opposing wind turbines: without exaggeration, it can be said that all the mountains are under threat (70 200-metre wind turbines are planned for the mountains of the eastern Peloponnese), and you only have to follow the road from Thebes to Delphi to see the mess. There is, of course, the aesthetic issue, which deserves to be debated, but which is obvious for a country that could develop a form of ‘soft tourism’ that is hardly compatible with these giant parks. Above all, they have an immediate impact on fauna - in regions where livestock farming is under threat - and flora, with roads cut into the mountains right up to the summits, which, contrary to what the Ministry of the Environment and Energy (YPEN) claims, increases the risk of landslides and fires.

The same is true of proposed offshore parks, as is planned for Samothrace: efforts to protect the necessary ‘sustainable fisheries’ would be ruined by the implementation of such projects. Faced with this situation, local residents are all the more determined to organise their refusal because they are generally not consulted and are aware that these projects are designed solely for the energy companies and their export plans. There is coordination in various places, and many initiatives of resistance. It might be time to prepare a new national initiative, as in December 2023.

L’Anticapitaliste, 30 January 2025


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Andreas Sartzekis is active in the Fourth International Programmatic Tendency, one of the two groups of the Greek section of the Fourth International.


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.

 

Geopolitics of genocide: An interview with Rafeef Ziadah

By Rafeef Ziadah & Nick Buxton

Published 6 February, 2025

First published at TNI.

The unwavering alliance between the West and Israel is not merely a matter of lobbying or influence; it is a strategic partnership rooted in shared imperial goals. Understanding this broader geopolitical map is essential for building effective alliances and crafting an effective strategy that confront the systems and actors that sustain Israel’s settler-colonial project.

Dr. Rafeef Ziadah is an organiser with Workers in Palestine. She is a Palestinian trade union organiser, academic and poet. She works as a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy in the Department of International Development, King's College London. She spoke to Nick Buxton about the geopolitics of genocide in Palestine today.

What does the genocide in Palestine reveal about the status of geopolitics today — who has power and how it is wielded?

The genocide in Gaza lays bare the harsh realities of modern geopolitics, highlighting the mechanisms of power in a world shaped by imperial ambitions and the strategic exploitation of resources. Central to this crisis is the alignment of Western power structures with settler colonialism and authoritarianism in the Middle East, in order to sustain economic dominance and geopolitical control.

The unwavering support for Israel from the US and key European powers is deeply entwined with their enduring imperial interests in the region. As a settler colony, Israel serves as a Western foothold in the Middle East. This settler-colonial project is not an isolated phenomenon; it is embedded in a wider architecture of control, working in concert with the oil-rich Gulf monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to uphold a regional and global system that privileges Western economic and military power.

Agreements like the normalisation deals between Israel and several Gulf nations reflect a consolidation of forces that are designed to marginalise Palestinian liberation entirely and aim to secure the status quo of authoritarian rule and resource extraction at the expense of the peoples of the region. While the genocide has thrown this project into question, it is unlikely to be abandoned and will almost certainly resurface in a rebranded form.

We also need to clearly understand the bigger historical trajectory at play, especially the role of the Oslo Accords and hollow promises of a two-state solution.1 The Oslo Accords sought to transform the struggle for Palestinian liberation into a restricted state-building project confined to the West Bank and Gaza, deliberately erasing the broader colonial reality of Israel as a settler state.

What does it say about US imperialism and its trajectory? 


Its unwavering support for Israel reveals a great deal about the nature and trajectory of US imperialism. At its core, this relationship is not about ideological alignment or cultural ties but about the strategic importance of Israel as a settler colony in securing and projecting US power.

Israel’s settler-colonial project has made it a uniquely steadfast partner in the region, one whose survival is inextricably tied to continued Western support. Unlike other allies in the Middle East, whose alliances with the US are often transactional or conditional, Israel’s dependency on US backing ensures that it operates as a consistent extension of US interests.

One of the most significant ways in which Israel facilitates US imperial goals is by helping to secure control over the Middle East’s critical trade corridors and energy resources. This is less about ensuring oil flows to the US or Europe, which have diversified their energy sources, and more about controlling access to these resources as a geopolitical weapon. As China emerges as a potential rival to the US, the ability of the US to influence the availability and pricing of Middle Eastern oil becomes a key tool in restricting China’s economic growth and strategic options and to head off other potential challengers to its global supremacy.

The US strategy has also been to encourage a normalisation process between the Gulf states and Israel, which reflects a calculated effort to reassert its primacy in a region where its influence has seen relative decline in recent years. These US-sponsored agreements seek to reinforce Israel’s role as a central pillar of US power in the region and tie the Gulf States more closely to US influence. In essence, normalisation is not just about diplomacy; it’s a strategic move to manage the shifting balance of power in the region.

This strategy has significant costs, however, particularly as Israel’s increasingly genocidal actions provoke regional instability and further erode US standing in international public opinion. It risks undermining the broader system of alliances on which the US relies. While the Gulf States like the UAE have normalised ties with Israel, the region’s populations remain deeply opposed to Israeli actions, creating a tension that could destabilise various regimes and, by extension, the US regional strategy.

Why is it important for social movements to understand this geopolitical picture ?

The genocide in Gaza has sparked an unprecedented wave of global solidarity, with millions taking to the streets, university campus encampments, and activists blocking ports and arms factories. This surge of protest challenges not only Israel’s actions but also the global systems that enable them. However, while this brought visibility to the Palestinian cause, the way Palestine is often framed can obscure the true nature of the struggle. Too often, discussions are limited to Israel’s immediate human rights abuses — killings, arrests, and land theft — without addressing the underlying systems of power that make these abuses possible. Framing the issue through a human rights lens alone depoliticises the Palestinian struggle, reducing it to isolated violations rather than a systematic campaign of settler colonialism backed by Western imperialism.

In essence, this genocide has been sponsored by the US and the European Union (EU), particularly by some EU member states, giving Israel the green light at every turn to continue its attacks and starvation policies, while diplomatically shielding it and arming its military. Discussions about Israeli politics often focus narrowly on the actions of individual prime ministers, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, as if they alone shape the state’s trajectory. While these figures are significant, we need to pan back to grasp the deeper, long-term dynamics that underpin Israel’s policies. This requires analysing the structural and historical forces driving its settler-colonial project and its broader role in maintaining Western hegemony.

Compounding this problem is the persistent narrative that attributes Western support for Israel solely to the influence of a ‘pro-Israel lobby’. This is a dangerously simplistic view that misunderstands the deeper geopolitical relationship. The unwavering alliance between the West and Israel is not merely a matter of lobbying or influence; it is a strategic partnership rooted in shared imperial goals.

Understanding the broader geopolitical map is essential for building effective alliances and crafting a strategy that goes beyond reactive solidarity. It enables us to identify and confront the systems and actors that sustain Israel’s settler-colonial project while avoiding the trap of viewing authoritarian regimes in the region as allies in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. These regimes have their own interests, often rooted in preserving power or securing economic and military benefits, and aligning with them uncritically can undermine the broader goals of justice and liberation.

Also, such an analysis allows us to target the corporations and industries that profit from and sustain Israel’s colonial violence. Arms manufacturers, IT companies, and multinational corporations (MNCs) play a critical role in enabling Israel’s settler-colonial project, and exposing their complicity is key to disrupting the networks of profit that underpin oppression. By identifying these actors and their connections, we can better strategise and direct interventions that strike at the economic foundations of settler-colonial domination.

Finally, a deeper understanding of the broader picture equips movements for the long haul. It ensures we remain focused and strategic, especially when confronted with initiatives like statehood discussions or diplomatic agreements that leave the situation on the ground unchanged. By maintaining clarity on the realities of occupation and dispossession, we can resist being swayed by superficial progress or symbolic gestures. Instead, we continue to expose the ongoing settler-colonial violence and work towards a genuinely anti-colonial future.

Will the fall of the regime in Syria change these dynamics?

It's too early to predict exactly what will happen in Syria, as there are many players involved, each with their own interests and agendas. We need to stay alert to the political economy of the situation, including proposed pipelines, transport routes, and reconstruction efforts. In the region, ‘reconstruction’ has often served as a cover for corporate control, deepened divisions, and the consolidation of power by external actors.

For now, Israel appears focused on controlling the situation — it has invaded more territory, targeted the Syrian army, and seems to prefer a federated Syria where it can exert influence. This approach aligns with its broader goals as a settler-colonial state seeking to expand territory and shape future trajectories in its favour. However, Israel's plans will depend heavily on the actions and interests of other key players.

The Assad regime carries responsibility for leaving the Syrian state in disarray. Weak and propped up by external forces, with no genuine internal support, the regime’s reliance on Russia and Iran to maintain Assad’s grip on power has left the situation ripe for fragmentation. This fragility has created fertile ground for competing actors to pursue their interests in Syria, both regional powers and global player. As well as Israel, Turkey, for example, is deeply invested in expanding its control while simultaneously suppressing Kurdish movements.

As always in these geopolitical constellations, the regimes and external actors involved are not concerned with freedom or democracy for ordinary Syrians. Rather, they pursue their own strategic and economic gains. Ultimately, it will be up to the Syrian people to determine their own fate, though this will be an incredibly difficult task given the current configuration of local actors and their backers.

Why, bar a few muted voices such as Belgium, Ireland, Italy and Spain, has the European Union been so complicit in the Gaza genocide and so reluctant to push a position independent of the US?

The European Union’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine reflects not so much subordination to the US as a convergence of interests. While the EU often projects an image of adhering to a different framework — claiming to prioritise international law, human rights and multilateralism – it ultimately benefits from and aligns with the broader imperial project that underpins Western dominance in the Middle East. The EU’s policies and relationships with Israel, including free trade agreements (FTAs), military contracts, and strategic partnerships, demonstrate that its interests are deeply entangled with maintaining the status quo.

The EU plays a strategic role in presenting itself as less overtly aggressive than the US. Even within this framework, it has failed to take meaningful steps to pressure Israel, such as suspending trade privileges or military cooperation, revealing its lack of commitment to genuine accountability.

Free trade agreements between the EU and Israel, such as the EU-Israel Association Agreement, facilitate economic cooperation and provide Israel with critical access to European markets. These agreements persist despite Israel’s clear violations. Military contracts and partnerships further cement this relationship, as some EU member states engage in arms sales and technology exchanges that directly support Israel’s military-industrial complex. These activities highlight the EU’s material stake in the systems that sustain Israeli aggression.

Within Europe, there is a division between countries like Germany and the UK, which provide overt support for Israel, and others such as Belgium, Ireland and Spain, which advocate for a more critical stance, often framed within the two-state solution. However, even the latter group operates within narrow constraints, focusing on softer criticism while avoiding actions that could fundamentally challenge the EU’s ties with Israel.

The EU’s alignment with the US and Israel also serves its own strategic interests in the Middle East. By supporting Israel, the EU helps to maintain a regional order that secures trade routes, stabilises energy supplies and suppresses anti-imperialist movements. Like the US, the EU has an interest in containing rival powers, particularly in the context of global competition with Russia and China. Israel’s role as a regional enforcer complements these objectives, making it a valuable ally for European states.

In essence, the EU’s approach to Palestine is not an alternative to US policy but rather a complementary one. Its dual role of alignment and differentiation allows the EU to maintain its economic and strategic benefits from the relationship while projecting an image of neutrality or moderation.

What has China done in response to the genocide? What does this say about its role as a global political player?

China’s response to the genocide in Gaza has been notably restrained, characterised by calls for ceasefires and humanitarian assistance but lacking in robust action. While it has voiced support for Palestinian self-determination at the United Nations, it has not taken a leading role in directly opposing Israel or providing substantial material support to the Palestinian cause. This restrained approach reflects China’s broader foreign policy, which prioritises non-intervention and maintaining relationships with a range of actors, including Israel, for economic and strategic reasons.

China’s actions reveal its prioritisation of economic interests over ideological alignment with anti-imperialist movements. While it positions itself as an alternative to US hegemony, its approach often mirrors the pragmatic calculus of traditional powers. Its growing interdependencies with Gulf monarchies and broader East Asia-Middle East trade corridors suggest a focus on economic integration rather than a direct challenge to US influence in the region. This leaves China appearing to be non-committal in moments of acute crisis.

People have celebrated South Africa’s taking Israel to the International Court of Justice as a sign of a rising Global South in opposition to imperialism and Zionism. How do you see it?

South Africa’s decision to bring Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) resonates deeply, particularly given its own history of apartheid and its solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. For Israel to be officially accused of genocide at an international level is a powerful step, highlighting the gravity of its actions and strengthening the narrative against its settler-colonial project.

However, the limitations and contradictions of international law must be recognised. Legal proceedings like those at the ICJ are protracted, often taking years, with a high bar for proving crimes such as genocide. Even when rulings favour justice, enforcement depends on the political will of powerful states and institutions. States like the US and its allies, which shield Israel diplomatically and militarily, can undermine or outright ignore ICJ rulings, making the law a tool of selective justice rather than universal accountability.

This move must also be understood within the broader context of South Africa’s internal political dynamics. While the African National Congress (ANC) historically positioned itself as a champion of anti-imperialism and solidarity with Palestine, its current trajectory is fraught with contradictions. The ANC faces internal challenges, including governance failures and the promotion of neoliberal economic policies, as well as a growing disconnect with grassroots movements.

At the same time, we must remain attentive to the voices of South Africa’s vibrant social movements, which have long demanded the country sever ties with Israel. These movements have led the call for concrete actions, such as ending diplomatic relations and enforcing boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS). While the ICJ case is symbolically powerful, it is grassroots pressure that ensures such symbolic gestures translate into meaningful change.

Where does corporate power fit into the picture? What corporations and from where prop up the genocide?

Unfortunately, numerous corporations across a wide range of sectors profit from and sustain Israel’s actions, from consumer goods producers to IT firms providing surveillance infrastructure. While arms and energy companies play particularly critical roles in enabling the genocide and have rightly been a focus for Palestinian trade unions and organisers, it is most effective when individuals and groups challenge complicity within their own sectors. This broad-based approach ensures the movement targets the full scope of corporate involvement, strengthening the campaign for accountability and justice.

On 16 October 2023, Palestinian trade unions and professional associations issued a powerful call to international unions, urging them to ‘Stop Arming Israel’. This appeal highlighted the vast scale of military and diplomatic support provided to Israel, particularly by the US and the EU. The figures are staggering. Under the current US agreement, which runs from 2019 to 2028, $3.8 billion in military aid is provided to Israel annually. In response to Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, the US approved an additional $14.5 billion in military aid as part of a $106 billion national security package.

European member states also play a significant role. Germany, for instance, finalised 218 export licences for arms to Israel in 2023, with 85% issued after 7 October 2023. Meanwhile, arms manufacturers have seen immense profits. The stock value of the top five US weapons companies — Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon – has soared by $24.7 billion since the assault began. These figures underscore the arms industry’s direct complicity in genocide and highlight the potential for organised labour and grassroots campaigns to disrupt these supply chains and halt the arms trade.

The global fossil fuel industry also plays a crucial role in sustaining Israel’s genocidal campaign. Energy, in the form of coal, crude oil, jet fuel, and gas, powers the military machinery used in the assault on Palestinians. Given that Israel also functions as a critical node in regional energy networks, targeting the transport of energy supplies aligns the struggles for Palestinian liberation and climate justice, exposing how fossil capitalism fuels both genocide and broader systems of exploitation.

For example, a critical development in Israel’s gas strategy has been the energy agreements with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), formalised following the Abraham Accords in 2020.2 These gas deals reflect the deepening of economic ties between Israel and Gulf states, with significant geopolitical implications In 2021, the UAE’s Mubadala Petroleum acquired a $1 billion stake in Israel’s Tamar gas field, signalling the UAE’s strategic interest in Israel’s natural gas reserves. These deals enable Israel to position itself as a regional energy hub, projecting power across the region while deepening its alliances with Western-backed Gulf states. At the same time, the extraction and export of gas – often from Palestinian waters – reinforce Israel’s colonial domination and resource theft, exacerbating Palestinian dispossession. Similar normalisation deals over gas have been signed with Jordan and Egypt. These partnerships strengthen Israel’s regional influence, as gas exports flow through pipelines and maritime routes that are heavily securitised and militarised.

Disrupting these industries — whether through blocking weapons shipments, targeting fossil fuel flows, or challenging the financial backers of militarisation — provides a tangible path to undermining and dismantling the infrastructure of settler-colonialism and genocide.

Tracing these arms shipments and energy flows, however, is a deeply challenging task. These supply chains are intentionally opaque, and corporations often rely on complex, hidden networks to avoid accountability. It also comes with tension. There is an urgent need for swift action to halt the ongoing genocide, but meaningful and strategic interventions often require extensive research, organising and coalition-building.

The genocide has awoken a new generation to the horrors of settler-colonial violence, assisted by US imperialism. How can we sustain this movement? What are the most strategic avenues for resistance and solidarity?

International solidarity for Palestine has reached an extraordinary level of support in recent months, with mass protests erupting across cities worldwide, demonstrating a growing global recognition of the urgency of the Palestinian struggle for justice, liberation and return. Yet, while these demonstrations have been powerful, the challenge now is to channel this widespread outrage and solidarity into organised, sustained action that can create real, lasting change for Palestine. To do so, we must move beyond the surge of mass rallies (which are important in their own right) and focus on building infrastructure for long-term, strategic organising. One way to deepen this movement is by focusing on labour solidarity, particularly through organising in workplaces to ensure that every space ends all forms of complicity with Israel.

In recent calls from Palestinian unions, workers have been urged to stop arming Israel by refusing to handle goods and military equipment bound for the Israeli regime. This demand represents a key turning point in the solidarity movement, where the fight for Palestinian liberation is being linked directly to the power of labour to disrupt systems of oppression. International unions have already started to take action, from dock workers in Barcelona and Italy blocking shipments to arms factories in Canada and the UK being shut down. These actions show that when workers take a stand, they can meaningfully challenge the industries fuelling Israel’s settler-colonial project.

This worker-led approach also brings with it the potential to revitalise trade unions themselves, shifting their focus away from merely symbolic actions. For example, while motions passed in trade unions supporting Palestine are important, they seldom come with actionable demands. To truly build power, these motions must evolve into rank-and-file organising, education and outreach that can lead to workers blocking shipments, disrupting production lines, or engaging in broader boycotts of companies complicit in the Israeli genocide. It requires a shift from symbolic gestures to taking concrete steps to halt the systems supporting Israel’s violence.

Building workers’ power requires a deep, strategic approach, one that focuses on long-term education and solidarity. Palestinian unions have emphasised the importance of engaging rank-and-file workers in political education, helping them understand the connection between their labour and the systems of oppression that perpetuate the violence in Gaza. Many trade unionists are new to the Palestinian struggle, and not every activist is well-versed in the history of Israeli settler-colonialism. Therefore, it’s crucial to create spaces for education, and solidarity-building that focus on the here and now, but also on how to build sustainable, worker-led movements that can continue to push for justice beyond the immediate moment.

The history of labour internationalism offers a valuable framework here. Just as workers around the world played a decisive role in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa or in supporting liberation movements in Chile and Ethiopia, the global trade union movement has an opportunity to build a similar legacy of solidarity with Palestine. Workers have always been at the forefront of challenging imperialism, and it’s clear that they can play a transformative role in this struggle. The history of successful worker-led struggles teaches us that building lasting solidarity takes time, but it also has the potential to fundamentally shift the balance of power, not just to end Israel’s military occupation but also the broader systems of oppression that sustain it.

• 1

  The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and 1995 and officially known as the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, were a set of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). They created the Palestinian Authority (PA) to administer parts of the West Bank and Gaza and set out a phased approach toward a two-state solution. In practice, the Oslo Accords entrenched Israeli control by fragmenting Palestinian territories, deepening economic dependency, and deferring key issues such as the right of return of Palestinian refugees, borders, and illegal settlements to an indefinite "final status" negotiation. The Oslo Accords functioned primarily as a mechanism to manage the Palestinian population by delegating day-to-day administrative responsibilities and security to the Palestinian Authority. This arrangement allowed Israel to maintain control over critical aspects of Palestinian life — such as borders, security, and resources — while sidestepping any meaningful recognition of Palestinian rights or self-determination.

• 2

  The Abraham Accords, formalised in 2020, are a series of normalisation agreements brokered by the United States between Israel and several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and later Sudan. Framed as a step toward regional peace, the accords aim to integrate Israel into the Middle East’s political and economic frameworks while sidelining the Palestinian cause. By prioritising economic cooperation and security alliances—particularly against perceived regional adversaries like Iran—the accords represent a geopolitical reconfiguration that legitimises Israel’s settler-colonial project. They further entrench systems of domination by normalising Israel’s occupation and erasing Palestinian rights from the regional agenda.

 

Palestinians Reject Trump’s Vision of Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza

Palestinians returning to their homes in northern Gaza are finding nothing but piles of rubble. But residents who spoke to Mondoweiss said they would not trade it for Donald Trump’s plan to resettle them outside Palestine.

By Tareq S. Hajjaj

February 5, 2025

Source: Mondoweiss

Palestinians inspect the rubble of destroyed buildings in Gaza City, on February 3, 2025. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)

On Monday, President Donald Trump told reporters that the U.S. would take over Gaza and permanently relocate its Palestinian residents to neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man responsible for Gaza’s devastation, sat beside him and grinned as Trump answered a reporter about whether Palestinians would be allowed to return: “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.”  

But after 15 months of displacement, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have already made their long-awaited return to their homes in northern Gaza. Most of them had only rubble to go back to, but they insisted on making the long trek on foot, many of them vowing never to leave again. Residents arriving in the north told Mondoweiss they were fully aware that barely any structure remained intact in northern Gaza and expected to enter into a new chapter of suffering. They also said that they would not trade what remained of their homes for anything Trump had to offer.

“The clear goal of this war is to make as many Palestinians as possible in Gaza homeless, because this destruction is deliberate and planned,” Alaa Subaih, a resident of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, told Mondoweiss. “The aim is to make us suffer from lack of shelter so that we leave our country and move.”

In direct response to Trump’s statements, Subaih said, “Even if this land is hell, it is my land. I do not want to live elsewhere. I returned to revive and rebuild it.”

“If the American president wants to help Israel, the best solution for him is to take all the Israelis to his country, America, not to transfer the owners of the land. We are attached to our land and will not go to any other country. Our country, Palestine, is the most beautiful country on earth,” Subaih added.

‘They returned us to Gaza, but they did not return Gaza to us’

In al-Shuja’iyya, residents are cut off from electricity, water, sewage, and internet lines. Most families have to walk over half a kilometer carrying empty plastic gallons so that they can fill them up at the nearest water supply point, as water trucks cannot reach most areas that have not been cleared of rubble.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, which previously announced that the Gaza Strip was classified as a disaster area, the Israeli occupation is delaying the implementation of the agreed-upon stipulations of the ceasefire that would see the influx of aid and humanitarian relief to Gaza as part of the ongoing first phase of the ceasefire agreement.

The statement also provided an overview of the scale of the destruction Israel caused in Gaza over the past 15 months, stating that 450,000 housing units were damaged or destroyed — 170,000 of them were “completely destroyed,” 80,000 were “severely damaged,” and 200,000 were “partially damaged.”

“This is not a livable city,” Subaih said after spending nearly a week camped out beside the destroyed remains of his house. “It’s just heaps upon heaps of rubble. We can’t get any basic necessities; there is no water, no housing. It’s as if the war only ended to open a new one.”

But this doesn’t mean he wants to leave it.

“When a city is destroyed, its people return to it to rebuild; they do not leave it,” Subaih said, in response to the U.S. president’s vision for forcing Palestinians to resettle outside of Gaza. “If Trump wants to give me a castle in Egypt or Jordan, or even in America, I would not replace it with the rubble of my home,” he added. 

Despite the ubiquitous destruction, signs of life are beginning to return to the area. Near Subaih’s residence in al-Shuja’iyya is Omar al-Mukhtar Street, a once-bustling market in Gaza City adjacent to several historic sites, including the Zawiya Market, the Great Omari Mosque, and the Qaysariya Market. All of them were bombed during the war, but people have now revived these areas and cleared them of debris as best they could. The markets offer a variety of foods, such as vegetables, fruits, dairy, canned foods, and clothes. Prices are still high compared to their prewar levels, but they have begun to go down. 

Residents have also organized themselves into groups of volunteers and worked on different sections of neighborhoods to manually clear roads of the rubble. Any serious rehabilitation of Gaza’s urban spaces must await the entry of construction materials and equipment, including cement, iron, bulldozers, trucks, and fuel needed to operate them. 

Subaih said that the difficulties Gazans continue to endure deprive them of the joy of returning to their homes. Pointing to the side of the street where his home used to be and where thirty of his relatives and neighbors were killed, he said, “They returned us to Gaza, but they did not return Gaza to us.”

‘We will remain here above the rubble until we rebuild it’

In Jabalia refugee camp, residents returned to neighborhoods that were leveled entirely. Jabalia was the hardest hit by Israel’s relentless bombardment and demolition campaign throughout the implementation of what was known as the “Generals’ Plan” — the failed effort to empty north Gaza of its people during the four months before the ceasefire took effect. Like in Gaza City, families in Jabalia have already begun to remove the rubble and set up camp beside their destroyed homes.

Sanaa Mousa, 29, returned to her home in Jabalia after being displaced to Gaza City for the past four months. The residential block she lived in was completely blown up.

“This massive destruction is meant to force us to leave our country,” Mousa told Mondoweiss. “But we will overcome. We’ll recover and rebuild our homes and celebrate our survival. We’re staying here on our land.”

Mousa and her family tried to find shelter upon their return, but there was no standing structure they could use in the area. This prompted the family to set up a makeshift tent out of nylon tarps, which has become a common sight in Gaza as people camp beside their destroyed homes.

“Life is difficult,” Mousa explained. “We cannot get the minimum requirements for survival and safety. There are no hospitals. Some food is available in the market, but we do not know where and how to cook it. There is nothing here; we cannot get water, and there is no sewage drainage. It is a difficult life, but we will get through it.”

In response to Trump’s comments, Mousa said that she endured all manner of suffering just to be able to return to her home. “It was the happiest moment of my life, even if my home was destroyed,” she said, adding that she wanted to embrace every grain of sand in Jabalia. She added that Trump wasn’t the first Westerner with no connection to the land to try to decide its people’s fate. “It’s like the Balfour Declaration,” she explains. “Trump wants to uproot us for the sake of an occupier.”

But Mousa believes that no such plan will succeed. “We will remain here above the rubble until we rebuild it,” she says. “Nothing worse can happen than the war of extermination we have already experienced, and even it did not succeed in removing us from our land.”

“If they offered me an entire city instead of the rubble of my home, I would not accept it,” Mousa added emphatically. “Homelands cannot be replaced. Homelands are like your blood and soul…Palestine is our land and our country, and we will not leave it under any pressure or plans.”