NOVEMBER 11, ARMISTICE DAY 

Honor Veterans by Ending Wars

by Jonathan Grotefendt | Nov 11, 2025 | ANTIWAR.COM

One of my family’s favorite regular getaways is Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. The roller coasters are top notch, the shows are fun, and everyone is in a constant state of joy; it’s great. It’s also a veteran’s hangout. Every day when the park opens they honor all the veterans. We line up, march to the flag pole, and salute as we sing the anthem and say the pledge of allegiance. (I normally explain to people that the pledge is big-government socialist propaganda written by someone to the left of Bernie Sanders, but I make an exception for Silver Dollar City). I’ve even been the one to carry and raise the flag. It’s always nostalgic and fun to talk with other veterans, especially since I’m often the youngest one there.

One fun-filled day I had just finished a coaster with one of my daughters when we had to run from some rain. My wife and kids ran indoors to get out of the rain and grab some lunch as I spotted a scruffy guy with a submarine hat. I knew from the submarine number on his hat it was an old boat. I struck up a conversation, motioned to my own hat, told him I was a nuke electrician, and asked him what he did. He told me how he mostly loved his time as a submariner, and even somehow got to work on “pig boat” for a while – the very old diesel submarines characterized by their relatively short but fat shape. I don’t remember his original navy job, but he was also a diver. Navy divers come from a proud tradition, of course. He told me about their mine-sweeping operations in the rivers of Vietnam, and how he’d often volunteer to stand watch topside so that his buddies could take liberty. He liked the fresh air and dark nights. That is, until he didn’t anymore.

Where they were, sabotage was a rare, but realistic threat. So, they had to stay vigilant. Like any foreign war, this task is often challenging because you’re surrounded by civilians just trying to get by in the midst of war. In this area, people would come to the waterfront and collect plastic trash where the currents would pool heaps of it together. One night, he saw someone come up to the edge of the sub. They ignored his yelling, commands, and even warning shots.

He ended up killing a 12-year-old girl. Then, he said soberly, “They even gave me an award for it.”

As the rain continued to drizzle on us he said, “So I put a shotgun in my mouth.”

I missed a few of the following details, but I wasn’t about to ask him to tell it again.

Seeing the pain in his eyes cut me to the heart. “I’m so sorry that happened to you” and after a pause I said, “I’m pretty anti-war.”

“Me too” he replied solemnly.

Even before that moment, him and his buddies knew the war was pointless, but being away from the shooting and knowing there was nothing they could do about it, they made the most of it and didn’t complain. Of course, this changed everything.

He told me that many people didn’t support veterans the way they do today, even though the wars are just as stupid. Nonetheless, he took his honorable discharge and new lifetime pension and decided to do something honorable with it. He went to DC, wore his dress blues (he laughed about how against the rules it was) and protested the hell out of the war till the very end.

Like him, I was relatively safe tucked away on a submarine hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean. Although we were never shot at, the Navy often really sucked. Since my enlistment has ended, I’ve known multiple vets or active-duty sailors who have killed themselves. Sometimes people suggest that if we all just care hard enough, wear ribbons, or change the borders on our Facebook photos that fewer Veterans might kill themselves. The numbers are insane: The VA says around 20 veterans and active duty servicemembers kill themselves every single day; but another exhaustive 4-year-long study shows that an alarming number of suicides don’t get reported as veterans, so the number for veterans alone is most likely closer to 24 a day.

Sure, a large piece of this can be chalked up to how stressful military life is and how difficult it can be for many servicemembers to transition to the normal world again, but many of us are convinced that one of the largest factors is the overall culture and the sense of waste and futility in “the system” and the missions. Both externally and inside the military, many have little faith in the leadership at the top and the missions they generate. This includes military and political leadership.

I want to be very clear: in the Navy we knew what we were signing up for: deployments, impossibly long-hours, sleepless nights, and incredibly demanding challenges. When it was necessary for the mission, we gave it our all and did it with pride. Honestly, I loved a lot of it. Operating a mobile nuclear power plant underwater is pretty cool. What did bother us though, was when “the suck” was so clearly unnecessary or politically motivated. How much more frustrating and depressing would it be to be sent across the globe to a desert, told to “win hearts and minds” and told to build a foreign government while blowing things up and shooting at people in a country known as “the graveyard of empires”? We spent 20 years replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. It was clearly a futile, impossible task–a fool’s errand. Our leaders intentionally lied to us the whole time to keep it going. To top it off, soldiers couldn’t even really explain why they were there to their loved ones.

Missions void of clear goals still exist all over the world. Imagine being stationed in Somalia. Did you know we’ve bombed Somalia nearly 90 times this year already? I haven’t heard a single word in the mainstream press about Somalia. We’ve been in Somalia since 2001, and before that we were there from 1992 to 1994. Can you explain Somalia? Do you know who we’re bombing and why? I wonder how many soldiers have felt like the Medal of Honor recipient, Retired Major General Smedley Butler who wrote “War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

Yet, when loss of life comes at the hands of the state, it seems many people don’t even blink. The state gets to get away with murder. Right now, we’re blowing up speed boats off the coast of a South American country because they might have drugs in them, as if these speed boats are about to cross 2000 miles of open ocean and sell drugs to kids on South Padre Island or Miami. Even if we suspect someone is selling drugs in our hometown now, the cops don’t get to go up to them and shoot them in the head without warning! It’s so obviously murder by any definition, even if there were drugs in the boats. The ethics don’t change just because it’s on the ocean far away. And yes, it was wrong when Obama and Biden did it, too.

This brings me back to the conversation with the old submariner. His words have stuck with me, not because of the horror he described – though that would haunt anyone – but because of what it revealed about the system that sent him there in the first place. He wasn’t broken by the enemy; he was broken by the mission. He did everything his country asked of him, and it still left him shattered.

And we’re still doing it.

We’re still creating veterans who will come home hollowed out by the same kind of futility. The details change, the geography changes, the justifications change – but the result is always the same: young men and women return from foreign lands with invisible wounds, told to be proud of serving their country in a war no one can explain and no one expected to win.

And we don’t just do it to our veterans, we do it to the veterans of our proxies.

Here’s another hard truth: you’re not supporting Ukrainian warriors by cheering on an unwinnable war. Not only are the Russians steadily advancing, but the demographics are horrifying.

According to Ukraine’s own Prosecutor General’s Office, more than 250,000 men have been charged with desertion since the war began–more than a quarter of a million! Their own media report on the bleak truth that they continue to experience a manpower crisis on the front, and that their soldiers suffer from exceedingly low morale. Furthermore, western mainstream media have completely ignored the absolutely brutal conscription practices going on in Ukraine. Men regularly get ripped off the street and shoved into vans or short busses. Hours upon hours of footage, often from a loved one’s cell phone, exists of this “busification” of Ukrainian men, often with their wives screaming in horror and trying to fight the gang of “recruiters” in vain. There are more than a handful of stories of Ukrainian conscripts even getting killed in the process.

Nothing says “defending freedom” more than beating the crap out of your citizens, tossing them into vans, and then forcing them to the front after hardly any training–all against their will. And yes, there are plenty of examples of men receiving very little training and then not even being told where they’re going. This piece from the Kyiv Independent tells the story of 37-year-old Vitalii Yalovyi who injured his leg during basic training. Instead of receiving an MRI, was bused into the disastrous, failed Kursk offensive. Even after telling his commanders about his injury and lack of training, he was forced to the front where his team was overrun. After making peace with his death, he was found by another retreating team who took him back to Ukraine. The same piece admits that over a dozen officers on the front have told them they regularly receive conscripts who fight as if they’ve never been trained, and that new recruits are often killed or wounded in the first weeks.

None of this is “Russian propaganda”, it’s literally all from Ukrainian or mainstream sources, so we can imagine the full reality of the situation is even more bleak. And even if we’re trying to be democratic about this, 69% of Ukrainians now say they favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible. That’s a supermajority by anyone’s count.

Once again, they’re lying from start to finish. The West provoked this war and they knew Ukraine never stood a chance.

So, if we want to honor veterans, we must end the next war before it starts. We’re not supporting American troops by calling for new wars or prolonging old ones. Supporting war veterans means refusing to create new ones completely unnecessarily. That’s what “support our troops” should mean. It means demanding peace before the next generation of kids learns what a prosthetic limb feels like. It means refusing to send them to fight for a contractor’s balance sheet. It means acknowledging that the “good intentions” of the war makers always seem to come wrapped in lies, lobbyist money, and flag-draped coffins.

The good news is that more people are waking up to it. The old narratives don’t work anymore. The slogans are wearing thin. We’ve spent decades hearing that every intervention is “for democracy,” every bombing “for peace,” and every proxy war “for freedom.” It’s so clear: The War Party is out of ideological ammunition.

They’ve run out of excuses.

Now, when people ask “why are we doing this?” – there is no coherent answer left. Only reflexive slogans and moral panic. And when the talking heads start waving the flag and calling anyone who questions the next war a traitor, the truth is, they’re terrified – because more Americans than ever are starting to see through the racket.

The empire has lost the plot.

This Veterans Day, don’t just thank a veteran – listen to one. Hear the pain, the exhaustion, the disillusionment that war leaves behind. We’ll always have men and women willing to serve. The best way to honor them is to ensure their courage is never wasted in another senseless war.

Jonathan Grotefendt was a 1st Class Petty Officer, Nuclear-Trained Electrician’s Mate on the USS Nevada, an Ohio-Class Submarine. After his 6 years in the Navy, he moved his family to Central Texas where they built a house and homeschool their 4 beautiful children. You can read his other pieces here, here, and here.

Will the Taiwan Issue Stay Quiet During Trump’s Term?



by Ted Galen Carpenter | Nov 11, 2025 | ANTIWAR.COM


President Trump professed to be extremely pleased with the results of his recent summit meeting with Xi Jinping in South Korea. Indeed, with his typical hyperbole, he rated it “a 12 out of 10.” Trump expressed special satisfaction with the conclusion of new trade agreements that significantly eased bilateral economic tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In what amounted to a casual comment, he also stated that he had received a pledge from Xi that the PRC would not take any military action to change Taiwan’s political status during the remainder of Trump’s term. Interestingly, neither the U.S. nor PRC documents summarizing the summit indicated that the Taiwan issue was discussed at all – a very surprising omission given the usual importance of the topic.

More-neutral observers were less overwhelmed by the summit’s results. Critics contended that the economic agreements amounted to little more than a temporary cease fire in the tariff wars that had raged between the two countries since Trump took office in January 2025. The new steps largely restored the status quo ante, with tariff rates mostly returning to the levels that existed before all the recent posturing and blustering by Washington and Beijing.

Trump’s comments about his alleged pledge from Xi are more interesting and potentially much more significant. If such a substantive “understanding” now exists between Beijing and Washington that the PRC will not take any military actions to change Taiwan’s political status, it would ease tensions in an especially volatile and dangerous global geostrategic hotspot. There are, however, some reasons to doubt Trump’s rosy interpretation. For one thing, the alleged pledge would be a sharp change in Beijing’s rhetoric and conduct for the past several years.

The PRC sought to strangle Taiwan in the global diplomatic arena throughout the 8-year tenure of former Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. In response to vigorous lobbying campaigns by Beijing that combined roughly equal amounts of bribery and threats, 10 of the 22 small nations that still maintained diplomatic relations with Taipei when Tsai took office in 2016 switched ties to Beijing. The attempted intimidation, coercion, and isolation of Taiwan occurred not only on the diplomatic front, however. Beijing also sharply increased the number and scope of its military exercises in the vicinity of Taiwan.

Both trends have grown more pronounced under Tsai’s successor, Lai Ching-te (William Lai) since he took office in May 2024. The PRC’s menacing military maneuvers are especially noticeable. Beijing dislikes Lai even more intensely than it did Tsai. She was a member of the “light green” (more restrained and pragmatic) faction of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Lai unsubtly favors the goal of formal independence that the “deep green” faction pursues. His confrontational course seems aimed at securing eventual international recognition of Taiwan’s (currently de facto) independence and a firm commitment from the United States and its allies to defend Taiwan from PRC coercion.

Lai also is waging a bitter internal political war with the more moderate Kuomintang Party, which favors a decidedly softer, less confrontational policy for dealing with Beijing. The DPP and its rival have both adopted highly questionable tactics to undermine the other. It is an increasingly tense political environment with Lai holding the presidency but a KMT-led coalition controlling the legislative branch. In July, 2025, voters rejected an effort by Lai to purge targeted opposition legislators through an unprecedented recall vote.

Lyle Goldstein, a prominent scholar on East Asia issues and Director of the Asia Program at Defense Priorities, voices deep concern about Lai’s goals and temperament. “Instead of taking a low profile and playing down any claims to Taiwan’s independent status like his more cautious DPP predecessor Tsai Ing-wen, Lai has lurched toward formal independence with a succession of speeches making the case for Taiwanese nationhood.” Indeed, Lai devoted nearly all of his initial national address to making the case for Taiwan’s right to sovereignty. As one prominent Taiwanese columnist noted: “Never before has a Taiwanese president devoted an entire speech to laying out clearly, point-by-point and unequivocally how Taiwan is unquestionably a sovereign nation.”

Even if Xi and Trump are sincere about wanting to take the Taiwan issue off the front burner, it is crucial to remember that other players also are involved. Lai Ching-te is perhaps the most important, and he is definitely the most disruptive.

Indeed, it is imperative to remember that support for Taiwan’s defense is powerful and thoroughly bipartisan in Congress and throughout the political and foreign policy communities in the United States. Trump and Xi may wish to avoid a crisis, but Lai and his hardline supporters have every incentive to push the envelope regarding formal independence for Taiwan. The PRC certainly has military options for challenging such a move. Although an outright invasion is unlikely given the excessive risk of triggering a full-scale war with the United States, more limited measures are possible. Beijing could impose a partial or total naval blockade on Taiwan, daring Washington and its allies to try to break that blockade. The PRC could seize one or more of the small islands in the South China Sea that Taipei claims as its own territory. An alternative would be to seize the small islands of Kinmen and Matsu lying just a few miles off of the PRC coast. Either assault would send an emphatic warning to the Lai government and put Washington in the delicate position of deciding whether it wanted to confront China militarily over such meager, largely symbolic, stakes.

Given the strong, pervasive support for democratic Taiwan in the United States, it would be foolhardy merely to assume that Washington would abandon its popular client to avoid a military crisis. Lai and his supporters understand that dynamic as well. Trump and Xi probably want the Taiwan issue to remain quiescent, but it remains extremely uncertain if they will get their wish.
Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and the Libertarian Institute. He is also a contributing editor to National Security Journal and The American Conservative. He also served in various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,600 articles on defense, foreign policy and civil liberties issues. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

Tony Blair Gaslighting Gaza’s Future

By his own testimony, the former British PM Tony Blair wants nothing more than to resolve conflicts worldwide. Yet, his long interest in the Middle East is ridden with conflicts of interest and tech billionaire donors.

by Dan Steinbock | Nov 10, 2025 | 

The Quest for Gaza’s Energy, Part 3
Read part 1 here
Read part 2 here

As the U.S.-mediated ceasefire is taking hold of Gaza, the Trump administration is pushing its peace plan, which is premised on post-genocide opportunities for infrastructure and property development. In this quest, Tony Blair is the public face; Jared Kushner, the commissioner; and the Trump White House, the architect.

But the other side of the story involves gas – and former British PM’s two-decade long effort to cash on the promising deals, vis-à-vis his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) and its staff of more than 900 people who are advancing his ideas in up to 45 countries.

U.S. administrations and the role/s of Blair in Gaza

As British PM, Blair developed a fascination with the Middle East, including the Bush Jr administration’s 2003 war on Iraq. Swearing by the false allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Blair steered the UK into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis earning him a reputation as a war criminal. Ironically, in Gaza, he will oversee the “Board of Peace.”

Shaking hands with Bush after their press conference in the East Room of the White House, November 2004 – over a year after the misguided and misrepresented Iraq War

In the Middle East, Blair likes to tout his 2009 success of securing radio frequencies from Israel to allow the creation of a second Palestinian cell phone operator (while also allowing JP Morgan to profit hugely). What is left unmentioned is the reality that Israel released the frequencies in exchange for a deal from the Palestinian leadership to drop the issue at the UN of Israeli war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

This was the Gaza War of 2008-09 which served as a prelude to and early test of the Obliteration Doctrine that would account for the Gaza genocide barely two decades later.

Making Gaza safe for American capitalism

When Blair left Downing Street, he initially engaged in lucrative commercial and prestigious philanthropic activities, including advising the U.S. financial giant JP Morgan for $1 million per-year and Zurich Insurance for a six-figure salary, and PetroSaudi on how to do business in China (for a 2% commission), while serving as the Middle East peace envoy for the Quartet of the US, UN, EU and Russia.

As the lines between advising, salaries and politics grew blurry, Blair consolidated his activities in 2017 – including his Faith Foundation, Sports Foundation, Governance Initiative and Tony Blair Associates – into his Institute for Global Change.

In Blair’s view, the extraordinary level of contemporary uncertainty is today addressed by two types of politicians, “reality creators and reality managers.” He saw himself as a “reality creator.” Managing the game was not for him; dominating it, was. That was the key to success and profits.

Blair’s institute was cloned in the image of the Clinton Foundation, another equally controversial operation, initially portrayed as a quasi-philanthropic pursuit, but criticized as a shrewd revenue-machine cashing on the poorest conflict-ridden countries.

By 2022, Blair’s Institute made more than $145 million in revenue. The critics saw TBI as a lobbying organization bankrolled by billionaires and countries, controversial track-record in human rights, and an overall approach dictated by neoliberal corporate interests. Gaza was no exception.

In July, the Institute’s people reportedly participated in a controversial meeting in which post-war Gaza plans were outlined in a presentation led by Israeli businessmen. It used “financial models developed inside Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub.” Featuring plans for a Trump Riviera and an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone, the Great Trust project included a proposal to pay “half a million” Palestinians to leave Gaza, in order to attract real estate investors to the area.

The technology interests

Another side of the TBI is its great interest in technology, presumably to cut costs on the public sector and promote public good. Those efforts are dictated by indirect cash schemes, thanks to one of TBI’s biggest donors, Larry Ellison. Ellison is the co-founder of the global technology company Oracle which has a market cap of $825 billion. It has invested in the Trump administration and its Secretary of State Rubio. Reportedly, Ellison has donated or promised $300 million to Blair’s Institute.

Reimagining Technology for Government: A Conversation with Larry Ellison and Tony Blair

Digitalization of health systems and other public-sector activities is one of Blair’s pet projects and perhaps one to promote in Gaza. This interest seems to originate from the early 2020s, when Oracle bought the healthcare IT company Cerner for $28 billion.

With a secular Jewish background, Ellison has longstanding ties with Israel. Since 2017, with the first Trump administration and its Messianic Israel champions, Ellison has donated increasingly to militant causes, including $16.6 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and a controversial archaeological dig in Arab East Jerusalem. In 2019, a $1 billion lawsuit was filed against several Israel supporters, including Ellison, for conspiring to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territories, committing war crimes, and funding genocide.

In 2021 Ellison, who had previously hosted Netanyahu in his Hawaiian island, offered the Israeli PM a post at Oracle, while seeking to protect him from corruption charges.

Recently, Ellison’s son David consolidated the Hollywood studio Paramount Skydancd and once-great CBS News under his control, while installing self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. Reportedly, he also participated in an Israeli government-led plot to surveil and suppress pro-Palestine activists in the US, including targeting American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

These are the benefactors behind Tony Blair’s Institute and his role as the director of Gaza’s peace and development.

 Creating “new realities” in Gaza

The efforts to develop the Gaza Marine natural gas field have been hindered for almost three decades. With the prospects of ceasefire, these efforts are accelerating.

Irrespective of their official mandates, the “reality creators” that have already positioned themselves in the area – property developers like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, and political intermediaries, such as Tony Blair – are likely to use their current posts to cash on the Gaza opportunities in the future.

After two years of infrastructure destruction and genocidal atrocities in Gaza, the Strip is ecocide-ridden.

Haunted by a series of moral hazards and interests of conflict, Blair will be in charge of an area cleansed of armed conflict. Presumably buzzing with development, it will serve as a “special economic zone” through which foreign capital can flow. It will be overseen by his international “board of peace.”

The quasi-colonial protectorate pledges boldly in the name of “reformed Palestine” in which Palestinians have little or no say – once again.

The author of The Obliteration Doctrine (2025) and The Fall of Israel (2024), Dr Dan Steinbock, a visionary of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/

The original version of this series of commentaries was published by the Informed Comment (US) in two parts on October 16 and 17, 2025.

Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net 

War on Gaza

War and genocide

by Eric Walberg / November 10th, 2025

FOR LEASE OR SALE; KUSHNER REALTY

The struggles for Palestinian liberation and climate justice are one and the same, according to Marwan Bishara. The eastern Mediterranean is one of the most climate-vulnerable places on the planet. Whereas worldwide temperatures have increased by an average of 1.1°C since pre-industrial times, in Israel/Palestine average temperatures have risen by 1.5°C between 1950 and 2017, with a forecast increase of 4°C by the end of the century for the 400 million people living in the region.

Despite the majority of Middle East countries being signatories to the Paris Climate Accords, so far, their leaders have failed to meet the commitments made in the agreement. Moreover, oil-rich countries in the region continue to increase fossil fuel production. The United Arab Emirates chose to appoint the head of its state-run oil company as the president of the 2025 climate conference in Dubai (COP28), though even this farce pales in comparison to the hypocrisy displayed by their western counterparts. The US will be responsible for over one-third of all planned fossil fuel expansion through 2050. President Biden called climate change an ‘existential threat’ and announced the creation of a climate conservation corps at the same time as the US broke a record for oil production.

This hypocrisy perfectly mirrors the long-standing response of affluent, and powerful, western nations to the Palestinian tragedy, which spout words of protest but continue to provide arms and fuel to the genocidaires. On climate change, they came up with deceptive concepts like carbon offset and carbon credit to evade meaningful action and a just, swift transition to renewable energy. On Palestine, they devised unworkable peace plans that only serve to deepen Palestinian oppression. Under President Trump this willful destruction of the environment will get far worse, as he denies there is any climate crisis at all, and chants ‘Drill, drill, drill’. On Palestine, Trump follows the will of Netanyahu, demanding the complete disarmament of Hamas, the surrender of the Palestinians’ legitimate resistance to occupation.

US hegemony rests on two key pillars in the region and beyond. First, Israel as a Euro-American settler colony, which is an advanced imperialist outpost in the so-called Middle East. Israel is the number one ally of the United States and maintains US hegemony in the region and control of its vast oil resources. The second pillar is the reactionary oil-rich Gulf monarchies. The Palestinian cause is not merely a moral human rights issue, but is essentially a struggle against US-led imperialism and global fossil capitalism, i.e., a vital link in the struggle to save the planet. There can be no climate justice, no just transition to a way of life which doesn’t lead to an end to life, without dismantling the racist settler-colonial state of Israel.

Blowback from Israel’s erasure of Palestine

Equally cynical is Israel’s routine confiscation of Palestinian lands under the pretext of environmental conservation. This tactic, known as green colonialism, exposes Israel’s use of environmentalism to displace the indigenous population of Palestine and exploit its resources. Israeli green zones are primarily established to legitimise land seizures and prevent the return of displaced Palestinians, further entrenching a system of apartheid.

There is only one planet Earth. Today, the climate justice movement calls not only for action to mitigate climate change but also for fundamental shifts in social structures that perpetuate the environmental crisis, addressing issues of social equality, distributive justice, and control of natural resources. Israel exacerbates the climate risks facing Palestinians by denying them the right to manage their land and resources, making them more vulnerable to climate-related events.

Israel’s forest fires in recent years are all due to planting invasive species of fast-growing European trees—pines, cypresses, and eucalyptus—that overwrite Palestine’s identity. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) placed blue donation boxes in Jewish homes worldwide, collecting money to buy land (for the Jewish National Fund, which sell only to Jews) and plant these alien trees—claiming it was planting forests on “barren, desolate lands.”After the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist forces destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages, the JNF planted forests atop the ruins. Pine trees now grow where homes once stood in Al-Qabo, Allar, and Ein Karem.

These forests are green graves, hiding erased villages and blocking refugees from returning. Fast-growing European pines, covering 40% of JNF lands, are ecological time bombs. Their oily needles ignite easily, fueling wildfires. Native olives and carobs—trees that Palestinians nurtured for generations—make up just 5% of JNF plots. This is not conservation. It is conquest, replacing resilient ecosystems with flammable monocultures. The aim is to efface all traces of Palestinian existence, and without concern for the environmental effects. It is ecocide, and utterly criminal.

In the Naqab desert, the Yatir Forest—funded by overseas donors—displaces Bedouin communities under the lie of fighting desertification. Meanwhile, vineyards guzzling stolen water grow on stolen land, their wine marketed as a revival of ancient Judean roots. The truth? They are symbols of colonial theft, draining Palestinian wells dry.

Even nature reserves serve the occupation. Israel bars Palestinians from farming on 70,000 hectares of ‘protected’ land, while settlers build roads and parks. Bulldozers clear olive trees to create ‘buffer zones’ for settler highways. This is not conservation. It is erasure, disguised as environmentalism.

Some of the key issues

* water, wastewater, and hygiene. Even before 2023, Palestinians in Gaza were restricted to water consumption levels well below the recommended minimum. The World Health Organization recommends 100 liters of water per day per person, yet, before the most recent war, Palestinians in Gaza had access to only 83 liters per day because of the occupation-driven lack of control over their own water resources. Under the current genocidal regime, this means close to no water at all. Even before the 2023 invasion of Gaza, Israel was denying spare parts for sanitation infrastructure. All sanitation facilities have been destroyed in Gaza. As a result, some tens of thousands of cubic meters of sewage are seeping into groundwater and flowing into the Mediterranean Sea every day—resources that are used by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Settlers use 6x as much water as Palestinians on the West Bank.

* chemical and debris contamination from bombings; The debris situation in Gaza is unprecedented in several ways including: i) the extent of damage to the housing stock; ii) its geographic spread and spatial density across almost the entire territory of the Gaza Strip; iii) the quantity of debris generated; iv) the rate at which debris is being generated; and v) the expected extremely high levels of UXO [unexploded ordnance, i.e., military ammunition or explosive that failed to explode] contamination.

Previous attacks involving munitions containing heavy metals, asbestos, and other hazardous materials have already contaminated the soil with high concentrations of cobalt and other metals.36 The bombing and use of bulldozers disrupted soil layers and burned (with temperatures of explosions as high as 2000°C), deteriorated, scattered, or completely destroyed the soil (including soil microorganisms). UNEP estimates that the approximately 40 million tons of debris will take 15 years to clear. Much of the land is poisoned and unusable for agriculture.

* noise pollution; with an average of 1 bomb dropped every 10 minutes in Gaza, continuous drone and jet flights, rockets, bombardment from tanks and ships, and other military activities was noted to result in more than double the allowable limit which is the allowable limit for short periods [of 8 hours] not for months.

* food insecurity; Most of Gaza’s remaining trees, including olive, pomegranate, and citrus orchards—essential not only for food and income but also for air purification and shade—have been completely uprooted. Cutting down olive trees is rampant now in the West Bank.

* traumatic impacts of targeted environmental destruction. 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed in 1948, and millions of olive trees since then—some centuries old—bulldozed or burned. Settlers attack farmers during harvests, turning groves into war zones. This planned genocide is comparable to the genocide against natives an the buffalo slaughter in North America. This loss of connection to land and previous and future generations through olive trees is a traumatic experience, expressed in Palestinian literature and art. For example, Khaled Baraka, a 65-year-old Palestinian who was forced to flee his home, shared his anguish: These trees lived through my moments of joy and sadness. They know my secrets. When I was sad and worried, I would talk to the trees, take care of them … but the war killed those trees.

The whole world suffers

Palestinian climate activists fear that cooperation could be misinterpreted as normalizing relations before the conflict is resolved. It is a situation that Majdalani, of EcoPeace, has frequently faced in her own activism. There’s this pervasive sense of ‘we don’t cooperate with the occupier, it’s not the right political environment.’ But if we wait for the ‘right’ political environment, we will lose more land. We will have more people suffering water shortages, more farmers leaving their farms, and the crisis will continue. Unless something changes, all this is moot for Palestinians, as Greater Israel means they will most likely cease to exist, either through murder, starvation or deportation, and Israel will face all these problems without the people who actually love the land and would work most ‘fanatically’ to heal it. Israelis will use their foreign passports to escape the Hell they have created, leaving Israel to hardcore pseudo-religious fascists, a pariah state spreading its sickness, its poison across the world.

Yes, the world. Genocide of Palestinians is a dress rehearsal for the collective West’s future treatment of climate refugees, argues Hamza Hamouchene, the North Africa programme coordinator at the Transnational Institute. Colombian President Gustavo Petro: genocide and barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the South because of the climate crisis. What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future.

In the first two months of the genocide in Palestine alone, the CO2 emissions by Israel were greater than the annual emissions of more than 20 nations in the global South…. Half of those emissions are due to the transport and shipping of weaponry by the United States, which shows the deep complicity in genocide and ecocide in that part of the world, and how even the high seas are not immune from Israeli crimes.

Clearly, what is necessary now is implementation of the grassroots world campaign Boycott, Divest, Sanction and an energy embargo of Israel. Colombia has shown the way when they stopped the export of coal to Israel and more recently banned all trade with Israel and expelled all Israeli diplomats. We need the same thing from South Africa. We need the same thing from Brazil, who provides around 10% of crude oil to Israel. We need the same thing from Nigeria, from Gabon, Russia and Azerbaijan that still provide fossil fuels that are being used to massacre Palestinians—to fuel genocide, displacement, to fuel infrastructure of dispossession, to fuel the F35 bombers and AI infrastructure that kills Palestinians every day.

Petro:

Why have large carbon-consuming countries allowed the systematic murder of thousands of children in Gaza? Because Hitler has already entered their homes and they are getting ready to defend their high levels of carbon consumption and reject the exodus it causes. We can then see the future: the breakdown of democracy, the end, and the barbarism unleashed against our people, the people who do not emit CO2, the poor people.

It is not just a genocide. A lot of analysts and researchers have been coming up with terms such as urbicide, domicide, epistemicide, ecocide. How about holocide, which means the utter destruction of the social and ecological fabric of life in Palestine?

Asad Rehman from War on Want and Friends of the Earth: We’re seeing now also the same ‘walls and fences’ narrative that Israel has used in terms of the West Bank and Gaza and Palestine, now being exported all over the world… the same technologies are being transplanted all around the world. And already Israel is saying, ‘This is battle-tested weaponry. This is battle-tested surveillance’ and already… selling it to some of ‘our’ despotic regimes. That’s why we need a new internationalism, with the trade union movement at the forefront of building and rebuilding a global anti-apartheid movement.

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

Statehood = Self-determination = No Outside Interference

by Stuart Littlewood / November 10th, 2025

But Trump, Kushner, Witkoff, Blair just don’t get it. And neither do those world leaders who signed up to Trump’s phony ‘Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity’.

Last week a Conservative MP in Westminster submitted a string of written Parliamentary questions about the UK’s recognition of Palestinian statehood:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether she plans to withdraw recognition of the State of Palestine in the event that Hamas break any conditions of that recognition.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether the UK will support Palestinian membership of the United Nations, in the context of UK recognition of the State of Palestine.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether she made the proscription of Hamas by the Government of the State of Palestine a condition of UK recognition.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what her Department’s policy is on the status of East Jerusalem, in the context of the UK’s recognition of the State of Palestine.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether she made continued access for Jewish and Christian communities to holy sites in the State of Palestine a condition of UK recognition.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, if she will make an assessment of the level of (a) human rights and (b) democracy in the State of Palestine.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether she has made free and fair elections a condition of the UK’s recognition of the State of Palestine.

They didn’t sound at all Palestine-friendly to me. On the other hand they may have been cleverly drafted to trap the Secretary of State, but that seems unlikely as the MP was not among the 84 parliamentarians who signed the letter calling for sanctions against Israel on the first anniversary of a landmark ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) is “unlawful” and must end “as rapidly as possible”.

And he misses the essential point. Palestinian freedom and self-determination are non-negotiable. It’s a basic right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel, the US or the UK agreeing to it. In short, statehood must not come with conditions attached. So what was the motive behind this MP’s largely irrelevant questions? To inflict even more anxiety on a people who have suffered unspeakable cruelty and injustice not just for the last 2 years but the last 7 decades, and now face extermination by their tormentor while the vultures gather for the rich pickings from their devastated homeland? Or was he just making mischief along with the countless others who should know better?

He is surely aware that a team of 28 independent human rights experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council have warned that any peace plan must absolutely safeguard the human rights of Palestinians, and not create further conditions of oppression. They also advise that key elements of Trump’s so-called peace plan are inconsistent with fundamental rules of international law and the 2024 Advisory Opinion of the ICJ which demands that Israel ends its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The experts’ warnings include the following:

Any peace plan must respect the ground rules of international law. The future of Palestine must be in the hands of the Palestinian people – not imposed in circumstances of extreme duress by outsiders (Trump please note).

The Trump plan does not guarantee the Palestinian right of self-determination as international law requires; and vague pre-conditions put Palestine’s future at the mercy of decisions by outsiders, not in the hands of Palestinians as international law commands.

The ICJ has ruled that fulfilling the right of self-determination cannot be conditional on negotiations.

The “temporary transitional government” is not representative of Palestinians and even excludes the Palestinian Authority, which further violates self-determination and lacks legitimacy.

Who governs is a matter for the Palestinians only, without foreign interference.

An “International Stabilisation Force”, outside the control of the Palestinian people and the United Nations as a guarantor, would be contrary to Palestinian self-determination.

The plan largely treats Gaza in isolation from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, when these areas must be regarded as a unified Palestinian territory and State.

The plan omits any duty on Israel and those who have sustained its illegal attacks in Gaza to compensate Palestinians for illegal war damage.

The plan does not address other fundamental issues such as ending illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, borders, compensation, and refugees.

The plan does not provide a leading role for the UN General Assembly or Security Council, or for UNRWA which is vital to assisting and protecting Palestinians.

The ICJ has been crystal clear: Conditions cannot be placed on the Palestinian right of self-determination. The Israeli occupation must end immediately, totally and unconditionally, with due reparation made to the Palestinians.

The United Nations – not Israel or its closest ally – has been identified by the ICJ as the legitimate authority to oversee the end of the occupation and the transition towards a political solution in which the Palestinians’ right of self-determination is fully realised.

The full list of objections can be found on the UN’s website.

We’re told the MP is a barrister specialising in ethics and compliance. So you’d expect him to know about UN Resolution 37/43 which comprehensively re-affirms previous resolutions and treaties on the universal right to self-determination and the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and all peoples still under foreign domination and alien subjugation – such as the Palestinians. It is hoped he is mindful that Palestinians have been kept waiting for over 100 years for this.

What’s more, 37/43 considers that denying the Palestinian people their inalienable rights to self-determination, sovereignty, independence and return to Palestine, and the repeated acts of aggression by Israel against the peoples of the region, constitute a serious threat to international peace and security.

And, by the way, 37/43 gives Palestinians an unquestionable right, in their struggle for liberation, to “eliminate the threat posed by Israel by all available means including armed struggle”. As China reminded everyone at the ICJ, “armed resistance against occupation is enshrined in international law and is not terrorism”. So who are Trump, Netanyahu and Starmer to insist Palestinians disarm when their neighbour has been illegally occupying them for nearly 78 years and continues genociding them (with US-UK support) as we speak?

As for the MP’s point about “free and fair elections”, there have been no elections to the Palestinian Authority since 2006. As everyone surely knows by now, Hamas won fair and square on that last occasion under the scrutiny of international observers, a result that didn’t suit the Israel-US-UK axis or the ruling Fatah faction. President Mahmoud Abbas indefinitely postponed national elections in April 2021, stating as his reason that Israel refused to allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to participate in voting per Israel’s commitment in the Oslo Accords.

Stuart Littlewood, after working on jet fighters in the RAF, became an industrial marketing specialist. He served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and a member of the Police Authority, produced two photo-documentary books including Radio Free Palestine (with foreword by Jeff Halper), and has contributed to online news and opinion publications over many years. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

 

Nayib Bukele and the Working-Class Struggle in El Salvador

by Marlon Javier Lopez / November 10th, 2025

This article analyzes the emergence of Nayib Bukele as a political figure in El Salvador from a Marxist materialist perspective. Bukele’s ascent is the result of both the failure of capitalist neoliberalist policies and the lack of a working-class struggle instrument. The author concludes that the only alternative lies in constructing a democratic political movement to confront the authoritarian and populist discourse taking shape in El Salvador.

Like several countries around the world, El Salvador is experiencing an onslaught of extreme right-wing policies. The current government of Nayib Bukele rules the country under a crackdown, persecutes human rights defenders, concentrates power, passes bills to deepen the neoliberalist model imposed on the country, establishes a pedagogy of blind obedience to authority, and expresses its intention to grant natural resources to external companies. To understand this context, it is necessary to delve into the material forces that have shaped the economic and social landscape in El Salvador. I reject the ordinary thesis, which states that his communication apparatus can ultimately explain Bukele’s success. Without doubt, this factor plays an important role. However, it would be insufficient without the concrete and material conditions that prepared the soil for imposing a new authoritarian regimen.

These are times of sharp class struggle. After the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, the imperialist ruling class of the United States strove to impose a neoliberal model all over the world. We should make no mistake. The Soviet Union plays a vital role in Western capitalist societies, where the threat of communism served as a shield that prevented further deepening of the level of exploitation and oppression on the working classes, as ruling classes feared that they might develop anti-capitalist feelings. With the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, US imperialists got the free hand to launch the most ferocious crusade against the working class.

This is the true meaning of neoliberalism, the economic and social model promoted since the last decades of the 20th century. The neoliberal offensive intensified in the 90s and 2000s, dismantling the welfare state, privatizing basic services, and advancing labor policies aimed to ensure a more extreme level of exploitation of the working class. It was an open war waged by imperialists and the national bourgeoisie against the working class worldwide.

Salvadoran context

This depiction faithfully represents what happened in El Salvador. Ever since the nation’s foundation, this country has been characterized by a solid class structure, which gave birth to an oligarchy that during the 20th century ruled the country ruthlessly with the support of military forces and US imperialism. As a result, the Salvadoran working class rose in a popular war to overthrow this class’s rule and democratize the country. Nonetheless, the support of US imperialism to the government makes it challenging to reach this goal, and the conflict endured for twelve years.

In the early 90s, a peace agreement was signed between the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) guerrilla and the government. That former guerrilla was established as a political party from that moment, moving the struggle into the electoral stage. The national ruling class established a twofold strategy to prevent even the slightest possibility of a modest social change. On the one hand, it was about delaying an eventual government of the FMLN; on the other, taming the political party, making it an integral part of the system. The FMLN slowly adapted to the existing political circumstances and finally renounced its anti-oligarchist and anti-neoliberalist project.

In 2009, the FMLN won the electoral contest with an independent candidate, Mauricio Funes, a social democrat, who was later accused of corruption. This meant the final blow to any hope of social transformation. This way, the Salvadoran working class was betrayed, and what had until that moment been its main political instrument to resist the wave of aggressive neoliberal policies driven by imperialist and oligarchic forces was undermined.

Bukeles’ path to absolute power

Paradoxically, this occurred at the exact point when neoliberalism collapsed all over the world. Therefore, at the exact moment when more anti-neoliberal and anticapitalist sentiment were on the rise. At that very point, the FMLN capitulated to neoliberalism, consummating its betrayal, now as a tamed ruling party. Ironically, just as the party reached its highest point and surveyed the landscape from the peaks of power, everything began to crumble. What neither the traditional oligarchy nor the imperial forces could do, namely, the party destruction, Bukeles did by weaponizing it from within.

Bukele emerged as an opportunist figure from the very beginning. He became a politician affiliated with the FMLN. He grew by utilizing a communicational campaign to construct the image of a youthful, new figure capable of maintaining a distance from the very same party he was a member of. Bukele’s strategy exploited the population’s discontent with traditional political parties, which aligned with the neoliberal system and did not represent the feelings and interests of the working class. It is class struggle, therefore, that primarily explains Bukele’s success. At that time, the political balance was tipping toward the left because people were ready to support an alternative party to take them out of capitalism and their horrors. Relying on his popularity, Bukele manipulated the FMLN to nominate him as a presidential candidate. When the party refused, he precipitated his own expulsion, knowing this would put it in an advantageous position from the viewpoint of the population, who would feel identified with a figure who had just become a victim of a political system people despised.

When Bukele was expelled from his former political party, he strove to promote the image of a radical progressive politician, promoting full democratization, which includes creating an absolute horizontal social movement, as well as social policies such as taxing the wealthy, lifting the national educational budget, and even creating more public universities. He also created a new local development ministry to support abandoned communities. In its first public intervention as an independent figure, it vindicated Shafik Handal, the historic leader of FMLN and former guerrilla commander. In short, Bukele appealed to left-wing forces. My hypothesis here is that this appeal had two purposes: on the one hand, to present himself as an alternative to neoliberal politics, which people were tired of, and on the other hand, and more importantly, to attract the electoral base of the FMLN, its former party, which he aimed to destroy.

Still, from the onset, his policies were far from progressive, let alone radical. He held a sovereigntist discourse while flirting with right-wing figures like Elon Musk. Therefore, Bukele was a split figure from the very beginning. My point here is that this split should not be located in the incoherence of his figure but is a mirror of a material split, namely, class struggle: to consolidate his power, Bukele needed to appeal to the interests of the working class. Initially, this implies stealing old vindications that people have longed for decades, the same vindications raised in the civil world, namely, social justice and genuine democracy. Once Bukele consolidates his power, he could play the traditional populist game and openly embrace the neoliberal language.

There is a way out through class struggle

This analysis shows that the current political moment in El Salvador can only be understood by a materialist analysis that considers the class dynamics. Bukele’s figure emerges to fill a void, resulting from the neglect of the working class by the FMLN. Salvadoran people launched a war to democratize the country and change its class structure. Finally, after 12 long years of war and a failed democratization period, people grew tired of so-called neoliberal democracy. The post-peace agreement period was perceived as a farce. In this context, the demagogy grew, presenting itself as a different solution.

The opposition’s main problem in El Salvador is that they are limited to denouncing the dismantlement of the democratic system; they forget that democracy was never a reality for the masses. We need a force capable of seeing beyond the ideological veil of capitalism. One of the key insights of Marx’s political thought was his depiction of capitalism’s tendency toward its own disintegration. Constant economic and political crises characterize capitalism. Marx viewed the construction of a communist party as essential to advancing historical progress. A key lesson of the Communist Manifesto is that without communism, capitalist disintegration can only lead to new ways of social and moral decay. Therefore, Marxism represents the most potent instrument through which the working class can confront the crisis of capitalism and the political monstrosities generated by its decline. The only viable course is the construction of a working-class party, the organization of the masses, and a united struggle against the resurgence of fascist forces.

FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Marlon Javier Lopez has a degree in philosophy from the University of El Salvador and has been in charge of various chairs at the same university. Read other articles by Marlon.