Fascism At the Gates

By Walden Bello

July 30, 2024

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Image by Robinson Niñal Jr.

Two recent events have shattered complacency about the specter of a fascist takeover globally that a number of us have been warning about for some time now. In Europe, far-right parties scored impressive gains in the elections to the European Parliament in June. \In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and other like-minded parties got 15.9 percent of the vote, forcing the long-time second-placer Socialist Party to third place. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance gathered just 14.6% of the vote while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National) took in 31.3% of the vote. The results prompted Macron to an ill-advised decision to immediately dissolve the French Parliament and call a snap election, which resulted in a devastating first round victory for Le Pen’s party.

In the United States, President Joe Biden made a second Trump presidency come immeasurably closer with a horrible performance in a debate with Trump on June 27 that simply confirmed what most voters have discerned for some time now: that Biden is simply too old to function effectively in what is arguably the most powerful job in the world.

This has made many progressives and liberals fear that the enemy is at the gates. They are right. Gramsci depicted his times, the early decades of the 20th century as a time when “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” That line might well describe where our world is at today.

How I Got Interested in Fascism

My interest in fascism started when I went to Chile in 1972 to do field research during the presidency of Salvador Allende, which was cut short by a military coup on Sept 11, 1973. I arrived in the capital, Santiago, in the midst of the Chilean winter, greeted by tear gas and skirmishes of opposing political groups in the aftermath of a demonstration. Hauling two suitcases, I made it with great difficulty from the bus depot to the historic Hotel Claridge.

I had gone to Chile to study how the left was organizing people in the shantytowns or callampas for the socialist revolution that the Popular Unity government had initiated. A few weeks in Santiago disabused me of the impression of a revolutionary momentum that I had gathered reading about events in Chile in left-wing publications in the United States. People on the left were constantly being mobilized for marches and rallies in the center of Santiago, and increasingly, the reason for this was to counter the demonstrations mounted by the right. My friends brought me to these events, where there were an increasing number of skirmishes with right-wing thugs.

I noticed a certain defensiveness among participants in these mobilizations and a reluctance to be caught alone when leaving them, for fear of being harassed or worse by roaming bands of rightists. The revolution, it dawned on me, was on the defensive, and the right was beginning to take command of the streets. Twice I was nearly beaten up because I made the stupid mistake of observing right-wing demonstrations with El Siglo, the Communist Party newspaper, tucked prominently under my arm. Stopped by some Christian Democratic youth partisans, I said I was a Princeton University graduate student doing research on Chilean politics. They sneered and told me I was one of Allende’s “thugs” imported from Cuba. I could understand if they thought I was being provocative, with El Siglo tucked under my arm. Thankfully, the sudden arrival of a Mexican friend saved me from a beating. On the other occasion, my fleet feet did the job.

When I looked at the faces of the predominantly white right-wing crowds, many of them blond-haired, I imagined the same enraged faces at the fascist and Nazi demonstrations that took control of the streets in Italy and Germany. These were people who looked with disdain at what they called the rotos, or “broken ones,” that filled the left-wing demonstrations, people who were darker, many of them clearly of indigenous extraction.

My experience in Chile did two things to me. One, it gave me an abiding academic fascination with counterrevolutionary movements. Two, it turned me into a life-long activist with a deep loathing for the far right and instilled a commitment to fight authoritarianism and the far right. In many ways, these contradictory drives have determined my personal, political, and academic trajectories.
Is It Fascism?

Fast forward to the present. When far-right personalities and movements started popping up during the last two decades, there was, in some quarters, strong hesitation to use the “f” word to describe them. With my experience in Chile, the Philippines, and other countries behind me, I had no such qualms. This apparently was the reason I was invited by the famous Cambridge Union for a debate on the topic “This House Believes That We Are Witnessing a Global Fascist Resurgence” on April 29, 2021, where I would speak for the affirmative. Of course, a great incentive for agreeing to participate was that one of my intellectual heroes, John Maynard Keynes, had been involved in a famous Cambridge Union debate. Joining me in the debate by Zoom that evening were New York University Professor Ruth Ben Ghiat, Russian journalist Masha Gessen, staff writer for the New Yorker, the prominent historian of the Second World War Sir Richard Evans, and Isabel Hernandez and Sam Rubinstein, two Cambridge University students.

In that debate, I said that a movement or person must be regarded as fascist when they fuse the following five features: 1) they show a disdain or hatred for democratic and progressive principles and procedures; 2) they tolerate or promote violence; 3) they have a heated mass base that supports their anti-democratic thinking and behavior; 4) they scapegoat and support the persecution of certain social groups; and 5) they are led by a charismatic individual who exhibits and normalizes all of the above. It is how they fuse these five features together that accounts for the uniqueness of particular fascist leaders and movements.

Not surprisingly, Donald Trump figured prominently in that debate. And one of my main arguments was that Donald Trump and the Jan 6, 2021, insurrection showed that the distinction between “far right” and “fascist” is academic. Or one can say that a “far-rightist” is a fascist who has not yet seized power, for it is only once they are in power that fascists fully reveal their political propensities, that is, they display all of the five features mentioned above. By the way, the Cambridge audience agreed with me. The Cambridge Independent carried the news the next day that “the motion was carried with 38 votes in favour, 28 against, and 2 abstentions.” Thank god, I didn’t let Keynes down.
Fascists and Counterrevolutionaries

In my work on the right, I have used the word “counterrevolutionary” interchangeably with the word “fascist.” Here I have been greatly indebted to the great historian of counterrevolution, Arno Mayer, who distinguished between the three actors in what he called the “counterrevolutionary coalition:” reactionaries, conservatives, and counterrevolutionaries. “Reactionaries,” said Mayer, “are daunted by change and long for a return to a world of a mythical and romanticized past.” Conservatives do not make a fetish of the past, and whatever the makeup of civil and political society, their “core value is the preservation of the established order.”

Counterrevolutionaries are more interesting theoretically and more dangerous politically. They may have, like the reactionaries, illusions about a past golden age, and they share the reactonaries’ and conservatives’ “appreciation, not to say celebration, of order, tradition, hierarchy, authority, discipline, and loyalty.” But in a world of rapid flux, where the old order has become unhinged by the emergence of new political actors, “counterrevolutionaries embrace mass politics to promote their objectives, appealing to the lower orders of city and country, inflaming and manipulating their resentment of those above them, their fear of those below them, and their estrangement from the real world about them.” Counterrevolutionaries or fascists, to borrow from another great historian, Barrington Moore, seek to “make reaction popular.”

Fascism as a Global Phenomenon

The rise of fascism is a global phenomenon, one that cuts through the North-South divide.

Narendra Modi has made the secular and diverse India of Gandhi and Nehru a thing of the past with his Hindu nationalist project, which relegates the country’s large Muslim minority to second-class citizens. The parliamentary elections earlier this year returned his BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) to power, though it lost its absolute majority in the lower house. Nevertheless, there is no indication that Modi will relent in his fascist project. Currently, he is carrying out the most sustained attack on the freedom of the press since the Emergency in 1976 by putting progressive journalists in jail and bringing charges against noted writers like Arundhati Roy.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential elections to Lula da Silva by a slight margin, but his followers refused to accept the verdict, and thousands of people from the right invaded the capital Brasilia on January 8, 2023, in an attempt to overthrow the new government, in a remarkable replication of the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington.

In Hungary, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party have almost completed their neutering of democracy. Indeed, Europe is the region where fascist or radical right parties have made the most inroads. From having no radical right-wing regime in the 2000s, except occasionally and briefly as junior partners in unstable governing coalitions as in Austria, the region now has two in power—one in Hungary and the government of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. The far right is part of ruling coalitions in Sweden and Finland. The region has four more countries where a party of the far right is the main opposition party. And it has seven where the far right has become a major presence both in parliament and in the streets.

In the Philippines, I wrote two months into Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in 2016 that he was a “fascist original.” I was criticized by many opinion-makers, academics, and even progressives for using the “f” word. Over seven years and 27,000 extra-judicial executions of alleged drug users later, the “f” word is one of the milder terms used for Rodrigo Duterte, with many preferring “mass murderer” or “serial killer.”

Duterte nevertheless ended his presidency in 2022 with a 75 percent approval rating, and he is now leading the opposition to the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., apparently confident he can topple it.

Fascist Charisma and Discourse(s)

Let me spend some time on Duterte since he is the fascist figure I am most familiar with. Like Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and now Javier Milei in Argentina, Duterte is a charismatic figure. Charisma, that quality in a leader that creates a special bond with his or her followers, is not just of one variety. Modi’s charisma is different from that of Duterte. Although Modi’s charisma is more of the familiar inspirational type, Duterte has what I called “gangster charm.” In the way he connects with the masses, in his discourse, Duterte has similarities to Donald Trump, with his penchant for saying the outrageous and delivering it in an unorthodox fashion—precisely what drives their supporters wild.

On Duterte’s discourse while he was president, I would like to share three observations. First, from a progressive and liberal point of view, his discourse was politically incorrect, but that was its very strength. It came across as liberating to its middle-class and lower-class audience. Duterte was seen as telling it as it was, as deliberately mocking the dominant discourse of human rights, democratic rights, and social justice that had been ritually invoked but was increasingly regarded as a cynical coverup for the failure of the post-Marcos liberal democratic regime to deliver on its promise bringing about genuine democratic political and economic reform.

Second, Duterte’s discourse involved a unique application of what Bourdieu calls the strategy of condescension. His coarse discourse, delivered conversationally and with frequent shifts from Tagalog, a Filipino language, to another, Bisaya, to English, made people identify with him, eliciting laughter with his portrayal of himself as someone who bumbled along like the rest of the crowd or had the same illicit desires, at the same time that it also reminded the audience that he was someone different from and above them, as someone with power. This was especially evident when he paused and uttered his signature, “Papatayin kita,” or “I will kill you,” as in “If you destroy the youth of my country by giving them drugs, I will kill you.”

Third, Duterte’s speechmaking did not follow a conceptual or rhetorical logic, and this was another reason he could connect with the masses. The formal conceptual message written by speechwriters was deliberately overridden by a series of long digressions where he told tales in which he was invariably at the center of things that he knew would hold the audience’s attention, even when they had heard it several times. Let me confess here that when I listened to Duterte’s digressions, peppered as they were with outrageous comments, like telling an audience he would pardon policemen convicted of extra-judicial executions so they could go after the people who brought them to court, my mind had to restrain my body from joining the chorus of laughter at the sheer comic effrontery of his words. With Duterte, the digression was the message.

Duterte, of course, is not unique among far-right leaders In his ability to connect to his base by trampling on accepted conversational conventions and admitting to illicit desires. One of the sources of Donald Trump’s appeal is that he, like Duterte, connects, without subterfuge or euphemism, with his white male base’s’ “deeply missed privilege of being able to publicly and unabashedly act on whatever savagery or even mundane racism they wished to,” as Patricia Ventura and Edward Chan put it. To many aggrieved white American males he came across as refreshingly candid in publicly calling Mexicans rapists, Muslims terrorists, colored immigrants as coming from “shithole countries” instead of pristine, white Norway, and boasting that, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Economics and Fascism

Leaders are critical in fascist movements, but social conditions create the opportunities for the ascent of those leaders. Here one cannot overemphasize the role that neoliberalism and globalization have played in spawning movements of the radical right. The worsening living standards and great inequalities spawned by neoliberal policies created disillusionment among people who felt that liberal democracy had been captured by the rich and distrust in center-right and center-left parties that promoted those policies.

Perhaps, there is no better testimony to the role of neoliberal policies than that of former President Barack Obama, who represents the dominant, neoliberal, “Third Way” wing of the Democratic Party, along with the Clintons. In a speech in Johannesburg in July 2017, Obama remarked that the “politics of fear and resentment” stemmed from a process of globalization that “upended the agricultural and manufacturing sectors in many countries…greatly reduced the demand for certain workers…helped weaken unions and labor’s bargaining power…[and] made is easier for capital to avoid tax laws and the regulations of nation states.” He further noted that “challenges to globalization first came from the left but then came more forcefully from the right, as you started seeing populist movements …[that] tapped the unease that was felt by many people that lived outside the urban cores; fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding; that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn’t look like them or sound like them or pray as they did.” These resentful, discontented masses are the base of fascist parties.

Disenchanted with the Democratic Party’s embrace of job-killing neoliberal policies, the white working class vote put Republican Trump over the top in the traditionally Democratic swing states in the Midwest during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. But it is not only neoliberal policies that white workers are protesting by walking out of the Democratic Party and walking into the Trump tent; they also feel that professional and intellectual elites have captured their old party, along with Blacks and other minorities.

It is not only the white working class that now forms the base of the Republican Party. Large parts of rural America have long been marked by economic depression, creating ideal ground for the politics of resentment and the incubation of far right militias, who made their intimidating presence felt in the cities where protests against police brutality spread after the killling of George Floyd.

In France, the Socialist Party collapsed, with a significant part of its former working class adherents going to Marine Le Pen and her National Front (now National Rally). Their sentiments were probably best expressed by a Socialist senator who said, “Left-wing voters are crossing the red line because they think that salvation from their plight us embodied by Madame Le Pen…They say ‘no’ to a world that seems hard, globalized, implacable. These are working-class people, pensioners, office workers who say: ‘We don’t want this capitalism and competition in a world where Europe is losing its leadership.’”

This is the first of two parts. The second part is available here.



Walden Bello  is currently the International Adjunct Professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Co-Chairperson of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2019), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/Zed, 2019), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009) and Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013).

TEAMSTERS

Reform Caucus Wins Amazon Labor Union Officer Elections

By Luis Feliz León

July 31, 2024
Source: Labor Notes
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Members of the reform slate and other JFK8 workers confronted management last month about heat sickness in the warehouse. (Photo: ALU Democratic Reform Caucus)

Amazon workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, New York, voted to elect reform officers in the first-ever leadership election.

“We are extremely excited to announce that every candidate on our reform caucus slate won decisively in our union’s leadership elections,” said Connor Spence, co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union and former treasurer, who won the presidency. “After more than two years of fighting to reform our union to make it more democratic, transparent, and militant, we are relieved to finally be able to turn our full attention toward bringing Amazon to the table and winning an incredible contract.

“The movement to organize Amazon is still growing rapidly, and for us, our Teamster allies, and rank-and-file members, much of this is uncharted territory. We’ll be communicating in the coming days our transition plan and how we expect to execute the tremendous task ahead of us. For now we’re grateful to our members, supporters, and movement allies for standing with us and making this win possible.”

Official tallies have not yet been released, but people who observed the vote count said the reform caucus won about 50 percent of the votes for each seat, and the ALU-Ma’at slate got about a quarter. Total turnout was tiny, roughly 250 out of 5,500 workers.

Workers said the low turnout is partly explained by their co-workers’ unfamiliarity with a mail-ballot election. Postal delays meant some workers didn’t receive their ballots in time. The instructions were also confusing, requiring multiple steps. Another snafu was a change in vendor at the last minute.

David-Desyrée Sherwood, a slate member who won a seat, said the union had failed over the past two years to properly engage members. “So there’s a large number of people still disengaged,” they said. “Our caucus did as much as we could to campaign and get the word out.” The caucus sent mass texts, emails, and campaigned outside the facility and at the bus stop. Caucus members walked the warehouse wearing their organizer vests, handing out pamphlets. The reform caucus won all 15 top leadership spots, including the four spots on the executive board and 11 on the union’s constitutional committee.

Both slates emphasized in their campaigns winning a new contract. But the reform caucus also vowed to make sweeping changes to transform the union: creating a system of stewards, allowing members to vote on and approve budgets, hiring an external firm to conduct financial audits quarterly, and expanding the executive board from the current four officers to 20 to 30 JFK8 workers drawn from the shop floor.

The vote came after the Teamsters announced an affiliation agreement on social media in June, and workers voted to affiliate the independent Amazon Labor Union with the Teamsters, creating a new New York City local, ALU-IBT. An overwhelming majority voted in favor of affiliation, with 829 yes votes and only 14 nos; turnout in that vote was 16 percent.Yes voters hoped the affiliation with Teamsters would bolster the ALU’s bargaining power. The union is still fighting for a first contract to improve working conditions at the mammoth warehouse and secure higher wages and better benefits.

The ALU won a landmark election to organize 8,000 warehouse workers in New York more than two years ago. Amazon continues to challenge the union’s victory with legal appeals.

Current and former ALU executives ran on the ALU-Ma’at slate, promising truth, justice, and harmony—qualities of the Egyptian goddess Ma’at. Claudia Ashterman, Tyrone Mitchell, Rina Cummings, and Arlene Kingston ran for president, vice president, recording secretary, and secretary-treasurer, respectively. The slate was backed by some of the union’s founders: Chris Smalls, Derrick Palmer, Gerald Bryson, and Jordan Flowers.

Ashterman declined to comment via text message.

A third slate known as Workers First! led by Michelle Valentin Nieves, a former ALU executive board member and a key leader in the union, also ran, but it garnered only a small portion of the vote.

The ALU Democratic Reform Caucus slate included Spence for president, Brima Sylla for vice president, Kathleen Cole for secretary-treasurer, and Sultana Hossain for recording secretary.

The JFK8 fulfillment center is the only unionized Amazon facility in the United States. Now their fight for a contract will be backstopped by support from the Teamsters.

Palestinian Detainees Face Inhumane Treatment

By Human Rights Watch

July 30, 2024

Source: Human Rights Watch

Screenshot from BBC



Israeli forces have been publishing degrading photographs and videos of detained Palestinians, including children, a form of inhumane treatment and an outrage on their personal dignity that amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

In many cases, detainees were stripped of their clothing, sometimes fully, then photographed or filmed, with the images published by Israeli soldiers, media outlets, or activists. Forced nudity followed by capturing and sharing sexualized images on social media is a form of sexual violence and also a war crime.

“Israeli authorities have for months turned a blind eye as members of their military published dehumanizing fully or seminude images and videos of Palestinians in their custody,” said Balkees Jarrah, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Senior officials and military commanders can be held criminally responsible for ordering these crimes, or for failing to prevent or punish them, including at the International Criminal Court.”

Israeli military officials have publicly denounced some of their members for publishing images of the detainees, but as far as Human Rights Watch has been able to determine, the government has not publicly condemned the underlying treatment of Palestinian detainees depicted in the images. Judicial authorities have not announced any prosecutions for these crimes. On July 15, Human Rights Watch wrote to the Public Diplomacy Office of the Israeli military but has not received a response.

Since October, Israeli forces have reportedly detained thousands of Palestinians from Gaza at Sde Teiman, an army base in southern Israel, where they have been reportedly ill-treated and tortured, and where at least 36 died in custody, according to media reports. As of July, 124 Palestinians remained at Sde Teiman, according to the Times of Israel, despite the Israeli attorney general calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to transfer detainees out of the facility due to the reports of abuse and deaths in custody.

Human Rights Watch analyzed 37 of the posts depicting captured Palestinians, predominantly men and boys in Gaza and the West Bank, often stripped to their underwear and in some cases completely naked, handcuffed, blindfolded, and injured. Some posts included demeaning and humiliating captions by Israeli soldiers or journalists. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube have removed some of these posts.

Between October 25 and December 28, one Israeli soldier, who according to his social media holds United States citizenship, published at least seven photos and videos of Palestinian men detained by his unit in the West Bank. In the images, the clothed detainees are handcuffed, many of them are blindfolded, and some have Israeli flags placed on them.

In two videos, published on October 28 and 29, the soldier places US dollar bills on the knees of two handcuffed, blindfolded, and squatting men, as a “blessing” while he mocks them and asks them to repeat phrases in Hebrew. The soldier also posted degrading captions, such as “trolling Hamas,” to accompany some of the published images.

In another case, an Israeli soldier in Gaza published a photo on Facebook on December 8, showing at least 22 detained males in a single file, all stripped to their underwear, some of them blindfolded. At least two detainees appear to be children. The caption says: “As part of our mission we kept Hamas terrorists under arrest. We’ll settle for this picture, there are pictures not for publication …”

Another image posted on Instagram, by an Israeli soldier, who according to media reports holds US citizenship, shows what appears to be a photograph of himself standing in front of at least six men with their backs to the camera, stripped to their underwear and kneeling on the ground while handcuffed and blindfolded, with their arms above their head. The caption of the now deleted photo says: “Mom I think I freed palestine” [sic].

Two separate investigations by the BBC on the conduct of Israeli soldiers, in February in Gaza, and in May in the West Bank, found that Israeli soldiers uploaded to social media platforms dozens of images and videos intended to humiliate Palestinians, including images of detainees who had been stripped to their underwear and others who had been draped in Israeli flags.

The Israeli military told the BBC that it had terminated the service of one reservist and that this conduct did not represent its values. In a response to another BBC investigation, the Israeli military said it had instructed soldiers “to avoid uploading footage of operational activities to social media networks,” and while it did not condemn any specific acts, it said that soldiers were “disciplined and even suspended from reserve duty” in the event of “unacceptable behavior.” The military spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, and national security advisor, Tzachi Hanegbi, separately commented in December that people who surrendered or were arrested needed to be stripped to be searched, as they could be carrying explosives or weapons, but that clothes should be returned to them and any photos taken should not be distributed. Hagari said the photos were “unusual” and that disciplinary measures will be taken in any event that is inconsistent with the Israeli military’s values. Hangebi said the photos “served no purpose.” The Israeli military gave no further details on holding those responsible accountable.

In its May 2024 report, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel concluded that the forced public stripping, nudity, and related “specific persecutory acts” against Palestinian men and boys in Israeli custody were either ordered or condoned by Israeli authorities, given the frequency of these abuses, the way these acts were filmed and photographed, and that they occurred in several locations.

Sexual violence and committing “outrages upon personal dignity” on detainees are serious violations of international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, applicable to all parties to the hostilities in Israel and Palestine.

On October 7, Hamas-led Palestinian armed groups, in what amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, attacked southern Israel, killing 815 civilians, according to Agence France-Presse, and taking 251 people hostage. Since then, Israeli forces have unlawfully attacked residential buildings, medical facilities, and aid workers, largely destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including its water and electricity plants. Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, where about 90 percent of the population have been displaced, many of them repeatedly.

Gaza’s Health Ministry has reported over 38,000 deaths and 88,000 injuries. These abuses occur amid the ongoing Israeli crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians.

Common article 3 of the Geneva Conventions requires that everyone in the custody of a warring party “shall in all circumstances be treated humanely.” Prohibited acts include “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Violations of article 3 are war crimes.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), in its Elements of Crimes explanation of the Rome Statute crimes, defines “outrages upon personal dignity” as acts in which “[t]he perpetrator humiliated, degraded or otherwise violated the dignity of one or more persons [and] the severity of the humiliation, degradation or other violation was of such degree as to be generally recognized as an outrage upon personal dignity.”

On May 20, the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced that he was seeking arrest warrants against two senior Israeli officials and three Hamas leaders. Khan confirmed that his office has been conducting an investigation since March 2021 into atrocity crimes committed in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and that since 2014, his office has jurisdiction over crimes in the current hostilities between Israel and Palestinian armed groups that covers unlawful conduct by all parties.

“International law recognizes the inherent dignity of human beings caught in a conflict, no matter what side they are on,” Jarrah said. “Victims have a right to justice and accountability, and any evidence of sexual violence should be investigated urgently in a way that is thorough, credible, and prioritizes the needs, well-being, and wishes of the survivors.”

Druze Mourn 12 Children Killed by Rocket in Israeli-Occupied Golan Heights

Israel is blaming the strike on Hezbollah, which denies any responsibility and says an Israeli anti-rocket interceptor hit the children

By Dave DeCamp

July 29, 2024

Source: Antiwar.com


People gather during the funeral of children who were killed by a rocket at a soccer field in Majdal Shams, July 28, 2024. | Photo by Ammar Awad via Antiwar.com



On Sunday, members of the Arab Druze community in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights mourned 12 children who were killed when a rocket hit a soccer field in the village of Majdal Shams a day earlier.

Israel has pinned the blame for the rocket strike on Hezbollah, which denies any responsibility. According to Axios, Hezbollah told the UN that an Israeli anti-rocket interceptor hit the soccer field.

The US is backing Israel’s claim, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying there was “every indication” that Hezbollah was behind the strike. For its part, Syria has blamed the incident on Israel and said the Israeli government was trying to use it to escalate in Lebanon.

“As part of attempts to escalate the situation in the region, Israeli occupation entity committed a heinous crime on Saturday in Majdal Shams town and then held the Lebanese National Resistance accountable for this crime,” the Syrian Foreign Ministry said, according to The Cradle.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said, “Since the beginning of the war, Hezbollah has been targeting military sites and not civilians, and I don’t think that it carried out this attack in Majdal Shams.” He called for an investigation and said the attack must have been “carried out by other organizations, or it must have been an Israeli mistake, or a mistake by Hezbollah.”

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 and annexed the territory in 1981. Under international law, the territory is considered to be Syrian and under Israeli occupation. In 2019, the US became the first country besides Israel to recognize the Golan Heights as Israeli territory.

According to CNN, most of the Druze in the Golan Heights consider themselves Syrian and have rejected offers of Israeli citizenship. None of the 12 children who were killed were Israeli citizens.

During the funeral, mourners protested the participation of Israeli ministers, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “Get out of here, you criminal. We don’t want you in the Golan,” one protester shouted at Smotrich, according to the Anadolu Agency.

Israeli ministers attended the funeral despite a request from community leaders not to come. “Do not come. Given the sensitivity of the situation, we ask not to turn this massacre into a political event. We demand a quiet religious funeral according to Druze customs,” the Druze Authority Forum said in a letter to Israeli government ministers.

Israeli officials are threatening a major attack in Lebanon in response to the rocket. The Israeli military launched strikes in southern Lebanon on Sunday, but more are expected. The Israeli Security Cabinet convened on Sunday to discuss a potential escalation, and the US is reportedly warning against strikes on Beirut.

A major Israeli attack could escalate the situation on the Israel-Lebanon border into a full-blown war. Since October 7, Israel and Hezbollah have been trading strikes across the border almost every day.

According to an AFP tally, Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon have killed at least 527 people, including 104 children. On the Israeli side, 18 soldiers and 24 civilians have been killed, a total that includes the 12 Druze children.

FRANCE

‘The Left Should Not Be Making Concessions, But Dictating Its Terms’

Boris Kagarlitsky on the far right threat, British Labour, and the French left’s chances of success

By BorisKagarlitsky

July 31, 2024

Source: LINKS


[Editor’s note: In the interview below, Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky responds to questions sent by Sasha from Rabkor to his cell in a Russian prison, where he currently finds himself serving a five-year jail term for his anti-war views. You can support the campaign to free Kagarlitsky by signing a petition here.]

First published in Russian at Rabkor. Translation by Renfrey Clarke for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

The left and liberal mass media in Europe and the US have increasingly been writing and talking about the new threat posed by the far right. This threat is also evident in the successes registered by far right parties in Europe, where these currents have good prospects of challenging for power or even taking government. How real, and how pressing, is the danger now of a fascisation of society and politics? Will today’s far-rightists actually be able to do away completely with the remnants of democratic structures and build a new totalitarian system, as occurred during the past century?

For a number of years I have been saying that we should not panic at the growth of right-wing populism in Europe, or for that matter in the US. In essence, the bugbear of the “right-wing threat” has been used by the liberal centre in an effort to force members of the left to abandon their own agenda, even if this is reformist, and to throw their support behind liberals and the moderate right in the name of “saving democracy”. The left has followed to the letter the instructions coming from the liberals, and what have we finished up with? The influence of the left has been reduced to a historic minimum, and its forces have been turned into a mobile reserve for the “progressive” bourgeoisie, which on economic questions is even more reactionary than a lot of hardened conservatives.

At the same time, the influence of the far right has kept growing in precisely the degree to which the left has retreated from its previous class politics. An outsized proportion of workers and the poor now vote for the far right, because they can see that the left has sold them out. Meanwhile, the successes of the national-populists are creating a situation in which a section of the bourgeoisie is starting to see these people as a force with a future, and is putting money into them. It is true that this is going to cause the rightists to abandon their social populism, which in theory could allow the left to win back this electorate. But this is only a possibility, and in the meantime, the situation is getting worse.

In France the far right Rassemblement National (National Rally, RN) has been riding high in the polls. Just before the parliamentary elections called by [French President Emmanuel] Macron, it seemed as though the far right would win an absolute or relative majority, but in the event, they finished up in third place. The front-runners turned out to be the Nouveau Front populaire (New Popular Front, NFP). What do you think — will the New Popular Front be able to achieve at least the successes of the old Popular Front, or is the alliance already doomed to defeat?

In my book Between Class and Discourse, I predicted some aspects of what is happened in France — notably, that Macron and his policies would allow the far right to take on the appearance of an anti-systemic alternative in the eyes of an important sector of the masses, and that this would make the far-rightists real contenders for power, or at least, would see them emerge as the largest single current. I also wrote that the left populism of Mélenchon offered an alternative, but that other left organisations would do everything they could to stop this alternative — to both Macronism and the far right — from coming into being.

Various lessons from past failures are still influencing Mélenchon in his choice of electoral alliances, but in political terms, unfortunately, the earlier line of joining with the centre persists. This is a catastrophic approach, but one that is very hard to overcome so long as the radical left is not confronting the moderates with a powerful grassroots mobilisation. The outcome of the electoral struggle will also depend on whether this mobilisation is successful. For the moment, Mélenchon is being forced to make concessions, since the extent of the upsurge is not sufficient. It exists, but it is inadequate. In essence, Mélenchon has tried to force his way into the Hôtel Matignon on the shoulders of a demoralised centrist electorate. Nevertheless, the debacle of the centre has not been complete — the corpse is still showing certain signs of life. Even after going down to defeat, the centrist agenda is being imposed on the left. This is despite the left scoring a victory, though not a complete one.

Do you think the radical left, led by La France Insoumise (France Unbowed, LFI), has any chance of turning the situation to its advantage?

The “unbowed” are not just capable of turning things to their advantage — it is essential for them to do it. But will this work? From my distant position, I cannot say with certainty.

In Britain, elections have brought the Labour Party to power. Will the moderate rule of Keir Starmer lead to mass disillusionment of the population and a possible growth of [Nigel] Farage’s far-right Reform UK party, which scored more than four million votes at those elections?

Predicting the imminent downfall of Keir Starmer is a commonplace for left-wing analysts, and not only for those on the left. This is because Starmer has neither a precise agenda nor a clear program, and in the words of the comrades from the TG-Canal program “The Wheatfields of Theresa May”, he is “as dull as non-alcoholic beer”. Quite likely, these forecasts will be borne out. But at least for the sake of intellectual balance, let us try to analyse another variant.

The fact that Starmer has no distinct political identity, that he lacks his own ideas and program, could turn out to be not just a weakness, but also a sort of advantage — it may be that, like a weathercock, he will turn in any direction. Since coming to power he has “purged” the left, since they were preventing him from consolidating his control over the party and achieving positive coverage for his activity in the bourgeois press. If for some reason he finds he needs to turn to the left, he will do that with the same unconcern and lack of principle as he showed earlier in turning the party to the right. I remember that while [Jeremy] Corbyn was leader, Starmer was completely loyal to him, not for ideological reasons but simply because it suited him better. So it is not about Starmer’s personality or his program, which does not exist, but about the general circumstances. Might something, like the pressures of a social and economic crisis, force the opportunists who head the party to change course to the left?

There is also a second question: just who are these 410 Labour MPs who have just been elected? In most cases they are unknown quantities. But most important is the fact that they themselves do not know who they are. How will they interact with their constituents, and how will they build their careers? The success of [former Labour leader] Tony Blair did not prevent the later return by the left to the leadership of the Labour Party, or stop the rise of Corbyn.

In theory, a shift to the left is possible even under Starmer, and especially after he goes. Is it going to be necessary to wait until the Labourites fail, to win changes in the party? What if some kind of turnabout starts on the municipal and regional level? We should not forget the revival of Labour in Scotland (my grandmother Anna Kolinz would have been very pleased by this). In Britain today there are interesting openings in regional politics. And can we really ignore the success of Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland? From being Catholic nationalists, they have transformed themselves into left populists, and their prospects depend on whether they can win the trust of worker-Protestants. In short, there are opportunities for left politics in Britain even now, and it is not obligatory to wait for three to five years.

And finally, let us return to Starmer. He is an apparatchik and a managerial type — more than likely, a capable one. The question is whether he will be able to cope with the tasks of government, which are completely different from weaving intrigues in the party. But perhaps he will cope, so on the whole, let us give this boring individual the benefit of the doubt. I am not at all sure that the possibilities I have sketched out will come to pass, especially since there are many countervailing factors. I simply call on everyone to be more attentive to detail, and when chances appear, not to let them slip.

Some time ago, the New York Times published an article by [former Democratic US presidential candidate] Bernie Sanders entitled “Joe Biden for President”, in which Sanders supported Biden and urged Democrats not to call for him to be replaced during the election campaigning. As a general thing, should members of the left think in terms of “lesser evils” in the run-up to elections? In the face of a far-right threat, is it correct to insist on the selection of a single bourgeois candidate?

Sanders has tried again and again to save the Democratic Party by making concessions, but the results have been unimpressive. In 2016 he capitulated before the party apparatus and Hillary Clinton in order to prevent a [Donald] Trump victory — with the result that Trump won. Bernie has also refrained from criticising [Joe] Biden, which has not helped Biden any. Bernie has set out to prove to the Democratic Party establishment that he is a loyal supporter, and that there is no need to be afraid of him. Nevertheless, they have not let him anywhere near power. We will see how that works now.

It is possible they will treat him more graciously, but they will not be less hostile to his agenda. Whatever the case, the same logic is at work here as in France and to some degree in Germany — the left is moving to the centre, while the centre is losing influence and the support of society. The need is for something quite different, for radical mobilisation. The left should not be making concessions, but dictating its terms. When you are at war, you act like you are at war. If democracy really is in danger, then there is all the more need to be tough and strong.



Boris Kagarlitsky
Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky (born 29 August 1958) is a Russian Marxist theoretician and sociologist who has been a political dissident in the Soviet Union. He is coordinator of the Transnational Institute Global Crisis project and Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO) in Moscow. Kagarlisky hosts a YouTube channel Rabkor, associated with his online newspaper of the same name and with IGSO.

Starvation in Sudan
As in Gaza, the Deprivation Is Deliberate

By Priti Gulati Cox

July 31, 2024

Source: Tom Dispatch

Operation Lifeline Helps Displaced in Southern Sudan (Photo: United Nations)

For months, we’ve all been able to stay reasonably informed about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But there’s another horrific war that’s gotten so little coverage you could be excused for not knowing anything about it. What we have in mind is the seemingly never-ending, utterly devastating war in Sudan. Think of it as the missing war. And if we don’t start paying a lot more attention to it soon — as in right now — it’s going to be too late.

After 15 months of fighting in that country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), experts in food insecurity estimate that almost 26 million people (no, that is not a misprint!), or more than half of Sudan’s population, could suffer from malnutrition by September. Eight and a half million of those human beings could face acute malnutrition. Worse yet, if the war continues on its present path, millions will die of hunger and disease in just the coming months (and few people in our world may even notice).

By now, those warring armies have driven Sudan to the brink of all-out famine, partly by displacing more than a fifth of the population from their homes, livelihoods, and farms, while preventing the delivery of food to the places most in need. And you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, with their foreign-policy eyes focused on Gaza and Ukraine, our country’s government and others around the world have paid remarkably little attention to the growing crisis in Sudan, making at best only half-hearted (quarter-hearted?) gestures toward helping negotiate a cease-fire between the SAF and RSF, while contributing only a small fraction of the aid Sudan needs to head off a famine of historic magnitude.

From Emergency to Catastrophe

In late June, the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, which monitors regions at risk of starvation, reported “a stark and rapid deterioration of the food security situation” in Sudan. It noted that the number of people suffering hunger severe enough to qualify, in IPC terms, as Phase 3 (“Crisis”) or Phase 4 (“Emergency”) has ballooned 45% since the end of last year. In December 2023, no Sudanese had yet made it to Phase 5 (“Catastrophe”), a condition characteristic of famines. Now, more than three-quarters of a million people are in that final phase of starving to death. Indeed, if the conflict continues to escalate, large parts of Sudan may spiral into full-blown famine, a state that exists, according to the IPC, when at least 20% of an area’s population is suffering Phase-5 hunger.

Until recently, the worst conflict and hunger were concentrated in western Sudan and around Khartoum, the country’s capital. Now, however, they’ve spread to the east and south as well. Worse yet, the war in Sudan has by now displaced an astounding 10 million people from their homes, more than four million of them children — a figure that looks like but isn’t a misprint. Many have had to move multiple times and two million Sudanese have taken refuge in neighboring countries. Worse yet, with so many people forced off their land and away from their workplaces, the capacity of farmers to till the soil and other kinds of workers to hold down a paycheck and so buy food for their families has been severely disrupted.

Not surprisingly, 15 months of brutal war have played havoc with crop production. Cereal grain harvests in 2023 were far smaller than in previous years and stocks of grain (which typically supply 80% of Sudanese caloric intake) have already been fully consumed, with months to go before the next harvest, a stretch of time known, even in good years, as the “lean season.” And with war raging, anything but a bumper crop is expected this year. Indeed, just as planting season got underway, fierce fighting spilled over into wheat-growing Gezira, one of Sudan’s 18 “states” and renowned as the nation’s breadbasket.

Sudan desperately needs food aid and it’s simply not getting enough. The U.N. High Commission for Refugees has received less than 20% of the funds necessary to help feed the Sudanese this year and has had to “drastically cut” food rations. As Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, head of the aid nonprofit Mercy Corps, told the New York Times, “World leaders continue to go through the motions, expressing concern over Sudan’s crisis. Yet they’ve failed to rise to the occasion.”

Worse yet, in the swirling chaos, even the food aid that does make it to Sudan is largely failing to reach starving populations in anything approaching adequate quantities — and when available, it’s usually unaffordable. Famished people are reportedly boiling leaves, as well as eating grass, peanut shells, and even dirt.

Starvation: “A Cheap and Very Effective Weapon”

For many families, the one thing keeping starvation at bay may be a local free soup kitchen. In a report published in May, Timmo Gaasbeek of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations noted, “Sudan has a long tradition of sharing food. After the war broke out and hunger spread, community-level initiatives for sharing food sprang up across the country. These ‘soup kitchen’ initiatives are often informal but can be very well organized.”

Gaasbeek warned, however, that soup kitchens can fill only so many gaping holes in a system shattered by wartime destruction, displacement, and crop failure. His institute estimates that at current rates of food sharing, 2.5 million people could die of hunger and disease by the time crops are harvested in September. In other words, a shocking 10-20% of the Sudanese in the hardest-hit areas could die — mortality rates similar to ones suffered during horrendous famines in parts of Nigeria in 1969, Ethiopia in 1984, and Somalia in 1992.

By Gaasbeek’s calculations, more aggressive food sharing through soup kitchens and other means could cut the total death toll to a still-appalling one million. But that seems unlikely since even the existing efforts by local mutual-aid groups and international organizations to provide food have come under attack from both sides in the war. Six international experts writing for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have accused SAF and RSF of “using food as a weapon and starving civilians.” They also found that the “deliberate targeting of humanitarian workers and local volunteers has undermined aid operations, putting millions of people at further risk of starvation.”

We recently got in touch with Hadeel Mohamed, an educator with whom we’d spoken last October after she fled Sudan for Egypt. In a July 16th email to us, she wrote that “the war in Sudan, like many wars, has proved to be more an attack on civilians than on any armed forces.” Still in contact with neighbors who stayed behind in Khartoum, she reports that neither army is protecting civilians. In fact, the two at times appear to be tag-teaming to do them in. When, for instance, RSF forces carry out a raid, her contacts tell her, SAF troops are often “removed from the locations hours before the attacks occur.” Worse yet, for those now trying to flee as she did last year, “Some said that, in their attempts to escape Khartoum, they’ve encountered RSF forces waiting to loot them. All their supplies were stolen once again!”

Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation told the BBC that the RSF paramilitary is “essentially a looting machine. They rampage through the countryside and towns, stealing everything there is.” They even bombed and looted the last hospital still functioning in Northern Darfur state. No less horribly, the government’s SAF troops are guilty of trying to starve people in areas now occupied and controlled by the RSF and, according to De Waal, neither side is willing to “relinquish what is a cheap and very effective weapon.”

Echoes from a Thousand Miles Away

Is Sudan’s nightmare starting to sound grimly familiar?

* Families displaced multiple times, with war following hot on their heels.

* Food aid falling desperately short of what’s needed.

* Humanitarian aid intercepted by soldiers and other armed men before it can reach intended recipients.

* Soup kitchens attacked.

* Aid workers targeted for death.

* Hospitals bombarded, invaded, and shut down.

* Crop production capacity sabotaged during a hunger emergency.

* Washington doing little or nothing to stop the horror.

Might we be thinking, perhaps, of a small 25-mile strip of territory a thousand miles directly north of Khartoum, just on the other side of Egypt?

Sadly enough, there are many striking parallels between the wars being waged on the civilian populations of Sudan and Gaza. It would nonetheless be wrong to blame world interest in the nightmare in Gaza for drawing attention away from the civil war in Sudan. Neither of those crimes against humanity, in their scale and ghastliness, should be exploited by anyone to minimize the weight and urgency of the other. Worse yet, simply paying more attention to the nightmare in Sudan and sending its people more food aid won’t address the imbalance. The fact is that neither the Sudanese nor the Gazans have received what they most urgently need right now: an end to their respective conflicts.

Efforts by the U.S. and other countries to push for cease-fires in both places and an end to each of those wars have proven almost cataclysmically inadequate and ineffective. For Sudan, it’s been especially discouraging. Talks last year between the SAF and RSF brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States failed to even reduce the fighting there and recent attempts to revive those talks all too expectably broke down. In early June, Egypt hosted supporters of both of Sudan’s warring parties in Cairo for negotiations. The only outcome: the creation of a supremely bureaucratic subcommittee to draft a meaningless communique.

Collective Courage

Last October, Hadeel Mohamed wrote that there was then only one modest hope in Sudan. For the millions of Sudanese living through their latest national nightmare, she told us, “You really come back to more community-based aid. With our limited resources, with our limited abilities, we still find people rising up to take care of each other.” And they’re still doing it. It’s just not enough to prevent a disastrous famine, as long as the sectarian fighting continues.

With weak support from the outside world, civilians in Sudan have little choice but to rely on long traditions of social cohesion and mutual aid as they work to survive and somehow bring the war in their country to an end. In that, there’s yet another parallel with the war on Gaza’s civilians: the coordinated service, heroism, and sacrifice personified by Palestinian journalists, taxi drivers, first responders, healthcare professionals, and countless other people is now legendary.

Civilians in many such situations are too often portrayed in the world media as nearly helpless victims. The Sudanese and Palestinian people are showing that image to be fallacious by acting with the kind of collective courage, endurance, and solidarity that’s all too rare in the comfortably situated societies that are leaving them to starve. They’re being cruelly victimized, yet they’re refusing to play the victim.

The wartime food-sharing movement in Sudan that operates soup kitchens is a good example. It’s led by grassroots neighborhood groups called “resistance committees” that started forming more than a decade ago in the wake of the Arab Spring, with the mission of providing social protection and provisioning in their home communities. They have since proliferated throughout Sudan, operating locally and independently but together forming a remarkably well-integrated national network.

The resistance committees took a leading role in grassroots protests against the October 2021 military coup that cut short a national transition to democratic rule then underway in Sudan. Eighteen months later, the current war erupted when the two generals who had led that coup turned on each other, with one leading the armed forces and the other the Rapid Support Forces. Throughout the ensuing war, at great risk to their own safety, resistance committee members have played essential lifesaving roles. While working to fend off hunger in their communities, they have also prioritized the maintenance of human rights, continuation of social services, and defense of direct democracy, while urging fervent opposition to the SAF, the RSF, and more generally the incessant militarization of their country. Some are also mobilizing their communities for self-defense.

Sudan expert Santiago Stocker suggested recently that the resistance committees, “because of their support among youth and local legitimacy in Sudan, are a voice the international community should support and elevate.” The committees are one part of a broader grassroots civilian movement that participated in those ill-fated Cairo talks. That movement, Stocker argues, could sooner or later help break the deadlock in Sudan by pressing other nations to move decisively to help end the war. They could urge, for example, that “the international community… increase punitive measures, including sanctions, against RSF and SAF leadership and key members of the SAF’s governing coalition, including businesses and hardline religious groups.”

While it’s important indeed that Gaza remains a focus of our attention as long as the nightmarish Israeli campaign there continues, it’s no less important that those of us in the Global North focus on the less visible war in Sudan and push our governments to impose punitive measures on that country’s generals and other elites, while pulling out all the stops (and ample cash) to get food to the millions who desperately need it.


Priti Gulati Cox (@PritiGCox) is an artist and writer. Her work has appeared in ZNet, AlterNet, Common Dreams, Countercurrents, CounterPunch, the Nation, Salon, Truthout, and more. To see her art please visit occupiedplanet.com

The Assassination of Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh Will Only Embolden Resistance

Israel has proven it can kill massive numbers of Palestinian civilians and assassinate political leaders, but it has been unable to defeat an armed insurgency in Gaza.

By Jeremy Scahill

July 31, 2024

Source: Drop Site


Ismail Haniyeh meets with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on July 30, 2024.



At approximately 2 a.m. local time, Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran in an apparent Israeli strike. It is not yet known what precise weapons were used, but Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency described it as a “projectile.” The U.S. has denied it was aware of the strike beforehand, though it is unlikely any American officials would publicly confirm prior knowledge—not to mention involvement—in the assassination.

“This is something we were not aware of or involved in. It’s very hard to speculate,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is on an official visit to Singapore.

“I don’t have anything on that for you,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a press briefing aboard a Navy ship in the Philippines when asked if the U.S. had advance knowledge or notice of the strike.

Haniyeh, who traveled from Doha, Qatar to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian, was killed alongside a bodyguard inside a housing development used by veterans of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. He has been a central figure in the Gaza ceasefire negotiations. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” asked Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, one of the top officials mediating the ceasefire talks.

While Israel has not yet issued an official statement, with the attack, it has reinforced the message that it speaks with the language of force above all else. Its actions over the past 24 hours are likely to encourage deeper collaboration among Axis of Resistance forces—which include Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen—and its Palestinian factions.

Haniyeh’s assassination was conducted just hours after Israel bombed a building in a southern suburb of Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least four people, two children and two women, and injuring dozens of others. Hezbollah has not officially confirmed the death of senior commander Fuad Shukr but said he was in the building when it was struck. Israel claimed that Shukr was the commander of a rocket strike that killed 12 Syrian Druze children on Saturday in the occupied Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams. The U.S. has accused Shukr of playing a key role in the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed more than 300 people, including 241 U.S. military personnel.

Hezbollah has vehemently denied it was behind the attack and said the deaths were caused by an Israeli Iron Dome interceptor missile that missed its target. Hezbollah said it is waiting for civil defense rescue workers to finish their operations at the bombed building to determine its specific military response to Israel.

U.S. Defense Secretary Austin spoke to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant after Haniyeh’s assassination, but a statement from Gallant’s office only referenced the strike in Lebanon and made no mention of Haniyeh’s killing. “They discussed the threats to Israel posed by a range of Iranian-backed terrorist groups, including Lebanese Hizballah,” according to a Pentagon read out, which also avoided reference to Haniyeh’s assassination. “Secretary Austin reaffirmed his unwavering commitment to Israel’s security and right to self-defense.”

Axis Reactions

Condemnations of Haniyeh’s assassination have poured in from all Palestinian factions and from Axis of Resistance members who have vowed to retaliate. “The criminal, terrorist zionist entity has brought upon itself the severest punishment with this attack,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. “Avenging the blood of Haniyeh is Iran’s duty because he was martyred on our land.” The IRGC released a statement promising that “this crime by the zionist regime will be met with a severe and painful response from the powerful and grand resistance front, especially the Islamic [Republic of] Iran.”

Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s deputy leader Mohammed Al-Hindi said in an official statement that the assassination “is not only directed at the Palestinian resistance and Hamas specifically, but also at Iran.” He added: “The Palestinian resistance and the resistance in Lebanon have bid farewell to many great figures without their martyrdom breaking them.” Several Palestinian armed factions called on their supporters to intensify their operations against Israel in the West Bank. Since October 7, according to opinion polls, support for both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have risen dramatically across the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Hezbollah released a statement, saying that the assassination of Haniyeh “will increase the determination and persistence of the resisting fighters in all resistance arenas to continue the path of jihad and will strengthen their resolve in facing the zionist enemy, the killer of women and children, the perpetrator of genocide in Gaza, and the usurper of Palestine’s land and the nation’s sanctities.”

A U.S. Role?

Many commentators on Arab media outlets and on social media are questioning what role, if any, the U.S. played in the Haniyeh hit. The Iranian foreign ministry said it holds both Israel and the U.S. responsible for the strike. Despite official denials from American political officials, it is highly likely U.S. intelligence was, at a minimum, aware of Israel’s assassination plot against Haniyeh in Tehran. If so, the central question is what the U.S. saw as the likely outcome or response from Iran and other regional forces.

The Biden administration has made a substantial public display in recent days of promoting the notion that a Gaza ceasefire is within reach, despite statements to the contrary by Israel and Hamas. CIA Director William Burns was in Rome Sunday for talks with Israel and mediators from Qatar and Egypt. In his comments in Singapore today following Haniyeh’s assassination, Blinken appeared disconnected from how the events of the past 24 hours are being interpreted on the ground. “One of the things that we’ve been focused on is trying to make sure that the conflict that occurred in Gaza doesn’t escalate,” he said. “We’re going to continue to do that as well. Now, again, the best way to bring the temperature down everywhere is through the cease-fire in Gaza.”

Assassinating Haniyeh, perhaps the most important member of Hamas’s negotiating team, fits within Israel’s narrative that the only way to achieve an end to the Gaza war is to force Hamas to surrender militarily. To most of the rest of the world, the assassination of a lead negotiator for a potential peace deal is certainly viewed as a bloody sabotage of multinational efforts to end the genocidal war. Russia, China, and Turkey all issued statements condemning the political assassination.

There has been discussion within the Biden administration of whether killing Yahya Sinwar, the Gaza chief of Hamas, would allow Israel to claim some form of victory that would pave the way for Israel accepting a ceasefire. In May, administration officials leaked a story to the Washington Post that the White House had offered Israel “sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders” in return for concessions from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the scope of the Rafah invasion.

It is possible U.S. officials may believe they can use Haniyeh’s death in an effort to convince Netanyahu to agree to a temporary pause in fighting to exchange captives. But with the U.S. presidency up for grabs, Biden out of the race, and the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House, it is unclear what leverage the administration actually has within its self-declared parameters of “ironclad” support for Israel. In reality, the U.S could have ended the slaughter in Gaza long ago by cutting off all weapons and logistical support to Israel, something neither Biden, Kamala Harris nor Trump would even contemplate.
Hamas: “We Won’t Surrender”

In recent days, Hamas has accused Netanyahu and Israel of sabotaging a ceasefire. While it has also blamed the U.S. for the continuation of the war and abetting Israel’s obstructionist stance in the negotiations, it has stopped short of withdrawing from the process. It has not yet issued any detailed statement about how Haniyeh’s death may impact the negotiations.

Israel has proven it can kill massive numbers of Palestinian civilians and assassinate Palestinian political leaders. Yet Israel’s occupation army has been unable to defeat an armed insurgency in Gaza that largely manufactures its own weapons and operates under constant attack from U.S. bombs and a modern military.

Hamas is not going to surrender because Haniyeh was assassinated. Israel has waged a multi-decade campaign of targeted killings of its military and political leaders. Over this period, the group has grown larger and more bold, culminating in the Hamas-led October 7 attacks against Israel, known as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. “These crimes will only increase our strength, steadfastness, and unwavering determination,” Hamas said in a statement. “This is the history of the movement and the resistance after the assassination of its leaders: they become stronger, more cohesive, more determined and persistent in their rights and principles.”

The Palestinian armed resistance movements are not inspired by or run by one individual or group. It is more likely that this assassination and the bombing in Lebanon will further embolden Palestinian resistance factions. That may well be Netanyahu’s intent if he believes the U.S. will continue to arm and support him in his wars of annihilation no matter the cost to Palestinian lives. It is not an unreasonable assumption given the full spectrum support Israel has received from the Biden administration over the past 10 months.

A funeral for Haniyeh will be held Thursday in Tehran, according to Hamas, before his burial in Qatar on Friday. Hamas is expected to name a new leader of its political bureau. Sinwar, who is widely believed to still be alive and in Gaza, will certainly have a hand in the decision. Among possible successors could be former Hamas leader Khaled Meshal.


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Jeremy Scahill -- July 12, 2024


Jeremy Scahill  has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill has served as the national security correspondent for The Nation and Democracy Now!. Scahill's work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for “Blackwater.” Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film “Dirty Wars,” which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Collective Bargaining in Europe – Recent Developments

By Thomas Klikauer

July 29, 2024

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

"Labor Solidarity has no Borders." This mural by Mike Alewitz was painted in Los Angles in 1992 to advocate for immigrant worker's rights. The green monster- "the green monster of capitalism" was also seen in a 1985 mural for Hormel strikers painted by the same artist.

In terms of recent collective bargaining successes, the situation of workers in Europe can be summed up as: real wages still need to catch up after the severe income losses during the recent “crises of high inflation” hitting European workers. In short, it is more than likely that more strikes will be needed in the near future.

The latest upwards shift on high inflation in the Eurozone’s 20 member states of Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain was caused by the tightening of energy markets that had been privatised in recent decades.

This was secured under Hayek’s neoliberal belief-system when a corner-shop daughter with limited understanding (Thatcher) married a third-class US actor with an equally limited intellectual capacity (Reagan) in the 1980s.

Guided by neo-liberalism, politicians kickstarted a relentless drive towards “the privatisation of everything” that was flanked by the all-encompassing ideology.

Unsurprisingly, the ideology of neo-liberalism and privatisation has spread through European politics like the plague that swiped through Europe.

All of this has converted energy delivery into a tradeable good exposed to the whims of “high-octane” energy speculations of markets – as shown by Enron. This assisted the recent crises of high inflation that impacted on European workers.

Despite some recent successes in collective bargaining, real wages throughout the European Union continued to fall between late 2022 and 2023. This came, notwithstanding the fact that inflation started to drop around October 2022.

Yet, a very slow recovery of wages is emerging for the current year of 2024. Still, this sluggish growth in wages might have the capacity to stabilise the already rather unequal distribution of income between labour and capital in favour of capital.

Europe’s corporate media will sell a “modest” or even “no” wage increases as “look, the system is working” and “wages are growing”.

Never mind that any wage increase will only asphyxiate the structural asymmetries between labour and capital. This is important for capitalism’s drive towards stability – with trade unions, as long as unions are not eliminated altogether.

This, of course, is never openly admitted. The idea of “incorporating” (read: using, manipulating, and moulding) unions into the apparatus of capitalism is commonly sold as “social partnership”.

Meanwhile, any upswing in wages will, almost by definition, strengthen the domestic demand side of capitalism’s consumerism. This assists consumer capitalism on the “spending side” by providing disposable income that translates into shopping and consumerism.

Yet, this does not work on the “expenses side” where companies seek to push wages down. These two out of the 17 unsolvable contradictions of capitalism are conflicting forces. In short, “high wages” conflicts with “cost-cutting”.

From a workers’ point of view, the current crisis “again” shows that workers have been made to cover the vast amount of the real income losses associated with what became known as “the energy price shock”.

The ideological message is that it is just a “shock”, a distress, a disturbance, and something that “came out of the blue” like an earthquake. It is all natural and has nothing to do with capitalism.

The second ideology that camouflages the usual crisis of capitalism is to associate high inflation with the Russian war against the Ukraine – everything will do, except capitalism.

As a result of these factors and the ideological smokescreen, workers suffered a reduction in real wage levels. This forces trade unions into catching-up in order to contribute to a “fairer” burden sharing between labour and capital.

Ever since the arrival of capitalism, there has never been a “fair burden sharing” between labour and capital. Once unions have caught up in wages increases, they – most likely – will be blamed for “cranking up inflation” by those who seeks to hide those that really crank up inflation: companies and corporations.

As a consequence of a workable ideology, we are frequently told about “the inflation shock of 2022”. Yet, it forces the hand of trade unions.

Overall, there will be more trade union engagements into collective bargaining and more strikes. We could also see what might be called a “normalisation of European collective bargaining policy”.

With more strikes on the horizon, trade unions might balance out the power asymmetries of capitalism. Of course, on all of this, corporate media will focus on the impact of strikes – causing “travel chaos” and “strike madness”, etc. Explaining the causes of strikes to the public can be dangerous.

It might make people support trade unions more and that is something corporate mass media (that are businesses themselves) do not want.

Meanwhile, inflation is slowly declining and thanks to rising nominal wages, the purchasing power of European workers is slowly “stabilising” (read: not really increasing). However, much of this has “not yet” offset the drop in real wages since “Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine”.

This was not caused by Russia (a country) but by companies and corporations cranking up prices. It is known as “price-gouging”. Blaming Russia for ‘providing’ the ideological cover for Uber-profitmaking. In the manageralisitic language of a CEO, it becomes as Kimberly-Clark’s CEO said,

the company has “a lot of opportunity” to expand margins over time.

Expanding “margins” is the managerialist codeword for “profits”. For the corporate apparatchiks who run corporations, the word “profit” remains a dirty word that must be avoided. Instead, it is way better for the apostles of neo-liberalism and Managerialism to speak of “margins”, “shareholder value” etc.

Meanwhile, on the workers’ side of the equation, the jacking up of prices by companies and the resulting inflation led to deep cuts in the available income of workers. This has far-reaching consequences for the “functional” (read: unequal) distribution of income between labour and capital.

Overall, collective bargaining continues to face the task of correcting the undesirable developments of recent years, and thereby, contributes to easing the burdens on workers. Yet, for almost half a decade, collective bargaining has been domesticated by calling it a “crisis” and “chaos”.

Meanwhile, the idea of “rapidly changing economic conditions” is also used to house-train and tame trade unions. Much of this is done to push trade unions into the defensive.

The short phase of economic recovery at the end of the Corona pandemic was abruptly ended by the inflation crisis in the wake of the Russian’s attack on Ukraine.

Terms like “economic recovery” are staunchly avoided by the apostles of neo-liberalism and adjacent pro-business writers as this might give unions “ideas” like we demand our share of the cake. The apostles of neoliberal capitalism seek to avoid this.

Meanwhile, the corporate jacking up of energy and consumer prices has put pressure on private consumption. It also increased production costs in energy-intensive industries.

At the same time, many companies have been able to increase their profits by rising prices, which in turn has contributed significantly to domestic inflation.

As in almost any crisis, this time too, an upward redistribution of wealth at the expense of wage earners and in favour of capital and profits was the result.

It works under one of the more cynical mottos of neo-liberalism: “never let a crisis go to waste” – in short, use it to extract even more wealth from the working class. The not-so-socialist RAND corporation estimates this to be in the vicinity of $2.5tr.

Worse, stagnating private consumption and an increase in private savings that was driven by uncertainties and was paired with a restrictive monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) have sharpened the edges of economics in recent years. In other words, it has made life for workers harder.

Notwithstanding, GDP in EU countries grew by an average of 3.5% in 2022. It came in the wake of re-opening of businesses after the easing of Corona restrictions.

Yet, growth slumped significantly to 0.4% in 2023. Worse, the increase in interest rates by the ECB that reached a spike in September 2023 at 4.5% – lowered to 4.25% in June 2024 – also contributed to the economic slowdown.

Meanwhile, in Ireland’s strongly cyclical economy, GDP shrunk by a full 3.2%. This was caused by the weak development in some sectors dominated by multinational corporations.

In Germany and Austria, GDP decreased by 0.3 and 0.8%, respectively. Yet, Belgium’s economy grew slightly by 1.4%. France largely stagnated with a small increase of 0.7%, as restrained investments slowed growth down.

All of this continues to impact on the labour market in the EU-27. Despite all this, it was still characterised by, albeit slow, employment “growth” particularly in the service sector. In the last quarter of 2023, the EU documented a new record with an “employment rate” of a whopping 75.3% among 20-64-year-olds.

Despite weak orders, many EU companies keep their current workforce to secure and ensure availability of required workforce in the event of an economic upturn.

With an unemployment rated in Poland (2.8%), the Czech Republic (2.6%), and Germany (3.1%), these EU countries had “almost” full employment in 2023 – on “official” (read: cleaned up / manipulated) statistics.

Overall, the EU expects Europe’s unemployment rate to remain as low as 6.1% in the EU-27 countries for 2023 and 2024.

This alone should significantly strengthen the collective bargaining position of trade unions. However, some also expect a slight increase in unemployment in 2024 – particularly in some northern and Western European industrialised countries.

Against this background, European collective bargaining is set to move towards “at least rudimentarily fair” (read: less unfavourable to workers) outcomes in the near future.

The previous rather sharp increases in corporate profits will serve as a corporate buffer in case wage gains are made by trade unions.

Meanwhile, workers and trade unions are set to “make up” for previous losses in the form of rising real wages by achieving improved collective bargaining outcomes.

At the same time, it is to be expected that this will be blamed by the corporate press on the so-called “wage-price spiral” that insinuates that trade unions – and not corporate bosses cranking up prices – are responsible for inflation.

In any case, further wage growth is strongly required in the current phase of economic recovery. This is the only way to – at least partially! – compensate for the sharp slump in real wages during the recent crises of high inflation that put wages on a downward spiral.

Those who have dared to forecast what might happen during the second half of the current year, agreed that a modest wage rise with next to no compensation for capitalism’s recent high inflation is what is likely to occur.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal and anti-union European Commission expect wages to grow by a measly 2.0% for the Eurozone.

Worse, there is currently absolutely “no sign” of wages growth to be “re”-coupled to productivity. Perhaps, the “decoupling” of wages from productivity was one of the most significant feats achieved by neo-liberalism.

It permanently made workers poorer and poorer while corporate profits rose and rose. Workers worked hard and others cashed in, big time!

Until the year 2025, productivity is set to grow by 1.2% while wage growth is expected to slow down. In other words, the gap between “productivity / profits” and “wages” will grow.

Despite unions achieving wage gains, the decoupling of wages from productivity is set to continue. And this will make corporations – in the long run – much richer and workers comparatively much poorer.

At first glance, it seems that Europe has, as presented by corporate media, taken a “just” way out of the crisis. On closer inspection however, the situation is more complex than the ideologues of the pro-business press want us to believe.

For example, real wages will continue to be well below the 2021 level even in the optimistic scenario outlined above with unions achieving significant wages increases.

A return to 2021 wage levels is “not” expected to be reached again until 2025 – at the earliest.

Worse, real wages in the EU-27 in 2023 were each around 7% below the value that could have been expected if a “normal” development had occurred, i.e. without the high inflation crisis caused by the cranking up of prices by companies and corporations and by exposing energy to the whims of a privatised market.

From this perspective, too, a catch-up movement in wages is therefore bitterly needed. In other words, European trade unions will have to fight even more rigorously to get workers back to that level of wages enjoyed before the “inflation crisis”.

This needs to be done with or without re-linking wages to the classical three demands for higher wages: Inflation: At least, wages levels need to be able to compensate for capitalism’s inflation that is caused by capital – not workers and trade unions.
Productivity: trade unions need to re-link wages to productivity so that workers can enjoy – at least parts – of the fruits they themselves have made possible.
Wealth-redistribution: this is the “returning” some of the Uber-wealth companies and corporations have made under neo-liberalism.


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Thomas Klikauer

Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013)