ICYMI

Canada Owes First Nations Billions After Making ‘Mockery’ of Treaty Deal, Top Court Rules

Court urges federal and Ontario governments to make payouts after ‘dishonourably’ neglecting 174-year-old deal. The Crown promised riches to First Nations in Canada – over 150 years on, they could finally get billions

By Leyland Cecco

July 29, 2024

Source: The Guardian


First Nations elders watch the Canada Day festivities in Calgary, Alberta - 2022 

| Image via wikimedia commons

An “egregious” refusal by successive Canadian governments to honor a key treaty signed with Indigenous nations made a “mockery” of the deal and deprived generations of fair compensation for their resources, Canada’s top court has ruled.

But while the closely watched decision will likely yield billions in payouts, First Nation chiefs say the ruling adds yet another hurdle in the multi-decade battle for justice.

In a scathing and unanimous decision released on Friday, Canada’s supreme court sharply criticized both the federal and Ontario governments for their “dishonourable” conduct around a 174-year-old agreement, which left First Nations people to struggle in poverty while surrounding communities, industry and government exploited the abundant natural resources in order to enrich themselves.

“For almost a century and a half, the Anishinaabe have been left with an empty shell of a treaty promise,” the court wrote in the landmark ruling.

The stark language reflects the enduring legacy of the colonial project first envisioned by the British government and continued after Canada gained independence and offers yet another example of major cases tilting towards Indigenous peoples. The court decision to highlight “egregious” ways in which governments have treated their agreements with nations could have far-reaching consequences, both for the affected communities and the country.

The case centered on a treaty signed in 1850 between the British Crown and a group of Anishinaabe nations on the shores of Lakes Huron and Superior. Known as the Robinson Treaties, the agreements, covering 35,700 sq miles (92,400 sq km) of land, included a rare “augmentation clause” that promised to increase annual payments “from time to time” as the land generated more wealth – “if and when” that payment could be made without the Crown incurring a loss.

Over the next 174 years, the lands and waters covered by the deal generated immense profits for companies – and substantial revenues for the province of Ontario. But in 1874, the annuities were capped in at $4 a person and never increased.

“Today, in what can only be described as a mockery of the Crown’s treaty promise to the Anishinaabe of the upper Great Lakes, the annuities are distributed to individual treaty beneficiaries by giving them $4 each,” the court wrote, singling out the “shocking” figure paid to beneficiaries. “The Crown has severely undermined both the spirit and substance of the Robinson Treaties.”

Among the key issues the court tackled was the novel “augmentation clause” in the treaty. The justices said that even though the treaty does not promise to pay a certain sum of money, “no party doubts that the Crown was able to increase the annuities beyond $4 per person without incurring loss, and that it should have exercised its discretion to do so.”

Finding the nation-to-nation agreement was an alliance of equals, the court called on the Crown to return “to the foundations of the treaty” and to “engage the honour of the Crown”, by increasing the annual payments. Failing to do so would be “patently dishonourable”, wrote justice Mahmud Jamal.

Lawrence Wanakamik, chief of Whitesand First Nation, told reporters the decision had been a “long time coming”.

“We have suffered all those years [with] no economic benefits to our community. It’s been hard over the years trying to make a whole community for Whitesand,” he said, holding back tears. “We do have other struggles to contend with, but you know, with this settlement … we’ll have a better community from this point on.”

Crucially, the ruling does not award a settlement to Superior Anishinaabe First Nations, who had previously argued they are owed C$126bn in back payments. An Ontario court ruled on this claim last year, but the supreme court ordered the ruling be held in reserve pending Friday’s decsion. The court also said the settlement ruling must remain unreleased for another six months so that both parties could come to an agreement.

But Wilfred King, chief of Gull Bay First Nation, said he was “a bit disappointed” by key parts of the ruling, namely the way in which the Crown proposes the figure it feels is fair.

“How do you negotiate when one side says, ‘Well, we think this is a fair amount?’”

Ontario has previously argued in court that far from growing rich, it has spent nearly C$4.2bn in its efforts to settle the north and open it up to industry.

For nations that have waited decades for compensation, the prospect of more legal wrangling is “unfortunate”, said King.

“Both Crowns – Canada and Ontario – were admonished by the court for making a mockery of the treaty. And it’s important that both Crowns understand why they were being criticized,” he continued.

The supreme court has given Ontario a six-month timeline to propose a new settlement with the First Nations groups on Lake Superior. The justices warned that if governments couldn’t settle fair compensation, the court would step in.

“I’m hopeful that the Crown comes to the table with clean hands this time and try to come to an amicable agreement,” said King. “We knew we were never going to come close to the C$126bn we believe we’re owed. But it just showed you the vast amount of resources that have been extracted from our territory without fair compensation.”

Leyland Cecco is a Canadian freelance photojournalist focusing on the intersection of culture, economics and the environment. He has covered the Middle East and North Africa for the last three years, and currently divides his time between Cairo and Toronto.

Will Leonard Peltier Die In Prison?

By Sarah Baum

July 30, 2024

Source: The Nation


Image by Kenny, Creative Commons 2.0

Leonard Peltier, one of America’s longest-serving political prisoners, could have been a free man today. He could have gone home to the little plot of land waiting for him in North Dakota that Indigenous groups and elders had prepared for him. He could have hugged his son, Chauncey, who he hasn’t seen outside the walls of a prison since Chauncey was 10. He could have lived out his final days in peace, or at least the approximation of it, after a lifetime of violence at the hands of the United States government, starting with his boyhood at the notoriously abusive, state-sponsored Indian Boarding Schools.

Instead, the US Parole Commission decided on July 2 that the ailing soon-to-be-octogenarian would spend the next 15 years—if he lives that long—in a federal penitentiary.

“They didn’t sentence him to death,” Nick Tilsen, an Indigenous activist who aided in the Peltier release efforts with the South Dakota-based NDN Collective, told The Nation, “but that’s what’s happening to him slowly, every day.”

The announcement came three weeks to the day after Peltier’s June 10 parole hearing, his first in well over a decade. It was a lot like his other legal proceedings, which is to say, highly unusual.

Many of the people who had led the charge to put Peltier behind bars in the first place, such as District Attorney James Reynolds and a top federal officer, were among those advocating for his release. But neither of those men—nor most of the character witnesses requested by Peltier’s legal team—were permitted by the government to take the stand. Only Tilsen, who had been coordinating Peltier’s release plan, and Peltier’s doctor had made the cut.

Most of the eight character witnesses Peltier’s legal team brought to speak on his behalf were deemed “inadmissible.” The Parole Commission didn’t give reasons as to why, but such quirks—to put it lightly—in the judicial process are not new for Leonard Peltier, a man who has spent nearly 50 years incarcerated for a crime he likely did not commit, thanks to a trial rife with prosecutorial misconduct and state-sanctioned violence.

To use that district attorney’s words: “[T]he continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is injust. We [the FBI] were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense.” To use Amnesty International’s words, Peltier is a “political prisoner”—jailed simply for being part of the American Indian Movement, or AIM.

Thirty sitting members of Congress (and countless former ones) have also called for Peltier’s release, as have the United Nations, Nelson Mandela, Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Human Rights Watch, and the Democratic National Committee.

But Peltier’s defense committee told The Nation that the roster was stacked against him at his hearing. In contrast to Peltier’s two allotted witnesses, nearly a dozen people were brought in to speak out against him. The current FBI director, Christopher Wray, wrote to the commission calling Peltier a “remorseless killer.” Testimony also included the families of the two FBI agents at the heart of the Peltier case: Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams. The pair were killed in a shootout at the Raging Bull encampment, located inside the Pine Ridge Reservation, on June 26, 1975.

Hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence have since been uncovered to suggest that Peltier’s conviction was the end product of unconstitutional tactics and surreptitious violence perpetrated by the feds. The Raging Bull shootout occurred in an era dubbed the “Reign of Terror” by Indigenous traditionalists who were routinely brutalized by the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the paramilitary faction of the US-installed tribal government, known as the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, or the Goon Squad. There were reportedly upwards of 60 unsolved murders across the reservation in one three-year period at this time. The FBI was known to turn a blind eye to, if not actively arm, the GOONs.

Peltier’s AIM codefendants were acquitted on homicide charges by an Iowa jury on the grounds that it was rational and necessary self-defense in the face of the government’s ongoing terror campaign. But Peltier, who had fled to Canada, had to be extradited, so his trial came later. This time, the FBI took the case to a federal judge who was“notoriously anti-Indian” and who barred all evidence pertaining to anti-Indigenous violence from the GOONs and the federal government. Key witnesses were blocked from the stand, or threatened and coerced into false testimony.

The jury found Peltier guilty of two counts of first-degree murder; he was given two consecutive life sentences.

Today, Peltier cannot even walk unassisted, let alone be a “danger to his community,” which is one of the considerations the Parole Commission must take into account. His lawyers told The Nation that for an incarcerated person, it can be near-impossible to access quality healthcare.

“The only consistent feature of his medical records is the near-universal lack of follow-up,” Moira Meltzer-Cohen, of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, said. “Even when it’s the prison’s own doctors recommending care, it just doesn’t happen.”

Moreover, in a maximum security prison, inmates are often thrust suddenly into lockdown—making reliable, routine care seemingly impossible, Meltzer-Cohen said.

But Jenipher Jones, a cocounsel on the case, said Peltier’s plight goes beyond the typical pitfalls of prison healthcare. “To withhold care from that political prisoner often means that attention is being diverted from advocacy, from pursuit of release,” Jones told The Nation. “It is forcing them to fight for their lives instead.”

Meanwhile, the FBI has leveraged its political power to keep Peltier locked up. Under the Clinton administration, The White House allegedly all but promised to free Peltier. His defense committee bought him clothes and his grandson prepared a bedroom for his homecoming.

Then, thousands of current and former FBI agents swarmed to Washington to protest Peltier’s clemency. Suddenly, and without warning, Clinton released his list of clemency grantees on January 20, 2001—without Peltier’s name on it.

Chauncey Peltier, Leonard Peltier’s oldest son, was with his father on the reservation on the day of the shootout. He recalls the long, winding road trips in his father’s orange Chevy van, fishing out on the lake, traveling with AIM demonstrators. He also remembers being 10 years old, entering the courthouse for his father’s trial—and being slammed against the wall by FBI agents who told him his “murdering dad would never walk free.”

It was just one more chapter in what the junior Peltier described as a lifetime of FBI harassment and violence on account of his last name, and a lifetime of loss.

“So many people tell me I sound just like him,” Chauncey Peltier told The Nation. “I feel like I’ve been robbed in this situation too, because my father’s been wrongfully incarcerated and he ain’t been there for us kids when we needed him.”

But Peltier’s reach has also spanned far beyond the prison walls—not just his story, but his words, his poetry, his art and his activism. From his cell in a supermax prison, Peltier has helped organize Indigenous-led mutual aid initiatives such as toy drives, collaborated with scholars to craft Indigenous-focused policy, and funded humanitarian initiatives by selling his artwork.

The elder Peltier was not available for interview at this time, impeded by both his declining health and the communications roadblocks of incarceration—phone calls and visits are severely limited. But in his 1999 memoir, he stood up for continued Indigenous resistance, and emphasized the importance of preserving the culture and heritage of his people.

“I am guilty only of being an Indian,” he wrote. “Being who I am, being who you are—that’s Aboriginal Sin.”

Peltier’s lawyers told The Nation they will be filing an appeal. There have also been continued demands for President Joe Biden to grant Peltier clemency—demands that will likely increase now that Biden is set to leave office in January.

USPS Letter Carriers Convention Shapes Up to Be Open Bargaining Showdown

By Tim Bash

July 30, 2024

Source: Labor Notes

Image by Nora Stamper



City letter carriers have been working without a contract for more than 400 days, and leaders of the Letter Carriers (NALC) still refuse to provide any substantive updates from bargaining. As rank-and-file anger boils over, a new group called Build a Fighting NALC (BFN) is building momentum to demand a stronger and more transparent contract fight next time.

We’re bringing an “Open Bargaining” resolution to the national convention, August 5-9 in Boston. As of this writing, two NALC state associations and 44 branches across the country have passed the resolution to show their support.

There was a time when the NALC, under the leadership of President Vince Sombrotto (1978-2002), used to engage in contract campaigns, hold rallies, make its demands public, and keep members informed of contract progress. Our resolution calls on the union to build on that legacy.

Union leaders have promised us over and over that contract resolution is imminent. But they share details only in closed-door meetings, where attendees are discouraged from sharing specifics with the membership. They insist we must trust them and trust their process.

If the parties reach an impasse in bargaining, the unresolved items will be taken to an arbitration panel and the resulting contract will be binding, with no opportunity for the 200,000 members to vote.

NALC leaders seem to be relying on management’s good faith. But in the daily life of a carrier, we don’t see much good faith coming from management. We work in often dangerous conditions and under increasingly strict metrics. For example, a carrier is supposed to take only 22 minutes to load a truck—no matter the volume of packages, no matter if you have to push a heavy cart through the snow. Though these work standards are not contractually enforceable and we can’t be disciplined over them, that doesn’t stop the threats and harassment.

Members have begun organizing to make ourselves heard, through a series of Zoom meetings with speakers from across the union. Out of these meetings, the BFN movement has landed on five demands to champion:An open bargaining strategy in future contract negotiations
A starting wage of $30 an hour (carriers currently start at $19.33)
An end to mandatory overtime
A “worker’s wage” for union officers
Fighting for the right to strike

GONNA BE INTERESTING

The leadership of the NALC has seen some controversy in recent months. President Brian Renfroe is facing charges brought by members of the Executive Council, including “abandoned position and dereliction/neglect of duty,” “making false or misleading statements about a NALC officer,” and “impaired driving after hours in a NALC-owned vehicle.”

Though the charges have mostly been dismissed, there will likely be an appeal to the national convention. This could lead to removal from office. Members at the convention will have a chance to reconsider the charges, and may vote on whether to follow the appeal’s suggestion to remove Renfroe from office.

Out of this disarray has emerged another organization, the Concerned Letter Carriers, led partly by carrier Corey Walton, host of the popular podcast “From A to Arbitration.” (These are not competing groups; Walton has also promoted the BFN movement on his show.) CLC’s goal is to replace the national leadership with members who will put the fighting spirit back in the union and fix the failures of the current regime.

Already two members of the Executive Council have announced their candidacy to replace Renfroe in the 2026 elections; one is backed by the CLC. They will both have to differentiate themselves from the old guard.

All this sets up what promises to be a national convention to remember. The debate over open bargaining has already begun; leaders who claim the strategy of secrecy is the only way have been making their case to members at various meetings and in union publications.

And while Renfroe fosters a friendly relationship with USPS Postmaster General Louis Dejoy, many members are working to oppose DeJoy’s “Delivering for America” plan that would close and consolidate scores of postal facilities. The group Communities and Postal Workers United has been fighting to make its voice heard at meetings of the Postal Board of Governors, the body that could fire DeJoy.

BFN hopes to awaken a long dormant rank and file—offering carriers a cause to fight for and a way to be heard. The time has come for change in the NALC.

Tim Bash is a letter carrier in Minneapolis and on the interim coordinating committee of Build a Fighting NALC.

IDF Just Destroyed Key Rafah Water Facility Rachel Corrie Spent Her Last Month of Life Defending

By Younis Tirawi

July 30, 2024
Source: Drop News Site



On Friday, I discovered a video posted on Instagram by an Israeli soldier from the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, showing the calculated demolition of a chief water facility in Rafah. The video, in three parts, shows Israeli soldiers planting explosives inside and around the water pumps of a facility in the occupied city. The video—which is captioned in Hebrew, “Destruction of the Tal Sultan water reservoir in honor of Shabbat”—ends with footage of the water facility being blown up. The soundtrack is a song produced by soldiers of the 51st Golani Brigade with lyrics like, “We will burn Gaza… shake all of Gaza… for every house you destroy we will destroy ten.”

The water facility, also known as the Canada Well, is situated in Tel Sultan Neighborhood, in the western part of Rafah city. U.S. human rights activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to prevent demolitions in the city, spent much of her time during the last month of her life helping to protect the municipality workers at the Canada Well. The workers were repairing damage done to the well due to the Israeli military bulldozers in the area, according to Gordon Murray, one of her fellow activists.

A report Corrie wrote just weeks before her murder lays out the work she and other activists with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)—“human shield work with the Rafah Municipal Water authority,” she described it—were doing with local Palestinian workers to protect the well and local water system. “The workers are currently building a barrier surrounding the Canada Well…in the Canada-Tel El Sultan area of Rafah,” she wrote. “This well along with the El Iskan Well…was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers on 30th January [2003]. On several occasions the internationals have witnessed shooting from military vehicles on the settler road which passes along the northwestern edge of the sand-dunes and agricultural areas on the outskirts of Rafah.”

Corrie’s report added that the Canada Well had the capacity to produce 35 percent of Rafah’s total water supply back then. The defense of the water supply, she noted, led “to ISM activists coming under fire.”

The soldiers who blew up the water system this week were carrying out a strategy that has been explicitly articulated by the Netanyahu government. In October, an adviser to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Giora Eiland, laid out the strategy to deprive Palestinians not just of water from outside Gaza, but to disrupt their ability to pump and purify water locally, on the IDF’s radio station, GLZ. “Israel, as I understand, closed the water supply to Gaza,” said Eiland in a Hebrew-language interview. “But there are many wells in Gaza, which contain water which they treat locally, since originally they contain salt. If the energy shortage in Gaza makes it so that they stop pumping out water, that’s good. Otherwise we have to attack these water treatment plants in order to create a situation of thirst and hunger in Gaza, and I would say, forewarn of an unprecedented economical and humanitarian crisis.”

The interviewer pushed back. “Giora, I want to check that I understand correctly. You are saying—get the residents of Gaza into thirst, into hunger. These are the terms you are using?”

“You understood correctly,” he said. “If you want to topple the Hamas regime, you won’t achieve that merely through aerial attacks. And a ground invasion, it has its benefits, [but] it also comes with great risks, and it’s unclear that the state of Israel needs to take these right now.”

For months, Israeli forces have been targeting vital water resources in the strip leading to starvation and, according to new reports, worsening access to clean water. Last week, the Israeli military and the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that Poliovirus has been found in Gaza’s sewage, further intensifying the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the occupied enclave.

Our exposure of the video on Friday immediately sparked outrage, with some describing it as evidence of war crimes. The soldier quickly made his account private and deleted the stories.

The Canada well was built in 1999 with Canadian International Development Agency funding. While initial reporting, based on the soldier’s caption, called it a “reservoir,” according to Gaza’s coastal municipalities water utility, the Canada well is the main water facility in the city of Rafah and provides services to 50 percent of the city’s residents, mainly in West Rafah.

Monther Shoblaq, Director General of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, who oversaw the maintenance and renovation of the Canada Well, described the destruction as “scandalous evidence” of the Israeli army’s deliberate targeting of water and sanitation facilities.

Monther told Drop Site in an interview that his organization had provided the Israeli military with precise GPS coordinates for the Canada Well and all water facilities in the Strip, in coordination with the Red Cross. Despite these precautions, the well was blown up. The Canada well remained operational throughout the war until the Israeli military full invasion into the neighborhood in late May, he said.

“The solar panels at the facility enabled water services during the war for tens of thousands of people in the area, even with the electricity shutdown,” he said. “I was shocked when I saw the video. It’s not just that they targeted this water facility; it’s the fact that they planted explosives, celebrated the act on Instagram, and did so under the guise of honoring the Sabbath. It’s deeply cruel. This is the Canada Well in Tal al-Sultan—one of the most important water facilities in the city of Rafah.”

Monther recounts witnessing the complete destruction of one of Gaza’s vital water facilities located in West Khan Younis by the Israeli military. He requested that facility be designated a deconflicted area through OCHA and UNICEF, providing details about the employees and their families present inside. The military approved the request, and CMWU restricted access to only employees and their immediate family members. Despite this, during the Israeli military operations in Khan Younis, the facility was struck without warning, resulting in the deaths of four of its employees’ relatives. As a result, the water facility, which housed Gaza’s largest water tools and equipment, was left and subsequently utterly destroyed.

In the north, too, Gaza City’s municipal government has repeatedly reported deliberate attacks on water facilities in the city. A statement by the municipality on July 15 warned that the city is experiencing “a severe water crisis, with available water amounting to only a quarter of the pre-aggression supply at best, covering only 40 percent of the city’s area.”

A BBC analysis based on satellite data from May 9, three days after the Rafah invasion, found out that 50% of Gaza’s water and sanitation facilities had been damaged or destroyed since Israel began its offensive following the Oct 7 attack.

Ryan Grim and Hind Khoudary contributed reporting.

Update: Monday, July 29, 2024. The IDF has not yet provided a comment, but, according to Haaretz, army sources said senior commanders did not approve the destruction of the facility. The military, Haaretz reported, is conducting an initial probe, after which it will determine whether to open an investigation.

Right to Housing and Its Relation to Democracy

By Yavor Tarinski

July 30, 2024

Source: Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

Image by Cathy Crowe

Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
~Matthew Desmond[1]

The issue of housing is of fundamental importance that has a direct connection, among other basic rights, to democratic participation. Despite that (or because of it) it is being contested by capitalist forces worldwide. Capitalist forces, being on the offensive of submitting everything to the doctrine of profit-making, are in the process of also shifting the use of urban space from one serving communal needs, to one generating profits.

This results in the expulsion of urban residents (via rising rent prices etc.) away from whole sections of cities, so that space is made for profiteering. A phenomenon that can be observed in many cities around the world. One stark example is the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where over 100,000 people live in occupied buildings, because of the housing crisis.[2]

As Peter Marcuse suggests, “neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose?”[3] In this sense, the current housing crisis is a product of structural adjustments of a system that favors certain social roles and behaviors over others. It is through the enforcement of scarcity over certain resources, which are often more than enough to satisfy the needs of the people,[4] that capitalism prompts societies to embark on wasteful consumerist lifestyles. As Samuel Alexander and Alex Baumann write:


The huge cost of land and housing has significant implications, affecting what we do for work, how much we work, our need for a car, and a range of other consumer habits. Our economy has developed in such perverse ways (particularly when it comes to land cost) that we are often locked into high-impact consumerist lifestyles.[5]

In other words, people are pressured to lead a passive type of life, where there is barely any time left outside of the work-consumption-sleep cycle. If someone dares to drift away from it, they run the risk of being deprived of vital resources for recreation. Once without them, people become marginalized, with different systemic obstacles and conservative prejudices standing on their way to go out of this marginalization.

People who are subjected to the stress of homelessness may have previous mental illness exacerbated, as well as have their mental state burdened by anxiety, fear, depression, sleeplessness, and substance use.[6] Homelessness thus sickens human beings, slowly crippling them in multiple levels. But despite that, we have seen many times that even under such violent conditions human beings are still capable to self-organize and fight to reclaim urban space for their recreational needs. This comes to show that no matter how grim a given condition my get, there is always potential for radical change, as long as people work collectively.

The absence of a right to housing should be viewed as an act of violence, as yet another means of keeping people engaged in passive consumerist lifestyle.

But a real democracy, one that is based on direct popular participation rather than on elections of representatives once every four years, requires social and individual autonomous activity. Political theorist and researcher Katy Wells underline the connection between housing and autonomy:


Individuals require somewhere they can sleep, prepare food, use the facilities of a bathroom, and be at leisure. Some of these are pre-requisites for basic health, and basic health is a pre-requisite for autonomy. Being able to relax and be at leisure is also a prerequisite of autonomous activity since otherwise we can never replenish our mental and physical resources.[7]

This relation is also highlighted by classical philosophers like Aristotle, according to whom:


The objective of work is usually to sustain our lives biologically, an objective we share with other animals. But the objective of leisure can and should be to sustain other aspects of our lives which make us uniquely human: our souls, our minds, our personal and civic relationships.[8]

In a truly democratic environment – one where everyone share power on equal basis – we can suggest that every member of the community will also have its personal space, where to be able to retreat from the public sphere and recreate. For a healthy civic life to be established, one cannot exist solely in the public sphere – i.e. in the agora – where it is exposed to encounter every possible member of the community. While stimulating, the debates and encounters produced in the public sphere need to be followed by citizens retreating to a personal sphere – i.e. oikos – where they can reflect on their own, or with their closest circle of people, on social matters and life in general. Without this symbiotic relationship between public and personal spheres, popular participation decays.

One example in history that points toward the relation between popular reclamation of power and right to housing is the Paris Commune, when the inhabitants of the city claimed for themselves the role of real citizens that directly participate in the management of their city through a network of revolutionary councils and sectional assemblies. In this revolutionary environment the rebellious Parisians decided, on 29 of March 1871, to suspend payment of rent. On 25 of April, the Commune also made the decision to requisition empty housing for the victims of bombing by the troops of Versailles[9], since by mid-April, the French army had began a bombardment of Paris.

In the more recent past, during the 1970s, a civil war broke in Lebanon. Due to severe capitalist crisis, the grassroots rebelled against the ruling elite, in an attempt to radically restructure Lebanese society. This uprising saw the emergence of people’s committees that undertook the management of cities, towns and villages. Sources refer that the inhabitants of the slums and refugee camps surrounding the capital city of Beirut have taken control of their own communities, and that government authorities were unable to enter the ‘belt of poverty’ for several months.[10] With the inhabitants reclaiming their control over their habitat, they refused to pay for rent or electricity. Instead, they give money over to the committees that administer the areas so that basic services can be provided.

In both cases, as well as in other historic moments, we see the implementation policies indicate that with the radical and equal redistribution of power also goes similar redistribution of urban space.

Nowadays the struggles for participation and space remain tightly interlinked. Initiatives for the Right to Housing and municipalist movements all can be viewed as different parts of the popular claim to a right to the city. Housing must be taken away from bureaucratic management (which by its nature tends to benefit the ruling oligarchies), and instead placed under the control of the collective citizenry (whose everyday life directly depends on). As 20th-century philosopher Harry Overstreet suggests:


Recreation is not a secondary concern for a democracy. It is a primary concern, for the kind of recreation a people make for themselves determines the kind of people they become and the kind of society they build.[11]

References:

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/13/we-must-separate-the-idea-of-house-from-home-the-case-for-drastic-action-on-shelter

[2] Baruq. Casa encantada: A Portrait of the Fight for Housing in Belo Horizonte (Seditionist Distribution, 2024) p11.

[3] Peter Marcuse. ‘Not chaos but walls: postmodernism and the partitioned city’, in Postmodern Cities and Space. (Oxford: Blackwel, 1995), p244.

[4] https://www.housingevolutions.eu/project/the-empty-homes-initiative-tackling-irelands-housing-crisis/

[5] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-03-03/access-to-land-plus-a-participation-income-could-change-the-world/

[6] https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/topics/mental-health#:~:text=The%20stress%20of%20experiencing%20homelessness,%2C%20sleeplessness%2C%20and%20substance%20use.

[7] Katy Wells (2019). ‘The Right to Housing’ in Political Studies, 67 (2), pp406-421.

[8] https://philosophybreak.com/articles/aristotle-on-why-leisure-defines-us-more-than-work/

[9] https://www.cadtm.org/The-Paris-Commune-of-1871-banks-and-debt#the_commune_s_positive_measures_dealing_with_rent_and_other_debts

[10] Georges Mehrabian. A Revolution Derailed: Lebanon in the 1960s and 1970s (Athens & Lebanon: Diethnes Vima & Dar Al Mousawar Al Arabi, 2023), p192.

[11] Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Recreation Act of 1962: Hearings Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1962), p32.

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.