This Nakba Day, Palestinians Remind the World We Will Not Be Erased

Palestine’s Nakba has gone on for 76 years, but even in my nightmares, I never imagined the carnage currently unfolding.

By Michel Moushabeck , 

TRUTHOUT

May 15, 2024Abdul Rahman Al-Helou, an 11-year-old Palestinian child, decorates the tent in which he and his displaced family live with lights for the holy month of Ramadan, on March 10, 2024, in Gaza, Palestine.SAHER ALGHORRA / MIDDLE EAST IMAGES / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES


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May 15, 1948, is a date forever etched in the collective memory of every Palestinian. We can’t forget what happened in the leadup to that fateful day. During that time, the world witnessed one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Palestinians call this day “al-Nakba” — the catastrophe that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of nearly 750,000 natives and the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages and towns.

Seventy-six years ago today, the Jewish state of Israel was established and the Palestinian state of despair, homelessness, terror and daily suffering began. During the Nakba of 1948, my family was terrorized; they were displaced from their home in West Jerusalem and became refugees in countries that did not want them. I carry their pain with me to this day as I raise my voice in support of Palestinian rights.

Israeli historian and scholar Ilan Pappé wrote: “Palestine was not empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was colonized, not ‘redeemed;’ and its people were dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily. Colonized people, even under the U.N. Charter, have the right to struggle for their liberation … and the successful ending to such a struggle lies in the creation of a democratic state that includes all of its inhabitants.

Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust and had no role whatsoever in the European pogroms. Before the start of large-scale European Jewish immigration of Holocaust victims to Palestine, 94 percent of the inhabitants of the land were Arabs. The number of Palestinian Jews — and, yes, they considered themselves Palestinians — in Palestine at the end of World War I was less than 60,000.

The Zionists could not have succeeded in colonizing Palestine if it weren’t for the support of Western imperial powers such as the United Kingdom and United States — two countries that did not want Jews in their midst and put strict restrictions on Jewish immigration.

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Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust and had no role whatsoever in the European pogroms.

According to a recent piece by Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect, it was the enactment of the Johnson-Reed Act by the U.S. Congress on May 26, 1924, “fueled chiefly by white Protestant xenophobic fear and rage at Jews and Catholics flowing into the United States,” that left European Jews with no other choice but to go to Palestine. The Johnson-Reed Act is a federal law that prevented immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe in order to “preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” Meyerson explains:


Not surprisingly, it was only then that Jewish immigration to Palestine began to soar, particularly after the Nazis took power in Germany and antisemitic movements and governments came to dominate Poland, Hungary, and much of the rest of Eastern Europe. The 3 percent of Jewish emigrants from Europe who were going to Palestine before the U.S. closed off its border soared to 46 percent from 1932 to 1939, as the Nazis took over Germany and loomed as a threat over the rest of Europe.

The Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt observed at the time that the European powers were attempting to deal with the crime carried out against Jews in Europe by committing another crime, one against Palestinians. She spoke out against it, since she felt it was a recipe for endless conflict. Zionist leaders, however, understood that they needed to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in order to establish an exclusively Jewish homeland, and that the use of armed force against the Arab majority was essential for the colonial project to succeed.

More than seven decades later, Palestinians continue to be colonized; Palestinian lands continue to be confiscated for illegal settlement building; Palestinian family members continue to be separated from one another by walls; Palestinian communities continue to be forcibly displaced; Palestinian homes continue to be demolished; Palestinian farmers’ olive trees continue to be uprooted; Palestinian children continue to be terrorized, detained and killed by the IDF; Palestinian refugees continue to be exiled; and Palestinians living inside Israel continue to be discriminated against. With the complicity of its greatest ally, the United States, Israel has not only continued but has intensified its inhumane policies of apartheid and violations of international law.


Nakba Day is about resisting erasure; it is about reminding the world that Palestinians worldwide are determined to keep our struggle alive.

Nakba Day is about resisting erasure; it is about reminding the world that Palestinians worldwide are determined to keep our struggle alive. Its commemoration every year on May 15 serves as an important reminder that until there is an end to the occupation; until Palestinians get justice, freedom and equal rights; and until Israel adheres to international law, there can be no hope for peace.

Palestinians will also never forget Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the ongoing atrocities that Israel has perpetrated in response. As I write, Israeli troops have moved into Rafah, the safe zone that 1.5 million displaced Palestinians were sent to after they were ordered to evacuate northern Gaza. More than 500,000 Palestinians are said to be fleeing Rafah amid Israeli bombardment from the air, land and sea, moving from one hell to the next. A massive humanitarian catastrophe is about to get even worse. This escalation is a direct result of the Biden administration’s unwillingness to end the genocide and its unconditional, “ironclad” support for Israeli actions, including its engineered starvation and forced displacement.

According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration notified Congress on May 14 of its plan to send yet another large arms package worth $1 billion to the Israeli state, which can be interpreted as giving Israel a green light for continuing its rampage and assault on Rafah. It will replenish tank ammunition, tactical vehicles and mortar rounds used up in Gaza over the past eight months, in contradiction to President Biden’s announcement last week that he will consider withholding additional arms shipments if Israel assaulted “population centers in Rafah.”

It is devastating to witness the ongoing Nakba with the latest nonstop bombardment of Gaza and the unimaginable suffering being inflicted every minute of every day on the now displaced Palestinian people of Gaza — including those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who are being terrorized by soldiers and armed settlers. The despicable, abhorrent and unjustifiable killing of so many innocent civilians is unfathomable. The children of Gaza are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.

My thoughts are with Gaza and Palestine — with every breath and every heartbeat. The past eight months have been unbearable. I have cried over the loss of many friends: writers, artists and journalists I’ve worked with. I have cried over the total devastation of what was once home to over 2.3 million Palestinians. I have cried at the sight of fathers frantically searching for their families under the rubble and mothers holding their dead children close to their chests refusing to let go. I have cried over the older folks who are witnessing yet another massive intensification of the Nakba in their lifetime — a Nakba that has already displaced them and rendered them refugees more than once.


The Biden administration notified Congress on May 14 of its plan to send yet another large arms package worth $1 billion to the Israeli state … giving Israel a green light for continuing its rampage and assault on Rafah.

The sheer cruelty of Gaza’s forced, intentional starvation and Israel’s blocking hundreds of trucks of food and aid from reaching the people is beyond comprehension. So is the Biden administration’s refusal to demand a ceasefire and its use of veto power three times when ceasefire resolutions were introduced in the UN Security Council. The administration’s enabling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza will no doubt taint Biden’s legacy with blood. Its building of a costly, temporary pier to bring in humanitarian aid instead of ordering the Israeli government to open the Rafah crossing and allow the safe passage of all the aid trucks amassed at the border is nothing short of nonsensical. This so-called pier project is estimated to take nearly two months to complete, during which time the death rate from starvation will keep rising with every passing minute. The construction timeline for the pier gives the Israeli Occupation Forces additional time to slaughter and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza.

The destruction of the Al-Shifa Hospital (Gaza’s largest medical facility) and the images of mutilated dead bodies of civilians and patients found after the Israeli Occupation Forces left — patients shackled with their hands and legs tied — was too painful to watch. The discovery of eight mass graves — four at Al-Shifa Hospital, three at Nasser Medical Complex and one at Kamal Adwan Hospital — with a total of 520 dead bodies recovered, including women, children and medics, with evidence of close summary executions due to fatal head and chest bullet wounds, is further proof of Israel’s inhumane, genocidal practices that constitute gross violations of the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law.

On Nakba Day 76, we continue to count: It is day 221; we are in the 8th month of renewed atrocities; the death toll has surpassed 35,000 with over 15,000 of these being children; over 79,000 are injured; 17,000 children are unaccompanied or separated from parents; 260 humanitarian aid workers have been killed; 493 health care workers have been killed; 142 journalists and media workers have been killed; 346 schools have been leveled; all 12 universities in Gaza have been flattened; two-thirds of the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed; and countless children have died from starvation.

What is difficult to keep track of or quantify are the daily lies uttered by U.S. government officials and White House spokespeople in defense of Israel; the shocking amount of weapons shipments being sent by the U.S. to Israel, including 2,000-ton bombs that can wipe out whole neighborhoods; the billions of dollars of aid our government is sending to Israel without accountability; the depth of Western media’s distortion of the Palestinian narrative and the level of its complicity in the genocide; the weaponization of antisemitism, and its conflation with anti-Zionism; the criminalization of dissent; the complicity of our educational institutions and the brutal crackdown on student protesters by riot police; the suspension of students and their disqualification from graduation for demanding that their institutions divest from weapons manufacturers, war profiteers and companies benefiting from and complicit in the Gaza genocide; and the heightened level of Islamophobia that allows for these horrendous genocidal massacres to continue.


The discovery of eight mass graves with evidence of close summary executions due to fatal head and chest bullet wounds is further proof of Israel’s inhumane, genocidal practices.

Today, Israel’s founding strategy of the forcible removal of the Indigenous population continues not only in Gaza, but also everywhere else in the occupied territories. For decades, Palestinians have been prevented from exercising their rights to freedom, equality and self-determination; for decades, they have endured horrific conditions of apartheid and brutal military occupation; and after decades, the hope of recovering even a small portion of their historic homeland has slipped away.

From the river to the sea, under occupation, in refugee camps, in the diaspora and around the world, Palestinians are a people who have been facing the brutal injustice of an apartheid Israeli regime for 76 years. I could have never imagined, in my wildest nightmares, the horrors we are witnessing in Gaza, in Palestine, and the complicity and active participation of the United States in the genocide of my people.

As we commemorate Nakba 76, let’s sum up what is happening in Palestine: Israel was born of British colonialism; it was created through Zionist terrorism that displaced Palestinians and dispossessed them of their homes and land; it is supported — financially, militarily and diplomatically — by Western (primarily U.S.) imperialism serving war profiteers; and it is sustained by a combination of state terrorism and a system of apartheid that denies Palestinians equal rights — Palestinians who form 50 percent of the people in the territory under Israeli control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

In short, Zionism is a settler-colonial ideology and political system that privileges one people over another and strives to ethnically cleanse and erase Palestinians from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This is the end game of 76 years of terror and ethnic cleansing. It did not start on October 7 and it is not about Hamas.

I am asked repeatedly to condemn Hamas by reporters that have been silent during much of our decades-long struggle against the brutal occupation and system of apartheid that denies our rights. Hamas is a resistance movement that began in 1987 as a result of the desperate conditions Palestinians have endured since the establishment of the state of Israel on their land in 1948. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed between 1947 and 1987 before Hamas even existed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist allies are using the pretext of the October 7 Hamas-led attack to fundamentally reshape Gaza and advance their plan of emptying it of Palestinians.


I could have never imagined the horrors we are witnessing in Palestine, and the complicity and active participation of the United States in the genocide of my people.

Israel does not want people to learn the truth. That is why its government has not allowed foreign journalists into Gaza. And that is why this month it passed a law banning Al-Jazeera from reporting from Israel.

Israel relies on the dehumanization of Palestinians, and the normalization of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is a nuclear-armed regional power whose politics have been shaped by ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestinian lands. International human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have issued extensive reports concluding that Israel practices apartheid. UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory Francesca Albanese has come under vicious attacks following her report highlighting Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid and, especially, her most recent sobering report that said, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”

Racism in Israel is not a flaw in the system; it is the system. Hagai El-Ad, the director of B’Tselem, Israel’s oldest human rights organization, said it clearly: “Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it: it is one regime between the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid.” It is a colonial project that employs oppression, violence, persecution, checkpoints, house demolitions, displacement, expulsion, imprisonment, land theft, torture and collective punishment to ethnically cleanse non-Jewish inhabitants. It is not complicated. It is not an age-old religious feud. And it is not a conflict by extremists on both sides. Yet, our elected officials disregard all of this, including the International Criminal Court’s labeling of apartheid as “a crime against humanity.”

Gaza today is asking us an important question about what kind of a world we want our children and grandchildren to live and grow up in. Gaza has become the defining moral issue of our time: How many years of suffocating siege has Gaza endured? How many brutal invasions has it confronted? How many children have been left parentless and how many have been robbed of their mothers? How many have lost their homes, their farms, their orchards, their olive trees, their livelihood? This horror must end — it is an injustice that has left people in crowded tent encampments without food, water, electricity or adequate health care; a devastation not seen in our lifetime; and a cruelty unmatched by any military in our time.


This is the end game of 76 years of terror and ethnic cleansing. It did not start on October 7 and it is not about Hamas.

We are outraged because we are human.

The magnitude of global solidarity with Palestinians shows that people — especially the younger generation, including the majority of young American Jews — are no longer looking away. Across the U.S. and around the world, students and faculty have been engaging in a wave of protests and Gaza solidarity encampments on their campuses to demand that their institutions divest from companies that profit from Israel’s apartheid and genocide. Despite the brutal crackdown by riot police and the arrests of over 3,000 protesters on U.S. campuses, the fearless students are inspiring others around the world to join their movement.

Here in my own backyard, 135 protesters, including two of my daughters, were arrested on May 7 at University of Massachusetts Amherst when the chancellor ordered the riot police to dismantle the encampment. I am outraged by the actions of the university administrators who, instead of protecting the students under their care, have put students’ lives in danger by subjecting peaceful protesters to an excessive show of force that resulted in police assaults, violence and arrests.

Today, the students are the conscience of the nation. They are on the right side of history and are teaching their college administrators a lesson about freedom of expression and the right to protest — a lesson that should be taught on university campuses by those who are attempting to silence the students and criminalize their dissent.

For us Palestinians, despite 76 years of mass displacement, ethnic cleansing and erasure, our connection to the land of Palestine is stronger than ever before. It’s a link to our identity, to our Indigenous traditions and culture. Palestine will be safe in the hands of the younger generation. My children and my children’s children will make sure that no effort or attempt at Palestine’s erasure can succeed or withstand their collective will. I can assure you: We’re not going away.

MICHEL MOUSHABECK is a Palestinian American writer, editor, translator and musician. He is the founder and publisher of Interlink Publishing, a 37-year-old Massachusetts-based independent publishing house. Follow him on Instagram: @ReadPalestine.

DEMOCRACYNOW!

Columbia Journalism Award Recipient: Resist Normalization of Evil and Injustice



Amira Hass discusses Israel’s recent censorship of Al Jazeera, its maintenance of a strict apartheid system, and more.

By Amy Goodman , 

May 17, 2024

Our guest is the Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass, the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. She is the recipient of the 2024 Columbia Journalism Award, and on Wednesday she addressed the graduating class of the Columbia Journalism School in New York City. Hass discusses the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, why journalists should “resist the normalization of evil and injustice,” Israel’s recent censorship of Al Jazeera, its maintenance of a strict apartheid system, its complete rejection of the prospect of Palestinian statehood and more. “Israel took Palestinian life, liberty and freedom as hostage for the past 75 years,” says Hass. “You go to Tel Aviv, you think you are in New York or you are in London — and 40, 50 kilometers away, Palestinians live in cages.”

We also play an excerpt from the student and faculty-led “People’s Graduation” held Thursday at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in response to Columbia University’s crackdown on student protest, which culminated in the administration’s cancellation of university-wide commencement. Centering Palestinian solidarity, the People’s Graduation featured speakers including the Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi, who praised the work of student journalists. While “our institutions have failed us these past seven months, … we listened to your radio stations if we wanted the truth,” she said.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Israel is intensifying its bombardment of the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, destroying dozens of residential buildings in heavy airstrikes overnight and pushing residents to flee to other parts of the city. This comes as Israel is vowing to escalate its ground attack in the southernmost city of Rafah, with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant saying Thursday additional troops would enter Rafah and that military operations will intensify in the city. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also said Thursday, quote, “The battle in Rafah is critical,” unquote.

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One-point-four million Palestinians — over half of Gaza’s population — had been displaced to Rafah seeking shelter. Now more than 600,000 have fled Rafah over the past week and a half since Israel launched its ground offensive there. Since then, no food, fuel or other aid has entered the two main border crossings in southern Gaza, further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. Some 1.1 million Palestinians are on the brink of starvation, according to the U.N., while a full-blown famine is taking place in the north, this confirmed by the World Food Programme.

The developments come as the International Court of Justice has wrapped up two days of hearings in The Hague after South Africa’s request last week for emergency measures to halt Israel’s assault on Rafah. It marked the third time the U.N.’s top court held hearings on Gaza since South Africa filed a case in December accusing Israel of committing genocide. On Thursday, South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Vusimuzi Madonsela, urged the court to order Israel to “totally and unconditionally withdraw” from the Gaza Strip.


VUSIMUZI MADONSELA: When we last appeared before this court to halt this genocidal process, to preserve Palestine and its people, instead, Israel’s genocide has continued apace and has just reached a new and horrific stage. Israel has sought to hide its crimes through the weaponization of international humanitarian law. It pretends that the civilians it ruthlessly kills, through its 2,000-pound bombs, through its targeted airstrikes, through its artificial intelligence systems, through its executions, are human shields. This whitewashing of Israel’s genocide misses the key and fundamental element, that of the massive and still mounting evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel presented its defense at the World Court today and denied it’s carrying out a genocide in Gaza. This is the head of the Israeli delegation to the court, Gilad Noam.


GILAD NOAM: South Africa presents the court yet again, for the fourth time within the scope of less than five months, with a picture that is completely divorced from the facts and circumstances. Israel is engaged in a difficult and tragic armed conflict. South Africa ignores this factual context, which is essential in order to comprehend the situation, and also ignores the applicable legal framework of international humanitarian law. It makes a mockery of the heinous charge of genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: The International Court of Justice today ordered representatives for Israel to submit more information about humanitarian conditions in its so-called evacuation zones in Gaza. This comes as foreign ministers from 13 countries have signed onto a letter warning Israel to halt its ground operations in Rafah and to get more aid to Palestinians. The letter is signed by all G7 members minus the United States.

For more, we’re joined by longtime Israeli journalist Amira Hass. Born in 1956 in Jerusalem, her parents Holocaust survivors, she’s the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, based in Ramallah. She’s the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. Her books include Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege. Amira Hass is the recipient of the 2024 Columbia Journalism Award. And on Wednesday, she addressed the graduating class of the Columbia Journalism School here in New York. She now joins us in our New York studio.

Amira, welcome to Democracy Now!

AMIRA HASS: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Congratulations on your award, but more importantly on your reporting. You are so unusual in Israel as the only Israeli Jewish journalist who lived in the Occupied Territories for the last 30 years. As you gave your address to the Columbia Journalism School, a number of its students threatened by New York police to even step outside the school when they were trying to cover the Gaza Solidarity Encampment outside, as police moved in, and, ultimately, I think, the number of arrests on campus numbered more than 200. Can you talk about the coming together of the issues that you cover, and what you feel it’s so important that journalists should understand about their role in society?

AMIRA HASS: As I said in my address to the students, it is — if I want to sum it up not in a professional way or like a teacher-like way, is to resist the normalization of evil and of injustice, because we are so used to so — there is so much injustice in this world, not in — everywhere. And we have to use our — the unwritten social contract between us and citizens the world over to scrutinize, to monitor, to challenge power, centers of power, the abusive power. Any power can be abusive or is abusive, only we have the power to at least try and restrain it. I think this is — this should be the role — not the only role, but this should be a main role of journalists, to restrain power, wherever it is being manifested.

AMY GOODMAN: Ever the journalist, in your J school address, you quoted a friend in Gaza. This is particularly important as —

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — what happened just feet from where the school is. If you can tell us who he is —

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — and what he said?

AMIRA HASS: Yeah. Just a few — two weeks before the address, I received a WhatsApp from a friend called Bassam Nasser. I met him in the early ’90s when he was still a student. And we haven’t been in touch for many years. He’s a father of four. He’s heading a aid institution or center in Gaza. He was displaced, like so many others, from Gaza to Rafah to save his life. His house, I know, is in ruins now in Gaza. And now he had to flee again with his family from — and the institution, from Rafah to Deir al-Balah in the center. And he sent me a very — he, from time to time, writes something on WhatsApp in English, and I guess he shares it with some others, and he shares his thoughts and feelings. And he shared with me something concerning the demonstrations and protests in American campuses. And I thought, of course, fit to bring it to the — to read it. So I can read it now. Sorry. And this is from the talk and what I — the quote that I brought on Wednesday to the students.

“A glimmer of hope emerges from university students demonstrating the enduring presence of humanity. Panicked, hypocritical politicians swiftly resort to force in order to quell the movement, fearing its global expansion. Repression is enacted to stifle voices challenging the status quo. Police and National Guards are deployed, arresting students who were expelled just hours earlier for speaking out against the violence in Palestine. From Gaza to New York and other major cities worldwide, I want to express deep gratitude for these voices. While you may not be able to save every child in Gaza or restore our shattered lives and dreams, and your efforts won’t prevent the next devastating airstrike that will wipe out our entire family, on behalf of every Palestinian, I want to express heartfelt appreciation for raising awareness to our plight.” And I know he’s not the only one. I mean, I know that if there was some kind of, really, a ray of hope in people’s life in — people’s hell — it’s not life — in the last month, are those demonstrations and protests.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, I wanted to go to someone else talking about those protests. You gave your graduation address on Wednesday at the Columbia Journalism School. The president, Minouche Shafik, had canceled the main graduation ceremony because of the protests. But yesterday, faculty, to say the least, completely exhausted, organized a People’s Graduation. Columbia students and faculty celebrated an alternative People’s Graduation as they gathered for a ceremony just nearby at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, with many students wearing their blue graduation gowns. On the stage with the professors was the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, the New York civil rights leader who was an early mentor to now-Mayor Eric Adams, who’s claimed the protests at Columbia were, quote, “coopted by professional outside agitators.” But among the speakers who addressed the students was the poet Fady Joudah, who read his poem, “Dedication,” about Palestinians killed by Israel; the Palestinian American lawyer and human rights activist Noura Erakat; and the award-winning journalist Mona Chalabi, who has rejected her 2023 Pulitzer Prize and has been highly critical of Gaza coverage by mainstream U.S. media outlets. In her address, she paid tribute to the student journalists in the audience who covered the Gaza encampment, often while facing arrest themselves.


MONA CHALABI: Hi, habibis. I’m just going to talk to you for two minutes, because I have the huge honor of acknowledging my fellow journalists in the room. So, as many of you know, our institutions have failed us these past seven months, and long before that. Writers and editors at some of the most respected newsrooms have told lies about what is happening in Gaza. They have said that death threats falling from the skies are evacuation orders. They have described forced displacement as migration. They have issued warnings to their staff, telling them not to use words like “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide.” In short, they’ve used their reporting to minimize the suffering in Gaza and maintain a status quo. And they’ve had that reporting honored by the Pulitzers. They’ve even sought to —

AUDIENCE: Shame!

MONA CHALABI: They’ve even sought to discredit or ignore Palestinian journalists, like Hind, who face death every day.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I heard what happened last month. A reporter at The New York Times was told that something seemed to be happening at Columbia University. Students appeared to have claimed a lawn as theirs. So, like any breaking news story, a select channel had been created for the journalists to discuss details and assign stories. This is what they do at The New York Times. When this reporter joined the select channel, they were surprised to find that it had been titled “Antisemitism on Campus.” They had decided what the story was before they even took a train uptown.

AUDIENCE: Shame!

MONA CHALABI: Meanwhile, journalists on campus have had a very different perspective. You had begun reporting before a single tent was assembled. You have not only witnessed the encampments, you listened to the chants, you read the signs, and you spoke to the organizers. You did the work, and you did it so well that journalists like me off campus turned to your words, your Instagram accounts, and we listened to your radio stations if we wanted the truth.

And you did that truth telling while cops harassed, assaulted and arrested you and your fellow students. And you did it all while trying to graduate and to grieve. That is true for anti-Zionist Jewish students who were having their faith questioned by those who want them to fall silent. It’s true for students whose parents look like the mothers and fathers being killed every day. And it is especially true for the Palestinian students who continue to report the facts while navigating unbearable grief. I am so proud to call you my colleagues. Would the journalists in the room please stand?

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the award-winning journalist Mona Chalabi, who just won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, though she rejected it. At the award ceremony, Mona called out fellow journalists for their unwillingness to say the word “Palestine.” She donated her $15,000 prize money to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate to help fight what she talked about as the asymmetry of information that elevates Israeli voices over Palestinian ones in the mainstream media. She was addressing the People’s Graduation yesterday at St. John the Divine for the Columbia and Barnard students.

Amira Hass, as you listen to Mona and you think about also the Palestinian journalists who have died in Gaza, the astounding number of journalists who have died —

AMIRA HASS: Who have been killed.

AMY GOODMAN: Who have been killed.

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that, then. And do you feel that they were directly targeted, so often wearing the press vests and the helmets?

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: I remember one Palestinian journalist, as he heard about his dear friend just having been killed, ripped off his press and helmet and said, “Why are we wearing these? They just make us a target.”

AMIRA HASS: Yeah. I guess, you know, one part in me wants to think that this is not true, I mean, that they were killed because they are in places which are dangerous and because they circulate a lot, I mean, move around in times when people try not to move around. I think there is what we call a finger — I think, a fingerprint targeting or profiling, because anybody who uses a drone, even for filming, for photographing, is considered by the people behind the Israeli assaulting drones, or Predator drones, as somebody who is part of the fighting units, so they kill them automatically without checking if they are only taking photos. So, I think there is a variety of excuses or explanation that Israel would give. But certainly, in some cases, they were connecting journalists to the 7th of October or to other activities completely not as journalists and wanting to take revenge of them. But this has to be checked, and I think it is being checked by several venues, each one case.

But certainly, when there are so many people, so many journalists killed, it shows that there is a pattern. And our role is to discover the pattern. But there are patterns of other things. There are patterns of whole families who are being killed, so 40, 30, 35. So, you can say that you are targeting one of the family, which means that you allow the killing of — let’s say that this one person is very dangerous to the security of Israel. Then it means that you allow yourself to kill 30 people, 40 people, 25 people, including children, including babies, for one person. So this is a pattern. We can learn about it from the reality. We don’t need to have secret documents for it. But it was so. There is a very important investigation by Yuval Abraham of +972, who did talk to intelligence, soldiers in the intelligence, and proved that there is an Israeli OK to kill so-and-so many for one person.

AMY GOODMAN: And we interviewed Yuval —

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — on Democracy Now! talking about the AI programs Lavender and Where’s Daddy?

AMIRA HASS: Yes, yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have the killing of journalists and then the banning of journalists. And I wanted to go for a moment — I think it was two days after World Press Freedom Day that Israel banned Al Jazeera inside —

AMIRA HASS: Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: — the country, police officers raiding the network’s Jerusalem bureau, seizing broadcast equipment. Over the past seven months, Al Jazeera, one of the only international outlets with reporters on the ground inside Gaza — a few of whom were killed. This is a prerecorded video message by Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan from East Jerusalem.


IMRAN KHAN: If you’re watching this prerecorded report, then Al Jazeera has been banned in the territory of Israel. On April the 1st, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, passed a law that allowed the prime minister to ban Al Jazeera. He’s now enacted that law.

Let me just take you through some of the definitions within the law. They’ve banned our website, including anything that has the option of entering or accessing the website, even passwords that are needed, whether they’re paid or not, and whether it’s stored on Israeli servers or outside of Israel. The website is now inaccessible. They’re also banning any device used for providing content. That includes my mobile phone. If I use that to do any kind of news gathering, then the Israelis can simply confiscate it. Our internet access provider, the guy that simply hosts AlJazeera.net, is also in danger of being fined if they host the website. The Al Jazeera TV channel, completely banned. Transmission by any kind of content provider is also banned, and holding offices or operating them in the territory of Israel by the channel. Also, once again, any devices used to provide content for the channel can be taken away by the Israelis.

It’s a wide-ranging ban. We don’t know how long it will be in place for, but it does cover this territory of the state of Israel.

Imran Khan, Al Jazeera, occupied East Jerusalem.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was his last report from occupied East Jerusalem. Now Al Jazeera reporters say, when they’re reporting from, for example, Amman, “We are banned from Israel.” But interestingly, Amira Hass, you don’t have the same thing happening with CNN and MSNBC. No, they’re not banned from reporting in Israel, but they are not allowed by Israel to go into Gaza. And each time they have a report outside of Gaza, they don’t say, “And we want to remind you, we are not on the ground in Gaza because the Israeli government has prevented that.”

AMIRA HASS: I cannot — I don’t watch them when I’m in Ramallah. But I want to say that when it comes to the Israeli public, it doesn’t matter if Al Jazeera are inside Israel or not inside Israel. The general Israeli public does not want to know about what’s happening in Gaza. And the Israeli media does not show anything. I mean, they show very, very, very few images of the destruction. They give very little information and footage of the death, of the wounded people. I mean, there is no relation between what is happening and what is shown on Al Jazeera and what the Israeli media shows.

But it is not — it is not a dictate from above. It is not state censorship, unlike with Al Jazeera. It is a decision of most of the Israeli venues, most of the Israeli media venues, especially the TV, of course, not to show those horrible scenes, that might give some sense to some Israelis that this is, not morally, but this is — logically, cannot produce — cannot produce a change in Palestinian attitudes or a change for accepting Israel or accepting Israeli right to exist, etc., etc., for eight months it launches such an onslaught of revenge and supremacy against them. But the Israeli public is not looking for it, is not searching for it, in general. I mean, of course there are exceptions, like the Israeli left wing, Israeli activists, Israeli human rights activists, political leftist activists. Of course, there are exceptions, so it’s not the entire society. And, of course, there are the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. But the banning of Al Jazeera is not the reason why Israelis do not see — do not see the reality in Gaza. And this is not the reason. This is the choice not to know.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, hostage families — you don’t even see in the U.S. media hostage families saying, “End this war.” You certainly see them talking about the horror of —

AMIRA HASS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — their loved ones being held in Gaza. But the second part of it, for a number of these hostage families, are “End the war now.”

AMIRA HASS: Yeah, number, not all, but number, yes, of course. But this is the American media. I mean, it’s not — we do know that there are families among the hostage families that do speak differently than the choir.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the Nakba, about what happened in 1948 and what’s happening today, when we come back from break. We’re speaking with longtime Israeli journalist Amira Hass, Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She’s based in Ramallah. And she lived in Gaza for three years, wrote a book called Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege. She’s the only Israeli journalist to have lived in the Occupied Territories for decades. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Composer and pianist Vijay Iyer performing “Kite” during the People’s Graduation Thursday at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He dedicated the song to the Palestinian writer and poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in December by an Israeli airstrike along with his brother, sister and four of his nieces, children.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with the longtime Israeli journalist Amira Hass, the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She’s now based in Ramallah, the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. Among her books, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, and editing her mother’s memoir from Bergen-Belsen, from the concentration camp. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

Talk about what happened 76 years ago this week, May 15th, Amira, and talk about what’s happening today.

AMIRA HASS: I’ll start from with today, because I think that we — look, there is a country with two peoples, Palestinians and Jews. And we can have a long discussion, historiographical discussion, and debate about how it came about that there are two peoples in this country and why in 1948 there was a state for Jews established, while the U.N. resolution about a state for Palestinians — Arabs, as they were called — was not established. It doesn’t change the fact that there are two peoples. And it doesn’t change the fact that people want to live in their homeland. It doesn’t change the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of refugees, Palestinian refugees, who were — or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were chased out of the country, of their homeland, in 1948, and that, by now, with their children and grandchildren, there are several millions, and they see this country as their country, as their homeland. And it doesn’t change the fact that there are Israeli Jews who see Israel and the country as their country.

And there is a decision that has to be made. Do they want to live, do they want their grandchildren to live, and live well, in that country, in justice? Or do they want to send their grandchildren and children for wars forever, that will force some people, who have the money, who have the talents, who have the contacts, to emigrate, and for others to remain and to live in destitute and in hunger and in ignorance for the rest of their lives and their — I don’t know — for the end of the generations, or until the world expires? So, this is why we feel that we still live the Nakba and the outcomes of the Nakba, because there is no —

AMY GOODMAN: The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe.”

AMIRA HASS: For “catastrophe” — because there is no acknowledgment that you cannot live in this unbearable injustice, that one people has the rights and one people controls and dictates the life of the other people in the land. The thing is that we have to acknowledge there are two peoples in the land, and peoples have rights. And right now we deprive the Palestinians of their very basic rights, not only the basic right of life, as we see going on in Gaza right now, but on the normal days of occupation, we deprive them of water, freedom of movement, land, housing rights, planning, travel, living with their families, choosing their university, developing their economy, prospering, investing, all these things. At any moment, Israeli soldiers can confiscate millions of dollars from Palestinians for one pretext or another. Israeli settlers carry out Israeli policies, but in much more zeal, and confiscate land, take over land. I mean, Palestinians’ life is never — they are never safe. They never live in security, for more than 75 years, in both sides of the Green Line, both in Israel and the territory occupied in ’67.

So, there has to be a decision by Israeli people: Do we want to live for — we came — Israel was established so that Jews will feel secure and live normally. This is not normal life. They pretended that this is normal life, that we can occupy another people and feel normal. No, on the 7th of October, with all the atrocities and the enormous suffering that families and the casualties and the victims on 7th of October are living through, all this suffering and the, really, trauma, terrible trauma and cruelty, but this was a kind of a very expected answer by Hamas and by Palestinians to yearslong atrocities perpetuated by Israel and perpetrated by Israel.

And the main thing is the refusal, refusal to accept and to acknowledge the national rights of Palestinians for statehood. They were ready for it in the ’90s, I know. I know that the Israelis try to switch everything around and say that they sabotaged the Oslo agreement. Not correct. And this is one of the things that I followed very closely, how Israel did everything, from the beginning, under the guise of a peace process, did everything possible to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian side alongside Israel. And there is a — you know, we go back all the time to this, because all the time Israelis say that it’s the opposite. But they completely avoid all the evidence.

So, Israel did — what Israel did during the last 30 years is to prove to the world and to the Palestinians that the Palestinians were right from the beginning of the ’30s and the ’40s, when they said that Israel is a colonial entity or a settler-colonial entity. Israel had the chance in 1993 to stop its settler-colonial activity in the West Bank and Gaza and to say, “OK, we don’t go back to ’48. Let’s start for now and build a different, a new phase, a new historical phase.” It did the opposite. It continued with its bans on Palestinian construction, on Palestinian development. It disconnected Palestinians from each other, disconnected Gaza from the West Bank, started to fragment more and more the West Bank by roads that are meant only for Jews. And this is in the ’90s. This is in the ’90s. Rabin said himself he did not want — he was not opting for a state. So this is the question of Israeli settler colonialism. It’s Israel that proved that it’s settler-colonial.

And we live with it now with all of this abnormalcy. Israeli Jews wanted to live normally, happily. You go to Tel Aviv, you think you are in New York or you’re in London — and 40, 50 kilometers away, Palestinians live in cages, in cages disconnected from each other, and everything is dictated by Israel — the quantity of water. In my place, in my home in al-Bireh, in summer, we have — the water quantities are rationed, because there is not enough water. But when you go to a nearby settlement, it’s lush. It’s green in so much water they have. Israeli ranchers take over by violence, take over hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of dunams, something that built settlements could not do. And they do it by violence and by the assistance and silence or indifference or encouragement of the Israeli authorities — the police, the army, the prosecution, everybody.

So, this is — when Palestinians say that the Nakba is ongoing, they don’t only mean — they mean Gaza, of course. And for many people, as I know, they feel that what’s the carnage in Gaza now is much worse than they experienced in 1948. But it’s also the — Israel took the Palestinian life and liberty and freedom as hostage for the past 70 years, 75 years, all over, in many forms. Inside Israel, Palestinians do not dare to speak out, because then they will be — if they just say a word, like if they say the word ”shahid,” which is “martyr,” and they mourn the deaths of so many Palestinians in Gaza, they might be taken. They might be arrested for incitement. So —

AMY GOODMAN: If they use the word “martyr”?

AMIRA HASS: Yeah, like on Facebook. I don’t — in Facebook, you see that they — or “martyr” or something like this. I mean, it’s just an example of how people are afraid to use words that are very normal. Even a sentence from the Qur’an can be taken as a proof that they are — that they support Hamas. So —

AMY GOODMAN: As you talk about Gaza and the West Bank, let’s talk more about the West Bank. Thousands of people have been arrested. Hundreds have been killed since October 7th. You talk about what you call the Smotrich plan. Bezalel Smotrich, now the minister of finance since 2022.

AMIRA HASS: Yeah, and he is a minister also in the Ministry of Defense, and he’s responsible on the settlements, actually, on the development of the settlements of the West Bank.

AMY GOODMAN: Both he and Ben-Gvir are settlers.

AMIRA HASS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He published in 2017 something called the Decisive Plan, which actually says that the Palestinians have to accept that they will never have a state, that we will never be equal citizens in this country, and they can enjoy their individual rights. If they don’t want, they can go, they can emigrate, which is, of course, the preferable option for him. And then, if they refuse both and they resist — sometimes he says “violently resist,” sometimes he says “resist” — they will — the army will know, or the security apparatus will know how to deal with it. And it was, in one way or the other, interpreted as, “OK, they will be killed.” He rejected when people — people assumed that he meant that civilians will be killed. He rejected this.

But anyway, we see now that what is happening is the implementation of the Decisive Plan. But it shows that, all over, Palestinians are targeted for any — as a message that if you want to live in peace, I mean, normally, or seemingly or quasi-normally, you have to be silent. You shouldn’t say anything. You certainly should not demonstrate. You certainly shouldn’t take arms. You certainly shouldn’t convene, do something to show support. Even defend yourself, protect yourself from settlers’ violence can cause you an arrest.

So, this message — and Smotrich would not have succeeded to such an extent if the state has not prepared the ground and has not really been in the same position for the last 20 years at least. So, it’s not that Smotrich is such a genius that he can — or so powerful that he can impose his position on the rest of the government. In a way, he is, because, I mean, he knows where Netanyahu is vulnerable. He knows how much also the Orthodox Jews want this government to continue. But the fact that, in practice, all Israeli authorities are part of the repression of the Palestinians, in so many ways, and in such a way that is so similar to Smotrich’s plans, shows that it has been in the DNA of the system of this deep state for so many years.

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up this discussion, where do you see what’s happening right now? Just as we sat down, Israel finished its defense for the emergency appeal by South Africa to prevent it from a full-scale ground offensive in Rafah, Israel insisting that aid is coming through with ease at all the entry points, and South Africa saying they must be stopped. How do you see this ending?

AMIRA HASS: Right now I hope that the judges will move, because the way that Israel has been able for almost six months to play and to drag it into — and how the Western countries allow this to continue without putting leverage, that they have, on Israel in order to stop the carnage and the famine and the starvation, and the deliberate starvation, our hopes now are with the judges, that they will see that Israel is lying.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about with the United States? I mean, you have President Biden now announcing $1 billion of military weapons in the pipeline for Israel, including $700 million for tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles, $60 million in mortar rounds. The significance of what position the U.S. takes and what Biden is doing?

AMIRA HASS: He supports Israel to continue the war. I mean, I see no other explanation to this. I mean, all his words that he’s worried about Rafah or famine or whatever, so it’s such hypocrisy that I feel almost speechless. You think, on the one hand, they are sending aid, or they say that they are sending aid, but it takes so long, and it is so little. And on the other hand, they encourage Israel to continue with the war against Gaza, where we see that already Israel is defeated. I mean, it’s defeated. If such a huge military power is still fighting Hamas after eight months, it doesn’t give anything good to the Israelis, I mean, except of some groups that want it to continue. But —

AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.

AMIRA HASS: Yeah. But for the majority of Israelis, it’s clear that the majority of Israelis understand, even though they support the war, on the one hand, they understand it’s against them, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Longtime Israeli journalist and author Amira Hass, Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

Citing Ethnic Cleansing, US Army Major Resigns Over Israel's Assault on Gaza

"As the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing," wrote Maj. Harrison Mann.

Members of the Nofal family mourn next to the bodies of their relatives, who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Rafah, Gaza on January 9, 2024 in an attack that used U.S.-made bombs.
(Photo: Mohammed Talatene/picture alliance via Getty Images)

JULIA CONLEY
May 13, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

An American Army officer on Monday described months of being increasingly disturbed by the images and news of Israel's U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza, which culminated in his public resignation from his position at the Defense Intelligence Agency to avoid further complicity in Israel's "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians.


Army Maj. Harrison Mann published his resignation letter on LinkedIn, saying he had distributed it internally on April 16 to announce his resignation from the agency.

As an officer at the DIA, Mann said, he has been unable to escape the fact that his place of work "directly executes policy" for the Biden administration, including its "nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel, which has enabled and empowered the killing and starving of tens and thousands of innocent Palestinians."

"My work here—however administrative or marginal it appeared—unquestionably contributed to that support," wrote Mann.


He described wrestling with the question of whether he could continue working at the DIA, reasoning with himself that, "I don't make policy and it's not my place to question it."

"However, at some point it became difficult to defend the outcomes of this particular policy," Mann wrote. "At some point—whatever the justification—you're either advancing a policy that advances the mass starvation of children, or you're not."


At the time Mann sent his letter to his colleagues, Israel was conducting airstrikes and preparing its ground invasion of Rafah, the southern Gaza city that over 1 million Palestinians have been forcibly displaced to since October.

Israel has continued to block aid to Gaza even after saying in early April it would open a crossing and a port, and has now pushed the enclave into what the United Nations World Food Program chief said earlier this month was a "full-blown famine." Dozens of people have died of starvation. At least 35,091 people who have been killed in Israel's military assault—two-thirds of those killed have been women and children, despite Israel's claim it is targeting Hamas fighters.

Mann wrote that as the bombardment dragged on and U.S. President Joe Biden's defense and funding of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continued, his mind turned to his European Jewish relatives.

"As the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing—my grandfather refused to ever purchase products manufactured in Germany—where the paramount importance of 'never again' and the inadequacy of 'just following orders' were oft repeated," wrote Mann. "But I also have hope that my grandfather would afford me some grace; that he would still be proud of me for stepping away from this war, however belatedly."

Mann publicized his letter about six weeks after foreign affairs officer Annelle Sheline resigned from her position at the U.S. State Department, saying her work in the human rights realm in the Middle East had become "impossible" in light of Biden's material and political support for Israel's assault on Gaza.

Education Department official Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American, also resigned in protest earlier this year, and a top official who oversaw arms transfers at the State Department, Josh Paul, stepped down in October, citing the Biden administration's decision to send more arms to Israel as the war began.

In February, U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell died after self-immolating in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., having said he was engaging "in an extreme act of protest" to avoid being complicit in genocide.

On LinkedIn, Mann wrote Monday that he "received an unexpected outpouring of support" when he distributed his letter internally, and appeared to address other federal employees who may be questioning their complicity in Biden's policies.

"I am sharing [the letter] now in the hope that you too will discover you are not alone, you are not voiceless, and you are not powerless," wrote Mann.

Feds United for Peace, which includes employees across 30 federal agencies who have advocated for a cease-fire in Gaza, called Mann's letter "incredibly significant."

The New York Times reported that it is not known "whether other military officers have resigned in protest of U.S. foreign policy" since the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October and the IDF's deadly retaliation, "but the resignation of an active-duty officer in protest of U.S. foreign policy is likely uncommon—especially one in which the officer makes public the reasons for doing so."

From the genocide in Palestine and Ukraine to the fascist threat: Working toward a revolutionary, Marxist-Humanist response

Peter Hudis
Kevin B. Anderson
Heather Brown
Lyndon Porter
Fernando Baleia
16 May, 2024


First published at The International Marxist-Humanist.

Part I: Does Today’s Objective Situation Represent the Midnight of the Twenty-First Century?

Today’s global capitalism is sinking into unimaginable levels of barbarism. It is exemplified by Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine; Russia’s escalating attacks on Ukraine; the violent suppression of mass movements in Peru, Iran, Sudan, Myanmar, and China; and in the growing threat posed by the neo-fascist far-Right in India, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Argentina, and the U.S., where the re-election of Donald Trump in November looms as a real possibility.

Nowhere is this barbarism more glaring than in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its intensifying attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. The 32,500 officially recorded killed in Gaza as of this writing is horrendous enough; but the dehumanization visited upon Palestinians extends even further. Almost 20,000 (mainly women and children) are missing and presumably buried under rubble, while well over a million-and-a-half are facing outright starvation and disease. The devastating impact of Israel dropping 30,000 air-to-ground munitions (not counting artillery shells and demolitions by its ground troops) on an area not much larger than Manhattan has birthed a new acronym—WCNSF, “Wounded Child with No Surviving Family.” According to reports from several human rights organizations, 17,000 Palestinian children fall under this category. Israel’s totally disproportionate response to the Hamas attack of October 7 has become one of the most horrendous catastrophe ever visited upon a people in our lifetime.

This is being done by an Israeli government that includes “moderates” as well as far-Rightists and which openly broadcasts and even boasts about its murderous onslaught. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote,

We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time. Yet the prevailing callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock and grief. Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos coming out of Gaza—those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows—have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children.

All of this is made possible by continuous U.S. arms shipments and financial aid to a government whose ministers make no secret of its desire to “clear” Gaza of its populace. As the war continues, Israeli settlers, aided by the state, have also been murdering Palestinians and taking over land in the West Bank, which has received little publicity in the global media. From October 7 to the end of March, over 7,000 West Bank Palestinians have been arrested and 1,100 killed by Israeli forces or Jewish settlers, leading to what some Israeli officials privately call “a volcano” ready to erupt.1

Israel’s plunge into total depravity risks setting off an even-wider regional conflagration, as it extends its attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon while even contemplating taking on Iran.

These developments clearly represent a global political turning point. Mishra does not overstate the case: “Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine.”2

Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are united when it comes to at least one thing—both insist that the peoples they are violently suppressing (Ukraine in one case, Palestine in the other) have no right to exist as national entities. For years prior to Russia’s imperialist invasion (which actually started in 2014), Putin insisted, “Ukraine is a fiction, it has never been a real nation”—the same kind of verbiage employed for decades by leading Zionists about Palestine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov let the cat out of the bag in February in stating, “Israel’s declared goals in Gaza are similar to Russia’s in Ukraine.” Ramzy Baroud, an editor of Palestine Chronicle and who supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself from Russia and also condemns the West for opposing Russia while supporting Israel’s war against Palestine responded, “Lavrov’s position is bizarre and greatly offensive…because it resembles some kind of a political nod for Israel to continue with its lethal war on Palestinian civilians without worrying about a strong Russian response.”3

Lavrov’s comment may indicate that Putin is looking ahead to a Trump presidency, which would almost certainly pull the plug on U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Toning down criticism of Israel for the sake of cementing an alliance with Trump’s white nationalism is not a big step for Putin, since he is a white nationalist himself (as is Netanyahu, who has refrained from criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).

While the Ukrainians fight on, they have clearly been set back their heels in recent months by declining military support from the West. Russia on the other hand is obtaining huge amounts of armaments from Iran and North Korea while evading the impact of U.S. and EU sanctions by expanding economic links to China. Last year, China’s exports to Russia increased 54% and half of Russia’s oil was exported to China. Overall trade between the two countries has increased 64% since the 2022 invasion. As a result, Russia’s economy is expected to grow 2.6% this year, outpacing each of the major industrial economies in the G7.

If Ukraine is defeated by Russia, it will embolden the far right everywhere—not only in Europe but also in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, where Putin is providing support to military regimes in Libya, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and the Central African Republic after having enabled Bashir Assad to crush the opposition in Syria.

The global far-Right includes forces allied with U.S. imperialism and it includes forces opposed to U.S. imperialism. It is a ubiquitous political phenomenon that has deep roots in the economic morass that increasingly characterizes contemporary capitalism.

Although the global economy has avoided for now the major recession that was widely feared only a year ago, it is expected to slow for the third straight year in 2024 and is headed for its weakest half-decade since the early 1990s. Rising levels of debt and lower than average rates of labor productivity are the main culprits. And the (relatively meager) economic growth that is occurring is accompanied by ever-growing levels of inequality, as millions of rural laborers are forced off the land, rising number of migrants cross international borders in response to the impact of climate change, and tens of millions of workers worldwide are displaced by labor-saving devices (such as robotics, AI, etc.). Economic distress and insecurity are not the only factors driving the growth of the far-Right, but they are clearly one of the determinants.

The growth of the far Right is being enabled by the pitiful effort of neoliberals and social democrats to counter it. Neoliberals have no solution to the economic morass afflicting global capitalism—and this has a lot to do with why the far-Right is on the rise.

This was demonstrated on a political level earlier this year when Biden proposed a bill on “immigration reform” (supported by most Democratic and some Republican senators) that adopted virtually word for word Trump’s anti-immigrant policies—even though these same Democrats denounced them as cruel, inhumane, and racist when he was in power. Senator Chris Murphy, who helped write the bill, confessed: “They—the Republican Party—told us what to do. We followed their instructions to the letter. And then they pulled the rug out from under us in 24 hours” when Trump chose to not let Biden get credit for his own policies.

This is typical of neoliberals and social democrats everywhere: They often seek to meet rightists “halfway” by attempting to steal their thunder only to have such weakness further embolden them. Given this, it is not a stretch to recall the fate of Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 1930s: the compromises and vacillation on the part of some claiming to support bourgeois democracy inadvertently paved the way for its destruction.

Trump and his supporters have made no secret of their plans if they win the November U.S. elections: the immediate deportation of millions of immigrants, the annulment of innumerable health and safety regulations, a push for a national ban on abortion, prohibiting discussions of race and racism in schools, gutting the NRLB to make it harder to unionize, unleashing the police against Black people, and restricting gender-affirming care for transexuals. And they have worked out detailed plans to make it harder for workers and minorities to vote—and to annul the results of any election that threatens their all-consuming drive for total state power.

Especially serious is the threat posed by climate change. Last year was officially the hottest one on record and temperatures in July broke the record as well, according to NASA.4 The Biden administration has touted its Inflation Reduction Act as key to solving the climate crisis, but its programs to develop clean energy and help workers transition to new jobs is too little and too late. It is too late because the effects of climate change are already apparent, and we may be at or very close to a tipping point of no return to “normal.” It is too little in the sense that the bill operates under a capitalist logic, providing subsidies to businesses to invest in clean energy, for example, while at the same time allowing fossil fuel production to continue.

The U.S. is now producing record amounts of fossil fuels for domestic and international markets. It has approved new drilling in Alaska, liquified natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, and greenlighted the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia,5 illustrating yet again how the needs of capital and its denizens for “cheap” oil and big profits eclipse the long-term survival of human beings.

Moreover, the Biden administration is touting the purchase of one million new electric vehicles in 2023 as a major ecological and economic success.6 Certainly, for purposes of future greenhouse gas emissions, electric cars are better than gas powered ones. However, the productivist logic remains in place. Electric cars produce less greenhouse gas in their lifetimes, but new vehicle production is still environmentally costly regardless of the type produced. More electric vehicle production is not in and of itself carbon neutral. Only by overcoming the productivist logic that greater output is inherently better for humanity and the environment will we begin to overcome this ecological crisis. That productivist logic will surely be further implemented if rightwing authoritarian nationalism consolidates its hold on state power.

Brazil offers a dramatic example the inability of neoliberalism and social democracy to counter such threats. After the coup d’état in 2016, Michel Temer and especially Jair Bolsonaro promoted a destruction of the environmental laws and institutions that have been helping to protect Brazilian forests. Bolsonaro’s administration (2016 to 2022) protected the criminals who followed his orders: the former Environmental Minister, Ricardo Salles, who was convicted of fraud against natural reserves;7 the secretary for agrarian questions, Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia, onetime leader of a militia that killed 21 militants of the Landless Workers Movement (MST)8. Then, with Bolsonaro’s help, a group of landlords in the 2022 elections won most of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, even as Lula won the presidency.

Two of The Bolsonaro administration’s most iconic symbols were the “day of fire,” when a group of landlords managed to burn down large portions of the Amazon Rainforest,9 changing almost 50% of the Nature Reserves into a pasture,10 and an attempted genocide against the Yanomami people.11 After Lula of the Workers’ Party (PT) won the 2022 election, the federal government tried to help the Yanomamis by providing food, healthcare and police protection. However, the gold prospectors continued to attack and invade their lands; the efforts of the PT to end this environmental and human crisis ended up a huge failure.

The PT and Lula can try anything they want to improve environmental protections, but the landlords, many of whom are deputies in the Brazilian Congress, won’t approve any laws that don’t benefit them. It’s a kind of mafia-ization of politics. Ever since Dilma Rousseff’s administration (2011 to 2016), Brazil has witnessed a massive commodification of nature, such as with REDD+, which pays farmers to “protect” a small area of their lands. Bolsonaro further developed this law and institutionalized payment for environmental services. And now Lula is trying to approve the newest version of a Brazilian carbon market. Since most laws approved and developed by the PT to protect the environment are subsumed under the interests of capital, it becomes hard to fight back against the landlords and the far-Right trying to set fire to the Rainforest and invading the Yanomami’s land.

Massive threats also loom regarding gender and sexuality. After the Dobbs decision in the U.S., abortion is either greatly restricted or completely illegal in 23 states, making it difficult or sometimes impossible for women to get the procedure. But as was indicated by a ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court, the goal of Christian fundamentalists is much broader. Using a law that grants a fetus personhood at the moment of conception, the Court ruled that an IVF clinic was liable for the destruction of embryos stored at their facility, causing a number of clinics to close their doors until the law was clarified. After much backlash, legislators carved out an exception to fetal personhood for IVF providers. However, the concept of life originating at the moment of conception remains in place, all but eliminating women’s reproductive choice in the state. It is far from surprising that other rightwing-dominated states are looking to Alabama as a model.

Along with anti-LGBTQ legislation and violence in the U.S. we have witnessed an effort in many African nations to criminalize LGBTQ individuals. In fact, 30 of 54 countries in Africa criminalize homosexuality.12 Many of these laws date back to colonial times, yet a new wave of legislation is being enacted. Last year in Uganda, a law was passed that made “aggravated homosexuality” a capital offense. Included in this category is any sexual activity involving people with HIV,13 a policy that is not only egregious, but one that is likely to have a horrifying effect on containing the AIDS crisis as people will go without testing and treatment to avoid criminal prosecution.

In Ghana, a bill has been passed by parliament that would increase penalties for same sex acts, criminalize organizations that advocate for LGBTQ rights, and criminalize the “failure to report an LGBT person to the authorities and to report anyone who uses their social media platform to produce, publish, or disseminate content promoting activities prohibited by the bill.”14 This draconian law has been criticized by many prominent Ghanaians including Samia Nkrumah, a former member of parliament, chair of a prominent political party, and child of Kwame Nkrumah, who has called for the president to veto it.

Despite these human rights setbacks, we shouldn’t lose sight of the other side. Since 2015, six African nations have decriminalized same-sex acts.15 Moreover, despite the repression that they face, LGBTQ advocates are continuing to pressure governments to change the laws while at the same time showing their humanity to the world at large. For example, as the #Endsars protests took off in Nigeria against the brutal tactics of a special police unit, LGBTQ activists joined in, pointing out the ways in which this police unit targeted them as well. They continued to protest even as many in the #Endsars movement were openly hostile.

Also, the recent mass protests in Senegal show a democratic opening, albeit one fraught with opportunism and other dangers.16

In light of these and other crises, does the rapaciousness of today’s global capitalism-imperialism signify that we are entering the midnight of the twenty-first century—that is, a plunge into utter darkness? And what does our organization need to do and become given that question?

Part II: Subjective forces of resistance — Accomplishments and contradictions

The development that provides hope that we are not plunging into utter darkness are the massive protests worldwide against Israel’s ongoing war against Palestine. These protests, sometimes consisting of half a million at a time, have brought a new generation into the streets. Hundreds of thousands in the UK and U.S. alone, and many more worldwide, are becoming radicalized through these actions; the Israel-Palestine issue has for many become a baptism of fire for questioning existing society.

It is already having a palpable effect—as in compelling many governments, including ones that have long uncritically defended the Israeli state, to distance themselves from it by providing at least verbal support for a ceasefire to end hostilities.

The protests are facing enormous push-back, especially from those claiming that any substantive criticism of Zionism constitutes antisemitism. The latter is on the rise today and it is hardly unknown among leftists. But its most predominant expression in the U.S. is coming from the far right, whose attacks on “East Coast elites” is a not-so-veiled version of stereotypical complaints about “Jewish cosmopolitans” who allegedly control the media, finance, and education. That nothing stops such reactionaries from fully embracing Israel for serving as the U.S.’s major military partner in the Middle East shows that support for it long ago ceased to have much to do with defending Jews.17

In the U.S., where this new McCarthyism is strongest (and has even toppled the president of Harvard University), opposition to it is being led by some courageous intellectuals, which owes a lot to the solidarity of Black intellectuals with the Palestinians and for democratic rights. Labor unions and Black churches have also spoken out courageously, in contrast to the shameful silence of the heads of universities, the cultural establishment, and the NGO sector, dependent as they are on corporate and state support. Also of note is the solidarity of two countries that have experienced forms of colonialism that blatantly touted ethno-racial domination, South Africa and Ireland.

Even more important has been the steely resilience of the people of Gaza. To date, there has been not one report of a Gazan turning in a Hamas hideout or hostage location, something Israel surely would have bragged about had it occurred. Many Gazans remain in or keep returning to the center and the north, despite the danger, in order to continue claiming their homes and land. This is rooted in a deep sense of national solidarity and the refusal of a people to be extinguished. The social formations involved at the village level deserve notice here. As Peter Linebaugh has shown, the Palestinian people have for centuries maintained a communal system of land tenure and village self-administration—similar to what Karl Marx described in his late writings on Russia—which they have retained, albeit in weakened form, through British and Israeli occupation.18

Even as we condemn Hamas’s indiscriminate violence on October 7, it is clear that it changed utterly the world situation, placing the decades-long resistance of the Palestinian people back on the agenda, not only as a factor the imperialist powers cannot count out, but also for the global mass movements for social justice and liberation.19 From the U.S. to France and from Germany to the UK, the new movements of and for the Palestinian people have exposed, in ways not seen in decades, the bankruptcy of so-called “liberal democracy” and especially what remains of reformist social democracy, whose leaders, from UK Labor Party leader Keir Starmer even to “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, have refrained from a strong, unequivocal support for Palestine even in this hour of genocide, all the while trumpeting support for Ukraine.

Despite the enormous destruction Israel continues to wreak upon Gaza—the ramifications of which will be felt for years and even decades to come—one thing is clear: Israel has lost the battle of ideas. Once that happens to any regime, it is only a matter of time before it loses the battle in material terms.

In the Call for our 2022 Convention, we called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 of that year a global turning point. It was a geopolitical turning point, since it initiated a new Cold War between Russia and the U.S., the solidification of a Russo-Chinese axis, and resulted in a refurbished and expanded NATO following Russia’s invasion. Israel’s response to Hamas’s brutal attack of Oct. 7 also marks a global turning point—but not only in terms of geopolitics. It also marks a potential subjective turning point, since Israel’s actions has been met with a mobilization of millions that is breathing new life into social movements around the world.

This is reflected in the support extended to Palestinians by many Indigneous people, Latinx and Blacks in the U.S. and elsewhere. The issues raised by the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—especially the police murder of young people of color—may be less visible in 2024, but they are smoldering under the surface, especially given the fact that both Trumpist fascists and mainstream liberals have blocked the passage of laws that would in any meaningful way restrain the police or even limit their budget.

The counterattack against BLM got seriously underway by 2022, with vicious campaigns against the teaching of Critical Race Theory or the use of books like The 1619 Project in schools. Although these anti-racist efforts may have limitations, such as their tendency to downplay the significance of capital and class, it’s important to note that they are not being targeted by racist reactionaries for this reason. Instead, they are outraged that these educational tools, which dare to speak of “systemic racism,” are moving the public discourse toward a more historical and materialist interpretation. Black intellectuals have been at the forefront of this struggle and have paid the price. This was seen in how the rightwing was able to force the resignation of so highly placed a person as Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, the first Black woman to hold that post. This was accomplished by an unholy alliance of neoliberal cheerleaders for the State of Israel and reactionary racists complaining of alterations in the curriculum and affirmative action.

Outside the universities, a key development in the Black struggle in the U.S. has been the new Poor People’s Campaign, organized by Reverends William Barber and Liz Theoharis. Their call for a Third Reconstruction states, “We must simultaneously deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.”20 Similarly, Black legislators in California introduced a groundbreaking reparations bill aimed at providing compensation to the descendants of enslaved Black individuals. The proposed measures encompass affirmative action initiatives to combat poverty and enhance educational achievements, restitution for families affected by discriminatory policies leading to property loss, the prohibition of forced prison labor, and the allocation of resources to community-driven alternatives to traditional policing methods.21

The searing anger in impoverished communities of color burned its way to the surface in another bourgeois democracy, France, as seen in the June-July 2023 urban insurrection. In the wake of police killing Nahel Merzouk, an unarmed 17-year-old of North African descent, youth expressed their outrage toward both the police and the system, staging 240 attacks on police or gendarme stations and injuring 700 police officers. What France’s leading newspaper called “an unprecedented” level of destruction is a sign of the times, and not just in France.22

These and other ongoing struggles have the potential to develop into movements and campaigns that oppose occupation, repression, and racial exclusion wherever they occur. Potential, however, is not the same as actuality. We are still a long way from an anti-capitalist alternative which opposes all form of capitalism-imperialism—whether generated by the U.S. or its adversaries—on behalf of universal human emancipation.

One sign of this is that many leftists oppose Ukraine’s fight for its national existence because the U.S and EU have provided it with arms—at least until recently.23 It is of course completely hypocritical for the West to send weapons to aid Ukraine’s fight for self-determination while providing Israel with weapons to suppress Palestine’s fight for self-determination. But it is no less hypocritical to take their ground by supporting the national liberation of the struggle of Palestine but not Ukraine. It is surely possible to defend the right of those resisting imperialism to get arms from wherever they can without endorsing either its leaders (Zelensky in the case of Ukraine, Hamas in the case of Palestine) or the regime that supplies them (the U.S. with Ukraine, Iran and Qatar with Palestine).24

At issue here is not simply taking “the right political position” but the fate of a humanist alternative to capitalism. It cannot be advanced by opposing U.S. imperialism while writing a blank check for Russian imperialism; nor can it be advanced by doing the reverse. sSerious revolutionaries don’t get to pick and choose which forms of statist oppression are more agreeable than others. Refraining from targeting all forms of class society necessarily results in an impoverished vision of human emancipation.

It therefore bears noting that the parts of the organized Left that is presently growing most rapidly are Marxist-Leninists and other vanguardist tendencies. In a way this is understandable: the move of many leftists into social democracy has become highly problematic given political developments in recent years. But that does not mean it isn’t a problem.

In this context, as many are returning to the writings of V.I. Lenin, it is important to note what his real contribution was: Though he is known for his many contributions as a revolutionary leader, his deep study of Hegel from 1914-1915 marked a turning point in his intellectual development. Through this study, Lenin moved beyond the confines of mechanical materialism, embracing dialectical principles like “transformation into opposite” that would inform his theory of imperialism. Lenin’s dialectical understanding enabled him to grasp the contradictions inherent in imperialism, particularly the emergence of new forms of oppression and resistance from outside the European working classes. Imperialism had created an internal differentiation of the proletariat in oppressor and oppressed nations and the need to connect their struggles for a successful social revolution. Through his analysis, Lenin illuminated the interconnectedness of class struggle and national liberation, laying the groundwork for a revolutionary praxis that transcended the Marxist orthodoxy of the Second International. His writings provide unique insight into the aspirations of oppressed groups striving for an alternative to capitalism. For Marxist-Humanists in an era marked by resurgent imperialism and colonialism, Lenin’s original contributions to dialectics and analysis of imperialism remain as relevant as ever. Nevertheless, while Lenin, as well as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, deserve to be studied anew, their limitations as “post-Marx Marxists, as pejorative,” also needs to be discussed in depth.

What also bears noting is the reactionary character of Middle Eastern states and militias that trumpet their support of the Palestinian resistance, as does the kind of conservative nationalism represented by Hamas, which originated as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.25 These forces, which are key components of what Iran calls the Axis of Resistance, are reactionary and fundamentalist in their internal politics: the Houthi regime in northern Yemen that is attacking Red Sea shipping, the counter-revolutionary Syrian regime, and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iranian regime, both of which played major roles in repressing the Syrian revolution.

It should not be forgotten that the Islamic Republic of Iran experienced a near revolution in fall 2022. Young women and members of the Kurdish and Baluchi oppressed minorities spearheaded this movement, which was touched off by the police murder of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa (Jina) Amini, for not covering her hair to their satisfaction (improper hijab). Despite massive repression, women have carved out hijab-free public spaces in the cities that they and youth continue to defend over a year later. In an interview smuggled out from prison on the occasion of International Women’s Day, leading feminist and Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi declared, “The Iranian people have turned the page on this regime,” adding that “women constitute the most radical, the most powerful, and the most widely engaged force opposing the authoritarian theocracy.”26 Along with oppressed minorities and the working class, they may yet give the regime another jolt, even as it attempts to identify itself with the Palestinian resistance. Again, this shows that there are two worlds in every country, that of the dominant classes and that of the working classes and oppressed groups.

If the global left and Palestinian support movement fail to take note of reactionary character of the regimes in Syria, Yemen, Iran and elsewhere, this will muddy the waters about what kind of resistance can actually lead toward genuine liberation, toward a humanist alternative to capitalism.

Since our founding in 2009, we have argued that the central problem facing today’s struggles is the absence of a viable alternative to all forms of capitalism—whether statist or “free market.” Much of our theoretical work has been devoted to this issue, such as the publication of a revised translation with an extensive commentary of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. But how do we promote such an alternative in the face of the growing power of the far-Right, the ongoing genocides in Palestine, Ukraine, Myanmar, etc., and the likelihood that the ecological crisis may soon (if it has not already) reach the point of no return? Speculating about “what happens after the revolution” when revolution seems nowhere in sight can readily fall on deaf ears. So, what exactly must we do as an organization in response?

Central to this is showing that a viable concept of the transcendence of capitalist alienation is not a matter of speculating about some distant utopia but is urgently needed to adequately respond to the most pressing political realities. When an alternative to capitalist value production, patriarchy, racism, and class domination recedes from view, what results in the long run is an accommodation to the limits of the given.

To be sure, it is part of our “organizational DNA” to support grassroots movements and stress the importance of horizontal, grassroots forms of organization. But that by itself does not address the problem of how to fill the void in articulating an alternative to capitalist value production, patriarchy, racism, and class domination.

This is why our founder, Raya Dunayevskaya, stressed, “Yes, the party and the forms of organization born from spontaneity are opposites, but they are not absolute opposites…the absolute opposite is philosophy, and that we have not yet worked out organizationally.”27

This was part and parcel of her insistence, “Without such a vision of new revolutions, new individual, a new universal, a new society, new human relations, we would be forced to tailend one or another form of reformism.”28 Today we might add, and/or forced to tailend one or another form of abstract revolutionism. Radicals that cannot find room in their hearts and minds for opposing dehumanized conditions of life wherever they exist are abstract revolutionists. Needed is a concrete universalism that is rooted in all forces of revolution and their reason.

Part III: Organizational tasks and challenges facing the IMHO

Despite these contradictions, there are signs of a growing recognition of the need for a humanist alternative to capitalism. This is reflected in several new works discussing the work of Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanist philosophy.29 One recent essay in a major leftwing journal states,

Marxist and socialist humanism have had a lasting impact on how we think about autonomy, social transformation, and radical democracy … Today, the influence of Marxist humanism, particularly as developed by Dunayevskaya’s merging of philosophy and practice, as well as her intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender formulated long before intersectionality came into vogue, are to be traced in such organizations as the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.30

Such discussions testify to the impact, admittedly still modest, that the publication of the collection Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism is beginning to have.31 Of course, these reconsiderations of Marx’s humanism hardly predominate. And for a basic reason: the radical intellectual horizon for the last 40 years, inside and outside of academia, has been defined by the disparagement of any form of humanism. The tendency to conflate bourgeois or Enlightenment humanism with Marxist Humanism is ubiquitous, as are claims that Marx left behind any “residual” humanism when he turned his attention to the critique of political economy, that humanism reeks of “speciesism,” or that a universalist perspective focusing on the transformation of human relations is necessarily hierarchical and oppressive.32 It goes without saying that such conceptions have direct political ramifications, as noted (in part) above.

Hence, our foremost goal as an organization is to work out how we can raise a revolutionary humanist banner within today’s movements—and do so in a way that will convince those drawn to such a perspective to join and help build our organization.

As of now the IMHO publishes a web journal, The International Marxist-Humanist, and at times holds public or zoom meetings on political and theoretical topics. Far rarer do its members come together at rallies and other events to distribute our flyers and literature and invite people to our upcoming events. As a result, many do not view us as an actual organization…because in some ways we have yet to become one.

This doesn’t mean members of the IMHO aren’t involved in important work. Vital activity has been done promoting our ideas at conferences, publications, and podcasts; the same is true when it comes to activity in Palestine and/or Ukraine solidarity, prisoner support, labor solidarity, and care work. But we are largely doing so as individuals rather than presenting ourselves as an organized tendency that poses an alternative to other variants of Marxism.

The operational goal of our 2024 convention is to work out how to move from individuals grouped around a website to becoming a real organization that can continue Marxist-Humanism. The latter is by no means assured. Ideas don’t live and develop on their own. They need living people to embody them, to commit their lives to, otherwise, they become mere footnotes to history.

There are objective barriers standing in the way of assuming such organizational responsibility. We were determined to form an international organization when we moved to create the IMHO in 2009. That we achieved this is our greatest strength, but it also means we are dispersed and rarely get together. That is why attendance at our bi-annual Conventions is vital for every member.

There are also the barriers of everyday life, where we face many obligations and responsibilities that means we must choose what commitments to prioritize and emphasize. This is important given that bourgeois society overburdens some communities more than others, such as workers, women, Trans, and BIPOC communities. This is why we strive to create a space where we can continue to challenge any and all manifestations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism and classism inside as well as outside the organization.

Are we willing take the responsibility to maintain and build such an organization? The major barrier facing us is one that afflicts all revolutionary groups that reject the model of a vanguard party. Vanguardists have no problem explaining why others need to join their group—after all, a revolutionary seizure of power “needs leadership” and they are there to provide it. It is harder to get across the necessity for an organized revolutionary group to exist that rejects such an elitist view. This is one reason why anti-vanguardist currents (whether Marxist or anarchist) either do not last long or become insular sects (as News and Letters Committees has become).

A clear example is C.L.R James: though he was surely a serious theoretician, after breaking from vanguardism he failed to explain why an organization of Marxists needs to exist apart from the spontaneous struggles. And the reason he failed to do so is that he recoiled from making the transition from state-capitalist theory to Marxist Humanist philosophy.33 Hence, though he had a small organization following his and Grace Lee Boggs’s break with Dunayevskaya in 1955, it dissolved in the late 1960s just as the mass movements were reaching their peak and a new generation of activists were joining Marxist organizations en masse. In a way, the dissolution of James’s group makes perfect sense: what basis is there in the end to have an organization if it lacks a philosophy of its own and sees its goal simply celebrating the movements and their revolutionary creativity?

In many respects, James’ failure to sustain an alternative form of organization was anticipated in his most important theoretical work—Notes on Dialectics (written in 1948). In rejecting the concept of the vanguard party, he held, “The task today is to call for, to teach, to illustrate, to develop, spontaneity—the free creative activity of the proletariat.” He went so far as to envision “the abolition of the party.”34 So, what kind of organization would replace it? He envisions a mass party along the lines of decentralized formations like the soviets during the Russian Revolution—one created by the spontaneous actions of the masses. No role was specified for an organization of Marxist theoreticians and activists even though he was a member of one.

This lack of specificity was not just James’s problem. It is ours. Marxist-Humanism has made great theoretical strides; having them become embodied and developed organizationally remains our most unfinished task.

History does have a way of repeating itself, but we surely do not want to repeat the history of what happened to James’ organization—any more than we want to repeat the history of News and Letters Committees after Dunayevskaya’s death, when it turned Marxist-Humanist philosophy into a stale ideology.35 This is why we say that the greatest gift we can offer to those joining the IMHO is to take part in the development of a philosophy of liberation—which means working out, consciously and critically, one’s own conception of the world, and in connection with the labor of others, taking an active part in the creation of the history of a new world.1

Jean-Philippe Rémy, “Cisjordanie: l’autre guerre menée par Israel,” Le Monde, Jan. 31, 2024.
2

“The Shoah After Gaza,” by Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, March 7, 2024.
3

See “Sergey Lavrov and Vulgar Anti-Imperialism,” by Howie Hawkins, Against the Current, March 2, 2024 https://againstthecurrent.org/atc229/sergey-lavrov-and-vulgar-anti-imperialism/
4

Bardan, Roxana. “NASA Analysis Confirms 2023 as Warmest Year on Record,” January 12, 2024. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-analysis-confirms-2023-as-warmest-year-on-record/
5

Hu, Akielly. “What it might look like if President Biden really declared a climate emergency,” August 14, 2023. https://grist.org/climate-energy/what-it-might-look-like-if-president-biden-really-declared-a-climate-emergency/
6

“FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Takes Action to Accelerate America’s Clean Transportation Future,” December 14, 2023. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/12/14/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-takes-action-to-accelerate-americas-clean-transportation-future/
7

“Ricardo Salles foi condenado por fraude em plano de manejo,” by Sabrina Rodrigues, Oeco, Dec. 20, 2018, https://oeco.org.br/noticias/ricardo-salles-foi-condenado-por-fraude-em-plano-de-manejo
8

See https://mst.org.br/2018/10/26/o-que-e-a-udr-e-quem-e-nabhan-garcia-cotado-para-ser-ministro-de-bolsonaro/ and also https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2018/11/26/entidades-ligadas-ao-campo-denunciam-influencia-da-udr-no-governo-bolsonaro-entenda
9

“O que se sabe sobre o ‘Dia do Fogo’, momento-chave das queimadas na Amazônia,” by Leandro Machado, BBC News Brasil, Aug. 27, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-49453037
10

“Dia do Fogo, “Tres anos depois: mais de metade da florista queimada na Amazonia viour pasto,” by B.A. Garridoi, Infoamazonia, April 24, 2023, https://infoamazonia.org/2023/08/04/dia-do-fogo-tres-anos-depois-mais-da-metade-da-floresta-queimada-na-amazonia-virou-pasto/.
11

“Sob Bolsonaro, mortes de yanomami por desnutrição cresceram 331%” by João Fellet e Leandro Prazeres, BBC News Brasil, Feb. 17, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cw011x9rpldo
12

Muhumuza, Rodney. “Uganda’s new anti-gay legislation includes death sentence in some cases,” May 29, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/ugandas-new-anti-gay-legislation-includes-death-sentence-for-in-some-cases
13

Ibid.
14

Nantulya, Carine Kaneza. “Ghana’s Leaders Push Back on Anti-LGBT Bill,” March 12, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/12/ghanas-leaders-push-back-anti-lgbt-bill
15

Ferragamo, Mariel and Kali Robinson. “Where African countries stand in their struggle toward more inclusive LGBTQ+ laws,” June 18, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/where-african-countries-stand-in-their-struggle-toward-more-inclusive-lgbtq-laws
16

See “Standing in Solidarity With Senegal,” by Ba Karang, The International Marxist-Humanist, March 17, 2024, https://imhojournal.org/articles/standing-in-solidarity-with-senegal/
17

For more on this, see “Challenging the New McCarthyism: Charges of Antisemitism Weaponized,” by Peter Hudis, Against the Current, March-April 2024, https://againstthecurrent.org/atc229/charges-of-antisemitism-weaponized/
18

Peter Linebaugh, “Palestine and the Commons: Or, Marx & the Musha’a,” Counterpunch, March 1, 2024 https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/01/palestine-the-commons-or-marx-the-mushaa/
19

See the statement issued by the International Marxist-Humanist Organization within days of the Oct. 7 attack, “The Middle East and the World After October 7, and Israel’s War on Palestine, by Kevin Anderson, https://imhojournal.org/articles/the-middle-east-and-the-world-after-october-7-and-israels-war-on-palestine/
20

See https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/join-us-as-we-build-the-third-reconstruction/
21

Austin, Sophie. “California lawmakers say reparations bills, which exclude widespread payments, are a starting point,” February 21, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/california-reparations-compensation-slavery-c3b8d7a4de973adf218b93e396af8fe1
22

Antoine Albertini and Luc Bronner, “Violences: Un bilan sans précédent,” Le Monde, July 4, 2023.
23

For example, the “March on the DNC” group organizing protests at the Democratic Party Convention in August lists opposing aid to Ukraine among its demands. See https://www.marchondnc2024.org/our-demands
24

See the statement by the Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) of February 24, 2024, “From Ukraine to Palestine: Occupation is a Crime!” https://linktr.ee/ukrainesolidaritynetwork
25

On this, see Joseph Daher, “On the Origins and Development of Hamas,” Tempest, December 27, 2023 https://www.tempestmag.org/2023/12/on-the-origins-and-development-of-hamas/ and more generally Gilbert Achcar, Israel’s War on Gaza (London: Resistance Books, 2023).
26

Ghazal Golshiri, “Voix des dissidents jaillies de prisons d’Iran,” Le Monde, March 1, 2024
27

“Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy” in The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Lexington Books, 2002), p. 9.
28

Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, by Raya Dunayevskaya (University of Illinois Press, [1982] 1991), p. 194.
29

See especially “The Self-Education of Rae Speigel (Raya Dunayevskaya): Child Radicalism and Abolitionist Pedagogies at the Crossroads of Great Migrations,” by W. Chris Johnson, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 17 (1) 2024, pp. 127-54; “She-Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya: Forgotten Comrade of Left-Wing Intellectuals,” by Sofya Nikiforova and Yekaterina Mikheyeva, Journal of the Higher School of Mathematics, Vol. 6 (4), 2023, pp. 84-104; and “’A Way of Knowing: Adrienne Rich’s Marxism and the Poetics of Revolution,” by Megan Behrent, Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 78 (2), 2022, pp. 13-42.
30

“Humanism and Post-Humanism,” by Sunyoung Ayn, Historical Materialism, 31.1, 2023, pp. 68-9.
31

See Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, edited by Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, and Heather A. Brown (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
32

For a fine critique of the latter two claims, see “Humanism: A Defense,” by Karen Ng, Philosophical Topics, Vol. 49 (1) Spring 2021, pp. 145-63.
33

See Dunayevskaya’s Introduction to the 1988 edition of Marxism and Freedom, from 1775 Until Today (Columbia University Press) entitled “Dialectics of Revolution: American Roots and Marx’s World Humanist Concepts”: “When, in the 1950’s Miners’ General Strike, I again used Marx’s Humanist Essays—and my own activity showed the beginning of Marxist-Humanism—C.L.R James also recoiled from Marx’s Humanism” (p. 2) [emphasis in original 1985 speech].
34

Notes on Dialectics, by C.L.R. James (Lawrence Hill, 1980), pp. 117, 141.
35

See “Towards an Organizational History of the Philosophy of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.,” by Peter Hudis, The International Marxist-Humanist, September 8, 2009, https://imhojournal.org/articles/towards-an-organizational-history-of-the-philosophy-of-marxist-humanism-in-the-u-s/