As strikes and protests escalate, Algeria’s army chief demands Bouteflika’s ouster

Bill Van Auken

In a desperate bid to defend Algeria’s military-backed National Liberation Front (FLN) regime, the chief of staff of the armed forces, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah, demanded on Tuesday that the country’s figurehead president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, be declared “unfit to rule.”

In a televised address delivered against the backdrop of a continuing escalation of the more than month-long wave of popular protests and strikes, General Salah declared: “In this context, it becomes necessary, even imperative, to adopt a solution to get out of the crisis, which responds to the legitimate demands of the Algerian people, and which guarantees the respect of the provisions of the Constitution and the maintenance of the sovereignty of the State.”

Salah called for the invocation of Article 102 of the Algerian Constitution, which empowers the Constitutional Council, the upper chamber of the country’s legislature, to declare Bouteflika “unfit to rule,” which would set the stage for his removal from office by a two-thirds vote of the parliament.

Bouteflika, a veteran of the war for liberation from French colonialism, has been in power since 1999. The 82-year-old president suffered a stroke in 2013 and has been confined to a wheelchair and not spoken publicly since then.

The mass demonstrations, which have brought millions of workers and youth into the streets across Algeria, erupted after it was announced that Bouteflika intended to seek a fifth term. In the face of the mass protests, the government shifted its tactics, declaring on March 11 that the president would not seek a fifth term, but that elections would be postponed until a new constitution was drafted, extending his rule indefinitely. His current term is set to expire on April 29.

The move was answered by demonstrators who chanted the slogan, “We wanted elections without Bouteflika, now we have Bouteflika without elections.”

The speech by the 79-year-old General Salah marks a humiliating climbdown by the regime and was greeted with cheers and the honking of horns in Algiers on Tuesday. At the beginning of the mass protests, the military’s chief of staff had denounced demonstrators as “adventurers.” Subsequently he, like much of the country’s corrupt ruling elite, changed his tune, feigning sympathy for the protesters, while continuing to back Bouteflika remaining in power.

Salah’s action is entirely unconstitutional. It is up to the Constitutional Council to invoke Article 102, not the head of the military. His intervention, however, expresses the reality of the bourgeois state structure in Algeria, in which the military serves as the backbone of the regime, repeatedly intervening in and mediating conflicts within the state.

The Constitutional Council obediently responded to the general’s demand, announcing that it would convene an extraordinary session to consider ousting Bouteflika on the grounds of his unfitness to rule.

The general’s televised speech came as the mass protests continued in the center of Algiers, and as workers’ strikes swept the country.

On Tuesday in Arzew, a major Algerian port and industrial area that includes a refinery exporting LNG (liquified natural gas), workers walked out Tuesday morning in response to a call made on social media, independent and opposed to the country’s trade unions, for a three-day strike. In addition to demanding the end of the regime and profound changes in the country’s social system, strikers carried a banner that read, “The union of shame,” and demanding the ouster of Abdelmadjid Sidi-Saïd, the secretary-general of the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA) for the past 20 years, who has backed Bouteflika against the mass protests.

Post offices and public services were also shut down in many parts of the country.

On Monday, thousands of workers, joined by family members and retirees, marched in Tizi Ouzou, one of Algeria’s largest cities in the north central part of the country. The march was called to protest both the regime and the support given to it by UGTA chief Sidi-Saïd. Banners read, “For the immediate departure of the system and Sidi-Saïd.” Others denounced the union leader as Bouteflika’s “court jester.”

While sections of the UGTA bureaucracy have aped the regime, attempting to present the ouster of Sidi-Saïd—like that of Bouteflika—as the solution to the grievances of the workers, the hostility of the working class is directed against an entire system of official unions that function as corporatist partners of the government and the employers, serving to suppress the class struggle.

In Algiers, meanwhile, Tuesday saw what has become a weekly demonstration by thousands of students, as well as protests by architects, court magistrates and other public sector workers.

And in the Mediterranean port city of Béjaïa, several hundred students demonstrated, joined by farmers who drove their tractors into the center of town and employees of the state-run forestry department.

While the sudden about-face on the status of Bouteflika has been forced upon the regime by the rising tide of working class opposition, General Salah’s pseudo-constitutional solution will answer none of the political, much less social, demands that have brought millions of Algerians into the streets.

If the Constitutional Council follows the military commander’s orders, as it likely will, Bouteflika will be replaced by the legislative body’s chairman Abdelkader Bensalah, who would serve as caretaker president for at least 45 and up to 90 days. Bensalah, 76, is one of the founders of the Democratic National Rally (DNR), a coalition partner of Bouteflika’s National Liberation Front (FLN) and a close ally of the ailing president.

Under the terms of the constitution, elections would be held under the supervision of Bensalah’s caretaker government within 90 days, ensuring continued control and domination by the ruling parties and the ruling class of wealthy businessmen, corrupt officials and military commanders that they represent.

Sections of the opposition have denounced Salah’s maneuver. Mustapha Bouchachi, a lawyer and leading figure in the Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), stated on Tuesday that “The Algerian people don’t accept that the government, or a symbol of power of this system, manages the transition period.”

These elements, which include all of the bourgeois opposition parties as well as pseudo-left groups like the Workers Party and the Pabloite Socialist Workers Party, allied with the French New Anti-Capitalist Party, are demanding only that they be included in this “transition” and are offering themselves to give the military-dominated regime a political facelift.

What has brought masses of workers and youth into the streets, however, is not the desire for such a political reshuffling at the top, but rather the demand for a fundamental transformation of a social order in which 80 percent of the wealth is controlled by the top 10 percent, while the official youth unemployment rate stands at 30 percent and some 14 million people are condemned to live in abject poverty on less than $1.50 a day.

As significant as the apparent abandonment of Bouteflika by the regime is in terms of the impact of the mass struggles that have shaken Algeria, it marks only the beginning of the struggle of the Algerian working class to transform these conditions. Whatever the fate of the aging president, power will remain in the hands of the military brass that has served as the linchpin of the capitalist setup in Algeria for decades.

Until now, the security forces have been overwhelmed by the massive character of the demonstrations demanding Bouteflika’s ouster, responding for the most part with tear gas and the arrest of protesters who are released the next day. The military command’s commitment to a shift within the state apparatus may be accompanied by a turn to far more repressive measures that emulate the methods employed by its counterparts in Egypt.

While Bouteflika’s ouster will no doubt be met with jubilation across Algeria, the critical question is the development of an independent political strategy and the formation of a new revolutionary leadership in the working class.

The central task facing Algerian workers is the formation of popular organs of power, based on the working class, to fight to overthrow and replace the remnants of Bouteflika’s regime with a workers’ government. The victory of this revolution depends on its extension beyond Algeria, uniting Algerian workers with their class brothers and sisters throughout the Middle East and in the advanced capitalist countries.

Sri Lankan think tank warns about growing levels of social inequality

Dilruwan Vithanage 

Sri Lanka: State of the Economy 2018, the latest annual report from the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), reveals that income inequality has been an ongoing and rising problem across the country over the past quarter century.

The government and international NGO-funded think tank nervously notes that “persistent income inequality in Sri Lanka is major issue which needs urgent attention of the policy makers.”

The report, which is based on figures from Sri Lanka’s department of statistics and census, compares household income and expenditure (HIES) data in 1990–91 with a 2016 survey. While official surveys in Sri Lanka are notoriously limited and do not give a real picture of the depth of poverty, the report does provide some glimpses.

The survey claims that the number of people suffering income poverty has reduced from 26.1 percent of the population in 1990–91 to 4.1 percent in 2016, which it claims is a “notable achievement.”

The poverty line, however, is just $US1.90 or 290 rupees per day per person, an extremely low amount. The World Bank’s 2016 global poverty line is $3.20 income per day, almost double, the Sri Lankan figure.

The geographical spread of poverty is revealing: 1.9 percent of those living in urban areas are poor compared to 4.3 and 8.8 percent in the rural and estate sectors, respectively. In other words, the most poverty-stricken sectors of the population are located in the tea and other estates where plantation workers walked out on strike late last year to demand a 100 percent increase in their 500-rupee basic daily wage. Rural farmers have been constantly agitating against the government over cuts to agricultural subsidies and for reasonable prices for their produce and debt relief.

The report indicates that the richest sections of society dramatically boosted their wealth compared to the poor during the past 25 years.

The average household monthly income of the bottom 10 percent increased from 1,661 rupees or $40 in 1990–91 (the exchange rate then was $1=41 rupees) to 10,419 rupees in 2016 or $71 (exchange rate was $1=146 rupees), less than double compared to the US dollar.

By contrast, the average monthly income of the richest 10 percent climbed from 12,963 rupees or $316 in 1990–91 to 162,460 rupees or $1,144 in 2016, more than trebling compared to the US dollar. For the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent, the growth was undoubtedly far greater.

In 2016, the richest 10 percent, or the top decile, earned the equivalent of the total amount earned by 70 percent of all households in 2016. The share of the bottom decile stood at just 1.6 percent of total household income.

Sri Lanka: State of the Economy 2018 indicates how poverty drastically impacts on the education of Sri Lankan children. According to HIES data for 2012–13 (no data was given for 2016), 23.8 percent of the poor children aged 15–16 years and 64.7 percent of poor children aged 17–18 are unable to complete their formal education due to lack of finance.

The report notes that these figures point to the failure of the Samurdhi (Prosperity) program and other limited social welfare measures, which consecutive Sri Lankan governments have claimed will reduce poverty and improve the living conditions of the poor.

In the face of widespread discontent, the United National Party-led government’s recent budget, as a cosmetic measure, increased the number of people receiving Samurdhi by 600,000. Currently, there are 3.5 million people in Sri Lanka receiving Samurdhi payments of between 1,500 and 3,500 rupees per month.

The IPS report provides some sense of the devastating impact of the bloody 30-year war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the north and east of the country. The highest percentage of Sri Lankan households falling into the “poorest group”—i.e., with a monthly income of less than 30,000 rupees—are in the northern districts of Mullaithivu (71 percent of the population) and Kilinochchi (66 percent) and in Batticalao (65.2 percent) in the east.

In 2016, 50 percent of Sri Lankan households earned less than 39,855 rupees per month. With the average household consisting 3.8 people, this is not enough to sustain this size family. The average price of goods and services measured by the Colombo Consumer Price Index have increased by nearly six times over the same 1990–91 to 2016 period.

Social inequality in Sri Lanka is an expression of the growth of inequality globally. In 2018, the UK-based charity Oxfam revealed that the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $900 billion, or 12 percent, while 3.8 billion people, half the world’s population, saw their wealth decline by 11 percent.

The World Socialist Web Site commented on January 22 this year: “In the decade since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, governments and financial authorities have imposed its full impact on the backs of the world working class, in the form of stagnant and lower wages and austerity programs that have gutted health and other social services, to name just some of its effects.”

In line with this agenda, consecutive Sri Lankan governments have imposed the austerity demands of the International Monetary Fund by increasing taxes on essentials, privatising state-owned enterprises, freezing wages and gutting social services.

As the same time large corporations and investors have been given tax cuts and various incentive packages to boost their profits. In 2012, Colombo reduced company tax rates from 35 percent to 28 percent. The maximum personal income rate, which was 35 percent before 2010, was reduced to 24 percent in 2011 and further cut last year to 16 percent.

Sri Lanka: State of the Economy 2018 laments that “in-depth analysis is needed to understand the root causes of persistent income inequity.” The root cause of “persistent income inequity” is no secret: it is the inevitable product of capitalism and the drive for profit, the system that the government and think tanks such as the IPS defend.

UK school funding crisis threatens children’s basic education

Tom Pearce

The funding crisis wracking UK schools is wreaking havoc across the country. Schools are being forced to manage their budgets in ways that did not seem imaginable a decade ago and taking desperate measures to balance their budgets.

At the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), heads warned that there is a “£5.7 billion funding shortfall” that could leave many schools bankrupt.

Many schools have already cut administration staff and reduced extra-curricular activities on offer. There have been staff redundancies and pay cuts for many.

Exacerbating the problem of funding, the government put in place statutory pay rises at the start of the 2018-2019 academic year without providing additional cash to cover the cost of the paltry pay rise. Instead, schools have had to make choices about the standard of children’s schooling, inevitably leading to a detrimental effect on pupils and staff.

The education-funding crisis is moving into a new stage, where initial cuts to schools are now moving towards the destruction of basic educational provision.

A school in Stockport, in northern England, Vale View Primary, has taken the measure of closing early on Fridays due to a desperate situation created by the lack of funding. Even more shocking is the fact that parents who cannot pick up their children at lunchtime early are going to be charged.

The school is one of 25 that have taken the drastic measure of shortening the school week due to funding constraints.

When announcing the changes to School Week, Vale View Primary’s chair of governors attempted to mask the situation in a letter to parents by selling shutting early as a way of allowing them to “spend more time with your children.” The head teacher, Helen Hannah, cited the statutory pay rises as a reason that she was making the changes due to a £100,000 deficit in her school. The head has also made double figure redundancies and justified the changes to ensure that class sizes would not rise to 40 pupils per class. Such are the choices that head teachers have being forced to make across the country.

A huge £400,000 worth of cuts have already been made to the Vale View Primary’s budget. The school is due to cut nearly £10,000 in art therapy and has reduced the amount of money spent on speech and language therapy by £16,000. School trip subsidies have been cut by £50,000 and resources have been cut by £100,000. Additionally, £136,000 has been saved from not replacing teaching assistants.

An indication of the indifference of the government to the crisis was the reported refusal, three times since last September, of Education Secretary Damian Hinds to meet head teachers to discuss the damage caused by cuts with those on the front line.

Vale View Primary’s fate is one now common in English schools. The scale of the impact of the cuts to education is mirrored across the country.

In the north of England, some schools are holding extra non-uniform days in order to raise cash from the donations that come from not wearing the usual school uniform. In Essex and inner London, lunchtime supervisors have been cut and replaced with the class teachers, who must give up their lunchtime to look after children. Teachers are also cleaning their own classrooms and areas after cleaning staff have been cut.

How are teachers able to plan and provide a decent education under these conditions? Teachers are already under extreme pressure to deliver high quality lessons and in some cases to mark to ridiculous standards. They are burning out and the funding crisis is exacerbating the situation.

In other schools, wish lists and crowd funding have been established for parents and carers to buy “luxury items” such as pencils, glue sticks and rulers. Some schools already have cut hours to save money, with many pupils in Birmingham’s primary schools being sent home at lunchtime on Fridays.

This month, the Guardian reported on the comments of teachers it surveyed about the crisis. It noted, “A chemistry teacher from Cheshire described four years of redundancies, school buildings no longer fit for purpose and diminishing resources: ‘No current GCSE textbooks, limited photocopying, sharing exercise books between classes, broken equipment not replaced.’”

A Gloucestershire science teacher said his annual budget had been cut by 45 percent since 2010. “We are actually unable to provide students with the GCSE ‘required practicals’ as the chemicals and enzymes are too expensive. Our buildings are cold. No heating until November is the rule even though teachers and students are wearing their coats indoors.”

The WSWS spoke to a teacher from a Cambridgeshire school, who said, “Sixth form hours have been cut from timetables in order to make the post-16 area financially viable. Teachers are worried that they will not be able to teach the course and students are worried that they will lose teachers input into their A Levels.”

In the face of unprecedented funding cuts, the education unions have done nothing to oppose the government.

Paul Whiteman, the National Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), in a TES article earlier this month, presented the problem as one in which “cross-party” MPs had not been aware of the devastation caused by funding cuts. However, “MPs are waking up, fortunately. According to our research, more than half are now prepared to say that the school funding crisis is real.” All that was required was a little more “honesty” from the same Tory ministers who have slashed billions from education over the last decade. “The Department for Education has listened somewhat to us and other unions and has found a little extra money, but now we need real movement from the Treasury. The trouble is, the chancellor doesn’t appear to be listening,” said Whiteman.

Kevin Courtney of the National Education Union (NEU), who is hailed by Britain’s pseudo-left groups as a militant fighter, has done nothing more than set up a website documenting funding cuts to school.

As with the NAHT, the NEU proposes nothing beyond an appeal for teachers to write to their Members of Parliament. This tactic so far has only enabled the situation to be debated in parliament for three hours.

The only other action undertaken by the main teachers’ unions was an ineffective march in London last year and a protest rally called on a week-day evening. A protest by NAHT members in London, culminating in a parliamentary lobby, took place at the end of February. On March 4, there was a three-hour debate on school funding in Parliament, with the Conservatives promising only to stick to their policies.

Internationally, education workers are taking action into their own hands. In every country, there is mass support among broad sections of workers for a fight to defend public education. This is shown in the international wave of strikes and protests against education cuts in the US, Colombia, Algeria, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Portugal, France, Netherlands, Morocco, Zimbabwe and Tamil Nadu, in southern India.

In all of these struggles workers are coming into conflict with the union bureaucracies who, when they cannot prevent strikes from breaking out, seek to do everything to isolate and sabotage them.

In the UK, Courtney et al are calling on teachers to wait for a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn and are sitting on demands by workers for action to be taken now.

At the end of last year, the NEU sent out an “indicative” survey to 257,849 members, to which 82,487 teachers responded. The survey found that 100 percent supported a campaign to expose funding cuts, with 99 percent of responses saying that funding cuts had had a severe impact on their schools.

However, the most significant statistic was the appetite for a fight against the cuts, with four-fifths of members prepared to strike. 82 percent of teachers at state schools and 84 percent at colleges were prepared to take strike action to “secure better funding for schools and the full implementation of the teachers’ pay award.” Only 31 percent of teachers participated in the vote, significantly lower than the required 50 percent level required to strike under anti-strike laws, expressing teacher’s lack of confidence in the NEU.

Despite the demand for a fight, Courtney made another bland statement committing the union to nothing: “The NEU Executive will be meeting to discuss these findings and will be considering the next steps in the campaign.”

UK teachers should look to the struggle of teachers internationally and draw the necessary lessons in order to fight against the destruction of free, public education. Only a complete break with the trade union bureaucracy will enable them to fight the education cuts. Teachers must form rank-and-file committees, controlled by workers themselves and independent of the unions. These must turn to education workers internationally and base themselves on what teachers and students need, not what the ruling elite say is affordable.

Only one UK soldier to be prosecuted for Bloody Sunday 47 years on

Steve James 

Nearly five decades have passed since soldiers of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment shot 28 peaceful civil rights demonstrators. The Bloody Sunday atrocity killed 13 people on January 30, 1972, in Derry, Northern Ireland. Another victim died later.

Last week, the director of Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service (PPS), Stephen Herron, concluded there is only “sufficient evidence to prosecute one former solder, Soldier F, for the murder of James Wray and William McKinney, and for the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O’Donnell.”

Soldier F remains anonymous and will receive the full backing of the British government. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson offered “full legal and pastoral support to the individual affected by today’s decision.”

Soldier F, a former lance corporal, is one of 21 members of the Parachute Regiment who fired their weapons on the day. No one else, of any rank, has ever been prosecuted.

The PPS decision shocked relatives and supporters of those killed, who were anticipating that three or four soldiers would be charged. Four soldiers, only known by the letters E, F, G and H, by their own evidence are responsible for at least seven deaths.

John Kelly, whose brother Michael was killed, told the Belfast Telegraph,“When I heard that no one was to be charged with my brother’s murder I was totally devastated. I couldn’t take it in. It was as if I wasn’t there and it was a dream.

“I looked around at my family—my eight sisters and my brother—all sitting around the table listening to this and they were all devastated.”

Bloody Sunday is one of the most notorious crimes of British imperialism. The massacre took place three years into Operation Banner, the deployment of tens of thousands of British troops to Northern Ireland to prop up the Unionist government by violently suppressing a powerful movement calling for civil and democratic rights, jobs and better housing.

An estimated 10,000–15,000 people attended the Derry march, demanding an end to anti-Catholic discrimination in the North. Most worrying for the ruling class, the demand for civil rights was accompanied by calls for greater social and political equality in all areas. What was posed was the overcoming of the sectarian divisions that had been fostered by British imperialism over centuries in its oldest colony. The movement developed at a time of an escalation in the class struggle internationally between 1968 and 1975, during which a revolutionary upsurge of the working class shook bourgeois rule to its foundations.

In the early 1970s, as tensions in Northern Ireland rapidly escalated, the Parachute Regiment was repeatedly unleashed against demonstrations and working-class areas deemed sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

In August 1971, the regiment murdered nine of ten people killed in the working-class Catholic estate of Ballymurphy in Belfast during Operation Demetrius—the internment without trial of hundreds of people accused of supporting the republicans.

An inquest into the Ballymurphy Massacre only opened last year and is still hearing evidence. Eighteen people were interned from Ballymurphy, while others were shot down during two days of protests and shootings. One woman, Joan Connolly, a 45-year-old mother of eight, was shot repeatedly in the head.

Outrage at internment and army violence triggered mass opposition resulting in demonstrations, rent and labour strikes. Sectarian violence escalated to the extent that 7,000 people, Catholic and Protestant, were forced from their homes. Thousands of Catholics fled to refugee camps in the Republic of Ireland. Hundreds of people interned suffered months of brutality and torture at the hands of British forces.

The protest march of January 30, 1972 was an expression of powerful opposition to the repressive savagery of British and Ulster governments and was targeted for repression by the Conservatives under Prime Minister Edward Heath. The PPS decision to allow only one prosecution is consistent with the approach taken ever since by the British and Northern Ireland authorities. Those directing the most egregious acts of state orchestrated violence, murder, torture, brutality, spying, entrapment and infiltration have gone unpunished because they have been following the policy of successive British governments.

Immediately after Bloody Sunday the Widgery Tribunal, which reported in April 1972, defended the soldiers, accusing them only of recklessness while falsely insisting that some of those shot had been “firing weapons or handling bombs.” The report was finally conceded to be a whitewash in 1998, when the British government agreed to another inquiry as part of discussions around the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

The subsequent Saville Inquiry, which heard evidence for five years and took another five to report, only continued the cover-up in a different form. Lord Saville accumulated a great deal of evidence, including from Heath himself, but the inquiry concluded that soldiers “losing their self-control and firing themselves, forgetting or ignoring their instructions and training” lay at the heart of the killings. Saville once again exonerated the army top brass and British government. Heath conveniently suffered memory failures when asked to comment on any discussion in a 1971 cabinet committee on the use of guns against unarmed demonstrators.

The belated prosecution of Soldier F, who must now be at least in his sixties, follows this pattern. The Tory government aims to close down any prospect of further trials over partially completed or paralysed investigations into atrocities of the Britain’s “dirty war.”

Besides the Bloody Sunday and Ballymurphy killings carried out by uniformed soldiers, there are other ongoing “historical enquiries”—particularly into British agents operating in both loyalist and republican paramilitary outfits. The most notorious and potentially damaging of these is Freddie Scappaticci, known as “Stakeknife,” who is alleged to have run the IRA’s internal security operation for many years and carried out large numbers of murders, including those of IRA members falsely accused of being British spies. “Stakeknife’s” activities are the subject of a police investigation, Operation Kenova, whose primary concern is to hide the role of Scappaticci’s controllers and political masters.

Earlier this month, the government’s Northern Ireland secretary, Karen Bradley, insisted to the House of Commons that the 10 percent of Northern Ireland killings directly attributed to “the hands of the military and police were not crimes.”

Bradley’s comments were calculated to mollify the ultra-right Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland, on whose votes Theresa May’s government depends in order to pass through British Parliament the Withdrawal Agreement she has agreed with the European Union to exit the bloc. She was quickly forced to apologise for the “tone” of her comments following complaints from Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney that her “timing couldn’t be worse,” but the content was not retracted.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson agreed, bemoaning the fact that proposed changes to retrospectively protect soldiers from “spurious” criminal charges would not be ready in time to cover those accused of Bloody Sunday.

During a visit to BAE’s warship yard in Barrow in Furness, England, Williamson made clear that he opposed any prosecutions for Bloody Sunday and for other past and future war crimes. “It’s not just about Northern Ireland, but about Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts before that and in the future,” he said.

In conditions of immense class tensions, with advanced preparations for civil unrest particularly in the event of a “no deal” Brexit, British imperialism is preparing new Bloody Sundays, internationally and in the UK itself.

Turkish economy falls into recession, amid fears of further US economic reprisals

Baris Demir 

The Turkish lira depreciated by more than 5 percent in US dollars terms last Friday, just nine days before nationwide local elections in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are expected to suffer significant losses.

The lira (TL) did recoup more than half of Friday’s losses yesterday, after Turkey’s central bank sharply raised overnight borrowing costs for financial institutions. Nevertheless, Friday’s sell-off points to the vulnerability and mounting crisis of the Turkish economy, which fell into recession late last year.

The principal, if not the overriding, factor in Friday’s lira depreciation was investor fears of a further deterioration in US-Turkish relations, after Erdogan sharply criticized US President Trump’s March 21 announcement that Washington was formally endorsing Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights.

According to press reports, figures showing a sharp drop in Turkey’s foreign reserves in the first two weeks of March and an IMF spokesman’s call Thursday for Ankara to address “key imbalances” in the economy also contributed to Friday’s lira sell-off.

US-Turkish relations have been in freefall since Washington made the YPG—the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdish nationalist PKK, against which Ankara has been waging a bloody war in southeast Turkey for the past 35 years—its principal proxy army in its regime-change war in Syria; then backed an unsuccessful military coup against Erdogan in July 2016.

In recent weeks, Trump administration and Pentagon officials have been making ever more explicit threats of retaliatory action against Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, if it proceeds with the purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defence system.

Last August’s doubling of US tariffs on Turkish aluminum and steel—purportedly in retaliation for Turkey’s jailing of a US pastor that it claimed was involved in the failed 2016 coup—triggered a crash in the value of the lira that continues to roil Turkey’s economy.

Prices have risen sharply, with inflation surpassing 20 percent in January. So too have borrowing charges on the many US dollar and euro-dominated loans Turkish corporations took out in recent years to take advantage of lower interest rates offshore.

Turkey fell into recession for the first time in a decade when its economy contracted 3 percent in the last three months of 2018. Analysts are predicting a further 2.4 percent slide in the first quarter of this year.

The working class is bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. Turkey’s official unemployment rate jumped to 13.5 percent in December 2018, its highest level since the 2008-2009 financial meltdown and global slump. The youth jobless rate is 24.5 percent. In January almost 3.8 million people were registered with the Employment Agency of Turkey (ISKUR), up from 2.4 million in the first month of 2018.

Workers are also being squeezed by food price rises. At 30.97 percent on a year-on-year basis, Turkey’s food-price inflation in January was the second worst in OECD counties, trailing only Argentina, and the seventh worst in the world.

Almost half of Turkish workers are paid the minimum wage, whose value in US dollar terms has tumbled—despite a recent 26 percent increase—from 1,603 (TL) or $424 per month at the beginning of 2018, to 2020 TL, or only about $350 today.

The Erdogan government is acutely aware of mounting popular anger over the deteriorating economic situation and the threat it could speak a social explosion. Its response has been to put off further austerity measures until after the March 31 elections and announce a handful of populist programs aimed at mitigating popular anger, while intensifying its turn toward authoritarian forms of rule and using nationalist and militarist rhetoric to try to divert social anger along reactionary lines.

The AKP government has set up markets in Istanbul and Ankara, respectively Turkey’s largest and second largest cities, to sell vegetables and fruits at half the market price. In both cities, AKP-led administrations are facing a strong opposition challenge in next Sunday’s municipal elections. The government has also announced a “new employment campaign,” under which it is promising to pay wages, taxes and social charges for new hires for their first three months on the job.

Erdogan is posturing as the defender of the people against price-gouging. He has accused the supermarkets of “usury” and “exploitation” and said their actions are akin to “treason,” even terrorism.” In February, the government even made a show of ordering raids on wholesale food markets.

In reality, the AKP has relentlessly pursued neo-liberal policies, including wholesale privatizations, since coming to power in 2002, Many of its pro-investor policies, including subsidy cuts, have adversely impacted small farmers and strengthened domestic and foreign agribusiness, directly contributing to the food price rises.

Erdogan has also tried to shift attention from his own government’s responsibility for the economic crisis with demagogic denunciations of US and European bullying, and bellicose attacks on the PKK and YPG.

In a speech at an election rally in the central city of Sivas, Erdogan accused the population of whining about food prices, when they should instead be concerned with the price of bullets and soldiers’ uniforms for the battle against the PKK. “All this talk about tomatoes, eggplants and green peppers,” fumed Erdogan. “Do you have any idea how much a bullet costs? Think about the cost of getting our soldiers ready to fight terrorists. And here you are talking about tomatoes and potatoes.”

“Some people are complicit,” he continued, “while George and Hans,” a reference to the US and Germany, “are trying to hit us.”

Tuncay Ozilhan, a billionaire and leader of Turkey’s most powerful business organization, the Turkish Industry and Business Association, recently criticized Erdogan’s economic policies, saying Turkey is now experiencing “the consequences of past mistakes in many areas from food inflation to unemployment.”

“We,” continued Ozilhan, “do not think that” the steps the government has taken “against rising food prices … can solve the problem. The number of farmers who are responsible for feeding an 80 million population has fallen from 10 percent to 3 percent. In a situation where production decreases, farming collapses and consumption increases rapidly, food price control cannot be a remedy.”

Behind these criticisms lie deeper concerns within the ruling class over the growing rift between Ankara and the western imperialist powers and the ability of the Islamist AKP—whose string of electoral successes over the past 17 years has been bound up with its ability to muster support from sections of the rural and urban poor—to contain mounting social anger as the economic situation goes from bad to worse.

Above all, the ruling class fears rampant social inequality, soaring prices, mass unemployment and the proliferation of precarious contract jobs will cause Turkish workers to join the global working class upsurge that has already convulsed France, Mexico’s low-wage maquiladora region, and has now engulfed Algeria in a revolutionary crisis—to name just a few of the most prominent examples.

The principal difference between the AKP and the opposition parties is the latter’s more pronounced orientation to the Turkish bourgeoisie’s traditional North American and European imperialist allies.

Both the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—the historic party of the Kemalist elite that dominated the military and other state institutions of the Turkish Republic in the last century—and the Kurdish nationalist, pseudo-left supported, People’s Democratic Party (HDP) are cynically seeking to exploit the popular anger over the mounting economic crisis, while advancing unabashedly pro-capitalist programs.

CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu deplores that Turks have been reduced to scrounging for food in trash bins, but in the very next breathe says Ankara should be focusing on boosting exports, i.e., on boosting the competitive positions Turkish capital, not borrowing funds to sustain a “social state.”

The HDP is supporting the CHP in the major cities of western Turkey and promoting it as a defender of “democracy” against AKP “fascism,” although the CHP has connived in repeated military coups that resulted in savage repression of the working class and has played a pivotal role in supporting the savage decades-long war against Turkey’s Kurdish minority.

The reality is all these parties stand as one against the working class. How they will respond to the inevitable eruption of mass working class discontent was indicated last September, when thousands of construction workers at the site of a new airport in Istanbul carried out protests against workplace accidents, precarious and oppressive working conditions and the violation of their basic rights. The government answered the mass protest and the workers’ just demands with a brutal police attack and the jailing of more than 30 militant workers.

US stages another provocation in the Taiwan Strait

Ben McGrath

The United States sent two warships through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, only days before the opening of trade talks with China in Beijing. This deliberate provocation over Taiwan, China’s most sensitive diplomatic issue, is a clear threat aimed at forcing the Chinese to accept a US-dictates trade deal.

The USS Curtis Wilbur, a naval destroyer, and the Bertholf, a US Coast Guard (USCG) cutter entered the strait dividing Taiwan from the Chinese mainland from the south. The US incursion was the third in as many months, as the Trump administration ramps up measures to bring further military pressure to bear on Beijing. Washington also sent warships through the strait last year in July, October and November.

“The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” declared Commander Clayton Doss, a spokesman for the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet. He added, in an implicit threat to Beijing, “The US will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows.”

China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Geng Shuang urged the US to “cautiously and appropriately handle the Taiwan issue to avoid harming Sino-US relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.” He also stated that “China has lodged stern representations with the US.”

The presence of a US Coast Guard vessel raised some eyebrows in the media, summed up by the headline of a Navy Times article, “Why did a Coast Guard cutter take a jab at China?” The idea of using the Coast Guard for so-called “freedom of navigation” operations, i.e., provocations against China, has been discussed in US ruling circles since at least January 2017, the same month Trump came to office.

That year, Admiral Paul Zukunft, then head of the Coast Guard, called for “a permanent USCG presence in the South China Sea and related areas. This would allow us to expand our working relationship with Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan. We can spearhead work with allies on freedom of navigation exercises as well.” Proponents claimed Coast Guard vessels would be less provocative, in an attempt to justify the further US military buildup in the South China Sea and throughout the region in preparation for war with China.

Trump has continually stoked tensions with China over Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade province. While Taiwan and Beijing both adhere to the 1992 Consensus recognizing the “One China” policy, the current government in Taipei of Tsai Ing-wen and the Democratic Progressive Party has cautiously leaned towards Taiwanese independence, though not making any formal declarations.

Beijing has maintained that it will use military force to retake Taiwan should it ever declare independence. In this regard, the US navy’s moves are not routine, but purposely risk a clash to further US geopolitical interests and measure how far China can be pushed. Beijing, however, has no intention of allowing an independent, US-aligned Taiwan to become a military base for Washington.

Chief Hu Xijin, editor of China’s state-owned Global Times, said in a statement on Monday, “[US] warships must pass through the Taiwan Strait in an orderly way. They shouldn’t make dangerous moves such as interacting with Taiwan’s military or docking at a Taiwan port. Or else, the Chinese mainland is bound to retaliate.”

China has previously threatened to attack Taiwan if a US warship docks at a Taiwanese port, a red-line the Trump administration came close to breaching last October when an American naval scientific research vessel docked at the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung during heightened tensions.

Washington, however, is already moving to build up its relations with Taiwan’s military. According to a March 22 Bloomberg article, sources within the White House stated that advisors to Trump have urged Taiwan to submit a request for the sale of sixty-six F-16 fighter jets, produced by Lockheed Martin.

The approval of the deal would be the first since 1992, when the US sold Taiwan 150 F-16 jets. The Obama administration rejected a similar request in 2011, instead agreeing to upgrade Taiwan’s existing fleet as part of a larger arms deal. Overall, the US has sold more than $15 billion in weaponry to Taiwan since 2010.

In addition, the Trump administration approved the Taiwan Travel Act last March, allowing increased visits between US and Taiwanese officials. The massive US military spending bill passed last year called for further arms deals and increased cooperation with Taiwan’s military, including “opportunities for practical training and military exercises with Taiwan” and “exchanges between senior defense officials and general officers of the United States and Taiwan consistent with the Taiwan Travel Act.”

In this regard, the sale of the F-16s to Taiwan is not simply a bargaining chip in trade talks. The build-up of Taiwan’s military is part of an overall strategy, backed by the Republicans and the Democrats, to militarily encircle China and force Beijing to acquiesce to US demands.

“There is a consensus that’s almost bipartisan in Washington that it’s time to be a bit more assertive against China,” noted Richard Aboulafia, an analyst from the Teal Group. “This is the part where fighters are geopolitics with wings.”

The trade war instigated by Trump is part of this strategy. It centers on demands for “structural reforms” in China that would give US corporations access to cheap labor and resources while eliminating an economic competitor.

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin will be in Beijing for trade talks on March 28. China’s Vice Premier Liu He will lead a delegation to Washington on April 3.

On the negotiations, Wei Zongyou, an expert on China-US relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, stated that “the US has constantly emphasized the verification mechanism and use of punitive tariffs as a counterweight.” Washington has threatened to more than double the current ten percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods while imposing new tariffs.

In essence, Washington is demanding Beijing relinquish sovereignty over its economy and return to a period of semi-colonial status. Naturally, Beijing will be unable to meet such conditions, leaving the US to further inflame tensions, risking the outbreak of a catastrophic war.

Thousands of young Moroccan teachers assaulted by anti-riot police

Nancy Hanover

Moroccan anti-riot police assaulted striking teachers with batons and water cannon in the capital of Rabat over the weekend. An estimated 10,000-15,000 education workers, on strike since March 3, had gathered to press their demands for permanent jobs, pensions, additional salaries and good healthcare.

The teachers and other education workers, mainly in the 20s and 30s, chanted “liberty, dignity, social justice” and held candles or illuminated cell phones. On Saturday night, they decided to camp out in front of the parliament on the main Mohammed V Avenue. They have been holding rallies for the past three weeks to demand permanent jobs, including sit-ins at regional academies across the kingdom.

Some shouted political slogans such as “This is a corrupt country” and “We are ruled by a mafia,” demanding the resignations of Prime Minister Saad Eddine El Othmani and Education Minister Said Amzazi.

The education ministry has threatened mass firings in retaliation for the strike with the pretext that teachers knew the terms of the contracts before signing them. “We are not intimidated by the threats of the education ministry because we came to claim our right to be integrated in the civil service and defend the public school,” Abdelilah Taloua, a young teacher, told Reuters.

Describing themselves as “forcibly contracted educators,” approximately 55,000 of Morocco’s teachers have received only annual renewable contracts since 2016. At that time, the education ministry instituted austerity policies, which removed them officially from the public sector. They are now demanding equal rights across the profession including full pension rights. Presently the teachers receive only 40 percent of their monthly salary after retirement.

Striker Oussama Hamdouch, 27, speaking with Moroccan World News, said the Ministry of Education has now proposed to hire teachers through regional academies. This was “unacceptable,” he emphasized, because the regional academies do not have the resources to offer employment to everyone.

“The academies will be able to fire teachers if they don’t have financial resources whenever they want to. School principals will also have a certain authority over us. We want to work with dignity like the other teachers in the public sector,” Hamdouch said.

Explaining that young teachers had no alternative but to sign the substandard contracts, Hamdouch added, “We had no choice. The job market is disappointing.” Teachers are particularly angry over the contract’s stipulation that they cannot take a full-employment position, even if one is offered, for the duration of the agreement.

The new round of protests follow those on February 20, when thousands gathered to press these demands and were met with similar violence by government forces. The February demonstration was called as part of a national general strike commemorating the revolutionary struggles dubbed the “Arab spring” in 2011.

With an escalating national debt, estimated at 82.5 percent of GDP, Prime Minister Saad Eddine El Othmani has continued to press the public sector in order to ensure payments to the state and international banks. Nearly 19 percent of the rural population lives in poverty, and about 15 percent of Moroccans eke out survival on about $3 a day, according to the World Bank. The official unemployment rate in the kingdom continues at just under 10 percent, but among the urban youth recent statistics show it close to 40 percent.

In June 2004, the United States designated Morocco a major ally in the “war on terror.” And, yesterday, March 25, the US State Department announced its approval of the sale of 25 F-16 fighter jets and assorted other military equipment to the Moroccan government at a cost of $3.8 billion. The news release explains that the upgrade will enable Morocco to expand its “ability to undertake [NATO] coalition operations, as it has done in the past in flying sorties against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.”

While attacking teachers, the Kingdom of Morocco, together with Tunisia, has also been the recipient of a special €55 million European Union fund to detain migrants attempting to enter Europe through Spain’s northern African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and across the Mediterranean.

The protests in Morocco coincide with the popular upheaval in neighboring Algeria. Tens of thousands of teachers joined the general strike earlier this month demanding the end of the figurehead regime of President Abdelaziz and the largest protests in 30 years continue to gain momentum.

New Zealand government bans fascist terrorist Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto

Tom Peters

The manifesto by Australian fascist Brenton Tarrant, who killed 50 people and injured the same number in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, has been officially suppressed in New Zealand.

On March 23 the country’s chief censor David Shanks announced that the 74-page document titled “The Great Replacement” has been deemed “objectionable” under the Films, Video and Publications Classification Act. Shanks instructed anyone in New Zealand who downloaded or printed off the manifesto, which Tarrant posted online just before the March 15 attack, to destroy it. Possession of the manifesto carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and anyone who shares it can be jailed for 14 years. For now, the document can still be accessed and read legally in other countries, including Australia, but the New Zealand decision sets a dangerous precedent.

The suppression of the document is a major attack on democratic rights. The ban is a highly political decision: it is part of the efforts by the government and the ruling elite to suppress public discussion about the roots of the terrorist attack, and especially to cover up the role of the state and political parties, in New Zealand and internationally, in creating the conditions for the development of fascism.

It is not the internet and the social media that have created an audience for fascist ideology and spurred acts of violence, but the systematic whipping up of anti-immigrant xenophobia by governments for decades, in particular the vilification of Muslims as part of the bogus US-led war on terror.

The ban is intended to prevent discussion of the fact that many of Tarrant’s views are not very different from those held in governments and parliaments throughout the world. The manifesto contains anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric strikingly similar to that used by US President Donald Trump, who Tarrant hails as a “symbol of white renewal.” Tarrant repeatedly describes immigrants as “invaders,” the same word Trump used to incite violence against refugees. Tarrant’s anti-Islamic rant also resembles the political rhetoric of far-right parties across Europe, as well as Australia’s One Nation and the New Zealand First Party, which is part of the Labour-led government in Wellington.

Like Tarrant, NZ First leader Winston Peters has sought to whip up anxiety about the “replacement” of New Zealanders by immigrants, especially Muslims and Asians.

The ban will pave the way for the New Zealand state to suppress other political publications, especially left-wing and Marxist publications, which were heavily censored in World War I and World War II. As the world economic crisis accelerates and New Zealand aligns ever more closely with US threats against Russia and China, the Christchurch massacre has been seized on to justify censorship.

Following the terrorist attack, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern denounced “extremism of every kind,” while Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for a crackdown on “extremism of the right and of the left.” Demands are being made for “extreme” content to be removed from Facebook, which has already censored the World Socialist Web Site and many left-wing sites.

Far from stopping the manifesto’s circulation among its intended audience, the ban will only increase its appeal in white supremacist circles internationally. Shanks admitted to TVNZ that his decision would give the document “cachet and attraction” among such layers.

The legality of the ban is not at all clear. New Zealand has no specific law against “hate speech” and books such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf can be distributed. The Bill of Rights Act (1990) states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.” These rights are “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

According to the Classification Act, a publication can be classified as objectionable and effectively banned “if it… deals with matters such as sex, horror, crime, cruelty, or violence in such a manner that the availability of the publication is likely to be injurious to the public good.” The decision is at the discretion of the Chief Censor and his staff.

Justifying his ban, Shanks said that in addition to espousing hateful ideology Tarrant’s manifesto was “terrorist promotional material” that exhorted others to acts of violence against specific groups and individuals. Speaking to TVNZ, Shanks dismissed arguments that the public should have the right to access the manifesto to help understand New Zealand’s worst terrorist atrocity. “This is a very poor place to go to try and understand what happened,” he said.

Journalists and researchers who want to study the document must apply to the Classifications Office for an “exemption” to access it for a limited time, determined by the censor. In a threatening press release, Shanks said the “use of excerpts in media reports may not in itself amount to a breach of the [Act], but ethical considerations will certainly apply. Real care needs to be taken around reporting on this publication, given that widespread media reporting… was clearly what the author was banking on, in order to spread their message.” This statement is meant to intimidate anyone wishing to report on the contents of the manifesto and to smear them as assisting the far-right terrorist.

A spokesman for New Zealand’s Free Speech Coalition, lawyer Stephen Franks, denounced the ban as “a completely improper use of the censorship powers.” It called for “each citizen” to be allowed “to engage, hear, read, and reject evil for themselves.” A few journalists have also objected to the ban. The Green Party, which is part of the coalition government, has remained silent, as have the pseudo-left organisations.

Most media commentators praised Shanks’ decision. An editorial in the Christchurch Press rejected the argument that the ban “stifles debate about the gunman, his motives and how future bad actors can be stopped.” It declared: “The debate is not worse because we can no longer possess or distribute the document. Its contents are well enough understood by the public.”

This is completely false. In fact, the media has played a major role in covering up the significance of the manifesto. The document, for example, makes clear that Tarrant is a highly-conscious fascist, sympathetic to certain far-right politicians and with international connections to many nationalist groups. He is not a “lone wolf,” as is asserted by the government and much of the media.

The manifesto also reveals Tarrant’s sympathy for the military and police and states that hundreds of thousands of people in the European armed forces are in nationalist groups. This passage, which raises extremely serious questions about whether Tarrant had any assistance from members of these state agencies, has received no attention in the New Zealand or Australian media. Fascist groups have been allowed to flourish in both countries unhindered by police and intelligence agencies, which ignored repeated warnings of neo-Nazi violence in the years leading up to Tarrant’s attack.

There has been complete silence in the media about Tarrant’s threats against Marxists and communists, which underscore that fascism is a tool used by the bourgeoisie to crush the working class, especially its most conscious, socialist elements. The suppression of the manifesto is intended to cover up the fact that, although fascism is not yet a mass movement, as workers and young people come into struggle against austerity and war, the capitalist class will increasingly turn to fascist forces in an attempt to defend its rule.

Trump recognizes Israeli annexation of Golan Heights: Green light for global war

Bill Van Auken

The hastily completed White House ceremony in which President Donald Trump signed a decree granting official US recognition to Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights is an act which, on its surface, appears to change few facts on the ground in the Middle East. No one should underestimate, however, its far-reaching global implications.

In a brief proclamation, witnessed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump declared that “the United States recognizes that the Golan Heights are part of the State of Israel.”

He argued that Israel’s illegal seizure of the Golan Heights in 1967, its unilateral annexation of the territory 14 years later and its continued assertion of control along with the aggressive buildup of Jewish settlements and Israeli capitalist exploitation in the territory were all justified by “Israel’s need to protect itself from Syria and other regional threats,” including Iran.

What nonsense. Trump turns reality on its head. Israel has used the Golan Heights as a launching pad for its own relentless attacks on Syria, which have included the Israeli arming and support for Islamist militias, including ISIS, in the war for regime change against the government of Bashar al-Assad, as well as the thousands of air strikes which Israel’s own military chief of staff acknowledged earlier this year.

Washington’s recognition of “Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights” comes amid reports that the US military is consolidating its permanent occupation of eastern Syria, including the country’s main oil and gas-producing areas, even after Trump’s abortive announcement at the end of last year that he was going to “bring the troops home” from Syria. In recent weeks, there have been reports that some 1,000 troops—backed by larger numbers across the border in Iraq—will remain on Syrian soil, while the US military has been spotted trucking large quantities of arms and materiel into the US-occupied zone.

In other words, Trump is recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, even as Washington is occupying and effectively annexing Syrian territory east of the Euphrates River.

In short-range political terms, Trump’s action was unquestionably aimed at propping up his right-wing ally Netanyahu, who faces a raft of corruption charges and potential defeat at the polls on April 9 at the hands of a slate of generals assembled by the so-called Blue and White coalition headed by former chief of staff Benny Gantz.

Netanyahu, who is both Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, cut short his visit to Washington to return to Israel in order to be seen leading the vengeful onslaught against Gaza for the firing of a single missile that killed no one and for which both Hamas, which administers the occupied territory, and Islamic Jihad, its other major armed faction, have denied responsibility.

Israeli warplanes carried out bombing raids across the Gaza Strip, including in the densely populated Gaza City. In other acts of collective punishment, the Israeli occupation forces blocked the sole two existing crossing points into the impoverished territory, an effective open-air prison for 2 million Palestinians, and forcibly turned back Palestinian fishermen attempting to fish off the territory’s coast.

Hamas officials announced Monday night that they had reached a cease-fire agreement brokered by Egypt, but Tel Aviv remained silent on the matter. Netanyahu’s electoral opponents are all attacking him from the right, accusing him of failing to take sufficiently bloody measures to quell resistance in Gaza. The leader of the Labor Party, what passes for Israel’s bourgeois “left,” denounced Netanyahu as a man “of talk and not actions.” The Israel Defense Forces, meanwhile, have beefed up their Gaza division with another 1,000 troops, an additional infantry and armored brigade, as top officials warn that “all options are on the table.”

Trump’s recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights will serve in the first instance to fuel Israeli military aggression in the occupied territories and throughout the region. It will also push the already rightward lurching trajectory of Israel’s capitalist political setup ever further toward outright fascism.

The present election cycle has seen Netanyahu ally himself with the fascist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, which is an offshoot of the Kach Party of Meir Kahane, which was defined by the US State Department as a terrorist organization. Together with the religious Zionists of the Jewish Home party, Netanyahu’s coalition stands for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population from Israel and the occupied territories in pursuit of the goal of a “Greater Israel,” an imperialist and colonialist project that is bound up with the subjugation of the Middle East to US imperialist interests and the preparation for war with Iran.

The turn toward openly fascistic politics, bound up with the growth of militarism in Israel as it is internationally, is unmistakable in the current Israeli elections. Campaign propaganda has included one television ad featuring the country’s extreme right-wing Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked spraying herself with a bottle of perfume labeled “Fascism” and turning to the camera to declare, “To me, it smells like democracy.” Another has the right-wing Knesset member, Oren Hazan, in a parody of a Clint Eastwood movie, shooting to death Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and leading member of the Balad party in the Knesset.

For the Golan Heights, Trump’s edict will doubtless spur on Israel’s drive to eradicate what remains of the territory’s original population. Some 130,000 Syrians fled for their lives when the Israeli military invaded the Golan in 1967. The remaining 25,000 Druze Arabs in their overwhelming majority have rejected Tel Aviv’s attempts to force them to accept Israeli citizenship and insist that they are Syrians.

On Saturday, hundreds marched in the Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams in protest over Trump’s impending decree. One told the media, “From here we say that the Golan [Heights] is Arab and Syrian and neither Trump nor any other person can decide its fate.” Another said, “He wants to give Israel land, he can give them one or two of his states in America.”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, during a tour of the Middle East that brought him to both Israel and Lebanon last week, was asked by a reporter if the US was pursuing a “double-standard policy” in recognizing Israeli sovereignty over territories seized from Syria, while indicting Russia for annexing Crimea, the pretext for the imposition of sanctions and an aggressive escalation of military threats from NATO. Never mind that the population of the Golan Heights has rejected Israeli occupation for over 50 years, while that of the Crimea overwhelmingly welcomed Russian citizenship.

“No, not at all,” Pompeo responded idiotically. “What the president did with the Golan Heights is recognize the reality on the ground and the security situation necessary for the protection of the Israeli state. It’s that—it’s that simple.”

Recognizing the “reality on the ground” and what was necessary for the “security situation” of states was precisely the rationale given for the annexations that led to the deaths of hundreds of millions in the course of the first half of the 20th century.

The Austro-Hungarian empire’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909 is viewed by historians as the prelude to the First World War, while the series of annexations carried out by the Nazi regime in Germany set the stage for the Second World War.

It was in recognition of these historical “realities” that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the major powers amended the Geneva Conventions and adopted a founding charter of the United Nations with the aim of outlawing such annexations and rejecting threats to the territorial integrity of existing states.

In the preparation for a third world war, these principles formally accepted in the aftermath of the second have been thrown onto the scrap heap. The Trump administration’s sanctification of Israel’s land grab in the Golan sets the stage for new and far bloodier invasions, annexations and the revival of outright 21st century colonialism.

US imperialism is attempting to legitimize this half-century-old crime in order to pave the way for far larger wars in the Middle East. Its action, however, takes place amid a steady escalation of the class struggle throughout the region, from the mass protests and strikes that have shaken Algeria, to the struggle of teachers and other workers challenging the monarchical regime in Morocco, to workers struggles in Iran, protests against the abysmal social conditions in Gaza and strikes by rail workers in Israel itself in defiance of deals worked out between the state and the official union, Histadrut.

The only answer to the threat of war and fascism lies in the independent political mobilization of the working class. In response to the right-wing turn of Washington and Tel Aviv, this poses the urgent necessity of uniting Jewish and Arab workers in the struggle for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East as part of the struggle to put an end to capitalism across the planet.