New Israeli Government, Same Israeli Apartheid

Ariel Gold

After 12 years, Israel finally inaugurated a new prime minister. While being hailed by many as the opportunity for a fresh start, Naftali Bennett is at best a continuer of Netanyahu’s policies and at worst an ideologue whose positions are to the right of Netanyahu’s.

In 2013, as Middle East peace talks were set to resume after a five-year freeze, Bennett reportedly proclaimed to Israeli National Security Adviser Ya’akov Amidror, “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.”

In 2014, Bennett, who had previously been the director of the Yesha Settlements Council, contradicted Netanyahu by asserting that all Jewish Israelis living in the West Bank, even those living in outposts that violate Israeli law, should remain under Israeli sovereignty, and called for more settlement construction. “This is the time to act,” he said. “We must continue building in all corners of the Land of Israel, with determination and without being confused. We are building and we will not stop.”

In 2016, as Israel’s Minister of Education, Bennett called on Israeli Jews to “give our lives” to annex the West Bank. While this might seem relatively innocuous, it was not. Bennett’s remarks invoked Kahanism, a Jewish supremacist ideology, based on the views of Rabbi Meir Kahane, that calls for violence and terrorism to be used to secure Israel as an ethno-nationalist state. In 1994, Israeli settler and Kahane follower Baruch Goldstein massacred Palestinians in the West Bank Ibrahimi mosque. In 1988, the Kach party was banned from running for the Israeli Knesset. In 2004, the US State Department labeled Kach a terrorist organization.

Sunday, June 13, 2021, right before he was inaugurated to replace Netanyahu as the prime minister of Israel, Bennett doubled down on his anti-Palestinian views proclaiming  that his government would “strengthen settlements across the whole of the Land of Israel.”

It’s not only on the Palestinian issue that Bennett is a far-right ideologue. Bennett uses his adherence to orthodox Judaism as cover for his opposition to gay marriage. “Judaism doesn’t recognize gay marriage, just as we don’t recognize milk and meat together as kosher, and nothing will change it,” he declared.  Netanyahu, by contrast, touts himself as being pro-LGBTQ+ rights. As recently as 2018 he wrote: “I am proud to be the prime minister of one of the world’s most open and free democracies… Israel consistently upholds civil equality and civil rights of all its citizens regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.”

So why then are progressive politicians and organizations responding so positively to the change in Israel? Bernie Sanders, known for his progressive stances and for being a congressional champion of Palestinian rights, said in a video that he was “hopeful” that the new government would be one “we will be better able to work with.” Americans for Peace Now, the sister organization of Shalom Achshav, Israel’s preeminent anti-settlement/pro-peace organization, released a statement that it “welcomes the swearing-in of Israel’s new government.” On Sunday night after the new government was sworn in, thousands of Israelis took to the streets in Tel Aviv — considered Israel’s bastion of secular liberalism — and celebrated into the night.

One answer lies in how fed up people inside and outside of Israel had become with Netanyahu’s rule. His tenure was marred by corruption charges and shrewd maneuvers to remain in power, and what had become an endless cycle of Israeli elections, during which the government was paralyzed and unable to pass a budget for the past three years.

The other answer, however, is that this was the best change that could be obtained from a government that prevents about five million people living under its rule from being able to vote. Here’s the situation:

About 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian. They can vote in all Israeli elections and have representation in Knesset. This election saw the first Palestinian party join an Israeli majority government coalition. However, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship represent only about one-third of the Palestinians living under Israeli rule and military occupation.

Though the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are the official governments of the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, Israel is the absolute power in charge. Israel controls the borders, the currency, and the central bank. It collects taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA), maintains the right to carry out military operations on Palestinian land, and controls the amount of freedom, or lack thereof, that Palestinians are granted.

Israel approves only about half of the permits that residents of Gaza apply for to travel outside of Gaza for vital medical treatment. In 2017, 54 people died while awaiting a permit to travel for medical treatment, leading to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, to release a joint statement calling for the blockade of Gaza to be lifted.

Reasons for denying people in Gaza necessary medical treatment are often absurd, such as denying travel because a relative at one time moved from Gaza to the West Bank without Israeli permission. Even when not carrying out a massacre, such as the May 2021 one that killed 256 Palestinians, Israel regulates the fuel and building materials available to Gazans. At times, it has even controlled the number of food imports according to the number of calories Gazans should consume.

Israel controls not only the exterior borders of the West Bank but what goes on inside as well. While the Palestinian Authority manages utilities and infrastructure for much of the West Bank, Israel is the ultimate authority.  Israeli settler regional councils control 40% of West Bank land. Even in areas like Ramallah, supposedly under complete Palestinian Authority control, Israel reserves the right to enter the city at any time, close streets and shops, burst into homes, and make warrantless arrests.

While the PA does maintain a judicial and penal system, one that itself is incredibly repressive, Palestinians are also subject to Israel’s military court system and laws such as Military Order 101, which bans peaceful protest. Though they are prosecuted in Israeli military courts and serve time in Israeli military prisons, Palestinians have no say over who is appointed to run the Israeli military, let alone the military courts.

Jerusalem was captured by Israel in 1967 and formally, and illegally, annexed in 1980. Common sense might follow that Israel would have then absorbed the East Jerusalem Palestinians, now numbering around 370,000, and made them Israeli citizens.

Rather than holding citizenship, however, Jerusalem Palestinians hold the status of permanent residents, allowing them to vote in municipal, but not national, elections. While this may at first seem a move in the right direction, a closer look reveals careful manipulation of demographics to ensure an at least a 70% Jewish majority at all times. Through such policies as exorbitant taxation, requiring constant proof of residency, and denial of family unification, since 1967 Israel has managed to revoke the residency of 14,595 Palestinian Jerusalemites.

Right now Israel’s courts are in the process of ethnically cleansing the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Before the Nakba, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and lands to establish the state of Israel, two Jewish trusts purchased a plot of land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. When Israel was established, the Jewish families living in Sheikh Jarrah left for West Jerusalem as that section of the city was now part of the new state of Israel while East Jerusalem came under Jordanian and UN control. In 1956, Jordan and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees resettled 28 Palestinian families who had been forced out of their homes inside the new state of Israel into Sheik Jarrah. In exchange for giving up their rightful refugee status, the 28 families were to receive ownership of the Sheikh Jarrah properties, but they never got the deeds to their properties. Israel is now trying to return the properties to the Jewish trusts who later sold them to Nahalat Shimon, a real-estate company registered in the US state of Delaware. The kicker is that while Israel regularly uses this tactic to remove Palestinians from East Jerusalem, Israeli law bars Palestinians from recovering property they lost in the Nakba, even if they still reside in areas controlled by Israel.

2021 marks 54 years of occupation, including 14 years of the siege of Gaza, and 28 years since the signing of the Oslo Accords that were supposed to create a Palestinian state. 600,000 Israeli citizens now live in the approximately 200 illegal Israeli settlements that cover the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

A breakdown of who is and isn’t allowed to vote between the Jordan river and the sea reveals Israel’s motivations:

* Number of Jewish Israelis living in Israel proper, and East Jerusalem, and West Bank settlements: 6.589 million (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics)

* Number of Palestinian citizens of Israel (Palestinians who can vote in national elections): 1.5 million (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and Jerusalem Municipality)

* Number of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza who cannot vote in Israeli national elections: 4.88 million (Palestinian Authority Central Bureau of Statistics)

As we get to know Israel’s new prime minister and government, as we continue to watch Israel forcibly remove Palestinians from East Jerusalem, as we worry about a next massacre in Gaza, and as we continue to hear the absurd label of Israel as a democratic state, let’s not forget that the right to vote is only granted to 60% of the total population and only one-third of Palestinians who live under Israeli rule had any say Naftali Bennett becoming Israel’s thirteenth prime minister.

The Global COVID-19 Inequality Virus

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

By early June 2021, the world was about one and a half years into the coronavirus pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic had not only a tragic human cost when millions of lives were lost, but it also impacted inequality, and it did so on a global scale. Recently, the global charity Oxfam surveyed approximately 300 economists from almost 80 countries. Their list included Jayati Ghosh, Jeffrey Sachs and Gabriel Zucman. Nearly 90% of them expected inequality to rise as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Thanks to the wonders of global capitalism, globalisation, neoliberalism and adjacent ideologies, we live in a world where nearly half of humanity is forced to scrape by on less than $5.50 a day – roughly the price of a Big Mac in the USA. Worse, during the last 40 years – around the same time neoliberalism was introduced – the wealthiest 1% more than doubled their income, leaving the rest behind. Still worse, the global elite (1%) causes twice as much carbon as the bottom half of the world.

Just before the coronavirus pandemic started to bite, over three billion people did not have access to healthcare, 75% of all workers had no access to social protection like unemployment benefits and sick leave. Moreover, over 50% of all workers were part of the precariat and working poor in low and middle-income countries.

During the coronavirus pandemic, billionaires’ wealth has increased by a staggering $3.9tr – a whopping $3,900,000,000,000 – between 18^th March 2020 and 21^st December 2020. By January 2021, their wealth stood at an unimaginable 12tr dollars. This Tsunami-like vacuuming up of wealth – camouflaged through the ideology of trickle-down economics – meant that by September 2020, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos could have paid all of his 876,000 workers $105,000 as a bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before the pandemic.

Simultaneously, it is estimated that the total number of people living in poverty could have increased between 200 and 500 million during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, for most of humanity, there has never been a permanent exit from poverty and insecurity. The coronavirus pandemic has made things worse.

The global pandemic has made matters notably worse for people living in poverty. Their lives got far harder compared to the rich. The acceleration of misery that came in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic has predominantly severely impacted six groups: a) women, b) Asians, Hispanics, etc., c) afro-descendants, d) indigenous peoples, and e) the historically marginalised, and f) those living in oppressed communities around the world.

Apart from these groups, children also suffered. More than 180 countries temporarily closed schools. This left close to 1.7 billion children and young people out of school when global school closures were at their peak in 2020. As in wars and natural catastrophes, children suffer.

Yet, the coronavirus pandemic exposed inequalities in the global labour system. For example, while 90% of US workers in the top one-fifth of the income scale have a right to paid sick leave, only 47% of the bottom one-fifth do so. Moreover, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on workers during 2020 showed that workers at the bottom of the income scale suffered more than those at the top.

A simple tax on the excess profits earned by corporations during the coronavirus pandemic could generate $104bn. This would have been enough to provide unemployment protection for all workers as well as financial support for all children and the elderly in the poorest countries.

Yet governments in rich countries choose to prop up companies and corporations rather than help humanity. We know this from the global financial crisis of 2009. Almost all government follow the motto: Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. The coronavirus pandemic provides good reasons for neoliberal states and their henchmen to help corporations more instead of assisting workers.

Even more in goose-step with neoliberalism are governmental tax policies often deliberately engineered by neoliberal states to favour the rich and corporations. Between 2007 and 2017, pre-COVID-19 tax arrangements in one hundred countries systematically favoured corporations, often at the expense of workers. In those years, corporate tax declined by roughly 10%, while wealth tax declined by about 1%. At the same time, workers’ income tax increased by 13%, and so did payroll tax. Finally, flat taxes on goods and services increased by 10% globally.

In short, corporations and the wealthy pay about 17% of all taxes. The rest falls increasingly onto workers. It seems as if corporations and the wealthy have withdrawn from sharing the burden when it comes to taxation. Apart from profit maximisation – often euphemistically called shareholder value – on which either no tax at all is paid or very minimal tax is paid, taxation has been another way of vacuuming wealth upwards to the global rich and corporations.

Meanwhile, we are told that the economy will raise all boats. But, in reality, super-yachts are getting ever larger while most people in our world sit in tiny inflatable rubber dinghies struggling to keep afloat, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic.

Even before the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic many corporations have put profits before workers’ safety. This sort of corporate behavior was showcased by BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster that killed eleven workers. During the coronavirus pandemic, some corporations have pushed safety and operating costs downwards to their supply chain.

Simultaneously, companies and corporations have also used their political lobbying to shape policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic in their favor. Unsurprisingly, this was rather successful and has led to the fact that many mega-corporations saw their profits soar even further.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the top 25 US corporations were well on course to earn 11% more profits in 2020 compared with the previous year. At the same time, small businesses in the US were likely to lose well over 85% of their profits in the second quarter of the year 2020. This is further testimony to the ideology that neoliberal and right-wing populist parties support small business. They do.

But they do so disproportionately for large corporations that hold the real power in two highly relevant areas, if not existential, for right-wing and neoliberal politicians: economically as corporations run the show in corporate capitalism and politically in terms of campaign funding for right-wing and neoliberal politicians.

This works globally, or at least in countries where capitalism is forced to find a way to live with democracy. For example, in the first half of 2020, billionaires in the Middle East and North Africa still managed to boost their wealth by a staggering 20%. Meanwhile, in the UK, the wealthiest 20% of people still managed to save $30bn – accumulating more wealth. Simultaneously, lower-income households have fallen into debt during the lockdown.

While the world’s top billionaires are getting richer and richer, unbothered by the coronavirus pandemic, billions of people who live in poverty have become even poorer. In times of crisis, many of the global poor are forced to sell assets like bicycles and livestock, often at giveaway prices. This leaves them far less able to recover from the coronavirus pandemic once the pandemic is over. It exasperates the poverty trap. Worse, this is likely to persist for decades to come. Of course, all this also applies to the roughly 740 million people who work in the informal economy.

As expected, the coronavirus pandemic resulted in the following: high-income OECD countries with a history of neoliberalism and austerity, which, of course, leads to very hefty cuts in health spending, have experienced higher COVID-19 mortality rates than those countries that did not follow the ideology of neoliberalism and austerity. Any first-year undergraduate student in political economy would have predicted that.

Whether following neoliberalism or not, in March 2020, EU states found that they need a staggering ten times more equipment to cope with the coronavirus pandemic than was available. So perhaps some countries should not have adopted Managerialism‘s ideology of lean management where just-in-time systems run-down stock to the absolute bare minimum.

At the same time and in several countries, the debt burden and the legacy of austerity measures and structural adjustment programmes have hollowed out public spending and health systems. As a result, some 90% of countries reported disruptions of essential health services in the first six months of the pandemic.

Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 mortality in the most deprived 10% of areas in England was twice that of the least deprived 10% – the poor suffer, and the rich don’t. It leads to the somewhat blasphemous question: wasn’t those the areas that voted most heavily for Brexit in the hope that Brexit will bring £350 million per week to the British health service NHS just as BoJo promised? Not so long ago, it was reported that “UK’s saving after Brexit even bigger than 350 million pounds, Johnson says“. Later Bojo claimed, “There was an error on the side of the bus”.

Of course, the central Brexit claim was just an error on a bus! Yet what might not have been “an error on a bus” was BoJo’s claim that bodies will pile up high during the coronavirus pandemic. The bodies did indeed pile up. But, as always, they did so more in Britain’s poor areas than in its affluent areas where the Eton educated elite like BoJo lives.

Yet, post-Brexit UK was not alone when it came to poor people dying disproportionally due to COVID-19. Similar trends have been reported from France, Brazil, Nepal, Spain and India. The fact that the poor perish discretionally is a global phenomenon. The global rich-poor divide also came to the fore in other areas. A relatively small group of wealthy nations, representing a low 14% of the world’s population, has bought more than 50% of the global supply of vaccines.

Their global corporations, particularly their Big-Pharma corporations, also seem to operate under the aforementioned motto: Never let a good crisis go to waste. During the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, pharmaceutical corporations made huge profits. Pfizer’s stocks, for example, soared 15% after its November 9^th announcement that its vaccine was highly effective. It follows the well-established pattern of capitalism: some get rich – some die.

Among those who die are many of the four billion people – more than 50% of the global population – who aren’t covered by social insurance and received next to no assistance when the coronavirus pandemic hit. One way of protecting themselves against the coronavirus is the ability to work from home. But, again, workers at the upper level of the income ladder did better than those at the bottom who were more often than not unable to work from home.

In the EU, for example, 74% of the highest-paid employees were able to work from home even when this meant the bedroom or the kitchen table. Meanwhile, only 3% of the lowest-paid workers could escape to the security of their own home. Moreover, informal workers – domestic workers, street vendors, delivery drivers, and construction workers – experienced significant distress due to the coronavirus pandemic. Globally, 61% of workers are in informal sectors.

Globally, about 1 out of 10 people go to bed hungry. Simultaneously, the world’s largest food and beverage corporations paid over $18bn to their shareholders between January and July 2020. As said before: some get rich – some die. This is capitalism. During the pandemic, the menace of hunger has spread even to middle-income countries such as India and Brazil.

Simultaneously, even in a so-called high-income country like the USA, about 30 million adults or 12.1% of all adults reported in July 2020 that their households had sometimes or often not had enough to eat in the previous seven days.

Finally, what people need during the coronavirus pandemic are nurses. Perhaps what they do not need so much are asset managers. Yet, in an average year in the UK, a newly qualified nurse earns around £22,000 annually. By comparison, a top-rated asset manager takes home about £31,000,000 or 1,400 times more than the life-saving nurse. So does capitalism reward the right people?, some might ask.

Overall, the coronavirus pandemic has exasperated the existing inequality between the global rich and the global poor. It has done so geographically and in terms of class. The Global South suffers more than the Global North. And the elite suffers far less (if at all) than workers. Some get rich – some die. In the end, capitalism, as it seems, megaphones global and class inequalities as well as the pathologies of the coronavirus pandemic.

Close Encounters of an Unprecedented Kind

Richard C. Gross

 

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!”

– Psalm 133:1

It’s a good thing Israel’s odd new government is in the Holy Land because the far left-centrist-far right coalition will need a miracle to survive. Pray.

A tumultuous Israeli parliament narrowly approved a government aiming at centrism Sunday, an unprecedented alliance that included an Arab party for the first time in Israel’s 73-year history that brought down the 12-year reign of a right-wing divisive prime minister.

“I’ll be back,” defeated former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset, in a line from the Terminator.

It took eight parties to form a 61-seat coalition in the 120-member Knesset, or parliament, that united around one goal: getting rid of Netanyahu. He served in a caretaker role after failing to form another government. He has been charged with corruption.

Israelis vote for a party, not for prime minister. The Knesset then casts ballots for confidence in the prime minister.

The coalition’s victory ignited such a Trumpist-like fury among Netanyahu’s right-wing followers that the internal security service, with the Hebrew initials Shin Bet, warned of “lethal” consequences. The warning recalled the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a rightist extremist.

Naftali Bennett, a right-wing modern Orthodox who once served as Netanyahu’s chief of staff, will be prime minister for two years. His former colleagues in the Likud party targeted Bennett repeatedly during the session with jeers of “shame” and “liar” for having joined the coalition.

“We are incapable of sitting together. What is happening to us?” Bennett responded.

Netanyahu, who has been channeling Donald Trump for four years, has railed against the ascendance of the coalition, echoing the lying American’s charges of a “fraudulent” election and trying to get members of the new government to quit before it was approved and to join him. One defected.

“The deep state is deep within this government,” he said, echoing Trump’s false allegations about a cabal of opponents seeking to oust him.

The amalgamation of such a diverse group of politicians that represent nearly every major political strain in Israel but the ultra-Orthodox is a grand, worthwhile, history-making experiment that, with the inclusion of the Islamist Arab Ra’am party, could mean improving the lives of Israeli Arabs. They represent 20 percent of the country’s 8.7 million people who historically have complained of being treated as second class citizens.

The ultra-Orthodox parties are out for the first time after participating in many right-wing governments since 1977, with two brief absences.

For secular Israelis, it could mean long-sought desires for societal improvements that could become reality. They include civil marriages and divorce; schools independent of the rabbis; recognition of Reform and Conservative rabbis; gay rights; compulsory military service for the ultra-Orthodox; and even permitting buses to run on the Sabbath nationwide.

The other coalition leader is Yair Lapid, a charismatic centrist who was a TV news anchor, created the coalition through arduous negotiations and heads the Yesh Atid (There Is a Future) party (pronounced ahteed). He is the opposite politically of Bennett, a former education minister who heads the Yamina (Rightwards) party and favors annexation of a big portion of the occupied West Bank.

Lapid, 57, will replace Bennett, 49, as prime minister in 2023 for the second two years of the government’s term, if it lasts. He is to be foreign minister during the first round.

To work together, these disparate parties have agreed not to confront the thorniest issues that divide them, like Jewish settlement of the West Bank, and to focus more on domestic problems affecting Jewish Israelis. They include the high cost of housing and needed jobs. Unemployment was 5.4 percent in April, the last month for which figures were available.

Concentrating on domestic issues could negatively affect any ideas the Biden administration may have about trying to revive the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process. It’s been ignored for years under Netanyahu.

If Washington should insist that the coalition take on Palestinian statehood, it could run the grave risk of right-wing members walking out, letting the government fall.

“The government will work for the entire Israeli public – religious, secular, ultra-Orthodox, Arab – without exception, as one,” Bennett said Friday after the parties signed the coalition agreement.

“The Israeli public deserves a functioning and responsible government that places the good of the country at the top of its agenda,” he said. “That’s what this unity government has been formed to do.”

My nephew, Nadav Eden, 39, and a technical account manager who lives with his wife and two kids in Rishon Lezion, south of Tel Aviv, gave me the Israeli street view. He wrote in response to my emailed question that it’s “tough to say” whether the coalition will survive.

“So many people have gone out of their political comfort zone that it just might stick,” he wrote. “I’m certainly hoping so.”

The most significant outcome in forming the coalition is the inclusion of the United Arab List, or Ra’am, headed by Mansour Abbas. Its acceptance by the three right-wing parties is a pleasant surprise, a major breakthrough.

The coalition came together after the 11-day air war between Israel and Gaza, the densely populated coastal strip about an hour south of Tel Aviv by road that is run by Hamas, a U.S.-branded terrorist organization.

The casualties included 256 Palestinians killed, 66 children among them, plus more than 1,900 wounded, the Gaza Health Ministry said. Israel reported 13 dead, including two children, and at least 200 wounded.

Parties in the coalition include three right-wingers, two centrists, two left-wingers and the Arabs. Some say miracles don’t happen. They need to show that they can.

Turkish President Erdoğan meets Biden at NATO summit

Ulaş Ateşçi

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met his American counterpart Joe Biden in a closed-door meeting on Monday during the NATO summit in Brussels. The two leaders then put a positive face on this first face-to-face meeting between them since Biden took office, though several significant disputes remain unresolved.

The meeting took place just weeks after the US State Department condemned “President Erdoğan’s recent anti-Semitic comments,” after Erdoğan attacked Biden for supporting the ongoing Israeli onslaught against the Palestinians. Calling Israel a “terrorist state,” Erdoğan accused Biden of “writing history with blood on your hands.”

US President Joe Biden, right, speaks with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a plenary session at a NATO summit in Brussels, Monday, June 14, 2021. ( AP Photo /Olivier Matthys, Pool)

 

Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Turkey was not acting like a NATO ally but violating “international law” over the issues, including the Armenia-Azerbaijan war, the eastern Mediterranean and Libya.

The Washington Post wrote: “The last time Biden met with the Turkish leader, during a vice-presidential visit to Ankara in 2016, it was to deny Erdogan’s charges that the United States had helped plot a coup attempt against him.”

Briefly remarking on his meeting with Erdoğan, Biden said, “We had a positive and productive meeting, much of it one-on-one. We had detailed discussions on how to proceed on a number of issues.” He added, “Our two countries have big agendas. Our teams are going to continue our discussions, and I’m confident we’ll make real progress with Turkey and the United States.”

Facing a deepening economic crisis and growing social anger exacerbated by the homicidal response to the pandemic, as well as a far-right mobster’s allegations that are undermining his government, Erdoğan issued a more detailed statement on the meeting. Despite his previous nationalist tirades against the US, he declared his commitment to the NATO imperialist alliance. He said, “We are going to increase our cooperation with the US. There is no problem between us that cannot be solved.

“We believe that cooperation between the US and Turkey will contribute to regional security,” he continued. In fact, “regional security” created by the US-led imperialist wars in the Middle East and North Africa over the last 30 years has devastated Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and beyond, killed millions and turned millions more into refugees trapped in squalid camps.

In the summit communiqué, the NATO powers took the opportunity to “reiterate our appreciation to our Ally Turkey for hosting millions of Syrian refugees.” Maintaining close military-strategic ties with the US and NATO, the Turkish ruling class willingly aids imperialist plunder.

Erdoğan added that there is “strong will” for US-Turkish cooperation, “based on mutual respect and interests in every field.” However, no concrete progress was reported in the major diplomatic conflicts between Washington and Ankara.

These include first and foremost US support for Kurdish nationalist militias in Syria. Ankara sees a possible US-backed Kurdish state in Syria as a major threat to its national interests. On this, Erdoğan said, “Our expectation is that our allies cut their support to those terrorists,” referring to the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces in Syria. Ankara considers the YPG as the same as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is banned in Turkey as a terrorist organization.

According to Al-Monitor, the Biden administration decided “to not extend a sanctions waiver granted by the Trump administration in April 2020 to American oil company,” Delta Crescent Energy, whose waiver expired April 30, “to operate in northeast Syria.”

However, it does not signal a major shift in US policy on Syria. Hundreds of US soldiers remain in the area controlled by Kurdish forces. Just last month, US Acting Assistant Secretary Joey Hood traveled to northeast Syria to meet senior officials of the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia.

Last week, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar made similar anti-YPG calls to NATO at the opening ceremony of the NATO Maritime Security Center of Excellence in Istanbul. This initiative targets Russia, particularly in the nearby Black Sea. “Turkey has repeatedly called on its allies to fight together against the YPG/PKK and Daesh [ISIS] terrorist organizations in northern Syria, which threaten our national security and regional stability,” he said.

Boasting that “Turkey is among the top eight countries that contribute the most to the military budget with a rate of almost 2 percent of its GDP,” Akar repeated his government’s offer to build a so-called “safe zone” in northern Syria. He stated, “Time and again, we told our NATO allies about the need to create a safe zone in Syria.”

The NATO communiqué referred to Syria 12 times, announcing plans “to monitor and assess the ballistic missile threat from Syria. … We reiterate our determination to defend NATO territory and borders against any threats and to address challenges emanating from Syria.”

While Ankara focuses on preventing the building of a Kurdish enclave in its southern border, it also continues to back the NATO war for regime change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Significantly, the US media have begun a propaganda campaign to rehabilitate the main American proxy force in this war, Al Qaeda.

The other major topic without progress in the Biden-Erdoğan meeting was Turkey’s acquiring of a Russian-made S-400 advanced air defense system. “On the issue of S-400s, I told [Biden] the same thing I had in the past,” Erdoğan said.

Washington canceled Turkey’s participation in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program and sanctioned the Turkish defence industry on the grounds that its use of the S-400s could compromise US security. Before the NATO summit, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “Regarding the S-400 system, our policy has not changed.”

The only issue where agreement emerged is Turkey’s military presence in Afghanistan, including the maintenance of the Kabul international airport after US and other NATO forces depart. Erdoğan said, “US diplomatic, logistical and financial support is important for a sustained Turkish presence in Afghanistan.”

On Monday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, “Some NATO countries, such as the United States and Turkey, are also in direct dialogue on how to make an international airport in Kabul sustainable. This is important for the continuation of diplomatic presence and assistance for both NATO allies and the entire international community.”

The Taliban have denounced this initiative in the service of imperialism, however. Its spokespeople told Reuters: “Turkey was part of NATO forces in the past 20 years, so as such, they should withdraw from Afghanistan on the basis of the agreement we signed with the United States on 29th Feb 2020.”

As the World Socialist Web Site explained: “Underlying the divisions over the Afghanistan withdrawal are neither concerns over terrorism, nor, much less, the rights of women. At stake are geostrategic interests in a country that provided US imperialism with a beachhead in energy-rich Central Asia and a potential launching pad for wars against China, Iran or Russia.”

The US press presented Erdoğan’s willingness to reconcile only with its NATO allies as due to the deep political crisis it faces inside Turkey.

“Thanks to both the coronavirus pandemic and his mismanagement of the economy, he is now facing severe domestic strains, with soaring inflation and unemployment, and a dangerously weakened lira that could set off a debt crisis,” the New York Times wrote Sunday, adding: “So he has dialed back his approach, already softening his positions on several issues in the hope of receiving badly needed investment from the West—something Russia cannot provide.”

Erdoğan’s growing difficulties at home and swing back closer to its imperialist allies in fact reflects working class anger at “herd immunity” policies on the pandemic and at decades of war that is growing among workers in the United States, Turkey and internationally.

Four years after Grenfell, millions live and work in unsafe buildings as the criminals remain at large

Charles Hixson & Robert Stevens

Monday June 14 marked four years since the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire when 72 people perished in the middle of London in an act of social murder.

To this day, not a single person or organisation responsible in political and corporate circles has been brought to account for this terrible crime. Moreover, the risk of dying by fire in an unsafe building today is greater than ever. It was estimated last June that 56,000 people were still living in high rises with the same type of aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding that enveloped Grenfell. The ACM cladding was the main reason a small fourth-floor kitchen fire became an inferno in matter of minutes.

But this is only a fraction of the true number affected. According to an assessment last June by Inside Housing—and based on the average household size of 2.4—at least 600,000 people (equivalent to the population of Glasgow) live in unsafe tall buildings and millions more in medium rise towers. Grenfell was 24 storeys, 67 metres, tall. Inside Housing warned, “There are an estimated 100,000 medium-rise buildings—between 11m and 18m—across the UK and no work whatsoever has been done to establish the extent of dangerous cladding materials on the outside… Both the Barking Riverside fire in June last year [2019] and the Bolton fire last November occurred in buildings below 18m with dangerous cladding systems, and both came very close to causing loss of life.”

The burnt out Grenfell Tower tower block building nine days after the June 14, 2017 fire. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Many more buildings used by the public remain in use despite being unsafe. Since the Grenfell fire, over 70 schools have been built with the same combustible insulation used on Grenfell, as well as 25 hospitals, care homes and sheltered housing. Although combustible materials have been banned on facades greater than 18 metres, the Department of Education recently drafted fire safety proposals for school buildings allowing for flammable materials in structures below that height. In the last five years, 47 primary and secondary school buildings have been destroyed by fire in England alone.

Set up in September 2017, the government’s Grenfell Tower Inquiry has heard more than 200 days of evidence from corporate and government officials, as well as firefighters and numerous technical experts.

Over the last weeks it has finally taken testimony from survivors, including residents, who had voiced concerns over their safety, worries about the Tower’s refurbishment, and the hostile attitude of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Association (KCTMO) which ran the Tower on behalf of the Conservative council. Among these was 16th-floor resident and member of the Grenfell Action Group (GAG), Edward Daffarn. Just months before the fire, GAG posted a November 2016 blog article reading: “It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders.”

It emerged that Daffarn was accused internally at the KCTMO of “scaremongering”. Rydon, one of the main builders on the “refurbishment” contract that ended with Grenfell being clad in flammable material described Daffarn and other residents who raised concerns as “rebel residents”. Daffarn presented the inquiry with a 127-page statement which included seven complaints relating to fire safety made before the fire. He denounced the authorities for treating residents with “hostility”, “neglect” and “contempt”, and for allowing the tower to deteriorate into a “slum-like condition”.

In 2010, a serious fire began on the 6th floor and spread to the 15th, injuring three people, including Sayeda Ahmed. Sayeda’s husband Shahid Ahmed made legal claims which revealed improper seals in the smoke ventilator system that spread smoke throughout the building rather than removing it. Nothing was done until the 2016 refurbishment and, even then, the “improved” system failed to work the night of the fire. According to Ahmed, who chaired the Grenfell Tower Leaseholders’ Association (GTLA), set up after the 2010 fire: “I thought that the complaints procedure was a way for the TMO to be judge, jury and executioner.”

When gas pipes in the tower were found to be improperly boxed in, GTLA Secretary Lee Chapman wrote in a March 2017 email, “I am seriously concerned about how I will get out of the building alive in the event of a fire with this added risk. If we cannot get out, people will die or at best suffer serious injury.” He joined other GTLA members in calling for an investigation. Their proposal was rejected just four days before the fire.

The testimony of KCTMO officials and others in the ensuing weeks substantiated claims of mistreatment and harassment. By September 2015, the growing backlist of needed repairs in KCTMO properties had reached 2,300, growing to over 5,400 by January 2017. By 2014, some 1,400 of these were fire risk assessment actions, which they failed to disclose to the London Fire Brigade (LFB) because of a fear “this would result in more scrutiny from the LFB and also possible enforcement action.”

KCTMO Grenfell refurbishment project manager, Claire Williams, was questioned by Richard Millett QC over her failure to fix Grenfell’s automatic opening vent (AOV), which failed on the night of the fire. The LFB had issued the TMO with a deficiency notice for the system in March 2016, giving them six weeks to repair it. Nothing was done and residents were unknowingly left to live under these conditions for at least a year. Former KCTMO health, safety and facilities manager Janice Wray wrote Williams, “Let’s hope our luck holds and there are no fires in the meantime.”

In the same period, it took the organisation more than six months to fix a broken dry riser—the pipe used to connect to a pressurised water source for firefighters.

No personal emergency evacuation plans (PEERs) were made for residents with disabilities, despite 52 of the 120 flats having disabled occupants.

A few months before the blaze, the Conservative Party-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) decided against an inspection programme of borough fire doors despite being advised to do so by the LFB.

Amanda Johnson, RBKC’s head of housing commissioning, requested the TMO check on Daffarn’s tenancy after he raised concerns about services. KCTMO director of assets Peter Maddison wrote colleagues in April 2015: “Mr. Daffarn is continuing to agitate in Grenfell Tower. He is clearly distributing misleading information. I wonder if you could advise on the point at which his comments become libelous.”

The organisation also blocked its staff from accessing the Grenfell Action Blog on their servers from 2013 onwards. Some KCTMO employees discussed not including the broken AOV system in a Freedom of Information request initiated by Daffarn.

Officials continue to shed crocodile tears at the Inquiry. Quentin Marshall, RBKC’s chair of the housing scrutiny committee, felt obliged to bemoan his organisation’s pre-fire attitude toward the tenants: “I don’t think we addressed the emotional side and I think we lacked a little humanity.” Marshall, a private banker, should know. At the time he dismissed the residents’ complaints on the refurbishment as “grossly exaggerated,”, describing himself as “not massively sympathetic to general ‘It’s all terrible’ complaints” and claiming Daffarn had made “wild and unsubstantiated claims.”

Another nauseating display came from Rock Feilding-Mellen, RBKC Deputy Leader and its Cabinet Member for Housing, Property, and Regeneration between 2013-2017. He admitted to having only “skimmed” LFB documents that spell out councils’ legal responsibilities for fire safety and did not act on an LFB recommendation to ask questions about the fire safety of council housing. The Inquiry revealed that, in 2014, Feilding-Mellen was involved in deliberations that saw plans for Grenfell’s new cladding switched from far more fire-resistant zinc cladding to ACM. This was done to save the council and the private developers a few hundred thousand pounds.

Feilding-Mellen told the Inquiry that he was “shattered” by the loss of life and would “probably be haunted” by whether or not he could have acted differently for “the rest of my life”.

This week, Nabil Choucair, who lost six members of his family in the fire, expressed the concerns and anger felt by many: “Four years on I fear that those responsible for the fire are going to get away with murder. It’s a shame that the public inquiry cannot be stopped and the criminal investigation is completed and prosecutions put in place immediately.”

What is taking place is a systematic cover-up in which the Inquiry serves as the mechanism to protect the guilty. No-one is being prosecuted as the Metropolitan Police long ago declared that its own glacier-paced “investigation” would wait until the inquiry finished and produced its report before even considering doing so. The Inquiry may not even conclude next year, five years after the fire.

The corporate and governmental figures responsible for Grenfell know they can turn up at the Inquiry, parade their criminality and then walk away—after the necessary handwringing—with no further consequences.

The public investigation was organised by the government under the terms of the 2005 Inquiries Act brought in by Tony Blair’s Labour government. Under the Act, Inquiry head Sir Martin Moore-Bick “has no power to determine, any person’s civil or criminal liability” over the Grenfell events. Last year, representatives of major corporations and other institutions demanded and were granted even more protection, as the government ruled that “any individual who gives evidence to the Inquiry… cannot have that evidence used in any prosecution against them in the future.”

All those fighting for justice for the Grenfell victims must demand an end to this charade and the immediate arrest and prosecution of the government and corporate officials responsible for social murder.