The Makeevka missile attack and the political crisis in Russia

Andrea Peters

In an effort to deflect blame for the deaths of likely hundreds of Russian soldiers in a Ukrainian missile strike in the Donbas on New Year’s Day, the Kremlin is insisting that the reason Ukraine was able to hit the barracks where troops were located was because the men were using their cell phones in contravention of military policy. Speaking in a video statement on last Wednesday, Lieutenant General Sergei Serdyukov declared this to be the “main reason” that at least 89 soldiers were killed in a single strike, a military humiliation for Russia and a disaster for the men and their families.

The Kremlin’s tally of the dead, which included one regiment’s deputy commander, is widely believed to be a significant undercount, as about 600 men were stationed in the now-leveled former school building. Because soldiers were being quartered on top of an ammunition depot that was located in the structure’s basement, the scale of the destruction was particularly massive.

The wife of one serviceman who survived the blast told the press that her husband awoke surrounded by “meat, meat and blood.” Already the Ministry of Defense has had to revise upward its death count, which, initially placed at just 63, was denounced by soldiers’ relatives as false.

Despite growing demands, the Kremlin has yet to release a list of the dead. Kiev claims it killed 400 Russian troops and wounded 300. The majority of these were reportedly recent conscripts, but there may have also been special forces among them. The city of Samara, from which many of the draftees came, announced that its hospitals alone are treating 60-70 wounded.

Wives of some soldiers told the press in Samara that they were never contacted by officials about the fate of their spouses, but rather had to track them down themselves. Others are still waiting for information.

According to one pro-Kremlin journalist, Anastasia Kashevarova, survivors will be either sent back into battle or “somewhere else out of sight.” Others, she said, are being dispatched to the state prosecutor’s office, which is investigating the event. “Please don’t even write his name,” one woman told the press, referring to her husband. “I’m afraid,” she said, explaining that he survived and walked “half-naked” to a hospital in Rostov. Those who lived through the attack “are being written off as unnecessary witnesses,” stated one relative.

For its part, Washington responded with unrestrained glee to the news that the Ukraine’s US-supplied HIMARS missile killed hundreds of Russian servicemen in one fell swoop. Speaking last Thursday, retired admiral John Kirby, who is the coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, declared that he would not “wring his hands” over the Russian toll and added that Washington would continue supplying Ukraine with the “kinds of systems and assistance they need to defend themselves,” including more HIMARS.

The Putin government is attempting to cover up its debacle and manage the fallout by on the one hand declaring the dead and wounded soldiers the responsible party, and on the other, declaring them heroes. The day following the ministry of defense’s claim that soldiers gave away their coordinates to the enemy by making phone calls, the Russian president announced special state recognition for the attack’s survivors.

It is clear, however, that the ability of Ukraine to inflict such a high one-time casualty count on Russia with the aid of a US-supplied HIMARS missile is in no small part a failure of Russian military planning, one of many in the last 11 months. According to one news report, to the extent that troops’ cell phone usage may have played a part in giving away the barrack’s coordinates to the Ukrainian military, it was because soldiers were gathered together to watch President Putin’s New Year speech.

The toll in Makeevka is intensifying the political crisis facing the Kremlin. The deaths of so many conscripted men, called up by Putin in a “partial mobilization” last year, can only deepen fears within the broader population about the costs of war and the dead end to which the Russian government has brought it.

Aware of the extreme unpopularity of the conscription, the Kremlin has been at pains to insist that it does not intend to extend the draft, although it may very well do so. Even under conditions in which all criticism of the “special military operation” is banned and violations carry large fines and prison sentences, there are regular news reports and social media accounts of desertions, draft dodging, and protests over the poorly equipped condition of troops at the front. At the same time, inflation, wage arrears and the spread of part-time employment are hammering real incomes.

According to the Levada Center, a Russian polling agency critical of the Kremlin, as of December 2022, 41.2 percent of those surveyed indicated they definitely supported the war, down about 7 points from February 2022. The number of those who “mostly” support it, rose about 10 points during that same period. Over the last 11 months, about 20 percent of respondents have consistently indicated that they do not agree with the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine to one or another degree.

Inasmuch as there is popular support for the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine, it stems from the mistaken belief within the population that the Putin administration is waging some sort of genuine fight against American and European imperialism. The ferocity of the anti-Russian policies of Washington and its NATO allies—which Putin returns to over and over in his speeches and statements—is real, and it is hardly lost on a population that saw 30 million and more die in the Nazis’ attempt to wipe the Soviet Union off the map.

The Kremlin works to exploit the latent, unclarified anti-imperialist sentiment stemming from the tragedy and heroism of the Soviet victory in World War II to win backing for its own agenda, which has nothing to do with defending the workers of that country and everything to do with defending Russian capitalists’ right to feed off “their own” population. Under Stalin and after, the Russian ruling elite has always falsely portrayed the battle against fascism as a Russian national struggle, as a struggle for “national defense.”

The problem, however, that the Putin government faces, is that the Soviet masses, including its Russian portion, did not fight fascism to defend capitalism or the “Russian nation.” They fought fascism to defend their socialist revolution, or what remained of it, despite the crimes of Stalin. Today’s ruling elite has long since liquidated everything that the struggle for socialism in the USSR accomplished, and therefore it grasps ever-more desperately at Russian nationalism to stay afloat.

As it was dissolving the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the central claims that the Communist Party bureaucracy made was that imperialism was a myth and the people of the Soviet sphere had nothing to fear from their newfound capitalist friends. Having worked to suppress working class revolution around the world for decades, the Stalinists insisted, as Mikhail Gorbachev said repeatedly, that the end of the Cold War would usher in a new era of peace. In their quest to enrich themselves by restoring the market and integrating the USSR into the global capitalist system, the elite savaged the Soviet working class and all of the economic and social resources it had built up over more than 80 years of struggle and sacrifice.

The heirs of this disaster, of which President Putin is a representative, now find themselves in a blind alley, discovering after years of reaching out to their “western partners” that imperialism is, indeed, not a myth, and Russia is on the losing end of its brutal logic. With the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin thought that it could force some sort of settlement with the US and NATO that would allow the Russian state to survive. Instead, the war has escalated, and whatever the twists and turns of the coming period, there is no way out. The national road has led only to a dead end.

The New Year’s Day military debacle, as well as all the previous ones over the course of the last 11 months, threatens to blow apart the Russian national myth and with it the tenuous support that the Putin government has. The frustrated and angry response of the country’s right-wing nationalists to the Makeevka death toll is revealing in this regard.

Igor Strelkov, a former member of the Russian security services and leading pro-Russian militant in the Donbas, denounced defense officials for the evident stupidity of stationing such a large number of troops in a single location.

“This could happen again AT ANY MOMENT,” he warned on Telegram on Monday. “This is not the only such (extremely dense) deployment of personnel and equipment in the HIMARS missile strike zone,” Strelkov wrote, referring to the rocket launchers supplied to Ukraine by Washington.

“Makeevka is criminal negligence,” wrote Pavel Gubarev, who fought with pro-Russian forces in the Donbas starting in 2014, on the same social media platform. “These are the mistakes of spring-summer 2022,” he said, adding that Russian troops around the occupied zone are increasingly vulnerable to HIMARS attacks and other strikes behind their lines.

Also writing on Telegram, journalist and Moscow Duma deputy Andrey Medvedev opined, “It was clear to everyone in advance that on New Year's Eve, the AFU and the SBU would try to strike where we would have vulnerabilities. Why was the enemy given the opportunity to hurt us? Why was the decision made to deploy personnel in this manner? By whom was it decided?”

“Every soldier and officer is important. The life of every soldier is a great value. With the approach ‘women will give birth to new ones’ not only will we not win, our prospects will be gloomy,” he added. 

He accused the military brass of “direct aid to the enemy.” Others have declared that a repeat of the Makeevka events due to a failure to intelligently deploy troops can only be regarded as “treasonous.”

2022 was Canada’s deadliest year of the COVID-19 pandemic

Malcolm Fiedler

According to official statistics released by Health Canada, 2022 proved to be the deadliest year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada so far. Almost 20,000 Canadians died from COVID-19, representing close to a 30 percent increase in fatalities compared to 2021.

Victoria Hospital in Ontario, Canada. [Photo by Nephron / CC BY-SA 3.0]

As stark as they are, these official figures represent a significant undercount of the true toll the virus has taken across the country. Data compiled by Dr. Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease expert at the University of Toronto, show that the country has recorded almost 65,000 excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. The excess death rate was almost 1.5 times higher in 2022 compared to 2020 and 2021.

Unsurprisingly, total infections and hospitalizations were also at their highest levels during 2022. Unlike the previous two years, there was no significant drop in hospital admissions at any point during the year, with thousands hospitalized continuously. The height of the original Omicron wave in the winter of 2021-22 saw over 10,000 Canadians in hospital care at the end of January 2022. At no point since has that number dipped lower than 3,000. The last reported national data shows that hospitalizations are currently around 5,000, a number that most public health experts expect to rise drastically in the coming months with the emergence of new variants.

Meanwhile, despite the vast curtailing of PCR testing by public health agencies across the country, over half of the country’s official 4.5 million infections occurred in 2022 alone.

Taken together, these figures represent a damning indictment of the claim advanced by the political and media establishment that the Omicron variant was mild. This grotesque lie was used by the Liberal Trudeau government and all provincial governments to justify the dropping of all measures aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19. The scrapping of the last remaining public health measures in the spring of 2022 was in fact a direct response to the demands of the far-right “Freedom Convoy,” a movement comprised of fascistic social elements.

Incited and built up by significant sections of the capitalist ruling class, including the official opposition Conservative Party and fascistic figures in the US such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump, the movement was invoked as an excuse by the Trudeau government and provincial health agencies to legitimize their refusal to implement mitigation measures to curb the disease and death that Omicron has caused during 2022.

Officials often assert that there is a “lack of public appetite for public health measures,” but this is a filthy lie. Polling has, since the start of the pandemic, shown that the public has consistently supported stronger health measures than those governments were willing to implement. A poll conducted in November by CTV News revealed that almost 70 percent of Canadians supported a return of face mask mandates, with 52 percent saying they supported such a measure fully and 17 percent saying they “somewhat support” a return to face masking. Just 22 percent of respondents said they opposed such a measure.

As the virus spread unchecked throughout the year, pressure continued to be applied to the country’s over-stretched and under-funded health care system. Hospitals across Canada buckled under the massive amounts of disease circulating in communities across the country, a trend that only accelerated as the winter respiratory virus season commenced.

Vancouver General Hospital, the largest in the province of British Columbia, reports that patients are waiting over 7 hours to receive care in the ER. Statistics provided by the Quebec Ministry of Health showed that most major hospital ER rooms in the province are currently operating at over 100 percent capacity. The Chief of Montreal General Hospitals, Dr. Cristian Toarta, told the Montreal Gazette that the month of December was the worst he has ever seen. In Edmonton, the provincial capital of Alberta, hospitals have reported the longest wait times for emergency care since they began collecting data in 2015.

The situation appears to be even more dire in rural communities, where emergency care is collapsing altogether. According to data collected by CBC News, emergency rooms were closed for the equivalent of 4 months throughout small communities in British Columbia in 2022, or 2,900 hours. The community of Clearwater, BC, saw its hospital ER close on 62 different occasions. In Ontario, Clinton Public Hospital announced on December 29 that it was closing its ER room for at least 12 hours.

The decision by the Trudeau government and provincial health authorities to let the virus rip unimpeded, a policy adopted by all capitalist governments around the world, has enabled COVID-19 to mutate into ever-more dangerous variants. The latest example of this is the XBB.1.5 variant, which is now spreading rapidly in the northeastern part of the United States. Due to extremely limited genomic sequencing by provincial health authorities, it is impossible to say how rapidly the variant is spreading in Canada, but experience with previous dominant variants such as the original Wuhan strain, Alpha and Omicron would suggest that by now most of the country has already been seeded.

As of Wednesday, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported 21 cases in which the new variant had been sequenced. The variant has been sequenced in small numbers in Ontario and Quebec. On January 3, British Columbia Chief Public Health Officer Bonnie Henry revealed during an interview with CBC radio that province had identified five such cases. Given Henry’s track record of previously lying to the public to conceal the spread and danger of COVID-19, including in February 2021 when it was revealed by CTV news that she deliberately misinformed the public of how rapidly the then new Alpha and Beta variants were spreading by a factor of ten, her latest figures are almost certainly a massive undercount.

Montreal-based microbiologist Dr. Donald Vinh sharply criticized the absence of widespread PCR testing across Canada in response to the emergence of the new variant. Ever since the eruption of Omicron last winter, health care authorities have made it all but impossible for the vast majority of infected people to get tested, unless they access care in an emergency room. “To think that we are living in Canada … and yet if you’re sick, you cannot get tested for COVID easily — I think that is just the antithesis of medicine,” he told Global News. “Every wave that we’ve had has led to an increase in hospitalizations. And even though we can buffer that increase, that’s come at a price to our health-care system. And so … going forward, we should be very aggressive against XXB.1.5. or whatever other variant is emerging.”

Under these conditions, the rank hypocrisy of the Trudeau government’s announcement that travelers from China would be screened for COVID-19 upon arrival as of January 5 is hard to beat. The decision by the Chinese government to abandon its Zero COVID policy in November, which has led predictably to a massive outbreak in the country, is one which the Canadian government, in partnership with its US imperialist ally, has long demanded.

While it allows XBB.1.5 to spread unchecked at home, the Trudeau government and the public health establishment would have the population believe that they are deeply concerned about protecting their health by banning travelers from China who test positive for the virus. As principled medical and public health experts have noted, this policy has nothing to do with protecting the Canadian public. It is a policy that is explicitly political in nature, serving only to poison public opinion towards China and thereby whip up public support for Washington and Ottawa’s aggressive preparations to wage war against China.

Macron’s sending tanks to Ukraine marks escalation of France’s role in war on Russia

Samuel Tissot

On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans for France to deliver AMX-10 RC light tanks to the Ukrainian military. This is the first time that Western-designed tanks will be sent to the Ukrainian armed forces. It marks a significant escalation of French involvement in the war.

France said Wednesday January 4, 2023 it will send French-made AMX-10 RC light tanks to Ukraine, the first tanks from a Western European country, following an afternoon phone call between French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. [AP Photo/Jeremy Bessat/Armee de Terre]

In a tweet announcing the deal, Macron stated, “Until victory, until peace returns to Europe, our support for Ukraine will not weaken. I confirmed it to President Zelensky: France will provide light combat tanks.” The exact number of AMX-10 RCs to be delivered is unknown, but they will be transferred from the French military, which currently has 248. The vehicles sent to Ukraine will be replaced by EBRC Jaguar vehicles at a cost of €5 million apiece.

In discussions held with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Macron also pledged to deepen France’s air defence support to Ukraine. France has already supplied Crotale air defense batteries and pledged more Caesar artillery pieces, on top of the 18 delivered in 2022. According to Le Monde, Macron is also currently in talks with Italy to send Ukraine SAMP/T Mamba missile batteries to Ukraine, a more modern surface-to-air missile system with similar capabilities to the American-built Patriot missiles already used by the Ukrainian military.

The delivery of light tanks confirms that French imperialism has joined the NATO war on Russia, even though it risks a nuclear conflagration.

In 2019, Macron declared NATO “brain-dead” in an interview with the Economist. He added that US policy towards Russia was unhinged, adding: “When the United States is very harsh with Russia,” the president of France declared, “it is a form of governmental, political, and historical hysteria.”

As the NATO-Russia war began last year, Macron was somewhat reluctant to openly endorse NATO’s policy of provocations against Russia and unlimited expansion of the war in Ukraine. He claimed he aimed to negotiate a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. On March 28, the New York Times wrote: “Nobody can accuse President Emmanuel Macron of stinting on efforts to avert, defuse or stop Russia’s war in Ukraine.” In February and March, he spoke to Zelensky and Putin and claimed his aim was “securing a cease-fire and then the total withdrawal of troops.”

In March, when then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson supported Zelensky’s call for NATO tanks to be delivered to Ukraine, Macron refused. He said this was a “red line” which, if crossed, would make the NATO powers “co-belligerents.” Now, at the beginning of 2023, Macron is attempting to position French imperialism as a European leader in arming Ukraine.

As recently as December, Macron said that he had two “red lines” on arms deliveries: that it did not affect France’s ability to defend itself, and did not make Paris a co-belligerent in the war.

By coordinating delivery of weaponry and ammunition with other NATO powers, France was in reality a co-belligerent state, according to international law. With the delivery of tanks, which are designed to perform offensive operations, Macron has only shattered what few illusions could have remained that Paris was not at war with a major nuclear-armed state.

This shift developed over the course of 2022 and intensified in particular after the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline. This effectively ended any chance of renewed French natural gas imports from Russia and aligned French imperialist foreign policy with that of its NATO allies.

The French announcement that it would supply tanks was soon followed by German and US pledges of their own military vehicles. Behind the front of united support for Ukraine, however, are increasing inter-imperialist tensions. Macron’s decision to pioneer tank deliveries is seen by military and political analysts as an attempt to remove France from the military and geopolitical shadow of its rivals, in particular Germany.

Marc Chassillan, engineer and specialist in military land equipment, told Le Monde, “From a political point of view, this announcement is a marker. France will be the first to deliver what the military calls a melee vehicle, i.e., an armored vehicle for close combat.”

Significantly, this has intensified tensions between Paris and Berlin. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chairwoman of the Bundestag’s defence committee and a member of the Free Democratic Party, one of Germany’s ruling parties, told AFP: “Once again, France is taking on the role that was expected of Germany and is taking the lead itself. The ball is now in Berlin's court.”

It is no accident that the announcement of delivery of French tanks to Ukraine was announced a few days after Macron declared that 2023 would be the year of pension reform. As in all the NATO powers, the cost of sending billions of euros in French arms to the Ukrainian military while expanding the French military is to be borne by the working class.

France’s military budget for 2023 is €49.3 billion, the highest ever and the largest year-on-year increase in 15 years. This includes an extra €3 billion added in an amendment in October last year, as the French ruling class took the decision to more firmly align itself with NATO’s policy. The military budget is the government’s second-largest budgetary expense, only after education.

In Macron’s New Year’s Eve speech, he announced that 2023 would be the year of pension reform, which has been a central goal of his government in both his first and second terms. His last attempt to force through the reform led to mass public sector strikes in December 2019. By raising the retirement age and freezing pension increases, so that their real value is eaten away by inflation, Macron hopes to find the funds for a massive military expansion.

In 2023, French government spending overall will decrease by 1.5 percent, and 6 percent inflation means expenditure in real terms will be cut even further. Most of these savings come from drastic cuts to the health sector, already suffering from wave after wave of COVID-19 and staffing shortages, including the dismantling of COVID-19 testing infrastructure.

NATO’s embargo of Russian energy exports has primarily impacted the poorest households as energy prices have increased by 15 percent in France, as US natural gas exporters ramp up prices for the European market amid the embargo on Russia. The French population still faces the prospect of winter blackouts due to shortages. So far, however, due to unseasonably mild weather, demand has not exceeded France’s limited energy supply.

Macrons’s delivery of tanks to the Ukrainian military sets the tone for his policy in 2023, that is, for a massive intensification of war with Russia, irrespective of the threat of escalation to all-out nuclear war, and massive austerity meted out to workers.

Mass protests resume across Peru against the coup regime and social inequality

Andrea Lobo

Since Wednesday, mass protests and roadblocks have taken place daily across Peru. Beyond the initial demands for the resignation of the Dina Boluarte administration, the shutdown of Congress and general elections, protesters are increasingly advancing social demands over the high cost of living and staggering social inequality.

Demonstrators block the Pan-American highway to protest against President Dina Boluarte's government and Congress in Ica, Peru, Friday, Janaury 6, 2023. [AP Photo/Martin Mejia]

The latest upsurge follows a holiday lull in the nationwide demonstrations triggered by the December 7 impeachment and arrest of president Pedro Castillo. On the same day, his vice president, Boluarte, was installed as part of a parliamentary coup orchestrated by the far-right parties in control of Congress, the US embassy, and the Peruvian military leadership.

The unrest increased dramatically after the suspension of democratic rights and the deployment of troops under a national state of emergency since December 14. The repression by the military and police has resulted in at least 28 demonstrators killed and hundreds injured, including many from live ammunition. Mock coffins have become one of the most common props carried by demonstrators.

In the context of a “national strike” since Wednesday, thousands have marched in the capital Lima, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Huancayo, Cusco, and Puno, while roadblocks were set up across the country, primarily in the south. The southern Pan-American highway remains blocked. The police and military have harassed marchers, blocked the entry to the locations frequented by protesters and used tear gas, rubber bullets, batons, fists, and boots to disperse them.

On Friday, 46 roadblocks were still reported, primarily in the southern departments of Cusco and Puno. As commercial activities grind increasingly to a halt due to the roadblocks and the participation of many workers and small shopkeepers in the protests, several trade unions in the service sector have been compelled to join the strike.

While Castillo’s 16 months in power were marked by concessions to the far right and foreign capital, including the suppression of protests over inflation and mining practices, the coup is widely recognized as a preemptive move by US imperialism and the Peruvian oligarchy. Their aim is to clamp down on the years of social protests and political instability in order to secure the operations of the transnational mining corporations and as a means of further imposing the burden of the deepening economic crisis on the backs of workers and the rural poor.

In an interview with La República, Maritza Paredes, head sociology professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, explained that demonstrators don’t express support for Castillo and that recent polls showed that most Peruvians believed that “if Castillo goes, they should all go.”

“The demonstrators are responding quite viscerally since, when they place rocks, block the highways, and kidnap police officials, they don’t know what to do next. There is no coordination or major social organizations,” she indicated.

At the same time, there are indications of a growing self-awareness that the struggles are being driven by opposition to social inequality and capitalism.

A young protester at a roadblock in Ica told La Lupa, “It’s because the poor people are rising up sweating that they have deployed the military, to oppress us, to beat us, to shoot at us. This is the march of the poor—the agricultural, mining, and rural workers. They don’t care if they kill 100, 200, 300 … We are all agricultural workers here.”

A small farmer at a roadblock in Asillo, Puno, told a local reporter who asked if he was a terrorist, “I feel the hunger, the need, the misery that we all carry here in Peru and other nations. Our needs compel us. We are nothing. On the contrary, Dina Boluarte is a terrorist. The congresspeople are terrorists. We are fighting because of our needs and we must fight until the last consequences to achieve our objective because they are looting the resources of our Peru.”

A demonstrator in Andahuaylas said that the government “doesn’t represent them.” He added: “We struggle every day. Look at how much a potato costs. What we make is not enough for anything. If Peru has silver, why are we poor? That is why people are fighting here.”

There is no institution or organization in Peru that retains any political credibility, which hinders the efforts of the ruling elite to contain and channel the incipient uprising into safe channels. However, the spontaneous and leaderless character of the protests also makes them vulnerable to a further crackdown that is consciously being prepared.

The Peruvian corporate media has been filled with mentions of “terrorist groups,” in some cases citing extinct guerrilla groups. The narrative is systematically being fabricated that the massacres of disarmed youth with live ammunition, the brutal beatings and volleys of tear gas canisters are somehow justified by this nonexistent threat. Throughout the 1990s, such language was used to promote the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori, who is now jailed for corruption and organizing death squads.

After naming several teenagers killed in the protests, whose impoverished rural background was reported by the local press, the host of the ATV evening news, Juliana Oxenford, ranted: “It must be investigated whether any of them belonged to terrorist bands, teams of genocidal killers. Of course, we need to rest assured that the police and military had to use the tool of firearms.”

The reactionary detention of Castillo and the persecution of his former prime minister Aníbal Torres on trumped up charges of “rebellion” is also being exploited to evoke the threat of armed insurrection by “terrorists.” Even their lawyer Wilfredo Robles was smeared as a “terrorist” on live television for his ties as a youth to the Maoist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso.

The corporate media and police promoted rallies on Tuesday demanding the suppression of the protests under the Orwellian slogan of “Peace and Democracy.” The affluent attendees took over the San Martin Plaza in downtown Lima, which is blocked to demonstrators.

Decoding Israeli ‘Extremism’

Richard Falk

Photograph Source: Natan Flayer – CC BY-SA 3.0

“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

– Benjamin Netanyahu, December 30, 2023

Anyone with but half eye open during the last several decades should by now realize that undisclosed Zionist Long Game preceded the establishment of Israel in 1948, and aims at extending Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Occupied Palestine, with the possible exception of Gaza. The significance of Netanyahu’s public affirmation of this previously secretive long game is that it may be reaching its final phase and the far right governing coalition is poised to pursue closure.

Netanyahu claim of exclusive Israel’s supremacy on behalf of the Jewish people over the whole of the promised land is in direct defiance of international law. Additionally, Netanyahu’s statement is at direct odds with Biden’s stubborn insistence, however farfetched, on reaffirming support for two-state solution. This zombie approach to resolving the Israel/Palestine struggle has dominated international diplomacy for years, usefully allowing the UN and its Western members to maintain their embrace of Israel without seeming to throw the Palestinian people under the bus.

Netanyahu’s brazen avowal of Israeli unilateral expansionism foregoes earlier diplomatic charades. It challenges the UN, Palestinian Authority, governments around the world, and transnational civil society to open finally both eyes and finally admit that the two-state solution is dead.

In fairness, it is true that this Zionist Long Game has only recently become apparent to all but the closest observers of the struggle. Throughout the 20^thcentury this process of progressive expansionism was hidden from public view by a combination of Israeli domination of the public narrative and U.S. complicity, which deceived especially diaspora Zionists by assuming that Israel was open to a political compromise and that it was the Palestinians who were resisting a diplomatic outcome. Such an interpretation of the stalemate was always misleading. The Zionist Project from its very beginnings, more than a century ago, proceeded by stages to accept whatever was politically attainable at any given time, and then moving on to the next stage in its fuller colonization plan.

This pattern of expansionist priorities became especially evident in the periods following the Balfour Declaration of 2017 and after World War II. The infamous colonial Declaration had pledged British support for ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, made credible by accommodating ballooning Jewish immigration during the period of British mandatory administration that lasted from 1923 until 1948. Then came the UN partition resolution UNGA Res. 181), which not only ignored Palestinian rights of self-determination by partitioning their country without a prior referendum, changing the status of the Jewish presence from ‘national home’ within the state of Palestine to a sovereign Jewish state on fully half of Palestine. Such impositions were greeted positively by Zionist, but rejected by representatives of the Palestinian people and by neighboring Arab governments, leading directly to the 1948 War, which resulted in the catastrophic dispossession of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians, known to its victims as the nakba, ending with a ceasefire that increased Israel’s share of Palestine from 55% to 78%.

Then came the 1967 War, which drove Jordan out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, dispossessed another wave of indigenous Palestinians, known among Palestinian as the naksa. It also resulted in Israel’s prolonger occupation, supposedly temporary but the establishment of many unlawful Jewish settlements encroaching on what had been projected as a coexisting Palestinian state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem strongly suggested that all along Israel’s leadership envisioned permanent arrangements with an end game in mind that did not include viable Palestinian statehood. Another strong straw in the wind back in 1967 was Israel immediate declaration and enactment of a sovereign claim over the whole of an enlarged Jerusalem as the ‘eternal capital’ of the Jewish state. This incorporation of Jerusalem was repeatedly rejected by overwhelming votes in the General Assembly, duly ignored by the Israeli government.

There were many lesser displays of virtuoso salami slicing of Palestinian rights and expectations in the subsequent 55 years. The Oslo diplomatic charade that lingered for 20 years after the hyped handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn was the most notable stunt along these lines. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that in the Israeli strategic imaginary ‘peace’ was never what Oslo was about. The real Israeli justification for Oslo, besides satisfying international pressure for some semblance of negotiations was to gain the needed time to make the settlement movement large and diffuse enough as to become irreversible. Such an obvious assault on the two-state mantra should then have been the death knell of two-state duplicity, but it wasn’t because its continuing international avowal, until now, was mutually convenient for both the Israeli leadership and to friendly foreign governments, and even to a UN too weak to insist on israeli compliance with international law.  Israel’s 2018 Basic Law proclaiming the supremacy of Jews in ‘the promised land of Israel,’ including the whole of the West Bank, came a giant step closer to revealing the integral goals of the Zionist Progrect endorsed by Netanyahu to coincide with the swearing in of his fourth go at being the Prime Minister.

Yet, despite these manifest successes of this Zionist Long Game is from some perspectives more in doubt than it has ever been, strange as that might seem from a purely materialist view of politics. The Palestinian people have held firm in their commitment to self-determination throughout the century of being tested by this series of Israeli settler encroachments, including representation by the quasi-collaborative leadership offered by the Palestinian Authority. The spirit of resistance and struggle has been sustained by a Palestinian deep culture of steadfastness of sumud. Resistance while sporadic never disappeared.

Additionally, the weight of evolving historical circumstances has enabled the Palestinians to achieve important victories in The Legitimacy War being waged by the two peoples for the control of symbolic and normative spaces in the wider struggle. Over the course of the last decade the international political discourse increasingly accepted the Palestinian narrative of Israel as ‘a settler colonial state,’ a damaging assessment in an era where colonialism elsewhere was being dismantled by the weaker side militarily, suggesting the unrecognized leverage of law, morality, and nationalist mobilization in out maneuvering a militarily superior adversary.

Beyond this, and more formally, the once radical accusation of apartheid directed at the Israeli state became validated over the course of the last six years by carefully documented reports of the UN (ESCWA), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the fiercely independent Israeli NGO, B’Tselem. As memories of the Holocaust faded and wrongdoing toward Palestinian rights became harder to shove under the rug, world public opinion especially in the West, became somewhat more sympathetic to and convinced by the Palestinian narrative, and as significantly, the relevance of the South African precedent became harder to ignore.

Further symbolic Palestinian victories included widespread diplomatic recognition of Palestinian statehood by many governments in the Global South, non-voting membership in the UN, access to the International Criminal Court and its 2021 judgment authorizing the investigation of Palestinian allegations of international crimes in Occupied Palestine after 2014, and at the end of 2022 of the approval by a wide margin of a General Assembly Resolution requesting an Advisory Opinion from the World Court in The Hague on the prolonged unlawful occupation of Palestinian territories. The 2022 HRC appointment of a high-level Commission of Inquiry with a broad mandate to investigate Israel wrongdoing occurred after the frustrations associated with decades of israeli non-compliance with international humanitarian law in the OPT.

Israeli and its puppet NGOs, UN Watch and NGO Monitor, recognized the gravity of these developments, as did the Israeli government, being intelligently sensitive to the precedent set. by the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa as a result of a blend of resistance, symbolic delegitimation, and global solidarity initiatives. Israel and its militants fought back, with unwavering support of the U.S. Government, but not substantively, recognizing the risks of bringing any further attention to the substance of Israel’s policies, practices, and racist ideology. Instead, it attacked the critics and their institutional venues, including even the UN, as antisemitic, smearing conscientious legal experts and even international civil servants and the institutions themselves. This has created a sufficient diversionary smokescreen to enable Biden and top EU bureaucrats to keep faith with the ever more hollow prospect of ‘two states for two peoples’ when they must know by this time that such a policy has is moribund even as a public relations tactic. Especially now that an apparently cocky Netanyahu has told them so to their faces.

Given this line of interpretation, contrary to media commentary, Netanyahu is likely pleased that his governing coalition includes the Religious Zionism (RZ) and Jewish Powerbloc. RZ, led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvar seem useful, if not natural allies of Likud in launching this culminating phase of the Zionist Project, which involves territorial consolidation over the whole of the promised land and likely moves to inflict further dispossession of Palestinians—a second Nakba—from their native lands. Seen in this way, the Netanyahu declaration above amounts to a virtual road map, hopefully with RZ taking most of the blame for its inflammatory and likely violent implementation.

Given this background, the present context should be understood differently than the prevailing mode of reporting on the most right-wing and extremist government in the history of Israel and the awkwardness of relying on a coalition that gives dangerous influence to RZ. It is instructive to notice that most of the regrets expressed in the U.S. about the outcome in the 2022 Israeli elections is its possibly negative impact on support for Israel in the liberal democracies, especially, among predominantly secular dominant communities in the Jewish diaspora. Little empathy or concern is expressed by the probability of intensifying suffering endured by the Palestinians, whose plight has been subject to Orientalist erasures throughout the struggle.

In Biden’s indoubtedly unconscious display of such Orientalist insensitivity to Palestinian rights, much less their  legitimate aspirations, the wording of an official statement congratulating Netanyahu, Biden warrants scrutiny: “I look forward to working with Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been my friend for decades, to jointly address the many challenges and opportunities facing Israel and the Middle East region, including threats from Iran.” In the same text, the American president asserts that “the United States will continue to support the two state solution and to oppose policies that endanger its viability or contradict our mutual interests and values.”

Most pro-Israeli commentary on the shift to the right on the part of the Israeli voting public attributes the extremist outcome in the November elections to either the absence of ‘a partner’ in the search for peace, a response to Palestinian ‘terrorism’ or the rising influence of the religious right within Israel, and the emboldening effects of the normalization agreements (so-call Abraham Accords) reached in 2020 during the last months of the Trump presidency. Undoubtedly, these contextual factors were influential in persuading a larger segment of Israeli voters to swallow their dislike of a governing coalition that gave strong influence to RZ, seemingly the foretaste of a now plausible Jewish theocratic fascism, preferring their hopes of a unilaterally imposed Israeli ‘victory’ scenario to the hypocritical uncertainties of the diplomatic status quo that is disinterested in negotiating a political compromise with its Palestinian counterpart.

My own encounters with liberal Zionist in America emphasized that Israeli good will with respect to a political deal with the Palestinian had run into a brick wall of Palestinian hard line opposition, an indirect validation of the ‘no partner’ excuse, or at best, the false symmetry of blaming both sides in a situation where one side was the oppressor and the other the oppressed, a situation accentuated by the insistence that Israeli’s closest ally and geopolitical source of security serve as intermediary. Nothing exhibited Palestinian weakness more dramatically than their willingness to rely on such a flawed diplomatic process for the realization of their prospect of such basic rights as self-determination.

While these factors have been endlessly analyzed in piecing together in composing an exoteric or public narrative, the real story—the deep roots of these developments—is yet to be told. It is bound up with an esoteric or secret narrative that antedates the establishment of Israel in 1948, and whose slow unfolding involved the pragmatic adaptation of the utopian character of Zionist Project of recovering Palestine during a period when these ultimate goals seemed hopelessly out of reach.

UK government announces new anti-strike laws for education, health, transport, and other workers

Thomas Scripps

The UK government is proceeding with its authoritarian crackdown on workers’ right to strike. Ministers intend to use the legislation to ram through pay cuts, job losses and speed-ups, amid the biggest fall in living standards in generations, to fund increased corporate profits and a surge in military spending.

Before Christmas, the ruling Conservative Party announced plans to introduce minimum service levels (MSLs) on the railways, requiring a certain number of employees to stay on the job during a strike. On Thursday, the government announced this frontal assault on democratic rights will be extended to workers in eight sectors, including teachers and nurses.

Train drivers on the picket line in Bournemouth, January 5, 2023 [Photo: WSWS]

Fire, ambulance and rail services will have a minimum safety level enforced by the government, after a meaningless “consultation”. Other health and transport services, plus the education, border security and nuclear decommissioning sectors, will have minimum staffing levels enforced if a “voluntary” agreement cannot be reached with trade unions. This is a round-about way of saying minimum service levels will be compulsory here also.

The legislation is expected to be moved in parliament “in the coming weeks.” It directly targets those sections of workers engaged in or planning large national strikes.

In the same statement, the government invited the public sector unions to direct talks on pay deals for 2023-24—pointedly moving on from the massively below inflation 2022-23 deals being fought in the current disputes. It attacks “inflation-matching pay awards”.

According to the statement, “Trade unions will be bound to follow this legislation and will risk the employer bringing an injunction to prevent the strike from taking place or seeking damages afterwards if they do not comply with their obligations.” The Tories have already quadrupled the damages for failing to comply that can be levied against the largest unions to £1 million.

A front-page report in the Times, published the day the statement was released and in clear coordination with the government, revealed, “Employers would be able to sue unions, and union members who were told to work under the minimum service requirement but refused to do so could be dismissed.”

A source told the paper, “This legislation will remove the legal immunity for strikes where unions fail to implement a minimum level of service. The strikes will be illegal. Ultimately people could be fired for breach of contract.”

The Times reported that previously raised plans to increase the ballot threshold for industrial action could be “dropped in an attempt to streamline the legislation and speed up its passage through the Lords,” but a final decision has not been made. Other measures including “doubling the minimum notice period for industrial action from 14 days and reducing the six-month limit for industrial action after a successful ballot” have also been floated.

Whatever its final form, the legislation is a major escalation in the class war being waged by the Tory government. This has global significance. Its statement specifically highlights “countries across the world such as France and Spain that already have minimum service agreements in place, to prevent large swathes of their economies being ground to a halt by industrial action.”

Last October, striking French oil refinery workers were requisitioned on pain of a six-month jail sentence or £10,000 fine. The month before, Spanish Ryanair staff faced disciplinary action for walking out in defiance of minimum service laws in the airline industry.

Striking workers gather at the entrance of the TotalEnergies oil depot, October 13, 2022 outside Dunkirk, northern France. [AP Photo/Michel Spingler]

Millions of workers will demand a mass, coordinated response to stop these plans in their tracks. But such a movement is precisely what the trade union bureaucracy wants to avoid at all costs. Aware they are sitting on a social powder keg they have tried to defuse through the sabotage and sellout of the last six months of strikes—including already ending a national strike by 40,000 telecoms workers—the union leaders’ fear is that the government’s announcement will set things ablaze.

Their determination to avoid a confrontation was paraded earlier this week in a series of interviews given by new head of the Trades Union Congress Paul Novak. He told the Financial Times that the only response to be mounted would be a “legal challenge”. Nowak dismissed calls to repeal bans on sympathy strikes imposed by Margaret Thatcher, telling the Mirror, “It’s not about going back to the 80s.”

The closer the government comes to enacting its plans, the more desperately the union bureaucracy reaches out. Nowak chose the word “unworkable” to describe the new legislation, then repeated his invitation to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to “take up my offer to get around the table to improve this year’s pay and end the current disputes.”

Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham called on Sunak to “step up to the plate, act as a leader and start negotiating.” The GMB union declared itself “always ready to discuss”. The Royal College of Nursing’s Pat Cullen promised to “meet with ministers,” pleading, “only negotiations on our dispute can avert the planned action this month.” She and Unison Assistant General Secretary Jon Richards pledged to “look closely at what the government releases next week” and to be “examining these proposals and considering how to respond, including any appropriate legal challenge.”

The Enough is Enough campaign, fronted by the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, Communication Workers Union and University and College Union revealed Thursday that a petition launched to protest the proposed minimum services legislation has been backed by more than 100,000 people. But despite the groundswell of opposition to the legislation and to a widely hated government enforcing it, Enough is Enough proposes no mass mobilisation of the working class—including calling immediate strikes—to fight it. It issued a press release declaring only, “Enough is Enough is planning to follow the petition with local meetings, rallies and protests across Britain in the coming weeks.”

The union leaders’ main appeal is for the Tories to rely on them to police and suppress the working class, rather than rely on state repression that will meet determined opposition. What they want is a corporatist arrangement, where sellout deals for workers are struck between employers, the government, and the unions in behind-closed-doors negotiations—with just enough fig leaves proffered to smooth their passage.

This is the policy advocated to the ruling class by Labour. Leader Sir Keir Starmer and Deputy Leader Angela Rayner were as one with the TUC’s Nowak, with Rayner calling the government’s proposals “unworkable and unserious.”

Her comments followed Starmer’s, “I don’t think this legislation is going to work. I am pretty sure they have had an assessment that tells them that it is likely to make a bad situation worse.”

In a speech Thursday setting out Labour’s own right-wing plans for government, Starmer stated the common objective uniting Labour, the unions and the Tories, questioning whether the new laws would “bring an end to industrial disputes.”

The Tories, however, feel they cannot rely on the union bureaucracy to act with sufficient determination against their members without cracking the whip. They intend to make the most of the bureaucracy’s sabotage of the strike wave it currently leads, hoping to demoralise workers by sporadic, ineffectual, and uncoordinated action while galvanising sections of the middle class they hope will become frustrated with the disruption caused by industrial action with no clear plan for victory. This was the strategy pursued by their ideological mentor in the 1980s. They hope that defeats inflicted on the working class in this way will first bring an end to the strike wave and enable them to fight the next general election on a ticket of bringing “order” and stability.

Amazon confirms layoff of 18,000 tech workers

Kevin Reed

The technology monopoly Amazon officially confirmed on Wednesday the layoff of 18,000 employees, significantly intensifying the impact of the US government-instigated recession on tech workers.

In this Thursday April 16, 2020 file photo, The Amazon logo is seen in Douai, northern France. [AP Photo/Michel Spingler]

In an update published on the company news site, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that, including the layoffs announced in November, “we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles.” Jassy said that the “majority of the role eliminations  are in our Amazon Stores and PXT organizations.”

Last March, Amazon announced it was closing all 68 of its physical retail store locations without specifying how many jobs would be impacted. The layoffs in Amazon’s PXT—which stands for People Experience Team—are essentially what are called human resource department employees at most companies.

Jassy wrote that one of the company’s employees had leaked the information about the total number of Amazon layoffs and management decided “to share this news earlier so you can hear the details directly from me.” The employees who are about to lose their jobs will begin to find out from Amazon officially, “starting on January 18,” Jassy added.

In late November and early December, tech media outlets began reporting that Amazon was planning to lay off as many as 20,000 employees, after leaks about the extent of the global e-commerce company’s cost-cutting plans began to emerge. At that time, Jassy confirmed layoffs were in the works but declined to specify the number.

Jassy, who took over as CEO of the world’s second largest corporate employer from billionaire founder Jeff Bezos in July 2021, went on to claim that the mass layoffs were a good thing. He wrote, in corporate-speak that serves to obscure the meaning of what is happening, “These changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure,” and, “I’m also optimistic that we’ll be inventive, resourceful, and scrappy in this time when we’re not hiring expansively and eliminating some roles.”

On the same day of the Amazon announcement, the cloud-based business software company Salesforce announced it would lay off 10 percent of its staff. In a letter to employees, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said, after “thinking a lot about how we came to this moment,” that he had hired too many “leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”

Also on Wednesday, Anjali Sud, the CEO of the video platform Vimeo, said 11 percent of the staff would be laid off in the new year, citing an “uncertain economic environment.” Sud wrote that Vimeo is “entering 2023 with a more focused strategy” and the job cuts enable the company to “achieve our growth and profitability goals in a way that is far less dependent on the broader market.” The video hosting and sharing company with 260 million users went public in May 2021 and its stock market value has fallen steadily ever since, going from $57 a share down to $3.72 today.

The layoffs at Amazon, Salesforce and Vimeo are added to the 238,000 tech workers who lost their jobs in 2022. According to TrueUp’s tech layoff tracker, so far there have been 25 company layoffs impacting 17,815 workers in 2023. On January 5 alone, there were 11 companies that announced layoffs of a total of 1,320 workers.

What none of the corporate statements have acknowledged is the fact that the primary cause of the economic slowdown behind the layoffs is the shift in US Federal Reserve monetary policy, with a series of sharp interest rate increases aimed at driving up unemployment.

The primary objective of this strategy—which is modeled on the policy implemented in the late 1970s and early 1980s during the era of Fed Chairman Paul Volcker—is to use unemployment as a weapon to suppress the growing demand of workers for increases in wages and benefits under conditions of skyrocketing price inflation.

The sharp edge of the Fed’s recession policy is being felt among tech workers because the internet, social media, software and computer technology industries are dependent on investment capital and highly susceptible to changes in interest rates. The transition away from near-zero to 4.25-4.5 percent interest rates, which have increased borrowing costs to the highest levels since 2007, is having a dramatic and immediate impact on tech jobs.

Meanwhile, tech stocks on Wall Street have seen the most dramatic declines over the past year and the financial oligarchy is demanding dramatic cost-cutting measures. In the case of Amazon, for example, the stock value on January 7, 2022 was $162.55 and today it was $83.12, or a decline of nearly 50 percent in the past year, for a drop in the company’s value of $856 billion.

On Monday, pymnts.com reported that the top ten tech stocks—including Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft and Meta (Facebook and Instagram)—lost a total of $4.6 trillion in 2020.