Japan prepares to deploy fighter jets to Australia on a rotational basis

Ben McGrath

Amid the escalation of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and with the United States threatening wider military intervention in the Middle East, the imperialist powers in the Indo-Pacific are pushing ahead with the Washington-led war drive against China. This includes Japan and Australia, which are expanding their military presence throughout the region while Tokyo also remilitarizes.

Japanese Air Self-Defense Force F-35A fighter aircraft. [Photo: ASDF/DEFENSE MINISTRY ]

The Asahi Shimbun reported on October 30, citing Japanese government sources, that Tokyo plans to deploy Air Self-Defense Force (the formal name of Japan’s air force) fighter jets to Australia on a rotational basis as early as the next fiscal year. These include F-35s, F-15s and F-2s, which would be stationed in Australia for several months a year while conducting training drills with the Australian air force.

Tokyo and Canberra are deepening their military ties to line up with Washington’s war preparations against China. During a meeting between Japanese Defense Minister Minoru Kihara and his Australian counterpart Richard Marles in Tokyo on October 19, the two agreed to put into practice a Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) signed between the two countries in January 2022, which went into formal effect in August.

The RAA allows troops from one country to enter the other more easily, facilitating their stationing abroad. According to the ministers, this will allow Japan and Australia to enhance operational cooperation and interoperability between their armed forces. The fighter jet deployment is an outcome of the RAA. Tokyo has similar agreements with the US and the United Kingdom.

Kihara and Marles also agreed to deepen trilateral military collaboration with the US. Washington regards both countries as key components of the war drive against China. While the US is the only country with which Japan has a formal military treaty, Tokyo considers Australia one of its closest partners. Both are members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad), a quasi-military alliance that includes the US and India.

Australia is a key base of operations for the US military, which includes the stationing of 2,500 US Marines in Darwin on a “rotational” basis. US think-tanks have described this base as an important strike force for a future conflict with China. The deployment of Japanese jets to Australia is meant to further solidify this position.

In recent years, Tokyo and Canberra have stepped up their military cooperation, which includes joint military exercises as well as unveiling a new security pact in October 2022. The closer integration between the two is part of the web of alliances that Washington is pushing to surround China. In addition to the Quad, Canberra joined the AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) pact in September 2021, while Tokyo has worked to integrate its own operations with US allies, including South Korea.

In Tokyo, Marles declared: “Our growing strategic alignment contributes to shared security challenges in our region, and is key to promoting an open, secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific.”

The promotion of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” is a euphemism for its opposite. The growing Japanese-Australian alliance means working to encircle China in order to goad Beijing into a military conflict, as the US and NATO did to Russia over Ukraine.

Japan is also using the fighter jet deployment to further its aims of remilitarization and to circumvent Article 9 of its post-World War II constitution that bans maintaining a military or deploying it overseas. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s administration states that basing jets in Australia is allowed under Japan’s “collective self-defense” doctrine, which Tokyo claims permits its Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to go to war in “defense” of “like-minded countries.”

No branch of the SDF has previously been deployed abroad for such training purposes. The deployment is part of Japan’s new National Defense Strategy, one of three documents released last December to further develop Tokyo’s war plans. The other two documents are the National Security Strategy and the Defense Buildup Program. Japan’s only overseas base is located in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, ostensibly to combat piracy in the region.

There is nothing defensive about this whatsoever. In 2014, the Shinzo Abe government carried out a “reinterpretation” of the constitution to justify the “collective self-defense” concept. The following year, Abe’s government and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party ran roughshod over popular anti-war sentiment and mass protests to force through so-called national security legislation to justify this “reinterpretation.”

Tokyo has backed Washington as it has inflamed previously minor territorial disputes in the Indi-Pacific, practically overturned the “One China” policy regarding Taiwan, and sharply increased its military presence in the region to place pressure on Beijing.

Legal experts question the constitutionality of the fighter jet deployment. Koichi Yokota, a professor emeritus from Kyushu University and a constitutional law expert, told the Asahi Shimbun: “Even the right to collective self-defense, which was made possible by the (2015) national security legislation, is highly suspected of being unconstitutional.” He added that the rotational deployment “could expand the scope of the right to collective self-defense without limit, making it clearly unconstitutional.”

This last point identifies the government’s true aim. The dispatch of fighter jets overseas sets a quasi-legal precedent for expanding Tokyo’s military operations overseas without regard for the constitution or for any requirement to amend the constitution, a prospect that faces considerable opposition in the working class.

Tokyo is also working to expand military partnerships with other countries in the region. Prime Minister Kishida visited the Philippines for two days on Friday and Saturday for discussions with President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., before leaving for Malaysia.

Tokyo announced on November 1 that it plans to provide surveillance radars to the Philippines as part of its new Official Security Assistance program, introduced earlier this year. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno stated: “While drastically strengthening Japan’s own defenses, it’s essential to improve the security and deterrent capabilities of like-minded countries.” Kishida and Marcos also discussed their own Reciprocal Access Agreement to allow Japanese troops to be stationed in the Philippines.

Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong is set to visit Japan this month, where Hanoi and Tokyo plan to elevate their relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership. Hanoi and Washington signed a similar agreement in September when US President Joe Biden visited Vietnam.

Gaza: From colony, to open air prison, to killing field—Part Two

Jean Shaoul

In 1993, Israel’s incoming Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, promising a “two-state solution” whereby Arafat and the Palestinian Authority would guarantee Israel’s security and preside over a bifurcated, non-contiguous state, separate from but contained by Israel. This precluded any possibility of an independent sovereign state, let alone any democracy or improvement in the Palestinians’ social and economic conditions.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US president Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, September 13, 1993

Oslo’s economic arrangements left Israel in control of foreign policy, defence, the settlements and the borders and crossings into Israel. It gave Israel jurisdiction over a customs union with the PA that exempted Israeli goods from customs duties and de facto control of Palestinian water and other resources, while giving the Palestinians the right to work in Israel. It held the PA’s purse strings, courtesy of its collection on the PA’s behalf of customs duties and value added tax—equal to about 75 percent of all PA revenue—and regularly withheld the tax revenue.

The newly formed Islamist groups, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), rejected the Oslo Accords and escalated their attacks on Israel. Rabin responded by implementing a closure regime, sealing Israel’s borders, establishing checkpoints and restricting Palestinians’ entry into Israel for work or business, breaking the Oslo agreements. Gaza was subjected to repeated closures. In 1994, even as the Accords concluded, Israel began constructing a perimeter fence around the enclave.

Deprived of their Palestinian workforce, Israel’s bosses turned instead to Asia for cheap labour, with the number immigrant workers reaching 100,000 by 1996, far more than the 70,000 Palestinians at their peak. The Palestinians had lost their limited usefulness to Israel’s employers, but not their land, resources and markets.

Israel’s land grab and settlement building continued apace. By 2000, the number of housing units had increased by 52 percent and three new settlements were officially established, along with over 42 unofficial settlements. The number of settlers rose from 115,700 in 1993 to 176,973 in mid-1999. Israel’s extraction of Palestinian water resources escalated, rendering Gaza’s water undrinkable and causing an acute water crisis in Gaza in 2000.

The Oslo Accords legitimized the increased theft of Palestinian land and resources, and a one-way movement of goods with little or no movement of labour. While Israel prospered during the Oslo years and largely secured the end of the Arab boycott, Palestinian agriculture and its economy collapsed, and unemployment and poverty rose. While Israel’s per capita GDP rose by 14 percent during Oslo years, the Palestinians’ per capita GDP fell by 3.8 percent. The situation in Gaza was even starker. Its share of the Palestinian economy fell from around 37 percent in 1994 to 31 percent in 2000.

The second Intifada and the ghettoization of the Palestinians

The assassination of Rabin in 1995 by a right-wing, religious zealot signaled the refusal of Israel’s ruling elite to make any meaningful concessions to the Palestinians. This and the self-evident fraud of the Oslo process that had brought only appalling poverty and degradation for the Palestinian workers and peasants, amid the rampant corruption and cronyism of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, gave rise to the second Intifada in September 2000. This was as much an uprising against the PLO leadership that had signed up to Oslo as against Israel, with Mahmoud Abbas, one of the negotiators of the Oslo Accords, calling for an end to the Intifada. It paved the way for the rise of Hamas as a political force to fill the vacuum.

It would take six years of massive Israeli violence and brutality to crush the uprising, with Arafat confined in a virtual prison inside the PA’s compound in Ramallah almost until his still unexplained death in 2004.

Faris Odeh, a 14 year-old boy who was killed in early November 2000—during the Second Intifada—throwing a stone at an Israel Defense Forces tank in the Gaza Strip. This photo was taken on October 29, 2000, and Odeh was shot dead 10 days later on November 8, while again throwing stones at Israeli troops. [Photo: Associated Press/Laurent Rebours)]

With the “demographic problem” escalating, all the Zionist parties sought to expand control over the West Bank, escalate settlement construction and promote population transfers and ethnic cleansing.

Ariel Sharon’s government embarked on a policy of separating Israel from the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and the West Bank Palestinians from those in the Gaza Strip. This included imposing a blockade on Gaza, erecting a high wall around the Strip, bombing Gaza’s new international airport just three years after it was opened in 1998, and stifling Gaza’s fishing industry by encircling it, ostensibly to stop arms smuggling.

Announcing in 2003 that Israel would “disengage” from Gaza, Sharon closed down the settlements and withdrew the troops guarding Israel’s assets in the Strip, having gained Washington’s green light for far more important settlement expansion and consolidation in the West Bank. He ordered the construction of the infamous Separation Wall that seized a further 18 kilometres of land inside the West Bank, taking 9 percent of the territory.

President George W. Bush of United States (center) discusses the Middle East with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel (left) and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas [Photo: US gov]

On taking up the PA presidency in 2005, Abbas faithfully imposed Israel’s dictats. After Hamas won a surprise victory in the January 2006 Palestinian elections over his Fatah-dominated PLO, widely seen as the corrupt representative of a handful of multimillionaires and Israel’s proxy security force, Abbas—with Israel’s backing—waged an unsuccessful civil war to unseat Hamas in its Gaza stronghold. The fratricidal struggle marked the definitive end of the Oslo “two-state solution” and more fundamentally of the nationalist perspective on which the Palestinians had based their struggle against Israel.

Following Fatah’s rout, Israel imposed a full-scale economic blockade of Gaza, with the backing of the PA, Egypt, the Arab regimes and the imperialist powers. Israel allowed just 259 commercial trucks to leave Gaza in the first three years, bringing Gaza’s exports, including agricultural products, to a halt. Within a year, employment in Gaza’s manufacturing industries fell from 35,000 to just 860. In 2010, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, no friend of the Palestinians, called Gaza “an open-air prison.”

Gaza’s plight was compounded by Israel’s repeated assaults that destroyed much of its public and social infrastructure and residential and commercial buildings. Its share of the Palestinian economy fell to 22 percent in 2008 and to 18 percent in 2018. Its per capita GDP of just $1,500 is now half that of the mid-1990s. Even before the war started, poverty rates were more than 50 percent, with unemployment at a similar level, leaving 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million population dependent on international aid.

The failure of Palestinian nationalism and the way forward for Palestinian and Jewish workers

The suffering inflicted on the Palestinians, no less than the failure of the Zionist project to secure a “safe haven for the Jews,” flows from the impossibility of securing democratic rights and socio-economic demands on the basis of a nationalist perspective. Fatah’s perspective of establishing a secular, democratic state by means of armed struggle could never provide the basis for the unification of Jewish and Palestinian workers that is required for the dismantling of the Zionist state. With the Israeli bourgeoisie backed to the hilt by the Arab regimes and the imperialist powers, above all the US whose interests it serves, the overthrow of the Zionist state would necessitate the overthrow of the Arab regimes.

Fatah, dominated by the Palestinian bourgeoisie, could never address that. Its aim was to reach a negotiated settlement with imperialism that would secure a state serving the interests of the Palestinian elite within the Middle East. It pledged to “cooperate with all Arab states.” Like all nationalist movements, it prioritized the national struggle over the class struggle, making it impossible to develop a class-based anti-imperialist movement that would cut across ethnic, religious and national division, be it in Jordan, Lebanon or Syria but above all in Israel. Instead, it maneuvered between one or other bourgeois Arab regime, all of whom in turn isolated and abandoned the PLO and the Palestinian people.

Hamas’s action on October 7, launched to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails and the end of the blockade, against vastly superior forces, was tantamount to a suicide mission, with 1,500 Palestinians losing their lives in the attack. But its legitimate resistance to decades of oppression and siege, the longest in modern history, cannot end the terrible suffering of the Palestinian people or halt Israel and US imperialism’s plans for a wider war in the region.

Palestinians look for survivors following Israeli airstrike in Nusseirat refugee camp, Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023. [AP Photo/Doaa AlBaz]

The Biden administration has deployed US war ships and troops to the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East and launched attacks on Iranian-backed targets in Syria, while Israel, in addition to its repeated attacks on Syria, has exchanged fire with Hezbollah in the Israel, Lebanon and Syria border region.

The genocidal war now engulfing Gaza is no less a tragedy for the Israeli working class. The perspective of nationalism has proved to be just as disastrous for the Jews as their Palestinian counterparts. Israel has developed as an apartheid state, discriminating against non-Jews and responsible for decades of brutality against the Palestinians in the occupied territories and neighbouring countries. Israel’s ruling elite, having embraced fascism, has no political perspective other than dictatorship at home, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and savage wars abroad. Israeli workers will be sacrificed in the service of the Israeli ruling elite and its imperialist backers.

Throughout the nine-month protest movement against Netanyahu’s fascist government, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the only way to combat the threat to democratic rights and put an end to the danger of war is to break with all factions of the Zionist bourgeoisie and carry out a struggle to unite the Palestinian and Jewish working class. We warned, “The opposition leaders are no less committed to the expansion of Israel’s borders at the expense of the Palestinians,” a statement confirmed by opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot’s rush to join Netanyahu’s war cabinet.

Demonstrators block the traffic on a highway crossing the city during a protest against Netanyahu's dictatorial measures aimed at the judicial system, in Tel Aviv, Monday, July 24, 2023. [AP Photo/ Oded Balilty]

A state founded on the basis of “the ongoing repression of the Palestinians was always incapable of developing a genuinely democratic society. Its evolution as a garrison state for US imperialism, repeatedly at war with its Arab neighbours and in perpetual war with the Palestinians; pursing an expansionist ‘Greater Israel’ policy; resting ever more firmly on right-wing settler population in the Occupied Territories and US military subventions to offset the destabilizing impact of acute levels of social inequality among the highest in the world, is what has paved the way for the Frankenstein monster of Netanyahu’s government.”

Gaza: From colony, to open air prison, to killing field—Part One

Jean Shaoul

Aerial footage from social media shows the unprecedented scale of the devastation wrought by Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza. Entire neighbourhoods have been obliterated. More than a million people have been forced from their homes. Israel’s sealing of Gaza’s borders and cutting off the supply of food, fuel, electricity and even drinking water has caused unimaginable suffering.

The daily death toll is horrific.

A man sits on the rubble as others wander among debris of buildings that were targeted by Israeli airstrikes in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled)

With its targeting of hospitals, schools and other places of refuge, it is ever more apparent that Israel’s twin policies of carpet bombing and deprivation of all means of existence are aimed at driving the Palestinians out of Gaza and ensuring they never return. This is a pre-planned policy that Israel has for years sought to achieve via the forcible displacement of Gaza’s population into Egypt’s Sinai desert, as leaked documents written by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence and interviews in the Israeli press have revealed. On Sunday, the Hebrew-language publication Mekomit reported, “the document recommends the forced transfer of the population of the Gaza Strip to Sinai permanently, and calls for the international community to be harnessed for the move.”

With the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories now slightly outnumbering Jews, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his fascist government view a war and ethnic cleansing as the only solution to the “demographic problem.” Addressing the nation, he pledged that Israel’s response to the Palestinians’ October 7 attack on Israel would “change the Middle East” and that “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”

This genocidal war against civilians in Gaza is an escalation of policies pursued by the Israeli bourgeoisie for decades, aimed at dispossessing the Palestinian people of their lands, property and homes, about which the ruling elite assumes a collective historical amnesia.

Since capturing the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, including military and political repression, have become ever tighter. Gaza has suffered 16 years of a suffocating blockade by Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Egypt that the United Nations had in 2012 predicted would make the besieged enclave uninhabitable by 2020, only to warn in 2017 that this was happening faster than it had predicted.

These events flow inexorably from Israel’s establishment as the answer to the problem of the European persecution of the Jews—where they would find a safe haven, social justice and equality. The state was in reality based upon the dispossession of another people and maintained through escalating wars, territorial expansion and repression, alongside social inequality at home.

The front page of the Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan memorandum, presented to UK Parliament in December 1922, prior to it coming into force in 1923. [Photo: British government - Archive.org]

Precipitating a war with its Arab neighbours that lasted until 1949, Israel was established in 1948 on 80 percent of the land controlled by the British under the League of Nations-granted Mandate, with King Abdullah of Transjordan, Britain's client state, seizing the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip. This was less than any of the various Zionist factions wanted. But Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, took a pragmatic approach: first establish a Jewish state and change the boundaries later.

The 1967 war and the plundering of Israel’s new Palestinian colonies

The 1967 War provided Israel with the opportunity to change the boundaries, denying its seizure of the West Bank and Gaza constituted an “occupation” of foreign territories since they had been part of Palestine, not Jordan and Egypt.

In June 1967, after a period of escalating conflict with Syria, Israel seized the opportunity presented by Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s grandstanding as the leader of the Arab nation to launch a pre-emptive but long-planned strike against its Arab neighbours, aimed at “improving” and enlarging Israel’s 1949 borders. It seized Syria’s Golan Heights, the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it immediately annexed, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, as well as the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip.

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights during the Six Day War, June 1967 [Photo by Government Press Office (Israel) / CC BY-SA 4.0]

While Israel gave back Egypt’s Sinai after signing the Camp David Accords in 1979 with Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat, and part of Syria’s Golan after the 1973 war, it retained most of the Golan, the West Bank and Gaza—home to around 1.4 million Palestinians, many refugees, having fled or been driven from their homes in what became Israel in 1948.

Israel moved swiftly—with some measures taken even before the six-day war ended—to incorporate its newly conquered territories into its economy. In effect, the Palestinian territories were to constitute a latter-day colony—even after the European powers had been forced to grant formal independence to their colonies in Africa and Asia—with a devastating impact on every aspect of Palestinian life, while benefiting Israel’s commercial elite.

Israel’s Labor government under Levi Eshkol imposed military rule to defend its colonisation policy on the ground and to subjugate the Palestinians. The Palestinians were required to carry identity cards and were subject to restrictions on their freedom of movement with curfews and roadblocks. Resistance was met with collective punishment, house demolitions, forced deportations and detentions without trial.

Israel took control of the financial and monetary institutions, obliging those seeking start-up loans to comply with Israeli regulations and making it virtually impossible for the Palestinians to industrialise and compete with Israeli firms. It replaced the Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian currencies with its own and tightly controlled Palestinian trade.

By 1983, Israel had expropriated over 52 percent of the West Bank, most of its prime agricultural land. On the eve of the 1993 Oslo Accords, these confiscations covered more than three-quarters of the territory. During the first 10 years of the occupation, when the Labor Party held power, the first settlements were built around the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem and in the Jordan Valley to block the expansion of the city’s Palestinian neighbourhoods and “encourage” them to leave. By 1977, there were 4,500 Israelis living in the West Bank and 50,000 in East Jerusalem.

The election of a Likud government headed by Menachem Begin in May 1977 turned settlement building into an ethno-religious project. The settlements were built with a raft of financial incentives in the biblical heartland of the West Bank adjacent to major Palestinian towns and cities. By 1983, the number of settlers in the West Bank had risen to 28,400.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin delivers an address upon his arrival in the US in 1978 for a state visit. Location: Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland.

Restrictions on building and infrastructure development and access to aquifers blocked development, including of agriculture on which very many Palestinians depended, and forced them off the land, only for the authorities to confiscate land left uncultivated. Its former occupants were forced to seek work in Israel, particularly in construction and agriculture, where they formed a cheap labour pool for Israeli employers.

By 1974, one third of the Palestinian workforce was employed in Israel, and an even higher proportion from Gaza. This dependency later allowed Israel to use unemployment as a collective punishment, closing the borders during periods of tension and the Intifadas of 1987-93 and 2000-05. At the same time, rising oil prices in the Gulf states encouraged skilled Palestinian workers to seek work there. In the years after the war, around 700,000 were to leave for good, including more than a few who were expelled.

These policies were aimed at increasing Israel’s control over the Palestinians and undermining support for Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) leader Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), with its commitment to achieving a Palestinian state through armed struggle. In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 War, the West Bank’s economy grew at 15 percent a year and Gaza’s at 11 percent, as they recovered to their pre-war levels. But at the same time, industry’s share of the Palestinian GDP fell from 9 percent in 1968 to 7 percent in 1987.

Rally for the anniversary of Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) in Gaza City [Photo by Fars Media Corporation / CC BY 4.0]

According to the UN, the loss of revenue to the Palestinian economy from 1970 to 1987 was $6-11 billion, or 13 percent of GDP. These changes rapidly transformed Palestinian territories from a diversified society of peasants, small businessmen and professionals into a working class and a reserve army of labour for Israeli employers, subject to the economic and political dictates of Israeli capital.

Broader international developments also took their toll. Following the stock market crash on 1987-88, falling oil prices, fewer work opportunities in the Gulf, the deflationary policies pursued in the United States, the mounting costs of the occupation and the resultant budget and trade deficits, were to lead to a major economic crisis in Israel, as inflation soared. For the Palestinians, this meant a sharp fall in the value of their wages, ever deteriorating working conditions—already far below those of their Israeli counterparts—fewer job opportunities and lower budgetary support. Settlements built on confiscated Palestinian land and land seized to build settler-only roads and secure the settlements expanded, further undermining the Palestinian economy.

The economic downturn was one of the factors—along with anger over Israel’s 20-year-long military occupation and its war on the Palestinians and their allies in Lebanon—that led to the outbreak of the first Intifada (uprising) in 1987. It erupted largely outside the control of the PLO, whose leadership was then based in Tunis after being driven out of Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon in 1982 and abandoned by the Arab regimes.

These conditions, along with the broader turn to Islamist politics in the Arab world following the collapse of Nasser’s pan-Arabism, benefitted the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), a bourgeois clerical group that Israel at first sponsored and encouraged in opposition to Fatah. But Hamas, with its religious fundamentalism, offered only a more extreme form of nationalism, articulating the interests of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, not those of workers and peasants.

Oslo tightens the noose

The Intifada began on December 1987 in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp after an Israeli Defence Forces truck crashed into a civilian car, killing four Palestinian workers, including three from the camp. It was to take Israel six years to suppress the uprising at a cost of more than 1,000 Palestinian lives, 175,000 arrests and 2,000 homes demolished. The conflict devastated the Palestinian economy, with the standard of living falling by a massive 30-40 percent.

Barricades during the First Intifada [Photo by Abarrategi / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The uprising convinced Israel’s Labor party leaders, out of power since 1977, of the need to reach some sort of accommodation with PLO leader Arafat and Israel’s Arab neighbours. The establishment of a Palestinian statelet would, they believed, help to ensure Israel’s stability and development and maintain its Jewish majority. Arafat and a Palestinian Authority (PA) would take over Israel’s role of controlling the Palestinian masses, in return for the PLO’s acceptance as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. This autonomy would, Israel’s rulers hoped, ensure continued economic dependency, while also opening new markets than Israel’s garrison state could ever deliver and potentially transforming it into a regional economic power.

UK COVID Inquiry reveals how Johnson government planned mass murder

Robert Stevens

The official UK public inquiry has lifted the veil on discussions within Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government that were intent on a policy of mass infection and the death of hundreds of thousands, before being forced to retreat from the “herd immunity” strategy out of fear of the explosive response in the working class. Johnson’s own belief was that Covid was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people.”

During Tuesday’s hearing, Lee Cain, then Downing Street’s Director of Communications, was questioned on evidence made available in the notebooks of Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic. In one entry, in December 2020 dealing with Johnson’s opposition to impose a further lockdown, Vallance wrote, “He [Johnson] says his [Conservative] party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them’.”

A diary entry from five months earlier, in August 2020, reports that Johnson favoured “older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life”.

Johnson went on national TV to publicly promote herd immunity on March 5, 2020, declaring on the This Morning show, “One of the theories is, that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures.”

The government was forced to change course just 18 days later, on March 23, 2020, and impose a national lockdown amid massive public anger at the growing numbers of COVID deaths and fears that the National Health Service (NHS) would collapse. But less than two months after the lockdown was imposed, on May 10, 2020, Johnson announced that restrictions would start to be lifted. Imran Shafi, a former private secretary to Johnson attributes to him the statement, made in March 2020, that there are “Large ppl [large numbers of people] who will die, why are we destroying economy for people who will die anyway soon?”

Johnson is a political criminal who should be put on trial for what he did during the COVID pandemic. But his position was dominant not only within his government but among its leading advisers, including Vallance, and England’s chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty, and the top civil servants involved.

Another entry in Vallance’s diary, written after a Cabinet Meeting in Downing Street in December 2020, notes: “Chief whip [Mark Spencer] says ‘I think we should let the old people get it and protect others’.”

Vallance himself said at a press conference alongside Johnson on March 12, 2020, “It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it and it’s also not desirable because you want some immunity in the population to protect ourselves in the future.”

Sir Christopher Wormald, who remains the most senior civil servant in the Department of Health and Social Care, in early 2020 felt it his responsibility to stiffen Johnson’s resolve in pursuing herd immunity. Then Civil Service head Mark Sedwill sent a message March 12 to Wormald, “I don't think PM [prime minister] & Co have internalised yet the distinction between minimising mortality and not trying to stop most people getting it.” Wormald replied, “Indeed presumably like chickenpox we want people to get it…”

To this roll call of shame must be added the Labour Party, which under Jeremy Corbyn and his Blairite successor, Sir Keir Starmer, pledged only “constructive” opposition to the government. Corbyn admitted that he was briefed on the government’s herd immunity strategy in early 2020 but said nothing publicly until August.

Similar discussions would have taken place in the United States, Germany, France and in government circles around the world. In every country measures to contain the pandemic were opposed by a ruling class that prioritises profits over lives.

The only reason why so much is known of official criminality during the pandemic in the UK is that Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings became a whistleblower. Much of what is known about this homicidal policy would never have come to light had Cummings and his ally Cains not been sacked from government by Johnson in late 2020. A right-wing fanatic who led Johnson’s successful Brexit campaign to leave the European Union, Cummings responded by going public amid bitter factional infighting within the government.

He was involved in every major discussion on the pandemic response. Among his revelations was the detailed testimony he gave before Parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee in May 2021. This included showing a series of slides, and pictures of whiteboards in Downing Street, featuring a Public Health England exercise outlining scenarios based on up to 800,000 people dying of COVID-19.

The architects of social murder in Downing Street worked on a Plan B, assuming over a quarter a million would die, in Cummings’ words by “choking to death,” after being forced to discard this Plan A.

The evidence uncovered by the UK inquiry has confirmed every word written by the World Socialist Web Site on the actual policy of mass death represented by anodyne appeals for a strategy of “herd immunity”.

A March 24, 2020 Perspective, “Message from big business on coronavirus pandemic: Save profits, not lives”, stated:

“From the beginning, the ruling class has viewed the pandemic not as an issue of public health, but as a potential impediment to generating profit. Its sole concern has been how the crisis will impact its bottom line. Now that it has secured a massive government bailout, the ruling class wants to ensure that business returns to normal.

“This form of socially sanctioned euthanasia has a distinctly fascistic character, not dissimilar to the argument by the Nazis that the disabled were “undesirable” elements who should be eliminated. In the face of the greatest crisis facing American capitalism, the ruling class is revealing itself to be not just parasitic, but homicidal.”

The mass deaths of the elderly, as Johnson makes clear, was considered a positive economic boon serving to reduce pension obligations and other social welfare spending. Telegraph columnist Jeremy Warner wrote at the pandemic’s outset, “Not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the Covid-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.”

The human cost of the refusal to implement the measures necessary to curb and eventually eliminate the pandemic is staggering. Britain has to date seen over a quarter of a million deaths. Over 92 percent were aged over 60. Less than a year after the first lockdown was put in place, the Office for Budget Responsibility reported that the amount the government would have to spend on state pensions was to fall by £1.5 billion by 2022.

The pandemic was a turning point in the decay of the world imperialism as the ruling class everywhere responded to a staggering level of indifference to mass deaths and human suffering. The pandemic has cost over 27 million lives globally and left many millions more suffering the debilitating impact of Long COVID.

After more than two decades on the decline, US infant death rate rose significantly in 2022

Benjamin Mateus

On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released their provisional report on infant mortality in the United States for 2022. They noted that the rates of infant mortality—covering a period from birth to one year of age—had significantly increased by 3 percent from the preceding year, the first such significant rise in more than two decades. This rise comes as the number of births in the US had only increased by 0.09 percent from 2021 (3,664,292) to 2022 (3,667,758).

A nurse makes a video of a newborn baby in the maternity ward to send to the parents, as visiting hours are restricted because of the coronavirus pandemic at Frimley Park Hospital, in Camberley, England, May 22, 2020. [AP Photo/Steve Parsons/Pool via AP]

This stark finding is only the latest in a series of statistics that confirm the social illnesses brought on by capitalism and rising inequality are taking a lethal toll on the working class in the US, including among those who have barely started their life.

In absolute terms, the rate increased from 5.44 infant deaths for every 1,000 births to 5.6. In total 20,538 infants died in 2022 up from 19,928 in 2021 or 610 more than the previous year, nationwide. The year-to-year increase was also noted for the provisional neonatal mortality rates—infant deaths less than 28 days (3.49 to 3.58 per 1,000; 3 percent higher)—and post neonatal mortality rates—infant deaths from 28 days to 364 days (1.95 to 2.02 per 1,000; 4 percent higher). 

Although news media like the New York Times usually prefer to spin these figures along racial lines—pointing in particular to developments related to African Americans as proof of supposed systemic racism as the root of all social ills—the infant mortality rates had increased significantly only for American Indian/Alaska Natives and whites.

For the other sections, the changes were not statistically significant although mortality rates for infants of black mothers remains the highest in the nation and has much to do with the socioeconomic dynamics and the geographic areas with dwindling quality and quantity of services available where mothers live.

Deaths had increased most in four states – Georgia (+116), Iowa (+43), Missouri (+61), and Texas (+251). Only Nevada (-45) saw a significant decline.

The provisional infant mortality rate impacted women ages 25 to 29. However, for women under 20 years of age, infant mortality rates are the highest with almost 10 deaths per 1,000 births. The most pronounced death rates were for preterm deliveries and those that were male. The leading cause of infant deaths were due to maternal complications and bacterial sepsis of the newborn. 

That these two factors, but by no means the only ones, are significantly contributing to infant mortality rates link the baby’s health to that of its mother. Congenital malformations, sudden unexpected infant death and higher unintended injuries are more pronounced among those giving birth in rural regions.

This speaks volumes to the inadequacy of prenatal care for many women and their vulnerability after delivery, when support from healthcare providers is paramount in ensuring the mother and baby have access to health, nutritious food, and safe and clean-living environment. Access to all of these is directly linked to poverty and rurality—socioeconomic factors that create dangerous conditions affecting maternal and infant health. 

Report after report has underscored the relationship between poverty and the decreasing access to maternity care across the country. In 2022, almost seven million women of childbearing age and a half-million babies had limited or no access to care. The March of Dimes estimated that 36 percent of US counties, mostly in the Midwest and South, are considered maternity care deserts where there are either no obstetric hospitals or obstetric providers.

A 2019 study published in the journal BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, found that among those living in high poverty counties, the neonatal mortality was 38 percent higher and the post neonatal rate 47 percent higher for term infants, compared to low poverty counties.

The report notes, “Two-thirds of term births occurred among mothers residing in high poverty counties. High poverty counties saw the highest births in non-metropolitan areas, the highest teen pregnancy rates and the highest birth rates to mothers with high school education or less. Mothers residing in high poverty counties were less likely to be married and more likely to be [non-Hispanic]-black or Hispanic compared to those residing in medium or low poverty counties.” 

As the authors state, these women are less likely to have any prenatal care, let alone access to care in the late stages of their pregnancy when undiagnosed medical conditions can cause serious complications for their gestation. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and the impoverishment of the population caused by the ruling elites’ response to the ongoing health crisis has only further exacerbated these grim statistics that can only be explained by the rise in social inequity.

Stacey D. Stewart, the president and CEO of March of Dimes noted in a press release, “With an average of two women dying every day from complications of pregnancy and childbirth and two babies dying every hour, our country is facing a unique and critical moment as the infant and maternal health crisis continues intensifying. With hospital closures, inflation, and COVID-19 limiting access to care, the compounding issues of our time are bearing down on families, forcing them to extend themselves in new ways to find care they need and ways to afford it.”

Arjumand Siddiqi, professor of population health at the University of Toronto, told the Wall Street Journal, “The US is falling behind on a basic indicator of how well societies treat people. In a country as well-resourced as the US, with as much medical technology and so on, we shouldn’t have babies dying in the first year of life. That should be super rare, and it’s not.”

The social implications of the bond market turmoil

Nick Beams

The headline financial news this week, announced on Wednesday afternoon, was the US Federal Reserve decision to maintain interest rates on hold for the second meeting in a row. But a more significant decision came that morning with the move by the US Treasury to slow the pace and change the composition of its issuance of new debt to be raised on financial markets.

Specialist Dilip Patel works at his post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023. Wall Street is sinking sharply as it focuses on the downside of a surprisingly strong job market. [AP Photo/Richard Drew]

The US Treasury decision did not make it as a top news story, but it was closely followed in financial circles because it related to the all-important question of liquidity—that is, the ability of financial markets to continue financing the ever-growing US government debt without disturbance and ructions.

It is more than three years on, but the experience of March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Treasury market froze for several days because there were no buyers for US government debt, is still fresh in memories in leading financial circles. The US Federal Reserve halted the crisis with a massive intervention by buying up bonds and other financial assets to the tune of around $4 trillion.

The immediate crisis was resolved but the underlying issue was not. Since then, liquidity in the $25 trillion US Treasury market has been an ongoing issue.

To understand it, an analogy may be useful. If a rock is dropped in a deep pool of water, then its entry creates little disturbance—a few ripples across the surface. But if the pool is shallow then the entry of the rock causes a major splash and waves.

If the Treasury market is liquid then the issuing of new debt, even in large amounts, has little effect. That was the situation in the “normal” times of the past. Those times have gone. The market is now illiquid and so an increase in issuance has a major effect.

That was seen in August when the US Treasury announced a large-scale issuance of debt, especially at the long end of the market—10-year and 30-year bonds—to finance the burgeoning US budget deficit.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, economics commentator Stephen Bartholomeusz described what happened.

“Investors were spooked by the sheer scale of the supply of bonds, particularly longer-dated bonds, scheduled to hit the market when the price-sensitive private sector investors are the primary source of demand, given that the Fed is allowing the securities it acquired with its quantitative easing program in response to the pandemic to mature without reinvestment and other central banks are largely absent as buyers.”

That August decision set off a wave of bond selling which sent the yield on the 10-year bonds from around 4 percent to as high as 5 percent at some points. (Yields and bond prices have an inverse relation.) Such a movement, where shifts in yields are normally a fraction of a percentage point, was extraordinary.

Bartholomeusz noted: “It was a bond market rout—one that inflicted losses of multi-billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars for investors in the $25 trillion market.” It was triggered by the “amount of long-term debt the market was being asked to absorb as a result of the $1.7 trillion US budget deficit.”

Fearing a repeat, on Wednesday the US Treasury modified the profile of its debt issuance for the last quarter, saying it would slow the pace of 10-year and 30-year bond issues. In August, it said it would raise the auction size of 10-year bonds by $3 billion a month and that of 30-year bonds by $2 billion a month. In the latest decision, the increases were cut to $2 billion and $1 billion respectively, while increasing issuance of two- and five-year bonds.

Overall, the Treasury said in the quarterly refunding auctions next week it would sell $112 billion worth of debt, down from $114 billion in the previous quarter.

The Treasury move, as well as the Fed decision not to lift interest rates, has calmed the bond market, at least temporarily. There was something of a rally on Thursday, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury moving down by 0.3 percentage points in two days.

But such a shift, large by historical standards, is itself a cause for concern because it is an expression of the volatility in the most important financial market for the US and the global financial system.

Moreover, there is a negative feedback loop at work. Interest rates are being driven up because of increased government spending, especially on the military, while the government must make higher interest payments on its debt.

The US federal deficit increased by $320 billion to $1.7 trillion in the year to September. Half of this rise was due to rising interest costs. They will increase further in the future.

The worsening situation in government finances extends around the world and is going to lead to deep attacks on the working class.

Writing in the Financial Times last weekend, the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Gita Gopinath, said there had been a focus on monetary policy after the pandemic but the recent turbulence in the bond markets meant the winds were shifting and calling for a “renewed focus on fiscal policy.”

She noted the increase in government spending over current outlays, not least because of rising military outlays, could surpass 7 percent of gross domestic product ($6 trillion) in advanced economies and more than 8 percent of GDP ($5.3 trillion) in emerging market and developing economies by 2030. Gopinath added that “by any scale, these numbers are enormous.”

Gopinath said that with record high debt levels, higher for longer interest rates and the weakest growth prospects in two decades, “restraint” was required, even for reserve currency issuers, above all the US.

The US has some of the biggest deficits in relation to GDP, expected to be 8 percent this year. Interest payments as a percentage of revenue are set to rise from 8 percent of revenues ($486 billion) in 2019 to 12 percent by 2028 ($1.27 trillion).

As one of the voices of finance capital, the IMF has made clear where the response to the crisis must be directed. “For several advanced economies with ageing populations, entitlement reforms are inescapable,” Gopinath insisted.

It will not just be Social Security in the US. Social services across the board, such as health, education and other facilities for life in modern society, are in the firing line. That is, the working class must be made to pay for the deepening crisis of the financial system, exacerbated by the eruption of militarism.