World’s media conceal the brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails

Jean Shaoul

Amid their rejoicing over the release of some of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, the international and Israeli media have for the most part remained silent over the Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel and the appalling conditions of their arrest and detention.

To do otherwise would confirm that Israel is the aggressor in this one-sided conflict and that its mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Gaza builds on a record of unparalleled brutality against the Palestinians of a fascistic character.

The demand for the release of Palestinian prisoners was central to the al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7. Almost every Palestinian family in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has had a relative imprisoned by Israel. Their only crime was resisting an illegal occupation maintained through savage repression.

Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, center is supported by her mother after she was released from prison by Israel, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, early Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023. [AP Photo/Nasser Nasser]

As of Thursday evening, Israel had released 240 Palestinian prisoners in return for 99 civilian hostages, including 24 foreign nationals, bringing to 104 the number of civilians released (a further five had been freed earlier). A four-day truce was extended Monday for two days, and again Thursday for a further day.

Of the Palestinians released, all but a handful are women and children who have been kept in indefinitely renewable administrative detention, without charge, due process or trial, in breach of their human rights. Many were held in prisons inside Israel, not in the occupied West Bank, a war crime under the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute and in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Those released included:

• 22-year-old Ahed Tamimi, whose 2017 confrontation with Israeli soldiers made her a symbol of Palestinian resistance. Israel’s national security minister, the fascist Itamar Ben-Gvir, had personally ordered her arrest over a social media post that her family denies she had anything to do with. She had been held for three weeks in an Israeli prison, without charge or trial, under administrative detention order.
• Fatima Shahin had spent seven months in prison. Initially accused of attempting to murder an Israeli, she was never charged with any crime. She said she was denied access to a lawyer while in detention and to her family while she recovered from life-changing injuries caused by her arrest. She told CNN, “They accused me of carrying out a stabbing. It’s not true. They opened fire [at] me. I was hit in the spine with two bullets… I have partial paralysis. I cannot feel my legs or stand up.”
• 24-year-old Marah Bakeer was shot in 2015 twelve times by Israeli soldiers who alleged she had stabbed a soldier, an accusation she denied. She was left with permanent injuries and sentenced to eight years. She was due to be released in four months’ time.
• Shorouk Dwayatt was sentenced to 16 years for stabbing an Israeli and attempting to stab another in East Jerusalem in 2015 after one of the men accosted her and tried to pull off her headscarf before shooting her.
• 59-year-old Hanan Saleh al-Bargouthi, the oldest female prisoner to be released, was in indefinite Israeli custody without any charge.

The freed are on a list of 300 Palestinians published by Israel. All are branded “terrorists” when fewer than a quarter have been convicted of any crime and the vast majority are held on remand pending trial. The overwhelming majority are under 18, mostly teenage boys, although there is one teenage girl and 32 women. Five are as young as 14. Most are relatively new prisoners arrested in the last year or two.

As crowds went to Ofer prison near Ramallah in the West Bank to welcome the prisoners, the Israeli military warned them to keep back and then launched tear-gas canisters into the crowd. At the Beituniya checkpoint near Ramallah, where the Israeli authorities released a group of 24 women and 15 teenage boys, soldiers fired rubber bullets and tear gas.

Ben-Gvir ordered a crackdown on celebrations. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.”

Apprehension stalks the celebrations, with many fearful of rearrest. Following the 2011 Israel-Hamas agreement to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1,027 prisoners, many were later rearrested and had their sentences reinstated.

B’tselem, the human rights group, says that in September, Israel was holding 4,764 Palestinians in prison on “security” grounds, including 176 from the Gaza Strip. Of these, 2,222 were serving a prison sentence; 1,117 had not yet been convicted in court; 1,310 were being held under administrative detention; and 115 were simply listed as “detainees.”

Israel was holding a further 932 Palestinians, eight from the Gaza Strip, for being in Israel illegally. Of these, 534 were serving a sentence while 398 were listed as “detainees.”

Many of these youths are seized in mass arrest operations in the dead of night, blindfolded and cuffed, abused and manipulated to confess to crimes they did not commit. Some are as young as 10. One child was so young his hands were too small for handcuffing, while another, the youngest, was too small for the prison uniforms.

In 2012, British legal experts concluded that the conditions the Palestinian children are subjected to amount to torture. In 2013, the United Nations agency for children UNICEF deplored “the ill treatment of children who come in contact with the military detention system, [which] appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” Earlier this year, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe called for an end to “all forms of physical or psychological abuse of children during arrest, transit and waiting periods, and during interrogations.”

After October 7, the number of Palestinians in Israeli jails soared to more than 10,000 as part of Israel’s campaign of intimidation and terror aimed at driving the Palestinians out of the West Bank. The security forces swept up around 4,000 Palestinian labourers from Gaza with permits to work in Israel. They were detained in degrading and inhuman conditions for several weeks before being released back into Gaza to face bombardment, the loss of their families and homes and enforced shortages of food, fuel, electricity, water and sanitation.

Israel has also arrested 3,290 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Mostly detained in dawn raids on their homes for social media posts, the majority are being held in administrative detention. The “humanitarian pause” that started on Friday has seen no letup in the arrests, with Israel detaining nearly as many Palestinians as were released.

Prisons are full to overflowing and many must sleep on the floor without mattresses. Conditions have declined still further after October 7. Videos circulating on social media show Israeli soldiers beating, stepping on, abusing and humiliating Palestinian prisoners who are blindfolded, cuffed and stripped partially or entirely.

According to legal rights groups, the prison authorities also halted medical care for at least a week. They have stopped family and lawyer visits; slashed exercise time in the yard to less than an hour a day; restricted access to electricity and hot water; shut down the canteen where prisoners could buy basic supplies; conducted cell searches and removed electrical devices. They have suspended visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to the prisons where members of Hamas’ elite Nukhba force are being held.

Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to Israeli military courts and are routinely denied counsel. They face language barriers and poor translations, while mistreatment, abuse and even torture during detention ensure that most prisoners plead guilty under a plea bargain, leading to a conviction rate of 95 to 99 percent. Appeals are rarely allowed. This is in stark contrast to the 500,000 Jewish settlers who live in their midst, who are free to attack the homes and property of Palestinians and even murder them.

Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said earlier this month, “Administrative detention is one of the key tools through which Israel has enforced its system of apartheid against Palestinians… Testimonies and video evidence also point to numerous incidents of torture and other ill-treatment by Israeli forces including severe beatings and deliberate humiliation of Palestinians who are detained in dire conditions.”

In 2012, a European parliamentary report described administrative detention as a tactic employed “principally to constrain Palestinian political activism.” In 2020, the then UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories Michael Lynk called on Israel to abolish the practice.

Israel can get away with this because it enjoys the support of all the imperialist powers that are now themselves slashing democratic rights and freedom of speech to suppress opposition to their domestic and foreign policies.

Henry Kissinger and the crimes of American imperialism

Patrick Martin

I met Murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim
Seven bloodhounds followed him.
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy

A commentary in the liberal Jewish publication Forward suggests that these lines from Shelley, directed against Lord Castlereagh, the reactionary British foreign minister of his time, would apply equally well to Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, who turned 100 years old on Friday, May 27.

It is a more than justified comparison of two enemies of human freedom and social revolution. Castlereagh defended the British Empire and sought to suppress revolution in its colonies, especially Ireland, and destroy the legacy and influence of the French Revolution.

Kissinger has devoted his long life to the defense of American imperialism and the destruction of the legacy and influence of the Russian Revolution. He may have been born a German Jew and escaped the Holocaust when his family fled to America, but he allied himself with the very forces that had sponsored and cheered on Hitler, and which encouraged Hitler’s imitators in fascist and authoritarian regimes around the world.

As Kissinger once remarked—with the cynicism that became a trademark and passed for “wit” among his admirers in bourgeois political and media circles—“If it had not been for the accident of my birth, I would have been an antisemite.”

At a meeting of top Turkish and US officials in Ankara in 1975, after Kissinger suggested that the Nixon administration could arrange to have allies provide critical military supplies to Turkey after a congressional vote banned US aid, the US ambassador blurted out, “That is illegal.” 

Kissinger replied, “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [Laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”

The secret transcript of this meeting was only made available by WikiLeaks in 2011, 36 years later.

Kissinger’s crimes

Kissinger was directly in charge of US foreign policy as national security adviser and then as secretary of state from 1969 to 1976, a critical period of worldwide revolutionary upsurge of the working class and oppressed peoples. In every country where American imperialism intervened, either with military force or political subversion or propping up bloodstained dictatorships, he played a sinister role.

At least one million people died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the period of Kissinger’s direction of American policy, most of them killed by US bombs, incinerated by US napalm or poisoned by US chemicals like Agent Orange. Many were simply massacred by American troops even as Nixon and Kissinger voiced the usual lies about America defending “freedom” and “democracy” against communism.

The Nixon administration proclaimed a policy of “Vietnamization” and began the long-drawn-out process of negotiations with North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. Throughout these seven years, American soldiers, nearly all draftees from the working class, continued to die, adding another 30,000 to the death toll.

The war crimes in Southeast Asia are innumerable, but the most important include the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the 1970 invasion of Cambodia that set the stage for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and the “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong, the major urban centers of North Vietnam.

In 1973, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Kissinger and the chief North Vietnamese negotiator at the Paris talks, Le Duc Tho. Kissinger did not go to Norway to collect his award, fearful of the likely mass protests. Le Duc Tho refused his award altogether.

In Latin America, Kissinger oversaw a wave of military coups and the imposition of dictatorships, most notably in Chile in September 1973, when Augusto Pinochet launched his CIA-backed military overthrow of the reformist regime of Salvador Allende. It ended in the death of Allende and the torture and murder of tens of thousands of Chilean workers and political activists.

It was about Chile that Kissinger made one his most notorious and oft-quoted remarks, telling a meeting of the top secret 40 Committee before the 1970 Chilean elections, won by Allende, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” He wrote later of the bloody 1973 coup, “The Chilean military had saved Chile from a totalitarian regime and the United States from an enemy.”

A tank in support of Gen. Augusto Pinochet approaches the government palace during the 1973 coup in Chile. [Photo by @goodvibes11111 / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Similar coups followed in Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, and these dictators joined forces with military regimes of longer standing in Brazil and Paraguay to mount Operation Condor, a joint venture of the region’s secret police and the American CIA to hunt down and kill revolutionary exiles and leftists of all kinds.

There were equally reactionary events in other parts of the world in which Kissinger is implicated: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975; the military slaughter in Bangladesh in 1971; US support and aid for dictatorial regimes in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Iran; US support for the ultra-right insurgencies against nationalist regimes in Angola and Mozambique; US backing for the Canberra Coup, which ousted the elected Labor Party government of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

In the Middle East, Kissinger helped stave off the military defeat of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, rushing huge volumes of military equipment to the Zionist state, and then bribed the Egyptian regime of Anwar Sadat to change sides in the Cold War and become an American rather than a Soviet client.

Kissinger’s legacy

In world geopolitics, Kissinger is most identified with the policy of taking advantage of the split between the Soviet Union and China, both under Stalinist rule, as these bureaucratic police states vied with each other for global influence, a reactionary nationalist conflict that even erupted into military clashes along the border between Chinese Manchuria and the Soviet Far East.

The central thrust of Kissinger’s simultaneous embrace of détente with Moscow and the ending of the decades-long US policy of non-recognition of Beijing was to enlist the aid of the Stalinists against revolutionary struggles in Southeast Asia and throughout the world. It is this policy which is the most celebrated in US imperialist circles and accounts for Kissinger’s ability to exert continued influence decades after he left office.

When the Nixon-Ford administration ended its eight years in office and Democrat Jimmy Carter entered the White House, he publicly pledged to make the defense of “human rights” the basis of US foreign policy. This was aimed at counteracting the stench of Kissinger’s crimes. However, nothing changed but the packaging. The crimes of American imperialism were now embellished with cynical references to the “humanitarian” concerns supposedly determining the actions of the CIA, Pentagon and State Department.

In later years, Kissinger’s accomplices in the Nixon-Ford administration constituted a who’s who of American war criminals. While Kissinger was secretary of state, George H. W. Bush, the future president, was CIA director. Donald Rumsfeld, White House chief of staff and then secretary of defense, returned to the Pentagon in 2001, where he oversaw US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Richard Cheney succeeded Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff, and in 2001 was vice president to George W. Bush and the principal warmonger in that administration.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to head a bipartisan commission to investigate, with a Democratic vice chair, former Senator George Mitchell. The congressional Democrats approved this arrangement, but public protests threatened to discredit the commission even before it could begin, and Kissinger had to step down.

As the WSWS noted at the time, “Selecting Kissinger to head this body amounts to an admission that the US government has much to hide in relation to September 11, and that the Bush administration, working in tandem with the congressional Democrats and the media, is determined to bury the truth.”

We also pointed out the growing notoriety of Kissinger internationally:

Kissinger can no longer travel freely in Europe and Latin America. He had to cancel a trip to Brazil last year because of human rights protests. He was sought for questioning by French police during a visit to Paris, in a case involving a French citizen murdered by the US-backed military dictatorship in Chile. He is the subject of lawsuits in Chile and the US for his role in the assassination of General Rene Schneider, the Chilean military commander whose elimination paved the way for the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Today this opprobrium is expressed on the internet, as the Washington Post noted in an article Sunday in its Style section, which cited the widespread social media preparation to celebrate Kissinger’s inevitable death and the overwhelming disgust and hatred for his crimes among millions of young people who were not even born when he headed the State Department.

For the most part, the media has been nervous about commenting on Kissinger’s 100 years, fearing the implications of any, even sanitized, review of his record. In a noteworthy and particularly guilty silence, the New York Times has not yet published an article on the subject.

It is a demonstration of how far to the right American foreign policy has moved that in recent years, Kissinger has been cited occasionally as a “moderate” critic of undue American aggressiveness, particularly in relation to China. (He is a fervent supporter of the war in Ukraine.) In his 2012 volume, On China, he warned that the US was adopting the same policy towards China as imperial Britain toward rising Germany in the period leading up to World War I, which made open military conflict inevitable.

There is no doubt, however, of the deeply reactionary character of his politics. In 1985, he publicly supported Ronald Reagan’s visit to a Waffen-SS military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where the US president laid a wreath.

In 1973, he made a revealing remark to Richard Nixon, after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who pressed him on the question of permitting Soviet Jews to leave the USSR (with the hope they would settle in Israel). The tape, made public only in 2010, has Kissinger declaring, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

A much earlier work, Necessity for Choice, published in 1961 when he was an academic “expert” on foreign policy at Harvard, sums up his world view: “No more urgent task confronts the free world than to separate itself from nostalgia from the period of its invulnerability and to face the stark reality of a revolutionary period.”

It is this hatred and fear of revolution and determination to crush it that underlies every crime with which the centenarian Kissinger—and the myriad imperialist politicians who consulted him, from John F. Kennedy to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—is identified.

While Kissinger’s criminality was of a particularly overt character, it set a standard for ruthlessness which has continued and indeed deepened in the subsequent development of American imperialism. It is in some way fitting that his 100th year on earth coincides with an escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia that is bringing mankind to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

As for the present day representatives of American imperialism, they confront the “stark reality of a revolutionary period” ill equipped to do anything to contain it.

Incoming New Zealand government prepares sweeping attack on public education

John Braddock

On November 27, New Zealand’s conservative National Party leader Christopher Luxon was sworn in as prime minister after securing a coalition deal with two widely despised far-right parties, ACT and New Zealand First.

David Seymour and Christopher Luxon [Photo: ACT NZ, Finnish Government]

The coalition agreement brings into office the country’s most right-wing government in decades. Its task will be to make drastic cuts to public services and ramp up the exploitation of the working class while increasing military spending to prepare the country to join imperialist wars.

None of the parties has any significant popular support. National only got 38 percent of the votes, while ACT received 8.6 percent and NZ First just 6 percent. Amid widespread alienation from the entire parliamentary set-up, roughly one million eligible adults—one quarter—did not vote for anyone.

In line with the turn by ruling elites around the globe which are bringing far-right and fascistic formations into official politics, ACT and NZ First wield far more power than their paltry electoral support justifies. NZ First leader Winston Peters and ACT’s David Seymour share the position of deputy prime minister. Peters takes the crucial foreign affairs portfolio while Seymour becomes minister for regulation and associate minister of education, finance and health.

Seymour’s positions overseeing key sections of the public sector are a sharp warning to the entire working class. ACT is a “libertarian” big business mouthpiece that has long campaigned for reduced taxes, “smaller government,” less “red tape” and minimal employment protections.

In education, the government has adopted ACT’s policy of reintroducing privately-run, publicly funded Charter schools and NZ First’s reactionary policy of ending sex and gender education. Its so-called “back to basics” approach includes mandated teaching hours for reading, writing and maths, regular testing in Years 3 to 8, and a ban on students using mobile phones.

The promotion of Charter schools foreshadows an escalating privatisation agenda. Charter schools are free to operate outside the national system, setting their own curriculum, hours, staff requirements and pay rates.

Modelled on “for profit” schools in the United States, Charter Schools were first introduced in New Zealand in 2014 as part of ACT’s confidence and supply agreement with the then National Party government.

The original schools, numbering 12 by 2019, were deemed a “trial,” but warning signs quickly emerged. Among the first established was Vanguard Military Academy, based in north Auckland, operating on strict military-style discipline preparing students for the armed forces. It established a model for similar military and police “academies” in some 27 schools across the public system.

Māori entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to set up racially separatist schools under the rubric of education provided “by Māori for Māori.” These were promoted on the reactionary basis that the public system had “failed” Māori students in particular who are broadly disadvantaged by the capitalist class system.

In 2015 a Charter school at rural Whangaruru, which received a $1.6 million establishment grant from the government mostly used to buy a farm, was found to have “dysfunctional management” and was closed down by the Ministry of Education. Charter schools in the city of Whangarei unsuccessfully sought help from nearby public schools to help fill curriculum gaps. Many turned to the Ministry of Education for extra funding to cover financial shortfalls or mismanagement.

Charter school advocates falsely claim that they provide parents with “choice.” In fact, evidence from the US shows that parents lost the right to send their children to the nearest school because the for-profit schools carefully vetted their intakes and refused to take students who might require too much attention. The onus was on parents to find a school that would accept their child.

Due to widespread hostility in the working class and among teachers to the emerging privatised system, the Charter model was scrapped under the Labour government following the 2017 election, and the existing schools offered special deals to change into new “designated character” state schools.

The Charter model is now to be brought back, with the distinct difference that ACT proposes that any existing public school can apply to become a Charter school. They will be able to continue to receive state funding but also seek sponsorship and various deals with private enterprise while running as a stand-alone “business.”

The corporate sector will not only establish a direct foothold in determining education practices. Businesses will enrich themselves through ACT’s plan to do away with the national curriculum and establish a private sector “market,” in which schools purchase commercial teaching packages off the shelf, which writers can tender for in return for royalties.

The National-ACT coalition agreement also promises to “explore further options to increase school choice and expand access to integrated and independent schools including reviewing the independent school funding formula to reflect student numbers.” A vast funding increase is on the cards for the elite private schools and state-funded “integrated” religious schools to boost their numbers.

Underpinning the attack on public education is the myth that more parental “choice” is needed to deal with low-performing schools that are “failing” poorer students. Writing in Stuff on November 26, right-wing columnist Damien Grant decried “the single-payer model that consistently fails our children; especially those from under-resourced families who stand to gain the most.”

Charter school advocates have no interest in working class students, whose educational disadvantages are the product of broader class oppression within capitalist society. New Zealand already operates a two-class education system in which wealthy parents seeking to bypass the under-funded, under-resourced state system with its myriad problems can pay thousands of dollars to join the elite private school system.

Charter schools are a further step in the gutting and long-term running down of public education. The agenda builds on the “Tomorrow’s Schools” policy of competitive self-managing schools, introduced by Labour in 1989, which opened up a widening chasm between rich and poor schools, resulting in students from the poorest schools struggling against enormous odds to achieve academic success.

Additionally, thousands of students planning to start university in 2025 will have to fund their first year of study following a change insisted on by Peters. Since 2018, eligible students have been able to have their first year’s tuition funded by the government. The fund is available to first-time tertiary students and covers one year of study or two years of work-based training up to $12,000. Working class students finishing school next year will be hit hard by the change.

The teacher unions, the NZ Educational Institute (NZEI) and Post Primary Teachers’ Association, have either ignored or downplayed the new policies, thereby disarming both teachers and workers about the dangers. Neither union campaigned against them during the election, while NZEI this week complacently described Charter schools as a “weird, radical idea” that would not attract many applicants. Neither union has announced any campaign to fight them.

The wholesale assault on the social position of the working class and youth has sharply intensified the crisis facing all students. As the WSWS has noted, the “parental rights” and “school choice” campaign is “not an expansion of rights, but an Orwellian term for the destruction of the right to free, high-quality public education and culture.”

The plight of Thai workers in Israel

Robert Campion

As Israel prepares to step up its genocidal war against Palestinians, tens of thousands of exploited foreign workers in Israel have been unable to leave. The largest national grouping among approximately 124,000 foreign workers prior to the conflict were around 30,000 Thai agricultural workers drawn from the impoverished north-east of Thailand.

Thai nationals leave Shamir Hospital in Ramle, Israel, Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023, on their way back to Thailand, after being released from Hamas custody. [AP Photo/Maya Levin]

Many were employed on Israeli farming communities or kibbutzes near the Gaza Strip where 75 percent of Israel’s vegetables are grown. In the initial Palestinian uprising on October 7 by Hamas on the outskirts of Gaza, an estimated 240 hostages were seized, including at least 32 workers from Thailand. As of November 27, 17 Thai citizens have been freed while 15 remain hostages. In addition, another 32 Thais have been killed.

The responsibility for these deaths and hostages lies with Israel, which has oppressed the Palestinian people for 75 years. Since 2007, Gaza has been little more than an open-air prison. Under the fascistic Netanyahu regime, Israel carried out numerous provocations against the Palestinians and has now seized on the Palestinian uprising to launch a genocide in Gaza.

Since the Israeli destruction of Gaza began, at least 8,600 Thai workers employed in Israel have returned to Thailand. However, thousands more workers remain in Israel.

Determined to hang on to their cheap labour, Israeli employers have reportedly either increased wages to convince Thai workers to remain or delayed payment to prevent workers from leaving. The Israeli embassy in Bangkok denied that money was being withheld, after Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin told reporters that it was “not acceptable that money is used by employers to lure them [to stay].”

The turn to exploiting cheap foreign labour is bound up with Israel’s repressive policies towards Palestinians. A large influx of Thai workers followed the First Intifada, Palestinian uprising from 1987 to 1993 which cost the lives of nearly 2,000 Palestinian. In response, Israel sought to lessen its dependence on Palestinian workers by turning to cheap foreign labour, particularly Thai farmers for the agricultural sector.

These workers face highly exploitative conditions. In 2013, following pressure from labor rights’ organizations, the Thailand-Israel Cooperation on the Placement of Workers (TIC) project was implemented, based on the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), replacing the extortionate training and fees of labour brokers.

A 2015 report by the US-based Human Rights Watch interviewed ten groups of Thai workers in different parts of Israel and found they “were paid salaries significantly below the legal minimum wage, forced to work long hours in excess of the legal maximum, subjected to unsafe working conditions, and denied their right to change employers.”

The report explained: “A Thai man working in a farm in the north of the country told Human Rights Watch that he felt ‘like dead meat’ after a working day that typically began at 4:30 a.m. and ended at 7 p.m. A colleague of his described employers watching them working in his fields through binoculars and treating them ‘like slaves’…

“At one farm, Thai workers showed Human Rights Watch researchers the makeshift accommodations they had constructed out of cardboard boxes, erected inside farm sheds. Workers at several farms listed a range of maladies, including headaches, respiratory problems, and burning sensations in their eyes, that they attributed to spraying pesticides without adequate protection; some workers said they had relatives in Thailand send them medicines on account of their inability to access medical care.”

A study in 2020 by Kav LaOved, an Israeli workers’ rights nongovernmental organization, confirmed that 83 percent of Thai workers were paid below the legal minimum wage.

A report of the US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report in 2022 categorized some Thai agricultural workers as undergoing forced labor, highlighting the “lack of breaks or rest days, withheld passports, poor living conditions and difficulty changing employers due to limitations on work permits.”

The report also drew attention to fraudulent “study programs” which contained no academic content and were merely a pretext for circumventing bilateral work agreements. Thousands of dollars in “tuition fees” placed workers into what amounted to debt bondage.

Successive Thai governments have facilitated this gross exploitation of Thai workers as their funds repatriated to their relatives form a significant source of foreign exchange. While Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin has promised to repatriate Thai workers who want to return home, thousands remain in Israel out of economic necessity. Those who have returned complain that the government’s promised financial assistance has failed to materialize.

Srettha has strenuously avoided any criticism of Israel or the imperialist countries backing its genocidal war. The government wants to keep open the export of cheap labour to Israel and at the same time avoid antagonizing the United States, which is a military ally of Thailand. As the brutality of Israel’s war has horrified the world’s population, the Thai foreign ministry, following other countries, has “condemned the killing of innocent civilians… by any group and for any reason,” drawing an equal sign between violence of the Israeli oppressors and oppressed Palestinians.

The Israeli government intends to expand the influx of foreign labor to eliminate the reliance on an estimated 100,000 Palestinian workers holding permits to work in Israel prior to the October 7 uprising. In April, the government announced plans to bring thousands of workers from India and China for employment as caregivers and in the construction industry. As its prepares to kill or drive all Palestinians out of Gaza, plans are undoubtedly being drawn up for a further expansion.

Reducing road crashes in India

Pradeep Krishnatray

On any given day, about 465 people die on roads in India. And about three times that number is injured daily. If you are a pedestrian or drive a two-wheeler or a car you need to be very cautious and vigilant.

This is despite central government’s continuing efforts to improve the grim situation. Try hard it may, just about anything connected with road crashes is on the rise over many years: number of road accidents, number of fatalities and number of injuries.

There are several multi-causal reasons for such a significant number of road crashes and causalities. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways’ 2022 Road Accidents on India report identifies several important ones.

Some of them are attributable to driving or the driver: Over speeding, drunken driving, driving on the wrong side, jumping red signal, and use of mobile while driving.

On the other hand, road accidents and fatalities are also attributed to bad or improper road infrastructure and design, lackadaisical enforcement, insufficient trauma care facility, rapid expansion of road network, increasing number of vehicles, and increase in average speed on road. 

The report doesn’t inform us how much each of these factors contribute. The main reason perhaps is that the ministry is totally dependent on states to share road accident figure (road transport is on the Concurrent list). And, at the state level, that responsibility falls squarely on the police who are not trained or equipped to diagnose the cause of the crashes.

The number of persons dying on Indian roads can be assessed in at least three different ways. The first of course is to look at what is happening elsewhere. Globally, the number of road deaths in India is more than the combined death rate due to road crashes in bottom 16 of the top 20 countries where the issue is of concern.

One can also gauge road crashes in terms of population of a country. China’s population, for example, was higher than India’s in 2020. However, its road fatalities were less than half (about 61,000) of what it was in India.

If one were to consider the number of four wheelers (mostly cars) into account, United States has more four-wheelers than India (29 crore vs 7 crore). But death due to road crashes in the USA is about three and half times less than in India.

Nearer home, comparing road fatalities in Delhi and Mumbai (Brihanmumbai, to be precise) is revealing. According to 2021 Delhi Road Crash Report, 1239 persons died due to road crashes in the city. In Brihanmumbai, the same year, the number was 387, according to the Economic Survey of Maharashtra 2022-23.

Almost half of road fatalities in Brihammumbai happened in just one part of the nation’s capital: West Delhi. West Delhi is the most accident prone. 187 fatalities happened in West Delhi with most crashes happening in Burari, Najafgarh and Bawana.

The road accident severity rate in India — number of persons killed per 100 accidents — has been consistently rising since the year 2000. It was 20.2 in 2000 and has shot up to 37.3 in 2021. It decreased slightly to 36.5 in 2022. Southern states such as Telangana, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have done better than the All India average of 36.5 in 2022.

Although state highways constitute less than 3 percent of the total road network in the country, about 25 percent of road deaths happen on them.

The WHO says road deaths are a preventable health epidemic. In India, road traffic injuries are among the top 10 leading causes of deaths. There is no gainsaying that road crash injuries and deaths should come down drastically.

A number of practical and often simple methods can ensure road safety. Electronic enforcement, enhanced penalties, speed calming strips, correct use of helmets, wearing seat belts, identification of the so-called ‘blackspots’, training of police personnel, and a comprehensive and coordinated approach among various departments can minimize road injuries and deaths.

It isn’t about doing anything more. It’s about strict enforcement of traffic rules to reduce the number of people dying because of road crashes.

Drastically rising rents fuel growing homelessness in Germany

Tino Jacobson & Markus Salzmann

Rising rents across the country mean the number of homeless people in Germany is also increasing dramatically.

Homeless people under a bridge in the centre of Berlin

According to a press release from the Federal Association for Assistance to the Homeless (BAGW) on November 7, around 607,000 people were homeless in Germany in 2022. Of these, 50,000 were permanently without a roof over their heads. This amounts to an increase of 58.5 percent over the previous year, when 383,000 people were homeless.

The picture is even clearer when you look at the figures as of the reporting date. On June 30, 2022, BAGW counted 447,000 homeless people. The figure was 268,000 exactly one year earlier. That is a gigantic increase of 67 percent. It is important to bear in mind that there are a high number of unreported cases and that the actual figures are far higher.

Foreigners and refugees are particularly badly affected by homelessness. The increase in homeless people with a German passport is 5 percent. In contrast, the number of homeless without German citizenship rose by 118 percent. Twenty-nine percent of people who were recorded as homeless on June 30, 2022 were German. Accordingly, the proportion of non-Germans is 71 percent. Just over one-quarter (26 percent) of the homeless are children and young people.

The number of homeless refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq in particular has skyrocketed. These countries have been reduced to rubble by the NATO wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union. People from Ukraine are also disproportionately affected. There, the leading NATO states and Germany have been constantly intensifying the proxy war against Russia, forcing more and more Ukrainians to flee.

In addition to the flight from war zones, the sharp increase in homelessness is due to rising rents and exploding inflation. According to data from the Documentation System on Homelessness (DzW), 57 percent of homeless Germans lost their dwelling due to a notice to quit, and 21 percent due to rent and energy debts. Twenty percent became homeless due to conflicts in their living environment and 16 percent lost their home due to separation or divorce.

Werena Rosenke, BAGW managing director, commented on the dramatic development as follows: “Inflation, increased costs and rising rents are a burden on low-income households in Germany. This leads to (energy) poverty, rent debts and loss of housing. Particularly vulnerable groups are low-income single-person households, single parents, and couples with many children. The lack of affordable housing is and remains the main reason for the housing shortage in Germany.”

At the same time, the number of social housing units has been falling for years. According to the BAGW, there were still around 1.8 million social housing units nationwide in 1989, whereas there are currently only 1.08 million. That is 40 percent fewer social housing units than almost 35 years ago.

The capital, Berlin, had around 115,000 social housing units in 2016. Seven years later, there are 93,000, and the trend continues to fall. Berlin’s state Department for Urban Development assumes that there will only be around 58,000 social housing units by 2028. This is a social disaster in the making. Around 10 times as many would be needed. Currently, 530,000 households in Berlin have a certificate of eligibility for housing, which—at least in theory—would allow them to obtain social housing.

In addition, all forecasts indicate that rents will continue to rise dramatically, making housing unaffordable for more and more households.

Due to the increased interest rates for building loans, many property companies have little interest in constructing new apartments in Germany. At the same time, existing housing, which is in short supply, is becoming increasingly expensive. According to information from the real estate service provider Savills, the six largest cities in Germany have for the first time recorded an average asking rent for new-build flats of over €20 per square metre. The French bank BNP Paribas, which is heavily involved in the German property market, recorded a rental explosion of 8 percent in the past six months compared to 2021, and even 12 percent in urban areas and for new builds.

Other forecasts paint an even gloomier picture for the future and warn of the social implications. “We are in a property recession the likes of which we haven’t seen for 45 years,” warns building contractor Dieter Becken. “Interest rates have jumped from 0.8 to almost 5 percent, construction prices have also increased dramatically, inflation is high and land is also scarce and expensive. In this combination and in this short space of time, this is unique.”

He added: “We are heading towards an affordable housing emergency. I see enormous socio-political risks because parts of the population simply can no longer find a roof over their heads.” Becken’s prediction: “Rents will rise significantly, very significantly. In new builds, €20 to €30 basic rent per square metre will become the norm.”

In September, the Swedish property company Heimstaden increased rents by more than 20 percent for around 6,500 of its 20,000 flats in Berlin. The rent increases were so high that most of them are even legally invalid, due to the so-called rent cap. A landlord is allowed to increase the rent by a maximum of 15 percent within three years.

Tenants cannot hope for support from the establishment parties. In fact, these parties all work closely with the property sharks and create the legal basis for them to enrich themselves at the expense of tenants. At the same time, the budget for housing is being cut further and further, as more flows into rearmament and boosting the powers of the state at home. The housing companies that are still publicly owned are also shamelessly increasing rents.

This is clearly evident in Berlin. Rents have exploded here more than in almost any other major city in recent years. After the vast majority of Berliners voted in favour of expropriating large housing companies in a referendum in 2021, the state executive—a coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Left Party—did everything it could to prevent this.

In the so-called Alliance for New Housing Construction and Affordable Housing, the Senate worked together with the property sharks to ensure that the profit interests of the corporations were not curtailed in any way. Since the change of state government at the beginning of the year, the grand coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and SPD has intensified its attacks on tenants.

Rents in state-owned flats are to be raised sharply over the next few years. After a year and a half in which rent increases were ruled out, in 2024 they will be allowed to rise again, by 2.9 percent per year. The Berlin Senate reached this agreement with the six state-owned housing associations. This means that rents are expected to have risen by 9 percent by the end of the legislative period alone.

In addition, the property companies will be allowed to charge €15 per square metre for first-time tenants. The last agreement still stipulated €11.50. In addition, an extra €2 per square metre can be passed on to tenants in the event of energy-efficient refurbishment. With his characteristic arrogance, Senator (state minister) for Urban Development Christian Gaebler (SPD) defended the planned rent increases, claiming these were “not an excessive burden.”

Heightened US-China tensions impact Taiwan’s presidential election campaign

Peter Symonds

Candidates for the presidential election in Taiwan on January 13 were finalised last Friday. The election has taken on global significance as the Biden administration, following on from Trump, has deliberately transformed the island into a dangerous flashpoint for conflict with China, even as it wages war against Russia in Ukraine and backs Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza.

Taiwan's Vice President Lai Ching-te delivers speech at press conference in Taipei, Taiwan, Wednesday, April 12, 2023. [AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying]

The current frontrunner for the presidency is William Lai Ching-te, the country’s vice-president and chairman of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). He took over as DPP chairman from the current president, Tsai Ing-wen, who is ineligible to stand as she has already served two four-year terms. Lai was selected as the DPP candidate in April.

Taiwan’s status is an explosive issue. The US and Western media commonly refer to Taiwan as “self-governing,” also noting that the island has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While true, Taiwan is only separate from China today because the US Navy prevented its takeover following the 1949 Chinese Revolution that forced the Kuomintang (KMT) to flee to Taiwan.

Both the KMT and the CCP claimed to be the legitimate ruler of all China. The US backed the brutal KMT military dictatorship on Taiwan, only ending its diplomatic recognition of Taipei in 1979 after reaching a quasi-alliance with Beijing against the Soviet Union. Central to the new US-China relationship was the One China policy under which Washington de facto recognised Beijing as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan.

Over the past decade, however, successive US administrations have deliberately undermined the diplomatic protocols underpinning relations with China, which Washington regards as the chief threat to its global dominance. The Biden administration has boosted diplomatic and military ties with an island it formally regards as part of China, increased arms sales to Taiwan and carried out provocative naval operations through the sensitive Taiwan Strait.

As Taiwanese president for the past eight years, Tsai Ing-wen has been a willing partner with Trump, then Biden, in heightening tensions across the Taiwan Strait. She has significantly strengthened the Taiwanese military and welcomed the growing stream of high-profile US visitors to Taipei, including the highly provocative trip by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. At the same time, Tsai did not take steps towards a formal declaration of independence, knowing that Beijing has repeatedly warned that it would respond by forcibly reunifying the island with China.

Lai, however, represents sections of the DPP committed to pursuing independence more aggressively. As premier in 2017, he described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwanese independence.” In 2019, Lai contested the DPP primary for the 2020 presidential election, in what was the first serious challenge to a sitting president, saying he would take responsibility for ensuring Taiwan was not annexed by China. After losing, he accepted Tsai’s offer to become her vice-presidential running mate.

As the DPP candidate, Lai has played down his support for Taiwanese independence and thus the threat of war with China, restricting himself to remarks that Tsai has previously made. While attempting to reassure voters nervous about the danger of conflict, he states that Taiwan is already a “sovereign independent country” and does not need to formally declare itself as such.

At the same time, Lai is determined to build on the close relations established with the US under Tsai. In August, he made two “stop-overs” in the United States on the pretext of an official visit to Paraguay—one of the few countries with diplomatic relations with Taipei, not Beijing—and undoubtedly held discussions with US officials. China regards such visits by top Taiwanese politicians as a breach of the One-China policy.

Lai has also chosen Hsiao Bi-khim, the former de facto Taiwanese ambassador to the US, as his vice-presidential running mate. Hsiao is not only well-connected in political and strategic circles in Washington but is known as a “cat warrior” for responding aggressively to Chinese diplomats branded in the Western media as “wolf warriors.”

Not surprisingly, Beijing has responded to the Lai-Hsiao ticket as a “union of pro-independence separatists” and has branded Lai as a “troublemaker.” Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for the mainland’s Taiwan Affairs Office, warned that “people who pursued Taiwan independence were essentially instigators of war.” She bluntly told a news conference on November 15: “Taiwan independence means war.”

There is no doubt that tensions across the Taiwan Strait will worsen if Lai is elected. US imperialism, however, is chiefly responsible for upsetting the status quo and deliberately heightening the danger of war over the island. It has hyped the threat from China to justify drawing Taiwan closer to Washington and thereby encouraging Lai and the DPP to adopt a tougher stance towards Beijing.

The outcome of the January 13 election is far from certain. Lai has a significant lead over the other two presidential candidates—Hou You-yi from the KMT and Ke Wen-je from the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP)—both of whom favour an easing of tensions and closer relations with China.

The KMT is based largely on the descendants of those who fled the Chinese mainland, in many cases airlifted by the US military, after the 1949 revolution. It claimed to be the government-in-exile of all China, placed the island under martial law and ruthlessly suppressed any opposition. Amid a wave of strikes and protests in the 1980s, the KMT regime gradually relinquished its iron grip on power. The first direct election for president and vice-president was only held in 1996.

As the CCP turned to capitalist restoration, the KMT sought to develop closer relations with Beijing opening the way for Taiwanese corporations to exploit cheap Chinese labour. The KMT continues to adhere to the so-called 1992 Consensus with the CCP under which Taiwan was declared to be part of One China, but disagreed on where legitimate power resided. The DPP has refused to ratify the 1992 Consensus, with Lai declaring that to do so would be tantamount to “relinquishing our sovereignty.”

Lai has consistently polled ahead of both of his rivals: a poll in late October showed Lai with 32 percent of support, Hou Yu-ih with 22 percent and Ko Wen-je with 20 percent. In an election based on first-past-the post, Lai would win the presidency even though he received less than 50 percent of the votes.

A fourth potential candidate—Terry Gou, the multi-billionaire founder of Foxconn, which operates huge electronic assembly plants in China—polled just 5 percent. Gou, who favours closer relations with Beijing, pulled out of the race just hours before nominations closed last Friday.

Last week, the KMT and Taiwan People’s Party engaged in a last-ditch attempt to forge a unity ticket to challenge Lai and the DPP. Negotiations, however, fell apart in spectacular fashion on Thursday when the KMT abruptly walked out of talks being broadcast live on television.

While the issue of relations with China inevitably looms large in the election, domestic issues including low economic growth rates, rising unemployment and social distress will also have a marked impact. Taiwan entered recession in the first quarter of 2023 as GDP contracted by 3.02 percent compared to the same period last year. The economy is expected to grow by just 1.61 percent for the year.

As around the world, workers in Taiwan are being hit hard by inflation, with a sharp drop in real wages in the first quarter. Real estate speculation is fueling a growing housing crisis. While official unemployment figures remain relatively low overall, youth unemployment for those between 20 and 24 is more than 11 percent.

COVID cases in the US have risen 50 percent in four weeks

Benjamin Mateus

On Monday, Biobot Analytics updated their SARS-CoV-2 wastewater dataset, showing that transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19 has risen 50 percent in the last four weeks and is quickly approaching the late-summer peak of the last wave that drove up hospitalizations and deaths across the United States.

The current surge began in early November, with the Midwest now showing a massive acceleration phase. While the Northeast and the West are seeing considerable rise in rates of transmission, the trends in the South have plateaued at a substantial level for now.

This is clearly the beginning of the second wave since the Biden administration unscientifically ended the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declaration last May, with well over 10,000 Americans succumbing to COVID-19 and tens of thousands more hospitalized or suffering from Long COVID.

On the week ending September 9, 20,678 people were admitted to hospitals for COVID-19. Between August 26 through the end of October, weekly deaths have consistently been above 1,000, with over 5,000 people perishing in the month of October alone. As a lagging indicator, the upward trends in hospitalizations that we are seeing again means that fatalities will climb as well in the weeks ahead.

Although much of the media has remained utterly silent on the issue of COVID, they all eagerly reported on the record number of Thanksgiving travelers last week. According to the TSA, their agents screened 2.2 million passengers on Friday, another 2.6 million on Saturday, and a record breaking 2.9 million on Sunday. In all, close to 30 million or more were screened from November 16-28, while an additional 55 million Americans drove to visit family or friends, meaning that more than a quarter of the US population traveled long distances to see family last week.

Undoubtedly, concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater will surge even more in the weeks ahead, as the impacts of this record travel on viral transmission are fully logged.

Dr. Michael Hoerger of Tulane University, who has been modeling the spread of COVID-19 using the Biobot data, noted on Monday that levels of wastewater now correlate with approximately 886,000 daily infections, or an average of more than 6 million infections in just one week.

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In Dr. Hoerger’s forecast, the figure for daily infections could reach 1.5 million during the Christmas break, when the next massive wave of travelers will take to the air or roads. He warns that in classrooms, lecture halls, restaurants, and other crowded indoor spaces, the chance of encountering someone actively infected with COVID-19 is essentially a flip of the coin.

With masking practically nonexistent and COVID vaccination rates abysmal, combined with the impacts of influenza, RSV, and other viral and bacterial pathogens, the impact on health systems could soon become catastrophic.

The Wall Street Journal in its recent healthcare update almost gleefully begins by stating, “Get ready for more sickness!” After admitting that COVID-19 is “settling in as a wintertime fixture,” they add, “The virus is on a collision course with the seasonal scourges of flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, which are circulating again after the pandemic disrupted their spread.”

The report then bluntly charges, “The risk? More infections, more disruptions to schools, work and holidays and more strains on hospitals than before the pandemic. COVID has raised the baseline… It’s going to be a new normal.”

However, this comparison of three viruses is a sleight of hand and outright lie. Since 2022, what amount to baseline rates of hospitalizations for COVID are far above those for flu and RSV, with the brief exception when flu admissions approached those for COVID in the last two months of 2022.

Furthermore, the comparison ignores the tens or hundreds of thousands of patients that will go on to develop Long COVID as a result of infection with SARS-CoV-2 during this current wave, often suffering from significant neurocognitive, cardiovascular or other damage to vital organ systems. Worse, there is growing scientific research showing that COVID-19 can cause dysregulation of the immune system, potentially exacerbating the severity of these other “winter” viruses.

One such study was recently published, providing evidence that the surge in RSV infections last year among children five and under was in large part driven by prior infections with COVID-19. Among a 2022 study population of almost a quarter million children, the risk of RSV rose among those without a prior COVID infection from around 4.3 percent to 6.4 percent in those with a prior COVID infection, or a 40 percent increase in relative risk. These were then corroborated with a 2021 study population of over 370,000 children that found a similar magnitude of increase.

The authors concluded, “Our findings suggest that COVID-19 contributed to the 2022 surge of RSV cases in young children through the large buildup of COVID-19 infected children and the potential long-term adverse effects of COVID-19 on the immune and respiratory system.”

The findings of this study cut through attempts by the media and COVID deniers to claim that these unprecedented numbers of illnesses are a byproduct of some sort of “immunity debt” that children accrued during weeks or months of limited lockdowns in 2020, a preposterous claim without any scientific basis.

Unsurprisingly, those 65 years of age or older face the severest consequences of COVID infections. In a CDC study published last month, they account for 63 percent of all COVID-related hospitalizations recorded from January to August. They constituted 61 percent of intensive care unit admissions for COVID and nearly 90 percent of COVID-related deaths. With more than 53 million adults in this age group, accounting for 16 percent of the US population, one must ask who is showing any concern for their interests?

Worse is that the elderly admitted to hospitals who become infected with COVID can have a mortality rate as high as a 10 percent. In a setting where mask usage among healthcare workers is not mandated and COVID testing is non-existent, the current rates of infections will see the most vulnerable in society pay once more for a disease that is not only easily mitigated, but could be eliminated through the use of technology such as Far-UVC and modern HVAC systems, combined with the full deployment of available public health tools.

Clearly, the financial institutions and political establishment are more than pleased to see life expectancy, especially among working people, on the decline. These early deaths are simply savings in pension payouts for banks and insurance companies. Among the 1.18 million official COVID deaths in the US, those who are 65 and older account for almost 76 percent of all fatalities (almost 900,000 deaths), despite comprising only 17 percent of the population. Such is in mathematical terms the definition of eugenics.