Since the start of the new year, reading about Israel in the Hebrew-language press has been an unnerving experience.
One article described a maternity ward in which a Palestinian woman from Nazareth was persuaded to move rooms after a Jewish woman complained about sharing the same space with a non-Jew.
Another article revealed that the Israeli military commander responsible for the West Bank recently distributed to his officers a messianic pamphlet – “The Secrets of the Land Redeemers, from Abraham our Father to the Young Settlers” – on how to seize Palestinian land.
A third reported that the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli military fire in the West Bank in 2022 has been the highest in 18 years.
A fourth explained how Israel’s Supreme Court approved the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in eight villages and the Israeli military’s demand to hold regular training exercises in that same area.
Domestic news stories like these, which inadvertently expose the grim everyday realities of Israel, seldom make it into international news bulletins. One likely reason why international media outlets do not cover these stories is that if they did, such reports would profoundly challenge the current narrative the very same outlets have long been peddling about Israel: that Israel’s otherwise well-functioning and robust democracy is being threatened by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government.
Indeed, international coverage of Israel since the November 2022 elections has been more or less uniform. Article after article has warned us that the legislative changes proposed by the government would effectively enable it to annul Supreme Court rulings and decried legislation that gave National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir broad political control over the police, including those deployed to the West Bank, as a threat to the rule of law in the country.
These are, without a doubt, important issues that deserve extensive media attention. The laws and policies that are being introduced or proposed by the new government are clearly aimed at undermining the separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial branches – a separation that serves to protect democracies from the tyranny of the majority.
Since the inception of Netanyahu’s coalition, international media’s coverage of Israel centred almost exclusively on these issues. News outlets extensively reported on protests by Israeli citizens who perceive the new government’s policies as an “attack on democracy”. They published countless think pieces criticising the government’s proposed overhaul of the judicial system as an effort to “undermine democratic checks and balances” and covered extensively any criticism of the planned legislative changes coming from Western leaders. Israel, they explained repeatedly, is experiencing an unprecedented “crisis of democracy”.
This take is not necessarily wrong – after all the proposals being discussed are real and indeed extremely concerning. But news reports in the Hebrew-language press like the ones cited above, and the experiences of millions of Palestinians living under “Israeli democracy”, suggest it is highly misleading.
The dominant narrative about Israel currently circulating in the Global North is informed by the familiar trope that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”. As such, reports that are seemingly criticising the new Netanyahu government as “undemocratic” are actually serving to whitewash the inherently undemocratic nature of Israel and its leading institutions, including its Supreme Court.
Sure, there is democracy in Israel – but it is more similar to the one that existed among whites in apartheid South Africa than it is to the democracy that currently exists in the United Kingdom or France.
Millions of Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israel’s effective control but cannot participate in the political process, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians residing in annexed East Jerusalem are “residents” rather than citizens and consequently cannot vote in national elections. And even though Palestinian citizens of Israel can participate in elections, they too are subjected to a series of discriminatory laws. All this, according to many researchers, legal scholars, activists and respected international organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, means Israel is not a fully functioning liberal democracy but an “apartheid”. Put differently, the democracy that is currently “under attack” from the government in Israel is a democracy only for the Jews.
Similarly, the Israeli Supreme Court, portrayed in international media as a model of moral rectitude, is indeed a principled defender of democratic rights – but only for the Jews. As several studies have shown, the court has played a vital role in enabling Israel’s colonial project and legitimising the state’s abuses against Palestinians. Its rulings provided legitimacy to the expropriation of Palestinian land, and legal cover for extrajudicial executions, home demolitions, deportations, and administrative detentions targeting Palestinians. A few of its justices are themselves settlers and, as such, “criminals” according to international law.
Netanyahu’s proposed legislative changes are new insofar as they will allow his government to target Jews who do not agree with its political ideology and to undermine the judicial branch’s ability to fight corruption (which is another reason why Netanyahu, who is currently facing three corruption trials, wants to introduce them). But the claim that the new government is on course to destroy Israel’s democracy would be true only in a world where Palestinians do not exist.
Lebanese banks were set aflame last week as the country’s increasingly desperate people took to the streets of Beirut in protest as the Lebanese pound fell to a new all-time low of 80,000 against the dollar. This came amid bank strikes and the government’s failure to take any measures to alleviate the long-running economic crisis.
There were reports of protesters rallying outside the house of Salim Sfeir, the Association of Banks in Lebanon’s chief, and starting a fire. The association began an open-ended strike last week in protest at recent judicial actions that had ruled against them and in favour of depositors.
Protesters stand behind burning tires they set on fire, in front the Central Bank building, background, where the anti-government demonstrators rally against the Lebanese Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh and the deepening financial crisis in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2023. Dozens protested in front of the Central Bank, denouncing the slide of the Lebanese pound, which began in 2019. [AP Photo/Hassan Ammar]
The official exchange rate of 1,507 pounds to the dollar was set in 1997, remaining roughly the same until the start of the economic crisis in October 2019. Since then, the pound has lost more than 90 percent of its street value and multiple exchange rates have emerged. Earlier this month, the government was forced to devalue the pound, setting the official exchange rate at 15,000 pounds to the dollar, well below the actual rate on the street, enabling the banks to offload their massive losses onto the public.
This has intensified the misery of Lebanon’s 6.7 million population that includes 1.3 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants, as well as 1.5 million Syrians who fled the 12-year long proxy war waged by the US, its Gulf allies, Turkey and Israel to replace the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with one subservient to Washington. Syria—due to its close ties with Iran—is seen as a “linchpin” in a broader drive to redraw the borders of the Middle East and strengthen the position of the US against its main geopolitical competitors.
The war and US sanctions on Syria have profoundly destabilized Lebanon—part of Syria before the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I—with longstanding economic, family and cultural links to its neighbour. The economic and financial crisis has been intensified by the pandemic; Lebanon’s default on its sovereign debt to international lenders in March 2020; the blast at the port of Beirut in August 2020—the result of the criminal negligence of successive governments that killed more than 200 people, injured thousands and destroyed much of the surrounding neighbourhood—and the war in Ukraine that has pushed up food prices, and has thrown at least 80 percent of the population into poverty.
The venal financial elite has syphoned off the country’s wealth. Last summer, a World Bank report accused the Lebanese authorities of orchestrating a “Ponzi finance” scheme, pursuing fiscal policies harmful to citizens in a bid to bolster the country’s power-sharing religious-sectarian system. It has described Lebanon’s economic crisis as a “severe and prolonged economic depression” likely ranking as one of the world’s worst since the 1850s, calling it “a deliberate depression… orchestrated by [an] elite that has long captured the state and lived off its economic rents.”
The scale of the economic devastation is almost unimaginable. According to the World Bank, the economy more than halved between 2019 and 2021, with GDP falling from about $52 billion in 2019 to $21.8 billion in 2021, the largest contraction of 193 countries.
Hyperinflation has been ongoing for nearly three years, with inflation running at nearly 200 percent last year, the second-highest rate in the world. Prices change throughout the day. Wages, when or even if they are paid, are effectively worthless. There has been a surge in unemployment. According to a UNICEF survey last year, 70 percent of households borrow money to buy food or purchase it on credit, while children are being sent to work to support their families and young girls married off to ease financial expenses.
Many are only surviving thanks to remittances from family members working overseas which accounted for 54 percent of GDP in 2021, equal to $7.15 billion, according to a study by Mercy Corps.
Electricity provided by the corrupt state corporation is only available for a couple of hours a day. For the rest of the time, people are dependent upon private generators, if they can pay for the fuel, or solar power.
Public anger has been directed at the banks, largely owned by the country’s oligarchs and ruling families, lending vast sums to the government to finance handouts to the plutocracy, while imposing strict controls on withdrawals by workers and their families that make it impossible for them to access their savings. On several occasions last year, desperate individuals stormed the banks with firearms to withdraw money for life-saving medical treatments.
There have been repeated protests and strikes. Protesters blocked roads and burned tyres near the central bank in Beirut and chanted slogans against central bank governor Riad Salameh, under investigation in at least five European countries on suspicion of laundering public money. Swiss authorities suspect Salameh and his brother Raja of embezzling more than $300 million from the central bank between 2002 and 2015 via transactions to an obscure offshore company, controlled by Raja. Riad Salameh is also the subject of a corruption investigation in Lebanon, but the investigative judge has repeatedly stalled the inquiry.
Last month, teachers went on strike against the massive devaluation of their salaries, leading to the suspension of “morning shift” classes, attended mainly by Lebanese students. The next day, the Education Ministry, which has received funds from foreign donors to teach Syrian as well as Lebanese students, closed the “afternoon shift” attended by refugee children.
The judicial system has been at a standstill for months due to the judges’ five-month strike over pay that has only recently ended.
Many of Lebanon’s doctors and healthcare workers have emigrated in search of paying jobs. Fees for private hospitals are sky-high. Many are dying due to lack of treatment, errors or hospital viruses. People have turned to drugs—captagon, cannabis, salvia and alcohol and, more recently, crystal meth—for self-medicating issues such as stress, depression or insomnia.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has offered a $3 billion loan in return for economic reforms that would pave the way for an additional $11 billion of assistance pledged by international donors at a Paris conference in 2018, but the political elite is so bitterly divided that all the political institutions and mechanisms have collapsed.
Politicians are deadlocked over the choice of a new president after former President Michel Aoun’s term expired at the end of October. This has left the designated prime minister Najib Mikati, who was unable to form a government following last May’s elections, as interim prime minister with no ability to pass legislation or a budget.
While there is explosive social discontent, the pressing need is to build a new political leadership based on a revolutionary programme. What is driving the collapse of the old political post-colonial equilibrium in Lebanon and elsewhere is the inability of the bourgeoisie to resolve the longstanding economic and political legacy of the post-World War I imperialistic carve up of the former Ottoman Empire. All the ruling factions are determined to hold onto their share of the country’s wealth at the expense of their rivals and already impoverished working class.
The situation in Lebanon is mirrored throughout the Middle East and Africa, with the political institutions of the ruling class impervious to the demands of workers and the rural masses.
Nothing can be resolved within the framework of a global economic system in which every decision and every government is subordinated to the interests of the giant banks and corporations.
The United States will quadruple the number of US forces stationed on Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, in an effort to provoke a war with Beijing along the lines of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The United States is actively turning Taiwan into a military base just dozens of miles off the coast of mainland China, with the aim of goading China into invading the island, and painting the ensuing war as the result of “Chinese aggression.”
U.S. Marines with Delta Company, 1st Recruit Training Battalion, conduct a motivational run at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, Feb. 23, 2023. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Julian Elliott-Drouin)
The announcement gives context to the Biden administration’s unprecedented decision to attack a Chinese research balloon that had been blown over the United States earlier this month, the first time that any aircraft had been shot down over US territory or its coastal waters.
The attack, and the media frenzy that preceded it, was used in an attempt to whip up public hysteria and fear of China, justifying a massive US military buildup on the other side of the world.
In January, Gen. Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, sent a letter to airmen under his command stating, “My gut tells me will fight in 2025,” and urging them to get their “personal affairs” in order in preparation for a conflict with China.
In both May and September of last year, US President Joe Biden categorically asserted the US would be willing to go to war with China if it invaded Taiwan.
The announcement of the troop surge follows the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act at the end of last year. It effectively rendered the US’s decades-old “One China policy,” under which Washington de facto recognized the Beijing regime as the sole government of all China, including Taiwan, a dead letter by sending direct military aide to Taipei.
Knowing it is acting without a mandate from the American population, the Biden administration is seeking to carry out the massive expansion of US troops on Taiwan with minimal public attention.
In a choreographed series of steps repeated any time the White House takes actions that move the world closer to nuclear annihilation, the White House leaked its plans to increase US troops on Taiwan to the press on Thursday, refused to comment on the initial reports, and will likely formally announce the moves in a “Friday night news dump” either the following day, or several weeks down the line.
In an article entitled “U.S. to Expand Troop Presence in Taiwan for Training Against China Threat,” the Wall Street Journal reported: “The U.S. is markedly increasing the number of troops deployed to Taiwan, more than quadrupling the current number to bolster a training program for the island’s military.”
All factions of the US financial oligarchy are united behind preparations for a military conflict with China. On Wednesday, Republican Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who chairs the House’s new select committee on China, declared himself “even more convinced that the time to arm Taiwan to the teeth was yesterday.”
The media is actively working to promote US war planning against China. Earlier this month, Chuck Todd, moderator of “Meet the Press,” asked Democratic Senator Cory Booker, “Are you going to be supporting whatever it takes to prepare for war with China over Taiwan? Do we need to do more to prepare for that potential?”
The Journal wrote that “The U.S. plans to deploy between 100 and 200 troops to the island in the coming months, up from roughly 30 there a year ago, according to U.S. officials. The larger force will expand a training program the Pentagon has taken pains not to publicize as the U.S. works to provide Taipei with the capabilities it needs to defend itself without provoking Beijing.”
The Journal continued, “Beyond training on Taiwan, the Michigan National Guard is also training a contingent of the Taiwanese military, including during annual exercises with multiple countries at Camp Grayling in northern Michigan, according to people familiar with the training.”
The United States has seized upon the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to massively expand its defense spending, targeting China no less than Russia.
In December, the US House and Congress voted overwhelmingly to approve an $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that is $45 billion larger than that requested by the White House, which was in turn larger than the request by the Pentagon.
The budget marks an eight percent increase over last year and a 30 percent increase in military spending over the 2016 Pentagon budget. The massive surge in military spending comes as the typical US household saw its real income fall by three percent in the past 12 months.
The bill increases funding for every single military department and weapons program. The US Navy will get $32 billion for new warships, including three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and two Virginia-class submarines. And the Pentagon is authorized to purchase a further 36 F-35 aircraft, each costing approximately $89 million.
“This year’s NDAA takes concrete steps towards preparing for a future conflict with China by investing in American hard power, strengthening American posture in the Indo-Pacific, and supporting our allies,” Republican Representative Gallagher said.
The NDAA will upend Washington’s previous One China policy by providing $10 billion in direct military funding to Taiwan for the first time. The bill will also institute no-bid contracting, typically used only in wartime, allowing defense contractors to charge the US government whatever they want.
The bill transforms Taiwan into a frontline proxy for conflict with China, in a manner similar to the way Ukraine is serving as a US proxy for war with Russia. In a press statement, Gallagher praised the fact that the bill “provides similar drawdown authority to arm Taiwan as we have Ukraine.”
The uncontrolled US militarization of Taiwan and US preparations for war with China make clear the extent to which the US war with Russia over Ukraine, now over one year old, is metastasizing into a global military conflagration.
In flagrant violation of the country’s constitution and basic democratic rights, Sri Lanka’s unelected president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, has cancelled the island-wide local elections to be held March 9.
For weeks, Wickremesinghe’s government, which is imposing savage International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity measures, has been working to sabotage the elections, because it fears they would result in a massive and humiliating defeat.
Last week, the Election Commission told the Supreme Court the vote would not be able to go ahead as planned on March 9 because the government had refused to provide the money to print ballot papers. In doing so, the Treasury cited a presidential order to fund only “essential government expenses.”
Yesterday, speaking before parliament, Wickremesinghe arrogantly proclaimed there would be no elections and that he would set police upon any officials who tried to proceed with them.
Some of the Sri Lankan army troops mobilised on 8 February 2023 near Colombo Fort protests [Photo: Facebook Malainadu]
Assuming the airs of a dictator, he cynically declared, “The election has not been postponed. There is no election to be postponed in the first place.” He justified this assertion with the absurd claim, which was never raised before, that the Election Commission had lacked a proper quorum in launching the election. In reality, the Commission would have been violating the law—to say nothing of all Sri Lankans’ democratic rights—had it not proceeded with organizing the elections, which were already one-year overdue. The government itself acknowledged this, by previously publishing both the call for nominations and the election date in the official government gazette.
Wickremesinghe went on to say that if the Treasury secretary gave money to the Election Commission, “I’d have to remove the secretary and ask the police to take legal action against him. The same would happen to the government printer [who is responsible for printing the ballot papers]. They will all lose their jobs.”
Wickremesinghe made no commitment—not that such a commitment would be worth a single rupee—as to when, if ever, the elections will be held.
On other occasions in recent days he has said there will be no elections until there is an “economic recovery” and that the “economic recovery”—that is, squeezing sufficient revenue surpluses from Sri Lanka’s impoverished workers and toilers to resume debt payments to international capital—is dependent on “public order.”
The reality is Wickremesinghe and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie are terrified of the renewal of the mass popular upsurge that convulsed the island from April through July of last year and which chased Gotabaya Rajapakse from the presidency, having first forced the resignation of his brother, Mahinda Rajapakse, as prime minster.
Speaking last week, Wickremesinghe vowed he would not “allow the country to go down [the road to] anarchy.” By this he meant, he is determined to use the full force of the capitalist state, running roughshod over the most basic democratic rights, to repress the incipient mass challenge to the ruling class’s scorched-earth “economic recovery program” of savage social spending cuts, privatization, and electricity and other rate hikes. Already, this program has led to mass impoverishment, with 35 percent of the population having to reduce the number of meals they eat per day.
SEP General Secretary Deepal Jayasekara addressing the press conference held in Colombo on 23 February 2023 [Photo: WSWS]
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, is calling on working people to vigorously oppose the government’s autocratic canceling of the local elections. “We, the Socialist Equality Party, strongly denounce the moves of President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s government to block the local government polls,” SEP General Secretary Deepal Jayasekera told a press conference in Colombo yesterday. “It is a blatant attack on the basic democratic rights of working people.”
The SEP has intervened in the local elections to intensify its struggle to mobilize the working class as an independent political force advancing its own socialist solution to the socioeconomic crisis ravaging the island—one that begins with the needs of the masses, not what bankrupt Sri Lankan and international capitalism can afford.
For weeks, the 53 candidates it has fielded for three local councils—Karainagar in the northern Jaffna district, Maskeliya in the central plantation district and Kolonnawa near Colombo—have been fighting to rally support for an international socialist program in opposition to the US-NATO instigated war on Russia and IMF austerity.
“Wickremesinghe’s action,” said Jayasekera, “is a part of his government’s broader attacks on the democratic rights of the masses. It is being carried out in preparation for suppressing growing struggles against the government’s harsh IMF-dictated austerity measures.”
The SEP general secretary explained the government’s fears that a crushing defeat in the local elections—a recent opinion poll showed it was supported by just 10 percent of the population—would intensify in-fighting within the political establishment. But its far bigger concern is that such a defeat will serve to further expose its illegitimate character and incite popular opposition.
A notorious representative of big business and pro-US stooge, Wickremesinghe was the sole representative of his party in parliament, when he was propelled into the presidency last July, through a ruling class conspiracy, led by the Rajapakse’s party, the SLPP, but in which the trade union-backed opposition parties were complicit.
Jayasekera reviewed the lessons of last year’s tumultuous events from the standpoint of preparing the working class and oppressed masses for the next stage of the struggle. The mass upsurge had demonstrated the immense social power of the working class and the potential for it to overcome the communal divisions incited by the bourgeoisie. But it also underscored the urgency of the working class forging itself into an independent political force, rallying the rural masses behind it.
Despite the militancy of the masses and the breadth of the mass movement, the ruling class was able to use Rajapakse’s departure, and the opposition supported calls for an interim government to reorganize the government and retake the initiative.
“We said,” continued Jaysekera, “there is no solution to the burning social and democratic problems within the capitalist framework.” Subsequently, “we initiated a campaign for a Democratic and Socialist Congress of Workers and Rural Masses, based on the delegates democratically elected by these action committees as an organ of independent workers’ powers and revolutionary political alternative” to the capitalist interim government that was set up by the discredited parliamentary cronies of Rajapakse.
Yesterday’s press conference was attended by journalists from six major media outlets, including Sirasa TV, MTV, TNL, ABC Capital and Virakerasari, the main Tamil-language newspaper.
When one of the journalists asked whether the SEP would collaborate with the various opposition parties in contesting the government’s cancellation of the elections, Jayasekera explained that those parties, such as the official opposition SJB and JVP, have themselves a long history of conniving in attacks on democratic rights, including through the promotion of rabid anti-Tamil chauvinism. Moreover, they support the anti-democratic IMF austerity measures being implemented by the government.
Hostile to the social and democratic needs and aspirations of Sri Lanka’s workers and toilers, the opposition parties have responded to Wickremisinghe’s cancellation of the election by appealing to the Western imperialist powers.
All of these countries, beginning with the US, UK, Germany and France, have a long and bloody history of imperialist banditry and intrigue, including sustaining savage anti-working class dictatorships from Pinochet and the Shah of Iran 50 years ago to Egypt’s al-Sisi today. And they backed the Sri Lankan state in its bloody three decades-long civil war against the Tamil minority.
Led by Washington, they have instigated and are now dramatically escalating war with Russia, bringing the world ever closer to a nuclear conflagration, in a desperate attempt to offset their crisis through plunder and conquest.
Moreover, Washington and its ally, India, have been ruthlessly exploiting Sri Lanka’s economic crisis to harness the island still more completely to the US military-strategic offensive against China. Only last week a delegation of 20 Pentagon officials visited Sri Lanka for secret talks with the government.
And of course, all the Western powers stand full-square behind the IMF’s austerity program.
The SJB has complained to the UN office in Colombo over the “unconstitutional attempts” by the government to postpone the local government elections.
Speaking in the parliament Wednesday, the JVP propaganda secretary Vijith Herath tried to hold up the vultures of the IMF as guardians of democracy, declaring, “The IMF has clearly stated that the government of Sri Lanka should have a popular mandate to receive assistance.” Herath said his party will hold demonstrations, take legal actions and “brief diplomats of the European Union, the United Nations and human rights organisations.”
The Freedom People’s Congress, a grouping that broke away from the former President Rajapakse’s party last year, has sent a letter to foreign missions “expressing their deep concern over the present situation surrounding the franchise of the people.”
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) carried out a mass raid on the northern West Bank city of Nablus on Wednesday morning, killing 11 people and wounding 103 in a barbaric show of brutality and militarism. Those killed included two older men aged 72 and 66.
Mourners chant slogans and carry the body of Montaser Shawwa, 16, through an alley, during his funeral in the West Bank refugee camp of Balata, Nablus, Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023. Shawwa succumbed to his wounds that were sustained during an Israeli army operation in the occupied West Bank on February 8. [AP Photo/Nasser Nasser]
It was by far the deadliest raid in decades, with soldiers preventing paramedics from evacuating the injured from the scene and firing on ambulances. Video clips showed a military jeep driving into a crowd of Palestinians who were confronting the raid, while another shows an elderly man lying motionless on the ground after he was apparently shot and left to bleed. Others showed three apparently unarmed people running along a sidewalk, one of whom fell to the ground after they came under fire.
These extra-judicial killings in broad daylight by the Middle East’s strongest war machine in a busy downtown area are nothing short of a war crime by the newly installed coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel, with its customary hypocrisy and cynicism, justified its murderous assault with claims that it was “seeking to arrest” three armed terrorists who had killed an Israeli soldier in October and were “involved in the planning of shooting attacks” in the future, without providing any evidence to back up the allegations. An army spokesperson said that the soldiers were met with heavy gunfire when they attempted to detain the three wanted men but did not explain why a further eight were killed.
The raid was a deliberate provocation calculated to precipitate revenge attacks in Israel and rocket fire from the besieged Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Hamas, the bourgeois clerical group affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood. Such attacks will in turn be used by the authorities to declare a “security crisis” and derail the growing protest movement against the government’s efforts to assume dictatorial powers and neuter the judiciary—in pursuit of their broader plans to annex the Palestinian territories that Israel has occupied illegally since the 1967 Arab Israeli war.
While the leaders of Israel’s protest movement largely share the Netanyahu government’s agenda and are hostile to any appeal to Israel’s Palestinian citizens, they fear his fascist-backed power grab is endangering the stability of capitalist rule and the Israeli state. Very conscious that the growing movement is also animated by broader social discontent and opposition to Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinians and system of apartheid rule, they have sought to restrict the protests to protecting the Supreme Court, which has nodded through Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law and authorized settlements, land seizures and evictions in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. They are determined that those participating in the rallies should not reach out to the Palestinians and unify their struggles.
After the killings in Nablus, the IDF carried out airstrikes on two military sites operated by Hamas. This followed the firing of six rockets from the Gaza strip, that for the last 15 years has served as an open-air prison for its two million inhabitants, five of which were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system.
Wednesday’s deadly raid was the third major operation in the West Bank in which several Palestinians have been killed since the new government took office at the end of last year. A raid on Jenin refugee camp in late January killed 10 Palestinian militants and civilians, while a similar operation in Jericho earlier this month killed five Palestinian fighters.
The latest massacre brings to 61 the number of Palestinians that have died at the hands of Israeli police, soldiers and settlers so far this year, as well as 10 Israelis and one Ukrainian national in the escalating violence. It follows last year’s record that saw at least 170 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including 30 children, the highest death toll in the occupied Palestinian territories in a single year since 2005.
The Nablus atrocity is part of Operation Breakwater, launched last March in response to a series of Palestinian attacks on Israelis, that has seen almost daily raids and arrest operations in the West Bank, focusing on the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Hebron and Jericho. These operations are fueling ever more resistance in the West Bank under the banner of new groups such as the Lions’ Den, the Nablus Brigade and the Tubas Brigades, as hostility towards the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) headed by President Mahmoud Abbas for its craven subservience to Israel escalates.
Indeed, in a tacit admission that the assault would lead to further violence, especially in the run up to Ramadan that begins next month, a police spokesperson said it would deploy extra personnel across Jerusalem and the West Bank in anticipation of further attacks, with the Jerusalem Post writing that Israel was preparing “for possible ripple effects from the operation such as revenge terrorist attacks in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the interior or rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.”
These events come just days after the cabinet approved the legalization of nine illegal outposts in the West Bank and the construction of 7,000 homes in existing settlements, prompting the United Arab Emirates, at the request of the Palestinian Authority, to table a resolution condemning the decision. The UAE, which has normalized its relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords, subsequently watered down the resolution at Washington’s insistence so that it could pass without the customary US veto.
Part of the backroom wheeling and dealing at the UN was that the PA would receive a financial aid package while Israel would not approve any more illegal settlements or settlement construction and would “reduce” its armed incursions into areas of the West Bank under the PA’s nominal control. All this was for public consumption. Just three days later, Netanyahu rode roughshod over the deal and authorized the raid.
This latest atrocity met with the customary tut-tutting by the United Nations, the US, the European powers and their Middle East allies. It underscores the fact that they have given Israel’s fascistic government carte blanche to terrorise and suppress the Palestinians with ever greater force in pursuit of its agenda of annexing the Palestinian territories and implementing apartheid rule—as embodied in the Nation-State Law that enshrines Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state. The Arab regimes that long proclaimed their support for a Palestinian state as a means of legitimizing their dictatorial rule over their own citizens stand exposed as outright accomplices of the Zionist state.
It also demonstrates the utterly opportunist use of the charges “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” The Biden administration excoriates Russia for such crimes in Ukraine while glossing over what its attack dog does on a daily basis as the quid pro quo for services rendered in pursuit of Washington’s predatory interests in the Middle East. What is defined as a war crime or crime against humanity and who is sent to the Hague tribunal—whose authority the US and Israel do not recognize for their own officials—depends entirely on the geo-political and economic interests of the various imperialist powers.
There is no solution to the Palestinian workers’ desperate economic and social situation within the capitalist system, nor is there any national solution. No amount of pressure will change the policies of the Palestinian leadership, the Israeli government and their imperialist backers. That has been bitterly demonstrated over decades.
The only real ally of the Palestinian masses is the international working class. The wave of international protests and strikes in Europe and North America as well as the Middle East is part of a growing militancy among workers, who harbour a growing outrage and revulsion at Israel’s war crimes, imperialist militarism and the deepest economic crisis of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression.
In an address to the Federal Assembly on February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation in the 2011 New START nuclear arms controls treaty. The treaty, which provided for a 50 percent reduction of the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers and a bilateral inspections regime, was the last remaining arms control treaty that was active between Russia and the US, the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
Defending his decision, Putin pointed out that NATO had de facto posed an ultimatum to Moscow earlier in February, demanding that Russia allow the US to resume nuclear arms inspections as part of the Treaty. Putin said, “We know that the West is directly implicated in attempts by the Kiev regime to strike our strategic aviation bases. The drones that are used for these attacks were equipped and upgraded with the help of NATO experts. And now they want to also inspect our defense objects? Under the current conditions of today’s conflict, this simply sounds like nonsense.”
Putin also stated that the Russian Ministry of Defense and Rosatom “should ensure their readiness for the testing of Russia’s nuclear weapons. We will of course not be the first ones to do so, but if the US will conduct tests, then we will conduct them too. No one should have the dangerous illusion that the global strategic parity [in nuclear arsenal] can be destroyed.”
Putin’s speech, while scheduled weeks in advance, came just hours after President Joe Biden completed a highly provocative tour of Kiev, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pledged that the US, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on the Ukrainian army over the past year alone, was committed to the war “as long as it takes.”
Coming just a few days before the first-year anniversary of the beginning of the war, Biden’s visit left no doubt about the character of this war: it is a war waged by NATO against Russia, in which the NATO-directed and armed Ukrainian armed forces are but a proxy. With widespread concerns about the crisis-ridden state of the Ukrainian army, one year into the war, Washington signaled with Biden’s visit that it is prepared to fund and continue the war against Russia, come what may.
Given the extraordinarily provocative character of Biden’s visit, Putin’s speech underscored, above all, the utterly bankrupt basis upon which the Russian oligarchy has conducted this war. Putin spent much of the speech lamenting the fact that NATO and the US, which he again called “our partners”, had continued to expand to Russia’s borders and prepared for war despite the constant efforts by the Russian oligarchs to find a compromise and basis for collaboration.
Having emerged out of the Soviet bureaucracy’s nationalist betrayal of the October revolution, which culminated in the 1991 destruction of the Soviet Union, the Putin regime invaded Ukraine last year, basing itself on the bankrupt conception that the war would force the imperialist powers to negotiate with the Russian oligarchs. But instead, the invasion was seen as a gift by the imperialist powers, which have long sought to provoke this war, and have since used every opportunity to escalate and expand it, determined to bring about the complete defeat of Russia and thus facilitate a regime change operation in Moscow and the break-up of the country.
The Kremlin, which was not prepared for a protracted war, has since scrambled to hold on even to the territories occupied in the first weeks of the war. With a new offensive now underway, involving tens of thousands of newly mobilized soldiers, territorial gains by Russia have remained minimal. Meanwhile, casualties on both sides are horrifyingly high, with estimates putting the number of dead and wounded among both the Russian and Ukrainian army in the hundreds of thousands.
In an indication that the years-long economic war by the imperialist powers against Russia, which was dramatically escalated over the past year, is taking a severe toll on the population, for about half of his speech Putin engaged in social and nationalist demagogy. As a result of the sanctions war, entire branches of industry that were closely integrated into the world economy, most notably auto, have been left in shambles, and Russia has been cut off almost entirely from the semiconductor industry, which is critical to the functioning of any modern economy (and army). Yet Putin painted a picture of an economy that had successfully weathered a supposedly only minor crisis and was now preparing to come back stronger than ever. He also tried, yet again, to present himself as an enemy of the oligarchs, despite the fact that his entire regime is dedicated to the defense of this criminal ruling class.
However, Putin’s main strategy, to diffuse and disorient popular discontent, consists in the promotion of the worst traditions of Great Russian chauvinism. As in previous speeches, he quoted the Tsarist official Pyotr Stolypin, who said, “In the defense of Russia, we must all join together, coordinate our efforts, our duties, and our rights to uphold one supreme historical right — the right of Russia to be strong.”
Whatever the reactionary combination of complaints about and appeals to the imperialist powers, and efforts to whip up nationalism on the part of the oligarchic Putin regime, NATO and the US continue to work to rapidly escalate and expand the war.
In a 20-minute speech also on Tuesday in Poland’s capital Warsaw, Biden largely repeated the same war propaganda that has been coming out of the White House and its affiliated news media for the past year: he denounced “Putin’s war,” praised the “patriots” and “heroes” that are “defending Ukraine” — a substantial layer of which are outright neo-Nazis — and insisted that “democracies” would stand united in the fight against “autocracy”.
The nauseating hypocrisy of Biden’s speech was underscored by the very setting in which it was given: Biden spoke at the invitation of Poland’s ruling far-right Law and Justice party (PiS), which has played a central role in the NATO offensive against Russia, and is infested with fascist and anti-Semitic elements. In its almost eight years of rule, PiS has banned free speech on and research about the role of Polish anti-Semitism in the Nazi-led Holocaust, effectively abolished the right to abortion and an independent judiciary, and has clamped down on the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of Biden’s speech was his open appeal to the Polish nationalist and anti-Communist right, the pro-NATO opposition in Belarus, and the pro-NATO government in Moldova. Biden praised the “brave leaders of the opposition and the people of Belarus”, meaning the NATO-backed opposition around Svetlana Tikhonovskaya. As in Russia and other former Soviet countries, the US has been working to bring about a regime change in Belarus. Ruled by the authoritarian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus is now the only remaining ally of Russia in Eastern Europe and on the verge of being fully dragged into the war in Ukraine.
Biden also stressed the role of Moldova, a tiny country of 3.6 million, sandwiched between NATO-member Romania and Ukraine. A portion of Moldova that borders Ukraine, Transnistria, is ruled by Russian-backed separatists and hosts 1,500 Russian troops. The country has long claimed a constitutionally enshrined neutral status. However, under its current President Maia Sandu, Moldova has sided with NATO in the war against Russia. The Sandu government is now openly discussing membership in NATO, despite warnings by the Kremlin that Russia would respond militarily to such an alignment. Sandu was present during Biden’s speech in Warsaw and the US President praised her, “I’m proud to stand with you and the freedom-loving people of Moldova. Give her a round of applause.”
Behind the smokescreen of rhetoric about “democracy” and “liberty”, the imperialist powers, basing themselves largely on fascist and ultra-nationalist forces, are preparing an escalation and geographic expansion of the war in Ukraine, which threatens to soon engulf all of Eastern Europe and could result in a nuclear catastrophe.
At the age of 52, Nicola Sturgeon has chosen to walk away from her roles as first minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Her resignation has multiple immediate causes, but all point to a crisis engulfing not only the SNP but the entire political project of Scottish separatism.
Depending on Sturgeon’s successor, the SNP’s coalition with the Greens may collapse, triggering an unpredictable Scottish general election.
Speaking in Bute House, her official residence in Edinburgh since 2014 when she replaced Alex Salmond as first minister, Sturgeon indicated divisions in the SNP over her proposal for the next UK general election. “My preference of using the next Westminster election as a de facto referendum is well known. I’ve never pretended it is perfect.”
Nicola Sturgeon [Photo by The Government of Scotland / Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0]
Last December, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the Scottish government did not have the authority to legislate for a second referendum, should the UK government not agree with it. Since then the SNP has been searching for a mechanism to continue its push to overturn the result of the 2014 referendum when Scotland voted by 55 to 45 percent to remain in the UK.
Sturgeon’s preference was for a general election in which every vote for the SNP, and any other pro-independence party, would be construed as a vote to break from the UK. The proposal was a concession to hardline nationalists within the SNP and outside it, in the form of Salmond’s Alba Party and various pseudo-left hangers on of both parties. A special SNP conference, now cancelled, was to have taken place next month to discuss it.
Her proposal suited neither those wishing to avoid an immediate focus on independence, or the hardline nationalists. A poll carried out by Lord Ashcroft Polling estimated that, of SNP voters, only 44 percent supported the scheme. Among voters in general, support collapsed to 21 percent. Many commentators noted that even in 2015, the SNP’s most successful Scottish election campaign, the party only won 49 percent of the vote. Nationalist writer Iain McWhirter wrote in the Spectator, “MPs in Westminster began to shift uneasily in their seats since they are in the front line of this kamikaze assault on the UK constitution.”
Leader of the SNP in Westminster, Stephen Flynn, was known to oppose the plan. Sturgeon loyalist and NATO warmonger, Stewart McDonald, authored a report complaining that the proposal was impatient.
Rather than fighting this out, Sturgeon threw in the towel, declaring, “By making my decision clear now I free the SNP to choose the path that it believes to be the right one, without worrying about the perceived implications for my leadership and in the knowledge that a new leader will steer us, I believe, successfully on that path.”
Sturgeon’s decision has echoes of the recent resignation of Jacinda Adern in New Zealand, as both saw political storms ahead and decided it was better to leave politics and go and make some serious money.
Gender recognition row
In all such political crises, there are immediate contributory factors. Sturgeon’s position was already unsafe. In recent weeks she had attempted to shore up support in layers of the party’s middle-class constituency with a Gender Recognition Reform Bill intended to reduce the time, bureaucratic hurdles and medical examinations required to formally change one’s legal gender—similar to measures introduced in nine European countries.
The bill included a reduction in the age at which someone could legally change their gender and was intended also as a (cost free) means of broadening the SNP’s support among young people, a key constituency in their drive for independence. It was extensively debated in the Scottish parliament and passed with a large majority.
The British Conservative government used Section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998 to prevent the Scottish bill from becoming law. It was opposed by 15 members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), mainly on religious grounds, and feminists within and outside the SNP, who believe the legislation undermines single-sex safe spaces. But more damaging for Sturgeon was the opposition to the proposals of two thirds of the electorate in opinion polls, with only 20 percent in favour.
Things were made worse for Sturgeon by a scandal surrounding two transgender women who had been convicted of sex offences while living as men, one of rape, being approved to serve their terms in women’s prisons.
In addition, there is an ongoing police investigation into the SNP’s finances, and a trove of emails hacked from Stewart McDonald's email account.
The history of the SNP
But the SNP’s crisis is rooted above all in the acute social tensions between workers in Scotland, the UK and internationally, and the financial oligarchy. This has fatally undermined the party’s ability to pose as a progressive alternative to the Tories and the Labour Party.
From its formation in 1934, the SNP articulated the interests of sections of the Scottish landed aristocracy, bourgeoisie and upper middle class. It remained on the political margins until the 1960s, when the collapse of much of Britain’s industrial base and the discovery of oil in the North Sea gave them an angle with which to exploit broader social grievances.
In 1974, in conditions of a mass movement in the working class across Britain against the then Tory government, the party expressed its visceral hostility to working people with the selfish nationalist slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil,” seeking a means of enriching themselves while presenting oil wealth as the means to overcome endemic poverty in Scotland.
The Labour Party accurately defined the SNP as “Tartan Tories” but adopted some of their prescriptions as a means of sowing regional divisions in the working class. In 1979, at a time of mass struggle against the Labour government’s austerity policies known as the “Winter of Discontent”, Labour held a Home Rule referendum for the establishment of a Scottish assembly. The result, 52 percent to 48 percent for the assembly, failed to reach a 40 percent participation threshold to be implemented. In response, the SNP, now with a handful of MPs, brought down the Labour government and opened the door to Margaret Thatcher’s Tories.
Throughout the huge class battles of the 80s, and the destruction of manufacturing industry in the 80s and 90s across Britain, both the Labour Party in Scotland and the SNP competed to present the social disasters imposed on the working class in explicitly nationalist and pro-capitalist terms. For Labour the solution was regional devolution, through which Scottish industrial and financial interests could attract globally mobile investment. For the SNP, the key to attracting investment was independence, within the European Union trade block, to counter reliance on the UK economy, and low taxes to attract global investors.
The SNP benefitted for years from the lurch to the right by the UK’s major parties. It successfully exploited hostility to the Tories during their 18 years in office, focusing on the fact that workers in Scotland voted Labour but still got Tory governments. Then, when Labour finally won office in 1997, they were easily able to portray themselves as to the left of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government, with its wholesale adoption of Thatcherite economic nostrums.
Blair’s Labour government sought to pull the SNP’s wings off and encourage regional competition for foreign direct investment by legislating in 1998 for a new referendum for a Scottish parliament. The result was an overwhelming “Yes” vote secured by a campaign led jointly by Labour’s Donald Dewar and SNP leader Alex Salmond. A devolved government was created led by the Scottish Labour Party but in alliance with the Scottish Liberal Democrats.
Salmond capitalised on the Labour Party’s continued shift to the right, open warmongering and the popular hatred it was inspiring through its role in slashing local government services and pushing forward privatisations. In 2007, he was elected First Minister and the SNP has been in power ever since.
Sturgeon succeeded her mentor Salmond in 2014 after the former resigned following defeat in the 2014 independence referendum. For years the party was able to combine complaints that Scotland was being prevented from pursing a progressive economic and social agenda by its subordination to England, while utilising higher per capita public spending agreed to as part of the devolution package to dress itself up in a left disguise.
The SNP’s record in government
This fiction was always destined to collapse. The 2008 financial crisis saw Salmond frantically call for the British government to bail out Scottish-based bank RBS while the SNP ruthlessly imposed austerity measures, passing on to workers all the costs of propping up the financial oligarchy and supporting the transformation of every area of social spending into a revenue stream for the wealthy.
The SNP’s actual role in government belied its pose as a friend of the working class. Running most of Scotland’s local authorities, the party has intensified the assault on social spending. Currently, the SNP’s flagship authority, Glasgow, is reported to be considering scrapping as many as 800 teachers’ jobs, in response to a £60 million funding deficit. Other proposals including closing care homes and day centres, cutting homeless provisions and cutting or entirely ending support to as many as 237 charities running small-scale community projects.
In contrast, Sturgeon and the SNP have stepped up their drive to attract global investment. The party has signed up to Sunak’s freeport, cheap labour and tax-break, schemes, with two locations identified. It is selling off vast swathes of land and seabed at rock-bottom prices for exploitation by privately owned wind power generators.
The pandemic also did much to undermine the SNP’s pseudo-progressive posturing. While Sturgeon’s down-to-earth daily press briefings made for a sharp contrast with the blatant mendacity of Boris Johnson, her underlying policies were identical, following the Tories’ lifting of public health measures within a matter of weeks. Scotland has suffered 16,780 COVID-19 deaths of the UK total of 218,405 which, given the differences in population, is a close to identical death rate.
During the 1970s and 80s, the SNP postured as an opponent of militarism, particularly opposing nuclear weapons and nuclear dumping in rural Scottish locations. All this has been dropped. The party is now an open advocate of NATO militarism, supports the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and seeks a role in NATO military doctrine for an independent Scotland’s armed forces. It has not yet formally dropped opposition to Trident nuclear weapons being based on the Clyde, but that is purely a matter of time. Such manufacturing as is left in Scotland is massively dominated by the arms industry.
These realities meant that the SNP, while still by far Scotland’s largest party, was only able to form a majority government in 2021 in a coalition with the Scottish Greens.
For the socialist unity of the working class
Acute social tensions produced by the cost-of-living crisis and exacerbated by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine mean that the Scottish government, like its UK and Welsh peers, has confronted a powerful movement in the working class. It too has depended on the trade unions to impose below-inflation pay agreements on local authority refuse workers, education workers, NHS staff, rail workers and many more.
Health provision in Scotland, as across the UK, is in deadly danger. The RCN nurses’ union has suspended strike action on both sides of the border, leaving the NHS in Scotland in a parlous state, short of 2,000 GPs and 6,400 nurses and midwives and with 14 percent of consultant positions vacant.
Every major social issue facing working people in Scotland is identical to those facing workers in England, Wales and throughout the world—rooted in a global crisis and breakdown of world capitalism. With millions of workers fighting back in an objectively unified counteroffensive against all the governments and parties of big business, the fiction that an embrace of “civic nationalism”, shorn of all nasty trappings, offers a path to economic security and democratic accountability is revealed as a fraud, along with the SNP’s claim to represent all Scots, irrespective of class.
The SNP is on a collision course with the working class, no less decisively than the Tories and the Labour Party. This does not translate in some quasi-automatic fashion into a popular repudiation of the anti-working-class perspective of Scottish separatism. But it creates the most favourable basis for advancing a perspective of international working-class unity in a struggle for socialism.
Workers will come to understand that if the crisis they face is global and arises out of the basic contradictions of world capitalism, then the solution too, is necessarily global, unified and socialist.
At what it is now clear was the high-water mark of support for Scottish nationalism, during the 2014 independence referendum, the Socialist Equality Party explained:
“We are for a revolutionary struggle of the working class against all of the representatives of British imperialism and the financial oligarchy. We advocate a workers’ government and a socialist Britain.
“We see this as inseparable from the fight for the United Socialist States of Europe.
“We are equally opposed to all those tendencies that have rallied behind the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the creation of a Scottish capitalist state. All efforts to equate anger towards the ruling elite with support for national separatism are fraudulent.
“A Scottish state will be no less beholden to the banks and major corporations than the UK. Its creation would signal a mad scramble to the bottom, as the governments in Westminster and Holyrood compete to cut the corporation tax and further slash wages and working-class conditions.
