Movement power: action and tactics / by Brendan Montague

_{^{Indigenous peoples from all regions occupy Brasília from 22 April 2024, the 20th anniversary of Acampamento Terra Livre (ATL) – the largest indigenous mobilisation in the country. Image: Agência Senado.}}

The movement power model of civil resistance can only succeed when its strategy informs and magnifies its tactics – its front line actions

_{Reposted from the Ecologist}

The movement power model of organising mass protests on issues of major concern such as climate change provides a lot of high-level theory, but what can it tell us about actual grassroots campaigning? The answer is: quite a lot.

Paul Engler and Carlos Saavedra explain how the best aspects of street level campaign planning from both structure and momentum can be harnessed in their YouTube training series first posted a decade ago. The same model is presented in Movement Power: A Toolkit for Building Power in a Time of Crisis, published by Tipping Point UK.

This is the eighth article in the Movement Power series from The Ecologist.

The novel features of the hybrid method include the foregrounding of prophetic promotion and the centring of polarisation as the ultimate goal and moving force of any campaign. Prophetic promotion could be reduced to the American aphorism ‘fake it ’til you make it’ but is both more authentic and more complex.

Relationships

Polarisation is subdivided into four key factors: the demand, levels of sacrifice, movement ambassadors, and public relations. This provides a clear framework for activists to design their interventions – from petitions to mass nonviolent direct action street protests.

Activists are encouraged to develop a detailed plan for a cycle of momentum that moves through trigger events to moments of the whirlwind, in order to secure active popular support. The cycle of momentum is turbo-charged by the dual processes of prophetic promotion and polarisation.

Jim Collins is quoted as advocating for a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (BHAG) for each proposed event: “The power of the Big Hairy Audacious Goal is that it gets you out of thinking too small. A great BHAG changes the time frame and simultaneously creates a sense of urgency.” This can otherwise be understood through the activist saying, “Build it, and they will come.” This is the heart of prophetic promotion.

Engler explains: “Prophetic promotion is talking about creating trigger events that occasionally lead to a moment of the whirlwind. These would include Seattle, Occupy and Black Lives Matter. There is so much polarisation that it creates a critical mass that means there is activity all around. You cannot control if you create a moment of the whirlwind.”

The use of prophetic promotion is described as a departure from the structure tradition of organising public campaigns. A trade union, as the classical example of a structure organisation, will develop relationships with its members and with partner organisations. This network will be activated for specific campaigns.

Union

Engler recalls: “The structure organisation was a machine. You could predict the number of people who would attend an action through these personal contacts. But the strength of the union was very much dependent on the enthusiasm and strength of the leadership at any time.”

This is contrasted with the more movement orientated tradition, more prevalent among student, environmentalist or anarchist circles at that time. Engler tells of his surprise when becoming engaged in student activism: “In the student activist and global justice movement mobilisation was done more like music or cultural promotion. There would be hype, there would be media stunts, and there would be actions. There were few interpersonal relations.”

Saavedra describes how the DREAM Act campaign adopted prophetic promotion for its 2006 mobilisations. “We billed it as the largest civil disobedience in Los Angeles history for immigrants’ rights. We found ourselves in conflict with the unions and the established migrant organisations because they did not want to do prophetic promotion.”

The approach proved a success. In March that year, 1.2 million people marched, and there was a general strike in May. “The amount of people we mobilised was insignificant compared to the ocean of people. Our red union shirts were just tiny little specks in a sea of white protester shirts.”

The campaigners held strategy meetings and foregrounded the question, “How do we keep the momentum alive?” Saavedra recalls: “We developed an action, to mobilise outside the structure. When we announced the action – to shut down the corridor to the airport – with immigration and union leaders, the media we got, just to announce this action, was greater than we usually get for an action itself. Ben Harper and Tom Morrello held a concert in the city.”

Consciousness

Saavedra adds: “The press was extreme. We had people coming to get arrested that were not from a structure. There was so much fear of it escalating too fast, how it might impact political relationships, that it was the first time where the union was calling people telling them to end the mobilisation. The mayor, the police, were scared we would create a city wide crisis and they would have to call the National Guard.

“This puts you into the history books as one of the most epic actions not just for LA but for the entire nation. There were legitimate concerns that the actions would undermine political relations – but this was a huge accomplishment. There were 325 people who were arrested. We refused to let Ben Harper get arrested.”

Activists should organise trigger events and invite the media. The times and dates of a future mass action should already be agreed. These can be promoted to the attendant reporters so that they form part of the reporting of the smaller initiating press stunt. “The trigger event can be small, and the movement can act to make it much bigger.”

A trigger event can also be based on actual natural or political moments, or even just organised to coincide. Political events might include election campaigns, legislation, or scandals. Medicare for All and Obamacare became weather moments for health campaigns, and could also be extended to migration campaigns. This is especially true for environmental campaigns where, for example, extreme weather events will take place, which will get the attention of the media, who in turn will want to interview people on the ground.

Engler states: “You want to work with the weather. There are already trigger events that are happening in the environment. There are political, natural, social trigger events. Those things can be very influential to your movement. Katrina, Sandy had huge effects on the public consciousness of climate breakdown. But the most influence happens to the movements, when people capitalise on such events to funnel it into activity and structure.”

Epic

This is one reason the Seattle protests in 1999 proved so successful. The World Trade Organization (WHO) was already meeting in the city, and this would have generated significant coverage in the national media on its own. The fact that thousands of activists were planning to converge on the site and try to shut the conference down both leveraged and extended this media event.

Engler recalls: “The WHO summit in Seattle – that would be a New York Times national story. Because the spotlight was already on the summit, we would already get media coverage. We organised people to shut down the conference, and it worked. This then became a moment of the whirlwind because protests at international summits followed for years to come.”

Activists need to always develop action scenarios for a trigger event, and plan for any one to suddenly become a moment of the whirlwind. The concrete action plans should form a coherent real world manifestation of the movement DNA – the theory of change and the grand strategy – and those who take part should know and respect the principles. “The activists need to think about the action scenario, talk about the action scenario and explain how the action forms part of grand strategy and a clear theory of change.”

The fundamental point is to capture the imagination of the public. Engler adds: “We need to design actions that will mean people want to be involved. Form your swarm around a provocative idea – put your stick in the ground. Announce your goal. When you provide such a focus point, a swarm intelligence emerges.

“Your goal must be tangible, credible, inclusive and epic. It needs to be epic, it needs to energise people, it needs to electrify people. Shoot for the moon. On second thoughts, don’t shoot for the moon, we have already been there. Shoot for Mars. You can only form a swarm around something that is epic.”

Wizard

Prophetic promotion must always be deployed alongside the strategy of polarisation. As discussed earlier in this series, the measures of success for the hybrid model of organising are “polarisation – how much public support; and organisational development – how are people engaging with the movement, and is the movement capacity increasing?” Engler argues: “Polarisation is the exact opposite of triangulation. You should be able to predict polarisation. You can become a wizard at this – if you know the secrets, you can predict how polarisation would happen.”

A good action therefore generates good polarisation around the issue of concern. “The actions should make people choose sides, and those that choose our side should be engaged and then moved up the ladder of engagement.” This means a good action will often involve high levels of commitment, risk, and drama.

Saavedra observes that there is very often a fear of escalation in structure-tradition organisations, and a fear of polarisation. “Holy crap, is the public going to like what we do?” There is of course also bad polarisation. This is most obvious when the membership itself becomes alienated from a campaign. He explains: “Some people are going to move against the movement. We need to make sure we can get the majority of the people to support us. At the same time, the movement must build and deepen its base support.”

Polarisation can be achieved using those four factors: the demand; levels of sacrifice; movement ambassadors; and public relations. We will describe each briefly in turn.

THE DEMAND

Cesar Chavez, the American labour and civil rights activist who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, would say: “We have another kind of power that comes from the justice of our cause.”

The first major concept of polarisation is framing of the goal, setting a clear and achievable demand. People associate with the movement first and foremost because they identify with the cause. Activists supported Occupy Wall Street because it was fighting for the rights of the 99 per cent, and for equality. Most Latinos in the United States were in favour of the DREAM Act, as the benefits to millions within these communities were straightforward and obvious.

Polling allows you to see whether the public is going to support the cause. The question needs also be asked how deeply they support the cause. Frank Luntz, a right wing strategist, uses “micropolling”, which measures attitudes of people within the base, the middle and the opposition to the campaign. Engler concludes: “You need to measure support, but you also have to measure how deeply they support you.”

Activists should not abandon causes where there is little public support. Engler states: “The anti-war movement was actually unpopular and was under attack, for example for being unpatriotic. The public also likes spending money on the military. What you can do, even on such issues, is pick specific things that the public will support – for example, a campaign against waste or corruption in the military industrial complex. You can take an unpopular goal and break it down into demands that will be more popular.”

SACRIFICE & DISRUPTION

“Full effort is full victory,” Mahatma Gandhi said. Engler interprets Gandhi’s message as “With an endless capacity to suffer, victory is inevitable.” High sacrifice is, in the Gandhian school of nonviolence, one of the most important tools at the disposal of the activist. “What we sacrifice for, we elevate.”

When people make deep sacrifices and they suffer – being beaten up or going to prison – they will gain popular support. In the civil rights movement, it was when people were being beaten by the police and this was being reported globally that people related to it. “If I go to prison, my mom instantly becomes an activist for the cause,” argues Engler.

The grounding assumption is that every time the participants in the movement are seen to make sacrifices for the cause, more people will want to join the movement. This is seen as an inevitable positive feedback loop. The aim of the action is to demonstrate high levels of sacrifice, or, as in the teachings of Martin Luther King, to “create a moral crisis”. This also feeds the media appetite for drama: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

High disruption can force an issue onto the public agenda, and indeed force powerful actors in society to meet the demands of the campaign. However, it can also have an adverse effect on the campaign strategy of gaining active popular support. The key claim here is that “you can only have high levels of disruption if you have high levels of support for the demand, and you demonstrate high levels of sacrifice.”

A lesson that Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil would need to confront a decade later was already being addressed by Saavedra and Engler in their training videos: “If you disrupt people’s lives, a lot of times they are not going to empathise with you.”

An example given at the time was a public transit strike to protect pensions: “The strike created huge disruption and was pretty easy and people hated that.” This observation would have its echo almost a decade later when activists climbed on top of a train at Canning Town tube station in London with significant negative consequences.

An action can be low or high sacrifice. But it can also be low or high disruption for the general public – including those who do not actively choose to become engaged with the campaign and its issue of concern. This results in four possible modes of action: low sacrifice and low disruption, low sacrifice and high disruption, high sacrifice and low disruption, and finally high sacrifice and high disruption.

The advantage of low sacrifice and low disruption actions is that such activism can be adopted by many people. However, they are unlikely to have much direct impact or gain much media attention. For example, petitions tend to have few results even when they are a useful first step onto the ladder of engagement.

Even a high sacrifice act such as a short term hunger strike can lose its impact over time. “That action has been repeated so many times that no-one believes it’s really sacrificial,” Saavedra notes. There are actions that will create high disruption: a strike action or a protest closing down a highway will get the attention of the public, as it impacts their lives.

SYMPATHETIC PEOPLE

The movement needs representatives to take the message to the public, often through the media. A classic communications approach is to have ‘ambassadors’ from each demographic who can bring the campaign and its values to their own communities. For example, white people might be better placed to assure people in a majority white population that immigration is ethically right and also brings benefits.

Likewise, Extinction Rebellion has made extensive use of the fact that scientists are trusted by the general public and are self-evidently the right people to communicate on climate science. Saavedra and Engler advise on using “sympathetic people” to represent the movement. “Nurses presenting your arguments that will extend the reach of your message.”

People are generally empathic. “There are a lot of physiological studies about how people have what are called mirror neurons, in which they naturally empathise when they witness suffering, without them even choosing to do so.” Empathy is, for better and worse, easier when you identify with a person or community. “If they can ‘other’ that person, then the mind shuts off their ability to empathise. The power of Fox News is the enormous efforts it invests in ‘othering’ people as terrorists, communists, and hippies.”

Engler argues: “Rosa Parks was a very well respected person within the Montgomery community in the 1950s and a secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a number of years when the bus protests started. Another young woman aged 16 was arrested for not giving up her seat, but it did not have the same impact.”

The corollary to the ambassador approach is to ensure that your opposition – those who refuse to make the change you are campaigning for, or are lobbying in the opposite direction – are presented as unsympathetically as possible. A venal, self-interested politician might cave to your demands rather than fight you and be exposed as venal to their electorate. “People hated Wall Street, so they were likely to support Occupy Wall Street.”

PUBLIC RELATIONS

All movements today need to have a clear public relations strategy. Therefore sufficient capacity and training should be made available from the very beginning. Areas of focus will be a) framing; b)relations with the mainstream media; c) capacity to create and distribute own (social) media. There are whole university departments talking about public relations. How can we change the way the media and the press relate to us, and to our demand? How can we distribute our message?

Do the movement and its representatives use the language of our movement or the left, or the language that most people understand? George Lakoff, a cognitive theorist, claims that people have frames about how they understand politics, and the actors and the movements within that. If the PR team does not have the right strategy then there is not a lot that they can do with that.

Engler recalls: “The healthcare campaign in the US had a debate about ‘single payer’ insurance, but no-one understood the policy or the language. Most people don’t know how to relate to it. We framed it as ‘Medicare for All’, because US citizens know Medicare. We had to go further because the media convinced people there was only public healthcare and private healthcare.”

Gaining mainstream media coverage, and therefore raising the profile of the campaign among the general public, is always a core activity for momentum tradition organisations. This can be achieved through “high levels of sacrifice and disruption”. Engler makes the point: “If you can get a couple of thousand people arrested, I can guarantee you are going to get front page newspaper coverage.”

However, this level of dedication can only be achieved if the founders of the movement assume or act as though it will happen. Escalating to high levels of sacrifice and disruption is how you get media attention. “If we do not think about building to get there from the beginning, we’re never going to get there.” Campaigns with millions of dollars never escalate to high levels of sacrifice and disruption, because they are risk averse and, as a result, “they never get a moment of the whirlwind.”

_{Brendan Montague is the editor of The Ecologist online.}

Israel ignores top U.N. court’s order to immediately halt attack on Rafah / by Morning Star

_{^{A demonstrator waves the Palestinian flag outside the Peace Palace, rear, housing the International Court of Justice, or World Court, in The Hague, Netherlands, May 24, 2024. | AP}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

The top United Nations court ordered Israel Friday to immediately halt military operations in the southern Gaza city of Rafah but stopped short of ordering a full ceasefire in the devastated territory.

While Israel is unlikely to comply with the order by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), it will ratchet up the pressure on the increasingly isolated country.

Criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza has been growing, particularly regarding operations in Rafah—and even from its closest ally, the United States.

This week alone, Norway, Ireland, and Spain announced that they would recognize a Palestinian state, and the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, along with Hamas officials.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also under heavy pressure at home to end the war. Thousands of Israelis have joined weekly demonstrations calling on the government to reach a deal to bring the hostages home, fearing that time is running out.

While the ICJ ruling is a blow to Israel’s international standing, the court does not have a police force to enforce its orders. In another case on its docket, for instance, Russia has so far ignored a 2022 order by the court to halt its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Ahead of the ruling, Israel signaled that it, too, would brush off an ICJ order to stop its operations. “No power on Earth will stop Israel from protecting its citizens and going after Hamas in Gaza,” government spokesman Avi Hyman told a press briefing on Thursday.

ICJ President Nawaf Salam read out the ruling as a small group of Palestine solidarity protesters demonstrated outside. Fears about an operation in Rafah have “materialized,” the ruling said, and “the humanitarian situation is now to be characterized as disastrous.”

The court also ordered Israel to keep the Rafah crossing into Egypt open “for unhindered provision at a scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.”

The court did not call for a full ceasefire throughout Gaza as South Africa, which brought the case, had requested at hearings last week. The ceasefire request is part of a case filed late last year accusing Israel of committing genocide during its Gaza campaign.

Israel vehemently denies the allegations. The case will take years to resolve, but South Africa wants interim orders to protect Palestinians while the legal wrangling continues.

The court ruled on Friday that Israel must ensure access to any fact-finding or investigative mission sent by the U.N. to investigate the genocide allegations.

At public hearings at the ICJ last week, South African ambassador to the Netherlands Vusimuzi Madonsela urged the panel of 15 international judges to order Israel to “totally and unconditionally withdraw” from the Gaza Strip.

The court has already found that Israel’s military operations pose a “real and imminent risk” to the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The operation has obliterated entire neighborhoods, sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing their homes, and pushed parts of the territory into famine.

“This may well be the last chance for the court to act,” Irish lawyer Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, who is part of South Africa’s legal team, told judges last week.

Israel rejects the claims by South Africa, a nation with historic ties to the Palestinian people.

In January, ICJ judges ordered Israel to do all it could to prevent death, destruction, and any acts of genocide in Gaza, but the panel stopped short of ordering an end to the military offensive. In a second order in March, the court said Israel must take measures to improve the humanitarian situation.

The ICJ rules in disputes between nations. A few miles away, the International Criminal Court (ICC) files charges against individuals it considers most responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

On Monday, ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan said he asked the court’s judges to approve arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three top Hamas leaders—Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh—on suspicion of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip and Israel.

Israel is not an ICC member, so even if the arrest warrants are issued, Netanyahu and Gallant do not face any immediate risk of prosecution. But the threat of arrest could make it difficult for them to travel abroad.

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{Morning Star}

War Cuts the Heart Out of Humankind /

_{^{Israeli Merkava tank in a Gaza Street January 2024. Photo: Wikimedia Commons}}

As Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza rages on, historian Vijay Prashad reflects on the multi-dimensional impact of war on people and society

_{Reposted from NewsClick}

In the apartment of my friends in Baghdad (Iraq), they tell me about how each of them had been impacted by the ugliness of the 2003 US-imposed illegal war on their country. Yusuf and Anisa are both members of the Federation of Journalists of Iraq and both have experience as “stringers” for Western media companies that came to Baghdad amid the war. When I first went to their apartment for dinner in the well-positioned Waziriyah neighborhood, I was struck by the fact that Anisa—whom I had known as a secular person—wore a veil on her face. “I wear this scarf,” Anisa said to me later in the evening, “to hide the scar on my jaw and neck, the scar made by a bullet wound from a US soldier who panicked after an IED [improvised explosive device] went off beside his patrol.”

Earlier in the day, Yusuf had taken me around New Baghdad City, where in 2007 an Apache helicopter had killed almost twenty civilians and injured two children. Among the dead were two journalists who worked for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. “This is where they were killed,” Yusuf tells me as he points to the square. “And this is where Saleh [Matasher Tomal] parked his minivan to rescue Saeed, who had not yet died. And this is where the Apache shot at the minivan, grievously injuring Saleh’s children, Sajad and Duah.” I was interested in this place because the entire incident was captured on film by the US military and released by Wikileaks as “Collateral Murder.” Julian Assange is in prison largely because he led the team that released this video (he has now received the right to challenge in a UK court his extradition to the United States). The video presented direct evidence of a horrific war crime.

“No one in our neighborhood has been untouched by the violence. We are a society that has been traumatized,” Anisa said to me in the evening. “Take my neighbor for instance. She lost her mother in a bombing and her husband is blind because of another bombing.” The stories fill my notebook. They are endless. Every society that has experienced the kind of warfare faced by the Iraqis, and now by the Palestinians, is deeply scarred. It is hard to recover from such violence.

My poisoned land

I am walking near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. My friends who are showing me the area point to the fields that surround it and say that this land has been so poisoned by the United States dropping Agent Orange that they do not think food can be produced here for generations. The US dropped at least 74 million liters of chemicals, mostly Agent Orange, on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with the focus for many years being this supply line that ran from the north to the south. The spray of these chemicals struck the bodies of at least five million Vietnamese and mutilated the land.

A Vietnamese journalist Trân Tô Nga published Ma terre empoisonnée (My poisoned land) in 2016 as a way to call attention to the atrocity that has continued to impact Vietnam over four decades after the US lost the war. In her book, Trân Tô Nga describes how as a journalist in 1966 she was sprayed by a US Air Force Fairchild C-123 with a strange chemical. She wiped it off and went ahead through the jungle, inhaling the poisons dropped from the sky. When her daughter was born two years later, she died in infancy from the impact of Agent Orange on Trân Tô Nga. “The people from that village over there,” my guides tell me, naming the village, “birth children with severe defects generation after generation.”

Gaza

These memories come back in the context of Gaza. The focus is often on the dead and of the destruction of the landscape. But there are other enduring parts of modern warfare that are hard to calculate. There is the immense sound of war, the noise of bombardment and of cries, the noises that go deep into the consciousness of young children and mark them for their entire lives. There are children in Gaza, for example, who were born in 2006 and are now eighteen, who have seen wars at their birth in 2006, then in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now, 2023-24. The gaps between these major bombardments have been punctuated by smaller bombardments, as noisy and as deadly.

Then there is the dust. Modern construction uses a range of toxic materials. Indeed, in 1982, the World Health Organization recognized a phenomenon called “sick building syndrome,” which is when a person falls ill due to the toxic material used to construct modern buildings. Imagine that a 2,000-pound MK84 bomb lands on a building and imagine the toxic dust that flies about and lingers both in the air and on the ground. This is precisely what the children of Gaza are now breathing as the Israelis drop hundreds of these deadly bombs on residential neighborhoods. There is now over 37 million tons of debris in Gaza, large sections of it filled with toxic substances.

Every war zone remains dangerous years after ceasefires. In the case of this war on Gaza, even a cessation of hostilities will not end the violence. In early November 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that the Israelis had dropped 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, which is the equivalent of two nuclear bombs (although, as they pointed out, Hiroshima sits on 900 square meters of land, whereas Gaza’s total square meters are 360). By the end of April 2024, Israel had dropped over 75,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, which would be the equivalent of six nuclear bombs. The United Nations estimates that it would take 14 years to clear the unexploded ordnance in Gaza. That means until 2038 people will be dying due to this Israeli bombardment.

On the mantle of the modest living room in the apartment of Anisa and Yusuf, there is a small Palestinian flag. Next to it is a small piece of shrapnel that struck and destroyed Yusuf’s left eye. There is nothing else on the mantle.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

_{Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.}

Power of Poetry to Move us to Love in Times of Human Cruelty / by April M. Short

_{^{Devorah Major. (image courtesy: devorahmajor.com)}}

_{Reposted from Newsclick}

Near the end of November 2023, about 15,000 people—including at least 5,500 children—had been killed by Israeli military bombardment in less than two months. Israel’s near-constant bombing and artillery fire in the 25-mile Gaza Strip began following an attack by Hamas that reportedly killed several hundred Israeli civilians.

For weeks, Israel cut off access to water, electricity, internet, and basic supplies in Gaza. International aid groups were barred from helping wounded and stranded civilians—civilians largely unable to flee Gaza since it is surrounded by walls and the Israeli military in the fashion of an open-air prison.

Many international aid organisations have called Israel’s illegal occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, and its treatment of Palestinian civilians, an apartheid for decades. In this current conflict, aid groups have warned of unprecedented humanitarian crises. On November 16, UN experts wrote, “Grave violations committed by Israel against Palestinians in the aftermath of October 7, particularly in Gaza, point to a genocide in the making.”

Amid global concerns of genocide being committed against civilians in Gaza, continual mass public protests have taken place around the world following October 7, often led by Jewish people.

Protests have called Israel’s actions a genocide and have highlighted the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza, citing multiple statements by state officials, the unparalleled number of civilian lives lost—so many of whom were children, and other reported international war crimes on the part of Israel (including attacks on hospitals, and the use of white phosphorus chemical bombs).

In mid-November, more than 2,000 musicians had urged Israel to declare a ceasefire in Gaza, and 24 US Congress members had signed onto a letter asking US President Joe Biden to call for a ceasefire. On November 16, the Los Angeles Times editorial board publicly called for a ceasefire in Gaza, joining the increasing global demand for an end to the violence.

On November 24, a four-day truce was reached between Israel and Hamas, which included “the release of Hamas captives and Palestinian prisoners.” This agreement was extended by two days on November 27. Protests continued during the truce, as activists in New York shut down the Manhattan Bridge on November 26 and disrupted the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, pointing out that a humanitarian pause is not the same as a long-term ceasefire.

Political Poetry

Meanwhile, since the beginning of November 2023, multiple reports stated entire families, with members spanning three or four generations, had been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. As of late November, an unknown number of nameless and unidentifiable bodies lay in piles in Gaza, including thousands of children.

Among the most tragic images from the Gaza Strip during these weeks on social media were those of children’s names written on their bodies, in hopes that they would be identifiable if killed. After learning about the practice in a social media post, San Francisco’s third poet laureate, Devorah Major, wrote the following poem:

Childhoods remembered

do you remember holding

your small child hand up to

your father’s large comforting hand

amazed at its size compared

to your vine thin fingers?

do you remember making

fingers and palms into church and steeple

and then opening to see all the people?

do you remember drawing

eyes and mouths on fingers

creating silly finger people?

thumb folded around

pointer finger making a mouth

opening and closing—

silly games of childhood

laughter crawling down our bodies

dissolving in the air

and reappearing

as a tickle giggle

finger wiggle.

remember?

not wanting to be one of the missing

or one of the unable to be identified killed

the little girl wrote on the inside of her

heart shaped palm between heart

and lifelines in neat Arabic script

“if my hand survived

this is my name” before she was slain.

these children do not have

numbers burned into their arms

but many have written their own

names statements and identification numbers.

pants legs rolled up reveal

the brothers inscribed legs reading

Ahmad Nateel

Jowan Nateel

Rebhan Nateel.

did the oldest write it for his younger brothers

or were they perhaps written by a trembling mother

or a father writing while damming his own tears?

now they lie next to each other

softly browned saplings chopped down

before they could bear fruit.

the whole family it seems

assassinated in what their killers

call a cleansing

a mowing of grass

a righteous final solution

are you old enough to remember being a child

old enough to remember growing up

maybe even remember becoming old

they are not

their dead bodies

reflect the memories they will never have

one child has written on her arm

“no I will not die”

does she still live

Poet Devorah Major has also written the poem “land, settlers, and genocide: america, australia, palestine” and others in response to “the most recent October 2023 Israeli attacks on and siege of Palestine,” she says. She notes that Israel’s current military response in Gaza is, “…precipitated by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which was precipitated by the continued aggression, murders, and land grabbing by Israel back to 1948.”

Major is a California-born, “granddaughter of immigrants, documented and undocumented,” award-winning poet, and writer of both prose and fiction who taught poetry craft, science fiction, short story writing, and composition at California College of the Arts (and has taught at a number of universities and other higher education institutions as well). She has been part of the poetry performance group Daughters of Yam for more than 20 years, and is a Cave Canem poetry fellow. Growing up, she says, poetry and books were “everywhere around” her home. Her father was a (nonfiction) writer and befriended poet Bob Kaufman in San Francisco’s North Beach when she was young, and her father would sometimes recite lines from Kaufman’s poetry book Golden Sardine to her. She wrote her first poem around the age of seven or eight, about a turtle.

She says the reasons she began writing poetry as “an avocation, vocation, and passion” is another story. This story is rooted in the Black Arts Movement, which had come to be by the time she was a teen. While studying dance and theater she found herself writing more and more poetry.

“A lot of us did,” she says, sharing that poet Sonia Sanchez was also a friend of her father’s. “I remember finding her chapbook, Homecoming, lying on our dining room table. The Last Poets were playing on the radio and poetry seemed to be the lingo of the times. It spoke to the promise of a revolutionary change that would bring the world I saw in my dreams to a world I lived in. It was wonderful and I was hooked.”

In an interview with the Independent Media Institute, she shared about her poetic process, why she writes poetry that is political, and the power of poetry to help us find connection and understanding as we navigate all the facets of this world, including unfathomable human cruelty.

April M. Short: What continues to draw you to poetry as an art form, especially in times of upheaval, violence, and conflict?

Devorah Major: Writing poetry is, for me, a way to see things more clearly, to question what surrounds me, to seek or express a kind of spirituality, to heal and be healed, to learn. I find words quite powerful. Wars are waged with weapons, but peace is attained through words.

In these times where there is so much dishonesty in the media and even much more distraction from what is really going on in our world, poetry can be a kind of light that helps us consider or reconsider where and how we stand in the world. Ultimately, I am not sure human cruelty and acts of genocide can ever be really understood, but poetry can help us see it more clearly and define better ways to vanquish it, ways to be truly human, to be more humane. Poetry is a means of connection.

When I have had the privilege of sharing my work in an international poetry festival, what was most inspiring and encouraging for me was that each of us, hailing from far parts of the globe and speaking myriad languages shared the same visions for a world that thrived on unity and cooperation and, of course, love—and turned from war and oppression, not just through words but through action.

AMS: Is there something unique that poetry can offer in coming to terms with difficult and painful realities in the world?

DM: I think that poetry can, in a concise and moving way, provide historical context, which often provides strategies for successful struggle and timely reflections on the happenings of the times. This helps people to emotionally and spiritually engage with these realities instead of just viewing news bites.

At its best, poetry can say in a very few words what an entire essay might discuss. Before we can solve a problem, we must clearly see its parameters. Poetry helps one to see. It is, after all, one thing to look, and quite another to see.

AMS: Will you please share why and when you wrote “childhoods remembered,” and your personal process with this piece?

DM: My daughter sent me a social media video of living and dead children with names written on their arms and legs. When I finished crying, I realized I had to write a poem that considered what this horrific act of writing on one’s body so that one’s corpse could be identified meant.

I remembered teaching my toddler daughter hand games that I had played as a child. That was the poem’s doorway for me. That poem poured out of me. Sadly, the translation did not name the girl who wrote, “No, I will not die,” or I would have included her name in the poem, too.

AMS: Will you please share your process and reasons for writing “land, settlers, and genocide: america, australia, palestine”? What were you thinking and what compelled you to tell this story in this way?

DM: What struck me about this barbaric response to the Hamas action, which insofar as it killed civilians also was barbaric, was that the occupation of Indigenous people’s land had a long, brutal history. I focused on North America, Australia, and Palestine. I actually researched what trees grew in America and Australia when they were uncolonized land and what crops were grown and harvested in Palestine for centuries.

Did you know Israelis uprooted olive trees that were over 2,000 years old to plant their pine trees? While looking into that, I found out that some olive trees chopped down and planted over with the Israeli pines began to regrow after 50 years dormant, and split open the pine trees. I often do some research for this kind of poem to make sure I stay focused on yes, the emotions, the story, the moments, but also the actual history and ecology that can provide useful metaphors.

AMS: Some Americans (and others) have been afraid of speaking up against Israel’s actions and/or are inundated with media narratives in support of Israel. Have you experienced backlash in regard to these poems and/or your work in general? If so, how do you navigate that?

DM: Some Americans fear their shadow. Most do not see the full picture and have no sense of history or context. American media contributes to this ignorance because of its own imperatives that rest on supporting the capitalist, war economy and sustaining the current power structure.

My fear is the world the children, all the children, will inherit if I am complicitly helping in this destruction with silence. Thus far, however, the comments I have gotten about my poems have all been supportive.

AMS: Have you ever felt hesitant to share poetry that is political, and where do you source the courage to create and share your art and your voice?

DM: I consider all art, and thus all poetry, political. The choice of focus, the choice of point of view, the choice of subject are all political choices. Does one look at the sky and only note its colors and the way they make one feel in that moment and maybe planes seen swooping by? Or does one notice how its colors have turned because of pollution, and the planes are warplanes leaving trails between the clouds? Does one write of idyllic, mythic love or investigate love’s truths? Do the words seek to distract or engage? Do I speak for positive change and the empowerment, freedom, and uplifting of the people, or do I write words that support, sustain, and possibly glorify the rulers and the military-industrial complex that is quite international these days and times? For me, even if I am writing a poem about the stars or the sea, the way I address that subject is innately political while I strive to maintain its scientific and poetic integrity.

I don’t find it an act of courage to speak truth as I see it. It takes no more courage to write on human struggles in these times than it does when I write of love or of the universe. However, at times, it does take a measure of courage to look, to actually see, especially now when the planet is burning in so many ways—Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, American city streets, among the many formal and informal wars; and of course, the planet itself is suffering its own warming and fires due to human excesses. I am never hesitant to share my voice. I simply keep working to improve my craft and my clarity, hoping that some of my words land in other people’s ears and/or hearts and are found of value.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a co-founder of the Observatory, where she is the Local Peace Economy editor, and she is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she was a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Good Times, a weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, California.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

_{April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a co-founder of the Observatory, where she is the Local Peace Economy editor. Previously, she was a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Good Times, a weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, LA Yoga, the Conversation, Salon, and many other publications.}

Biden Should Stop Attacking the International Criminal Court / by Branko Marcetic

_{^{US president Joe Biden speaks in Nashua, New Hampshire, on May 21, 2024. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images)}}

The ICC seeking arrest warrants for Israeli leaders is a major step forward for international law. US officials’ attacks on the ICC are a major step backward for US global standing

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

“I’ve had some elected leaders speak to me and be very blunt: ‘This court [the International Criminal Court] is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is what one senior leader told me.”

It’s hard to know what’s more extraordinary: yesterday’s announcement by International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan that he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, or the above admission, which he made on CNN the same day.

The plan to arrest senior Israeli leaders over the now seven-month-long destruction of Gaza, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant, takes both the court and the world itself into uncharted waters. Whichever leader made that statement to Khan, they weren’t totally wrong, as cynical as it is: for most of its two-decade-long history, the ICC really has been mostly a vehicle to go after tin-pot dictators in Africa and exact punishment on various villains and Western adversaries in the Global South.

By 2014, eleven years into its existence, the ICC had only prosecuted Africans, despite that span of time covering Western-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Palestine. Ten years later, this ratio hadn’t gotten much better: before this announcement, nearly 90 percent of those indicted were from the continent. Israel will be the first Western country, let alone a close US partner, to ever be indicted by the court.

This is a major breakthrough. Two years ago, when there was talk about prosecuting Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials over the invasion of Ukraine, I wrote that while this certainly should happen, the court’s highly selective and inconsistent application of the law carried the risk of making the decision look like little more than geopolitical score-settling against a Western adversary.

With this decision, the ICC puts those concerns to bed and takes a major leap closer to transforming international law and the institutions meant to enforce it into the actual thing its proponents have always said they should be: universal, fair, and blind to politics. In fact, there’s a good chance this indictment would never have happened without the similarly historic warrants issued against Putin last year and the subsequent pressure on the ICC to maintain its legitimacy by making sure that that case was a rule, not an exception.

Already the ICC has come under fire for this announcement, with critics firing a barrage of remarkably similarly attacks as if some kind of memo had gone out: the ICC has no jurisdiction here; this is the handiwork of a rogue, possibly antisemitic, and highly political prosecutor; it created a false “equivalence” between Israeli officials and Hamas, by seeking warrants for the latter at the same time yesterday.

Not one of these holds any water. The ICC plainly has jurisdiction here, since Palestine is a party to the Rome Statute that created the court in the first place (a statute, incidentally, that the US government still hasn’t signed onto). As many have already pointed out, we didn’t hear any of this legal hairsplitting in the Western world last year when the ICC waded into the Ukraine war, where neither the aggressor nor the victim had ever signed onto the 2002 treaty. In fact, its actions were roundly applauded within the United States and by US allies, with President Joe Biden calling it “justified” and one US official rhapsodizing the court made up “part of a larger ecosystem of international justice.”

The idea that Khan is some kind of politically driven zealot vindictively targeting Israel is equally laughable. Khan was nominated by a right-wing (and pro-Israel) British government and was Israel’s preferred candidate for the post. Plus, one of his first acts as ICC prosecutor was to “deprioritize” the court’s investigation into US war crimes in Afghanistan, under US pressure.

The last charge is the silliest one. The idea that indicting Israel and Hamas at the same time is a statement of “equivalence” is as nonsensical as saying that if officers arrest a serial killer as well as someone responsible for a hit-and-run on the same day, the police are making a statement that those crimes are fundamentally the same. In fact, it’s the opposite: by targeting both Israel and Hamas, the ICC is proving that it’s committed to taking an evenhanded application of international law. But it’s true that the two aren’t equivalent: while Hamas’ monstrous rampage killed 767 Israeli civilians, the Israeli government has so far slaughtered at least sixteen thousand Palestinian civilians, by Netanyahu’s own self-serving count (lower than the actual likely number of civilian deaths).

There’s another major significance to the court’s request. Thanks to the brazenly hypocritical, wrathful response to the ICC announcement from US officials (and some US allies), this episode is another, major step in the entirely avoidable process of international isolation and faltering global leadership status of Washington and its Western allies, as well as the Biden administration’s gradual reputational self-destruction.

It’s broadly taken as a given around the world that the response from Republicans — including those who just a year ago applauded Khan for issuing an arrest warrant for Putin and waxed poetic about the ICC’s importance then — would be unhinged. So some of the GOP’s leading lights, including Senator Lindsey Graham and House speaker Mike Johnson, are talking about slapping sanctions on the ICC, with Senator Tom Cotton even threatening ICC officials’ families.

But this kind of talk isn’t limited to the GOP. A host of prominent and even high-ranking Democrats have publicly denounced the ICC’s decision as “trash,” “reprehensible,” “wrong,” and “political,” leading them to double down on their support for Israel’s war.

Even worse, all of this is being backed up and repeated by the Biden administration itself, which at this point seems hell-bent on not just shredding its own public diplomacy strategy, but burning the shredded leftovers into ash. Biden’s state department has questioned “the legitimacy and credibility” of the ICC investigation, while the president himself explicitly said that “we reject” the application for arrest warrants. Earlier today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed the White House was backing US retaliation against the court, declaring at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the administration would “work with Congress, with this committee, on an appropriate response.”

Amazingly, all of this — lobbing threats against the ICC, denying its jurisdiction, preparing retaliation, even describing its indictment as “outrageous” — closely mirrors the apoplectic Russian response to the ICC’s Putin warrant last year. That Biden is doing this high-stakes act of geopolitical seppuku on behalf of not even his own war, but that of a foreign government — and a foreign government that openly disrespects him and is rooting for him to lose in November — makes this even more remarkable.

But then, so deep and integral is US support for the brutality and continuation of Israel’s war that the Biden administration’s attacks on the ICC at this point may well be an act of rational self-preservation. As Johnson put it just hours ago, “if the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next.”

A consistent pattern throughout this war is that the longer it’s gone on, the legal and political perils for Biden and the United States have not only piled up, but gotten progressively more serious. Netanyahu once said that not even The Hague “will stop us” from continuing to wage Israel’s terrible war. We’re about to find out just how far he and his benefactors in Washington will go to prove that true — and to what depths they’re willing to drag the United States to as a result.

_{Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.}

How US Labor Law Constrains Unions’ Political Activity / by Stephen R. Keeney

_{^{UC Santa Cruz members of UAW Local 4811 and pro-Palestinian protesters carry signs as they demonstrate in front of the campus on May 20, 2024 in Santa Cruz, California. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)}}

A growing number of unions have taken a stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Yet US labor law throws up major obstacles to unions using their leverage to press political demands, including the demand for a cease-fire

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

As university encampments have become the center of American popular resistance to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the most powerful voices in the country calling for a cease-fire continue to be labor unions. For many, the logical next step after endorsing a cease-fire would be for unions to take more concrete actions to press this demand. The problem for unions is figuring out how to maximize pressure on the corporate and political classes who enthusiastically (and profitably) support Israel’s apartheid regime and genocide in Gaza, given that US labor law intentionally restricts the ability of unions to use workplace actions for political ends — like striking to stop a war.

The difficulty is that US labor law generally only protects workplace actions when there is a nexus between what is being protested and the working conditions of the employees taking action. Generally, rights to free speech and political expression stop at the workplace door. In this respect, bosses have greater control over workers than the elected government does over citizens, because the Constitution restricts governments but not private actors. (Even government agencies have more power to restrict expression when they are acting as employers.) This means that, with few exceptions, bosses can easily squash their workers’ political expression and speech.

A History of Making Effective Methods Illegal or Unprotected

The difference between an illegal activity and an unprotected activity is important, but often it makes little difference for workers. If an activity is illegal, then there are legal repercussions for doing it, like criminal charges or liability for damages. These exist on top of any employment repercussions. If an activity is not protected by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), then it means that workers can be fired for doing it and have no legal recourse for getting their jobs back. This vulnerability stems from the absence of constitutional rights in the workplace.

US labor law has a long history of taking tactics that unions use successfully and making them illegal or unprotected. After the passage of the NLRA in 1935 gave workers and unions legal rights to organize, strike, and bargain collectively, unions stepped up political donations to worker-friendly candidates. In 1943, Congress lumped unions in with banks and corporations as entities forbidden to donate to federal candidates. The sit-down strikes that were so effective in the late 1930s were soon declared illegal by the Supreme Court. A similar fate befell intermittent strikes, which are not illegal, but were determined to be unprotected.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), which established a minimum wage and overtime pay for hours over forty, put so much money into workers’ pockets that it had to be reined in. In 1946, the Supreme Court held that “time during which an employee is necessarily required to be on the employer’s premises, on duty or at a prescribed workplace” counted as work for FLSA purposes. Within six months, unions and employees had filed 1,500 lawsuits seeking $6 billion ($93.67 billion in 2023 dollars) in unpaid wages.

Congress scurried in to defend capital by enacting the Portal-to-Portal Act in 1947, which excluded most “work-adjacent” time by only counting “principal activities” as work that requires compensation under the FLSA. It also prohibited unions from bringing FLSA lawsuits on behalf of their members. The pendulum has swung so far the other way on this issue that, in 2014, the Supreme Court unanimously held that an Amazon contractor could legally force its employees to stand in line for twenty-five minutes for a security screening at the end of their shift without paying them for that time. (If anyone besides your employer did this, we would call it false imprisonment.)

As we’ve seen over the past few years, a strike is the most powerful workplace action a union can take, and a credible strike threat one of its most powerful bargaining chips. That is why most collective bargaining agreements have “no-strike clauses,” in which the union agrees not to call a strike during the term of the contract in exchange for other benefits (often binding arbitration). It is illegal for a unit with a “no-strike clause” to go on strike unless the employer commits “serious” unfair labor practices.

Other steps can also be powerful, especially if they put pressure on supervisors who are stuck between the workers and management. But these actions are only protected under certain conditions.

Restrictions on Workplace Actions as Political Speech

In the context of action on something like the genocide in Gaza, the most important restriction on unions is the ban on “secondary boycotts.” A secondary boycott is when a union uses concerted action (strikes, picketing, boycotts, etc.) to either pressure someone besides the primary employer into action, or to pressure the primary employer to take action against another party. The only exception is that employees are allowed to honor a lawful strike or refuse to cross a lawful picket line.

What makes this ban so important is that not only are secondary boycotts illegal — but they are the only unfair labor practice I’m aware of that allows someone to bring a case directly to court instead of going through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This is a huge thumb on the scale in management’s favor.

So under Supreme Court precedent, a labor union refusing to handle goods or striking until an employer divests from Israeli companies or war manufacturing would be illegal and put the union on the hook for damages. In Longshoremen v. Allied International, for instance, the International Longshoremen’s Association refused to handle cargo coming to or from the Soviet Union in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Allied was a company that imported goods from the Soviet Union; Allied had hired a shipping company called Waterman to ship its goods, and Waterman hired John T. Clark and Son, which was under a contract with the longshoremen, to unload its ships. The Supreme Court held that the longshoremen’s actions were an illegal secondary boycott, and that the union had to pay damages to Allied.

Less than three months later, however, the court held that a boycott of white businesses by a local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch seeking equal rights in the community was a valid exercise of First Amendment activities. Under US law, the First Amendment simply does not exist within the employer-employee relationship.

If a union today refused to handle goods (including war materials) heading to or from Israel in protest of its genocide of Palestinians, there is no doubt the court would reach the same conclusion it did in Longshoremen. This means that, while the refusal or strike may send a powerful message in the short term, the companies profiting from the genocide would ultimately suffer no loss — their bloodstained profits would be covered by the legal damages and paid for by union-member dues.

There are, of course, less dramatic — and typically less powerful — actions that unions can take. But while the NLRB is generally more protective of workers than the Supreme Court, the board still requires a nexus between working conditions and what workers are protesting. In Eastex, Inc. v. NLRB, the Supreme Court upheld an NLRB ruling that a union distributing a flyer that included political messaging (opposing right-to-work laws and condemning President Richard Nixon’s veto of a minimum-wage increase) was protected by the NLRA. The court held that these issues were related enough to employees’ working conditions to be protected.

Earlier this year, the NLRB issued a decision in Home Depot that held that employees putting “BLM” (for “Black Lives Matter”) on their company-issued uniform aprons was protected activity because there was a nexus between the BLM movement at large and the racial discrimination by management and supervisors that employees were protesting. This is the most expansive ruling yet on what messages employers must allow employees to express at work — and even then, the expression was allowed only because it was related to specific working conditions at that store.

The Path Forward

There is little hope that unions will be legally able to directly engage in broader politics via workplace actions anytime soon. Passage of the PRO Act would make secondary boycotts legal, but that does not mean they would be protected — employers could still legally fire employees who participate in them And while in Eastex the court gave an opening for unions by saying that workers are protected when they seek to change conditions for workers generally or when they act on behalf of other workers to build solidarity for future disputes, it is hard to see many courts applying that logic to Palestinian workers.

But there are other ways unions can support the people of Palestine, which some unions have made use of. When universities use force against protests that include workers, they may be turning a geopolitical issue into a workplace one. UAW Local 4811, which represents forty-eight thousand grad students and academic workers in the University of California system, has gone on strike in response to the working conditions created by the university’s crackdown on the peaceful protesters. The local’s strike vote announcement cited unsafe work conditions caused by the university failing to stop mob violence against the protesters and calling in the police to violently disperse their encampments.

Other unions have filed unfair labor practice charges based on unilateral changes in work rules and policies (like changes to free speech and expressive conduct policies aimed at the antigenocide protesters) and the creation of unsafe work conditions. These charges, if upheld by the NLRB, would be massive wins for unions. Strikes against unfair labor practices have a special status in labor law: while a worker engaged in an economic strike can be permanently replaced, a worker striking over unfair labor practices must be reinstated even if the employer hired a permanent replacement for them during the strike.

US labor law outlaws and discourages unions from acting on issues bigger than the workplace. Still, if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that labor can find a way. When an effective tactic is outlawed, unionists can develop new tactics. But one thing that has never changed is that capitalists need workers a lot more than workers need them — and when workers find ways to wield that collective power, they can win big changes.

_{Stephen R. Keeney is a former union staff representative who currently works as a union-side labor lawyer at Doll, Jansen & Ford in Dayton, Ohio, where he is a member of the Union Lawyers Alliance.}

Israel punishes Palestinians after Norway, Spain, Ireland recognize State of Palestine / by Al-Ittihad

_{^{Finance Minister and West Bank colonial governor Bezalel Smotrich, left, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Smotrich is vowing to punish Palestinians with more Jewish settlements on Palestinian land after Norway, Ireland, and Spain announced their intention to recognize the State of Palestine. | Pool photo via AP}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

HAIFA—On Wednesday, Israel’s extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take “immediate punitive measures” against the Palestinian Authority in response to the decisions of Norway, Spain, and Ireland to recognize the State of Palestine.

Smotrich called for an immediate meeting of the Colonial Planning Council in the occupied West Bank, which he heads, to approve 10,000 new illegal settlement units to be prepared for occupancy by Israeli citizens.

He also called for the cabinet to approve on Thursday the establishment of a new Jewish settlement on Palestinian land for every single country that recognizes the Palestinian state. He instructed the directorate responsible for settlements to prepare a strategic plan to construct three entirely new settlements in response to the actions of the three countries in question—Norway, Spain, and Ireland.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre announced on Wednesday that his country will recognize the State of Palestine as of May 28. The decision to recognize Palestine as a state, under Article 28 of the Norwegian Constitution, requires the approval of the King in the Council of State. After the adoption of a royal decree next Friday, Palestine will be officially informed of the recognition through a verbal note.

_{^{This scene from Oct. 10, 2015, is a typical one in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank territory. Israeli police rough up a Palestinian man in the streets of Hebron. With Israel vowing to punish Palestinians after more countries recognized their statehood, many expect more deadly violence from the government and ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers. | Nasser Shiyoukhi / AP}}

Recognizing Palestine as a state means that Norway will consider Palestine an independent state with the rights and duties that result from that.

Later in the day Wednesday, Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris confirmed that his country also now recognizes a Palestinian state, saying, “We are confident that more countries will join us in the coming weeks.”

Harris added that it is a historic and important day for Ireland and Palestine, as both countries share a history of being colonized and subjected to imperialist violence. Ireland was the first member state of the European Union to recognize the “Palestine Liberation Organization” in 1980.

Rounding out the list, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez also announced his country’s recognition of the State of Palestine. Sanchez stressed that his country’s declaration is in line with a foreign policy that respects international law in Palestine, and Spain’s vote in the United Nations for full membership of the State of Palestine was in support of this decision.

He continued: “We tell the innocent Palestinians that we are with them. Despite the destruction and siege, the State of Palestine will remain in our hearts.”

All three governments said the decision to recognize Palestine is intended to apply further pressure on Israel to end its genocidal war in Gaza, its oppressive occupation of Palestinian lands, and to negotiate a permanent ceasefire and lasting peace.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed the three declarations and said they are proof of the international support for the Palestinian people and their inalienable and legitimate rights in their land and homeland despite Israeli and U.S. obstinance on the issue.

Over 140 countries—most of the United Nations—already recognize the State of Palestine. The addition of Norway, Ireland, and Spain to the list shows the increasing isolation of Israel and the U.S., as they are now losing the backing of even their usual European allies.

Israel opposes a Palestinian state, while the U.S. government sticks to a policy of officially supporting the future creation of a Palestinian state but only as a result of negotiations and Israel’s approval.

Abbas said the list of countries that recognize Palestine will only continue to grow.

_{^{The leaders of three countries have announced their governments will join the list of nations recognizing the State of Palestine. Top: Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. Bottom left: Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris. Bottom Right: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. | Photos: AP}}

“The right of peoples to self-determination is an established right recognized under international law,” he said, “and we renew our continuous call to countries that have not yet recognized the State of Palestine to stand up to their responsibilities and acknowledge the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and restore confidence in a global system based on…equal rules and rights for all peoples of the Earth.”

The Palestine Liberation Organization also welcomed the recognition of the State of Palestine by Spain, Norway, and Ireland. The secretary of the Executive Committee of the PLO, Hussein Al-Sheikh, said in a statement on the X platform:

“This is a historic moment in which the free world triumphs for truth and justice after long decades of Palestinian national struggle, suffering, pain, occupation, racism, murder, oppression, abuse, and destruction.”

He also expressed his thanks to the countries of the world that have recognized and will recognize the State of Palestine, stressing that “this is the path to stability, security, and peace in the region.”

As for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it summoned its ambassadors to Norway, Ireland, and Spain for “emergency consultations.” Foreign Minister Israel Katz accused the three countries of “award[ing] a gold medal to Hamas murderers and rapists.” He warned, “This hasty step will have serious repercussions.”

So far, though, it is Palestinians who are on the receiving end of the Israeli government’s anger.

In addition to his demands for new illegal settlements on Palestinian land, Smotrich also stated that he is working to cancel the “Norwegian path” that the cabinet approved a few months ago. Under that program, funds are transferred to a bank account in Norway for the use of the Palestinian Authority. Smotrich said he would order the transfers to stop and demand the return of all funds previously transferred.

He indicated that he would also demand the permanent cancellation of all VIP permits from Palestinian Authority officials for all checkpoints and impose additional financial fines on senior officials and their families.

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, meanwhile, staged an intentionally provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, called the Temple Mount to Jews. Standing there, he declared, “We will not even allow a statement about a Palestinian state.”

_{^{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}}

_{Al-Ittihad (The Union) is the daily Arabic newspaper published by the Communist Party of Israel.}

Israel’s War Is Not About Bringing Down Hamas / by Guy Laron

_{^{Israeli tanks move near the Gaza border on October 12, 2023. (Mostafa Alkharouf / Anadolu via Getty Images)}}

Israel clearly has little interest in recovering the hostages taken on October 7. The real objectives: protecting West Bank settlements, further eroding the judiciary, rehabilitating the military’s image, and simple revenge

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

If we judge the military operation in the Gaza Strip by the measure of the objectives that the government presented to the Israeli public, it is clearly an absolute failure.

After six months of combat, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have not accomplished their primary mission: eliminating Hamas rule in Gaza. The IDF has put out of action an estimated one-third of Hamas’s fighting force and has detonated approximately 20 percent of its tunnels. That is a hard blow but not a fatal one. Hamas is not just still functioning but managing to take over new swaths of territory upon the IDF’s departure, using them to launch rockets into Israel.

Moreover, the additional objective set for the operation, returning the hostages, has not been accomplished. The vast majority of hostages were released thanks to a deal that exchanged them for Palestinian prisoners. Only three of the hostages were freed as a result of the military operation.

What’s worse, three of the hostages were shot to death by IDF forces, and a still-unknown number of hostages have been killed as a result of indiscriminate bombing by the IDF (based on statements that Hamas ordered the hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin to recite in a recently released video, it appears that Hamas estimates the number of hostages killed in such a manner at seventy).

The cabinet that made the decision to go to war included two retired IDF chiefs, a former general, and a prime minister who has approved and conducted multiple military operations. In addition, the chief of the IDF pushed and pressured the cabinet to approve the ground maneuver in the Gaza Strip. These people knew full well what the operation they were about to approve could and could not achieve, yet pushed ahead with it anyway.

Evidence of that effect can be found in the interview that Gadi Eisenkot, a minister in the current government, gave for Ilana Dayan. The battle-tested general cogently explained to the veteran journalist why the operation had no chance of freeing the hostages: the hostages are not being held on the surface in an isolated target such as a plane or a bus, Eisenkot said; they are being hidden in tunnels that the IDF would struggle to get at. If that is indeed the case, one can conclude that the objectives of the operation as they were presented to the public aimed to garner support and were not the real objectives that the government sought to achieve.

If so, what were the real objectives of the operation?

West Bank Settlements

The first is to protect settlements in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlers’ leadership enjoys representation in key ministries of the current government: finance, defense, and internal security. The judicial coup that the coalition put forward sought to bring about a unilateral annexation of the West Bank without bestowing the rights of citizenship on the Palestinians living there. In that way, the state could guarantee the property rights of settlers to the houses they built there.

In the decade and a half preceding the Hamas attack, Netanyahu articulated a security doctrine that guided his actions and rhetoric as prime minister. One of the principles of the “Netanyahu Doctrine,” which he reiterated as often as he could, was that the occupation carried no price. Israel, Netanyahu told the electorate, could become a technological powerhouse and forge ties with countries throughout the Arab world despite the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

The key, explained the prime minister, was to preserve the division between the West Bank and Gaza that resulted from each of these territories being ruled by antagonistic and competing Palestinian organizations. Apparently, Netanyahu thought that funding by the petro-emirate of Qatar to Hamas made it in the latter’s interest to play ball with Jewish colonialism in the West Bank. The Hamas attack on October 7 upended all the presuppositions of the Netanyahu Doctrine.

Hamas used Qatar’s money to build a sophisticated war machine and turned Netanyahu into a laughingstock, both in Israel and abroad. Had Israel restrained itself to a limited reaction against the attack and focused instead on upgrading the security fence as well as reaching a hostage deal, then the public would have had time to discuss the collapse of the Netanyahu Doctrine and demand the fall of the government. With the decision to start a military operation, the government bought itself precious time and postponed public debate on the price of settlement in the West Bank.

The prolongation of the war and the government’s de facto refusal to bring it to a close continue to serve this purpose. By rejecting yet another hostage deal, the government takes off the agenda any debate concerning “the day after” — i.e. the political settlement required to ensure quiet along Israel’s borders, a solution that the government fears will necessitate the evacuation of some of the settlements.

The government is not only acting to protect existing settlements but also striving to broaden the settlement project through actions intended to destabilize the West Bank. That is why, for example, the government is refusing to allow laborers from the West Bank to return to work in Israel and withholding funds that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is entitled to according to the Paris Accords. Thus the West Bank has been put in an economic chokehold, and the PA’s ability to pay its police officers has been compromised. Settler militias seek to damage the property of Palestinians, whose expulsion has continued even after October 7.

A Judicial Coup

As combat wears on, the government is acting to advance its second real goal: the judicial coup.

Since January 2023, Netanyahu’s coalition attempted to ram through a set of laws that would annul the courts’ independence. Among other things, the government sought to have the power to appoint judges, restrict judges’ ability to pass a verdict, and give Parliament the authority to cancel verdicts. Had these laws passed, the coalition would have gained the freedom to legislate without any judicial oversight.

The judicial coup aims not only to restrict the space for democracy but also the wholesale privatization of all government services. The government is acting to subject these services to market forces while paying off sectors of the population. These are complementary processes: restricting the freedom of expression and the right to protest are ways to suffocate protests against the collapse of the welfare state. Those most striving to this end are the ministers from the Religious Zionist Party.

Thus, for example, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, can go on making appointments to the upper echelons of the police and turning it into a partisan militia. Increasingly, the police shed the semblance of impartiality. Frequently, police officers have made arbitrary arrests of protesters and their leaders, shoved opposition members of parliament who participated in the demonstrations, turned a blind eye to violence inflicted on the protesters by pro-government thugs, and ignored settlers’ activity to block humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.

At the same time, Ben-Gvir is privatizing national security by granting tens of thousands of gun permits to civilians. In this way, the police lose to local militias their position as guarantor of law and order. Providing personal safety becomes a task for the individual rather than the state.

Meanwhile, the minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, hands out funds to sectors of the population allied with the government such as the settlers and the strictly orthodox Haredim. Each day newspaper readers learn about a new motion just approved by the government to pass hundreds of millions of shekels to the orthodox education system, municipal authorities of West Bank settlements, rabbinical services, and religious associations that perform charity work. All of this is happening at the same time that health, education, and transport services are facing budgetary strangulation. Becoming a settler or a Haredi is turning into the only option for those hoping to receive education and health services in the wake of the collapse of the education and health systems serving the general public.

Rehabilitating the IDF’s Image

The third real objective of the operation is to rehabilitate the IDF’s image and experiment with land warfare technology in which the army heavily invested during the last decade.

No organization so thoroughly internalized the Netanyahu Doctrine as much as the army. Its main task in the last decade was to maintain the occupation of the West Bank at the lowest cost possible by harnessing the latest military technology. The army’s devotion to this mission explains in part its dismal performance on October 7.

The IDF identified the educated bourgeoisie’s discomfort with the mission of policing the West Bank and thus handed this mission to low-income sectors of the population who served in units like Kfir and Netzah Yehuda. These battalions performed the humdrum tasks of the occupation such as securing the settlements’ perimeter, patrolling Palestinian towns, confronting Palestinian protests, and making arrests. The children of the educated bourgeoisie were enlisted into high-tech units aimed at making possible the management of the conflict with a relatively small amount of manpower.

As a result, the IDF was able to transfer the bulk of its ground forces to security detail in the West Bank, leaving a far smaller number of troops along the northern and southern borders. The army convinced itself that its intelligence capabilities and the robotic technology deployed along the southern border would ensure that it would never be taken by surprise. Were that ever to happen, the army supposedly would be able to respond right away.

The army so bought into the Netanyahu Doctrine that senior officers in the intelligence services refused to believe the obvious signals that a surprise attack was in the offing. Even when on-the-ground soldiers brought convincing evidence of an impending Hamas attack, the colonels sitting in the halls of the intelligence branch plugged their ears. The surprise attack by Hamas on October 7 uncovered the army leadership’s incompetence.

To contend with the shock and fear among the Israeli public, the army latched on to an armed offensive in Gaza as a quick fix to the reputational damage it suffered on October 7. Since 2006, the Israeli General Staff, led by officers drawn from the ground forces, invested in the technological capabilities that would allow the ground forces to improve over their pathetic performance during the Second Lebanon War. The land operation in Gaza, ominously codenamed “Swords of Iron,” has handed generals the opportunity to check if this investment has borne fruit, putting the troops and the technology to the ultimate test on the battlefield.

Revenge

Once those same generals realized that the ground operation would not bring about the defeat of Hamas, a fourth real objective for the operation was born: the mission of revenge.

Despite knowing that such images would create serious problems for Israel with the international court system, the General Staff and officers on the ground allowed soldiers to upload videos and pictures that could sate the public’s desire for revenge and help them to forget that that operation was bound to fail at bringing down Hamas.

Thus the ground operation in Gaza became a military failure and a political success. Under its cover, the army and the coalition are winning back their status among the public and advancing their interests. Their political egotism expresses itself through their willingness to ignore Israel’s difficult problems: the country’s transformation into a pariah state, the never-ending conflict in the Gaza Strip, economic hardships, and intensifying internal division.

The ministers and the general are heading toward a forever war. After them, the deluge.

_{Guy Laron is a senior lecturer in international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.}

Biden is dramatically out of touch with voters on Gaza. He may lose because of it / by Moira Donegan

_{^{‘The “uncommitted” movement that aimed to express displeasure at Biden’s support for the attack on Gaza in the Democratic primary produced vote tallies higher than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in some states.’ Photograph: Stephen Maturen/AFP/Getty Images}}

The president’s shedding key constituencies. If morality won’t move him to end his support of this war, will self-interest?

_{Reposted from the Guardian}

Joe Biden’s re-election team is playing it cool. The Biden campaign has long been shrugging at the president’s fading polls, turning down opportunities to put him in front of voters, and generally doing their best to portray an air of confident nonchalance. The campaign’s apparent lack of concern seems, or perhaps is meant to seem, like an expression of certainty in the outcome: that Biden will win re-election, and that it won’t be close. They want us to think that they’ve got it in the bag.

They do not. Biden is in no way guaranteed re-election, and all available information suggests that the contest will be close. Donald Trump has been narrowly but consistently ahead in national polls. A new dataset released by the New York Times on 13 May found that Biden was trailing in five key swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania – and suffering from disillusionment among young voters as well as Black and Latino ones.

In typical style, the Biden camp brushed this off. “Drawing broad conclusions about the race based on results from one poll is a mistake,” Geoff Garin, a pollster for the Biden campaign, told the New York Times. But at this point, it’s not just one poll. It’s a lot of polls.

What’s driving this discontent among young voters and voters of color – those cornerstones of Biden’s coalition that were so key to his 2020 victory over Trump in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania? There are several factors, but one issue remains consistent in these voters’ accounts of their dissatisfaction with Biden: his handling of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

The indiscriminate bombing and civilian massacres that have accompanied Israel’s assault on Palestinians are a moral catastrophe that has shaken many Americans’ souls. The United Nations now estimates that more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the start of the fighting. Since many human bodies are buried beneath the rubble of Gaza’s bombed homes, schools and hospitals, that number is likely to be a significant undercount. The dead are mostly women and children; those men who have died are also overwhelmingly non-combatants. More than 1,000 children in Gaza have lost limbs to Israel’s war of revenge.

If that figure cannot shake you into moral recognition, consider that many of those children have endured their amputations without anesthesia, since medicine – like food – has largely been prohibited from being delivered to Gaza by Israeli authorities. More than 75% of Gaza’s population is now displaced, according to the UN; they have left homes, worlds, entire lives that they will never be able to retrieve. More than 1.5 million people are now sheltering in Rafah, the strip’s southernmost city, which Israel is currently bombing and is poised to invade. Many human rights advocates and experts in international law have described Israel’s actions against Gazans as genocide. The death toll will keep climbing.

Many voters believe, with good reason, that none of this would have happened without Biden’s assent. Biden has continued to speak of Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians using the absurd language of “self-defense”. He has insulted Jewish Americans and the memory of the Holocaust by invoking them to justify the slaughter. And though his White House repeatedly leaks that he is “privately” dismayed by Israel’s conduct of the war, he has done little to stop the flow of US money and guns that support it.

Even after the US state department issued a vexed and mealy-mouthed report on Israel’s conduct, which nevertheless concluded that it was reasonable to assess that Israel was in violation of international humanitarian law, the Biden administration has continued to fund these violations. That state department report was published on 10 May. The Biden administration told Congress that it intends to move forward with a $1bn arms sale to Israel. “OK, [Israel] likely broke the law, but not enough to change policy,” is how one reporter summarized the administration’s judgment. “So, what is the point of the report? I mean, in the simplest terms, what’s the point?”

Meanwhile, Biden has expressed public disdain for the Americans – many of whom he needs to vote for him – who have taken to protest on behalf of Palestinian lives. Speaking with evident approval of the violent police crackdowns against anti-genocide student demonstrations, he said coolly: “Dissent must never lead to disorder.”

It is a creepy and nonsensical claim, almost chilling in its Orwellian ahistoricism. But Biden does not see the protest movement against his war support as a legitimate instance of dissent, because he does not seem to understand concern for Palestinians as a legitimate moral claim. At times, he has seemed almost incredulous that any Americans would take sincere offense at the massive violence and waste of Palestinian life, as if such a concern was incomprehensible to him.

But it is not incomprehensible to the voters he needs in order to win re-election. The genocide in Gaza has quickly become a moral rallying cry for many Americans, particularly young people and people of color. And the disgust at Israel’s massacres is not confined to campus radicals: more than half of Americans now disapprove of Israel’s handling of the Gaza war, according to a recent Gallop poll. Maybe that’s one of the same polls that the Biden campaign feels determined to ignore. But they shouldn’t: the “uncommitted” movement that aimed to express displeasure at Biden’s support for the attack on Gaza in the Democratic primary produced vote tallies higher than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in some states.

Biden’s supporters are quick to point out that the alternative to Biden’s re-election will be dramatically worse, both for Americans domestically, and for those Palestinians who suffer as a result of US policy. And they are right. Biden supporters are right, too, that voting is a binary choice, between the options available. And they are right that abstaining from voting hastens a statistically likely Trump victory.

But these lesser-of-two-evils argument do not lessen the tax on the conscience that many anti-war Americans will feel when they consider whether to vote for Biden in spite of his support for the genocide in Gaza. And they are certainly not justifications for Biden’s continued aid to Israel’s war project. Rather, the extreme dangers of a second Trump presidency are all the more cause for Biden to abandon this support, and to align himself with the moral cause championed by the voters he needs.

On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose those voters – and may indeed lose the election – if he does not cease his support of these atrocities.

Biden has that rare opportunity in politics: to help the country, and himself, by doing the right thing. But he must do so now. Both the Palestinian people and his own election prospects are running out of time.

_{Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist}

The first US-Israeli joint war / by Gilbert Achcar

_{^{Destruction in the Gaza strip, October 2023 | cc. Ali Hamad}}

_{Reposted from Le Monde Diplomatique}

The Israeli military forces’ war on Gaza, following Hamas’s 7 October attack, is the first Israeli war in which Washington is a cobelligerent. The US openly supports the war’s proclaimed goal and is blocking calls for a ceasefire at the United Nations — all while providing arms and ammunition to Israel and acting to dissuade other regional actors from intervening in the conflict to help Hamas.

The US did not give Israel military support at its creation: it presented itself at first as an impartial arbiter between Israel and its Arab neighbours, ordering an embargo on arms packages to both that remained in force until the end of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency (1953–61). In the early years, Israel had to rely on West Germany and France for its funding and arming. The situation changed when John F Kennedy, faced with radicalised Arab nationalism led by Nasser’s Egypt and setbacks to US influence in the Middle East, decided to rely on Israel and began to send it arms.

This was the beginning of a ‘special relationship’ that would prove very special indeed: between its creation in 1948 and the start of 2023, Israel received more than $158bn in US aid, including more than $124bn in military aid, which makes it the largest cumulative recipient of US funding since the second world war (1). Every year the US provides Israel with military aid to the tune of almost $4bn.

Yet Washington did not openly support Israel’s war against its Arab neighbours in 1967 (it could not endorse the invasion of the West Bank at the expense of Jordan, another ally). During the October 1973 war, the ‘special relationship’ did translate to an airlift of weaponry to Israel — the goal, however, was to help it to contain the offensive launched by Egypt and Syria. Once Israel managed to redress the situation to its advantage, Washington exercised strong pressure on it to end hostilities. The US did not openly support the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and intervened as mediator for the evacuation of Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) combatants in Beirut. Nor did it support the war launched by Israel against Lebanon in 2006, or its subsequent successive offensives against Gaza.

This time, though, US support for Israel has been explicit and massive. In the aftermath of 7 October, Washington decided to send two US carrier battle groups into the eastern Mediterranean, led by the aircraft carriers USS Eisenhower and USS Ford, a marine intervention unit, as well as an amphibian assault group led by the USS Bataan in the Black Sea and the USS Florida nuclear submarine, which carries cruise missiles. At the same time, Washington alerted its air bases in the region and urgently delivered military equipment to Israel, including missiles for the Iron Dome aerial defence system.

Washington thus provided a regional cover to Israel, so that it could devote the bulk of its forces to a war against Gaza whose stated objective, from the outset, has been the eradication of Hamas. The US and other western states have openly supported this goal. The fact is, however, that the eradication of a mass organisation that has governed a small, very densely populated territory since 2007 cannot go ahead without a massacre of genocidal proportions. This is especially true since the Israeli army had the clear intention of minimising losses in its own ranks during the invasion, which called for the intensive use of remote strikes, the flattening of urban areas in order to avoid urban guerrilla warfare and, therefore, the maximisation of civilian deaths.

The US’s responsibility in this massacre includes providing Israel with a large portion of the means to commit it. As of late November, Washington had sent its ally 57,000 artillery shells and 15,000 bombs, including more than 5,400 BLU-117s and 100 BLU-109 (‘bunker buster’) bombs, which weigh 2000 pounds (almost a tonne) each (2). The New York Times reported military experts’ astonishment at Israel’s ‘liberal’ use of these 2,000-pound bombs, each of which can flatten a tower several stories high, and which contributed to making Israel’s war against Gaza a massacre of civilians ‘at a historic pace’ (3). By 25 December, the US had provided Israel with 244 arms deliveries by cargo plane, as well as 20 shipments by boat (4). In addition, the Guardian revealed that Israel had been able to draw on the vast stockpile of US weapons already ‘pre-positioned’ in the country (5).

To finance all of this, on 20 October, the Biden administration made an extra-budgetary request of $105bn to Congress, including 61.4bn for Ukraine ($46.3bn in military aid), $14.1bn for Israel ($13.9bn in military aid) and $13.6bn for the fight against illegal immigration at the border. The US president believed he could wrangle a green light from the Republican right for Ukraine by tying that aid (a bone of contention) with causes dear to them — yet by the end of 2023, Biden had still not succeeded in having his request approved. The Republican right has used Biden’s strategy against him by demanding even more drastic measures at the border, putting him in an uncomfortable position with his own party.

In order to provide Israeli Merkava tanks with 45,000 artillery shells for $500m, the Biden administration has bypassed Congress by passing an emergency measure on 9 December, a package of 14,000 shells for $106.5m. It repeated this manoeuvre on 30 December for $147.50m, provoking the anger of Democrats calling for more controls on arms packages to Israel. For all this, Biden bears a direct share of responsibility for the massacre perpetrated by Israeli forces in Gaza. His exhortations for Israel to be more ‘humanitarian’ ring hollow and are easily dismissed by critics as hypocrisy. His disagreement with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on the plan for the day after the war does not change the two governments’ joint responsibility for the war itself (6).

Ultimately, Biden — who, during his 2020 presidential campaign, promised to reverse course on his predecessor’s markedly pro-Israel politics, notably by reopening the US consulate in East Jerusalem and the PLO office in Washington — did none of this. Instead, he followed in Donald Trump’s footsteps, first by focusing on encouraging Saudi Arabia to join the Arab states that had established diplomatic relations with Israel under Trump’s aegis, then by giving unconditional support to Israel in its invasion of Gaza. In so doing, he has managed to anger his own Democratic Party — which is today more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to the Israelis (by 34% to 31%), according to a poll published on 19 December — without satisfying the Republicans either. In the end, 57% of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the conflict, according to the same poll (7).

Notes –

_{(1) Congressional Research Service, U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, CRS Report, Washington, 1 March 2023.}

_{(2) Jared Malsin and Nancy A Youssef, ‘U.S. Sends Israel 2,000-Pound Bunker Buster Bombs for Gaza War’, Wall Street Journal, 1 December 2023.}

_{(3) Lauren Leatherby, ‘Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace’, New York Times, 25 November 2023.}

_{(4) ‘244 US cargo planes, 20 ships deliver over 10,000 tons of military equipment to Israel – report’, Times of Israel, 25 December 2023.}

_{(5) Harry Davies and Manisha Ganguly, ‘Gaza war puts US’s extensive weapons stockpile in Israel under scrutiny’, The Guardian, 27 December 2023.}

_{(6) Read Gilbert Achcar, ‘Israeli far right’s plans for expulsion and expansion’, Le Monde diplomatique in English, December 2023.}

_{(7) Jonathan Weisman, Ruth Igielnik and Alyce McFadden, ‘Poll Finds Wide Disapproval of Biden on Gaza, and Little Room to Shift Gears’, New York Times, 19 December 2023.}

_{Gilbert Achcar is professor of international relations at SOAS, University of London. His most recent book is The New Cold War: The United States, Russia and China, from Kosovo to Ukraine, Westbourne Press, London, and Haymarket, Chicago, 2023.}

On the ICC’s Announcement of Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant and Hamas’ Leadership / by John Whitbeck

_{^{Karim Khan, chief prosecutor, International Criminal Court. Photo: ICC}}

_{Reposted from Counterpunch}

It had been widely anticipated that, to maintain any institutional respect, the International Criminal Court would have to indict some Israeli leaders, unavoidably including Prime Minister Netanyahu, in connection with the Gaza genocide and that, for balance, it would choose to indict at least one Hamas leader at the same time.

Its announcement Monday of applications for five arrest warrants and the strong language of its announcement, particularly coming from a British Prosecutor who had previously been suspected of being totally subservient to the British government, is excellent news.

However, it offered three surprises:

(1) ANNOUNCING APPLICATIONS FOR ARREST WARRANTS

It is normal ICC practice to announce the issuance of arrest warrants only after the court’s judges have approved them on the basis of an application from the Prosecutor.

This was the procedure followed last year when the court announced the issuance of arrest warrants for President Putin and for Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.

The decision to announce these applications for arrest warrants prior to their formal approval may have been motivated by a sense that the conditions under which the people of Gaza are striving to survive are deteriorating so rapidly and horrifically that there is no time to waste and by a hope that announcing the applications now might have a positive impact on the decisions of relevant decision-makers for whom arrest warrants are not yet being sought but could be sought later.

(2) NOT SEEKING AN ARREST WARRANT AGAINST GENERAL HALEVI

When rumors of imminent ICC indictments started swirling several weeks ago, three Israeli leaders were cited as targeted — Prime Minister Netanyahu, and General Herzi Halevi, Chief of General Staff of the IDF. Arrest warrants are now being sought only against Netanyahu and Gallant.

The Prosecutor may be hoping that not indicting General Halevi or other top military officers for the time being while stating explicitly that his office “will not hesitate to submit further applications for warrants” if conditions are met might encourage them, in their own self-interests, to try to rein in their political leadership and to wind down or even wind up Israel’s genocidal assault against the people of Gaza.

(3) SEEKING AN ARREST WARRANT AGAINST ISMAIL HANIYEH

It was widely reported at the time that Hamas Political Bureau head Ismail Haniyeh and other members of the external leadership of Hamas had no advance knowledge of the October 7 operation, which makes attributing “criminal responsibility” to Haniyeh for the events of that day surprising.

It is possible that, in the hope of mitigating American fury and the publicly threatened American retaliation for any indictments of Israelis, the Prosecutor thought it desirable to seek arrest warrants for more Palestinians than Israelis. Within Gaza, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif are the only widely recognized personalities to whom responsibility might be attributed. Hence, perhaps Haniyeh was added to achieve the desired Palestinian majority.

In these circumstances, it is possible that the court’s “independent judges” might show their independence by not issuing an arrest warrant against Haniyeh, which should not upset the Prosecutor if he was adding Haniyeh primarily to achieve a Palestinian majority.

If an arrest warrant were to be issued against Haniyeh, he might, with good reasons to hope for an acquittal, choose to turn himself in to the court and, thereby, to set a good example for (and contrast to) Netanyahu and Gallant.

Indeed, Sinwar and Dief might at least be tempted to do likewise if they could find a way to be safely extricated from the Gaza Strip.

Since October 7, their future has offered only martyrdom — and not necessarily a quick and easy one. They may well be reconciled to martyrdom or actively seek it, but they could also view the chance to live out their natural lives and to defend themselves and their acts on the basis of the right of an occupied and oppressed people to self-defense against perpetual occupation and oppression and on the basis of 10/7 Truth as a viable and even attractive alternative.

It has also been widely reported that Netanyahu is personally obsessed with killing Sinwar and Deif and is determined to pursue his assault against Gaza until he achieves that goal.

If that goal were to become impossible because Sinwar and Deif had successfully turned themselves into the court, thousands of lives might be saved.

_{John V. Whitbeck is a Paris-based international lawyer.}

How US Big Tech Supports Israel’s AI-Powered Genocide and Apartheid / by Micael Kwet

_^ZNetwork

As an extension of US imperial power, US tech corporations are eager to support Israeli atrocities

_{Reposted from Znet}

Shortly after the October 7 attacks on Israel, Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a statement on social media, extending sympathy to Israelis without mentioning the Palestinians. Other tech executives – including from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM – offered their gushing support for Israel as well.

Since then, they have remained largely silent as the Israeli army has massacred close to 35,000 Palestinians, including more than 14,500 children, destroyed hundreds of schools and all universities and devastated Palestinian homes, healthcare infrastructure, mosques and heritage sites.To execute this shocking level of destruction, the Israeli military has been assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) programs designed to produce targets with little human oversight. It is not clear to what extent foreign tech giants are directly involved in these projects, but we can say with certainty that they supply much of the core infrastructure required to build them, including advanced computer chips, software and cloud computing.Amid this AI-assisted genocide, Big Tech in the United States is quietly continuing business as usual with Israel. Intel has announced a $25bn investment in a chip plant located in Israel, while Microsoft has launched a new Azure cloud region in the country.None of this should come as a surprise. For decades, Silicon Valley has been supporting the Israeli apartheid regime, supplying the advanced technology and investment needed to power its economy and occupy Palestine.Just as they did in 20th-century South Africa, today’s largest US-based technology corporations see an opportunity to profit from Israeli apartheid – a by-product of US-driven digital colonialism.

AI-assisted genocide

Big Tech has been complicit in Israel’s occupation, dispossession and abuse of Palestinians in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most well-known one is its support for pervasive Israeli surveillance of the occupied Indigenous population.In March 2021, Google, along with Amazon, signed a $1.2bn contract for cloud computing services for the Israeli government and defence establishment. The two companies provide Israel with the capacity to store, process and analyse data, including facial recognition, emotion recognition, biometrics and demographic information in what is known as Project Nimbus.The deal received considerable attention in the mainstream media after Google and Amazon workers demanded an end to the contract by launching the campaign No Tech for Apartheid. Anticipating this response, Google and Amazon signed a contract with Israel guaranteeing the continuation of services in the event of a boycott campaign. To date, they have held firm and continue to supply Israel with cloud computing services.Details around Nimbus are concealed from the public, but Google employees have raised fears that it may be servicing Israel’s AI-infused military massacres. These concerns were amplified by reports that the Israeli army is using a new AI-powered system, such as “Lavender” and “The Gospel” to decide on targets for its bombardment of Gaza. According to one former Israeli intelligence official, The Gospel facilitates a “mass assassination factory” where “emphasis is on quantity, not quality”.

Meanwhile, recent reports have revealed that Google is working directly with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, despite the ongoing genocide. The company also allows Israeli forces to use its Google Photos facial recognition service to scan the faces of Palestinians across Gaza for its dystopian “hit list”.

Silicon Valley and apartheid surveillance

Yet AI-assisted genocide is just the tip of the iceberg. For decades, American tech corporations and investors have been quietly aiding and abetting Israel’s system of digital apartheid. One of the most egregious examples is IBM, which was also the major supplier of computers for the South African apartheid regime’s national population registry and the upgraded passport system used to sort people by race and enforce segregation.According to Who Profits, an independent research centre dedicated to exposing commercial involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land and population, “IBM designed and operates the Eitan System of the Israeli Population, Immigration and Border Authority [PIBA]… where personal information on the occupied Palestinian and Syrian people collected by Israel, is stored and managed.” The system contains information collected through Israel’s national population database and at the border and major checkpoints.PIBA is also a part of Israel’s permit system which requires Palestinians over the age of 16 to carry “smart” cards, containing their photograph, address, fingerprints and other biometric identifiers. Much like in apartheid South Africa’s passport system, the cards double as permits which determine Palestinian rights to cross through Israeli checkpoints for any purpose, including work, family reunification, religious rituals or travelling abroad.Microsoft for its part has supplied cloud computing space for the Israeli army’s “Almunasseq” app used for issuing permits to Palestinians in the occupied territories. In the past, it also held a stake in surveillance firm AnyVision (renamed Oosto) which provides real-time facial recognition services to Israeli authorities. Other companies, such as Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Dell, supply technology to service Israeli military and carceral authorities.

Building Israel’s tech superiority

Apart from assisting the Israeli surveillance apparatus, Silicon Valley also provides critical support to the Israeli business sector, helping it maintain and develop a high-tech modern economy.For example, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all launched major cloud computing centres in Israel, offering businesses infrastructure critical to data-driven products and services. Intel is the largest private employer in the country, having commenced operations in 1974.Along with hundreds of other multinationals, Microsoft hosts its own research and development (R&D) centre in Israel, and it launched a chip development centre in Haifa. Nvidia, the trillion-dollar chip behemoth powering the AI revolution, has also announced it is expanding its already large R&D operations in Israel. The list goes on.Venture capitalists are also critical to growing Israel’s local tech sector, which houses 10 percent of the world’s unicorns (companies worth at least $1bn), accounts for 14 percent of jobs and generates about 20 percent of the country’s GDP. Since 2019, $32bn has been invested in Israeli companies, with 51 percent led or co-led by US-based investors.Social media companies have also lent a helping hand to Israeli apartheid and occupation. In 2022, an outside report commissioned by Meta found that Facebook and Instagram’s speech policies showed bias against Palestinians. These longstanding practices of blatant censorship against Palestinians are continuing into the present.In December, Human Rights Watch reported that Meta continues to crack down on pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook and Instagram. Of 1,050 cases reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful content supportive of Palestine that was censored or suppressed – despite allowing a substantial amount of pro-Palestine content – and one removal in support of Israel. The company is even considering censoring the word “Zionist”.Other organisations stand accused of censoring pro-Palestine voices, including X (formerly Twitter), YouTube and even China-owned TikTok. Western governments, including the US and the European Union, have been pressuring Big Social Media companies to review and censor content deemed “terrorist” or supportive of Palestine.Big Tech censorship extends beyond everyday users. Political organisations like Hamas are banned by Big Social Media giants. Meanwhile, the Israeli military, government and other organs of Israeli state terror post freely, with widespread support.

Digital colonialism

It is no surprise that US-based Big Tech companies are partnering with and investing in Israel, supporting its genocidal and apartheid activities.Big Tech corporations are modern-day East India companies; they are an extension of American imperial power. They colonise the global digital economy and reinforce the divide between the North and the South. As a result, the US profits from the ownership of digital infrastructure and knowledge and the extraction of resources from the Global South.Digital colonialism is hardwired into Big Tech’s DNA. Its close relationship with the Israeli army is not only lucrative, but it serves the broader geopolitical interests of the American Empire, from which it benefits.Tech corporations’s support for Israel exposes their fake image as companies espousing antiracism and human rights. In reality, they are complicit in Israeli crimes, much like other organs of American imperialism. What we are witnessing is US-Israeli apartheid, colonial conquest and genocide, powered by American tech giants.But just as the US and other Western governments are feeling the heat of legal action taken against them for the role they are playing in the genocide in Gaza, so are Western companies. US tech giants bear clear responsibility for what is happening in Palestine. They are on the wrong side of history, just as they were in apartheid South Africa. With enough popular pressure, Big Tech collaborators will find their day in court soon.

_{Michael Kwet received his PhD in sociology from Rhodes University, and he is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg and is a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. He is the author of ‘Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the new imperialism in the Global South’ (Race & Class, 2019), ‘The Digital Tech Deal: a socialist framework for the twenty-first century’ (Race & Class, 2022), and is editor of the forthcoming book, ‘The Cambridge Handbook of Race & Surveillance’. Michael hosts the Tech Empire podcast and is the founder of the forthcoming People’s Tech website.}