Gaza’s Health Ministry said Thursday that Israeli forces killed 78 Palestinians and injured 214 in the previous 48-hour period as Israeli strikes continued across the Gaza Strip.
One strike on Thursday targeted a school-turned-shelter in the Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza. At least 12 Palestinians were killed and 30 were wounded in the attack on the Shati Elementary Boys School, which is affiliated with the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA.
Palestinians react after a school sheltering displaced people was hit by an Israeli strike in Shati camp in Gaza City November 7, 2024 (REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa)
Reutersreported that dozens of Palestinian families were pushed out of Beit Lahia, one of the cities where the ethnic cleansing campaign has been focused. Israeli forces have been destroying homes in Beit Lahia to ensure Palestinians don’t return.
“After they displaced most or all of the people in Jabalia, now they are bombing everywhere, killing people on the roads and inside their houses to force everyone out,” a displaced Palestinian man told Reuters.
In southern Gaza, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported three children were killed by an Israeli strike in Rafah.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said that the latest violence brought its death toll since October 2023 to 43,469 and the number of wounded to 102,561. The ministry only counts bodies brought to hospitals and morgues. “There are still a number of victims under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry said.
A group of American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza have estimated the US-backed Israeli bombing campaign and siege has killed at least 118,908 Palestinians, including over 60,000 who have starved to death.
The election of Donald Trump is a critical event in the protracted crisis of American democracy, whose shattering repercussions will be felt throughout the world. A fascist demagogue—who attempted in January 2021 to violently overthrow the last presidential election—has decisively won the 2024 election with both an electoral and popular vote majority. He will be re-installed in the White House in little more than 70 days.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump gestures at a campaign rally at the Santander Arena, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, in Reading, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Trump owes his political triumph to the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, whose fixation with the identity politics of the affluent middle class, arrogant indifference to the devastating impact of inflation on workers’ living standards, and unrelenting support for war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza prepared the ground for the election debacle.
The major pillars of the capitalist press are already attempting to downplay the political implications of Trump’s victory. “Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat,” writes the New York Times, “but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy.” The Times reassures its readers that Trump will be a lame-duck president because he is barred by the Constitution from seeking another term.
This is wishful thinking. Trump openly proclaimed that this would be the last election, and that his supporters would not have to vote again. The political reality is that the election of Trump sets the stage for an unprecedented wave of social counterrevolution, which he plans to enforce with an iron heel.
Trump has pledged to become “dictator” and deploy the military to crush “the enemy within.” He plans to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, an operation that would require placing major American cities under martial law. He has floated eliminating the income tax and promises to slash taxes for the rich and end corporate regulations. The devastating impact that these policies will have on the working class cannot be overstated.
He is not a political accident. However it was achieved—and this is not to minimize the political complicity of the Democratic Party—the coming to power of a second Trump administration represents the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States.
Donald Trump speaks not simply as one criminal individual but as the representative of a powerful capitalist oligarchy that has taken shape over the last three to four decades. Mega-millionaires and billionaires—led by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison—are utilizing Trump to effect in their interests a reactionary restructuring of American society. They will use the time leading up to the January 20 inauguration to prepare the barrage of repressive and socially reactionary measures that will be unleashed as soon as Trump is once again ensconced in the White House.
He was able to exploit the absence within the political establishment of any articulation of the interests of the vast majority of the population. The Harris campaign was opposed to making any social appeal to the working class. They pitched their campaign to the most affluent voters, promoting hated warmongers like Liz Cheney and promising to place Republicans in the cabinet.
Harris, Barack Obama and other Democratic surrogates traveled the country haranguing voters that a failure to turn out for Harris would be proof of misogyny or racism. They combined incessant appeals to racial and gender identity with full-throated endorsement of war abroad. The Democrats pledged further support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and called for an escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
The Democrats offered nothing to address the escalating social crisis in the United States, instead presenting the country as “on the right track” to a population which almost unanimously believes the opposite. Figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presented the absurd lie that the Biden-Harris administration had improved conditions for working people and that Harris would challenge the domination of “the billionaire class.” Mimicking Hillary Clinton’s 2016 claim that the working class consists of “a basket of deplorables,” Biden called Trump’s supporters “garbage” in the final days of the election.
The vote totals show not a surge in support for Trump, who appears to have lost votes compared to his 2020 totals, but a staggering collapse in support for the Democrats, with Harris winning somewhere between 10 and 15 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020.
Harris underperformed Biden in every single region of the country. The Democratic Party’s efforts to cajole various racial and gender groups behind the Harris campaign on the basis of an appeal to identity fell completely flat. Trump saw the largest increase in vote margins in counties where over 50 percent of the population is non-white, and exit poll data shows that Harris lost Latino men nationally by a 54-44 percent margin, a reversal from 2020, when Biden won that demographic by a 59-39 percent margin.
The margin by which the Democrats won young voters also fell substantially from 2020, as countless young people refused to vote for the candidate complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Harris won the youngest voters by only 56-41 percent versus Biden’s 65-31 percent margin. Trump won a majority of votes among first-time voters, a sign that the Democrats were unable to activate voters beyond the affluent upper-middle class.
In fact, Harris improved only among the affluent. Among voters with an income of $200,000 or more, she won 52-44 percent, reversing a narrow Trump win in that income bracket in 2020. Trump won voters with an income between $100,000 and $200,000 in 2020 by a 58-41 percent margin, but Harris won by 53-45 percent. Democrats simultaneously saw a collapse in support from working people, with Harris losing those making between $30,000 and $100,000, a wide swath of the population which Biden won by a roughly 57-43 percent margin in 2020.
The electorate was driven by deep social anger. Among the 43 percent of voters who said they were “dissatisfied” with “the way things are going in the country today,” Trump won 54-44 percent. Among the 29 percent who answered that they were “angry,” Trump won 71-27 percent. Harris won 89-10 percent among the tiny sliver of the population who are “enthusiastic” about economic and social conditions today. The total percentage of the population who said their financial situation is “worse” today versus four years ago more than doubled to 45 percent, with Trump winning those voters by an 80-17 percent margin.
Trump and the Republicans are well aware that they will preside over a social powder keg, and that the right-wing policies they plan to implement will only deepen the social anger. Their strategy is to combine massive police state repression with a fascist campaign to scapegoat immigrants for all social ills. Though exit polling does not suggest that voters were taken in by Trump’s vile attacks on immigrants, and though large majorities say they believe immigrants deserve a pathway to citizenship rather than face mass deportation, the stage is set for a massive and violent attack on immigrant workers on a scale that will make even his first administration appear like child’s play.
And while Trump’s demagogic claims to oppose war might have won votes away from the inveterate warmongers in the Democratic Party, Trump is himself a ruthless imperialist politician who advocates escalatory confrontation with China, Iran and North Korea.
The response of the Democrats to Trump’s electoral victory will be to seek compromise and coalition, already evident in Harris’ capitulatory statement Wednesday afternoon. She made no warnings about the dictatorial character of the incoming Trump regime and pledged to cooperate with the transition to the would-be American Führer. The Democrats will shift even further to the right, while seeking to forge an agreement with the Republicans on their central priority, the escalation of war.
The reactionary character of Trump’s political and social program will become clear enough. As the ruling class seeks to restructure the state, there has to be a restructuring of politics, along class lines. As WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North wrote, Trump’s election “is the disastrous outcome of the long-term and very deliberate repudiation by the Democratic Party of any programmatic orientation to the working class…
In the United States, the new anti-Marxism blended with the longstanding tradition of anti-communism. Left-wing politics, of the sort connected to working class militancy, disappeared. The grievances related to identity displaced any serious concern with the massive concentration of wealth in a small segment of society at the expense of the working class.
Those who have promoted this form of right-wing politics, promoted by the Democratic Party, now resort to the most bankrupt of all responses to the election: blaming the population.
In fact, the past year has seen an explosive growth of political and social opposition, from the mass protests against the genocide in Gaza to a steady growth of strike action by workers, who are striving to break free from the control of the corporatist trade union apparatus. Immense social struggles are on the horizon.
These struggles must be politically directed, and they must be guided by an understanding that fascism can only be stopped by the development of an independent movement of the working class against the source of political reaction and oligarchy: the capitalist system. There must be “a new birth” of genuinely socialist politics, based on the working class and animated by an international strategy.
The Socialist Equality Party, through its presidential election campaign of Joseph Kishore and Jerry White, set out to mobilize the working class on an international, socialist program in opposition to war, inequality and the capitalist system that produces them. This program now takes on an even greater urgency. In the period ahead, the Socialist Equality Party and International Committee of the Fourth International will fight to win the leadership of a growing movement of workers and youth against war, dictatorship and inequality and for the socialist transformation of society.
Defeating the Arab democracy movement left autocratic states hollowed out and often reliant on US and Israeli support to survive. Palestinians cannot expect help anytime soon
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (R) meets with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Alamein in northern Egypt on 20 August 2024 (AFP)
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As Israel continues its genocidal war in Gaza, and expands it to Lebanon, most Arab countries appear to be mere observers or enablers of the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians on an unprecedented scale.
Even with the threat of a large-scale regional war looming, which could have extremely destabilising effects on the entire region, the ability and desire of Arab states to restrain Israeli imperial hubris appears to be non-existent.
There is good reason to argue that the main enabler of the current crisis engulfing the Middle East is none other than the United States, which has effectively funded the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon, with aid topping $17.9bn since 7 October 2023. It has also provided diplomatic cover to Israel and given its far-right government the green light to expand the war into Lebanon.
This, however, misses an important aspect of the dynamic. Namely, Israel’s colonial hubris regards having the ability to reshape the Middle East through mass violence being fed by the autocratic nature of the Arab states and the failure of the democratic movement in the region.
More than a decade after the mass revolts that swept the region, the result is weak states, with contested legitimacy, only able to exercise power over their own citizens through mass violence – not dissimilar to the way that Israel is treating the Palestinians.
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In many ways, the logic of regime survival at any cost has eroded the ability of these states to influence events in the region – and, in some cases, the social foundation of the national state itself.
Flow of US aid
A notable example of this is Egypt, the most populous Arab state and the only one to have a border with the Gaza Strip, making it, theoretically, one of the Arab states with the most potential to influence the conflict and restrain Israeli aggression.
Egypt is also a close ally of the US, receiving a whopping $183.5bn in aid since the end of the Second World War, positioning it as a possible interlocutor with Israel’s patron.
This strategic positioning, however, was overridden by the Sisi government’s obsession with survival, which placed it in a dependent relationship with Israel, even as Israel threatens the very stability that Sisi covets.
Indeed, Israel played a not insignificant role in the consolidation of the Sisi government after the 2013 coup, offering political support, security cooperation and deeper economic ties to the direct benefit of the Egyptian elites.
War on Gaza: Arab despots’ failure to stand up to Israel could fuel an explosion
For example, during the summer of 2013, after the coup that overthrew the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) was lobbying on behalf of the fledgling military autocracy to ensure the continued flow of American aid.
The close relationship between President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the Zionist lobbying groups continued, with reports emerging in February 2017 that Sisi met representatives of the most influential pro-Israel groups, including Aipac, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) and the Zionist Organization of America (Zoa) five times in 20 months.
The relationship between Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been described as the closest between any leaders from the two nations since the peace treaty of 1979.
This apparent closeness was anchored in close security cooperation between the countries, with reports emerging in 2018 that, in the preceding two years, Israel had conducted over 100 air strikes against militants in Sinai, with Cairo’s approval.
This security cooperation was extended to include direct repression of peaceful dissent in Egypt, with the sale of Israeli spyware to Sisi’s government, which was used to hack into the phone of Ahmed Tantawy, a prominent member of the secular opposition.
The depth of the alliance extended to the energy sector, with a $15bn deal signed in 2018 between the two countries to import Israeli gas for re-export in liquid form.
An investigation by human rights campaigner Hossam Bahgat revealed that the Egyptian private company responsible for the deal was managed by Egypt’s General Intelligence Services (GIS), allowing the country’s security elites to profit from the deal directly.
Egypt’s debt crisis
These deep structural dependencies placed Sisi’s government in an extremely vulnerable position, unable to restrain Israel, even when the idea of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza was floated by Netanyahu, with its highly destabilising effects on the government and the country.
Indeed, beyond rhetorical condemnation, Egypt has done little to impact the dynamic on the ground. The most notable example of a critical public stance was the Egyptian declaration in May that it would join the International Court of Justice case against Israel.
At the time of writing, there is no evidence of it doing so. But there is evidence of deepening economic ties, with Egypt in September signing another deal with Israel, to increase its imports of natural gas by 20 percent.
More than a decade after the coup, with the Sisi government facing a grinding debt crisis and following a logic of power consolidation at any cost, it finds itself at the mercy of Israel and its colonial hubris, unable to exert influence on one of its closest allies.
Syria in shambles
The enabling of Israel’s colonial ambitions is not limited to Israel’s Arab allies, but also extends to Syria, where the logic of government survival above all else is at its most extreme.
More than a decade after the start of the Syrian uprising, the Assad government has survived, albeit at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, high levels of foreign interference and the loss of large swathes of territory. The Syrian economy is decimated, the state’s monopoly on violence is now completely eroded, and the social foundations of the state have been eviscerated.
The post-colonial state has failed to meet its raison d’etre, namely to empower the people of the Middle East, and confront the old imperial powers, including Israel
The Syrian government has reduced the country to a narco state, blackmailing the Gulf states into reintegrating it into the Arab fold in exchange for stopping the flow of illicit drugs.
In essence, Assad decided to sacrifice the Syrian state on the altar of his survival, leaving behind a state in shambles – unable to assert control within its own borders, let alone restrain Israeli aggression that could spiral to engulf Syria as well, whose territory it already occupies.
The horrors that we are witnessing in Gaza and Lebanon are as much the result of an Israeli colonist mania, and western support for it, as it is also a direct result of the nature of the Arab political landscape that emerged from the failed Arab spring.
The post-colonial state has failed to meet its raison d’etre, namely to empower the people of the Middle East, and confront the old imperial powers, including Israel. Any pretences of this have now completely disappeared, with a new raison d’etre emerging, namely the domination of their own citizens at any cost.
This is not to argue that these states were not repressive before, but there is not now even a pretence of confronting a dangerous external enemy, now that said enemy is internal.
The dissident has now come to replace colonists and the occupier as the number one enemy of the Arab states, with the mass slaughter of the Palestinians, Lebanese and whoever dares to challenge the Israeli vision of the new Middle East standing as a testament to a new Arab autocratic political order.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Maged Mandour is a political analyst who is a regular contributor to the Arab Digest, Middle East Eye, and Open Democracy. He is the author of an upcoming book entitled Egypt Under Sisi, to be published by IB Tauris. The book will examine the social and political developments in Egypt since the 2013 coup.
Footage shows a Palestinian man being used by the Israel Defense Forces as a human shield.
(Photo: Al Jazeera)
“The earliest testimony we have on it is from a soldier who was aware of it just a few weeks after the ground invasion began,” one human rights expert said. “The latest testimony we have on this is from the summer.”
The Israel Defense Forces routinely use detained Palestinians as human shields in Gaza, according to testimony from four Palestinians and one IDF soldier shared withThe Washington Post.
Their stories, published on Sunday, build on other accounts from Haaretz, Al Jazeera, the international press, and Defense for Children International to reveal a pattern of Israeli soldiers forcing Palestinians—including children—to enter buildings or tunnels ahead of them to check for militants or explosives, in clear violation of international law.
“This wasn’t something that happened just here and there but rather on a large scale throughout a number of different units, at different times, throughout the war and in different places,” Joel Carmel, advocacy director of Breaking the Silence, told The Washington Post.
“My hospital was turning into rubble, and they were asking me to demolish it with my own hands.”
The incidents recounted to the Post occurred between January and August. One man, 20-year-old Mohammed Saad, said he was detained by the IDF in June and interrogated for several days. Then, a new pattern began. Every day, he and two other Palestinian men were blindfolded and taken to a different location. They were made to wear IDF uniforms, given cameras, and told to enter buildings ahead of the Israeli soldiers to film and check for explosives. On the second day, an explosion went off after Saad had made his forced investigation.
“They tied my hands and threw me on the sand,” he recalled. “They took turns beating me. I still don’t know where the explosion came from.”
Another time, the captain of the unit he was detained by showed him an image of his family home destroyed by bombing.
“If you do not cooperate with us, we will kill all your family members like this,” the captain said.
On the 15th day of Saab’s ordeal, he was given civilian clothes and told to walk. As he did so, he felt a pain and realized he had been shot in the back.
The other three Palestinians interviewed by the Post were detained during the IDF’s raid on al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City in March. One was a surgeon at the hospital, while the other two were taken from their homes nearby. They were made to enter the hospital building ahead of IDF troops, remove any barriers, and take pictures of each room they entered.
“I was telling them that my hands are precious for my work; I am the only vascular surgeon here,” the surgeon, Omar al-Jadba recalled to the Post. “My hospital was turning into rubble, and they were asking me to demolish it with my own hands.”
The IDF soldier, who spoke anonymously, said that two Palestinian detainees were placed with his unit to make sure that buildings were safe to enter. One of them was only a teenager. His commander said the two men were terrorists, but then later said they could be released after the mission was over.
“At this point we understood that if we could release them, then they were not terrorists,” the soldier, a reservist, told the Post. “The officer just lied to us.”
“Every one of their accusations is a confession.”
Another group of soldiers questioned the use of human shields, telling a higher-level commander that it was against international law.
“He told us that international law is not important and the only thing that simple soldiers need to think about is the ethical code of the IDF,” the soldier told the Post.
However, the IDF said in a statement that its orders prohibit the use of human shields.
Breaking the Silence, a group that records testimonies from Israeli soldiers in the occupied Palestinian territories, said the reservist’s account was in line with others they had received.
“The earliest testimony we have on it is from a soldier who was aware of it just a few weeks after the ground invasion began,” Carmel said. “The latest testimony we have on this is from the summer.”
The Post reporting came the same day as a major Associated Press investigation into Israeli raids on three hospitals in northern Gaza at the end of 2023. Israel has often justified its hospital raids with the claim that Hamas operates from the inside, turning all the patients and doctors into human shields. However, the AP concluded that “Israel has presented little or even no evidence of a significant Hamas presence at the three” hospitals it considered: the al-Awda, Indonesian, and Kamal Adwan hospitals.
“What do [former U.S. President Donald] Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu have in common?” asked journalist Mehdi Hasan in response to the Post‘s reporting. “Many things but especially… projection. Every one of their accusations is a confession.”
Other commenters responded to the clear violations of international law and questioned why the U.S. continues to provide weapons and funding to the IDF while it engages in war crimes.
The Austin for Palestine coalition shared a quote from the article, noting that what it described was “paid for by our tax dollars.”
Israeli Newspaper Haaretz Editorial, Oct 29, 2024,
For three and a half weeks, Israeli forces have been besieging the northern Gaza Strip. Israel has almost completely blocked the entry of humanitarian aid, thereby starving the hundreds of thousands of people who live there. Information emerging from the besieged area is only partial, because ever since the war began, Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza.
But even based on the little that has been revealed to the public, two things can be said about the siege. First, the scale of the civilian casualties from the army’s daily bombings of towns and refugee camps in northern Gaza – children, women, elderly people and men who are innocent of any crime – is enormous.
Gaza is the horror that can’t be denied. But Israelis will try
‘We are truly worried that Israel is going to commit something very dangerous in Gaza’
With no strategy to deal with Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, Israel is pushed into occupation
Moreover, medical and other aid facilities have largely collapsed, and other institutions are also collapsing. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people are now at risk of starvation or are already suffering terrible hunger.
Israel says it told the residents that they needed to leave northern Gaza, and even now, they can still move southward on routes the army has designated for this purpose. Thus the residents, many of whom have already been uprooted two or three times or even more from the places to which they have fled the terrors of war, are now being asked to move again. Yet Israel has refrained from giving the displaced any guarantee that they will be able to return once the war ends.
Given this, it’s no wonder that grave suspicions have arisen that Israel is effectively perpetrating ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza and that this operation is intended to permanently empty this area of Palestinians.
This suspicion fits with both the principles of the “generals’ plan” being pushed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland – a plan Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has denied implementing – and the demands of the Jewish supremacist parties in the governing coalition that are openly pursuing a policy of mass expulsions and the renewal of Jewish settlement in northern Gaza.
Ethnic cleansing is both a moral crime and a legal one. Criminal law treats mass expulsions as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. Horrifyingly, some members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government want to commit these crimes.
As soon as the war began, they began calling for “erasing Gaza” and for perpetrating a “second Nakba.” But many Israelis made light of such statements, and the law enforcement system, headed by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, refrained from dealing with this incitement to commit crimes.
Now, we can see the results: Israel is sliding into ethnic cleansing; its soldiers are carrying out the criminal policies of the messianic, Kahanist right; and even the opposition on the center and center-left isn’t making a peep. This consensus behind ethnic cleansing is shameful, and every public leader who doesn’t demand an end to the de facto expulsion is supporting this crime and has become a party to it.
If this process doesn’t stop immediately, hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israeli.
The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel
Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee areas of Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip, earlier in October.Credit: Omar Al-Q
A new report by the Israeli outlet Calcalist reviewed Israeli military spending on wars since October 7, finding that Washington is funding 70% of Tel Aviv’s military costs. In a little over a year, the US has provided Israel with more than $20 billion in military aid.
“The scope of American aid since the beginning of the war is about 85 billion shekels… According to official estimates by the Bank of Israel, the total cost of the war is…approximately NIS 118 billion.” It continues, “Therefore, according to a simple calculation, The Americans financed about 70% of the war effort.”
According to the Cost of War Project, the US has given Israel $22.57 billion in military aid since the Hamas attack. Calcalist concludes without US support, Tel Aviv’s war would simply be unaffordable.
“There is no doubt that without the American aid the government deficit for the years 2024-2025 (which is one of the highest in the country’s history), would have increased by about 4.3 % GDP, which would have made it unfinanceable,” it says. “Therefore, it is doubtful whether this war would have been conducted as it is – neither in intensity nor in scope – without the American assistance.”
The US has sent Israel tens of thousands of bombs, artillery rounds, and tank shells. Those weapons have been used to commit countless war crimes against the Palestinian people of Gaza.
The official death toll in the besieged enclave now exceeds 43,000. However, a group of American healthcare workers who have spent time volunteering in Gaza estimate the actual death count to be over 118,000.
Dr Tammy Abughanim, a pediatric intensive-care surgeon, said, “We cannot do our jobs, because Israel has made our jobs impossible, and Israel has made our jobs impossible with the direct support of the United States.” She added, “We all know the obvious step is to stop supplying Israel with the arms that it is using, the weaponry that it is using to target and kill civilians.”
Earlier this month, Al Jazeera’sInvestigative Unit published a documentary documenting Israel’s systematic use of indiscriminate attacks during its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. A remarkable feature of the investigation is that, to document Israel’s war crimes, it largely relies on evidence published on social media by Israeli soldiers or the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) itself.
War crimes documented in the video include wanton destruction, abuse of Palestinian detainees including torture, and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by Israeli forces. Watch it here:
Also this month, the organization Airwars in collaboration with Sky News published an investigation similarly relying on video evidence published to X by Israeli forces themselves to document 17 indiscriminate Israeli strikes in which collectively more than 400 Palestinian civilians were killed.
An interactive map of the murderous attacks is published at Airwars. Watch their 20-minute video of the investigation’s findings here:
Yesterday, Drop Site, a Substack publication spearheaded by journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim published an investigation into the conduct of the IDF’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion, whose self-described job has been “to flatten Gaza”. Once again, the documentation of brazen war crimes relies heavily on photos and videos posted to social media by Israel’s own armed forces.
Anyone still claiming that Israel is “targeting Hamas” and that Palestinian civilians have only been dying because Hamas uses them as “human shields” cannot possibly still believe that. Maybe at one point early into Israel’s assault on Gaza, some apologists for the Jewish supremacist state actually managed to convinced themselves of their own propaganda. But with Israel’s genocide ongoing now for over a year and being livestreamed on social media, including gleefully by Israel’s own military forces, it is inconceivable that any of the genocide apologists actually believe that Israel has been acting in accordance with international humanitarian law.
All one needs to do to see the truth that Israel has been perpetrating the crime of genocide — with the full backing of the US government — is to open one’s eyes.
“All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”
― Karl Marx
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the Prussian province of Rhine, and died in London in March 1883, at the age of 65. He was the most influential socialist philosopher and revolutionary thinker, whose ideas have deeply influenced the course of human history and human thought.
His writings cover philosophy, history, political economy, anthropology, social criticism, history, theory of revolutionary practice, and he himself participated in revolutionary activities. When he was a student at the university, he was deeply involved in the Young Hegelian movement. The members of this group in their articles and pamphlets criticized Christian culture. Feuerbach’s materialism was opposed to Hegel’s idealism. He reduced Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit’ to human ‘species being’.
Because of Marx’s critical articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, the government closed this paper. He went to Paris in 1843 where he made contacts with French socialist groups and emigre German workers. Here he met Frederick Engels and the two became friends for the rest of their lives. But his stay there was short. He was expelled from Paris in 1844.
After his expulsion from Paris, Marx, along with Engels, moved to Brussels, where they lived for three years. After an intensive study of history, he formulated the theory of history commonly known as historical materialism.
In his theory of history, Marx accepted Hegel’s idea that the world develops according to dialectical process. But the two had different ideas about what the dialectic process entails. For Hegel, historical developments take place through the mystical entity called Absolute Spirit. Marx rejected the notion of Absolute Spirit, and said what moved society was not the Absolute Spirit, but man’s relation to matter, of which the most important part was played by the mode of production.
In this way, Marx’s materialism becomes closely related to economics. Human labour shaped society, and material conditions determined the superstructures. The part played by labour, not some mystical Absolute Spirit, formed the basis of social life. Marx’s dialectal view of social change is shorn of Hegel’s idealist dialectics. The two stand on different levels, and their philosophies of history differ.
For Marx, man working on nature remakes the world and in doing so he also remakes himself by increasing his powers. Marx wrote in the German Ideology, ‘Men have history because they must produce their life.’
Marx went to Paris in 1848 where the revolution first took place and then to Germany. But the failure of the revolutions forced him to seek refuge in London in 1849, where he spent the rest of his life.
He and his family had to face many economic hardships in London. His friend Engels helped him economically and he himself wrote articles as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune for which he was paid reasonably well. But he and his family had unending economic problems.
However, the revolutionary thinker devoted much time to the First International and its annual Congresses. The rest of the time, he spent in the British Museum library, collecting material and taking notes and analysing the material for studies of political economy. In 1867, he published the first volume of Capital, in which he discussed the capitalist mode of production. He explained his views on the labour theory of value, the conception of surplus value, accumulation of capital and the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in the final part of the book. He had completed the volumes II and II in the 1860s, which Engels published after the death of Marx in 1883.
The profound analysis of capital, Marx undertook in the nineteenth century, is still relevant to our understanding the global capitalism and the forces that control it. He had shown the tendency of capital under the general law of capitalist accumulation. A few own more wealth, but others have little to live on. A recent Oxfam report says that eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people, who form the poorest half of humanity. In the global economy, rich industrialists and producers take advantage of the global workforce that mostly lives in the global South. The abundant cheap labour from the poor countries is used to produce goods that are sold at high prices in the industrialized western countries.
The problem to end the exploitation of the working-class people was a core issue for Marx, and his theory to end this exploitation can only take place when a more equitable form of society is created that stands opposed to the accumulation of capital by a few and the poverty or meagre existence of the majority. That objective of a human society is not possible under capitalism.
In a major escalation of the imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East, Israel launched three waves of airstrikes on Iran Saturday morning in coordination with the Biden administration.
A view of Tehran capital of Iran is seen, early Saturday, October 26, 2024. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]
The White House quickly endorsed Israel’s illegal attack on Iran, declaring, “We understand that Israel is conducting targeted strikes against military targets in Iran as an exercise of self-defense.”
A White House official further endorsed the illegal attack in a statement to Bloomberg, calling it “targeted and proportional.” The official told Bloomberg, “The president and his national security team, of course, worked with the Israelis over recent weeks” to plan the illegal act of war.
Rather than self-defense, the attack is a calculated provocation aimed at eliciting a military response by Iran that can be used to justify further US-Israeli aggression, including the deployment of even more combat troops to Israel and a further military build-up throughout the region.
The Iranian military confirmed that airstrikes targeted bases in Ilam, Khuzestan, and Tehran provinces, and commercial flights were suspended throughout the country.
The attack follows the October 9 discussion between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the American president signed off on the strikes, along with a series of discussions with the Pentagon and White House Friday night.
The attack took place just days after US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that US combat troops had arrived in Israel, in the role of air defense support for the operation.
The attack took place as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East after extensive discussions with Netanyahu in which he reviewed both the planned attack on Iran and Israel’s so-called “generals’ plan” to starve, displace, or exterminate the remaining population of Northern Gaza.
The Israeli-US attack on Iran took place just 11 days before the November 5 US presidential election. Earlier this month, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the Biden administration was planning an “October conspiracy” to escalate the war with Iran. We wrote:
There is a long history of events taking place in October that have major effects on an upcoming US presidential election. By deploying US troops to Israel, the Biden administration is not so much seeking to impact Kamala Harris’s electoral prospects as to ensure that plans for military escalation are underway before the election takes place. Instead of an “October surprise,” it is an “October conspiracy” to massively expand US involvement in war throughout the Middle East.
These warnings have now been confirmed. While the scope of the Israeli attack is at this point unclear, it is evident that the Biden Administration is recklessly seeking to escalate war throughout the Middle East targeting Iran.
Israel’s attack on Iran is part of its rampage throughout the Middle East, supported by the imperialist powers, with the aim of reimposing colonial domination over the oil-rich region as part of their effort to dominate Russia and China.
The most horrific consequence of this imperialist offensive throughout the Middle East is the genocide in Gaza. The official death toll of the Gaza genocide stands at 42,847, with over 100,544 wounded. The real death toll is likely to be far higher, with an article in The Lancet estimating it at 186,000 or more in July.
This month, Reuters reported that Israel had suspended all commercial food shipments into Gaza, leading the availability to fall to the lowest level since the start of Israel’s onslaught, as human rights organizations warned of imminent mass starvation.
The attack on Iran follows a campaign of illegal assassinations targeting all of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as leading Iranian figures, as the US and Israel expand their military onslaught throughout the region. On October 16, Israel murdered Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Rafah. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed by more than 80 Israeli 2,000-pound bombs in Lebanon last month, and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July.
Israel simultaneously continued its ground invasion and daily bombardment of Lebanon Friday, with the Lebanese death toll rising to 2,634.
Peace and Justice Post 
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