Notes from the Editors
“From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free”
The morally-depraved US ruling class and its subservient media manipulate the “conversation” about this chant in at least two ways:
They propagate the disingenuous Zionist view that the chant calls for the killing or removal of all Jews in historical Palestine. Anyone who knows anything about the Palestinian struggle for justice and self-determination knows that this chant is a call for equality for all peoples in Palestine, including the Jews.
They never point out that the Israeli ruling class has not only declared Jewish supremacy over all the land between the river to the sea but that it has been state policy and the reality on the ground for decades, even predating the formation of Hamas. Behold Bibi Netanyahu’s words uttered in a closed-door meeting of Likud legislators at a Jerusalem Heritage center in March of 2019: “We will rule over all the territory west of the Jordan, we will be everywhere… We won’t uproot even one [Jewish] person. No one will be uprooted.”
This manipulation by the US, the chief enabler of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, is an aspect of its neo-McCarthyite campaign at home to silence Palestinian solidarity activists. To the ruling class, silencing those who shout “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is more important than ending a live-streaming genocide now well into its ninth month with nearly 40,000 deaths, close to 90,000 injured, thousands dead and unaccounted for under the rubble, some 70% of building structures destroyed or damaged, almost all the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza displaced multiple times, and starvation used as a weapon against them, not to speak of the exacerbation of oppression in the West Bank.
As catastrophic as the situation has been for Palestinians, the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza offers little hope of victory for Israel or ending anytime soon despite Biden administration’s concerns that its full backing of this genocide may cost it the coming November presidential elections. Biden no doubt would like to see a ceasefire, release of Israeli hostages, and a halt to the rising disaffection of a significant number of democratic voters with his administration, voters who have registered their concerns by voting as “uncommitted” in the various Democratic primary state elections.
A key problem is Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. He is bent on continuing the slaughter of innocent Palestinians to maintain the emergency that keeps him out of court and possibly jail that awaits him once he is out of power. What’s more, the Israeli Jewish public supports his genocidal Gaza policies. Therefore, it is not accurate to suggest that a change at the helm would bring about a fundamental shift in Gaza policy. Lastly, Biden is unwilling or unable to halt military aid to Israel and force it to comply with his wishes. Yes, the administration is keen on seeking a ceasefire, but on Israel’s terms that are clearly unacceptable to Hamas. Biden may also have calculated that if it cuts off military aid, it will certainly lose the election in November due to the pressure and influence of the Zionists at home. But that it may have a better chance of winning the November elections with better management of the uncommitted democratic voters via the use of rhetorical devices and minor or marginal but loud policy disagreements with Netanyahu.
The neo-McCarthyite campaign at home won’t alleviate any of the above concerns. In fact, the increasing identification of Israel with genocide is undoing decades of its association with the Holocaust in the minds of the public. The harm to Zionism and Israel will be incalculable and is bound to change the trajectory of the anti-colonial struggle for Palestinian liberation. Indeed, for the first time since 1948, one can argue reasonably that we may be witnessing the beginning of a long process towards the end of the Zionist colonial project in historical Palestine.
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Recall the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) principle falsely invoked in 2011 in Libya. Why not invoke it now and stop Israel from slaughtering Palestinians? Do we need a Reminding to Protect mechanism to invoke R2P when it’s needed?
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Racism in Israel is not limited to the treatment of Palestinians. Discrimination against Jews that are not European (Ashkenazi) is widespread. For example, in the 1950s, when many Jews from Islamic and Arab countries (Mizrahi) immigrated to Israel, they were sent to “transit” camps to be “reeducated” into Ashkenazi culture. Around 5,000 healthy babies were stolen from Mizrahi mothers and given to white families.
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The U.S. Neocon’s Dilemma Over Israel (contributed by Gary Olson)
If memory serves, Noam Chomsky once wrote that the US would do everything possible to prevent choosing between Israel and oil because in that event the choice would be oil. This worked well for some time, but now the Zionist entity has gotten out of hand with its genocidal war in Gaza and the attack on Iran’s embassy in Damascus. Israel has become a dangerous liability and has, in Garland Nixon’s apt phrase, changed from being a “trained guard dog to a mad dog.”
The US national security neocons know that if Israel retaliates against Iran now, oil and gas prices would skyrocket — sinking Biden’s re-election and cause both the American and European economies to plummet. Russia, with its ample oil and gas resources would be the winner. Let me put it this way: murdering Gazans is fine and dandy but endangering US control of Middle East oil resources is strictly beyond the pale.
Iran, a non-Arab Shiite nation has further enhanced its reputation among the Sunni Muslim masses even as its action has shaken the ruling monarchies and dictators that fear their own people and have covertly and overtly supported Israel.
Finally, what’s happening in the Near East is a further contraction of the US empire. After humiliating debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US attempted to weaken Russia via a proxy war in Ukraine — and failed miserably — leaving Russia stronger than ever and China poised to further weaken US global hegemony. The Zionist entity totally failed to defeat Hamas militarily or politically and its deterrence myth was shattered by Iranian missiles. For anyone seriously interested in a more peaceful and just world, all this is a cause for cautious optimism.
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Achieving gender equality is indispensable to liberatory projects. Iranian women have struggled since the 1979 revolution to regain some lost rights and advance in others. They have progressed greatly but have yet to achieve full equality in law, not unlike women elsewhere, including the US, where the state has recently attacked their reproductive rights. The recent Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran promised greater freedom from gender repression. The anti-regime opposition in the Iranian diaspora in the US however tried to weaponize the movement for their own mostly reactionary political agendas and some among them even urged violent tactics to bring about regime change. In our view, this ill-served the movement by giving the state ready-made reasons to repress the movement. Nevertheless, the Iranian state afterwards adopted a less restrictive approach to the issue of veiling not because it favored it but as a concession to the steadfastness of the movement and the broad public support it had enjoyed.
The state should have adopted this orientation as a formal or declared policy. Instead, it chose to move backward in 2024 as it began to implement coercive veiling policies in a campaign known as “Noor” or light. This does not serve either the state or the public interest and must be opposed. With the death of Iran’s president in what appears to have been a helicopter accident in May and the new elections in Iran next week, there may be a chance that the new president could move in the opposite direction as all six approved candidates, all men, have spoken critically of the state’s recent harsher gender policies.
Many in the Iranian opposition diaspora communities in the US who have proclaimed themselves as champions of Women, Life, Freedom are not to be trusted. Most of them have been silent about (if not supportive of) the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza with 70% of the killed, injured, maimed, starving, and sick being women and children. They have also remained silent about the repression and arrests of several thousand anti-genocide students and faculty on US campuses. Their human rights advocacy only applies to Iran. And like the US and Western countries in general, they apply a double standard and at best engage in a selective approach and at worst seek to weaponize human rights for their agendas. They too, like the Western states, and the US protestations, need to be seen for what they are and rejected as hypocritical at best and motivated by other (and hidden) considerations at worst.
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Since the 2016 Paris Agreement, the largest global Banks have given nearly $7 trillion to the fossil fuel industry. Bank of America poured nearly $34 billion into fossil fuel financing in 2023 alone.
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