Death Spiral Delusions: Behind the New Israel/Palestine Disaster
David Finkel
Posted October 10, 2023
IN A RECENT post “Catastrophe in Jenin and Palestine, continued” (July 8, 2023), I reiterated a previous remark: “The degenerative spiral in the so-called Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ is nowhere near reaching the bottom yet.”
First, the immediate desperate priority for supporters of Palestinian freedom, and simple human decency, must be demanding international pressure to stop the Israeli siege of Gaza with its genocidal implications.
Not only the Israeli bombing and pending ground assault but even more, the cutoff of food and water, gas and electricity will spell death for tens if not hundreds of thousands of Gaza civilians in the months that the military operation to “crush Hamas forever” and “change Gaza for decades” would likely take.
As the degenerative spiral descends to a death spiral for Palestinians and Israelis, it’s also become all the more important to be clear about what’s behind it. Without trying to respond to daily headlines where every horror surpasses the previous one, we must investigate the big, bigger and biggest delusions of the present moment and those leading to it.
Since this piece is being written for predominantly Palestine solidarity readers, to begin with, I’m afraid that on the pro-Palestinian side (and perhaps the thinking of the HAMAS leadership), there’s a delusion that the HAMAS raid, spectacular, amazingly organized without Israeli detection – and let’s face it, murderous – would trigger a broader uprising in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Palestinian communities inside Israel.
It will do nothing of the sort – unless the lunatic religious-Zionist West Bank settlers take the occasion to escalate their wave of violence against Palestinian villages (which may be a bit less likely since Israeli army units who protect the vicious settler assaults are being redeployed to Gaza and the Lebanese border).
Even if feeling some understandable emotional satisfaction that at least someone’s fighting back, the Palestinian population has no ambition to be martyred along with their families, nor do they wish to duplicate the gruesome scenes of ordinary Israeli civilians slaughtered in the streets. (Besides, upsurges like mass strikes or popular intifadas don’t happen because someone “calls” for them.)
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Israel-Palestine Conflict Gives Birth to a New U.S. antiwar Movement
Dan La Botz
Posted October 22, 2023
Israel’s merciless bombardment of Gaza, destroying apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, and places of worship, killing thousands; its siege, cutting off food, water, and electricity; and its massing of tens of thousands of troops on the Gaza border, preparing an invasion, have horrified millions of Americans.
Thousands have joined protest demonstrations in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., among other cities. These demonstrations, organized around the slogan “Ceasefire…
UAW striking for pensions, a socialist response to the cases made against them
Luke Pretz
Posted October 19, 2023
One of the major demands being made by the UAW membership in this round of bargaining is the restoration of defined-benefit pension plans that would provide retirees with a guaranteed stream of income. The restoration of pensions would be a massive win that would drastically improve the lives of workers, help reorient the U.S. labor movement towards a more militant approach, and build momentum for new organizing at nonunion plants, concentrated in the U.S. South.
Some history
The UAW first won pension…
Week Five — UAW surprise strike at Ford Kentucky truck plant
Dianne Feeley
Posted October 16, 2023
With the surprise strike that shut down the Ford Kentucky Truck Plant almost one month into the UAW strike against the Detroit Three, the corporation responded with a squeal that it had reached the limit of what it could offer. Given the profits Ford is reaping, strikers found that laughable. CEO Jim Farley’s salary was $21 million last year while Ford temps make $16.67 an hour.
UAW President Shawn Fain pointed out that Ford had responded to the union’s demands early and positively. But it didn’t…
Health Care Battles in a Post-COVID World
Malik Miah
Posted October 13, 2023
INTRODUCTION: On OCTOBER 13 Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions reached a tentative agreement that will be voted on by members starting October 18. If passed, the contract would provide for a 21% wage hike over four years and a minimum wage in California, where it is based, of $25 an hour within three years….
Solidarity with the Palestinian people — end the occupation!
Executive Bureau of the Fourth International
Posted October 13, 2023
The root cause of the violence is the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli state. Palestinians have borne the brunt of the death and destruction of the last 75 years. The situation in the Gaza strip is particularly inhuman. Here, the population has been subjected to ongoing humiliation, collective punishments and violence from the Israeli state. Appeals for “de-escalation” are pointless, one-sided condemnations of violence by Hamas are hypocritical, as long as this root cause is not addressed….
Give us a break, TX!
Folko Mueller
Posted October 12, 2023
Texas, in recent times, has seemed to be constantly trying to outdo Florida in a contest over who is more staunchly ultra-reactionary as shown by a string of outrageous bills introduced and often passed over the years. Think HB4378, which, in essence, would result in drag queen bounty hunting; HB 3596, aka TEXIT, calling for a referendum on secession from the United States and still pending; or SB8 — aka the TX Heartbeat Act — which bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat is discernible,…
Initial Comments on Hamas’s October Counter-Offensive
Gilbert Achcar
Posted October 9, 2023
The counter-offensive launched by Hamas against Israel on 7 October 2023, a day after the 50th anniversary of another Arab surprise attack on Israel—the October 1973 War, is a much more spectacular feat than the latter. Whereas fifty years ago, the two Arab states of Egypt and Syria launched a conventional war to attempt to recover the territories that Israel had seized from them six years earlier in the June 1967 War, the new counter-offensive launched by Hamas evokes the boldness of the biblical…
Week Four — GM concedes EV union recognition
Dianne Feeley
Posted October 8, 2023
Going into the fourth week of the UAW strike, GM got serious when it dawned on them that workers at its most profitable plant, in Arlington, Texas, were about to join the picket lines. Instead of continuing to call the union’s strategy mere, “theatrics” it offered to include electric vehicle battery production work in its master agreement with the union.
Given that the massive Arlington facility produced 345,000 trucks and SUVs last year — with an average profit around $10,000 per Tahoe,…
Russian Feminist Anti-War Resistance Accepts Award
Feminist Anti-War Resistance (Russia)
Posted October 6, 2023
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2023 the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAS) together with the Foundation for Human Rights Defenders received the Aachen Peace Prize. During the award ceremony twenty FAS members and activists performed with their faces covered. This was out of solidarity with the anonymous and activist women of the movement currently in Russia. Behind them….
Week Three—The UAW Strike Expands Again
Posted September 29, 2023
by Dianne Feeley
SEPTEMBER 29 — AT his Friday morning UAW negotiations update, president Shawn Fain surprisingly announced that at the last minute Stellantis had submitted a proposal to restore a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), impose a moratorium on outsourcing, and recognize the right to strike over product commitments and plant closures.
Compared to Stellantis’ previous position of demanding the right to close up to 18 plants, this marked a step forward.
At the same time, negotiations with Ford…
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Against the Current
- Palestine and Empire—The Editors
- Auto Workers Ready to Strike—Dianne Feeley
- The UPS Contract in Context—Barry Eidlin
- Why the Rush to Strike?—Kim Moody
- GEO vs. the University of Michigan—Kathleen Brown
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Pamphlets from Solidarity
THE “SOCIALISM-FROM- BELOW” tradition views the working class as the central agent of overthrowing a system based on the market and the exploitation, alienation and unequal society it perpetuates.
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