This document was adopted by the September 2025 Solidarity national convention. It focuses on specific features of the present, generally grim international situation which we see as important for analysis and our work. It will not attempt to be comprehensive. A few of the issues not addressed here are referenced at the end.
The convention notes the following paragraph:
As socialist internationalists, we look to a future “free Palestine from the river to the sea” with equal rights and security for both its nations and for all its people — within a liberated Middle East for all its peoples, from the Euphrates River to the Atlantic Ocean. But no such future can emerge if Palestine today does not survive. That survival is the overriding priority.
We would be interested in a developing a discussion of what would be needed to liberate Palestine. What developments would be necessary in Palestine, the Middle East and North Africa, the U.S., and Israel?
1) AMIDST THE SWIRLING chaos and zigzags of Trump’s pronouncements and dictates, first and foremost what stands out is the continuing U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal Gaza war in Gaza and Netanyahu’s plans for the mass removal of Gazans, along with the annexationist settler-military pogroms in the West Bank and clear intent to drive several million Palestinians from their homeland. To the horror of the world and growing disapproval of the majority of the U.S. population, the United States remains the biggest provider of weapons of mass destruction to Israel. While white-nationalist Christian Zionists hold sway in the Republican Party, the supine complicity of the national Democratic Party is especially grotesque as a large and growing majority of its voting base recognizes that Israel and the U.S. are perpetrating mass starvation as a tool of genocide against a defenseless population.
While the clear intent of the Netanyahu-extreme right Israeli coalition is to destroy the possibility of a viable future for the Palestinian people in Palestine, the fact is that they do not wish to leave — and there is no place for them to go, as attested by the absurdity of suggestions to “voluntarily” remove them to Indonesia or Uganda, or for the United States to “administer” Gaza for a decade and turn it into an international luxury resort.
Underlying this horror is the longterm reality that U.S. imperialism, whichever party governs at a given time, has always been cynically indifferent to the fate of Palestine and its people. The only strategic imperative has been Middle East “stability” and Israeli “security.” (This underlies the three-decade fraud of the U.S.-guided “peace process” that never produced peace, which is beyond our scope here.) The explosive contradiction today, arising since the horrific events on and following October 7, 2023, is that U.S. imperial indifference to Palestine is now leading toward its destruction — at a time when Washington’s policy under both Biden and Trump had been to build a new Middle East “order,” based on an axis of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Gulf oil kingdoms. Constructing this “normalization” and calling it peace remains the goal, especially with the enormous strategic weakening of Iran, but there are few indications that restraints will be imposed on Israel to facilitate the desired regional alliance.
Our immediate obvious responsibility, along with the entire Palestine solidarity movement, is to do absolutely everything possible to stop the genocide and ethnic cleansing. Demands to stop U.S. aid to Israel, targeted BDS (boycott/ divestment/ sanctions) campaigns, and critical exposure of the vicious tactics of the pro-Zionist machinery of lobbying and intimidation in the USA, are essential. Today’s movement is spearheaded by a new layer of activist Palestinian youth, with help from older generations and strategic allies including the growing anti-Zionist segment of the U.S. Jewish population. BDS campaigns focusing on complicit corporations (Maersk, Chevron etc.) are gaining traction.
In U.S. domestic politics, the criminalization of Palestine solidarity activism is also very much part of the wholesale assault on democratic rights, dissent, and immigrant communities. Student and faculty rights on campuses are a central target, using false and weaponized charges of “antisemitism” against discussing Israel’s crimes. Further, Israeli-developed technologies of mass surveillance, population control and suppression of dissent are already incorporated into police-state tactics in U.S. cities.
As socialist internationalists, we look to a future “free Palestine from the river to the sea” with equal rights and security for both its nations and for all its people — within a liberated Middle East for all its peoples, from the Euphrates River to the Atlantic Ocean. But no such future can emerge if Palestine today does not survive. That survival is the overriding priority.
2) Imperialist indifference toward humanity is equally demonstrated in the world’s largest-scale present catastrophe and famine, the war in Sudan between two wings of the military counterrevolution. It is barely remembered today that the United States, following the awe-inspiring youth-led uprising of 2018-9 that overthrew the decades-long dictatorship, played the facilitating role in the “compromise” that was supposed to create a civilian government alongside the army. Instead, the military leadership pushed aside the civilian authorities, then split into the warring factions (the official army and “Rapid Support Forces”) that have now practically destroyed the country. Various regimes including Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are arming one or another faction aiming for access to Sudan’s oil, mineral and strategic port assets.
Meanwhile the United States’ dismantling of USAID condemns millions of people, in Sudan and many nations in Africa and elsewhere, to death from starvation and preventable diseases including AIDS. This is part of the same ideologically driven, supposed cost-cutting that has gutted the very parts of government that provide essential services. In the end it saves no real money, to say nothing of the daunting expenses that will be required to restore what’s being destroyed.
3) Solidarity participates with other groups and activists on the left in the Ukraine Solidarity Network, which supports the Ukrainian people, the left and the independent unions against the imperialist war of aggression by Putin’s dictatorial government including the full-scale military invasion launched in February 2022.
Recognizing the brutal toll that this war is taking on Ukraine’s people, territory, economy and demographic future, we understand that Ukraine will continue fighting because surrender to Russia’s aims means enslavement. The twists and turns of Trump’s pronouncements don’t really hide the trajectory of U.S. policy, toward the betrayal of Ukraine and some kind of imposed “peace” with the bloody amputation of Ukrainian territory.
3) We support Ukraine’s war of national independence and survival because we are consistent anti-imperialists. That doesn’t make us supporters of NATO, although we do recognize Ukraine’s right to obtain weapons from any source for its self-defense. We won’t repeat here what we’ve written extensively about all this, including the parallel between the Israeli-Zionist denial of the Palestinian nation and Russia’s denial of Ukraine’s national existence.
Trump’s mixed signals to Putin and Zelensky are partly due to his egomania and incoherence, partly the tensions between the traditional neoconservative-militarist and the Christian-nationalist MAGA sectors of his base, including the latter’s sympathy for Putin’s Christian-supremacist and far-right politics, and partly within a broader international strategy that can be difficult to discern among his rapid shifts and ranting. The most recent, if clumsy, example is imposing fifty percent tariffs on India, a U.S. ally, ostensibly for its purchase of Russian oil. These tariffs may prove to be short-lived but have the look of different policy objectives — to extract trade concessions from India, and also to caution China about what the United States might to do in case China challenges the U.S. in the Pacific or over Taiwan.
4) Behind much of Trump’s seemingly chaotic foreign policy is the drive to counter China in the competition for Asia, but also Africa and Latin America, in which China has become the major source of capital investment and infrastructure development. It’s notable that the longtime “U.S. backyard” in Latin America, along with the Arctic region, are both becoming intensified arenas of inter-imperial rivalry.
Trump’s use of tariffs as a political weapon, and threats to take over the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada (!) are indicators of this, even if his annexationist rants have the marks of insanity. Besides their illegality, Trump’s tariffs are blatantly aimed at his goals of intervening in Brazil’s judicial process — the trial of Trump’s coup-plotting fascist friend Jair Bolsonaro — as well as strongarming South Sudan and African governments into accepting people deported from the United States.
A return to the naked colonial imperialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries is not really feasible except in Trump’s imagination, but his hostility to Washington’s NATO allies is a sea change from the post-World War II system (hypocritically praised as the “rules-based global order”) that established the United States as hegemonic, but heavily connected to European junior partners. The expansion of NATO following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, accelerated with Sweden and Finland having joined after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and now Trump’s ambivalent and shifting attitudes toward Europe’s defense, is stimulating drastic increases in military spending by the major European states. All this creates new realities, rivalries, and potential instabilities.
5) There are other important developments and conflicts that we won’t try to explore here but require ongoing attention and analysis by Solidarity and our FI partners. These include:
a) The rise of reactionary, even neo-fascist regimes and implications for both U.S. and global politics.
b) New explosive areas of competition, including semiconductor technology, the militarization of space, and new methods of disinformation and subversion of politics.
c) A terrifyingly degraded environmental situation, with consequences emerging every day and every year, discussed in the FI’s ecosocialist manifesto which will need regular updating.
