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No 1646 16th August 2024

Racist violence induced by deliberate fascist provocation is inevitably part of contradiction-ridden imperialism in crisis and will only get worse as unstoppable Slump collapse deepens into Catastrophe. Much better revolutionary perspectives on monopoly capitalist causes of deprivation, alienation and hopelessness, the only answer for confused and backward workers prey to simplistic chauvinist “explanation” of jobs, homes and social resources ”taken by others” rather than lacking through capitalist collapse and corrupt profiteering greed. Bankrupt imperialism’s international asylum and migration racket deliberately fosters hatred & scapegoating here and heads off revolution abroad as countries everywhere are devastated by economic plundering and war. Anti-Muslim prejudice inseparable from crisis imperialism’s barbaric genocidal warmongering against “terrorism”, the confused but deepening expression of growing world revolution to end an out-of-time system, exemplified by Palestine’s unbeaten resistance to Zionist fascist occupation and imperialist butchery despite unbelievable depravity and horror returning to WW2 levels of degeneracy. Despite lessons from world “freedom” hypocrisy on Gaza, public opinion clings to “democracy” and lying imperialist warmongering in Ukraine. Fake-“left” illusions hamper understanding on need for class war

Protective street demonstrations in response to the vicious rightwing racist riots are an encouraging development but their ideology is a million miles from that needed to stop society’s further plunge into fascism and war.

Such counter-“protest” might temporarily deter or contain the worst immediate effects of poisonous eruptions of “anti-Muslim” (racist) hatred and despair which have come close to outright lynching and murder of asylum seekers and anyone with a black skin, but they will not head off for long the class war turmoil and conflict beneath which is rapidly worsening as crisis deepens in a bankrupt world imperialism system.

They do not begin to touch on all the issues of total breakdown and failure of an out-of-date imperialist order which is driving the world into utter chaos and warmongering disaster – already underway for two decades and more in Serbia, in the Middle East, in Africa and in Ukraine, and constantly on the edge of further escalation on a barely comprehensible scale.

Only within this perspective of the total unstoppable collapse caused by the contradictions of capitalism identified and analysed by Karl Marx a century ago (and further elaborated by Lenin’s Bolsheviks see Capital, and the Communist Manifesto etc) can there be any attempt to make sense of these frenzied and murderous outbursts, instigated and led by the vilest of petty bourgeois fascist elements, with both hidden and open support and encouragement from the establishment.

It is the vile, sour and antagonistic relations of all capitalist society caused by the inhuman contradictions of its exploitative system now brought to red heat by its slump bankruptcy and failure, which create the conditions under which confused, frustrated, backward and ignorant workers and lumpen proletarians are dragged into the riots themselves or at least misled by the influence of those like Nigel Farage and the vile chauvinism of the Reform Party (and its kin on the Tory right).

Well meaning as the subsequent public show of solidarity might be, and even indicating stirrings of communal action against the barbarities of slump capitalism, its continuing illusions in peacefully “saying no” to racism, or pacifist “standing up to” the fascists as the fake-“left” placards declare, do not even touch the much deeper questions at stake or offer the revolutionary answers that they need.

The self-defence squads some of the Muslim communities spontaneously formed around their mosques come a little closer to independent class action which could have the seeds of revolutionary movement (which is why the ruling class immediately discouraged them).

But overall, like the continuing “ceasefire” or “stop arming Israel” social-pacifist demands on the pro-Palestine marches, (now virtually routine to the point of uninspiring habit 10 months into the demented Zionist genocide) these fake-“left” ineffectual slogans say nothing useful.

In fact what they do is worse, blocking the understanding of capitalist crisis collapse that workers from all sides (including the rioters) need to grasp and of the kind of convulsions that will grip society more and more as it inexorably deepens, until capitalism is overthrown.

Generated by the slew of fake-“leftism” that has kept the working class away from revolutionary Marxist understanding for more than a century (despite much shallow lip service to “revolution” and “communism” from all kinds of Trot and revisionist groups), these are reformist notions that continue tying workers to mere protest and the “left pressure” which has left the working class trapped in class collaboration and parliamentary illusions for over a century.

They are counter-revolutionary garbage, and dangerous misleading obstacles to the ever more urgently required class war understanding needed as capitalism’s degeneracy heads into world war horrors worse than any yet in history, most obviously in the outright genocide being carried out by the zionist fascists, armed to the teeth by American imperialism, and endless deadly war (provoked by Nato) against Russia using the swastika toting nazi proxies in Ukraine, also armed to the teeth by imperialism.

Least of all do they deal with the non-stop anti-communist brainwashing of the masses, and particularly those in the West, against all the past, and still existing, workers states and against communism in general, – lyingly declared to be a “failure” or a “nightmare” etc – which prevents the working class uniting around the fight for the only possible way out of this hair-raising Catastrophe, namely the revolutionary ending of bankrupt and ever more deadly, planet-threatening capitalism.

Without a gigantic deep-running debate on these issues and the battle to (re-)establish how the USSR and others demonstrated for the first time the glittering progress possible for future mankind through socialism but which fell back after Lenin from the huge philosophical challenge of continuing the revolutionary path, there can be no rebuilding of the fight for communism (see EPSR Books Vol 13, 20 on Gorbachevism, and Polemics against Stalinism).

That is the only way out of the cataclysmic breakdown now underway and manifesting itself in all kinds of foul and vile warmongering genocide and domestic conflict forms butchering and destroying by the hundreds of thousands, in fact millions.

The horrific reality of deepening slump-war is teaching the masses daily what a vile and degenerate system they live in and building up the contempt and hatred of billions, that will lead to its overthrow.

All that is reflected, in a minor and extremely distorted way, in the street turmoil.

Anyone with a scrap of thoughtfulness has known for years that the dominant Western monopoly capitalist ruling class is sitting on a volcano as the working class is driven into ever greater penury and despair, both relative to the ever greater “rewards” and “compensation” taken by a disgustingly greed-ridden incompetent, corrupt, arrogant and cynical bourgeois ruling class, and increasingly in absolute terms of hunger, homelessness, destitution and collapsing health.

Those conditions are the underlying cause of these latest riots, which erupted and will continue to erupt because the whole capitalist system has hit the buffers of economic and political collapse to which the ruling class has only one suite of “solutions” – blitzkrieg warmongering internationally to destroy the “surplus” capital it has inexorably built up and which is choking the whole profit making basis of the so-called “free market” (actually not “free” at all but dominated by ruthless world monopolies - see economics box); more blitzkrieg warmongering to divert attention from the unsolvable failure of the entire profit based system; and yet more blitzkrieg warmongering to intimidate and paralyse any challenges to the supremacy of the monopoly imperialist domination of the planet, be it from rival monopoly capitalist powers wanting to “adjust” the pecking order to supplant the “topdog” US Empire, from rising powers wanting a share too; or especially, the ever mounting anti-imperialist struggle against the whole stinking neo-colonialist exploitation tyranny.

Simultaneously the ruling class needs to divert attention at home too from the savagery of stepped-up austerity and breakdown caused by the contradictions in its own system, and the pressures of cutthroat trade war, using scapegoating and demonisation of others – in all directions, splitting and dividing the working class.

So its warmongering goes hand in hand with domestic repression and state and police violence, as well as the violence of social breakdown generated by the very conditions of the crisis itself as the system’s failure relentlessly tightens its “austerity” grip into the all-out Depression conditions seen in the past, but on an even larger scale.

And of course the riots have been deliberately fomented, or to be more accurate the atmosphere of poisonous, scapegoating hatred and chauvinism has been created that provided the flammable dry undergrowth from which they sprang.

Years of anti-asylum and anti-Muslim dogwhistle scapegoating and overt demonisation of “migrants”, has pumped out for at least 30 years against world Islamist revolt in the nonsensical “war on terror”, while idiot trade war chauvinism and jingoism has been constantly fostered across the board from the fascist rightwing and Empire Toryism to Union Jack Labourism and trade union “British jobbism”, all the way through to the “left” chauvinism of Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, George Galloway’s Spitfire-roundel Workers Party of Britain and the Brexit supporting revisionists of various shades.

Deliberately or inadvertently it comes laced with overt and covert racism, knowingly pumped out by the capitalist establishment, setting up entire communities to be scapegoats and victims.

At best virtually the whole slew of “lefts” leaves that unchallenged (effectively) even those professing their “internationalism”, by still advocating reformist pressure on Labour or the union leaders, or on other allegedly “more militant” lefts thereby keeping workers trapped behind them, and behind the whole hoodwinking “democracy” racket instead of exposing and confronting their opportunist stoogery.

Among other factors causing division are the liberal or black nationalist notions of “multicultural” separation which ghettoises communities, opening them up to targeting as “different” and helping maintain the divisiveness capitalism uses to weaken and fragment class solidarity.

That is intertwined with non-stop demonising stunts and hysterical hatred against “terrorism” and “jihadism”, feared by the ruling class because of their potentially revolutionary significance, and “condemned” by a craven “left” particularly since the blow struck against US imperialism in the 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington (EPSR No1105, 1106 01-10-01).

For all their crudeness and mystical-anarchist theoretical limitations these “terrorist” attacks are current expressions of world anti-imperialist revolution, spreading further and further afield, constantly gathering momentum and transforming into mass movement (as the millions on the Tunisian and Egyptian streets showed in the 2011 Arab Spring) as well as making strides towards ever greater sophistication like that shown by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups in the uprisings against the Zionist occupation and much anti-imperialist turmoil across Africa as well.

Some of the fascist influences around the riots are whipped up by all kinds of sinister behind the scenes links, connections and funding via the great network of imperialist NGOs, “thinktanks” and “lobby groups” which imperialism’s intelligence and government agencies have created over decades as supposed “democratic” and independent voices, to spread confusion and disinformation. Liberal petty bourgeois and fringe anti-establishment journalism has been long documenting all this as in such as these points from the “Active Measures” team:

[..]the unrest’s actual, and perhaps most apparent, sources have been mysteriously overlooked. For one, average Britons remain gripped by an ever-worsening economic cataclysm, in which the cost of essentials ever rises, while living standards precipitously decline. The newly-elected Labour government has not only practically pledged to do nothing to alleviate the misery - by maintaining if not intensifying self-destructive austerity policies - but already exacerbated the dire situation significantly by slashing winter fuel payments, leaving millions facing life-threateningly freezing cold, without state support.

History shows that this milieu is invariably a fertile breeding ground for fascism to take root. With no mainstream alternative to the neoliberal status quo, desperate, disillusioned and dispossessed working-class Britons look to “outsiders” and extremists like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson for salvation in ever-greater numbers. And their remedy, as always, is to blame migrants, refugees and “the other” for all of society’s ills and citizens’ personal deprivation, rather than ruling elites.

Even more ominously, though, there are unambiguous indications the anti-Muslim fervor that has torn through Britain in August is being stirred up by unseen spectral actors in service of the Zionist entity’s ideological, political, and military interests.

Within mere hours, [of the triggering knife attack] a popular anti-lockdown account announced on ‘X’ that the attacker was named “Ali al Shakati” - “an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year…on an MI6 watch list.” While this false information was deleted within an hour, the damage was thoroughly done. Multiple far-right influencers instantly leaped upon these claims, adding further groundless, incriminating details of their own to the mix. Among them was Robinson - aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon - a notorious fascist activist of some standing.

He declared the Southport knife attacker was an “alleged Muslim,” adding, “they always target women.” The next day, an aggressive crowd gathered outside Southport Mosque, chanting Robinson’s name, along with the offensive Islamophobic slogan, “Who the fuck is Allah?” - a common fixture at far-right demonstrations.

In almost every instance, police were quick to identify the rioters as members of the English Defence League (EDL), a now-defunct far-right organization comprised of hardcore anti-Islam agitators and football hooligans. Robinson, the League’s former leader, rubbished these allegations via X on the grounds that “there’s has [sic] been no EDL for over a decade.” Nonetheless, in a video published while the Southport riot was ongoing, he seemingly traced the violence back to the group he once headed and the streetfighting dogma it espoused:[]

On August 8th, British intelligence-adjacent “independent” outlet Byline Times published a lengthy probe into “the real UK race riot instigators,” mapping “the key players and Transatlantic network” around Robinson. It argued he may have instigated the recent British upheaval at the behest of a sinister nexus of wealthy far-right figures in Europe and North America, including wealthy Donald Trump supporter Patrick Michael Byrne. Markedly, not once were Israel or Zionists mentioned - far more plausible candidates for directing Robinson’s incitations to Islamophobic violence.

[..]Yet, indications the EDL’s activities served quite another nation’s interests were always unambiguously hidden in plain sight. The League never operated as a charity or political party in Britain, but two separate commercial entities were registered under its name. In June 2011, Robinson’s compatriots launched a company, the English Defence League. A month later, this was updated to the English and Jewish Defence League. Meanwhile, a firm known as EDL English Defence League LTD was registered in December 2010.

Two years later, the company’s name became the Jewish Defence League, and one of its directors, Roberta Moore, a belligerent Zionist, established links with Jewish Task Force, a far-right US organization. Founded by Victor Vancier, it espouses a hardcore, fundamentalist Zionism. Despite raising money for illegal settlements in the West Bank and avowedly seeking to “save” Israel, Vancier was banned from entering Tel Aviv for his involvement in 18 bombings in New York and Washington, protesting Soviet treatment of Jews during the 1980s.

This connection was reportedly too “extreme” for EDL higher-ups, who subsequently distanced themselves from Moore and their “Jewish” wing. However, this is difficult to rationalise with Robinson’s own views. In February 2019, a leaked video depicted the former League chief declaring his love for Israel and discussing how, on some occasions, he is forced to “get [his] Zionist card out, which says that [he is] a Zionist.” The clip ended with him proudly declaring:

“Palestine?! F*** Palestine. Why would you support Palestine? If there was a war tomorrow, which probably there would be, I would be there on the front line fighting for Israel”.

Five months later, Robinson was jailed for 13 months for contempt of court after he exposed the protected identities of accused sexual groomers while they were on trial in May the previous year. Once imprisoned, notorious hardline Zionist lobby think tank Middle East Forum announced it had not only helped fund his legal expenses, but financed and organised numerous solidarity protests in his honour, attracting tens of thousands of people. An accompanying statement revealed:

“MEF is helping Mr. Robinson in his moment of danger…[MEF] is aiding Mr.Robinson…diplomatically, by bringing foreign pressure on the UK government to ensure [his] safety and eventual release.”

Author Kit Klarenburg details further Zionists links and the Zionist connections to

“ normalised and legitimised everyday discrimination and xenophobia towards Muslims, while dehumanising and demonising them in pursuit of its putrid, genocidal settler colonial project. Having insidiously poisoned Western information spaces with surging Islamophobic hatred via assets such as Tommy Robinson for many years, it appears the pot finally boiled over in Britain during the first weeks of August.

More general manipulations have long been detailed such as intelligence journalist Ian Cobain’s exposure, some while back, of “terrorist incident” propaganda manipulation plans:

The British government has prepared for terrorist incidents by pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks, Middle East Eye has learned.

Hashtags are carefully tested before attacks happen, Instagram images selected, and “impromptu” street posters are printed.

In operations that contingency planners term “controlled spontaneity”, politicians’ statements, vigils and inter-faith events are also negotiated and planned in readiness for any terrorist attack.

The campaigns have been deployed during every UK terrorist incident in recent years, including the London Bridge attack in June 2017 and the Finsbury Park mosque attack that took place two weeks later.

Within hours of an incident, campaigns are swiftly organised, with I “heart” posters designed and distributed according to the location of the attack. Plans are also drawn up for people to hand out flowers at the scene of the crime, in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support.

The purpose of the operations...,. is to shape public responses, encouraging individuals to focus on empathy for the victims and a sense of unity with strangers, rather than reacting with violence and anger.

Many of the operations are said to be modelled on extensive plans that were drawn up to channel public anger in the event of any attack at the 2012 London Olympics.

Some strategies had been devised in 2011, when social media platforms were aiding communication between protesters during the Arab Spring – and when a series of riots were erupting across English towns and cities that summer.

One senior figure involved in that contingency planning told MEE that the riots “absolutely terrified” the British government, and that Theresa May, who was then home secretary and is now prime minister, had been particularly shaken.

The measures drawn up in advance of the [2012] Olympics were intended to “corral the Princess Dianaesque grief” that was expected to emerge after any mass-casualty attack - a reference to the public mourning that followed the death of the royal in a car crash in 1997. This person describes those measures candidly as an attempt at “mind control”.

[..]“A lot of the public’s responses are spontaneous, of course. But a lot are shaped. The [British] government doesn’t want spontaneity: it wants controlled spontaneity.”

‘That’s what we want’

After Alan Henning, a British aid worker, was murdered by Islamic State in October 2014, the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) – a controversial propaganda unit that is part of the Office of Security and Counter-terrorism at the UK Home Office – turned to a striking image that had already been developed by one of its private sector contractors.

It had been developed, according to an internal Breakthrough document seen by MEE, because “the UK authorities wanted to challenge ultraconservative and misogynistic interpretations of Islam – particularly those around women – in order to promote the true face of Islam among vulnerable UK communities”.

A few days after the murder of Henning, Making A Stand approached The Sun, tabloid newspaper, which agreed to dedicate all its front page to the Union Jack hijab photograph.

Inside, the newspaper devoted a further six pages to coverage of political leaders and members of the public who said that they were making a stand against Islamic State terror.

The document explains that RICU’s objective was to “establish a platform for British Muslim women to set out an alternative interpretation of Islam and to take a lead in countering extremism in their communities”.

The result, the document continues, was Making A Stand, “a new British Muslim women’s campaigning organisation and network active within British Muslim communities and with an increasingly high-profile in the national media”.

Although covert messaging developed as part of the Prevent programme is aimed at Muslims, particularly young men, plans for “controlled spontaneity” following a terrorist attack are targeted at the wider population.

The day after the London Bridge attack, a team of men arrived at the scene of the murders in an unmarked van.

They were admitted behind the police cordon, before plastering walls with posters bearing images of London and hashtags that were already circulating on Twitter, including #TurnToLove, #ForLondon and #LoveWillWin.

This practice, known in the UK as fly-posting, is a minor criminal offence, but police allowed the members of the fly-posting team behind their cordon and took no action. The men doing this work declined to tell journalists who they were, or where they were from.

When the cordon was eventually lifted and the public were able to return to the scene of the attacks, they found themselves surrounded by apparently impromptu signs of public defiance and unity.

[..]The blending of traditional emergency planning – the police, paramedical and hospital responses - with post-attack propaganda has gathered pace in the UK in recent years.

It has happened at a time when covert government messaging has been developed as part of the Prevent programme. Growing use of social media has also offered new opportunities for the creation of “controlled spontaneity”.

[...]Lucy Easthope, a leading figure at the Cabinet Office emergency planning college, wrote in her book The Recovery Myth that “recovery” has since come to be regarded as “a specific phase of the disaster that emergency planners attempt to order and something that can be planned for in advance before the specificities of the emergency are known. (The implication being that these details are a minor issue, capable of being filled in later.)”

“What is wanted is flowers being handed out outside mosques,” one emergency planner emphasised, “and not riots”.

There is no suggestion of course, despite these revelations of the huge extent to which government pysops and “mind-control” operations are now mobilised in such incidents, that local community sympathy for the murdered children in Southport is “artificial” – just the opposite; it is because ordinary people will feel huge empathy in such tragedies that such techniques are able to have an impact.

But it should be noted that while they appear to directed at “calming things down” they in fact do the very opposite, whipping up a more targeted form of Islamophobia against militancy and rebelliousness, labelled “terrorism”. And nothing guarantees they cannot be used to inflame, as much as “contain”, if the bourgeois powers deem that more useful at any time.

These sinister psyops (hugely used to maintain public support for the sick and deliberate diversionary Ukraine war) are as much part of imperialist anti-revolutionary propaganda as the cruder rightwing racist influences pumping out on the Internet, all aiming to divide and split the working class.

But while all these twisted overt and secret provocations are clearly helping inflame fascist sentiment and backwardness, it would be a mistake to see them as generating the upheavals of the past fortnight.

The complexities of the riots and the societal breakdown they express are far deeper than mere racism or fascism.

For a start it puts matters upside down to suggest that racism is the cause of the upheavals rather than being a result of much deeper and profound contradictions in a has-been society that is sick with bankruptcy, inequality, alienation, and moral and societal decay.

The driving engine is the unstoppable, irreversible and historically inevitable material collapse of the whole capitalist system.

Some of the more perceptive of the bourgeois commentators at least make these points. So, arch “left” opportunist ex-MP George Galloway in correctly scorning the dull reactionary Starmerites for coming nowhere near tackling the real problem, points to:

the desert of abandoned cities and towns of the north, and the bereft coastal communities with nothing left. They have no business, no tourism, no industry, no employment, and no hope, stricken by poverty pay and underachievement, hopeless, and directionless.

So they are fuelled on adrenalin, generated by anger and alienation.

And what can you expect when they have got no houses, can’t get a doctors appointment or a dentist, potholes are never repaired and if a street light goes out it never comes back on again, in high street where everything is shuttered except pound shops and betting shops.

And where the rivers are full of shit because of privatisation plundering greed he could have added, and with no prospect of seeing any of it change as Starmer’s new Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has made clear with declarations of spending restrictions to come so hard-nosed they would have seen Margaret Thatcher blush (were it possible) and already shattering the Labourite illusions of various petty bourgeois analysts with pension cuts (fuel allowance) and keeping the two-child benefit cutoff.

In the Observer meanwhile is the observation that twisting and distortion of underlying deprivation produces reactionary outcomes:

It is worth recalling how the disorder began. In response to the horrific killings of three young girls in a dance class in Southport, many leapt to the conclusion that the murderer was a Muslim who had arrived on a small boat across the Channel. This bigoted speculation became the starting point for insisting the tragedy arose from “uncontrolled immigration” and from the refusal of immigrants to integrate.

Liberal commentators have often been chastised, correctly, for treating working-class voters who back the wrong politicians or have the wrong views about immigration as racist or ignorant. In response to the post-Southport riots, many of the critics have themselves treated working-class people as if they really were boneheaded and bigoted, conflating racism with working-class anger.

Working-class grievances in towns such as Sunderland or Stoke are real, from a lack of housing to an Uberised labour market, from an inability to find NHS dentists to a broken public transport system. But attacking mosques and migrant hotels, assaulting people possessing the wrong colour of skin or professing the wrong god, is straightforward bigotry. Or rather, it reveals how grievances can become warped within a national conversation obsessed with blaming social problems on immigrants.

[...]The context of the current upsurge in racism is, however, distinct from the bigotry of the 1970s and 80s, to which many have drawn parallels. Britain was then viscerally racist in a way that it no longer is, despite recent events.

But liberalisation, too, has to be placed in context. Not that long ago, Britain was congratulating itself for being more relaxed about immigration than its European neighbours, and for having avoided the rise of far-right parties as seen in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, even if Reform partly fills the gap.

Yet, if Britain has forestalled the rise of a true far-right party, there has nevertheless developed, as in Europe, a reactionary politics of identity, spawning hostility to Muslims and minorities. The current disorder is the product of that kind of hostility expressed not through organisations such as the Rassemblement National in France or the AfD in Germany but in the form of a more inchoate lashing out.

Sections of the working class have become open to identitarian arguments because of the way that much of the left – indeed much of society – has embraced politics of identity at the same time as deprecating the politics of class. For many today, the frameworks through which they make sense of their relationship to the world are less political – “liberal” or “conservative” – than cultural or ethnic – “Muslim”, “white”, “English”.

As social democratic parties have moved away from their traditional working-class constituencies, leaving many feeling abandoned and voiceless, some within those constituencies have turned to the language of identity to find a social anchor. Being “white working class” often feels as much about the whiteness as the class location.

Whether in white or minority communities, identitarianism has entrenched sectarian movements, pushing people to see those beyond the boundaries of their identity as threats. It has also allowed the far right to rebrand racism as white identity, a rebranding given legitimacy by mainstream conservatives who now casually talk of white Europeans “losing their homelands” and “committing suicide”, of Britons “surrendering their territory”, bemoaning cities like London becoming less white.

“We are not allowed to talk of immigration,” the critics claim. We’ve barely stopped talking about immigration over the past decade. What they really mean is that we don’t talk about it sufficiently in identitarian terms. There is much to be discussed about immigration, not just about numbers but also about integration, cohesion and belonging. To frame that discussion in the language of identity would be disastrous, hindering the possibilities of rational debates around any of these issues.

But while these commentaries at least get past blaming “racism” as such neither comes anywhere close to offering the revolutionary answers that are needed.

The second does point to the abandoning of class division (basic Marxism) as the fundamental framework for any useful perspective, correctly pointing to its substitution with multiple lines of “identity politics” but without explaining why that has happened, namely a total retreat into single-issue PCism, all of which constitutes an evasion of any revolutionary understanding and its replacement with the new “super-reformism” of feminism, black nationalism, animal rights and eco-warring etc (see eg EPSR No1032 22-02-00).

But it does not go on to say how only a return to a class war revolutionary perspective can overcome those diversions.

So it ends up only slightly better than the outright moralising of commentators like black historian David Olusoga declaring shame and blame on racism and dismissing deprivation as “just an excuse” (as many self-righteous petty bourgeois Guardian letter types have done too).

But boldly confrontational black nationalist anti-racism, denying the complete desperation and despair based on envy and the underlying existential fear created by a system in meltdown (felt unconsciously if not grasped or understood) will not solve the problem any more than softer “left liberal” exhortations.

As the EPSR has explained:

As long as capitalism rules via hire-and-fire in the marketplace, etc, this self-protective clannishness, suspicious or fearful of all others, will hold sway. And the moment that serious economic difficulties return, the sheer chaotic unevenness and anarchic unfairness (or deliberate injustice) with which the axe falls, guarantees that envy and resentment will start to dominate all capitalism’s other natural rivalry emotions.

And it hardly requires any organised deliberate racist agitation to start to play on these frustrations to turn the slightest provocation or accident into blazing hate-filled anger. It will continually recur spontaneously anyway, such is the cultural meanness or small-mindedness with which the capitalist rat-race scars everybody, shrivelling much of the natural generosity of the human spirit which will often be commendably anti-racist in small doses in a localised setting but which doesn’t stand a chance of rising to the universal “black and white unite and fight” utopian reformist delusions of petty- bourgeois PC ‘morality’. EPSR No1098 17-07-01):

Which makes all the do-gooding notions of “welcoming all migrants” not only an unachievable fantasy but one that potentially plays into imperialism’s hands:

Such small-mindedness will need fighting on a far broader front than just single-issue anti-racist campaigning. Without an understanding of world imperialist crisis and the inevitability of communist revolutions everywhere, trying to mobilise the current working-class mentality to eschew blind-alley race-prejudice with the slogan: “Unconditionally oppose all immigration controls” is worse than useless. This barminess, widely supported in the Trot press, is the fruit of posturing that ‘moral principles’ should, and can, rule politics.

This is subjective-idealist nonsense at its worst. The fascist victimisation of asylum-seekers is odious and dangerous filth that working-class communities must be fought-with over, as hard as possible. But it is just as big and loony a diversion to try to persuade workers to go round saying “Asylum-seekers welcome here” instead. Economic migrants are not all necessarily petty-bourgeois-minded opportunists, eager to embrace all the West’s crap values, but the chances of them being outstanding communists and determined revolutionaries are even less.

What people fed up with life in Turkey/Albania/Bangladesh/Nigeria/ etc, really need to be doing is taking up the fight for revolution there, not helping swell the illusion of the ‘good life’ under Western imperialism, and distracting local anti-capitalist struggles with welfare demands, which are more pure reformism.

Not for ages after world socialist revolution will a planned new planetary order be sufficiently well-established to start creating a genuine ‘freedom for all to move and live where they want’. And it can only create more confusion than clarity to adopt it now as a slogan supposedly disruptive of capitalism. What the world proletariat needs the ruling class off its back for is not “for everyone to be free to do what they like” but for the working class to be free to build a strong, affluent, secure, educated society where voluntary mutual discipline can eventually resolve all difficulties with the best reasoned argument available.

The idea that this will be automatic upon the overthrow of the world imperialist system is insane. As all past revolutions have proved, there would initially ‘automatically’ be much total anarchy. A new party-led proletarian dictatorship order is the only possibility for preventing world imperialist counter-revolution and for getting planned socialist reconstruction under way. (EPSR No1057 12-09-00).

Nor will it necessarily convince workers:

By rejecting any serious Marxist revolutionary analysis of imperialist crisis, the self-righteous posturing against racism in the working class by the fake-’left’, pretending to be able to drive it out, will only add to widespread disgust against all ‘reformist’ posturing of any kind.

The impractical and empty-gesture politics of “end all immigration controls” and “welcome all asylum-seekers from everywhere” teach the working class absolutely nothing about the disruptive stunts, rackets, and breakdowns indicative of the whole imperialist system in terminal crisis, but only tend to add to local communities’ immediate worries or confusion, playing right into the hands of the fascists. [...]

There are arguments to believe that such politically-correct-tinged striving might be counter-productive, even. If it is only the National Front (or EDL etc - ed)that is ever prepared to argue out loud that waves of economic-opportunist migrants coming into the country and taking up scarce welfare resources, housing, good jobs and good education opportunities, etc, is not necessarily to the immediate practical advantage of already-resident proletarians struggling to get the same scarce things for themselves, and that the unfair ‘foreign monopolist’ system was to blame for all this enforced (and condoned) migratory nonsense, – then would not such ludicrous diversions be as likely to attract proletarian support as the PC anti-racist ‘left reformists’ with their “end all immigration controls” and “welcome to all asylum-seekers, the more the better” slogans, which take politically-correct subjective-idealist philosophy to new heights of absurdity???

Hammer people too ridiculously and too relentlessly for being ‘politically incorrect’ and it is as likely to create a nationalist backlash as anything else. (EPSR No1085 17-04-01.)

 

And although it is precisely all the OTHER problems of imperialism (slump, inter-imperialist trade war, etc) which make fascism the system’s final destination in crisis, (racism being the SYMPTOM of fascism and not remotely its CAUSE), ever-increasing confusion about ever-increasing social degeneration is not helping anything.

Only a programme which is nothing whatever to do with racism, or immigration, or asylum-seeking directly, can now affect this increasingly deteriorating situation, - the programme explaining capitalism as now declining irrevocably into revolutionary warmongering crisis everywhere, and at last giving the opportunity to start building a planned socialist flourishing for ALL, in workers states in every country in the world, stopping all need for emigration or asylum-seeking so cruelly placed on people of the Third World by imperialism for so long. (EPSR No1133 23-04-02.)

As always, insisting the answer is a revolutionary programme, lifting matters to a completely new level of understanding, will be sniped and sneered at by all the fake-“left” from shallow anti-theory Trot activists to academic and wooden revisionism behind the usual excuses about “workers not being ready” and “in the meantime, reforms are needed”.

But conditions become riper and riper for such understanding – festeringly rotten ripe.

Far from the “it couldn’t happen here” cynicism/complacency which remains widespread, particularly in the southern petty bourgeois and “labour aristocracy” layers, still benefiting from illusions in continuing “economic growth” which Bidenism’s ever expanding insane dollar credit creation has very temporarily, albeit patchily, extended (tech company investments in London, ditto the media industry, ditto finance jobs and the “hospitality industry” that lives on them, perhaps wind power etc) the eruptions tell a different story.

They respond to the imminent collapse of the world imperialist economy, presaged by yet another sudden lurch downwards on world Stock Exchanges triggered by Japan’s recent 12% plunge and much more importantly the coming collapse of the now balloon dollar which cannot be inflated with valueless credit “printing” forever.

Temporary finance rescues notwithstanding, the edginess of the whole system reflects its complete hollowness, and the final implosion of the Great Bank Collapse deferred from 2009 (and that only possible because of China’s relative stability under overall workers state planning, helping boost demand).

Without suggesting any misplaced sympathy for the backward elements pulled along behind the explosive and terrifying racist riot outbursts, and certainly maintaining full class war hostility for the outright fascist provocateurs at the heart of it, it is nevertheless clear these eruptions are driven by the same underlying crisis factors as the 2011 riots (not coincidentally just after the world bank collapses and coincident with the Arab Spring); the Bradford and Oldham inter-racial turmoil in 2001 (when the dotcom boom stopped); and all the way back to the 1980s riots at the start of Thatcherite cutbacks; and the later Poll Tax eruption; and forward again to the Bristol police station “riot” in 2022 against new draconian legislation criminalising protest itself – part of a stream of repressive legislation intensifying the bourgeoisie’s moves towards an open police state precisely because of its fears of slump-induced revolution.

That does not remotely imply deludely trying to “win over” any of the core fascist thuggery but it does underline double-edged significance of the riots and ruling class nervousness at quite what it might be unleashing.

The severe police crackdown in the wake of the riots and the draconian punishments being meted out along with bourgeois state bluster is certain to backfire, piling on further resentment and alienation.

So will the seemingly astonishing “condemnations” of the riots coming from much of the usually vociferous anti-Islam “anti-woke” establishment, crashing into reverse after winding up and encouraging the whole divisive atmosphere for years, including assorted senior Tories and reactionary media outlets like the Daily Mail.

The capitalist state and its Labour Government stooges (or the previous Tories they emulate) have nothing to do with “restoring stability” by cracking down on the nazi thugs and anti-foreigner scapegoating either; delusions that such is the purpose by various reformist elements are grossly misleading, leaving public opinion lulled into accepting ever more stringent state repression which can just as easily be turned on leftism (and ultimately is intended for precisely that purpose as even more severe punishments against eco-protests have already shown).

Even less are they upholding a morally neutral position on “unacceptable” street fighting and affray to stop it disrupting an “otherwise peaceful society” – anyone who watched the recent videos of the Manchester police violence at an airport arrest would doubt that any level of brutality, including booting a floored and restrained man in the face, will be tolerated by the ruling class if it serves state interests (and will be excused with a stream of dissembling apologetics by opportunist Labourite stoogery such as Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham pretending there could possibly be “mitigating circumstances”. Really????).

No surprise that the potentially murderous street thugs were emulating just such head stamping mere days later.

The difference between a fudged over police incident and the rapid sentencing imposed on the rioters lies in ruling class fearfulness that such street turmoil could rapidly go out of control – despite its backwardness and fascist attitudes, the raw challenge to state forces like the police and firemen sails too close to anarchy and loss of authority to be acceptable.

In addition, the threat of counter-demonstrations, and local community self-defence groupings developing, is particularly unnerving for the ruling class, further forcing their hand on reining in the rioters.

That goes with the pretence of “even-handed justice” aimed at the counter-demonstrators as exampled by the savage prison sentences imposed on two young Asians caught up in a fracas with some of the thugs in Leeds.

The two Yorkshire lads were clearly the victims of racist provocations and taunting as the judge accepted, but their spirited and fighting response back against the nazis was deemed “unacceptable” by a capitalist state which is paranoid about maintaining its “authority” and determined to shut down any manifestations at all of independent activity by the working class.

Individual accounts from various court appearances make it clear too that many of those caught up in the rioting were expressing much more an inchoate hostility to capitalist authority than any hard-bitten racist fascism:

Last Sunday afternoon a homeless mother-of-five left her hotel room in Middlesbrough to nip to a nearby shop. On her way, 34-year-old Stacey Vint bumped into some locals she knew and joined them on their way to what had been described on social media as a “pro-British” protest in the town centre.

Five days later, she found herself being handed a 20-month prison sentence for violent disorder after becoming part of a 1,000-strong riot that saw police attacked as homes, cars and public buildings were vandalised.

A barrister representing Vint, who had drunk alcohol and smoked cannabis on the day, told Teesside crown court her involvement was “simple”.

“One of the group she was with asked her to give him a hand with a wheelie bin, which had been set on fire, and she did,” Andrew Turton said. “Stupidly, she took hold of the bin, pushed it towards police, and fell at their feet.”

[..]The smashed windows at Teesside crown court were still boarded up as the judge, Francis Laird KC, sentenced Vint, telling her the “large-scale act of public disorder” had caused significant physical and financial damage to her home town, traumatised police officers and terrified residents.

The judge found that Vint had no racist or ideological motivation for her offence, but that her sentence had to be increased because of the riot’s scale, impact and the “backdrop of other violent incidents” across the country.

The court heard that Vint’s life had been blighted by drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence, and that she had become homeless after fleeing an abusive relationship and seeing all five of her children taken into care.

Such sentences were being handed out at remarkable speed at courts across England and Wales on Friday, with Vint just one of more than 300 people so far charged with offences linked to violent protests fuelled by false online claims that the perpetrator was a Muslim small-boat migrant.

But at Teesside crown court on Friday, there was little exploration of rioters’ motivation. Alongside Vint was 21-year-old Charlie Bullock, who was seen launching rocks towards police with his face covered by a balaclava during the Middlesbrough riot. He fought the police who tried to arrest him, and when eventually detained told them: “I couldn’t give a fuck.” He was jailed for 18 months, with the sentence having been reduced because of his young age and evidence that his behaviour may have been affected by a failure to take ADHD medication.

Like Vint, he had refused to answer any questions in his police interview and pleaded guilty to violent disorder, but was also found not to have any racial or ideological motivation.

Cole Stewart, 18, admitted launching the missiles at a line of officers keeping protesters away from a mosque, but claimed a police van was his target and that he held no racist or far-right views. “He came across the protest, having consumed alcohol, and got involved because everybody else was doing it,” said defence barrister Gary Wood. But prosecutors told the court the offence was a “racially motivated attack” and that the teenager’s sentence should be increased accordingly. Judge Laird said a “trial of issue” would be held if agreement could not be reached.

Keir Starmer has promised “swift justice” for those who engage in disorder, having overseen the controversial use of 24-hour courts and ramped-up sentences for more than 2,000 adults and children convicted over the 2011 riots as director of public prosecutions.

Tim Newburn, a criminology professor at the London School of Economics, said that “procedural speed” and punishment had been prioritised over a deeper assessment of how and why the 2011 riots spread.

“The danger in all of these cases is that we reach for a simplistic explanation and that comes to dominate,” he added. “There is the potential that what’s beginning to be revealed in the court is more complex than the political or general narrative. A failure to investigate is to fail to take the opportunity to mitigate future problems.”

Minutes after Vint and Bullock were jailed on Friday, Cleveland Police published their mugshots alongside news of their sentences on Facebook. The posts were met by a chorus of jokes, celebratory comments and applause emojis. Bullock’s mother was the only show of support at Teesside Crown Court, holding her head in her hands as his sentence was passed before trying to speak to the teenager as he was taken down to the cells.

A recent speech from the Tory Tom Tugenhat for the party leadership race makes more explicit that the concern of the ruling class is to stamp on any signs of independent working class action – including attacking “inflammatory” provocations from the ultra-right wing which might stir things too much at this stage (though always kept warmed-up in reserve for when conditions get so bad that formal authority cannot hold the line):

Nigel Farage was “irresponsible and dangerous” to suggest the police were withholding the truth about the Southport attack, Tory leadership contender Tom Tugendhat has said.

The Conservative hopeful, a former security minister, said Farage had been “amplifying false information” by spreading a theory first suggested by influencers like Andrew Tate, and then failed wholly to condemn the riots.

“I want to be clear: this is not leadership. It is deeply irresponsible and dangerous,” he said.

Speaking in London, Tugendhat did not reserve all his criticism for Farage, who he said would not be admitted to the Conservative party on his watch.

He also attacked Keir Starmer for failing to bring the riots under control more quickly, despite the prime minister having been largely praised for his handling of the unrest by speeding up the justice process.

Tugendhat said: “If he had chaired a daily Cobra meeting – with senior police officers, the security services, the army and others – the prime minister could have given the police more of what they needed.

“They could have cancelled leave, extended mutual aid, and confronted the rioters earlier with an overwhelming police presence. We did not see this leadership.

“They could have backfilled policing roles by calling up all special constables and using the army for back-office duties. They could have decided – before the shameful scenes outside the hotel in Rotherham – to allow the police to use appropriate force.”

The Conservative MP said arrests should be made while violent protests were occurring, and not in the subsequent days.

He also said Home Office minister Jess Phillips ought to have been sacked by Starmer for having “sought to justify vigilantism and violence, to excuse a militia on our streets” when there were violent counter-protests in Birmingham.

The last shot across the bows, against the feminist Phillips forced by local feeling to posture about self-defence, reminds the disgusting Labourite opportunist stooges for the ruling class that even their most grovelling and craven servitude, – filling in for the main government team when it is too split, corrupt and incompetent to continue for the moment, – is only just tolerable for the bourgeoisie even though Starmerism has long demonstrated its utter dedication to carrying out the interests of the ruling class (as Starmer already demonstrated as Director of Public Prosecutions, instructing judges to double the sentencing severity after the 2011 riots).

The pretence that such draconian “law and order” is about maintaining a “peaceful and harmonious” democratic society would be gross and hypocritical humbug at the best of times – the bourgeois state of bodies of armed men and its huge machinery of biased courts, prisons and detention, where any crack at “justice” at all is virtually impossible for those who cannot stump up relatively large sums, (and even more if they are to counter bottomless legal resources of the very rich), is there to defend the interests of the property owning class, noone else, as Lenin spelt out in State and Revolution. And even then it is the big fry who always win against lesser bourgeoisie.

But in the great world breakdown now underway, even this monstrous humbug concealing what is in reality a dictatorship of the rich maintained by institutionalised violence, is reduced almost to insignificance against the sick degeneracy unfolding against the Gazan people and the West Bank in Palestine and in the NATO controlled and managed war against Russia using the nazi Banderite/Hitler worshippers in Kiev.

“Hypocrisy” does not begin to cover the active collusion of the US Empire and its Western imperialist “allies” in what is now an outright holocaust of a 2.3 million strong population, gleefully and wilfully being carried through by the Zionist occupation.

Berating street anti-Islamic racism is beyond sanctimony when the entire world is being directed in mass murderous hatred against the Hamas national liberation rebellion, and every supposed principle of “human rights”, “international justice” “humanitarian concern” and “rule of law prosecution of war crimes” is torn to shreds (including the tame and ineffectual judgements of the imperialist stooging United Nations, the international Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court – made even tamer by the complete absence of any powers to enforce such “justice” anyway).

Who is feeding anti-Muslim sentiment if not the entire worldwide campaign declaring the Zionist genocidal occupation called “Israel” to be inviolable and that any criticism whatsoever – including of nearly a year long child-butchering war destruction – is to be deemed “racist anti-semitism”, not least obviously the Starmerite campaign of “discipline” of the Labour Party to expel the “left” wing with a monstrous McCarthyite campaign against alleged “left anti-semitism”.

There need be no sympathy or concern for the “lefts” who are all opportunists who only ever played a role giving Labour a “left” cover, but this campaign demonstrated how sick and fascistic the Labour “alternative” has become, with Mosleyite tones exactly as was already being flagged (to use an appropriate jingoistic metaphor) by the rise of Blairism 30 years back which the EPSR’s Marxist theoretical antenna was detecting even then (No800 02-05-95 & No819 12-09-95) and more strongly later (No1058 19-11-00).

Its cynical pro-Zionist support behind monstrous Bidenism (and its slew of luvvy celebs) is now at war crime level, as the 10 month long litany of utter horrors makes clear and the bourgeois press cuttings below demonstrate (among many more for which there is no space).

There is no question that the grotesque horrors of the massacres are now in the realm of total Nazi holocaust, wilfully and deliberately butchering and slaughtering men, women and children behind barely disguised total lie pretext of “targeting terrorists” (a big lie description in itself for a national-liberation movement by a people dispossessed of their own lands for 75 years (and starting 100 years ago)).

There is nothing “accidental” or “unavoidable” about the civilian damage and all the pretences about “reducing the risk” of hitting them are the purest humbug.

So fascistically sick is this depravity that some of the military and many of the settlers post pictures of the savagery, cheer on the slaughter and even laugh and joke about the carnage (while others reel back from it, with a growing refusal to serve).

Every aspect of human empathy and decency has been abandoned – in some respects true throughout the 75 year duration of the Zionist “project”and particularly in the parts of the most fanatical of the ‘illegal’ settler enclaves – but now on a massively intensified scale and widespread through the Israeli Jewish population.

The Gazan programme of destruction is now clearly little to do even with the ostensible “fighting Hamas” rational though obviously that remains part of it and serves as a justification.

It has become a ruthless programme of complete elimination of these entire people, by blitzing, forced siege starvation and disease, or their forced terrorised ethnic cleansing expulsion.

Increasingly obviously that is what was intended from the beginning, as clearly emerges for example from the leaked information that signs and symptoms of the planned Hamas attack were known about in advance of October 7th, and not only ignored but deliberately suppressed, with silencing discipline measures enforced against IDF and intelligence operatives who raised concerns.

That goes hand in hand with an escalated programme of land seizures, land expulsion terrorising and intimidation all across the West Bank, already massively occupied with illegal settlements and increasingly being expanded.

The vicious attacks on Palestinian villages, always regularly occurring, hugely escalated into fullscale terrorising rampages of car and shop burning, and occasional killings, during early 2024, long before the Hamas “Flood” and continuing to this day (as the latest gratuitous killing incident has highlighted).

All this is the inexorable progress of the 1948-9 Nakba forced expulsion of the local inhabitants of all of Palestine, living on the land for a minimum of 1500 years and traceable back twice as long via the Philistines (the original peoples forced out by the Jewish takeover more than 3000 years ago).

As the EPSR has many times said, (See EPSR book Vol 20 on Occupied Palestine) the logic of this modern colonial landtheft takeover, in an epoch of world revolt against all the old empire colonialism post-WW2, is inescapably one of permanent conflict, with the Palestinians forever forced to fight to take their land back – or be utterly wiped out by an occupation driven to ever greater genocidal frenzy in order to “protect itself” (from the consequences of its own invasion) just as the European settlers “defended” themselves in Latin America, Africa, North America, Australia and New Zealand by wiping out the multiple nations of the aboriginal inhabitants (bar a few rump populations reduced to poverty and deprivation).

Ever more depraved language, expression and intent of dehumanisation (talking of subhumans, “animals” etc etc) is driven out to “justify” the systematic butchery which in relative scale parallels the Nazi anti-Jewish programmes of the 1930s in a sick and depraved inversion of history from victim to perpetrator that is possibly without parallel.

Just as sick is the staggering two-faced support from US imperialism (and its slithering stooge “allies”), which only this week was again mouthing the hollowest of platitudes about “humanitarian ceasefire” while simultaneously committing itself to another $20 billion (!!) in arms deliveries of every vicious and devastating kind.

Its only fear, that ultimately this beyond-barbaric expulsion, blitzing and terror, will eventually lead to such a powerful response from this downtrodden people and from the Arab and other Middle Eastern peoples, that it will sweep away the whole “Israel” project, thus losing them everything already “gained”, that has created a growing dismay among some “moderate” anti-Zionist Zionists.

Meanwhile a cowed or colluding bourgeois media staggeringly challenges none of this, but keeps on regurgitating the lying and long discredited “justification” that the “war” (itself a gross misnomer implying some parity between the downtrodden Gazans and the massively well armed Jewish Israeli military) is “a response” to “the worst attack on Jewish people since the Second World War” & endlessly repeats unquestioned the big lie that 1200 Israeli “civilians were killed” and amid lurid stories of beheaded babies, rape and other atrocities.

First of course multiple accounts have shown that most of this is outright propaganda fabrication by the Zionists; that hundreds of those who were killed were victims of the Israeli Army’s response under its “Hannibal doctrine” of never allowing a hostage to be taken alive.

Lies about burned bodies, rape and babies in ovens, etc have been debunked and so too the massive damage to buildings and car roofs shown off to whip up public opinion has been demonstrated to be Zionist inflicted (it being impossible without the helicopter and air heavy weaponry only the IDF could deploy or ground based heavy weapons sufficient to demolish buildings).

But even accepting that there was an attack and discounting deliberately lurid exaggeration, there is still no justification for any “operation” against the Palestinians, let alone the monstrous blitzkrieg that has followed; it is their land and they are entitled to wage a resistance struggle against its occupation in anyway they see fit or are able to carry out.

The occupiers – (and they are even declared to be such by the “international community” for all the seized lands after the 1967 Zionist war (and in reality for all the land “granted” to them in the original imperialist set up Partition in 1948 as well)) – have no such right.

Everything they do is a colonialist crime and tyranny as even the post-war pretences of the fraudulent international “rule of law” justice spell out – without ever being put to the fore let alone enforced as dozens of utterly ignored United Nations Resolutions testify, (and none more so than on Palestine).

Least of all do those who have seized another people’s territory by terror, ethnic cleansing and war have any “right to self-defence” as a colonialist power since; to answer the question constantly used to confront the fake-“left” and liberal opinion, this artificially established “nation” does not have any “right to exist”.

Refusal to deal with this question, and the whole “origin story” of “Israel” is the defining characteristic of all the Zionist aggression, all the bourgeois backing for it and all the bourgeois coverage, and just as much it is evaded by the analyses put forwards by much of the capitulatory fake-“left”.

Throughout every argument it is swept under the carpet, or aggressively thrust forwards as a bullying intimidation to cow any who sympathise with the Palestinians or claim solidarity with them by instantly clanging alarms bells about “anti-semitism” and “racists threats”, a pleading of “victimhood” now extended to any criticism at all of anything the Zionist regime does or that the entire Zionist-supporting Jewish freemasonry throughout the world advocates.

The whole massive worldwide conspiracy now blocks all opposition to all Zionist interests inside and outside “Israel” (where the Jewish “diaspora” is virtually all in support of its apartheid domination and ready to benefit from it (both emotionally, politically and materially via dual nationality and “right-of-return” (!!!)).

So massive is this influence in behind the scenes manipulation, bribery, influence peddling and political sting pulling that it now constitutes a mainstay of bourgeois censorship and repression completely intertwined with all bourgeois monopoly interests (and a significant weapon for it as the entire Labour Party demonstrates (see the excellent four part al-Jazeera documentary The Lobby).

Internationally the Zionist project is a crucial instrument serving the interests of imperialist domination as a whole (of which it is a part) and most obviously over the critically strategically important Middle East region, not just “to safeguard the oil” but to suppress some of the biggest potentially revolutionary populations (Arab, Turkish and Persian, Horn of Africa) and to throttle rival world interests.

Domestically it has been serving the similar purpose with its demonisation of falsely alleged “anti-semitism” now at the forefront of class war repression.

But the fraudulent self-righteousness gets more difficult to maintain with every further vile atrocity:

In little over a month, Israel has bombed at least 18 schools in Gaza, killing hundreds of Palestinian people.

On 5 August, in strikes on two United Nations-run schools – the Hassan Salama and al-Nasr in Gaza City – 80% of the victims were children. This is a feature of Israel’s assault, where Israel has killed 16,456 children so far.

A particularly deadly strike on al-Tabin school in Gaza City on 10 August killed over 100 people. According to Palestinian civil defence, every body found was torn apart.

On social media, people analysed the carnage brought upon civilians, compared to Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July.

Palestine’s education ministry reported that, as of 6 August, Israel had killed around 10,043 Palestinian students since 7 October. It said Israel killed a further 504 teachers and administrators.

On 3 August, Israel bombed the university of applied sciences in Gaza City, reportedly entirely obliterating campus buildings. It has destroyed or damaged all 12 universities in Gaza.

UN human rights experts expressed grave concern back in April:

“With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’”

The experts also pointed to the damaging or destruction of libraries, heritage sites, and the Central Archives of Gaza. They said:

“The foundations of Palestinian society are being reduced to rubble, and their history is being erased”

Despite Israel’s occupation, UN-run schools for Palestinian refugees have helped deliver one of the highest literacy rates in the world for Palestine.

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said in January that Israel “has targeted academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in the Strip in deliberate and specific air raids on their homes without prior notice”.

In October, teenager Shaimaa Saydam was among those Israeli forces killed in strikes. She was the highest performing Palestinian high school student of 2023.

Responding to the attacks on schools, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, said:

“Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighborhood at a time, one hospital at a time, one school at a time, one refugee camp at a time, one ‘safe zone’ at a time, with US and European weapons”.

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At least 80 people have been killed in Israeli missile strikes on a school compound in Gaza City, according to the territory’s civil defence service, the latest in a string of attacks on schools that the Israeli army says are targeting militants using them as bases.

The bombing of Tabeen school, where about 6,000 displaced people were sheltering, was hit when many people were preparing for dawn prayers on Saturday, and reportedly caused a fire. Video from the scene showed horrific loss of life, with body parts, rubble and destroyed furniture scattered across blood-soaked mattresses.

Abu Anas, who helped to rescue the wounded, told the news agency Associated Press (AP): “There were people praying, there were people washing and there were people upstairs sleeping, including children, women and old people.

“The missile fell on them without warning. The first missile, and the second. We recovered them as body parts.”

Dr Fadel Naeem, the director of al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, told the AP that the facility had received 70 bodies of those killed in the strikes and the body parts of at least 10 others.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Naeem said Saturday was “one of the hardest days”.

“The situation at the hospital is catastrophic, with a severe shortage of medical supplies and resources due to the horrific Israeli massacre, which has resulted in numerous amputations and severe burns,” he said.

As it stands, the Tabeen school death toll is one of the largest from a single strike during 10 months of war between Israel and Hamas.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement that the Palestinian claim was inflated, and at least 20 fighters, including senior commanders, were among the dead.

Israeli forces have targeted at least 10 schools since the beginning of July – including at one point four in four days – adding to the Gaza war’s staggering death toll, which is now approaching 40,000.

Israel blames Hamas for civilian casualties, saying that its fighters use civilian infrastructure as a cover, which makes buildings such as schools and hospitals valid targets. Hamas denies those claims.

Almost all of the strip’s 2.3 million population has been forced to flee their homes, often multiple times,during almost a year of fighting. Schools in particular have been used as shelters.

According to the civil defence service, three missiles targeted a two-storey building where women were using the top floor and men and boys the ground floor, which was also a space for prayer.

A Hamas political officer, Izzat el Reshiq, called the strikes a horrific crime and a serious escalation, adding in a statement that the dead did not include a “single combatant”.

The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority also made a rare statement on the attack. A spokesperson for the president, Mahmoud Abbas, urged the US – Israel’s most important diplomatic ally and weapons supplier – to “put an end to the blind support that leads to the killing of thousands of innocent civilians, including children, women, and the elderly”.

The EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said in a statement posted on X: “There’s no justification for these massacres.” The UK’s foreign minister, David Lammy, said he was “appalled”.

Jordan and Egypt also immediately condemned the attack, with Egypt’s foreign ministry saying that Israel’s “deliberate killing” of Palestinians proves a lack of political will to end the war in Gaza.

Egypt, along with the US and Qatar, called this week for Israel and Hamas to resume negotiations to finalise a ceasefire and hostage-release deal, saying there were no excuses “from any party for further delay”.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel would send a delegation to the talks beginning on 15 August. His administration has been accused of repeatedly sabotaging ceasefire talks.

Iran joined the chorus of condemnation later on Saturday, calling the Tabeen attack “barbarous” and “a war crime”.

Both Iran and the powerful Lebanese militant group Hezbollah have vowed revenge against Israel for the back-to-back assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shakur and Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, on 31 July. Israel has not commented on Haniyeh’s death, but its spy agency has a history of targeted killing operations abroad.

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The EU, France and UK have condemned a senior Israeli minister for suggesting it might be “justified and moral” to starve people in Gaza.

Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, sparked international outrage after he said on Wednesday: “No one in the world will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages.”

Separately on Wednesday, Israel’s Channel 12 broadcasted security camera footage that reportedly showed the sexual assault of a Palestinian detainee from Gaza at Sde Teiman military detention camp. Last week, the detention of the soldiers accused of involvement in the alleged abuse sparked violent riots.

The White House called the reports of rape, torture and abuse of Palestinian prisoners “deeply concerning”.

In his speech this week, Smotrich said that Israel was “bringing in humanitarian aid because we have no choice. We are in a situation that requires international legitimacy to conduct this war.”

The EU said the deliberate starvation of civilians was a “war crime” and that it expected the Israeli government to “unequivocally distance itself” from the words of the far-right minister.

France also criticised Smotrich, saying providing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza is an “obligation under international humanitarian law” for Israel as it controls all access to the territory.

The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, called on “the wider Israeli government to retract and condemn” the remarks.

“International law could not be more clear – the deliberate starvation of civilians is a war crime,” he tweeted. “There can be no justification for Minister Smotrich’s remarks.”

Also on Wednesday, the US Department of State said Israel must fully investigate allegations of sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees by its soldiers.

Asked about the video aired by Israel’s Channel 12 that appeared to show soldiers taking a detainee out of sight of surveillance cameras to carry out abuses, a spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said US officials had reviewed the video.

“We have seen the video, and reports of sexual abuse of detainees are horrific,” Miller said. “There ought to be zero tolerance for sexual abuse, rape of any detainee, period … If there are detainees who have been sexually assaulted or raped, the government of Israel, the IDF need to fully investigate those actions.”

A spokesperson for Israel’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. The Israeli military, which runs some detention facilities where Palestinian prisoners have been held, said in response to earlier allegations that it operated according to the rule of law and any specific claims of abuse were investigated.

The investigation into the incident last week sparked protests by rightwing Israelis, who broke into two military facilities after military police detained nine soldiers at the Sde Teiman detention facility in southern Israel over allegations of severe abuse of a detainee captured in Gaza by army reservists.

“It is appropriate that the IDF in this case has announced an investigation has arrested a number of people who are alleged to have been involved,” Miller said.

On Monday, the Guardian reported that interviews with released prisoners showed violence, extreme hunger, humiliation and other abuses of Palestinian prisoners had been normalised across Israel’s jail system.

Israeli rights group B’Tselem said in a report that mistreatment was now so systemic that it must be considered a policy of “institutionalised abuse”.

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Violence, extreme hunger, humiliation and other abuse of Palestinian prisoners has been normalised across Israel’s jail system, according to Guardian interviews with released prisoners, with mistreatment now so systemic that rights group B’Tselem says it must be considered a policy of “institutionalised abuse”.

Former detainees described abuse ranging from severe beatings and sexual violence to starvation rations, refusal of medical care, and deprivation of basic needs including water, daylight, electricity and sanitation, including soap and sanitary pads for women.

In a months-long investigation, B’Tselem interviewed 55 former prisoners housed in 16 Israeli prison service jails and detention centres run by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), mapping the scale and nature of abuse. The highly respected Jerusalem-based group concluded that Israel’s prisons should now be labelled “torture camps”.

“When we started the project we thought we would find sporadic evidence and extreme cases here and there, but the picture that has emerged is completely different,” said Yuli Novak, the organisation’s executive director.

“We were shocked by the scale of what we heard. It is uncomfortable as an Israeli-Palestinian organisation to say Israel is running torture camps. But we realised that is what we are looking at.”

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) said it operated according to the law and under the oversight of the state comptroller. “We are not aware of the claims you described and as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility,” it said in a statement. The IPS also claimed that several petitions regarding jail conditions filed by human rights organisations had been rejected by the supreme court.

The IDF said it “rejects outright allegations concerning systematic abuse of detainees in detention facilities” and acts “in accordance with Israeli law and international law”. Allegations of abuse were thoroughly examined, a statement said. Conditions for detainees had significantly improved throughout the war, it added.

There have been multiple reports of arbitrary, cruel and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees since the Hamas attack of 7 October – the outside world’s only glimpses of conditions inside the jails, since Israel has denied access to lawyers, family members and Red Cross inspectors.

In late July, multiple members of parliament broke into two military bases, backed by a far-right crowd, to protest against the arrest of nine men over the violent rape of a detainee in Sde Teiman detention centre. The MP Tally Gotliv told the crowd that Israeli troops deserved total immunity, regardless of their actions.

A former barracks that became a processing centre for people seized in Gaza, there have been suggestions that suffering at Sde Teiman is a horrific and temporary exception created by the Gaza war.

Detainees’ testimony and the B’Tselem report suggest, however, that it is just one particularly violent component of an abusive system, and cases of abuse are not unsanctioned acts of violence.

Instead, it is suggested that under the direction of the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the mistreatment has become an integral part of Israel’s detention system.

At least 60 people have died in Israeli custody since the war in Gaza broke out, compared to one or two deaths a year previously.

The Guardian carried out separate interviews with eight detainees, the majority arrested without charge and released without trial, who detailed patterns of abuse matching those documented by B’Tselem.

Field researchers in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza collected dozens of testimonies, medical reports, autopsies and other evidence.

They found consistent and widespread testimony of severe, arbitrary violence, sexual assault, humiliation and degradation, starvation, deliberately unhygienic conditions, overcrowding, denial of medical treatment, prohibitions on religious worship, and denial of legal counsel and family visits.

Several witnesses the Guardian spoke to gave details of three killings: Thaer Abu Asab and Abdul Rahman al-Maari, who were allegedly beaten to death by guards, and Mohammad al-Sabbar, who died from a chronic medical condition. Cellmates said that after 7 October he was not given medicine or the special diet he needed.

Along with the use of direct violence and restrictions on movement, Palestinians have long alleged that imprisonment is a key element of Israel’s 57-year-old occupation: various estimates suggest that up to 40% of Palestinian men have been arrested at least once in their lives.

Before 7 October, 5,200 Palestinians were held in Israeli jails, including 1,200 in administrative detention, which allows indefinite detention without charge or trial. Intense waves of arrests in the aftermath of the Hamas attack mean that prisoner numbers soared to 9,623 as of early July.

Among them, 1,402 prisoners from Gaza are classed as “unlawful combatants” under emergency legislation, which also allows detention without charge or trial. The IDF says the measure complies with international law.

Palestinians ‘tortured’ in Israeli prison speak out: ‘We couldn’t sleep from the screams’

Firas Hassan, a 50-year-old youth ministry worker from Bethlehem, was arrested under an administrative detention order in 2022. Conditions then were acceptable, he told the Guardian: there were hot showers, decent food, time outside in the yard, and about six prisoners to a cell, each with his own bunk.

In early 2023, Ben-Gvir was appointed the minister in charge of prisons. He immediately set about getting rid of what he called “perks” for Palestinian inmates, such as fresh bread, and limiting shower times to four minutes.

But those changes were nothing compared to what happened after 7 October, Hassan said. “There was respect before. But after 7 October I was sure I was going to die there. I lost all hope.”

Hassan described conditions common to many of the interviews. He said he and his cellmates – up to 20 people in the same cell designed for seven – were beaten, sometimes several times a day. He said one injured cellmate claimed to him through tears after a particularly brutal incident in November that guards had raped him with a baton.

With little water and no washing facilities or clean clothes, conditions quickly became extremely unsanitary. Food for the entire room consisted of a piece of meat, a cup of cheese, half a tomato and half a cucumber in the morning, and about five spoonfuls of uncooked rice per person for dinner. There was one 2-litre bottle of water for the whole room to share.

“The guards told me, we are giving you enough to keep you alive, but if it was up to us we will let you starve,” he said. On his release without charge in April, Hassan had lost 22kg in weight.

Hassan also heard the screams of 38-year-old Thaer Abu Asab, who was allegedly beaten to death in the cell next door after refusing to bow his head to guards.

Another witness, Mousa Aasi, 58, from Ramallah governorate, told the Guardian that after the beating, Asab was dragged into the courtyard in view of all the inmates. “They said he died in hospital later, but I think he was already dead,” he said.

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On Friday, I discovered a video posted on Instagram by an Israeli soldier from the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, showing the calculated demolition of a chief water facility in Rafah. The video, in three parts, shows Israeli soldiers planting explosives inside and around the water pumps of a facility in the occupied city. The video—which is captioned in Hebrew, “Destruction of the Tal Sultan water reservoir in honor of Shabbat”—ends with footage of the water facility being blown up. The soundtrack is a song produced by soldiers of the 51st Golani Brigade with lyrics like, “We will burn Gaza… shake all of Gaza… for every house you destroy we will destroy ten.”

The water facility, also known as the Canada Well, is situated in Tel Sultan Neighborhood, in the western part of Rafah city. U.S. human rights activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to prevent demolitions in the city, spent much of her time during the last month of her life helping to protect the municipality workers at the Canada Well. The workers were repairing damage done to the well due to the Israeli military bulldozers in the area.

A report Corrie wrote just weeks before her murder lays out the work she and other activists with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)—“human shield work with the Rafah Municipal Water authority,” she described it—were doing with local Palestinian workers to protect the well and local water system. “The workers are currently building a barrier surrounding the Canada Well…in the Canada-Tel El Sultan area of Rafah,” she wrote. “This well along with the El Iskan Well…was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers on 30th January [2003]. ”

Corrie’s report added that the Canada Well had the capacity to produce 35 percent of Rafah’s total water supply back then. The defense of the water supply, she noted, led “to ISM activists coming under fire.”

The soldiers who blew up the water system this week were carrying out a strategy that has been explicitly articulated by the Netanyahu government. In October, an adviser to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Giora Eiland, laid out the strategy to deprive Palestinians not just of water from outside Gaza, but to disrupt their ability to pump and purify water locally, on the IDF’s radio station, GLZ. “Israel, as I understand, closed the water supply to Gaza,” said Eiland in a Hebrew-language interview. “But there are many wells in Gaza, which contain water which they treat locally, since originally they contain salt. If the energy shortage in Gaza makes it so that they stop pumping out water, that’s good. Otherwise we have to attack these water treatment plants in order to create a situation of thirst and hunger in Gaza, and I would say, forewarn of an unprecedented economical and humanitarian crisis.”

“If you want to topple the Hamas regime, you won’t achieve that merely through aerial attacks. ”

For months, Israeli forces have been targeting vital water resources in the strip leading to starvation and, according to new reports, worsening access to clean water. Last week, the Israeli military and the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that Polio virus has been found in Gaza’s sewage,[..] .

Our exposure of the video on Friday immediately sparked outrage, describing it as evidence of war crimes. The soldier quickly made his account private and deleted the stories.

The Canada well is the main water facility in the city of Rafah and provides services to 50 percent of the city’s residents, mainly in West Rafah.

Monther Shoblaq, Director General of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, told Drop Site in an interview that his organization had provided the Israeli military with precise GPS coordinates for the Canada Well and all water facilities in the Strip, in coordination with the Red Cross. Despite these precautions, the well was blown up in late May, he said.

“The solar panels at the facility enabled water services during the war for tens of thousands of people in the area, even with the electricity shutdown,” he said. “I was shocked when I saw the video. It’s not just that they targeted this water facility; it’s the fact that they planted explosives, celebrated the act on Instagram, and did so under the guise of honoring the Sabbath. It’s deeply cruel. ”

Monther recounts witnessing the complete destruction of one of Gaza’s vital water facilities located in West Khan Younis by the Israeli military. He requested that facility be designated a deconflicted area through OCHA and UNICEF, providing details about the employees and their families present inside. The military approved the request, and CMWU restricted access to only employees and their immediate family members. Despite this, , the facility was struck without warning, resulting in the deaths of four of its employees’ relatives. As a result, the water facility, which housed Gaza’s largest water tools and equipment, was left and subsequently utterly destroyed.

In the north, too, Gaza City’s municipal government has repeatedly reported deliberate attacks on water facilities in the city. A statement by the municipality on July 15 warned that the city is experiencing “a severe water crisis, with available water amounting to only a quarter of the pre-aggression supply at best, covering only 40 percent of the city’s area.”

A BBC analysis based on satellite data from May 9, three days after the Rafah invasion, found out that 50% of Gaza’s water and sanitation facilities had been damaged or destroyed.

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The war that followed the invasion is devastating Gaza, but it is also impoverishing the West Bank, which has become a kind of second front in Israel’s battle against Palestinian militancy.

The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank but does not run Gaza, has been paying only about 50 percent of the salaries it owes its estimated 140,000 employees. In the West Bank as a whole, which has a population of about three million, 144,000 jobs have disappeared since October, and 148,000 Palestinians who were working in Israel have lost their jobs, according to the World Bank. Before Oct. 7, unemployment in the West Bank was about 13 percent, compared to 45 percent in Gaza.

Less than three years ago, Wassif Frahat spent $3 million to open a lavish, two-story restaurant, the Ali Baba. With an impressive, pillared entryway, polished stone floors, glittering chandeliers and colorful frescoes on the high ceilings, the restaurant was his commitment to a better future.

The Ali Baba, in Jenin, is just a few minutes’ drive from the Jalameh checkpoint, which in normal times allows Israeli Arab citizens entry to the West Bank. The atmosphere is Palestinian, and the shops, restaurants and services are significantly cheaper than in Israel. The crossing also allows Palestinians with valid entry permits to go to jobs in Israel.

But after Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, the checkpoint was closed. Israel withheld most tax revenue from the authorities in the West Bank, in an effort to weaken them and clamp down more broadly on Palestinians. The economy in the territory’s north collapsed, and the better future that Mr. Frahat expected now seems farther away than ever.

Israeli Arabs are not his only lost customers; local Palestinians have stopped coming, too. They lack money, he said, and fear continued incursions by Israel’s military. Its forces are trying to tamp down increasing militancy among young armed Palestinians who largely run the sprawling refugee camps in Jenin and the cities of Tulkarm and Nablus.

The Israeli army killed seven people in a raid in Jenin on July 5, after a larger operation in late May that killed 12.

“People are afraid to leave their homes,” Mr. Frahat said.

In large parts of Jenin, and especially near its refugee camp, Israeli troops using tanks and armored bulldozers have ripped up roads, cut water and sewage pipes, broken power lines and smashed many storefronts and U.N. offices, including a recently renovated medical clinic. The scene is similar in Tulkarm, with its two refugee camps.

Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli brigadier general and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, said that the army was engaged in “preventive actions” to head off a new wave of suicide bombings carried out by “armed groups producing explosives.”

Jenin and some of the camps are bastions of armed resistance to the occupation. Israel has conducted frequent raids over the years, but they have become more common since Oct. 7. Israeli officials say the raids are part of counter-terrorism operations against Hamas and an extension of the war. Hundreds of Palestinians have been detained.

The raids have piled only more misery on a failing economy. Amar Abu Beker, 49, the chairman of the Jenin Chamber of Commerce, which represents 5,000 businesses, said that 70 percent of them were struggling to stay afloat.

The chamber is working to repair the key roads that Israeli forces have wrecked because the Palestinian Authority has little money for such work, Mr. Abu Beker said. In addition to the damage done by the checkpoint closure, the economy had been constricted by months-long general strikes in 2022 and 2023 in sympathy with Palestinians killed in Israeli raids.

The measures to starve the Palestinian Authority of funds, pushed by far-right members of the Israeli government who want to annex the West Bank and resettle Gaza, have alarmed the Biden administration. U.S. officials want the authority to play a role in running postwar Gaza and worry that an economic crash in the West Bank could lead to more violence.

U.S. officials have pressured the Israeli government to release withheld taxes, which make up about 70 percent of the authority’s income. On July 3, Israel agreed to release $116 million, but the Palestinian Authority said it was owed nearly $1.6 billion.

In the West Bank as a whole, according to the World Bank, 144,000 jobs have disappeared since October, and 148,000 Palestinians who were working in Israel have lost their jobs.

The governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Rub, 58, admitted that with checkpoints closed, first during the Covid pandemic and now after Oct. 7, the city is struggling.

“The veins that let us live are Palestinians from Israel, our lifeblood,” he said, sitting in his large office as an American armored personnel carrier guarded the entrance. The city’s Arab American University is mostly shut now, with only a third of its regular 6,000 students, who in normal times pay rent and shop in stores.

He praises the Palestinian security forces, two of whose commanders were in the room monitoring the interview, for keeping law and order on badly reduced salaries. But he acknowledges that the security forces do not maintain a presence in the refugee camps, where Israel says the militants have established control, and he blames Israel for all the trouble.

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There is no light at night in the Nur Shams refugee camp other than that of a bright moon, although even that doesn’t fully penetrate the maze of narrow alleyways; since 7 October, residents here have stretched sheets of black tarpaulin across the camp’s streets to block the view of Israeli attack drones.

In an uncovered passageway no more than a metre wide between the camp’s shoddily constructed homes, Mohammed al-Jaber, known as Abu Shuja’a, the 25-year-old leader of the local Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) cell, greeted a dozen young men who emerged from the darkness.

Like him, they were dressed in black and carrying pistols and rifles. The militants had dodged Israeli checkpoints, drones and location tracking technology on their 60km journey from Jenin because there was work to discuss, Abu Shuja’a said.

This is the new reality in Nur Shams, just four kilometres away from the green line and separation wall that divides the occupied West Bank from Israel. Months of airstrikes and fierce street battles with Israeli forces have devastated the camp, earning it the nickname “Little Gaza.”

There are destroyed buildings everywhere, including the youth centre, while roads have been churned up by tanks. Water and electricity are often out; piles of tyres lie in the central square, ready to be set alight to impede the next Israeli raid. At every entrance, men with walkie-talkies signal the camp’s comings and goings, on alert for undercover Israeli operatives or anything unusual. Gas canisters to be used for making improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are not hidden away.

“Look at our lives here,” a commander, Saeed al-Jaber, said during a recent visit by the Guardian last month. “The Mediterranean sea is 10km away, you can see it from the hill, but I have never been there. The Israelis call us terrorists because we don’t want to live in a prison.” A few weeks later, he was killed in a drone attack.

For the past nine months, the death and destruction caused by Israel’s campaign in Gaza, in response to Hamas’s 7 October attack, has dominated the world’s attention. But the other Palestinian territory – the West Bank, including East Jerusalem – is also facing spiralling bloodshed.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raids on militants in refugee camps such as Nur Shams are not new. There are 19 camps across the West Bank, set up for Palestinians expelled from their homes after the creation of Israel, and many have long functioned as centres of resistance against the 57-year-old occupation. Today, they resemble slums, and still suffer from high rates of poverty, crime and unemployment.

In March 2022, the IDF launched Operation Breakwater, near-nightly raids focusing mostly on the West Bank’s camps, in response to the deadliest spate of Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis in 20 years.

Since then, the situation in the West Bank has rapidly deteriorated; young men in the camps say they have no choice except to pick up weapons in order to defend their communities against the Israeli incursions. The Palestinian Authority, which is nominally in control of towns and cities in the West Bank and coordinates on security matters with Israel, hold no sway in the camps.

Even before the 7 October attack, 2022 and 2023 were the most violent years on record since the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, of the 2000s. Israel resumed using helicopter gunships and targeted drone attacks in the territory last summer, and since the war in Gaza broke out has begun using extensive air power.

The death toll is steadily rising. According to Ocha, the UN’s humanitarian agency, between 7 October 2023 and 24 June 2024, 536 Palestinians, including 130 children, have been killed in the West Bank, mostly in clashes with Israeli forces and settlers.

Several incidents for which video evidence exists suggest that Israeli soldiers shot unarmed men and boys; other civilians have been caught up in raids and targeted attacks on militants. In Nur Shams this week, an armoured IDF vehicle ran over an IED and exploded, killing a soldier; an Israeli drone strike on the camp a night later killed at least four people whom the IDF identified as members of PIJ, although local media reports said one of the dead was a woman.

Sarah Mahameed, 20, was traumatised by watching her 15-year-old brother Taha die after he was shot by an Israeli sniper in front of their home in November. Anyone that tried to help him was also shot; her father, Ibrahim, died of his wounds in hospital three months later.

“There are no rules any more. They just want revenge,” she said.

The escalating violence is fuelling both armed Palestinian resistance and popular support for groups such as Hamas and PIJ, several Nur Shams residents said.

The new generation of fighters in the West Bank are for the most part only loosely affiliated with the traditional Palestinian factions such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the secular Fatah. Abu Shuja’a, the PIJ commander, said he used to be a member of Fatah, but switched allegiance to PIJ after raids on the camp intensified in the wake of 7 October.

Many Palestinians have suggested that the Iran-backed group is better supplied with weapons and money in the West Bank than other factions. Anecdotally, it appears that support for PIJ, rather than Hamas, is stronger in several camps than it was before the conflict began.

“We fight for Palestine against the occupation, We would fight under the banner of anyone who helps us defend ourselves,” Abu Shuja’a said.

Similar situations are playing out all over the West Bank: along with Nur Shams, nearby Tulkarm, Jenin, Nablus and Qalqilya also bear many new scars that will take a generation to heal. The children of Nur Shams idolise Abu Shuja’a and his men, asking to hold their guns and posing for photos. There are only about 7,000 people living here: many of the killed fighters, now immortalised in martyr posters, are their brothers, fathers and cousins.

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Two Al-Jazeera reporters have been killed in an Israeli strike in northern Gaza, the satellite news network said – the latest Palestinian journalists working with the Qatari network to be killed in the war-torn enclave.

A 27-year-old correspondent, Ismail al-Ghoul; a cameraman, Rami al-Rifi; and a child who was not identified were killed in a blast that struck the car in which the three were travelling in Gaza City, according to the network and the emergency and ambulance service, which helps recover and transport casualties to hospitals across Gaza.

The two journalists had been reporting together at the al-Shati refugee camp, the birthplace of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in a strike in the early hours of the day in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Haniyeh had attended the swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday for Masoud Pezeshkian, the new president of Iran, a Hamas ally.

The latest deaths bring the number of journalists killed in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war erupted last October to 111, including 106 Palestinians, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists which tallies the casualties. Of the other five journalists killed, two were Lebanese and three were Israeli.

The bodies of the two Al-Jazeera journalists were taken to the nearby al-Ahli hospital from where their Al-Jazeera colleague, Anas al-Sharif, went on air in a phone interview with the channel. No information about the child that was killed was immediately available.

The Israeli army did not immediately comment on the strike.

UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric called for a full investigation and accountability for the killings of the Al-Jazeera journalists and others, saying that journalists everywhere need to be protected.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and Hamas both accused Israel of assassinating the two journalists.

The Israeli government closed Al-Jazeera offices in Israel in May, using a new law that enables it to close down media outlets it says are a security threat and incite against Israeli troops. The Israeli government says the network has close ties to Hamas – a claim Al-Jazeera denies – as many of the militant group’s leading officials are based in the Qatari capital.

Throughout the latest Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, now in its tenth month, the openly pro-Palestinian Al-Jazeera has accused Israel of targeting its journalists.

In December, Samer Abu Daqqa, one of the network’s cameramen, was killed in a strike. Wael al-Dahdouh, the outlet’s bureau chief in Gaza, was reporting in late October when he received word on air that his wife, daughter, a son and grandson were killed in an Israeli airstrike. In January, a strike killed another of his sons, who was also working for Al-Jazeera.

Even though Western bourgeois reporting is unable to ignore the grossest aspects of this Zionist barbarism, particularly when the local reports expose much more, it still comes nowhere near conveying its full extent, and continues to swallow the most outrageous lies and justifications from the Zionist propaganda machine.

So for example the recent missile strike on a school football team in the Golan Heights, tragically killing ten was reported unquestioningly as a “deliberate atrocity against Israel” without any questions asked about the reality that this happened inside annexed Syrian territory; that the victims were not Jewish at all but local Druze, who to this day refuse to accept “Israeli” identity (and who shouted down the Zionist rightwing minister who visited the scene to milk it for propaganda “justification” to escalate the warmongering by attacking Lebanon and possibly Iran too); and most of all that it was clearly not a deliberate attack by pro-Palestinian Hezbollah, being either a missile aimed at a local Zionist military base but missing, (probably because of electronic counter-measures) or more likely, a stray air-defence missile from the Zionists themselves:

Hezbollah statement : The Islamic Resistance of Lebanon categorically denies the accusations of some enemy media and various media regarding the attack on Majdal Shams and also confirms that the Islamic Resistance has nothing to do with this incident and categorically rejects all false allegations.

Ghalib Saif, head of the Druze community in the Israel: The missiles that hit the Druze villages in the Golan and Galilee are Israeli intercepted missiles and they always cause great damage to our places and lives.

Every day we see that the missiles of the Iron Dome miss their target and fall towards us.

Egregious blame pinning and wild distortions and fabrications have been a major part of imperialism’s warmongering in Ukraine also, relentless pysops lies (far more sophisticated than Joseph Goebbels ever managed) pouring out non-stop to help stampede petty bourgeois public opinion behind the vicious nazi regime installed in Kiev by the CIA “colour-revolution” Maidan coup in 2014.

As the EPSR has said from the beginning, this is a deliberately initiated and sustained war by imperialism begun by Kiev on its Russian speaking eastern provinces ten years back and then escalated by provoking Russia into a defensive move lying presented as “starting a war”.

Imperialism’s purpose is provide a diversion and cover for its crisis, and to hamstring and setback the trade war rivals in Europe, dominated by Germany, whose competition has been undermining and eating away at America trade and commerce for decades (with Airbus virtually bringing flagship enterprises like Boeing to their knees for example).

Russia is obviously the notional target though it is only part of the whole war purpose; it gets it in the neck mostly for economic reasons for sustaining the EU with its cheap energy and mineral supplies, now largely cut off by sanctions and the astounding US sabotage of the NordStream II pipeline, an attack on its own NATO ally in Berlin.

Politically Moscow remains hated by Western reaction for its past communism and fears that it is by no means properly dead yet (though the Trumpite wing is more sanguine about how much of a threat remains). And while Vladimir Putin’s bonapartist, oligarchic-friendly leadership is a million miles from restoring Sovietism, enough of the USSR’s legacy remains (in nostalgia and necessary state reformist provision for schools, hospitals etc) to coral Western petty bourgeois fears behind the warmongering.

But that needs constant propaganda distortions – one of the latest paralleling the Druze incident with another out of context isolated incident hyping up an alleged “genocidal attack” (as the demented little croaking green toad fascist Zelensky ludicrously asserted) after a missile hit a hospital in Kiev.

All ballistic expertise, examining video of its incoming, the limited size of the explosion and the damage pattern suggested this was also a misdirected or malfunctioning anti-aircraft missile from a Ukrainian battery illegally situated in a civilian suburb.

But this was ignored in favour of reporting days of Zelensky’s lurid hysteria about Russia “wanting to kill everyone in Ukraine.”

Two doctors died, which is tragic enough, but proving the exact opposite to “genocide”; the Russians have not attacked and destroyed multiple hospitals in over two years of war (whatever unproven, unverified and unwitnessed allegations the CIA/MI6/NATO lie machine puts into the mouths of the Kiev Nazis).

To quote Galloway, to whose credit the WPB is one of the few fake-“left” groups which has not capitulated to the Western anti-Russia lie campaign:

“the bourgeois press had two days running this story at the top of the news even as the Zionists were destroying yet more of the entire medical infrastructure in Gaza including two dozen hospitals and killing hundreds of patients and medical staff”.

Among dozens of non-stop psyops fabrications the hysterical accusation of “Nazi book burning” run by the Observer takes the biscuit. The incident, yet another misdirected missile (or possibly air defence diverted missile - assertions that it was a Russian missile is from Ukrainian “forensics”, which has lied through its teeth since the war began) - saw a book works damaged:

Olena Ninadovska was inside Ukraine’s biggest printing house when the Russian missile hit. She was working in the binding department. It was 10.20am. Two colleagues – Tetaina Khrapina and Olha Kurasova – stood next to her. The women were operating a row of book-sewing machines. Another employee, Sveta Arestova, had just stepped away to take a telephone call.

The S-300 missile came through the roof. There was no warning. It instantly killed Ninadovksa and the others at her workstation. Arestova was injured but survived. The blast flipped over a 10-tonne book-finishing machine, killing Svitlana Ryzhenko, who was sitting at the end of the assembly line. Two more workers died at an adjacent table. Another, Roman Stroyhi, was killed by shards from a guillotine machine.

Seven people died in the attack on 23 May at the Factor Druk printing house in Kharkiv. Twenty-one were injured.

Hryniuk said she did not know if the Russian military had deliberately targeted her workplace or had attempted to hit a train repair workshop next door. Three more S-300 missiles fell at the same time. One crashed on to an old railway line; another landed next to a perimeter wall. Whatever Moscow’s intentions, the result, Hryniuk said, was the same: “They destroyed Ukrainian history and culture.”

In occupied areas, the Kremlin has forbidden the Ukrainian language, removed books from schools and imposed a patriotic pro-Russian curriculum. Statues of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko have been torn down. Vladimir Putin insists Ukraine does not exist. Its land, he says, is a part of “historical Russia”.

The strike on the factory wiped out 50,000 books. Among them were works of children’s literature and Ukrainian school textbooks – 40% of them were printed by Factor Druk – due to be sent to classrooms for the new September academic year. Also destroyed were young adult novels and bestsellers. They included a Ukrainian translation of The Marriage Portrait, a historical novel about an Italian duchess by Maggie O’Farrell.

“For me it’s so symbolic. They burned books, like the Nazis did 80 years ago. We have so many historical examples of Russia trying to kill off Ukrainian culture,” said Oleksiy Sobol, the head of the pre-press department. The Russian empire banned Ukrainian-language texts from the 17th century onwards, with follow-up edicts. Under Stalin, in the 1930s, Ukrainian poets and writers were shot – a generation known as the “executed renaissance”.

Since 2022, Russia has erased 172 libraries and nearly 2m books, according to the Ukrainian Book Institute.

But what has Tsarism’s backwardness got to do with anything except to completely speciously imply some “anti-cultural intent” with the ludicrous assertion about “book burning” (which was always a deliberate propaganda act of street intimidation be it done by the ancient Catholic Inquisition or Hitler’s Nazis)? The real issue is disguised and buried halfway through – an attack on industrial/military railway repair facilities next door.

All kinds of people were shot by Stalinism in raging counter-revolutionary civil war led by former White Guards and the rich peasantry in the 1930s (hostile to the difficult collective task of industrialisation), and possibly some, even many, were wrongly blamed, but without some detail about who these victims were, what side they fell on and what else they might have done and why, it is deliberate fascist misrepresentation to suggest it was because of their language.

The reality of the Soviet Union was to encourage and expand local cultural traditions:

The Chechnya debacle is an interesting illustration. The history-making Soviet nationalities policy, – the first state in the whole record of civilisation to deliberately set out to provide written languages, education, culture and political regional autonomy in the native tongue of more than 180 small nations inside the former Tsarist empire, – was monstrously distorted, vilified, and simply lied about or suppressed by the West more than any other achievement of the Soviet Union (and for good reason because it was imperialist colonialism’s greatest weakness).

In particular, anti-communist propaganda about continuing Soviet problems with the fierily independent Caucasus region nationalities was a permanent useful smokescreen for imperialist ideology to conceal the real historic balance of the matter. Just find one anecdotal incident or two of alleged rough Soviet justice against local nationalist gripes, – and the whole tyranny of worldwide imperialist exploitation (and of real colonial empires up until the 1960s) could be covered up again, – and the actual achievements of the USSR in effectively banishing racism and discrimination throughout a vastly difficult country to govern, could be forgotten.

And forgetting all Marx, Engels, and Leninist science about how long an epoch would have to pass before all this ‘old crap’ of chauvinistic squabbling could be finally seen an end to permanently, all the dilettante ‘revolutionary socialists’ of the West joined in with their bourgeois-imperialist ruling class’s propaganda to screech as well, – at every World Service or Radio Free Europe ‘incident’, – that Soviet Russia was a prisonhouse of nations just as under the Tsar, etc.

An entire balanced record of Soviet government versus local national-chauvinist and tribal reaction is not possible yet, and whatever arbitrary criminal mistakes in Soviet nationalities policy in Stalin’s time will have to remain an open question.

But how do even the worst allegations, - that Chechen reactionaries were unnecessarily and vindictively deported from their homeland to avoid the advancing German Nazi-imperialist armies being able to recruit them or bribe them for anti-communist struggle, - look now in the light of ‘free’ Moscow’s apparent willingness to try to literally wipe out the entire Chechen nation with non-stop mass bombing and scorched-earth fullscale invasions which have already reduced the entire Chechen homeland to total destruction, killing hundreds of thousands.? (EPSR No867 20-08-96)

That context was Yeltsin’s mid-1990s untrammelled capitalist restorationism of course, already heading for bankruptcy. But Putinism’s Greater Russian nationalism is a major flaw too, and one reason (among others) why the EPSR position on Ukraine is solely to see defeat for NATO but without any support for Putin.

But in fact it is the Ukrainian nationalists who precipitated war on the eastern Donbass by suppressing the Russian language, newspapers and teaching, and eventually banning it altogether, after massive intimidation by the outright fascist wing, as a recent assassination made clear:

A nationalist former member of Ukraine’s parliament known for her vociferous campaigns to defend the Ukrainian language has died after being shot in Lviv.

Police launched a wide search for the gunman alleged to have shot Iryna Farion, 60, on a street in the western city.

The regional governor, Maksym Kozytskyi, said on Telegram that Farion had died after being taken to hospital. The interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, had earlier said that the shooting was being treated as an attempted assassination.

Farion, a linguist, became a member of the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party in 2005 and was elected to parliament in 2012, but failed in subsequent attempts to win a seat. She had also served on Lviv regional council.

She gained notoriety for frequent campaigns to promote the Ukrainian language and discredit public officials who spoke Russian.

In 2018, when Ukraine was fighting Russian-financed separatists who had seized territory in the east, she called for a drive to “punch every Russian-speaking person in the jaw”.

In the early months of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Farion denounced Russian-speaking fighters of the Azov regiment who defended the port city of Mariupol for three months.

Although Ukrainian is the sole state language of Ukraine, many of its people speak Russian as a first language, a legacy of Soviet rule, when Ukrainian was under official pressure.

She is hardly an isolated example: the whole of Ukraine and particularly in the West is saturated in such reactionary nationalism and its fascist aggression, willingly in service to Western imperialism.

Support for the “plucky little Ukrainians” remains a major weakness in petty bourgeois and labour aristocratic opportunism. Tragically too it exposes the weakest side of the Irish national-liberation struggle which can see no further than alleged absolute “self-determination”, missing completely the imperialist crisis and its skulduggery using and manipulating all such struggles (even some less obviously reactionary anyway) .

A major part of all this dangerous confusion remains in the continuing delusions about “democracy”, originating in the revisionist peaceful coexistence retreats of the Stalin period.

Currently it is giving imperialism more sticks to beat assorted anti-imperialist movements such as Maduro-led left bourgeois nationalism in Venezuela, for the similar “leftism” in Nicaragua - both suffering the foulest of denunciations by surrounding fake-“lefts” such as the opportunist Lula da Silva in Brazil, showing his true colours by refusing any support against the outrageous US manipulated coup attempt (of which more next issue).

And it is helping support the hollow “student revolution” in Bangladesh, which if anything is more reactionary than the bourgeois nationalist Sheikh Hasina government, which was almost certainly toppled because of its moves towards China and Russia.

Much further analysis is required and much deeper study and development of Leninism.

Alan Moss

 

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