Back issues

No 1526 2nd January 2018

American UN contempt for Middle East outrage over handing Jerusalem to Zionist aggression; US backing for cynical Saudi civilian bomb slaughter and starvation of millions in Yemen; and escalation of killer-siege sanctions on North Korea’s workers state for daring to build nuclear defence (like everyone else) all point to a crisis wracked imperialist system out of control and threatening the world with 3rd world war devastation. Fake-“left” Trotskyism and revisionism ever more craven failing to build the only possible answer to this fascist degeneracy and instability, – revolutionary theory for overturn of capitalism. Instead Beijing votes with the US and the “lefts” capitulate to the stinking Goebbels Zionist lies that calling for an end to landtheft “Israel” is a “new kind of anti-semitism”. Leninist perspectives needed now

American imperialism’s UN bullying of near universal objections to its Jerusalem embassy move and the intensified “sanctions” siege of socialist North Korea, both underline the desperation of the declining top power in the world.

Whatever “New Year” pretences are made about “booming” Stock Exchanges, “growth” and “more billionaires” the relentlessly deepening reality facing monopoly capitalism across the board is of the greatest oncoming Catastrophe in history, already surfacing in 2008 and held off since only by insane unsustainable dollar printing (on top of decades of dollar credit pollution before).

Along with ever more nervous economic data (see last EPSR), the increasingly outright expressions of fascist aggression (and the ruling class splits tearing the establishment open in fear of the consequences) are evidence in themselves of a system hitting a brick wall of unsolvable contradictions, as Marx originally explained must happen (see Communist Manifesto eg).

Demented Trumpism and its pale echo in the Brexit chauvinist belligerence, are the last resort, a ruling class trying to bludgeon and intimidate the world into accepting the continued dominance and exploitation of the now bankrupted monopoly capitalist system and, most of all, the USA’s dominating position within it.

America’s hand is being forced towards ever more outright Nazi bluster and threats by the unstoppable economic and political crisis, and the ever growing worldwide hatred of its “war on terror”.

There can be no let up and it has to keep expanding the warmongering (even as it turns “isolationist”) as the only diversionary way out of its crisis that imperialist capitalism has ever been able to come up with (and which has twice destroyed much of the “advanced” world in appalling horrors).

It is unstoppable for as long as the vicious, divisive and brutal capitalist system is allowed to call the shots and dominate the world with its antagonisms and grotesque hampering inequality.

And it will only be stopped by revolutionary struggles against it and a clear grasp of the need to defeat, and then overturn its entire stinking butchering and torturing depravity (as in Yemen - see cutting further on).

Far from “at least preventing war”, as the continuing influence of deluded revisionist thinking in Beijing has just explained as the reason for its shameful United Nations vote, alongside Trump, to tighten even further the oil-supply throttling of Pyongyang’s economy, this “appeasement” move will simply drive the whole world closer to the explosion point of all-out international conflict.

It is the crisis collapse of capitalism alone which is driving the world to war and North Korea is perfectly sound in its understanding that the threat of being able to damage imperialism’s belligerence to restrain it – developing its own nuclear deterrence, as it has every right to do like any other sovereign nation, – is the best way it can do that.

Even though it has a small capability compared to the gigantic arsenal of the US, the only nation ever to have used nuclear bombs, and with a long history of near use, (including plans in the 1950s to wipe out fifty Chinese cities held back by fear of Soviet responses), it knows this is better than relying on “deals” with imperialism as Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Gaddafi both fatefully did.

The idiot notion that imperialism can be “contained” or at least held back from warmongering if it is “not provoked” has had a disastrous impact on the world class struggle through the post-WW2 period, courtesy of such mistaken perspectives, as most clearly set out in Stalin’s last major writing (the 1952 Economic Problems) but already emerging prior to that in Moscow’s slow retreat from Leninist grasp.

Only defeat has ever been the decisive factor in stopping monopoly capitalism’s drive to war; only revolutionary struggle to completely overturn its rule ever securely transformed conditions anywhere (under workers state authority and constant vigilance and revolutionary determination to fight against, and suppress, all external and internal counter-revolutionary skulduggery).

Only worldwide revolutionary overturn can now secure worldwide peace – by building a completely new international order of planned socialist cooperation in which the working class rule takes power and then consciously and firmly keeps its grip on all bourgeois remnants until they gradually disappear in a new classless rational socialist world.

And it should be added, only the threat of such struggles, as at the end of the Second World War, ever secured reforms anyway (and those always to be dismantled and overturned once crisis returns, as the welfare cuts, privatisation of the NHS, the callousness of the Grenfell fire disaster and much else are proving).

It is not by coincidence that a central part of this new crisis belligerence emerges in conjunction with the Jewish religious freemasonry bigotry and fanaticism (largely US originated) which permanently terrorises the Palestinian people in order to squat on their stolen lands.

It is precisely the move to openly annex and takeover Jerusalem itself – which is the full implication of the US provocation through the support its overwhelming world power lends to the Zionists – that cuts right through the fraudulent post-war “consensus” of “democratic” settlements and an alleged new world order of “reason” all supposedly mediated by an over-arching international “rule of law” in a shiny new “United” Nations, with commonly agreed principles and treaties which would forever outlaw and ban such horrors as torture, chemical and biological weapons etc etc,etc.

It is, and always was, fatuous social-pacifist garbage.

It was already garbage post-WW2 when it was devised to rescue imperialism from the shame of its 1930s backing for Hitlerism (across the board to step up the warmongering that all capitalism needed, as the great diversion from Depression collapse, while trying to push Nazi Germany against the USSR first of all) and its humiliating defeat by the huge sacrifices of the proletarian forces of the Soviet Union primarily.

Just as still happening around North Korea, post-war, Moscow revisionist illusions gave this UN mediation credence, by downplaying revolutionary necessity in favour of permanent peaceful coexistence and “peace struggle” strategies, as later given a “theoretical” base by Stalinism.

The Moscow analysis (contrary to Lenin) was that imperialism was now too hamstrung by world war and the growth of the socialist camp to expand any further, needing only to have its worst aggressions contained as socialism steadily progressed to world triumph (see EPSR book Unanswered Polemics).

So confused was this nonsense and its follow-on faith in supposedly “better non-aggressive imperialisms” that Stalin even went along with the United Nations’ “generous” provision of a “land for the Jews” (a critical error never mentioned by the “everything was fine till Stalin died” Lalkar/Proletarian revisionist hero-worship school of fake-“leftism”, even in its five recent, long, academically useful, articles on Zionism’s imperialist origins).

The UN “world order for peaceful development” garbage is far fouler and more festeringly rotten now that the intractable crisis of the private profit making system forces a turn instead to blasting its way out with world war destruction, just as it did in 1914 and 1939.

The Zionists’ willingness (and driven necessity) to go to almost any lengths of genocidal depravity to keep and “protect” their plundered property, is a core element setting the tone for imperialism’s Third World War “shock and awe” already begun in two decades of blitzing on Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria and being readied on a much wider scale.

The Zionist entity, installed into full colonialist “statedom” after the Second World War, by US imperialism – (after initial British efforts before and with much help from its own gangster terrorising and ethnic cleansing massacres) - and lavishly subsidised and heavily armed by it ever since, to keep a hobnail boot on the neck of the strategically valuable and resource rich Middle East, is a key instrument.

Its “self-defence” non-stop genocidal persecution and barbaric smiting all around it, now also serves not just as a regional rottweiler on behalf of imperialism’s interests but additionally as a frontline force for the coming Third World War.

To keep these reactionary fanatics sweet as crisis belligerence is stepped up, they have now been thrown the juicy bone of the “Holy City”.

It is an outright and deliberate war provocation, just as are the sanctions against North Korea, (with echoes of the way Japan was deliberately suckered into “making the first move” by years of US blockades, to blame the “little yellow people” in getting World War Two underway after Pearl Harbour).

So fascist US diktat, cutting right through the supposed internationally guaranteed “multi-faith” neutral zone status for Jerusalem, now blesses the “illegal” (even by the already monstrous UN 1948 “vote” terms) military and civil occupation of the city by Benjamin Netanyahu’s reactionary crew.

New Washington’s Nazi tone is strident, picking up from the Bushite “with us or against us” bombast of the initial Afghanistan and Iraq invasion blitzings around the ludicrously named “war on terror” crisis response in 2001:

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has warned UN members she will be “taking names” of countries that vote to reject Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

In a letter seen by the Guardian, Haley told countries – including European delegations – that she will report back to the US president with the names of those who support a draft resolution rejecting the US move at the UN general assembly on Thursday, adding that Trump took the issue personally.

Haley writes: “As you consider your vote, I encourage you to know the president and the US take this vote personally.

“The president will be watching this vote carefully and has requested I report back on those who voted against us,” she continued.

Haley followed the letter by tweeting: “At the UN we’re always asked to do more & give more. So, when we make a decision, at the will of the American ppl, abt where to locate OUR embassy, we don’t expect those we’ve helped to target us. On Thurs there’ll be a vote criticizing our choice. The US will be taking names.”

The Trump administration’s heavy-handed approach to foreign policy – often in breach of both international consensus and diplomatic niceties – has alienated even close allies.

The 193-member UN general assembly – which has no vetoes – will hold an emergency session on Thursday to vote on the proposed measure that the US vetoed at the security council earlier this week.

There was fury in Washington over Monday’s vote, in which the US was isolated in a 14-1 vote requesting Trump withdraw his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

According to Haaretz, Israel has sent instructions to its own diplomatic missions ordering ambassadors to seek meetings with officials to persuade them to direct their representatives at the UN to oppose the draft resolution at the general assembly and ask them not to make speeches.

A copy of the draft resolution, also seen by the Guardian, calls on the general assembly to declare the US move “null and void”.

It also demands that countries avoid “any decisions and actions which purport to have altered the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem” and calls upon all states to comply with existing security council resolutions.

The UN general assembly meeting was requested by Turkey and Yemen on behalf of the Arab group of countries and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

The two countries circulated a draft resolution on Tuesday that mirrors the vetoed measure Egypt had put forward at the security council meeting, which was backed by all members apart from the US.

The Palestinian ambassador, Riyad Mansour, said he expected “overwhelming support” for the measure stating that Jerusalem was an issue “to be resolved through negotiations” between Israel and the Palestinians.

“The general assembly will say, without the fear of the veto, that the international community is refusing to accept the unilateral position of the United States,” Mansour told reporters.

Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital broke with international consensus, triggering protests across the Muslim world and drawing strong condemnation. Key US allies including Britain, France, Italy, Japan and Ukraine were among the 14 countries in the 15-member council that voted in favour of rejecting the move.

After that vote, Haley described the 14-1 vote as “an insult” and warned: “It won’t be forgotten.”

Israel seized control of the eastern part of Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and regards all of Jerusalem as its undivided capital. The Palestinians view the east as the capital of their future state.

Several UN resolutions call on Israel to withdraw from territory seized during the 1967 war.

“Regards it as”!!!! – sheer bullying might trumps all!

But all this comes at a huge cost, trampling allover the postwar networks of bribed stoogery and regional alliances built over decades with Washington and other imperialist powers, while simultaneously delivering a warning to those major capitalist rivals too about their own separate trading arrangements which might compete with US interests in the ever-intensifying cutthroat market conditions of the crisis - especially against the German dominated European Union but also Britain too and its hopes for “Brexit” deals.

Such inter-imperialist rivalry grows ever more intense and is the major driving factor in the crisis turn to belligerence ultimately.

The comfortable regional setups meanwhile have previously allowed all kinds of local bourgeois and nationalist regimes (and the petty bourgeois compromisers of the Palestinian Authority) to coast along, fobbing off the growing pressures of anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist hostilities from below, - the “Arab street” particularly – with halfway house promises and endless “peace processes”.

Most of all this involves the notorious, – once-more revisionism sanctioned, – “two state solution” whose permanent “jam tomorrow” condition was never either reasonable or fair, (even if it were ever remotely achievable, instead of being an historic nonsense) – providing as it does for the Palestinians to be “allowed” to form their state on just 22% of the land which has been violently taken from them in the first place, (and the crappiest parts at that with the rockiest soil and the worst water and other resources), leaving the other four fifths to the occupiers arriving from the US, other imperialist states and Russia etc.

It is and was never a “solution” at all and could only ever guarantee endless resistance and rebellion by the dispossessed until they are either wiped out completely (or reduced to an Australian aborigine or Native American level of a demoralised 2-3% rump population), or can finally triumph in the revolutionary overturn of this colonialist intrusion, almost certainly now as part of the greater rebellion in the Arab nation, and others in the Middle East, which is constantly in ferment.

The entire “peace process” racket has become increasingly obviously unworkable anyway as the Zionists have been ever more dominated by the fanatical rightwingers and the aggressive settler movement, seizing ever greater sections of even the scraps supposedly set aside for the PNA, which is now to be satisfied with coordinating separate and disconnected “Bantustan” pockets of land on the occupied West Bank and the concrete hellhole de facto concentration camp of the besieged Gaza strip.

Now even this parody of a “deal” gets the same kick in the teeth that daily life has always been anyway for most of the Palestinians, ethnically cleansed by non-stop terrorism from the 1940s onwards (and even before).

But giving free rein to the most reactionary elements in the anyway reactionary “Israeli” racist Jewish colony means that imperialism abandons the greatest weapon that the ruling class has always been able to deploy, the pretence of “democracy” and “rule of law”, and the illusion that the masses can “choose” and influence gradual improvement.

It tears up all past pretences of United Nations “legality” for the monstrous colonist implant “Israel” in the first place, substituting bullying bluster in its place.

All these more subtle mechanisms for control by manipulating international collusion, and fooling the world with promises about eventual “justice” and “freedom” are abandoned and the opportunism of the stoogery which gave it credence, from the West Bank Abbas Palestine authority to the local bourgeois regimes are exposed for what they are.

Small wonder that it has all been loudly protested at the United Nations, not out of “principle” but because they know they are sitting on a volcano of Middle East and Third World rebellion which may well unite around resistance to this further contemptuous boot into the Palestinian issue in a way that starts at least to overcome some of the tragically self-destructive jihadist sectarian infighting of the last decade.

Any such advances in the struggle would not simply be further development for the Palestinians but would have general effect too.

The vote against the US is driven by fears of widespread revolutionary upsurge which finds its expression for moment in such “terrorism”.

With the huge firepower it has and networks of worldwide military bases, Washington can perhaps impose its will for the moment.

But the Bushite New American Century “shock and awe” blitzkrieging and torture imposed on Afghanistan and Iraq to try and pre-empt all challenges even before the great capitalist catastrophe had fully burst into the open (seven years before 2008) showed the dangers and weaknesses of relying on brute force and fascist blitzkrieg.

That not only failed completely but stirred up unprecedented levels of Third World rebellion and “jihadist” revolt, as well as the mass street revolts of 2011 in Egypt.

It is also further ate away at what remains of the US domestic illusions in the presidential “democratic” system, bringing the whole White House mythology into the greatest disrepute in history as the body bags came home and trillions of dollars poured down the drain.

The “terrorist” fire has raged ever since and mostly against imperialism despite sectarian confusions, much attempted CIA/Zionist manipulation, backward Saudi and Gulf funding, stirred up pseudo-“insurgency” and/or brutal suppression as just imposed on the ISIS revolt by totally depraved razing of major cities in Iraq and Syria, costing thousands of civilian lives.

But the supposed “withdrawal” of the “liberal” Obama period could not solve anything either because the crisis is unsolvable.

Now this US renewed fascist contempt for the “international community” can only make things worse again, once more driving further tens of thousands, millions even, into the ranks of the resistance and adding to the overall burning hatred for Western tyrannical domination everywhere.

Hitler’s thousand year Reich lasted 12 years and a new Nazism cannot survive for ever either.

The great upsurge in the Arab Spring, still continuing in Yemen, shows how a jump into mass rebellion is just beneath the surface, lacking only scientific clarity and leadership.

It is that ferment which has forced even the Egyptian and now Turkish leaderships, both unstable and even reactionary in themselves, to take the lead in the UN challenges the US.

All of which exposes the across-the-board cowardice and opportunism of the fake-“left”, all dutifully and cravenly “condemning terror” at every possible opportunity instead of explaining its eruption, however confused, as the symptom of world revolt, and a major problem for imperialism.

The astounding and dogged resistance of the Palestinians is not only symbolic of this revolt, but a pivotal and central element in it, not just supported by, but embodying the struggle of the 250 million strong Arab world and beyond that the entire Middle East, all Muslims and essentially most of the billions strong Third World.

So what now do the fake-”lefts” say about the call for a new Intifada?

Are the Palestinian people justified in picking up every weapon they can find - which under their poverty conditions will often be suicidal “terrorist” methods – to attack and push back against this monstrous post-war colonialist implant, sat like a fat belligerent cuckoo in the Middle East with no justification whatsoever except its ludicrous Jewish mysticism and a dirty deal to service the smiting needs of imperialist Middle East oppression (as well as its own non-stop blitzkrieging), in return for the stolen lands and property it was “granted” in 1948?

Or are they permanently to suffer the exploitation, abuse, torture, imprisonment, air-raids, killings (of children and women too), and appalling concentration camp siege repression, which make up daily life and the repeated “punishment” onslaughts of mass butchery which punctuate it with even more genocidal racist savagery, such as this for example???

The death of Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, 29, came as Trump administration officials again pre-empted negotiations over the disputed city’s final status in comments about the Western Wall.

“We cannot envision any situation under which the Western Wall would not be part of Israel,” a senior official said. “But as the president said, the specific boundaries of sovereignty of Israel are going to be part of the final status agreement.”

The death of Abu Thuraya came on the bloodiest day of protests since Trump’s controversial announcement earlier this month, with no sign of the unrest dying down. Photographs showed the body of the former fisherman being carried on a stretcher through Gaza City during his funeral on Saturday.

Abu Thuraya, who lost his legs in an Israeli airstrike in 2008, was one of four Palestinians to die in clashes with Israeli security forces on Friday in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Israeli military said it had fired “selectively towards main instigators” of the protest in which Abu Thuraya was reportedly hit, and that it was investigating the circumstances of his death.

The Palestinian health ministry confirmed in a statement that Abu Thuraya and Yasser Sokhar, 31, were shot in the head in Gaza during clashes with Israeli soldiers.

According to photographs and witness accounts, Abu Thuraya had been pushed to the fence in his wheelchair, before leaving the chair and attempting to crawl further forward.

Video footage from after he was shot showed him being pushed back, slumped in his chair surrounded by other shouting protesters.

Two days before his death he told a video interviewer that he had been protesting against the US decision. “This land is our land. We are not going to give up. America has to withdraw the declaration it has made,” he said.

The Israeli military said about 3,500 Palestinians had demonstrated near the Gaza border fence on Friday.

“During the violent riots IDF [Israel Defence Force] soldiers fired selectively towards main instigators,” it said in a statement.

A military spokeswoman had no immediate comment on the death of Abu Thuraya, who was a regular at such demonstrations.

In another deadly incident in Ramallah, a Palestinian wearing what appeared to be a suicide belt stabbed and lightly wounded an Israeli border police officer before being shot and killed.

What choice is there for this most persecuted people?

And if the answer is none at all, then what does that say about all the “condemning of terror” which the fake-“left” grovellingly produces at every incident of an attack on the West?

As the EPSR has said previously (No1213 16-12-03):

Either way, and whatever happens, anti-”Israeli” terrorism is bound to grow.

However regrettable some might think it, a Marxist historical view can only be that this spontaneous terrorist fightback has to happen first before a more organised revolutionary political movement is likely to get going towards building a positive revolutionary Palestine to put a certain end finally, once and for all, to this Zionist-imperialist nonsense.

In which case, the only progressive historical comment it is possible to make about something that is going to happen anyway, in the direction of even better future developments, is “let it happen”.

The Marxist programme for a communist revolution would rarely be wishing to encourage the development of spontaneous terrorist anarchy; but it would never condemn it either, even though it might often have cause to regret its consequences, along with other “innocents”.

But fighting capitalist society’s battles for it, against a mess of its own making, would be a ridiculously self-defeating thing for any serious anti-imperialists to do.

If nothing can stop a wave of spontaneous terrorist hatred from being brought about by the injustice, brutality, and degeneracy of the capitalist system, prior to the class war crisis becoming irreconcilably deep and matured enough to lead on to the development of a real revolutionary answer to collapsing bourgeois-system decadence; then the sooner this terrorist spasm is got through, then the more rapidly that the really serious revolutionary progress to put an end to the whole capitalist ruling-class system (and not just an end to individual capitalist state officials or random bourgeois electors) can get under way.

But the fake-“left is heading in the opposite direction.

Just as this embassy provocation makes clearer than ever the reality of the Zionist intrusion of “Israel” as nothing but the most monstrous genocidal landtheft Nazi-colonialist implant it is, and has always been, and now its complete intertwining with the imperialist drive to world war, they bow to the ruling class bludgeoning insistence that there should be no questioning of “Israel’s right to exist” – because it would be “anti-semitic” to say so.

Yet there has never been a better moment to call out and expose the entire artificial foundation of this Nazi-“Israeli state” - the implant of a permanently violent and repressive alien occupation in the middle of someone else’s land, (the Palestinians’, a people there for a minimum 1500, possibly 2000 years) and driven by its very nature to permanently and continually suppress the displaced indigenous population with utmost genocidal brutality and barbarism.

Even the bourgeois press will occasionally feel obliged to concede more than much of the “left”:

One hundred years ago, on 11 December 1917, the British army occupied Jerusalem. As General Allenby’s troops marched through Bab al-Khalil, launching a century of settler colonialism across Palestine, prime minister David Lloyd George heralded the city’s capture as “a Christmas present for the British people”.

In a few months’ time, we mark another such anniversary: 70 years since the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, the catastrophic destruction of the Palestinian polity; the violent dispossession of most of its people with their forced conversion into disenfranchised refugees; the colonial occupation, annexation and control of their land; and the imposition of martial law over those who managed to remain.

The current US president’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel bookends a century of such events: from the Balfour declaration in November 1917 to the partition plan of 1947; from the Nakba of 1948 to the Naksa of 1967 – with its annexation of Jerusalem, the occupation of the rest of Palestine, further mass expulsions of Palestinians including from East and West Jerusalem, and the invaders’ razing of entire ancient neighbourhoods in the city.

Donald Trump’s declaration could easily be read as one more outrage in his growing collection of chaotic and destructive policies, this one perhaps designed to distract from his more prosaic, personal problems with the law. It is viewed as the act of a volatile superpower haplessly endorsing illegal military conquest and consolidating the “acquisition of territory by force” (a practice prohibited and rejected by the UN and the basic tenets of international law). And it is seen alongside a long list of domestic and international blunders.

However, this analysis obscures what happens each day in occupied Palestine, and hides what will surely happen next – unless governments, parliaments, institutions, unions and, most of all, citizens take measures to actively resist it.

Leaders across the world appear incapable of naming what is taking place in Palestine, so their received wisdom on the cause and nature of the conflict, along with the “consensus solutions” they offer, prove futile. This century of events instead should be understood as a continuum, forming part of an active process that hasn’t yet stopped or achieved its ends. Palestinians understand it: we feel it in a thousand ways every day. How does this structure appear to those who endure it day in, day out?

Patrick Wolfe, the late scholar, traced the history of settler colonial projects across continents, showing us that events in Palestine over the last 100 years are an intensification of (rather than a departure from) settler colonialism. He also established its two-sided nature, defining the phenomenon – from the Incas and Mayans to the native peoples of Africa, America, and the Middle East – as holding negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, settler colonialism strives for the dissolution of native societies; positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land: “Colonisers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.”

After the British marched into Jerusalem in 1917 and declared martial law, they turned Palestine into an Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA). Declaring martial law over the city, Allenby promised: “Every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer of whatsoever form of the three religions will be maintained and protected.” But what did he say of its people? Allenby divided the country into four districts: Jerusalem, Jaffa, Majdal and Beersheba, each under a military governor, and the accelerated process of settler colonialism began.

At the time of the military takeover, Palestine was 90% Christian and Muslim, with 7-10% Palestinian Arab Jews and recent European settlers. By the time the British army left Palestine on 14 May 1948, the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people was already under way. During their 30 years’ rule, the British army and police engineered a radical change to the population through the mass introduction of European settlers, against the express wishes of the indigenous population. They also suppressed Palestine’s Great Revolt of 1936-39, destroying any possibility of resistance to what lay ahead.

Once any individual episode is understood as part of a continuing structure of settler colonialism, the hitherto invisible daily evictions of Palestinians from their homes assume their devastating significance.

Invisible too has been the force driving the expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land. Without a framing of settler colonialism, the notion of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, of “spiriting away” the native Arabs “gradually and circumspectly”, makes little sense. In Jerusalem this is how gradual ethnic cleansing is being practised today.

The new US policy on Jerusalem is not about occupation and annexation; the supremacy of one religion over another so “balance” must be restored; the two-state solution or the failures of the Oslo agreement; or the location of an embassy, or division of Jerusalem.

Nor is it even about the soap opera-level conspiracy the Palestinian people have been abandoned to: where the son-in-law of the US president, who has actively funded the rightwing settlement movement in Israel, has been granted absolute power to fabricate a “peace process” with a crown prince who has just locked up his relatives.

In this dystopic vision, the village of Abu Dis outside Jerusalem is proposed as the capital of a future fragmented Palestinian “state” – one never created, given that (along with all US-led peace processes), its eventual appearance is entirely dependent on Israel’s permission. This is named, in “peace process” language, as any solution to be agreed “by the parties themselves”, via “a negotiated settlement by the two sides”.

With colonialism always comes anti-colonial resistance. Against the active project to disappear the indigenous people, take their land, dispossess and disperse them so they cannot reunite to resist, the goals of the Palestinian people are those of all colonised peoples throughout history. Very simply, they are to unify for the struggle to liberate their land and return to it, and to restore their inalienable human rights taken by force – principles enshrined in centuries of international treaties, charters, and resolutions, and in natural justice.

The US has been blocking Palestinian attempts to achieve this national unity for years, vetoing Palestinian parties in taking their legitimate role in sharing representation. Palestinians’ democratic right to determine their path ahead would allow our young generation – scattered far and wide, from refugee camps to the prisons inside Palestine – to take up their place in the national struggle for freedom. The US assists the coloniser and ties our hands.

Former European colonial powers, including Britain, now claim they are aware of their colonial legacy, and condemn centuries of enslavement and the savage exploitation of Africa and Asia. So European leaders should first name the relentless process they installed in our country, and stand with us so that we can unite to defeat it.

• Karma Nabulsi is fellow in politics at St Edmund Hall, and teaches at Oxford University

Of course this academic account itself still clings to past illusions in a “democratic” way out when only the revolutionary overturn of this monopoly capitalist Jewish intrusion and the imperialist system it is intertwined with, can solve things.

But it is a good factual account of the colonialism of this monstrosity.

Yet just as that becomes clearer the “lefts” cower more cravenly than ever, now under a deluge of absurd “anti-semitism” accusations coordinated by the CIA and its willing Zionist henchmen.

This long-fostered propaganda onslaught (see eg EPSR 1207 04-11-03) has been escalated and is now one of the main tools for silencing all criticism of this Jewish occupation, cravenly complied with by the “left”, so far away from class understanding and trapped in its PC single-issue “identity” politics (feminism, anti-racism, gay rights) that most of it no longer dares say boo to a goose for fear of petty bourgeois opinion calling it “racist” or “homophobic” etc.– or “anti-semitic”.

Their cravenness goes hand in hand with capitulation to the demonisation of “terrorism” (particularly, but not only, since 9/11) being used to whip up the atmosphere of fearfulness, scapegoating and jingoism needed to drag the working class behind international warmongering once again.

So deep does this go that much of the “left” even ends up doing capitalism’s dirty work for it, helping censor polemic and discussion, (eg “safe spaces”, “trigger warnings” and ever extended versions of alleged “homophobia”) by not only going along with the absurdities of supposed “left anti-semitic racism” but even “investigating it” to silence the more outspoken.

It has reached a peak in the Labour Party’s Corbynite upsurge, which has even initiated its own outrageous witch-hunt “investigations and inquiries”, bending over backwards in its opportunist grovelling to the ruling class to “weed out” alleged “left anti-semites” despite the “left” leadership’s three decades of trawling round Palestine support groups etc.

As the famous Hollywood joke has it, the Corbynite leadership has principles, “and if you don’t like them – they have others”.

So much for the “left” transformation of the thoroughly bourgeois Labour Party where most of the Trots and revisionists are now opportunistically burrowing, proving yet again their treachery too, as they try tying workers back to deadly illusions in “parliament” and “democracy”.

All this rank opportunist “rooting out” of “left anti-semitism” simply concedes the political ground to the lying “anti-semitism” campaign by the Zionists by going along with the pretence such a thing exists.

It aids the sheer chutzpah (to use an appropriate Jewish word) of the Zionist propaganda lie that there is no basis for the growing hostility and resistance to its endless genocidal repression except some alleged crude “racism”, as poisonously set out by the “liberal” Guardian’s regular French reactionary columnist Natalie Nougayrède:

Antisemitism has mutated in Europe. Different strains of it have now developed. The far-right antisemitism that led to the Holocaust is part of our history. Today it still lurks among Europe’s resurgent, nativist political movements, including in the UK.

Muslims, too, have also bought into antisemitism. In 2013 Mehdi Hassan described the antisemitism among some British Muslims as “our dirty little secret”. Yet another form of antisemitism has hidden since the 1960s behind radical leftwing anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.

Neither Europe’s Muslims nor its radical left should be tarnished with antisemitism en masse, of course. Large majorities reject it. But if European democracy is to be protected, antisemitism needs to be exposed and combated much more actively. In my country, France, it took an attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris in 2015 for the scale and depth of antisemitic feeling among certain groups of radicalised youths to be grasped. The 2012 attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse – in which Mohammed Merah murdered three children, their teacher and others – had not been seen as the watershed it truly was.

I was visiting Sweden when the recent attacks unfolded, and was struck that there was no spontaneous public show of solidarity with the Jewish community. Sure, widespread indignation and concern were present – but somewhat discreetly.

Europe is not antisemitic. But we need to acknowledge that new versions of anti-Jewish sentiment exist. In Hungary, rabid antisemitic campaigns have flourished against George Soros, including posters harking back to an era we may have thought was long gone. But I’m told that some in the Hungarian Jewish community have become as worried about radical Islamist ideas as they are about extreme rightwing antisemitism, and are reluctant to call out the right as antisemitic for this reason. None of this is simple.

There is a growing awareness of the problem at EU level. The European parliament passed its first resolution on “combating antisemitism” in June. The text refers to a “working definition” which points out that antisemitism must not be seen as limited to the targeting of Jews. It can target non-Jews, as was the case when cartoons of Emmanuel Macron, carrying echoes of the 1930s, referred to his prior work at the Rothschild bank.

As for the far-left, anti-Zionist brand of antisemitism, EU-validated guidelines say: “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish entity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” A red line is crossed when criticising Israel becomes a criticism of Jews.

On 9 December in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, a group of masked men attempted to set fire to a synagogue. They threw molotov cocktails, forcing young people who had been holding a Hanukkah party to seek refuge in the basement. Days later, a second arson attack occurred at a Jewish cemetery in Malmö, where there were also reports of calls for an “intifada” and violent, antisemitic shouts at a demonstration. In Amsterdam, a man holding a Palestinian flag smashed the windows of a kosher restaurant. The incident, recorded on video, was described by the Organisation of Jewish Communities in the Netherlands as “no less than an act of terror”.

In Gothenburg, three men were detained for “attempted criminal arson” after the synagogue attack. According to the antiracist activist magazine Expo, they were two Syrians and one Palestinian. All three had arrived in Sweden this year. The Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven declared there was “no place for antisemitism in our society”, while Angela Merkel commented that “no difference of opinion, including on the status of Jerusalem, can justify such acts”.

A legal definition of antisemitism helps the authorities collect data, which is currently patchy. The EU agency for fundamental rights has now announced a new survey investigating discrimination and hate crime against Jews living in the EU.

A “legal definition” helps only the creeping imposition of ruling class censorship and repressive clampdown on discussion of all “radical” (ie anti-capitalist and revolutionary) thought and opinion, is what she should say, along with intensified surveillance (“helps the authorities collect data”!!!) which is what this Goebbels lying is actually about.

The point is that it is not some revival of 1930s anti-semitism that is underway at all but a deep running and entirely rational hatred of the fascist occupation of Palestine which has stolen away an entire peoples’ land and of the barbaric terrorising, blitzing and smiting oppression imposed by this artificially imposed “state” on firstly the seven million Palestinians themselves, driven out of their own homes, farms, land and countryside, and then on the whole Arab nation around them.

It is not “racism” (now “adopted by Muslims” as Nougayrede’s twisted account has it) which drives this along but anti-imperialist hatred by hundreds of millions of little people against this Jewish takeover, and against the imperialism which they see supporting it.

But, says Nougayrede, there are attacks on synagogues and the like in Europe, does this not show its racist side?

Some hoary myths are buried in such sly and disingenuous questions.

First, that there is separation between Jewishness and Zionism and as soon as hostility spills onto the Jews outside Israel it must be because of old style “racism” just as in the past.

But that is a gross lie.

Conditions in the early 21st century are very different and primarily because of the existence of “Israel”.

Early in the 20th century (particularly poorer) Jews were certainly victimised, pogroms were repeatedly imposed and eventually the horrors of Nazism. Many were against the whole Zionist project.

But the modern Jewish diaspora, almost universally well-off middle-class, is completely interconnected with “Israel”.

Nearly all of them go along with the existence of “Israel”, accept their passports and the “right” to go there at any time and settle (on whose land?), and indeed their own “special status” as part of a “chosen people”.

Surveys indicate that 9/10 see their identity as “bound up with Israel”.

And while many claim to be “anti-Zionist” (and even some in “Israel” itself) this is no more than an argument about how best to hold onto what has been gained so far; the “liberals” believing that the more fanatical aggressiveness of the rightwing overt Zionists and “greater Israel” settlers, will threaten everything, precisely because it cannot but stir national or even socialist revolution and regional hostility. They think it better to be content with what has been “achieved” which is to say with the 80% of Palestine already taken over.

Some may even be dismayed by the crudeness and the atrocities of the Israeli regime and its torturing, death squads, civilian punishments, endless “collateral” damage and inhuman siege impositions on Gaza (causing a constant toll of sick and dying with sewage in the streets, no electricity much of the day, no medicines, limited supplies etc etc etc).

But even those who renounce their “Right of Return” etc, in the main still support the existence of “Israel” and certainly do not stand up and fight for the ending of this gigantic imposition in the Middle East which is the only non-Zionist position possible; by continuing to declare themselves “Jewish” they accept an entire philosophy of separateness and a “promised land”.

This is essentially true even of those who are “secular” Jews, who even so continue to enjoy and remained connected to what is a giant religious freemasonry within capitalism, one of many such self-preserving groupings looking out for their own interests at the expense of the rest of society in this system, and a very successful one.

As many times analysed (EPSR 1207 eg), no-one is obliged to be Jewish, or remain in this grouping once they have achieved adulthood; like Catholicism, or any other religion or cultural grouping, it is a matter of choice (unlike being female, or black for example); there is no genetic or even national commonality in this population.

Remaining Jewish is solely a political decision and one which leaves no essential difference with Zionism.

From which the spilling over of generalised hostility to “Israel” into anti-Jewish hostility becomes obvious.

But does not such anti-Jewishness become anti-semitism when it makes no such political distinctions (such as excepting those who declare against the existence of Israel as a few do, for example)?

Perhaps so, just as the raw nascent hostility of the Third World currently arises as anti-Americanism, or anti-Westerner in general and with sometimes equally unfair, random consequences.

But the positively campaigning anti-Israel Jewish exceptions are an extremely tiny minority to begin with, and even then, this modern crude generalised hostility is still not the same thing at all as the deliberately whipped-up scapegoating capitalist “racist” hatred of the past.

That remains true even though some of this growing world hostility borrows and uses the “tropes” of the past such as becoming entangled in such past fabrications and hate-forgeries as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or in “Holocaust denial” or questioning, or wilder conspiracy theories that “the Jews run everything” rather than the more objective assessment that their freemasonry has a disproportionate influence within capitalist ruling circles as part of capitalism.

Raw visceral anti-imperialist sentiment over “Israel” expressed this way may yet be a long way from a conscious grasp of the real enemy as the monopoly capitalist ruling class but to denounce and condemn it as “anti-semitism” on a par with that deliberately and systematically fomented by the most aggressive and powerful sections of monopoly imperialism in the past is to renounce and betray all hold on revolutionary understanding.

It has roots in emerging anti-capitalism.

If it is yet confused and misdirected then blame that on the philosophical vacuum left by the failure of revisionism (and its Trotskyist alter ego) to maintain revolutionary perspectives and grasp in the world.

But moralising condemnation? That is on a par with “condemning terrorism” as the whole fake-“left” does, permanently marking them as opportunists and class collaborating mountebanks, complete “revolutionary” frauds and ultimately a deadly danger to the working class.

Hitlerite anti-semitism, whatever barmy “theoretical” notions abut Jewishness the Nazis may have subscribed too, is something else, objectively part of big capitalist power victimisation of a wide variety of scapegoats selected semi-randomly according to past societal separation (medieval hostility to usurers etc or to Roma “gypsies” on the edge of communities); or mentally and physically disabled people; or homosexuals; or for ruling class-war purposes such as, from the beginning, trade unionists and communists.

All were part of deliberate intimidation, inflaming of divisions and terrorising for maintaining capitalist rule and whipping it into the hate-frenzy of the Second World War.

Seeing only superficial appearances of phenomena is blinkered petty bourgeois philosophy which misses what is really going on in the world and, in the case of such reactionaries as Nougayrède deliberately muddies the waters out of class interest.

The picture currently is further confused by the revival and use of actually backward reactionary Nazi anti-semitism, part of the stirred up deep-south US civil war chauvinism and white-supremacy racist diversions being re-heated by US imperialism now for the same war-hate reasons as German Nazism.

But while this causes further confusion, it also gets into great tangles itself, since there remains such universal horror at the memory of the capitalist warmongering Nazi “final solution” and such a useful role for current reactionary Zionism, that the old game cannot be played – instead the Muslims, associated with a great wave of anti-imperialist revolt, are now the main scapegoating targets.

All kinds of contradictions beset the loopier of the throwback Nazi groups now, struggling to explain that they “hate Jews” but simultaneously support the Zionists.

But instead of clarifying workers the “left” groups go along with similar nonsense too about Zionism not being the same as Jewishness.

Lead among them has been the “intellectualism” of the Weekly Worker CPGB, former revisionist “rebels” and long barely distinguishable from Trotskyists in their billious petty bourgeois outpourings against the Soviet Union, written off as a supposed “hell hole” of relentlessly grey and repressive near-slavery (without the Brie and burgundy that these mountebanks long ago declared the British working class was grazing on in their “well stocked supermarkets”).

To keep its “left” credentials intact it obviously cannot support the atrocities and brutalities of “Israel”, nor the Jewish supremacism of the effectively apartheid-racist “state”.

Hence an endless series of long-winded articles pour out in the WW denouncing the Israelis and their barbarities, even more vigorously than most, with some ripe language and robust descriptions in places of the worst excesses of the smiting onslaughts.

Much righteous indignation against the Israeli right wing and the racist nature of the “state” of “Israel” is expressed.

All well and good. But they never ever take on the central question of why should this colonialist intrusion exist at all as an alleged “country” or what should be done about it.

And why not? Because they are essentially “left” Zionists themselves, supporters of the existence of “Israel”, under various specious justifications (such as that it is all “too late now” to change things back - an appalling defeatist copout that matches all their defeatism about imperialism, and the supposed “impossibility” of revolutionary change).

To maintain this tricky balancing act, they are obliged to spend reams of paper “proving” that Jewishness is nothing to do with Zionism – a total nonsense as already spelled out above.

It is nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism.

Its purpose is to cover up their acceptance and collusion with the status quo, and their total betrayal of any revolutionary understanding and leadership.

It is entirely on a par with their “entryism” into the Corbynite Labour Party, fooling and misleading the growing disquiet in the working class and heading it away from any true revolutionary perspective.

But this has a more tricky purpose; by declaring there to be a “difference” - and a fundamental one, between Zionism and Jewishness they find a way to capitulate to the Zionist onslaught while pretending to oppose it.

Instead of exposing the lying “left anti-semitism” propaganda racket for the twisted special pleading of the Jewish occupiers that it is, they pretend that “opposing Zionism is a very different question to being anti-Jewish” and that “yes there are left racists”.

What a totally disgusting and sinister betrayal of various activists struggling to grasp these questions!

The sickest part is that this is then dressed up as a campaign for justice in itself to reinstate various expelled or suspended Labour members – “Labour against the Witchunt” – unsurprisingly including assorted CPGBites themselves or their regular associates, a hall of mirrors distortion that also provides for further diversionary posturing around Labour keeping Corbynism propped up, when it deserves only to be totally exposed for the class collaborating treachery it is.

Actually, an even sicker aspect of this Weekly Worker dissembling is that it then takes up the “left anti-semitism” cudgel itself, laying into the rival Socialist Fight Trotskyist group, long on the fringes of the WW, but at least taking a stab at understanding the interconnections between the Jewish freemasonry’s role within, and as part of, capitalist imperialism.

But the rigidly Trotskyist Socialist Fight still ties itself in all kinds of formalistic knots its efforts, failing to understand the core question of the existence of the Israeli “state” too; it declares simply that most of the Jewish diaspora are Zionists, instead of grasping that even the supposedly “many” (?) “anti-Zionist” Jews fall on the counter-revolutionary side on that central question.

And in the end SF is only battling this question out in order to remain within the LAW group anyway, continuing the illusion that the working class needs to enter the Labour Party itself!

They are as much part of the problem thereby as the Weekly Worker-ites, misleading and fooling the working class and worse.

Meanwhile the imperialist desperation tying itself to this rabid Zionism is also driving to ever greater depravities elsewhere in the Middle East deliberately and crudely bombing and starving millions:

At 11.30pm, 10 nautical miles off Yemen’s western Red Sea coast, seven fishermen were near the end of the four hours it had taken to haul their nets bulging with the day’s catch into their fibreglass boat. Suddenly, away from the illumination of the vessel’s large spotlight, one of the men spotted a black silhouette coming towards them.

Moments later a helicopter began circling overhead. The fishermen were well within the 30 nautical mile boundary they had been warned not to cross by leaflets airdropped on land by the Saudi-led coalition. But, without warning, gunfire erupted from the helicopter.

Osam Mouafa grabbed his friend, Abdullah, dragging him into a corner, curling himself into a protective ball as bullets flew through the boat. Shot in both knees, with a third bullet having grazed his thigh, Osam began to feel water rising around him. “The boat became like a sieve,” he said, sitting next to the wooden stick he now needs to walk.

By the time the onslaught stopped, the captain – a father of eight – and Abdullah were dead. Another crew member, Hamdi, was deafened and paralysed down one side after being hit in the head by shrapnel. All bleeding heavily, the five survivors frantically began bailing water out of the sinking boat.

The partially submerged vessel, with the fishermen’s clothes plugging the holes, drifted at sea for 15 hours until another boat rescued them, towing them ashore.

Since Saudi Arabia launched its military intervention in Yemen in March 2015, more than 10,000 civilians have died. More than 250 fishing boats have been damaged or destroyed and 152 fishermen have been killed by coalition warships and helicopters in the Red Sea, according to Mohammed Hassani, the head of the fishermen’s union in Yemen’s western port of Hodeidah.

“They have declared war on fishermen,” said Hassani. More than 100 miles further south in the port of Mocha, fishermen have been barred from going out to sea since the Houthi-Saleh forces, who the Saudi-led coalition have been fighting for more than two and half years, were pushed out by Yemeni fighters backed by a coalition partner, the United Arab Emirates, in February.

Yemen’s fishing industry has become an ever more vital lifeline for a country in the midst of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. More than eight million Yemenis are now facing famine after Saudi Arabia tightened a blockade on the country on 6 November. Restrictions were slightly eased on 26 November, allowing some aid in for the 20 million Yemenis relying on humanitarian support. But aid agencies have predicted mass famine if key ports such as Hodeidah remain closed to commercial imports.

Yemen relies on maritime imports for more than 80% of its annual staple food supplies. Although staples remain available, the Saudi-imposed import restrictions, combined with a rapidly depreciating currency, mean food prices have sky-rocketed. Government salaries have gone unpaid since August 2016 and an estimated 55% of the workforce have been laid off due to the conflict. Millions of Yemenis can no longer afford to buy food, forcing them into the more than 75% of the population who are in need of humanitarian assistance.

In the district of al-Rawda in northern Sana’a, farmer Yahya Abdu Taleb stopped cultivating his land after a bomb from an airstrike landed in a field less than 50 metres from his house. Fortunately for the family, the missile failed to explode.

Standing in the now fallow farmland, Yahya watches a team from Yemen’s national demining programme extract the missile buried some 10ft into the soil.

“I have three wells on my land. But now I don’t grow anything,” he said. When food prices started to rise, he went to rebuild the polytunnels needed to grow vegetables in the extreme mountain temperatures of Yemen’s arid northern highlands. But his neighbours begged him to stop. “The Saudis target them [the polytunnels]. They were afraid the planes would come back, bomb us and kill their families.”

Nine-year-old Zahara Taleb used a mobile phone to film the bomb being winched out of her father’s farmland next to their home. “I want to make sure it’s gone so I don’t have to be afraid anymore,” she said.

Ali al-Mowafa, heading the team from the NDP working to remove the unexploded ordnance in al-Rawda, said British, American and Italian-made bombs were identified among 12 missiles that failed to explode from one night when 52 bombs hit the district last August.

Research on the pattern of bombing, carried out by emeritus professor Martha Mundy at the London School of Economics, concluded that in the first 17 months of the Saudi-led bombing campaign there was “strong evidence that coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution” in areas controlled by the Houthis and allied forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saleh was killed by Houthi forces in Sana’a last week, days after declaring he had switched allegiances.

Data on coalition airstrikes collected by the Yemen Data Project have recorded 356 air raids targeting farms, 174 targeting market places and 61 air raids targeting food storage sites from March 2015 to the end of September 2017.

The UK’s de-facto deputy prime minister Damian Green has defended the British government’s continued support of weapons sales to the kingdom on the grounds that “our defence industry is an extremely important creator of jobs and prosperity”, while also highlighting Britain’s role as “the fourth largest humanitarian donor to Yemen”.

The British government has approved more than £4.6bn in fighter jets and arms sales to Saudi Arabia since their Yemen bombing campaign began. British military officers are also providing targeting training to the Royal Saudi Airforce.

May said she would demand Saudi Arabia immediately end its blockade during her recent visit to the kingdom. It remains in place.

Attacking Yemenis’ ability to provide food for themselves has been described as a “blatant violation of international laws” by aid agencies.

Despite the prospect of imminent mass famine, this strategy is being used to put greater pressure on the Houthis in lieu of failed efforts by the Saudi coalition to bomb the Iranian-aligned rebels into submission over more than two years.

Yemen analysts also point to the policy as a more appealing option for the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who also holds the role of minister of defence, than deploying thousands of loosely aligned, highly factional troops to attempt a precarious forced takeover of the Houthi-controlled capital.

“There are voices in the coalition and Yemeni government who view economic levers as a potential means of putting pressure on the Houthis and of pressuring people living under the Houthis into rebelling or expressing greater discontent against them as conditions worsen,” said Adam Baron, a Yemen expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“Destruction of access to food and water constitutes a war crime,” Mundy of the LSE noted in a paper published in September by the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition.

“But who is to prosecute when the same international organisations and national states, which stood aside for months of bombardment and blockade, now play the role of humanitarian intervention to save Yemenis from famine and cholera?”

[Return to story reference].

But this crisis savagery can only further educate the masses: the great upheavals in the Third World of anti-imperialist hatred and rebellion will unstoppably grow as capitalism crashes. Leninism is needed. Jacob Tremain

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Monarchist demands and violent attacks on state forces clearly show the hand of Washington subversion in the Iranian “demonstrations” - all a piece with Zionist and Saudi war provocations

It looks as if CIA/Zionist skulduggery has now turned its attention to Iran with a wave of obviously stunted up “demonstrations” set going and a mass international media campaign behind them.

It is no coincidence that this happens just when the most reactionary and aggressive Zionists are hyped up by the Jerusalem decision and the desperate Saudis have been encouraged by Washington to escalate belligerence all around, both particularly against Shia Iran, Syria and Lebanon.

The open declarations to “bring down the regime”and “restore the Shah” make very clear the reactionary agenda of the “rebels”.

These echo just such “monarchist” flag waving and capitalist restorationist demands appearing in the first few days of the bogus “Arab Spring” extension in Libya among the pathetic but much media exaggerated “demonstrations” against Gaddafi, which provided the excuse for a NATO invasion.

The deaths of demonstrators is also highly suspect – killings denied by the Islamic government.

Mysterious “shootings”, much hyped by the international press, were a pattern in past provocations like Libya and those setting going Syria’s horrific civil war, and would have been in the 2002 coup attempt on Hugo Chávez in Venezuela if a hidden snipers were not discovered in time.

Monopoly capitalism needs war to escape its disastrous failure and bankruptcy and this staged eruption is part of a pattern.

Iran’s barmy Ayatollahocracy – with its own record of anti-communist brutality and continued capitalism – is not the future either and Marxism does not “support” the Tehran regime.

But this upheaval is imperialist subversion playing on the crisis and the only possible call for the working class is that such disruption and the war invasion it is preparing, should be defeated.

When the threat is gone, the fight for socialism can resume (see Kornilov 1917). DH

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