Engraving of Lenin busy studying

Economic & Philosophic Science Review

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.--- V. I. Lenin


Current paper

No 1639 1st March 2024

Genocidal ethnic cleansing by fanatical Zionism in Palestine and universally complicit Western warcrime backing, exposes the desperation of whole imperialist system, plunging into Third World War. Fascist barbarity of grotesque “kill them all” butchery, already seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen & Libya etc., the only answer capitalism has to unsolvable Catastrophic collapse. But gross hypocritical trampling across all supposed progress & humanity comes at giant cost. The whole lying fraud of “democracy”, “freedom” and “justice” and the “international rule of law” bamboozling compliant public opinion since 1945 being totally demolished. Only idiots, petty bourgeois idealists, extreme feminists and anti-communists swallow sick psyops hype over CIA’s reactionary racist non-entity Navalny in Russia risibly hailed as heroic “fighter for freedom and democracy” even West turns to censorship and police-state-ism over Gaza. Putin Great Russian barminess wrong but defeat for Nato and Nazi toad Zelensky opens way to Leninism

Western humiliation from its Kiev fascist-stooge losses in the Ukraine war, and from continuing Palestinian insurgent resistance, unbeaten despite months of horrifying Zionist genocide “punishment” of 2.4 million people in Gaza and the West Bank, is shaking the crisis-wracked imperialist system to the core.

These anti-Western conflicts are not the communist revolution – in some ways far from it – but the blows against the imperialist world’s crisis aggression are massively shifting consciousness, exposing the total fraud of the “democracy and freedom” lies of imperialism as it is driven to a frenzy of barbarity showing the true face of its tyrannical exploitation system.

Domestically the ruling class is escalating police state repression, censorship and surveillance laws across the board to try and hold back a ferment of public dismay.

Repression and increasingly open fascism is the order of the day whipped up with populist hate-mongering (notably “anti-Islamism” coded racism) and brutal blitzkrieg to try and head off the long brewing revolt throughout the anti-imperialist world and growing at home as austerity/Slump bites ever deeper.

Internationally, inevitable and unstoppable economic and political Catastrophe, as analysed by Marx and Lenin (see economics box) is driving humanity into World War Three as the imperialists turn to the only answer they know, inter-imperialist warmongering and domestic repression – fascism – abandoning all its “freedom” pretences.

But this vicious turn reflects the weakness and desperation of an out-of-time system closer than ever to complete bankruptcy, facing worldwide upheaval (labelled “terrorism”) and the social turmoil at home that will erupt as the current “austerity” becomes all-out Slump, and nowhere among the major nations more than moribund British imperialism.

Things are already near boiling point for dozens of reasons from the Covid corruption and arrogant incompetence; the NHS hidden selloff; the desperate dentistry disaster; the wasteful and stupid Port Talbot steelworks closure; the arrogant contempt of the Post Office scandal; the Grenfell tower fire horror and ongoing terror for millions in similar substandard buildings; shit-stinking coast and river profiteering; the Windrush racist expulsions outrage; endless police brutality, misogyny and racism; the Hillsborough football disaster injustice; and the haemophiliac blood scandal, not to mention 15 years of “austerity” slump and counting, (or 40 if Thatcher is included) riddled with gig job insecurity, homelessness and foodbank desperation, with one million of the working class now in total destitution and some 14.5 million in poverty and despair, while hedge-funds drive investments to indebted bankruptcy in order to cream off their capital and banks siphon billions more from capital flows.

Much worse is to come as pensions are put out of reach, local councils, already stripped to the bone, now go bankrupt, and capitalism-generated social antagonisms explode in alienated and despairing crime violence, racist attacks, pornography, massive gambling and drug addiction, and drug and youth knife and gun gang warfare (all products of capitalist profiteering, degeneracy, antagonisms and the example it sets by its own warmongering, plundering and venality).

These devastating Slump conditions at home are driven by the same crisis failure of the monopoly capitalist system which is driving the degenerate breakdown into war destruction underway for two decades, from the blitzing of Serbia and the invasion of Iraq, and now raging in the two-year long war provoked against Russia and the disgusting and degenerate butchery in Palestine by the berserker Zionist colonialists.

Both are part of imperialism’s plans to rescue itself from total Catastrophic disaster by bludgeoning and bullying the ever more rebellious (and bankrupt) neo-colonial world back into submission, and pushing the whole world ever deeper into the Third World conflict that it needs as both a distraction, and a means of destroying the great tides of “surplus” capital and credit its system creates which are choking the whole system.

This totally deliberate and contrived path into war – now being suddenly hyped up by unelected plummy-voiced generals and even Sweden’s supposedly pacifist neutral government – has been sold to a deluded petty bourgeois public opinion by the gigantic fraud that the West is dealing with assorted external bogeymen/monsters who “threaten out way of life”, to cover up its own and sole responsibility for the great anarchic breakdown inevitable in the contradiction ridden greed and profit system (see box).

But it has been going badly, with failure after failure from the Iraq and Afghan pullouts to the warlord mayhem left in Libya and Syria and the collapse of the Nato coordinated, funded and directly aided war against Russia in Ukraine (a deadly unsanctioned undemocratic secret just exposed):

What the British and French are doing in terms of target control and accompanying target control cannot be done in Germany,” Scholz said on Monday.

Those remarks have been seen by some British lawmakers as Scholz publicly commenting on the classified activities of UK soldiers in Ukraine. A “small number of personnel” are “supporting the armed forces of Ukraine,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s spokesman Dave Pares said on Tuesday, offering no details.

“Scholz’s comments are wrong, irresponsible and a slap in the face to allies,” Alicia Kearns, chair of the UK’s foreign affairs select committee, said in a post on the social media site X. “Scholz should give Taurus and stop holding back the security of Europe.”

Nils Schmid, a senior lawmaker from Scholz’s Social Democratic Party who sits on the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, said the chancellor’s remarks on British activity in Ukraine had only referred to “publicly available arguments.”

The reaction of “some British Conservative politicians is completely exaggerated,” Schmid told Bloomberg, calling the matter “an artificially manufactured furor that distracts from the real issue” of ammunition for Ukraine.

What “classified”?? What “soldiers”?

The latest Russian advance, taking the heavily fortified Avdiivka stronghold near Donetsk is a shattering defeat for the Kiev Nazi stooge regime and for the coordinated Western military and intelligence forces which pull its strings.

It could see the collapse of the croaking little fascist toad Volodimir Zelensky’s entire stooge government and beyond that, the morale and confidence of the entire Nato structure.

The heavily censored Western media’s near silence on this critical war disaster, and its ridiculous campaign to instead fill the headlines with the nasty little nonentity Aleksei Navalny in Russia as some kind of “freedom hero” is an outrageous propaganda stunt meanwhile, to try and cover up the staggering implications of the setback as Russian troops now power forwards, potentially to defeat Ukraine completely.

This sudden death is highly convenient for the West with his ultra-reactionary pro-Western wife immediately on hand at the disunited European Security conference in Munich to milk every propaganda drop, so much so that some, not necessarily off-the-wall, mainstream online speculation suggests the death was pulled off by British intelligence. And false flag or not, there is nothing in it for Putin who has no reason to give the West any propaganda boost.

Days of virtual feeding frenzy in the Western media followed to elevate this racist (who keeps videos online advocating killing “non-Russians” with just as much venom as some of the Zionist ministers do against Palestinians) to almost immediate sainthood while denouncing yet again supposed “Putin thuggery” with an instantaneous media trial and judgement blaming the Russian government for his “murder”.

No one could possible know any such thing within minutes of the news when even the shortest forensic investigation needs days, and in fact the “evidence” for this Goebbels-level assertion was nothing but the say-so and allegations of assorted axe-grinding Western opinion, “ex-MI6 operatives” and outrageous high-level political assertion all the way up the warmongering imperialist chain to avuncular warmonger “Joe” Biden.

The whole basis for this demented MI6/CIA-fed bourgeois media deluge, was the regurgitation of a string of past unproven allegations of assassinations and deathsquad incident, an unsteady edifice of propaganda built one lie on top of another, all with extremely thin, logically inconsistent and full-of-holes circumstantial “evidence” (from the ludicrous “polonium in the Ritz teapots” to the Dutch “guilty” verdict against the Russian side over the downing eight years ago of the Dutch passenger plane MH17 which just happened to be directed by Kiev air traffic control on a flight path over a war zone where military planes had been downed already).

No-one has to consider Vladimir Putin pure as the driven Siberian snow, (and would be mistaken if they did) or incapable of ruthless action, to see the absurdities of all such “proof” including the ridiculous stunt that Navalny himself had been “poisoned by Novichok placed in his underwear” on a plane journey some years ago (such seemingly silly details always included as part of clever psyops to give verisimilitude on “who would make that up” grounds).

As the former UN weapons inspector and commentator Scott Ritter pointed out, in a long background piece on Navalny’s CIA training, the poison is supposed to be such a deadly nerve agent that one drop kills virtually instantly (and anyone nearby) making the story about “falling ill on a plane and then flying on to Germany to be saved by 'Western doctors'” a total pantomime.

More importantly, he adds that in Russia Navalny is virtually unknown, as the tiny numbers organised for the Western media-aimed “protests” and funeral “crowds” testified.

His alleged status as the great “hope” of a “wide opposition”, is nothing but a desperate fantasy by the Western agencies trying to stimulate the kind of “colour” revolution they have got away with (partially) in Serbia, Georgia, Syria and Libya, (and even essentially against Corbynism’s “left” movement in Britain), and, pertinently, in the half-successful 2004 “Orange revolution” in Ukraine itself, and the subsequent 2014 Maidan coup, the end result of $5bn worth of subversion and manipulation, eventually using hidden-sniper-induced turmoil to install a fascist saturated ultra-nationalist regime in Kiev (just as snipers were used against Chávez in 2002 and later in Syria to stampede “evil regime” hysteria).

Only petty bourgeois minds bitten with panic as capitalist society unravels, and brainwashed by decades of anti-Sovietism (now broadened to include even Putin’s bonapartist balancing act) would swallow this garbage.

That includes much of the fake-“left” still blaming Russia for the war, all the way from outright social-imperialists like the AWL to the Trot and revisionist collection in the Stop the War social-pacifist movement.

The few “left” groups who have not been stampeded by the Western hate campaign, correctly opposing the Nato war for the imperialist barbarity it is, still cause confusion by supporting the Russian side, leaving workers confused about its cause and the underlying crisis.

Putin is not the answer either, presiding as he does over a capitalist oligarch regime which might have been reined in to some extent, by mobilising some aspects of the former workers state machinery but his bonapartist balancing act (between the gangster oligarchs and the residue of past Soviet sentiment) is still a minor imperialist capitalist power and therefore ultimately part of the world warmongering system.

For the moment only, the world working class interest is to see defeat for imperialism, which means defeat for the overwhelmingly larger power on the planet, the US monopoly capitalist empire and its sidekicks (notably Britain).

Let it be by Russia since that is what has panned out but go no further; Putin also has to be brought down and the revolutionary fight to re-establish a workers state resumed as the only possible way to stop the world plunge into Catastrophe.

The only question is timing, since to do so now would play into imperialism’s hands, and its reactionary aim to break up the former Soviet Union even further.

The Navalny hype meanwhile could backfire badly, especially in the light of the horrifying genocide being perpetrated with full US approval and arms in Gaza by the depraved Zionist occupation.

Eulogising this squalid and corrupt individual as a “brave fighter for our values of democracy and freedom”, as the Western chorus has done, is bad enough given his history of racism and anti-communism but it is far worse when all such “values” are being contemptuously trampled into the ground in Gaza and the US simply vetoes and blocks virtually unanimous world disgust.

As they witness these horrors the whole world’s masses are being further taught what a gigantic lie is the whole post-war “order” of “free speech” “right to protest”, the “rule of law” and “democracy”.

All this has been a powerful tool for keeping the world in line for 80 years under the domination of the topdog American dollar-Empire and the other imperialist powers, particularly within their “privileged” class-collaborating populations (while much of the Third World exploitation, that philistine Western consumerist “lifestyle” lives off, has only seen repression anyway under a slew of fascist dictators from Marcos, Mobutu and Suharto, to the Duvaliers and Pinochet and many more, or their modern “elected” (!?!) successors like Jair Bolsonaro, berserk Javier Milei in Argentina, the Sisi dictatorship in Egypt, Bong Bong Marcos in the Philippines, the generals running Pakistan or the vicious reactionary Hindu-nationalism of Modi in rapidly rising capitalist India).

Now the mechanisms set up by boomtime capitalism postwar like the United Nations, international financial bailouts and aid (IMF, World Bank), international courts, and renewed Geneva conventions, to pretend bourgeois “democracy” and “free world values” could equal the giant achievements, rationality and social fairness of the workers state Soviet camp, have been falling apart.

They were developed post-1945 to head off mass enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and communism, generated worldwide as the Red Army smashed capitalism’s Nazism (the real crisis face of all monopoly imperialism including the supposed “anti-Nazis” like Britain, France or America, who initially encouraged Hitler in the 1930s and only later entered (very) temporary alliance with the USSR to save their own tyrannical skins and lucrative Empire exploitation, or to extend their own domination as Washington did).

But this world “justice” was always a fraudulent racket like all domestic bourgeois “democracy” in the major powers, itself refined over the previous century in order to hoodwink workers by disguising the ruthless bourgeois dictatorship which really rules over capitalist society (see Lenin’s State and Revolution).

In the same way the international “rule of law”, ostensibly neutrally situated “above nations” (presumably on tablets from God??) is nothing but a giant confidence trick, veiling non-stop suppression and ruthless exploitation of the non-communist mass of the planet with endless brutal wars, coups, assassinations and outright invasions, some 400 incidents large and small in the twentieth century alone, including the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the butchery of 3 million Indonesians in 1965 and much else killing millions (but still not always working).

“Justice” dictated by US-dominated imperialism or its “allies” is aimed strictly at the suppression of any stirrings of anti-imperialism, “terrorism” and “rogue states” that do not comply sufficiently with the US dominated monopoly capitalist order – no surprise eg that most of those arraigned by the International Criminal Court are from Africa’s seething “developing” nations and the revolts that threaten capitalist interests or the occasional uncompliant white European like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic.

Imperialism got away with it only because the whole fraudulent framework was swallowed by a complacent and deluded Moscow revisionist philosophy, which while still keeping the Soviet workers state camp going (and over the four decades from 1945 achieving more major advances in science, technology, space, military defence, culture, social justice, education and housing etc than ever before, as well as aiding multiple anti-imperialist struggles) was simultaneously more and more in retreat from the revolutionary perspectives of the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin’s leadership.

The “world justice” chicanery fitted with the slow decline into revisionist delusions of “permanent peaceful coexistence” of “separate systems” in a “multipolar world”, philosophically founded in the pre-war Stalin period’s Popular Front “anti-fascist” mistakes (eg China and Spain) and post-war misanalysis of imperialism’s supposedly hobbled capability to expand again (see EPSR Book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics on Stalinism quoting Stalin’s Economic Problems book).

Bureaucratic complacency, more and more abandoning Leninism, led all the way to complete liquidation of the USSR once the rising contradictions and trade war demands between powers within the imperialist world had temporarily taken the edge off the united imperialist Cold War pressure in the 1980s so that commercially challenged US imperialism could turn its attention to trade war, battling against rising and efficient Japanese and German trade competition, which was steadily wiping it out (as they have continued to do, along with China’s massive use of capitalism within its overall planned economy).

The re-orientation of US political and intelligence attention, actually reflecting deepening crisis and therefore ultimately more dangerously warlike, fooled idiot Gorbachevism into believing a new peace era prevailed and it no longer needed the workers state (dictatorship of the proletariat), dismantling it and using “market mechanisms” to speed development, thereby opening all the bitterly fought for great gains of the working class to the Western infiltrated carpet-bagging plunder in the 1990s and endless subversion.

Putinism has partly re-established the old Bolshevik state machinery (FSB etc) but only to rescue the new oligarch capitalism from its own gangster excesses, which were threatening to re-generate all-out revolution once more.

His garbled Great Russian nationalist moralising “history” and partial reforms only carry forwards the very worst elements of soft-brained revisionism which continue to hamper world understanding.

Social-pacifism still persists in the “left”,and, tragically, also in the Revisionist leadership of the remaining workers states like China or North Korea despite their determined domestic resistance to Western belligerence, subversion and non-stop lying propaganda, as too in heroic Cuba, which also continues to uncompromisingly defend its workers state, building a socialist society despite the huge difficulties of nearly 70 years of debilitating economic blockade.

So the revisionist perspective on Palestine continues to confuse workers.

The action at the International Court of Justice led by the SACP in post-apartheid bourgeois nationalist South Africa, while adding to world opposition to the Zionists with a genocide declaration, reinforces illusions in the West’s lying “international democracy” by its latest reliance on such procedures as a solution, instead of making the world clear that this ICJ is also part of the same bourgeois charade.

Certainly the official courts, councils, congresses and so on that capitalism has created for hoodwinking purposes, can nevertheless be used to trip up imperialism, as now by forcing out a judgement against the Zionist occupation and its barbarism.

All these institutions can and should be used as a platform, (just as Lenin and Marx explained bourgeois parliament could be used by revolutionaries to denounce parliament and capitalism).

But that applies only if that platform is used to expose the whole racket which a) otherwise disarms workers by heading them away from revolutionary understanding and back behind the “democracy” lie, b) will be heavily biased towards imperialism anyway and would not be allowed to continue if the balance tipped the other way and c) has no powers or capacity to act quickly, and least of all to enforce its judgements, even if anything halfway truthful is decided.

The vital lesson needed alongside and as part of any such revolutionary tactical move, is that only ending the whole vile capitalist order can stop this horrifying WW3 destruction in the Middle East and throughout the world, including defeating Zionism and its imperialist backers.

That will not happen without a fight for much greater scientific understanding about what the world’s masses are facing as the capitalist system degenerates.

And there has never been a greater need for a Marxist-Leninist perspective to clarify the world’s masses’ understanding, explaining the crisis driven desperation of the collapsing bourgeois order and its increasingly obvious turn to war and fascist scapegoating.

Huge questions being raised which require deep revolutionary answers – still avoided by the entire spectrum of fake-“lefts”.

Despite much current revived boasting about being “Communists” or even about “overturning” the capitalist system, obviously responding to the mood of anger and dismay, none of them come close to examining the crucial questions needing answers nor even any willingness to begin the great debate and polemical discussion that is vital to find such answers.

Particularly important among many questions is to grasp the full unprecedented scale and apocalyptic nature of the monopoly capitalist crisis which is driving this demented warmongering and genocide, and which the latest Gaza destruction is only a part of (with the blitzings of Serbia, Iraq (twice and during a 13 year interim), Afghanistan (20 years), Libya, and Syria killing millions all preceding – and another 700,000 slaughtered in the Yemen over the last decade, reducing much of it to rubble and throwing millions more onto the edge of famine, in what is still one of the worst “humanitarian crises” in modern times.

Further savage devastation has been imposed with imperialist fomented disruption and conflict across the Sudan and Ethiopia, throughout Myanmar (risibly presented as a “fight for freedom and democracy” even as the giant in-your-face hypocrisies continue over Gaza); Latin America slides into ever worsening drug trafficking cartel warfare: and planet-threatening plundering and poisoning of the natural world continues everywhere, to feed the insane and insatiable greed and capital accumulation of an ever more concentrated billionaire or even trillionaire parasitic ruling class (and layers and layers of middle class grovellers and facilitators and some better of “worker aristocrats”, who live off their droppings).

Most of all none tackle the conundrum of the Soviet Union, the world’s first great experiment in communism, with 70 years of brilliant achievements to its name and yet flawed by dire philosophical failures which finally liquidated it through retreat from the need for that same endless revolutionary struggle (and not any “failure of the system” which was still fundamentally sound until Gorbachev’s nonsense scuppered it).

Neither the Trot groups, still poisonously hostile to “Stalinist Russia” and rubbishing everything as “all rotten”, nor the revisionists, still stuck simply worshipping the “genius Stalin” but refusing to examine the errors made, do anything but mislead.

As a result continuing doubt that “communism ever worked in practice” remains the biggest obstacle to working class understanding and the class-war civil-war struggle it needs to make to end capitalism, take production into common ownership and build the disciplined workers states that alone can take the world forwards from the degenerate anarchy and devastation of imperialism.

Without rebuilding this basic perspective of firm control of society by the working class through the dictatorship of the proletariat, (which petty bourgeois ideology hates as “totalitarianism”) guided by a purpose built party of revolutionary leadership, the anarchic capitalist system will continue to foment total confusion of the kind currently fed out in gobsmacking black-is-white pysops lies about “Russia starting the war” or utterly twisted Western “anti-semitism” lies against pro-Palestinian sentiment, (while pretending “concern to protect civilians” in Gaza as the turkey shoot butchery grows ever more horrifying).

The astounding inhumanity of the Gaza killings, is shaking mass opinion to a new realisation of just how much they have been fooled and pushing them spontaneously towards rebelliousness, along with deepening crisis conditions.

As the disastrously low turnouts showed at the three by-elections just held, “democracy” no longer attracts any confidence, with the long term trend of most workers staying at home in contempt, now deeper than ever. Such votes as there are just hostility for the incumbents from the few petty bourgeois.

Even the special case George Galloway’s Rochdale victory, picking up positive pro-Palestinian votes, saw only 40% turnout.

So “democracy” gets the contempt it deserves.

There is nowhere else for minds to go than revolution with only revolutionary theory the missing ingredient.

It will stay missing until consciously studied and fought for.

The bourgeoisie knows what turmoil is coming which is why imperialism’s ultimate standby – fascist populism around racist scapegoating and chauvinist hatred, incited and wound up for years already – is now being unleashed with a vengeance, throughout Europe on various minority groupings (Roma, “Islamists” etc) and in the US (against Mexicans and Latin Americans, and now even wider as Trump attacks “people who speak other languages”) and at “communists”.

Soon enough this will be turned on other imperialist powers which are the ultimate targets as their trade competition continues to undermine the dominance of US monopoly power.

Japan and Germany especially have been in US sights for decades, bullied by foreign exchange pressures and tariff regulations – and more obviously so as the Ukraine war has continued, with aggressive actions like the NordStream II sabotage, obviously carried out by Washington, to undermine German industrial capacity (as well as hitting Moscow’s sales income).

Because of its very successful use of capitalist methods in a significant section of its economy, China too is a potential target for trade war reasons as well as attracting imperialist hostility for the basic class war reason of still continuing to be a workers state.

The “left” meanwhile are still academically discussing “the nature of fascism” as something different to “ordinary” capitalism and whether we are “there yet”.

So the Putinite bonarpartist Russian perspective of “de-nazifying Ukraine” which is part of the war there against Nato and its Banderite fascist stooges in Kiev, goes unchallenged in its wooden brained suggestion that a “good” version of Ukrainian capitalist government could be established – exactly the nonsense that Stalin’s post-war perspectives relied on with its “aggressive and non-aggressive imperialism" stupidity (see Unanswered Polemics op cit).

But what needs explaining is that fascism is inseparable from imperialist reaction, and is simply a different point on the spectrum of all monopoly capitalist dictatorship nastiness and world domination, when it is forced abandon the pretence of “justice and freedom” and international law and impose outright intimidation (to whatever extent it feels necessary against inevitable rising rebelliousness), perhaps with some new political form or party, but just as often simply shifting the goalposts, as with Britain’s Tory Party, (and its alter ego Labour) steadily imposing more and more censorship, Prevent brainwashing, surveillance and draconian punishments (as the fake-“left” Guardian author George Monbiot has detailed, without explaining the revolutionary conclusion it must lead to).

Most obviously this is made clear by the disgusting and hypocritical backing from the Western imperialists for the Zionist occupation’s genocidal slaughter of the Palestinian people.

Every every passing day brings barbarous butchery and gleeful slaughter of civilians and children, deliberate destruction of their homes and hospitals, schools, mosques, colleges and culture and the plundering, looting and desecration of housing and apartments as in this sample of just a few multiple depravities:

The cousin of a six-year-old Palestinian girl who died in Gaza after her family’s car appeared to come under fire from Israeli tanks has told how he spoke to her as she waited to be rescued.

Hind Rajab’s body was recovered on Saturday, alongside those of six of her relatives, and two Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) paramedics, Yusuf Al-Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun, sent to find her in Gaza City.

Mohammed Hamada, said he was devastated by her death, as he accused the Israelis of having killed her.

Hind Rajab 6-year-old butchered GazaTrapped in the car, Hind had phoned the Red Crescent and pleaded with them to come to save her, telling them: “I’m so scared, please come.” The aid agency lost contact with the ambulance dispatched to her aid on 29 January and its crew and Hind remained missing until her death was confirmed on Saturday. Her exact cause of death is unclear.

Speaking from Frankfurt, Germany, the 28-year-old said: “Hind said: ‘Please help me. Please come and rescue us. Rescue me.’ She told me that she was injured in the leg.

“I was literally crying because I was unable to do anything, and I think all of my family were in the same situation. But the funny part was how strong she was. My wife told her: ‘Sweetheart, don’t be scared, God loves you and he will take care of you.’ And she just responded with ‘OK’.

Hamada said he has been overwhelmed by grief. He relived the trauma on Saturday when Hind’s body had been recovered.

The tragedy comes as Israel prepares a ground offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza, despite warnings from aid agencies that such an assault would be a “catastrophe”.

More than half the strip’s population of 2.3 million are thought to be sheltering in the city, having fled the Israeli military campaign elsewhere in Gaza. Israel had previously designated Rafah a safe zone.

Hind and her uncle, aunt and four cousins attempted to flee Gaza City which had been under bombardment by the Israeli military. But the family appeared to have encountered Israeli tanks in the Tel al-Hawa.

He found out around 13.40 that the family had been “shot” by the Israeli military and that he and another cousin contacted the PRCS for help.

He then called the family directly and spoke to Hind’s 15-year-old cousin, in touch with the PRCS. The aid agency has published a partial recording of her harrowing phone call.

“Layan told me that her father and my aunt were shot and all dead. She said the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers were shooting them and tanks getting closer to them.

She explained that she had been injured in the leg, as had Hind, but that “she didn’t know how bad the injury or injuries were because she was covered – all of them were covered – in blood.

Soon after the family lost contact with Hind, a “funny kid” with dreams of becoming a doctor.

The PRCS has accused Israel of deliberately targeting the ambulance, which they said had been bombed. It published footage of what it said were the blackened and destroyed remains of the vehicle. The ambulance was found just metres away from Hind’s family’s car, smashed and riddled with bullet holes.

 

UN experts* today expressed alarm over credible allegations of egregious human rights violations to which Palestinian women and girls continue to be subjected in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Palestinian women and girls have reportedly been arbitrarily executed in Gaza, often together with family members, including their children, according to information received. “We are shocked by reports of the deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of Palestinian women and children in places where they sought refuge, or while fleeing. Some of them were reportedly holding white pieces of cloth when they were killed by the Israeli army or affiliated forces,” the experts said.

The experts expressed serious concern about the arbitrary detention of hundreds of Palestinian women and girls, including human rights defenders, journalists and humanitarian workers, in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October. Many have reportedly been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, denied menstruation pads, food and medicine, and severely beaten. On at least one occasion, Palestinian women detained in Gaza were allegedly kept in a cage in the rain and cold, without food.

“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,” the experts said. They also noted that photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances were also reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online.

The experts expressed concern that an unknown number of Palestinian women and children, including girls, have reportedly gone missing after contact with the Israeli army in Gaza. “There are disturbing reports of at least one female infant forcibly transferred by the Israeli army into Israel, and of children being separated from their parents, whose whereabouts remain unknown,” they said.

“We remind the Government of Israel of its obligation to uphold the right to life, safety, health, and dignity of Palestinian women and girls and to ensure that no one is subjected to violence, torture, ill-treatment or degrading treatment, including sexual violence,” the experts said.

They called for an independent, impartial, prompt, thorough and effective investigation.

“Taken together, these alleged acts may constitute grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, and amount to serious crimes under international criminal law that could be prosecuted under the Rome Statute,” the experts said.

“Those responsible for these apparent crimes must be held accountable and victims and their families are entitled to full redress and justice,” they added.

As if.

And how little attention these atrocities get compared to the utterly made up lies about non-existent rape of Zionist women during the October 7th breakout, a complete inflammatory provocation repeated multiple times by the Zionists and Washington on zero evidence and then publicised by a New York Times article which has just been debunked in the Intercept.

Slightly more evidence comes here, as men get it too:

Cold, almost naked and surrounded by Israeli soldiers with M16 assault rifles, Ayman Lubbad knelt among dozens of Palestinian men and boys who had just been forced from their homes in northern Gaza.

It was early December and photographs and videos taken at the time showed him and other detainees in the street, wearing only underwear and lined up in rows, surrounded by Israeli forces. In one video, a soldier yelled at them over a megaphone: “We’re occupying all of Gaza. Is that what you wanted? You want Hamas with you? Don’t tell me you’re not Hamas.”

The detainees, some barefoot with their hands on their heads, shouted objections. “I’m a day laborer,” one man shouted.

“Shut up,” the soldier yelled back.

Palestinian detainees from Gaza have been stripped, beaten, interrogated and held incommunicado over the past three months, according to accounts by nearly a dozen of the detainees or their relatives interviewed by The New York Times. Organizations representing Palestinian prisoners and detainees gave similar accounts in a report, accusing Israel of both indiscriminate detention of civilians and demeaning treatment of detainees.

Israeli forces who invaded Gaza after the Oct.7 Hamas-led attack have detained men, women and children by the thousands.

Some were ordered out of their houses and seized while others were taken as they fled their neighborhoods on foot with their families, trying to reach safer areas after the Israeli authorities ordered them to leave.

Photographs taken by Gaza journalists have shown newly released detainees being treated in hospitals, the skin around their wrists worn down with deep cuts from the tight restraints Israeli forces kept on them, sometimes for weeks at a time.

The United Nations human rights office said last week that Israel’s treatment of Gazan detainees might amount to torture. It estimated that thousands had been detained and held in “horrific” conditions before being released, sometimes with no clothes on, only diapers.

In a statement in response to questions from The Times, the Israeli military said it detains people suspected of involvement in terrorist activity and releases those who are cleared. It said the Israeli authorities were treating detainees in accordance with international law and defended forcing men and boys to strip, saying this was to “ensure that they are not concealing explosive vests or other weaponry.”

“Detainees are given back their clothes when it’s possible,” the military added.

Human rights defenders say Israel’s detention and demeaning treatment of Palestinians in Gaza could violate international laws of war.

“Since the beginning of the Israeli bombardment and ground invasion in Gaza, the Israeli Army arrested hundreds of Palestinians in a barbaric and unprecedented manner and has published pictures and videos showing the inhumane treatment of detainees,” said a recent report by several Palestinian rights groups.

“So far, Israel has concealed the fate of detainees from Gaza, has not disclosed their numbers, and prevented lawyers and the Red Cross from visiting detainees,” the report added.

 

Israeli snipers have killed at least 21 Palestinians after they opened fire on displaced civilians trying to reach Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Rafah, said on Friday that snipers had surrounded the hospital and were “shooting at every moving object” as people were trying to reach it from two densely populated residential neighbourhoods near the facility.

“The area around the hospital is very dangerous, and it has turned into a combat zone,” he said, noting that the hospital is the only place right now in Khan Younis that has some water left.

Rights groups said the Israeli military’s repeated attacks on medical facilities, doctors, nurses, medics and ambulances must be investigated for war crimes.

“Hospitals and other medical facilities are civilian objects that have special protections under international humanitarian law or the laws of war,” Human Rights Watch noted.

Mahmoud said this represents a “new trend of targeted killings” by Israeli snipers, who shoot Palestinians in the streets. People inside the medical facility would also become easy targets by trying to retrieve the bodies.

“Attack drones also targeted a group of young people who gathered on the roof of the hospital. Because of the communications blackout, they were trying to get signals for the internet on their mobile phones so they could communicate with family members,” Mahmoud reported.

Along with al-Amal Hospital, Nasser Hospital is the largest in Khan Younis. Both medical facilities have been under siege for weeks as the Israeli army said it “encircled” the area and ramped up its offensive from air, land and sea.

Many Palestinians, who had been forcibly displaced by previous Israeli attacks in other areas, are now left with few options inside Nasser Hospital, along with limited medical staff and patients, all of whom have little to eat or drink.

The Israeli military has destroyed or heavily damaged dozens of medical facilities across the Gaza Strip since the start of the war on October 7.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said on Friday that al-Quds Hospital in northern Gaza City also suffered significant damage as a result of being fired on by Israeli tanks.

“The Israeli army deliberately targeted the society’s headquarters and vehicles to put them out of service,” Red Crescent spokesperson Raed al-Nims said.

More than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million is now in Rafah, the last place previously designated a “safe zone” by the Israeli army. Israel has said it plans to launch a ground assault on Rafah soon, ignoring warnings of a “catastrophe” by the United States and the United Nations.

 

I am in awe of Wael Dahdouh’s strength to haul himself back in front of the camera and focus on the suffering of others even as he has repeatedly endured his own personal hell. The face of Al Jazeera’s reporting throughout Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza was on air in October when he learned that his wife, seven-year-old daughter, 15-year-old son and one-year-old grandson were killed in an attack. Still he went on reporting.

Last month, Dahdouh himself was wounded and his cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa, killed in the Israeli bombing of a UN-run school used as a shelter. Then on Sunday, an Israeli drone strike on a car in southern Gaza killed Dahdouh’s eldest son, 27-year-old Hamza, who also worked for Al Jazeera, along with another journalist.

Dahdouh took a break from reporting to attend the funeral of his son and then returned to the airwaves.

“Nothing is harder than the pain of loss, and when you experience this pain time after time, it becomes harder and more severe,” he told Al Jazeera. “I wish that the blood of my son Hamza will be the last from journalists and the last from people here in Gaza, and for this massacre to stop.”

Hamza and his colleague, Mustafa Thuraya, a videographer for Agence France Press, were the latest of scores of journalists killed by Israel in its assault on Gaza in response to the Hamas cross-border attack in October. Israel says it does not target journalists but that is hard to square with the fact that its military aimed two missiles directly at the car carrying Hamza. The Israel Defense Forces, which has a track record of false claims about the circumstances in which it has killed journalists, initially said that there was a “terrorist” with a camera drone in the vehicle. But the reporters were not flying the drone when the car was struck and it is difficult to believe that, if the military was following the journalists’ actions, it did not recognise them as media workers.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) calculates that Israel has killed more than 70 media workers in the latest war in Gaza, making it the deadliest conflict for journalists in decades. Others put the toll at more than 100.

(Already far more since this January item).

The CPJ says that the scale and circumstances of the killings, including direct threats to reporters and their families by Israeli officials, is evidence that Palestinian reporters in Gaza are being targeted. Murdered, in other words. If so, it’s a war crime and, as Al Jazeera has demanded, the international criminal court should add these killings to its investigation of Israel’s other alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions across occupied Palestine.

[]Even reporting from Gaza during the second intifada 20 years ago, when the Israeli military regularly invaded, bombed and flattened Palestinian neighbourhoods, did not feel especially unsafe compared with other regions. Not that the Israeli army was above killing people it knew to be journalists.

In 2003, an Israeli soldier shot dead the British documentary cameraman James Miller in Gaza. An inquest in the UK returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Israel declined to prosecute the soldier responsible but it did pay £1.5m in compensation, which Miller’s family said was “probably the closest we’ll get to an admission of guilt”.

Miller’s killing looked to be part of a pattern of ill-disciplined Israeli soldiers shooting whoever they felt like – not only journalists but UN officials and aid workers as well as Palestinian children. The army was usually quick to try to cover up the killings but it did not appear they were coordinated.

Gaza looks very different today. As the CPJ and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders say, the scale and nature of the deaths of journalists and their families suggests there is more going on than a few ill-disciplined soldiers taking pot shots at reporters, even taking into account the deaths of thousands of other Palestinians, including more than 8,000 children.

Certainly the message from some Israeli leaders is that journalists are fair game. Israeli politicians were quick to call for the “elimination” of a number of Palestinian journalists working for foreign news organisations who were falsely accused by a pro-Israel pressure group in the US of being “embedded with Hamas” on 7 October. Benny Gantz, a member of the Israeli war cabinet, said they should be hunted down as terrorists,

It is therefore troubling that while western newspapers and television stations have reported the rising numbers of deaths of journalists in Gaza, many news organisations appear unwilling to directly address the pattern of killing that, as the CPJ’s evidence appears to show, provides strong evidence of a war crime.

None of this is about “fighting Hamas” as such – though Zionism certainly wants to destroy all such militant resistance, which it crudely labels as “terrorism” along with Washington and Britain, an exposure in itself of contempt for the “rule of law” which says armed resistance is justifiable for national liberation struggles against occupation.

Even the constrained rulings of the United Nations declare the Palestinians to be under occupation, notably in the Resolution 242, contemptuously ignored for almost 50 years by all imperialism and especially the US which more or less dictates what the United Nations stooge organisation is able to do, bribing and twisting its various bodies, bullying “support” votes or simply outright vetoing its actions, as it repeatedly does against universal opposition to the Cuba blockade and as it has now done four times to prevent a ceasefire.

But the reality is that the imperialist-Zionist occupation is ethnically cleansing an entire a people as has always been the plan, fulfilling the fanatical Zionist settler agenda, stealing away an entire country from its historical population (living there for a minimum 1500 years if not far more) and simultaneously intimidating or blitzing all revolt and rebellion in the Middle East, the service it does together with, and for, imperialism in return.

That was the reason this colonial implant was given the go-ahead in the first place, first by British imperialism in the Balfour Declaration, to be another “Northern Ireland” colonialist enclave keeping the local Arab population under control, and then by the US imperialist dominated United Nations post-WW2, “donating” most of already inhabited Palestine to the Jewish-Zionist immigrants as “recompense” for the imperialist-created Nazi Holocaust.

For imperialism this entire artificial “state”, carved out from another people’s land, served essentially as a permanent knife in the side of the Arab and other countries in the region, a colonialist intrusion on a much larger scale this time, ensuring “safe-keeping” of the whole region for the interests of imperialism, notably increasingly important oil resources but also strategically as a military and trading nexus, the Suez link, a financial hub and a point of intimidation against the Soviet Union, not so far away.

So it turned a blind eye to the immediate expansion of the original “Israel” by Zionist terror-gang intimidation and mass expulsion of the local Arabs by war in 1947-8 going far beyond what had been “granted” – a “gift” which in itself was a gross imperialist armed colonisation completely out of kilter with an historical rejection of the old colonial system by the world anti-imperialist movement (though it continued through dollar domination instead of course).

Much other non-stop intimidation and settler landtheft takeover and arrogant expansionism has gone on since, permanently intimidating and denying the Palestinians anything but total humiliation, poverty, repression, daily violent harassment and exploitation as steadily advancing settler implants have taken more and more of the tiny areas of land left as notionally “theirs”.

Hundreds have been killed since October and expulsions have escalated.

And while this new full scale resumption of the 1948 Nakba terror and massacre can be seen as the fanatical settler Zionists’ own project, part of the “Greater Israel” ambition which has always been aimed for (driving all the racistly dehumanised Palestinians out through so-called “transfer” (or death)), it is backed all the way this time by imperialism, arming and financing it, supporting it diplomatically, while massive censorship, fabrications and psyops manipulation, use the great lie that responsibility lies with the Palestinians for attempting to fight back on October 7.

Quite apart from the stinking lie that this was an “anti-semitic” attack aimed at Jewishness, – the now hugely overworked all-purpose excuse that any resistance or opposition to what the Jewish occupation and its supporters do has a “racist” intent and is therefore invalid – this ignores the previous 75 years of torture, killings, arbitrary arrests, imprisonments (much of which is hostage taking by the Israelis) and intimidatory punishment which has been the brutal means the Zionist occupation used to maintain its existence.

Anti-semitism exists, as result of centuries of class society and feudal backwardness and persecution such as Tsarist pogroms, and subsequent adoption and magnification by imperialism for its own scapegoating war purposes (alongside deliberately stirred hatred of gays, the mentally and physically hampered, Roma, and above all communists all dragged to the Nazi concentration camps and killed).

And of course the Nazi Holocaust was an historical monstrosity with its particularly chilling industrialised slaughter (devised, organised and implemented by the most “modern” and efficient capitalism on the planet at the time) but to declare that this is qualitatively different to any other butchery is the most twisted special pleading; the millions carefully and systematically garrotted and shot in Indonesia with MI6 and CIA guidance in 1965 (see the film Act of Killing) or poisoned with dioxin-laden Agent Orange “efficiently” and systematically sprayed over Vietnam’s towns, villages and fields, or simply carpet-bombed, droned or cruise missiled in Kampuchea, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc etc. would argue differently were they able (and as if it made any difference anyway to those slaughtered).

So it is that a self-righteous Simon Schama, historian and intellectual can advance the topsy-turvy notion that you cannot attribute to the Jews the same description of implementing a holocaust now, saying that it is only prejudice that holds that persecuted Jewishness in Zionist “Israel” has become its opposite, the perpetrator.

But it is not words which determine reality, it is the material conditions and the butchery and slaughter of tens of thousands, along with just as much racist and inhuman contempt as was ever heard from Nazism with talk of “dealing with the Palestinian animals” and crushing “cockroaches” are the starting point.

The opposite – asserting that the Palestinian wish to end the implanted “state” of “Israel” implies a “wish to end Jewish people” is an equally vile calumny used to whip up hysteria and hate-frenzy.

No such thing – this is simply the national liberation demand that the Palestinians have all their land and property returned to them and can assume their justifiable right to live on it.

And its justice is clear as soon as the question of the foundation of “Israel” is explored – the one question that is deliberately suppressed and ignored in all the media interviews – such as that on the BBC Today programme with Chris Williamson from George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain on the morning of his election in Rochdale, talked over during his attempt to make just that point.

The real consequence is that either the Jews return to their original countries (where they have citizenship, family and multiple connections, now or historically) or they must find a way to be accepted in a new state (across the whole of Palestine) and one which is not just an enlarged “Israel” but under the authority of the Palestinians who would be most sensibly advised to accept those who wanted to stay once the property issues were sorted out (see EPSR Book Vol 20 Occupied Palestine).

In Ireland, and in South Africa, where similar hysterical nonsense was advanced about persecutions or pogroms, just such a way forwards is being found, though only after revolutionary nationalist war has defeated the old colonial imperialist domination sufficiently for such a path to be negotiated (the need for the socialist revolution to continue forwards notwithstanding).

None of that includes the contemptuous “two-state solution” suddenly being revived by an increasingly pressured “liberal” bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeois intellectuals who service it, in a desperate attempt to head off the ever more appalling culpability they all share for this gruesome genocide.

It has always been a sick joke, for the Palestinian people, a half-chewed crust thrown to a beggar, offering them at best a tiny fragment of their own land (and nowadays not even the 22% “available” at the time of the “Oslo accords”), situated on the scrappiest of the remaining territory and never with any possibility of true viability economically or politically let alone full autonomy, including the right to maintain their own state forces, military etc. and be free of the non-stop surveillance, encirclement and military domination.

As the EPSR has always maintained:

Now outnumbered by their Zionist-imperialist conquerors and exploiters in the actual territory of old Palestine, and more comprehensively defeated and humiliated than almost any people in modern history, – and more often, – the Palestinian Arab nation has nevertheless staged an astonishing Intifada come-back, despite having been (and still being) written-off by the whole bourgeois world (fake-‘lefts’ included) who all insist that there is no way now of ever dismantling the ‘State of Israel’ colonisation and expropriation of most of Old Palestine, and that the best that the Palestinian Arab nation can hope for is either a ‘two-state solution’ on pocket-handkerchief scraps of barren land here and there which the Zionist overlords might let the Palestinians fester on, or else in the supposedly ‘more radical’ solution of joint citizenship with the Zionist colonisers in a unitary state on the entire territory of old Palestine, i.e. a relationship of permanent servitude and domination without even the pretence of ‘independence’.

Both fake-‘left’ so-called “solutions” are a complete anti-historical joke.

There can be no effective Palestinian Arab statehood or citizenship for as long as the ‘Israeli’ domination continues. The Zionist colonising tyranny is philosophically incapable of any serious withdrawal from past conquests (as daily evidenced by perpetual Sharon-type political dominance)*; (*much more extreme now - ed) and in practice within capitalist crisis, there could never be any harmonious settlement anyway, only constant aggravation leading repeatedly to renewed hostilities, just like throughout the whole previous 100 years of this monstrous colonisation project since rich Western Jews first started agitating for an independent stake in Western imperialism’s Middle East colonisation game (EPSR No1139 11-06-02).

Benjamin Netanyahu insists that even pocket handkerchief bantustans would only be allowed if completely dominated and overseen by Zionist state forces with all politics removed and “education” only allowed according to a Zionist curriculum of total subservience.

Essentially it means abandon all future claims for their own liberation and live in the kind of reservation degradation and despair that has been forced onto the remnants of the First Nations in America or the aborigines in Australia (with those trampled over if capitalist interests dictate, such as oil pipeline routeing).

And it is not going to happen anyway, because the Zionists’ “Israel” agenda is wrapped up in the overall domination needs of all crisis-threatened imperialism, which is facing a rising tide of revolutionary struggle throughout the world, labelled “terrorism” by the West and much of it with an Islamist coloration for the moment (which militant ideology has been adopted and adapted by the masses in the absence of better, more scientific revolutionary Leninist leadership).

The revolutionary determination and organisation of the Hamas revolt, has already stunned the Zionists, but also all of imperialism, with its self-sacrificing discipline and skill.

That is far from the outrageous “crude atrocities” propaganda lies and exaggerations poured out still by the Zionist psyops units and Washington’s intelligence agencies, (see debunking of “beheaded babies” total lies, or the cover-up of the deadly mayhem created by the Zionists’ own forces during the breakout.

However far the genocidal onslaught goes, – and threatened attack on the starved and traumatised Rafah population is potentially even more horrifying that anything seen to date, – Zionism will never solve its problems with this maniac blitzing.

Just the opposite; it can only rebound in magnified form as the entire Middle East is driven to new levels of hatred just as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and more saw tens of thousands join the “jihadists” etc.

The Zionist entity itself is being hollowed out:

[]volunteers can’t make up for a shortfall in workers that has helped to ravage Israel’s economy. The Bank of Israel estimates the war against Hamas will cost the country £46 billion by the end of next year. Labour shortages alone are costing £475 million a week. The loss of reservists, migrants and Palestinians in the workforce is the key reason for Israel’s economy shrinking almost 20 per cent in the final three months of 2023, according to data released last week by the Central Bureau of Statistics.

About 300,000 reservists were called up to serve, while foreign workers flew home on state-sponsored evacuation flights to Thailand, China and the Philippines. Israel has also lost 18,500 workers from Gaza and 160,000 from the West Bank after restricting their work permits.

The impact has been felt keenly in agriculture. Israel is the seventh-largest exporter of tropical fruits in the world, and they are the third-biggest product exported by the country to the UK, after medicines and diamonds. Israel is running recruitment drives in India, Sri Lanka and Malawi.

The war’s impact on urban and rural areas meet at a vegetable store on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, where the shopkeeper, Ben Mizrahi, was apologising to customers for price rises. The street, named after the banking dynasty, is home to more tech start-ups than anywhere else in Israel. Last week, the pavements were mostly empty and building sites along the road were half-deserted.

“The high-tech sector is the locomotive for the Israeli economy,” said Professor Zvi Eckstein, head of the Aaron economic policy institute at Reichman University in Herzliya, seven miles north of Tel Aviv. “Around 40 per cent of the Israeli growth rate from 2017 to 2023 was driven by tech firms.”

Israelis working in the tech sector pay a quarter of the government’s direct taxation. They account for 12 per cent of the workforce but make up 15 per cent of reservists called up for duty. This means a 400,000-strong workforce has lost about 60,000 employees.

Some reservists are returning to work. Yet 58 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women absent from work last month were serving in the military.

[]Nonetheless, the war is having a chilling effect on inward investment. Foreign investment levels fell by 70 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year.

About 250,000 of Israel’s 9.2 million population have been internally displaced due to fighting, with their personal and business lives thrown into disarray.

Israel ran a budget deficit of 4.2 per cent of GDP in 2023, after a 0.6 per cent surplus the year before. The price of insuring Israeli government debt, via financial instruments called credit default swaps, has soared, reflecting concerns over Israel’s ability to pay its dues.

The government plans to raise VAT by 1 percentage point at the start of 2025 and cut non-defence spending.

“This economic shock is even worse than the pandemic,” Professor Eckstein said. “And there is no vaccination at the end. The end is not clear at all. ”

Fantasies that somehow things will go back to normal are just that, and trebly so when the whole world economy is sliding disastrously into the chasm, propped up only by trillions of valueless QE dollars.

But even more worrying for the imperialist world must be the exposure of the local bourgeoisies, who have got by sitting on their hands for decades behind the “international justice” and “democracy” pretence, and who all find their populations increasingly in ferment.

First there is the rapid widening of the revolt, to Lebanon’s Hezbollah and particularly to the Houthis in Yemen with their attacks on Zionist, US and British shipping. The Gazan massacre has seen 250,000 new recruits, despite, or maybe because of, imperialist bombing raids.

Second the crisis itself is already pushing matters towards new social explosions, most of all in Egypt where the 2011 Arab Spring could only be suppressed by military coup butchery and subsequent torturing and murderous repression:

Already facing a deep crisis, Egypt’s economy appears poised to take a hit from Israel’s war on Gaza and the spiralling tensions in the Red Sea, analysts have said.

Currently on “life support”, Egypt’s suffers growing public debt now at more than 90 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), capital flight and the currency’s fall against the US dollar.

Now, those challenges are being compounded by the war, as it edges closer and closer to Egypt’s border, with a large chunk of Gaza’s population pushed into Rafah, after four months of displacement as a result of Israel’s relentless attacks.

Tourism and the Suez Canal are two of Egypt’s major sources of foreign exchange.

Egypt’s pyramids, museums, resorts and monuments attract visitors from all over the world. In 2022, roughly three million Egyptians worked in the tourism industry which was already struggling to recover from COVID-19.

But it appeared to be rebounding. The Gaza war and the Red Sea crisis could batter revenue prospects from this industry. Revenues are set to experience a 10-30 percent fall from last year, which could cost the country 4-11 percent of its foreign exchange reserves and shrink GDP.

Since November, Egypt has been grappling with the economic impact of Houthi missile and drone attacks against Israel-linked commercial vessels in the Red Sea.

A consequence of these strikes along the shortest trade route linking Asia to Europe through the Suez Canal has rerouting of vessels around the Cape of Good Hope.

In the 2022-23 fiscal year, the Suez Canal brought in $9.4bn of revenue for Egypt.

Egyptian authorities said revenue in January from the Suez Canal had fallen 50 percent.

Egypt’s gas economy has also suffered greatly. Two days after the Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel, the Israeli defence establishment ordered the temporary halting of extractions from the Tamar gas field, 25km from Israel’s southern coastal city of Ashdod.

Egypt has the Eastern Mediterranean’s only two gas liquefaction facilities. Israel’s gas is turned into LNG there and exported to other markets, in particular, Europe.

Re-exports of gas fell by more than 50 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared with 2022.

This dynamic has highlighted Egypt’s economic dependence on Israel, a huge vulnerability for Cairo.

The fate of the 1.4 million Palestinians taking shelter in Rafah is also a source of unease in Egypt.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi wants to prevent the influx of displaced Palestinians into the Sinai peninsula or any permanent displacement from Gaza, which many experts fear is Israel’s game plan. There are already nine million refugees in Egypt.

Security concerns over Palestinian fighters in Sinai, and the effects of their planned attacks against Israel on relations between Cairo and Tel Aviv, are a factor for Egypt. Economic challenges also explain why forcible expulsion into the Sinai crosses a red line. Since Sudan’s conflict erupted 10 months ago, 450,000 Sudanese refugees have crossed Egypt’s southern border, which has already strained Egypt’s troubled economy.

[]“Washington’s irrational refusal to stop him may encourage Netanyahu to extend the fighting into Sinai, even if it ends the peace treaty with Egypt,” Theros said.

In fact the West is now clearly participating in the latest slaughter, with military advice, “intelligence” guidance, huge financial subsidy, daily arms deliveries and covert special forces operations, even as “Joe” Biden and the rest of the West mumble completely lying hypocrisies about “protecting civilians”, and those only because world reaction to the depravities.

There has been endless finance for the Zionists, the largest subsidies per head in the world from US coffers, as well as direct military aid, but now it is virtually open ended as Netanyahu’s ultra-reactionary government is given carte blanche to pursue the “eradication” of the Gazan people effectively, the “kill them all” solution to a “problem” that cannot be solved any other way.

Recent immediate withdrawal of finance for UNRWA by nearly all the major Western powers on the sanctimonious and ludicrous basis of uproven and relatively minor Zionist accusations about some tiny proportion of its staff being Hamas members - confirms for the world’s masses the grotesque hypocrisies and utter fascist inhumanity of this entire imperialist system.

The consequence of blocking this lifeline aid organisation for the Gazans, which provides huge amounts of the economic basis to the already desperate life in Gaza, brutally compounds the already horrific crime against humanity of cutting off water, food and electricity in starvation siege imposed since October.

The dispossession of this ancient people cannot but reproduce their resistance, using whatever means they can and it will never stop while they exist.

It will have to go on until there are none left, or so few they form only a rump population, just as Spanish and British imperialism destroyed dozens of entire indigenous nations across America.

Or until world revolution unrolls in earnest.

Meanwhile the astonishing scenes of “chaos” and manipulation of “procedure” in the House of Commons by Keir Starmer’s opportunist Labourites recently only add to the exposure of the whole “democracy racket” and its turpitude and skulduggery.

The dirty dealing and bullying of the Speaker, were nothing but an outrageous lying cover-up to rescue the opportunist Labourites from the growing rage of popular opinion, utterly appalled by the support they have given to the demented butchery of (so far) 100,000 killed or maimed Palestinians by the Zionist occupation of their land including Keir Starmer’s disgusting approval of the siege cuts to water, food and electricity, a completely fascist lining up with the war crimes.

The fake-“left” have all condemned this sick and twisted manoeuvre, and denounce the Speaker’s subsequent greater sophistry, quickly adopted by the Tories too, which excuses this glaring arm-twisting trampling of “democracy” (tearing up even the usual pompous pretences) as done to “protect democracy”(!!).

MPs should be allowed to keep their views secret this slimy excuse declared, finding the lowest form of finkery to “justify” the previous day’s treachery by going on to call for even more police-state suppression of demonstrations or even “shouting against MPs” lyingly pretending that they are “in danger”.

Could a bum be raised higher in the air in supine cravenness to the ruling class???

How else does public opinion get voiced in a world where the “democracy” humbug is nothing but stitched-up censorship control to make sure left views and anti-capitalism are never given voice by “official” representatives?? (not forgetting that nothing now gets through to the media about the Ukraine war except Western lies, for example).

Or ditto on Palestine.

Correctly enough workers should resist all these further police-state encroachments. But without giving them a revolutionary perspective the fake-“left” objections only feed further confusion, suggesting there is some kind of abstract “right to protest” and around it a “democratic world”. Pure idealism.

In Britain this in-your-face bullying demonstrates sharply the sinister treachery of the TUC/Labour class collaboration that has hoodwinked the working class for more than a century with parliamentary reformism.

Even some nervous petty bourgeois press accounts were labelling it the “end of democracy”:

On Thursday morning, British democracy was very much in the frame. After 24 hours of furious and unseemly argument over the handling of a debate in the House of Commons on a Gaza ceasefire by the speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the veteran Labour MP Barry Sheerman rose to declare the behaviour of his colleagues a disgrace.

Vicious political point-scoring had drowned out serious debate on events in Gaza, and whether calling for a ceasefire was now the best way forward. “It was shameful that the BBC had to blank off the proceedings at one stage because of the crude and vile language that was coming from one end of the chamber,” said Sheerman.

Hoyle’s troubles had begun the previous morning, when he decided to go against the advice of his own officials and select a Labour amendment, as well as a government one, to an SNP opposition day motion calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Normally only the government can put down an amendment to an opposition day motion but Hoyle had gone out on a limb.

The SNP’s motion was for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire, with the onus on Israel, and it mentioned what it called the Netanyahu government’s “collective punishment” of Palestinians.

Labour’s amendment, meanwhile, was for an “immediate, humanitarian ceasefire” observed by all. It condemned the terrorism of Hamas, while also demanding the release of hostages, and calling on Israel to stop its bombardment. The government amendment did not call for an immediate ceasefire but put the emphasis on a humanitarian pause to the conflict, working towards a ceasefire.

Hoyle, who used to sit on the Labour benches before becoming speaker, had, as a result, left himself wide open to accusations of pro-Labour bias, and of helping Starmer avoid the damaging prospect of seeing many of his pro-ceasefire MPs rebel by voting for the SNP motion calling for an unconditional and immediate ceasefire.

Many Labour MPs felt under pressure from constituents to show they backed a ceasefire. If Labour’s own amendment wasn’t selected, backing the SNP motion would have been the only way to answer those voters.

[]If no Labour amendment had been allowed, and Starmer had been left to whip his MPs to abstain, this could have seen mass resignations, as happened with the likes of Jess Phillips when a similar situation occurred last November.

“The situation was really tense at the top,” said one Labour source. “There were fears that at least two shadow cabinet members would have resigned. There would have been a big rebellion that would have seriously damaged Keir.”

There were reports, denied by Labour and Hoyle, that with this in mind team Starmer had made clear to the speaker that the party would not back his re-election at the start of the next parliament unless he called the Labour amendment.

Even the SNP’s minimal articulation of popular feeling is too much for an ever more desperate ruling class, fearing it could open the floodgates of mass contempt and hostility for this rotten, arrogant and corrupt system.

So the Labour amendment was designed to scupper even such a token expression for fear of where it might lead.

“It was a pro-Zionist motion masquerading as pro-Palestine” declared the fake-“left” maverick George Galloway, just elected in the Rochdale by-election for his Workers Party of Britain, not least because of his opposition to the Zionist-imperialist holocaust being imposed in Gaza.

Galloway can be forthright in exposing imperialism and he has also correctly stood against the West’s warmongering on Russia via its nazi-stooges in Ukraine.

But while he has excellently condemned the Labourites for the “blood staining their hands”, he is not going to give the working class the understanding they need either.

Just the opposite.

His opposition is just “left” opportunism suggesting that salvation can come through parliament and the kind of “left” patriotism he espouses - deadly chauvinism.

It cannot. Only building an internationalist revolutionary party to end capitalism suffices.

Build Leninism. Alan Moss

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