Israel/Palestine

Despite the challenges, anti-war and anti-occupation groups in Israel have continued to organise. On 24 October, leaders from Standing Together, the grassroots Arab-Jewish social movement, spoke on an online panel organised by activists in the US, along with Yael Berda, an Israeli activist in the “A Land for All” initiative, and Palestinian activist Kefah Abukhdeir. Equal rights All speakers emphasised the need for common organisation between Jews and Palestinians against the agenda of the Israeli government as a necessary basis for forging a shared future based on equal rights. Sally Abed, a...

Two national peoples, one historically colonially subjugated by the state of the other. An ongoing war of attempted conquest and occupation. Devastating air strikes, bombardment of civilian targets, cutting off access to utilities and humanitarian aid. An authoritarian leader who continually denies the legitimacy of the subjugated people’s national identity and right to self-determination. Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, Putin/Netanyahu. There are many clear similarities between these two situations. As Ukrainian activist and writer Daria Saburova put it, “How can we look at images of Gaza...

Why does the BBC hate Palestine? Yuri Prasad asks rhetorically in Socialist Worker . Prasad asserts that the BBC’s interest in the Hamas tunnel networks and use of civilians as human shields is minimising the bombing of Gaza. In fact most people horrified by the Israeli onslaught in Gaza know about the horrors from the BBC and similar media. The BBC interviews lots of Israeli journalists, government and IDF spokespeople, retired diplomats, ex-prime ministers and similar; but it reports the figures provided by Hamas for casualties. It has reporters in Gaza, and they have reported on the ground...

The massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 caused genuine shock and horror around the world. There was considerable sympathy for Israel in the wake of the tragedy. But not so for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States. Their response to the terrorist attack was to claim that the “real victims” were Palestinians. For supporters of the Socialist Party, the SWP had crossed a red line. A national campaign was launched to spread the word that the SWP was now openly taking an antisemitic position. The SWP’s reaction was an interesting one. In their weekly...

1791: French revolution grants equal rights to Jews, ending thousands of years of discrimination and sometimes murderous persecution against Jews in Christian Europe. In the first half of the 19th century it looks as if this bourgeois equality will spread. Jews finally gain full legal equality in England in 1890. 1881: Wave of pogroms in the Tsarist Empire, followed by a series of laws discriminating against Jews. Antisemitism starts rising again in Europe. 1897: First congress of the Zionist movement. Settlements in sparsely-populated and less economically developed lands — the Americas...

Solidarity calls on readers to go to the protests for a ceasefire in Israel-Gaza this coming weekend, 4-5 November, and probably many weekends for months now. We recognise Israel’s right to defend itself, but oppose the massacre in Gaza. And we are socialists: people who get active, out on the streets, rather than “getting on with our lives” and protesting only privately or by social media. Secondly, we go to the protests not to blend in and just swell the totals, but to create a profile for a clear and sharp position opposing both Hamas and the Israeli military onslaught. Conversations tell...

The front page headline on Solidarity this week says “Peace”. It is a way of saying in one word what we said in three (“stop the massacre”, “stop the war”) in previous issues . It is also a slogan rarely used by Marxists in recent decades. Why, and what is different now? From the early 1950s, and the reverberations persist, the Communist Parties in the stronger capitalist countries made “peace” a big slogan and busied themselves heavily with building “peace movements” designed essentially as adjuncts to the USSR’s diplomacy. For Algeria’s independence war, the French Communist Party’s slogan...

On 24 October, Standing Together leaders Sally Abed and Uri Weltmann, alongside Palestinian educator and activist Kefah Abukhdeir and Israeli activist Yael Berda, a supporter of the “A Land for All” initiative, spoke at an online webinar organised by activists in the USA. These are lightly edited excerpts from their comments, some of which were made in response to questions from the moderator and therefore do not necessarily reflect “prepared” remarks. The webinar can be viewed on YouTube Sally Abed I identify as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Especially these days, unfortunately, the...

This week, I called Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, a physician from Gaza who now lives in Canada, to check in on him. During Israel’s 2008-9 war on Gaza, three of his daughters were killed when an Israeli tank struck their home. This time, I had to offer my condolences again, when he told me about the recent deaths of more than 25 members of his extended family in Gaza. Among them, he said, were five babies. In his declaration of war on Gaza on Oct. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel quoted a line from a poem by the Jewish writer Chaim Nachman Bialik. “Revenge for the blood of a little...

There has been wide publicity for 150 people, many union activists, blockading a military-component factory in Kent on Thursday 26 October, with implications or statements that the factory is “providing weapons to the Israeli military”. Many people surely took part out of horror at the Israeli government’s collective punishment of Palestinians, and good for them. Only the image of doing something immediate and practical against Israel’s misdeeds in Gaza is not quite right. Elbit Systems UK Ltd, the main target for some years for similar protests by the Palestine Action group, including brave...