Student Protests Against U.S.-Supported Israeli Genocide Spread Globally

Building since October 2023, the final weeks of April 2024 saw an explosion of student protests against U.S.-supported Israeli genocide in Gaza on campuses across the U.S. and the world. The latest, at Columbia University in New York City, was the site of a previous protest in 1968. That one was against Columbia’s ties to the U.S. military during the Vietnam War and was part of a wave of student protests around the country. It spread to France and helped trigger the great workers’ General Strike of May-June 1968.

The 2024 Columbia students demand:

Divest all finances, including the endowment, from corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.
Complete transparency for all of Columbia’s financial investments.
Amnesty for all students and faculty disciplined or fired in the movement for Palestinian Liberation.

As of April 29, protests have swept across so many campuses that we don’t have the room to list them. We can safely say nothing of this scale has been seen since the May 1970 student strikes against Nixon’s extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia.

International Workers’ Day

The tech for this blog has run off to Cuba for May Day! The next posting won’t appear until May 11.

The Genocide Continues

Israel’s relentless genocide against the people of Gaza continues without letup as I write these lines. In recent weeks, U.S. imperialism has tried to create the impression they’re putting some distance between themselves and the Israeli regime. For example, the Democratic Senate majority leader Charles Schumer said, “As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed, radically, since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past”.

Schumer is right about one thing: The world changed after October 7 as massive protests broke out across the globe, including within the United States. It isn’t only Schumer. Genocide Joe’s administration, after vetoing every ceasefire proposed in the UN Security Council, introduced a resolution of its own, the nature of which was summarized by Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia.

“Nebenzia further described the vote as a ploy to throw [U.S. voters in support of a ceasefire] a bone’ with a false ceasefire call,” the web publication Truthout reported.

The Fate of Rafah

As I write these lines on Feb. 25, 2024, the immediate future of the genocide waged by Israel against the people of the Gaza Strip is coming down to the fate of the small southern city of Rafah. The vast majority of Gazans have been rendered homeless, as Israel’s bombing campaign has destroyed or made uninhabitable most of the housing stock of what was Gaza City as well as the rest of the strip.

Since October, Gaza’s people have been crowded into the city of Rafah along the border with Egypt. In the next few weeks, the question is whether Israel will destroy Rafah, killing or driving out its population, or will Israel be forced to accept a temporary ceasefire. Without a ceasefire, the effects of the bombing and other military actions, plus thirst, hunger, and disease, will kill Gazans or force them out of Palestine altogether. A ceasefire would buy time and pressure the U.S.-led imperialists to allow aid to reach the people so they can stay alive and keep fighting to stay and rebuild in the future. But this presents a danger to Israel.

The danger is when the war — if this kind of genocide can be called a war — ends in some kind of ceasefire — those who’ve survived it will still be in place, fighting and eventually liberating their entire homeland. This would be a defeat for Israel and its aim of transforming itself from the settler colony it is today into a real nation along the lines of Canada, Australia, or the United States. These nations began as settler colonies but became nations, in part, by crushing the native population.

How Vietnam Won, Part 1

On January 14, 2024, 400,000 pro-Palestinian anti-genocide demonstrators marched in Washington, D.C., to the White House (occupied by the Democrat President “Genocide Joseph Biden”). Tens of thousands more marched in support of Gaza in San Francisco, California, the following day.

The stakes could not be higher. Those of us living in the United States have a special responsibility to do all we can to force the government to halt its support to Israel. Though it is the Israeli government carrying out the genocide on the ground, it could not commit these nightmarish crimes without the financial, political, military, and moral support provided by the government headed by Genocide Joe.

The genocide — there is no other word for it — has continued without let-up in Gaza. Israel aims to kill people directly or through hunger and disease, then drive out the rest of the population as far away as possible from Palestine. The January 3 edition of the Middle East Monitor reports, “According to the Times of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is discreetly exploring the acceptance of thousands of migrants from Gaza, with the Democratic Republic of Congo being one of the countries under consideration. ‘Congo will be willing to take in migrants,’ said a senior source in the security cabinet, ‘and we’re in talks with others.’”

Can the Palestinians Win?

The year 2023 was dominated by Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza beginning in October. It was supposedly in response to the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood attack on Israel by Hamas [Islamic Resistance Organization] and other Palestinian resistance organizations on October 7, 2023. Many so-called liberals, progressives, socialists, and even some Marxists have attacked the alleged excesses Palestinian fighters committed, such as beheading Israeli babies, raping Israeli women, kidnapping children, etc. Many of these claims of excesses have since been discredited. These “progressives” claim they sympathize with the Palestine people in their struggle against Israeli apartheid. But they then lecture that the Palestinians must conduct their struggle without violence or harm to “innocent Israeli civilians.”

It’s now clear that many of the civilian deaths were the result of the Israeli army itself firing into areas that were allegedly occupied by Palestinian fighters and their Israeli captives. Our “liberal” friends insist there is still a residue of Palestinian excess. But how could it be otherwise, considering how Zionists have treated the Palestinian people for the last 75+ years? Before October 7, there was the day before. Yet the so-called friends of the Palestinians insist we in the West must equally condemn Palestinian excesses, real or alleged, and Israel’s crimes. They want to support only a “pure” national liberation struggle without any “excesses.” In other words, they do not support any national liberation struggles at all!

They argue that today’s Palestinian liberation movement is dominated not by secular democrats like the Palestinian Liberation Organization of the past that fought for a secular democratic state for all of Palestine’s residents. The PLO’s program included the separation of church and state with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews to practice their respective religions. This is what these “friends” support as an alternative to Zionist apartheid with Judaism as the state religion.

The Genocide Resumes

It was announced on December 1 that Israel’s genocidal bombing and ground attacks on Gaza had resumed. Contrary to media reports, this isn’t an Israeli-Hamas war, but rather it’s a genocidal attempt by Israel, backed by the Genocide Joe’s government, to drive Palestinians out of Gaza into the Sinai, killing as many as possible along the way.

This would reduce the Arab population by about 2.3 million, transforming the current Arab majority in historic Palestine in favor of an Israeli majority. It would prepare the way for finally driving out the Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank into Jordan — again killing as many as possible along the way. The Israeli leadership — not just Netanyahu — hopes that Israel will be consolidated as a nation-state much like the U.S., Australia, and Canada became nations after the genocide and apartheid of the native population. This has been the aim of the Zionist movement and its imperialist sponsors from the beginning of the modern Zionist movement.

Origins of the conflict

Let’s briefly review the process of how Israel was, in the words of Biden, “created.” Toward the end of the 19th century, capitalism was being transformed into monopoly capitalism based on free competition (not the perfect competition of neoclassical capitalist economists).

Palestine

To avoid any misunderstandings of what I am going to say here, I am a Jewish American who despises all forms of anti-Semitism. Like most Jews whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents came from Europe, I lost relatives in the Holocaust. I never knew them because they died in the gas chambers before I was born. I can also say that since childhood, I have never believed in the truth of the Jewish religion or any other religion.

As a child, I became fascinated with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, a fascination that’s never ceased. Since childhood, I have been an unconscious dialectical materialist and then a conscious dialectical materialist from early adulthood onward. I have never understood those trends in Western Marxism that reject the dialectic of nature and “diamat” (dialectical materialism), as the more I study the natural sciences, such as biology, physics, chemistry, and meteorology, the more I find materialist dialects everywhere.

I want to make crystal clear to Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu that if you insist on carrying out genocide in Gaza or anywhere else in Palestine, you won’t do it in my name! Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!

Corporate Joe on the Picket Line

Over the last month, the news in the U.S. (the world’s leading imperialist power) was dominated by three main stories. The first is the strikes against the Big Three automakers by the United Auto Workers (UAW). The second is the continued struggle of the Party of Order against the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. As of early October 2023, Trump appears to have built a sizeable lead in the Republican primary, with all the other candidates fading fast. The third story was confined mainly to the financial pages but is of particular interest to the readers of this blog. That story is the crash of the U.S. government bond market.

A government bond crash gets much less attention than a stock market crash, though it’s really more important. A stock market crash lowers interest rates. Unless a recession is already underway — like the famous 1929 stock market crash — a crash that relaxes the money market and lowers interest can postpone a recession. This happened in the crash of October 1987, when it lowered interest rates and prolonged the ongoing economic expansion by several years.

While a government bond crash doesn’t prevent the federal government from continuing to borrow money (increasing the cost to the taxpayer), it does increase the interest rate that both businesses and consumers have to pay. For example, housing construction had been slumping but began to recover last summer as mortgage rates began to decline. This raised hopes for a “soft landing” of the U.S. and the world economy. But now mortgage interest rates are rising to their highest levels since before the 2007-09 crisis, and housing starts renewed their decline.

The Political Crisis of U.S. Capitalism

On September 7, ABC News online edition reported, “More than a dozen presidential centers got together to warn about the fragile state of American democracy heading into 2024.” The phrase “fragile state of democracy” means that the traditional form of class rule by the U.S. capitalist class is in real trouble.

The center of this developing political crisis is the upcoming presidential election in November 2024. As the election approaches, for the first time in U.S. history, a former president faces felony charges in four venues. In New York and Georgia, involving election fraud; in South Florida, involving classified documents allegedly stolen and held illegally after leaving the White House; and in the District of Columbia, where he’s charged with attempting to defraud the United States by stealing the 2020 election.

Trump is not just a former President. He’s also the current leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2024 election. Attempts by the “Party of Order” to build up a rival Republican candidate have so far not gone anywhere. Polls show that as the downpour of felony indictments descends, his lead in the polls for the nomination over the other declared candidates has widened.