international solidarity

By staff - La Via Campesina, November 17, 2023

Israel is waging a genocidal war on Palestinians. In addition to its incessant bombings – targeting civilians, residential buildings, hospitals, schools, places of worship, and all basic infrastructure – Israel has imposed a complete blockade on Gaza, preventing the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza from accessing food, water, electricity, and fuel. The farmers have no access to their farmland, much of which has been bombed. The fisher folk too have no access to the sea. Israel’s ongoing brutal assault has created a human catastrophe of unimaginable scale. La Via Campesina’s member organization in Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Workers Committee (UAWC), warns that “Those who survive the bombings will die of starvation or thirst”.

It is urgent that third states take immediate action against this crime against humanity. The global mass mobilization of the past month has shown that the majority of the world stands with justice, and the majority of countries are deeply shocked by Israel’s blatant genocidal warfare imposed on the Palestinian people.

We call upon the governments who supported the United Nations General Assembly resolution for a humanitarian truce on the 26th of October to take immediate action to uphold their legal and humanitarian obligations and protect civilians. We urge these third states to organize an International Conference of Governments as soon as possible in order to stop this genocidal war and bring immediate relief to Palestinian people, in particular those in Gaza. This conference is a critical step towards the end of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine.

By Memet Uludag - Global Ecosocialist Network, November 17, 2023

As thousands of civilians continue to die and millions suffer under the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza, there is another horror that threatens the future of the Palestinian people and the future of our planet: The deepening environmental crisis.

Wars create environmental disasters. We witnessed this in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among others. The consequences of these wars for the environment are well documented. Toxic weapons and the destruction of civilian infrastructure have created long-lasting pollution of the air, land and water sources. Millions of people continue to suffer long after the bombs stop.

Today we are witnessing yet another bombing of Gaza as an escalation of the long-running siege by Israel. On October 26th the Municipality of Gaza City issued a warning that the city is witnessing an environmental disaster due to the accumulation of garbage. The bin crews cannot service the city because of the ongoing Israeli airstrikes. This can cause serious health and environmental problems. More than 2,500, including 1500 children, have been reported missing and may be trapped or dead under the rubble. Gaza Municipality officials warn about the serious health risks this is creating for the people.

However, the environmental crisis in Gaza is not new and Israel is responsible for it. The New Arab Newspaper puts it plainly: “By limiting what is fished, what comes in and out of Gaza, and routinely bombing civilian and agricultural infrastructure, Israel has contributed to Gaza’s barely liveable conditions.”

By Radhika Jani, Ameen Kamlana, Nambi Kiyira, and Lauriem Mompelat - Platform London, November 17, 2023

“This is our memory. It is the history. It is the land. it is the sky.”

– Fadia’s Tree (2022)

“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.“

– Mahmoud Darwish

Uprooted

October and November are celebrated as olive harvesting season in Palestine. This is usually a joyous time when Palestinians return to the trees that have provided sustenance to their family for generations. But these months are now being marked with a calamitous and all-encompassing grief as bombs rain down. The land is not fruiting, it is bleeding.

No stranger to difficulty, the olive tree grows under harsh conditions: it is drought resistant and has become a symbol for Palestinian belonging, resilience and hope under Israeli occupation. Olive trees have an average lifespan of 500 years, and many on Palestinian land predate the Israeli occupation by centuries. These are trees that have been lovingly tended to and are the primary source of income for about 800,000 families.

Approximately one million olive trees have been illegally uprooted by the Israeli authorities since 1967. Over 9,000 were removed in August 2021, and in March 2022, 2,000 olive trees were uprooted in the village of Marda in the West Bank, where Israeli forces also ‘sprayed chemical pesticides over olive, grape and almond saplings’. 

Saad Dagher, a Palestinian agronomist from Mazari En-Nubani, says that Palestinian farming has always been “polycultural, meaning that different crops can and should grow side by side on one piece of land. Israeli agriculture has imposed monocultures, which go against the natural biodiversity and self-sustainability of Palestinian land”. Farmland and crops owned by Palestinians present a barrier to annexing more land for Israeli settlements, so the desecration of olive trees both facilitates the process of colonisation and helps destroy Palestinian history, morale and collective memory. 

By Patrick Nevada and Bev Tang - Rising Tide North America, November 15, 2023

Photos and videos for download here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CAZK8SHZ2Yi-Y1dMQMiaQZG_3SlJknpz?usp=sharing

San Francisco, CA – Members of the No to APEC Coalition engaged in a civil disobedience action by blocking access to the site of the APEC CEO Summit at the Moscone West Convention Center in defiance of the hyper-militarized structures erected by the local and federal government. This action is the latest effort by the No to APEC Coalition during its months-long campaign to highlight the global and local harms of free trade and global free market agendas while demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

By Kenny Stancil - Common Dreams, January 27, 2023

A new manifesto calls for building "a sustainable social pact for the 21st century" in which "our rights are guaranteed, not based on our ability to pay, or on whether a system produces profit, but on whether it enables all of us to live well together in peace and equality."

An international coalition made up of more than 200 trade unions and progressive advocacy groups on Thursday published the Santiago Declaration, a manifesto for "a complete overhaul of our global economic system."

The undeniably anti-neoliberal document proclaiming that "our future is public" is the product of a meeting held in Chile—the "laboratory of neoliberalism" where Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago acolytes' upwardly redistributive economic model was first imposed at gunpoint by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military junta.

From November 29 to December 2, more than 1,000 organizers from over 100 countries gathered in Santiago and virtually to germinate a left-wing movement against "the dominant paradigm of growth, privatization, and commodification."

"We are at a critical juncture," the manifesto begins. "At a time when the world faces a series of crises, from the environmental emergency to hunger and deepening inequalities, increasing armed conflicts, pandemics, rising extremism, and escalating inflation, a collective response is growing."

"Hundreds of organizations across socioeconomic justice and public services sectors—from education and health services, to care, energy, food, housing, water, transportation, and social protection—are coming together to address the harmful effects of commercializing public services, to reclaim democratic public control, and to reimagine a truly equal and human rights-oriented economy that works for people and the planet," reads the document. "We demand universal access to quality, gender-transformative, and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society."

By Daphne Lawless - Fightback, December 8, 2022

Fightback proudly positions itself as a socialist internationalist publication. Since 2015, we have set ourselves against what we call campism:

the metaphor that the world is divided into several military “camps”, with the largest being the Western camp led by the United States. Therefore, any government which disagrees with American foreign policy – no matter how oppressive to its own people, or however wedded to neoliberal market economics – can be supported. These governments are even called “anti-imperialist” – as if there were only one imperialism, that of the Western bloc.^[1]

These politics have led a significant section of the activist Left – in Australasia and elsewhere – to endorse the Syrian state’s brutal crushing of the democracy movement; to support Chinese suppression of protests in Hong Kong and attempted genocide of Uighurs; and, most recently, to defend Russia’s incompetent but still deadly military intervention in Ukraine. Or, alternatively, to conduct a shamefaced “whatabout” defence of all those actions – even if they are bad, so the line goes, Western imperialism is always the central issue. Therefore, any uprising or struggle against a State which poses as hostile to the USA/”the West” must be assumed to be part of Western imperialism’s schemes, if not an outright CIA plot. Therefore, we must support “the other guys” – whatever their brutal track record or antipathy to basic human rights, let alone socialism.

Campism, we believe, is based on a fatal misconception about how the global order works. That misconception is that Western imperialism is the basis for global capitalism, rather than the other way around. Once you believe that, then it follows that weakening Western imperialism – towards some kind of capitalist “multipolarity”, with Moscow or Beijing getting the upper hand over Washington, London and Brussels – is the necessary precondition for pushing back against capitalism. Which means judging every single struggle by whether “the West” supports it – if so, we must be against it. As British-Lebanese journalist Joey Ayoub puts it: “The term anti-imperialism became a shorthand for people who actually mean multipolarity. They’re not against imperialism. They just want other powers to do that.”^[2]

This sophisticated geopolitics often fails to convince, due to basic human empathy for the oppressed and suffering. The more degraded campists are then forced to resort to what experts in domestic violence call DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.^[3] This aims to counteract the impulse to solidarity by portraying the apparent victims of violence as in fact the bad guys. Hence, fighters for a Free Syria become “ISIS-like headchoppers”, who gassed their own children to make Russia look bad. Ukraine is not a country with an ugly Nazi subculture – like almost all capitalist nations – but an actual Nazi state which wants to exterminate all Russian-speakers (whose president, interestingly, is a Russian-speaking Jew).^[4]

The disinformation required to maintain this bubble of “alternative facts” is readily supplied by Western activists and journalists (and the occasional rock star) who identify as Left-wing, but who – like their counterparts on the Trumpist or anti-vaxxer Right – happily use faked evidence, bad logic, the war propaganda of non-Western authoritarians, or outright smears to support their predetermined geopolitics of “West always to blame”. The campist Left have developed a media culture which resembles nothing less than the “information bubble” in which the Trumpist right or anti-vaxxers live. Journalism from outside the bubble is rejected as “MSM/state lies”, while non-Western state media and shadily-funded attack websites such as The Grayzone, Global Research or MintPress are taken as trustworthy sources.

The predominance of these beliefs – and the unwillingness to openly debate them – led Fightback to withdraw from the Organise Aotearoa project.^[5] But contrary to what those not familiar with the activist-Left subculture might suppose, these beliefs are not restricted to those who self-identify as Marxist-Leninists, or even “tankies”. They are the common sense of many veterans of the progressive Left in this country, especially those grouped around The Daily Blog – for example, veteran activist John Minto or former Alliance MP Matt Robson – or this country’s major Left-wing podcast, 1 of 200.^[6]