Tag Archives: U.S.

China, U.S., Uncategorized, Women

FROM THE U.S. TO AUSTRALIA:
FOR FREE, EASILY ACCESSIBLE,
ABORTION ON DEMAND!

Above photo: Thousands marched in Sydney on July 2 in protest at the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of abortion rights in America and to demand free, safe, legal, abortion on demand in Australia. The vigour and determination of the protesters reflected their understanding that those attacking abortion rights were not only opposing an absolutely crucial right for women but were attacking women’s very right to decide what they do with their own bodies and how they lives their own lives.
Photo Credit: Reuters

FOLLOWING MASSIVE U.S. ATTACK ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS,
MOBILISE THE WORKERS MOVEMENT TO FIGHTBACK

FROM THE U.S. TO AUSTRALIA:
FOR FREE, EASILY ACCESSIBLE,
ABORTION ON DEMAND!

1 July 2022: The U.S. regime struck a savage blow against women when its Supreme Court overturned its nearly 50 year old Roe vs Wade ruling that had tenuously given American women a degree of abortion rights. Now, 26 of America’s 52 states are set to deny women those rights or to severely restrict them. It will be low-income women – and because of intense racist discrimination that often means black women as well as other women of colour – who will be hit hardest. Since a women’s decision to seek an abortion is often an economic one, the majority of women who had been getting abortions in the U.S. were those below or just above the poverty line. Yet this is precisely the same group who will now find it extremely difficult to pay for the travel and accommodation – often while suffering loss of income from taking time off work – to travel to states where abortion is legal.

To make matters worse, the majority of black women, the women most hurt by the Supreme Court overturn ruling, live in the very same southern states that are now outlawing abortion. For many such black and low-income women, the stripping of abortion rights will mean that they will either be forced to continue with pregnancies that they do not want, which could well consign them and their children to further immiseration, or will be compelled to seek dangerous backyard abortions that could result in their death, or if they get caught, imprisonment. Trotskyist Platform insists that women must have the right to safe, free and widely accessible abortion on demand. We also say that there must not be any restriction on women accessing abortion care in even the later stages of pregnancy. Moreover, women must not be forced to undergo compulsory “counseling” which only adds to the stress of what can often already be an anxious time for her, when she may have to deal with pressure from husbands, boyfriends and family as well as ignorant stigma from broader society. We demand the right to abortion that is completely on demand for women in the U.S. and for women everywhere, including here in Australia.

Right now in Australia, women generally have more of the right to choose than in the United States. In recent years, important victories have been won here. In October 2019, a law came into force that finally decriminalised abortion in NSW. This is not the result of the benevolence of its pro-capitalist parliament but a product of a decades-long struggle by abortion rights activists and supporters of women’s rights, including from sections of the trade union movement. However, women are far from having the full right to abortion on demand in Australia. For example, if a woman wants a later term abortion in NSW, that is after 22 weeks of gestation, whether they will be able to go ahead is out of their hands. That decision lies with two medical practitioners who must decide whether the practice is “appropriate”. In Tasmania, such restrictions come into force after just 16 weeks of gestation. Meanwhile, Western Australia has this country’s most draconian laws. After 20 weeks gestation, abortion is basically banned, with a women only able to access services if two doctors out of a panel of six find that she or the foetus has a severe medical condition. Before this period, women can only access abortion care after first going through a “counseling” session with a doctor different to the one providing the services. We need to fight here to remove all these serious curtailments to the right to abortion in Australia. There needs to be a major struggle to ensure that whatever rights to abortion that do exist are actually accessible for working class and rural women – and especially for Aboriginal women who are often forced to live in poverty in rural areas. Many of the abortion services that are currently available are privately run and thus the procedure is often out of reach of lower income women. Thus, ensuring women’s true right to choose means not only winning the full right to abortion on demand but also requires ensuring that the procedure is a free and widely available service provided by the public health system; and it also means ensuring that lower-income women are lifted out of poverty.

Hundreds march for abortion rights in the city of St Petersburg in the U.S. state of Florida. There have been spirited and massive pro-choice demonstrations in the U.S. following the Supreme Court’s savage blow against women’s right to choose.
Photo Credit: WFTS

Women’s Rights Are Workers Rights

The abortion rights in the U.S. provided by Roe vs Wade had always been partial. Indeed, Texas and Oklahoma had effectively banned abortion even before the recent court ruling by passing laws enabling civil lawsuits against women getting abortions. A notorious late 1970s law passed in the time of Democrat president, Jimmy Carter, called the Hyde Amendment, prevents federal funding for abortion. Therefore, many low-income women simply could not afford an abortion even in the time when Roe vs Wade stood. Nevertheless, the recent court decision is a huge setback for women’s rights. In response, women in the U.S., joined by men who support women’s rights, have held huge protests. Trotskyist Platform stands in urgent solidarity with those fighting on the streets of America for women’s right to choose what they do with their own bodies.

The Supreme Court decision was condemned by senior U.S. Democrat Party members including president, Joe Biden. The Democrats have been, with success, taking control of the mass protests and saying that people need to vote for them in order to push back against the attacks on abortion rights spearheaded by the reactionary Republicans. However, the Democrats’ commitment to abortion rights is at best half-hearted. Biden himself has for decades been a strong supporter of the notorious Hyde Amendment that denied women access to federal funding to pay for abortion care. He only changed his position before the 2020 presidential elections after being attacked for his stance. Meanwhile, there have been many times where there has been a Democrat president and a Democrat controlled congress, yet the party has stubbornly refused to legislate the right to abortion on demand, despite this right long being supported by a sizable majority of Americans. Although most of those on American streets marching for abortion that have illusions in the Democrats or are rank-and-file Democrat members are sincere in their support for abortion rights, many rightly suspect that many a Democrat leader is half happy at the court ruling since it enables them to win votes from the right-wing Republicans on the promise of upholding abortion rights.

The very partial nature of the Democrats’ commitment to abortion rights flows from the fact that no less than the conservative Republicans, the Democrats are a party dominated by capitalists. The capitalist system in turn is tied up with an obsession on insisting that everyone conforms to the traditional family structure, in particular as a family economic unit. The wealthy capitalists have an attachment to this structure because they are fixated with passing on their property to, usually male, heirs. However, so as to be sure that their wealth isn’t claimed by the patriarch of another family, they want their property to be passed on to heirs who are indisputably theirs. This obsession with handing down their property to their own heirs and, thus, with ensuring that their wives do not bear children to other men drive rich propertied males’ compulsion to socially – and, thus, economically – isolate their wives. Yet the capitalists want everyone else to also adhere to the same structure that serves their needs, even the working class who own no commodity-producing property. This is because capitalists see the division of the masses into separate family economic units as being useful to, on the one hand, preventing workers from uniting against them and on the other hand with helping them to instill discipline and conservative values in the next generation. Moreover, greedy capitalist ruling classes do not want to actually pay people to conduct the essential tasks of housework and child rearing. And so it is held incumbent upon women to, without any pay, conduct these important social functions; work that in original human civilisations – including those of most of Australia’s Aboriginal nations – had humanely and quite rightly been carried out as the collective responsibility of whole communities. Given that the capitalists’ interests are in forcing everyone into economic units based on the traditional family structure, they view with hostility anything that deviates or challenges this, whether it be independent women empowered by the right to decide what to do with their own bodies, lesbian and gay relationships or trans people. Thus, women in leading positions in the Democrat party, which given the nature of the party means that they are either directly from the ruling class or are otherwise pro-capitalist in their politics, are torn between wanting their own personal freedoms and rights as female human beings on the one hand and, on the other, as capitalists, wanting to do everything possible to herd everyone into nuclear family units through measures that necessarily oppress women.

Yet for the same reasons that even progressive-minded women from the capitalist class are limited in their ability to stand for women’s rights, it is the united working class – in which history has destined working class women to play the lead role – that has a strong interest in spearheading the struggle for women’s emancipation. The workers movement needs working class women to have the right to control their bodies so that they will be feisty and independent and can, thus, play a leading role in uniting all their class to struggle for workers rights against the capitalist exploiters. Or as the peak trade union body in the north-eastern U.S. state of Vermont, the Vermont State Labor Council AFL-CIO, put it: Women’s Rights Are Workers Rights! Moreover, through their power to turn on and off production, the workers movement has not only the interests to stand up for women’s rights but the power to force the ruling class to concede rights to women through strike action and other mass actions. However, industrial action necessarily hurts the profits of all the capitalists, whether they are open right-wing reactionaries or supposed “progressives.” That is why the struggle to mobilise working class power in support of the struggle for women’s liberation will be a struggle that must be waged against all wings of the capitalist class – even its most progressive members. The extent to which working class power in the U.S. can today be unleashed in the urgent fight for abortion rights depends on the extent to which the workers movement can be unchained from its present subordination to the capitalist Democratic Party.

Here, mobilising the workers movement to support women’s full right to choose and to support the broader struggle for women’s emancipation requires breaking the stranglehold of the Labor Party – and pro-ALP and pro-Greens agendas – on the workers movement. Although most individuals in the ALP support abortion rights, the party’s stance is half-hearted given that it includes staunch anti-abortion elements within its leading layers. As a party that seeks to reconcile workers’ interests with those of the capitalist exploiters, the ALP parliamentary and union tops seek to restrict industrial action to being a supplementary add-on to their main parliamentary game rather than fighting for a program that fully unleashes the power of our unions in an all out struggle for workers’ and women’s rights. Meanwhile, although more progressive on social questions than the ALP, like the ALP the Greens are also congenitally opposed to a program of militant class struggle. For unlike even the ALP, whose ranks are largely workers, the Greens actually include significant numbers of actual capitalist exploiters in their ranks and this party is politically dominated by upper-middle class elements loyal to capitalism.

Anti-abortion politician Claire Scriven is a cabinet member in the South Australian Labor government and the state’s Minister for Primary Industries and Regional Development and Minister for Forest Industries. On July 2, Scriven joined politicians from the Liberal Party and the hard right Family First party in an anti-abortion propaganda training seminar. The event was held five days before South Australia’s law decriminalising abortion in the state finally goes into force and provocatively went ahead after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling gutting already limited abortion rights in America. The fact that the ALP includes such hardline opponents of women’s right to choose shows that it is an obstacle to mobilising the workers movement in support of women’s rights.
Photo Credit: South Australia ALP website

What Do You Mean That America is a “Liberal Democracy”?

The overturning of the already limited abortion rights in the U.S. has made a mockery of the U.S. ruling class’ claim to be the bastion of “liberal democratic values.” Of course, this was always a lie. Both the U.S. and Australia are neither truly “democratic” nor “liberal.” Their “democracies” are dominated by capitalist oligarchs who own and control the media, use their wealth and ownership of the economy to control state institutions by thousands of threads and use their billions to dominate political narratives by disproportionately funding political parties, paying for political advertising, establishing think tanks and “independent” NGOs and hiring lobbyists. As for “liberal values”, the U.S. has the world’s largest prison population and jails its people at a rate six time higher than in China. Moreover, both the anti-abortion Republicans and the more “progressive” Democrats supported the U.S. training and arming – and now hailing as valiant war heroes – of Ukraine’s ultra-right wing Azov Regiment, which along with other violent fascist groups there, have not only attacked Roma, leftists, Jews and pro-Russia activists over the last eight years but have conducted violent assaults on Ukraine’s LGBTIQ+ community and women’s rights activists; including simultaneously attacking, in several cities of Ukraine, participants in the 2018 International Women’s Day rallies. Meanwhile, here, the capitalist regime kills Aboriginal people in state custody, imprisons refugees in hell-hole camps and in Afghanistan committed horrific racist war crimes.

The claims of Washington and Canberra to be champions of “liberal democracy” are mainly used to justify their meddling in countries around the world and especially to sell their intensifying Cold War drive against socialistic China. However, undermining the mantras of Western governments is the fact that China has one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world. Article 19 of the Population and Family Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China grants the unrestricted right to contraception and abortion and Article 21 stipulates that these rights should be enjoyed for free.

Anti-communist propagandists have long sought to denigrate China’s liberal anti-abortion laws as merely a means to enforce a one-child policy. However, that policy was long ago abandoned and China is now actively trying to increase the country’s birth rate. Yet the liberal abortion laws remain. China’s liberal abortion laws were, indeed, confirmed in an amended version of her Population and Family Planning Law that was passed just ten months ago. There are, however, two small autonomous parts of China where abortion on demand does not exist: that is in Macau and in Hong Kong (as well as in the rogue capitalist Chinese region of Taiwan). This is a legacy of laws brought in by the former Western “liberal, democratic” colonial rulers of these territories. In both these regions, abortion is considered a crime which is only allowed as an exception when two doctors determine that there is a serious risk to the physical or mental health of a woman (the Macau law is stricter than the Hong Kong one). As a result of lingering influence of Christian churches and Christian schools from the British colonial times, there is often a terrible stigma against Hong Kong women obtaining abortion care. Furthermore, in Hong Kong it is hard to access abortion services from public providers,
meaning that the right to choose is out of reach for lower-income women. For these reasons, many Hong Kong women travel to Mainland China to access abortion services. Unfortunately, because the Beijing government has accommodated the Western imperialists and the local capitalists dominating Hong Kong and Macau by granting these regions a high degree of autonomy under a “one country, two systems” formula, it has not thus far moved to overturn the colonial-era restrictions on abortion in these regions. We call on the Chinese government not to bend to the sensibilities of those demanding the “two systems” part of “one country, two systems” and to instead move to bring the right to free abortion on demand overwhelmingly enjoyed by women in the socialistic mainland of China to the regions of Macau and Hong Kong.

It is telling too that the biggest ever blow to a women’s right to choose – even greater in scale than what has just happened in the U.S. – occurred as a result of a triumph of “liberal democracy”, by which the Western powers really mean capitalism. In her socialistic days, women in Poland had enjoyed the right to abortion on demand. However, soon after Poland became the first country in the former Soviet bloc to be swept away by capitalist counterrevolution, women’s right to choose became severely restricted in 1990. Today, women in Poland can only obtain abortion care if their physical health is seriously endangered by continuing the pregnancy or if she is raped – and even in the latter case she can only have the abortion up to 13 weeks’ gestation.

June 1987, Poland: Right-wing then pope, John Paul II very publicly gives his blessing to the then leader of Poland’s anticommunist forces, Lech Walesa. Walesa’s anti-secular, capitalist counterrevolutionary movement known as Solidarnosc (“Solidarity”) was also rabidly backed by the then conservative leaders of the U.S. and Britain, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as well as by the Hawke Labor government in Australia. Upon seizing power and restoring capitalist rule, the new Solidarnsoc government followed through on its reactionary platform and wasted no time in carrying out mass privatisations and overturning the liberal abortion rights that women had previously enjoyed during the period of socialistic rule in Poland. The triumph of Poland’s Pope-backed capitalist counterrevolutionaries, which Western capitalist regimes had dubbed “a victory for liberal democracy”, was in fact the greatest setback to women’s control over their own bodies in any country since World War II (now, the recent U.S. Supreme Court has made the U.S. the country to have the second biggest rollback of those rights). As the chant popular with women standing for abortion rights goes: “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!”
Photo credit: Arturo Mari/AFP

The Terrifying Rise of Far-Right Reaction in the Capitalist World

Right-wing forces wildly celebrated the court decision overturning Roe vs Wade. The momentum that these forces have been given could threaten women’s right to choose in even those American states that currently allow abortion. This terrible setback to women’s right to choose is indeed closely related to the growth of hard-right forces. The Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe vs Wade had been stacked with hardline conservative judges by racist former Republican Party president, Donald Trump. Trump celebrated the court ruling as did his estranged ex-vice president, Mike Pence. Now with the Democrat administration overseeing plummeting workers’ real wages and rampant inflation, the increasingly right-wing Republican Party is leading in polls for November’s mid-term congressional elections. Here too in Australia, far-right forces have been gaining ground. Along with the ever clearer right-wing trajectory of the Liberal Party, signified by the ascendancy of racist hardliner, Peter Dutton, to its leadership, forces even further to the right have increased their influence. At the recent federal elections, such far-right parties increased their votes by almost 60%, allowing them to gain almost one in eight votes. As well as the senate seats retained by One Nation, the United Australia Party, led by greedy billionaire Clive Palmer and rabid right-wing former Liberal Parry politician, Craig Kelly, was able to win a senate seat in Victoria after having won no seats in the previous elections.

Moreover, the growth of parliamentary based far-right parties has inevitably been associated with the strengthening of violent fascist gangs on the streets. Let’s remember, that it was less than a year and a half ago when far-right mobs incited by Trump tried to stage a right-wing coup in America. Then, just six weeks ago, a white supremacist, shouting racial slurs, shot dead ten black people in a mass shooting at a supermarket frequented by predominantly black people in New York state’s Buffalo. In March 2019, an Australian neo-Nazi, raised in Australia’s racist environment, murdered 51 Muslim people in a shooting rampage at two mosques in New Zealand’s Christchurch. Meanwhile, every day in Australia, violent bigots and those incited by them harass, abuse and physically attack Aboriginal people and people of Chinese background, as well as other people of colour and those from LGBTIQ+ communities. Emboldened by the recent U.S. court ruling, the growing Australian right-wing extremist forces are now likely to unleash more intense harassment and violence against women entering abortion clinics.

So why, in the 21st century, is all this bigotry rising in places like the U.S., Australia, France and Germany? In short it is because of the increasing decay of the capitalist order. To understand how capitalist decay spawns right-wing reaction, one needs to examine the social base of the Far Right. The stronghold of extreme right-wing forces is amongst economically insecure layers of the self-employed middle class – which includes farmers, self-employed tradies and contractors, owner truck drivers and small business owners (in short the class that we Marxists refer to as the petit bourgeoisie) – as well as smaller-scale members of the actual capitalist exploiting class. Now when the working class moves powerfully to challenge the capitalist exploiters, the best of the petit bourgeoisie will identify their interests with those of the workers movement. However, when the workers movement is on the back foot, the most insecure and reactionary members of the self-employed middle class, the petit bourgeois, will be manipulated by capitalist demagogues to turn their frustrations against those doing it harder than them. Instead of seeking to join with the working class to jointly seize the best parts of the cake stolen by the big end of town they will be mobilised to fight against the rest of the masses for the crumbs. In this way, sections of the self-employed middle class are being manipulated to obsess about maintaining their social position one or two rungs above the working class by seeking to push down those from the working class seeking to expand their rights – especially if they are from its most downtrodden layers like Aboriginal people, women workers seeking equal pay, unemployed workers and people of colour. Since the self-employed are essentially small businessmen, divided by the reality that everyone else operating in their market is an economic rival, they can easily fall prey to divisive racist rhetoric. Since they share the capitalists’ same pre-occupation with passing on productive property to male heirs – and sometimes they are even more obsessive about this than the big capitalists given that their businesses are much smaller and, thus, all the more precious and precarious – the insecure self-employed can easily fall for extreme “family values” agendas and, consequently, anti-abortion ones. Moreover, not brought together with others at the point of production like wage workers and hopelessly dependent on both the elements (the weather in the case of farmers) and big capitalist-generated market forces beyond their control, the isolated and precariously operating petit bourgeoise is especially susceptible to the influence of rabid religious forces.

So why then is middle class reaction becoming ever stronger. There are three closely related reasons. For one, the size of the self-employed layer has actually increased in countries like the U.S. and Australia over the last few decades. Theoretically, this should not be happening. Smaller scale production of goods and services is usually less efficient than large-scale production. However, the capitalists artificially propped up the size of this class by laying off workers from maintenance, courier, trucking, cleaning and other jobs and rehiring these workers as contractors. The corporate bosses made these moves because, although the new arrangement led to a loss of technical efficiency, it undercut union organising. So the social class on which right-wing reaction is based has actually grown in the U.S., Australia and other capitalist countries.

However, this would not have automatically led to such a rise in right-wing reaction if the workers movement had been active and determined enough to fight for its rights so decisively that it drew in the self-employed behind it. That this has not thus far happened is the fault of the social democratic current leaders of the workers movement, which in Australia means the ALP. Meanwhile, the reason that sections of the insecure middle class have moved from supporting traditional conservative politics to backing aggressive far-right agendas, is that the decay of the capitalist system and its repeated economic crises have increased economic insecurity. Today, it is surging fuel and other raw material prices that are buffeting the self-employed layers as they are all the masses. Furthermore, the more that the capitalists need to exploit to keep their system afloat, the more that its representatives promote racism, bigotry and extreme religion to divide the masses that they exploit.

What all this means is that even though the U.S. Democrats and the Australian ALP – and still more strongly the Greens – reject the agendas of the Hard Right, their loyalty to the capitalist order means that they uphold the very system that is spawning right-wing reaction. That is why one cannot resist the Far Right by supporting the Democrats in the U.S. or the ALP and Greens in Australia. After all, it was eight years of the relatively liberal Obama administration which, incapable of providing economic security to the masses, created the conditions for the rise of right-wing reaction that led to Trump’s ascendancy. Similarly, if Albanese’s ALP is allowed to carry out its pro-capitalist agenda, it will allow Dutton or others even more extreme to eventually gain the ascendancy. This is doubly so since right now the masses’ living standards are plummeting and there are even signs that we are headed towards yet another deep global capitalist economic crisis.

The force that can resist right-wing reaction and the socio-economic conditions which breed it is the multi-racial working class. However, it can only do this by opposing all the representatives of the capitalist class in unleashing struggles for secure jobs for all through forcing bosses to increase hiring at the expense of their profits and by stopping rampant inflation through winning the confiscation of the greedy oil, gas and power corporations and their transfer into public ownership. At the same time the workers movement must oppose the turning of its ranks into self-employed contractors by fighting for contractors and gig workers to be hired – and often rehired – by companies into jobs with high wages and all the rights of permanency. When the working class decisively challenges the capitalists in this way and fights for additional measures that are both in the interests of themselves and those of the middle class – like nationalising the banks and lowering power prices – then it can draw in the self-employed middle class behind them and make the latter realise that it is possible to fight against the exploiters above them rather than cowardly kicking those in a social position below them. Recent strike action by NSW nurses, rail and bus workers and teachers give a small taste of the potential for working-class resistance. However, to unleash the power of the workers movement requires replacing the pro-ALP social democratic leadership dominating the working class and its unions with one that stands for uncompromising opposition to the capitalist order.

The revolutionary party of the working class that we need, in which women and people of colour will necessarily play a dominant role, would champion the cause of all the oppressed. It would unite with all the oppressed in mobilising mass action to physically defend Aboriginal people, targeted ethnic communities, LGBTIQ+ people and abortion clinics from violent right-wing forces. It would also struggle for the complete liberation of women through fighting for women’s complete economic independence. This means standing for equal pay for equal work, guaranteed permanent jobs for all, a massive increase in low-rent public housing and free around the clock childcare. We also fight for a system that will deliver free pre-school education, free school lunches at all schools and after-school sports, music and cultural activities provided for free by the state alongside free transport from school to and from these activities. The struggle to implement and provide the resources for all these measures poses the need to strip the economy away from the filthy rich capitalist exploiters and place it into socialist, public ownership under a workers government. When such socialist revolutions place economies into the collective hands of the masses on a global scale, the capitalist decay and economic insecurity that breeds far-right forces will be done away with and racist, male chauvinist and homophobic bigotry will finally be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Anti-Imperialism, U.S.

OPPOSE THE U.S. & AUSTRALIAN
REGIMES BACKING ISRAEL’S TYRANNY

Photo Above: 15 May 2022, Ramallah, West Bank, Occupied Palestine: Thousands of Palestinians protest on Nakba (the Catastrophe) Day, the 74th anniversary of Israel’s murderous ethnic cleansing of three quarter of a million Palestinian people from their homes.
Photo Credit: Ayman Nobani/Xinhua

DEFEND THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

OPPOSE THE U.S. &
AUSTRALIAN REGIMES
BACKING ISRAEL’S TYRANNY!

RESIST THE WESTERN IMPERIALIST
DOMINATION OF THE WORLD
UNDERPINNING THE SUBJUGATION
OF PALESTINIAN PEOPLE

12 May 2022: Yesterday, the Israeli military demolished several homes of Palestinian residents in the Masafer Yatta region south of the West Bank city of Hebron. This atrocity is part of Israel’s plan to evict some 1,000 residents from the area. If Israel is able to get away with this, it would be one of the biggest single expulsions of Palestinians since Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Palestinian families are being driven from homes and lands that they have lived, farmed and herded on for generations – going back long before Israel’s murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was unleashed in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe). Simultaneously, Israel is accelerating the construction of Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank in order to further displace Palestinian people and undermine their just demands for statehood. Today, the regime announced that it would be building an additional 4,300 Jewish-only housing units in the West Bank.

The U.S. and Australian-backed Israeli regime is subjugating Palestinian people in an ever more brazen way. During the recent Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Israeli forces repeatedly carried out violent raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites. They injured hundreds of Palestinian worshippers as they unleashed volleys of rubber bullets, tear gas cannisters and stun grenades. Israeli state forces are being encouraged to commit ever more cruel acts by increasingly active fascist groups amongst the Jewish “settlers” that have gone to colonise the West Bank. These fascist mobs have not only spearheaded the attacks on Al Aqsa and threateningly marched on Palestinian villages but have beaten and murdered Palestinian residents, torched their homes and cut down their food crops. Israeli forces have murdered over 50 Palestinian people in 2022 alone.

The working class and all oppressed of Australia and the world and all opponents of national oppression must stand with the persecuted Palestinian people. We must demand: Israel and its far-right “settlers” get out of all of the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza! For the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their pre-Nakba homes and lands! Let us support the Palestinian resistance against the murdering Israeli security forces and the fascist “settler” groups!

MOBILISE THE WORKERS MOVEMENT IN
SUPPORT OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE’S RESISTANCE

Israel is only able to subjugate Palestinian people because it receives massive military, economic and diplomatic backing from the U.S. imperialist superpower and the Americans’ closest allies, like Australia, and because of the complicity of the other Western imperialist powers likes Britain, Germany and Japan. That is why supporters of Palestinian rights in Australia must oppose the Australian rulers’ backing of Israel and must fight against the Australian ruling class’ support for the U.S. juggernaut that underpins Israel’s terror. Down with Canberra’s military cooperation and diplomatic backing of Israel! U.S. troops out of Darwin! Close the Pine Gap spy base and all the joint U.S.-Australia military bases in Australia! Down with the ANZUS Alliance! Down with AUKUS – Down with the new Cold War drive against socialistic China!

Although there are powerful pro-Israel lobbies in the U.S. and Australia, this is not the main reason why Washington and Canberra uphold Israel’s persecution of Palestinian people. The U.S. and Australian capitalist ruling classes uphold Israel’s tyranny because this is in their own class interests. The ultra-rich owners of the U.S. and Australia’s mines, banks, factories, agribusiness, transport operations and service sector firms not only exploit workers in their own countries but also exploit workers at an even more intense rate in the ex-colonial countries of the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific, Africa and Latin America where they also loot the natural resources and seize control of markets. To enforce this tyranny, these imperialist powers use not only their own militaries but also those of various “deputy sheriffs” who they back to enforce their interests in return for a share of the imperialist loot. Israel is the Middle East deputy sheriff of U.S. imperialism. Along with the Saudi regime, Israel was built up as the enforcer in the oil-rich Middle East of the imperialist powers’ drive against the USSR-led socialistic bloc during the Cold War. Today, Israel is both a strategically located ally of Western imperialism in their new Cold War drive against socialistic China and a henchman against local forces that dare not bow down enough to the Western imperialist tyrants, whether they be groups in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq or “disobedient” countries like Syria and Iran. For playing this role, Israel’s powerful U.S. godfathers are happy to uphold its subjugation of Palestinian people and to turn a blind eye (or more cynically, give meaningless, gentle slaps on the wrist) to its most heinous atrocities. This is similar to how Washington covers up the Australian ruling class’ horrendous oppression of Aboriginal people and its brutal persecution of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African refugees in recognition of the crucial role that the Australian rulers play as America’s deputy sheriff in the South Pacific.

Given the interests that Australia’s imperialist ruling class has in propping up Israel’s tyrannical role in the Middle East, it is unsurprising that all the pro-capitalist parties in Australia, which includes all the parties currently in parliament, defend Israel. To be sure The Greens, unlike the right-wing Liberals or the ALP, do call out Israel’s worst atrocities. However, their position of “condemning violence on all sides”, which disgustingly equates the violence of the Israeli oppressors with the just resistance of a subjugated people, is far from genuine solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Moreover, while Greens politicians do attend pro-Palestinian rallies in Australia, one can be suspicious that this is mostly a vote gathering practice, given that nowhere in The Greens official foreign policy election platform – that is in what they present to everyone as opposed to what they promise to known Palestinian supporters – do they even mention support for the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Instead, while they call to “renegotiate” Australia’s alliance with the U.S., they nevertheless uphold this alliance, and thereby uphold a pact that strengthens the U.S. imperialist superpower that props up Israel.

Alongside the geostrategic interests that the U.S., Australian, Canadian and New Zealand ruling classes have in backing Israel, all these capitalist rulers feel a connection with Israel’s rulers because, like the latter, their own rule was also founded on the colonial dispossession and murderous subjugation of the peoples living on the lands that they now lord over. If one sees the way that Australian state forces brutalise Aboriginal adults and children in custody and then cover up these crimes – like how a racist white police officer killed an unarmed Aboriginal man Kumanjayi Walker by shooting him three times at close range yet was two months ago acquitted of murdering the Aboriginal teenager by the Northern Territory courts – it has many similarities to Israel’s heinous persecution of Palestinian people.

Given their ideological affinity with the Israeli ruling class and more significantly, the interests that they have in upholding Israel’s strength, it is impossible to make the capitalist rulers of the U.S. or Australia an ally of the Palestinian people. However, what we can do is to force these imperialists to back off their level of support for Israel. Such a perspective is, however, undermined to the extent that many supporters of Palestinian rights continue to believe that it is possible to win over Australia’s ruling class to the side of the Palestinians. For the latter notion falsely implies that what we need to do is to appeal to Australia’s capitalist rulers when what we must do is the very opposite: we need to punish the ruling class for their backing of Israel’s reign of terror. One cannot appeal to the conscience of Australia’s capitalist class as they are not driven by conscience but by the drive to expand profits and to shape the world order in such a way that their profits both at home and abroad are secured and maximised. Instead, we must threaten the profits and political authority of Australia’s capitalist rulers to such an extent that the harm that they would thereby suffer outweighs the geostrategic benefits that they gain from upholding the Israeli, Middle East deputy sheriff of their American godfathers. The key force for achieving this perspective is the organised workers movement. Trade union political strikes here in protest at the Australian regime’s support for Israel would hurt the profits of Australia’s capitalist rulers and could, therefore, arm-twist them to dial back their support for Israel.

Union action against Israel’s tyranny is possible because not only is such struggle vitally needed it is also in the very interests of the workers movement. By striking economic and political blows against a key deputy sheriff of U.S. and allied imperialism, the workers movement would be landing punches against the U.S. and Australian imperialist ruling classes themselves. In other words they would be weakening the very same capitalist rulers who at home are driving down workers’ real wages, jacking up rents and prices, pushing ever more workers into precarious gig and casual jobs and who in their efforts to prevent the masses uniting to resist their ever greater exploitation of working class people are scapegoating Aboriginal First Peoples and people of Asian, Muslim, African, Middle Eastern and Islander backgrounds. Any damage done to the strength of the Australian ruling class by weakening its international position will necessarily aid the struggle against exploitation and racism at home.

A small number of the left-wing led unions have indeed shown some solidarity with the Palestinian cause by attending pro-Palestinian rallies in Australia. However, such acts are undercut by the fact that the workers movement in Australia is currently led by the Labor Party, a party that from its support for anti-strike laws, to its fulsome backing of the Cold War drive against socialistic China to its defence of Israel is determined to prove to Australia’s ruling class that it is as reliable a defender of the capitalist class’ key interests as the right-wing Liberal-National Coalition are. The struggle to mobilise the working class in support of the Palestinian people is thus closely bound up with the struggle to reorient the workers movement onto a new truly anti-capitalist agenda – an agenda that is needed to not only ensure working class support for oppressed peoples like Aboriginal people and the Palestinians but which is essential to the fight for the working-class’ own rights.

STANDING WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE MEANS OPPOSING
WESTERN IMPERIALISM’S MASSIVE BACKING FOR ITS UKRAINIAN PROXY
IN EUROPE’S LATEST WAR

An example of just how emboldened Israel is right now to crush the Palestinian people was seen yesterday when the Israeli military murdered American-Palestinian, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in a targeted assassination. Of course this is hardly Israel’s first murder of journalists and certainly not of Palestinian people more generally. However, Abu Akleh was not only a Palestinian journalist but a citizen of the United States, the main country that is propping up Israel. Moreover, unlike American student Rachel Corrie who was a leftist opponent of U.S. imperialism when she was murdered by the Israeli military in 2003 while courageously helping to protect Palestinian homes in the Gaza strip from demolition, Abu Akleh worked for a news organization that while covering Palestinian issues more fairly is overall a rabid promoter of U.S. imperialism – from its support for the Western imperialist agenda in the Syrian and Ukraine Wars to its retailing of anti-China, anti-communist propaganda.

Part of the reason why the Israeli regime thinks it can now get away with acting even more brazenly than in the past has to do with the context of the Ukraine-Russia War. In order to prevent Russia emerging as a potential capitalist competitor and to push her back down to the humiliated position that she had in the first decade after the destruction of the USSR, the U.S.-led Western imperialists are throwing huge amounts of arms, money and propaganda into supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia. The Western imperialists are so driven by this agenda that they are more than willing to abandon any minor disputes they may have had with any force that contributes to this anti-Russia campaign. For example, the Western mainstream media had in the past occasionally reported on the influence in the Ukrainian state of brutal fascist paramilitary groups like the white supremacist Azov Battalion. Even as the U.S. military trained the Azov forces, Washington was worried that too open support for such avowed neo-Nazis would constitute a bad look. However, today such misgivings have been totally abandoned. Western regimes and media openly hail the “resistance” of the Mariupol-based Azov regiment and completely whitewash both its ultra-racist, Nazi character and its torture and murder of pro-Russia civilians. Similarly, in the past, the likes of France and Germany had made mild criticisms of the extreme hostility to dark-skinned refugees, persecution of LGBTIQ+ people and authoritarian repression of dissent by the hard right government in Poland. The EU powers were worried that the openness of these repressive policies was undermining the EU’s claims to uphold “democracy.” However, today as the Polish government has put itself up as an extreme frontline opponent of Russia, these mild rebukes of her by her Western allies have softened into total silence. Israel is now also a crucial part of the anti-Russia campaign. Not only do the far-right infested Ukrainian and Israeli regimes enthusiastically support each other, Israel has also recently played a headline role in the propaganda campaign against Russia by accusing Russia of committing war crimes in Ukraine and by fanatically attacking Moscow’s basically correct point (albeit distracted by her foreign minister Lavarov’s false and hurtful claim – for which Putin later apologised – that Hitler had Jewish roots) that just because Ukrainian president Zelenskyy is Jewish does not change the fact that the neo-Nazis play a significant role in the Ukrainian regime. Aware of its importance to the anti-Russia campaign of its Western imperialist backers, Israel knows that its allies will tolerate it acting in an even more heinously cruel manner than usual. And the Palestinian people are the victims of this.

Unfortunately, the murdering Israeli regime’s calculation has thus far proven correct. It was striking how the U.S. State Department responded to the questions about the impartiality of the “investigation” into the murder of Abu Akleh announced by Israel. State Department spokesman Ned Price kept on insisting that Israel has the “wherewithal and the capabilities to conduct a thorough, comprehensive investigation” and rejected calls for an independent probe. In other words, the U.S. imperialists are willing to accept the whitewash of the murder of their own citizen by the Israeli regime even though she worked for a thoroughly pro-Western news organisation in Al Jazeera. Earlier, as anti-Russian propaganda ramped up in the tense days leading up to the Ukraine-Russia War, the Australian government further boosted its support for Israel by outrageously designating Hamas in its entirety to be a “terrorist” organisation (in contrast to the previous stance that only recognized the group’s military wing as such).

Some pro-Palestinian groups in Australia, like the Socialist Alternative group, claim that the West is not being consistent by supporting Ukraine against Russia while refusing to support the Palestinian cause. However, the truth is that the Palestinian people’s completely justified resistance against Israeli occupation has very little in common with Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. For one, a major trigger of the Russian intervention was Ukraine’s brutal persecution of Russian-speaking people living in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine over the last eight years. The post-2014 Ukrainian regime threatened these peoples’ language and cultural rights. When the Russian-speaking people protested, they were brutally attacked by fascist Ukrainian paramilitary groups that have many similarities to the far-right settler groups in the West Bank. In the eight years prior to the current escalation of the conflict, Ukrainian state forces and their fascist paramilitaries killed around 10,000 of the Russian speaking people in the Donbass who were struggling for their self-determination. In that sense, it is more Ukraine rather than Russia that has been mirroring the oppressive terror of Israel. To be sure, in sending Russian forces into Ukraine, Moscow’s agenda is more than merely defending the persecuted Russian-speaking populations in the East and South of Ukraine and pre-emptively pushing back NATO’s threatening eastwards expansion to her borders. Moscow also seeks to quench the capitalist thirst for ever greater access to guaranteed markets by grabbing more territory and simultaneously advancing her quest to become a new imperial power. However, by violently resisting the wish of many Russian-speaking people in the south and east of Ukraine to either join Russia or have closer ties with her, the Ukrainian regime is also driven by the capitalist push to maximise their own country’s territories.

The Western imperialists say that Russia’s intervention into Ukraine is “threatening the rules-based international order.” But this order is a brutal, oppressive one where the U.S. ruling class and its allied counterparts in the likes of Britain, Australia and Germany set the “rules” which they then make everyone else follow … except themselves! This “rules-based” order has seen the U.S., British and Australian imperialists brutally invade and ravage Iraq twice, devastate Afghanistan during a cruel twenty year occupation, NATO destroy Libya through a bloody 2011 regime change invasion, the devastation of Syria in a Western proxy war, the killing of large numbers of Pakistani people in U.S. drone strikes, the brutal U.S./Australian colonial occupation of Somalia, the 1999 NATO terror bombing of Yugoslavia, the bloody Western-backed Saudi war on Yemen, etc, etc. Moreover, it is this Western imperialist-dominated “rules-based world order” that sustains Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinian people.

The significance of the Ukraine-Russia conflict to the Western-dominated “world order” and therefore to the Palestinian cause has grown markedly over the last two and a half months. When the Russian troops first intervened, the Western powers, while supporting Ukraine, shied away from providing her with the heavy weapons needed to really take on Russia. However, drunk with their own war propaganda, the Western imperialists have now drastically increased their level of military support to Ukraine – including the provision of heavy weapons, direct training of Ukrainian soldiers and the actual presence of Western special forces’ advisers in Ukraine. Having now invested far more in this conflict than they previously had, the outcome of this war will in turn affect far more the U.S., Australian and other Western imperialists. Should their Ukrainian allies triumph it would embolden Western imperialism and thus intensify the subjugation of Palestinian people, increase the Cold War threats to socialistic China and North Korea, increase the dangers faced by “disobedient” countries like Iran, Venezuela and Syria and intensify Western imperialist exploitation of the developing countries. On the other hand, while a Russian military victory would encourage reactionary nationalism within Russia and boost the authority of Russia’s capitalist exploiting class, it would weaken the U.S., British, Australian, German, Japanese and other Western imperialists who have so avidly backed the other side. This would be a good thing for all those subjugated by Western imperialism and its proxies, including the Palestinian people. Therefore, while Russian anti-capitalists would have to oppose their own ruling class while explicitly opposing NATO and refusing to ally with pro-Western pacifists, opponents of imperialism and capitalism in the rest of the globe, especially in the Western imperialist countries themselves, must campaign for the defeat of the Western imperialist-backed side in this war and oppose the growing intervention of the U.S., Australian and other imperial ruling classes into the conflict. That is why we in Trotskyist Platform say: Let’s oppose all the economic sanctions on Russia! Let’s campaign to stop all Western military supplies to the Ukrainian military! Let’s undermine the Western-imperialist controlled “world order” that underpins Israel’s brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people!

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the Left in Australia have taken the opposite position. The Socialist Alternative, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance groups are all backing the U.S., Australian and Israeli-backed Ukraine side in this war. The Australian Communist Party (ACP) formally takes a position of opposing both sides in the conflict but by proudly stating that “the ACP condemns the attack by the forces of the Russian Federation on Ukraine” the ACP in practice gravitates towards supporting imperialist-backed Ukraine. Although the members of all these groups sincerely hold their support for the Palestinian cause, by backing the side of the Western imperialists in the Ukraine-Russia conflict they are supporting the forces that uphold Israel’s tyranny over Palestine. Most of these groups – in particular the Socialist Alternative, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance groups – similarly backed the side of Western imperialism during the Syrian war when they supported imperialism’s Syrian proxies against the Syrian government; and in doing so also put themselves in a de facto military bloc with the Israeli regime that launched hundreds of airstrikes against Syrian government positions.

We insist that true solidarity with the Palestinian people and all those suffering under the direct and indirect tyranny of Western imperialism means slashing back at the U.S., Australian, British, German, Japanese and other Western imperialist ruling classes in every single field where they extend their claws. That means that as well as opposing Western imperialist intervention into the Ukraine conflict and their support for Israel, we must stand for: All U.S. and allied forces out of Iraq, Syria and all the Middle East! Down with the imperialist threats to Iran! Down with all imperialism’s proxies in Syria! U.S. troops out of the Korean Peninsula! Australian imperialist rulers: Get your bullying hands off the Solomon Islands and the rest of the South Pacific! Down with the cruel imperialist-driven sanctions against North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Afghanistan!

STANDING WITH PALESTINE MEANS STANDING WITH SOCIALISTIC CHINA!

The U.S., Australian and other imperial ruling classes see a far greater threat to their domination of the world than the one posed by their would-be Russian competitor. And that is the threat to imperialist domination of the world posed by the rise of China. Unlike Russia, which is today just another capitalist country, China is a workers state formed when the toiling classes grabbed state power in a giant anti-capitalist revolution in 1949 and which continues to have an economy centred on socialist, public ownership of key sectors. Of all the main powers in the world, including Russia, the Peoples Republic of China currently takes the strongest position in support of Palestine. However, China’s support remains far below what it should be. China’s compromising leaders take a narrow, national-centred approach to foreign policy where they seek to build socialism only in China while trying to ensure “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist world by avoiding any aggressive involvement in any issues abroad that do not very directly affect China’s interests. This policy is a flawed response to the immense hostile pressure that China faces from the capitalist powers. China’s leaders hope that should they avoid threatening capitalist interests abroad, the capitalist powers will in turn avoid attacking China. However, this policy has been a failure. Whereas, China indeed does little to actively promote anti-capitalist struggle abroad, the imperialist powers are doing everything possible to strangle socialistic rule in China. However, should greater solidarity with Red China from working class people around the world arise, stauncher communists within China would get a greater hearing when they push for China to take a much stronger stance in opposing capitalism and imperialism abroad. This can only be a good thing for the Palestinian people.

Moreover, even though the current Beijing leadership does not seek to challenge Western imperialism’s domination over the world, the mere existence of China as a socialistic power is slowly undermining the grip of imperialism over the ex-colonial countries. China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with the Global South is allowing countries in the Pacific, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America to access capital, modern technology, training and a large market in China without having to subordinate their country to the imperial powers or their agencies like the IMF. This is what is driving Australia’s capitalist rulers mad as countries in the South Pacific like the Solomon Islands and Fiji slowly exert greater independence from their Australian imperialist overlords. Eventually, some Arab countries may even finally start exerting greater independence from Washington and its allies, which can only be a good thing for the Palestinian struggle.

Furthermore, the capitalist powers are terrified that even though Beijing does nothing to explicitly promote socialist revolution, the mere example presented by the most populous country in the world continuing to adhere to a socialistic course, while successfully lifting her people out of poverty and providing rapidly rising real wages, wide access to low-rent public housing and ever improving infrastructure, public transport and cultural opportunities for her masses, will encourage working class people in the capitalist world to themselves start agitating for socialism. That is why the Western ruling classes see the rise of socialistic China as an “existential threat.” Of course, if their worst fears are indeed confirmed and the working classes in the West, inspired by socialistic China’s successes, overturn capitalist rule in their own countries that could very quickly open the road to the liberation of Palestine.

More immediately, if solidarity from the masses around the world is able to protect socialistic China such that she is allowed to continue to rapidly rise, this will inevitably loosen the grip of the U.S., Australian and other Western imperialists over the world. That will in turn naturally weaken the Washington-propped up Israeli regime and bring more opportunities for the Palestine liberation cause as well as for the struggles of all people living under the tyranny of the imperial powers. Therefore, all consistent supporters of the Palestinian struggle, all opponents of imperialism and all supporters of working class interests must stand for the unconditional defence of the Chinese workers state against imperialist threats and internal pro-capitalist forces. Down with the lying propaganda war against Red China over Taiwan, Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong, the COVID response and the Pacific! U.S./ British/Australian navies get out of the South China Sea! Oppose the Australian capitalist regime’s anti-China military build up: no to nuclear submarines, no to missiles! For the right of the Solomon Islands and any other country to engage in military and economic cooperation with Red China to the extent that they see fit!

Occupied East Jerusalem, Friday, May 13, 2022: Israeli police horrifically attack mourners as they carry the casket of slain Palestinian-U.S. journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was shot dead during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin last Wednesday. Under the cover of the war in Ukraine, the brutal, occupying ethno-nationalist Israeli regime has been given the green light from its big brother in Washington to even more brazenly attack the long suffering Palestinian people and their brave struggle of resistance. Working class people of all colours, nationalities and religions must join together with all oppressed peoples to resist the bloody, U.S.-led capitalist world order & extend sororal & fraternal comradely hands of friendship and encouragement to the workers state in China which – despite capitalist encroachment into her economy and imperialist pressure from abroad – remains, alongside the international working class, the only world power that can truly stand up to the imperialists and stop the dead hand of Washington and Canberra et al dragging us all into an ever broadening, greed-driven downwards spiral of oppression, poverty and racism.

ISRAEL = DEADLY OPPRESSION OF PALESTINIAN PEOPLE
+ NO FUTURE FOR JEWS EITHER

Recent weeks have confirmed that while Israel spells murderous subjugation for Palestinian people it cannot even deliver on the main promise that Zionist leaders use to sell Israel: that it will be a secure homeland for Jewish people. The building of an ethno-religious state through murderous ethnic cleansing of another people and through ongoing murderous terror against the dispossessed people inevitably provokes resistance and violent responses. Most of the Palestinian armed resistance takes the form of completely justified blows against the Israeli security forces and fascist settler groups. A small number of desperate Palestinians also lash out in pointless and harmful to their cause attacks on Israeli civilians. That is the byproduct of the brutal Israeli subjugation of Palestine. Although far more Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli security forces, 19 Israelis have also been killed in 2022 in occupation-connected violence including several police officers, a security guard, two Israeli troops killed in an accidental attack by a nervous fellow soldier and several civilians. Moreover, although massive backing from Washington allows Israelis to enjoy a higher standard of living than neighbouring peoples, life in an ethnic supremacist garrison state is not exactly great: youth are required to undergo long periods of forced military conscription and the reality of Israel’s brutal subjugation of Palestinian people means that Israelis are sometimes consigned to life in bomb shelters to protect themselves from counterattack. Yet Israel’s capitalist ruling class does not have the interests of the Jewish masses as their real concern… and never did! What they really want is a guaranteed market and a state compacted together by extreme nationalism that will allow them to exploit the labour of fellow Jewish, Hebrew-speaking people and to con such Jewish working-class people into feebly accepting this exploitation out of nationalist devotion to the ethno-religious state. Indeed, Israel’s most dramatic intervention into the Ukraine-Russia War has confirmed how little its rulers are truly devoted to the well-being of Jewish people. In slamming Moscow for pointing out that Ukrainian president Zelenskyy’s Jewish heritage does not prevent neo-Nazis from playing a significant role in the Ukrainian state, the Israeli regime covered up the large presence of neo-Nazi groups like the Azov and Aidar regiments in the Ukrainian paramilitary forces and inhabitation of virulently anti-Semitic, fascist individuals in parts of Ukraine’s military and police top brass; while whitewashing the reality that the Ukrainian state glorifies as national heroes two Nazi-collaborating, anti-Soviet, Ukrainian World War II paramilitary groups (Stepan Bandera’s UPA and OUN). During World War II, the UPA and OUN between them murdered tens of thousands of Jewish people and over 100,000 Polish people, while helping their Nazi allies to carry out the Holocaust.

It is crucial that a far-sighted section of the Jewish working class in Israel sees the futility and injustice of the Zionist project and comes over to the side of the subjugated Palestinian people. There are some brave Israelis who do protest the worst excesses of the regime’s anti-Palestinian terror but these individuals need to come over fully to opposing the Israeli state and to standing squarely in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s resistance. They must see that the implicitly ethnic supremacist ideology of Zionist nationalism serves to obscure the fact that Jewish working class people in Israel are being exploited by Jewish capitalists and that Israeli capitalism has left the masses with a poor welfare system, the single highest rate of poverty in the OECD and unaffordable rents and house prices (which the regime has cynically manipulated to encourage people to become West Bank settlers with the promise of cheap land in a strategy typical of all settler colonialist regimes). What is needed is for a slice of the Jewish working class to break from Zionist nationalism and unite with the Palestinian people in toppling the Israeli capitalist state. Such a socialist revolution would produce a binational workers state that would ensure equal rights for people of all ethnicities, would annihilate the fascist Settler forces and would guarantee the right to return of all Palestinian refugees.

Given the national chauvinism that currently infects much of the Israeli population, such a solution presently remains distant. By allowing them a relatively privileged economic position in comparison with neighbouring Arab peoples, massive imperialist aid to Israel has tied much of its masses to the illusions and prejudices of Zionism. But any weakening of Western imperialism and its domination over the world would cut the ground from under the feet of Israel’s capitalist rulers and necessarily stir upheavals amongst the Israeli masses. So let us relentlessly resist the Western imperialist domination of the world that underpins Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinian people! Down with all Western imperialist military aid and sanctions over the Ukraine-Russia War! Stand with socialistic China against imperialist threats and anti-communist forces! Oppose the ANZUS and AUKUS alliances that strengthen the imperialist powers that back Israel’s tyranny! For workers’ industrial action to oppose U.S. and Australian backing for Israel! Let’s resist the U.S. and Australian regimes that support Israel’s terror! Let us make the nest of Zionist expansionism fall by vigorously shaking the imperialist branches on which it is perched and which give it support!