IV598 - November 2024

Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv fans ignited violence in Amsterdam, but the far-right is victimising them to repress Palestine solidarity, writes Alex de Jong.

The clear-cut election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America is a major development in the process of right-wing and extreme right-wing extremism underway in global capitalism. At a time when neoliberalism has deepened abysmal social inequalities that hit women and racialised people the hardest; at a time when the ruling classes are wallowing more and more in an opulence whose legal and illegal sources are so mixed that they can no longer be distinguished; at a time when the climate catastrophe and the collapse of biodiversity caused by the race to make a profit from fossil capital are hitting millions of poor people hard and threatening to take them with them; at a time when the race for hegemony is increasingly taking on the hideous face of neo-colonial supremacism and the savage appropriation of wealth at the cost of monstrous massacres.

‘There was no such thing as Palestinians… They did not exist.’ This statement by Golda Meir in 1969 is the essence of what, fifty years later, would lead to the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Despite live media coverage by its victims and a solidarity movement organised in many countries, it has continued unabated for a year.

To make up for its inability to improve the security situation in Burkina Faso, the ruling junta is stepping up its repressive course. On 24 August, nearly 400 civilians were killed by jihadists in the village of Barsalogho in north-central Burkina Faso. This tragedy sheds a harsh light on the real situation in the country, far removed from the triumphalist rhetoric of the putschists.

Since 7 October, Palestinians in Gaza have been subjected to the worst military onslaught in the history of the enclave, with an unprecedented outpouring of force and violence. At the same time, Israel has been on the offensive in the other occupied territories: the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and now the whole region. The aim of this offensive, in all its configurations, is to increase colonial control, in particular by evicting and destroying homes, but also by deliberately and systematically killing those who resist - the Israelis call this ‘mowing the lawn’.

On 6 November, Germany’s governing coalition comprising the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens and the Free Democrat Party (FDP) broke up. The break-up came as no surprise, as the three parties are defending totally different concepts for tackling the economic crisis.

Trump’s victory in the US presidential race is a major catastrophe for the peoples of the Middle East. It comes on top of the Nakba that has been raging since the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 operation. Benjamin Netanyahu had been eagerly hoping for this victory and did everything he could to contribute to its achievement, whether by inciting his right-wing US allies or by refusing to grant Joe Biden and the Democratic presidential campaign the Gaza truce they had been hoping for in order to provide them with an electoral argument they desperately needed. So, what awaits us now that Trump’s return to the White House is confirmed?

Since September, Martinique has been rising up against the high cost of living. Faced with this revolt, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has responded with violence. L’Insoumission has been covering this movement since its beginning. Thanks to its network of reporters, today we are presenting an unpublished interview with Philippe Pierre-Charles, former general secretary of the Martinique Democratic Workers’ Centre (CDMT).

Donald J. Trump won a decisive victory for himself and for the Republican Party, taking the presidency, the Senate, and it appears the House as well, while in his first term Trump’s appointments remade the Supreme Court, which fully supports him. Trump and the Republican Party thus control all three branches of government giving him the power to implement his right-wing program and to transform the United States, and possibly dismantle its democratic system and suppress civil liberties.

These comments by former Sandinista militant and now exiled dissident Dora María Téllez, are excerpted from an interview by Carlos F. Chamorro on the Esta Semana program broadcast July 21 on CONFIDENCIAL’s YouTube channel. Téllez, an historian and political activist, analyzed president Daniel Ortega’s speech and the country’s political situation on the 45th anniversary of ousting the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship.