Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich attend the weekly cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv on 7 January 2024 (Ronen Zvulun/AFP)
Finance minister describes Donald Trump’s election victory as an ‘opportunity’ to extend Israeli ‘sovereignty’ over the entire Palestinian territory
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has told his department to prepare for the annexation of the occupied West Bank in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections.
Speaking at a meeting of his far-right Religious Zionism party, Smotrich said that Trump’s victory provided an “important opportunity” and that “the time has come to apply sovereignty” over the West Bank.
According to a statement from his office, Smotrich said he had instructed Israeli authorities overseeing West Bank settlements “to begin professional and comprehensive staff work to prepare the necessary infrastructure” for extending sovereignty.
As well as finance minister, Smotrich has a role in the defence ministry overseeing illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK’s air force has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al Ahli Baptist Hospital for medical treatment following an Israeli attack on the Omar Al Mukhtar market in Gaza City, Gaza on November 11, 2024. (Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Despite clear evidence showing that Israel is committing war crimes and blocking humanitarian aid, the U.S. is still unconscionably selling billions of dollars of offensive weapons to Israel,” said one advocate.
Ahead of historic U.S. Senate votes on military aid for Israel that are expected next week, dozens of civil society groups on Monday launched a grassroots campaign aimed at pushing lawmakers to support blocking more than $20 billion in offensive weapons transfers.
Demand Progress, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), Action Corps, and the Center for Constitutional Rights were among the groups that launched the No More Weapons for Israel’s War campaign, asking the groups’ millions of supporters across the U.S. to demand that their senators to support the joint resolutions of disapproval (JRD) that are scheduled for a vote this month.
The JRDs were introduced by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) in September. The resolutions could block transfers of certain U.S. weapons, such as joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs), tanks, and artillery shells, which have been linked to civilian casualties in Gaza since Israel began its assault on the enclave more than 13 months ago.
“For the last 13 months, the Biden administration has refused to use the leverage at its disposal to end to the war in Gaza and alleviate an ever-increasing humanitarian catastrophe,” said Cavan Kharrazian, senior policy adviser for Demand Progress. “Despite clear evidence showing that Israel is committing war crimes and blocking humanitarian aid, the U.S. is still unconscionably selling billions of dollars of offensive weapons to Israel.”
Kharrazian noted that passing the JRDs is “even more urgent now,” following the election last week of President-elect Donald Trump, a “notorious ally” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Sanders pointed out when he introduced the JRDs in September that the weapons that would be impacted by the vote have been shown by “a mountain of documentary evidence” to be killing and maiming civilians in Gaza.
Amnesty International submitted a report to the federal government earlier this year detailing several Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure including homes in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) used U.S. weapons to kill large numbers of civilians.
An attack using JDAMs manufactured by Boeing killed 43 civilians, nearly half of whom were children, in October 2023. Four strikes used bombs and other weapons made in the U.S. and killed at least 95 civilians, including 42 children.
A Guardian analysis last month also found that U.S. weapons were used by the IDF when it conducted an airstrike in Beirut, Lebanon, killing at least 22 people and wounding more than 115.
The Biden administration has repeatedly claimed that it is pushing Israel to limit civilian casualties, but has been condemned by human rights advocates and progressive lawmakers for continuing to provide offensive weapons despite mounting evidence that more civilians are being killed each day. Last week, the United Nations said it had found that 70% of people killed by the IDF in Gaza between November 2023 and April 2024 were women and children, despite persistent claims by the U.S. and Israel that it is targeting Hamas fighters.
“It’s time for the Israeli government to take U.S. demands about de-escalation, civilian protection, and humanitarian aid seriously,” said Tori Bateman, advocacy director for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “If the United States wants to see the Israeli government change its behavior, then it must change too by being willing to leverage arms sales to achieve a cease-fire, protect civilians, and serve the U.S. national interest. Senators should vote ‘yes’ to block these transfers of offensive weapons to Israel.”
Progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups have pointed out in recent months that $12.5 billion in U.S. military aid has continued flowing to Israel even as the Israeli government has blocked humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, resulting in the spread of disease and widespread hunger, with U.N. experts saying in July that the enclave was facing famine.
Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits the U.S. from providing weapons to a country that is blocking U.S. humanitarian aid.
“We are grateful Sen. Sanders has introduced the joint resolutions of disapproval and the historic vote to take place in November to block the sale of offensive arms to Israel,” said Yasmine Taeb, legislative and political director for MPower Change Action Fund. “Sending any offensive arms to Israel is a violation of U.S. and international humanitarian law. We urge senators to co-sponsor and vote YES on the JRDs.”
Hassan El-Yayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy for FCNL, called Israel’s war in Gaza “not just a humanitarian catastrophe but a mass atrocity carried out with U.S. bombs and military support, funded by American taxpayers.”
“It’s long overdue for Congress to hold a public debate and vote on ending U.S. complicity in the mass killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians,” said El-Yayyab. “These joint resolutions of disapproval mark a historic moment—the first major effort in Congress to block offensive arms sales to Israel in United States history. Senators must vote yes and press the Biden administration to use all forms of U.S. leverage to finally end the war in Gaza, bring hostages home, and de-escalate tensions across the Middle East.”
In a separate statement on Monday, Chip Gibbons of the civil liberties group Defending Rights & Dissent noted that “war crimes” committed by Israel include “the deliberate assassination of Palestinian journalists, making our government complicit in the worst attack on free expression rights anywhere in the world today.”
“As a domestic civil liberties group, we don’t take stances on international issues,” said Gibbons, the group’s policy director. “But when our government provides weapons that are used to violate human rights, that implicates our core mission.”
The group’s executive director, Sue Udry, applauded Sanders for introducing the JRDs and urged every member of Congress to support them.
“It’s well past time to hold our government accountable to our own laws,” said Udry.
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK’s air force has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Claudia De la Cruz speaks at “What is to be done?” panel on November 8 (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
US-based movement leaders take up the task of answering the burning question: “What is to be done?”
Just two days after Donald Trump’s landslide victory against Vice President Kamala Harris, US socialists and movement leaders took up the task of answering the burning question: What is to be done following Trump’s win?
Hundreds of people gathered at the People’s Forum in New York City on November 8 for a panel discussion which featured the presidential candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Claudia De la Cruz, who ran against both Trump and Harris in a explicitly socialist campaign, Brian Becker, executive director of the anti-war organization the ANSWER Coalition, Eugene Puryear, journalist with BreakThrough News, Jorge Torres, part of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network with extensive experience organizing undocumented immigrant workers, and Miriam Osman, leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement, which has played a central role in the Palestine solidarity movement across North America.
Layan Fuleihan, Education Director of the People’s Forum, opened up the discussion. “We, the workers, the social movements, the immigrant families, the young people, the anti-war movement, the working class as a whole, we are faced with many urgent questions,” she said.
“How will we confront this continual rise of the right? Will we be driven by fear and apathy or pessimism? Will we stay home? Or will we organize our forces and chart our own path forward? Will we follow the lead of the Democratic Party and mourn their loss? Or will we assert that we reject the billionaire agenda no matter which party is executing its orders?”
Speakers put the blame for Trump’s win not on a shift to the right by working class people, but on the failures of the Democratic Party. Claudia De la Cruz spoke to what she called the “scapegoating of working class sectors” by the Democrats.
“They are saying we have to blame Black men, that we have to blame Latino men, that we have to blame immigrant communities, that we have to place judgment on those who didn’t go out and vote,” she said.
In reality, according to De la Cruz, “it is the spinelessness of the Democratic Party that has brought us here.”
“While Trump won this election, we cannot pretend that the Democrats have not allowed and conducted attacks against the working class people for decades,” De la Cruz said. “If we think about the last 16 years, the Democratic Party had power for 12 of those years, and they didn’t do anything. Not a single thing to protect or expand our rights. In fact, they sat back and watched how our rights were placed on a chopping block and said, we can’t do anything about it.”
Torres, who himself comes from a migrant background and was undocumented, spoke not only of the fear that exists within immigrant communities of Trump’s anti-migrant policy promises, but also the resolve to fight back. According to Torres, for the past few months, immigrant day laborers within the NDLON network were very scared of what would happen in the event of a Trump win. Trump has promised to deport between 15 to 20 million people in the largest mass deportation in US history, a policy which could result in family separations affecting up to 1 in 3 Latinos in the country.
But this did not paralyze these communities, who instead came together in a renewed resolve to “start organizing for real,” Torres described. Communities began to ask one another, “What does that mean when we say the people save the people?”
“We made a decision that it was about time to organize local communities in popular committees across the country,” Torres said. “We decided to organize popular assemblies across the country. In around one month we organize almost 25 assemblies across the country. And now we have almost 45+ committees led by workers, led by undocumented people, led by people that really are directly impacted.” Torres also mentioned that NDLON is working closely with the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil, speaking to deep ties of international solidarity.
According to Torres, “most of the committees have lost their belief and hope and the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.”
“By now it is time to organize, and we just have us, and we don’t have no one else,” Torres asserted.
According to Eugene Puryear, Trump’s policy promises to round up migrant workers should be a call to action for a mass movement to defend immigrant communities. This movement can find inspiration from the history of the movement for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Puryear recalled the history of the Fugitive Slave Act, which imposed harsh punishments on those who sheltered runaway slaves. But this certainly did not stop abolitionists and anti-slavery activists from protecting slaves anyway.
“Whether or not the law said one thing, there was a higher law: that they had to fight against slavery no matter the risk,” Puryear described.
“So [abolitionists] formed things called vigilance committees, all across the country, that said that when a fugitive slave is brought before the bar into the courthouse, we will go to the courthouse and we will physically resist the imposition of returning them back. That we will physically remove them from the courthouse if we have to, and put them on the Underground Railroad and send them to Canada. And maybe we won’t succeed. Maybe we’ll be beaten. In many cases, these were serious tussles. People were pulling out guns. Maybe we’ll even be killed. But we would rather risk our lives than allow our formerly enslaved brothers and sisters to be taken back.”
There are parallels between the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and Trump’s promise to remove tens of millions of migrants from the country by force, Puryear argued. And the historic tasks of the mass movement, therefore, are similar to those shortly before slavery was abolished. “You can say it’s scary, and it is scary. You can say it’s odious, it is odious. But when they start bringing the trucks around to round people up, you can also say, I’m going to step outside of my door and I’m going to link arms with my neighbors. And if you’re going to throw them out, you better throw me out with them because we’re standing together no matter what,” Puryear said.
Brian Becker also echoed this same militant fighting spirit, rooted in the lessons of past movements. Becker drew attention in particular to the movement that arose after 2016 in opposition to Trump’s first election.
“There’s another side to the question of what is to be done, and that is what is to not be done,” Becker said. “Let’s learn the lesson of the first Trump administration when Trump came into office. So many people went to the airports because he said, we’re going to ban Muslims from coming into the country. Massive protests on Inauguration Day. We outnumbered Trump supporters. This was the anti-Trump resistance,” he described.
“But what happened? The Democratic Party completely co-opted that movement, completely took over that movement, because they said you have to resist Trump, the person, which meant that the best and practical way to do it, is to get rid of Trump by electing the Democrats.”
This co-optation marked the end of this mass movement, which because merely a “tail to the Democratic Party,” Becker described.
According to Becker, “the problem isn’t just Trump. The problem is the capitalist system and the ruling class parties. The Democrats and the Republicans are not an opposition to capitalism. They are the voice of capitalism.”
Becker spoke to the need to “build a political program” independent of the two establishment parties, which speaks to the needs of the masses of people.
Miriam Osman of the Palestinian Youth Movement spoke to the way that the movement in solidarity with Palestine has given people in the US renewed political clarity regarding the similarities between both major parties. “Our task is to draw more and more people into our struggle against the shared enemy, the shared enemy of the Palestinian people, the shared enemy of the working people of the world, and the shared enemy of working people in the United States,” which is the US ruling class, Osman articulated. “Our task is to build power. Our task is to unify our efforts, because this is the only thing that’s going to give us the force to transform this system.”
Protesters hit out at fossil fuel corporations fuelling the climate crisis and profiting from genocide in Gaza
Activists demonstrate for climate justice and a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, November 11, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan
PROTESTERS hit out at oil giant BP “hijacking” Cop29 while profiting from the genocide in Gaza as the international climate summit kicked off in Azerbaijan today.
Palestine and climate campaigners protested outside the firm’s London headquarters as world leaders headed the latest round of international climate talks.
As the UN warned 2024 is set to be the hottest year on record, Fossil Free London activists held a banner reading “BP, stop fuelling genocide and climate breakdown.”
They demanded BP stop its oil and gas extraction, “hijacking” the Conference of the Parties (Cop) process in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku and “profiteering from genocide.”
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Human rights experts have warned that countries and corporations supplying oil to Israeli armed forces may be complicit in war crimes and genocide following an International Court of Justice ruling on Israel.
Joanna Warrington, a campaigner with Fossil Free London, said: “It’s the very same fossil fuel giants that profit from the suffering of billions as our climate tips closer to collapse, which are fuelling and enabling Israel’s horrific colonial genocide.
