Zionism

Over 80 US cities to hold protests on Trump’s inauguration day

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Original article by peoples dispatch republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Activists in Houston, Texas designing signs for Inauguration Day protests. Photo: Vivek Venkatraman

Demonstrators mobilizing in over 40 US states to launch movement pledging to oppose “ultra-right, billionaire agenda”

Demonstrations have been called in more than 80 US cities, in over 40 states, on the day of incoming President Donald Trump’s inauguration. These cities include Washington DC, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, Montgomery, Chicago, Houston, and New Orleans. 

These demonstrations, intended to mark the start of a movement against Trump’s “ultra-right, billionaire agenda”, have been endorsed by a variety of working class and grassroots organizations. These include the Party for Socialism and Liberation, United Auto Workers Local 4811, the Palestinian Youth Movement, United Educators of San Francisco, Black Men Build, the Democratic Socialists of America, the People’s Forum, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the ANSWER Coalition, the US Palestinian Community Network, UNITE HERE Local 2, Artists Against Apartheid, CODEPINK, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, and Dream Defenders.

Conveners of the demonstrations have spoken to the variety of Trump’s promised attacks on working people. “Trump is planning to wage war on immigrant families through a brutal mass deportation campaign,” said Claudia De La Cruz, who ran on a socialist platform in her campaign for president against both Harris and Trump, on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. “We will stand up and say NO to these attacks. Trump is a billionaire, was elected with the help of other billionaires, and runs the government on behalf of the billionaire class. All working people, no matter where you were born, should stand together in solidarity against the billionaire class that wants to rob and exploit us all.”

Brian Becker, the national director of the ANSWER Coalition, does not believe Trump’s promises to “put American Workers first.” According to Becker, Trump “ran a con game during the election.”

“His real agenda is to destroy worker’s rights, deport millions of immigrant families,” Becker said. Trump plans to “pave the way for a complete corporate takeover by ending regulations to protect the environment, firing thousands of public sector workers, and transferring ever-larger parts of the national treasury to the military industrial complex.”

Manolo De Los Santos, Executive Director of The People’s Forum, said, “The Trump victory in the 2024 election represents the complete failure of the Democratic Party to stop the rise of the ultra-right.” 

“We can defeat the Trump program not by following the Democratic Party establishment, but by building a massive movement against the ruling class and the political system that gives everything to billionaires while impoverishing an ever larger section of the population.”

Original article by peoples dispatch republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingOver 80 US cities to hold protests on Trump’s inauguration day

Majority describe the UK Labour government as sleazy

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Majority describe UK's Labour government as sleazy. Source: YouGov.
Majority describe UK’s Labour government as sleazy. Source: YouGov.
Keir Starmer justifies why he has to travel abroad so much
Keir Starmer justifies why he has to travel abroad so much
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefiting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity.
Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefiting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity.
Deputy Labour Party Leader Angela Rayner calls for police to kill and harass innocent people.
Deputy Labour Party Leader Angela Rayner calls for police to kill and harass innocent people.
Continue ReadingMajority describe the UK Labour government as sleazy

Israel cabinet delays approval of Gaza ceasefire deal, as strikes on enclave kill 77

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https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250116-israel-cabinet-delays-approval-of-gaza-ceasefire-deal-as-strikes-on-enclave-kill-77

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) holds a meeting with the Security Cabinet after Iran’s missile attacks on Israel in West Jerusalem on October 01, 2024. [Avi Ohayon (GPO) / Handout – Anadolu Agency]

Israel said it had delayed holding a cabinet meeting on Thursday to ratify a ceasefire with Hamas, blaming the group for the hold-up, as Palestinian authorities said Israeli air strikes overnight had killed 77 people in Gaza, Reuters reports.

Hamas senior official, Izzat el-Reshiq, said the group remained committed to the ceasefire deal, agreed a day earlier, that was scheduled to take effect from Sunday to bring an end to 15-months of bloodshed.

President Joe Biden’s envoy, Brett McGurk, and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff were in Doha with Egyptian and Qatari mediators working to resolve the last remaining dispute, a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

The dispute involves the identities of several prisoners Hamas is demanding be released and it is expected to be resolved soon, the US official said.

Israeli government spokesperson, David Mencer, told reporters Israeli negotiators were in Doha to reach a solution.

The complex ceasefire accord emerged on Wednesday after mediation by Qatar, Egypt and the US to stop the war that has devastated the coastal territory and inflamed the Middle East.

WATCH: Israel Intensifies attacks on Gaza as ceasefire is agreed

The deal outlines a six-week initial ceasefire with the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, where tens of thousands have been killed. Hostages taken by Hamas, which controls the enclave, would be freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners detained in Israel.

The deal also paves the way for a surge in humanitarian aid for Gaza, where the majority of the population has been displaced and is facing acute food shortages, food security experts warned late last year.

Rows of aid trucks were lined up in the Egyptian border town of El-Arish waiting to cross into Gaza, once the border is reopened.

Israel’s acceptance of the deal will not be official until it is approved by the country’s security cabinet and government, and a vote had been slated for Thursday.

However, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has delayed the meeting, accusing Hamas of making last-minute demands and going back on agreements.

“The Israeli cabinet will not convene until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement,” a statement from Netanyahu’s office said.

Hardliners in Netanyahu’s government were still hoping to stop the deal, though a majority of ministers were expected to back it.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party said in a statement that its condition for remaining in the government would be a return to fighting at the end of the first phase of the deal, in order to destroy Hamas and bring all the hostages back. Far-right police minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has also threatened to quit the government if the ceasefire is approved.

In Jerusalem, some Israelis marched through the streets carrying mock coffins in protest at the ceasefire, blocking roads and scuffling with police.

Despite the hold-up to the cabinet meeting, political commentators on Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, said the latest delay would likely be resolved and that the ceasefire was a done deal.

Calls for faster implementation 

For some Palestinians, the deal could not come soon enough.

READ: Israel’s Smotrich demands resuming Gaza war, displacing Palestinians

“We lose homes every hour. We demand for this joy not to go away, the joy that was drawn on our faces – don’t waste it by delaying the implementation of the truce until Sunday,” Gazan man, Mahmoud Abu Wardeh, said.

The accord requires 600 truckloads of humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza every day of the ceasefire, with 50 carrying fuel. The first phase of the agreement will also see Israel releasing more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

While people celebrated the pact in Gaza and Israel, Israel’s military conducted more attacks, the civil emergency service and residents said.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 81 people had been killed over the past 24 hours and about 188 injured. The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said at least 77 of those were killed since the ceasefire announcement.

The Israeli military is looking into the reports, a military spokesperson said.

Israel secured major gains over Iran and its proxies, mainly Hezbollah, as the Gaza conflict spread. In Gaza, however, Hamas may have been crippled, but without an alternative administration in place, it has been left standing.

If successful, the ceasefire will halt fighting that has razed much of heavily urbanised Gaza, killed over 46,000 people, and displaced most of the tiny enclave’s pre-war population of 2.3 million, according to Gaza authorities.

That, in turn, could defuse tensions across the wider Middle East.

With 98 foreign and Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza, phase one of the deal entails the release of 33 of them, including all women, children and men over 50.

Global reaction to the ceasefire was enthusiastic.

Israel launched its campaign in Gaza after Hamas-led gunmen burst into Israeli border-area communities on 7 October, 2023, killing 1,200 soldiers and civilians and abducting over 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.

READ: Dismantling UNRWA will be ‘catastrophic’ for Gaza and Palestinians: Expert

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

Continue ReadingIsrael cabinet delays approval of Gaza ceasefire deal, as strikes on enclave kill 77

What legitimacy is the PA talking about?

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https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250116-what-legitimacy-is-the-pa-talking-about

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa speaks during the first meeting with the new cabinet at the Prime Minister’s Office in Ramallah, West Bank on April 02, 2024 [Issam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]

“While we are waiting for the ceasefire, it is important to stress that it won’t be acceptable for any other entity to govern the Gaza Strip but the legitimate Palestinian leadership and the government of the state of Palestine,” the Palestinian Authority’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mustafa, stated during a meeting of the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution.

The PA is not a legitimate leadership. In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, disturbing the Western world’s preferred outcome. Democracy, according to the West, can only conform with Western expectations; therefore Palestinians got a taste of what the US does when democracy crashes imperialist expectations. Instead of respecting the electoral result, the US and Fatah embarked upon a series of destabilisation and coercion tactics, aimed at marginalising Hamas further and ultimately destroying the legitimate representation of Palestinians according to the 2006 electoral result.

While Hamas was shunned and its diplomatic efforts rebuffed, even though it combined resistance and political pragmatism, the PA intensified its efforts at forcing Hamas to relinquish power, enforcing sanctions on an enclave repeatedly bombarded by Israel. When Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank protested against such authoritarianism and cruelty, the PA unleashed its security services on civilians, and continues to do so. As the US and the EU continued funnelling funds to enhance the PA’s brutality under the guise of state-building, and the PA continued harming Palestinians in the name of security, to the point of detaining, torturing and, at times, killing their critics.

READ: Palestinian Authority must run Gaza after war, Prime Minister says

All this was orchestrated because the international community sided with an illegitimate political representation under the auspices of democracy. Are we to assume that legitimacy and democracy change meaning according to colonial and imperialist interests? What of the importance of language, which is of equal importance in the anti-colonial struggle against Israel and the PA?

Back to the present. Since Israel started its genocide in Gaza, the PA has consistently sought to navigate the corridors of power by presenting itself as an alternative to Hamas. Yet, in doing so, it completely neglected the fact that its silence on the genocide is tantamount to tacit support. The PA merely reiterated the importance of the two-state paradigm as it has for decades, with no acknowledgement of the fact that not even the hypothesis can sustain itself, let alone implementation. Meanwhile, to garner favour with Israel and the international community, and possibly prove how relevant it is to post-genocide Gaza governance, the PA started its own attack against the Palestinian Resistance.

The question is, since legitimacy does not hold the same meaning for the PA and its accomplices, what does legitimacy mean in the context of its Prime Minister citing legitimacy as the reason why the PA should return to Gaza? There is no other acceptable entity, according to the PA – based on what parameters? Just as genocide became synonymous with human rights in the Israeli and international narrative, is the PA’s illegitimate rule becoming synonymous with democracy? Why hasn’t the PA suggested elections and why has the international community not voiced any concern over Ramallah wanting to extend its power to Gaza?

The PA’s attempts to prove itself purportedly worthy of governing Gaza are precisely the reason why it should not. The PA’s only foundations are foreign funding and Israeli colonialism. Having sold itself to the two highest bidders (not forgetting the tangible illegitimacy since 2006), what Palestinian leadership and legitimacy is the PA really talking about?

OPINION: What fate awaits Abbas and his Authority?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

Continue ReadingWhat legitimacy is the PA talking about?

Gaza ‘humanitarian zone’ struck almost 100 times since May, BBC Verify finds

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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2jld7j50eo

The area in Gaza which Israel’s military has told people to go to “for their safety” has been hit by 97 strikes since May, BBC Verify analysis has revealed.

The findings come as negotiations for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas appear to be nearing a breakthrough. Mediators in Qatar say talks are in their final stages, raising hopes that an agreement could be reached soon.

The “humanitarian zone” was first established by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in October 2023 to protect civilians and keep them out of harms way.

On 6 May 2024, the IDF significantly expanded the zone to include the cities of Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah.

The area – much of which is a strip of land along the Mediterranean sea – is densely populated and is estimated to have over a million people living there according to international humanitarian organisations. Many people are living in tents, with limited infrastructure and limited access to aid.

Local media reports indicate more than 550 people have been killed in the 97 strikes mapped by BBC Verify.

In a statement to BBC Verify, the IDF said it was targeting Hamas fighters operating in the “humanitarian zone” and accused the group of violating international law while “exploiting” civilians as human shields and launching rockets from the area.

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Article continues at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2jld7j50eo

Continue ReadingGaza ‘humanitarian zone’ struck almost 100 times since May, BBC Verify finds