Palestine solidarity activists should stand with the people of Syria against the dictatorship they have just deposed. 
Bashar al-Assad would not have been ousted so quickly by militias without there being mass opposition to his regime. Indeed, in the southern cities of Sweida and Daraa, people rose up to push out state officials without needing the intervention of the northern Islamist fighters. The Syrian military effectively dissolved, its soldiers donning civilian clothes and offering no resistance—Assad had no popular support, even within his own army. Likewise, as rebels approached Damascus, government forces crumbled and withdrew. Assad fled. 
Across Syria, mass celebrations across all religious and ethnic lines flowed into the streets. Yellow flags of the Kurds and multi-coloured Druze flags flew among the green, white and black flags of the 2011 Syrian revolution. Tens of thousands are being released from Assad’s torture dungeons, people are loudly speaking the many words banned by the regime, and statues of the dictator have been torn down by large assemblies of people all over the country. 
Syrian revolution, Assadist brutality
The dictatorship of Bashar, like that of his father Hafez al-Assad, rested on extreme repression. The country was known as the kingdom of silence because of its absence of free speech, its co-option and neutering of all trade unions, and its enormous security state, the heart of which was the network of torture prisons now being prised open by the people. 
When the Syrian masses joined those in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and across the Arab world rising in a democratic revolution, they were met with massacres. Yet even then, most of Assad’s military defected. Iran’s Islamic Guard and the Lebanese party-militia Hezbollah intervened to rescue the regime, but even they couldn’t crush the popular uprising. In 2015, Russia finally intervened to rescue Assad, barrel bombing entire cities.
Yet, while the country was being bombarded, tens, even hundreds of thousands of people came out into the streets to march with the revolutionary flag during nearly every ceasefire. Some of the local councils, which the revolution had set up, continued. In 2017, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/syrias-last-bastion-of-freedom">activists in the north-western town of Saraqib</a> held Syria’s first genuinely free election since 1954, illustrating the depth of the revolutionary process that had unfolded before Russia and Iran intervened. 
Just last year, after almost everyone had written off the Syrian revolution, hundreds of thousands returned to the streets in more than 55 locations to protest against the regime. In Daraa and Sweida, workers launched general strikes. This context is important for understanding the current moment as part of a mass process rather than solely an Islamist seizure of power.
Assad and the Palestinians
Some in the Palestine movement have denounced the overthrow of Assad, arguing that his regime was a bastion of resistance to Israel. Even if that had been true, Palestine solidarity activists would still have a responsibility to stand with the people against Assad’s dictatorship. 
But Assad has policed the Israeli border for decades, refusing to challenge the occupation of the Golan Heights. “We haven't had a problem with the Assad regime—for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-12/ty-article/netanyahu-israel-has-no-problem-with-assad-agreements-must-be-upheld/0000017f-e1aa-d804-ad7f-f1faccdb0000">told</a> reporters during a 2018 visit to Moscow. Assad also collaborated with the United States, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190518111450/https:/www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-torture-cia-secret-detention-and-extraordinary-rendition">holding</a> and torturing prisoners for the CIA during its “extraordinary rendition” program after 9/11. 
And Assad has persecuted and repressed Palestinians in Syria. In recent weeks, 67 members of the Al-Qassam brigades were released from Sednaya prison, along with 630 other Palestinians. We can only imagine how many Palestinians are among the bodies uncovered in the prisons, having been tortured to death and dumped in graves. Just days before Assad fled, Palestinians in Raml refugee camp in Latakia held a night-time march to call for his overthrow. This was particularly meaningful: 5,000 Palestinians were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/15/syria-palestinians-latakia-assault">expelled</a> from the camp in 2011 for joining the revolutionary protests against the dictatorship. 
In fact, many Palestinians participated in and aided the Syrian revolution from 2011 onwards. In 2013, Haitham, a Palestinian revolutionary, <a href="https://souriahouria.com/palestinian-revolutionary-assad-is-no-friend-of-the-palestinians/">told a Tunisian audience</a> that the inhabitants of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus supported the Syrian uprising by forming committees to organise the intake of Syrians fleeing repression and to smuggle medical supplies to cities held by the revolution. 
“Our first role in the revolution was providing humanitarian and political support to our Syrian brothers and sisters”, he said. The Palestinians in the camp also drove out the Assadists that administered it. 
The so-called Axis of Resistance
Other supporters of Palestine insist that Assad’s rule was a pillar within broader regional Palestinian liberation forces. For example, Ali Abunimah and Asa Winstanley <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-israel-thinks-it-won-syria/50205">write in the Electronic Intifada</a>: “Syria was for decades the backbone of the Axis of Resistance to US hegemony and Israeli settler-colonialism”. 
The Iranian and Syrian dictatorships, the centre of the so-called Axis of Resistance, were never going to liberate the Palestinians. The evidence for this is their despotic rule over their “own people”. In the past three years, there have been mass protests and strikes over the Iranian regime’s treatment of women and workers and its massacres of demonstrators. They will never stand for genuine liberation in Palestine precisely because it could inspire workers and the oppressed in Iran to liberate themselves from tyranny. 
Max Blumenthal, an American journalist and founder of the news site Grey Zone, <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1866724321907052860">declared on X</a> that Netanyahu is the primary winner in Syria, and has repeatedly implied that the rebels are basically Israel’s foot soldiers. Yet Israel has bombed and destroyed arms depots across Syria over the past weeks to keep weapons out of the hands of the rebels. After <a href="https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1865757924594786810">celebrating</a> Assad’s downfall on X, Netanyahu ordered a sustained bombing campaign to neuter the Syrian military, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/10/middleeast/israel-syria-assad-strikes-intl/index.html">striking the country at least 480 times</a> and reportedly destroying the country’s naval fleet. Israel never felt that threatened by Assad.
Israel has always taken advantage of instability in the Middle East and North Africa to advance its interests and claim territory, just as the United States has long taken advantage of ruptures in that region, the Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America. When imperialist nations capitalise on political ruptures to advance their interests, we should not blame the actors who created the rupture in the first place or label those actors imperialist pawns.
When Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal and attempted to block the waterway to all Israeli ships in 1956, Israel responded by occupying the Sinai Peninsula—a significant chunk of territory—for five months. Did giving the Israelis both a pretext and an opportunity to take over Egyptian land make Nasser an Israeli stooge or mean that he should never have nationalised the Suez? 
The road ahead
For now, the rebels in Syria have defeated a vile dictatorship that was the enemy of both the Syrian people and the Palestinian liberation movement. Importantly, their offensive unleashed the popular movement again, drawing hundreds of thousands into the streets and squares across the country. Palestine supporters have added reason to watch for mass movements across the Middle East and North Africa: hope for the Palestinians is tied to the success of struggles against dictatorship across the region. Freedom for the Palestinians depends on the Arab working classes defeating their own ruling classes, and on whether they’re organised enough to defeat meddling imperialist powers. 
Yet many factors and actors are arrayed against the Syrian people. 
First, the imperialist powers—Israel, Turkey and the United States—will all attempt to safeguard their own interests, rather than those of the Syrian people. Second, Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the insurgency, is an authoritarian Islamist militia with its own agenda. Much of its leadership emerged from Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham, both of which have played a counter-revolutionary role, pressing back on the popular movement and its attempts to create democratic structures. 
After HTS took power in Idlib in 2017 from the locally run councils created by the revolution, it established a new, authoritarian civilian government called the Syrian Salvation Government. Students protested against its closure of the Free Aleppo University; others protested over issues of democracy and living standards, showing some determination to assert themselves on the new government. 
Much Western criticism of HTS has focused on the group’s reactionary Islamism. But the key challenge now will not be its religiosity, reactionary or otherwise. The group has made clear that it wants Syria to be run like other countries across the MENA region (and, indeed, the world): a top-down, capitalist government overseeing a country in which business owners dominate workers and the oppressed. 
It’s hard to imagine the group governing as brutally as the Assad dynasty. But now that that era is over, a new HTS-led government will be the key obstacle to a just society. Hopefully, the democratic politics of the masses—the opposition to authoritarian rule and religious sectarianism that characterised the revolution—can again come to the fore. It’s also possible that, with Assad gone, there will be more room to reconstruct a political left.
We should not write the revolution out of history or ignore the possibilities offered by the mass participation in the process so far. All the Western liberal media outlets, the regional governments and the imperialists are doing this. Whatever happens, those who stand for liberation must have consistent political principles and highlight the heroic role of the Syrian people in trying to determine their own future.

Jasmine Duff

Those who stand with the Palestinians should celebrate Assad’s fall

Newly re-elected President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/11/12/nx-s1-5181962/trump-promises-a-mass-deportation-on-day-1-what-might-that-look-like" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">pledged</a> in a recent interview: “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America”. He wants to deport anywhere from <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigration-what-matters/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">15 to 20 million people</a>, mostly from Latin American countries. “Criminals” for Trump is a broad slander against undocumented workers. He plans to use the US military—along with state and local law enforcement agencies—backed by the legal authority of a host of repressive federal laws, including the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/14/politics/alien-enemies-act-1798-trump-cec/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Enemies Aliens Act of 1798</a>, to carry out what would be the largest attack on the US working class this century.
Few areas of the country, including workplaces, schools, and communities, would be untouched by such a sweeping, militaristic assault. With the prospect of mass deportations on the horizon, where will the Teamsters—the country’s most Trump-aligned union—stand on the issue? The Teamsters like to boast that they represent every kind of worker; that they are nearly a union federation unto themselves. Will the Teamsters defend undocumented workers in their own ranks and in the broader working class from the Trump administration?
Looking back on the union’s history, we should be greatly worried. The Teamsters have a terrible record defending undocumented workers, especially during the 1950s “Operation Wetback”, which Donald Trump has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7UuuEFPGN0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">enthused</a> about publicly.
Anti-Mexican racism
“Wetback” was and is the racist term used to describe Mexican workers who cross the Rio Grande into US territory. Beginning in February 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower implemented one of the largest deportations of workers in US history, including of many who entered the United States legally decades beforehand. Eisenhower, the WWII hero, is lamented these days as the kind of moderate Republican and public servant that has disappeared from the Republican Party during the Trump era.
Yet his administration’s luridly racist “Operation Wetback” revealed how deeply ingrained <a href="https://www.history.com/news/the-brutal-history-of-anti-latino-discrimination-in-america" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">anti-Mexican racism</a> was—and still is—in US culture and politics. Mexican immigrants were portrayed as lazy, docile, criminal-minded, undermining “American wages”, and sinister communist agitators. These racist tropes persist to the day—in one form or another—though “communist” has been replaced with “terrorist”. Chicago Tribune columnist Ron Grossman, writing earlier this year, <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/2017/03/04/the-1954-deportation-of-mexican-migrants-and-the-wetback-airlift-in-chicago/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported:</a>
“Prominent US senators were troubled by a government program that allowed some Mexican workers to enter the country legally. Sens. Herbert Lehman, D-N.Y., and Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., the Tribune
reported, ‘charged that the recruitment program makes it easy for Communists and other subversives to enter the United States’. Lehman estimated the daily flow of troublemakers as ‘perhaps many hundreds’.”
Operation Wetback wasn’t woven out of thin air; it built upon the more neutral sounding, but equally racist and terrorising <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv6J6vEXtCo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mexican “repatriation”</a> program under President Herbert Hoover in the early years of the Great Depression. Eisenhower’s Attorney General Herbert Brownell and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — the predecessor to today’s Immigration and Custom Enforcement both made well publicised visits to California and other border states to sound the alarm about the alleged but unfounded threat of “subversion” posed by Mexican immigrants. Historian Erin Blakemore <a href="https://www.history.com/news/operation-wetback-eisenhower-1954-deportation" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">summarised</a> Operation Wetback this way:
“As many as 1.3 million people may have been swept up in the Eisenhower-era campaign with a racist name, which was designed to root out undocumented Mexicans from American society. The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants—some of them American citizens—from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico.”
Adam Goodman wrote in <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691182155/the-deportation-machine?srsltid=AfmBOorT_dYArJG4G-fzWZeqasnOa0QuCqcXlHkDm2F6FG3lq-6SROmC" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants</a>:
“The campaign depended not only on hundreds of Border Patrol agents organized in special mobile task forces, but also on local and state authorities and law enforcement officers, farmers and ranchers, and the media. It stoked and mobilized public fears that ‘wetbacks’ propagated disease, committed crimes, drained the tax base, and degraded the labor standards and living conditions of domestic workers.”
According to Goodman, the shape of the campaign was somewhat different when it shifted to the industrial Midwest, specifically, the Chicago area:
“Whereas the service [INS] relied on hundreds of Border Patrol officers and the use of light planes to locate large numbers of immigrants and jeeps and buses to apprehend them in the southwestern border region, in Midwestern metropolitan areas a relatively small number of agents conducted investigations and relied on tips from citizens and informants to carry out piecemeal deportation campaigns.”
Dave Beck
How did the Teamsters respond to Operation Wetback? Not only did they support Eisenhower’s anti-immigrant crackdown, but they promoted the worst racism and anti-Communism in the ranks of the union.
The Teamsters were led by Dave Beck, who became general president in 1952 after a vicious behind-the-scenes battle to replace Dan Tobin, longtime leader of the union. While Tobin was a militant anti-Communist who expelled the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2011/07/08/free-speech-in-wars-shadow" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Minneapolis Trotskyists</a> from the union, he was also a New Dealer and a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, Roosevelt <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2011/07/08/free-speech-in-wars-shadow" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">spoke</a> at the 1944 Teamster convention dinner in Washington, D.C. Beck later <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1955/11/07/91377046.html?pageNumber=18" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">revealed</a> that he voted for Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey in 1948 and Eisenhower in 1952. The Teamsters were becoming known as the Republican union during this era.
In what was probably the most notorious issue of the International Teamster magazine ever, the front cover declared: “The Wetback Menace: Drastic Imperative to Halt Dangerous Threat to American Security and Labor at Mexican Border”. It repeated all of the Eisenhower administration’s racist tropes against Mexicans, while expressing some concern about the unsafe living conditions and poverty wages paid to migrant workers, much of which could have been solved by amnesty from the president, not pushing them further into the shadows or out of the country.
The Teamsters escalated the anti-Communist part of Operation Wetback by claiming that “100 Communists A Day Invade U.S. By Wetback Route”. The Teamsters article took a swipe at the mildly reformist government of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bitter-Fruit-American-Guatemala-Expanded/dp/067401930X" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jacobo Árbenz</a> in Guatemala. In display of Cold War paranoia, it claimed:
“An increase in Communist activity in Central America, particularly in Guatemala, raises the problem of stricter security on the Mexican border for it is easy for the Guatemalan to enter the country disguised as a wetback. Once in the country, he can get on his way to carry out whatever mission the Communist party may have cut out for him.”
Beck, in his Letter from the General President column, mused, “I wonder if we could infiltrate behind the Iron Curtain as easily as Communists are getting into this country?” He then went on to argue:
“News stories of recent weeks indicate the magnitude of the Communist threat in Central America. And we are getting, according to the testimony of our own government, hundreds of Communists coming via the wetback route. This poses a serious menace to our security which is two-fold; there is the immediate danger of Communists infiltrating our workforce and into our cities, and the economic situation created by American incompetence and bungling in handling the problem is serving the long-range aims of the Communist masters.”
None of this was remotely true. After <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/28/obituaries/dave-beck-99-teamsters-chief-convicted-of-corruption-is-dead.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">disastrous testimony</a> before the Senate Rackets Committee in 1957, he chose not to run for re-election and was replaced by Jimmy Hoffa. Within a few years​, Beck was charged with financial crimes related to his time as Teamster general president and went to prison for three years.
“The American worker”
When Teamster General President Sean O’Brien <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/politics/elections/2024/07/15/watch-sean-obriens-full-speech-at-the-rnc/74419476007/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">spoke</a> before the Republican National Convention (RNC) this past summer, he was enthusiastically embraced by Donald Trump, Senator (soon-to-be Vice President) J.D. Vance, and well-known fascist sympathiser Tucker Carlson. O’Brien was proud of the speech he gave. He attacked tech monopolies and union busting but he was silent on the lurid racism and xenophobia of the RNC. Trump’s xenophobic <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc5NgBZXdtI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">acceptance speech</a> drew a wild response from the delegates. The near hysterical delegates shouted approval and hundreds of delegates waved “Mass Deportation Now!” signs.
Trump’s racism and xenophobia is well-known, and though O’Brien <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/politics/elections/2024/07/15/watch-sean-obriens-full-speech-at-the-rnc/74419476007/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">spoke</a> days before the former president, he made no effort to challenge Trump’s bigotry, despite the long history of racism and xenophobia being used to weaken and divide the US working class. In fact, O’Brien appeared to enjoy going along with it all. From boilerplate declarations of “I love America. Teamsters love this country” to the more ominous sounding, “To ensure we make the greatest nation in the world, BIGGER, FASTER, and STRONGER!”, O’Brien kept referencing the “American worker”. It was a traditional way of playing native-born workers against foreign-born or undocumented workers.
Back in June, when Trump visited Teamster headquarters in Washington, D.C, O’Brien said he disagreed with Trump on immigration, but he has said little, if anything, publicly since then. Despite proclaiming that the Teamsters are “not beholden to any party”, O’Brien appears to be very beholden to Trump. O’Brien applauded the appointment of Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Trump’s secretary of labor despite her <a href="https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-04-labor-nominee-chavez-deremer-trump-loyalist/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">terrible labour record</a>. He even posed for a photo with her and Trump publicly thanking Trump.
If the mass deportations begin—and they are very likely to begin soon after Trump is sworn-in—the Teamsters, from bus to truck to rail workers, are likely to be some of the workers tapped to transport the undocumented to concentration camps before they are expelled from the country. How will the union respond? The history of the Teamsters is not heartening and many of its officials will likely duck the issue. If the union is to overcome its past and not participate in this great crime, a response will have to come from the membership.
First published at <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/the-teamsters-and-operation-wetback-ccd44176e303">Joe Allen on Medium</a>. Joe Allen is a former Teamster and the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service.

Joe Allen

Will America’s most diverse union oppose mass deportations under Trump?

In this article first published at <a href="https://www.newarab.com/opinion/syria-palestine-liberation-comes-below">the New Arab</a>, Joseph Daher explains why the Assad regime’s toppling in Syria is important to liberation efforts across the region, especially for the Palestinian struggle.
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Prior to the toppling of <a href="https://www.newarab.com/news/fall-damascus-how-syrian-rebels-toppled-assad-11-days">Bashar al Assad’s regime</a> in Syria, divisions within the international Palestinian solidarity movement had started to form when news hit that Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the pro-Turkey “Syrian National Army” (SNA) had captured Aleppo and other territories. Some argued that this military offensive led by “Al-Qaida and other terrorists” was a Western-imperialist plot against the Syrian regime, in order to weaken the so-called “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran and Hezbollah.
These states, they claimed, were allies of the Palestinians, and undermining them meant weakening the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. And, that the military offensive by HTS and SNA took place only one day after the conclusion of a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, was deemed suspicious.
However, this entire description of the context has many shortcomings, and if anything, it shows a lack of understanding of Syrian and regional dynamics.
The real context
<a href="https://tempestmag.org/2024/12/understanding-the-rebellion-in-syria/">The military offensive led by HTS and SNA</a> took place at a time when the main allies of the Syrian regime were weakened. The Russian military forces had been focusing on their imperialist war against Ukraine, while Iran and Hezbollah had taken a blow following Israel’s war in Lebanon. This all reflected the overall structural weakness of the Syrian regime militarily, economically and politically, hence why it collapsed like a house of cards.
The Turkish government most likely assisted the military offensive against the regime in one way or another. Certainly, Ankara's initial objective was to improve its position in future negotiations with the Syrian regime, and with Iran and Russia in particular. However, with the fall of the regime it stood to play an even bigger role. Through the territories conquered by the SNA it also sought to weaken the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which are dominated by the armed wing of the Kurdish party PYD (the sister organisation of the PKK).
After the SNA <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/rebels-take-north-syria-town-us-backed-group-turkish-source-says-2024-12-09/">captured</a> the Tal Rifaat and Shahba areas in Northern Aleppo and of the city of Minbej—previously under the governance of the SDF—this led to over 150,000 civilians being displaced and many violations of human rights against Kurds, including assassinations.
In the lead-up to Assad’s toppling, HTS had relative autonomy vis-à-vis Turkey. The successful seizure of Aleppo showed its evolution into a more disciplined and structured organisation that has brought together a number of military groups under its wing over the years. Whilst it was considered a terrorist <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce313jn453zo">organisation by the UN, US, Turkey and other countries</a>, since its rupture with al-Qaeda in 2016, it was attempting to project a more moderate image as a rational and responsible actor.
However, it remains an authoritarian organisation with an Islamic fundamentalist ideological orientation and foreign fighters within its ranks. Many <a href="https://blogs.eui.eu/medirections/the-present-crisis-in-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-interactions-and-scenarios/">demonstrations</a> took place in Idlib denouncing HTS’ rule and its violations of political freedoms and human rights. Both SNA and HTS are threats to a democratic Syria.
Neither the US nor Israel had a hand in these events; in fact, they were worried about the events leading up to now. Israeli officials, for example, declared that the “collapse of the Assad regime would likely create chaos in which military threats against Israel would develop”. Moreover, since 2011, Israel has never really been in favour of the Syrian regime being overthrown.
In July 2018, Netanyahu had no objection to Assad taking back control of the country and stabilising his power. He said Israel would only act against perceived threats, such as Iran and Hezbollah’s forces/influence, explaining, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights”.
As this stable actor is no more, Israel took matters into its own hands. Indeed, in the days following the fall of the Syrian regime, the Israeli occupation army invaded the Syrian part of Mount Hermon, in the Golan Heights. It sought to prevent the rebels from seizing the area, and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-incursion-into-syria-reaches-25-km-southwest-damascus-security-sources-2024-12-10/">carried out over 350 strikes</a> on anti-aircraft batteries, military airfields, weapons production sites, combat aircraft and missiles. Missile vessels struck the Syrian naval facilities of Al-Bayda port and Latakia port where fifteen Syrian naval vessels were docked.
These raids aim to destroy Syria's military capabilities to prevent them being used against Israel. It is also seeding the message that the Israeli occupation army can cause political instability at any time, should the future government adopt a hostile position that doesn’t serve Israel’s interests.
“Axis of Resistance” versus struggle from below
Alongside ignoring the agency of local Syrian actors, the main issue with the argument promoted by the supporters of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” within the Palestinian solidarity movement, is that it suggests liberation of Palestine will come from above. These states, despite their reactionary and authoritarian nature, and neoliberal economic orientation, will somehow deliver freedom.
This ignores that their foreign policies are shaped by the need to protect their own political interests, and that regional authoritarian states have repeatedly betrayed and repressed the Palestinians.
While rhetorically supporting the Palestinian cause and funding Hamas, since 7 October 2023, Iran has sought to improve its standing in the region in order to be in the best position for future negotiations with the US. It is therefore keen to avoid any direct war with Israel. Its main geopolitical objective in relation to the Palestinians is therefore to use them as leverage.
Similarly, Iran’s passivity towards Israel’s attacks on Lebanon—which was particularly visible following the assassination of key Hezbollah cadres—has demonstrated its first priority is protecting its own geopolitical interests. Not to mention, Iran didn’t hesitate to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/09/hamas-iran-rebuild-ties-falling-out-syria">reduce its funding to Hamas</a> in the past when their interests did not match: like when uprisings erupted in Syria in 2011 and the Palestinian movement refused to support the Assad regime’s murderous repression of protesters.
Similarly, the Syrian regime didn’t respond to Israel’s war on Gaza, despite also facing attacks. Indeed, it has been avoiding any direct confrontation with Israel since 1974.
The regime has actually <a href="https://anticapitalistresistance.org/the-syrian-rebellion-and-palestine/">historically repressed Palestinians in Syria</a>, and killed many since 2011. It also destroyed Yarmouk camp in Damascus, which was home to a considerable Palestinian refugee population. In the last few days, 630 Palestinian political prisoners were released from Sednaya prison alone.
The regime also attacked the Palestinian national movement.
Furthermore, in 1976 <a href="https://merip.org/2005/09/syria-and-lebanon-a-brotherhood-transformed/">Hafez al-Assad’s regime intervened against Palestinian national movement and Lebanese left-wing organisations</a> to support far-right political parties in Lebanon. It also carried out military operations against Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut in 1985 and 1986. In 1990, approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were detained in Syrian prisons.
Supporters of the “Axis of resistance” are also ignoring or refusing to accept the <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241209-hamas-congratulates-syrians-on-ending-assads-rule/">statement</a> by Hamas that congratulates the Syrian people for achieving their “aspirations for freedom and justice” after toppling Bashar al-Assad.
Liberation for all
The list of historical crimes against Palestinians by the Assad regime do not, of course, undermine the fact that US imperialism remains exceptionally destructive and deadly. However, supporting authoritarian and despotic regimes undermines the objective liberating of Palestine. It is accepting that oppression will continue in other parts of the region in the name of freeing one people, which is neither what the Palestinian struggle calls for, nor could it actually deliver the goal.
What happens in the region is ultimately directly linked to the future of Palestine.
A considerable majority of the MENA region’s popular classes identify with the Palestinian struggle and see it as linked to their own local battles for democracy and equality. It is important that those organising in solidarity with Palestine understand that Palestinian and regional popular classes are central social forces capable of creating the conditions required to achieve liberation, with their support.
When Palestinians fight, this triggers a regional liberation movement, and the regional movement in turn fuels that of occupied Palestine.
Far-right minister Avigdor Lieberman recognised the danger that popular uprisings in the MENA posed to Israel back in 2011, when he said the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.
This is not to deny the right of resistance of Palestinians and Lebanese against Israel, but to explain that the united revolt of popular classes has the power to transform the entire region, topple authoritarian regimes and expel the US and other imperialist powers.
The main task of the international solidarity movement for Palestine, particularly in the West, is to denounce the complicit role of our ruling classes in supporting the racist settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel. We must pressure them to break off any political, economic, and military relations with Tel Aviv. This is the only way that Israel weakened, and in turn the path to the liberation of Palestine and the region more widely can be paved.
As a Syrian revolutionary wrote from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights in the summer of 2014: “freedom—a common destiny for Gaza, Yarmouk and the Golan”. This slogan holds out the hope of regional revolutionary transformation, the only realistic strategy for liberation.
First published at <a href="https://www.newarab.com/opinion/syria-palestine-liberation-comes-below">the New Arab</a>. Joseph Daher teaches at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and the University of Ghent, Belgium. He is the author of Syria after the Uprisings, The Political Economy of State Resilience; Hezbollah: the Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God and Marxism and Palestine.

Joseph Daher

From Syria to Palestine, liberation comes from below

On 7 December, around 200,000 South Koreans braved freezing Seoul weather to demand the resignation and impeachment of right-wing President Yoon Suk Yeol after his failed coup attempt four days earlier. 
Yoon declared martial law, for the first time in 44 years, at 10.23pm on 3 December in a surprise national television broadcast, which was met with widespread shock and outrage across South Korea. During the broadcast, the South Korean president, who is from the People Power Party (PPP), justified the enactment of martial law by accusing the National Assembly, which is dominated by the opposition Democratic Party (DPK), of paralysing his administration and causing “political strife” by blocking the proposed national budget and “sabotaging the core functions of the state”, while also “turning Korea into a ‘drug paradise’ and causing panic over public security”. 
In the announcement, Yoon noted that since his government came to power in May 2002, opposition lawmakers in the DPK had brought 22 motions to impeach government officials, including the minister of the Interior and Safety, the minister for National Defence, the chair of the Korea Communications Commission and the president of the Board of Audit and Inspection.
Yoon also accused the National Assembly of being a “den of criminals” engaged in a “legislative dictatorship”, as well as being North Korean agents, going on to say that martial law was necessary “to protect the Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces, to immediately eradicate the unscrupulous pro-Pyongyang anti-state forces that pillage the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect free constitutional order”. 
At 11pm, the full text of the martial law declaration was issued, repeating Yoon’s claim that “anti-state forces” were secretly operating in South Korea and that all political activities by the National Assembly, political parties and associations were now banned, along with all political rallies, protests, strikes and workplace slowdowns. The martial law decree also announced that all press and publications would now be under the control of the military, and that any workers currently engaged in workplace protests must “return to work within 48 hours or face punishment under the Martial Law Act”. The decree concluded by declaring that “violators of the decree may face arrest, detention, and warrantless search and seizure” and other punishment. 
Shocked and angered by Yoon’s declaration, thousands of Korean citizens defied the threat of arrest and flooded the streets outside the National Assembly in protest. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) issued a statement condemning Yoon’s actions, saying, “the people will not forgive this,” as they remembered and had never forgiven the previous dictatorships that had “suppressed citizens and violated democracy”. Opposition lawmakers also raced to the National Assembly to vote to overturn the martial law declaration. Under South Korean law, martial law can be overturned by a two-thirds vote of the 300-strong National Assembly. 
Many of the politicians, including DPK leader Lee Jae-Myung—whose party holds 175 seats in the South Korean parliament—had to scale the walls of the building to enter, while other politicians and staff already inside barricaded the main entrances to stop the military from taking control of the building. 
Footage of Ahn Gwi-Ryeong, a former news anchor turned lawmaker, attempting to stop troops from storming the building also quickly went viral. Ahn, a deputy spokesperson for the DPK, was filmed grabbing the rifle of a soldier, saying: “Don’t you feel shame?” In an interview with Reuters on 6 December, Ahn downplayed her actions, saying that they were not “particularly special” and that “there were many people braver than me who stood up to the martial law troops”, including “people who even managed to stop armoured vehicles outside”, referring to the actions of ordinary citizens who had massed on the streets. 
Failure of the Coup
Despite Yoon’s office contacting the national police to “stand by” approximately four hours before his declaration of martial law, it appears that only a small number of Yoon loyalists within the military and his political party were aware of the coup plot. 
In testimony given on 6 December to the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee, the first deputy director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Hong Jang-Won, described how, minutes after the declaration of martial law, the president contacted both himself and the national director to demand they carry out a series of arrests of Yoon’s political opponents, which they refused to do. According to Hong, the Yoon had ordered him to “use this opportunity to round everyone up. Wipe everything clean”. 
Hong went on to state that Yoon’s arrest list included the head of the KCTU, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court and left-wing journalists, as well as the head of Yoon’s own People Power Party, Han Dong-Hoon, who had been critical of the presidential imposition of martial law. Yoon also sought to target for arrest key members of the opposition party, including the DPK’s national leader Lee Jae-Myung, National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-Shik, the DPK’s National Assembly floor leader Park Chan-Dae and DPK Supreme Council member Kim Min-Seok, who four months earlier had warned that Yoon was preparing a coup. 
According to a Korea Times article published on 3 September, Kim Min-Seok raised concerns about a possible coup during the confirmation hearing for Yoon’s newly appointed defence minister, Kim Yong-Hyun. The DPK lawmaker noted that the government was “suddenly replacing the minister of national defense with [former] Presidential Security Service chief Kim Yong-Hyun, a Cha Ji-Cheol-style suppressor of the opposition”, referring to the long-term political ally and security chief of military dictator Park Chung-Hee, who was assassinated along with Park in 1979. He argued that this, along with Yoon’s sudden use of the phrase “anti-state forces”, signalled “a strategic operation to prepare for martial law by stoking fear of North Korea under considerations of a regional war”. 
The DPK member has further noted that the newly appointed defence minister was also a member of the “Chungam faction,” which included Yoon contemporaries and loyalists who all attended Chungam High School with him. Other loyalists within Yoon’s faction included Park An-Su, the chief of the army, who would later enact the martial law decree following Yoon’s national broadcast, the Defence Counter-Intelligence Commander Yeo In-Hyung and Army Special Forces chief Kwak Jong-Geun and Special Forces Commander Lee Jin-woo.
According to a report on 5 December by Yonhap News Agency, it was Kim Yong-Hyun who recommended that Yoon implement martial law and was also responsible for ordering troops to “infiltrate the National Assembly and block lawmakers from entering the compound during martial law”. The former defence minister was subsequently arrested in the early hours of 7 December on charges of insurrection and abuse of power. On Sunday, 8 December, Yonhap reported that another of Yoon’s loyalists in the Chungam faction, Defence Counterintelligence Commander Yeo In-hung, in November had ordered the preparation of plans to implement martial law. Due to his role in the botched operation, Yeo has been suspended, while investigation into the plot continues. 
While evidence continues to emerge about the planning of the coup, the narrowness of the plot resulted in a lack of communication and confusion between military, police and intelligence commands. This delayed not only the dispatch of the special forces and other military, providing a 40-minute window for both opposition lawmakers and ordinary citizens to mass at the National Assembly to try to stop martial law.
According to a report on 6 December in the conservative Chosun Daily, one of Yoon's closest allies, Interior Minister Lee Sang-Min, lamented the failure of the plot, saying, “Frankly speaking, if we had successfully shut down the National Assembly, the vote on the lifting of martial law would not have happened at all. We could have held back the legislators with ease if we had chosen to”. 
Yoon’s lame duck presidency
Yoon has faced turmoil since becoming president in May 2022. A former prosecutor, Yoon only very narrowly defeated the DPK’s Lee Jae-Myung. During his presidential campaign, Yoon ran on an anti-labour and anti-union platform, threatening to cut the minimum wage, remove limits on working hours and enact policies that would allow corporations to operate free from “excessive” regulation. 
Yoon also sought to capitalise on the growing anti-feminist sentiment among many young male Korean voters impacted by rampant economic inequality caused by decades of neoliberal capitalism but who have blamed the modest gains made by Korean women for their plight. Courting the 20-30-year-old male vote, Yoon called for the abolition of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, claiming that systemic “structural discrimination based on gender” did not exist in South Korea. This is despite the economic and social indicators for women in South Korea being some of the worst in the developed world. 
After winning the presidency, the new president moved to crack down on South Korea’s union movement. Yoon’s anti-labour attacks, however, have sparked widespread opposition. On 24 November 2022, more than 25,000 truck drivers walked off the job for sixteen days to demand job security and for minimum pay rates to be extended to all truck drivers. Seoul subway workers joined the truck drivers on the streets, launching their first strike in six years after negotiations about worker redundancies had collapsed. Yoon’s response was aggressive, invoking a law not used for 18 years to issue a “back-to-work order” five days after the strike had begun. Under the order, workers who failed to comply faced jail terms of up to three years and/or fines of 30 million won (USD $22,400).
In January 2023, just weeks after the back-to-work decree was issued, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions was surrounded by 1,000 riot police as 30 National Intelligence Service agents stormed the building, conducting a ten-hour raid. The NIS accused members of the KCTU and the KCTU-affiliated Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union of being North Korean spies and charged union members with violating South Korea’s anti-communist laws. The KCTU, which has a membership of more than 1 million workers, denounced the raids. In a statement issued by the confederation’s Central Executive Committee, KCTU President Yang Kyeung-Soo accused the president of trampling on democracy, say the union would not stop its criticism of the government and would continue to fight again Yoon’s anti-democratic and anti-labour regime.
Yoon’s popularity has continued to plummet, dropping from 53 percent at the start of his presidency to just 17 percent in August 2024. Already unable to pass much of his legislative agenda, Yoon officially became a lame duck president after the DPK won a landslide victory in the April 2024 general elections. While the DPK increased their seats by 19 to give them 175 and a super-majority with other oppositionists in the National Assembly, Yoon’s PPP lost six seats, reducing their parliamentary number to 108. 
The DPK and opposition super-majority has meant that the National Assembly has been able to pass a range of opposition legislation, while actively stymieing Yoon’s legislative agenda, including his national budget. Yoon, however, has repeatedly used his presidential veto powers to stop opposition legislation moving forward. 
Public anger has continued to grow over Yoon’s abuse of the presidential veto, including his vetoing of a legislative investigation into allegations that his wife had been involved in stock manipulation and had interfered in the nomination process in a June by-election and subsequent local elections. In response to Yoon’s abuse of the presidential veto, the DPK and the KCTU have organised a series of mass rallies with between 100,000 and 300,000 workers and other anti-government protesters taking the street each time, the fifth such rally being held just three days before Yoon’s declaration of martial law. 
Candlelight Protests 
The fallout from Yoon’s failed coup has been swift. The morning after the botched coup, the KCTU announced that they would “commence an indefinite general strike until the Yoon Suk Yeol regime steps down” and that their members would stage ongoing public protests. Trade union members and workers have been joined by tens of thousands of ordinary Koreans each day on the streets. The public’s anger has been further fuelled by 105 of the 108 People Power Party lawmakers in the National Assembly boycotting the impeachment vote on Saturday. 
As word filtered out to the 200,000-strong candlelight protests outside the National Assembly on Saturday night that the vote to impeach Yoon had automatically terminated due to the failure to reach a quorum because of the PPP boycott, protesters demanded they “get back in the chamber” and vote. People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, one of the many groups that helped to organise the Saturday rally, called the boycott of the vote “an act of sympathizing with insurrection that tramples on the will of the people, the true owners of the country”, going on to say that the public would “not tolerate the existence of the People Power Party”. 
 While the DPK has scheduled a motion on 11 December for another impeachment vote in the National Assembly to be held on 14 December, newspaper Hankyoreh, reporting live from the Saturday protest, noted the widespread determination from protesters, who vowed they would “not give up” despite the failure of the first impeachment vote. One student told the newspaper “our candles will only grow brighter” because of the PPP’s lack of action. True to their word, tens of thousands of KCTU workers and other protesters returned to the streets again on 9 December to demand both Yoon’s arrest and impeachment. As both Yoon and his party continue to try to cling to power, hoping to wait out the crisis, pressure from the streets will only continue to intensify as people vow to continue their protests until he is arrested and impeached.

Kim Bullimore

South Korean coup attempt provokes democratic uprising

The fall of the Assad regime, thirteen years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, is among the most extraordinary events in Middle Eastern history.
The 2011 Syrian revolution was the most far-reaching of all the Arab revolts, penetrating deep into every crevice of society. Driven by poverty, economic crisis and hatred of a brutal authoritarian regime, millions took to the streets demanding an end to the regime.
But President Bashar al-Assad’s vicious strategy to maintain his rule—slaughtering half a million people, flattening cities, imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands, forcing millions into exile—came to embody the smashing of all the dreams of democracy and freedom that animated the Arab revolution in its first months.
The Syrian struggle for freedom was assaulted from every conceivable angle. Peaceful protesters were mowed down in the streets without mercy, forcing the resistance to take up arms and transforming the mass movement into a civil war. When it looked like the rebel forces might finally overcome the regime, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah intervened to choke the life out of free Syrian cities. 
The US initially mouthed support for the revolution. But Washington was never interested in a genuinely democratic Syria, which it accurately judged not to be in its foreign policy interests. The US refused to provide the weaponry the rebels were pleading for, which would have allowed them to defeat the regime. It also blocked other states from providing those weapons. This betrayal didn’t save the Syrian revolution from being slandered by many so-called anti-imperialists on the Western left, who shamefully dismissed Syrian aspirations for freedom from dictatorship as little more than a CIA/Mossad plot.
Years of devastating civil war, foreign intervention and monumental death and displacement destroyed almost all of the revolution’s civic institutions and fed the rise of groups whose aims greatly diverged from the spirit that drove revolutionaries in 2011.
Yet, despite everything, and seemingly against all hope, Assad is suddenly gone. In less than two weeks, a rebel offensive that began in the northern city of Aleppo transformed into an extraordinary nationwide uprising that routed the regime. As rebel forces swept south, taking first Hama and then Homs, it became clear that the regime would get little support from its foreign backers. Rebel factions across the country joined the offensive.
Instead of the much-feared influx of Iranian-backed militias from Iraq to defend the regime, regime fighters fled to Iraq or ditched their military uniforms and left their tanks and weapons lying in the streets.
The great lie—that the Assad regime had the support of large numbers of Syrians—disintegrated as quickly as the regime itself. Without Russia and Iran slaughtering people on its behalf, the regime couldn’t last two weeks. As Assad fled the country, his forces melted away. Even the coastal Alawite areas fell with barely a fight. 
The coalition of fighters behind this extraordinary chain of events was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—an Islamist group originating in Jabhat al-Nusra, which was affiliated with al-Qaeda. However, the group that became HTS broke from al-Qaeda and then re-formed under its current name in 2017. For many years, and especially in the course of this uprising, it has emphasised tolerance of other religious groups and minorities and has disavowed the most reactionary elements that characterised al-Nusra and ISIS.
HTS has for years controlled Idlib in the north-west. During that time, it repressed protests, but nothing remotely on the scale of what either the Assad regime or ISIS have been guilty of. It is far too early to know its role in the coming months. But whatever the sincerity of HTS’s shift to a more inclusive, all-Syrian stance, that stance played a vital and probably decisive role in uniting the country behind the rebel offensive. Unity across religious lines was a crucial part of the initial success of the 2011 revolution and will remain so for its prospects. 
However, with Assad gone, Syria’s free and democratic future hinges on a revival of the extraordinary revolutionary energy that first emerged in 2011. The real hope is that the mass of Syrian people can seize this opportunity to build a society of genuine justice and equality that so many gave their lives for.
The scenes emerging from Syria since the fall of the regime are extraordinary: thousands celebrating on the streets, chanting the slogans of unity and freedom that had been buried under years of counter-revolution. 
All ethnic and religious minorities have been involved. Christians in Aleppo chanted, “Syrians united, we are one people!” and decorated their areas of the city with Christmas trees. Alawites in the port city of Tartous, traditionally an important base for Assad, tore down regime statues to wild cheering. In Iraqi Kurdistan, people filled the streets carrying the flag of the Syrian revolution and chanting, “One, one, the Syrian people are one!”
Multi-coloured Druze flags filled the streets alongside the green and black flag of the revolution. Palestinians in Raml refugee camp in Latakia held a nighttime demonstration, lit up with lanterns, protesting against Assad right before he fell. 
Across the country, statues of Bashar and his father, Hafez al-Assad, came crashing down. In one case, a gold one was used as a sled. People mocked Bashar by ostentatiously walking along the red carpet in his Damascus palace and filming themselves saying banned words. It was a nationwide carnival of celebration.
An extraordinary reversal of the mass displacement of the last thirteen years has also begun. Thousands are returning to cities they were forced from in the war. From Lebanon and Türkiye, enormous convoys of former refugees are streaming back into the country.
Nothing has captured the momentous but also heartbreaking nature of this moment more than the liberation of the prisons. As each city fell to the rebellion, the doors of the regime’s vile and vast jails were broken open. “Hellholes” does not adequately convey their nature. Every Syrian knew the reality of these places. They were no secret—the whole point of them was to instil terror in anyone who thought of resisting the regime. But to see the videos of people emerging from them—people who had endured years of torture, physically and mentally broken; to see toddlers, whose mothers had been raped in prison and who had lived their whole lives in these pits—is devastating beyond words. 
The joy of seeing these prisons empty must be accompanied by rage that they were allowed to endure for so long. There are those in the Palestine solidarity movement who laud Iran or Russia—because they purportedly fight against tyranny—and who defended the regime as a heroic part of the “axis of resistance” right until it fell. 
But Assad did nothing for the Palestinians except massacre them and lock them up. Among the thousands released from the notorious Sednaya Prison were 67 members of the Al-Qassam Brigades and 630 other Palestinians, according to reports. Bashar al-Assad, like his father, never fought Israel, either to defend the Palestinians or to take back occupied Syrian land. 
Even if Assad had supported the Palestinians, it wouldn’t have justified his regime or made the revolution illegitimate. You can’t tolerate one genocide to oppose another.
And while there was support for Assad among some activists in the West, Palestinians themselves sympathised with the uprising from the start. And why wouldn’t they? Who knows better than the Palestinians the meaning of genocide, dispossession and exile? And how could anyone watch the beautiful scenes of Syrian refugees returning to their country and not dream of the day the Palestinians will end their long exile?
In any case, whatever short-term geopolitical benefit Israel might now gain (which is not at all clear), the past year has demonstrated, yet again, that there is no hope for a free Palestine in a Middle East ruled by dictators. The hope that dictators in Tehran and Moscow, any more than those in Cairo or Amman, would liberate Palestine was a fantasy. The only hope for Palestinian liberation is an Arab world with the Arab people themselves in charge.
Overnight, Syria has gone from being the most despotic state in the Middle East to the freest. This is not to say that the country’s problems will be resolved simply. There are enormous issues to be worked through and obstacles to be overcome. After a long dictatorship and civil war, the country is deeply scarred and controlled by militias, many of which have fought each other in recent years. The Israelis have already invaded from the west, the Americans have troops in the country, Turkish-backed forces are fighting the Kurds in the north, and ISIS is still active. The struggle ahead will be long and difficult, with no guarantee of success. 
Nevertheless, the precondition for achieving any of the goals of the Syrian revolution was the overthrow of the Assad regime. This is now done; he is gone. The future can start to be written.
Jasmine Duff contributed to this article.

Corey Oakley

Hope returns to Syria

In 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page made what seemed like <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B">a bold claim</a>: “If policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened”. In 2024, that became clearer as billionaires flaunted their influence in the US electoral circus.
It wasn’t just that one corrupt and noxious billionaire, Donald Trump, won the presidential election or that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, used his social media platform and wealth to land a spot as a “virtual” co-president. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/democrat-donors-harris-biden.html">Billionaire Democratic donors</a> for months propped up President Joe Biden, before driving him from the presidential race, having been assured that his replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, <a href="https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/tony-west-negative-influence-on-harris-campaign/">would run a business-friendly, centre-right campaign</a>.
In 2024, the American oligarchy <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/12/06/trump-billionaires-cabinet-elon-musk">emerged from behind the curtain</a>. More accurately, 2024 marked the year when oligarchic tendencies that had been gathering force for decades came into full bloom. Months before Trump narrowly won the election, the Supreme Court, whose unpopularity rivalled Biden’s, granted Trump and future US presidents <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-courts-presidential-immunity-ruling-undermines-democracy">expansive impunity</a> even to commit crimes while in office.
The liberals—the leaders of the Democratic Party and its associated non-governmental organisations, intellectuals, media and fundraisers—said the 2024 election was a <a href="https://dailyjournal.net/2024/10/22/harris-says-democrats-are-ready-if-trump-tries-to-prematurely-declare-victory/">referendum on US democracy</a>, maybe even the last-ditch effort to stop “fascism” riding in on Trump’s coattails. Yet despite the heated rhetoric, they ran an uninspired campaign in defence of a status quo that most Americans had already rejected. They showed themselves (once again) to be a party more interested in touting support from “never-Trump” Republicans than in campaigning for real change for working people.
In the process, they showed their contempt for the main source of activist energy in 2024, the movement opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Their support for Israel wasn’t a surprise. But the degree to which the liberal establishment—from university presidents to the president of the US—<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/criminalization-of-first-amendment-protected-pro-palestinian-speech-is-spreading/">reached to criminalise</a> supposedly First Amendment-protected political activism reminded us of earlier periods of liberal capitulation, such as the <a href="https://accuracy.org/release/how-liberals-collaborated-with-mccarthyism-then-and-now/">anti-communist witch hunts</a> of the 1940s and 1950s.
In 2025, when the Trump administration is trying to outlaw pro-Palestinian activism, or is implementing mass deportations, we will need to remember that the liberals paved the way. When the Democratic Party hierarchy believed that supporting the most restrictive immigration bill in a generation <a href="https://www.ctinsider.com/politics/article/ct-chris-murphy-dnc-speech-19715629.php">was a clever piece of political jujitsu</a> against Trump, we should tell the inconvenient truth. <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/09/27/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-campaign-event-douglas-az/">If you’re competing to show how “tough on the border” you are,</a> you’ve already ceded the ground to the right. And when the voters are presented with the original (Trump) or the copy (the Democrats), <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/11/24/far-right-voters-generally-prefer-the-original-to-the-copy_6285464_23.html">they almost always choose the original</a>.
For all their attempts to disqualify Trump and to make their stand “in the most important election of our lifetimes”, it’s revealing to see the liberals and Democrat leaders revert to “business as usual”. The hosts of the liberal MSNBC’s Morning Joe <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2024-11-18/kissing-the-ring-msnbc-morning-joe-hosts-say-they-met-with-trump-to-reopen-lines-of-communication">visited Mar-a-Lago</a>, Trump’s Florida estate, to “kiss the ring”. Biden, who, earlier in 2024, cast his presidency as no less than a Second World War fight against totalitarianism, welcomed Trump—whose own vice president <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jd-vance-once-compared-trump-hitler-now-they-are-running-mates-2024-07-15/">once called him “America’s Hitler”</a>—for a cordial White House photo op. Even the <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/11/24/resistance-trump-protests-womens-march">2017-era liberal “resistance” is deflated</a>.
So, what is the alternative? One path that 2024 should have closed is <a href="https://jacobin.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture">the electoral road to change</a> that supporters of Bernie Sanders/AOC (New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) reformist politics represent. Since Sanders’ failed 2016 Democratic primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, we’ve heard many social democrats say that <a href="https://jacobin.com/2020/04/third-party-bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism-elections">reforming the Democratic Party</a> is the only meaningful way for the left to impact US politics. 
And yet, in 2024, with Sanders and AOC being “all in” for Joe Biden and then “all in” for Harris, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/">that strategy has run aground</a>. And Sanders’ post-election chastising of the Democrats for “abandoning” the working class is much less credible after he and AOC touted Biden as the most pro-working-class president in our lifetimes.
The next few years under the Trump administration will be exceedingly difficult, with many defeats to come. But there will also be unanticipated and heroic struggles that push back what is, despite the election results, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/a-trump-mandate/">an unpopular agenda of social regression</a>. It’s in those struggles, not in the multibillion-dollar electoral circus we just witnessed, that working-class people can win the change we deserve.

Lance Selfa

US liberalism offers nothing for workers or the left

These French governments just fly past, don’t they? Under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, the expected lifespan of a prime minister has gone from three years to three months. Michel Barnier, the latest PM to fall victim to the rolling political, social and constitutional crisis that is the Macron presidency, was appointed in September and kicked out in time to spend Christmas with his family. His predecessor, Gabriel Attal, lasted a comparatively Methuselean six months. Projecting this rate of decline forward, some online statisticians estimate that the duration of the next French government will be somewhere below zero weeks, potentially triggering a crisis in the space-time continuum on top of the political disorder.
Macron called a midyear snap election to disorganise the left-wing opposition. The move backfired. Support for Macron’s coalition collapsed. An increase in support for the far-right National Rally was outpaced by anti-fascist and anti-neoliberal sentiment, the election bringing a surprise victory for the left-wing Popular Front coalition.
In response, Macron carried out a typically high-handed anti-democratic stunt. Claiming that “nobody had won” the election, he spent weeks locking the various parties into “consultations”. Finally, he appointed as his new prime minister an aged operative of the right-wing Republican Party—a party that had just won 3.8 percent of the vote.
Michel Barnier’s new government was completely dependent on far-right support. He had previously distinguished himself in politics by endorsing some of the most extreme and unconstitutional anti-migrant politics of the far right, including a five-year moratorium on immigration. Marine Le Pen, leader of the quasi-fascist National Rally party, noted approvingly that the new PM was “respectful” of National Rally and its supporters. Her offsider, Jordan Bardella, noted with pleasure that the Barnier government would operate “under surveillance” from the far right, who could bring it down at any moment.
For the fascists, the Barnier government provided a means to implement aspects of their anti-immigrant, pro-cop agenda while remaining unsullied by formal collaboration with Macron. For Macron, Barnier’s main qualification seemed to be that, unlike most other candidates for the prime ministerial post, he would retain Macron’s hated neoliberal pension reforms. Barnier embodied the symbiotic relationship between Macron’s neoliberal authoritarians and the French far right, for all that those forces denounce each other demagogically.
France’s broad reformist left is unusual: its most influential and biggest part is also the most left wing. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s pugnacious electoral outfit, France Unbowed, is the main force on the French left. It drags behind it the Greens and France’s ancient, decrepit Socialist Party, whose leaders are constantly tormented by the desire to break with the coalition and return to “respectable” centre politics. When Barnier’s appointment proved Macron’s desire to completely ignore popular concerns, protests broke out throughout France. The left spoke in strong terms: France Unbowed, and others around its region of the left, called the move a “coup against democracy”.
But the reformist left did not rise to the level of its own rhetoric. The midyear elections proved there is strong social support, especially in the big cities, for a left-wing, anti-racist political program. The entire Macron presidency has proven the willingness of workers, students and the oppressed to mobilise in protests, occupations and serious, prolonged strike movements. France faces the real prospect of fascist governments and presidencies. The left-reformist coalition, and particularly France Unbowed, have articulated a pretty coherent anti-racist, left-reformist program, and backed it up with impressive speech making and disruptive parliamentary operations. They have helped cohere and shape a left-wing current in French society that is in better health than what is found in many other imperialist countries. They have scored important victories—including the electoral defeat of the far right this year. But speech making and parliamentary interventions are not sufficient to confront a growing fascist menace in a country experiencing what is effectively a permanent political crisis.
France Unbowed’s main response to the Barnier government was to move repeated no-confidence motions, exposing his dependence on the far right each time the National Rally voted to keep him in power. Now, after Barnier proposed an austerity budget, the far right have decided to bring him down. 
Time after time in France, as social struggles are converted into parliamentary crises, the initiative has passed to the far right. This was true even of the electoral mobilisations, where mass support for a left-wing government was in part defused by Macron’s long procrastination in nominating a new government. It is even more true of the strikes and protests that have been a recurring feature of Macron’s presidency. Both Macron and Le Pen tend to passively wait out the big eruptions of social struggle. It is much easier for right-wing forces—both of the neoliberal and far-right variety—to get away with their political tricks when the streets are empty of protesters, strikers have gone back to work, and the only path to resolve social problems seems to be the state.
The causes of the crisis are not hard to understand. Macron’s commitment to neoliberal austerity politics is confronting a population that consistently rejects his program. Macron’s refusal to back down requires him to engage in more daring experiments with the anti-democratic provisions of the French constitution, and with racist scapegoating. This has fuelled the rise of the far right along with the revival of a social-democratic left. None of these currents can claim a complete social majority. The best weapon of the left is its capacity to mobilise workers and the oppressed in joint struggle, regardless of the rhythm and schedule of elections, and in defiance of the law and constitution if necessary. A significant national strike against Barnier’s austerity budget—a strike that continued even after Barnier had resigned—shows the capacity for resistance to develop and grow remains.
The crisis is likely to deepen. France’s economy is under serious pressure, and not only from the familiar effects of neoliberalism. Last year, the fascist Eric Zemmour, interviewed on Le Grand Jury, analysed the French economy from a different perspective: “France has managed to bring its artillery production from 1,000 to 3,000 shells per month”, he explained. “You must know that Ukraine consumes 5,000 shells a day, and that the Russians produce a million shells a year. Voilà: the balance of forces.” 
Macron, the military-industrial hawk of Europe, sees things in similar terms. Late last year, he spoke of the need for a “long-term war economy” in France. France aims to triple its annual manufacturing of 155mm shells; Russia produces more of its equivalent than all the EU combined. Macron’s project of bringing down the debt and deficit while ramping up military production will require economic sacrifices.
“We have rediscovered what great nations can do: realise the impossible”, Macron said at the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The ceremony did not necessarily provide the symbolic moment of optimism and hopefulness that was intended. Barnier’s government had fallen, and no replacement had been appointed. Macron’s audience included firefighters and priests. It also included President-elect Donald Trump, whose concept of a “great nation” is largely shared by France’s far right and may define future French governments. With him was Volodymyr Zelenskyy; his besieged nation’s need for artillery shells and air defence systems foreshadows how imperialist war is likely to reshape world politics in the coming years.

D. Taylor

On the fall of France’s government

“Step down, impeach, arrest!” chanted around one million protesters, according to rally organisers, in Yeoido, Seoul, on 7 December. They were demanding the impeachment of South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol, who days earlier had declared martial law. In front of the National Assembly, people chanted, sang and waited tentatively in the cold for hours for the outcome of the impeachment vote.
Seven years earlier, the incumbent right-wing party, now rebranded to People Power Party (PPP), faced another one-million strong impeachment movement that successfully brought down the Park Geun-hye government. “This time it’s very fast”, Seon-gyeong, a socialist student organiser with Workers’ Solidarity told Red Flag during the demonstration. She explained how it took many months of patient work to grow the anti-Park movement. In the end, rail strikes were the lynch pin for its success.
Striking workers spoke from the main stage. Three days into their strike, Kang Jeong-nam, head of the Seoul branch of the railway union, apologised to the crowd for any inconvenience. “It’s okay! ... Keep going!” thousands shouted back. “But it’s okay to be uncomfortable right now, right?” Kang said, which was met with a loud supporting cheer.
People in the crowd flew satirical flags from the anti-Park movement. Some held repurposed signs, crossing out “Park” and adding “Yoon”. The lively block of university students reached around 100,000—many hoped that such large numbers would guarantee impeachment. “Impeach Yoon Seok-yeol! Arrest Yoon Seok-yeol!” the crowd chanted in unison. 
There’s a sense of déjà vu at the demonstration: a corrupt PPP, rail strikes and impeachment. However, Seon-gyeong isn’t sure that the result will be the same as 2016, when impeachment led to a heavy electoral defeat for the conservative party. 
When the vote was eventually held, all bar a few PPP members left the assembly, resulting in a failed vote. The crowd was incensed. “Come back you traitors!” people yelled as the main stage called out the names of each absent politician. As the sham became apparent, people streamed out of the rally, cursing the PPP. Organisers asked people to stay, but most knew it was over. There were neither tears nor rage, just disgust and a determination to keep coming back until the job is finished.
“Next week! Next week!” people chanted as they left the rally. The opposition vowed to reintroduce another impeachment bill in a few days, but “it’s not just about how big the next rally is” Seon-gyeong said, but whether it will be large and sustained enough to encourage more workers to join the strike.
The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) have promised an indefinite general strike until Yoon is impeached. Some of the key areas covered are the Hyundai manufacturing plants in Ulsan, the site of historic labour struggles in 1987 and 2006. “Yoon Seok-yeol is most afraid of the union between the KCTU and the citizens”, KCTU Chairman Yang Kyung-soo said from the main stage.
Yoon is determined to cling on to power. But millions of South Koreans are even more determined to oust him.

Jayden Trask

One million protest for Yoon Seok-yeol’s impeachment

You know the multiverse theory, that there are many parallel universes, and that they may contain alternate versions of ourselves and our conditions in this universe … Well, the last couple of days feel like we’ve jumped from one existence into a parallel universe, one in which a lot more is possible. 
This universe is a flexible, more cheerful place, in which the Syrian revolution may even be resolved. (As it happens, we went the day before yesterday [30 November—ed.] on a trip to Edinburgh to see my son. He bought us tickets to the Museum of Illusions. We walked through an arrangement of swirling lights called The Vortex, and we lost our balance. Was that when it happened? When we got home we heard the news that Aleppo city had been liberated.)
The rebels advanced out of the narrow strip of Idlib in which they and millions of Syrians from around the country had been crammed for over four years. “The rebels” here means a military alliance under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—the greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s still an authoritarian Islamist militia, but it’s not at all “like ISIS”, as the uninformed are saying. 
It broke definitively from the ISIS stream in 2014. It has a much more positive policy towards sectarian and ethnic minorities than ISIS. It allows far greater space for pluralism, disagreement and consultation than ISIS did (though it still arrests and detains some political opponents and tortures them). Unlike ISIS, it doesn’t field a Hisba Diwan (morality police) to interfere in people’s daily lives. Its focus is Syrian rather than transnational. It doesn’t threaten the West.
Its Fath al-Mubeen military alliance also incorporates lots of members of other less authoritarian groups that were displaced to Idlib and then gobbled up by HTS. HTS has not been popular among people in Idlib—they’ve been demonstrating against it for months—but its offensive is wildly popular because the people want to be rid of Assad and his foreign backers and to return to their homes.
I didn’t expect the offensive, at least not on this scale. Nobody did. At first, it looked to me like a controlled operation to restore the agreed Astana lines—that is, the division of north-west Syria agreed upon at Astana by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Russia had pushed Turkey to normalise and negotiate with Assad, and Turkey had tried hard to do so. Assad had refused to budge from his maximalist positions, the Russians don’t want to alienate Turkey (given their difficult position attacking Ukraine), and Turkey needs more Syrian territory to which to send Syrian refugees. So perhaps the Turks and Russians were scaring Assad into negotiating by taking a few towns in the Aleppo countryside.
But the offensive went much further than that, far beyond the Astana lines. News came, meanwhile, that the Turks had prevented the Syrian National Army—comprised of former Free Army militias now under Turkish control—from moving towards eastern Aleppo. This allowed the PKK-dominated SDF to take areas in Aleppo abandoned by collapsing Assad forces—surely the opposite of what Turkey wanted. Turkey was not, therefore, in control of events. Turkey clearly didn’t know what was going on.
What this offensive shows, therefore, is Syrians organising themselves, and Assad’s gangster regime crumbling as soon as Russian and Iranian imperialists are unable to protect it. When Assad subjugated free Aleppo in 2016, 80 percent of his ground troops were Iranian-organised transnational Shia militia and the air force was Russian. Now, the Iranian militia system is weak as a result of its targeting by Israel. In particular, Hizbullah was decapitated. (After 2011, Hizbullah turned itself from a resistance organisation into a counter-revolutionary tool, and was infiltrated and now destroyed by Israel as a result – but that’s another story.) The Russians are preoccupied with their invasion of Ukraine. 
In these circumstances, the unsustainable nature of regime rule comes inevitably to the fore. Anybody who knew Syria knew that the regime was widely hated, that it had utterly destroyed the Syrian economy, and that it was held in place only by foreign powers. But nobody expected such a dramatic and sudden turnaround.
The rebels swept into Aleppo city. The regime and the Iranian militias, which had previously spent years battling for the city, fled without resistance. Military analysts say the rebels appear better organised and more disciplined than ever before. Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the HTS leader, issued directives to his men to respect the civilians of the city, including the large population of Christians and other minorities. 
So far, I have heard one unconfirmed report of a woman being ordered by a rebel fighter to cover her hair, but nothing worse. Apparently, people in the city are nervous of how the rebels may behave, and of course of punitive Russian and Assadist bombing, which has already begun. (It is important to hold the rebel fighters to account, and to high standards. In the past, they have helped the revolution’s enemies with their violations of Syrian people’s rights.)
Key towns in Idlib province were quickly liberated—places that were once full of creative revolutionary activity, like Saraqeb, Khan Sheikhoun, Ma’aret al-Nowman, and Kafranbel. Next, the offensive moved into the Hama countryside, taking towns like Morek. Years’ worth of progress is happening in mere hours. As I write [1 December—ed.], the rebels are at the gates of Hama city.
This is by far the best news in many years. Assad, Iran and Russia are being smashed. Prisoners are being released (moving footage can be seen of prisoners, including many women, rushing out of the dungeons in Aleppo <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2024/04/11/syrian-gulag/">in which they were tortured and starved</a>). Hundreds of thousands of people are returning to their homes.
Apparently, Rastan and Talbiseh, towns in Homs province, have been liberated by armed residents. In Deraa in the south, several towns have risen against Assad. (Next door, the Druze-dominated Sweida province is already largely autonomous, having <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2023/08/26/revolutionary-resurgence-in-syria/">roundly rejected Assad well over a year ago</a>.) The Turkish-backed National Army, meanwhile, is this morning moving into territory held jointly by the PKK/SDF and the Assad regime in the Tel Rifaat area.
The fact that other parts of Syria are rising, and under different commands, is important because it means HTS influence will be diluted. If several parts of the country are liberated, HTS will have to build a united front with people with other perspectives and political backgrounds.
This doesn’t mean that the democratic revolution is about to seize power, or that Syria is about to enter paradise. The civil revolution that began in 2011 was largely crushed, its experiments in democracy eliminated, its most grassroots military forces co-opted or gobbled up by more powerful and authoritarian actors. There are no longer hundreds of independent, quasi-democratic local councils to organise civil life. The country is divided, traumatised, cursed by warlords and foreign occupiers. 
But suddenly, it looks as if it may be possible not only to challenge but to end the rule of the monster, which means it may become possible for millions to go home, and therefore for civil society to begin to reconstitute itself. The future can’t start until Assad is gone.
Today, the most important events may occur around the city of Hama, where the regime may be able to mobilise fighters based in loyal communities to stage a fightback. If the dominoes continue to fall, I’d expect very fierce fighting in Homs and Damascus, where militarised Alawi communities have been planted in strategic locations precisely for this eventuality.
I also expect all fascist forces regionally and globally to do what they can to stop Syrian self-determination, including the genocidal Zionist state, which Assad father and son have served so well. Israel certainly wishes to crush Hizbullah and the Iranian militia system, but it doesn’t want to unseat the dictatorship <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2023/03/05/palestinian-assadists/">which handed over the Golan</a> and which imprisons teenage girls (like Tal al-Mallouhi) if they write poems about Palestine. 
Already, there are Zionists making noises about the “danger of chemical weapons falling into the hands of jihadists”—people who didn’t worry about chemical weapons in the hands of Assad, who slaughtered thousands of innocents with them, or in the hands of the Iranian militias that are supposedly such a threat to them.
People who still choose to believe that the fascist Assad regime—which murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians, and recently withdrew further from its side of the Golan so that Israel could advance—is “anti-Zionist”, well, I really can’t help them. Freedom for the Syrians from fascism and foreign occupation is a noble aim in itself. So is freedom for the Arabs in general from the dictatorships which abuse them. This is actually a precondition for Palestinian liberation.
But today, it doesn’t matter so much what outsiders think. History is being made on the ground.
First published at <a href="https://qunfuz.com">Qunfuz.com</a>. Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Damascus-Robin-Yassin-Kassab/dp/0141035641/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_1_0/275-3026135-7857639">The Road From Damascus</a>, and co-author, with Leila al-Shami, <a href="http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745336220">Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War</a>.

Robin Yassin-Kassab

In Syria, history is being made on the ground

At least 42,000 people flooded Pōneke (Wellington), Aotearoa (New Zealand), on 19 November, as the final act of the hīkoi mō te Tiriti (protest march for the Treaty).
The hīkoi began in Cape Reinga, the northernmost point of the North Island, and travelled more than 1000 kilometres over nine days, ending at the New Zealand parliament. Tens of thousands joined the march as it moved through the North Island, and Iwi (Māori tribes) from across the country participated. Many Tangata Titiriti (non-Māori New Zealanders) joined and supported the action.
The hīkoi marks the latest in a long and proud history of Māori resistance, bringing the population together in opposition to the racist right-wing government currently in power and the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT) party’s Treaty Principles Bill.
A notable moment was when the hīkoi crossed the Auckland Harbour Bridge and visited Ihumātao. Ihumātao is Māori land that has been an ongoing site of occupation and protest as the state (under both Labour and Nationals) attempts to sell it to private developers in flagrant breach of Te Tiriti O Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi).
The hīkoi finished its march at parliament, where crowds filled the grounds to capacity to hear from hīkoi leaders and Te Pāti Māori MPs. A petition to stop the Treaty Principles Bill with more than 281,150 signatures (a larger number than the total vote for the ACT party in the last election) was also delivered to parliament.
Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke (a Te Pāti Māori MP, and at 22 years old the youngest MP in parliament) gave an emotional recounting of the Haka she had performed in parliament the day before, describing how she received a 24-hour suspension as punishment but “the next day, showed up outside the steps with 100,000 of my people”. David Seymour, author of the Treaty Principles Bill and ACT leader, attempted to speak to the crowd, but was drowned out by chants of “Kill the bill” and retreated to sook on his social media.
The day finished with a celebration of the largest hīkoi in Aotearoa’s history at Waitangi Park. Those present described the mood as defiant and joyful, as Māori and non-Māori celebrated together. “What’s good for Māori is good for everyone, we come here in peace, we love everyone no matter who you are, where you come from” one protester told Radio New Zealand.
There were solidarity protests in London, New York, the Cook Islands and across Australia, with the hīkoi solidarity action in Melbourne drawing hundreds of people.
The bill
Tiriti O Waitangi enshrines Tino Rangatiratanga (self-determination or sovereignty) for Māori. However, there are two versions, one in English and one in Māori, and only the Māori one recognises Māori sovereignty. The Treaty Principles were established to resolve this contradiction as part of the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act. The principles are partnership, participation and the guarantee of rangatiratanga for Māori.
ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill, which would replace the current principles with “All New Zealanders are equal under the law, with the same rights and duties, The New Zealand Government has the right to govern New Zealand, The New Zealand Government will protect all New Zealanders’ authority over their land and other property”, is a racist attack on Māori sovereignty. Seymour argues the current principles give Māori “special privileges”, a recurring racist argument from the right. 
NZ First and the Nationals, the other two parties in the governing coalition, agreed to support the bill’s first reading in order to get ACT to join their coalition so they could cobble together a government. They have said they will not support the bill beyond its first reading, but their support up to now has emboldened the racist far right and provided it with significant air time. And the Nationals and NZ First have spent the last year attacking Māori rights in other ways, including destroying the Māori health authority and restricting the use of Te Reo Māori (Māori language) in government.
At the bill’s first parliamentary reading, instead of announcing Te Pāti Māori’s vote, Maipi-Clarke tore up the bill and began a haka. She was joined by the rest of Te Pāti Māori MPs, Māori Green MPs and members of the public in the gallery. Maipi-Clarke has become something of a hero for many on the left during her first year in parliament. She used her maiden speech to do a haka, and has repeatedly taken on right-wing politicians like Winston Peters (vice prime minister and leader of the NZ First Party).
Peters is a bastion of the conservative and reactionary right wing, and he regularly demeans and attacks Maipi-Clarke, although he is Māori himself. After he told her to “listen to her elders, hush up and learn some manners” and “stop showing off” in the parliamentary budget debate, Maipi-Clarke’s speech in response ended with her saying “moumou tō toto Māori” to Peters three times, which translates as “a waste of Māori blood”. The video of her response went viral and sparked a Tiktok trend involving young Māori women lip-syncing to the speech.
1960s radicalisation leads to new organised resistance
To understand what’s happening today, history is important. Māori were pushed into the capitalist workforce in the major cities to support the war effort in World War Two, while their land was increasingly stolen by the state. By 1975, Māori controlled only 2 million hectares of their land.
By 1966, 70 percent of Māori men worked in production, transport-equipment operation and labouring, centred in industrial zones. Māori were subject to racist discriminatory laws, forced into impoverished, over-policed city suburbs, denied opportunities and education, restricted to difficult and low-waged work, had their children removed and abused by the state, and were punished for practising their culture or speaking their language. In 1961, Māori life expectancy was 15 years less than Pākehā (white New Zealanders), and Māori were three times more likely to be unemployed. In 1960, only 25 percent of Māori could speak Te Reo (the Māori language), and by 1975, only 5 percent of children could. Resentment towards the system, especially among urban youth, was rising.
The radicalisation of the 1960s brought movements against the Vietnam War, for women’s rights, against Māori exclusion from the 1960 All Blacks rugby tour of South Africa and an increase in strikes. Many young Māori participated in these movements and emerged as political leaders, and an array of radical organisations sprung up in the cities.
The Māori Organisation on Human Rights (MOOHR) was founded in Wellington in 1967 by Tama Poata. Poata was a member of the New Zealand Communist Party and the Wellington Drivers Union and was labelled the country’s “leading Māori Communist” by ex-Prime Minister Robert Muldoon.
MOOHR was established when Poata organised mostly Māori and Pasifika drivers in his union to resist the Maori Affairs Amendment Act, a law designed to break up what was left of Māori communal land ownership. MOOHR campaigned for a cross-racial resistance to capitalism, which it saw as the cause of all oppression and inequality, and published a regular newsletter.
In 1970, Ngā Tamatoa (Young Warriors) was established at a young Māori leaders conference at Auckland university under the guidance of Ranginui Walker, a Māori academic. These Māori student leaders were inspired by the Black power movements in the US, and wanted an organised fight for Māori sovereignty, not a polite appeal. After the group was established, it was joined by Māori highschoolers and young workers in urban centres, like Tama Poata. Ngā Tamatoa was not explicitly anti-capitalist, and members had different political approaches, which would diverge more drastically as time went on. Although labelled “violent revolutionaries” by the mainstream press, only some members believed in armed uprising, and Ngā Tamatoa organised only peaceful resistance and community aid.
Ngā Tamatoa’s first action was to protest Waitangi Day celebrations, which it argued should be a day of mourning and reflection on the ongoing oppression of Māori people. In 1973, members of Ngā Tamatoa like Hana Te Hemara were arrested as they tried to burn the union jack and storm the stage on which Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk was speaking. Kirk had recently changed the name to New Zealand Day in an attempt to obscure Aotearoa’s colonial history. Hana Te Hemara is Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke’s great aunty and her namesake. In 1972, Ngā Tamatoa, the New Zealand Māori Students’ Association and the Māori Language Society delivered a petition to parliament with 30,000 signatures to teach Te Reo Māori in schools, presented by Hana Te Hemara. It was signed by a significant number of Pākehā, and reflected a shift in mainstream Pākehā consciousness against Māori oppression. Another Ngā Tamatoa member, Tame Iti, set up the Māori tent embassy that same year, inspired by the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra.
The Polynesian Panthers were formed in Auckland in 1971 by Will ’Ilolahia and five other Pasifika youth, with an average age of 20. They were a revolutionary socialist organisation formed to fight racism, inspired by the Black Panther Party in the US.
Many Pasifika people were brought to Aotearoa in the 1950s to do the hardest, lowest paid work, and they faced systemic racism. In the 1970s they were blamed for the economic crisis by the media and ruling class, who depicted them as job-stealing criminals. They were subjected to violent “dawn raids” brought in by Norman Kirk in 1973, in which police would break into homes while people slept and forcibly take them to the police station without any belongings to be deported, for apparently overstaying their visas. The Polynesian Panthers provided community support, set up a pig patrol and organised activism and occupations of homes whose families were being evicted. They also carried out dawn raid of minister’s houses, drawing widespread publicity to the depravity of the dawn raids.
Miriama Rauhihi Ness joined the Polynesian Panthers in 1971. After moving to Auckland when she was 18, she worked in a sewing factory with many Pasifika women. She became a union representative and within six months had organised a strike over unfair conditions for Pasifika workers. After joining the Panthers, she became a key organiser and held the culture portfolio, organising workshops educating members on sexism and chauvinism.
1975 land rights hikoi: not one more acre of Māori land!
In 1975, Ngā Tamatoa, the Polynesian Panthers, Whina Cooper and other left-wing groups took on the loss of Māori land together. Whina Cooper was a revered activist who fought both women’s and Māori oppression through her activism for Māori land rights, beginning in 1915 when she was only 19 years old. As a single mother in 1949, she moved to Auckland and worked with the Māori women’s welfare league. Her involvement in both the fight for Māori land rights in rural areas and against urban Māori impoverishment, demonstrated to her the connection between the two issues.
In 1975, at age 79, she organised Te Ropu o te Matakite (the people with foresight), an organising group for a hīkoi for Māori land rights. The group was made up of Ngā Tamatoa members, Polynesian Panthers and other left-wing activists. Deciding on the slogan “Not one more acre of Māori land”, they encouraged diversity in politics and tactics, and united the activism of the old and new generations. They also sought to consolidate support for Māori land rights amongst other oppressed demographics, writing; “We see no difference between the aspirations of Māori people and the desire of workers in their struggles. We seek the support of workers and organisations, as the only viable bodies which have sympathy and understanding of the Māori people and their desires. The people who are oppressing the workers are the same who are exploiting the Māori today”.
To journey down the entire North Island on foot was a decision made by organisers to draw attention to their struggle, and to connect with different Iwi. As they travelled, they stayed at different Marae (meeting houses), and Whina Cooper would spend the nights agitating for more people to join the hīkoi and sign their petition to end the sale of Māori land and for Māori control over Māori land. She was often successful.
After the hīkoi concluded, 60 protesters occupied parliament’s lawn. The pressure from this resistance led to the Treaty of Waitangi Act, which established the Waitangi Tribunal, a court that would examine the theft of Māori land and breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, and bring the Treaty into law.
The act also established Treaty Principles, made necessary by the discrepancy between the English and Māori treaty documents, which enshrined Māori sovereignty in law. But the tribunal created to uphold the principles was not given power to enforce its decisions.
Members of Ngā Tamatoa and the Polynesian Panthers continued to organise resistance throughout the 1970s. Although they had dissolved by the 1980s, many continued to organise resistance and activism, becoming key organisers of the anti-apartheid action against the 1981 South African Springbok tour.
Ngā Tamatoa members also went on to be key figures in the Māori cultural renaissance. They worked in unions, the arts and community to revitalise Māori culture and pride. The renaissance brought Māori language back from near extinction, and led to the establishment of Kohanga reo and Kurakaupapa (Māori language schools) in the late 1970s, and later Māori radio, television and film.
A policy of “bi-culturalism” was adopted by the Labour Government in 1984, which included Māori personnel, Māori models of organisation and Māori social practices and cultural symbolism in institutions of the state. In 1987, the Māori Language Act was passed, making Te Reo Māori an official language of Aotearoa. Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke attended Kohanga reo, and is seen as representative of a Kohanga reo generation, who have been raised with pride in Māori culture.
Some Ngā Tamatoa members moved towards the right. Donna Awatere Huata, who wrote the influential book Māori Sovereignty, later started a consulting business that provided Māori cultural education for government departments like the treasury and the police. In 1996 she joined ACT, the right-wing libertarian party, and became an MP.
2004 foreshore and seabed hikoi
In 2004, the Labour government under Helen Clarke announced the seizure of the foreshore and seabed around Aotearoa by the state. The Foreshore and Seabed Act would annex millions of hectares of marine land from Māori, the largest grab since the 1800s. The act was in response to appeals made by Māori to have their customary right to the foreshore and seabed recognised.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the Māori Land Court should determine whether the foreshore and seabed could be customary land. The Court of Appeal ruling (which didn’t give anything to Māori) was jumped on by the right. National party MP Nick Smith started a petition to “save our beaches” from Māori who were trying to “steal them”. The Nationals spread racist rhetoric that Māori had special privileges, and at a protest Nick Smith attended, many Pākehā brought placards with racist slogans, such as “Whites have rights too”.
The National party elected Don Brash as leader, who had previously led ACT. He doubled down on the vicious racist attack against Māori, and jumped 17 percent in the polls. Instead of condemning the racism of the right wing and supporting Māori customary rights, Clark lurched to the right herself with the Foreshore and Seabed Act.
Māori decided to replicate the 1975 hīkoi to resist the Foreshore and Seabed Act and the rampant racism being pushed from the top of society. Some of the key organisers were Ngā Tamatoa veterans like Hone Harawira. As in 1975, the hīkoi travelled from the top of the North Island to parliament, stopping at Marae along the way to gather support, under the slogan “Māori Seabed, For Shore”! Young Māori played an active role in the hīikoi, and many had learnt about the 1975 land march in Kurakaupapa. As the growing hīkoi advanced on the capital, Clark hardened her attacks, infamously saying, “What it is is the same old faces—the Ken Mairs, the Harawira families, the Annette Sykes—the haters and wreckers”.
Around 15,000 people arrived at parliament as the hīkoi concluded, filling the grounds. The Labour Party held most of the seven Māori seats (seats that are reserved for Māori MPs, which only Māori can vote for) in parliament. These MPs were facing expulsion from the party if they did not vote for the act. Only one Labour Māori MP, Tariana Turia, voted against and despite the massive protest, the act passed.
Organisers of the hīkoi began to look to different avenues for change. Hone Harawira and Tariana Turia decided to create the Māori Party (today Te Pati Māori), as a way to combat the two major parties’ anti-Māori politics and fight for Māori rights in parliament. The party went on to help National form a government in 2008, and the Foreshore and Seabed Act was overturned and replaced by the Marine and Coastal Area Act. This decision to join a National Party government led to Hone Harawira resigning and a plummet in the party’s public support.
Prior to the 2017 election, Raiwiri Waititi and Debbie Ngawera-Packer were elected leaders (and still are today). Under their leadership the party has moved to the left. In the 2023 election they won six seats, claiming five from Labour, reflecting a political polarisation and collapse in support for the centre. They have used their platform in parliament to build campaigns and movements on the ground, like Hīkoi mō te Tiriti. 
Hīkoi mō te Tiriti is the largest hīkoi ever. It is the latest chapter in this radical tradition, buoyed by the two preceding Hīkoi and Aotearo’s rich history of resistance. It is an escalation of a protest movement that is mobilising huge numbers of Māori and non-Māori in unity against the right, and is gathering momentum. There is much to learn and take inspiration from in the current movement, and the radical tradition on which it builds.

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