“Don’t be afraid, we are all together”—the chant rings out inside Tehran’s grand bazaar. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DS5tciAErAZ/">A young woman, bravely unveiled</a>, leads a march of hundreds through one of the oldest markets in the world. 
The collapse of the rial, Iran’s official currency, has triggered the biggest protests since the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in 2022. On Sunday 28 December, in the Iranian capital Tehran, the grand bazaar erupted. Merchants closed their shops and took to the streets chanting “shut it down”. Within 72 hours protests had spread to more than 21 of Iran’s 31 provinces, according to a report in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/world/middleeast/iran-shutdown-protests.html">New York Times.</a> From the Mashhad metro to the tiny town of Farsan, demonstrators converged on street corners and squares with the slogan “death to the dictator” —a reference to the 46-year-old Islamic theocracy—featuring prominently. 
Rebellion on the streets soon reached the major universities. From Tehran to Tabriz, students joined rallies in their hundreds demanding an end to poverty and corruption. <a href="https://en.kolbarnews.com/expansion-of-protests-and-strikes-on-the-fifth-day/">Activists at the Khajeh Nasir University</a> warned “we will go until the overthrow and death of the dictator”. Echoes of the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising were everywhere, such as women with headscarves in their hands declaring “no headscarf, no veil, freedom and equality” and “women, life, freedom”. 
Protests have grown over the past five days despite severe state repression, with reports of police using live ammunition against demonstrators, raiding people’s homes and kidnapping them off the streets. According to the human rights group <a href="https://hengaw.net/en/news/2026/01/article-7">Hengaw</a>, at least three protestors, including a child, have been killed in Iran’s Lorestan province. Meanwhile, <a href="https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/basij-forces-member-killed-during-iran-protests-in-first">Said Pourali,</a> the deputy governor of Lorestan, claimed that protestors had killed a member of the Basij, the paramilitary militia within Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Roots of the rebellion 
This is the latest in a series of uprisings that have rocked Iran over the past decade. In 2017, workers went on strike across the country to demand bread, jobs and freedom. They burned down police stations and attacked banks. The sugarcane workers in Khuzestan established workers’ councils to fight for control over production. The 2017-2018 general strike precipitated the 2019 November uprising, sparked by a 200 percent increase in the price of fuel. Students rioted under the slogan “strike and revolution”. The strike committees active in 2017 re-emerged, and new sections of workers joined the struggle. The regime drowned the rebellion in blood but could not crush the will of the people for long. 
Strikes continued to ebb and flow in the first year of the pandemic. Then in 2021, protests erupted in Khuzestan in response to severe water shortages and soon spread to other cities and towns. A few months later, oil workers went on strike to protest the sham election of Ebrahim Raisi as president. Protests and strikes continued through 2022, from the smallest province Khorasan to the capital Tehran. This cycle of revolt reached its climax in the 2022 <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/we-are-all-mahsa-riots-shake-iran">Woman, Life, Freedom uprising</a>, triggered by the police murder of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Gina Mahsa Amini. This was the largest uprising since the 1979 Iranian Revolution which saw the overthrow of the US-backed Shah dictatorship. 
The successive rebellions in Iran have deep economic and political roots. Runaway inflation and a collapsing national currency have been compounded by decades of government corruption and Western sanctions. Despite having the world’s second largest gas reserves and third largest oil reserves, nearly 70 percent of the Iranian population live below the poverty line, according to a report by the <a href="https://iran-hrm.com/2025/10/17/poverty-and-the-collapse-of-human-dignity-in-iran/">Iran Human Rights Monitor</a>. The minimum wage for Iranian workers is the worst in the region, behind even Afghanistan and Yemen, and the labour force participation rate has fallen to 41 percent, as documented by the <a href="https://www.meforum.org/mef-observer/the-year-in-review-irans-deepening-economic-crisis">Middle East Forum Observer</a>. The collapse of the rial, <a href="https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/12/31/empty-tables-sanctions-battered-currency-why-irans-protests-are-different-this-time">down around 20 percent</a> in the last month alone, has further eroded ordinary people’s purchasing power, making it even harder to buy already hyper-inflated goods like food and medicine. 
Meanwhile, the cabal of criminals who run Iran live in luxury. Oil tycoons, steel magnates, politicians and the elite military and police make billions in profit from exploiting and oppressing the working class. According to Iranian based economist Ali Heidari, nearly one-third of the country’s wealth is now concentrated in the hands of just one percent of the population. The regime has responded to the crisis by doubling down on austerity measures: gutting healthcare and infrastructure and attacking workers’ wages and conditions. 
A regime in crisis
All this has further fuelled a longstanding crisis of legitimacy for the regime. It has no popular support, instead maintaining its rule through sheer force with over <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20141025084454/http:/en.iranwire.com/features/6081/">sixteen intelligence agencies</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/irans-coercive-apparatus-capacity-and-desire">one of the largest civil militia organisations in the world</a>. But Iran’s rulers know that despite their best efforts, they can’t completely crush dissent. The election of Reformers’ Party candidate Masoud Pezeshkian to the presidency in July 2024 signalled an attempt by the state to soften its image after crushing the Women, Life, Freedom uprising. Pezeshkian paid shallow lip service to the movement demanding an end to the mandatory hijab and criticised the morality police, who enforce the sexist policies of the state. 
But the hopes that some Iranians had in his presidency were quickly dashed as it became clear he’d continue the policies of his predecessors. Pezeshkian’s recently proposed annual budget will hold minimum wages far below the inflation rate, raise taxes by 62 percent and increase the price caps on fuel, according to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/26/irans-government-budget-reveals-tough-road-ahead-as-currency-hits-new-low">Al Jazeera</a>. The government proposes to spend the same amount of money bolstering its propaganda apparatus as it will on the entire education sector. 
The regime also suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel and America, which last June launched a twelve-day war that <a href="https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/comprehensive-updated-assessment-of-iranian-nuclear-sites-five-months-after-the-12-day-war">largely destroyed</a> Iran’s most important nuclear sites, destroyed or damaged crucial oil, gas and water resources and targeted civilian infrastructure, killing over 1,000 people. The fallout of the war contributed to the collapse of the rial, the value of which has declined by at least 40 percent since June, according to a report by the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/7295df7f-5e4b-4fe6-a266-7390c71412f5">Financial Times</a>. Israel’s all-out assault on the region—its Gaza genocide, war on Lebanon and bombing campaigns in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, weakened Iran’s regional allies. Added to that, the overthrow of the dictatorship of Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria left the regime a sitting duck.
Some on the left argue that we should support the Iranian regime because of its hostility to Israel and America. This position denies the right of Iranian workers and the oppressed to resist after decades of suffering under the boot of a capitalist dictatorship with Islamic colouring. Socialists should stand unequivocally with the resistance in Iran, while also rejecting attempts by the Western imperialists to exploit the movement for their own gain. 
The dynamics of the current movement 
The dynamics of the current protests can’t be understood without this context. The crisis is so deep that it has started to break one of the regime’s historically loyal support bases—the bazaaris, the traditional merchant class. The alliance between the merchants and the regime has deep roots going back to before the 1979 revolution. They formed an alliance against the US-backed Shah dictatorship in 1963, establishing the Islamic Coalition Party. During the 1979 revolution the bazaaris provided important financial support to the clergy, who under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini eventually defeated the revolution and established the Islamic Republic. 
The clergy relied on the bazaaris to get them into power and for many years maintained a strong, albeit at times unstable, alliance. But the worsening economic situation and the growing financial dominance of Iran’s repressive state forces gradually weakened the influence of the bazaaris. This was particularly the case during the hardline presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) but has continued to today. The bazaaris no longer enjoy the relative privileges they once had. 
In response they have organised increasingly frequent protests, including participating in the 2018 general strike where they raised slogans that for the first time transcended their own commercial interests. The bazaaris’ initiation of the current protests is not unprecedented but represents a significant breakdown in the relations between the traditional middle class and the Iranian regime. 
Meanwhile students and the youth have swung back into action after being the epicentre of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising. Through their Telegram channels, students circulated footage of protests on multiple university campuses in Tehran, Isfahan and Yazd. They gathered in their hundreds chanting “freedom! freedom! freedom!” and “don’t be afraid! We are all together”. At night when security forces came to kidnap students from their dormitories at Tehran University, they bravely fought back, inspiring more students to rise up. At Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, students declared “protest is our right, sit-ins are our tool, and resistance is our path. The young generation will not accept injustice and will not surrender the future at the cost of fear”. 
Many student groups, including independent student unions, that were active in the Women, Life, Freedom uprising have re-emerged. The memory of this rebellion is fresh in their minds—they turned the universities into hubs of resistance, defying gender segregation rules, burning their hijabs and occupying buildings. Students joined forces on a national scale, and compelled teachers to go on strike in solidarity with their struggle. Their participation in this moment can inspire wider layers of society into action. In the words of the students at Khajeh Nasir University, their protest “is a warning from students to the rulers who have become comfortable with corruption, we remind them that the normalisation of misery has failed, and the student is still standing”. 
Much of the mainstream media reporting focuses on the bazaaris and the students. While it’s true that they’ve been at the centre of the current protests, workers have been on the battlefield for many months. They feel the economic crisis most acutely. Teachers, nurses, truck drivers, gold miners, steel, oil and gas workers have been striking and protesting to demand wage increases, health and safety measures and the abolition of the predatory contract labour system. It’s workers who are the beating heart of Iran’s economy and who have the power to topple the regime. 
We’ve seen glimpses of this potential. In early December, videos posted on Telegram captured 5,000 contract oil and gas workers on strike in the biggest industry-wide mobilisation since the 1979 revolution. These workers are stationed in Asaluyeh, at the world’s largest natural gas field. They provide more than half of the country’s income. It’s why they were targeted by Israeli airstrikes back in June. 
In the aftermath of the Israeli attack, politician Hassan Nowruzi tried to deter workers from protesting, arguing that bosses and workers are “in the same boat”. But this attempt to cohere national unity failed miserably—the oil and gas workers continued to strike. Their independent union pushed back, replying “No sir! We workers and you plunderers are not in the same boat. You and your government have punctured the boat that carries our livelihood, and through these holes you are looting everything we have”. 
Challenges and prospects 
For the struggle on the streets to deepen, students and bazaaris must unite with the working class. In the case of oil and gas workers, they are geographically isolated from the big cities and forced to live on or near the plants in terrible camps. But recent years have shown that this barrier can be overcome. During the Women, Life, Freedom uprising workers and students consciously forged solidarity, recognising that freedom from oppression is bound up with the class struggle. The Haft Tappeh union at the time declared, “this great uprising should be linked with the strike of workers’ everywhere … to have bread and freedom, let us not leave the women of the revolution alone”. Today, the economic grievances of the working class are directly linked to the protests in the bazaars and on the university campuses. 
As for the regime, it has responded in typical fashion: with repression. But unlike previous rebellions, it has been forced to pay lip service to the grievances of the masses. This was reflected in <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/30/irans-president-calls-on-govt-to-hear-legitimate-demands-of-protesters">Pezeshkian’s social media address</a> on Monday, writing that he asked the interior minister to engage with the legitimate demands of the protestors. Fatemeh Mohajerani, a spokeswoman for the government, <a href="https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2025/12/irans-government-offers-dialogue-protesters">told reporters</a> that Tehran planned to set up a dialogue that would include protest organisers. “We see, hear and recognise the protests, crises and constraints”, she said. At the same time, the government announced the closure of universities, government offices and commercial centres in 18 of Iran’s 31 provinces and security forces are crawling the streets hunting down dissidents. 
The Iranian regime is caught in a perpetual crisis with no clear solution. But one thing is for sure—the fire will continue to burn so long as the Islamic Republic still stands. The decade of crisis and class struggle has made clear that its days are numbered.

Bella Beiraghi

Iran on fire: rebellion returns to the streets

Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds">genocide</a>
in Gaza—a premeditated campaign to erase the Strip and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that nearly 80 years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide <a href="https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf">Convention</a>.
If we go so far as to accept the sterile, ahistoric claim that the <a href="https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/">Nakba</a> of 1948 was “merely” ethnic cleansing rather than genocide—ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilisation—we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on 7 October 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it?
The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has actually stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile <a href="https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-hamas-gaza-ceasefire-agreement-10-10-25">ceasefire</a>
on 10 October, Israel has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/20/israeli-troops-kill-palestinians-sheltering-in-gaza-school-hospital-chiefs">killed</a>
over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants like 8-month-old Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/11/world/palestinian-baby-dies-hypothermia-intl-latam">froze</a>
to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable.
During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were <a href="https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-20000-children-killed-23-months-war-more-one-child-killed-every-hour">murdered</a>, accounting for a staggering 30 percent of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls entrapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those currently being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics.
The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real-time, broadcast to every handheld screen on earth. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/spread-famine-gaza-strip-averted-palestinians-face-starvation-128549483#:~:text=Aid%20groups%20say%20nearly%201.3,shelters%20and%20relying%20on%20assistance.">endure</a>
a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralysed.
If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitise this criminal discourse.
The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-s-ben-gvir-renews-call-to-occupy-gaza-encourage-palestinian-migration/3620645">championed</a>
the “encouragement of migration” and <a href="https://x.com/MarquardtA/status/1714349157144564112?lang=en">demanded</a>
that “not an ounce of humanitarian aid” reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich <a href="https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/57/NGO/107">argued</a> that the starvation of two million people could be “just and moral” in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240314-shager-israeli-song-promises-to-erase-gaza-and-shoot-rockets-like-rain/">refrain</a>
was the same: “erase Gaza”, “leave no one there”. When military leaders refer to an entire population as “human animals”, they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination.
This was preceded by the hermetic <a href="https://euromedmonitor.org/en/gaza">siege</a>—a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of “security”, always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s “right to defend itself”.
In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world’s “largest open-air <a href="https://www.warchild.net/stories-of-children/rami/">prison</a>”. Whether they utilised armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded “terrorists” and “militants” whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier.
Years before the first bomb of this genocide fell, the United Nations <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2015/09/507762">declared</a> Gaza “uninhabitable”. Its water was a toxin, its land a graveyard, and its people were dying of curable diseases. Yet, aside from the typical ritual of humanitarian reports, the international community did nothing to offer a political horizon, a just peace.
This criminal neglect provided the vacuum for the events of 7 October, allowing Israel to weaponise its victimhood to execute a genocide of sadistic proportions. Former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant explicitly <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-paints-palestinians-as-animals-to-legitimize-war-crimes-israeli-scholar/3030278">stripped</a>
Palestinians of their humanity, launching a collective slaughter directed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The stage is being set for the next phase of extermination. The siege is now absolute, the violence more concentrated, and the dehumanisation of Palestinians more widespread than ever. As the international media drifts toward other distractions, Israel’s image is being rehabilitated as if the genocide never happened.
Tragically, the conditions that fuelled the first wave of genocide are being meticulously reconstructed. Indeed, another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalised unless it is stopped.
The 1948 <a href="https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf">Convention</a>
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was a legal <a href="https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1263&amp;context=gsp">vow</a>
to “liberate mankind from such an odious scourge”. If those words possess a shred of integrity, the world must act now to abort the next phase of extermination. This requires absolute accountability and a political process that finally severs the grip of Israeli colonialism and violence. The clock is ticking, and our collective voice—or our silence—will make the difference.
First published at <a href="https://ramzybaroud.net">RamzyBaroud.net</a>.

Ramzy Baroud

How the world is preparing the ground for the next Palestinian genocide

“BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”, US President Donald Trump wrote on social media last month after Hamas and the Israeli government agreed to the first phase of the so-called Peace Plan for Gaza. The same day, as Palestinians began the annual olive harvest in the West Bank, armed and masked Israeli settlers descended on the village of Aqraba, south-east of Nablus. They brandished batons and guns, attacking farmers and their supporters to prevent them from accessing the farms. On this day, as on all subsequent ones, these settlers were backed by the Israeli military. 
Two days later, on 11 October, 13-year-old Ayssam Jihad Ma’ala joined his family to help with the harvest. He was teargassed by the Israeli military. For a month, Ayssam lay in a coma, suffering from brain damage. He died on 12 November, joining the ranks of more than 1,000 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and Jerusalem since October 2023. This is what “peace” looks like. 
“Peace” sounds like the cheering and applause that <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israelis-applaud-soldiers-accused-raping-palestinian-prisoner-court-hearing">echoed through the Israeli Supreme Court</a> in Jerusalem on 10 November. The reception was for two soldiers from Force 100, a special unit of the Israeli military, who face charges relating to the gang rape last year of a blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert. The soldiers were caught on CCTV carrying out the rape.
According to a report in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the detainee was so violently assaulted that he sustained a ruptured intestine, a torn rectum, broken ribs and damaged lungs. Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, responsible for overseeing Israeli prisons, described the accused soldiers as “our best heroes”. 
There have been other accounts of abuse at Sde Teiman. Khaled Mahajneh, a lawyer granted access to the site last year, <a href="https://www.972mag.com/sde-teiman-prisoners-lawyer-mahajneh">told +972 Magazine</a>: “The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo”. A spokesperson for human rights organisation B’Tselem describes Sde Teiman as “the tip of the iceberg”. Discussing a B’Tselem report on Israeli prisons, titled “<a href="https://www.btselem.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell_eng.pdf">Welcome to Hell</a>”, Shai Parnes told Al Jazeera’s Simon Speakman Cordall last year:
“We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in sixteen different locations across Israel. It was depressing. As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.” 
Blessed are the peacemakers. 
Since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, there has never been peace for the Palestinians. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, which <a href="https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&amp;ItemID=5750">released an estimate</a> in May last year, some 134,000 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli state.
In 2020, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs <a href="https://www.ochaopt.org/page/publications1">estimated that 3,624 Palestinians were killed and more than 100,000 injured</a>
over the previous decade. Of the killings, 87 percent were in Gaza, mostly during the 2012 and 2014 Israeli offensives, as well as in the Great March of Return demonstrations that started in 2018. Three out of four Palestinians killed during the decade were civilians, including 805 children. This is the status quo that our political leaders would have us believe is the basis for a peaceful future. 
The violence in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem has a purpose. Israeli politicians such as Naftali Bennet, the former prime minister, have referred to the policy of regular military offensives in Gaza as “mowing the lawn”. Before 2023, this referred to a policy of semi-regular bombings of Gaza as a method of restraining Palestinian national aspirations. The Gaza genocide since 2023 represents something else: an apocalypse of Old Testament proportions, enacted upon a besieged population, designed to settle the question. The goal is to smash the Palestinians in body and soul, once and for all.
“Peace” for the Israeli state and its backers in the West has only ever meant a pause in open warfare—a time in which they could get on with the somewhat quieter project of “everyday” ethnic cleansing and colonisation. In the West Bank, the Israelis have a longstanding project of creating “facts on the ground”—the expansion of Israeli-held territory in order to undermine the prospect of a Palestinian state. This project has been waged nonstop, through “peace” and war. 
“By the end of 2022, there were 483 Israeli occupation sites and military bases in the West Bank, including 151 settlements and 25 inhabited outposts that were considered as neighborhoods following established settlements, in addition to 163 settlement outposts, and 144 classified as other sites (industrial, tourists, service areas and Israeli army bases)”, notes the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics report. By the end of 2022, the number of Israeli “settlers” in the West Bank reached 745,467. 
Under the fog of the most recent war, Israel rapidly increased the number of settlements in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli NGO, <a href="https://peacenow.org.il/en/settlements-watch/settlements-data/population">has documented 121 new outposts</a> since October 2023, representing 40 percent of the 298 outposts established since 1996. <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165988">Another United Nations report</a>, covering June to September this year, finds that the Israeli state has approved more than 20,000 housing units in the occupied West Bank. The hope among Israeli officials is that the ceasefire in Gaza will allow them to take more and more of the West Bank.
The world’s major capitalist powers, such as the United States, aren’t religiously or ideologically invested in Israel conquering the West Bank. Nor is their sole focus the destruction of Palestine. Nevertheless, they do care about the strength of the Israeli state. And they care about profiting from death. The Wall Street Journal’s Middle East correspondent Benoit Faucon <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/the-gaza-war-has-been-big-business-for-u-s-companies-8830b54a">recently described</a> the “unprecedented arms pipeline from the US to Israel” over the last two years. The trade resulted in billions of dollars in profits for companies such as Boeing, Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. 
Profits are just part of the picture, though. The global capitalist order is built on savagery. In an era of big power rivalry, Israel, the US and their defenders also have a project to normalise extreme violence. They carried out a genocide and now present themselves as peacemakers. If the status quo in Palestine is “peace”, and those responsible for it are the peacemakers, then damn them. We should never leave them in peace.

Vashti Fox

‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire

So this is “peace”. 
Seven days after the ceasefire came into effect, a family of 11 were blown up by an Israeli tank shell. On 19 October, Israel bombed a Gazan school, a makeshift coffee house and the area around Al-Ahli soccer club. The International Court of Justice has just confirmed that Israel is still forcibly starving people in Gaza by refusing to allow in enough aid. Israeli troops occupy 60 percent of Gaza, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has explicitly argued for soldiers to “shoot children and donkeys” on sight if they are deemed to be in the occupied area. This, they tell us, is peace. 
There can be no peace for Palestinians while Israel exists. Israel is an expansionist state committed to ethnic cleansing. The Gaza genocide is merely the latest—and particularly brutal—phase of annexations and forced displacement. Israel can do this with impunity because it is a crucial linchpin in Western domination of the Middle East and North Africa. 
In 2023, then US President Joe Biden repeated a line he first said in 1986: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one”. The Middle East and North African region is oil-rich, home to important trade routes and geopolitically vital. Without Israel, the US would have to maintain a significant—and unwelcome—military presence in the region to guarantee its interests. Instead, in Israel, it has a loyal ally that is well armed and belligerent. 
Israel has carried out a twofold process of ethnic cleansing since its creation in 1948. On the one hand, through intense, devastating wars that fundamentally alter the region’s balance of forces and geographic boundaries. The Gaza genocide has been one of these. Before, it was the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and others. 
These wars are coupled with a continuous strategy of annexation, imprisonment, displacement and periodic massacres. In the words of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, “No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land of Israel. A Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning”. 
Ben-Gurion’s vision included all of occupied Palestine, as well as sections of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In its brutal 1967 war, Israeli forces took Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights at the same time as occupying the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East and West Jerusalem. 
Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continue to argue for this expansionist vision, and have used this war to expand further into Lebanese and Syrian territory. In January, Israel began a new invasion of the West Bank and has carried out the largest expulsions there since 1967. More than 40,000 people have so far been expelled in Operation Iron Wall. Israel sent snipers into Jenin refugee camp, conducted home raids and mass arrests, and carried out aerial strikes. The Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur al-Shams camps have been almost emptied. Hundreds of homes have been demolished, and the IDF has outlined a strategy to prevent destroyed roads and homes from being rebuilt. 
In late October, the Knesset passed a bill to annex the entirety of the West Bank, which even the Trump administration is not willing to support. But plenty in Israel do, which means Israeli encroachment in the West Bank could well accelerate in the near future. 
Our leaders talk of peace. In reality, we are witnessing the beginning of the brutality that is to come if the capitalists are allowed to blast their way through in the coming decades. 
Yet a different world is possible. The proof of this is every student who has protested, every grandparent arrested on terror charges to defend Palestine Action, and each of the Italian and Spanish workers who shut their countries down. We know that a radical workers’ movement can be rebuilt. The task of the resistance is to throw themselves into that project. We have to fight like hell with what we have, with a vision for a mass movement that can defeat imperialism and capitalism for good.

Jasmine Duff

The fight for Palestine continues as long as Israel and Western imperialism exist

While the grieving of Israelis has been a media spectacle over the past two years—revisited again and again each time Israeli hostages’ remains have returned to their families—the trauma of Palestinians now returning to their destroyed homes receives relatively little attention.
UNICEF estimates that over the past two years of Israel’s genocide, 28 children have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces every day on average. Let that sink in: a classroom of kids murdered each day.
You won’t hear much about the tens of thousands of grieving Palestinian families in the corporate media. Yet you will hear, again and again, about Israeli trauma, even as Palestinians continued to be killed in their dozens.
US President Donald Trump, addressing the Israeli Knesset on 13 October, claimed that the ceasefire deal he brokered will open a new “golden age” for the Middle East and end some 3,000 years of conflict. It was laughable.
Yet a largely uncritical Western media seriously pondered whether the Trump administration—which, like the Biden administration before it, provided the finance and weaponry to Israel as it carried out genocide—really was some great peacemaker.
The reality for Palestinians, however, is that the war is far from over. 
Israel continues to occupy 53 percent of Gaza, after withdrawing behind an invisible “yellow line”, and continues to prevent vital aid and recovery equipment from entering Gaza. In the first week of the so-called ceasefire, the Israeli army committed 80 violations, killing 97 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 
Imagine if it had been 97 Israelis killed. There would be no handwringing about the ceasefire holding. It would be wall-to-wall condemnations of Hamas and justifications for Israel to continue the genocide. In the Western media, Palestinian lives don’t matter.
Israel has returned the remains of 1,718 living and 150 deceased Palestinians from Gaza, along with 250 Palestinian political prisoners. However, 154 of these political prisoners were immediately deported to Egypt by Israel, according to Hamas, denying them reunification with their families. 
According to the director of Gaza’s Health Ministry, Dr Munir al-Bursh, documents that accompanied 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned to Gaza reveal that they were held in the notorious Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert. According to photos and testimonies <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/23/whistleblowers-allege-widespread-abuses-at-israeli-detention-camp-sde-teiman">published in the Guardian</a> last year, Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman were held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and forced to wear nappies. 
On 20 October, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/20/mutilated-bodies-palestinians-held-notorious-israeli-jail-gaza-officials">the Guardian reported</a> that several of the recently returned victims were blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs. In one photo, a rope is fastened around a man’s neck. No identification accompanied the victims’ bodies, adding to their families’ grief and trauma.
Imagine for a moment the media reporting if Israeli hostages had been returned like this. The images should have provoked the kind of outrage generated by the revelations of torture by US troops of prisoners at <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/abu-ghraib-twenty-years-on">Abu Ghraib prison</a> in Baghdad in 2004. Yet these crimes received little reporting.
The reunification of 1,718 Palestinian detainees with their families in Gaza was news for a day. Many told their families of brutal treatment in Israeli prisons, including beatings and torture. But those are the “lucky” ones. Some 9,000 West Bank Palestinians remain in Israeli custody, having been kidnapped and transferred to Israel in breach of international law. More than 3,500 are “administrative detainees”, who have never been charged with any crime, while 2,763 are deemed “unlawful combatants” by the Israeli military, according to <a href="https://hamoked.org/prisoners-charts.php">Israel Prison Service data</a>.
Their families’ separation from loved ones—in many cases for years—and their encirclement and harassment by an increasingly aggressive and violent settler movement, is not considered worthy of the media attention given to Israeli families whose loved ones were taken hostage on 7 October.
American journalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times, is the latest to fall foul of the conservative media establishment. After being scheduled to address Australia’s National Press Club on 20 October, Hedges was informed that the event was cancelled. Everyone knows why: Hedges reports the truth, and the truth is embarrassing to Israel, Australia, and the corporate media.
In a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/chris-hedges-national-press-club/105913174">Late Night Live interview</a>, the ABC’s David Marr took Hedges to task for accepting an invitation from the Australian Friends of Palestine Association to deliver the annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture, “Requiem for Gaza”. He claimed Hedges had compromised his credibility as a journalist by accepting such an invitation. 
This isn’t just a disgraceful slur against Hedges, but a racist attack on the Palestinians. If reporting the truth about what they face under the boot of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide is a mark against any reporter, the insinuation is that Palestinian oppression itself is some lie. In the Said Memorial Lecture, Hedges hit back:
 “October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.
“The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state.”
The obfuscation and lies of Western politicians and their media mouthpieces have enabled and emboldened Israel, Hedges argued:
“The funding and arming of Israel by the US and European nations, as it carries out genocide, has imploded the post-World War Two international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilisation.”
This loss of credibility—the exposure of the hypocrisy of the capitalists and their institutions—is perhaps the greatest achievement of our solidarity movement over the past two years. It should give us the strength to continue the fight for Palestine.
Nick Everett is the secretary of Friends of Palestine WA.

Nick Everett

Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues

Morocco is one of the latest countries to erupt under the “Gen Z” banner. Young people, organised largely through anonymous social media channels, have taken to the streets to demand an end to corruption and inequality. The hashtag #freekoulchi (free everyone) has also been a rallying cry for the release of political prisoners.
The government in Morocco is made up almost entirely of wealthy capitalists, while most of the population increasingly struggles to survive. The president, Aziz Akhannouch, has a net worth of US$2 billion, and is the current CEO of the Akwa conglomerate, owned by the Akhannouch family, which is a major player in several key sectors of the economy. As agricultural minister from 2007 to 2021, Akhannouch allegedly stole $2.2 billion of public funds. Akwa has colluded with other corporations to keep the prices of fuel and other essential goods extortionately high, and the company was one of the targets of a 2018 boycott organised to protest these practices.
Morocco has the largest wealth inequality in North Africa. The government maintains control by criminalising dissent, controlling the media and arresting journalists who criticise the government. While social services have been pushed to the brink of collapse by insufficient funding, the government is spending $3.3 billion on lavish stadiums and beautifying tourist areas of major cities in preparation for the African World Cup later this year and the FIFA World Cup in 2030. A primary school in Benslimane, a city in the country’s west, was recently demolished to make way for a stadium. The former pupils were left without access to education.
The national unemployment rate was <a href="https://sonofgao.substack.com/p/stadiums-are-cool-but-where-are-the">13.3 percent last year</a>, but among 15 to 24-year-olds it was 36.7 percent and as high as 48.4 percent in cities. This age group makes up a quarter of Morocco’s total population (in Australia, it is half that). <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?locations=MA">There are only 7.7 doctors for every 100,000 people</a>, according to the World Bank, and in poorer areas like Agadir, on the southern Atlantic coast, it drops to 4.4, well below the World Health Organisation’s recommendation of 25.
Neglect of public services has deadly consequences, especially in the most deprived cities. Last month, eight women died in a maternity ward in a public hospital in Agadir. After the deaths, residents held a small protest outside the hospital, unfurling a banner that read “Hospital of death”. The image and story spread across the country. On 29 September, an anonymous collective on social media called for protests across the country under the banner of GenZ 212 (+212 is Morocco’s country code), inspired by similar youth rebellions in places like Nepal.
Protests began in the largest cities—Casablanca, Marrakech and Rabat—but soon spread. Young people gathered and marched, chanting, “The people demand the end of corruption!” and “The stadiums are here, but where are the hospitals?” In Agadir, protesters blocked the central highway, and in smaller rural cities, riots broke out. In Ait Amira, just south of Agadir, a bank branch was set on fire and police cars were overturned.
The government’s response was severe. More than 500 protesters were arrested; many were beaten by police. But this only inflamed the anger. Protests and riots continued nightly, even after a 19-year-old student in Oudja, a town near the Algerian border, had his leg amputated after a police car drove into a crowd.
On 1 October, three young men were shot and killed in Lqliaa after allegedly trying to storm a police station. The victims’ families have denied the allegation, pointing out that one of the victims—24-year-old Abdessamade—was a filmmaker documenting the movement to share with the world.
A 22-year-old protester who is facing up to six months in prison <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/oct/14/this-generation-is-defiant-gen-z-protests-set-to-resume-in-morocco-despite-deaths-and-arrests">described</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/oct/14/this-generation-is-defiant-gen-z-protests-set-to-resume-in-morocco-despite-deaths-and-arrests"></a>his motivations to the Guardian: “I went to protest because I’ve seen government violence all my life; not physical, but psychological. In hospitals, there are no doctors. In schools, classrooms are packed with over 50 students”.
The GenZ 212 Discord channel, launched on 18 September, now has more than 200,000 people in it. Members discuss religion, key demands, and tactics and strategy. There is a main announcements server, on which only the anonymous admins can post, a general chat where anyone can message, groups for localities and districts, press videos, resources and much more. Decisions on whether to protest, and the time and location of the protests, are decided in real time through voting in the general chat. There is a heavy emphasis from the anonymous admins on peaceful tactics and on rallying rather than rioting.
I attended a rally in the north-western city of Tangier on 2 October. It was in a park in the middle of the city, and police and military personnel, in uniform and plain clothes, were everywhere. Small groups of young people were scattered around, but, initially, there was no obvious congregation. In the Discord chat, people began to ask where the rally was going to be, and, if people were in the park, who was going to start it. Other messages, probably government and police bots, argued that there was no point rallying, that the king would listen to young people, that the movement was over, along with other generally derailing efforts. An hour and a half passed like this, with messages getting more frustrated and urgent.
Eventually, five young men in their late 20s stood up in the square and began to chant. Instantly, twenty or so of us surrounded them and formed a circle, clapping and chanting. More people joined, mostly young men and boys, some who looked no older than four.
The chants were themed around the movement’s demands: “The people demand the end of corruption!”, “The people demand Alhannouch leave!”, “The people want the king’s intervention!”. The rally slowly grew to a couple of hundred, all encircling the initial leaders and almost all young. A woman also arrived and led the chanting, and more young women joined. Some people wore Palestinian scarves.
The police watched on, surrounding the action and likely outnumbering the protesters even at the rally’s peak. There were no arrests.
At midnight on the Discord channel, a meeting discussed the demands the movement should make to the king. The next day, the admins shared a draft, and debates about the demands began. While there were disagreements about emphasis (many people wanted health care to be the focus), most people seemed to agree that dismissing the current government and implementing some reforms would be enough to resolve Morocco’s crises.
There were also suggestions to create an organising committee and an electoral political party. However, these were not taken up, and the general mood was strongly in favour of a leaderless, anonymous movement. Political parties were banned from participating.
Notably, there was no criticism of the king, which may be because such criticism can result in fifteen years’ imprisonment. However, it is a shift from earlier protest movements that called for an end to the monarchy. King Hassan is the fifth richest monarch in the world, and the richest in Africa, with a net worth of US$8.2 billion, according to Forbes. He is Morocco’s leading businessman, the Moroccan royal family holding the majority of stakes in <a href="https://businessempires.africa/king-mohammed-vi-moroccos-reclusive-ruler-with-6-billion-deep-pockets/">Al Mada</a>, a previously state-owned conglomerate with holdings in almost every major part of the economy, from mining and banking to food processing.
King Hassan has long been suspected of corruption. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/239525">WikiLeaks cables</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/239525"></a>previously revealed that he used his power to solicit bribes, especially in the real estate sector. To say the least, he is an unlikely ally in the fight against inequality and corruption, but his ability to dismiss the government seems like the easiest way forward from the point of view of many protesters.
A rally the following evening started in the same way as the 2 October protest, but in a more prominent place close to the tourist area around the medina. Again, police and military personnel swarmed surrounding streets. The same five men from the night before began the chanting. It grew more quickly this time, and people were more confident.
A woman in her 20s arrived halfway through. It was her first time at a protest, because her mother hadn’t let her attend initially because of the violent police response. But once the rallies seemed safe, she felt she had to come.“No one is going to help us, we have to fight for ourselves”, she said.
The rally was bigger this time, although still less than a thousand, and much more visible to cars and pedestrians, which meant it attracted many honks of support, curious tourists and locals, and a significant media presence. There were also many more women than the previous night, making up probably half the demonstration, and they again led chants.
At one point, a flag of the Berbers (an oppressed indigenous group in the region) was raised alongside the Moroccan flag. Protesters broke out into wild cheers. More people were wearing and waving Palestinian scarves. People had placards calling for the president to step down, for an end to corruption and to free all the political prisoners. After a couple of hours, people dispersed without any arrests or confrontations with police.
On 3 October, an <a href="https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/10/261456/moroccan-gen-z-212-issues-open-letter-to-king-mohammed-vi-demanding-accountability-and-reform/">open letter</a> <a href="https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/10/261456/moroccan-gen-z-212-issues-open-letter-to-king-mohammed-vi-demanding-accountability-and-reform/"></a> to the king from the GenZ movement was released. It asked him to use his power to dismiss the government, and for decent health and education for all, an end to corruption and the release of all political prisoners. <a href="https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/10/262656/genz212-over-60-intellectuals-artists-and-activists-address-open-letter-to-moroccos-king/">An open letter from 60 journalists, artists and other key figures in Moroccan society</a> was also released in solidarity with the movement, calling for a complete overhaul of government practices and priorities.
A boycott of corporations linked to the president was also initiated through social media. King Hassan’s annual <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251010-morocco-king-calls-for-social-reforms-amid-youth-led-protests">address</a> <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251010-morocco-king-calls-for-social-reforms-amid-youth-led-protests"></a>on 10 October reflected the pressure he was under. He called for more investment in social services and announced an initiative to create rural jobs, although he did not address any of the movement’s demands specifically.
Through discussion and voting in the Discord channel, the protests then moved from nightly to specific dates. The next was called for 18 October, with a call out for everyone, not just young people, to attend. There were also calls to expand the resistance into other areas, like deepening the boycott movement.
The GenZ212 movement is a beacon of hope for workers and young people around the world struggling under capitalism. The global Gen Z movement shows that many young people are prepared to resist in the face of deepening crises.

Elliott Shaw

Protesting with Gen Z in Morocco

The ceasefire in Gaza is bringing blessed relief to 2 million Palestinians whose lives have been made a living hell by Israel’s genocidal war. For now, Palestinians can wake without dreading imminent bombing. 
But nothing guarantees that Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will not resume attacks as it did when it broke a previous truce in March. Supporters of Palestine must demand complete withdrawal of the Israeli military from Palestinian territory and an end to military, economic and diplomatic relations with Israel. This is no time to be easing up on our demands.
Halting the violence is only the beginning. Western and Arab governments need to deliver large-scale humanitarian aid—food, water, medicine and housing supplies. They certainly have the resources: the United States has spent at least $18 billion arming Israel since the war began.
An end to the war demands more than only peace. US President Donald Trump’s twenty-point plan keeps Gaza under Israeli control. The IDF may be “withdrawing” but still controls 60 percent of the territory, with no schedule for final departure. Even if fully enacted, this plan leaves a buffer zone in Israeli hands, granting control over supplies, movement and military incursions. Gaza remains the world’s largest open-air prison.
Under Trump’s plan, Palestinians lose any prospect of democracy. It installs a committee of unelected Palestinian technocrats and “international experts”, overseen by a “board of peace” chaired by Trump. No part of this scenario allows Palestinians to freely choose their future.
Even as Gaza’s ceasefire stands, Israel’s annexation of the West Bank proceeds unchecked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to intensify this process to keep far-right coalition partners happy, meaning further dispossession for Palestinians.
Given the appalling nature of Trump’s plan, the support of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong is no surprise. They lavish praise on Trump for “leadership” and “the biggest contribution to peace in the Middle East for a generation or more”. These are the same leaders who have stood behind Israel since the start. Satirical website the Onion sums up the result: “Israel agrees to go back to killing Palestinians on less frequent basis”.
Justice also means that those responsible for this genocidal war should pay for their crimes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. ICC member states must arrest them if they enter their territory.
Israeli leaders were supported by many, not just the United States and its allies, but also by governments in Russia, China, Arab and Muslim countries—whether supplying weapons, providing diplomatic cover or simply doing nothing. If Netanyahu belongs in The Hague, so do fellow war criminals Trump, President Joe Biden, British Labour leader Keir Starmer, Prime Minister Albanese and the complicit Arab and Muslim leaders.
The widespread complicity of governments with Israel reveals much about capitalist priorities. Capitalism breeds wars, tramples on human rights and destroys livelihoods. Trillions are wasted on weapons, while millions go hungry.
Governments backing Israel include democracies, dictatorships and military regimes—liberal, conservative and social democratic. Even supposed democracies have used Israel’s war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties at home. 
The genocide in Gaza exposes the reality of capitalism. Yet global resistance to the war has also pointed to an alternative. The mass antiwar marches since October 2023 show that millions of people will not simply sit back and watch as a genocide takes place. They have learned the power of solidarity on the streets. 
In recent weeks, workers’ power has come to the fore. Israel’s attack on the Gaza flotilla in early October has been the catalyst for mass strikes. In Italy, millions of workers and students took part in four days of mobilisations, including a 2 million-strong general strike and a million marching in the streets. On 14 October, Greek workers will be out in their millions; the day after that it’s the turn of workers in Spain. In every case, they are demanding, and through direct action halting, the movement of weapons for Israel.
These strikes arose from years of mass demonstrations against the war but also rising anger at government austerity.
Workers see the connection: the same forces behind war in Gaza are those cutting wages and services at home. A Greek socialist explained: “An Italian striker sent us a message and said, ‘The hand that bombs the Palestinians, is the hand that exploits us in our workplaces’, and that is really felt here”. This is why anti-austerity demonstrations in France that began on 10 September under the slogan “block everything” featured Palestinian flags alongside union banners. Struggle on each front helps the other: the Greek strike for Palestine on 14 October builds on big strikes against government plans to lengthen the working week.
Collective working-class power can stop wars and austerity. But lasting change requires much bigger socialist organisations, forging ties between progressive causes and putting workers at the centre. Protest matters, but strikes can grind the system to a halt—and ultimately, lead to its overthrow. That is what’s needed as capitalism drags society ever deeper into barbarism.

Tom Bramble

Ceasefire in Gaza: relief, but not enough

An illegal invasion unleashes mass slaughter in the Middle East. Western leaders clamber to justify the horror. Those responsible commit untold war crimes but never face prosecution from spineless international courts. When the occupation finally ends, airstrikes, disease and malnutrition will be estimated to have killed a million people.
This is not 2023 in Gaza. It’s 2003 in Iraq. The perpetrators are not the openly fascistic ethno-state of Israel, but the “civilised” rulers of Britain, the US, Australia and others like them. 
The chief ideological <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blair-defends-war-on-iraq/">spokesperson</a>
and international defender of this massacre was Tony Blair, British Labour prime minister from 1997 to 2007, whose notorious <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/6/8/dodgy-dossier-haunts-blair">“dossiers”</a>
claimed the Iraqi government was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
While the US provided the main military force behind the invasion, Blair supplied troops, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36712735">false justifications</a>
and rhetorical ammunition. Twenty-two years later and still dripping in blood and complicity, this butcher of Iraq is returning to the Middle East to oversee a so-called peace process in Gaza.
US President Donald Trump’s “20-point peace plan” for Gaza—a document that Blair himself <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-02/leaked-document-reveals-details-of-trump-peace-plan/105839640">helped</a>
to develop—specifically designates a role for the former prime minister. Under the proposal, he will serve alongside the US president on a transitional body that overrides any Palestinian representation and indefinitely dictates the future of postwar Gaza.
Disturbingly, the White House <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70155nked7o">directs</a> this “Board of Peace” to “create modern and efficient governance that ... is conducive to attracting investment” into a low-tariff “special economic zone”. This is business shorthand for low wages, corporate handouts and violations of workplace rights.
Such a task could find no more enthusiastic enforcer than Blair. Indeed, Trump’s previous dystopian vision for a free-market Gaza “Riviera” first <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/06/tony-blair-think-tank-worked-trump-riviera-plan-for-gaza/">originated</a>
from the twisted hive mind of the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change”, one of the ex-Labour leader’s numerous think tanks and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37416855">consultancy</a> firms.
Well before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Blair government’s priority was “ensuring British companies benefit from any post-war reconstruction contracts,” as was <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/in-lead-up-to-war-u-k-officials-and-businesses-planned-on-dividing-the-spo">revealed</a>
in a 2002 telegram brazenly entitled “Iraq: Dividing the Spoils”.
Blair’s appointment is a deliberate message from the Trump administration that Western imperialism’s arch-criminals still reign supreme and that Gaza’s reconstruction will be pounced upon as a shameless profit-making exercise.
All this is familiar ground for Blair, whose ten years in government hinged on market deregulation and the privatisation of Britain’s public infrastructure. Upon losing power in 2007, Blair was immediately appointed as Middle East envoy by fellow warmonger George W. Bush, and turned his attention to merging his political responsibilities with private business ventures.
While serving in Jerusalem, Blair took up a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/jan/10/blairjpmorgan">part-time position</a> as senior adviser with investment bank JP Morgan, for which he quickly brokered a deal between the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government and Wataniya Mobile to establish a privately run cell network in the West Bank, according to UK current affairs program Dispatches.
Jacobin magazine <a href="https://jacobin.com/2017/09/the-ghoulish-post-politics-career-of-tony-blair">reported</a>
in 2017 that Blair had also used his connections as envoy to orchestrate the development of oil fields off Gaza’s shoreline under the aegis of the British Gas Group, another JP Morgan client.
All told, Blair has leveraged the political ties he developed as UK prime minister and peace envoy to win lucrative deals and amass a personal fortune of £60 million as of 2015, according to the Telegraph’s <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11670425/Revealed-Tony-Blair-worth-a-staggering-60m.html">analysis</a>.
And while he continues to <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/tony-blair-putin-cant-use-iraq-to-justify-ukraine-invasion/a-65037323">insist</a>
that invading Iraq was about spreading “democracy” to the Middle East, he’s had no qualms accepting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/12/tony-blair-institute-continued-taking-money-from-saudi-arabia-after-khashoggi">sizeable donations</a> to his “Global Change” think tank from US-aligned dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/27/tony-blair-conflict-interests-middle-east">Gulf states</a>. He has long fostered personal and political ties with tyrants from Muammar <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/23/-sp-blair-gaddafi-letter-thanks-spy-cooperation-libya-uk-dissidents">Gaddafi</a>
to Hosni <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/02/tony-blair-mubarak-courageous-force-for-good-egypt">Mubarak</a>.
Whatever form Gaza’s postwar governance takes, this man’s involvement ensures Western and Israeli interests will be imposed on Palestinians as ruthlessly as decades of occupation and neoliberal ransacking were forced upon civilians in Iraq. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/09/29/tony-blair-gaza-strip/">Washington Post</a> last month, “the Israelis ... respect him”.
Tony Blair is an unindicted war criminal and foremost embodiment of rapacious capitalism. A gold-class seat in hell is waiting for him.

Ruby Healer

Tony Blair: war criminal in charge of Gaza peace

“From there we came outside and saw the stars.” 
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno
After two years, Israel’s genocidal campaign of bombing in Gaza could be over. In the days since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was signed in Egypt, videos have emerged of children roller-skating through the ruins of Gaza City and hundreds of thousands of people making the long march northward along Rashid Street to return to blasted homes and ravaged land.
For millions across the world who have fought for the Palestinians, time seems to have a different quality, no longer measured by videos of ashen limbs and wrecked bodies. While Palestinians rightly celebrate the reprieve, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s statement calling this ceasefire the “biggest contribution to peace in the Middle East for a generation or more” recalls the words of the Roman historian Tacitus: “They make a wasteland and call it peace”.
The fate of Gaza is being decided by the very people who imposed starvation and approved the bombing of homes, schools and hospitals. The global Palestine movement must push for the right of Palestinians to self-determination, not a future designed by their killers.
Of course, Israel could break the agreement—just as it did both previous ceasefires, in November 2023 and March 2025. Under the “Phase One” arrangement, Hamas will release all Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. Israel will release thousands of Palestinians from its prisons, and the Israeli military will withdraw from cities. Once the Israeli hostages are released, Hamas will have no leverage left.
At this point, the ceasefire looks likely to hold. The US military is sending 200 troops to oversee it, unlike the last ceasefires. And key US regional aims have been met, with blows struck against Hezbollah and Iran. Gershon Baskin, a US negotiator, wrote for the Times of Israel
that Hamas agreed to something like the current deal in September 2024, and for more than a year, the outcome depended on whether the US government would push Israel to sign on. The role of President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration in this genocide must be remembered.
But it’s important for those who stand with Palestine to be clear that Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians will never end until Israel is defeated. Israel is fundamentally expansionist. Since its foundation, its rulers have aimed at the creation of Greater Israel, incorporating Gaza, the West Bank, and sections of Lebanon. In that sense, any ceasefire is only a pause and we can be certain that the barbarity will resume.
While President Donald Trump’s twenty-point plan has been widely publicised, it’s unlikely to be fully implemented; a special economic zone among rubble and devastation is far from reality. Gazan analyst Muhammad Shehada said, based on discussions with mediators involved in the negotiations, that he’s certain the plan is a propaganda exercise.
While the details are yet to be settled, it’s clear that if President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu get their way, life in Gaza will remain unbearable for decades. Before 7 October 2023, Gaza was already an open-air prison, besieged by land, air and sea. Israel staged regular bombings and restricted construction materials, so rebuilding was impossible. Israel even calculated calories to allow in only enough food to keep people barely alive.
The West Bank is broken up into isolated villages, fenced off and blocked to control Palestinian movement. Israeli settlers regularly seize land and commit atrocities. Now, conditions are even worse. Half a million Gazans face famine, disease is spreading, and all of the key infrastructure has been destroyed. 
In an 8 October Fox News interview, Trump claimed that he phoned Prime Minister Netanyahu and told him, “Israel cannot fight the world, Bibi, they cannot fight the world”. Who is this world he’s referring to? Not the Western and Arab governments, which have watched the genocide play out without lifting a finger. Even small gestures like statehood recognition were won only by the Palestine solidarity movement. Israel hasn’t been fighting rulers; it’s been fighting the masses.
The movement for Palestine has opened the floodgates in country after country, unleashing workers and young people into the streets.
Israel and the US now have reasons to end the genocide. Hamas is militarily defeated and Gaza’s population is decimated. But the movement seems to have played a role in Trump’s push for an end, against Netanyahu’s wishes, and created a political cost to continuing. In silence, Netanyahu might have kept destroying Gaza and seizing the West Bank.
We can’t stop now. 
The Palestine movement worldwide must keep marching, striking, occupying and sailing for a complete end to genocide—not just what Israel started fast-tracking in 2023, but the longer-term genocide of Palestinians it’s been carrying out since 1948. Gaza must be rebuilt on Palestinian terms with freely given food, medicine and building supplies. The blockade must end. The illegal settlement of the West Bank and the apartheid system must be dismantled. War criminals must be held accountable.
But more is needed. An international working-class revolution must overthrow the capitalist system that produced this genocide. Every grave in Gaza is an indictment of the capitalist institutions that brought us here: from the market, which incentivises imperialist domination of oil-rich regions and rewards the creation and sale of weapons, to the capitalist governments built to put the flow of profits before every single human life. 
“Never again” means little in a system soaked in violence. Destruction of the oppressed has happened, again, before our eyes, and will again, unless socialists build a movement strong enough to finally replace capitalism with a system organised for collectivity and human liberation—a world where no-one wakes to the sound of bombing or the barrel of a gun. It’s time to step out of this hell and see the stars.

The Palestine solidarity movement must continue

In the second week of September, a two-day strike and plant-gate sit-in at the Nile Linen Group in Alexandria forced management and officials from the Labour Ministry to concede to a <a href="https://manassa.news/en/news/27111">package of demands</a> after an infant died in her mother’s arms inside the factory. 
Workers said the mother—just ten days back from maternity leave—was blocked from leaving for emergency care because of punitive leave rules and a cost-of-living allowance clawback that effectively trapped her at work. Security forces ringed the free-zone compound, two workers were briefly detained, and management tried a “cool-off” lockout by sending everyone home. It backfired. Workers returned en masse to continue the strike, elected negotiators, and won commitments on an investigation, compensation and changes to pay and leave practices. By 15 September, production resumed following management’s written pledge to address demands.
The same week, <a href="https://revsoc.me/-50409">a wave</a> of labour unrest across upper Egypt’s sugar industry—Edfu, Kom Ombo, Armant and Dishna—subsided after weeks of stoppages over pay, arrears, hazard allowances, overtime and the non-application of state-announced minimum wage measures. Envoys from the regime-run General Federation of Trade Unions and local officials descended on plants, <a href="https://www.madamasr.com/2025/09/14/news/u/%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1-%D8%A5%D8%AF%D9%81%D9%88-%D9%88%D9%83%D9%88%D9%85-%D8%A5%D9%85%D8%A8%D9%88-%D9%8A%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%82%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%B6%D8%B1/">promising</a> October raises and a review “at the highest levels”. Some groups ended strikes under pressure, including threats of dismissal and state security referrals; others suspended action with explicit warnings they’ll down tools again in January at the start of the production season if promises aren’t honoured.
Read together, these two episodes show how shopfloor bargaining in 2025 is actually happening in Egypt: a combustible mix of desperation-driven action, security containment and last-minute fixes that arrive only after escalation. Even under today’s repression, strikes still force the state–capital nexus to bargain—grudgingly, temporarily, and case-by-case.
A slow, stubborn uptick
Granular national strike statistics are deliberately hard to come by, but we have credible signals from 2024-25 that collective action is ticking up despite the climate of fear.
The year 2024 saw a <a href="https://revsoc.me/workers-farmers/49598/">broad rise</a> in labour complaints and protest events, dominated by wage and minimum-wage issues amid currency collapse and runaway prices. Employers in both public and private sectors used exemptions and procedural loopholes to dodge mandated increases. Workers responded with petitions, stoppages, and plant-gate rallies that triggered targeted arrests, firings, and prosecutions.
Throughout 2025, according to my labour sources, the country has witnessed more than 70 strikes and protests spanning textiles, ceramics, sugar mills, retail, petroleum, chemicals, utilities, and education. Workers’ demands have centred on overdue wages, annual bonuses, enforcement of the minimum wage, and improved conditions, with large-scale actions including a 4,000-strong strike at Ceramica Inova and coordinated stoppages across Upper Egypt’s sugar industry. Employers and authorities frequently responded with repression—including arrests of T&amp;C and greenhouse workers, suspensions and investigations at El-Shorbagy, and dismissals of union leaders—while others sought to defuse unrest through Ministry of Labour-led mediation or emergency fund payouts.
This isn’t a <a href="https://merip.org/2007/05/strikes-in-egypt-spread-from-center-of-gravity/">2006-style explosion</a>. It’s an incremental curve—a rise in frequency and breadth from the post-2013 nadir, expressed as short, defensive, economic strikes that are extremely sensitive to local triggers (a fatal accident, unpaid arrears, a humiliating rule). Workers are calculating, not reckless: they end strikes when repression bites or when tangible wins are secured; they hold their fire until leverage peaks (e.g., the January sugar campaign season).
Why is it happening? Inflation, repeated devaluation cycles, and a wage floor that is either eroded by prices or not applied at all. Put bluntly, the cost of living has crossed the threshold at which fear of the police competes with fear of hunger. That’s the inflexion point at which Egyptian workers historically move from complaint letters to stoppages.
What the strikes tell us about the regime’s playbook
Policing first, bargaining later: plants are surrounded, entrances controlled, and small numbers are picked up early to chill momentum. Only when production halts and workers hold their ground do mediators appear—labour directorates, federation officials, MPs and governors.
Procedural fixes, not structural change: The “solutions” offered are narrowly tailored: suspend one manager, promise an investigation, pay a tranche of arrears, float a month-X raise. No change to the underlying enforcement vacuum on wages and safety, and no recognition of independent organising.
Time-buying. The favourite tactic is to defer: “October”, “three months”, “after the presidency’s review”, “at budget time”. That punt only works if workers disband, and in the sugar case, they explicitly set January as a hard deadline.
Free zones, not free unions: the Nile Linen case underlines how “export zones” pair hyper-discipline (leave rules, docked allowances, gate control) with weak inspection and security gatekeeping. It’s the quintessential model of privatised coercion under public cover.
Under the surface, though, the state’s posture betrays anxiety. When local stoppages reverberate—through national supply chains (sugar) or foreign-currency exports (textiles)—the case files travel “up”. That upward escalation is the workers’ leverage.
Labour lit the fuse in 2011
Egypt’s modern labour insurgency didn’t begin in Tahrir. It was forged on the shop floors of <a href="https://merip.org/2007/03/egyptian-textile-workers-confront-the-new-economic-order/">Mahalla</a> and across transport, civil servants and public services in the mid-2000s. Those strikes disoriented the state’s forces, birthed strike committees and then independent unions—most famously the <a href="https://flickr.com/photos/elhamalawy/albums/72157607027521066/">real estate tax collectors’ union</a>—years before the revolution began on 25 January 2011.
When the 2011 uprising peaked, wildcat strikes in transport, textiles, steel and the public sector on 8-10 February <a href="https://arabawy.org/24959/permanent-revolution/">were decisive</a>. They took the revolution from square to system: from spectacle to shutdown. Within months, new federations and dozens of independent unions proliferated. For the first time in decades, Egyptian workers could credibly bargain outside the state’s official federation.
The revolution’s <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bread-freedom-social-justice-9781780324333/">social soul</a> was not a romantic abstraction; it was the organised power of workers to halt production. That force helped topple a president and briefly opened a window in which wages rose, corrupt managers were purged, and shopfloor dignity was renegotiated.
After the coup—how it was crushed
The 2013 military takeover set out to extinguish politics by decapitating the networks most capable of paralysing the state: political parties, youth groups, community organisations, and independent unions (including informal labour networks) inside workplaces.
Legal crackdown: protest and public-order laws criminalised assembly; the 2017 trade-union framework forced re-registration under state terms, starved or dissolved independents and restored de facto monopoly to the official federation, now coupled with <a href="https://eipr.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/reports/pdf/a_lopsided_law_1.pdf">draconian restrictions on the right to strike</a>.
Security filtration: factory union committees were either purged or co-opted. Activists were harassed; labour leaders faced case-by-case <a href="https://revsoc.me/-50223">prosecutions</a> for “obstructing production” or “inciting”.
Managerial impunity: plant bosses learned that police would enforce internal discipline, from gate control to forced leave to lockouts dressed up as “maintenance”.
Wage theater: headline “minimum-wage” decrees and presidential “allowances” became PR covers, unevenly applied, easily dodged through exemptions or hollow claims on “inability to comply”.
The result was not a pacified labour force so much as a frozen one. From roughly 2014 to 2020, strikes became rare, brief and isolated. People still suffered; they just suffered silently. The state proved it could jail thousands, kill by example, and make union legalism a dead end.
Then prices did what police could not: they melted the freeze. The pandemic’s aftershocks, global food and energy spikes, and repeated devaluations pulled the last nails from household budgets. By 2022-25, the “no strike” equilibrium had eroded, not because repression eased, but because survival left no slack.
Where the movement stands now
This is not 2006-11 redux. Today’s labour fights are defensive and economic—not overtly political—focused on arrears, allowances, safety, childcare, meal stipends, shifts, and even the right to reach a hospital when a child is dying. They are short-cycle and local, measured in days rather than months unless the state stonewalls. They are also networked yet atomised: WhatsApp groups, ex-unionists and NGO veterans still share tactics and draft demands, but no national coordination with real teeth exists.
The risks are also clear: targeted arrests, mass firings, “disciplinary” dockings that erase the very raises you just won, and blacklist-style threats inside free zones. That’s why many stoppages end not in victory but with a warning and a date to resume if management backslides.
Sceptics will say that a few concessions here and there change nothing. They’re wrong. In Egypt’s current political economy, every shopfloor win—whether restored hazard pay, scrapped punitive leave rules, back pay for overtime, or a posted safety notice—has cumulative effects. Each gain raises the reservation wage, as even modest improvements, once normalised, set baselines that other plants imitate. They also expand the repertoire: once a plant has struck and survived, the next stoppage is less daunting and better organised. Most importantly, such victories rebuild confidence, the rarest resource under repression, built incrementally not through manifestos.
This is countercyclical politics from below. While elite pacts revolve around asset sales, debt service and foreign backing, workers are quietly renegotiating the daily reproduction of labour. It is not glamorous, but it is how movements survive long winters.
The state dilemma
Egypt’s rulers face a structural contradiction they cannot ideologically resolve. They need exports and domestic production to secure foreign currency and sustain patronage. They need docile labour to offer investors predictable costs and avoid disruptive headlines. At the same time, they need public credibility that “the state cares” even as real incomes collapse.
They can’t have all three. When prices surge faster than wages, labour unrest becomes a cost of doing business. The regime compensates with selective coercion (to deter organisation) and transactional concessions (to keep assembly lines moving). That’s precisely what the September strikes showed.
The longer arc
Egypt’s labour movement ignited the 2011 revolution’s decisive phase by translating street protest into stoppage power. The counter-revolution understood this perfectly and built a system designed to defang workers: re-monopolise representation, criminalise assembly, make managers de facto police, and flood the airwaves with a cult of “order”.
For a while, it worked. But no authoritarian model can repeal arithmetic. When the grocery bill doubles while allowances vanish, plants don’t stay quiet forever. What we’re witnessing now is not a return to the old days—there is no national wave, no open federation, no safe civic space. It is a learning process under extreme constraints. Workers are rediscovering what they already knew: if you don’t stop the machine, nothing changes.
September’s strikes didn’t rewrite the system. They did something more important for the long haul: they showed thousands of workers, again, that the machine still stops when they decide it will.
That’s the line that matters in 2025. Not the fantasy that one grand strike will topple a militarised political economy, but the reality that incremental, repeatable, local wins—backed by credible threats to escalate when promises fail—are rebuilding the only power that ever made Egypt’s rulers blink.
The question for 2026 is not whether Cairo will suddenly allow free unions. It won’t. The question is whether, plant by plant, shift by shift, workers continue converting unbearable living conditions into precision strikes that win real money, real safety, and real dignity, and whether those informal networks begin talking to one another again. If they do, the regime will face a familiar headache: a labour movement that doesn’t need permission to breathe.
The Egyptian labor movement is alive, conservative in tactics, brutalized by context, and—because of the economy—becoming unavoidable again. The state can’t crush prices. That’s why it won’t crush strikes forever.
Most importantly, such victories rebuild confidence, the rarest resource under repression, built incrementally rather than through manifestos.
First published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Iran on fire: rebellion returns to the streets

How the world is preparing the ground for the next Palestinian genocide

‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire

The fight for Palestine continues as long as Israel and Western imperialism exist

Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues

Protesting with Gen Z in Morocco

Ceasefire in Gaza: relief, but not enough

Tony Blair: war criminal in charge of Gaza peace

The Palestine solidarity movement must continue

Egypt’s workers stir again

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us