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

2025 will go down as a turning point in world politics—a year characterised by the ascendancy of the far right, savage attacks on living standards and imperialist brutality from Gaza to Ukraine. But it’s also been a year in which millions have been grasping for ways to resist this state of affairs—from general strikes in Europe to communities facing down immigration agents in US cities, from left electoral challenges to youth revolts in the economically underdeveloped world. There is no shortage of will to fight. What socialists make of this potential will play a role in shaping the future. Here are some lessons from the year.
1. Capitalist politics is showing its true face 
The Trump administration in the US has radicalised at breakneck speed, encapsulated by the president’s recent speech to top-ranking generals, pledging to use the military to destroy the left-wing “enemy within”. Trump has built his own Gestapo in the form of an army of deportation agents that now receives more funding than most national militaries.
This is a far-right insurgency not on the fringes of world capitalism, but at its centre. The notion that “capitalism”, “freedom” and “democracy” were essentially synonyms has long been an article of faith in mainstream politics—as former Vice President Kamala Harris expressed in September: “I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy”. But Trump came to office with the “titans of industry” sitting in the front row, and no amount of deportations, war crimes and coup threats seems to have dimmed their enthusiasm.
As billionaires cosy up to the far right, traditional conservatives are basking in their glow—from Britain’s Tories, to German Chancellor Frederich Merz, to Emmanuel Macron in France. Vice President J.D. Vance, once lauded as a “never Trump” moderate Republican, embodies this shift.
Politicians of the liberal centre, who have spent the past decade promoting themselves as the only viable barrier against far-right advance, have proved that, when push comes to shove, they crawl and simper before it. This goes beyond the cringing statements of fealty to Trump, as shameful as these are. Centrists and liberals are the prime drivers of a new militarism, fulfilling Trump’s demands for Western countries to build their armed forces. Germany’s Merz, for instance, has been able to rely on support from the Social Democrats and Greens for his plans to raise military spending to 5 percent of GDP. Britain’s Kier Starmer has attempted to roll back disability support payments in the quest to build a “battle ready” military. 
This should surprise nobody. The pretence that the “sensible centre” stood for a “rules-based” liberal international order based on human rights was shattered by their wholehearted support for Israel’s war on Gaza. As Israel has spent two years bombing hospitals, massacring hungry children at “aid distribution” points and burying Palestinians in mass graves, the arms from Israel’s Western allies have kept flowing. 
All the pro-capitalist political currents have shown themselves to be part of the same sordid game of power politics, in which the lives of the poor count for nothing.
2. The resistance will not go away 
2025 wasn’t just a year of right-wing ascendancy. Resistance to the new normal of austerity, authoritarianism and war has rocked every continent. 
Some of the sharpest struggles have occurred in the global south, where a wave of struggle over the past few years, dubbed the “Gen Z revolution”, has pitched millions of young people against their governments, from Paraguay to the Philippines. This is a generation for whom capitalism has broken all of its promises—of “development”, jobs and democratic rights. 
The movement in Bangladesh last year, which reached revolutionary proportions, contains important lessons. Protesters faced down mass arrests, torture and massacres to topple Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Hasina fled to India and has been sentenced to death in absentia. But Bangladesh’s movement also shows that replacing a leader or political clique at the head of the state will not be enough to address the demands that fuelled such heroic resistance. Hasina’s replacement, Muhammad Yunus, has doubled down on implementing the International Monetary Fund’s austerity directives. A year on from the revolt, two-thirds of young women in Bangladesh are still classified as “NEET”—not in employment, education or training. 
The sense of frustrated expectations is also felt in the West. Young people are priced out of their own cities by the real estate market, face mountains of student debt and diminishing prospects of finding a stable, well-paying job. This underlying resentment is constantly looking for new outlets. 
The global movement for Palestine has given a generation a unifying banner—a focal point for opposition to a discredited, genocidal political establishment. The urgency of defending Palestine has also acted as a source of courage, helping people across the world sweep away decades of demoralisation and apathy, and reviving traditions of mass protest. In standing up for the brutalised population of Gaza, people are also learning again to stand up for themselves. As one placard wielded by a demonstrator in Rome said: “We wanted to free Palestine, but instead Palestine is freeing us”. 
Another expression of the desire for an alternative is the emergence of new left-wing political forces. La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) has consolidated into the largest radical left party in Europe, with 400,000 members. The German Die Linke (The Left) party has grown from 58,000 to 120,000 this year. In Britain, the Greens have turned sharply to the left, increasing their membership by more than 100,000. The Socialist Party in Australia, formed this year, has already attracted more than 5,000 members, making it the largest socialist organisation in the country for generations. 
3. The working class has the power to change the world 
For decades, it has been fashionable to write off the working class. Liberal academics have argued that workers are too precarious and atomised to act effectively in their own interests. Postcolonial writers claim that Western workers are a privileged layer, beneficiaries of the imperialist exploitation carried out by their rulers. Many question whether the working class meaningfully exists any more—and when workers are noticed, it’s usually to pin blame on them for the latest disaster. 
Trump’s 2016 victory was dubbed the “revenge<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/09/how-trump-won-the-revenge-of-working-class-whites/">
of the white working class</a>” by commentators of conservative and liberal persuasion alike. Both sides agreed that “the white working class” was irredeemably conservative and racist. This was never rooted in genuine analysis, but reflected middle-class prejudices and a desire to legitimise a further shift to the right in mainstream politics. 
This rubbish was blown out of the water this year by the incredible actions of workers in solidarity with Palestine. Dock workers were the first to put themselves on the line. In the Greek port city of Piraeus, Marseille in France and Genoa in Italy’s north, they have repeatedly taken industrial action over the last two years to stop the loading of arms onto ships bound for Israel. In September, inspired by the upsurge in Palestine activism and the courage of those on board the Global Sumud Flotilla, dock workers decided to raise the stakes, calling for a general strike if Israel dared intercept the delivery of aid to Gaza. 
This culminated in an incredible moment in October: more than 100 cities were seized by mass demonstrations and strikes involving an estimated 2 million people. The promise of left-wing unions and the Palestine movement to “block everything” for Gaza was made good. Society was paralysed, from the ports to the railways to the factories. Schools were blockaded and universities occupied. The attempts by Italy’s fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to demonise, trivialise and repress the movement all fell flat. An authoritarian “security decree” that her government passed earlier this year to criminalise disruptive protests was torn to shreds as hundreds of thousands blocked major intersections and highways. 
It’s not the case that workers are always at the forefront of struggles against oppression and injustice. The workers’ movement is misled by politicians and bureaucrats who want to use workers as nothing more than a voting base and discourage any struggle. After decades of defeats and demoralisation, many people have understandably adapted and lowered their horizons on what is possible. 
But this can change quickly—once workers’ power catches on, it’s infectious. When workers withdraw their labour, they can halt the flow of profits, stop the flow of arms, end wars and even topple governments. The common interests and experiences of workers in vastly different situations across the globe, and a sense that all face a common enemy, push working-class solidarity back to the fore. As one participant in the Italian general strike for Gaza wrote: “The hand that bombs the Palestinians is the hand that exploits us in our workplaces”.
If a new left is built that can play a role in turning the tide of reaction, it has to restore at its heart the idea that the organised working class is the most powerful potential force for social change on the planet. 
4. A radical minority, when organised, can move millions 
While the horrific direction of world capitalism has generated many spontaneous movements, resistance has reached its greatest heights where organised groupings of radicals have given a lead and inspired masses of people to join them. The world isn’t going to be changed by sitting around complaining about capitalism with your friends or arguing on the internet. Turning discontent into a political movement requires organisations experienced in arguing, educating and mobilising people. 
This was shown clearly in Italy, where the sustained organising and bold action of a left-wing minority galvanised the strikes. They were not the initiative of the liberal parliamentary opposition to Meloni, nor of the largest union federation, the CGIL, which is a conservative and cautious bureaucracy.
First came the actions of militant students, organised by various socialist and communist groups, who blockaded high schools, organised university encampments and bravely stood up to police violence, generating sympathy from the public and statements of solidarity from sections of the union movement. 
The baton was then taken by radical unions dominated by the far left, which operate independently of the CGIL. The call of workers in the radical Autonomous Port Workers Collective lit the fuse for the movement. Millions of people fed up with government complicity and looking for a way to offer meaningful support to Gaza took up their call to block everything in successive days of mass strikes.
The left didn’t move millions into action by sucking up to their equivalents of the Labor Party or the ACTU—they planted a flag and challenged the “moderates” to follow. The first day of mass strikes on 22 September was not supported by the CGIL, but was nevertheless a massive success, with half a million taking to the streets. Many CGIL members took the day off work despite their union’s stance. The CGIL then felt it had no choice but to reverse course and endorse a general strike on 3 October or risk discrediting itself completely. The strike was a rare and exceptional day of workers’ unity, with the left and the country’s biggest union federation working together to shut down the country. 
In Germany, Die Linke has played an important role organising opposition to the fascist Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany). As mainstream politicians have moved to normalise the party, Die Linke leader Heidi Reichinnek used her platform in parliament to call for people to take “to the barricades” against the far right. 
Socialists in Australia have also played a modest but crucial role in mobilising resistance. The 300,000-strong demonstration in July, which defied the NSW state Labor government to march across the Sydney Harbor bridge, was the initiative of experienced Socialist Alternative members working through the Palestine Action Group. Socialist Alternative campus clubs also organised a national “student referendum” on university ties to weapons manufacturers and Labor’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, which culminated in the biggest wave of mass student meetings since the 1970s. 
5. Socialists have an enormous opportunity—and a responsibility 
The good news: socialism is becoming more popular. As the Liberal Party-aligned Institute for Public Affairs <a href="https://ipa.org.au/realities-of-socialism">bemoans</a>, polling conducted in Australia, Canada, the United States and the UK shows that around half of young people see socialism as the ideal economic system. 
Politicians who adhere to the socialist label are winning elections from the Irish Republic to New York City. It’s no wonder—the mass cynicism towards politics as usual, the discrediting and fracturing of established parties and political polarisation have created an opening. 
But the scale of the crises and injustices of 21st-century capitalism places an enormous responsibility on socialists. It’s not enough to win elections. Socialist leaders and organisations have to be judged on the extent to which they contribute to the organisation, struggle and consciousness of workers. Socialist politics is fundamentally about organising people around a radical world view, based on an understanding of working-class collective power, shared interests and a hostility to capitalist institutions like the state and mainstream political parties. 
Unfortunately, the most popular self-described socialists of recent years haven’t done this. US Senator Bernie Sanders raised the hopes of millions by calling for a struggle against the hated Democratic Party establishment, before becoming the left flank of the Biden administration as it armed Israel and broke strikes. 
In New York City, mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s “socialism” consists of a series of reforms such as free buses and rent controls, which, while deserving support, have nothing to do with challenging the priorities of capitalism. Worse, his “strategy” for achieving these reforms is to conciliate and collaborate with the Democratic Party establishment and the billionaires who run New York. He has stacked his transition team with Democratic Party bigwigs and Goldman Sachs executives, and disgracefully praised Trump’s supposed commitment to an “affordability agenda”.
This won’t cut it. This type of politics has never won meaningful change for working-class people. In a world defined by widening inequality, climate crisis, authoritarianism and war, it is dishonest to promote Mamdani’s agenda as a “socialist” project. 
Rebuilding a real socialist movement to meet this moment means restoring a sense among people that victories won’t be delivered by enlightened progressive politicians, through clever negotiations or accommodation to the institutions of capitalist power. They will come about only by building organisations that encourage the self-organisation of workers, raise political horizons and demand a fight against the rich and powerful. 
The discrediting of the capitalist mainstream, the overlapping crises facing the world and a sense of injustice have gripped a generation. This has created new opportunities for the socialist movement. But these can be seized only if there is a break with decades of demoralisation and moderation. The socialist movement must be bold. We have a world to win.

Luca Tavan

Five lessons from 2025

It’s a great time to be a neo-Nazi. For fans of the Third Reich, 2025 was probably one of the best years since the battle of Stalingrad. Hitlerian podcaster Nick Fuentes could take to Tucker Carlson’s massive online platform to denounce “organised Jewry” and receive the backing of an august conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Elon Musk unveiled the world’s first automated global fascist propaganda publication, Grokipedia, where modern theorists of antisemitism and white nationalism like Kevin Macdonald, David Irving and Jared Taylor are praised in glowing terms. In Australia, underground Nazi organisations led mass marches against immigration, with the enthusiastic support of right-wing media outlets and mainstream politicians. The sects and gurus of the Nazi fringe can now influence, and sometimes even lead, the mainstream right.
For most of the last 80 years, that has seemed pretty unlikely. Hitler’s empire was blown to smithereens, and Mussolini was lynched by his compatriots. The world seemed to move on comprehensively. By the 1970s, biological racism, medieval sexual politics and antisemitism were viewed by many as historical relics that could never be revived in the Western mainstream. 
The programs, methods and doctrines of first-generation fascism seem strictly bound to a particular time and place: a Europe of mass political parties, nascent revolutions and colonial empires challenging one another in open conflict. Fascism’s particular combination of those political elements—building a mass party to repress the revolution and rearm the empire—seemed irrelevant for much of the intervening period.
The ditching of so many distinctive elements of fascism led scholars like Enzo Traverso to use terms like “post-fascism” to describe far-right movements that emerged after the 1950s. Until fairly recently, describing right-wing governments as “fascist” could generate a cringe of embarrassment among liberals (afraid of seeming like overexcited socialists) and among socialists (afraid of seeming like scaremongering liberals). But now even neo-Nazi sects recognise, if not an identity, then a certain common project with the president of the United States. There are no great conceptual gaps in the chain of world views linking Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell to Tommy Robinson, to Musk, to Farage, to Le Pen, and to Trump, the great peacemaker and leader of Western democracy.
The fascist and conservative movements, today merged as a nebulous “far right”, have grown towards each other. Fascist activists have spent decades finding creative, entrepreneurial ways to recast their doctrines and forms of organisation to suit new political periods, and conservative parties have been open to imitating, absorbing and, at times, exceeding those innovations.
Fascism was hardly eradicated after the Second World War. Right-wing dictatorships remained or emerged on the European continent throughout the postwar period, and many ex (or not so ex) Nazis found comfortable positions within the postwar political and business elites. Fascist sects continued to operate underground, sometimes as adjuncts of Western intelligence services. But to rehabilitate it as a mass social phenomenon, or to allow it to influence mainstream right-wing thought openly, would require a series of political manoeuvres and programmatic shifts.
The anti-colonial movement and its aftermath provided an opportunity. Colonialism had been an inspiration for the first generation of fascists: acquiring colonies, preserving colonies and applying the open violence of colonial rule against the domestic left. The rise of anti-colonial movements allowed fascists like France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen to relate to a broad right-wing fury at the impending loss of overseas possessions, and to the humiliation of defeat at the hands of lowly Algerian Muslims. In 1957, his National Front of Combatants organised a nationwide “Caravan for French Algeria”, a propaganda tour rallying support for the crushing of the Algerian independence movement. It was an early step towards the construction of what would be one of Europe’s most successful and influential postwar far-right parties.
But if colonialist pro-war politics allowed the European far right a platform, it did not give it a long-term future. The powers that had retained colonies soon lost them; independence, whether de jure or de facto, became practically universal. There was little to be gained by arguing for the military reconquest of Indochina, Algeria or the Indian subcontinent. By the late 1960s, the far right turned to the issue that would give them a new life and sustain them to this day: immigration.
Opposition to immigration could unite and grow multiple constituencies for fascist-adjacent politics. For extreme reactionaries in Europe, the presence of migrants from former colonial possessions was an insult and a humiliation. For racists, the mere rumour of African, Caribbean, Arab and Asian populations settling in for good was, and remains, an unthinkable horror. But perhaps most importantly, opposing immigration could seem like a simple nationalist solution to almost any economic problem. 
Two years after Jean-Marie Le Pen led his pro-colonial caravan, British fascist Oswald Mosley campaigned in a by-election in West London. Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists and led their infamous march through the Jewish district of Cable Street. But he was also a former Labour politician and knew precisely how to relate to frustration at wealth inequality; now, he openly directed that anger towards working-class immigrants. In his memoirs, he wrote:
“For nearly two generations, the repeated pledge to rebuild the slums and to house our people properly had been broken. Without lifting a finger to fulfil the forty-year-old promise, the government piled a new population on top of people already suffering from an acute housing shortage and widespread slum conditions ... My proposal was simply to repatriate immigrants to their homeland.”
Mosley was disappointed with the 8 percent he garnered in this election, but he had been one of the pioneers of a strategy that would define far-right politics forevermore. Writing in 1968, Mosley hinted that the full potential of the anti-migrant strategy would become apparent in the future: “An electorate never moves decisively except under severe economic pressure, which is nearly always unemployment”. 
Sure enough, as the postwar boom exhausted itself and unemployment ratcheted up through the 1970s, anti-migrant far-right movements gained momentum. By 1977, Britain’s National Front had become a genuine mass phenomenon, with 15 percent of young men expressing support for it; from Mosley’s 8 percent support in the North Kensington by-election, the National Front polled 8 percent nationwide.
The anti-migrant stance was helped by the economic stagnation of the 1970s. That same stagnation gave rise to the era of neoliberalism: the centre-left parties would more openly embrace privatisation, deregulation and attacks on working-class living standards. The neoliberal era, in turn, supercharged the potential of anti-migrant politics.
It was not only far-right parties that embraced this scapegoating strategy: the right-wing press, mainstream conservatives and even centre-left parties spent the decades since the 1970s directing frustration and resentment towards migrants, even when the targeted immigrant population was so small as to be completely economically irrelevant, like refugees in Australia. 
But for far-right parties, the neoliberal era created a special opportunity to present themselves as the defenders of the redistributive traditions that had been abandoned by the mainstream centre left. The “post-fascists” adopted a stance that became known as “welfare chauvinism”, the 1990 coinage of Danish researchers Jørgen Goul Andersen and Tor Bjørklund. The welfare state should be preserved by banning migrants from accessing its generosity. Immigrants were attacked as the parasitic beneficiaries of a marketised, unequal society.
While railing against the new neoliberal consensus, in the same decades many of the fascist-derived parties sought to “mainstream” and shed the last embarrassing vestiges of their associations with Hitler’s traditions. Antisemitism was deprecated and largely replaced with the fashionable Islamophobia of the War on Terror: the “dédiabolisation” of the French National Front culminated with the expulsion of its founder for his open Holocaust denial; the street-fighting British National Front gave birth to the “respectable” British National Party, which by 2008 was being described as having “one of the most Zionist” stances of any British political party. 
Far from Hitler’s revolutionary calls for bloodshed, dictatorship and war, the far right of the 2000s often presented itself as a defender of democracy, liberalism, civilisation and social welfare. Its Muslim-bashing leaders were women like Marine Le Pen, gay men like Pim Fortuyn and self-proclaimed “social democrats” like Jörg Haider.
This was the rehabilitated, sophisticated and relatively popular “post-fascist” right that entered the political maelstrom of the 2010s, when the aftermath of the global financial crisis led to explosive hatred of the established political elites, and the civil war in Syria led to a new focus on immigration. The new politics provided a template by which right-wingers could convert anti-establishment sentiment into reactionary madness. 
In some countries, such as the United States, the mainstream conservative party, after an internal crisis, largely adopted a far-right framework. In other cases, new far-right parties surged and displaced the old conservatives, as in France. In some, both processes unfolded one after the other, as in Britain, where Boris Johnson’s Conservatives rode the tiger of Brexit only to be consumed by it and replaced by Nigel Farage’s Reform. But as that process unfolded, something changed. In the decade after the Brexit vote and Trump’s election, the “post-fascist” far right has become a little less “post”. Right-wing activists with mass followings now sound less like Geert Wilders and more like Goebbels. 
Having surged, the mass far-right subcultures have also radicalised. Right-wing tech giants have rediscovered the traditional capitalist hostility to democracy and interest in social Darwinism, exemplified by Elon Musk’s musing that the vote should be restricted to “high status males”. Biological racism, extreme misogyny and thuggish 1950s-style homophobia have become normalised. Even Nazi-style antisemitism is increasingly welcome in the global conservative community, the natural and logical conclusion of an ultra-nationalist reactionary world view.
When fascism first emerged, the Communist movement’s leaders were thrown back on their heels. It took some time to understand the seriousness of the threat and the novelty of its methods. A degree of complacency existed. “At first, the prevailing view was that fascism was nothing more than violent bourgeois terror”, Clara Zetkin told the Comintern in 1923—an audience intimately familiar with “violent bourgeois terror” and not inclined to underestimate it. But fascism was “quite different”, with its base “in broad social layers, broad masses, reaching even into the working class”. That required new methods of political combat.
But distinguishing too sharply between fascism and “traditional” reactionary politics can be misleading too. Fascism’s first generation pioneered new tactics—mass parties, revolutionary demagoguery and street violence—that could be adopted as needed by pro-capitalist political forces. The next century was marked by open and hidden collaboration, mutual inspiration and competition between fanatical fascists and mainstream conservatives. The fascist activists who swarmed around Trump, and the post-fascist parties he inspires, have helped to create a broad political movement with few clear barriers separating the underground Nazi sects from the tech CEOs and the think tank chairmen.

D. Taylor

From Hitler to here: the journey of the far right

One night in June 2024, balaclava-clad pro-Israel thugs descended on the Deakin University Gaza solidarity encampment. The next night, a Turkish woman in her 40s turned up at the camp. She mostly sat back from the flurry of activity, but by 3am we realised she wasn’t leaving. She stayed that night, and many more after, as our self-appointed sentry, leaving early each morning to take her kids to school and go to work. 
She later explained that she had been one of the thousands of protesters who camped in Istanbul’s Gezi Park to defend it from demolition in 2013. When Turkish riot police carried out vicious pre-dawn attacks, the protests transformed into a mass revolt calling for the downfall of the president. She sat watching over us all these years later because, to her, we were the next generation, taking up a fight that was in some way the continuation of her fight.
The mass struggles which draw people out of their routines and into the streets shape official politics and the minds of millions. The Gezi Park protests, for example, imbued a sense of defiance and opposition to police in Türkiye. Black Lives Matter spread anti-police consciousness and a desire to fight racism in millions across the world. The environmental movement, especially Extinction Rebellion and the School Strikes for Climate, pointed the finger at the corporations and the rich that are wilfully hurtling us towards disaster. 
These movements showed again and again that, when confronted with brutality and injustice, throwing ourselves into protest is the natural and logical thing to do. To win most of our demands, we will have to go further than this—to mass working-class action—but protest continues to be how the powerless initially demand to be heard. 
The Palestine movement has hit the world in a different way. It has become the core issue animating a bitter anger at the system among a new layer of leftward moving young people and millennials. And, significantly, those who march have felt themselves part of an international struggle, not just a local question. The sheer depravity of Israel’s war has shaken people from all walks of life, the deliberate bombings of hospitals and schools destroying any remaining illusions in the Western powers’ respect for human rights or the rules of war. 
From the beginning of the genocide in 2023 to the aftermath of the latest ceasefire, tens of thousands of people have repeatedly hit the streets in major cities across Australia. The movement overall has involved many hundreds of thousands of people. The movement has had ebbs and flows. When the extremity of the starvation in Gaza began making headlines in May 2025, the weekly demonstrations surged. By August, public anger was at its peak. Sydney-based Palestine Action Group battled the Minns Labor government over the right to march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The activists won, and 300,000 people defiantly marched in pouring rain. This was followed by a nationwide day of protest that mobilised hundreds of thousands across the country, including large numbers in small towns. This defeat of Minns, a more active supporter of Israel than other premiers, was an important political win for the movement. So was the constitutional challenge against his attempted anti-protest laws in October 2025. 
The extremity of the war has laid bare the fact that our world is not governed by rules and that even the most extreme human suffering is tolerated in the name of projecting Western power. Organisations like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, which are meant to stand above nation-states and protect human rights, have proven impotent in the face of atrocities committed by Israel and backed by Western imperialism. 
Mass sentiment shifted significantly over the course of Israel’s war and genocide. In November 2023, 49 percent of Australians said that they thought the government <a href="https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/9398-roy-morgan-islamic-society-of-south-australia-survey-november-2023">shouldn’t</a> take a side in the war. By <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/over-half-of-australians-support-sanctions-on-israel-and-its-leaders-for-ongoing-attacks-on-gaza-poll-shows">October</a> 2025, 57 percent of Australians supported sanctions on Israel and 58 percent <a href="https://apan.org.au/media_release/poll-finds-australians-back-sanctions/">said</a> a genocide was taking place. 
Support for the United States has likewise tanked. In 2020, a Lowy Institute <a href="https://poll.lowyinstitute.org/files/lowyinsitutepoll-2020.pdf">poll</a> found that 51 percent of Australians trusted the US to act responsibly in the world. In 2025, the result has dropped to just 36 percent, with more than 62 percent saying they did not trust the US to act responsibly. This is the lowest level in the history of the Lowy poll. 
The Palestine movement has created a new culture of activism. Groups of friends in capital cities don’t just go clubbing or to gigs any more—for two years they have planned their lives around protesting for a group of people on the other side of the world. Parents of young kids contended with how to explain what they were protesting about to their children, and workers marched with workmates and talked Palestine over lunch. 
All this despite the near consensus on the part of official politics for backing Israel—with the honourable exception of the Greens, who took a commendable stand against the genocide that likely impacted large numbers among their heavily millennial voter base. 
In Melbourne, campaign groups cropped up everywhere early on. At first, they were mostly framed around campaigning to get local councils to pass motions condemning the genocide, pledging to divest or to raise the Palestinian flag. These didn’t just crop up in the leftie ghettos or heavily Arab areas, but across the city. After a few months, many of these groups transitioned to other tactics. Some organised protests outside of local Labor MP offices or focused their efforts on picketing factories that are part of the global F-35 supply chain. 
Workers in all sorts of industries formed union groups to campaign for Palestine. ASU for Palestine, which has organised two walkouts by community and legal sector workers, stands out. Most of these council and workplace groups wound down by 2025, but they left an important imprint and meant the movement itself was deeper than just central demonstrations.
In April 2024, when the demonstrations waned somewhat, student encampments blossomed across the country. Inspired by students at Columbia University in New York, University of Sydney students set up tents and camped out through winter to demand divestment. Many other campuses followed, with the camps becoming an important focal point for activism and education. Activists exposed the links that universities have to Israel, their role in facilitating weapons research and the political nature of the institutions. The camps connected with each other, discussing and updating a shared <a href="https://overland.org.au/2024/05/statement-from-11-palestine-solidarity-encampments/">statement</a> in regular meetings. Socialists played a key role in establishing them in most cases, and in connecting them to each other. University managements have used heavy-handed repression against students, including expulsions at Melbourne University and the Australian National University and suspensions at Deakin. Many students have now been dragged through disciplinary processes for their activism, and notably in most cases they have won. 
To a far greater degree than during the climate movement or Black Lives Matter protests, those who wish to stand with Palestine must take risks to do so. The fight around the political question has opened many more battles over the question of free speech and expression. In 2024, two bakery workers were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/17/melbourne-black-star-pastry-employees-sacked-wearing-keffiyeh-work-discrimination-case?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other">sacked</a> for wearing keffiyehs at work. Academics, teachers and public sector workers have been faced disciplinary processes or had their funding cut. Many have had to fight for the right to wear a keffiyeh or badge at work. This means that even though support for Palestine is widespread, it’s also a real fight in people’s everyday lives and, as a result, more politicising than issues that are less controversial among liberals. 
Cultural institutions have also been forced to take sides and reveal their political affiliations, discrediting their liberal reputations in the process. Melbourne Symphony Orchestra terminated the contract of Jayson Gilham after he dedicated a recital to assassinated Gazan journalists. When three actors in a Sydney Theatre Company production of the Seagull wore keffiyehs on stage during a curtain call, donors pulled funding and three board members resigned. Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre refused to host a performance by feminist activist Clementine Ford, citing “safety” fears for Jewish patrons because of Ford’s strong stance against Israel’s genocide. 
And once again, the highly partisan nature of the Australian media has been exposed. There’s been a systematic burial of Palestinian voices, while Israeli and pro-Israel figures are given a front seat. Journalists have <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/07/04/four-israel-gaza-letter-signatories-departed-nine/">resigned</a> from the ABC, Nine, the Age and other outlets over the coverage of Gaza. In 2024, ABC journalists <a href="https://archive.is/K6B0c">revealed</a> that management had tried to ban them from using words including “genocide” and “occupation” when covering Palestine. 
Australian politicians from both sides have backed the genocide. The Labor government has only strengthened its commitment to the F-35 supply chain for fighter planes to Israel. 
Labor’s political support for the genocide is, if not more so, as important as its arming of Israel. Albanese’s statements have always led with assertion of solidarity with Israel, and he’s done his best to denigrate, demonise and belittle those who protest against Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation. He has appointed an antisemitism envoy to assist in his campaign to portray pro-Palestine feeling as antisemitic bigotry. He travelled to the US to pose with US President Donald Trump, and forced Senator Fatima Payman out of the party for daring to stand firm in her support for a Palestinian state. 
Labor state governments have proved some of the most determined opponents of the Palestine movement. The Victorian and NSW governments in particular have helped the political right charge supporters of Palestine with antisemitism. The Minns government deliberately withheld information that showed organised crime was responsible for the attacks. It did so to use them as a pretext for serious anti-protest measures, knowing that the protesters had nothing to do with the crimes. Now, the Minns and Allan governments are exploiting the tragic Bondi shooting to rush through laws allowing the state governments to ban protests for defined periods. The defence of civil liberties will continue to be a crucial fight for those who stand with Palestine. 
It is important to reckon with the fact that this significant, large and ongoing movement did not stop the genocide. 
When atrocities happen, people find they have no option but to protest. And while the genocide wasn’t stopped, people feel vindicated in their opposition and have been drawn into an international opposition to the brutality of our rulers. Only once people have been convinced to plant their feet on the right side of history, and to act in accordance, can discussions about strategy begin to take on real meaning beyond the ranks of handfuls of people. In this sense, the movement is an important beginning. And the response to government intransigence has largely been not demoralisation but demands to escalate. The mass strike against the genocide by Italian workers in solidarity with the Sumud flotilla showed a small glimpse of the type of action that is and was needed across the world to defeat Israel. Protests and pickets are essential acts of mass defiance, but they do not have anywhere near the power of workers striking at the point of production. 
To defeat Israel’s genocide, we would have needed to see sustained mass strikes in Western bloc nations like Australia and the United States, and revolutionary working-class uprisings involving strikes across the Arab world. This is not an impossible dream. 
Australian workers carried out a general strike in 1917, partly motivated by opposition to the First World War. In 1967, Australian Seamen’s Union members refused to crew the ship Boonaroo, which was meant to deliver military cargo to support the Western war effort in Vietnam, and Melbourne dock workers refused to load ships in solidarity with the struggle against South African apartheid. During the Arab revolutions of 2011, Palestinian liberation both inspired the anti-dictator struggles and was a thread running through them. In 2019, when Algerians rose against their own dictator, the Palestinian flag was draped on buildings and carried in crowds. 
In the words of Joseph Heller in Catch-22, “they have the right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing”. We might not have stopped them this time, but there will be more battles. The challenge for all those on the side of the Palestinians is to keep up the fight and build a movement with the power and the politics to defeat the ruling classes who carried out or backed this genocide, once and for all.

Jasmine Duff

The impact of the Palestine solidarity movement

“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

Ryan Stanton

The rise and fall of the US Congress of Industrial Organizations

In a timely response to Donald Trump’s phoney “peace plan” and Israel’s continual violations of the ceasefire agreement, the concluding session of a <a href="https://gazatribunal.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“people’s tribunal” on Gaza</a> was held in Istanbul, 23-26 October. Over the four days, an audience of hundreds, plus many more online, heard compelling testimony from dozens of experts and individual victims of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign, including the mass murder, deliberate starvation and destruction of medical care, housing, the environment and other civilian infrastructure. The statement below was issued at the conclusion of the Gaza Tribunal hearing. All talks from the Istanbul session are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@GazaTribunal/videos">available on YouTube</a>.
--------------------
The Steering Committee members of the Gaza Tribunal issue this conclusion at a historic moment of darkness, but in a continuing quest for the light of justice. 
The Gaza Tribunal recognizes that the current genocide in Palestine, rooted in a century of colonization and oppression, represents a watershed moment in the history of our world. If the Israeli perpetrators and their western enablers are allowed to escape justice, and the Palestinian survivors are left without meaningful redress and, ultimately, their full liberation from the dehumanizing shackles of Zionism and colonialism, the world will have ratified one of the worst atrocities in history. The Tribunal notes that if colonialism, apartheid, and genocide are not moral redlines, then there are no redlines. And the world that presages will be a world of unprecedented horror. Every member of the human family has a stake in Palestinian justice. 
Cognizant of this, the Gaza Tribunal was established in London in November 2024, as a people’s tribunal in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal that was established at the height of US aggression in Vietnam. It convened public hearings in Sarajevo in May 2025, adopting the historic Sarajevo Declaration as a statement of the principles of the Tribunal and of the global quest for justice in Palestine. Its work over the past year has consisted of the collection of information and analysis, the hearing of witnesses and survivors, the archiving of evidence, and the issuing of appeals to humanity for action to end the genocide and to secure justice for the Palestinian people. Its convening here in Istanbul has brought together members of the Tribunal, witnesses, survivors, experts, and an international Jury of Conscience to issue a moral judgement on the crimes of the Israeli regime and those complicit in their perpetration, and to set the course for the next phase of the quest for justice in Palestine. The members of the Gaza Tribunal welcome the findings of the Jury of Conscience, applaud their moral clarity, and commit to the struggle to see their implementation in full. 
The accelerated genocide of the past two years had shocked the conscience of humanity. The images of its audacious cruelty are forever seared in the minds of decent people everywhere, and the echoes of the cries of its victims will forever ring in our ears. We will forget none of it. The brutal attacks on an imprisoned civilian population, the intentional infliction of hunger, thirst, and disease as weapons of genocide, the targeting of bullets and bombs and drones at innocents, the mass arrests and imprisonment in notorious dungeons, the systematic beatings, and torture, and sexual violence of the genocidal perpetrators, the sniping of toddlers for sport, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, homes, refugee shelters, aid facilities, agricultural fields, food stores, even cemeteries, and the deliberate targeting of civilian truth tellers, journalists, medical personnel, aid workers, and other protected persons. So too will we remember the arrogant genocidal threats and declarations of the perpetrators, and their cruel laughter and public celebration of their crimes, all recorded forever in a catalogue of shame. 
We warn the world today that the genocide in Palestine has not ended. The Israeli regime continues to murder Palestinians in Gaza with its Western-supplied bullets and bombs. It continues to obstruct the delivery of food and medicine to the survivors. It continues to impose its unlawful siege on the survivors. Its two-year systematic imposition of hunger, disease, injury, the plaguing of all of Gaza with toxic chemicals and explosive ordinance, its destruction of most shelter as well as the infliction of mass mental disorder and impaired developmental capacities for surviving civilians, will all continue to claim victims of the genocide for years to come. Even as Gaza continues to bleed, the Israeli regime has extended the annihilation phase of the genocide to the West Bank, where land, and livelihoods, and lives are claimed every day in the ethnic cleansing and racist assaults of the Israeli army and its violent settlers. 
Nor do the colonial maneuvers reflected in the so-called Trump Plan, or in the New York plan, offer any hope for end to the genocide, or for freedom or justice for Palestine. Even as we welcome any ceasefire, we note that the Israeli regime has continued to violate with impunity the current declared cessation with daily killings of Palestinians and the continued obstruction of humanitarian aid. We reject the provisions of both plans that would violate fundamental Palestinian rights of self-determination, the essential elements of which are agency, sovereignty, authentic representation and unified leadership. The proposed Plans presuppose impunity for Israeli genocide and apartheid, normalize the Israeli regime, ignore the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, and impose proxy occupation and colonial control over the victims of genocide, while doing nothing to reign in the perpetrators of genocide. Palestinians must lead the restoration of Gaza, and Israel and its enablers must be held responsible for all reparations. 
We demand accountability for the perpetrators and their complicit enablers, redress for the victims and survivors, action to address the root causes of Zionist colonization, occupation, and apartheid, rejection of all efforts to normalize the perpetrator regime and its criminal acts, and freedom for Palestine. In sum, we demand justice. 
To these ends, we call on people of conscience everywhere to intensify their efforts to secure justice for the Palestinian people, through increased and coordinated efforts to isolate the Israeli regime, reject its normalization, and to hold it to account through boycotts, divestment, sanctions, military embargoes, criminal prosecutions of perpetrators and complicit actors, civil actions against those benefitting from harms, education of our neighbors, public protest and civil disobedience, and the amplification of calls for a free Palestine.

Gaza Tribunal: The genocide continues

“Improbable” doesn’t quite capture the political significance of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor-elect of New York City. The left is not supposed to win capitalist elections, at least not big ones like this. And not in America, where corporate power’s grip on politics is more vice-like than anywhere else on Earth. 
Yet, while his victories this year might appear to be something out of the blue—and at odds with the triumphant moment the right is having, which is reshaping the US and much of Europe—this moment has been building for some time. A decade ago, we wrote in these pages of the insurgent US presidential primary campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who, like Mamdani, was running on a democratic socialist platform:
“Something is happening in the United States. The political landscape is being transformed, though just how widely, deeply or permanently is still unclear ... It seems improbable that [Sanders] will defeat the machine of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ... But even if he ultimately fails, you get the sense that a genie has been let out of a bottle. The genie is not Sanders himself ... but the sentiment that he has tapped ...
“Anger with the economic and political system has found a left-wing electoral expression, which is unlike anything seen in the US in generations. Whether it can be cohered into a movement to rebuild the left is another question. But there definitely is hope that it might.”
Ultimately, the Sanders insurgency was unsuccessful. In the following years, the senator went on to betray the aspirations that he stoked, and the revolutionary left imploded just as it might have seized the moment to build something independent of the Democratic Party. These are cautionary tales for the Mamdani moment. 
Nevertheless, the broad shift in consciousness has continued. It was evident at the end of 2015 and became clearer as the presidential primaries unfolded the following year. The political establishments of both the Democrats and the Republicans were facing significant blowback from their left and right bases, respectively. 
Since then, the political polarisation in the United States and elsewhere has intensified, although it has been expressed somewhat asymmetrically; at least in the electoral sphere, the far right has made most of the running. That’s reflected in its leaders’ surnames gaining worldwide recognition: Trump, Meloni, Modi, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, Milei. 
Everywhere, far-right organisations have been bankrolled by billionaires and masses of smaller capitalists while receiving free and positive publicity from sections of the reactionary corporate media. They have built a base among the personnel of the repressive arms of the state, such as the police and the military, and more broadly among the population by dishonestly selling their reactionary pro-capitalist programs as some form of “people power”.
New York has now kicked back. Young working-class people have reacted to the consolidation of Trumpism, to ongoing economic hardship, to the new holocaust in Gaza, to the victimisation of undocumented migrants and the Gestapo-like raids being carried out across the country, and to the capitalist establishment’s complicity in it all. 
A member of the Democratic Socialists is about to take the reins of global finance’s most important city. A Palestine solidarity activist who rejects the idea of a Jewish state has succeeded in the heart of liberal Zionism. A 34-year-old who said that billionaires shouldn’t exist has won the metropolis that is home to the most billionaires on the planet. 
However, the main thing is that Mamdani’s victory came on the back of more than 100,000 volunteers and the city’s largest voter turnout in over half a century. This astonishing mobilisation reflects a very positive shift in political consciousness. 
Most of the mainstream commentary, naturally, focuses on Mamdani himself—his political talents, his campaigning acumen and his identity. From the left, numerous criticisms can and should be made of his increasing embrace of the establishment that he purports to oppose. Some of these were foreshadowed in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/fairytale-of-new-york">the Red Flag editorial</a> following his victory in the primaries. Lance Selfa, writing from Chicago, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/trump-cops-a-pasting-in-us-election-rebuke">outlines the subsequent developments</a>.
Nevertheless, this is a moment to grasp—New York has electrified people across the globe because they can see an alternative to the status quo in a world that is totally stacked against us. Increasingly over the last decade or so, that alternative has been given a name: “socialism”. This sea change in sensibilities is astounding. From a ridiculed word, it has again become the menace of the political right and the hope of millions.
That is something to be built on.

Editors

The Mamdani moment

There isn’t much to explain about the result of the off-year US elections on 4 November. In virtually every election held in every district and every state, Democrats improved on their performance in last year’s presidential election. And in many places, they exceeded their most optimistic predictions.
“No Kings” went to the polls.
In New Jersey, expectations of a close election melted before Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill’s 13-percentage-point victory. In New York City, Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani won a majority of votes in a four-way race for mayor amidst the highest turnout in the city’s mayoral election since 1969.
The Democratic sweep wasn’t confined only to liberal strongholds like New York City or California. Mississippi Democrats managed to break the Republican super-majority in the state Senate. Two Georgia Democrats won election to the state’s public utility commission, marking the first time in twenty years that Democrats won a statewide race for state office. 
<a href="https://www.citizensvoice.com/2025/11/04/democrats-regain-majority-on-luzerne-county-council-flip-4-seats/">Democrats turfed out local officials in conservative areas like Luzerne County, Pennsylvania</a>, considered a bellwether county for a Trumpist future. The right-wing city council member who promoted the Trump-amplified lie that Venezuelan gangs had taken over apartment buildings in <a href="https://sentinelcolorado.com/orecent-headlines/aurora-vote-2025-election-night-results/">Aurora, Colorado, received a well-deserved ejection from her seat</a>.
The explanation for the rout is simple. Voters wanted to voice opposition to Trump, and to support Democratic pledges to improve affordability. That was the winning message for Democratic candidates, whether the messenger was a self-described moderate or a social democrat.
According to opinion polls, President Trump is more unpopular now than Joe Biden was when Democratic Party mandarins forced him out of the 2024 presidential race. Clearly, millions went to the polls to vote against Trump. Second, Trump’s 2024 promises to lower prices on necessities have not been fulfilled. Trump’s policies, such as his across-the-board tariffs and cuts to health-care subsidies, are raising prices.
The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/economic-anger-once-again-punishes-the-party-in-power">economic and political headwinds</a> that pushed against Kamala Harris and the Democrats a year ago are now blowing against Trump and the Republicans. <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/">In 2024, it was “the economy, stupid”</a> and in 2025, it still is. Only now, Trump and the GOP are the target for voters’ frustrations—as Harris and Democrats were in 2024.
In 2024, voters who took a chance on Trump could tell themselves that he would, as he said, “bring down prices on day one” and that his deportation plan would focus on “violent criminals”. Since January, however, they have seen that Trump’s policies have served corrupt oligarchs and that federal goons are abducting day labourers and childcare workers off the streets. For these reasons, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/seven-data-driven-takeaways-from">2024 Republican gains with young voters and with Latinos have evaporated</a>.
Even GOP “culture wars” couldn’t save it. The Republican candidate for Virginia’s governorship spent millions on anti-trans ads. She lost by 14 points.
In California, more than 8 million voters turned out to endorse Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to provide Democrats the opportunity to win five additional seats in Congress in the 2026 midterm election. Newsom touted this measure as “fighting fire with fire” against the governments of Texas and other Republican-led states who are trying to gerrymander their congressional maps to insulate Republicans from a building wave to throw them out of office.
Liberals are cheering the overwhelming victory (by a margin of almost 2-to-1) of the Newsom-backed Proposition 50. To them, Newsom deserves credit because his partisan ruthlessness broke the usual mould of Democratic Party fecklessness against Trump and the GOP. But from a socialist point of view, a manoeuvre to elect more Democrats shouldn’t be a cause for celebration.
<a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/lessons-of-election-2024/">The Democrats remain a capitalist party whose dedication to the status quo laid the groundwork for the horrors that Trump is enacting today</a>. In 2024, Kamala Harris touted her “tough on the border” credentials and defended the Biden administration’s abetting of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. A generation of Democratic Party support for the neoliberal policy agenda that destroyed labour unions and immiserated millions opened the way for Trump.
Even today, after their landslide victories, the “centrist” Democratic governors-elect in New Jersey and Virginia won’t commit to basic policies to support working people. Mikie Sherrill, governor-elect in New Jersey, has yet to say whether she will extend the state’s law preventing its <a href="https://boltsmag.org/immigration-and-new-jersey-governor-election/">law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration authorities</a>. Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor-elect, has already said she won’t support repealing the state’s <a href="https://www.virginiascope.com/spanberger-splits-the-middle-on-right-to-work-opposes-full-repeal/">anti-union “right to work” law</a>.
Electing more Democrats doesn’t guarantee support for democracy or for working people, any more than decades of Democratic super-majorities in California have produced affordable housing or <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/single-payer-healthcare-meets-its-fate-again-in-the-face-of-californias-massive-budget-deficit">single-payer health care</a>. For all their election campaign rhetoric about “standing with working people”, the Democrats have no plan, nor vision, that can combat Trumpism’s appeal to cynicism for politicians who talk a good game but don’t do anything to improve ordinary people’s lives.
In this political wasteland, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York City, stands out as something different and fresh. It’s not just that he cited socialist hero Eugene Debs in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-election-victory-speech">his victory speech</a>. Or that he ran a clever social media-driven campaign that embraced New York’s immigrant diversity. Or that he dared Donald Trump: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us”. It’s that he captured the hopes of millions who expect him to stand up for them against the billionaire oligarchs.
Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability in one of the US’s least affordable cities inspired tens of thousands of volunteers to canvass for him, and more than 1 million to turn out for him against the decrepit Democratic Party establishment that couldn’t stop him. 
Mamdani focused his campaign on a simple set of promises, including pledges to freeze rents, make bus rides free and open city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s message resonated widely especially among younger and immigrant voters in New York.
What can we expect from his administration? JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Mamdani a “Marxist” “pushing the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world”. In fact, Mamdani’s transition team relies on professionals who have worked in the last three New York City administrations.
Despite all the ridiculous rhetoric branding him as a dangerous radical, Mamdani’s proposals are modest. Mamdani and his supporters in the DSA openly embrace the early <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-mayor-socialism-nyc-strategy/">1900s model of “sewer socialism”</a>. This moniker originated as a put-down of Socialist Party city officials who eschewed radical politics in favour of humdrum provision of city services. 
But the reformers who implemented it—especially in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the bastion of some of the most conservative Socialists—chose to embrace “sewer socialism”. To them, “socialism” meant running “clean” (not corrupt) governments that delivered public services. This type of city administration is clearly preferable to corrupt cronyism, but it’s hardly the stuff of the transition to socialism.
Moreover, Mamdani endorsed policies, like loosening regulations on small businesses and land use, that dovetail with <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/06/04/2025/at-welcomefest-centrist-democrats-pick-a-fight-with-the-left">so-called “abundance” agenda that is all the rage with “centrist” neoliberal Democrats</a>. Last September—before he announced his run for mayor—he met with Kathy Wylde, a leader of the city’s business elite. Wylde told the Wall Street Journal
that “[Mamdani] said, ‘Look, I’m not in favour of government taking over your business ... He made clear that he’s not anticapitalist in that sense”.
Two of his proposals—appointing members of the city’s Rent Stabilization Board committed to his pledge to freeze rents and fare-free buses—are within his power to implement as mayor. In fact, the previous liberal Democratic Mayor Bill deBlasio implemented similar rent-stabilisation policies. His plan for city-owned groceries is a pilot project aimed at providing one store in each borough as a “proof of concept”. In a city of more than 8 million, this is hardly a threat to the retail grocery sector.
His more ambitious proposals, such as universal pre-kindergarten education, will require approval from New York state for the taxes to fund them. But here’s where Mamdani’s agenda will run up against other forces in the Democratic Party determined to coopt him or to break him.
In his runs for office, Mamdani has always run as a Democrat. This may provide DSA-backed candidates with a more ready-made electorate, but it also makes them captive inside a capitalist party. Not wanting to be ostracised from people who hold influence over their agenda or their advancement leads candidates to make concessions to the mainstream that undercut their independence or even their ability to deliver for their supporters. This process helps to turn <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-just-a-regular-old-democrat-now.html">nominal socialists into “regular old Democrats”</a>. 
We’ve already seen that process taking shape with Mamdani. <a href="https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/zohrans-historic-win-16-takeaways">Social democrat Eric Blanc may</a> consider Mamdani’s rejection of “defunding the police” (a goal that Blanc called “performative ultraleftism”) as a brilliant stroke to avoid having to answer multiple “gotchas” from reporters and pro-cop trolls. But it’s not going to help him deal with the NYPD, a resource-sucking army that will declare war on him the minute he tries to take any action to curtail its abuses.
In a meeting with executives in the Partnership for New York, the city’s de facto chamber of commerce, Mamdani said he was open to retaining the current police commissioner<a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/mamdani-clarifies-globalize-the-intifada-stance-in-meeting-with-business-elites-">, Jessica Tisch (daughter of Leow’s billionaire CEO James Tisch)</a>. At the same meeting, he also pledged to discourage activists from using the slogan “globalise the intifada”, a phrase which has been the pretence for multiple attacks on him, <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/zohran-mamdani-adl-antisemitism-intifada-bogus-scandal-nyc">even though he has said repeatedly that he doesn’t use it</a>.
What will hold Mamdani to fulfil his promises to working-class supporters, especially when he faces opposition from Wall Street, the police or establishment political forces? His supporters look to the army of canvassers his campaign mobilised. <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-victory-hope-nyc-election">As Liza Featherstone put it</a>, “the mass movement that elected him must be prepared to help him succeed, as the ruling class (especially the real estate industry), the Trump administration, and the police make every effort to make his mayoralty a failure”.
While this is theoretically possible, it has almost never happened. There are too many differences between the mechanics of an electoral campaign and a social movement needed to win reforms. Marxists have long contended that elections are the “lowest form” of politics, not requiring the type of political commitment or mobilisation that a true social movement entails.
There’s also the compromised position that someone like Mamdani, as chief executive officer of a city and boss of hundreds of thousands of city workers, will face. First, he will have to staff an administration, undoubtedly pulling many grassroots activists into the government. That means many who could be pressuring the government from the “outside” will be on the “inside”, defending the mayor’s agenda instead.
Will the nominal boss of the NYPD use his office to mobilise protests when the police brutalise or murder someone on his watch? Will the CEO and employer of teachers and other city workers support them if they strike against austerity? Will his administration arrest and prosecute Trump’s immigration goons for civil rights abuses? To ask these questions is to be clear-eyed about developments that will put Mamdani’s brand of “municipal socialism” to the test.

Lance Selfa

Trump cops a pasting in US election rebuke

“‘Palestine will free us all’—you know this slogan, right?” Michael Letwin, a co-founder of US solidarity group Labor for Palestine, was speaking with the enthusiasm of a recent convert, despite his decades of activism, over tea and coffee in Brooklyn’s Iris cafe last year. 
It was some time in May, and northerly gusts whipping off the East River still sent occasional chills through the city, even as summer threatened to burst through the spring. Letwin wasn’t making small talk about the weather, though; he wanted to stress a shift in New York’s political climate. As students in Palestine solidarity encampments across the city were being slandered and smashed by authorities, their defiance seemed only to grow. 
“The activists aren’t going through ‘stages’”, he said, referring to their political consciousness. “It’s more akin to something like ‘permanent revolution’—they are leaping over the old liberal progressive consensus and drawing much more radical, even revolutionary, conclusions.”
I was a little sceptical, having been in Hong Kong five years earlier, embedded in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM7N9XICfes">the siege of the Polytechnic</a>, when police faced seemingly endless volleys of Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs, bricks and arrows from the city’s massive student movement. Almost everywhere across the city bore scars of a dramatic mood shift mobilised ferociously against the government—graffiti, boarded-up banks and shops, excavated footpaths, smashed signal boxes and traffic lights. 
New York, by contrast, appeared totally unaffected as an urban space and broadly indifferent. You wouldn’t have known there was a movement unless you walked onto the campuses or stumbled into one of the demonstrations. Of course, I was comparing apples and oranges. Hong Kong’s rage manifested as a scream of physical confrontations everywhere, but without a noticeably commensurate lifting in the political level of the participants. 
At any rate, despite my unspoken misgivings, it wasn’t hard to get caught up in the excitement of the New York campuses, where spectacular things certainly were happening. And Letwin wasn’t the only person talking about a momentous political shift—anyone with a long history on the left, and particularly Jewish leftists, all were saying similar things: Gaza had precipitated a generational crisis within liberal Zionism, the effects of which would be far ranging.
It has been striking since then to watch the decline of the street-based Palestine solidarity movement in Israel’s key supporter. The resistance has been bigger in countries that matter far less than America: Australia, Italy, the UK, for example. Yet it’s clear now that Palestine didn’t disappear as an issue, and possibly played out in the New York mayoral election in ways that were not so evident from afar. John Ganz, a left-wing writer based in New York, <a href="https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/thoughts-on-a-victory">writes in his Unpopular Front newsletter</a>:
“Israel’s place in American politics was more the unquestioned status quo than ideological, even for many Jews ... Then there was Gaza. Suddenly, all those activists didn’t seem so crazy after all. Maybe they had a point—or two. And so Mamdani’s views [that Israel ought to be a democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians] rapidly go from being an eccentric force in American politics to a central one. It wasn’t so much that the election was a referendum on Palestine, Israel, or, even less, the Jews, as some race baiters want us to believe, but that Mamdani now sounded reasonable and attached to reality, while the people who were defending Israel tooth and nail and calling everyone else antisemites and terrorists now sounded like the wild-eyed ideologues.”
That is, Palestine as a signal of political sanity. Perhaps even more than this, Mamdani’s stance might have become a signal to people that he was genuinely different from other politicians in other ways. “When pressured to temper his criticisms of Israel, Mamdani has barely flinched”, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-mamdani-era-begins">Eric Lach writes in the New Yorker</a>. “These qualities convinced many young voters, in particular, that he might have what it takes to follow through on his promises.”
While bread and butter issues appear to be the singular driving force of the campaign, Palestine figures here not as a background foreign policy issue irrelevant to running a city, but as a bellwether for political character. It not only played a role as a moral question that helped drive the young volunteer mobilisation but as an indication of political spine and integrity that pushed up Mamdani’s vote. 
After all, someone who can withstand the unending and vicious barrage of the Zionist movement surely has a shot at tackling a rental crisis, delivering free child care and buses, and taking two cents on the dollar in tax from incomes above $1 million—none of which are likely to be as ferociously denounced as the call for equality in Palestine. 
In this sense, “Palestine will free us all” suggests something akin to a revelation about the operations of capitalism and the nature of mainstream politics: Gaza shows that the rule of naked, brutal, unapologetic power is ubiquitous. The jettisoning of reason, the silencing of arguments and the resort to brute force are happening not only “over there”, but are mirrored in day-to-day establishment politics, and in the marginalisation of people speaking the truth in workplaces, campuses and the public sphere everywhere. 
Michael Letwin and others, then, might have been proven right, not only about New York’s spring being more than a seasonal change, but about how Palestine became central to even local politics, albeit in ways that many would not have predicted.

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

Five lessons from 2025

From Hitler to here: the journey of the far right

The impact of the Palestine solidarity movement

‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire

The rise and fall of the US Congress of Industrial Organizations

Gaza Tribunal: The genocide continues

The Mamdani moment

Trump cops a pasting in US election rebuke

Did Palestine set New York free?

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us