Israel strikes Iran as US and EU impose new round of sanctions
Andre Damon, WSWS, Apr 19 2024
Israel has carried out an airstrike on Iran Friday morning, a US official told major US news outlets. Iranian state TV reported that three drones were shot down over Isfahan air base. The move came just hours after the US and its European allies announced a new round of sanctions targeting Iran Thursday, deepening their participation in a spiraling war in the Middle East. In a statement announcing the sanctions, Biden declared:
I’ve directed my team, including the Department of the Treasury, to continue to impose sanctions that further degrade Iran’s military industries. Let it be clear to all those who enable or support Iran’s attacks: The US is committed to Israel’s security.
The same day, Sunak announced a new round of sanctions targeting Iran. Biden and Sunak were joined by the European Council, which declared that sanctions would be imposed in order to “isolate Iran.” The sanctions come after days of declarations by Israeli officials that they intend to carry out an attack on Iran following Tehran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel over the weekend. On Wednesday, Netanyahu declared that Israel will “do everything necessary to defend itself” and that “we will make our own decisions” with regard to attacking Iran. This statement came one day after Cameron, following a meeting with Iranian officials, said:
It’s clear the Israelis are making a decision to act.
Meanwhile, Iranian officials vowed that any strike by Israel would be met with overwhelming force, with Iranian Maj-Gen Ahmad Haghtalab warning that “the hands are on the trigger” to retaliate against Israel’s nuclear sites. In an interview with CNN, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian declared:
In case the Israeli regime embarks on adventurism again and takes action against the interests of Iran, the next response from us will be immediate and at a maximum level.
The Middle East is poised on the knife-edge of full-scale war. In an address to the UNSC, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned:
One miscalculation, one miscommunication, one mistake could lead to the unthinkable: a full-scale regional conflict that would be devastating for all involved and the rest of the world.
In a further endorsement of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its military escalation against Iran, the US vetoed a resolution in the UNSC to make Palestine a full member-state of the UN. Absurdly, the US carried out this action while proclaiming its support for a so-called “two-state solution.” In a statement, US Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood said:
The US will continue to oppose unilateral measures that undermine the prospect of a two-state solution. This includes any actions that violate the principles that Secretary Blinken has emphasized for months, that Gaza cannot be a platform for terrorism.
In a statement in response, the Palestinian presidency rebuked the US action, which it described as “unfair, immoral and unjustified.” The statement read:
This aggressive American veto reveals the contradictions of American policy, which claims, on the one hand, to support the two-state solution, while it prevents the international institution from implementing this solution through its repeated use of the veto in the Security Council against Palestine and its legitimate rights.
Ziad Abu Amr, special envoy of the Palestinian presidency, asked:
How could this damage the prospects of peace between Palestinians and Israelis? How could this recognition and this membership harm international peace and security?
The Biden administration is increasingly framing its escalating conflict with Iran as part of a globe-spanning war targeting Russia and China. In an op-ed in the WSJ, Biden drew an equivalence between the US conflicts with Russia and China, claiming:
Both Ukraine and Israel defended themselves against these attacks, holding the line and protecting their citizens. And both did it with critical help from the US. But while both countries can capably defend their own sovereignty, they depend on American assistance, including weaponry, to do it. And this is a pivotal moment. Vladimir Putin is ramping up his onslaught with help from his friends. China is providing Russia with microelectronics and other equipment that is critical for defense production. Iran is sending hundreds of drones; North Korea is providing artillery and ballistic missiles. ‘An attack on one is an attack on all’ means that if Mr Putin invades a NATO ally, we will come to its aid, as our NATO allies did for us after the Sep 11 attacks.
This conception forms the rationale for the US support for the Gaza genocide, which it sees as a critical element of its effort to dominate the Middle East. Amid mass starvation and continuous bombing, the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains disastrous. In a statement, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said:
In Gaza, six and a half months of Israeli military operations have created a humanitarian hellscape. Tens of thousands of people have been killed. Two million Palestinians have endured death, destruction, and the denial of lifesaving humanitarian aid; they are now staring down on starvation. An Israeli operation in Rafah would compound this humanitarian catastrophe. The casualty figures are overwhelming and unprecedented in speed and scale during my time as Secretary-General. According to UNICEF, more than 13,900 Palestinian children have reportedly been killed in intense, often indiscriminate attacks.
Under these conditions, there are indications that the US is moving toward an open endorsement of Israel’s planned assault on Rafah. On Thursday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with Israeli officials to discuss the Rafah attack. The official readout of the meeting noted:
The two sides agreed on the shared objective to see Hamas defeated in Rafah. US participants expressed concerns with various courses of action in Rafah, and Israeli participants agreed to take these concerns into account.
In a press briefing Thursday, Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder declared:
We understand the need for Israel to go after Hamas and to eliminate or defeat Hamas as a threat.
Meanwhile, the death toll of the Gaza genocide has reached 33,970, with 76,770 more wounded, according to the latest figures from Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Starmer’s UK Labour Party declares for nuclear war
Robert Stevens, WSWS, Apr 19 2024
UK Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer last week declared for the third time that he would, in office, authorise the firing of nuclear missiles. A conversation between Starmer and ITV News Political Correspondent Harry Horton, as Starmer was visiting the BAE Systems shipyard where Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines are built, was chilling. Horton asked:
If Britain was under attack would you be prepared to push the nuclear button, even it means potentially killing millions of people?
Starmer replied:
The deterrent only works if there is a preparedness to use it, so that is a clear answer to your question.
With the Conservative government mired in crisis and hated by millions, Labour is expected to win the general election later this year. Starmer’s statement is an essential element of Labour’s pitch to the ruling class that it can be trusted with office, under conditions in which Britain is embroiled in major military conflicts all over the globe. Significantly, Starmer’s first public confirmation that he would authorise nuclear strikes took place on Feb 10 2022. Asked by the BBC whether he would be willing to use nuclear weapons, he replied, “Of course.” This was just 14 days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In January this year, while in Estonia, Starmer answered yes to the same question. Starmer has since then boasted that Labour is the “party of NATO,” as he has enthusiastically backed every global crime of British imperialism, from the bloody slaughter in Ukraine, to supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and advanced plans for war against Iran and China.
The Labour leader is one of three senior political figures, including two prime ministers, who have publicly declared over the last decade that they would take actions meaning the end of civilisation. That they were asked if they would do so was the response of Britain’s ruling class to the election of Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, when he hesitated to pledge to launching a nuclear strike. After winning a general election, a prime minister is privately briefed by a leading military figure and then told to write instructions in a letter to each of the four nuclear-armed submarine commanders, based on the scenario that Britain has been hit by a nuclear bomb and the prime minister is dead. The “letters of last resort” instruct the commanders on whether and when to use nuclear weapons. Since Britain obtained nuclear weapons, following the decision of the Atlee Labour government in 1947, every prime minister has signed these letters.
The destructive power of Britain’s arsenal is staggering. Each of the four Trident submarines carries 40 nuclear warheads, each with an explosive yield of 100 kilotons, at least six to eight times more destructive than the 15-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the US at the end of WW2. Each warhead can obliterate up to one million people. Corbyn is a lifelong member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and was chairman of the Stop the War Coalition when he took the leadership of Labour on a massive mandate against war and austerity in Sep 2015. Within three weeks of taking office Corbyn was asked, at Labour’s annual conference in Brighton, if he would use nuclear weapons if elected prime minister. He replied “no” and stated his opposition to renewing the Trident nuclear programme. This set into motion a ferocious campaign by the Blairites—backed by the Conservative government, intelligence agencies and the military—which resulted, in the space of five years, in Corbyn’s removal as Labour leader and expulsion from the parliamentary party. Even before his Brighton statement, a senior serving British general told the Sunday Times, on Sep 20 2017 that, if Corbyn came to power:
There would effectively be a mutiny. You would see a major break in convention with senior generals directly and publicly challenging Corbyn over vital important policy decisions such as Trident, pulling out of NATO and any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces. The Army just wouldn’t stand for it.
On July 18, 2016, after taking the Conservative Party leadership five days earlier and signing her own “letters of last resort,” Prime Minister Theresa May was asked in Parliament by the Scottish National Party’s George Kerevan:
Is she personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill 100k innocent men, women and children?
May replied:
Yes, and (we reject) the suggestion that we could have a nuclear deterrent but not actually be willing to use it, which seemed to come from the Labour Front Bench.
During the campaign for the Jun 2017 general election, the first question asked by BBC journalist Andrew Marr during an interrogation of Corbyn was what would he write in the letters of last resort. “You have to say fire or don’t fire.” Corbyn took a major step in his ongoing capitulation before his Blairite opponents by fudging the issue, saying his “strict instruction” would be to “follow orders when given.” By this time Corbyn had already abandoned everything he professed to personally believe regarding membership of NATO and the renewal of Trident. His 2017 election manifesto reaffirmed Labour’s “commitment to NATO” and promised that Corbyn would be “spending at least 2% of GDP on defence.” A draft of the manifesto dated May 11 had stated:
Any prime minister should be extremely cautious about ordering the use of weapons of mass destruction which would result in the indiscriminate killing of millions of innocent civilians.
This was deleted from the final manifesto published five days later. The 2017 election was narrowly won by May. Corbyn remained Labour leader until being routed by the Tories’ next leader Boris Johnson in the 2019 general election. As part of the war drive of the imperialist powers against Russia, Corbyn’s 2019 Labour manifesto had implied that the Johnson government was in the pocket of Russian President Putin and attacked him for refusing to “publish the report into possible foreign interference by Russia in UK democracy.” Johnson fell from office three years later thanks to the murderous policies he pursued during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and was briefly replaced by Liz Truss as prime minister. When Truss was asked during a Tory leadership husting in Aug 2022 if she would launch nuclear missiles that “would mean global annihilation,” she replied:
I’m ready to do that.
That all those auditioning for office before the ruling elite must now affirm their readiness to kill millions and destroy the planet is a stark warning. No matter who is prime minister and which party they lead, the working class in Britain, like workers internationally, confronts a single party of war. There is no lesser-evil because there is nothing fundamentally to choose between them. In the UK, the Socialist Equality Party will stand candidates in the upcoming general election rejecting any vote for Labour and its candidates and insisting on the building of a new anti-imperialist and revolutionary leadership to mobilise a mass socialist movement of the working class against war. In Germany our comrades are fielding a slate of candidates in this summer’s European elections fighting for the same political turn, and the SEP in the US is fielding Joseph Kishore as its presidential candidate against the would-be Führer Donald Trump and “Genocide Joe” Biden. All these campaigns address the essential task of building the Fourth International, led by the International Committee, to lead the world working class in the overthrow of capitalism.
NYPD arrests over 100 Columbia University students following congressional hearing
Elliott Murtagh, Clara Weiss, WSWS, Apr 19 2024
In a brutal state-sanctioned crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests on campuses, a horde of NYPD officers descended onto Columbia University’s campus in NYC to arrest over one hundred peaceful student protesters on Thursday afternoon. It was the first time in over half a century that Columbia University allowed the NYPD on campus to arrest students. The police state-type action, directed by Columbia President Dr Minouche (Nemat) Shafik, came the day after she testified before a McCarthyite Congressional hearing. It marks a new and dangerous stage in the attacks on democratic rights internationally, centered on widespread opposition to the US-backed genocide in Gaza. According to a press release from Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) Thursday evening, over 120 students were arrested. The statement said that the lawn where the encampment took place was designated a “free speech zone” by Columbia’s latest protesting policy. The SJP statement explained:
The Gaza Solidarity Encampment was established to pressure Columbia to divest all funds, including the endowment, from corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and military occupation in Palestine. We demand they ensure further accountability with complete transparency for all Columbia’s financial investments.
Columbia students erected the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the South Lawn with 50 tents beginning at 4 am Wednesday morning, ahead of the House Committee’s hearing, which focused on Columbia University. The encampment was organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)—both of which were banned by the university last November—and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). Hundreds of students and supporters gathered on campus by the evening, amid growing threats by the administration of mass expulsion and arrests following President Shafik’s kowtowing before far-right Congressional representatives. As the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) analyzed yesterday:
The hearing made clear that the goal of the US ruling class is nothing less than a purge of the faculty and student body at universities, in order to completely subordinate higher education to the war machine. Everyone who dares voice opposition to US foreign policy is to be thrown out, blacklisted and made the public target of attacks by Zionists and far-right elements.
Students occupied the encampment through the night from Wednesday to Thursday, and protests continued to grow on Thursday. Early Thursday afternoon, Shafik made good on her promises. The University president sent a campus-wide email stating that she has ordered the NYPD “to begin clearing the encampment.” In a separate letter by Shafik to the NYPD, the president stated:
All University students participating in the encampment have been informed they are suspended. At this time, the participants in the encampment are not authorized to be on University property and are trespassing.
Student leaders of the campus occupation reported receiving emails Thursday morning stating they were suspended, including Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi. This follows a wave of student evictions and suspensions at New York City universities, including Columbia and NYU.
Widely-shared social media posts calling for mass student support in response to these attacks brought together over one thousand chanting students to surround the encampment. Dozens of NYPD buses and hundreds of police in riot gear blocked off access to the campus-adjacent streets and then stormed the encampment, zip-tying and arresting a mass of students at 1 pm.
A recorded message blared from a NYPD loudspeaker:
You are currently participating in an unauthorized encampment. You will be arrested and charged with trespassing.
Video footage shows NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban, Chief of Patrol John Chell and Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry, the head of the NYPD’s drone program, leading the charge. According to the SJP:
NYPD Technical Assistance Response Unit, Strategic Response Group, and Anti-Terrorism Unit were confirmed on campus.
The mass arrests included Jewish students and legal advisers. After the encampment was torn down, hundreds of student protesters moved location and began occupying a campus lawn while shouting pro-Palestinian and anti-NYPD chants. Hundreds of students and supporters also continued to demonstrate outside of Columbia’s main campus.
Socialist Equality Party 2024 Presidential candidate Joseph Kishore issued a statement on Twitter Thursday afternoon:
The arrest of students at Columbia University is part of an expanding police state assault on opponents of the Gaza genocide, supported by the Biden administration and both the Democrats and Republicans. The arrests follow the testimony from Columbia president Nemat Shafik before Congress, held on the false pretense that universities have been overcome by “antisemitism,” an outrageous slander directed at opponents of the genocide in Gaza. Shafik issued a statement saying she invited the NYPD gestapo police onto campus because the opponents of the genocide were creating a “harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students.” Lies! All students protesting the genocide must be freed! Those who should be behind bars are those who are carrying out the genocide and arming and financing it, that is, the Netanyahu government and its accomplices in the Biden administration.
Students, as well as faculty at Columbia and local residents, have expressed shock, anger and defiance in the face of the violent state assault on peaceful protesters. One student organizer tweeted:
A Columbia alum spoke to the WSWS Thursday night at a protest next to the campus and denounced the hearing and the crack-down on protesters as a “new McCarthyism”:
I think it is despicable, really against the tenets of the university, both against free speech and expression and diversity of thought.
There is no question that the Columbia University administration staged the police raid in close coordination with the Democratic administration of NYC mayor Eric Adams and the White House. Adams gave a brief press evening Thursday evening, flanked with top NYPD officials, defending the crackdown. The message is clear: Anyone who dares publicly protest against a genocide that is being carried out with drones, weapons and planes, manufactured and paid for by the US, can be the subject of arrest, expulsion from their school or workplace, and public harassment and attacks. One day before the police raid at Columbia, nine Google workers protesting their company’s involvement with Israel’s genocide were arrested and over twenty were terminated. The Columbia raid also comes less than a week since the raid and shutting down of the anti-war Palestine Congress in Berlin by 900 German police, which included arrests of Jewish activists and the issuing of bans on prominent politicians and academics to enter Germany and address German audiences online.
The IYSSE demands an immediate end to the crackdown on free speech on campuses and workplaces. All arrested, suspended and expelled students, faculty and organizations must be immediately released and reinstated. The attack on the democratic rights of students is an attack on the entire working class. Workers throughout New York, the US and internationally must take up the defense of these students against the state’s assault. We also support calls for walk-outs by students and faculty to protest this egregious attack on democratic rights, and demand an end to the genocide in Gaza and the universities’ complicity in it. However, in developing and broadening the protests, students and youth need a clear understanding of what lies behind the attacks on them, and who their enemies and allies are.
Students at Columbia University are confronted with the full force of the state because they are opposing what is now declared a state policy of genocide in Gaza. But this genocide cannot be understood outside the emergence of a new imperialist redivision of the world, targeting not only Russia and Iran but also China. The pursuit of this war is incompatible with the maintenance of bourgeois democratic forms of rule. Columbia University’s administration is tied by a thousand threads to Wall Street and the Democratic Party. This is why it is so ruthlessly cracking down on its own students. Two fundamental political conclusions follow from this: Appeals to the Democratic Party are a dead-end, and can only lead to the demoralization and isolation of the protests. Second, the fight in defense of democratic rights, and against imperialist war and genocide, cannot be limited to the campuses. It must be rooted in the working class, waged through the means of class struggle and based on a revolutionary socialist program.
Rising gold price a sign of emerging financial crisis
Nick Beams, WSWS, Apr 19 2024
The publication by the Financial Times of a comment by one of its leading editorial writers on the soaring price of gold is an indication that this issue is starting to raise concerns in financial circles about what it signifies for the stability of the global monetary system based on the US dollar. The article by Rana Foroohar on Monday, entitled “Gold is back, and it has a message for us,” began:
It’s easy to mock gold bugs, but their moment may finally have come.
She pointed to several immediate factors for the rise, which has seen the gold price escalate from around $1.8k/oz last year to close to $2.4k/oz. These included higher than expected inflation in the US, anxiety over geopolitics, the US presidential elections and uncertainty over monetary policy. However, there were longer-term factors at work, including higher for longer inflation which aside from a “technology-driven productivity miracle” looks to be a real prospect. One of the major factors to which she pointed was the vast shift in the global economic order.
It is no secret that the Washington consensus, which expected emerging nations to fall in line with free-market trade rules written by the West, and the postwar Pax Americana are over. Trade tensions with China are growing and the weaponisation of the dollar after the outbreak of the Ukraine war, when the US and the European powers froze the financial assets of Russia’s central bank, have quickened moves in many countries, especially China, to sell Treasury bills and buy gold as a hedge against America’s financial might. A pendulum shift has led many analysts to predict a massive run-up in gold.
Two economic strategists at BNP Paribas Fortis, a major European bank, have predicted that gold could rise from its present level of $2,347/oz, already a record high in monetary terms, although not yet when adjusted for inflation, to $4k/oz in “the not-too-distant future.” As one of analysts put it:
This isn’t just an interest-rate thing. People are hedging against a new world.
That “new world” is characterised above all by war and the division of the world into rival blocs on both the economic and political fronts. There are moves by a number of countries, not only China, to make trade payments in their own currencies and bypass the dollar. A recent report by Currency Research Association, cited in the article, noted:
China buying gold and selling Treasuries mirrors how Europe’s central banks began to redeem dollars for gold in the late 1960s as the Bretton Woods system began to break apart.
The Bretton Woods system, which was aimed at restoring the international financial system that had been shattered by the Great Depression of the 1930s, established the US dollar as the global currency. It was backed by gold at the rate of $35/oz. But it was marked by a profound contradiction which was identified in the early 1960s. The functioning of the system required an outflow of dollars from the US to the rest of the world to finance trade and investment. At the same time the build-up of dollars outside the US undermined its capacity to redeem them for gold. This was not a problem initially because of the enormous strength of the US relative to the other major capitalist powers. But as those economies recovered from the devastation of the war and more productive industrial methods were introduced, the competitive supremacy of the US was eroded.
The turning point came when the US balance of trade went negative. leading US President Nixon to remove the gold backing from the dollar on Aug 15 1971. Since then, the world has operated with the dollar as a fiat global currency. Unlike gold which embodies value, paper dollars have no intrinsic value. They can function as world money, facilitating trade, investment, credit and acting as a store of value to the extent they are backed by the economic power of the US state and its financial system. That power is now increasingly called into question. It was severely shaken by the global financial crisis of 2008, originating in the orgy of speculation by US banks, which, but for massive intervention by the Federal Reserve, would have led to the collapse of the world financial system. Since then, it has been delivered further major shocks including in Mar 2020 at the start of the pandemic. The US Treasury market froze for several days, there were no buyers for US debt supposedly the safest financial asset in the world, and the Fed had to again intervene to the tune of around $4t.
The role of the US dollar has provided enormous advantages to US imperialism. It has allowed it to run up deficits and debts, much of which has been used to finance military spending and wars, in a way not possible for any other economy. There are now very clear indications that as a result of this process, a new crisis is brewing which has parallels with what took place in 1971, but at a much higher level. As Foroohar noted in her comment piece, echoing sentiments expressed at the highest levels of the US financial system, including by Fed chair Jerome Powell, the pile-up of US government debt is “quickly becoming unsustainable.”
The most recent Congressional Budget Office projections put US debt as 99% of GDP at the end of this year, and have it on track to reach 172% by 2054. If this happens the result would be monetisation [a situation where assets based on debt would essentially become worthless], inflation, financial repression and a period of extreme chaos in monetary policy and markets.
Such a situation is not 30 years down the track but very much an emerging present-day reality because of the accelerating growth of the debt mountain. When interest rates were near zero because of the Fed’s quantitative easing program, the problem could be covered over. Not any more, with the Fed rate at around 5%, the highest in 20 years. According to the CBO, the US budget deficit will rise by almost two-thirds over the next decade, from $1.6t to $2.6t, with three-quarters of that rise coming from the interest bill, making it a larger component than the bloated military budget. The potential for a financial crisis in the near future was indicated by the director of the CBO, Phillip Swagel, in an interview with the FT last month. He said the US fiscal situation was on an “unprecedented” trajectory, raising the risk of a Liz Truss-style financial crisis, when the short-lived UK prime minister tried to finance tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy in Sep 2022 by running up debt.
There are decisive social, economic and political class issues in the present situation. It appears at times that the financial system operates somewhere way above everyday life, even assuming a kind of illusory character as central banks create money out of nothing with the press of a computer button. However, in the final analysis, it depends on the value which can be extracted from the working class in the real economy. As the bitter experiences of 2008 revealed, a financial crisis means sweeping attacks on wages, the destruction of jobs and the evisceration of vital social services. Another crisis, for which all the conditions are being created, will bring an even deeper assault. One of the warning signs is the rising price of gold, the historically-determined ultimate store of value. It cannot be answered by workers at the level of the factory or workplace in a struggle against individual employers. It must be met with a political strategy by the entire working class aimed at the capitalist profit system as a whole, directed to its overthrow as the starting point for the development of socialism.
Niqnaq 