wsws

With de facto endorsement from Biden, Israel broadens Rafah onslaught
Andre Damon, WSWS, May 24 2024

Israel’s attack on Rafah has now displaced nearly 1 million people and massively intensified famine throughout the entire territory. This assault is taking place with the effective endorsement of the Biden administration, despite Biden’s earlier public declarations that a full-scale attack on Rafah would be a “red line” for the White House. On Tuesday, an unnamed senior Biden administration official told reporters:

It’s fair to say that the Israelis have updated their plans. They’ve incorporated many of the concerns that we have expressed.

This gives the administration’s stamp of approval for the widening attack on the city. On Thursday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said:

Israel had not carried out major maneuvers into dense urban areas. What we have seen so far has not been that.

This is an absurd falsehood. Israel has been bombing Rafah non-stop and is pushing armored columns deep into the city, leading to the total suspension of humanitarian operations amid widespread hunger and starvation. As a result of the offensive, only 150 trucks of food have entered Gaza since May 6. Sam Rose, planning director for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said:

We’re going back to levels of aid that we were getting in October when the war first started.

On Monday Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in a meeting that Israel intends to broaden its offensive into the city. Gallant said:

We are committed to broadening the ground operation in Rafah to the end of dismantling Hamas and recovering the hostages.

Sullivan posed for a photo shaking the hand of black-shirted Gallant on the day that the International Criminal Court’s lead prosecutor brought charges against him. In a column published the same day, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius said that US and Israeli officials had reached an agreement over the plans to attack Rafah. Ignatius wrote:

Israeli leaders have reached a consensus about a final assault on Hamas’s four remaining battalions in Rafah, in a move that Biden won’t oppose.

The Times of Israel wrote, “the Biden administration appeared to signal its initial approval of the operation launched by Israel early Tuesday morning to take over the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.” It added, “Spokespeople for the administration said the goals of the operation were legitimate.”

In response to the ICC’s charges against Netanyahu, the Biden administration has effectively dropped its earlier token criticisms of the Israeli government, with Biden declaring Tuesday, “It is clear that Israel wants to do all it can to ensure civilian protection. Contrary to allegations against Israel made by the International Court of Justice, what’s happening is not genocide,” Biden said.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate amid ongoing mass starvation imposed by the Israeli blockade. In a briefing to the UNSC Tuesday, Edem Wosornu, a spokesperson for the UN OCHA, said:

To be frank, we are running out of words to describe what is happening in Gaza. We have described it as a catastrophe, a nightmare, as hell on earth. It is all of these and worse. And living conditions continue to deteriorate as a result of heavy fighting, particularly in Jabalya and eastern Rafah, as well as Israeli bombardment from air, land and sea. More than 35k people have been killed and another 79k injured, with 17k children unaccompanied or separated from their families. Since Oct 2023, 75% of the population in Gaza, 1.7m people, has been forcibly displaced within Gaza, many of them up to four or five times, including as a result of repeated IDF-issued evacuation instructions.

In a statement, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) said it was running out of food in central Gaza. WFP spokesperson Abeer Etefa said:

Humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse. Unless food is provided in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread.

On Tuesday, Israeli troops launched raids into the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, attacking a local hospital and killing a doctor, a teacher and a ninth grade student. Ambulance driver Hazim Masarwa told Al Jazeera:

Undercover forces raided the area suddenly, and they were firing at any moving body in the street. They were targeting anything moving.

In a statement, the UN Human Rights Office in Palestine said:

We are horrified by the deadly Israeli Forces operation in Jenin: 7 Palestinians killed, including two children, one on his way to school, a school teacher, and a doctor. This senseless bloodshed must stop, and those responsible must be held accountable.

Arrest warrant against Netanyahu undermines German war propaganda
Peter Schwarz, WSWS, May 24 2024

The application by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, for the issuing of arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant is a major blow to the German government’s mendacious war propaganda. Khan has accused the Israeli head of government and his defence minister of serious war crimes against the Palestinian population. The German government, which has declared support for Israel to be a German ‘reason of state,” has justified these crimes, supplied Israel with weapons for them and continues to do so. It slanders anyone as an antisemite who denounces Israeli war crimes and suppresses protests against them with brutal violence. Both the Israeli and US governments, which do not recognize the authority of the ICC, have denounced the arrest warrants in the strongest possible terms. This is a problem for the German government. Germany is one of the 123 contracting states that have signed the Rome Statute of the ICC. It is the most important donor to the court after Japan.

In the face of the bestial crimes committed by German imperialism in WW2, the German bourgeoisie sought to cloak its return to militarism and great power politics with an aura of legality. The Federal Government has repeatedly invoked the Criminal Court to justify its foreign policy. One year ago, for example, Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann welcomed an international arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and declared that the Russian president would be arrested immediately if he set foot on German territory. If the court confirms the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, which lawyers consider likely, Germany would be legally obliged to arrest the two as soon as they enter German territory. Of course, it would never do so. But if the government and the judiciary disregard the arrest warrants, the ‘political damage’ would be serious. As the news magazine Stern states:

With this refusal, Germany would undermine the authority of the court to such an extent that it would probably have no major relevance in the future.

Not only the authority of the court would be damaged, but also the already battered credibility of the federal government. Protest camps and resistance to the genocide in Gaza are already growing despite intimidation and repression. If the federal government openly defies international law and disregards an arrest warrant against a head of government it supports, while welcoming arrest warrants against political opponents, it would further undermine its lying propaganda. The arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant are based on extremely well-documented facts. They were written by internationally renowned lawyers, whom even the pro-Israel German press cannot accuse of bias.

British jurist Karim Khan, who was elected Chief Prosecutor of the Criminal Court for nine years in 2021, is considered an expert on international law. Among other things, he worked as an advisor to the prosecution at the UN tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda and most recently headed a UN mission that investigated crimes of the Islamic State on behalf of UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Before requesting the arrest warrants, Khan had them reviewed by a panel of experts that included multiple award-winning British jurists and well-known lawyer Amal Clooney, as well as Jewish Holocaust survivor Theodor Meron, an Israeli citizen and former president of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The experts’ report, accessible online, is devastating. They write:

The Prosecutor accuses Netanyahu and Gallant of the war crime of intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, as well as various other war crimes and crimes against humanity associated with the use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. These include the war crimes of ‘wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health’ or cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, and intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population. The proposed charges also include the crimes against humanity of murder, extermination, other inhuman acts and persecution with respect to deaths and injuries resulting from or associated with the systematic deprivation of objects indispensable to the survival of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The Panel notes the Prosecutor’s statement that other alleged crimes, including in connection with the large-scale bombing campaign in Gaza, are actively being investigated… In the Panel’s view, there are reasonable grounds to believe that the suspects committed these crimes. The Panel also considers that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the crimes were committed in the context of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza, pursuant to State policy.

On May 20, the experts published a joint article in the Financial Times explaining why they supported the Chief Prosecutor of the Criminal Court. In it, they write:

For months, we have been engaged in an extensive process of review and analysis. We have carefully examined each of the applications for judgment warrants, as well as underlying material produced by the prosecution team in support of the applications. This has included witness statements, expert evidence, official communications, videos and photographs. In our legal report published today, we unanimously agree that the prosecutor’s work was rigorous, fair and grounded in the law and the facts. And we unanimously agree that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the suspects he identifies have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the ICC.

The experts also support the arrest warrants against three Hamas leaders that Karim Khan requested at the same time as the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. The arrest warrants issued against Netanyahu and Gallant and their unanimous support by a high-level panel of international law experts carry great moral weight. But it would be an illusion to believe that the International Criminal Court or any other legal or political institution will stop the genocide in Gaza and the war policies of the great powers. They are preparing a third world war because the deep crisis of the capitalist system leaves them, as in 1914 and 1939, with no other way out than the violent redivision of the world and the suppression of all political and social opposition. The imperialists will not be deterred by a warrant or a court decision. The only way to stop the genocide in Gaza, the NATO war in Ukraine, and the preparations for war against China is to mobilize and unite the international working class in the struggle for a socialist program.

Britain’s snap general election: A prelude to direct NATO war against Russia
Chris Marsden, WSWS, Maqy 24 2024

Sunak’s announcement Wednesday that a snap general election will be held Jul 4 was a shock even to his own Conservative MPs. Ministers and backbenchers spoke of the decision as “madness,” with the Tories 20% behind Labour in the polls. Sunak’s closest ministerial allies were kept in the dark until a cabinet meeting, called less than an hour before the prime minister stood outside Downing Street in the pouring rain to make his announcement. However, Sunak’s decision and the speed and secrecy of its implementation are bound up with calculations of the British ruling class and its imperialist allies in the US that snap elections are needed to preempt growing opposition to war and create a political framework for a massive escalation of the conflict with Russia. In his announcement, Sunak made clear that foremost in his considerations is the rapid escalation of NATO’s de facto war against Russia in Ukraine. He declared:

This election will take place at a time when the world is more dangerous than it has been since the end of the Cold War. Putin’s Russia is waging a brutal war in Ukraine and will not stop there if he succeeds. In the Middle East the forces of Islamist extremism threaten regional and ultimately global stability. China is looking to dominate the 21st century by stealing a lead in technology, and migration is being weaponised by hostile states to threaten the integrity of our borders.

Focusing the general election on war and national security is dictated by the advanced preparations for a new stage in the Ukraine conflict involving the use of NATO weaponry to directly target Russia and even the sending of NATO troops to the war zone. The UK is the central military ally of US imperialism and has been in the forefront of every single escalatory move in Ukraine, including sending special forces and training thousands of Ukrainian troops. It was under the premiership of Boris Johnson that the conflict first erupted on Feb 24 2022. Johnson wanted British backing for the war to define his government. But Washington has been forced to rely throughout on a deeply unstable government in Britain, beset by bitter factional conflicts and hatred by millions, especially for the murderous herd immunity agenda pursued during a pandemic that claimed over 230k lives. Johnson was forced to resign as Tory party leader on Jul 7 2022, becoming the first head of a major imperialist power to fall from office during NATO’s proxy war against Russia. A Jul 8 perspective on the WSWS noted:

The political fear animating a leadership challenge that almost led to the meltdown of the government is that Johnson is such a divisive and discredited figure that he could not be entrusted with the next stage of the ruling class offensive against the working class or with prosecuting NATO’s war in Europe. His forced resignation unleashed a leadership contest dominated by former military figures…

This was eventually won by the rabid warmonger, Johnson’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who during her leadership campaign boasted of her readiness to use nuclear weapons against Russia. But, after taking office in Sep 2022, Truss was swiftly deposed on Oct 20, under pressure from the global markets for having announced large and unfunded tax cuts. Since then, any hope that her replacement by Sunak would finally bring political stability has been dashed by the constant growth of social and political opposition to the Tory agenda of austerity and war, opposition that first erupted in the strike wave in 2022 and then took political form in the mass movement in opposition to Britain’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Sunak’s efforts to rescue his premiership have therefore focused on attempts to meet the demands of Washington to place war at the centre of the government’s agenda. On Apr 23 at a military base in Warsaw, he announced:

We will increase defence spending to a new baseline of 2.5% of GDP, by 2030. That starts today. And rises steadily in each and every year. Over the next six years, we’ll invest an additional £75b in our defence. And it will be fully funded with no increase in borrowing or debt. So this is not some vague aspiration for the future. We have a clear plan for what we’ll spend, when we’ll spend it, and how we pay for it. A plan that makes the UK by far the largest defence power in Europe, and second largest in NATO. I am putting the UK’s defence industry on a war footing, We will send Ukraine an additional £0.5b, hitting £3b of support this year. And we’ll provide them with largest-ever package of UK military equipment. This will include more than 400 vehicles, 4 million rounds of ammunition, 60 boats and offshore raiding craft, vital air defences, and long-range precision-guided Storm Shadow missiles.

On May 3, while meeting Zelensky, Foreign Secretary David Cameron then gave the green light for Ukraine to use British Storm Shadow cruise missiles against targets within recognised Russian territory. Finally, in a May 13 speech setting out the Tory general election campaign, Sunak warned:

The dangers that threaten our country are real. They are increasing in number. An axis of authoritarian states like Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China is working together to undermine us and our values. War has returned to Europe, with our NATO allies warning that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, they might be next. War rages, too, in the Middle East as Israel defends itself not only against the terrorists of Hamas but a barrage of missiles fired for the first time directly from Iran. Right now in Africa, conflicts are being fought in 18 different countries. And Putin’s recklessness has taken us closer to a dangerous nuclear escalation than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis. These are not faraway problems. Iranian proxies are firing on British ships in the Red Sea, disrupting goods destined for our high streets. Here at home, China has conducted cyber targeting of our democratically elected MPs. Russia has poisoned people with chemical weapons. And when Putin cut off the gas supplies it had a devastating impact on people’s lives and threatened our energy security.

He threatened a savage clampdown on anti-Gaza genocide and anti-war protests, denouncing them as an abuse of “our liberal democratic values.” But neither Washington nor the British ruling class can tolerate a government unable to rule effectively and bereft of all legitimacy to stay in office a moment longer. Sunak was therefore forced to go to the country, even if this meant almost certain defeat for his government. Media commentary makes clear that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is now seen as a reliable and more effective instrument for waging war overseas, imposing the austerity measures to pay for war and repressing the opposition in the working class this will provoke. His government will not bring a change in Tory policy but its continuation, while leveraging the services of the trade union apparatus. He and his frontbench began their preparation for office by expelling Jeremy Corbyn and many of his main allies from the parliamentary party to prove that Labour was not only the most business-friendly party but the “party of NATO,” committed to waging war against Russia, and the party of Zionism, ready to back genocide in Gaza and a wider war in the Middle East. Starmer told the Daily Mail in April:

In the face of rising global threats and growing Russian aggression, I’m proud to confirm to Mail readers that Labour’s commitment to our nuclear deterrent is total. I want to be crystal clear to Mail readers. My commitment to NATO and the UK’s nuclear deterrent, maintained on behalf of NATO allies, is unshakeable. Absolute. Total. The changed Labour Party that I lead knows that our national security always comes first.

Should Labour win the election on Jul 4, Starmer’s first international trip will be to the NATO summit in Washington on Jul 9-11, where plans will be discussed for stepped-up aggression against Russia. The great political danger facing the working class is that there is presently little understanding of how advanced the preparations for a wider war are. Millions of workers and young people have taken to the streets internationally to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Among the protesters in the UK, Sunak and Starmer are jointly hated. Yet the leadership of these movements, such as the Stop the War Coalition, have made no serious attempt to explain that what is taking place is an attempt by the imperialist powers to redivide the world and its resources between them, in which the war against Russia in Ukraine, support for the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the targeting of Iran and China for escalating provocations are various fronts of a single global conflict.

The disarming of the working class now centres on efforts to limit opposition to Labour to a harmless protest vote in mainly Muslim constituencies and against the more right-wing MPs, while insisting that Labour must otherwise be backed as a “lesser evil” to the Tories that can be pressured to the left. This political betrayal is being fought by the Socialist Equality Party. We are standing candidates in this general election in opposition to the Tory and Labour parties. We warn that a Starmer government would be a mortal enemy of the working class, committed to war abroad and class war at home. Our aim is the organisation of a mass movement of workers and young people against the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine and the plans for war against Iran and China and to build the socialist leadership required for this life-and-death struggle.

Australian Labor government lines up behind US/Israeli attacks on ICC
Oscar Grenfell, WSWS, May 24 2024

The Australian Labor government’s response to the International Criminal Court (ICC) action against Israel over its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza has been another display of cynical duplicity. Labor has again sought to present itself as a disinterested party with no involvement, despite having backed the Israeli onslaught for the past seven months. At the same time, its leaders have repeated talking points of the Zionist regime and its principal sponsor, the US government, attacking and undermining the international court. On Monday, the ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan applied for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, alleging that they had orchestrated the murder and extermination of the Palestinians. Khan also sought warrants for two senior Hamas leaders. Since then, the Netanyahu government and the Biden administration have launched a frenzied campaign, denouncing the ICC and Khan in hysterical terms and calling into question the whole nominal framework of international law. Labor has not gone as far, or been as explicit, but the implications of its position are clear. Responding to the announcement of the warrants, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade issued a statement “noting” Khan’s warrant and alluding to the “independence” of the ICC. The statement declared, however, that “there is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.” It demanded the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza and proclaimed:

Any country under attack by Hamas would defend itself. And in defending itself, every country is bound by the same fundamental rules. Israel must comply with international humanitarian law.

The line about “no equivalence” has been repeated by a slew of government representatives, including Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Speaking yesterday, Albanese proclaimed:

There is no equivalence between a terrorist organisation like Hamas. They confirmed on Oct 7 with the violent murders and the capturing of hostages that occurred on Oct 7, that that was the right designation for them to have and should not be compared with any nation state.

There is indeed no equivalence between Israel and Hamas, but in precisely the opposite sense to the lying statements of the government. What occurred on Oct 7 had the character of an inevitable uprising of the long-oppressed. It came in the context of 75 years of dispossession and brutal oppression of the Palestinians, including a 16-year Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Previous peaceful protests, including the 2018–2019 right-of-return marches to the Gaza border wall, were routinely fired upon by the IOF, claiming hundreds of lives. The hysterical references to Oct 7 also ignore the role of the Israeli government on that day. It has since been established that the Zionist regime was warned of the assault and stood its soldiers down to create a pretext so that the long-planned destruction of Gaza could be carried out.

Hamas is a bourgeois nationalist organisation that has at various points in its existence functioned as something of a client of the Israeli regime, keeping other armed organisations and the masses in check. Its weaponry is primitive, as opposed to Israel, which receives tens of billions in arms and funding from the US and the other major powers, to play its role as a beachhead of imperialism throughout the region. Israel, building on the “war on terror” methods of the US and its allies, including Australia, has perpetrated some of the worst war crimes of the past eighty years. Its actions have legitimately raised comparisons with the Nazi regime, in that Israel is an advanced industrial state seeking the extermination of an oppressed population. Albanese’s comments yesterday followed complaints from Zionist groups, the Murdoch media and the Liberal-National opposition that he had not joined Biden and Netanyahu in vitriolic denunciation of the ICC and defence of Israel. Albanese has now obliged. His initial response was a pathetic attempt to deflect from Australia’s complicity. Albanese absurdly claimed he did not “have a view” on the warrants and then stated:

I don’t comment on court processes in Australia, let alone court processes globally which Australia is not a party.

The prime minister seemed to be invoking the separation of powers, which bars interference by the executive branch, the government, over the Australian judiciary. It has no bearing on Albanese’s or any government minister’s ability to comment on the actions of the ICC. With his comments on Thursday, Albanese dispensed with this silly charade, making clear comments directed against the actions of the international court. That is, de facto, an attack on the framework of international law and an insistence that it does not apply to US and Australian allies. So too was the assertion by DFAT and government ministers that Israel had a “right to defend itself” from Hamas’s attack. As UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and other experts have noted time and again during the genocide, a nation state has no such right over the population of a territory that it is illegally occupying.

Labor’s hostility to the ICC warrants and Albanese’s initial fiction that he could not even comment are belied by the government’s record. In Mar 2023, when the ICC issued a warrant for the arrest of Putin on charges of war crimes in Ukraine, it was immediately “welcomed” by DFAT and Labor. Whatever crimes Russia has committed in Ukraine pale in comparison to the systematic slaughter being perpetrated by Israel. The conflict in Eastern Europe, moreover, is not the result of unprovoked “Russian aggression” but is a US-NATO proxy war aimed at inflicting a military defeat on Moscow effecting regime change and dismembering and occupying it. Australia has actively participated, funnelling more than a billion dollars of aid to Washington’s fascistic client state in Kyiv, most of it in weaponry to be directed against Russia. The Labor government has not only backed the ICC move against Putin, but has invoked it in formulating its policy. As recently as February, Foreign Minister Wong issued a statement unveiling new sanctions on Russian government representatives, declaring that these were in line with the ICC’s warrants.

The differing responses are another graphic expression of imperialist hypocrisy. They underscore the extent to which Labor is marching in lockstep with the US, as it oversees the genocide in Gaza, the proxy war against Russia and preparations for a catastrophic conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific. It should be recalled that in March, a group of lawyers referred Albanese and his government to the ICC for investigation on charges of complicity in the Gaza genocide. In a meticulous brief, they outlined Labor’s repeated legitimisation of Israeli war crimes, as well as Australia’s assistance, political, diplomatic and material. Albanese could not refute that brief, instead vaguely dismissing it as “disinformation.” That response and the current assault on the ICC demonstrate that the genocide will not be ended through the international courts or any other official mechanism. Instead, what is posed is the need for the independent intervention of the working class, against all of the governments responsible, the broader eruption of imperialist militarism and its root cause, the capitalist system.