Global military spending is skyrocketing. The total spent on waging or preparing for war in 2024 was about US$2.7 trillion, 9.4 percent more in real terms than in 2023, according to <a href="https://www.sipri.org/publications/2025/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2024">the latest Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates</a>. This is the biggest year-on-year increase since the institute began tracking world military expenditure in 1988.
The United States remains the world’s biggest spender, outlaying US$997 billion and accounting for 37 percent of the global total. China was a distant second, spending an estimated US$314 billion. The top five spenders (including Russia, Germany and India) account for 60 percent of the global total. The top fifteen countries, Australia included, all increased military spending and made up four-fifths of the global total, spending a combined US$2.1 trillion in 2024.
The spending growth is part of a longer-term trend. Last year was the tenth consecutive year of increases in global military expenditures, the total being 37 percent higher in real terms than in 2015.

<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/military-spending-soars-to-2-7-trillion.png" alt="" /></figure>
While US military spending is more than triple that of China, Beijing’s ten-year real increase is nearly 60 percent, about triple America’s 19 percent. As tensions increase between the two biggest powers, other countries are marching in lockstep to hold their ground.
This includes Australia, where uncompromising allegiance to the US has been central policy for Labor and Liberal governments for decades. Australian military spending in 2024 was 25 percent higher than in 2015. However, the big increases associated with obtaining nuclear-powered submarines have yet to be felt. The government is set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars that should be spent on public housing, welfare and healthcare.
Europe’s trajectory is more dramatic. Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization more than doubled their annual military expenditure in the last decade. Among them is Germany, which in one year has increased its military spending by 28 percent to US$88.5 billion, making it the biggest spender in Western Europe.
These trends will only continue. And it won’t be the wealthy footing the bill—it’ll come at the expense of social services and working-class living standards.
Only a fraction of the money being spent on weaponry would be needed to end world hunger (US$48 billion a year, according to the World Food Program) and provide universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation to 140 low- and middle-income countries (US$138 billion a year, according to the United Nations).
But capitalism’s priorities are elsewhere. British conservative columnist Janan Ganesh, in a March Financial Times <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989">opinion piece</a> titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”, put it plainly: “[T]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt. It was never designed for a world in which living to 100 is banal”.
Every dollar added to the world’s military budgets takes us closer to a potentially apocalyptic scenario of world war. The working classes of all countries have nothing to gain from this. The war drive must be resisted.

Danica Rachel

World military spending explodes

The West Bank has been the primary region for the Israeli colonisation of Palestine for decades. There, Israeli settlers attack Palestinians and steal their land and homes under the protection of the Israeli military. 
In the mid-1990s, the Oslo Accords divided the territory into zones under Palestinian Authority control, joint Israel-Palestinian Authority administration, and total Israeli control. The last of these zones covers most of the land.
Israeli military violence in the West Bank escalated when the genocide in Gaza began. It has now increased further since the delicate Israel-Hamas ceasefire was signed in January. Far-right Israeli politicians, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have openly declared that they want to annex the entire West Bank.
Ghaied Hijaz is a student activist with the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University, which defends the right of Palestinians to education in the West Bank and Gaza. She spoke to Red Flag
about the current situation. The text has been edited for length and clarity.
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The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza must have been a great relief. But there are reports that Israel has since escalated its operations in the West Bank. What’s going on?
When the ceasefire was announced, it was of course the moment we’ve all been waiting for, especially for the people in Gaza. It gave this moment of relief and comfort.
But since the beginning of the ceasefire, everything in the West Bank got much worse.
Even though through the last fifteen months of war the West Bank was not technically living in war, we were witnessing daily raids, daily attacks on the villages and towns, daily arrests, daily killings. But when the ceasefire was announced, many troops that were in Gaza came to the West Bank, and they started by completely closing all the checkpoints, the entrances of all cities in the West Bank, and everybody was stuck. 
It was very, very sudden. At my university, we turned to online learning because there was no way anyone could reach the university if they were outside of Ramallah. People were stuck at the checkpoints for hours.
They continued closing everything for two weeks. And then, after two weeks, it started to get a bit easier, but now they’re going back at it again, they are pushing for more troops to go into the West Bank. 
Yesterday [23 February], they decided that they’re going to have tanks inside the cities, especially in Jenin. The last time Palestinians in the West Bank saw Israeli tanks in the middle of our cities and towns was during the Second Intifada in 2002-04. 
Now what we’re seeing is that the war is paused in Gaza because we’re still not sure if the ceasefire is permanent. And we’ve been hearing statements from Israeli officials claiming that they will go back to war very soon, and that they will not go on with the deal and so on. 
But the war in the West Bank is just starting. We’re just starting to see the plans that they have for the refugee camps, especially for the cities inside of the West Bank, to displace people, to change how cities look, to change the structure of cities and towns. 
They started in Tulkarm and Jenin. They are completely wiping out the refugee camps, they’re destroying all houses, they are building new streets, and they loudly say that they will not leave the cities for at least a year, and some say that they will never leave.
So Israeli forces are saying they’re going to be in Palestinian cities in the West Bank long term?
Because of the Oslo Accords the areas in the West Bank are separated into A, B and C areas, and the A area is for the Palestinian Authority, where the Israeli military is not supposed to enter. But of course, that was never a reality—the Israeli military would enter any city or town that is in the Palestinian area anytime they want.
But they were never inside the city or town for a long time. Now they’re saying that they are going to create bases inside the cities and the towns. They demolished most of the homes in the Tulkarm refugee camp and in Nur Shams refugee camp. Just like how they did the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza, they want to do this in the heart of towns and cities and refugee camps, and they don’t want to leave.
They say that this will be the new reality. No A areas, no Palestinian Authority. They’re going to rule everything, which they already did, but this is in a different way. This is more intense. It puts the West Bank in the middle of a war and creates new questions. What’s the future of the Palestinian Authority, if everything that the Palestinian Authority is based on is being torn apart?
Has there been more violence and land theft by Israeli settlers?
Yes. After the ceasefire was announced, with the plans for annexation, with what Trump is saying, with Netanyahu’s promises to Israeli officials on the right wing to increase attacks in the West Bank instead of Gaza, they’ve just got more nerve now. They keep blocking roads for everyone, attacking people in their farms. In the olive picking seasons, we’ve seen settlers go into lands burning trees [and] hurting people.
And they also organise attacks on a city or a town, and they shoot and kill people because they are all armed. And most of the time, that would be with the protection of the IDF [the Israeli military]. So the IDF would be there just to protect settlers from people who are throwing stones at them as they are shooting with their machine guns at everyone.
In many areas, especially the C areas in the West Bank, you would have land. It’s in your name; it’s yours. The Israeli government hasn’t exactly taken it, but you’re not allowed to do anything in it. It’s yours, but you can’t go there, sometimes you need a permit to go there, you can’t remove anything, you can’t grow anything. You can’t even pick the fruits of the trees.
Since the right-wing politicians and officials in the Israeli government refused a ceasefire and didn’t want to halt the attack in Gaza, Netanyahu promised [Bezalel] Smotrich, who is the finance minister and is kind of the de facto ruler of the West Bank, to take the war from Gaza to the West Bank to achieve what they’re planning for annexation and displacement of Palestinians.
The ceasefire deal has included the release of hundreds of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. How has the community responded?
We have been waiting for our detainees and prisoners to be released for years, especially the ones who were sentenced to life sentences. And also many of the women, many of the children who were living under cruel circumstances in Israeli prisons, under torture, starvation and everything.
So it was a moment of happiness that was long waited for. On the first day of the ceasefire, many people gathered to welcome the released Palestinian women and children that day. And even though it was so cold we were waiting in the streets under the threat of Israeli forces attacking. And they did, throwing tear gas, live bullets or rubber bullets.
We needed to give our prisoners the welcome they have long been waiting for. And so even though it was delayed for six hours, there were a lot of people who were not going to let Israeli forces ruin this moment for us. And every week after that, when there’s a release as part of the exchange deal, hundreds gather to welcome their loved ones.
But as we’re seeing people getting out, we’re hearing more horrible stories about the situation they were living in. When they get out of the bus and we see them, sometimes we don’t even recognise them. Like, if you saw Khalida Jarrar—she was right next to me and I didn’t recognise her. She was in such bad shape and bad condition that it was tearing my heart apart. [Jarrar is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was released as part of the prisoner exchanges.]
Last Saturday [22 February], it was supposed to be the last day of prisoner exchange. Six hundred Palestinian prisoners were supposed to be released. More than half of them were women, children, and men who were detained in Gaza after 7 October [2023]. And Israel, after delaying and delaying again and again, at 2am the next day decided they are not going to release the Palestinian prisoners, and they still haven’t released them [as of 25 February].
Has your activism with the Right to Education campaign been able to continue?
There’s a whole discussion in universities whether we should be on campus or just go to online learning because of how bad the situation is, because they always live with the threat of the settler attacks, threat of arrests, killing at checkpoints, and it’s actually dangerous. But what we always say is that getting to the university and moving between cities is a form of defiance and resistance, because what they want is to separate cities, and for every community to live alone, separated, isolated. And we don’t want that to happen.
We want to keep connected, no matter the hardships. And we continued doing that, even though it was becoming more difficult and challenging by the day. But since the ceasefire agreement, it became impossible.
Students were separated again. The campuses are really important for students to gather and communicate, and to organise together, to have the spirit of community. When everyone at home can’t move, that just crushes it.
And so for the past fifteen months, we’ve been on and off. When we go home, we need to come back and rebuild things again, rebuild the spirit, rebuild the organising efforts. But as the Right to Education, we continued working, because our work with advocacy and building alliances is just more online.
Other student groups and campuses have taken really big hits. Most of their activists are currently in prison or just released from prison, traumatised and not able to work or maybe not able to come back to university. So we’re going through difficult times where we’re trying to maintain student activism overall, not just in the Right to Education, but in all universities with all student groups.
US President Donald Trump recently declared his intention to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip. How did people in the West Bank respond?
Palestinians have been living under the threats of displacement, and in the West Bank, annexation, for 75 years. It’s not new. So when Trump said it, it was not really a new thing since in his previous term, he suggested the “deal of the century”, which was not exactly the same, but was leading to the same thing: to liquidate the Palestinian cause and get Palestinians scattered around the world.
It is [now] much more difficult circumstances, in a much more tense environment. But what we know is we’re not leaving. The core of the Palestinian cause is that Palestinians don’t want to leave. Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza are either refugees or they are residents from these cities. If they are refugees, they don’t want to become refugees again. And if they are originally not refugees, they don’t want to become refugees at all.
So, leaving is not an option for us. And it doesn’t matter if Trump said it or not. People are defiant of what Trump is saying. And that is just the stance of everyone. Every single political group, no matter the differences between them, they all say clearly we don’t want to leave.
I personally think that Trump’s plan is not about displacement. And it’s not going to work, because there’s no way to do it unless he wants to take Palestinians to the US, because nobody is willing to take Palestinians in, as we’ve seen statements from around the world. I think that Trump’s plan is about pushing normalisation [with Israel] in an economic trade way, especially with Saudi Arabia.
And I think that’s what’s dangerous about the plan. He’s just proposing something big that would make everybody say no, especially Arab countries, who are not exactly allies, but still hold on some grounds in supporting Palestinians. So he proposes this big thing to achieve other things he wants.
So it seems that, yes, they rejected the displacement plan, but they accepted normalisation with Israel. They accepted increasing cooperation with Israel, which is the kind of peace Trump is looking at. Trump is a businessman who’s just looking at everything and everyone as a profit. So when he’s trying to manipulate the Middle East, he’s just trying to make more profit. 
Is there anything else you would want our readers to know about what’s happening in the West Bank?
I don’t think that what’s happening in the West Bank is getting much coverage or much attention. Right now, I think we have 40,000 people displaced from three refugee camps, and these displaced people went to surrounding cities and towns. And we hear Israelis, what they’re saying is that they’re going to attack them.
It’s not enough for them that they’ve destroyed the refugee camp, that they have destroyed the houses, that they displaced everyone. They want to go after every single refugee. And we see this as they are attacking UNRWA and suspending their services in Jerusalem. 
If we’re still under the threat of displacement and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and in Gaza, and the threat of going back to genocide as Israeli officials want to resume the fighting, the fight is not over. It’s just starting, even though the past fifteen months were mentally exhausting and physically exhausting, and it caused a lot of damage and losses for a lot of people in the West Bank and in Gaza and around the world. People lost their jobs. They were getting harassed by Israeli activists and [the] Israeli government and everything. 
But we still have to keep going, because it’s not over.

The view from the ground in the West Bank

There’s an obvious wealth divide in Australia. Drive through or use Google street view to peruse Perth’s Cottesloe, Melbourne’s Toorak or Sydney’s Darling Point. You will find no shortage of decadent mansions worth more than any working-class person will likely make in their entire life. Walk through any capital city CBD. You’ll see flashy shops selling luxury items to the richest few alongside desperate people begging for loose change.
The <a href="https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/04/wealth-gap-widening-new-report-acoss">Inequality in Australia 2024</a> report, published in April by the Australian Council of Social Service and the University of New South Wales, estimates that the richest 10 percent of households have on average fifteen times as much wealth as the bottom 60 percent. Almost half of Australia’s wealth is concentrated in the top decile, and less than a fifth in the bottom six.
Home ownership, or lack thereof, is the biggest contributor to the wealth gap. This is unsurprising, given that many working-class people find it difficult to find an affordable home to rent, let alone buy. And when they do rent, they’re probably paying that top 10 percent, who own (or rather, hoard) two-thirds of all investment properties by value.
Workers who do own their home are usually still paying off the mortgage, and are therefore subject to the whims of the banks that set their interest rates. Being squeezed for cash by the banks via home loan repayments is not a problem if you own your home outright and are adding a second, third, fourth, or fifth property to your portfolio.
Inequality in Australia 2024 compares household wealth in 2023 to 2003. To put the findings bluntly: the rich are getting richer while most Australians are falling further behind them. Since 2003, the top 10 percent accrued almost half of the overall growth in household wealth. Their average wealth went from $2.8 million to $5.2 million per household, an increase of 84 percent. The bottom 60 percent went from an average of $222,000 to $343,000—a 55 percent increase.
Why is wealth accumulating at the top? One part of the problem is government policy that favours the rich.
Negative gearing and the capital gains tax (CGT) discount are the most notorious housing policies. The latter was introduced by John Howard’s federal Liberal government in 2000, but every subsequent government, Coalition and Labor alike, has defended them.
Negative gearing lets investors deduct any losses on properties they own (including interest payments on property loans) from their taxable income. This subsidises investors and shields them from needing to sell their extra houses.
The CGT discount favours the wealthy. It lets investors who profit from capital assets (investment properties are one category) halve the amount of tax paid on that profit if they hold the asset for twelve months or more. By the Treasury’s own estimates, this left more than $23 billion in the coffers of property investors in the 2022-23 financial year instead of in public hands, where it could have been used to boost social welfare or—here’s an idea—build public housing.
Both of these policies primarily benefit landlords, especially big landlords. They make it less risky and more lucrative for investors to speculate on the housing market. They create an incentive to accumulate properties and endlessly push up house prices, driving the wedge between the wealthy and the rest of us ever deeper.
Scrapping negative gearing and the CGT discount would slow down the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority and alleviate the housing crisis. Even better would be forcing landlords to sell homes that are vacant for too long. But none of this is likely when parliament is full of landlords. That includes PM Anthony Albanese, who this year evicted a tenant from one of his several properties so he could sell it and put the money toward the $4.3 million mansion he bought in October.
Beyond real estate, other factors in wealth inequality include savings, superannuation, and assets like cars. These are all obviously heavily dependent on a household’s income level and necessary expenditures like rent and mortgage repayments.
To address this area of inequality, the simplest solution is a real wage rise for workers. In 2021 inflation exploded ahead of average pay rises. The Consumer Price Index (CPI, how much more expensive basic goods are than a year prior) peaked at just under 8 percent at the end of 2022, while wages were growing by 3.4 percent on average, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Only this year did wages start rising more than CPI, and then only barely. 
So Australian workers have been set back by years of real pay cuts. But the Labor government doesn’t seem at all interested in doing anything to get them caught back up to where they were, let alone substantially ahead. Many of their “cost-of-living relief” policies don’t do anything about inequality. For instance, the Stage 3 tax cuts gave all taxpayers an income boost, including the rich, who gained the most.
It’s not as though Albanese’s hands are tied. His government could raise welfare payments to the minimum wage and wipe out student debt. It could give public sector workers enough of a pay rise to make up for years of declining wages, which would put pressure on private employers to do the same.
It could pay for all this by taxing the living daylight out of the rich. Undoing the Stage 3 cuts for the top earners would give the budget $148 billion extra to work with over the next ten years—turning the dial back the other way and increasing their taxes would net even more.
If we wait around for governments to be nicer, nothing will ever get better. Things meaningfully improve only when the fucked-over fight back. And the most powerful force in this category is the working class.
Workers can strike to demand higher wages. By refusing to work, they hit their boss in the only place the boss cares about: the bottom line. The recent strikes by workers at Woolworths distribution warehouses should be defended and celebrated as the path forward for winning better pay and conditions.
But as powerful as they are, strikes are rare. The leaders of the trade unions, the highest body of which is the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), have, for the most part, collaborated with governments and bosses, rather than fighting them, for decades. 
Any discussion about the working class’s declining living standards has to account for the failures of its organised leadership. Concessions can be forced, and bad policies overturned, but it takes a fight. Instead, this year, the ACTU has been helping and justifying the government’s hostile, undemocratic takeover and hamstringing of the CFMEU, one of Australia’s strongest unions.
But the main reason there’s a wealth divide in Australia is not government policy or the weakness of the trade union movement.
The main cause of inequality is capitalism itself. Capitalism is based on a tiny minority of the population owning and controlling society’s productive economic assets. Most of the rest of the population have to work for the capitalists, making their profits for them and getting paid relative scraps in return.
In capitalism, everything is commodified and organised via the market—including housing. For capitalism, houses exist primarily, not for living in, but for making money from. The housing market being rigged for landlords isn’t just because of negative gearing and the CGT discount. That housing is bought and sold on a market means it will always favour those with the most economic resources.
In a society organised around profit, workers will never get a fair deal. Every cent of profit the bosses keep for themselves is in effect stolen from the people who actually did the work. So, if we want an equal society without poverty and destitution, we need to end capitalism.

Why do so few have so much wealth?

The United States has sent Israel at least US$17.9 billion worth of military support since October 2023, according to a <a>report</a> from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in the US.
The report outlines the known arms deliveries to Israel between 7 October 2023 and September 2024. These include: 20,000 M4A1 rifles, 14,100 2,000-pound bombs, 3,000 laser-guided Hellfire missiles and over 4 million kilograms of jet fuel. This list is likely longer—many of the details of US military exports are not public.
It’s safe to assume these weapons are not sitting in warehouses gathering dust. They were provided with the full knowledge that they would be used to murder Palestinians.
This staggering amount of material support makes the 2024 fiscal year the biggest on record for US military aid to Israel.
Also noted in the report is US$20.3 billion in newly approved weapons sales, reaffirming US backing of Israel in the form of F-15 fighter jets, tank cartridges and mortar rounds.
The US is not only acting as a patron. It directly intervened in April and October to shoot down Iranian missiles bound for Israel, and since January has been striking Houthi targets in Yemen. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the US secretly expanded its intelligence sharing with Israel after 7 October.
This reality is at odds with the narrative in the mainstream media that the US is trying, or at least threatening, to hold Israel back.
On 13 October, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent Israel’s defence minister and minister of strategic affairs a letter giving Israel 30 days to increase the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza. If Israel doesn’t comply, the letter implies that unwavering US support for the genocide may be reconsidered.
The letter was described as an “ultimatum” by the <a>ABC</a>, <a>Telegraph</a> and <a>Politico</a>. This is at best misleading, and at worst a lie.
Far from threatening a “halt to arms transfers” as the <a>Guardian</a> reported, the letter merely says that a failure on Israel’s part to improve the catastrophic conditions in Gaza “may have implications for US policy” with regard to weapons supplies. America is asking Israel to be a bit nicer while it commits genocide, and if it doesn’t comply then the US might consider not helping so much—hardly an ultimatum.
In April, <a>Reuters</a> reported on an “ultimatum” US President Joe Biden issued to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza or risk losing US support. Nineteen days later, the US Department of Defense <a>announced</a>
that Congress had signed off on US$14.1 billion of military aid to Israel, despite there being no evidence that Israel had made any provisions to avoid civilian deaths.
On 13 October, the same day that Blinken’s most recent “ultimatum” was sent to Israel, the Pentagon <a>announced</a>
that it would send a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence battery to Israel, along with almost 100 soldiers to operate it. 
The liberal media’s spin absolves the US (and its allies like Australia) of Israel’s crimes, washing clean the hands of the so-called “free world” from the blood of the Palestinians shot, bombed, incinerated and starved by Israel.
Make no mistake, the US-Israel alliance is rock solid. Israel needs American weapons, and America needs its attack dog in the Middle East. Without Israel on its side, the US would have a much harder time keeping the region—with its oil reserves and vital trade routes—under its own influence and not that of its rivals.
That the US is willing to sacrifice the lives of tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people to maintain its dominance should come as no surprise. Poverty contributes to hundreds of thousands of American deaths each year, making it the fourth biggest killer, according to a recent American Medical Association study. More than 300 lives were lost to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, after little was done to mitigate the environmental risk. The US government doesn’t care about its own civilians, let alone those on the other side of the world.
As Israel expands its campaign of terror into Lebanon and Iran, the US has very possibly realised that this is an opportune moment. It’s certainly not mad that a severe blow has been inflicted on Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia allied with Iran—a long-term US foe. Israel crushing, or at least weakening, these enemies could help to entrench US hegemony in the region.
The US is arming Israel because it is in its perverse interest to do so. The idea that Biden is pulling out all the stops to end Netanyahu’s genocide could not be further from the truth—the weapons speak for themselves.

The US is spending billions to fuel Israel’s genocide

Dr Mohammed Mustafa is an emergency trainee doctor who went to Khan Younis in June to volunteer in Gaza’s Nasser and European hospitals. From a Palestinian refugee family, Dr Mustafa trained in medicine in Britain and Australia. Now returned to Perth, he spoke to Red Flag’s Danica Rachel about his experience providing medical aid in the besieged Gaza Strip. 
 
Most people are now, unfortunately, familiar with all the awful statistics of the genocide. No doubt you were as well before you arrived in Gaza. But, beyond the numbers, what weren’t you prepared for? 
When we first entered Gaza, it hit you within the first 200, 300 metres. There were dead bodies on the ground near aid that had fallen off aid trucks. People, out of desperation, go and try to pick up this aid, and if they’re in an area that’s a combat zone, or even if they’re not in a combat zone, get shot by a sniper and killed. 
There’s smoke everywhere from the debris, and there’s thousands of people on the roads by the bombed-out buildings. They all had lived there, but now the homes are destroyed, and they’re just sleeping on the streets. You could see how desperate the situation was. There’s no electricity, no running water, there’s barely any food, and there’s hundreds of thousands of people crammed in very small spaces with nowhere to live and no access to any sanitation.
My first full day, we had a mass casualty event in the first hour and a half. There was a drone strike on a playground. There were about twelve children that were injured. Five of them were dead on arrival. Three of them were bleeding out on the floor.
I looked at the other doctors and we realised that we just didn’t have the equipment, the supplies, the expertise, the operating theatres to help these children. 
I told one of the nurses just to comfort a child on the floor. And that’s all she did. She just sat, she put this child’s head in her lap, and she just stroked his head as he was taking his last breath. He took about four minutes on the floor, where he was just in agony until he died. And I could see that in the corner of my eye, as we’re trying to resuscitate another child. 
 
Famine and extreme hunger are now widespread, and the UN has accused Israel of carrying out a targeted starvation campaign. What does this look like for a doctor on the ground?
There was a massive hepatitis A outbreak, to the point where even doctors with hepatitis A and jaundice were still working. Hepatitis A is usually a self-eliminating disease. But when you’ve been malnourished for nine months, and you’re a child, and you’ve got the constant cortisol release from the anxiety of constant bombs and artillery shells going off, that hepatitis A is going to have a massive effect. 
We were seeing children coming in with liver failure. There was one girl, she was 14 years old. We managed to do a blood test on her, which we don’t usually get to do, and her blood was more acidic than it should have been. When I shined a light in her eye, her pupils weren’t responding to light, which essentially meant she was brain dead. And she’s brain dead because of the toxins in her body from her liver not being able to clear any out. 
Her heart was still pumping. She ended up going into cardiac arrest. We spent about fifteen minutes trying to resuscitate her. But she was dead. And after I saw her, it was like a floodgate had opened. So many children had come in with hepatitis A and liver failure. I’d never seen anything like it. The number of children dying such a slow, painful death was unbelievable.
The other thing that we saw as well was kids coming in with malnutrition. So there were children that came in cachecticly [wastingly] thin—almost skin and bone and struggling to breathe. The electrolytes and salt levels in their bodies were so off from their malnutrition that their hearts were going into an abnormal rhythm, and some of them were having heart attacks and dying.
The UN has said that Israeli forces are obstructing humanitarian operations in Gaza—for example, by preventing their movement and bombing UN schools sheltering refugees, killing aid workers. How do the Israeli forces impact the provision of medical support?
You have to apply through multiple different aid agencies to get in. You have to be accepted by a particular NGO or a particular charity, and then you go through the vetting process. The Israelis require your passport, your birth certificate, your parents’ birth certificates and passports as well, and the names of your grandparents. 
Originally, we were told that we were allowed to bring two bags of medical supplies. About one week before departure, we got told that we had to itemise every single thing that we had in our bags. We weren’t allowed to bring in any medications or drugs. 
When I departed from Australia and arrived in Qatar for a transit flight to Jordan, I got a call from the head of our mission, saying that we weren’t allowed to bring any medical supplies either. I had with me eight bags of medical supplies that I’d managed to get through donations or I had managed to buy.
Our medical team was going to be 23 doctors. It ended up just being seven.
When we were there, there hadn’t been a single medical aid trip that had come in carrying medical equipment for six weeks. The sutures that we used were not suitable for humans. There were no painkillers. There was very little anaesthetic. We had no burns dressing. We had people coming in with 80 percent body burns, and we had no burns dressing, so we were just washing their skin with whatever little equipment that we had.
There was a group of doctors that came in the day after us, and they were turned away because they had a bag of baby milk formula.
Everything was really arbitrary of what you were allowed to do, and it would change almost hourly. And I don’t know whether that was done on purpose to disrupt the planning of the team and how effectively we can get things planned and sorted. The rules would change all the time, even a few hours before departure.
What is something that you think people should know about Gaza that they might not already know? 
It’s hard sometimes to imagine that things are worse when you’re there on the ground than what you see on TV, because what you see on TV is children with heads blown off. You see people buried alive under rubble and people trying to dig them out with their hands. You see children who have starved to death. You see people burning alive in tents. 
When you go there, the reality is even worse. What you see on TV is when the bodies arrive, maybe into the hospital, or you see them when they’re being pulled out from the rubble and the limbs missing and their heads missing. 
But to go to the hospital and see the ones that survived: that’s a different story, because they are in extreme agony. They’re in extreme pain. They are alone. Some of these children are alone. Their whole families have been killed. I’d walk around these wards after I finished my shift, and we would have lollipops with us and things like that to try and give to the kids. But some of the stories and some of the orphaned children there—it’s just so difficult to process. And there’s no real support. The support there is other people in Gaza who are looking after these orphaned children.
What are the people in Gaza saying that you think should be heard by the world?
I think what’s unique about the people in Gaza is how resilient they are. They’ve been through bombing campaigns for the last twenty years, every couple of years, and there’s always hundreds, if not thousands, killed.
So Gaza has been through stuff like this before, and the people are quite resilient. But they’re also human beings as well, and there’s only so much human beings can tolerate. You can’t really generalise everybody in Gaza as resilient and the same. Some people are really struggling.
I was recording when we’d have mass casualty events to post and show what we were dealing with. Sometimes a family member would come up to me and they would say, “What’s the point in recording? We’ve been recording for nine months now, ten months now, and nobody cares”. 
Then there are other people that would say, “Look, I want to show you”. It’d be a mother, she would hold my hand, and she would take me to her child who was dead and had burns and blast injuries. And she would pull back the covers and say: “Video this, show the world this”. 
Some people are still hopeful that the world is going to do something about it, and the world is watching. Others have lost hope.
When I spoke to the doctors and the nurses and certain patients, they were really moved by the amount of support that the world was showing them. They would say the politicians and the governments have always been against us, but now the people are with us. I think that gives them a lot of hope as well. 
We would see graffiti on walls of college campuses [around the world] and things like that, and people were really, really moved by the students.
There’s this air of hope that we’re coming to the end of this occupation. We’re coming to the end of this illegal war and these war crimes. The apartheid state is crumbling in on itself. There’s a lot of people that believe that in Gaza. You can go through the same ward round, and you could be lost with grief and you could be filled with hope and inspired, all at the same time. 
So it’s very varied, but I think the overall message from them is: “Just keep going, it is making a difference”. I think for the first time the people of Gaza don’t feel like they’re alone any more.

Eyewitness to genocide

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, the violence and repression from the Israeli military have risen dramatically in the occupied West Bank. According to the UN, more than 600 Palestinians, including more than 100 children, have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank since October last year. Now, West Bank villages are being subjected to the heaviest assaults in decades.
But even in these circumstances, students at West Bank universities are organising resistance. Ghaied Hijaz is a Birzeit University activist in the <a href="http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/">Right to Education</a> campaign, which defends the rights to education of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. She spoke to Red Flag’s Danica Rachel about the West Bank’s current situation and Palestinian university activism. The text has been edited for length and clarity.
When did the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University start, and what is it about?
The Right to Education campaign started in 1988 during the First Intifada. We document any violations, especially when it comes to education or students or academics. We provide legal assistance to students and teachers who get arrested and also after they’re released from Israeli prisons. We help them cope and get back on track with their academic performance and everything else. 
We also mobilise and create a broad network of solidarity groups in the United States, Europe and Asia, basically everywhere. Before the war, we used to receive many visitors to the campus from different universities, mostly US universities. We talked to them about the situation we witnessed, the Palestinian issue and Palestinian rights.
It’s an independent group. It has a diverse collection of people from every single political and ideological background—Fatah or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] or Hamas or anyone. We work with the student factions in different universities, no matter what their background, and we sometimes create events and activities in different universities.
Has it become more difficult to be politically active in the West Bank since 7 October?
Definitely. In the first 24 hours after October 7, the arrest campaign started in the West Bank, and within the first week, there were hundreds of detainees. It has been ten months, and there have been more than 10,000 or 11,000 arrests. We have seen cases of people being arrested for their Facebook posts, and sometimes their sentence is longer if their post got more interactions. 
People are arrested every day—our friends, classmates or family. Conditions in the prisons are terrible, that we have not seen in years, and maybe we have never seen before. People who get out of prison describe it as a torture camp. They compare it to Abu Ghraib. So it’s become difficult, because you feel like you’re always targeted, and if you’re not targeted by the Israeli occupation, you’re intimidated by the Palestinian Authority. So we feel like every single word we say we’re going to pay for it, and we are watched all the time.
What organising and activism have you been able to do since the genocide started? Are you mainly focused on local issues or is Gaza solidarity also a focus?
Of course, we are focusing on Gaza. Mainly, we have been joining other organisations and grassroots initiatives in the West Bank to try to organise a state of popular, peaceful resistance. But in the West Bank, we have been met with military violence. Before, when towns were raided, they would not shoot at anyone going on the street. The increased military violence increased the fear, and that also decreased the ability to organise. Because when you are organising a peaceful protest heading to a checkpoint or something, it’s almost like a suicide mission. 
In addition to that, with military checkpoints, movement became impossible between cities. And so cities were isolated and people were isolated. There was no ability to join people from different cities and organise a main, big protest or something, and that also decreased the ability to organise, but people still continued organising protests and sit-ins in the centre of the cities or at embassies or at the UN.
And also boycott campaigns. We also keep raising awareness, documenting, researching, and creating spaces where people can sit and discuss political issues. But everything that has been done, whether it was in the university or outside the university, is focused on Gaza, is focused on our efforts to stop this genocide, to resist the occupation and to just save the people.
Is it true that you ran the German ambassador to the Palestinian Authority off your campus?
He was in a museum next to the university. His visit was, he said, an effort to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and to discuss further cooperation initiatives or something. 
But the students were not able to accept the presence of the ambassador of Germany, who supported the genocide from day one and spread dehumanising propaganda against Palestinians, and denied our right to exist and to resist. There is no acceptance of these colonial powers of these genocidal countries. And so students didn’t even think, and they just went to the museum and demanded that the German ambassador leave immediately. And he left; he was forced to leave.
How does student activism relate to the broader Palestinian resistance?
If we want to look at the history of the Palestinian revolution, it started with students. It started with refugee students in Egypt and in the Gulf areas, and they created the Palestinian factions, all of them, without any exception—from Fatah, to the PFLP, to Hamas. So the role of the students is to maintain this revolutionist mindset, to maintain the resistance, to maintain the ability to organise and to object to what undermines our rights. 
And we have seen the student movement’s role even after that, in the First Intifada and the Second Intifada, and in recent years—how they always stood in the face of any policy that was meant to undermine the role and the meaning of the student movement.
On another level, especially after 7 October, many students have found their way to participate in physical violent resistance, joining small military groups, as in Tulkarm and Jenin, that we call Kateeba Tulkarm [Tulkarm Brigade] and Kateeba Jenin [Jenin Brigade]. They’re just students who, most probably, were not able to get to their university, and lived in a refugee camp for all of their lives and witnessed the continuous Israeli raids. 
So they’re also part of the student movement, and they’re part of the Palestinian revolution, because the Palestinian resistance could not just be forced to be peaceful, because when we are met with extreme violence, we are supposed to defend ourselves in the same way. And so these active students are also part of the student movement to play a fundamental role in the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian revolution.
Does what you do on the campuses influence the broader politics of the West Bank?
I would say so, yes, because, especially at Birzeit, it’s kind of the most open university and the university where people can actually express their opinions and develop, let’s say, their ideologies and their political identity. So everybody that goes to Birzeit goes through this healthy process of accumulating ideas, accumulating concepts to go into society and be an active political citizen. And many of them go and work with humanitarian organisations, political organisations, cultural organisations. 
What impact has the global student movement had at Palestinian universities and among other activists in the West Bank?
It had such a great effect. Most of the universities in the West Bank turned to online learning for the first three, four months of the war. And still, until now, there are some universities that cannot teach on campus. So student organising, student activism decreased. Students felt like they were out of touch not being able to do anything. 
When the encampments started, students in the West Bank looked, felt ashamed, because these are people outside who are doing stuff that we’re not doing. We’re just sitting home and we’re not able to do anything. So I would say that it’s revived the spirit of the students again, because after three or four months of just continuous disappointment and feeling helpless and useless, they felt again that, yes, students can do something. 
The scenes of the encampments were so inspiring and they encouraged us to try again. Let’s try to organise protests again. Let’s try to have an influence again. If people in the West, in the US, and in Australia and in France, who are not physically connected to the struggle, are doing this, we can do that too. We should do that too. 
And then, in Birzeit, even though we had protests and activities before, we also started a symbolic encampment in solidarity. Then, to strengthen the student movement and the student encampments, we created the Popular University for Gaza, or, as we called it, the Martyrs’ University for Gaza, where we held discussions and lectures and protests, just to strengthen the student movement, to revive the student movement and also to stand in solidarity with the students in Gaza.
Thousands of students in the West have been following what’s going on in Palestine. What’s something you think activists might not know, but should know about Palestine and the current situation?
I don’t know if these are new things to say, but I would say that the most important thing for people to remember is how crucial these days are. This war is not just like any other war. We had escalations before, the violence was escalated before, the First and the Second Intifada, the wars in Gaza. But this war is different.
The threat is not just about the death of people, it also includes the complete erasure of Palestinians. When we say genocide, we mean genocide because we see it happening with more than 40,000 people killed in Gaza, and possibly much, much more.
If the war stops right now, it doesn’t mean that everything is solved, because we still have a major crisis. In Gaza, they have nothing to live with. People would have to leave if they had no schools, no universities, no municipalities, disease spreading. And that’s the plan that [Israeli National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu were always saying: to limit or to decrease the population of Gaza. That’s genocide, that’s ethnic cleansing, and it has never been more clear. 
And the same is happening in the West Bank. Residents of towns and villages are subjected to daily raids from Israeli settlers, not just the military. And so we are seeing the actual threat of ethnic cleansing—it’s very obvious and it’s very clear.
We must not fall into this discourse of just calling for a ceasefire. We have to call for justice, for freedom.

Organising under apartheid: interview with a Palestinian student activist

A recent <a href="https://essentialreport.com.au/reports/13-june-2023">Essential poll</a> found that 79 percent of Australians believe social classes still exist in Australia. This is unsurprising, given the distribution of wealth. For example, the Australia Institute’s <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/inequality-on-steroids-the-distribution-of-economic-growth-in-australia/">Inequality on Steroids report</a> estimates that the top 10 percent of Australian income earners received 93 percent of the benefits from all economic growth in the decade from 2009 to 2019.
Of Essential poll respondents, 49 percent consider themselves to be middle class, 30 percent self-identify as working class and 4 percent as upper class. This raises a question: what is a social class? 
Definitions typically revolve around income. “Middle class”, we’re often told, means earning something like the median income—about $65,000 a year <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/employee-earnings/aug-2022">according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics</a>. There’s no consensus on how much below or above this figure someone can earn while still being in the middle. 
This is a vague way to define class and is ripe for misinterpretations and distortions. An <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/millions-to-wear-cost-of-stagethree-tax-cut-retreat/news-story/656c97b95c52921b5e3fc382b390c0c5">article</a> published in the Australian last year described yearly earnings between $120,000 and $160,000 as “middle income” in an attempt to defend the high-end tax cuts due to be implemented by the federal Labor government next year. 
In reality, according to the most recently available <a href="https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/taxation-statistics-2020-21/resource/d902104e-a9c1-4d14-8d21-f4538bda037a">statistics</a> from the Australian Taxation Office, people making this much money are comfortably in the top 15 percent of Australian income earners.
More sophisticated classifications refer to education levels, cultural interests and family occupations as well as income. But again, the outcome is imprecise. Anyone with a university degree becomes middle class, and “working class” often becomes a synonym for “lower class”—that is, anyone economically worse off or with lower formal education levels than those in the “middle”.
 Socialists are more precise. While income can often be an indicator of social class, we define the latter in terms of people’s relationship to society’s economic infrastructure. That gives us three categories: the capitalist class, the working class and the middle classes.
Capitalists are the parasites at the top. They’re the executives, CEOs and board members who own and/or control the big companies, and with them the machinery, farmland, office buildings, media outlets, electricity grids, telecommunications infrastructure, ports and so on. They own the “means of production”, which they put to use with the singular purpose of generating profit.
Workers, on the other hand, don’t own any means of production. They might own personal property such as a car, a phone, maybe a house. But while workers use their personal property to meet their daily needs, capitalists use their private property as capital—a means to generate wealth through exploiting workers. 
A worker might grow some veggies in their garden to cut grocery costs; an agricultural capitalist uses thousands of acres of farmland to turn a profit. A house owned by a worker is just a home, but it becomes capital when owned by a real estate investor, used to generate wealth on the market.
The threat of poverty, homelessness and starvation gives workers no choice but to sell the only thing they can: their capacity to labour. They are deprived of control over much of their daily lives, having little say over the work they do or the workplaces in which they are employed. Even simple dignities like meals and bathroom breaks in many places can be taken only when allowed by the boss. 
The number of people fitting this definition of “working class” is difficult to quantify. Diane Fieldes, writing in the 2005 anthology Class and struggle in Australia, <a href="https://sa.org.au/marxism_page/csaseminars/Working_class.pdf">estimated</a> that the working class makes up a substantial majority of the population—more than double the 30 percent figure in the Essential poll. 
“Middle class” also takes on a different meaning in this framework. It describes those who sit between the working class and the class of big capitalists. There are many different categories that fit in here: small business owners, middle managers, union officials, academics and state bureaucrats, to name a few. They can have different and contradictory relationships to the means of production—some are small capitalists, others just bureaucrats. What they generally have in common is that they control their own work or the work of others. They certainly make up a lot less than 49 percent of the population.
The Marxist definition of class is much more useful than loose definitions based on income or education. 
First, it gives us an understanding of how capitalism works. Workers and bosses don’t exist in isolation; they are intimately connected through exploitation. Capitalists own the means of production, but need workers to operate machines, maintain infrastructure, harvest crops, serve customers and so on. The workers are the ones who produce the goods or services that their bosses sell for profit.
But there’s the rub. For the boss to make a profit, they have to sell the products for more than the costs of production, which crucially includes what they pay their workers. So the workers have created value, but that value has been seized from them by the capitalist, and only a fraction returned as a wage. This isn’t just the case with blue-collar workers, but also applies to workers in retail, hospitality, healthcare, IT, administration and elsewhere. 
Whether a business is successful depends on how much profit it can make, and therefore how much its workers are exploited. Profits are the lifeblood of capitalism—and every cent of them comes from exploited labour. By understanding exploitation, we can understand how 93 percent of wealth went to the top 10 percent last decade.
Second, the Marxist definition shows that classes have counterposed interests. What’s good for capitalists is whatever makes their profits go up. This often means, for instance, paying workers less, cutting costs wherever possible and lowering workplace safety standards. What’s good for workers is the opposite: being paid more and having more rights at work. Thinking of class simply as where someone sits on the spectrum from “low income” to “high income” obscures this tension.
Third, defining classes by their relation to the means of production tells us who has power in society. The capitalists own the most important section of the economy, so they make all major decisions about what society produces and how it will be produced. And because of this control, governments must keep them onside. Otherwise, they might move their investments overseas, threaten the economy, or even outright depose governments.
But profits are generated by workers, which gives them a different kind of power. When a workplace goes on strike, its production stops, and therefore profits cannot be made. The bosses go to great lengths to avoid this happening. They’ll pit workers against each other and spread lies about unions to stop workers organising.
Finally, we can see who is needed to run society—and who runs it day to day. The capitalists portray themselves as the deserving few who are indispensable. But their profits and wealth are the fruits of workers’ labour. Workers, not bosses, construct buildings, run hospitals, and stock shelves. Workers run the world, but under capitalism they are forced to run it for the capitalist class.
Another world is possible, where workers run the world for themselves, because of the simple fact that the bosses need us, but we don’t need them.

World military spending explodes

The view from the ground in the West Bank

Why do so few have so much wealth?

The US is spending billions to fuel Israel’s genocide

Eyewitness to genocide

Organising under apartheid: interview with a Palestinian student activist

What is social class?

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