Classes were in session on 6 January at Birzeit University, near Ramallah in the West Bank, when Israeli soldiers entered the campus firing tear gas, sound bombs and live rounds on students and staff. <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/6/israeli-forces-injure-11-palestinian-in-university-raid-in-ramallah">Al Jazeera reported</a> that 41 people were injured, including hospitalisations for five who inhaled tear gas, three hit by shrapnel and three shot in the legs.
Ghaied Hijaz, an activist and Birzeit University graduate, told Red Flag that more than 150 soldiers stormed the university:
“This is not the first time [Israeli forces] break into the university campus. But this time was different. For the past ten years, they would break in during the night. But to come in during the day when the university is full of students, shooting live bullets and tear gas, is something that was surprising to all of us, because that didn’t happen since the Second Intifada [a period of Palestinian revolt against Israeli occupation from 2000 to 2005].”
In the north, the Israeli military’s Operation Iron Wall has been a campaign of total destruction in the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps. <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/genocide-continues-gaza-west-bank-pushed-new-nakba">Middle East Eye reported</a> that 40,000 refugees were expelled in early 2025 and that entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. Israel has broken another boundary: these areas were supposed to be under Palestinian control, and now they have a permanent Israeli military presence.
Things have shifted decisively in the West Bank since October 2023. The violence and theft of Palestinian land have increased to levels that were perhaps untenable a few years ago. The support that Israel has received for its genocide in Gaza has been taken as a green light for stomping on the rest of Palestine.
Al Jazeera reports that, since October 2023, at least 1,102 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and about 11,000 injured, either by Israeli military forces or by settlers looking to steal more land; around 21,000 more are locked in Israeli prisons. More than 2,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented more than 1,800 attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank in 2025 alone.
The goal is to eradicate Palestine “between the Sea and the Jordan” river, as the original charter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party reads. For this, the West Bank is crucial, as it is where an imagined Palestinian state would be formed with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel is now taking the opportunity wipe Palestine off the map.
Armed settlers roam the hilly West Bank countryside, terrorising Palestinians trying to protect their homes. They are regularly backed by soldiers and have the full support of Netanyahu’s government. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, himself a settler, has been making it easier for settlers to obtain weapons: some 230,000 gun licences have been distributed in Israel in the two years to November 2025, as <a href="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-organized-settler-militias-west-bank-palestinians-funding-arms">reported by Drop Site News</a>.
The settlers are at the front line of stealing Palestinian land. Since October 2023, at least 152 new settler outposts have been set up, making up more than 42 percent of all outposts established since 1996, according to monitoring by Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now. The outposts are not officially sanctioned by the Israeli government, but many eventually become recognised as settlements.
On top of the new outposts, the Israeli government approved eleven new official settlements in December of 2025, adding to dozens of others in the past two years. By exploiting an Ottoman Empire-era law, Israel “declares” land owned by Palestinians “state land” as long as it hasn’t been cultivated. The “state lands” are then often used for further development of settlements. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem <a href="https://www.btselem.org/download/201007_by_hook_and_by_crook_eng.pdf">estimated in 2010</a> that about 16 percent of the West Bank has been stolen in this way. Peace Now recorded that at least another 40 square kilometres have been taken since then, with 2024 the largest year since they began recording in 1998.
The most significant ongoing land theft is the imminent development of the E1 zone, stretching east from the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was approved by the Israeli government in August 2025, but the plan had been in limbo for twenty years because it was considered too much for Western states to stomach. Now, it’s going ahead, and developers are bidding for the right to build 3,401 housing units to connect existing Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem to others deep in the West Bank.
The settling of E1 will plug the hole in the separation barrier, a concrete wall Israel has built through the West Bank stretching as high as nine metres. It will physically separate East Jerusalem from the West Bank and cut off the northern part of the West Bank from the south. The point is to establish “facts on the ground” that kill any possibility for a Palestinian state. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, also a settler, put it bluntly as he announced the approval:
“This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise. Anyone in the world who tries today to recognise a Palestinian state will receive an answer from us on the ground.”
If the two-state solution was ever anything more than a fantasy, soon it will be a geographical impossibility.
All of this is an acceleration of a process that has always been part of the Zionist project. In 1948, Israel was established on top of most of historic Palestine. In 1967, Israel defeated Jordan in the Six-Day War and began its occupation of the West Bank. Since then, Israel has progressively encroached further and further, eating away at the area Palestinians have access to or control over. B’Tselem’s 2010 <a href="https://www.btselem.org/download/201007_by_hook_and_by_crook_eng.pdf">By Hook and By Crook report</a> includes invaluable documentation of the mechanisms and policies Israel has used to this end.
Israel immediately began requisitioning land for settlements, claiming them as necessary for security and military functions. By 1981, 53 settlements had been established in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That year, the Israeli government adopted a policy known as the <a href="https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-186771/">Drobles plan</a>, named after its author Matityahu Drobles, then chairman of the World Zionist Organization settlement department. It spelled out in no uncertain terms the goal for the West Bank, which Israel calls “Judea and Samaria”. The policy pre-empted Smotrich’s above-quoted boast about the E1 zone by several decades:
“The state-owned lands and the uncultivated barren lands in Judea and Samaria ought to be seized right away, with the purpose of settling the areas between and around the centres occupied by the [Palestinians] so as to reduce to the minimum the danger of an additional Arab state being established in these territories. Being cut off by Jewish settlements, the [Palestinian] population will find it difficult to form a territorial and political continuity. There mustn’t be even the shadow of a doubt about our intention to keep the territories of Judea and Samaria for good.”
The Drobles plan makes gestures towards “the cohabitation of Jews and Arabs side by side”, but no such peaceful coexistence was meaningfully pursued. Insofar as the Jewish and Palestinian populations in the West Bank are “side by side”, it is on the two unequal sides of apartheid.
Israeli settlers are subject to civil law; Palestinians are under military law. Settlers get highways built for them and enjoy total freedom of movement; Palestinians are restricted to slower roads blocked with military checkpoints and require Israeli-issued permits to travel. Israelis have political rights; Palestinians in the West Bank have none.
After 1979, Israel slowed down (but didn’t stop) the military requisitions of West Bank land and switched to the “state land” declaration strategy. Most declarations were made between 1979 and 1992, and are where most settlements near built-up Palestinian areas were established.
The carve-up was codified in the signing of the second Oslo accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1995. This defined three areas in the West Bank: Area C, under total Israeli control, was the only geographically contiguous and the largest area, making up 60 percent of the land; Area B is jointly administered by Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), and was 22 percent of the area; Area A is the smallest—18 percent—and the only area ostensibly under Palestinian control through the PA.
It was a stitch-up heavily in favour of Israel, but it did not end there. Peace Now estimates that, from 1994 to 2006, the municipal areas of 92 settlements were expanded in defiance of Oslo. And settlers have continued establishing outposts.
During the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, construction began on the separation barrier, with a route designed to claim even more land for settlements and to make movement for Palestinians even more difficult. The barrier now spans almost the entire length of the West Bank. To build it, Israel routinely requisitioned land and demolished Palestinian homes.
In 2005, when Israel removed its settlements from the Gaza Strip, it also retreated from four of them in the north of the West Bank. In March 2023, Netanyahu’s government re-authorised those four settlements.
If these decades were death by a thousand cuts, then what Israel is doing now is hacking and slashing. While all eyes have been on Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank has accelerated. Israel’s aim is total control and ownership, from the river to the sea.

Danica Rachel

The new phase of colonisation in the West Bank

The following piece was first published by the Iranian Revolutionary Marxist Tendency.
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Iran’s nationwide uprising continues amid mounting evidence of a systematic and deadly campaign by the state to crush popular resistance. Reports emerging from hospitals, despite a near-total internet blackout, reveal the scale of violence being unleashed against unarmed protesters—overwhelmingly drawn from the working class, youth and urban poor.
Medical staff at two hospitals in Rasht, in northern Iran, and Tehran, the capital city, have confirmed that at least 110 bodies were transferred to these facilities alone. Doctors inside the country report that on 8 and 9 January, numerous patients arrived with live-ammunition gunshot wounds to the head, neck, and eyes—clear indications of intentional lethal force.
Human rights defenders had warned that the nationwide internet shutdown would be used as a cover for mass killings. Under these conditions, obtaining reliable nationwide figures is impossible. Current estimates of the death toll range from hundreds to potentially thousands, reflecting not exaggeration, but the deliberate obscuring of reality by the state.
According to multiple external sources, the Iranian regime has reportedly sought to reinforce its repressive apparatus by drawing on foreign paramilitary forces, including members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Hashed al-Shabi. While independent verification remains difficult, such reports underscore the regime’s growing dependence on militarised networks to maintain power against its own population.
Yet repression is not the only danger confronting this uprising. As blood is shed in the streets, monarchist and royalist factions, long detached from the lived realities of Iran’s working people, are attempting to politically hijack the revolt. These forces seek to redirect the grassroots, class-driven uprising into a project aligned with elite restoration and foreign patronage.
The role of the United States has been particularly revealing. While issuing statements of concern for “human rights”, Washington has simultaneously signalled implicit support for royalist currents, reproducing a familiar imperial strategy: backing compliant elites while presenting intervention as solidarity. This double game is neither new nor misunderstood by Iranians.
Iran’s modern history, from 1953, is the best justification of people’s fear and disgust of any foreign state intervention. At that time, the US and England engineered a coup d’etat to overthrow the first democratically elected prime minister, Mosaddeq, and enforced a dictatorship on the Iranian people that continued until 1979. They again orchestrated another hijacking of the revolt by the clergy-capitalist state that continues to rule the country up until now. They brought incredible economic, political and social consequences to Iran and have created a bankrupt country whose price is paid by the majority of the working class and urban poor of the society, while a small oligarchic class lives in unbelievable luxury.
The monarchists are attempting to manipulate the situation in their favour. They do not understand that what has driven millions into the streets is not nostalgia for past rulers, but decades of economic dispossession, rampant inequality, privatisation, unemployment, inflation and the militarisation of everyday life. The Islamic Republic has functioned not as an alternative to imperial domination, but as a local manager of capital accumulation and repression, enriching a narrow ruling layer while condemning vast sections of society to precarity.
Sanctions, far from weakening authoritarianism, have deepened class polarisation, allowing the regime to shift the burden of economic collapse onto workers, pensioners and the poor while expanding its security apparatus. At the same time, Western governments instrumentalise human rights discourse selectively—invoking it loudly when it serves geopolitical pressure and quietly discarding it when it threatens strategic interests. This hypocrisy has been fully internalised by Iranians who have lived through war, embargo and covert intervention.
The danger now is that the uprising’s radical potential—its capacity to articulate demands for social justice, democratic control and economic redistribution—will be neutralised by forces offering only a change of flag or figurehead.
Monarchist currents, amplified disproportionately by foreign media and exile networks, present themselves as a ready-made “alternative”, while remaining fundamentally hostile to popular participation and to working-class self-organisation. Their project is not emancipation, but restoration under new branding.
Against this backdrop, the Iranian people face a dual struggle: resisting a state that kills to survive, and rejecting external and internal actors who seek to discipline the uprising into safe, controllable outcomes. The most dangerous moment for any revolutionary movement is not only when it is attacked by power, but when it is spoken for—when its voice is replaced by intermediaries claiming legitimacy without accountability.
What endures, however, is the political consciousness forged in struggle. Strikes, neighbourhood resistance, student mobilisations and grassroots solidarity networks—often ignored by international coverage—point toward an alternative political horizon rooted in collective power rather than elite negotiation. These forms of organisation, fragile yet persistent, represent the embryo of a politics that neither kneels before clerical authority nor appeals to imperial guardians.
History does not repeat mechanically, but it does issue warnings. Iran’s past revolutions were derailed when popular movements were isolated, fragmented, or subordinated to external interests. The lesson emerging once again from the streets is uncompromising: freedom cannot be delivered by executioners, nor negotiated by exiles backed by foreign states.
As repression intensifies and narratives multiply, the central task remains clear for Iranians and for those in solidarity abroad: to defend the independence, class character and democratic substance of this uprising. Anything less risks turning yet another mass sacrifice into a footnote in the long record of betrayed revolutions.

Iran’s uprising under fire

The following is a statement from the Iranian Revolutionary Marxist Tendency (IRMT). The IRMT was founded in early 1979, initially under the name Iranian Socialist Workers’ Party. Its founders began political activity in the 1960s, establishing an Iranian Commission within the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. The organisation’s theoretical foundations are rooted in Trotsky’s Transitional Programme and the first four congresses of the Communist International. Today, IRMT is part of International Standpoint and remains the only Iranian Trotskyist organisation.
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The recent protests sparked by the sharp rise in the dollar exchange rate—initially led by Tehran’s bazaar merchants—quickly evolved into a broader social uprising. What for a privileged layer meant a partial reduction in profits translated for the vast majority of people into deepening poverty, worsening living conditions and an acute cost-of-living crisis. Combined with fuel price hikes, higher taxes and soaring prices of basic goods, millions are now pushed to the edge of survival.
Since the brutal suppression of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, Iranian society has been subjected to relentless economic pressure, unemployment, insecurity, and hunger. Under these conditions, protests rapidly spread beyond the bazaars to include workers, youth, women, students and striking labour sectors across multiple cities. Increasingly, demonstrators are expressing opposition not only to specific policies but to the ruling system as a whole. The state has responded, as always, with intensified repression, mass arrests and the deployment of security forces and plainclothes enforcers.
Runaway inflation has removed essential items—bread, rice, meat, and other staples—from the reach of large sections of the population, while basic goods have become luxuries. Unemployment, homelessness, addiction and social disintegration are the direct outcomes of Iran’s capitalist order. No reshuffling of officials or factions within the regime can resolve these structural crises.
Class polarization continues to deepen. A small elite, tied to state power, the security apparatus and religious foundations, accumulates vast wealth through the exploitation of labour and the plunder of public resources. Meanwhile, millions survive through precarious and degrading work, child labour and informal street trade, while the children of the ruling class live in comfort abroad.
The Tendency of Revolutionary Marxists of Iran expresses full and unconditional support for the just struggles of the Iranian people. Past experience has shown that spontaneous protest alone, without organization, is vulnerable to repression and exhaustion. For this reason, the linkage between mass street mobilization and organized working-class struggle is decisive. Only the convergence of labour struggles and popular protest can shift the balance of forces and open the path to lasting gains.
Self-defence against state violence is a legitimate right of workers and oppressed people. Sustainable resistance requires organization, solidarity and coordination across sectors. The fight in Iran is not a single episode, but part of a longer struggle for workers’ power, social equality and democratic control over society through workers’ councils.
We salute the courage of Iranian workers, youth, women, teachers, students and retirees who continue to resist repression in streets, workplaces, schools and universities across the country. We call on trade unions, workers’ organisations, and left movements internationally to stand in active solidarity with the Iranian working class and oppressed masses.
Forward toward the overthrow of capitalist rule and the establishment of a council-based, workers’ government in Iran.

Editors

In solidarity with the popular uprising in Iran

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

Bella Beiraghi

Iran on fire: rebellion returns to the streets

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

Ramzy Baroud

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

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

Vashti Fox

‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire

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

Jasmine Duff

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

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

Nick Everett

Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues

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

Elliott Shaw

Protesting with Gen Z in Morocco

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

The new phase of colonisation in the West Bank

Iran’s uprising under fire

In solidarity with the popular uprising in Iran

Iran on fire: rebellion returns to the streets

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

‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire

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

Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues

Protesting with Gen Z in Morocco

Ceasefire in Gaza: relief, but not enough

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