Archive for the ‘Fourth International’ Category
Solidarity With Palestine, Dublin October 23 2023 – Sue Pentel Addresses Large Demonstration – “We see genocide unfolding before our eyes”
Is Genocide happening today in Palestine 🇵🇸 and Ukraine 🇺🇦?
Let us consider carefully a robust definition :
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people[a] in whole or in part. In 1948, the United NationsGenocide Conventiondefined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
The answer is Yes.
The term is carefully used by Sue Pentel, a speaker at an October 23 2023 large Dublin demonstration. The speech is here :
Read the rest of this entry »Current positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières (ESSF) has published a number of statements about the Israeli-Palestine conflict from across the globe. In addition we publish a letter which appeared in the October 11 2023 edition of the Irish Times, and solidarity statements issued by the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, and the SIPTU Global Solidarity Committee.
Israeli Apartheid Must Be Dismantled
Sir, – Michael Jansen (“Hamas attack on Israel followed years of containment and dire poverty in Gaza”, World, October 9th) rightly notes that the attack on Israel by Hamas was inevitable. Gaza has been under siege and blockade for 16 years, with 60 per cent of its people living in poverty, and tens of thousands suffering from post-traumatic stress after suffering four full-scale Israeli military attacks between 2008 and 2021. When people protested at the Gaza fence in the Great March of Return, they were met by snipers’ bullets.
The response of the Israeli government to the Hamas attack in recent days is shocking. It intends to punish the civilian population of Gaza, in knowing breach by a government of international law.
Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant has ordered a total siege on Gaza. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, it’s all closed. We are fighting against human animals,” he said. The dehumanisation of Palestinian residents is the prelude to massacre. The bombs have started to fall on Gaza wiping out entire families. The statement by the Israeli ambassador Dana Ehrlich (News, October 9th) that lawyers sit with “very strict rules” observing each target is palpable nonsense.
Read the rest of this entry »A Palestinian View On Ukraine: Parallels Of Occupation And Solidarity – Versus People Before Profit Double Standards
Several public representatives and supporters of the Irish left-wing party People Before Profit (PBP) attack the Dublin Government’s Double Standards over two major 2023 genocidal wars : Israel’s Genocidal Assault on the Palestinian People and Russia’s Genocidal Invasion of Ukraine.
For example Paul Murphy TD (Dublin South-West) declares on his Facebook page :
“Since Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the right of an occupied nation to defend itself has been widely recognised.
Now as Israel begins to unleash hell on Gaza and governments prepare to excuse Israeli war crimes, it’s clear that right doesn’t apply to Palestinians. Why not?”
Big problem here : Paul and and others on the left are throwing a dangerous political boomerang : instead of using exactly the same principled framework for supporting Ukraine and Palestine, they operate double standards. When they add denunciation of mass media inconsistency, the government, the European Union, in supporting Ukraine while opposing Palestine, we witness inconsistency in reverse from the left, supporting Palestine while opposing Ukraine.
John Meehan October 10 2023
Aden Shaheen, a Palestinian living in Britain, offers a far better policy.
Article Source : https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article68151
In this interview, Adeeb Shaheen shares his perspectives on the ongoing war in Ukraine. As someone who has experienced life under military occupation, he draws parallels between Israel’s actions in Palestine and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, speaking to the suffering of civilians under aggression from a more powerful military force. Interview by Fred Leplat.
Fred Leplat – Adeeb, you describe yourself as a Ukrainian Palestinian and you are now in Britain. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and why you are now in Britain today?
I was born in Palestine and lived there until the Israeli occupation administration expelled my father to Jordan in 1968 for his activities against the occupation. My mother took us, her children, and left for Jordan to join him. I finished school in 1976 and set off for the Soviet Union to study electrical engineering. After finishing my studies, I went back to Jordan, worked there for a couple of years, and then moved to live in Palestine with my wife and son. In Palestine, I took part in the first Intifada and the resistance movement. In 1990, I was arrested by the Israeli occupants and sent to prison for four years. After jail, I resumed my life in Palestine, where the Palestinian Authority began to operate the civilian life of the Palestinians on the occupied Palestinian land. After two years of the second Intifada, I left my home town of Nablus with my family and moved to live in Jordan. It was difficult there as well. In September 2003, I received a job offer from an international trading company to work in its branch in Ukraine. I moved there with my family to Ukraine, to Kharkiv, where I finished my studies when Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union. I worked there and had a normal life there until February 24, 2022. Putin’s war against Ukraine forced us to leave for Poland, then for the UK.
Read the rest of this entry »Palestine: Hamas Attack
Article Source : https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article68150
“Breaking the Silence” is an interesting organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Silence_(organization)
Hamas’s attack and the events unfolding since yesterday are unspeakable. We could talk about their cruel and criminal actions, or focus on how our Jewish-supremacist govt brought us to this point. But as former Israeli soldiers, our job is to talk about what we were sent to do
Israel’s security policy, for decades now, has been to “manage the conflict”. Successive Israeli governments insist on round after round of violence as if any of it will make a difference. They talk about “security”, “deterrence”, “changing the equation”.
All of these are code words for bombing the Gaza Strip to a pulp, always justified as targeting terrorists, yet always with heavy civilian casualties. In between these rounds of violence we make life impossible for Gazans, and then act surprised when it all boils over.
Read the rest of this entry »Making sense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – Paul Le Blanc “I favour the defeat of Vladimir Putin’s invasion and victory for Ukrainian self-determination”
We wish to thank Dick Nichols, European Editor of the Australian Magazine Green Left Weekly, who drew our attention to an important article on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, written by the well-known Marxist scholar and historian Paul Le Blanc.
The author takes the side of Ukraine Against Russia :
- I favour the defeat of Vladimir Putin’s invasion and victory for Ukrainian self-determination.
- I oppose imperialism in all its forms – including Putin’s invasion and NATO.
- I oppose capitalism and favour its replacement with the genuine political and economic democracy of socialism everywhere: the United States, Ukraine, Russia etc.
More about the author here : “Paul Le Blanc (born 1947) is an American historian at La Roche University in Pittsburgh as well as labor and socialist activist who has written or edited more than 30 books on topics such as Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg.[1][2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Blanc_(historian)
Paul Le Blanc launches his new book, in person, on November 7 2023 in Dublin
Making sense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
6 October, 2023
A momentous development has drawn my attention away from the unfolding climate catastrophe on which I have been riveted. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major factor fragmenting the left-wing forces I hoped would become a major force in the revolutionary struggle for climate justice and human survival. Recently, I have met Russians and Ukrainians — and others from Brazil, Argentina and the United States — who have all made it clear to me that I cannot avoid dealing with this issue.1
In this article, I will attempt to do three things:
- Review what some on the left assert either in favour of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or against the Ukrainian response;
- Review Russian and Ukrainian realities and views on the war; and
- Touch on essential aspects of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion (including where the weapons come from).
In the footnotes I offer sources that have influenced my analysis and that I believe may be useful for those seeking to make sense of these realities. But I owe it to readers to indicate my own position from the outset. This is my bottom-line:
Read the rest of this entry »Notes from Kyiv: Which side are we on? – An article the USA Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Leadership removed from the organisation’s website
Vladyslav Starodubtsev reports :
Two days ago Democratic Left, Democratic Socialists of America’s online publication, ran Eric Lee’s article about his recent visit to Ukraine. It was entitled “Notes from Kyiv: Which side are we on?”
DSA has now answered that question — by removing the article from its website.
Thanks to Des Derwin and Adam Novak for drawing our attention to this Undemocratic Anti-Socialist Censorship hatchet job.
We are advised this is the result of a decision taken by the organisation’s National Political Committee.
The full article is below; a link is here :
We are advised that the long-standing editor of Democratic Left, Maxine Phillips, has resigned in protest.
Notes from Kyiv: Which side are we on?
September 26, 2023 by Eric Lee
As I walked around Kyiv on a beautiful, sunny morning in early September, I noticed the scaffolding in the city’s squares. Statues had been covered up to protect them from bomb damage. Later, I saw a statue with no protection around it– a graffiti-covered memorial to a Red Army general whose name nobody remembered. I was told that this statue had been covered by protective scaffolding before the war. The protection was removed when the war broke out. There was some hope that Russian bombs might solve the problem of what to do with this relic of Soviet rule.
You cannot understand the war in Ukraine without knowing its history. This was made very clear to me in a conversation I had with Olesia Briazgunova, who works for one of Ukraine’s two national trade union centers, the KVPU (Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine). I suggested that I saw some similarities between the situation in Ukraine today and the Spanish Civil War.
Olesia stopped me right there and asked if there had been genocide in Spain. I said there hadn’t been. She said, “Well there’s genocide here — and the Russians have been trying to wipe out the Ukrainian nation for a very long time.” I thought of Stalin’s terror-famine of the early 1930s, which Ukrainians call the Holodomor, and which they rightly consider an act of deliberate genocide. She had a point.
Read the rest of this entry »Irish troops to provide weapons training to Ukraine despite Government’s ‘non-lethal’ assistance pledge – Irish Times News Report, August 18 2023
“Department of Defence insists training does not impact neutrality and that there was no attempt to mislead public” – Irish Times
A copy of Conor Gallagher’s report is here :
Paul Murphy TD (Dublin South-West, People Before Profit) has issued a deeply mistaken public response, consistent with his party’s previously stated opposition to any military anti-imperialist solidarity action in support of the Ukrainian masses’ fight against a genocidal Russian invasion. Source :
This is a grim PBP Left-Evasionist chapter, part of the shocking story: failure to show anti-imperialist solidarity with the masses of Ukraine who are resisting a genocidal Russian invasion.
On July 29 2023 the PBP helped to organise a well-supported anti-racist rally in Dún Laoghaire, a town which proudly hosts a magnificent statue honouring the Irish anti-imperialist gun-runner and human rights activist Roger Casement.
PBP speakers drew attention to the many reasons we honour Casement today : but they overlooked a vital fact : this Easter 1916 rebel imported weapons from Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Empire in order to strike a blow against the then mighty British Empire.
John Meehan August 18 2023
Correcting Mandel: Why arming Ukraine is the road to peace
This is a very good polemical article, written by the Canadian author David Gutnick, examining Professor David Mandel’s calls for Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and negotiate with Russia immediately.
The source is :
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
David Gutnick’s article was originally published in :
Canadian Dimension
Monday 14 August 2023, by GUTNICK David
Correcting Mandel: Why arming Ukraine is the road to peace
“Pacifism has its place, but not here and not now,” writes David Gutnick
David Mandel and I share much more in common than our given name. We’re both French-speaking Anglophones who live in Montréal. Like professor Mandel, I worked for decades at a publicly funded institution: he taught at universities, while I produced documentaries for CBC Radio. We both consider ourselves humanists who want to help build a kinder, more democratic and socialist world.
But while reading Mandel’s August 2 piece in this publication, it became clear that we profoundly disagree on how to get there.
In a nutshell, Mandel calls for Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and negotiate with Russia immediately, while I—following the lead of Ukrainians—believe the country needs more arms: the deadlier the better, unfortunately.
Mandel—like Vladimir Putin—says his position is the humanist one, as it will save lives.
I think that is wrongheaded. A wealth of evidence proves Volodymyr Zelensky’s position is right: Russia’s present leadership is bloodthirsty, intent on building an untrustworthy imperialist power. Putin slaughtered Chechens and Georgians when they would not submit to Russian domination, and now he is slaughtering Ukrainians. He will not hesitate to slaughter whoever is next to get in his way.
Humanists think of peace-building in the long term, and that means standing up to aggression now, not turning the other cheek.
Pacifism has its place, but not here and not now.
Unless Putin pulls back his army, Ukrainians have no choice but to fight.
Mandel writes that over the decades he has been “opposed to the policies of the regimes of these states, which were and remain deeply hostile to workers’ interests.”
We share that view.
But since the first Russian tanks illegally crossed Ukraine’s border into Crimea on February 20, 2014, then again into Kyiv on February 24, 2022, it is not just “workers’ interests” which have suffered: tens of thousands of Ukrainian trade unionists, kindergarten monitors, university students, mothers and fathers and innocent children have been killed by Russian invaders.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tomás Ó Flatharta 