Category: Uncategorized

by LEANDRO MELITO & LEONARDO FERNANDES

Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, escalated the tone again in opposition to the Israeli military massacre in Gaza Strip in the last weeks. During a meeting with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in Paris, Lula classified the offensive from Israel as a “planned genocide by an extreme right wing governant”.

“What is happening in Gaza is not a war, what’s happening there is a genocide carried out by a highly trained Army against women and children”, he said to journalists. Lula also supported that the international community should say “enough” to the military campaign in Gaza and pointed out that “it is sad to know that the world keeps silent facing a genocide”.

The Itamaraty Palace, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had already expressed an opinion about the deaths of Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid who were shot by Israeli troops. “The use of hunger as a weapon of war and violence against civilians searching for food are absolutely unacceptable,” the ministry said in its statement.

According to Itamaraty, Brazil supports independent investigations into the circumstances of recent attacks that occurred at humanitarian aid centers run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Despite the strong rhetoric and accusation of genocide, civil society organizations and pro-Palestinian movements are putting pressure for concrete actions against the Israeli government. Earlier this month, a letter with more than 12,000 signatures was handed directly to Lula during his official visit to Paris, demanding that the federal government adopt tangible measures against Israel.

The Palestinian genocide, that takes place in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, has already resulted in nearly 55,000 deaths, most of them women and children. In addition to bomb attacks, the entire population of over 2 million people in the territory face a severe risk of undernutrition, as Israel blocks food aid. Dozens of deaths from starvation have already been registered, mainly among young children and the elderly.

Brazilian civil society calls for effective actions, such as the immediate severance of diplomatic and trade relations with Israel. The document, organized by the BDS Brazil movement (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), demands the end of the Brazilian-Israeli free trade agreement, suspension of military cooperation, an energy embargo, among other sanctions.

The open letter has the support of prominent figures in Brazilian culture, law, and politics. Signatories include artists such as Chico Buarque, Ney Matogrosso, Letícia Sabatella, Milton Hatoum, and Gregório Duvivier; magistrates Carol Proner and Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro; former minister Guilherme Estrella; and the philosopher Vladimir Safatle. Politicians from the Workers’ Party (PT) and Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), such as Guilherme Boulos, Erika Hilton, Sâmia Bomfim, Luiza Erundina, and João Daniel, also signed the letter.

Brazzil for more

by SOPHIE NEIMAN

Sophie Neiman reports from the Democratic Republic of Congo to shine a light on the neglected stories of women bearing the brunt of war.

The sharp sound of glass breaking under a rubber boot echoes over the rooftop like the crack of gunfire, as Thérèse Ndarubyariye leans forward in her chair. Her mouth is set in a thin, determined line and she speaks in a voice no louder than a whisper.

Ndarubyariye, who is using a pseudo-nym for her protection, is a soldier with the Alliance of Patriots for a Free and Sovereign Congo (APCLS), just one of the 120 armed groups battling in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). ‘I joined to protect my country,’ she says simply.

We meet on the roof of a rundown bar on the outskirts of Goma, the lakeside capital of the DRC’s North Kivu province and the region’s strategic and economic hub. It is a safe place to talk freely, she tells me. Other uniformed fighters with bullets strung across their chests and AK-47s slung on their backs admire the view, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Far below us, a line of people with yellow jerry cans waits to collect water from a pump. White land cruisers stamped with the insignia of international NGOs speed towards sprawling displacement camps, further along a potholed road that stretches from Goma to the frontlines north of the city. Ndarubyariye goes to battle there whenever she is called.

APCLS is part of the Wazalendo, a loose network of militias whose name means ‘patriots’ in Swahili. These government-aligned units fight against rebels from the March 23rd Movement (M23), who are in the midst of an insurgency in the DRC. Originally formed in 2012 by disgruntled members of formerly disbanded armed groups, M23 took its name from the date of failed peace agreements. The insurgents managed to capture Goma briefly that year, with support from neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda.

M23 surrendered a year later, following an offensive by the Congolese military, backed by a United Nations peacekeeping force. Fighters laid down their weapons or slipped over the border into Rwanda and Uganda.

But the same guerrillas resurfaced in late 2021. A series of attacks on farming villages have forced nearly two million civilians to flee their homes and take refuge in ramshackle tents on the outskirts of Goma and other small cities. M23 has been accused by Amnesty International of indiscriminately targeting civilians, while using high-tech weaponry such as drones and guided mortars.

Women have borne the brunt of this violence.

Some have taken up arms and joined the fighting themselves or been wounded by bombs and bullets. Others are caring for fellow displaced women raped in war. Still others have emerged as peace activists striving to build a better future for their homeland. Together, their experiences reveal the difficult decisions women must make in wartime and how, day by day, they are trying to break the DRC’s cycle of conflict.

New Internationalist for more

by IKER SUAREZ

Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone.[1] On June 2022, the border fence of Melilla, one of two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, was witness to a massacre that killed or disappeared over a hundred African migrants.[2]  A recent BBC investigation revealed that Greek border guards systematically repeal immigrants already on Greek land, hurling them back into the sea. Meanwhile, Frontex (Europe’s ICE) has become the EU agency with the largest budget and is fast assembling 10,000-man-strong army to counter immigration, with its own ships, aircrafts, drones and weapons. The Standing Corps, as it’s called—the first and only pan-European armed force.

Reports of massacres punctuate the short history of European borders. The repetitive media cycle of death, indignation and forgetting is by now customary. The accumulation of massacres barely even registers among political forces or the broader public. Europe’s “left,” both moderate and “radical,” alternately decries or plays down migrant death, depending on their own position in government.

In between the more mediatized massacres, however, an uninterrupted stream of death is the rule. Mostly unreported, hard to even count. Advocates calculate that at least 60,000 people have been killed at Europe’s borders since 1993; others calculate that over 30,000 have died or gone missing since 2014 alone (excluding the 10,000 of 2024).[3] These are minimum estimates. The reality is bleak—it is time to transcend moral lamentation and understand this situation structurally.

Critical social forces in Europe have called it a “human rights crisis.” Nonprofits highlight the contradictions between “European values” and this ongoing “scandal.” But is it a crisis? Mass slaughter at Europe’s southern borders undoubtedly is—but not in the way painted by liberal-progressive European civil societies. The migrant genocide is not a crisis because it shakes the consciousness or self-perception of Northern publics. Rather, it is at once a structural imperative of the late imperialist arrangement and among the direst expressions of the broader crisis of global capital. This piece attempts to explain how, exactly, this is.

Montly Review Online for more

by Dr. AFTAB HUSAIN

‘Operation Sindoor’ echoes Indian nationalism’s trope of the motherland as a chaste body needing protection

In the days following the recent Indo-Pak conflict, a freshly written short story — a tale of a theatre actress who grieves, resists, and ultimately reclaims her identity on her own terms — by veteran Hindi writer Mamata Kalia appeared on a social media outlet.

“A Pinch of Sindoor” (Chutki Bhar Sindoor, titled after the red pigment that married Hindu women apply as a dot on the forehead or in the parting of the hair) is the story of Rita, a celebrated stage actress at the peak of her theatrical career, who marries Alam Khan, a devoted admirer and dry fruit merchant, defying warnings from her peers. Their marriage, however, becomes strained when Alam grows insecure and disapproving of Rita’s progressive roles on stage. Unable to reconcile with her public life and independence, he commits suicide, using her wedding dupatta. The media frenzy and his family’s backlash force Rita into isolation and grief. Yet, the world of theatre, unwilling to lose its star, draws her back.

With time, she returns to the stage, emotionally scarred but professionally resilient. Her comeback role portrays a widow finding hope again, mirroring her own journey from personal trauma to public performance. The story ends with Rita reclaiming her identity and agency, symbolised by her act of applying glitter and lipstick like sindoor, marking both continuity and rebirth. Through Rita’s journey, the story delicately explores themes of artistic autonomy, gender expectations, public versus private identity, and the quiet strength required to survive love, loss, and societal judgment.

Set far from the battlefield, the story appears to bear no direct reference to geopolitics or military conflict, yet its timing and symbolic gestures — particularly the protagonist’s final act of adorning herself with sindoor as an assertion of self rather than subservience — invite a deeper reading.

Around the same time, the Indian state named a retaliatory military operation “Operation Sindoor”, invoking a traditionally feminine, conjugal symbol to frame a nationalistic act of aggression. What does it mean when a symbol of love and marriage is militarised by the state, while in fiction it becomes a gesture of survival and autonomy?

The gendered language of war, as this article explores, is never innocent.

The naming of India’s recent cross-border retaliation as “Operation Sindoor” is not just a tactical code — it is a deeply symbolic gesture, with Sindoor being the traditional symbol of marital status for women. The phrase evokes themes of marriage, conjugal unity, identity, tradition, femininity and feminine sacrifice.

By using this intimate, culturally potent symbol to name a military operation, the state effectively feminizes the nation and sacralises militarism — embedding within the language of war a narrative of chastity, purity, protection, and violation.

This is not a neutral move. It reflects a long-standing gendered metaphor in Indian nationalist discourse, where the motherland (Bharat mata) is cast as a chaste, violated body needing protection. In this symbolic schema: The nation becomes the wife or mother whose honour must be avenged; The soldier becomes the husband or son whose duty is to protect or restore that honour; blood becomes sindoor — a conflation of sacrifice and sanctity.

Tribune for more

by NAINA SHARMA

Iran’s retaliatory strike on Al Udeid Air Base highly calibrated and limited but nonetheless raises urgent questions about US deterrence

On June 23, 2025, Iran launched a volley of missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military installation in the region. The strike, reportedly named Operation Basharat al-Fath (“Glad Tidings”), was Iran’s direct retaliation for the US President Donald Trump’s airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites days earlier.

While most of Iran’s 14 missiles were intercepted by US and Qatari air defenses, one landed near the base, there were no casualties but geopolitically, the strike was seismic. While Iran had directly attacked US forces before, most notably in Iraq in 2020 – this is the first time it has struck a US base located inside a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state.

The Al Udeid attack thus marked a bold departure: an overt, calculated warning that the US military presence in the Gulf no longer guarantees insulation for host states. Iranian officials had warned that the American attack on its territory has “expanded the scope of legitimate targets.”

That threat is now no longer hypothetical, because with Al Udeid, Iran has firmly placed US bases on Arab soil inside its retaliatory framework.

Qatar responded by closing its airspace and within hours, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, and the UAE followed, shutting down one of the busiest air corridors in the world. Commercial flights were canceled or diverted.

Qatar Airways suffered major disruptions, even Dubai International Airport suspended operations briefly. The economic fallout from just one attack illustrated the fragility of Gulf infrastructure in any direct US-Iran conflict.

Though airspace was reopened later, the region was shaken. Even Gulf states with recent tensions like Bahrain and the UAE quickly expressed solidarity with Qatar. Bahrain called the strike a “blatant violation of sovereignty,” and the UAE warned of the “urgent need to de-escalate.”

Iran’s strike had not only raised the military stakes but also triggered a rare moment of diplomatic unity born out of shared vulnerability.

Asia Times for more

by YVES SMITH

Yves here. Below Michael Hudson explains how long-standing the neocon plans to break up Iran have been (as going back to before they were called “neocons”) and why this project has been and still is seen as vital to preserving US dominance.

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilization. Originally published at The Democracy Collective

Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the neocon logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.

What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.

Around 1974 or 1975 there was much talk of creation a New International Economic Order (NIEO). I was working at the Hudson Institution with Herman Kahn on international finance and trade, and he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s northeast border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks and the Turkic Azerbaijanis are others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.

Three decades later, by 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, culminating in Iran.

Fast Forward to Today

Most of the discussion of the geopolitical dynamics of how the international economy is changing is understandably focusing on the attempt by the BRICS and other countries to escape from U.S. control by de-dollarizing their trade and investment. But the most active dynamic reshaping the international economy has been Donald Trump’s whirlwind presidency since January has to lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China, Russia and other states seeking their own autonomy from U.S. control. That is what the war in Iran is all about.

Trump expected that countries would respond to his threat to create tariff chaos in hope of regaining the U.S. market by reaching an agreement not to trade with China and indeed to accept U.S. trade and financial sanctions against it, Russia, Iran and other countries deemed to be a threat to the unipolar U.S. global order. This fight explains the U.S. objective in its current fight with Iran, as well as with Russia and China – and Cuba, Venezuela other countries seeking to restructure their economic policies to recover their independence.

From the view of U.S. strategists, the emergence of China’s industrial socialism poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control in providing a model that other countries might seek to join to recover the national sovereignty that has been steadily eroded in recent decades.

The Biden Administration and a host of U.S. Cold Warriors frame the issue as being between democracy (defined as countries supporting U.S. policy as client regimes) and autocracy (seeking national self-reliance from foreign trade and financial dependency. This way of framing the international economy views China as an existential threat to U.S. unipolar domination, and that attitude explains the US/NATO attack on Russia in the Ukraine war of attrition, and most recently the US/Israeli war against Iran threatening to engulf the whole world in U.S.-backed war

The motivation has nothing to do with Iran’s attempt to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to pre-empt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony.

Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and introducing a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS-Al Qaida Syrian Wahabi terrorists.

Naked Capitalism for more

by MATTHEW WARD AGIUS

Overhauling public policy could be key to improving long-term health outcomes says Brazil investigation of eight national dietary surveys.

What you need to know

• A Brazil-led study

• has found a link showing premature deaths increase as ultraprocessed food consumption rises.
• Stronger food cultures tend to have lower rates of death attributed to these products.
• The US is encouraging food manufacturers to switch from artificial to natural additives.

An investigation by one of Brazil’s leading health research institutes has linked high intakes of ultra processed foods to greater rates of premature death.

For some countries like the US and United Kingdom, as many as 1 in 7 deaths could be attributed to ultraprocessed food consumption.

The study led by researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, based in Rio de Janeiro, analyzed data from eight countries, including nationally representative dietary surveys and mortality data.

They discovered what they call a “linear dose-response association,” which means that as the amount of dietary energy derived from ultraprocessed foods increases, so too does the risk of mortality from any cause.

While many studies have found ultraprocessed foods may be bad for health due to deficiencies in key nutrients, this study investigated the impact of dietary patterns, or how having a diet higher in these food products, on mortality risk.

Eduardo Nilson, a nutritional epidemiologist at the Oswald Cruz Foundation, who led the study, said the focus on single nutrients is “reductionist,” and that a whole-of-diet assessment was necessary to understand the impact of ultraprocessed food.

“We should look at the pattern of the diet,” Nilson told DW. He points to Brazil’s adoption of “food system” dietary guidelines and other interventions to promote healthier food systems as a way forward to reducing mortality.

What are ultraprocessed foods?

The University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, developed a classification system to group foods based on the amount of processing a product undergoes before being sold to consumers.

The four groups used by this Nova classification system are:

• Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, which can include whole foods, fruits and vegetables, fresh meat, eggs and milk.
• Processed culinary ingredients, which can include certain condiments, oils, salts and sugars.
• Processed foods, which can include preserved and tinned fruits and vegetables, preserved meat products, breads and fresh cheese.
• Ultraprocessed foods are those that undergo industrial processing and modification using food derived substances such as fats, starches and proteins, and may include coloring, flavor enhancing chemicals and preservatives. These include chocolates, soda and energy drinks, pre-packaged meals, baked products and pastries, certain breakfast cereals, sweetened yogurts and juices.

Ultraprocessed foods — sometimes abbreviated to UPFs — are often referred to as “junk foods,” which should be consumed sparingly.

They have been associated with 32 health impacts and disease, including obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, cancer, and cognitive health, gastrointestinal, metabolic and respiratory problems.

How do different countries compare?

Of the eight countries studied, those in Latin America had the lowest share of UPFs in their diet and the lowest number of premature deaths that could be attributed to their consumption. 

That contrasts to four major Anglosphere economies — Australia, Canada, the UK and US — with particularly high premature mortality, and larger proportions of UPFs in the average diet. 

Nilson attributes durable food cultures that have resisted infiltration by UPFs as crucial in keeping premature death rates low.

“It’s not surprising that the countries that have the stronger food culture, that have been less changed by ultraprocessed foods have maintained healthy patterns,” said Nilson. “We’re talking Japan, Italy, France, the Mediterranean countries in general.”

“With the Brazilian food pattern, with rice, beans, salad, fruits and some kind of protein, it also leads to a cardioprotective outcome.”

Deutsche Welle News for more

by MANASH GHOSH

A new book details the circumstances which led to the Bangbandhu’s assassination.

The following is an excerpt from the book Mujib’s Blunders: The Power and the Plot Behind His Killing.

Fidel Castro was right in giving a prescient and timely warning to Bangabandhu that showing magnanimity to his political enemies, who had dourly opposed the Liberation War, would be considered as a sign of inherent weakness in his character and not as a moral virtue. His benevolence would only spur them on to conspire and act with greater gusto and vengeance against him and his government and, in the process, frustrate his dream of building a sonar (golden) Bangladesh.

Castro was among the few world leaders who had paid the most glowing tribute to Bangabandhu saying he had not seen the mighty Himalayas but had seen Mujib. And yet Bangabandhu paid no heed to Castro’s advice as he thought that by accommodating the committed pro-Pak minded officers in the top echelons of his administration and uniformed services, he had been able to win their trust and confidence.

‘Mujib’s Blunders’, Manash Ghosh, Niyogi Books, 2025.

However, when he started getting hard evidence of how some of his ambitious plans and projects were being sabotaged by an influential section of the bureaucracy, he confided in his party colleagues that he had committed a big blunder by placing repatriates in key bureaucratic posts. He had confessed saying he had tried to build a Bangladesh of his dreams with untrustworthy Pakistani materials and admitted that this was the ‘worst mistake’ of his life.

The Wire for more

As NATO’s secretary general urges member nations to ‘shift to a wartime mindset’, now more than ever it is clear that this aggressive alliance poses a threat to peace on a global scale.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 24 and 25 June, the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) will strut around the streets of The Hague for their annual summit – the first since Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency and the first under new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. On 13 March, Rutte visited Trump in the Oval Office, where he praised the US president on a number of fronts, including the war in Ukraine. Rutte ended the meeting by telling Trump that he was looking forward to hosting him in The Hague, his ‘hometown’, and was eager to ‘work together to ensure that [the NATO summit] will be a splash, a real success projecting American power on the world stage’.

There are thirty-two full members of NATO, thirty from Europe and two from North America. The United States is only one among them, yet, as Rutte made clear in his statement, it is the one that defines NATO and is but a vehicle for the projection of US power. There should be no doubt about that fact. It is precisely for this reason that the idea of the US leaving NATO – as Trump threatened to do if the Europeans did not increase their military spending – is moot. NATO is the United States.

From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the No Cold War collective, and our European partners at the Zetkin Forum for Social Research comes our June dossier, NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth. The title is bold but not hyperbolic. It reflects the facts before us. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has conducted some of the most lethal wars on the planet and now threatens us with the unthinkable possibility of nuclear conflict. The dossier provides ample evidence of this. Here, we simply note two of the alliance’s more egregious acts over the past decades:

• It was NATO that dismembered Yugoslavia in 1999.
• It was NATO that destroyed the Libyan state in 2011.

It is erroneous to see NATO as an autonomous actor. NATO, as Rutte so eloquently stated, is an instrument of ‘projecting American power on the world stage’. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has used NATO to incorporate Eastern Europe into a pliable set of states subordinate to its interests. When the European Union expanded eastward and sought to build autonomous European institutions, NATO came along and ensured that the United States would be the engine of any European expansion. One might be forgiven for having forgotten the warning that came not from Russia’s current President Vladimir Putin but from his decidedly pro-US predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who warned during NATO’s 1995 bombing of the Bosnian Serbs, ‘this is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. … The game of war could burst out across the whole of Europe’. In 1990, the Soviet Union reluctantly agreed to the reunification of Germany and its entry into NATO under assurances that the alliance would not expand eastward (the US also used the move to ‘keep the Germans down’ bykeeping them anchored within NATO structures). But there was no agreement that the US could use NATO as an instrument to project power right up to Russia’s borders. Nor was there any mandate for NATO to be used in far-off theatres like the South China Sea to confront the People’s Republic of China under the pretext of freedom of navigation and regional stability. NATO – against the self-interest of its European member states – has been drawn into confrontations against Russia and China that are entirely about the US wanting to shackle its ‘near-peer rivals’. These confrontations have nothing to do with European security: neither Russia nor China have threatened Europe, with Russia repeatedly reiterating that its war in Ukraine has everything to do with threats on its borders and China emphasising that it is a defensive power with no aggressive intentions regarding Europe.

The Tricontinental for more

by FREDERIC LORDON

The first says: ‘Zionism could never have triumphed without the Holocaust.’ The second adds: ‘Netanyahu more or less let it happen in order to take back Gaza.’ Who are these people? Where are they speaking? How long before they are denounced by the media, summoned by the police and taken into custody? The answer: they are talking heads of the French political centre, the former MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit and erstwhile education minister Luc Ferry, appearing live on the cable news channel LCI. As for their public condemnation and visit to the police station, we’re still waiting. Such is the scale of the tectonic shift.  

The astonishing volte-face unfolding before our eyes, and the collective whitewashing that accompanies it, will go down as a textbook case in the annals of propaganda. A reversal emanating from the most hypocritical precinct of the propaganda bloc – the ‘humanists’: Delphine Horvilleur, France’s first female rabbi, Joann Sfar, a well-known cartoonist, and Anne Sinclair, the former TV anchor. Celebrated for their moral integrity, all three were perfectly comfortable with eighteen months of mass slaughter, systematically smearing those who saw things clearly from the beginning and took every risk – symbolic, legal, even physical – to decry the genocide and the obscene conflation of support for Palestine with antisemitism. Then, once these paragons of virtue gave the signal, the mass of denialists moved in lockstep, pretending to open their eyes – or better yet, claiming that they had never been closed in the first place. 

Why have our ‘humanists’ finally come around? Not out of any stirring of a universal conscience, but rather to protect a set of interests, starting with their own, symbolic and reputational, imperilled by complicity with a crime that has broken every taboo; followed by those of the Zionist project itself, whose political and moral credentials have been shipwrecked, and yet must be kept afloat – hence the need to present its ‘humanist’ face.

Here is the heart of the matter: the question of Zionism, the axiom that must be preserved at all costs, whether by silencing dissent or feigning contrition. This is the neuralgic point where repression persists, even amid the great reversal. The Socialists and the Greens, in the colonial camp from day one, deniers of seventy-seven years of occupation, censors of every voice raised in defence of the Palestinian cause, mute before the massacred until permission to speak had been granted – these same Socialists and Greens, only a month ago, voted through the infamous university censorship law affirming the equivalence of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and criminalizing the former in the name of the latter. All the more perverse, at a moment when the concept of Zionism is the only thing preventing the blanket attribution of a crime to all Jews, including those who utterly reject it. Anti-Zionism, far from being equivalent to antisemitism, is a bulwark against it.

In these quarters, European panic is understandably at fever pitch. By what right do the perpetrators of the Judeocide presume to pass judgement on the state of Israel? Overwhelming historical guilt, complicated by a troubled philosemitic conversion, logically issued in a carte blanche – and the message was received. But the truth is this: there will be no settlement either in the region or, by the classic boomerang effect, at home, until we break with the wretched euphemisms of the ‘humanists’ and return to politics: that is, to calling the indisputable into question.

New Left Review for more