Israel’s mass incarceration of Palestinian prisoners is notorious for its many human-rights violations, including the regular imprisonment of children and systemic torture. But framing these practices only in terms of legality misses the point. Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinian detainees is not just a failure of justice, but an integral part of a genocidal settler-colonial project.
Israeli expat historian Ilan Pappé’s 2017 work of popular history is a landmark in anti-Zionist literature and a valuable weapon in our arsenal for countering the lies and distortions about Palestine perpetuated by Israel and the US. In its analysis of the disastrous 1993 “peace process” and the entrenchment of Israel’s genocidal policy in the occupied territories, it is particularly relevant in the current moment.
For the last decade, the far right has been mobilizing in the US and around the world. How should socialists combat this frightening tendency? A look at the history of left-wing approaches to fascism, from the failures of social democrats, ultra-leftists and Stalinists to the groundbreaking clarity provided by Trotsky and Zetkin, shines a light on the path forward for Marxists today.
Every year I teach an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. In the section in which we focus on socioeconomic class, I ask my students to read and interpret the famous first pages of the Communist Manifesto. These are the pages in which Marx and Engels broadly...