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Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ Is The USA Retreating Back Into Isolationism?

A good question and one with multiple answers.

The US was, prior to World War One, very much an isolationist country meaning it would keep out of European wars as far as possible. This policy had its origins in the 19th century and in 1812 the US and UK fought a war on US soil, not European. This policy was compounded
somewhat by the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ of 1823 when President James Monroe stated:

The USA will not allow interference in any country of the American continent by any European power, and that any such involvement will be regarded as a danger to the peace and security of the USA itself.

As can be seen such a conflict would not be fought on European shores but any of those threatened - if any - the lands of American countries from Argentina to Canada. In many ways this ‘doctrine’ copper fastened US isolationism from any European conflict as was the case in the Napoleonic wars which were fought from 1799-1815. There are those who suggest, with limited justification, that the 1812 war was an extension of the Napoleonic Wars while other dismiss these claims as the war was fought not in Europe but the USA. No US troops fought in Europe either at Waterloo or elsewhere and the United States played no part in the 1815 ‘Concert of Europe’ or perhaps better known as the ‘Vienna Settlement’ resulting in the demise of Napoleon Bonaparte. The 1898 war between the US and Spain was fought on South American shores under the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ as Spain tried to impose its will and reclaim her empire, placing the King of Spain as head.

This form of isolationism continued and became more clearly defined in the early 20th century up until the outbreak of World War One. Britain needed the United States in on her side as Kaiser ‘Bill’s’ army proved a more capable fighting force than the British anticipated. There would be no ‘spending Christmas in Berlin 1914’ and the best achieved by the men themselves on both sides (many not really wanting to fight at all) was a cordial game of football and an unofficial ceasefire. The USA refused categorically to become involved in the European slaughter and retrenched into isolationism. 

As the war progressed and the British and French took a few hidings from the foe Britian became more desperate to have the US on side. Even the sinking by a German U Boat in 1915 of the Lusitania killing many American passengers was not enough for the US to break with isolationism. However, on 17th January 1917, a secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office was intercepted by the desperate British and some said it was actually written by the British to force the US to the battlefield. The telegraph proposed ‘a military contract between the German Empire and Mexico if the United States entered the war against Germany. With Germany’s aid Mexico would recover Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.’ The contents enraged the USA and its peoples. And when the German State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Zimmerman, foolishly publicly admitted the telegram was genuine on 3rd March 1917 it was sufficient to push the USA into the conflict. 

The First World War ended with an armistice on the stroke of 11am on the 11th November, the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918. Germany never really accepted defeat but they laid down their arms and were humiliated, particularly by the French, at the Treaty of Versailles signed on 28th June 1919, coming into effect 10th January 1920. At this point President Woodrow Wilson and continued by his successor, Warren G. Harding, retreated back into a policy of isolationism for the USA.

This would be how it remained until the Second World War erupted and Britain once again found herself needing the US involvement against Nazi Germany. President Franklyn D. Roosevelt having been re-elected on a policy of; “our boys will not fight in foreign wars” refused to send US troops to fight on European soil. On 7th December 1941 US isolationism was shattered when the Japanese, an ally of Nazi Germany, launched an unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbour. Despite US efforts to remain neutral, although with sympathetic leanings towards Britain during the war, this forced Roosevelt’s hand. He couldn’t stay out of the conflict, now a world war, any longer. 

There are those who believed Winston Churchill had knowledge of Japan’s intentions but, in order to force Roosevelt’s hand, kept the information from the US President. Like the Zimerman letter of the First World War this is purely supposition with no real evidence to support such claims which were not beyond the bounds of possibilities. When the Axis forces were defeated, the US found themselves in a dominant world position both politically and militarily. The two Superpowers, as they became known, the USA and USSR, embarked on an arms race known as the ‘Cold War’, and in 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was formed primarily by the United States. In 1955 the Soviet Union and her allies formed the ‘Warsaw Pact’ in retaliation. Isolationism was no longer a prospect or option for the US. This situation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and with it the end of the Warsaw Pact. NATO was and is still maintained, drawing in more and more member states against Russia, the largest of the former fifteen states of the USSR. Russia remains the world’s largest single nuclear power by a distance.

In 2016 under the strange electoral college rules Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States. He took up office on 20th January 2017 and left office, reluctantly, on 20th January 2021. Trump's election motto was, and is, ‘America First’, and he has shown support for far-right parties around the globe including the fascist ‘Britain First’ who reportedly have links to ‘Ulster’ loyalists. He indicted in his first term his contempt for countries who did “not pay their way towards NATO”. This cavalier nutter of a President has also indicated his tepid support for the Atlantic Treaty and even, if others don’t come up to the mark in contributions, to pull out of NATO. 

The alliance without the US amounts to nothing really as it is the USA who provide the heavy firepower. The question is; could Trump, re-elected in 2024, be heading towards a new isolationism? Or, on the other hand, dominating Europe militarily from the White House? On 20th January 2025 Donald Trump began his second tenure as President of the United States. He appears more aggressive than Trump mark one who may have been just testing the waters. Trump mark two is now a convicted felon and may be awaiting trial for other offences. The question is, can a US incumbent President be prosecuted? Well, yes, he can, but it is not easy or straight forward. Like his mate in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the butcher of Gaza, who is also waiting charges against him but is alright as long as he is Prime Minister of Israel, Trump is safe enough while he is in the White House. 

Once again, this President is making noises about others financial contribution to NATO. By making these threats about effectively dismantling NATO he can dictate how much of a member state's GDP is spent on defence therefore neglecting other goods and services like health and housing! He is also making aggressive noises in the ways of tariffs against Mexico and Canada both hitherto friendly countries. He is also making the same aggressive tones towards China who are a different prospect and a nuclear power.

It is unlikely the USA under President Trump will head back into isolationism, at least not in its traditional sense. What is apparent is the US are changing their allegiance’s possibly away from Europe and NATO to a point and more towards Rusia in pursuit of the mineral deposits beneath the soil of Ukraine! This analysis may in the long term be proved not to be the case but present evidence, like the humiliating of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, suggests this could be the new direction of US foreign policy. As opposed to old style US isolationism perhaps a new kind of US imperialism is the more likely? Only time will tell. Whatever the outcome the present policies of this President are not healthy for the rest of us. 

Finally, one point of observation: the public humiliation of President Zelenskyy was televised around the globe, while President Trump's meeting with British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was not. Why could this have been? Further evidence the showing up of the Ukrainian leader was pre-planned and a further indication of the sort of man Trump is.

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

US Isolationism

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Five Hundred And Seventy Eight

 

A Morning Thought @ 2508

 

A Morning Thought @ 2507

Mike Burke ✍ Thirty years ago, literary critic Joe Cleary pointed out a “most remarkable thing” evident in Irish and British politics, revisionist historiography, and literary and cinematic narratives: the Irish border was “rendered invisible” despite the long and turbulent history of partition (Cleary, 1996, p. 228). 

Today, a similarly remarkable thing is evident in some contemporary narratives about the north’s future: the border is rendered invisible despite long-standing nationalist opposition to it.

Academics Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward and Peter Shirlow refer to the constitutional divide in the north as “the binary union/unity border poll” (Coulter et al., 2021, p. 193).[1] This characterization is misleading and partisan. It is misleading because the constitutional binary is centrally about the border, not a border poll. The notion of a border poll is highly contested precisely because the border itself is in dispute. Active discussion of uniting Ireland and a constitutional vote are merely symptoms of a more basic disagreement about British versus Irish sovereignty. The authors’ curious view of the binary is also partisan, for at least three reasons. It highlights and problematizes the unity side of the binary, arguing that heightened interest in a united Ireland produces talk of a border poll that in turn destabilizes politics in the north. And it hides and normalizes the union side of the binary, suggesting that constitutional division and the border itself disappear as the prospect of a border poll recedes. Finally, it privileges unionist discontent with the possibility of constitutional change while it devalues nationalist unhappiness with maintenance of the constitutional status quo.

The authors in effect describe a one-sided binary in which the constitutional status of the north becomes a public concern only when the unity half of the union/unity divide is engaged. Otherwise, the union can plod merrily along without anyone giving a thought to the constitutional state of affairs. In a broader sense, a one-sided binary sees moving to Irish unity as a discrete constitutional experience, but renders continuing with union a non-constitutional, a-constitutional or extra-constitutional circumstance. Maintenance of the status quo becomes constitutionally invisible, as if British sovereignty is somehow a natural or unproblematic state of affairs.

Coulter et al.’s discussion of how Brexit interrupted a comfortable constitutional serenity illustrates clearly the blinkered perspective of a one-sided binary. The authors claim that, at the time of the Good Friday Agreement, republicans and nationalists largely accepted that Irish unity was very far off in a distant future. A united Ireland became more “an ‘aspiration’ than ... a likelihood or even a very strong possibility” (p. 289). In this unionist heaven the authors portray, nationalists silently acquiesce in the border. They consign their constitutional preference to the netherworld of aspiration, to a realm they never expect to materialize. Nationalist discontent with British sovereignty is no more, the border disappears from view. Between 1998 and 2016, constitutional disaffection is evident only in the rhetoric of “hardline or dissident republican parties and groups” (p. 289). The authors seem to lament that Brexit abruptly interrupted this constitutional quietude. Suddenly, after June 2016, nationalist and republican political parties and civic groups began talking about a “united Ireland” that might actually materialize as the result of a border poll. The north moved quickly from unionist heaven to unionist hell.

The major flaw in this account of the constitutional landscape since the GFA is that it devalues continuous and widespread nationalist discontent with the border. The authors are correct to say that Brexit helped to galvanize support for Irish unity and put the issue of constitutional change on the immediate political agenda. But nationalist ambition for a united Ireland long predated Brexit. The authors trivialize this support for unity by labelling it as mere aspiration, and marginalize nationalist opposition to British sovereignty by wishing it away. In nationalist eyes, the border did not disappear between the signing of the GFA in 1998 and the Brexit referendum in 2016. The authors’ account of a golden era of constitutional satisfaction in the years surrounding the GFA is mere illusion, which can endure only because they ignore or otherwise discount nationalist public opinion on the border.

A great deal of evidence shows that nationalists were plainly uncomfortable with constitutional arrangements in the immediate aftermath of the Agreement. Northern Catholic support for the GFA’s constitutional principles dropped precipitously in the decade after 1998. At the time of the GFA, 75 percent of Catholics expressed support for “the guarantee that NI will remain part of the UK as long as a majority of the people in NI wish it to be so”; by 2011 this support for the consent principle (unionist veto) had declined to 55 percent, a drop of 20 points. Northern Catholic support for the south’s removal of its constitutional claim to the north completely eroded, from 49 percent in 1998 to just 16 percent in 2011. This erosion of 33 percentage points was the single biggest reduction in support for any of the Agreement’s principles among either Catholics or Protestants in the north (Hayes & McAllister, 2013, p. 96).

The annual Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) surveys provide especially pertinent evidence. They allow for pre- and post-Brexit comparisons on the central question of nationalist support for unity and opposition to union. In the nine years following the GFA—well before Brexit—average nationalist support for unity is fully 64.4 percent, for union a miniscule 12.8 percent. In the eight years since Brexit, the average nationalist support for unity remains strong at 65.9 percent; the corresponding figure for union has risen but stands at just 20.6 percent.[2] Nationalists’ clear preference for unity over union is as evident in the pre-Brexit period as it is in the years since 2016. Nationalist contentment with the border before the Brexit shock is a myth.

Why should Coulter et al. be so cavalier about support for a united Ireland in the immediate GFA years and yet so concerned now, when the level of that support remains largely unchanged? The big difference, of course, is that support for a united Ireland is now open and active, and it has aroused intense opposition from unionists who, like the authors, see a border poll as a polarizing threat. The lesson for nationalists seems to be that they should strive to ensure the border remains invisible. They should stay hidden in the shadowy domain of unrealized aspiration. They should just shut up about Irish unity in order not to unsettle unionists. They should swallow their discontent with the constitutional status quo and eschew mobilizing for a border poll. They should refrain from activating what the GFA defines as their legitimate constitutional preference and instead defer to the superior legitimacy of unionist constitutional wishes. This one-sided lesson repeats the standard unionist trope that refuses to accept nationalists as nationalists, that demands that they drop any active pursuit of a united Ireland for the good of the north (Burke, 2020). As northern public opinion shows, nationalists will continue to resist learning this lesson, no matter how frequently or eloquently it is taught.

Next week, the eighth and final installment in the series will examine the crude demonization of advocates of Irish unity.

Notes

[1] A fuller version of the quotation is that: “the binary union/unity border poll creates no middle ground such as ‘neithers’ might prefer to see.” By neithers, the authors are referring to survey respondents who identify as neither unionist nor nationalist. They argue that neithers tend to become politically disengaged because they have little interest in a politics dominated by the question of a border poll. I’m not concerned in this paper with the plight of neithers, but instead focus on the causal determinant the authors identify as “the binary union/unity border poll”.

[2] In the NILT surveys, “nationalists” are those respondents who say that, generally speaking, they think of themselves as nationalist. I’m using the NILT question on long-term constitutional preference, which asks respondents whether they think the long-term policy for the north should be for it to: remain part of the UK (with direct rule or with devolution), reunify with the rest of Ireland, or be an independent state. The NILT asks this question in every survey since 1998 (NILT, various years). I compute the first set of averages (i.e., means) for the years 1998 to 2006, the second for 2016 to 2023. The surveys in between these two periods, from 2007 to 2015, are compromised by a new, biased question measuring long-term preference, which the NILT introduced in 2007. The biased measure artificially inflates support for union and deflates support for unity, especially among Catholics (Burke, 2021). Means calculated for the years 2007 to 2015 reflect that bias, with average nationalist support for union at its highest level (37.3%) and average nationalist support for unity at its lowest level (49.3%). There remains, despite the flawed question, a decided but reduced nationalist preference for unity over union. The biased measure is still in use today, which affects the figures I cite for 2016 to 2023. One could argue that, by increasing nationalist support for unity and decreasing nationalist support for union, Brexit overcame part of the bias in the measure and restored nationalist long-term constitutional preferences to nearer their natural levels. The NILT has other measures of constitutional opinion, free from the kind of bias in the long-term preference question, but they are available only in limited years. Those questions ask respondents how they would vote, for union or unity, if a border poll were held tomorrow. They confirm the relative stability of nationalist preference for unity over union in the pre- and post-Brexit eras. The one border-poll question available from the pre-Brexit period shows that in 2002 fully 71.3 percent of nationalists wish to unify with the south and only 15 percent want to remain part of the UK. A border-poll question was not asked again until 2017, after Brexit, but was included in every survey since 2019. Calculating averages for these years shows again, like the 2002 pre-Brexit measure, that nationalists strongly favour Irish unity (79.3%) over continued union (8.8%). The border-poll questions also show clear growth in nationalists’ preference for unity since 2017, reinforcing the authors’ view, and that of many others including me, that Brexit has had an independent effect on increasing support for a united Ireland. But this recent growth has occurred in the context of longstanding and strong nationalist preference for unity over union, a context the authors ignore. In addition to the questions on long-term constitutional preference and on voting in a border poll tomorrow, the NILT has a third set of questions asking respondents to select the set of constitutional arrangements that comes closest to their own view. Unfortunately, these questions are available only in the pre-Brexit period (2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006) and are glaringly biased in a pro-union and anti-unity direction. They, nevertheless, show that more than twice as many nationalists prefer unity over union. In sum, all the measures indicate that, both before and after Brexit, nationalists strongly prefer a united Ireland to maintenance of the union. There is no defensible reason for Coulter et al. to downplay the nature of nationalists’ constitutional beliefs in the years before Brexit entered public debate.

References

Burke, M. (2020). “Nationalism = 0: The Formula for Peace and Stability in the North of Ireland?” The Pensive Quill. 1 January. Retrieved from.

Burke, M. (2021). “Up with Union, Down with Unity: Measuring Constitutional Preference.” The Pensive Quill. 29 May. Retrieved from.

Cleary, J. (1996). “‘Fork-Tongued on the Border Bit’: Partition and the Politics of Form in Contemporary Narratives of the Northern Irish Conflict.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95:1 (Winter): 227-276.

Coulter, C., N. Gilmartin, K. Hayward and P. Shirlow. (2021). Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hayes, B.C., and I. McAllister. (2013). Conflict to Peace: Politics and Society in Northern Ireland over Half a Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

NILT. (various years). ARK. Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey Datasets [computer files]. Retrieved from.

⏩ Mike Burke has lectured in Politics and Public Administration in Canada for over 30 years.

Beguiling Constitutional Narratives 7 🪶A One-Sided Binary

Mahmoud Khalil ✏ has penned a fetter from an ICE Detention facility.
 

Letter from a Palestinian political prisoner in Louisiana dictated over the phone from ICE detention. 

March 18, 2025 

My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law. 

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn't the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn't the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing. 

Justice escapes the contours of this nation's immigration facilities. 

On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor's safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours - I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request. 

My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as l advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January's ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom. 

I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel's use of administrative detention - imprisonment without trial or charge - to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace. 

I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted. 

While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. 

Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns - based on racism and disinformation - to go unchecked. 

Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration's latest threats. 

My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students - some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation - and the expulsion of SWC President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples. 

If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change - leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and jus-tice. 

The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, ad-vocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all. 

Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.

⏩ Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian political prisoner.

Letter From Mahmoud Khalil In ICE Detention

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Five Hundred And Seventy Seven

 

A Morning Thought @ 2506

 

A Morning Thought @ 2505

Azar Majedi ✊with a statement released by Organisation for Women’s Liberation just prior to International Women's Day earlier this month. 

It is 8th March, the International Women's Day.

On this day, we once again emphasize our commitment to eliminating sexual oppression and to continue our fight for liberation and equality. We live in an extremely dire situation, internationally and in the Middle East. In the world we live in, it is of utmost importance to emphasise our egalitarian and liberating horizon and values. It is befitting to voice our humane goals on 8th of March.

This day belongs to the socialist movement. It was the socialist movement that declared the day as the day of freedom and equality of women, and it is due to the relentless socialist struggle that 8th of March has become identified with women’s equality throughout the world. United Nations chose this day as women’s day, not out of radicalism or dedication to equality and freedom, but rather with the intention of watering it down.

Women's liberation movement in Iran was born at the same time as the Islamic regime; Islamic regime gave birth to its antithesis, its staunchest enemy, i.e. women’s liberation movement. This movement has taken deep roots in society. It has faced ups and downs over the past forty years. At one time, the national Islamic reformist movement became widely active and tried to steal the stage in order to silence the radical left tendency. The left was fighting to completely de-Islamise the laws and the state, to overthrow the Islamic regime and has been fighting for real equality. The demand and slogan "equal blood money for men and women" demanded by national-Islamic reformists was among the masterpieces of this period. Organising religious ceremonies and prayers and kissing the hands of criminal mullahs in the parliament was their activism! Shirin Ebadi was one of their heroes (a friend of the regime at the time, she received the Noble Peace Prize.) We exposed them and pushed for the deepening of radicalism in the women's liberation movement. Our role was effective.

In the next round, these national Islamic women activists went abroad. They toured Western countries and received awards, donations and funds from Western states or foundations. Their position was still the same: "Islam does not contradict women's rights," (Shirin Ebadi’s famous declaration after winning the Noble Peace Prize in 2003). It did not take long before they gradually replaced their veils with hats and then tousled their hair. (Masih Alinejad is a famous example of this.) Different stunts are used to enable them to keep up with the times! With the rise of the revolutionary movement against the Islamic regime, they changed course from timid defenders of the regime to joining the right wing opposition, the national-fascist movement defending the previous regime.

Women's liberation movement is a solid pillar of the revolutionary movement against the Islamic Republic. The world felt the existence and weight of this movement in street protests, in burning the hijab, and in breaking sexual apartheid. A striking feature of the women's liberation movement in Iran is the large and active presence of men in it.

The balance of power has changed dramatically. Women's liberation movement in Iran succeeded in the de facto overthrowing of hijab. All the regime's efforts to attack women without the hijab and the "hijab and Chastity" bill are a desperate attempt to save face. The Islamic Republic is tangled in a predicament, it has lost the war on hijab and sexual apartheid, but as these two phenomena are its flag and ideological identity, it needs to keep it alive.

On the other hand, the right-wing opposition, who are counting on US regime change to rise to power, is trying to dilute and "hijack" the women's liberation movement. The word "Woman" is being superficially glorified in this scenario. All kinds of “human rights” and Nobel Peace prizes have been bestowed upon these figures. Their model-like photos are published in Western fashion and political magazines.

In1979 Iranian revolution, US and the West brought Islamists to power in Iran, a regime change imposed on people who had risen against tyranny, inequality and poverty. This time, US and the west intend to change the regime back to the old one. National fascists are the main actors of the regime change scenario and they use the narrative of "women against Islam” in the most superficial and fake way; (Or, even more superficial, woman’s body against Islam!) The West is very “creative”; professionally making up false narratives, refurbishing and customising movements and creating leaders; just as they once made ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and then with a minor plastic surgery, exchanged their robes and turbans for Yves Saint Laurent suits and were installed into the Syrian government.

We need to be aware and vigilant. We should expose their narrative. This is a trap to abort the revolutionary movement for freedom and equality of the masses of the people, the working class and the women's liberation movement. In the current critical conditions of the region and the world, increased vigilance is needed to put a barrier against this regime-change trap in the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic regime. Socialist ideals, that is, freedom and equality are deep rooted in Iran. These goals must be formulated and expressed loudly. Unity and solidarity must be expanded. Revolutionary organisation must be formed. A huge and decisive battle is ahead of us.

Even if we ignore theory, history has consistently shown that freedom and equality under capitalism are impossible. Leave aside the vast majority of the world under oppression and dictatorship thanks to US imperialism, look at the western world, the cradle of democracy and prosperity. 80 years after the end of a devastating world war that led to horrific genocides in every corner of the world, to holocaust, and the US celebrated its end by dropping atomic bombs on Japan, after promising that it will "Never happen again!", celebrating human rights and democracy; fascism is rapidly on the rise to complete power.

Repression and censorship are rampant; poverty and deprivation have engulfed millions in the "prosperous" West. Western statesmen are beating the drums of war. Thousands have been killed in Palestine; the flames of war have engulfed the region. The Middle East has practically become a ruin, an open mass grave. The cleansing of a nation is proceeding in the most brutal way possible before the eyes of the world. This is capitalism. Capitalism came to power by bleeding society and has continued to exist by enslaving millions of people. This is the nature of capitalism.

Women’s liberation movement in Iran must raise the flag of socialism, the flag of real freedom and equality, not a formal or cosmetic one. If the west and their allies have not been able to implement the regime change yet is because of the existence of the socialist aspirations within Iranian society. Let us believe in our strength. Let us rely on our united and organised force. Let us not allow our demands and ideals to be diluted, hijackedor distorted.

8th March is a suitable occasion to consolidate and strengthen our movement; a movement that strives for the freedom and equality of humans from the yoke of slavery and exploitation, injustice and oppression.

Long Live Women’s Liberation!

Long live Freedom, equality and prosperity!

Organisation for Women’s Liberation

5 March 2025

⏩Asar Majedi is a Member of Hekmatist Party leadership & Chairperson of Organisation for Women’s Liberation

8th Of March A Socialist Heritage Celebrating Freedom And Equality

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Five Hundred And Seventy Six

Barry Gilheany ðŸŽ¥The jointly Israeli/Palestinian produced documentary No Other Land which recently won an Oscar is a coruscating and unfiltered account of an aspect of the daily Israeli occupation of the West Bank. 


Shot mainly between 2019 and 2023 by Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian farmer and photographer and Rachel Szor, an Israeli cinematographer, it relates the erasure of Masafer Yatta, a collection of Palestinian Arab hamlet, to create space for an IDF “firing zone.[1] It aroused a predictable outcry from supporters of Israel who have condemned the documentary as “antisemitic” and have congratulated “Hamas for its Oscar win”. 

As depressingly certain pro-Palestinian voices such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign and the Palestinian Academic Campaign for Boycott of Israel (PACBI) have also decried the documentary for “normalising” relations with the “Israeli Occupation.” In this fateful triangle between Israel, Palestine and artistic/intellectual enquiry, such innovative truth telling projects are subject to political purity and loyalty tests rather than being judged on artistic and humanistic grounds. As in any work of scholastic, literary or artistic dealing with the Israeli/Palestine imbroglio and or that concerning any conflict, ideological conformity should never confer any brownie points. Telling unvarnished truth (an increasingly difficult but even more difficult undertaking in the ‘post-truth’ era) and empathetic treatment of its subjects must be the hallmarks of any such endeavour; not obeisance to loyalty to partly line or received wisdom or “common sense.”

The backstory to the documentary is the designation of part of the Masafer Yatta by the Israeli authorities in the 1980s as “Firing Zone 918”, a closed military area. In 1999, the Israeli government issued eviction orders in the area for “illegally living in a firing zone”. Two decades of court battles ensued which ended in 2022 when Israel’s Supreme Court ruled the villagers could be expelled. The documentary is a collaboration between Basel Adra and three other Palestinian co-directors; Israeli journalist and activist Yuval Abraham whose developing, tense relationship with Adra is a key dynamic in the film; Ballal and Szor.[2] The moment of truth in this relationship arrives when Abraham is asked on his arrival his opinion on “what your country is doing to us” to which he replies “I think it is a crime.

Malik describes the documentary “as a film about power;” the power of the Israeli state to dominate and trample over Palestinian lives and the converse lack of Palestinian power their resistance efforts. For in 2022, the IDF forced children and teachers out of the school that had been visited by Tony Blair in 2009, moments before bulldozers levelled it. At the time of Blair’s visit, the school had achieved fame for having been rebuilt in defiance of Israeli attempts to tear down the village. After his departure, Israel cancelled the extant order for the school’s demolition.[3] Sadly on this occasion there was to be no such intercession by a similar person of influence.

Though the film does not tell this part of the story, Malik points out that documents uncovered in Israeli state archives reveal that the IDF “firing zone” was purposely created for the pretext for ethnically cleansing the area to create a “buffer zone between Jews and Palestinian Arabs."  The film shows slowly but with haunting deliberation how in order to accept defeat, soldiers confiscate vehicles, pour concrete into wells, cut water pipes, and assist armed settlers in attacking residents. The most harrowing scene concerns the shooting at point-blank range of one young Palestinian, Harun Abu Aram, after he protests about the confiscation of a generator by soldiers. Paralysed from the neck down and denied proper medical treatment and forced to live in a cave like many residents whose homes have been bulldozed, Abu dies before the completion of the filming, The soldier who fired the fatal shots knew he was being filmed but faced no sanction regardless. The most moral army in the world? As Malik states “With power comes impunity.” Or power unconstrained by legal norms which seemingly do apply in the occupied Palestinian territories. The “accursed victory” indeed in the words of one Israeli author who having had to administer the occupation as an IDF officer became a refusenik.

No Other Land made its debut at the 2023 Berlinale where it won the best documentary, and it has gone onto to win over sixty awards. However, it still does not have a distributor in the United States. The Associated Press review critic Mark Kennedy describes the film as “a piece of resistance but also of humanisation.” He describes the soundtrack to the film one:

where the bulldozer arrives and never stop, protected by soldiers ripping into simple concrete homes. The residents retreat to the caves, albeit with High-Definition TV connections and try to rebuild under the stealth of night. Then the bulldozers return” meaning that “every week a new family must decide whether to endure or leave their land.[4]

The hostile reaction of Israeli ministers and pro-Israel advocates to the film on the grounds of “antisemitism” requires a vigorous restatement of what can become a slippery and elusive concept. The Israeli culture and sports minister Miki Zohar, in calling for a boycott of the film, described its Oscar award “a sad moment for the world of cinema.” Acknowledging that “freedom of expression is an important value”, it seems to decrease in value in Zohar’s terms, when “in turning the defamation of Israel into a tool of international promotion” it commits “an act of sabotage against the State of Israel”. Meanwhile more than 100 Israeli filmmakers reacted against the minister’s call not to screen the film in a joint letter which condemned the attempts at silencing on his part and encouraging the public to watch the film and to arrive at their own independent judgement of it.[5] Others have dismissed it as a “carefully crafted piece of demagoguery” and congratulated “Hamas for its Oscar win.”[6]

In the US, the Mayor of Miami Beach, Florida, Steven Meiner who is Jewish has threatened to close the O cinema arthouse movie theatre for showing No Other Land on the grounds that it is “antisemitic.” Meiner is proposing a resolution at a City Commission meeting this Wednesday 19th March to revoke the O Cinema’s licence and to eliminate more than $40,000 in funding. Mayor Meiner who says he has watched the film described it as “a false one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people” and did not align with the values of the residents of Miami Beach city which does have a high concentration of Jewish residents and is a frequent destination for Israeli tourists.[7] However, the spectre of a religio-cultural community leader policing the thoughts and behaviour of its members and prescribing what they can or cannot see in arthouses arises.

The above two anecdotes are egregious but sadly increasingly typical examples of the weaponisation of antisemitism in the pursuit of the delegitimation of Palestinian rights and genuine, durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians. In the words of Kenneth Stern, one of the drafters of the IHRA definition of a antisemitism (itself a source of contestation), to label works like No Other Land “antisemitic “ is the wielding of a “blunt instrument “ by those who “seek out binary/good, black and white thinking.[8] The essence of antisemitism is its conspiratorial nature; it is the projection onto Jews of a fantastical capacity to run the world through shapeless and invisible cabals which mysteriously pull the strings of governments and the commanding heights of global finance and media. It can be summed up in one word: “globalism.” The other, perhaps more deadly, defining feature of antisemitism is the attribution to Jews of evils such as child killing and responsibility for catastrophic events such as the Black Death and even Covid-19 and of crimes committed by both communism and global capitalism (including the African slave trade); none of which have any evidential bases. What is common to all forms of antisemitism, be it of pre-Vatican Catholicism; Nazi racism, Soviet inspired antizionism, Islamism or Pan-Arabism is an irrational and delusive belief in the power of the “Jew” and the perceived rejection by the Jews of redemptive and emancipatory projects like socialism, Christianity, nationalism, liberalism – whatever they can be accused of.

None of those classic features of antisemitism figure in artistic projects concerned with the Occupation like No Other Land. First of all, it documents real transgressions by the IDF, and settlers not imagined, conspiratorial offences like Mossad involvement in 9/11 or the creation of ISIS. Second, the documentary makers do not attribute the actions of Israel in the West Bank to innate characteristics of Jews as a collectivity or of Judaism or even of Zionism (a term which should be retired as the Zionist dream was realised with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948; just as Irish nationalism or republicanism should at least be redefined to take account of an actually existing Irish nation state and the constitutional architecture of the GFA). Third, since the State of Israel does not represent the totality of World Jewry, it is the actions of Israelis as Israelis that need to be judged not the actions of Israelis as Jews. So, to apply the “antisemitic” slur to No Other Land is to silence the voices of Palestinian advocacy and to dismiss Israel’s treatment of Palestinian people.[9]

From pro-Palestinian critics of the film, an inverse censorship dynamic is at play. The Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PCABI), aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has called out the film for allegedly violating BDS “anti-normalisation” guidelines. It accuses the makers of making the idea of Israeli “occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism “seem normal and establishing normal relations with the Israeli regime."  In a statement issued on 5th March 2025, PACBI concede that No Other Land does expose “an important, if partial dimension of Israel’s system of colonial oppression”. But the film makers are still in violation of BDS guidelines since it was produced with the aid of Israeli documentary filmmakers NGO Close Up which did not provide any financing but assisted the filmmakers during the film’s development. The offence committed in PACBI’s eyes was that of engaging with Israel as “if it were a normal state.” PACBI further noted the ‘simmering controversy’ across the Arab world caused by co-director Abraham’s acceptance speech in which he called out “the atrocious destruction” being rained on the people of Gaza as well as condemning the brutality of the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023. This was a “false equivalence between the colonised and the coloniser that may be used to rationalise Israel’s genocide.”[10]

So, there you have it. The two sides of the coin minted “cancel culture.” Extremists browbeating their communities as a whole to conform to their received narratives using in the most toxic manner possible emotionally resonant terms like “antisemitism,” “sabotage” and normalising “settler-colonialism” and even “genocide.” The desire to keep the conflict simmering in perpetuity. The imperative to freeze all debate within black and white, good, and bad binary thinking to satisfy the impulse of the algorithm moulded and echo chamber keyboard warriors. What really scares such doctrinal robots is the impulses of humanity and solidarity. The best riposte to the calls for a boycott was given by one local activist to the writer Samah Salaine on a visit to Masafer Yatta to determine support for such. All were proud of Abraham:

far more Palestinian than the online commentators attacking him. He is Jewish and Israeli but understands exactly what’s happening here just as I do, and he chose to stand with us.[11]

Do catch up with No Other Land on Channel 4 Player.

References

[1] Kenan Malik Ignore the row; this Oscar-winning film offers a vision of a shared Palestine in solidarity. The Observer Comment & Analysis 9th March 2025 p.47

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Movie Review: ‘No Other Land’ is a shocking look at Palestinian life under occupation.


⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

No Other Land 🪶 Truth Telling Or Propaganda?

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