Left Resistances
Worn down by the unraveling of the Keynesian social compromise and taken aback by the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Left was not at its best - electorally or intellectually – in the early years of the post-Cold War era. Adding to the morass, social justice advocates had to deal with a Zeitgeist full of neoconservative pronouncements about the demise of collectivism and neoliberal celebrations of globalization.
Gradually, however, the survivors of the “End of History” took advantage of their exile from the mainstream and adjusted their own lenses. Much of the left learned to expose the fallacies of the “war on terror”, to debunk the efficient market hypothesis, and to counter the arguments of fossil fuel lobbies. The disastrous Bush wars, the stock market crash, and the IPCC’s increasingly ominous alarms made left critiques impossible to dismiss. Politically, however, progressives hardly reaped the rewards of their adversaries’ discredit.
Two decades later, the task confronting Left activists seems even more daunting. While still reeling from their failure to take advantage of the legitimacy crises of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, they now must reflect on these missed opportunities in light of the new challenges posed by the world’s far-right drift. Trained to question assumptions about the elective affinities of capitalism and democracy, the contribution of free trade to global prosperity, and the virtues of enticing private investors to lead the energy transition, their skills are of little use against foes whose policymaking is predicated on executive privilege, mercantilist calculations, and unapologetic extractivism.
Rather than reckoning with a rapidly deteriorating political environment, it may be tempting to pretend that nothing has really changed. Hence the propensity, in some quarters of the Left, to indulge in the comfort of waging yesterday’s wars. The stakes are arguably too high, however, to keep looking at uncharted perils through familiar but increasingly obsolete prisms. Indeed, neither the anti-imperialist indictment nor the anti-totalitarian endorsement of the defunct international liberal order can shed much light on our dystopian world.
From Washington to Beijing, via Moscow, Delhi, Ankara and Jerusalem, the strongmen in charge of the brutal new order seem bound by a kind of gentlemen’s agreement: while vying for access to energy sources and treating their own citizens without much regard for human rights and civil liberties, they tend to respect each other’s license to govern their regional zones of influence as they please. This explains why, despite their cynical and predatory ways, they tend to fancy themselves as peacemakers.
To offer a measure of hope in this context, the Left must take stock of what it is up against and reorganize accordingly. Assessing its progress thus involves tracking: (1) the sites where resistances are emerging – i.e., where social movements are taking root but also the issues around which they are mobilizing; (2) the strategies that activists invent or rediscover to undermine overtly undemocratic regimes; and (3) the new solidarities rising among peoples and communities who share the misfortune of being targeted by one of the world’s major bullies.
THE ARGENTINIAN LABORATORY
Interview conducted on 01 April 2025
"Milei presented himself as the final outcome of the representational crisis of the system."
POSTDEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
Interview conducted on 23 February 2025
“Race has always been used, in American politics, as a battering ram against every public good, any redistributive impulse, any idea of collective freedom or social freedom. If you go in there with race, saying that what you’re doing is protecting white people from black people, then you end up protecting capitalists from social provision.”
GENOCIDAL INTENT
Interview conducted on 26 January 2025
"The genocide requires the intent to destroy people in whole or in part, or any protected group, in whole or in part. And the way to understand it is not really to just look at the evidence, but at the relation between evidence. So, in fact, it's become a meta-process. It's evidence about evidence."
Portraits
Raphaël Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) was a Jewish Polish lawyer trained at the Lwów law school (now Lviv, Ukraine), who escaped to Sweden and eventually to the United States after the occupation of Poland by the Nazis. He coined the term genocide and was pivotal in clarifying its multifaceted legal definition, with which state-led mass murder could be criminalized.
In the early 1920s, Lemkin was already scrutinizing the systematic elimination of the Armenian people that had accompanied the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Then, two decades later, he became one of the first legal scholars who not only perceived the specific nature of the crimes committed against the European Jews, but who also extended the notion of genocide to instances of settler colonial violence, such as the treatment received by some Slavic groups during the Second World War.
As outlined in his major research on Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, genocide “is intended (…) to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group1.”
1 Raphael LEMKIN, Axis rule in occupied Europe : laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress, Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944, p. 79.
Francesca Albanese
Francesca Albanese is an Italian international lawyer and academic affiliated to Georgetown University and the organization Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development. She has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories since 2022, and her three year mandate was renewed in 2025.
Since her first report, calling for action to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime, including through boycotts and sanctions, Albanese has personally been the target of recurrent smear campaigns, along with delegitimation attempts against the United Nations. Her latest report presented in March 2024 at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva expounded detailed evidence for Israel’s intentional enactment of at least three “genocidal acts” against the Palestinians.
She is currently preparing a report on Israel's experimentation with new military technology, such as remote-controlled quadcopters, autonomous lethal weapons and killer robots.
Patrick Buchanan
According to his apologists, Patrick Buchanan is neither a racist nor an antisemite. He merely says racist and antisemitic things. As a former speechwriter and pundit, Buchanan has certainly resorted to words in order to make a living. Yet it would be unfair to suggest that, instead of being a true bigot, Buchanan was only playing one on TV.
Regarding race relations in the US, Richard Nixon, who employed him at the time, summarized his press secretary’s position as “segregation forever”. As for Jews, Buchanan’s statement on Treblinka not being an extermination camp squarely falls under the rubric of Holocaust denial – not to mention his kind words about Hitler. As fellow conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer once remarked, “(t)he interesting thing (about Buchanan) is how he can say these things and still be considered a national figure.”
One should add that even his most fervent advocates never tried to argue that Buchanan’s homophobic, xenophobic and sexist rants did not reflect his true self. At best, they might have claimed that the views he proffered on the AIDS epidemic – nature’s revenge on homosexual practices – immigration – an existential threat – and the role of women – “building the nest”, like “Momma Bird” – were less his own than those of the God he worships.
Born in Washington in 1938, Patrick Buchanan was raised as a traditionalist Catholic. His great-grandfather fought under General Robert E. Lee, and he remains a proud member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A streetfighter and a bully in his youth – his family’s Jewish neighbors were his favorite target – “Pat” eventually matured, attending the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and starting his journalistic career at the Saint-Louis Globe-Democrat.
In 1966, Buchanan was hired by Richard Nixon’s campaign team to write the speeches meant for the candidate’s conservative base. Among other accomplishments, he coined the phrase “Silent Majority”. After the election, he worked as White House assistant and speechwriter, kept his job during Nixon’s unfinished second term and remained faithful to his boss until the bitter end – he even urged the President to burn the Watergate tapes in order to stay in power.
When Gerald Ford took office, the new administration briefly considered making Buchanan the US ambassador to apartheid South Africa. However, because of his segregationist inclinations and his excessive enthusiasm about getting the job, the State Department eventually rescinded the offer. Temporarily retired from politics, Buchanan embarked on a long and successful career as a news commentator, first at NBC radio then on cable TV – where he successively joined NBC’s The McLaughlin Group and CNN’s Crossfire and The Capital Gang. In these popular shows, Buchanan was typically cast as the conservative voice pitted against a liberal counterpart.
The renowned pundit came back to the White House in 1985 as Ronald Reagan’s Communications Director. During his two-year tenure, Buchanan was instrumental in the organization of the President’s visit to the German cemetery of Bitburg, where 48 Waffen SS members were buried. While busy defending the Administration’s decision – in the face of widespread outrage – the Communications Director used his spare time fighting the deportation of suspected Nazi war criminals to countries of the Eastern bloc. For Buchanan, honoring the Wehrmacht’s sacrifice and frustrating the plans of “revenge-obsessed Nazi hunters” were two sides of the same mission – one that his great-grandfather would have surely condoned.
After leaving the Reagan administration and returning to punditry, Buchanan felt freer to embrace his favorite causes. In 1989, for instance, he paid yet another tribute to his Confederate ancestor by writing a column about the so-called Central Park Five case: in his article, he called for the public hanging of at least one of the Black teenagers falsely accused of having raped a white jogger.
At about the same time, Pat started encouraging his sister Bay, who had also worked for the Reagan administration, to pursue her “Buchanan for President” initiative. The siblings’ platform was two-pronged.
On the domestic front, Buchanan lambasted the open border policy promoted by the globalist wing of the Republican party – or at least by the contributors to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal: mass immigration from non-European countries, he warned, would fatally imperil the cultural and moral fabric of the United States.
With respect to foreign affairs, the former speechwriter argued that the closing of the Cold War should also mark the end of US military involvement throughout the world. Hence his staunch opposition to the Gulf War in 1990, which prompted his decision to run against George H.W. Bush two years later.
In the Republican primaries of 1992, Buchanan ran as the paleoconservative candidate: he challenged the incumbent President, whom he accused of harboring both a liberal and an imperialist agenda. Bush, Buchanan complained, had not only reneged on his “no new taxes” pledge: even more importantly, his administration had failed to curb immigration, to hinder women’s access to abortion and to suppress gay rights. Meanwhile, he added, the Jewish lobby and its neoconservative proxies were allowed to dictate the terms of America’s foreign policy.
Buchanan failed to win the nomination but still received almost a quarter of the votes. He also delivered his famous “culture war” speech at the Republican convention, where he claimed that America was in the grips of a decisive struggle for its own soul: the choice was between remaining “God’s country” or descending further down the liberal and multicultural path of moral decline. Though some commentators blamed the Republican defeat in the presidential election on the chilling effect of Buchanan’s oratory, the paleoconservative tribune persisted. After returning to Crossfire, he created a foundation called the American Cause to prepare himself for his next bid. He ran against Bob Dole, in the 1996 primaries, and was defeated once again.
After his second attempt, Buchanan began to despair of the Republican party, which he left in 1999. The following year, he ran as the candidate of the Reform party. While his campaign failed miserably, he inadvertently played a decisive role in George W. Bush’s controversial victory. In Palm Beach, Florida, about 2,000 ballots meant for Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, were mistakenly credited to him. Because the conservative Supreme Court rejected Gore’s request for a recount, his opponent was declared the winner in Florida, which gave him enough delegates to become President.
After 2000, Buchanan gave up on presidential politics and left CNN for MSNBC, where he was one of the few pundits who opposed Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. He also became even more overt in the defense of his other pet causes: one of his columns stated that the UK should not have declared war on Nazi Germany and his book entitled Suicide of a Superpower explicitly lamented the waning of white supremacy in America. Yet it was not until 2011 that MSNBC decided to end his contract.
Five years later, Donald Trump won the presidential election on a platform that largely echoed Buchanan’s. The latter had endorsed the MAGA candidate of course, though Trump’s success must have been bittersweet for the culture war veteran – who continued to write articles, mostly for Peter Brimelow’s white supremacist site VDARE, until 2023.
Similarities between their outlooks notwithstanding, the extent of Buchanan’s actual influence on the 47th President is open to debate. What his charmed professional life reveals, however, is the fact that long before Trump, Washington’s mainstream media and political establishment would already welcome an unapologetic segregationist and Hitler sympathizer as one of their own.
Friedrich Ratzel
Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was a German geographer and zoologist who had a major influence on German geopolitical thought at the turn of the 20th century. Intoxicated by his social Darwinism, he developed dubious biologistic concepts to describe the differential development of states and their spatial expansion.
His ideas are considered a decisive impetus for the “Lebensraum” ideology of National Socialism, the postulate that a strong and self-sufficient nation-state requires ample space and resources to feed its population and support its industry, which in turn legitimizes plundering neighboring territories.
Eighty years after Hitler’s defeat, Ratzel’s infamous concept seems to be enjoying a rebirth of sorts, at least among the advocates of a “Russian World” that would absorb Ukraine, of a “Land of Israel” that would annex the West bank and Gaza, and even of a “Greater America” that would range from Greenland to the Panama Canal and even include Canada
Clyde Snow
“Being dead is not a problem, dying is.” Clyde Snow often repeated these words, as the bodies he autopsied lay at the bottom of mass graves. An expert listener to such silent witnesses, the American medical examiner and anthropologist spent years reconstructing the story of their final hours by documenting the traces of abuse, torture, beatings, or execution engraved in their bones. Snow’s work was ultimately aimed at identifying these bodies and restoring their dignity.
Forensic anthropology began in 1865, when Clara Barton was commissioned by Abraham Lincoln to identify unknown soldiers who had fallen on the battlefield during the Civil War. In 1984, the discipline took on a new dimension. Clyde Snow's expertise was then called upon in Argentina, where it was no longer just a matter of restoring the identity of human remains, but of proving, through anthropometric study, the “dirty war” waged from 1976 to 1983 by the military dictatorship of General Videla.
Clyde Snow enthusiastically accepted the mission, seeing it as an important new application of forensic anthropology: documenting human rights violations. He thus headed to the mass graves where death squads had piled up some of the 30,000 desaparecidos. Bullet wounds and perimortem fractures were among the evidence that the anthropologist then presented at the trial of the Argentine generals responsible for these massacres, leading to the conviction of five of them.
In Croatia, he discovered the remains of 200 patients and hospital staff executed by soldiers. In El Salvador, he found the skeletons of 136 children and infants who had been shot by army squads. In the Philippines, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Rwanda, Chile... all over the world, Clyde Snow has excavated bodies from mass graves and provided evidence of atrocities committed by governments, dictatorial regimes and generals, so that those responsible can be brought to justice. As one of the main witnesses at Saddam Hussein’s trial for genocide against the Kurdish ethnic group in 2007, the anthropologist stood for four hours presenting detailed forensic evidence of the use of sarin gas and summary executions.
A member of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Clyde Snow became the father of a movement that put forensic anthropology at the service of human rights campaigns against genocide, massacres, and war crimes. In more than 20 countries, he scientifically and psychologically trained experts in excavation techniques designed to preserve evidence, identify human remains in conflict situations, and reconstruct the conditions of their death.
Bones never lie and never forget, Clyde Snow used to say. “Their testimony is silent, but very eloquent.”
Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Ghassan Abu Sittah is a British-Palestinian surgeon, who regularly intervenes in conflict and crisis situations, including in Palestine where he first came as a medical student at the time of the First Intifada. During the Nakba, his father’s family were expelled from their land and became refugees in the Gaza Strip, before moving to Kuwait and later to the United Kingdom.
Amidst the urgency of October 2023, Abu Sittah once again returned to Gaza to volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, performing numerous amputations and other procedures at al-Shifa, al-Awda, and al-Ahli hospitals. The latter was targeted by a first Israeli attack on October 17 of that year, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, as Abu Sittah was conducting an operation inside the hospital.
With his first-hand experience of devastating injuries, including burns caused by white phosphorus, he has supported multiple investigations into war crimes. There have been multiple attempts to silence Abu Sittah and to suspend his medical license. In April 2024, Germany banned him from obtaining a visa for one year in the entirety of the Schengen area.
Kyle Rittenhouse
A man “whose sole qualification is killing people standing up for Black lives and getting away with it”. That’s how Cori Bush, then Democratic U.S. Representative for Missouri, described Kyle Rittenhouse in 2021. The young murderer had just been found not guilty in his trial for voluntary manslaughter, attempted manslaughter, and reckless endangerment. On August 25, 2020, Rittenhouse shot and killed two people in the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin: Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, two demonstrators who had come to protest the murder of Jacob Blake by a local police officer. Rittenhouse then wounded a third man, Gaige Grosskreutz, who was trying to stop the killing by pointing a handgun at him. Even though his first two victims were unarmed - except for a skateboard in Huber's case - and he was in possession of an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, Rittenhouse, who would soon become a MAGA darling, was acquitted on grounds of self-defence.
At the time of the shooting, Rittenhouse was 17 years old. He traveled from Antioch, Illinois, to act as a vigilante in Kenosha. His goal, he would later explain during his trial, was to prevent anti-racist organizers from threatening the safety and property of honest business owners. Parading through the streets with his loaded rifle, he fired when Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz successively tried to disarm him.
During the trial, and even more so after his acquittal, both the right-wing media and neo-fascist organizations, as well as elected Republicans and their base, treated Rittenhouse as a hero — two-thirds of Donald Trump voters saw him as an example of patriotism. He was interviewed twice by the famous columnist Tucker Carlson, who was still on FOX News at the time and who reached one of his largest audience by interviewing him; the Proud Boys, one of the leading far-right organizations, made him their mascot; he was offered numerous jobs and internships — both by the gun lobby and by MAGA senators and congressmen — and was even received, with his mother, by the former and future president at his Mar-a-Lago lair in November 2021.
After an unsuccessful attempt at publishing video games based on his exploits, Rittenhouse gradually withdrew from the spotlight, even though the Texas chapter of the National Association for Gun Rights continues to call on his services and Turning Point, the libertarian association headed by Charlie Kirk, persists in organizing events where he is presented as America's ideal son-in-law. This is because, as Cori Bush pointed out, shooting unarmed protesters is really his only qualification.
On the other hand, Rittenhouse's hour of glory remains an important reminder to anyone who doubts that murderous hatred is indeed the most powerful driving force behind the MAGA movement.
Charles Murray
“He will never be the country's most famous conservative, but he may well be the most dangerous.”1 That's how the New York Times described political scientist Charles Murray in a long profile published at the time of the release of The Bell Curve in 1994. Co-authored with psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, the book sold over 1.3 million copies and “is perhaps the most controversial book published in the United States since the end of the Cold War,”2 according to Quinn Slobodian. Its thesis is firmly rooted in the eugenicist tradition: if Black people are disproportionately poor, incarcerated, and dependent on government assistance, it is because they have a lower IQs than white people. There’s nothing they can do about it, say Murray and Herrnstein; it's in the genes they inherited.
To substantiate this relationship between race, social class, genetics, and intelligence, the authors filled the book with graphs, tables, and statistics, lending a scientific aura to their racialist manifesto. What they fail to mention, however, is that many of the references and sources they cite were developed by advocates of racial purity whose research was funded by the white supremacist organization Pioneer Fund.
In his writings, Charles Murray often presents himself as a beleaguered researcher who arrives at troubling conclusions with deep regret. It’s not him speaking, he insists—it’s science. “I really don't think I'm a racist,”3 he claims, noting that he uses the cautious verb “think” only because he’s wary of categorical statements.
Not all of Murray's books follow the racialist vein of The Bell Curve. His first, Losing Ground, published in 1984, mainly targeted social programs and their recipients, whether Black or white. Single mothers, in particular, have been one of his favorite targets for more than 40 years. In Losing Ground, the libertarian essayist was already resorting to the same method: filling his pages with pseudo-scientific data to lend an air of rationality to his anti-welfare theses. According to the doctrine he promotes, social programs cause more problems than they solve, so they might as well be abolished. Responsible for the emergence of a white underclass, they are so dangerous that in the near future, they might even force the cognitive elite to resort to military repression to contain the feeble-minded hordes. And there’s no point in relying on public education, which will remain forever powerless in the face of their intellectual limitations, so it might as well be abolished too. “For many people, there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of teaching,” Murray believes.
In the last chapter of The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray express their hope that the book will spark a debate on how to ‘manipulate the fertility of people with high and low IQs.’ Thirty years later, it is in libertarian Silicon Valley that his ideas have taken root most deeply. Companies such as Genomic Prediction now offer prospective parents tests on embryos to calculate their “polygenic scores” and give birth to a generation of genetically optimized children. These practices, which Nature magazine describes as experiencing an “alarming rise”, delight the tech world. Malcolm and Simone Collins, enthusiastic Trump admirers and champions of pro-natalism, proudly claim to have brought to the world “the first baby selected for its intelligence.”4 As for Elon Musk, he is encouraging his wealthy white friends to emulate his pro-procreation activism—he is the father of 14 children—by advising them to watch “Idiocracy.” The plot of this dystopian film sends shivers down the spine of the owner of X: the intelligent elite stops procreating, leaving the world to be overrun by idiots.
1 Jason Deparle, “Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?”, The New York Times, October 9, 1994.
2 Quinn Slobodian, “The Unequal Mind: How Charles Murray and Neoliberal Think Tanks Revived IQ”, in Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, University of Pennsylvania Press, vol.4, N°1, Winter 2023.
3 Jason Deparle, ibid.
4 Raphaëlle Besse Demoulière, “Ces Américains en croisade pour faire le plus d’enfants possible, et sauver l’humanité”, Le Monde, 29 octobre 2023
Moshe Dayan
For anyone who came of age during the Cold War, and particularly among supporters of Israel, Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) is an iconic figure. One of the first prominent Israeli politicians to be born in Palestine, he joined the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organization, at the age of 14, before enlisting in the British Army during World War II. From the declaration of independence in 1948 until his death in 1981, Moshe Dayan held numerous positions in the army and government: he was Chief of Staff from 1955 to 1958, Minister of Agriculture in the early 1960s, Minister of Defense in the governments of Levi Eshkol during the Six-Day War and Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War, and finally Menachem Begin’s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1977 and 1979, at the time of the peace negotiations with Egypt.
A fervent supporter of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Dayan campaigned after 1967 for a dual strategy of quelling resistance while integrating Palestinians into the Israeli economy, notably through the widespread distribution of work permits.
Moshe Dayan's name has recently returned to the headlines because of a famous eulogy: On April 30, 1956, the then chief of staff of the army visited the Nahal Oz kibbutz on the Gaza Strip border to pay tribute to Ro'i Rothberg, a kibbutznik killed the day before by Palestinian refugees who had returned to the place from which they had been expelled eight years earlier.
Moshe Dayan's speech remains famous in Israel, mainly because it called on Israelis never to let their guard down. However, it is the fact that the Nahal Oz kibbutz was one of the places most violently attacked by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, that has brought it back into the spotlight. For advocates of Israeli “reprisals,” Moshe Dayan's call for uncompromising firmness in 1956 is more relevant than ever today. But critics of the ongoing destruction of Gaza focus on two other aspects of the famous general's speech.
First, they recall that when Moshe Dayan took the floor at Nahal Oz, he began his speech as follows: “Yesterday morning, Ro'i was murdered. Intoxicated by the serenity of dawn, he did not see those who were waiting for him in ambush at the edge of the plowed field. But let us not cast shame on his murderers. Why blame them for the burning hatred they feel toward us? For eight years they have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their very eyes we have made our own the land and villages where they and their ancestors lived. It is not the Arabs of Gaza we should ask to account for Ro'i's blood, but ourselves. How could we have closed our eyes and refused to face our destiny and the mission of our generation, in all its cruelty?”
Second, as historian Omer Bartov points out, Moshe Dayan’s lucidity proved short-lived. For when he recorded his eulogy for Israeli radio the next day, there was no trace of the passage about the refugees and their good reasons for rejecting the settlers rule1.
1Omer Bartov, As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel, The Guardian, 13 August 2024
Yosef Weitz
Yosef Weitz (1890-1972) was one of Modern Israel’s founding fathers, emigrating from present-day Ukraine in 1908 to champion the Zionist cause, becoming director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) during the Mandatory Period.
He had a notorious role in the frantic expropriation of Palestinian lands, and in consolidating the war’s spoils over decades through agriculture and arboriculture. He thereby implemented Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben Gurion’s call to “make the desert bloom”, all the while uprooting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands. The Ottoman property laws, taken up by the British mandate and then by the Israeli occupation, were employed to legitimize, through its cultivation, colonial ownership of the land seized from the local population.
Raphaël Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) was a Jewish Polish lawyer trained at the Lwów law school (now Lviv, Ukraine), who escaped to Sweden and eventually to the United States after the occupation of Poland by the Nazis. He coined the term genocide and was pivotal in clarifying its multifaceted legal definition, with which state-led mass murder could be criminalized.
In the early 1920s, Lemkin was already scrutinizing the systematic elimination of the Armenian people that had accompanied the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Then, two decades later, he became one of the first legal scholars who not only perceived the specific nature of the crimes committed against the European Jews, but who also extended the notion of genocide to instances of settler colonial violence, such as the treatment received by some Slavic groups during the Second World War.
As outlined in his major research on Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, genocide “is intended (…) to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group1.”
1 Raphael LEMKIN, Axis rule in occupied Europe : laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress, Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944, p. 79.
Francesca Albanese
Francesca Albanese is an Italian international lawyer and academic affiliated to Georgetown University and the organization Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development. She has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories since 2022, and her three year mandate was renewed in 2025.
Since her first report, calling for action to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime, including through boycotts and sanctions, Albanese has personally been the target of recurrent smear campaigns, along with delegitimation attempts against the United Nations. Her latest report presented in March 2024 at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva expounded detailed evidence for Israel’s intentional enactment of at least three “genocidal acts” against the Palestinians.
She is currently preparing a report on Israel's experimentation with new military technology, such as remote-controlled quadcopters, autonomous lethal weapons and killer robots.
Patrick Buchanan
According to his apologists, Patrick Buchanan is neither a racist nor an antisemite. He merely says racist and antisemitic things. As a former speechwriter and pundit, Buchanan has certainly resorted to words in order to make a living. Yet it would be unfair to suggest that, instead of being a true bigot, Buchanan was only playing one on TV.
Regarding race relations in the US, Richard Nixon, who employed him at the time, summarized his press secretary’s position as “segregation forever”. As for Jews, Buchanan’s statement on Treblinka not being an extermination camp squarely falls under the rubric of Holocaust denial – not to mention his kind words about Hitler. As fellow conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer once remarked, “(t)he interesting thing (about Buchanan) is how he can say these things and still be considered a national figure.”
One should add that even his most fervent advocates never tried to argue that Buchanan’s homophobic, xenophobic and sexist rants did not reflect his true self. At best, they might have claimed that the views he proffered on the AIDS epidemic – nature’s revenge on homosexual practices – immigration – an existential threat – and the role of women – “building the nest”, like “Momma Bird” – were less his own than those of the God he worships.
Born in Washington in 1938, Patrick Buchanan was raised as a traditionalist Catholic. His great-grandfather fought under General Robert E. Lee, and he remains a proud member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A streetfighter and a bully in his youth – his family’s Jewish neighbors were his favorite target – “Pat” eventually matured, attending the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and starting his journalistic career at the Saint-Louis Globe-Democrat.
In 1966, Buchanan was hired by Richard Nixon’s campaign team to write the speeches meant for the candidate’s conservative base. Among other accomplishments, he coined the phrase “Silent Majority”. After the election, he worked as White House assistant and speechwriter, kept his job during Nixon’s unfinished second term and remained faithful to his boss until the bitter end – he even urged the President to burn the Watergate tapes in order to stay in power.
When Gerald Ford took office, the new administration briefly considered making Buchanan the US ambassador to apartheid South Africa. However, because of his segregationist inclinations and his excessive enthusiasm about getting the job, the State Department eventually rescinded the offer. Temporarily retired from politics, Buchanan embarked on a long and successful career as a news commentator, first at NBC radio then on cable TV – where he successively joined NBC’s The McLaughlin Group and CNN’s Crossfire and The Capital Gang. In these popular shows, Buchanan was typically cast as the conservative voice pitted against a liberal counterpart.
The renowned pundit came back to the White House in 1985 as Ronald Reagan’s Communications Director. During his two-year tenure, Buchanan was instrumental in the organization of the President’s visit to the German cemetery of Bitburg, where 48 Waffen SS members were buried. While busy defending the Administration’s decision – in the face of widespread outrage – the Communications Director used his spare time fighting the deportation of suspected Nazi war criminals to countries of the Eastern bloc. For Buchanan, honoring the Wehrmacht’s sacrifice and frustrating the plans of “revenge-obsessed Nazi hunters” were two sides of the same mission – one that his great-grandfather would have surely condoned.
After leaving the Reagan administration and returning to punditry, Buchanan felt freer to embrace his favorite causes. In 1989, for instance, he paid yet another tribute to his Confederate ancestor by writing a column about the so-called Central Park Five case: in his article, he called for the public hanging of at least one of the Black teenagers falsely accused of having raped a white jogger.
At about the same time, Pat started encouraging his sister Bay, who had also worked for the Reagan administration, to pursue her “Buchanan for President” initiative. The siblings’ platform was two-pronged.
On the domestic front, Buchanan lambasted the open border policy promoted by the globalist wing of the Republican party – or at least by the contributors to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal: mass immigration from non-European countries, he warned, would fatally imperil the cultural and moral fabric of the United States.
With respect to foreign affairs, the former speechwriter argued that the closing of the Cold War should also mark the end of US military involvement throughout the world. Hence his staunch opposition to the Gulf War in 1990, which prompted his decision to run against George H.W. Bush two years later.
In the Republican primaries of 1992, Buchanan ran as the paleoconservative candidate: he challenged the incumbent President, whom he accused of harboring both a liberal and an imperialist agenda. Bush, Buchanan complained, had not only reneged on his “no new taxes” pledge: even more importantly, his administration had failed to curb immigration, to hinder women’s access to abortion and to suppress gay rights. Meanwhile, he added, the Jewish lobby and its neoconservative proxies were allowed to dictate the terms of America’s foreign policy.
Buchanan failed to win the nomination but still received almost a quarter of the votes. He also delivered his famous “culture war” speech at the Republican convention, where he claimed that America was in the grips of a decisive struggle for its own soul: the choice was between remaining “God’s country” or descending further down the liberal and multicultural path of moral decline. Though some commentators blamed the Republican defeat in the presidential election on the chilling effect of Buchanan’s oratory, the paleoconservative tribune persisted. After returning to Crossfire, he created a foundation called the American Cause to prepare himself for his next bid. He ran against Bob Dole, in the 1996 primaries, and was defeated once again.
After his second attempt, Buchanan began to despair of the Republican party, which he left in 1999. The following year, he ran as the candidate of the Reform party. While his campaign failed miserably, he inadvertently played a decisive role in George W. Bush’s controversial victory. In Palm Beach, Florida, about 2,000 ballots meant for Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, were mistakenly credited to him. Because the conservative Supreme Court rejected Gore’s request for a recount, his opponent was declared the winner in Florida, which gave him enough delegates to become President.
After 2000, Buchanan gave up on presidential politics and left CNN for MSNBC, where he was one of the few pundits who opposed Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. He also became even more overt in the defense of his other pet causes: one of his columns stated that the UK should not have declared war on Nazi Germany and his book entitled Suicide of a Superpower explicitly lamented the waning of white supremacy in America. Yet it was not until 2011 that MSNBC decided to end his contract.
Five years later, Donald Trump won the presidential election on a platform that largely echoed Buchanan’s. The latter had endorsed the MAGA candidate of course, though Trump’s success must have been bittersweet for the culture war veteran – who continued to write articles, mostly for Peter Brimelow’s white supremacist site VDARE, until 2023.
Similarities between their outlooks notwithstanding, the extent of Buchanan’s actual influence on the 47th President is open to debate. What his charmed professional life reveals, however, is the fact that long before Trump, Washington’s mainstream media and political establishment would already welcome an unapologetic segregationist and Hitler sympathizer as one of their own.
Friedrich Ratzel
Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was a German geographer and zoologist who had a major influence on German geopolitical thought at the turn of the 20th century. Intoxicated by his social Darwinism, he developed dubious biologistic concepts to describe the differential development of states and their spatial expansion.
His ideas are considered a decisive impetus for the “Lebensraum” ideology of National Socialism, the postulate that a strong and self-sufficient nation-state requires ample space and resources to feed its population and support its industry, which in turn legitimizes plundering neighboring territories.
Eighty years after Hitler’s defeat, Ratzel’s infamous concept seems to be enjoying a rebirth of sorts, at least among the advocates of a “Russian World” that would absorb Ukraine, of a “Land of Israel” that would annex the West bank and Gaza, and even of a “Greater America” that would range from Greenland to the Panama Canal and even include Canada
Clyde Snow
“Being dead is not a problem, dying is.” Clyde Snow often repeated these words, as the bodies he autopsied lay at the bottom of mass graves. An expert listener to such silent witnesses, the American medical examiner and anthropologist spent years reconstructing the story of their final hours by documenting the traces of abuse, torture, beatings, or execution engraved in their bones. Snow’s work was ultimately aimed at identifying these bodies and restoring their dignity.
Forensic anthropology began in 1865, when Clara Barton was commissioned by Abraham Lincoln to identify unknown soldiers who had fallen on the battlefield during the Civil War. In 1984, the discipline took on a new dimension. Clyde Snow's expertise was then called upon in Argentina, where it was no longer just a matter of restoring the identity of human remains, but of proving, through anthropometric study, the “dirty war” waged from 1976 to 1983 by the military dictatorship of General Videla.
Clyde Snow enthusiastically accepted the mission, seeing it as an important new application of forensic anthropology: documenting human rights violations. He thus headed to the mass graves where death squads had piled up some of the 30,000 desaparecidos. Bullet wounds and perimortem fractures were among the evidence that the anthropologist then presented at the trial of the Argentine generals responsible for these massacres, leading to the conviction of five of them.
In Croatia, he discovered the remains of 200 patients and hospital staff executed by soldiers. In El Salvador, he found the skeletons of 136 children and infants who had been shot by army squads. In the Philippines, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Rwanda, Chile... all over the world, Clyde Snow has excavated bodies from mass graves and provided evidence of atrocities committed by governments, dictatorial regimes and generals, so that those responsible can be brought to justice. As one of the main witnesses at Saddam Hussein’s trial for genocide against the Kurdish ethnic group in 2007, the anthropologist stood for four hours presenting detailed forensic evidence of the use of sarin gas and summary executions.
A member of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Clyde Snow became the father of a movement that put forensic anthropology at the service of human rights campaigns against genocide, massacres, and war crimes. In more than 20 countries, he scientifically and psychologically trained experts in excavation techniques designed to preserve evidence, identify human remains in conflict situations, and reconstruct the conditions of their death.
Bones never lie and never forget, Clyde Snow used to say. “Their testimony is silent, but very eloquent.”
Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Ghassan Abu Sittah is a British-Palestinian surgeon, who regularly intervenes in conflict and crisis situations, including in Palestine where he first came as a medical student at the time of the First Intifada. During the Nakba, his father’s family were expelled from their land and became refugees in the Gaza Strip, before moving to Kuwait and later to the United Kingdom.
Amidst the urgency of October 2023, Abu Sittah once again returned to Gaza to volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, performing numerous amputations and other procedures at al-Shifa, al-Awda, and al-Ahli hospitals. The latter was targeted by a first Israeli attack on October 17 of that year, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, as Abu Sittah was conducting an operation inside the hospital.
With his first-hand experience of devastating injuries, including burns caused by white phosphorus, he has supported multiple investigations into war crimes. There have been multiple attempts to silence Abu Sittah and to suspend his medical license. In April 2024, Germany banned him from obtaining a visa for one year in the entirety of the Schengen area.
Kyle Rittenhouse
A man “whose sole qualification is killing people standing up for Black lives and getting away with it”. That’s how Cori Bush, then Democratic U.S. Representative for Missouri, described Kyle Rittenhouse in 2021. The young murderer had just been found not guilty in his trial for voluntary manslaughter, attempted manslaughter, and reckless endangerment. On August 25, 2020, Rittenhouse shot and killed two people in the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin: Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, two demonstrators who had come to protest the murder of Jacob Blake by a local police officer. Rittenhouse then wounded a third man, Gaige Grosskreutz, who was trying to stop the killing by pointing a handgun at him. Even though his first two victims were unarmed - except for a skateboard in Huber's case - and he was in possession of an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, Rittenhouse, who would soon become a MAGA darling, was acquitted on grounds of self-defence.
At the time of the shooting, Rittenhouse was 17 years old. He traveled from Antioch, Illinois, to act as a vigilante in Kenosha. His goal, he would later explain during his trial, was to prevent anti-racist organizers from threatening the safety and property of honest business owners. Parading through the streets with his loaded rifle, he fired when Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz successively tried to disarm him.
During the trial, and even more so after his acquittal, both the right-wing media and neo-fascist organizations, as well as elected Republicans and their base, treated Rittenhouse as a hero — two-thirds of Donald Trump voters saw him as an example of patriotism. He was interviewed twice by the famous columnist Tucker Carlson, who was still on FOX News at the time and who reached one of his largest audience by interviewing him; the Proud Boys, one of the leading far-right organizations, made him their mascot; he was offered numerous jobs and internships — both by the gun lobby and by MAGA senators and congressmen — and was even received, with his mother, by the former and future president at his Mar-a-Lago lair in November 2021.
After an unsuccessful attempt at publishing video games based on his exploits, Rittenhouse gradually withdrew from the spotlight, even though the Texas chapter of the National Association for Gun Rights continues to call on his services and Turning Point, the libertarian association headed by Charlie Kirk, persists in organizing events where he is presented as America's ideal son-in-law. This is because, as Cori Bush pointed out, shooting unarmed protesters is really his only qualification.
On the other hand, Rittenhouse's hour of glory remains an important reminder to anyone who doubts that murderous hatred is indeed the most powerful driving force behind the MAGA movement.
Charles Murray
“He will never be the country's most famous conservative, but he may well be the most dangerous.”1 That's how the New York Times described political scientist Charles Murray in a long profile published at the time of the release of The Bell Curve in 1994. Co-authored with psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, the book sold over 1.3 million copies and “is perhaps the most controversial book published in the United States since the end of the Cold War,”2 according to Quinn Slobodian. Its thesis is firmly rooted in the eugenicist tradition: if Black people are disproportionately poor, incarcerated, and dependent on government assistance, it is because they have a lower IQs than white people. There’s nothing they can do about it, say Murray and Herrnstein; it's in the genes they inherited.
To substantiate this relationship between race, social class, genetics, and intelligence, the authors filled the book with graphs, tables, and statistics, lending a scientific aura to their racialist manifesto. What they fail to mention, however, is that many of the references and sources they cite were developed by advocates of racial purity whose research was funded by the white supremacist organization Pioneer Fund.
In his writings, Charles Murray often presents himself as a beleaguered researcher who arrives at troubling conclusions with deep regret. It’s not him speaking, he insists—it’s science. “I really don't think I'm a racist,”3 he claims, noting that he uses the cautious verb “think” only because he’s wary of categorical statements.
Not all of Murray's books follow the racialist vein of The Bell Curve. His first, Losing Ground, published in 1984, mainly targeted social programs and their recipients, whether Black or white. Single mothers, in particular, have been one of his favorite targets for more than 40 years. In Losing Ground, the libertarian essayist was already resorting to the same method: filling his pages with pseudo-scientific data to lend an air of rationality to his anti-welfare theses. According to the doctrine he promotes, social programs cause more problems than they solve, so they might as well be abolished. Responsible for the emergence of a white underclass, they are so dangerous that in the near future, they might even force the cognitive elite to resort to military repression to contain the feeble-minded hordes. And there’s no point in relying on public education, which will remain forever powerless in the face of their intellectual limitations, so it might as well be abolished too. “For many people, there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of teaching,” Murray believes.
In the last chapter of The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray express their hope that the book will spark a debate on how to ‘manipulate the fertility of people with high and low IQs.’ Thirty years later, it is in libertarian Silicon Valley that his ideas have taken root most deeply. Companies such as Genomic Prediction now offer prospective parents tests on embryos to calculate their “polygenic scores” and give birth to a generation of genetically optimized children. These practices, which Nature magazine describes as experiencing an “alarming rise”, delight the tech world. Malcolm and Simone Collins, enthusiastic Trump admirers and champions of pro-natalism, proudly claim to have brought to the world “the first baby selected for its intelligence.”4 As for Elon Musk, he is encouraging his wealthy white friends to emulate his pro-procreation activism—he is the father of 14 children—by advising them to watch “Idiocracy.” The plot of this dystopian film sends shivers down the spine of the owner of X: the intelligent elite stops procreating, leaving the world to be overrun by idiots.
1 Jason Deparle, “Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?”, The New York Times, October 9, 1994.
2 Quinn Slobodian, “The Unequal Mind: How Charles Murray and Neoliberal Think Tanks Revived IQ”, in Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, University of Pennsylvania Press, vol.4, N°1, Winter 2023.
3 Jason Deparle, ibid.
4 Raphaëlle Besse Demoulière, “Ces Américains en croisade pour faire le plus d’enfants possible, et sauver l’humanité”, Le Monde, 29 octobre 2023
Moshe Dayan
For anyone who came of age during the Cold War, and particularly among supporters of Israel, Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) is an iconic figure. One of the first prominent Israeli politicians to be born in Palestine, he joined the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organization, at the age of 14, before enlisting in the British Army during World War II. From the declaration of independence in 1948 until his death in 1981, Moshe Dayan held numerous positions in the army and government: he was Chief of Staff from 1955 to 1958, Minister of Agriculture in the early 1960s, Minister of Defense in the governments of Levi Eshkol during the Six-Day War and Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War, and finally Menachem Begin’s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1977 and 1979, at the time of the peace negotiations with Egypt.
A fervent supporter of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Dayan campaigned after 1967 for a dual strategy of quelling resistance while integrating Palestinians into the Israeli economy, notably through the widespread distribution of work permits.
Moshe Dayan's name has recently returned to the headlines because of a famous eulogy: On April 30, 1956, the then chief of staff of the army visited the Nahal Oz kibbutz on the Gaza Strip border to pay tribute to Ro'i Rothberg, a kibbutznik killed the day before by Palestinian refugees who had returned to the place from which they had been expelled eight years earlier.
Moshe Dayan's speech remains famous in Israel, mainly because it called on Israelis never to let their guard down. However, it is the fact that the Nahal Oz kibbutz was one of the places most violently attacked by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, that has brought it back into the spotlight. For advocates of Israeli “reprisals,” Moshe Dayan's call for uncompromising firmness in 1956 is more relevant than ever today. But critics of the ongoing destruction of Gaza focus on two other aspects of the famous general's speech.
First, they recall that when Moshe Dayan took the floor at Nahal Oz, he began his speech as follows: “Yesterday morning, Ro'i was murdered. Intoxicated by the serenity of dawn, he did not see those who were waiting for him in ambush at the edge of the plowed field. But let us not cast shame on his murderers. Why blame them for the burning hatred they feel toward us? For eight years they have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their very eyes we have made our own the land and villages where they and their ancestors lived. It is not the Arabs of Gaza we should ask to account for Ro'i's blood, but ourselves. How could we have closed our eyes and refused to face our destiny and the mission of our generation, in all its cruelty?”
Second, as historian Omer Bartov points out, Moshe Dayan’s lucidity proved short-lived. For when he recorded his eulogy for Israeli radio the next day, there was no trace of the passage about the refugees and their good reasons for rejecting the settlers rule1.
1Omer Bartov, As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel, The Guardian, 13 August 2024
Yosef Weitz
Yosef Weitz (1890-1972) was one of Modern Israel’s founding fathers, emigrating from present-day Ukraine in 1908 to champion the Zionist cause, becoming director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) during the Mandatory Period.
He had a notorious role in the frantic expropriation of Palestinian lands, and in consolidating the war’s spoils over decades through agriculture and arboriculture. He thereby implemented Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben Gurion’s call to “make the desert bloom”, all the while uprooting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands. The Ottoman property laws, taken up by the British mandate and then by the Israeli occupation, were employed to legitimize, through its cultivation, colonial ownership of the land seized from the local population.
Timelines
Gaza Under Fire 1949-2022
1949
Creation of the Gaza Strip: The armistice signed between Israel and Egypt in February 1949 put the 555 square kilometers area henceforth known as the Gaza Strip under Egyptian control. Out of the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes during the Nakba (the catastrophe), 200,000 were forced to resettle in Gaza, many of them in refugee camps.
1953
Attack of al-Bureij camp. In 1953, Moshe Dayan, the newly appointed IDF chief of staff, created Unit 101, a commando unit whose mission was to eliminate “infiltrators”, i.e., refugees trying to return to their homes. On August 28 of that year, a patrol of Unit 101 led by Ariel Sharon entered the al-Bureij camp in the Gaza Strip and killed up to 50 civilians in what was framed as a preventive mission against further infiltrations.
1956
Khan Yunis and Rafah massacres. During the Suez campaign, the IDF briefly occupied Gaza as part of a combined attempt by Israel, France and Britain to occupy the Sinai, topple Gamal Abdel Nasser and reopen the Suez Canal. During their incursion, Israeli soldiers rounded up and killed hundreds of men, first in the Khan Younis refugee camp, on November 3, and nine days later in the city of Rafah.
1967
Occupation of Gaza. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in June 1967. Dubbed the Naksa (the setback), the conquest of these territories was followed by what Palestinians remember as the “Four Year War”. Ariel Sharon, then head of Israel's Southern Command, orchestrated the division of the Strip into zones, the deportation of thousands of Gazans and the destruction of several refugee camps in order to quell the resistance.
1987
First Intifada. The First Intifada started in Gaza, on December 8, 1987: a riot erupted in the Jabalia refugee camp after an Israeli vehicle caused a crash that killed four Palestinians. The upheaval would rapidly spread to the rest of the Strip and the West Bank. Violently repressed by Israeli forces, the Intifada lasted six years, during which a hundred Israelis and a thousand Palestinians were killed.
1996
The Iron Wall. One year after the signing of the Oslo I Accord, the Israeli authorities sought to tighten their control over the allegedly autonomous Gaza strip by erecting a barrier called the Iron Wall. Fully erected by 1996, this construction has played a crucial role in the isolation and de-development of Gaza.
2004
Second Intifada. During the Second Intifada (September 2000-February 2005), Israeli forces launched a number of retaliatory raids in Gaza: “Operation Rainbow”, in May 2004, involved the murder of more than 50 Palestinians, including children, and the destruction of three hundred homes in Rafah, whereas “Operation Forward Shield”, in August, and “Operation Days of Penitence”, in October, killed at least 134 Palestinians in the towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia.
2007
The Blockade. Following its withdrawal from the Strip in 2005 and the victory of Hamas in the 2006 legislative elections, Israel declared Gaza “hostile territory” and imposed a blockade on the transfer of electricity, fuel, and other supplies into the Strip.
2008/9
The First Gaza War. In December 2008, Israel broke what had been a fragile ceasefire with Hamas by launching “Operation Cast Lead”: combining air strikes, naval operations and ground invasions, the mission lasted until the end of January 2009 and killed about 1,400 Palestinians and injured 5,300 in Gaza City, Rafah, and elsewhere in the Strip. Particularly brutal was the Zeitoun District Massacre: entire neighborhoods were razed, creating about 100,000 refugees, whilst white phosphorus munitions were used on civilian populations in densely-populated residential areas.
2012
Operation Pillar of Defense. Starting with the assassination of Ahmed Jabari, chief of the Hamas military wing in Gaza, Israel launched “Operation Pillar of Defense” in November 2012: the maneuver destroyed settlements all over the Gaza strip, killing 171 Palestinians, including 102 civilians, in the span of 8 days, and displacing 700 families.
2014
Battle of the Withered Grain. In order to dissuade Hamas from firing rockets from Gaza, Israel conducted a seven-week-long operation, dubbed “Protective Edge”: ground and air forces launched about 50,000 shells onto the Strip, in a combination of bombs, tank missiles, and other artillery. About 2,200 Gazans were killed including 1543 civilians and 10,000 wounded.
2018/9
The Great March of Return. From March 2018 to December 2019, Gazan civilians, eventually backed by Hamas, demonstrated peacefully every Friday to claim their “right of return” and protested the blockade imposed on the Strip. Israeli soldiers systematically responded with deadly force, killing 214 demonstrators and over 36,000 injured in the course of 21 months.
2021
Unity Intifada. The so-called Unity Intifada was triggered by an Israeli Supreme Court decision, in May 2021, ordering the eviction of four Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. Violence escalated after the Israeli police stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Hamas and Islamic Jihad retaliated by launching rockets from Gaza. In response, the IDF conducted a two-week operation “Guardian of the Walls”, which killed 260 people, destroyed about a thousand housing units and resulted in the internal displacement of more than 70,000 Palestinians, in what Tsahal described as the “first artificial intelligence war”. Journalists were targeted in the shelling of the al-Jalaa Tower, which housed Al Jazeera, Associated Press, and several other media.
2022
Operation Breaking Dawn. In August, 2022, then Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz ordered “Operation Breaking Dawn” in retaliation for ongoing rocket attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad: it involved some 147 airstrikes and killed about 50 civilians in Gaza City, Rafah, Khan Yunis, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia. “Breaking Dawn” was the last operation of its kind before the ongoing genocidal campaign.
2015-2023 : wave of racist mass shootings
2015-2023
It took nineteen years for the number of victims of hate crime in the United States to drop by 36%. In 2014, it reached its lowest since the 1990s. In only nine years, that number went back up 115%.
Many researchers, including Griffin Sims Edwards and Stephen Rushkin, have documented the impact of Donald Trump’s hate speech, and the legitimacy it acquired after his victory, on the rise of domestic terrorism since 2015. Here are a few examples of what they’ve termed, “the Trump effect”.
June 17, 2015
Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist and self-proclaimed neo-Nazi, opened fire on the Black community of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. He had attended an hour-long Bible study class at the religious establishment before gunning down nine of its participants. “I almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to me,” he told the police, but the man was determined to start a race war. Radicalized online after spending hours reading the Council of Conservative Citizens’ racist diatribes, Roof, a native of South Carolina, bitterly regretted the good old days of the Confederate States for whom “slavery subordination to the superior race is [the] natural and normal condition [of the negro]”. The day after the massacre, all flags were lowered to half-mast, and only the Confederate flag, with which Roof loved to take photos, continued to fly proudly over the Capitol in Columbia.
August 11-12, 2017
In Charlottesville, Virginia, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, members of the alt-right, the Ku Klux Klan, and far-right militias gathered to protest the city's decision to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park. The “Unite the Right rally”, which aimed to unify the American white nationalist movement, was met with resistance from numerous anti-fascist activists. On August 12, neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of counter-demonstrators, injuring 35 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Far from condemning the rally and the hateful motivations of its initiators, Donald Trump established an equivalence between the neo-fascists and anti-fascists clashing in Charlottesville, declaring that “there are very fine people on both sides”.
August 3, 2019
In El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, Patrick Crusius committed one of the deadliest mass murders on U.S. soil since World War II. Stating that he wanted to kill as many Mexicans as possible, he opened fire at a Walmart store, killing 23 people and wounding just as many. Prior to the shooting, Crusius was obsessed with the immigration debate. Praising Donald Trump's hardline border policy on social networks, everything in the manifesto he wrote to denounce the “Hispanic invasion” echoed the president's rhetoric on Mexican immigration. Three months earlier, at a rally in Florida, Trump had asked his supporters for ideas on how to “stop these people”. One of his supporters had shouted “Shoot them!”. The crowd laughed, the president smiled.
May 14, 2022
Payton Gendron, a proponent of the “Great Replacement” theory and self-described ethno-nationalist and white supremacist, was eighteen years old when he killed ten people, all of whom were Black, and wounded three others in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. With this act, he hoped to “terrorize all non-white and non-Christian people, and drive them out of the country”. In the manifesto he published online before the attack, Gendron said he initially identified as left-wing, before being convinced by the populist, supremacist, anti-Semitic, and ecofascist ideological positions of Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin. Anglin was one of Donald Trump’s earliest supporters in 2015, calling on his readers to follow him. He wrote, “let's vote for the first time in our lives for the only man who truly represents our interests.”
May 6, 2023
Mauricio Martinez Garcia is a Neo-Nazi, a (non-white) white supremacist, and an incel who killed eight people, including a three-year-old asian boy, in a shopping center in Allen, Texas. During the shooting, he wore a tactical vest embroidered with an “RWDS” (Right Wing Death Squad) crest. On his profile on the Russian social network Odnoklassniki, Garcia posted photos of his fascist tattoos, expressed his hatred of Asians, Arabs, Jews, and women, and fantasized about race wars and the collapse of society as a whole.
1983-2023: Argentine Presidents since the return of Democracy
December 1983 - July 1989
Raúl Alfonsín
Candidate of the social-democratic Radical Civic Union (UCR) in the 1983 election, Raúl Alfonsín’s presidency marked Argentina’s return to democracy after decades of military rule interspaced by periods of Peronist domination. Shortly after taking office, he set up the first official inquiry into the dictatorship’s crimes, the CONADEP (National Commission on Disappeared Persons). As opposition leader, he later signed the Pact of Olivos, a memorandum of understanding for a constitutional reform allowing his successor Carlos Menem to be reelected in 1995.
July 1989 - December 1999
Carlos Menem
Peronist Carlos Menem came to power in 1989, in a context of hyperinflation and social unrest, aiming to promote a newfound national stability. He immediately implemented neoliberal structural reforms and sweeping privatisations along the precepts of the Washington Consensus, and pegged the Argentine peso to the US dollar. Menem was re-elected in 1995, but his monetary and trade policies plunged his country into recession by the end of this second mandate. He also pardoned military and police commanders of the “Dirty War” period, responsible for killing thousands of civilians.
December 1999- December 2001
Fernando de la Rúa
Menem’s short-lived successor, mayor of Buenos Aires Fernando de la Rúa, could not reverse Argentina’s downward trend at the turn of the century. He called a state of emergency in December 2001, enforcing the “corralito”, a limit on cash withdrawals. In the midst of this full-blown banking and currency crisis, massive popular protests erupted. Eventually, grassroots opposition movements initiated among others by the piqueteros forced him to resign. He famously fled from the presidential Casa Rosada in a helicopter.
May 2003 - December 2007
Néstor Kirchner
Following the ‘Great Depression’, under the two interim presidencies of Adolfo Rodríguez Saá and Eduardo Duhalde, Néstor Kirchner came to power in 2003, aiming to bolster the Peronist Justicialist Party’s support among the working class. He managed to stitch together a broad, consensual coalition on a platform of economic growth, moderate redistribution, human rights justice, and restored sectoral collective bargaining. His relative success in some of these areas made him a symbolic figure of the Latin American “Pink Tide” of the early 2000s, albeit without him ever truly tackling the structures of capital accumulation.
December 2007 - December 2015
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner succeeded her husband, initially aiming to build on his progressive policies with nationalisations, energy prices subsidies, currency controls, and the introduction of a Universal Child Allowance program. Going into her second mandate, however, she went down the path of fiscal austerity, passing a series of controversial measures dubbed sintonía fina [fine tuning]. By the end of her term, Kirchner faced major protests in a context of stagnating wages, growing inflation and corruption scandals.
December 2015 - December 2019
Mauricio Macri
Amidst intense polarization between Kirchner’s supporters and opponents, known as la grieta [the crack], the millionaire businessman Mauricio Macri was elected in 2015. Macri formed a conservative-reformist centre-right coalition, Cambiemos, with which he was able to reverse many of Kirchner's policies through liberalization, deregulation, drastic cuts to public spending, His allegedly meritocratic agenda did not improve either unemployment or inflation, however. Soon confronted with a severe monetary crisis, Macri signed on to a $57 billion IMF loan – the biggest in the organisation’s history. In 2023, he stood openly behind Milei’s candidacy. Many cadres of the new far-right libertarian government hail from his traditional conservative party, Republican Proposal.
December 2019 - December 2023
Alberto Fernández
Alberto Fernández was Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers under the two Kirchner administrations until his resignation in 2008, He defeated incumbent Macri in the 2019 election. Fernandez had in the meantime reconciled with former president Cristina Kirchner, who had become too unpopular to run herself, but provided crucial support for his ticket and then served as a discreet vice-president. Fernández’s term was marked by the Covid-19 crisis and its socio-economic consequences, and by a continued degradation of living standards and soaring inflation levels, leading many disoriented voters, especially young ones, to cast their vote on Milei in 2023.