The Annihilation of Gaza and the Farce of Western Rhetoric

Once again, ceasefire negotiations between Hamas and the imperialist outpost that is Israel have crumbled. Hamas’ demand that Israel withdraw from Gaza, cease the mass slaughter of their people, and recognize the right of the Palestinian people to exist are a non-starter for the Zionist state. The reality is that Israel was never serious about negotiation – they outright rejected a deal that would have seen the release of all Israeli hostages. 

International pressure to end the genocide is mounting – imperial subalterns Britain, France, and Germany are evermore anxious about the spectacle of the famine conditions in Gaza, which are the design of the US and Israel. Much has been made of the threat to recognize a Palestinian state by these decrepit imperialist has-beens, but the truth is that their demands amount to the annexation of Gaza by the Palestinian Authority – the PA is very much a puppet of the West, a collaborator with Israel, which has done less than nothing for the masses in Gaza. 

This is the pattern of international demands to end the genocide – capitulation of Israel, dressed up in humanitarian rhetoric. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have demanded that Hamas disarm, disband and surrender the future of Palestine to Israel. Apparently it is the position of the international community that the real problem with the genocide of Gaza is its pace; demands for a two-state solution amount to the West-Bank-ifacation of Gaza; a slower, more easily ignored genocide.

Donald Trump, for his part, claims to be disturbed by the images of starving and deceased infants – and has, bizarrely, concluded that the most logical couse of action is for the United States to claim stewardship of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – Israel’s infamous “aid” organization which in reality functions as a means to lure Palestinians into kill-zones so that they may be massacred by IDF Einsatzgruppen. Over 1,000 Palestinians have been murdered in this way.

At the same time, 23 Palestinians have been killed, crushed, by aid pallets, recklessly airdropped by a growing coalition of European and West Asian countries, notably Germany, the UAE, and Jordan. This tracks with the performative rhetoric of these countries – airdrops are wildly inefficient, in addition to being dangerous for individuals on the ground. 

This ridiculous farce is made all the more disgusting by the fact that actual humanitarian aid organizations, led by the UN and more than capable of meeting the needs of Gaza, and waiting in the wings – cut off from starving men, women and infants by the Israeli siege of Gaza. Airdropping paltry boxes of supplies is a mere drop in the bucket that is the famine – and frankly constitutes complicity in the extermination of Palestine.

The European preference for a slow, more palatable genocide is greatly offensive to Israel. Netanyahu has declared, against all military, political and moral logic, that the IDF shall assault, capture, and raze to the ground Gaza City. Whether Israel intends to annex Gaza is more-or-less irrelevant in the face of the fact that it is the explicit intention of the zionist genocidaires to expel the entire population to neighboring Arab nations – for this, they must control the whole of the Strip for the time being. 

All that stands in the way of this apocalypse is the Palestinian resistance and the Yemeni people. Calls for Hamas to disarm, even as a requisite for peace, are calls for the extermination of the Palestinian people – the culmination of 77 years of systematic murder – in which all who do not resist are fully complicit.

Trump’s Drug War Remix and Mexican Sovereignty

Putting his grotesque spin on familiar US imperialist tactics, Trump is threatening to deploy the US military in Mexico with the supposed goal to do battle with drug cartels. Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum responded by saying, “The United States is not going to come to Mexico with the military. We cooperate, we collaborate but there is not going to be an invasion.” Trump has already used tariffs and the threat of tariffs to create a sense of chaos and impose a more belligerent US foreign policy towards Mexico . Expanding current US military and drone operations in Mexico to include lethal force would be an act of war on Mexico.

Starting as early as January, the Trump administration declared several cartels as terrorist organizations. Hearkening back to Obama’s double-tap drone strikes, this move could allow the US to declare any man of combat age to be a terrorist, rather than a more accurate description such as a father, paramedic, or simply a passer-by. The US already has an extensive drone surveillance program in Mexico that started under Biden and intensified under Trump and is in current cooperation with the Mexican government. There is very little stopping Trump from escalating the current program to be a future deadly drone program. 

This is not about drug trafficking, or surely Trump’s first target would be the opioid-pushing Sackler family. This is about expanding military operations in a way all too familiar to Latin America and the Caribbeans. Just look to the examples of Colombia, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cuba, Haiti, Panama, Venezuela, and Brazil to name a few. US expansion requires death and destruction, something surely to take place in Mexico unless we do something about it.

US Imperialists Issue 50% Tariff on Brazil

After months of back-and-forth proclamations and frantic negotiations, Trump’s international tariff regime has finally gone into effect. In classic Trump fashion, the tariff rollout was chaotic, slapdash, seemingly arbitrary—and deeply strategic. Trump is attempting to move the U.S. empire away from ruling primarily through the large multinational institutions that make up the post-WWII order and into direct economic and military pressure on individual nations. This Trump doctrine is, of course, not a retreat from U.S. domination but a reification of it.

One country subject to some of the highest tariffs is Brazil, which has been hit with a 50% tariff on much of its U.S. exports, excluding those exports key to the U.S. ruling class (energy, aircraft) and to the parasitic preferences of the U.S. population (orange juice). These tariffs were implemented with a White House Fact Sheet, absurdly claiming that Trump was “addressing a national emergency.” What is that national emergency? That Brazil has the audacity to exercise its own sovereignty.

Trump, the President of the most vicious empire in human history, and one that is currently carrying out a holocaust-level atrocity in Palestine, is claiming that Brazil is violating human rights by prosecuting former president Jair Bolsonaro for corruption. Bolsonaro is one of the most comically corrupt and reactionary leaders in recent world memory, who cut his teeth in the death squads of Brazil’s military dictatorship and became president on the back of a US judicial coup. Not only is Brazil firmly within its rights to prosecute Bolsonaro, but it is also morally justified in doing so.

Whether legal or illegal, whether through institutions or unilaterally, whether for purely economic or political reasons, any system of organizing the world based on imperialism and economic domination is unjust. As people who live in the heart of the US empire, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to ensure that Trump’s tariffs turn into rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

At least 18 Asylum Seekers Killed in Shipwreck Between Libya and Europe

A boat carrying dozens of asylum-seekers, bound for Europe, capsized off the coast of Libya, adding to the hundreds of people across Africa and the Middle East who have drowned as they’ve fled war and instability in their home countries. Libya is a prominent travel corridor for refugees, though the journey is a dangerous one—after the US-NATO-led overthrow of the Libyan government and assassination of the nation’s leader, Gadaffi, in 2011, the country spiraled into a failed state; human trafficking is rife and migrants seeking safety become victims.

Traveling to Europe, refugees find themselves in precarious travel circumstances, as dozens pack onto boats that don’t have the capacity; the result is 434 migrants have been reported dead and 611 missing off the Libyan coast in 2025 alone.