Syria

The geo-political disposition of the al-Sharaa/Julani government has become ever more unambiguous in recent weeks – the ‘indirect’ normalization talks between Syria and Israel have become direct talks; sanctions have been lifted by the Trump regime; a $7 billion energy deal has been signed between Syria and the US, Turkey and Qatar; the United Arab Emirates has begun the process of establishing so-called free trade zones near the port of Tartus to hyper-exploit the workers of Syria; and the Blood-Flag of the US empire has been raised atop Syrian soil once more.

At this point a crystal ball would be an extravagance, unneeded to divine the direction of the al-Sharaa government and the demands of Syrian realpolitik. The new Syria is emerging as a full-blown proxy of Turkish expansionism and US imperialism, making moves to disarm the Kuridsh struggle and actively abandoning the Palestinian people.

If al-Sharaa has the constancy of the Syrian people, he is undeserving of it. If his past as an Al-Qaeda butcher is no indicator, then his prostration before the demands of the United States unquestionably is. History has already borne out the cost of alignment with the United States: death, immiseration, desolation.

West Bank

This week, Israel has conducted raids across the whole of the West Bank. Focusing mostly on money exchanges and gold dealers, Israel claimed these businesses were funding “terrorism” . In other words, funding the ongoing resistance to genocide.

But the charges are almost certainly false. The fact is that money exchanges are critical to the reception of remittances, crucial to the livelihoods of Palestinians. Rather, the raids are designed, as is all that Israel does, to make life unbearable for Palestinians, to starve them out, to eradicate them. In the West Bank, as in Gaza, Israel has destroyed homes, smashed infrastructure, besieged hospitals, obliterated entire villages, stolen the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians. The Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, as he often is, was quite blunt about US-Israeli designs on the West Bank:

“Tulkarem and Jenin will look like Jabalia and Shujayea. Nablus and Ramallah will resemble Rafah and Khan Younis … They will also be turned into uninhabitable ruins, and their residents will be forced to migrate and seek a new life in other countries”

Confronted by the acidic terror of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, the world often neglects the ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by the Israel in the West Bank. Perhaps this is reasonable, given the scale of the carnage in Gaza – but we can never forget that the whole of Palestine is under assault by the United States and Israel.

Gaza Famine/GHF

On Monday night, Jake Wood, the executive director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, resigned. He was quoted by Reuters, explaining that the GHF does not adhere “to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

The prescience of this statement was revealed mere hours later; IDF guards opened fire on Palestinians attempting to secure food at a GHF aid site outside Jenin, killing one person and wounding 46. Earlier today, Israel did it again – IDF tanks opened fire on aid-seekers, killing 31 and wounding at least 200.

The stated goal of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is to provide the necessary aid to starving population of Gaza, but this is an increasingly transparent lie. The original proposal for the GHF was orginated by a group called the Mikveh Yisrael Forum, which is made up of Israeli politicians, military officers and intellectuals; according to the New York Times:

“The plan was designed to undermine Hamas’s control of Gaza, prevent food  from falling into militants’ hands or the black market, and bypass the  United Nations, which Israeli officials do not trust and have accused of  anti-Israeli bias. Israeli officials argued, too, that their plan would  move distribution out of chaotic and lawless areas into zones under  Israeli military control.”

With the ignominious commencement of GHF operations, the truth of Mr. Woods statement is crystal clear. The GHF is simply a new branch of the US-Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. Reaching GHF aid sites necessitates displacement into areas control by the IDF; when aid-seekers arrive at these distribution hubs, they are massacred by the IDF, or they are arrested and interrogated seemingly at random.

So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation cannot adequately feed the people of Gaza, but it is more than capable of butchering them. Such is the nature of US imperialism; such is the nature of a world where people of conscience do not act upon their principles.

Hegseth

US defense secretary/deranged millenarian freak, Pete Hegseth, spoke last week at the Shangri-La Dialouge, an annuel Asian security forum in Singapore. While Trump foreign policy has typically been rhetorically different from his preddessors, Hegseth’s remarks were notable for their continuity. He emphasized that US imperialists continue to view Asia as a critical strateic region to dominate, an especially the need to “contain” China. This saber-rattling with the rising nuclear-armed Chinese imperialists threatens the lives and livelyhoods of the billions of people who live in Asia.

The policy of building up US troops and ships, and funding militaries in proxy states and allies in the region dates back to the Obama era, Obama openly called it (with imperialist arrogance) the “pivot to Asia.” While Trump and Hegseth certainly favor a different method of achieving dominance than the Obama crowd (favoring country to country relations over post WW2 multi-lateral arrangements), the end goal is the same: keeping the US imperialists as the world’s top dog and dominating the rest of the world economically and militarily, no matter the cost to human lives and livelihoods.