Author: Oliver Eagleton

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False Alternative

In launching its assault on Gaza, the Israeli government had three primary aims: to exact revenge, to restore the prestige of the army – which had been severely damaged by the 7 October attack – and to guarantee Netanyahu’s political survival. So far it has proven relatively successful. The IDF has embarked on an effective public-relations campaign to rebuild its credibility as it lays waste to the Strip. And while Netanyahu’s popularity is at a nadir, calls for his resignation remain marginal; the public seem content to wait until the fighting is over to hold him accountable, which gives him an incentive to prolong it indefinitely.

Yet after four months, it is becoming harder to sustain the official narrative that the purpose of the war is to eliminate Hamas and secure the release of the hostages. It is increasingly clear that these goals are contradictory, since the greatest threat to the hostages’ lives is the continuation of the violence. With the number of IDF casualties rising, more than a hundred Israeli captives still being held in Gaza, and no significant gains in weakening Hamas’s operational capacities, public support for the war is declining. A significant majority – 58% – have expressed a lack of confidence in Netanyahu’s management of it. More Israelis now believe that returning the captives should take priority over the destruction of Hamas than vice versa.

Against this backdrop, a series of interconnected questions have come to dominate the Israeli political agenda: the future of Netanyahu, the future of the war, and the settlement that will be established in its wake. The most widely touted candidate to replace Netanyahu is the former army general and Defence Minister Benny Gantz, whose National Unity party is polling far ahead of Likud. Gantz’s political vision has never been particularly coherent. Over the years he has indicated support for some kind of diplomatic solution with the Palestinians, but he has also stressed that the present situation is ‘not ripe for a permanent agreement’. He opposed the Nation-State Law but abstained from voting when amendments were proposed in the Knesset. During the protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms he avoided direct confrontation with the Prime Minister and stressed the need for a ‘mutual agreement’ between the two sides. Since October, Gantz has served in the war cabinet as a minister without portfolio. At times he has tried to distance himself from Netanyahu’s belligerent rhetoric, but in practice he has been just as active in prosecuting the military campaign. 

Among Israel’s Western backers, Gantz is seen as a welcome alternative who could save the country from the hard right and reestablish its identity as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. Washington, in particular, views him as someone who could be persuaded to accept a ‘constructive solution’ to the perennial problem of Palestine. The hope, among Biden and his team, is that once the war winds down Netanyahu will be ousted and replaced by this more reliable and less erratic partner. Yet both Gantz’s record and the current situation in Israel suggest that this is wishful thinking.

For one thing, there is a question mark over how much Gantz truly wants to lead the country. During his short political career, he has twice saved the political skin of the man he is supposedly trying to replace: first in April 2020, when he helped Netanyahu form an emergency government; then in October 2023, when he joined the war cabinet in the name of ‘national duty’. Having passed up these opportunities to topple his opponent, Gantz now finds himself without a clear pathway to power. As Israeli politics have moved rightward, his ‘centrist’ camp has lost the ability to assemble a Knesset majority on its own. It would need the support of Arab parties, which currently hold ten seats out of 120. But given Gantz’s attitude toward both Palestinians and Arab Israelis, winning their trust seems all but impossible. 

During the 2019 election campaign, Gantz boasted that he had ‘returned Gaza to the Stone Age’ during Operation Protective Edge, when he served as the IDF Chief of Staff. He also claimed to have ‘eliminated 1,364 terrorists’ – the total number of Palestinians killed in the assault, including hundreds of children. Now Gantz is replaying these apocalyptic fantasies on a much larger scale, waging a brutal war against an entrapped civilian population that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the same time, he is overseeing the systematic persecution of Arabs in Israel, whose treatment is reminiscent of the military rule imposed on them in the early years of the state. The legal organization Adalah has documented an ongoing crackdown on any expression of solidarity with Palestine, which has so far led to hundreds of arrests, a wave of unfair dismissals, and the expulsion of hundreds of students from higher education institutions. Earlier this month, four leading Arab politicians, including Mohammad Barakeh – head of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab citizens of Israel – were detained by police for trying to participate in an anti-war protest.

The government has also pushed through extensive budget cuts for Arab local authorities, which are already suffering from persistent neglect, crumbling infrastructure and an upsurge in organized crime that the state refuses to address. In light of this, it is unlikely that the Arab population will support Gantz’s elevation to prime ministerial office, even if he is presented as the ‘lesser evil’. In recent years, mainstream Israeli political discourse has become highly personalized, centred on Netanyahu as an individual figure: ‘Should he stay or should he go?’ But for Arabs his removal would make little meaningful difference.

One need only recall the anti-Netanyahu ‘Government of Change’, elected in 2020 and led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, to underscore this point. The coalition, which represented almost every part of the Israeli political spectrum – and even won the reluctant backing of the Arab parties – had no plans to break with its predecessor’s so-called security policies. It had no interest in ending the conflict or the occupation. After only a year, it dissolved itself in order to save the regulations governing the dual legal system in the West Bank, which were placed in jeopardy when the right refused to vote for their renewal. In the end, the Bennett–Lapid government preferred to return Netanyahu to power than to see the apartheid regime threatened.

The unwillingness of the Israeli ‘opposition’ to mount a genuine challenge to the present order was reflected in the mass protests last year, where hundreds of thousands took to the streets following Netanyahu’s judicial coup. The movement, which was supported by senior figures in the political and military establishment, claimed to be ‘defending democracy’. But this did not mean full political and legal equality for all, since that would have to include Arabs. Its image of democracy was rather a technical-procedural one, based on the separation of the executive and judicial branches. The protesters’ primary demand was for the courts – those which had ratified the Nation-State Law, along with countless other racist and discriminatory measures – to retain their formal independence. Above all, the leaders stressed that an impartial national legal system was necessary to protect Israeli soldiers from facing international war crimes tribunals. Unsurprisingly, this was a ‘democratic celebration’ in which Arab citizens refused to take part.   

Even if Israel’s ‘centrist’ bloc were to somehow form a new government, with the aim of changing the status quo on Palestine, the obstacles to a Western-backed settlement would still be insurmountable. Among them is the strength of the Israeli far right, which would fight tooth-and-nail to block any diplomatic ‘solution’, as well as the drastic decrease in public support for Palestinian statehood after 7 October. There is also the dramatic demographic changes in the occupied territories, caused by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the constant growth in the number of settlers, whom the Israeli government would never agree to relocate. In Palestine, meanwhile, there is the issue of widespread distrust for the PA, which lacks the credibility to implement any such arrangement.  

Israel’s Arab citizens, who comprise 20% of its total population, are now succumbing to despair as the state continues to slaughter their brethren in Gaza. Large numbers of Israeli Jews have given up on the prospect of a legal settlement: a development that the far right is exploiting by calling for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their historic homeland. A government of the ‘centre’ would not solve this structural crisis. It would only put a thin layer of makeup on the face of Israeli society.

Read on: Yonatan Mendel, ‘New Jerusalem’, NLR 81.

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Asymmetries

As Israel’s assault on Gaza enters its fifth month, it remains unclear whether it will grow into a full-scale regional conflict. Among the decisive factors is Hezbollah, one of the most heavily armed non-state actors in the world, and arguably the most skilled in urban and alpine warfare. So far, the group has refrained from taking escalatory measures, aiming to prevent Lebanese involvement in the war while partially diverting the IDF with limited attacks from the north. Rather than targeting Israeli vital infrastructure, it has conducted hundreds of operations aimed at military outposts, forcing Israel to create an internal buffer zone by evacuating citizens from northern settlements. More than 170 Hezbollah fighters have been killed so far; but the party, which has an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 trained combatants, can handle such losses.

There are elements of the Israeli political and military leadership, however, which seem intent on provoking a major confrontation with Hezbollah. Their motives are clear enough. First, members of the Israeli cabinet, along with the IDF command and Mossad, know that their best chance of staying in power is to prolong the fighting – and they are not above sacrificing their own civilians to achieve this. Second, it is possible that if Israel continues to carry out mass murder without achieving any of its stated war aims, it may find itself more isolated on the international stage; whereas if Hezbollah were to start attacking Israeli cities and targeting civilians, Netanyahu’s government could revive the fantasy of an imperiled democratic state and rally the ‘forces of civilization’ to its cause. And third, there is a fear that Hezbollah might someday launch its own ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ across Israel’s northern border – prompting senior politicians, including Gantz, Gallant and Ben-Gvir, to call for a preemptive strike.

Israel has therefore been making repeated attempts to provoke its neighbour: targeting civilians in South Lebanon and launching attacks elsewhere in the country. Hezbollah and Hamas commanders, including Wissam Al-Tawil and Saleh Al-Arouri, have been assassinated on Lebanese soil, and Netanyahu has threatened to ‘turn Beirut and southern Lebanon into Gaza’. But Hezbollah remains committed to low-intensity warfare and has so far refused to respond with a major assault. What explains this strategic decision? It is not just a fear of further destruction that is preventing escalation; it is an awareness that this would not necessarily advance the group’s objectives, nor those of the Resistance Axis.

To understand Hezbollah’s calculation, we need to consider Lebanon’s position in the region. Since Obama announced the ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2009, the US has been trying to establish a new Middle Eastern security architecture that would allow it to minimize direct involvement in proxy wars and focus on containing China. As part of this process, the hegemon sought to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab world, culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords. At the same time, Iran and Saudi Arabia began to pursue détente – hoping to reorient their economies, attract inward investment and forge ties with neighbouring countries, while reducing their respective roles in regional conflicts. Last year the two states reached a bilateral agreement in Beijing, the details of which remain obscure, but which seem to involve a compromise when it comes to nations where they both wield influence, such as Yemen and Lebanon. Some analysts have argued that Mohammed bin Salman is now ready to cooperate with Hezbollah and accept its status as the dominant political and military power in Lebanon. It may even be in the Saudis’ interest to have a strong deterrent force on Israel’s border, especially one for which they have no financial or political responsibility.

Given Lebanon’s ongoing economic misery, this could be a potential lifeline. The country’s downward spiral began in 2019 after the Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, cut off aid and divested from its real-estate and financial sectors. Challenging Hezbollah’s hegemony was cited as the motive, although the decision also came after the ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis finally reached the Gulf, forcing its leaders to restructure their foreign investment plans. Now, the Lebanese political class, including powerful elements in Hezbollah, believe that the Saudi–Iran accords – which have so far endured following 7 October – could allow them to turn back the clock to before the 2019 collapse. Their aim is to revive the rentier model that was established in the post-Mandate period and consolidated under Rafiq Al-Hariri in the 1990s: a dominant financial sector propping up the central state through regular loans, and a real-estate market dependent on inflows from Gulf investors and Lebanese expatriates. They also hope that the Lebanese financial system could now serve as a mediator for Gulf and Iranian investment in the reconstruction of Syria.

With the Saudi–Iran deal in place, and the effects of the financial crisis having passed, the barriers to investment in Lebanon could be removed and Hezbollah’s legitimacy could be recognized across the region. Moreover, if Iran is hoping to scale down its involvement in regional conflicts and establish lasting economic partnerships with erstwhile rivals, then it may want Hezbollah to do the same: reducing its military activity in Lebanon and Syria and focusing instead on economic revival and ‘good governance’. One should refrain from making categorical statements about the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah, since its contours are unclear, and the latter can hardly be described as a simple proxy. But Tehran’s foreign policy outlook would seem, prima facie, to align with Hezbollah’s approach to Gaza over recent months.

It would also appear to tally with the interests of Washington, which is eager to prevent the war from engulfing the Middle East, and has reportedly been making diplomatic efforts to convince Hezbollah to continue its policy of restraint. Though the details remain unclear and uncorroborated, briefings from Iranian officials and Hezbollah-affiliated media suggest that the White House has offered Hezbollah a new ‘settlement for the entire region’, so long as it does not expand the war. Habib Fayad, a Lebanese journalist (and brother of a Hezbollah MP), has argued that the Americans would accept ceding control over Lebanon to Hezbollah, on the condition that the party pledges to never launch a 7 October-style incursion into Israel.

Yet this supposed settlement may also create a dilemma for Hezbollah. Previously, the group was able to evade accountability for the Lebanese economic crisis, since it has no ties to the banking and real estate sectors. It could use its status as a transnational military movement to distance itself from Lebanon’s national political parties, loathed for their mismanagement and corruption. Were Hezbollah to accept this American offer, some of its cadres are worried that it would signal its slow transformation into something more like a conventional party of government: integrated into the establishment, sapped of its insurgent energy. Whether it will take this course remains uncertain. The group consists both of politicians, most of whom have no military background and may be favourable to such ‘normalization’, and a militant faction – more heavily represented in the leadership – which is reluctant to be co-opted. 

The present situation thus appears to be one of deep asymmetry. Israel, foundering on the battlefield and discrediting itself internationally, is under pressure to set out some sort of end-game for its war. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has no real time constraints. As the fighting drags on, it believes it can renew its credibility – which was damaged during the Syrian civil war and the 2019 protests in Lebanon – by striking a balance between armed solidarity with Palestine and concern for Lebanese security. This is not to say that Hezbollah is merely instrumentalizing the conflict; its dedication to the Palestinian cause is genuine and should not be understated. The point is that Israel and the Resistance Axis are operating on two different timeframes, one more urgent than the other.

Still, Hezbollah’s policy could yet be reversed if regional war is deemed necessary or inevitable. Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly asserted that in these circumstances, his forces would engage with no limits or constraints – which, according to some Lebanese commentators, could mean attacking strategic Israeli targets including ammonium nitrate factories, plus petrochemical and energy plants, in an attempt to redress the significant military imbalance between the two sides.

If Hezbollah is currently pursuing a non-escalatory strategy and asserting its willingness to negotiate with Israel on condition of a ceasefire, that is because it is confident that it can consolidate its power both in Lebanon and across the region. In other words, Hezbollah still has something to lose from entering a full-scale war. But if Hezbollah comes to believe that this kind of war – which could lay waste to Lebanon, damage the party’s military infrastructure and compromise it politically – is unavoidable, then it would have nothing to lose. In which case, Israel may end up with a powerful presence on its northern border: heavily armed, and no longer interested in restraint. 

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’, NLR 38.

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Unlearning Machines

There is no denying the technological marvels that have resulted from the application of transformers in machine learning. They represent a step-change in a line of technical research that has spent most of its history looking positively deluded, at least to its more sober initiates. On the left, the critical reflex to see this as yet another turn of the neoliberal screw, or to point out the labour and resource extraction that underpin it, falls somewhat flat in the face of a machine that can, at last, interpret natural-language instructions fairly accurately, and fluently turn out text and images in response. Not long ago, such things seemed impossible. The appropriate response to these wonders is not dismissal but dread, and it is perhaps there that we should start, for this magic is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few often idiosyncratic people at the social apex of an unstable world power. It would obviously be foolhardy to entrust such people with the reified intelligence of humanity at large, but that is where we are.

Here in the UK, tech-addled university managers are currently advocating for overstretched teaching staff to turn to generative AI for the production of teaching materials. More than half of undergraduates are already using the same technology to help them write essays, and various AI platforms are being trialled for the automation of marking. Followed through to their logical conclusion, these developments would amount to a repurposing of the education system as a training process for privately owned machine learning models: students, teachers, lecturers all converted into a kind of outsourced administrator or technician, tending to the learning of a black-boxed ‘intelligence’ that does not belong to them. Given that there is no known way of preventing Large Language Models from ‘hallucinating’ – weaving untruths and absurdities into their output, in ways that can be hard to spot unless one has already done the relevant work oneself – residual maintainers of intellectual standards would then be reduced to the role of providing corrective feedback to machinic drivel.

Where people don’t perform this function, the hallucinations will propagate unchecked. Already the web – which was once imagined, on the basis of CERN, as a sort of idealized scientific community – is being swamped by the pratings of statistical systems. Much as physical waste is shipped to the Global South for disposal, digital effluent is being dumped on the global poor: beyond the better-resourced languages, low-quality machine translations of low-quality English language content now dominate the web. This, of course, risks poisoning one of the major wells from which generative AI models have hitherto been drinking, raising the spectre of a degenerative loop analogous to the protein cycles of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease – machine learning turning into its opposite.

Humans, no doubt, will be called upon to correct such tendencies, filtering, correcting and structuring training data for the very processes that are leaving this trail of destruction. But the educator must of course be educated, and with even the book market being saturated with auto-generated rubbish, the culture in which future educators will learn cannot be taken for granted. In a famous passage, the young Marx argued that the process of self-transformation involved in real learning implied a radical transformation in the circumstances of learning. If learning now risks being reduced to a sanity check on the outputs of someone else’s machine, finessing relations of production that are structurally opposed to the learner, the first step towards self-education will have to involve a refusal to participate in this technological roll-out.

While the connectionist AI that underlies these developments has roots that predate even the electronic computer, its ascent is inextricable from the dynamics of a contemporary world raddled by serial crises. An education system that was already threatening to collapse provides fertile ground for the cultivation of a dangerous technology, whether this is driven by desperation, ingenuousness or cynicism on the part of individual actors. Healthcare, where the immediate risks may be even higher, is another domain which the boosters like to present as in-line for an AI-based shake-up. We might perceive in these developments a harbinger of future responses to the climate emergency. Forget about the standard apocalyptic scenarios peddled by the prophets of Artificial General Intelligence; they are a distraction from the disaster that is already upon us.

Matteo Pasquinelli’s recent book, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence, is probably the most sophisticated attempt so far to construct a critical-theoretical response to these developments. Its title is somewhat inaccurate: there is not much social history here – not in the conventional sense. Indeed, as was the case with Joy Lisi Rankin’s A People’s History of Computing in the United States (2018), it would be hard to construct such a history for a technical realm that has long been largely tucked away in rarefied academic and research environments. The social enters here by way of a theoretical reinterpretation of capitalist history centred on Babbage’s and Marx’s analyses of the labour process, which identifies even in nineteenth century mechanization and division of labour a sort of estrangement of the human intellect. This then lays the basis for an account of the early history of connectionist AI. The ‘eye’ of the title links the automation of pattern recognition to the history of the supervision of work.

If barely a history, the book is structured around a few striking scholarly discoveries that merit serious attention. It is well known that Babbage’s early efforts to automate computation were intimately connected with a political-economic perspective on the division of labour. A more novel perspective here comes from Pasquinelli’s tracing of Marx’s notion of the ‘general intellect’ to Ricardian socialist William Thompson’s 1824 book, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth. Thompson’s theory of labour highlighted the knowledge implied even in relatively lowly kinds of work – a knowledge that was appropriated by machines and set against the very people from whom it had been alienated. This set the stage for speculations about the possible economic fallout from this accumulation of technology, such as Marx’s famous ‘fragment on machines’.

But the separating out of a supposed ‘labour aristocracy’ within the workers’ movement made any emphasis on the more mental aspects of work hazardous for cohesion. As the project of Capital matured, Marx thus set aside the general intellect for the collective worker, de-emphasizing knowledge and intellect in favour of a focus on social coordination. In the process, an early theory of the role of knowledge and intellect in mechanization was obscured, and hence required reconstruction from the perspective of the age of the Large Language Model. The implication for us here is that capitalist production always involved an alienation of knowledge; and the mechanization of intelligence was always embedded in the division of labour.

If Pasquinelli stopped there, his book would amount to an interesting manoeuvre on the terrain of Marxology and the history of political economy. But this material provides the theoretical backdrop to a scholarly exploration of the origins of connectionist approaches to machine learning, first in the neuroscience and theories of self-organization of cybernetic thinkers like Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts and Ross Ashby that formed in the midst of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war, and then in the late-50s emergence, at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, of Frank Rosenblatt’s ‘perceptron’ – the earliest direct ancestor of contemporary machine learning models. Among the intellectual resources feeding into the development of the perceptron were a controversy between the cyberneticians and Gestalt psychologists on the question of Gestalt perception or pattern recognition; Hayek’s connectionist theory of mind – which he had begun to develop in a little-reported stint as a lab assistant to neuropathologist Constantin Monakow, and which paralleled his economic beliefs; and vectorization methods that had emerged from statistics and psychometrics, with their deep historical links to the eugenics movement. The latter connection has striking resonances in the context of much-publicized concerns over racial and other biases in contemporary AI.

Pasquinelli’s unusual strength here lies in combining a capacity to elaborate the detail of technical and intellectual developments in the early history of AI with an aspiration towards the construction of a broader social theory. Less well-developed is his attempt to tie the perceptron and all that has followed from it to the division of labour, via an emphasis on the automation not of intelligence in general, but of perception – linking this to the work of supervising production. But he may still have a point at the most abstract level, in attempting to ground the alienated intelligence that is currently bulldozing its way through digital media, education systems, healthcare and so on, in a deeper history of the machinic expropriation of an intellectuality that was previously embedded in labour processes from which head-work was an inextricable aspect.

The major difference with the current wave, perhaps, is the social and cultural status of the objects of automation. Where once it was the mindedness of manual labour that found itself embodied in new devices, in a context of stratifications where the intellectuality of such realms was denied, in current machine learning models it is human discourse per se that is objectified in machinery. If the politics of machinery was never neutral, the level of generality that mechanization is now reaching should be ringing alarm bells everywhere: these things cannot safely be entrusted to a narrow group of corporations and technical elites. As long as they are, these tools – however magical they might seem – will be our enemies, and finding alternatives to the dominant paths of technical development will be a pressing matter.

Read on: Hito Steyerl, ‘Common Sensing?’, NLR 144.

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Ukania and Palestine

The UK government has been among the most hawkishly pro-Israel states in the Western world, and the opposition Labour Party has done its best to purge critics of Israel from its ranks – yet the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain has been the largest in Europe. As one of the chief organizers of that movement, how would you account for its impressive scale?

In many Western countries, the pro-Palestine movement has different components that don’t always work together: leftist, Muslim, Arab nationalist. When we set up the Stop the War Coalition in 2001 we tried to take a different approach, and began collaborating with Muslim groups from early on – for instance after the massacre in Jenin in spring 2002. We decided that the February 2003 mass demonstration against the Iraq war would also be a march for Palestinian liberation: the two slogans for the event were ‘Don’t Attack Iraq’ and ‘Freedom for Palestine’. Then, during the protests against Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, we made an alliance with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Muslim Association of Britain, Friends of Al Aqsa and the Palestine Forum in Britain, which remains in place today. We’ve also worked a lot with British trade unions, whose stance on this issue has generally been quite robust. So I think the strong links between these institutions make the UK a distinctive case.  

There’s also a fairly widespread awareness of Britain’s imperial history, including its role in the Zionist project: Balfour, Sykes–Picot, and of course the League of Nations Mandate. If you mention these things at a rally in London, people of very different backgrounds and social classes know what you’re talking about – which is interesting, since we’re not taught about them in school. Now, with the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and violence spreading across the region, people are horrified by the UK’s support for the Israeli war machine. They recognize that this is a watershed moment. So for seventeen consecutive weeks there have been either major national demonstrations, which have brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets, or significant numbers joining local actions. In response, the government has suggested banning Palestine flags, proscribing certain slogans and even outlawing the protests outright, as was done in France and Germany. But as yet they haven’t succeeded.  

Does that challenge the idea, which we heard throughout the Corbyn years, that anti-imperialism is a marginal, unpopular strain in British politics?

I think there’s a misconception that British workers have always been bought off by imperialism. But if you look at the history, there have been repeated mobilizations around international issues: from the Spanish Civil War to the Suez crisis to South African apartheid. William Morris bitterly opposed the Sudan war in 1884. The Lancashire working class supported the North during the US civil war even though they suffered hardship as a result. These were all popular causes. So there is a strong political current here – and I think it’s one of the main reasons why Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015. But of course, that current is anathema to the Labour establishment, whose foreign policy has been consistently reactionary, especially when it came to the independence and decolonization movements of the twentieth century. The right of the party couldn’t bear the idea that Corbyn would have changed Britain’s policy on the Middle East. And they couldn’t bear that a substantial segment of the population supported him on these questions. They could have tolerated him renationalizing the railways, but that was a bridge too far.

Does that also explain why the UK government has responded so aggressively to the recent protests?

I think the government was surprised by the response to October 7th. As the bombing of Gaza got underway, they decided to light up Downing Street in the colours of the Israeli flag. They thought this would be another Ukraine moment, with everyone rallying around Israel in a supposed clash between civilization and barbarism. They were gearing up for that kind of propaganda operation. But as early as October 9th, thousands of people gathered to protest outside the Israeli Embassy. As with 9/11, they saw that this attack would be used to justify killing on a much greater scale – and that the Israeli government would exploit this opportunity to try to expel the Arab population from historic Palestine. People didn’t trust the government, or the media coverage, or Keir Starmer. And this is a serious problem for the political class, because if the war continues to escalate they won’t have a mandate for intervention. They’ll struggle to gain consent for following the US into this military quagmire. And they won’t be believed when they tell us that Iran poses an existential threat, for example.

This is partly why we’ve seen the attempts to repress the movement. The government have branded the demos ‘hate marches’ and introduced legislation to criminalize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. They’ve also launched a crackdown on smaller fringe groups. The Muslim outfit Hizb ut-Tahrir has been labelled a terrorist organization – which obviously it isn’t, although we might disagree with it on most issues. Police have also arrested members of a small Maoist organization called the CPGB-ML, raided their houses and confiscated their literature. People in the Muslim community are being told that their children can’t talk about Palestine in school, otherwise they’ll be reported under the Prevent legislation. There is a real effort, from different sections of the establishment, to present pro-Palestine activists as Hamas supporters or antisemites. But despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail and the Metropolitan Police, they only ever manage to find about half a dozen people at each march who they can claim are carrying questionable placards.

More than 70% of the UK population now support a ceasefire, while the two main Westminster parties oppose it. What are the strategic implications of this situation for the left? Could it open up the space for an electoral challenge to Starmer’s Labour?

When the election is held later this year, Palestine will be on the ballot paper. Right now neither party is managing to satisfy its own supporters, let alone the wider public, so my guess is that there will be major abstention. It still looks like Labour will win a clear majority, but Starmer’s cheerleading for Netanyahu has prompted a mass exodus of members. Every week I hear about more local politicians who are leaving in disgust. In Liverpool, Hastings, Oxford and elsewhere, left-wing councillors have established independent groupings. Some of these people will probably run against Labour in the general election. It’s hard to predict how they’ll do, given the constraints of the first-past-the-post system, but they’ll certainly hurt the Labour vote share in various places – especially where there is strong support for a ceasefire. And this could, in theory, form the basis of a new organization: a new type of left party.

One of the big problems, though, is that the major trade unions remain tied to Labour. There are lots of general secretaries who come and speak at our Palestine demos, and several unions have backed our call for a ‘workplace day of action’ on February 7th, which is encouraging. But despite the strike wave that’s taken place over the last two years, the unions haven’t made significant gains in terms of their membership or influence. They are still relatively weak formations. So they’ll be keen to strike deals with Starmer once he gets into power, and reluctant to support autonomous political initiatives.

Might the unions begin to play a more militant role once a future Labour government starts imposing wage restraint on workers, as Starmer has indicated that it will?

Well I suppose we’ve been here before. Wilson launched a brutal attack on the Seamen’s Union in 1966, but the labour movement still refused to cut ties with his government. Since then, the unions have lost a great deal of their strength, which may put them in an even more precarious position; but then again so has Labour and Labourism, as a result of severing its organic connection with the working class. So I guess the answer is: some will wrest free of the party and some won’t. The Fire Brigades Union disaffiliated under Blair, and it’s conceivable that it and others like it might do so again. But my sense is that the larger unions will do everything they can to try to preserve a Labour government, even if its policies – on everything from austerity to the Middle East – are merely an echo of the Tories’.

Where next for the Palestine movement in the UK, especially given the tendency for regular A-to-B marches to lose momentum? How to preserve its energy?

The forms of action that can be taken are almost endless. Groups like Workers for a Free Palestine and Palestine Action have been shutting down weapons factories. Protesters have been staging sit-ins in railway stations. There was a day of action against Barclays Bank – which provides billions worth of investment to arms companies linked to Israel – and other types of BDS organizing are sure to continue. We’re preparing for limited walkouts across workplaces and campuses next week. But I don’t think we should see direct action and marches as somehow counterposed. To me, what the national demos do is bring very large numbers of people and groups together – which energizes them to go off and do different things. So that helps to keep the momentum going. If you don’t have the national demos, there’s a danger that the movement will fragment.

The other thing that will help to sustain the activism is a strong political core, which takes us back to the question of anti-imperialism. I think it’s important for people to see Gaza as integrally related to the wider setup in the Middle East – how it’s shaped by the United States, and to a lesser extent by Britain. So you need public meetings and discussions to develop that critique. And you also need writers and intellectuals to bring the issue into focus. Apparently Ghada Karmi’s 2023 book One State has sold out, and keeps selling out every time new copies are printed, which tells you that people are increasingly aware that the two-state ‘solution’ is a fantasy and are now thinking beyond it.

The thing is, even if there were a ceasefire tomorrow, this movement isn’t going away. The demos might get much smaller, and people might want to do more local actions, but the feeling among the organizers is that there has been a permanent sea-change in public attitudes towards Palestine. And this has already altered British politics. The establishment are still trying to weaponize accusations of antisemitism against anyone who criticizes Israel, but this has become much harder to pull off. The line that Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ just doesn’t work anymore. Thanks to both the solidarity campaign and the ICJ ruling, Israel will now forever be associated with the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.

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Chaos in Ecuador

In recent years, the surging violence in Ecuador has made international headlines. Initially, coverage centred on frequent prison riots and massacres, which have claimed four hundred lives since 2021. Then, as the turmoil spread beyond the penitentiary system, the focus shifted to gang shootings and executions. Last April, video footage of an attack in the coastal city of Esmeraldas, showing a speed boat full of armed men shooting people on the docks, went viral. The following summer, the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated and his alleged hitmen were murdered in custody. Now the country is reeling from a 24-hour rampage by drug gangs that culminated in a live, on-air hostage-taking on a TV news set. The incident prompted the newly inaugurated president Daniel Noboa to announce that the country was facing an ‘internal armed conflict’: constitutional parlance for a declaration of war, which essentially allows the military to take over from the police. Ecuador wasn’t always this cliche of a narco-state. It was once hailed as an ‘island of peace’, a security success story. What explains its spiral into chaos?

When Rafael Correa became president in 2007, the national murder rate was 15.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. When he left office office ten years later, it had fallen to 5.8, one of the lowest in Latin America. Several policies lay behind this success. There were, undoubtedly, some elements of a traditional law-and-order approach. The police force grew by 40% and many of its personnel were replaced, partly as a result of a 2010 police mutiny in which the president was held hostage for a day. There were significant wage hikes – the salary of rank-and-file officers was tripled – as well as investment in training and equipment that were often sorely lacking. The policing doctrine was also reformed, with the government driving decentralization and a smaller-scale, neighbourhood approach. Such initiatives played a major role in reducing crime rates.

This was accompanied by broader institutional change: most notably the creation of a Coordinating Security Ministry which oversaw security policy and enabled collaboration between different state agencies, in an attempt to diminish rivalries between branches of the military, police and intelligence services. Correa’s government also invested in a widely celebrated 911 emergency response system, which established call centres in seventeen locations by 2015. The state was, in short, making itself present on its territory: an exercise in Weberian sovereignty unlike anything that had come before. 

Perhaps more importantly, the Correa administration implemented a series of ambitious social policies – striving, for instance, to rehabilitate and reintegrate members of Ecuador’s prominent urban gangs. It approached the Latin Kings and Queens, Ñetas and Masters of the Street in an attempt to convince them to ditch crime and enrol in social and educational schemes. The government recognized that these organizations had not yet been inserted into the structures of the larger Mexican-run cartels, and that it could therefore stop the problem from festering. Correa also decriminalized the possession of small quantities of narcotics, as part of a general shift towards treating drug consumption as a public health issue. The aim was to prevent overcrowding in the prison system and allow the police to focus on criminal organizations.

Beyond that, the administration oversaw a marked improvement in living conditions. It doubled social spending, with significant increases for health and education, plus robust welfare programmes and a higher minimum wage. It audited the public finances to suspend or restructure illegitimate debts, renegotiated the country’s oil contracts, and improved tax collection from $5bn in 2007 to $13bn in 2017. By the end of Correa’s tenure, poverty had been reduced by 41.6% and inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, had fallen by 16.7%. Ecuador was making the kind of social progress that renders drug cartels obsolete. 

The concrete effects of Correa’s policies belie the narrative, pedalled by the Ecuadorean establishment, that his ‘soft-on-crime’ tactics are to blame for the current security collapse. Media pundits often suggest that if Ecuador was peaceful under Correa, this was because his government had made a secret pact with the narcos. But this argument is fanciful. The gangs would only have accepted such a deal were they able to increase their drug traffic. Yet even the US Drug Enforcement Agency celebrated ‘the excellent results obtained by the anti-narcotics police’ under Correa, which significantly disrupted the trade. Since he left office, by contrast, drug exports have risen to unprecedented levels.

It was in 2017, under the presidency of Lenín Moreno, that the situation began to unravel. Having styled himself as a continuity candidate, once in office Moreno reversed most of his predecessor’s policies. Under the supervision of the IMF – which extended Ecuador a credit line in 2019, on the condition of a so-called ‘reform program aimed at modernising the economy’ – the social state was rolled back, budgets were slashed and thousands were laid off. The security sector was not spared. The prison system saw its budget cut by 30%, and several ministries, including the Coordinating Ministry of Security and the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, were closed. The Ministry of the Interior, in charge of the police, was dissolved in a merger, while the main intelligence agency was shut down and its activities handed over to a new outfit run by retired military officers. The White House cheered from the sidelines, applauding Moreno’s ‘transition away from “21st century socialism” to a democratic society focused on the defense of basic rights and a free market economy’.

The outcome was catastrophic. Poverty increased almost 17% by 2019. Once the pandemic hit, there was an upsurge of unemployment and informal work, along with crime and drug trafficking. Gangs used the shutdown to consolidate their control over territory and cultivate ties with impoverished sectors of the population. These internal problems coincided with growing external ones. Following the 2016 Colombian peace process, Colombian drug traffickers began to move their product across the southern border and gained access to Ecuador’s Pacific ports, turning the country into a key transit point for drugs en route to the United States, Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Of course, we can only speculate as to how a different government would have dealt with these incursions. But it is clear that, rather than confronting a state with functional infrastructure and institutions, the cartels merely encountered Moreno’s neoliberal vacuum – and found it easy to fill. 

The government of Guillermo Lasso, which came to power in 2021, pushed ahead with the same IMF-supervised austerity and deregulation programme. His administration was weak – his party holding less than 10% of seats in the National Assembly – and marred by corruption. It did not take long for its approval ratings to reach a record low. This resulted in a deficit of leadership and legitimacy that constrained the state’s capacity to fight the crime syndicates, which began to flourish like never before. Still, the government retained the unflinching support of President Biden, who ignored frequent letters from Congressmen warning him about Lasso’s corruption and calling for a DOJ investigation into his hidden assets in the US. Allegations eventually surfaced that Danilo Carrera, Lasso’s brother-in-law and closest business collaborator, was linked to the ‘Albanian Mafia’ drug ring. Soon after, the key witness in the investigation was murdered, and Lasso’s scandal-ridden presidency began to fall apart. In May 2023, a few days before his likely impeachment by the National Assembly, he called new elections and relegated himself to the role of lame-duck president.

Violence meanwhile continued to mount. Prison massacres became commonplace and homicide rates climbed to an astonishing 45 per 100,000, an eight-fold increase since 2017. If Daniel Noboa, the centre-right businessman elected last October, is able to make even modest improvements in the security situation, he stands a chance of re-election when the country returns to the polls next year. His political prospects depend on convincing Ecuadorians that he is the man to defeat the cartels. So far he has tried to project toughness by reversing Correa’s decriminalization laws. He has also announced the construction of ‘maximum prisons’, contracted with an Israeli company, as well as ‘prison barges’ intended to conjure up images of Alcatraz or Devil’s Island. But aside from this, little is known about the specifics of his security plan. His ‘war’ on the gangs will be extremely costly, and the current economic outlook is not favourable. Though the incumbent benefits from relatively high crude oil prices – Ecuador’s main export – he is desperate to secure other sources of funding for his offensive. Judging from the recent decision to increase VAT from 12% to 15%, this could mean further attempts to squeeze the public.

This precarious situation makes the Noboa government highly dependent on the US. Bilateral security ties had already been strengthened over the last five years, particularly under Lasso. In October 2023, a cooperation agreement opened the door for an American military presence in Ecuador, which would be forced to relinquish some of the basic tenets of its sovereignty and grant full immunity to US personnel. (Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has ruled that, since the deal only involves ‘cooperation’ as opposed to a formal ‘alliance’, it does not require legislative authorisation.) This fits into a wider trend. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has used the War on Drugs as a tool to maintain its foothold in the Western Hemisphere and exert its influence over the security apparatus of Latin American states. Having charted a nonconformist course under Correa, Ecuador is now eager to signal its compliance with the hegemon. Another sign of this reorientation is the growing security partnership with Israel, which has managed to coax Ecuador – along with a number of other states in the Global South – into complicity with its expansionist project. As Palestinians are slaughtered in their tens of thousands, Noboa bleats that ‘we’re not going to condemn Israel’s actions nor are we going to take the position Brazil and Colombia did’.

The risk is that the president will now try to assuage public anger over rising crime with a host of repressive and reactionary measures, whose primary casualties will be ordinary Ecuadorians – in particular the impoverished youth of the urban peripheries. We have already seen how, in Colombia, security forces who are under pressure to deliver can sometimes be more concerned with the headcount, or even the bodycount, than with the accuracy of the targets. A renewed crackdown on crime, absent any social programme, could lead to mass arrests, incarcerations and even killings based on little evidence. Another potential threat is the appearance, as in the 1980s, of death squads often acting in cahoots with security forces. Ecuador is swiftly becoming the new frontline of the failed US War on Drugs. It may take years or even decades for the country to rebuild a state that can guarantee peace and security for its people.

Read on: Rafael Correa, ‘Ecuador’s Path’, NLR 77.

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The Baluchistan Imbroglio

The level of ignorance in Western coverage of the border clashes between Iran and Pakistan should come as no surprise. Nor should the State Department declaration that Pakistan’s response was ‘proportionate’ – making for queasy comparisons with the ongoing mass slaughter being perpetrated by another US funded and armed entity not too far away. To get a clear picture of the latest strikes – Iran targeted the base of an armed-separatist group, the Jaish al-Adl, in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan on Tuesday; two days later, Pakistan unleashed a drone attack against Baluchi-militant ‘terrorist hideouts’ on the Iranian side of the border – we need to sweep away their web of lies and mystifications.

Baluchistan is a mountainous region bifurcated by the Pakistan-Iran border, just as Pakhtun lands are divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Baluch nationalists have long resented the often brutal control exercised by the Iranian and Pakistani governments. Historically, though, whereas the Baluch leaders in Iran were politically conservative, the main Baluch tribal leaders in Pakistan were all progressive, in some cases close to the traditional communist currents of the sub-continent. Before the Iranian clerical revolution of 1979 there was even talk of unifying the two provinces as a self-governing republic.

I was involved in many discussions with Baluch tribal leaders as well as radical activists at the time. There was an independent Marxist current that spanned the tribes, led by leftist Balauch intellectuals and their non-Baluch allies from the Panjab and Sindh provinces. Their magazine, Jabal (‘Mountain’) carried some of the most interesting debates on the national question, replete with reference to Lenin’s texts on national self-determination. The analogy of the Ethiopian-Eritrean divide was discussed non-stop. A leading figure, Murad Khan, argued that with the 1974 overthrow of the pro-imperialist Haile Selassie regime in Addis, the objective conditions of the Eritrean struggle had changed and the socio-economic situation in both regions could be developed in the direction of a class unity that transcended pure nationalism. Most Baluch also wanted some form of political autonomy, or failing that, independence.

Pakistan was under heavy pressure from the Shah of Iran to crush the Baluch insurgency. Tehran was worried that the radical currents might slip across the border. Bhutto, then Prime Minister, capitulated and the Pakistan Army went on to crush the rebels. From 1977, Pakistan was run by a vicious US-backed military dictatorship (as it is now, as far as Baluchistan is concerned, under the current ‘caretaker’ government). In 1979 the military would hang Bhutto, Pakistan’s first democratically elected leader, brutalizing the national political culture. In Iran meanwhile the new Islamic Republic excited popular hopes and Baluch nationalism was compelled, for some years, to take a back seat.

Geopolitics crushed all the utopian visions emanating from Baluchistan. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the implosion of the Baluch leftist groups in Pakistan. The Iranian mullahs asserted their authority on their side of the border. The repression in Pakistani Baluchistan was vicious and unrelenting. Bhutto’s execution unleashed turbulence throughout the country, and soon an entire Baluchi tribe, the Marris, led by Sardar Khair Baksh Marri (a semi-Maoist by inclination) escaped by crossing the border to Afghanistan where they set up camp and were given refuge, food and weapons by the pro-Soviet PDPA government. There were reports that Marri and key aides had flown to Havana via Moscow for advice from Fidel Castro, though this has never been confirmed by either side. This phase ended with the advent of civilian government in Pakistan, but the Pakistan Army continued to virtually rule the province.

The repression of the Baluch people has been appalling over the last decades. Temporary relief under some civilian governments never lasted long, and recently the crackdown has gathered pace. A few weeks ago I was asked to sign yet another Baluch solidarity appeal, after a totally peaceful and relatively small gathering of Baluch dissidents and their Pakhtun and Punjabi supporters in Islamabad was broken up by police, its leaders arrested and some of them beaten up. My first reaction was ‘why now?’ At the time such arbitrary brutality made little sense. Now it does. It’s obvious that the Pakistani military intelligence had orders to prevent any display of Baluch dissent in Pakistan. To choose to provoke Iran just now would only cause more headaches for Washington. At the same time, of course, it would further divide the Muslim world at a moment when Yemen – though not Egypt, Saudi Arabi or the stooges ruling the Gulf states – is offering a strikingly effective form of solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinians.

I doubt that this exchange of fire between the two states will turn into a fully-fledged war. Pakistan, already an orphan-state of the IMF, would suffer more. And China has appealed to both countries to proceed to an immediate ceasefire. China has some clout. It has a large military-economic base in Gwadar on the Baluch coast in Pakistan and enjoys close economic ties with Iran. The Beijing cavalry will be working hard behind the scenes. But the political implications of this flare-up are worth noting.

The group that Tehran targeted, Jaish ul-Adl an offshoot of al-Qaida, has been operating from Pakistani Baluchistan for well over a decade. The group has close relations with Ansar al Furqan, its Sunni equivalent in Iran. Who funds such organizations? Why does Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, busy disappearing unarmed Baluch nationalists, not deal with these well-supplied Sunni fanatics? It is they who have targeted and killed Iranian security forces, including most recently an attack on police headquarters in Rask, an Iranian border town, in December. Iran has pleaded with Pakistan on many occasions to stop these outrages. No response except honeyed words. Is anyone else funding this terrorist group? Israel? The Saudis? Any takers? I don’t know, but nothing would surprise these days as Western double-standards on ‘human rights’ and ‘international law’ are not taken too seriously, except by payroll buddies.

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’, NLR 38.

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Democratic Pretence

Following Serbia’s elections on 17 December, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe held a press conference that felt like a funeral. A row of solemn bureaucrats read out a list of irregularities recorded during the contest, and they were legion. In recent years, Serbian national ballots have been somewhat Gogolian, with votes cast by long-deceased voters and other instances of fraud. But this time the scale was different. The OSCE concluded that the election had been carried out under a climate of intimidation, amid violence, vote-buying, dubious registers, ballot stuffing, pressure on public sector employees and ‘multiple allegations’ of mass bussing from neighboring Bosnia to vote for the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of President Aleksandar Vučić.

Even taking into account the SNS’s underhanded tactics, the party still won a convincing victory at national level, netting about 47% of the vote, while the liberal opposition bloc Serbia Against Violence (SPN) came in distant second with just under 24%. SNS looks set to have an absolute majority in the 250-seat parliament: 147 seats to SPN’s 63. While the opposition maintains that the result would have been different in a media landscape less dominated by the government, Vučić still exceeded expectations. In most cases, it seemed that the rigging supplemented his mandate rather than dramatically altered the final outcome. One important exception, however, was Belgrade’s City Assembly elections, where irregularities were recorded at a full 14% of all polling stations. SPN are confident that they were the true victors in the capital.

The SPN coalition emerged out of the large-scale protests prompted by two back-to-back mass shootings in May 2023. Protesters blamed the killings on a culture of glorified violence and criminality, which they see as embodied in the imposing figure of Vučić. The President is believed to have extensive ties to organized crime, including some that stretch back to the underworld of the wartime 1990s, when he served as Milosević’s Minister of Information. In that role he was known for his ruthlessness in managing the media and government critics. It’s a reputation he has retained. Vučić dominates the country’s politics, presenting himself as a guarantor of stability and guardian of Serbian national interests in a hostile region. Since his party came to power in 2012, he has amassed total control over the country’s security services and overseen a lurid tabloidization of the press, which is used to savage his detractors. In the run up to the recent election, a member of SPN had a computer stolen from his home which contained a private sex tape; in the weeks ahead of the election, the graphic video was played on pro-government morning television.

The SPN coalition is comprised of several parties and political associations: the Green-Left Front, the nominally centre-left Party of Freedom and Justice, the liberal Movement of Free Citizens, and the conservative People’s Movement of Serbia, among others. Its campaign centred on corruption, political and media repression, and environmental issues. The liberal opposition has tried to draw a dividing line between its foreign policy and that of the government. Whereas Vučić’s orientation is deliberately ambiguous – pledging continued military neutrality and maintenance of ties with both Russia and the West – SPN has criticized the government for failing to join the EU in imposing sanctions on Moscow. Perhaps reflecting its primary support base among the educated, urban middle classes, SPN’s campaign did not foreground Serbia’s spiralling food price inflation, which is currently the second highest in Europe. Vučić’s supporters, meanwhile, tend to be rural, conservative and working class.

Protests against the election results began just hours after the polls closed, with SPN demanding that the electoral commission cancel the Belgrade results. A week later, clashes broke out with police after a window was smashed in the City Assembly building, and at least 38 demonstrators were arrested. Since then, students have blocked some of Belgrade’s main arteries and erected tents in the streets. On the afternoon of 30 December, tens of thousands of protesters congregated in the city centre to hear speeches from ProGlas (‘ProVote’), a group of artists and intellectuals calling for democratic reform. One of them held up a faded, threadbare EU flag which he had carried during the anti-Milosević marches of the 1990s. Also in attendance was a visibly weak Marinika Tepić, a leading figure in SPN who went on hunger strike after the election. While the bitterly contested Belgrade local election has been the foremost concern of the protests, SPN is now demanding an annulment of all elections at both the local and national level.

Both sides of the country’s political divide are drawing parallels with the ‘colour revolution’ that brought down Milosević. Serbian and Russian officials have accused the West of trying to enact a ‘Serbian Maidan’ – a slogan that a few protesters have since printed on their banners. The Russian ambassador, Alexandr Botsan-Kharchenko, told the press that Serbia was being targeted for refusing to impose sanctions on his country. Superficially, the contours of the unrest are reminiscent of colour revolutions past in pitting two elites against each other: an outwardly pro-Western faction and one more amenable to Russia (though not exclusively). But the missing element, notwithstanding Vučić’s official narrative, is firm Western political, financial, and logistical support for the opposition.

This is especially significant to many Serbs given the outsized role the United States played in turning the tide against the regime of Slobodan Milosević in 2000. In the months preceding his downfall, Washington contributed $80 million to so-called ‘democracy assistance initiatives’ and provided extensive logistical support to the opposition. Back then, the West promised Serbia a bright democratic future. Now, Vučić’s staying power reflects how much the world has changed since the turn of the millennium. Western governments may still help to fund election monitoring NGOs, but for the most part they have been reserved in criticizing the recent elections or the President himself. Across the region, US Ambassador Christopher Hill is widely regarded as excessively accommodating of the current Serbian regime. Shortly after the vote, he remarked that he was ‘really looking forward’ to continuing his work with the incumbent while criticizing protesters for supposedly resorting to violence. He has said that concerns about electoral irregularities should be dealt with by Serbia’s domestic institutions. This is no Maidan. No ‘democracy’ cavalry is riding to the rescue this time.

That is in part because Vučić has balanced his electoral chicanery and overtures to Moscow with actions designed to please the West. Here we can see a split between the spheres of political and media opinion. The editorial boards of both the Guardian and Washington Post have published scathing denunciations of Vučić, describing contemporary Serbia as a ‘textbook case of state capture’ and rejecting the recent election as a fraud. They have characterized the current US strategy as appeasement and called for a new approach, suggesting that Belgrade is edging closer to Moscow. Yet they are conspicuously silent about Vučić’s continuing cooperation with NATO, including a joint press conference he held with Jens Stoltenberg as recently as late November. Under Vučić, Serbia has participated in more military exercises with the Atlantic alliance than it has with Russia. Accusations of Western coup-plotting continue to be a staple of the country’s public discourse, amplified by its garish press; but in Vučić’s Serbia, populist pro-Russian rhetoric has always concealed quieter Western-friendly actions. 

Even as Vučić blamed Washington and Brussels for orchestrating mass protests against him, he also signalled that he would continue to play along. On 25 December, the day after dozens of demonstrators were arrested and outrage over the election reached its apex, his government announced that it would henceforth allow Kosovo licence plates to be used in Serbia: a controversial move for which the West has long applied pressure. The EU praised the decision as a sign of ‘progress’ – one that supposedly demonstrated Vučić’s willingness to resolve the issue of Kosovo, on which SPN is often notably silent and internally divided.

It is unlikely that a dramatic change in US approach is forthcoming. Electoral tricks in Serbia are a relatively minor issue, given the many wars and geopolitical crises in which Washington is now embroiled. Liberal interventionism and heavy-handed democracy promotion in the Balkans now seem like a luxury of the unipolar moment. Looking ahead to the upcoming American elections, it seems that a Trump victory would herald an even friendlier US–Serbia relationship. The Trump administration made no secret of its antipathy towards Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, and Vučić surely hopes that a Republican White House would give Serbia the upper hand in its tortuous negotiations with Prishtina.

It is also unlikely that the post-election crisis presages an imminent political shift in Serbia. The opposition will almost certainly fail to secure a rerun of the elections. SPN have said that regular protests will continue on a weekly basis, and disruptive street demonstrations are now starting to seem like a regular feature of Belgrade life. But absent any powerful Western patron, such activism has a largely therapeutic function. The recent holiday period has already reduced its scale. Even the opposition’s most achievable goal – new City Assembly elections – is looking less likely as the weeks go by. Yet, were it secured, this concession might well yield the best outcome for everyone: a victorious opposition could legitimize itself by governing at city level, while Vučić could continue to argue that Serbia is a democracy, and the West could continue to pretend that it supports one.

Read on: Lily Lynch, ‘A New Serbia?’, NLR 140/141.

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Slow Motion Lulismo

One year after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to power, it is possible to make a preliminary assessment of his governing strategy. After his election in October 2022, at the head of a heterogeneous coalition hoping to protect Brazilian democracy from Bolsonarismo, the president revived the classic Lulista approach: wholesale concessions to the bourgeoisie along with retail measures to benefit the masses. When he first assumed the presidency two decades ago, this combination of elite pacts and gradual reforms was both innovative and troubling. Lula refused to break with the neoliberal legacy of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, yet he fought to raise living standards for the impoverished majority: expanding cash transfers through the Bolsa Família programme, extending cheap credit and securing regular real-terms increases in the minimum wage. This social programme secured his 2007 reelection and took centre-stage in his 2022 campaign. Whether it can be sustained remains an open question.

From the outset, Lula’s ‘weak reformism’ was beset by a plethora of contradictions. To name just a few: gains in workers’ purchasing power were not accompanied by equivalent improvements in public healthcare, education, transport or security. Greater access to university degrees was not matched by decent employment opportunities. There was no coherent plan to stimulate domestic industry or shift away from raw material exports. Brazil’s decision to host the World Cup and the Olympics led to violent conflict and the displacement of communities. In the electoral sphere, however, weak reformism brought about a decisive realignment, with the poor supporting Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) en masse, while the middle classes coalesced around Cardoso’s centre-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB). This model led to four consecutive presidential election victories for the PT. At its peak, a Rooseveltian dream of change without conflict won many hearts and minds.

Yet dissatisfaction, at both popular and elite levels, began to build in the 2010s. Mass protests erupted in 2013 after an increase in public transport fares. There followed a wave of judicial activism against the government, the illegitimate impeachment of Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, and finally the imprisonment of Lula himself. Having ascended to the presidency through a congressional coup in 2016, Michel Temer launched his ultraliberal ‘Bridge to the Future’ plan, tearing up workers’ rights and pushing through austerity policies, including a constitutional cap on public spending. The next few years saw a return to the backwardness associated with the military dictatorship of the previous century. Temer and Bolsonaro buried the dream of social justice beneath the rubble of Lulismo. Poverty and homelessness soared. Societal regression was compounded by political atavism, with the army aspiring to run the state again. In the wake of this demolition, Lula was called back to rebuild from the ruins.

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After winning by a narrow margin, Lula took office on 1 January 2023, promising ‘unity and reconstruction’. He did not set any specific goals for his administration. His speeches emphasized the general aims of healing society, overcoming the climate of hatred, fighting inequality and pulling the country out of its international isolation. Throughout his campaign, the contrast between the good times of Lulismo and the subsequent period of crisis was evoked. Future prospects were relegated to the background.

Once in power, ‘unity’ was sought primarily through dealmaking with capital and Congress, which remained dominated by conservative forces. Left-of-centre lawmakers rarely comprise more than 30% of the Chamber, so Lula has always sought to form alliances with parties across the political spectrum. Since 2018, however, the far right has established a significant presence in the legislature. The Liberal Party (PL), which now hosts Bolsonaro, is the largest in the House, having won 99 out of 513 seats in the last elections. The rise of radical conservatism followed the decline of both the PSDB, which had 70 seats in 2003 and has since sunk to 13, as well as that of the PT, which shrank from 91 to 68 over the same period. These shifts have reduced Lulismo’s room for manoeuvre. But this does not necessarily imply greater parliamentary pressure for an austere fiscal policy. In fact, the entire right-wing camp maintains its ties with the bourgeoisie by offering privileged access to public funds and resisting tax increases. Its survival is closely linked to the use of budgetary resources.

For Brazilian capital, however, austerity remains the top priority. Over the past year Lula has given his Finance Minister, Fernando Haddad, the role of granting concessions to big business. These include the government’s new ‘fiscal framework’, which we will analyse below, as well as its modernizing tax reforms – which will consolidate a range of federal, state and municipal taxes into a single Value Added Tax. This bill, which followed three decades of debate on the tax system, was approved by Congress on 15 December with only the far right voting against. Four days later, Standard and Poor’s upgraded the country’s rating on the international markets.

Lula has meanwhile devoted the months since his election to finding loopholes through which the needs of the people can be met. In December 2022, after circumventing pressure for immediate austerity measures by skilfully appointing Vice President Geraldo Alckmin to chair the presidential transition team, Lula managed to approve a R$145 billion uplift in the 2023 budget with the so-called ‘Transition Constitutional Amendment’. He thereby avoided cutting welfare schemes such as cash transfers and subsidies for medicines.

The canniness of this move lay in establishing a dialogue with Arthur Lira, the powerful Speaker of the House, who had been in charge of its so-called ‘secret budget’. This mechanism, formalized under Bolsonaro, gave the Speaker approximately R$20 billion to distribute among deputies – generally used to fund works in their constituencies – without the need for transparency. The Federal Supreme Court had ruled the practice unconstitutional, but Lula agreed to retain it informally on a case-by-case basis (to be negotiated with the executive), and pledged his support for Lira’s reelection as Speaker, in exchange for the approval of the Transition Constitutional Amendment. As a result, on the day he took office Lula was able to extend the Brazil Aid programme, and in March he launched Bolsa Família 2.0, with a minimum of R$600 per eligible household, to which he added R$150 in welfare payments per child up to the age of seven. He thereby repaid the loyalty of his subproletarian base and shielded himself from the precipitous fall in approval ratings that has weakened other progressive leaders in Latin America.

Yet among the concessions granted to Lira, the percentage of net current revenues earmarked for parliamentarians has now been raised from 1.2% to 2%, partly to compensate for the weakening of the secret budget. This reinforces the power of Congress, which has been growing ever since Speaker Eduardo Cunha orchestrated Dilma’s overthrow in 2016. During the reign of Cunha’s successor, Rodrigo Maia, there was talk of ‘informal parliamentarism’, which persisted with Bolsonaro’s support up until Lira was elected. In light of this, some commentators claim that the Brazilian political system has moved from hyper-presidentialist to semi-presidentialist. This trend further constricts Lula’s power, as his fiscal policy now faces pressure on two fronts – from a capitalist class demanding more austerity, and from the steady advance of conservative congressional power over the budget.

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Lula’s fiscal framework, unveiled in March 2023, was the primary means of appeasing capital. Formulated by the Ministry of Finance, it was presented as a more flexible substitute for the spending ceiling that Temer had imposed seven years earlier. Given the absence of orthodox economists from Finance Minister Haddad’s team, the timidity of the plan probably stemmed not from any theoretical convictions, but from an agreement with the fractions of the capitalist class that reluctantly supported Lula in the 2022 run-off – the globalized financial sector in particular.

The overall effect of the framework is to put weak reformism into an even lower gear. Unlike the restrictions of the Temer era, which froze spending in real terms, it allows spending to grow as long as tax revenues expand as well. Yet the spending increase is limited to 70% of the gains in public revenue, and it must not exceed a maximum of 2.5% per year. By ensuring that spending grows at a slower pace than revenue, the rule enforces a gradual reduction in the size of the state, much like Temer’s infamous reform. As the economist Pedro Paulo Bastos has pointed out, the proposal is not even compatible with increasing the minimum wage to keep pace with GDP growth, or with maintaining the constitutional floors for education and health spending. The inherent contradictions of Lulismo were always destined to create problems in the long term, but now even the short term is under threat.

Lula’s attempts to mollify the investor class did not stop there. The executive also committed itself to the bold target of abolishing the primary deficit in 2024 and securing surpluses of 0.5% and 1% of GDP over the following two-year period. Given that the 2023 primary deficit is expected to exceed 1%, bringing it down to zero would require significant cuts – greater than those of Lula’s first term, which catalysed the establishment of PSOL as a left-wing challenger to the PT. The government claims that the plan is not to squeeze spending but rather to raise revenue, in part by taxing the rich. It has begun to take some positive steps in this direction: taxes on exclusive and offshore investment funds; reforms that give the executive more power in tax disputes with private companies; the Provisional Measure for Subsidies, which seeks to shore up the government’s tax collection capacity; and the review of so-called ‘tax expenditures’, mostly subsidies and tax benefits granted to specific sectors.

The passage of these measures has, however, meant granting further concessions to the conservative majority in the House, resulting in alliances with the Progressive Party (PP), a former bastion of the right that supported the military dictatorship, and the Republicans, an electoral vehicle created by the neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which is linked to Bolsonaro. In September, these parties were given the ministries for Sports and Ports and Airports respectively, as well as other positions in the second tier of government. In theory, this means that Lula’s parliamentary bloc exceeds the quorum of three-fifths needed to pass constitutional amendments. Without that number, there is thought to be a constant risk of congressional mutiny against the president. But, in reality, thanks to the changeable and amorphous nature of the parties, the deal is no guarantee of stability. The relationship between the presidency and the House will still be characterized by tit-for-tat negotiations which could break down at any moment.

The parts of the fiscal framework that seek to change Brazil’s regressive tax system are welcome. And reducing the deficit by increasing taxes on the rich tends to be less harmful to growth than cutting spending. Yet the cap on spending increases means that this programme will at best reduce austerity without repealing it. The 2.5% limit represents a hard brake on progress that did not exist in previous Lula administrations. In the first and second Lula terms the federal spending growth rate was 7.2% per year. Between 2003 and 2010, primary spending as a proportion of GDP increased from around 15% to 18%, creating the conditions for dispensing the Bolsa Família and raising the real-terms minimum wage by 66%. Similarly, during both Cardoso’s second term and Dilma’s first, spending grew twice as fast as permitted by the framework. According to one counterfactual study, if the new rules had been adopted in 2003, government spending would not have increased, but fallen to 11% of GDP. The constraints are now so tight that the popular strata cannot move forward. This is Lulismo in slow motion.

One might argue that Brazil’s 3% GDP growth in 2023 contradicts the idea of a squeeze. But we are not yet living under the restrictive effects of the new fiscal framework. The recent economic acceleration was partly due to the spending from 2022 – the result of Bolsonaro’s use of the budget as an electoral tool – as well as the Transition Constitutional Amendment and the agrarian bonanza brought about by a record harvest in 2022-23. The proposed fiscal regime will bring this growth spurt to an end. Lula is well aware of this, which is why he has begun to speak of loosening the fiscal straitjacket. At the end of October he asserted that the deficit for the coming year ‘doesn’t have to be zero’. Almost immediately, the stock market fell and the dollar rose. Capital demanded a commitment to austerity and, for the time being, the government has given in, keeping the current target in place. Yet the dispute continues, with the PT recently ratcheting up its criticism of austerity. It remains possible that the stringent targets will be eased over the coming months. But will this be enough?

*

To put Lula’s programme in perspective, it is worth comparing it to the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, who took office in late 2018. AMLO is generally associated with the centre-left, despite what is seen as his populist persona and his dubious approach to Covid-19. His agenda combines fiscal restraint with income redistribution, and has so far proved hugely popular with the working masses. Forecasts suggest that his successor is on track to win this year’s election comfortably. The president has pursued what he calls ‘republican austerity’, which seeks to restrict the private control of public resources while increasing taxation on the richest. There are obvious similarities with Haddad’s crusade against patrimonialism and his tax proposals. Yet AMLO governs with a flexibility that would be impossible under the Brazilian framework. The first year of his mandate was marked by expansionary fiscal policy, which intensified when the pandemic struck in 2020.

The next three years saw an overall contraction of public spending, yet this headline figure obscures important changes in the allocation of funds. Mexico’s traditional cash transfer programme, Progresa, was always viewed with suspicion by many on the country’s margins due to its strict conditions and eligibility criteria. Under AMLO, it has been replaced with universal transfer programmes increasing the number of beneficiaries. At the same time, his government has significantly raised the minimum wage and reinforced labour rights – financing these measures through cuts to the civil service. Whatever the shortcomings of AMLO’s programme, it has kept the Mexican economy growing at over 3% a year since 2021, which has contributed to his persistent popularity. His republican austerity is, from a macroeconomic point of view, far less austere than what is now being proposed for Brazil. It is more evocative of the original Lulism than of its pinched revival.

Lula may not enjoy AMLO’s approval ratings, which have stayed consistently above 60%, but he has still fared better than many of his other Latin American counterparts. Chile’s Gabriel Boric saw his ratings fall by 22% during his first year in office, while Colombia’s Gustavo Petro suffered a 23% drop over the same period. By contrast, Lula’s support has declined by just 11%: from 49% at the start of his term to 38% last month. Though he presides over a bitterly polarized nation, he has managed to retain a significant popular base, albeit one that is diminished compared to December 2003 and December 2007. Yet this relative stability will soon be threatened once, as is widely predicted, Brazil’s economy begins to falter under the new restrictions.

*

The Planalto knows that the ‘feel good factor’ is crucial in election years. Ten months from now, the public mood will be reflected in municipal and mayoral elections across the country. Defeat in high-profile constituencies is sure to cast a pall over the beginning of the 2026 presidential election campaign. Hence the government’s recent steps towards altering the terms of the fiscal framework. Hence, too, the efforts of parliamentarians to secure their desired shares of the budget. In São Paulo, which often acts as an electoral barometer, the upcoming contest is on a knife-edge. The left-wing mayoral candidate, Guilherme Boulos, ran a strong campaign in 2020, and Lula won over the voters on the city limits in 2022. Yet the right may be effective in exploiting the conservative instincts of the metropolitan middle classes, usually decisive for the outcome of municipal elections. Here, as elsewhere, the fortunes of the economy will likely determine how they vote.

Global dynamics have introduced another note of uncertainty. Since the end of 2022, inflation in the US, the Eurozone and the UK has been falling – and interest rates should follow, reinforcing similar tendencies in Brazil. With any luck, this will allow global liquidity to recover and stimulate growth south of the equator. Yet rising geopolitical tension, volatile capital flows and extreme weather events will continue to disproportionately affect peripheral countries. Lula is attempting to reduce Brazil’s vulnerability to such external headwinds by finding new opportunities for development, especially those that don’t involve confrontation with the bourgeoisie. In the energy sector, for example, he has refused to block oil prospecting at the mouth of the Amazon River, even though this had officially been banned by the government’s own Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources. (This has sparked fierce criticism from environmentalists, and even from Climate Minister Marina Silva, who oversaw a 22% drop in deforestation in the Amazon last year and proposed a ceiling on oil production.)

There are also those banking on the possibility of aid from China, amid growing Sino-American rivalry. Lula has generally displayed an audacity in global affairs that he has lacked on the domestic front. His emphasis on foreign policy has been so great that voters have criticized his international travel as excessive (in 2023 he visited 24 countries and spent 62 days abroad). Overseas, he has tried to mediate between the Venezuelan government and opposition, revitalize relations with Cuba, and carve out an independent position on the wars between Russia and Ukraine and Hamas and Israel. In September, Lula assumed the rotating presidency of the G20, using his platform to denounce ‘the structural mistakes of neoliberalism’. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to signal that Brazil will not be automatically aligned with any great power – that it expects concessions from both the American and Chinese blocs, particularly when it comes to the country’s long-term goal: reindustrialization. Yet, on this front, progress remains glacial. All we know so far is that the Chinese have agreed to build an electric vehicle factory in Bahia after Ford pulled out.

Of course, it is unlikely that any external strategy will have enough heft to move a continental nation like Brazil. This opens a window of opportunity for the far right, which could exploit conditions of stasis to cast itself as the only genuine force for change. If Lula’s first and second terms created the illusion of painless progress, his third has all but removed social justice from the picture. Some onlookers argue that, given the present circumstances, the priority should be to save democracy and leave the rest for later. But democracy cannot be stabilized without structural transformation – which, under the emerging regime of decelerated Lulismo, is proving increasingly difficult to imagine.

Read on: André Singer, ‘Lula’s Return’, NLR 139.

An earlier version of this article was published in A Terra é Redonda.

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Broken Codes

There is an ironic term for a piece of cinema that combines weighty themes with an imposing style: un grand film. Several recent Palme d’Or winners merit the appellation: Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2019), Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2020), Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022). These are works that strive for ‘relevance’, often at the expense of psychological depth or aesthetic subtlety. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall – the latest film to be awarded the prize – adheres to the same criteria. Triet, however, is less interested in mounting a schematic critique of inequality than her confères. Her subject is the cosmopolitan European family, and beyond it, other institutions of bourgeois life.

The film unfolds as follows: Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a German writer, her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their visually impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) live near Samuel’s hometown in the Alps. Returning from a walk with his guide dog, Daniel stumbles upon Samuel’s body outside their house. It is unclear whether Daniel has happened upon a murder, suicide or accident. Sandra is charged, and a courtroom drama begins. Evidence is sparse; attention turns to Sandra’s infidelities, Samuel’s jealousies. Her work is highly acclaimed, while he is struggling with his first novel. On the day he died, she was being interviewed in their living room; he was upstairs blasting music to disrupt the meeting. Samuel was additionally paralysed by guilt, blaming himself for the accident that blinded Daniel. Sandra, for her part, regretted leaving their life in London. These resentments erupted in a screaming match the day before Samuel’s death, later found to have been recorded on his phone.

The result is a two-hour-long exercise in haute vulgarisation, in which art-house tropes and trappings are combined with those more familiar from the made-for-TV movie. Triet has said she drew inspiration from the case of Amanda Knox, accused of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007 – already the subject of a TV movie as well as a Netflix documentary. The conventions of the whodunnit – a bird’s-eye view of the corpse in the snow, the arrival of police, the painstaking reconstruction of the incident – are mobilized to full effect. In this regard, Anatomy of a Fall is only superficially distinct from the better products of the recent true-crime boom, where viewers are invited to pass judgement on real-life mysteries. Triet, though, has loftier conceptual ambitions. Samuel’s fall metonymizes the fall of the modern male; the court case probes the contemporary status of the family and the law, as well as – more obliquely – the novel and the cinema.

In the film’s diagnosis, these institutions have fallen into a state of disorder. Reconstruction of the truth is conspicuously absent from the trial; questions of legal guilt appear casually relative. The rise of trial-by-media and its pas de deux with the true crime format appear to have produced a qualitative change: the purpose of true crime, after all, is not to uncover what happened, but to relish in the process itself. Triet’s court has a purely mediatic function, presenting wife and husband as sleazy characters rather than legal subjects.

The nuclear family is afflicted by a parallel breakdown. The free-spirited middle class to which the protagonists belong has rejected conventional marital roles, yet this is not depicted as progress: the scrambling of domestic codes has instead resulted in turmoil. Samuel struggles to share his life with a successful woman, Sandra to tolerate her husband’s closer relationship with their son. And while the great bourgeois form, the novel, was once capable – in Hegel’s words – of neutralizing the ‘conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of circumstances’, Sandra’s experimental, interior, achronological novels do no such thing. The prosecution claims to find incriminating details in her work, at one point citing a character who expresses the desire to get rid of their spouse. A nucleus of ‘truth’ is sought in her slippery autofiction but proves stubbornly elusive. The novel is now a world unto itself, and can no longer shed light on our own.

Anatomy of a Fall thus depicts a society that claims to have moved beyond shared codes – generating new and unstable ones in the process. As viewer, we are placed in a position where we are expected to resolve such disorder ­– if only we could ascertain if Sandra did it. But all the while Triet conveys the impossibility of this task. For the authority of the cinema is also under threat, its engulfment by the streaming industry embodied in the film’s very form. At its conclusion, Daniel, like a blind Tiresias, tells the court that he has just remembered a conversation he had with his father some months earlier, in which Samuel seemed to confess that he was preparing to take his own life. This, we are led to assume, is an expedient fiction. Only such an act of symbolic patricide can bring the chaos of rival narratives to an end.

A gentrified television film, though, cannot easily transcend the bounds of its genre. If its true subject is bourgeois polycrisis, the film’s reliance on received ideas means this cannot be dealt with effectively. Ultimately, its depiction of gender relations is a tissue of conservative cliches – the sapphic feminist, the splenetic macho. An egalitarian marriage is apparently unworkable due to some ‘repressed’ male essence. Triet insists on raising social ‘issues’, but the result is still an upmarket family film.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘What’s Your Place?’, NLR 136.

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Master and Servant

The Israeli massacre in Gaza is a catastrophe, and not just for the city’s tortured inmates, languishing for decades under a merciless occupation. The United States in particular, but also Germany, will forever be closely associated with this unrelenting slaughter of thousands of innocent men, women and children, a slaughter that both countries continue to underwrite materially and diplomatically. Two-and-a-half months into the mass killing, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have restored some hope of survival to those Gazans still remaining after the hell of continual bombing and shelling. By that time, following the Hamas breakout and the murderous attack on kibbutzim close to the Gaza wall, more than 20,000 Gazans had been killed, 8,700 of them children and 4,400 women, and 50,000 wounded, compared to 121 dead Israeli soldiers, one fifth of them victims of friendly fire or traffic accidents. Since the beginning of the war, the Israeli air force claims to have bombed 22,000 ‘terrorist’ targets: more than 300 a day, every day, in an area the size of Munich.

As the year draws to an end, 90% of the roughly 2.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza strip have been made homeless, chased by the Israeli military from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip and back, told to shelter in allegedly safe zones which are subsequently bombed. There is hunger verging on starvation, scant medical care, no fuel, no regular electricity supply, and no indication that the slaughter will end any time soon. The reason given by the US for vetoing the Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire was that this would be ‘unrealistic’. Meanwhile the German government, led by its feminist foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, demands ‘humanitarian pauses’ as an alternative to peace, after which the killings are to continue until ‘Hamas’, prepared for death by a free UNRWA meal, will finally be ‘rooted out’.

What is eerie is that in the unending stream of reports and commentary on the Gaza war it is hardly ever mentioned that Israel is a nuclear power, and by no means a minor one. For a small country Israel is heavily armed, and not just conventionally. All in all, Israel spends more than 4.5% of its GDP on its military (as of 2022), which probably doesn’t include a good deal of free military assistance provided by the US and Germany. Before the latest assault on Gaza, Israel was estimated to have at least 90 nuclear warheads and fissile material stockpiles of more than 200. Even more importantly, Israel has at its disposal the complete range of means of nuclear delivery, the so-called tripod: land-based, air-based, and sea-based. Israel’s land-based nuclear missiles are allegedly kept in silos deep enough to withstand a nuclear attack, making them suitable not just for a first but also for a second strike. For nuclear delivery by air, the IDF maintains a fleet of at least 36 out of a total of 224 fighter planes with an extensive capacity for refuelling. Israel also has six submarines – of the so-called Dolphin class – which, experts believe, can fire nuclear-armed cruise missiles. The missiles have an estimated reach of 1,500 kilometers, providing Israel with an almost invulnerable platform for nuclear defence, or as the case may be, attack. Generally, one can assume that Israel commands the full spectrum of nuclear capabilities, from tactical battlefield arms to the aerial bombardment of military staging areas, to the bombing of cities like Tehran.

It is not known exactly how Israel became a nuclear power, most likely little by little, small step by small step. Certainly, there is no lack of nuclear science in Israel. The US may have helped, some administrations more than others, along with American friends of Israel deep inside the US military-industrial complex. Like other out-of-the-closet nuclear powers, the US is dedicated to non-proliferation, and indeed has a strong national interest in it, as do Russia and China. Espionage may however have been a factor; remember Jonathan Pollard, a US defense analyst and Israeli spy who after his discovery in 1985 only narrowly escaped a death sentence? In spite of relentless Israeli efforts to get him extradited, Pollard had to serve 28 years in prison until he was pardoned by the outgoing Obama administration, against the wishes of the US military establishment.

There also seems to be a German component, and it has to do above all with those Israeli submarines. Merkel’s mysterious claim in 2008 that Israel’s security was Germany’s raison d’etat, enthusiastically received by the Israeli government and now parroted literally every day by the German government and its staatstreue media, might have to be read in this context. As mentioned, six submarines were delivered between 1999 and 2023. Of the first three, Germany paid for two of them while the cost of the third was shared, supposedly as penance for what the US alleged was the participation of German firms in the development of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – which, of course, turned out to have never existed. (For the next three submarines, Germany agreed to pay €600 million.)

If the German-built Israeli submarines are fitted for nuclear missiles, not just the manufacturer ThyssenKrupp but also the German government would know. This also holds for the US, which would have turned a blind eye to Germany breaching its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. From 2016 until a few months before the Gaza war, the prospect of three more German-built submarines, also to be subsidized by the German state, was discussed by the two governments. But this time there were doubts in Israel over whether they were in fact needed. There was also an unfolding corruption scandal on the Israeli side, which among other things involved ThyssenKrupp hiring a cousin of Netanyahu as a lawyer. As the matter was investigated by Israeli public prosecutors, it was drawn into the constitutional conflict between the Netanyahu government and the judiciary. In 2017, the German side found itself forced to postpone a final decision until the Israeli corruption charges were settled. Then, in January 2022, the contract for the three submarines was signed. Of the estimated price of €3 billion, Germany will be paying at least €540 million.

Israel has never officially admitted that is has nuclear arms; some of its leaders, however, often retired prime ministers, have occasionally dropped hints to this effect, and probably not by accident. Leaving it an open question means no inspections and no pressure from the IAEA. Keeping potential adversaries in the dark about the size and exact purpose, or indeed the very existence, of its nuclear capacity may also offer strategic advantages (nothing is known for certain about Israel’s nuclear doctrine, for example). What can be assumed is that Israel is determined to remain the only nuclear power in the region – as indicated by its occasional bombing of nuclear reactors in Syria and its overtures to the US to stop Iran acquiring nuclear bombs, not by treaty à la Obama but by military intervention. It can also be assumed that Israel, unlike other nuclear powers, does not preclude first use of its nuclear arms, given it is surrounded by several nations with which it finds itself in a state of enmity. This should hold especially in a situation where the Israeli government considers the survival of the Israeli state at risk, although what exactly survival means remains open, unless one adopts the definition of both the right-wing extremist government of Netanyahu and the government of Germany, for whom the right of Israel to exist includes the right of Israel to define its borders at will.

As the Gaza war continues, the uncertainty surrounding Israel’s nuclear force increasingly seems to govern events on both battlefields, diplomatic and military. Protected by its veil of unpredictability, the Israeli government seems to believe it can inflict on Gaza, and soon perhaps on the West Bank as well, whatever punishment it chooses, without having to fear external interference from anyone. In recent weeks, Netanyahu has acted as though he could tell Washington, in particular, that its support for Israel must be unconditional – since, if pressed, Israel could defend itself on its own, relying on its nuclear tripod. The Gaza massacre risks turning Israel into one of the most hated countries in the world, together with Germany – which unlike the US is solidly united behind the Netanyahu government; yet there seems to be an established view on the part of the Israeli high command that this doesn’t matter, since no government near nor far will dare give in to domestic pressure to come to Gaza’s support.

There is another angle to this, and one that is perhaps even more frightening. In October 1973, during the Yom Kippur war, what later became known as the Watergate tapes recorded a conversation between Richard Nixon, then still President, and his closest aide, Bob Haldeman. When Haldeman informed Nixon that the situation in the Middle East was becoming critical, Nixon ordered him to have American nuclear forces worldwide put on high alert. Haldeman, stunned: Mr. President, the Soviets will think you are mad. Nixon, in response: That is exactly what I want them to believe. In a nuclear strategic environment, credible madness can be an effective weapon, especially for a government led by someone like Netanyahu. As noted, Israel does not have an official nuclear doctrine, and cannot have one as it does not admit to being a nuclear power. But it seems likely that if the existence of Israel was threatened in the eyes of its government, it would not hesitate to make use of all of its arms, including nuclear ones. This makes it relevant that Israel’s present governing coalition includes people who consider the Bible to be a sort of land registry. For many of them, the myth of the Masada mass suicide in 73 CE, after the first Jewish-Roman war was lost, is a powerful source of political inspiration, a fact that cannot be unknown to whatever intelligence is still at the disposal of the US government.

In fact, there is an even more ancient model of Israeli heroism, the myth of Samson, which seems to be no less popular among at least some of the nuclear strategists in and around the IDF command. Samson was a ruler of Israel – a ‘judge’ – in biblical times, during the war between the Israelites and the Philistines in the 13th or 12th century BCE. Like Heracles, Samson was endowed with superhuman physical strength, enabling him to kill an entire army of Philistines, reportedly one thousand strong, by striking them dead with the jaw bone of a donkey. After being betrayed and falling into the hands of the enemy, he was kept prisoner in the main temple of the Philistines. When he could no longer hope to escape, he used his remaining strength to pull down the two mighty columns that supported the roof of the building. All the Philistines died, together with him.

Nuclear weapons are sometimes claimed by radical pro-Israeli commentators to have given the country a ‘Samson option’ – to ensure that if Israel has to go down, its enemies will go down with it. Again, when that option might be exercised depends on what the sitting Israeli government would consider a threat to Israel’s existence, which for some might include the imposition of a two-state solution by the UN Security Council. Myths can be a source of power; a credible threat of extended suicide can open a lot of strategic space – enough perhaps to allow Israel to cleanse the Gaza strip of its Hamas-infested population by making it forever uninhabitable. If it is believed to be mad enough to die for a strip of land, or for not having to make concessions to an enemy like Hamas, a country like Israel may, long in advance of actually exercising its nuclear option, manage to deter countries like Iran, or hostile armies like Hezbollah, from heeding popular calls for ending mass eradication by military means.

Has the US lost control over its protégé, servant turned into master, master into servant? It is not inconceivable that the public disagreements between the two hitherto inseparable brothers-in-arms are simply theatre, artfully concocted to protect the US from responsibility for the slaughter of Gaza. But this is far from certain, given that the divergence between the two countries’ public statements on the legitimate aims of the Gaza special military operation has deepened almost by the day. Is the US, blackmailed by the threat of a Middle Eastern Armageddon, now forced to allow Israel to pursue ‘victory’ at any price? Does Israel’s capacity for nuclear war bestow on the Israeli radical right a sense of invincibility, as well as a confidence that they can dictate the terms of peace with or without the Americans, and certainly without the Palestinians? The political costs incurred by the US for not ending the killing – either not wanting or not being able to do so – are likely to be gigantic, both morally, although there may not be much to lose in that regard, and strategically: the ‘indispensable nation’ paraded before the world, helpless in the face of brazen disobedience on the part of its closest international ally. For its place in the emerging new global order after the end of the end of history this cannot bode well for the United States.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.