Category: Imperialism

CIVILIAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS: ‘ISRAEL’, USA AND THE BRITISH

On By rebelbreezeIn Current Affairs Comment, Genocide, History, Imperialism, Indigenous or Original People, Middle East, Palestine, Political Analysis, Popular ResistanceLeave a comment

Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time: 5 mins.)

The Zionist state’s latest genocidal plan involves driving the inhabitants into a densely-packed area in the south of Gaza where they will be examined on the way in and then never allowed to leave unless to emigrate to another state.1

This plan was announced recently by ‘Israeli’ Minister of Defence (sic) Israel Katz and has been enthusiastically approved by a number of ‘Israeli’ politicians, including Finance Minister Smotrich.

It’s being suggested Katz’s plan is to be run by the GHF food-and-bullets organisation and to connect to Trump’s earlier remarks about turning Gaza into a seaside resort once the Palestinians had left. However, Trump and his administration have declined to comment on this latest plan.

The Gaza Humanitarian (sic) Foundation, responsible for the deadly food traps in Gaza, has been suggested as the organisation to run the concentration camp (also being called Humanitarian Camp). (Image: Cartoon by D.Breatnach)

But wasn’t Gaza previously a concentration camp? Well, it has been called “the largest open-air prison in the world”2 due to its intensified blockade since 2007 with Israeli control over who went in or came out.3 The intention was to make living intolerable but the Palestinians managed.

The refugees who came there from the Nakba in 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli War built houses, shops, community centres, mosques and churches, shops and markets, schools, colleges and university, farmed land and grew produce in polythene tunnels, dug wells, desalinated sea-water …

The IOF have destroyed nearly all of that (even roads and sewage treatment facilities) and now of course with water, fuel and food blockaded and frequent forced internal displacement, Gaza conditions are much much worse, with starvation andcontagious disease spreading.

This new plan however, is to compress the population into a smaller and smaller area, a concentration camp within that prison.

CIVILIAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

The plan announced by the Zionazis is a concentration camp for civilians and this was in fact admitted by an Israeli journalist on one of their news channels. It’s fascist and racist but it’s not a new idea, having been practised by others including the British, USA and the Turks previously.

Concentration camps for civilians were used by the Nazis and Spanish fascists4 for example; in those cases their punitive function was clear. But during WWII the British interned Germans (including Jewish refugees) and allowed the Poles to run camps for dissidents in Scotland.

‘Concentration Camp’, drawing by David Ludwig Bloch. (Image sourced: Internet)

The British too built two Jewish concentration camps in Germany to prevent them from emigrating to the British Protectorate of Palestine, where the Zionists, encouraged to emigrate there by the British originally, were now destabilising British control and antagonising the indigenous people.6

The British also held Jewish civilians in a concentration camp in Cyprus, many of them Holocaust survivors who had tried to enter Palestine without British authorisation.7

During their war in Malaya (1948-1960) also the British ran civilian concentration villages, a model which the USA were to adopt later in Vietnam. These British measures were under the Briggs Plan and formed part of widescale repressive measures including forced deportations of Chinese.8

Those interned by the British in Frongoch concentration camp after the 1916 Rising were not all military personnel but included civilian members of Irish nationalist organisations.

The USA interned Japanese ethnic minority people during its war with Japan, allegedly as a purely security non-punitive measure. 1,862 deaths (out of 180,000) were recorded in those camps9 for which the USA did not apologise until 197610 or pay reparations until 1998.

The Imperial Japanese forces during the same war period established concentration camps in their conquered territories for civilians, mostly Dutch and British colonial settlers, administrative officials and their families. More than 140,000 of those died in the camps.11

Previously the USA had briefly used concentration camps against Native Americans but later shifted to removal and reservations policed by state-appointed officials. They also interned civilians, tens of thousands dying, in the US-Philippines War of 1898-1914.

In its war against the PKK (1978-2025) the Turkish State forced the evacuation of Kurdish villages where it felt unable to prevent guerrilla penetration, forcing relocation of the people and placing them under a collaborator administration in the new residential location.

The Turks also created a paramilitary police force to operate in the local areas but responsible centrally to the State which they called the Jandarma. In fact this was on the model of similar gendarmerie of the British in Ireland, of the Spanish, French and Italian states.12

Large rural areas of Turkish Kurdistan villages were cleared and relocated forcibly by the authorities. Arguably, despite the difficult conditions, the final defeat of the PKK was internal through adoption of a pacification process under the orders from captivity of their leader Ocalan.13

The village had Turkish-appointed guards and the headman was expected to ensure that the guerrilla forces did not enter and, if they did, to inform the South Vietnamese authorities (and through them the US military). Presumably he was also charged with informing them of ‘disloyal’ villagers.

Of course this put those recruited by the authorities in danger from the insurrectionary forces who viewed the guards and any collaborating headman as traitors. On the other hand, the headman might come under great pressure from the authorities to comply with their plan.

The USA’s version in Vietnam, the Strategic Hamlet Program was practised in 1962 during their War through their proxy, the South Vietnam government.14 Villagers either had their hamlet fortified or more often, they were forcibly relocated to a fortified location.

The Program was reportedly sabotaged but it is doubtful if it would have succeeded in any case as the forced relocations alienated even those who did not already sympathise with the insurrectionary forces. It marked President Kennedy’s last attempt to fight their war in Vietnam ‘indirectly’.

The living conditions in Israel’s version currently being contemplated for Palestinians in Gaza will be intolerable and the clear intention is for those who survive to want to emigrate – so, once again ethnic cleansing within a genocidal framework.

Israel Katz, Minister for Defence (sic) in centre of photo on his sally with IOF into Lebanon with IOF occupying troops. (Photo sourced: Internet)

It will also be very dangerous for those trying to enter, especially men, having to pass the interrogation process at the gate. Those suspected of Resistance activities – or even related to such suspects – will be deeply interrogated and many no doubt interned without trial.15

Families which have survived the genocidal bombing and starvation will be broken up as some enter and some refuse to enter (or are refused).

Overall, the historical experience of people confined in civilian concentration camps has been oppressive but for many a death sentence also. Despite the suffering, as a measure of repression against insurgency amongst the population, it has largely been ineffective.

Actually, there is one recorded case of the civilian concentration camp being successful in a counter-resistance context and that was of the British (again!) against the Boers of South Africa. In the Second Boer War the British (who had been defeated in the first) killed Boer livestock and burned their farms.

The British constructed a civilian concentration camp16 in which they placed the abducted Boer women and children in order to get their menfolk to submit. (The IOF are not above using relatives also, frequently arresting relatives in order to coerce a ‘wanted’ resistance person to surrender.)

80,000 Boer civilians were interned and, in separate camps, 115,000 African servants of the Boers. Due to the conditions, between 18,000 and 28,000 Boers died, 80% of them children. The British kept no records of African deaths but their losses are believed to have been similar.17

However, the British-Boer wars were between one group of settlers and another. So far, for all the suffering it causes, the record of the civilian concentration camp as a repressive measure by an occupying state against a resistant nation is one of failure.

End.

FOOTNOTES

1https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/07/israeli-minister-reveals-plan-to-force-population-of-gaza-into-camp-on-ruins-of-rafah

2David Cameron, Prime Minister UK called it a prison in 2010, as did others, including Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director Human Rights watch in 2022. As late as 2023, so did British-Israeli historian and emeritus professor of International Relations at Oxford University Avi Shlaim who said it had evolved into “an open-air graveyard” at the time of his writing (there are numerous sources for the description by various people).

3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip

4The civilians in General Franco’ hugely overcrowded camps and jails contained large numbers of Basque, Catalan, Galician nationalists, Republican, Communist non-combatant nationalist civilians in addition to opposition military.

5https://jacobin.com/2017/05/uk-concentration-camps-wwii-poland-internment-prisoners

6Ibid.

7https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24457292

8A good account is given in this admittedly anti-communist biased report: https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-15/issue-3/oct-dec-2019/civilians-in-crsfire

9https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

10Admission by US President Gerald Ford.

11https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-short-history-of-civilian-internment-camps-in-east-asia

12The RIC (later RUC now PSNI in the British colony) in Ireland, the Guardia Civil in the Spanish state, Gendarmerie in France and Carabinieri in Italy. Those forces in the last three named operate throughout the different nations that are incorporated in those states.

13Highly critical analysis https://noria-research.com/ceasefire-and-the-end-of-the-pkk/

14https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Hamlet_Program, a hostile source like most I’ve found on line.

15A process the Zionist State calls ‘Administrative Detention’, resulting in six months trial without judicial process, which can be renewed.

16The main reason for the belief that the British originated the practice of concentration camps.

17https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/south-african-concentration-camps

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Israeli plan: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/07/israeli-minister-reveals-plan-to-force-population-of-gaza-into-camp-on-ruins-of-rafah

Turkey civilian concentration villages: https://smallwarsjournal.com/2024/06/19/assessment-turkish-kurdish-conflict-1984-1999/

British concentration camps for Boer civilians: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/south-african-concentration-camps

and for civilians in Malaya, good account is given in this admittedly anti-communist biased report: https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-15/issue-3/oct-dec-2019/civilians-in-crsfire

USA civilian concentration camps for ethnic Japanese civilians https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment and ‘strategic hamlets’ in their Vietnam War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Hamlet_Program (a hostile source, like most I’ve found on line).

BBC, Kneecap and the long history of censorship

On By rebelbreezeIn British imperialism, Censorship & Witch-hunting, Cultural Comment, Current Affairs Comment, Human Rights, Imperialism, Indigenous or Original People, Ireland, Irish Republicanism, Israeli Zionism, Mass Media Criticism, Political Analysis, Resistance Art, Rhyming Rapping & Ranting, Song, Song in Struggle, US ImperialismLeave a comment

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh June 2015

(Reformatted entire for publishing in Rebel Breeze from article of same title in his Substack)

(Reading time: 8 mins.)

Kneecap’s music is not really my thing. I am perhaps too old, or maybe my musical tastes are more conservative. But I do love their politics and their stance on Palestine.

I don’t think much of Hezbollah, but I do think waving their flag is not a criminal offence.

The BBC think otherwise as evidenced by their decision to not broadcast Kneecaps’s performance at the Glastonbury festival. The only reason for this was their support for Palestine. There was no other reason.

Though, it didn’t work out well for the BBC as Bob Vylan who was broadcast live got the crowd to chant Death to the IDF!, one of the noblest of chants ever to be heard at Glastonbury.

But there is a long history to the BBC and other British media censoring musicians. The BBC in its statement said:

Whilst the BBC doesn’t ban artists, our plans ensure that our programming meets our editorial guidelines.

We don’t always livestream every act from the main stages and look to make an on-demand version of Kneecap’s performance available on our digital platforms, alongside more than 90 other sets.[1]

In other words, the BBC does ban artists.

The rapper trio under the band name of Kneecap (Image sourced: on line)

It is not like this is the first time they have banned some of them. Following the Bloody Sunday massacre by the British Army in Derry in 1972, Paul McCartney, penned a song titled Give Ireland Back to the Irish.[2] It was the debut single of Wings.

It was instantly banned in Britain by the BBC but managed to get to No. 16 in the British charts nonetheless and got to No. 1 in Ireland.

They banned songs that mentioned sex, even Shirley Bassie’s Burn My Candle[3] and they banned songs that were considered more political such as The Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK,[4] a song that wasn’t really political at all.

Not surprisingly they banned the then relatively unknown Heaven 17’s debut (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,[5] over concerns it might upset the then recently-elected US president Ronald Reagan.

This was a man whose government through the CIA went on to support deaths squads in Latin America and set up cocaine smuggling networks to finance them through his loyal servant Oliver North.[6] Reagan of course is referred to in the song.

Democrats are out of power
Across that great wide ocean
Reagan’s president elect
Fascist god in motion

That wasn’t the last of it either. The BBC went on to ban a song by The Police, Invisible Sun[7] because of a possible slight on the British Army contained in the lyrics and of course the official video to the song.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an Armalite
I don’t want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say

I don’t want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell
I don’t ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart

The BBC would, during the 1st Gulf War ban a total of 67 songs for the duration of the war, amongst them songs by such establishment figures as Elton John whose song Act of War [8] recorded in 1985 with Millie Jackson was put on the list.

As was Pat Benatar’s Love is a Battlefield,[9] recorded even earlier in 1983. It takes little to upset the BBC it would seem.

The former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar criticised Keir Starmer’s call for Kneecap to be not allowed play at Glastonbury stating that

It’s not great for politicians to get into deciding which artists should be allowed to perform where or not.

To me, that’s illiberalism. Part of the whole point of art and music and literature is to be inappropriate, is to be challenging, is often to be anti-establishment,” he said.

We’ve had a situation now for quite some time in Ireland and in Europe and Britain, where politicians didn’t get into the space of saying who should be allowed to perform, who shouldn’t, what books you should be allowed to read, and I hope we don’t slip back into doing that under the guise of national security and anti-terrorism when it isn’t really about that.[10]

Varadkar tut tuts the BBC and Starmer. Sounds great, except his party and the Irish state in general does not have a great record in the matter.

The state broadcaster took an insidious approach to censorship with songs rarely being banned outright. Rather they were just not simply played on the radio station. Hint hint, nudge nudge. A very Irish way of doing things.

The Irish group The Wolfe Tones released many songs over the years about the conflict in the north of Ireland and got little to no airtime. Such was the situation that they even recorded a song about it, called Radio Toor I Li Ay (sometimes called They Don’t Play Our Songs on the Radio) [11].

The lyrics are pertinent to Kneecap and Starmer and sum up exactly what the Establishment are about.

You don’t play our songs on radio
You say they’re too political!
Who controls the mind, where’s the mind’s control?
For the music on the airwaves
Follows empty minds, those empty heads
Play songs of sex and drugs instead
Don’t tell them how it really is

Won’t MI5 look after you, control your thoughts
Feed information to your hearts and minds
To save you all from thinkin’, thinkin’, thinkin’, thinkin’

It is a fact that RTE didn’t give them much airtime and still don’t. So much so that in 2024, Derek Warfield the lead singer with the group said it was time to end the ban on them.[12] It still hasn’t happened, nor will it.

In fact, the Irish women’s football team got into trouble for singing one of their songs, Celtic Melody,[13] and were excoriated by British sports journalists, who are not renowned for their knowledge of music, politics, history or much else aside from who ran how fast and where.

Not exactly intellectual heavyweights. Nonetheless these idiots led to the Irish women’s team being eventually fined €20,000 for singing the song.[14]

The Irish singer Christy Moore found himself on the wrong end of state repression in Ireland on many occasions and his songs, like those of The Wolfe Tones were not banned per se, but they never received much airplay.

Except those that were considered to be humorous and non-political, such as Don’t Forget Your Shovel.[15] 

But other songs of his were censored on the radio without the need for an official ban, such as Ninety Miles From Dublin,[16] which was about the IRA and INLA prisoners on the Blanket and Dirty Protests in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh.

Likewise, other songs he recorded about the prisoners and later on about the Hunger Strikers equally received no airplay. There was one brief exception to this.

Patsy O’ Hara (INLA) died on hunger strike on May 21st 1981 after 61 days. His mother Peggy O’Hara was initially adamant that she would not let her son die and that when he lapsed into a coma she would intervene and give the doctors the order to break his strike with an intravenous drip.

However, in her last conversation with her son, he said to her that he was sorry they had not won and asked her to let the fight go on, before lapsing back into unconsciousness. Christy Moore wrote a song about that exchange called The Time Has Come.[17] 

It was well received and got airplay and praise. Then someone informed the ignorant and arrogant mandarins at RTE what the song was about and suddenly it got no more airplay. Listening to the song, it is obvious what it is about.

The gentle clasp that holds my hand
Must loosen and let go
Please help me through the door
Though instinct tells you no

Our vow it is eternal
And will bring you dreadful pain
But if our demands aren’t recognized
Don’t call me back again

Ironically Christy Moore would record another song that got no airplay. It was called Section 31,[18] a reference to the article of the Broadcasting Authority Act (1960) that gave the minister power to ban interviews with members of Sinn Féin and proscribed organisations such as the IRA.

But in effect it led to RTE’s scant reporting of or carrying out of few interviews that were critical of state policy on the conflict. The song explained exactly why some issues are censored.

Who are they to decide what we should hear?
Who are they to decide what we should see?
What do they think we can’t comprehend here?
What do they fear that our reaction might be, might be?

The Kneecap trio with friends at the Sundance Festival in January. (Photo sourced: RTÉ)

It is always about silencing the opposition and preventing a reaction to their repression and in this case genocide.

So back to Kneecap. They stand in a long line of artists who have put their money where their mouths are. They stand side by side with giants from other musical genres such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger who were repressed by the McCarthyite wave in the US in the 1950s.

The BBC for its part continues to be the propaganda arm of the British Empire, or what is left of it, covering up, lying about or justifying murder, massacre, torture and plunder from India to Kenya, Ireland and now Palestine.

Woody Guthrie had the words This Machine Kills Fascists carved into his guitar, a slogan that might earn him a jail sentence nowadays.

It was meant more in the sense that his music was part of the struggle against fascism, carrying political messages to workers, Dustbowl refugees and migrants.

It didn’t literally kill anyone, though in his song Ludlow Massacre,[19] Guthrie celebrated the workers taking up arms to kill the scab thugs that came to shoot them.

Scabs at the behest of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, owned by the infamous Rockefeller family murdered 26 people, mainly the wives and children of the striking miners.

However, the massacre was just one large incident, the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency had harried and harassed the striking miners, murdering them in ones and twos.

The detective agencies celebrated in comics and films were what would later become known in Latin America and elsewhere as death squads. The miners fought back and Guthrie celebrated this in his song. Resistance, including armed resistance was legitimate.

The state soldiers jumped us in a wire fence corners,
They did not know we had these guns,
And the Red-neck Miners mowed down these troopers,
You should have seen those poor boys run.

The press, at the time, described the striking miners as savages.

Any similarity to the current media onslaught on Palestine is not a coincidence, it shows the class interests of the media moguls and the western states. Working class people, foreign resistance movements will always be savages to the media.

And the use of armed masked thugs by the state is not new either. Before ICE, there were the detective agencies. Most of the dead at Ludlow were migrant workers. The final death toll according to Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US was sixty six men women and children.

Kneecap have contributed to the fight against fascism and Bob Vylan’s chant Death to the IDF! should be on everyone’s lips. There is no reforming the IDF, just like there was no reforming Hitler’s SS. Only the complete destruction of the IDF will bring any change.

Can their music, like Guthrie’s be said to kill fascists? I don’t know, time will tell, but from the reception they got at Glastonbury it is looking good.[20] What I do know is Keir Starmer and Trump finance fascists.

Starmer like a fascist wants to ban Palestine Action. The BBC covers up for fascists, praises them and censors those who stand up to fascists. I know who is on the right side of history.

End.

NB: For more articles by Gearóid see https://gearoidloingsigh.substack.com

NOTES

[1] The Guardian (28/06/2025) Kneecap’s Glastonbury set Will not be broadcast live, BBC confirms. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/28/kneecap-glastonbury-set-will-not-be-broadcast-live-bbc-confirms

[2] See Wings: Wild Life – Give Ireland Back To The Irish

[3] See

[4] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q31WY0Aobro&list=RDq31WY0Aobro&start_radio=1

[5] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV5dbcOmw6I&list=RDlV5dbcOmw6I&start_radio=1

[6] Jacobin (12/11/2021) What We Really Know About the CIA and Crack. Daniel Finn. https://jacobin.com/2021/11/what-we-really-know-about-the-cia-and-crack

[7] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VuDjJ9KIxM&list=RD1VuDjJ9KIxM&start_radio=1

[8] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKbuDkueGek&list=RDvKbuDkueGek&start_radio=1

[9] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGVZOLV9SPo&list=RDIGVZOLV9SPo&start_radio=1

[10] The Journal (27/06/2025) Varadkar on Kneecap row: Terrorism is bombs and guns, not music. https://www.thejournal.ie/varadkar-on-kneecap-row-terrorism-is-bombs-and-guns-not-music-6745000-Jun2025/

[11] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsxQaXdflU&list=RDjtsxQaXdflU&start_radio=1

[12] Newstalk (11/09/2024) ‘Systemic ban’ on The Wolfe Tones should be lifted – Warfield. Jack Quann. https://www.newstalk.com/news/systemic-ban-on-the-wolfe-tones-should-be-lifted-warfield-1764007

[13] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgWeD7tHhaE

[14] Sky News (08/12/2022) Ireland women footballers fined €20,000 for singing song referencing IRA in World Cup celebration. https://news.sky.com/story/ireland-women-footballers-fined-20-000-for-singing-song-referencing-ira-in-world-cup-celebration-12764012

[15] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV9c0OnekvM&list=RDrV9c0OnekvM&start_radio=

[16] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q98EcxrOr6w&list=RDQ98EcxrOr6w&start_radio=1

[17] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7wJsDx2qg&list=RD6E7wJsDx2qg&start_radio=1

[18] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m19Pc-b7EBc

[19] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDd64suDz1A&list=RDXDd64suDz1A&start_radio=1

[20] See https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLdeW1sI2A-/?igsh=YnJqeDd0bm1obzdi

GAZA CEASEFIRE DISCUSSION: A PANTOMIME WITH MANY ACTORS

On By rebelbreezeIn Current Affairs Comment, Genocide, Guerrilla Action, Human Rights, Imperialism, Indigenous or Original People, Israeli Zionism, Massacres, Middle East, Palestine, Political Analysis, Uncategorized, US ImperialismLeave a comment

Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time: 4 mins.)

Trump says he convinced Netanyahu to agree to a Gaza ceasefire and the Palestinian Resistance1 had better take it because it’s the best they are going to get. Does the deal include the IOF pulling out of or an end to bombing Gaza? No, neither.

Mass media speculation abounds that the Resistance are under pressure (by starving Gaza residents in the midst of daily massacres) to agree to the ceasefire promoted by Trump and that it will be announced during Netanyahu’s visit to meet his imperialist backers in the USA.

Netanyahu says he won’t agree to ultimate peace nor even to the IOF pulling out of Gaza. His aim, he declares is the total defeat of Hamas (i.e. all the Palestinian resistance and the expulsion of their leaderships). Details of the deal mention a 60-day ceasefire.

Older now but still holding hands: back on 23 May 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and US President Donald Trump shake hands at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. (Photo cred: Sebastian Scheiner/AP)

And Gaza afterwards? All options are open, perhaps even the Israeli seaside resort of which Trump and Netanyahu were speaking earlier.2 But not a Palestinian administration by free and popular elections, because that would mean the election of supporters of the Resistance).3

No doubt in order to increase the pressure on the Resistance, the IOF intensifies its daily bombing of civilian housing and refugee centres and food queue massacres. Starvations deaths begin to appear, first of children then of adults too, emaciated bodies and skull-like faces.

July 2025 cartoon by D.Breatnach

The Palestinian Resistance factions led by Hamas have been adamant all along that they will sign up to an end to the war but not to a temporary ceasefire. The IOF must pull out of Gaza and the gates must be opened to let desperately-needed food, medicine, fuel and water in.

The Resistance will release living Israeli prisoners and dead (bodies) and ‘Israel’ will release Palestinian hostages. This has been their position for a long time and was part of the US envoy’s (Witkoff)-approved agreement of 19 January with ‘Israel’ this year which the latter broke on 18 March.4

Smotrich and Ben Gvir threaten to bring down Netanyahu’s coalition if there is a ceasefire agreement, saying the war should continue without pause until the defeat of the Resistance. But Smotrich and Ben Gvir also shadow-box against one another through the Israeli media.

There are elements of pantomime and farce between some pushing for a deal and those against – “Look out, Netanyahu: Ben Gvir’s behind you!” But Trump and Zionists are playing with real lives, primarily those of the Palestinians but also those of their own IOF on the ground.

Funeral of IOF Captain Elkana Vizel in Mount Herzl Military Cemetery Jerusalem 23 January 2024. Vizel was killed with 20 other IOF when the Resistance fired a rocket into a house where the IOF had stored explosives intended for demolishing Palestinian houses. (Photo: Getty)

The armed Resistance, fighting in areas of Gaza cleared of civilians by the IOF have been hitting the latter hard, Israeli media reporting “a security incident” (its shorthand for fatalities of their soldiers by Resistance action) every second day or so (sometimes a number in the same day).

This after 20 months of attack by the strongest and best-supplied military force in the region which has undisputed air cover over Gaza.

Jon Elmer, in his Resistance Report on Electronic Intifada Updates podcast on Thursday evening said that June had been the worst month for the IOF in a year of battle fatalities and injuries. He recorded nearly 200 Resistance operations with IEDs, snipers, RPGs, rocket and mortar attacks.5

The IOF are being hit in areas they have invaded before and claimed to have ‘cleared’ of the Resistance. In approaching two years Netanyahu has failed to achieve his two declared war objectives: to defeat Hamas (Resistance leading faction) and recover the captives.

By any sober assessment Netanyahu and his coalition government have lost the Gaza war so far but he wants to cover that over and knock out the Israeli opposition which demands a deal with the Resistance to free the Israeli prisoners held by the Palestinians.

Netanyahu and his wife face a trial for corruption as soon as he can no longer use the war in Gaza (or with Iran!) as an excuse not to stand trial. So peace is not a good option for him personally. A deal releasing the prisoners of the Resistance followed by renewal of the war might be best for him.

The Resistance is taking heavy toll of the IOF whenever they try to move forward in Gaza. But in the limited area of the Resistance, possibly the IOF can defeat them eventually by massive continuous bombing with ordnance supplied by the USA, the UK and some EU states.

But who knows what other factors might develop in the meantime and whom they might favour?

The resistance of the Palestinian people and the operations of their armed Resistance factions have challenged not only the actions of the Zionist colonial state but its very legitimacy to a degree not seen before, across the world and among the people of the Zionist-supplying heartlands.

The desperation of the ruling classes of the colonial state and of its principal backer was behind their short recent war against Iran, leading to a danger of World War. They were defeated for now but in the logic of imperialist power must try again.

The world is changing but whether that will favour the Palestinians in the short or medium-term is not certain. However that the question can even be asked is the result of the long cultural and political resistance of the Palestinian people and of their armed resistance movement.

End.

FOOTNOTES & SOURCES

1Trump, Netanyahu and the western mass media generally identify the Resistance as Hamas, whether to avoid the legitimising term, as a shorthand or to conceal the fact that the Palestinian resistance is composed of a number of factions, some of them Islamist (e.g. like Hamas and Islamic Jihad and others secular (such as the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, perhaps the longest-surviving Resistance organisation.

2https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/1/26/hamas-wins-huge-majority and https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/if-palestinian-elections-proceed-hamas-may-have-upper-hand

3https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-gaza-riviera-echoes-kushner-waterfront-property-dreams-2025-02-05/

4https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy5klgv5zv0o

5The Resistance in Gaza have made June the worst month for the IDF in a year (mostly in just one area, Khan Younis). “180 (resistance infantry) operations in Khan Younis in one month alone plus 60 artillery operations” (discussion at end of Jon Elmer’s Resistance Report @ 3.16 minutes mins.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4nuYJp5RC0&t=11283s)

“DEATH TO THE IDF” IS A HUMANITARIAN CALL

On By rebelbreezeIn Cultural Comment, Current Affairs Comment, Genocide, Human Rights, Imperialism, Internationalist Solidarity, Israeli Zionism, Journalism, Palestine, Political Analysis, Popular ResistanceLeave a comment

Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time main text: 3 mins.)

The media and some British politicians have been in a furore about what a performer of one of the acts at the Glastonbury Festival1 called from the stage and got most of the audience to chant with him: Death, death to the IDF!2

    The performer was not, for change, one of the Kneecap trio (who also performed at Glastonbury) despite British politician complaints after another anti-Zionist “controversy” (i.e. unlike daily Zionist genocide of Palestinians, supplied by UK weapons, which is not at all controversial).

    The latest performer to raise the genocide-proof ire of British politicians and mass media commentators was a member of the Bob Vylan group and the call which caused such anger in pro-Zionist circles was uttered from the West Holts stage during the Festival on Saturday.

    Bob Vylan lead singer performing on the West Holts stage during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset. (Photo cred: Yui Mok/AP)

    This call was not only denounced by right wing conservative and social-democratic figures such as the UK’s Prime Minister, Keith Starmer, who dubbed it ‘hate speech’ but also went too far for the liberal Glastonbury Festival management who issued a statement declaring it “appalling”.3

    To call for the ‘death’ of an organisation or a power is to call for it to cease to exist, to end. So what is the IDF? Well, the acronym stands for Israeli Defence Force, often and more realistically referred to as the IOF, i.e. the Israeli Occupation Force.

    Now this organisation is the military wing of the Zionist European settler colony which is ‘Israel’, and with a history of attacks on the indigenous Palestinians, in addition to the people of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and, the week before last, Iran.4

    APPALLING OR MODERATE AND REASONABLE?

    On that basis alone, surely it would be moderate and reasonable to call for such a military organisation to cease to exist, i.e. to call for its death?

    But there’s more – a lot more! The IOF has since 9th October 2023 been enforcing a water and starvation blockade on Gaza, also depriving it of importation of medicines.5 The IOF ground and air forces have destroyed at least in part but mostly completely every hospital and medical facility in Gaza.6

    Cartoon regarding the Israeli water blockade on Gaza (D.Breatnach)

    In addition to starving the population of Gaza by military blockade, the IOF has, with the direct assistance of the USA, set up the “killing fields” in which hungry Palestinian people are sniped, machine-gunned and shelled as they queue for meagre GHF food parcels.7

    The IOF has assassinated or caused the death of at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between 7 October 2023 and 4 June this year,8 including hundreds of first responders and civil defence workers,9 over 230 journalists10 and many police and security workers.11

    This same organisation is the one primarily responsible for the mass demolition in Gaza of Palestinian residential buildings and the displacement of 1.9 million people,12 along with destruction of water and sewage infrastructure, desalination plants, water tanks and agriculture.

    Many massacres by the IOF have been carried out in areas they had declared safe when displacing Palestinians from another area. (D.Breatnach)

    The evidence of daily genocide by the IOF is incontrovertible and even the weak and hesitant International Court of Justice in the Hague stated that there was a plausible case to answer.13 The court also ordered the arrest of some leading government ministers who control the IOF.14

    UNCONTROVERSIAL, A DUTY

    To call for the death of an army of genocide is surely not only not controversial but is instead correct, a duty, one which all reasonable institutions and individuals should emulate.

    According to the Genocide Convention of 1948, all signatory states have a duty to act to prevent genocide,15 not only not to collude with it. Bob Vylan is to be commended for their call and those who condemn them should, at the very least, face widespread opprobrium.

    Bob Vylan’s call is absolutely correct and humanity awaits its implementation, not only death to the IOF but also to the regime and colonial state that gave rise to and which program it follows. Let us join our voices to the humanitarian call and expand upon it.16

    Death to the IOF — and to the Zionist settler colony that spawned it!

    End.

    Sources:

    1The Glastonbury music festival is an annual event of a liberal alternative ambience.

    2https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0629/1520889-kneecap-glastonbury/

    3Ibid.

    4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Israel

    5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip_(2023%E2%80%93present)

    6https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/uk-s-channel-4-to-air-gaza-medics-documentary-rejected-by-bb

    7https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000 and https://www.breakingnews.ie/world/charities-call-for-end-to-israeli-backed-aid-group-as-dozens-more-die-in-gaza-1779018.html

    8Gaza health Ministry figures, quoted in https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r1xl5wgnko (which incorrectly quotes the Israeli figures on Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7th despite a number of Israeli sources indicating that an unknown number of those were killed by the IOF in implementation of the “Hannibal Doctrine”.

    9https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/over-1-500-humanitarian-workers-killed-since-start-of-israel-s-war-on-gaza-media-office/3524966

    10More since this published https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/2/gaza-war-deadliest-ever-for-journalists-says-report https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/2/gaza-war-deadliest-ever-for-journalists-says-report

    11In particular to facilitate food looters under IOF protection https://www.nbcnews.com/world/middle-east/israeli-strike-kills-18-palestinians-central-gaza-turmoil-mounts-food-rcna215479

    12About 90% of the population, some of them many times https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-177-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem

    13https://www.npr.org/2024/01/27/1227397107/icj-finds-genocide-case-against-israel-plausible-orders-it-to-stop-violations

    14Prime Minister Netanyahu and (then) Minister of ‘Defence’ Gallant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court_arrest_warrants_for_Israeli_leaders

    15See States’ Obligations in https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/Genocide%20Convention-FactSheet-ENG.pdf

    16https://x.com/BobbyVylan/status/1940015727743815986

    AFTER A 12-DAY WAR – HOW DOES THE BALANCE LOOK?

    On By rebelbreezeIn Current Affairs Comment, Imperialism, Middle East, Political Analysis, ZionismLeave a comment

    Diarmuid Breatnach

    (Reading time: 5 mins)

    Both the USA and its proxy Israel carried out an unprovoked attack on Iran, both attacking nuclear facilities and Israel, as per their playbook, bombing civilians and their public facilities.

    Iran targeted every category in Israel (generally not civilians) matching those the IOF bombed in Iran, assassinations excepted. And replied to the USA’s attack by hitting their most forward base in a Middle Eastern state, Al-Udeid in Qatar.1

    The objectives of the US and of Israel were ostensibly to wreck Iran’s nuclear program. But more than that, to achieve a change of regime to one amenable to the western powers, such as is the case with most of the Middle Eastern regimes.

    The regime change was to take place internally by subversion, terrorism and uprisings as it was fighting bombing by Israel.

    Neither the US nor Israel achieved those listed objectives.

    Iran’s objectives were to maintain its sovereignty and independence in general and, because of the US and Israeli public focus, defend its sovereignty with regard to uranium enrichment to improve its nuclear energy and by-products.

    Iran achieved those objectives,2 at least for the time being and it will probably now leave the IAEA with justification3 so western powers will know very little of what is going one with Iran’s nuclear program, which is to Iran’s benefit.

    Iran however also wanted the lifting of sanctions and it has not achieved that.

    Once the Israeli attack started, Iran’s objectives were a) to recover from the initial external and internal assaults and assassinations; b) defend the state from internal subversion and terrorism and from Israeli bombing; b) strike back at Israel and punish it so thoroughly as to prevent repetition.

    Iran successfully and quickly recovered from internal assaults and assassinations; b) put up a strong defence but was unable to down enemy planes other than drones, which was not a success;4 c) punished Israel very severely, to an extent that will become clearer as time goes on.

    Scene of Iranian missile damage in ‘Israel’, June 2025 (Photo sourced: Telegram)

    But the level of Iran’s attack was not enough to ensure Israel will never attack it again and the Zionist entity’s political and military leadership is probably even now concentrating on how to rebuild itself to strike again.

    Once the USA attacked, Iran had to show that it was capable of eliminating US bases across the region and would do so if attacked again. The strike on its evacuated Al-Udeid base in Qatar was largely symbolic but in fact proved Iran’s point and willingness to go that far if necessary.

    In that, Iran was resoundingly successful. No other state has attacked a Middle Eastern US base, albeit warned and evacuated at the time, without serious repercussion.

    This conflict ended overall as a draw but with the preponderance of success on Iran’s side.

    It is more difficult to assess the political wins and losses but in so far as there is any change in the overall political situation one would have to say it has shifted in Iran’s favour.

    One process of assessment is to investigate what the antagonists think:

    • Iran is celebrating nationally before turning to the funerals of their martyrs, in particular state funerals of victims of assassinations;
    • Israel is full of recriminations against its leadership but also against the US5 for not going further and imposing a ceasefire;
    • The USA leadership seems divided but opinion is increasingly mounting that Trump is mistaken in his assessment of ‘obliteration’ of Iran’s enriched uranium production sites.

    Another measure is the relative financial expenditure and loss.

    • Although this picture is far from clear from either side we know of over 39,000 insurance claims in Israel so far6and the state spent $5 Billion in the first week of the war.7

    They lost a prominent military science development site and lost or sustained damage to military and military intelligence sites too but it will be some time before the true level or even approximation will escape Israeli military censorship.

    Israel also lost presumably a great deal of its Mossad-run sabotage and terrorist network in Iran which exposed itself as part of Israel’s attack, much of which is now under interrogation, on trial or already executed.

    • U.S. spending on aid for Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere in the region between Oct. 7, 2023 – Oct. 7, 2024 was calculated at over $17.9 billion; spending on related U.S. operations in the region at over $4.86 billion.8
    • Iran produces missiles much more cheaply than Israeli munitions and has greater productive capacity; its greatest loss was the human cost (the disparity in civilian deaths shows who was really targeting civilians) and it lost a lot of scientists through Israeli assassinations.

    On the political-psychological level, an extremely important one:

    • Iran emerged as a strong state with popular support in defence of sovereignty that cannot easily be defeated. Internally this has led to greater unity, at least for the moment.

    Externally, Russia and China will see it not only worthwhile but important to support Iran and possibly even to part-arm them (which Pakistan too may do).

    Iran’s western-friendly neighbours will be wondering whether US airbases brings them greater security or the opposite and also whether any alliance with Israel is a good idea, even though pushed by the USA and other Western powers.

    Israel has seen its image of military superiority and even invincibility destroyed, internally by its war in Gaza and externally by its recent war with Iran and this process will increase as those from other areas view the damage in ‘Tel Aviv’ for example.

    For a decade the state has been seeing a steady exodus of dual-nationality Israelis, particularly among its technocrat population and during this war mass evacuations by boat and land after the Israeli State closed its airports.10

    The degradation of the IOF through mental fatigue, injuries and deaths (totalling more than 10,000 since their Gaza offensive), along with damaged armour, will continue in a deeply divided body politic.11

    • The USA’s population will continue to see protests not only against the wars in the Middle East and genocide in Palestine but also against the increasing decrees and police repressing free speech and the right to organise and participate in protests.
    • Western capitalist companies will continue to reduce or even end their investment in – or relationships with – the Israeli state,12 pushed in part by targeted protests and probably more largely by doubts about how financially safe Israel really is, even in the mid-term.

    IN CONCLUSION

    Iran is the overall winner, Israel definitely the big loser and the USA somewhat also (not forgetting that any Israeli loss is ultimately one for the US also). But the Zionazis will rearm and increase spying, sabotage and probably covert assassination operations in Iran.

    Iran will rearm also, possibly even in nuclear terms and will intensify its intelligence war against subversion and spying and always viewing future attacks on it as inevitable.

    The US will continue to view Iran as its primary adversary in the Middle East, in terms of its sovereignty and military capabilities.

    Also viewing Iran as a necessary obstacle to remove before its future full confrontation with China, a state financially and economically already ahead of the US and a strong proponent of a multi-polar world against the existing unipolar version with the US as its head.

    The world geopolitically-militarily will not be a better place as the result of the outcome of this 12-day war and may even be worse for it – after all, Israel and the US were permitted by the rest of the western alliance to bomb nuclear installations while continuing to support genocide in Gaza.

    But with the weakening of US Imperialism and Israeli Zionism, it will offer opportunities for reversing damaged sovereignty, for anti-imperialist revolutions and for social progress.

    End.

    FOOTNOTES & SOURCES

    1https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjxdgjpd48o

    2https://thecradle.co/articles/european-intel-says-irans-enriched-uranium-survived-us-attacks

    3https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/25/irans-parliament-approves-bill-to-suspend-cooperation-with-iaea

    https://thecradle.co/articles/russian-fm-warns-new-iaea-inspections-of-iran-can-lead-to-sensitive-leaks

    4Sharmine Narwani on the Cradle podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK8tYo3jdIk pointed out that none of the many Israeli photos taken from the air over central Iran could be ascertained as typically originating from IOF planes and were instead likely taken from drones. This raised the possibility that all the air-launched missiles of the IOF were all from airspace outside Iran (and we know that the Iraqi Government complained about the US violation of its airspace by opening it to the IOF). This also seems to answer a question that was bothering me: What happened in this war to the sophisticated radar that allegedly caused enemy planes to veer away from Iranian airspace in the attack last year, with some leaks alleged from pilots claiming that the Iranians were able to ‘see’ and target the latest stealth fighter planes. However ‘seeing’ fighters is not the same as ‘targeting’ them and may not even be possible at all with US B2 bombers – see interesting short presentation from this hostile source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz6cd9tHiyM No doubt scientists are working on the problem and technology will develop further so that stealth bombers may be detected and fighters and bombers targeted, with US technology developing technology to confuse the targeting and so on … and on.

    5Including reported tweets and comments calling for Israel to bomb the US!

    6https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-receives-nearly-39-000-compensation-claims-for-damages-caused-by-iranian-missiles/3611868 and https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-multi-billion-shekel-price-tag-iran-war

    7“The David’s Sling system, used to intercept short- and long-range threats, costs around $700,000 per activation when firing its minimum of two interceptors.” https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/12billion-a-month-the-cost-of-israels-daily-strikes-and-defence-against-iran-war-at-a-premium/articleshow/121979978.cms

    8Costs of War

    9https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/world/middleeast/gulf-states-iran-attack-us-qatar-base.html

    10Even before the retaliation by Iran https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/over-550000-israelis-flee-country-amid-gaza-war-data-shows-18176225 and during the war reported leaving by sea and land, after Israel closed airports https://www.newarab.com/news/israelis-quietly-flee-europe-yacht-escape-iran-missiles

    11https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/over-10-000-israeli-soldiers-killed-or-wounded-in-gaza-war-says-military-officer/3587606

    12The largest European consumers’ cooperative with 2,700,000 members (Wikipedia) joins boycott of Israeli products European retailers drop Israeli goods in solidarity with Gaza – TRT Global

    The feminist call to war

    On By rebelbreezeIn Anti-War, Current Affairs Comment, Genocide, Human Rights, Imperialism, Israeli Zionism, Middle East, Political Analysis, Political Prisoners, US Imperialism, WomenLeave a comment

    Gearóid Ó Loingsigh 24 June

    Reprinted in full from G.Ó.L’s substack and formatted for the Rebel Breeze blog.

    Feminism used to be associated with pacifist anti-militarist movements, but times have changed and now there are feminists who call for war, whilst they still continue to blame all wars on men. It is an enormous contradiction.

    For the last two years Gaza has lived under a siege and a genocide, supported by some sectors of feminism and in the midst of the conflict with Iran, once again feminist voices come out with a clamour for war. The reason is their supposed rush to free the women of Iran.

    Four female political prisoners in Evin prison in Tehran (before it was bombed by Israel), conscious of the cynicism of some feminist groups in the West issued a communiqué denouncing the war and those who support it.

    They stated that Israel wanted a submissive and weak Middle East and they opted to continue their own struggle against the government in Tehran without allying themselves with Yankee imperialism.

    Our liberation…from the dictatorship ruling the country is possible through the struggle of the masses and by resorting to social forces – not by clinging to foreign powers or placing hopes in them.

    The powers that have always brought destruction to the countries of the region through exploitation and colonisation, by inciting wars and killing in pursuit of greater benefits, will have no way out for us except for new destruction and exploitation.[1]

    The four women are pro-Kurdish and also women detained in the protests following the death of Masha Amini at the hands of the Morality Police in 2022. One of them fought against ISIS in Syria. They are not coffee house feminists.

    Women ‘of colour’ probably of the Combahee Collective with banner in what seems to be a general women’s liberation demonstration in the early 1970s. (Photo sourced: Internet)

    They branded as traitors those Iranian who have called for war, amongst them the son of the despotic Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah imposed by the USA in 1953 following the CIA coup.

    He ruled with an iron hand murdering and torturing the opposition, both the Left and Right, men and women. His son wants to go back to robbing the country’s coffers.

    Traitors to Iran and traitors to the peoples of the Middle East and traitors to the people’s years of freedom-seeking struggles against oppression will know that their betrayal and disdain will be recorded in the memory of the Iranian people and in history.

    Future generations will remember with shame those who stand on the corpses of defenceless people and trample them.[2]

    Whilst these women who did actually rise up against the regime are opposed to the war, in the West there are those bourgeois feminists who in between their macchiatos ask for more attacks on Iran, in order to “free” the women.

    They only think of Iran when a US president or the Nazis in Tel Aviv want to attack the country. They believe that the sexual predator who acts as US president is going to fight for the women. Maybe the way he did in Syria by installing ISIS.

    One of the first to invoke the repression of women was none other than Netanyahu,[3] a man who has bombed maternity hospitals in Gaza killing women and children all around.

    The US said something similar about Afghanistan and various bourgeois feminists came out to justify the war, deliberately ignoring that without US support the Taliban would never have existed.

    It was Jimmy Carter and then Reagan who started to finance the troglodytes of the Mujahadeen and later the Taliban i.e. the bourgeois feminists too.

    I should clarify that many of those feminists are not bourgeois in the sense of their social class, they have no capital, they are not rich, though there is no lack of those who are.

    They are bourgeois in an ideological sense, although they use terms such as liberal, radical, separatist etc., but what unites them is their defence of capitalism and the bourgeoisie.

    You could say right wing feminists but many of them like to present themselves as progressive when they are bourgeois, or in the case of the less wealthy ones, acolytes of the bourgeoisie.

    Hillary Clinton, a bourgeois feminist (both in the ideological sense and also in terms of her bank balance) who has her hands stained with the blood of women in Libya and other parts is one of the spokeswomen for bourgeois feminism.

    Much though they may shout, down with patriarchy! Their favourite slogan is Long Live Capitalism and Imperialism! This includes feminist intellectuals like Julie Bindel.

    They kept silent about the genocide in Gaza and now believe that whoever criticises the war against Iran supports the regime. I suppose this includes the political prisoners who don’t sip macchiatos in their cells.

    Bindel writing in The Sun said that those who criticise the war support Iran and the oppression of women. She repeated the usual lies about October 7th, mixed with some truths about Iran with the aim of supporting the war.[4] Bindel has kept silent about the massacres of women in Gaza.

    She doesn’t support the women of Iran, but rather the West. It is worth pointing out that the owner of the paper, where she writes, has supported reactionary governments around the world, including in Great Britain where Bindel lives.

    It is a misogynist, homophobic paper that frequently runs campaigns against the poor and migrants. Bindel is not alone, Kelly Jay Keen shares videos of the son of the Shah, perhaps to indicate that she supports the monarchy.[5]

    The bourgeois feminists, like all of the bourgeoise in practice see other cultures as inferior ones. They use the same imperialist language to justify wars as did Rudyard Kipling, the author of the infamous poem The White Man’s Burden. They boast about the White Woman’s Burden.

    It should be remembered that Kipling wrote that poem to seek and to justify the US invasion of the Philippines.

    Take up the White Man’s burden
    The savage wars of peace
    Fill full the mouth of Famine
    And bid the sickness cease;
    And when your goal is nearest
    The end for others sought,
    Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
    Bring all your hopes to nought.

    Then they say that men are to blame for wars and not their dear capitalist system. Over and again the bourgeois feminists call for war.

    But if they want wars and invasions, well why not ask for the US to be invaded, where women are pursued fleeing from one state to another to obtain an abortion, or where access to sex education is restricted and deficient as is access to contraceptives,[6] where women earn less than men and are under-represented in a wide range of fields.

    Afghanistan is a country where women are more repressed than in any other part of the world. Throughout the conflict the US financed the Mujahadeen and later the Taliban.

    They had the option of supporting organisations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a women’s organisation that opposed the Islamists and also the Russians and later the US invasion.[7] 

    No, between one macchiato and another our dear bourgeois feminists let the men in the Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton support the Taliban troglodytes.

    They said the same in Iraq. I am sure more than one reader is asking themselves what Iraq has to do with it all. It was a secular country, that promoted women’s education and participation.

    However, one of the reasons bandied about by Bush was that he was rescuing and defending women and he compared their situation to that of Afghanistan, despite Saddam promoting women’s education.[8] 

    In fact, under Saddam, 30% of faculty staff were women, trained in Europe and the USA with full funding from the government. It is no longer like that, in fact there is no intellectual world in Iraq, the bombs the bourgeois feminists asked for, put paid to that.[9] 

    In the US the bourgeois feminists paid to go to universities, but Iraq promoted women as a state policy, something the Yanks have never done. In Britain, just 31% of the lecturers were women.

    Iraq almost beat them, but in-between macchiatos the bourgeois feminists called for a war to improve the situation of women in Iraq and of course their investment portfolios.

    Now the drums of war are beating again and the bourgeois feminists once more give themselves over to the war, despite believing that wars are a male product rather than a capitalist one.

    They are not going to analyse their own participation, whilst a refugee from one of their wars prepares another macchiato for them.

    As the female political prisoners in Evin said, it will be the Iranian people and the Iranian women who will free Iran and the Iranian women and not the bourgeois with the macchiatos, wine and caviar.

    They are just as much the enemy of the women of Iran as the male bourgeois and are as deserving of our contempt.

    There is no lack of Iranian voices asking for war and not just the son of the despot Pahlevi. Masih Alinejad is an exiled journalist. She took part in the movement against the obligatory use of head coverings in Iran and other things.

    So far so good, unlike others she has fought against the oppression of women in the country.

    But in exile, she turned out to be a Zionist and in the first Trump government met with the hawk Mike Pompeo and also worked at the official US propaganda radio station, Voice of America, transmitting programmes in Farsi.

    Masih Alinejad & Jake Sullivan, Intelligence Adviser to US President Biden 2021 2025. (Source: Wikipedia)

    Now she criticises Netanyahu, but not for bombing Iran and killing civilians but because of his bad timing. She believes he should have waited for protests against the government and attacked at that time. Of course the bombs were not going to fall on her, safe in New York.

    Those feminists who keep silent about the genocide in Gaza do not seek the liberation of women in Iran, but rather a geopolitical reorganisation of the region and the victory of Zionism.

    But that slogan doesn’t sound too good and you can easier convince the dozy in the world by talking about the rights of women in Iran. Meanwhile they have little to say about why their governments installed and recognised the Islamists from ISIS in Syria.

    It is an exercise in public relations rather than real concern for the future of women in Iran. At the end of the day bourgeois feminists defend the bourgeoisie more than they defend women.

    End.

    NOTES

    [1] Middle East Eye (19/06/2025) Iran: Jailed women activists issue letter condemning Israeli attacks. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/jailed-female-activists-iran-issue-letter-condemning-israeli-attacks

    [2] Ibíd.,

    [3] See https://link.sbstck.com/redirect/ab68f07d-68ef-4e79-9561-0c8062663882?j=eyJ1IjoiMzBqYW1wIn0.0Y_uIvVCiPFxQqpA0lVO04u7LmUWrBGajjuhH6mjvNk

    [4] The Sun (23/06/2025) Stupid ignorant lefties who support Iran when it stones women for adultery are mad and immoral. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/35536772/support-iran-death-cult-opinion-julie-bindel/

    [5] See https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1937201198370549828

    [6] The Guardian (23/01/2025) As Trump returns, state lawmakers pursue bills that would treat abortion as homicide. Carter Sherman. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/23/abortion-homicide-bills

    [7] See http://www.rawa.org/index.php

    [8] The New Arab (22/10/2021) Colonial feminism and the un-liberation of women in Iraq. Jyhene Kebsi. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/colonial-feminism-and-un-liberation-women-iraq

    [9] Al Jazeera (01/10/2013) The Destruction of Iraq’s Intellectuals. Matthew Schweitzer. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/10/1/the-destruction-of-iraqs-intellectuals

    MEANWHILE, IN GAZA, THE OTHER WAR: RESISTANCE OPERATIONS EVERY DAY

    On By rebelbreezeIn Cartoon, Current Affairs Comment, Guerrilla Action, Imperialism, Indigenous or Original People, Israeli Zionism, Massacres, Middle East, National Liberation, Palestine, Political Analysis, US ImperialismLeave a comment

    Diarmuid Breatnach

    (Reading time: 5 mins.)

    As Israel and Iran slug it out with some criminal interventions from the USA, the older war continues in Gaza – the one that’s been ongoing since the late 1940s and has intensified sharply since 8th October 2023.

    The antagonists in this war are the Israeli Occupation forces, supplied not only by the USA, the UK, and the EU but to practical purposes by the whole western imperialist alliance, against the Palestinian resistance, now reduced to their existing stockpiles and own inventions.

    But the IOF is not fighting the armed resistance in Gaza – it is rarely fighting at all. It is killing unarmed civilians in GHF food traps, in bombings of homes and refugee centres and targeting media workers, first responders, security personnel. And arresting hundreds.

    The IOF has destroyed huge areas of Gaza by air bombing, demolition charges and bulldozing by machines built in the USA. Areas are declared unsafe where Palestinians may be sniped but nowhere is safe really, whether from random missile or shell strikes or targeted assassinations.

    But there IS armed resistance and it IS fighting, even if we are not told of it, unless by some well-connected sources outside the heavily-censored and biased western mass media. There are Resistance operations almost daily – 50 reported the week before last alone.1

    Israeli tank in Gaza after hit by the Resistance, presumably with the tandem Yassin. Date unknown. (Cred: Palestine Chronicle)

    Several times a week the Zionist military or public media reports “a serious security incident” in Gaza, their usual code for an event in which either a very senior IOF officer has been killed or more usually, one in which two or more IOF have been killed or injured.

    Many of these operations are Resistance ambushes or traps by previously-laid IED2 either detonated electronically or by pressure of the heavy tanks or armoured bulldozers. These may be followed up by ambush of rescuing force or attack on survivors, then a fast evacuation from the scene.

    And it needs to be fast because the IOF has control of the sky and the ordinance from which to blast whole areas in the hope of killing a couple of fighters.

    The IOF also take over Palestinian buildings as sniper and observation posts and sometimes the Resistance has pre-mined the building. The IOF soldiers and dogs check for hidden explosives but rarely find them before they explode around, underneath or above them.3

    Or their post may get hit by Resistance rocket with thermobaric warhead. Again, the detonation of the building4 may be followed by ambush of the rescuing IOF forces, such battles sometimes lasting for considerable time, occasionally in close combat, despite the IOF control of the sky.

    There are also Palestinian bombardments by light and heavy mortars or missiles from hidden positions targeting IOF infantry and vehicle concentrations, after which the firing positions are concealed and the vicinity quickly abandoned in advance of IOF artillery or missile targeting.

    Resistance sniping operations continue and, where possible, commanding officers are targeted. The Palestinians have developed their own Al-Ghoul single-shot sniper rifle, effective up to 2,000 metres.5 Tanks, armoured bulldozers and troop carriers may be hit by shoulder-launched rockets.6

    Incredibly, video exists of fighters emerging from a ruined building carrying a bomb, placing the explosive device at an IOF tanks’s most vulnerable spot and racing back to shelter before the explosion.

    A Palestinian Resistance fighter (PFLP by headband) firing a medium mortar shell in Gaza. (Photo sourced: Internet)

    What are the weapons of the Resistance and where from are they obtained?

    The Resistance has many weapons, mostly automatic rifles, which they were supplied by allies in the past but none of those supply routes are probably open now. They have also taken weapons from dead IOF7 and constructed their own.

    Aside from the Al-Ghoul, there is also the tandem Al-Yassin8 in which the Resistance has developed a shoulder-launched rocket of limited penetration strenght into a deadly armour-penetrating missile, seen on occasion blowing the entire turret off an IOF tank.

    The IEDs employed as mines or carried to place against tanks contain high explosive donated by the IOF in their hundreds of unexploded bombs littering Gaza. With a failure-to-explode rate estimated as high as 20%9 the Resistance looks unlikely to run out of source for years.

    Recently too the Resistance filmed themselves removing sacks of high explosive from an IOF stack intended for the demolition of homes. Both missiles and mortars are developed and produced in engineering shops below ground, as are bullets and IEDs and they too are filled with explosives.

    The Tandem Yassin, manufactured in Gaza by the Resistance. (Sketchfab)

    Where are these operations taking place? In the areas of Gaza which the IOF and Netanyahu boasted of “clearing of Hamas” over a year ago, mostly now devoid of civilians, into which the IOF moves tentatively — and have recently been instructed to move even more cautiously.

    Where from are the Resistance fighters coming? Sometimes from still-standing fractured buildings but mostly from the network of tunnels which they have been constructing for years. Here they live frugally, waiting the chance to attack the Occupier of their land,10 the killer of their children.11

    Who are the armed Resistance in Gaza? They vary in history and in ideological basis, religious or secular but all unite in resistance and often take joint actions. The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas, of course are the main force but not the only ones.

    Next in size and influence are the Al-Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad. Other factions include the Al-Nasser Salah Ad-Din Brigades of the Popular Resistance Committees12 and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of the marxist-leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.13

    Representatives of different Palestinian Resistance factions posing for photograph to show their unity against the Zionist Occupation as the ceasefire approached in March 2024, soon after breached and abandoned by ‘Israel’. (Photo cred: Workers World)

    The IOF collects their dead and wounded by helicopter, rushing them to some of the World’s most up-to-date war trauma treatment facilities. They drop smoke cannisters to obscure surveillance, not to protect from snipers: the Palestinian resistance never fires on those ‘copters.

    Perhaps they should – the IOF — “the most moral army in the world”14 – certainly has no qualms about firing on Palestinian ambulances, paramedics, first responders and they hold the world record for destruction of hospitals and medical facilities. But clearly the Resistance has higher standards.

    All military matters in the Zionist Entity are subject to military censorship and this includes numbers of dead and injured IOF, which allows them to conceal the numbers; they have military liaison officers stationed at hospitals to deal with queries.

    Analysts have concluded that the IOF masks the numbers of killed and injured15 while wildly expanding the numbers of Palestinian Resistance fighters killed. Of course in war both sides engage in propaganda and it is said that Truth is the first casualty.

    However, while there have been a great many videos of the Resistance in action filmed by themselves, there are none of the IOF fighting the Resistance at anything like close quarters. Clearly this is not due to modesty or even less to delicacy – it is due to absence of occasion.

    Cartoon comment by D.Breatnach

    While the Zionist state continues its daily genocidal actions in Gaza (and in the West Bank) and its aggressive actions in Lebanon, Syria and now in Iran, in 19 months they have failed to defeat the armed Resistance factions in Gaza. And now they have admitted to arming criminal looters.16

    The IOF is unfit for standard military combat, even against insurgents and specialises only in assassinations, usually from the air and in genocidal operations against unarmed civilians, from air, sea and on the ground. Oh, and in destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, infrastructure, wells …

    According to increasing number of reports, it is becoming unfit even for those.17

    End.

    FOOTNOTES

    REFERENCES

    Resistance operations over six months: https://electronicintifada.net/blog/503891

    A hostile source reports briefly on Gaza Palestinian domestic weapons engineering: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/11/middleeast/hamas-weaponry-gaza-israel-palestine-unrest-intl-hnk-ml

    IOF casualties: https://www.palestinechronicle.com/heavy-israeli-casualties-in-gaza-as-resistance-ambushes-intensify/

    1Elmer, Jon, Resistance Report, Electronic Intifada YouTube podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXvvCOjdgjI

    2Improvised Explosive Device

    3Nine IOF were injured, four fatally in such an ambush on 7th June. Report from hostile source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/4-idf-soldiers-killed-5-wounded-after-booby-trapped-south-gaza-building-collapses/

    4A daily experience for Gazans but a rare one for Israelis, until the retaliation from Iran in the more recent ongoing war.

    5https://www.presstv.ir/doc/Detail/2024/05/29/726456/whats-story-behind-advanced-ghoul-sniper-rifle-used-hamas-fighters

    6https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240125-haaretz-the-missile-that-killed-21-soldiers-in-gaza-was-produced-by-hamas/

    7https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-weapons-rockets.html

    8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasin_(RPG)

    9https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/thousands-of-unexploded-israeli-bombs-have-become-key-resource-for-hamas-wing-in-gaza-report/3559371

    10Israel declared itself the Zionist state on the land of Palestine in 1948.

    11The IOF has killed at least an estimated 17,400 children (15,600 have been identified) since 7th October 2023,; at that rate Israel kills a child in Gaza every 45 minutes. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2025/3/26/gazas-stolen-childhood-the-thousands-of-children-israel-killed

    12Many sources including this one, non-supportive of the Resistance: https://www.newsweek.com/not-only-hamas-eight-factions-war-israel-gaza-1841292

    13They are the only organisation of the Gaza resistance which is also part of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which bars Islamic-ideological organisations from membership. The PFLP has called for unity of all Palestinian resistance (as have the Islamic organisations) but the PLO is dominated by the Fatah party and holds only internal functions to formally approve its own manoeuvres. It also controls the undemocratic, repressive, corrupt and Israeli collaborator Palestinian Authority under Fatah nominee Mahmoud Abbas.

    14https://x.com/IsraeliPM/status/1745501858611786029

    15https://www.palestinechronicle.com/heavy-israeli-casualties-in-gaza-as-resistance-ambushes-intensify/

    16https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250607-israel-admits-support-anti-hamas-armed-group-accused-looting-gaza-aid-bedouin-abu-shabab

    17https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-close-israeli-army-collapse/49851

    UNPROVOKED, UNJUSTIFIED IMPERIALIST-ZIONIST ATTACK

    On By rebelbreezeIn Anti-War, Current Affairs Comment, Genocide, Imperialism, Internationalist Solidarity, Ireland, Mass Media Criticism, Middle East, Political Analysis, US Imperialism, ZionismLeave a comment

    Diarmuid Breatnach

    (Reading time: 5 mins.)

    On Friday the ‘Israeli’ state launched an unprovoked and unjustified attack on Iran. Apart from any any liking or disliking of either attacker or attacked, this is a fact. And if this be acceptable, then it can happen to any country.

    Of course, in this century and in the last it has already happened to many countries – and in general, it is imperialist states or their proxies who have been responsible. Also in the case of ‘Israel’ in Lebanon and Syria while practising genocide in Gaza.

    The western mass media could not deny that Iran’s attack is retaliation to an attack by ‘Israel’, nor could they just omit that context in their reports. So instead, they called the Israeli attack a ‘pre-emptive’ strike,1 which usually means that one had to act first as was just about to be attacked.

    But no, that is completely misleading; any time Iran has attacked ‘Israel’ it’s been in retaliation to an ‘Israel’ attack on them first. And in fact the Zionist regime was overdue a retaliation due to their attack on Iran in October last year.

    There are many regimes around the world of which I do not approve and some which I detest but that does not give me or others justification for attacking their countries. Stopping genocide does provide justification and, according to international law, actual obligation but only Yemen acted.

    Iranian retaliatory missiles striking Haifa (‘Tel Aviv’) 14th or 15th June 2025. (Image sourced: Online)

    The ‘Israeli’ ‘justification’ for their attack is that Iran posed a threat to their state. This was based on the often-stated belief of the Iranian authorities that the Zionist settler colony is a threat to the whole Middle East and should be eliminated. But is an expression of an opinion a real threat?

    It is not, unless followed by action (such as for example the genocidal and racist statements of Israeli Government ministers as the IOF carries out their wishes in practice).

    And in fact the Zionists have themselves verified the correctness of the opinions of the Iranian authorities by their history since 1948 (and for some time before that too). But how was this alleged threat to be carried out? By Iran developing nuclear weapons, claimed the Zionists.

    Netanyahu has been claiming over ten years, against all the evidence, that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, despite numerous Iranian denials and official inspections. The Western powers are apparently also very concerned about the possible development of nuclear weapons by Iran.

    Wait a minute! France, UK and the USA are concerned about Iran possibly having nuclear weapons some day? All of those are nuclear weapon-holding states! What gives them the right to decide who should and who should not have nuclear weapons?

    We could ask too what gives the Israeli State, which has secret nuclear weapons, such a right?

    Yes, the Zionist State has had nuclear weapons since the 1960s, although it keeps it secret and its nuclear weaponry is not open to any inspection. Israeli peace activist whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, a former nuclear scientist, confirmed this to the British press in 1986.2

    Vanunu was lured to Italy by Mossad, drugged, kidnapped and flown to the Zionist state where he was tried in secret. He has spent 18 years in jail, 11 of them in solitary confinement (despite there not being any such sentence in the ‘Israeli’ penal code) and is not permitted to leave the country.

    Leaders of the USA have expressed the fear that Iran may one day develop nuclear weapons and attack Israel with them. This worry is being expressed by the only state that has used nuclear weapons to attack another state – and did it not once, but twice!

    In August 1944 US bombers exploded atomic bombs over two cities of Japan, with which the US was at war. One study estimates the number of dead, mostly civilians at 199,0003 but many continued to die from radiation poisoning in following years.

    ALTHOUGH IRAN HAS THE RIGHT TO DEVELOP NUCLEAR WEAPONS – THEY WEREN’T DOING SO

    Not only was there no evidence that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, and that they repeated many times that they were not and a number of observers and investigators had confirmed their statements – but the Supreme Leader of Iran had issued a fatwa4 against such development!

    Trump in his many statements seemed to confuse the terms enrichment with nuclear weapon, using them alternately. Now we can see that it was never about nuclear weapons: it was the enrichment that the western allies wished to stop, in order to cripple Iran’s nuclear energy development.

    What we are seeing in this conflict is international bullying in which threats, economic sanctions, assassinations, bombing and war (not to mention genocide) are fine with the western powers as long as they (or their proxies) are committing them.

    This is the alliance that the Irish gombeen ruling class wants us to join, either through an imperialist EU ‘defence’ (sic) force or through NATO. And the supreme irony is that they will use the very wars they start as ‘evidence’ of the need for us to join them!

    As I write, Iran is hitting back, completely justifiably. A number of waves of missiles so far, striking Zionist regime buildings and military establishments. Of course, it is not a sneak attack and most of leaders and ‘Tel Aviv’ residents are in bomb shelters.

    The Zionists cannot be paid back in their own preferred coin of leadership assassination. At the moment, it’s not certain where war criminal and child-murderer Netanyahu is but he did visit one of the sites hit by Iran from where he poured out further threats.

    So far, Iran has not attacked US bases in West Asia although the US is clearly complicit in the attack on Iran, for which no further evidence is required than that the missiles came through Iraq’s totally USA-controlled air space. And Trump has been boasting about US involvement too.

    Recent news is that the Genocidal State has asked for help from its allies in its defence against just retribution and that the UK responded positively. The western imperialist bloc is about to reveal its collusion with the genocidal state even more openly than recently.

    What will happen next? How will the rest of the world act over the coming months? It is hard to predict but we can definitely say that the world is in a different place from now on.

    WHERE DO WE STAND?

    So far the population of most of Ireland has managed not to be recruited into the western imperialist bloc but the government of the Irish state continues to be complicit and the six-county colony is under UK occupation — and therefore officially part of US/ NATO.

    Simon Harris, Tánaiste, Irish Government Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and for Defence was reported today saying that “Iran has consistently been a danger to the world.”5

    Er … Iran? Not the aggressor (and genocider) Israel, which attacked Iran first, also attacking Syria and Lebanon and in the past Jordan, Libya and Egypt?

    Not the USA (201 military actions in 153 countries after WW2)? Not the UK or France, colonial masters and currently major imperialist states?

    I suspect that some socialists will find it difficult to stand in solidarity with the people of Iran; they found it impossible to do so with the people in the secular regimes of Libya and Syria – and Iran is a theocracy with many social regulations to which they would be strongly opposed.

    On the other hand, Iran is being attacked by imperialist-backed Zionism because of its insistence on sovereignty and support for anti-imperialist struggles in West Asia. Apart from the Ansarallah regime of Yemen, Iran is the only state to stand up to Zionism in the region.

    For genuine anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists then, for all democratic people, our stance and demand is clear: HANDS OFF IRAN!

    End.

    Footnotes

    1Even this ‘background explanatory’ piece, which starts off recounting a decades-long list of ‘Israeli’ sabotage and assassination operations against Iran, later turns to defend ‘Israel’ by referring to the Hamas-led 7th October breakout and tenuously connecting Iran to that operation through their solidarity with Hamas. For context of that solidarity the journal would need to go back to all the attacks on the Palestinians by ‘Israel’ but of course it does not do. https://www.breakingnews.ie/world/timeline-of-tensions-and-hostilities-between-israel-and-iran-1773045.html

    2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu

    3https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_chp10.html

    4A religious and legal injunction according to Muslim law.

    5https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/harris-says-world-on-brink-of-extraordinary-destabilisation-1773627.html

    WE FOUGHT THEM FOR 800 YEARS BUT WE ARE STILL NOT FREE

    On By rebelbreezeIn British imperialism, Capitalism, Current Affairs Comment, History, Imperialism, Internationalist Solidarity, National Liberation, Palestine, Political Analysis2 Comments

    Diarmuid Breatnach

    (Reading time main text: 4mins.)

    I was jarred recently hearing the Irish actor and Palestine solidarity activist Liam Cunningham mention “700 years of British occupation”.1 And I have heard others not from Ireland speak admiringly of the “Irish freedom struggle of 700 years.”

    Quite a few of those from other countries who quoted the “freedom” after “700 years” did so admiringly and may not be well acquainted with our nation’s history.

    Liam Cunningham in Italy with two of the humanitarian activists about to sail on the Mayleen’s expedition to Gaza.

    The foreign occupation of Ireland is normally dated from the Norman invasion of 1169 (although we could add to it the foreign occupation of Dublin by the Vikings from roughly 853 AD to 1170 AD).

    I’m aware that I can be somewhat challenged in mathematics but after checking and re-checking I find that 856 years have elapsed since 1169, which means that the British-based occupation of Ireland has continued for well in excess of the 700 years quoted by Cunningham and others.

    The Pale or walled city of Dublin under British Norman/ English occupation (Source image: https://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/dublin/short_history/map_1.html)

    So where did the “700” years figure come from? It occurred to me that in some people’s heads this might be based on the creation of the Irish State and an assumption that was the point at which we threw off the British colonial yoke. Well, even then it would be 752 years but o.k, that might be it.

    So, all of Ireland was occupied for centuries, then after numerous uprisings, in 1921 the British ceded 26 counties to Irish State control. But Ireland has 32 counties – what happened to the missing six counties? Well, we know, they remained occupied.

    The Irish State in 1921 abandoned the people of the Six Counties, in particular the 34%+ who were of Catholic background; abandoned them to institutional sectarian religious discrimination in housing, employment and representation — and to repression.2

    And in fact, the fairly recent 30 Years War was precisely about that occupation. Inevitably, the people rose up against their repression and oppression. The Irish State formally claimed those Six Counties but took no steps to regain them and cooperated with the colonial forces.3

    Clearly we can’t change history but we can choose not to collude with injustice. We can refuse to conceive of Ireland as missing six counties, as only four-fifths of its actual landmass. We used to have a word for the thinking that had a Six-County blind spot – we called it ‘partitionist’.

    In other words, an attitude that agreed with, colluded with or merely accepted the partition of the Irish Nation.

    The Irish State that was born in 1921 was dominated by a capitalist ruling class which was pro-British and socially conservative, even beyond the social conservatism of Britain. And the social conservatism of the colonial Six County regime was even more extreme.

    The agreement to abandon the Six Counties was a good indication of the servile nature of the ruling class of the Irish State which became even more evident as the State developed — and even under a later government of former opponents of the State, the Sinn Féin split of Fianna Fáil.

    The Irish economy was neither developed nor diversified. Emigration continued unchecked as it had for centuries under British rule and. Irish State obeisance in turn switched to the USA and then to the EU. Currently the Irish ruling class is trying to eliminate any Irish State neutrality.

    In 1845 Ireland was able to feed over 8 million but today in 2025 cannot even feed a little over 7 million in (over 5.3 million in the Irish state, nearly 2 million in the Six Counties). Yes, we must import food in order to eat.

    Most large companies and banks within the state are foreign-owned, including such national brands and flagships as Aer Lingus, Guinness (including Harp and Hop House lagers and Smithwicks ale), Jameson and Paddy’s whiskeys,4Erin Foods, our telecommunication system5.

    Most financial institutions within the state such as insurance companies in health, life, accident, motors, travel are also foreign-owned, including the now ironically-named Irish Life. The health, transport and mail systems and infrastructures are increasingly penetrated by foreign companies.

    Foreign-owned hotels, housing apartment and office blocks are the rule and growing while vulture companies gobble up the properties of people who already paid the construction costs of their homes.

    In economic policies and in foreign political policy it is clear that the Irish State remains close to the major Western Powers. Responding to popular feeling over the genocide in Gaza, its political leaders may posture a little away from the pack but in effect?

    The Irish State imports productsfrom the Israeli State (US$4.15 Billion in 2024),6 allows genocidal state munitions through the State’s ‘neutral’ air space, US munitions and personnel through Shannon International Airport while maintaining all normal links with the Zionist state.

    What we believe and say is important

    In his interview with The Group Chat Cunningham, with the agreement of the panel, stated that no state was fulfilling its legal duty to practically oppose genocide. This was an unjustified slur on Yemen, which has shut down Israeli inward or outward Red Sea traffic and hit the state itself.7

    It is very interesting that even among the many condemnations of Israel by media commentators and politicians we rarely hear acknowledgement, never mind commendation of the anti-genocidal action and sacrifice of the Ansarallah state and the Yemeni people.

    Perhaps the contrast is too painful.

    However, in an interview during a Palestine solidarity march in Dublin8 Cunningham referred to 800 years. Was that a slip of the tongue, or were the references to 700 centuries instead the slips? Interestingly he also referred to foreign vulture funds and landlords in the same interview.

    Liam Cunningham speaking about the seizure by the ‘Israeli’ navy of the humanitarian mission ship Mayleen. (Source photo: The Irish Star)

    It is important that an actor in a popular drama series speaks up for Palestine and also for the Irish people and Cunningham has been doing so for years.

    What we say and how we recall history is also important because they have an impact on the present and on the future. On what we aspire to. On how we act and think, on how those around us act and think.

    Ireland is partitioned between a colonial ruling class and an Irish foreign-dependent ruling class. We fought the Viking occupation for 300 years and the British occupation for well over 800 years – and we are still fighting it. Without sovereignty we cannot develop our economy.

    Without sovereignty we will be dragged into imperial and colonial conflicts but never to our historical and traditional place – on the side of the Resistance.

    End.

    NOTES

    1A number of times but in particular in interview on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znTKPzXLfrI and on 21.17 minutes in the Empire Files interview

    2It also abandoned the Protestant majority, including many descendants of the United Irishmen particularly in Antrim, to a sectarian, bigoted, racist and colonial ideology that helped maintain them for decades with the worst housing and lowest wages in the UK of which they were part.

    3In 1998 it abandoned even the formality of that claim https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-65184915

    4And Bushmills in the colonial statelet.

    5https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/03/16/french-billionaire-niel-inches-closer-to-full-ownership-of-eir/#:~:text=NJJ%20Boru%2C%20a%20company%20controlled,private%20equity%20firm%20Anchorage%20Capital

    6https://tradingeconomics.com/ireland/imports/israel and https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2025/06/08/despite-the-politics-ireland-is-israels-second-biggest-export-market-for-goods/

    7Also in the Empire Files interview.

    8On 24th April https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/game-of-thrones-liam-cunningham-gaza-b2534126.html

    SOURCES

    The Group Chat interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znTKPzXLfrI

    The Empire Files interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojQGOD3vywU

    CHANGING THE STARRY PLOUGH COLOUR AND SEAN O’CASEY

    On By rebelbreezeIn History, Imperialism, irish history, Irish Left, Irish Republicanism, National Liberation, Political Analysis, Resistance Art, Socialist Revolution, Workers' Struggles2 Comments

    Diarmuid Breatnach

    (Reading time: 5 mins.)

    For many years the Starry Plough flag in Ireland, associated with socialist Irish Republicanism, was the form of the Ursa Mayor1 constellation in white or silver stars on a blue background, from the time of the Republican Congress (1934-’36).

    Somewhat later a different design including an actual plough following the stars and shape of Ursa Mayor on a green background began to be seen. But which was the original? And how, when and why did the other version come into existence?

    It is not disputed that the Starry Plough was designed for the Irish Citizen Army, nor that it came to be designed in 1914, as the ICA was reorganising following the defeat of the Dublin workers in the 1913 Lockout. Whatever its colour, that was clearly the original.

    It is beyond dispute that the Starry Plough was raised above Clery’s building, across the road from the GPO, during the 1916 Rising. It survived the burning of the building even though one witness spoke of a melted glass stream from its windows running across O’Connell (then Sackville) Street.

    The flag disappeared thereafter. A British officer claimed to have taken it as a trophy. If there was more than one copy of that flag at the time, no-one has spoken of it.

    When the Republican Congress was founded in 1934 the need for its own flag was felt. The Starry Plough of the ICA seemed appropriate and former members of the ICA were consulted as to the original design and colour and it appears that memories diverged on that issue.

    Some remembered the background colour as green, some as blue. Prominent in the latter group was playwright Sean O’Casey, who had been Secretary of the ICA for a brief period in 1914 and presumably was present when the flag design was approved.

    Whether or not, between April 1914 and April 1916, surely the flag had been paraded through the Dublin streets on a number of occasions and in any case it had flown over Clery’s in O’Connell Street for five or six days.

    Nevertheless when the former members of the ICA were consulted in the 1930s there appeared to be uncertainty about the background colour – was it green or blue? Possibly the majority remembered it as blue or perhaps the opinion of O’Casey, who insisted on blue, was taken as the most valid.

    In May 2022 former IRSP comrades of former leading IRSP activist Mick Plunkett stretch the blue Starry Plough version over the coffin containing the remains of the latter. During the 1970s-to the 2000 the blue version of the flag had been particularly associated with the IRSP.(Source photo: Seamus Costello Memorial Committee FB page).

    So the flag of the Republican Congress was made a plain blue background with the shape of Ursa Mayor outlined in white or silver stars (and no actual plough design). That design was flown in Irish Republican colour parties from the 1960s at least and adopted too by the Irish Labour Party.2

    A problem for the claim that the original was blue arose in the 1950s when an ex-British Army officer offered the Irish National Museum what he claimed to have been the Starry Plough which he said he had removed from the ruin of Clery’s. The background colour was green.

    O’Casey was contacted by the NMI and insisted it could not be the original, maintaining that had been blue. To bear this out, he submitted a watercolour of what he claimed was Megahey’s (original artist) design work, in which the background was blue but did include a plough.3

    The watercolour submitted by O’Casey which he claimed was the original design of the man who designed the flag, William Magahey. (Copied from article about the conservation of the original flag in History Ireland).

    There was no way to prove the provenance of the watercolour. Nor was it impossible that a change of mind had led from a blue background on a design artwork to green on the produced flag. But O’Casey insisted that not only the artwork but the finished product had been blue.

    Well then, why not investigate the artefact, the one claimed to be that which had been taken back to England by the British officer?

    The original flag in the possession of the NMI back to front prior to conservation work. (Copied from article about the conservation of the original flag in History Ireland).

    The NMI curator invited former members of the ICA only4 to view the artefact and although distressed at the state in which they saw it they confirmed that it matched their recollection. For the curator it seems that was the clincher and he then authorised its purchase in 1956.5

    Around 2012 (the article does not give a date) an NMI curator charged with preserving the artefact set out to carry out modern method analysis of the material and its construction, paint and the more than 50 holes in it corresponding to .303 machine gun bullet impacts.6

    The original Starry Plough flag in correct orientation (Photo sourced: NMI on line)

    Former ICA members had remembered a golden edging on the flag, traces of which were indeed found on the green specimen. It all checked out. A clever hoax? Possibly, but for an eventual price of £150, a relatively small amount even back in 1954?

    The ICA members viewing the artefact believed it was the original, the British Officer testified as to his having taken it and also produced an Irish Times account by himself dated 11 May 1916.7 The NMI tests all pointed to the conclusion that it was the original flag – and the background was green.

    But O’Casey was adamant that it had been blue. And what about the blue watercolour, allegedly the artist’s design?

    It’s possible that between the design outline and manufacture, a change in the desired background colour had taken place. But not only colour – the plough design on the watercolour is very different from that on what we must now conclude was the original flag.

    We have no evidence to verify that the watercolour was the original designer’s. O’Casey might have painted it himself, from his mistaken memory, for example. Or is it possible that he falsified its origin in order to convince the NMI that the flag had been blue and not green?

    Any such effort would not have been about an aesthetical judgement in favour of one colour over another but rather about removing the colour associated with nationalism.

    O’Casey resigned from the ICA in a dispute8 about allying with nationalism but more tellingly, he disagreed after the fact with Connolly throwing himself and his forces into an uprising against colonialism9 – a nationalist rather than socialist uprising, as O’Casey would have seen it.

    Connolly’s thesis was that the advance towards socialism was not possible in a colony such as Ireland without allying the socialist forces with the most progressive and revolutionary national bourgeois forces, i.e the IRB and the Irish Volunteers.10 O’Casey could not agree with that.

    In Innisfallen Fare Thee Well (1949)11 he wrote: “The Easter Rising had pulled down a dark curtain of eternal separation between him and his best friends: and the few that had remained  alive and delightful, now lay deep, with convivial virtues, under the smoking rubblement of the Civil War.”

    The symbolism of the original green, the colour of Irish Republicanism since the United Irishmen of the late 18th Century would have been anathema to the later O’Casey. Was he indulging in revisionist wishful thinking?

    Or perhaps trying to ensure that in any future conflicts, the Irish Republican and Socialist trends would be kept firmly separate?

    Two green Starry Ploughs on view among other flags carried by a section of marchers at the Bloody Sunday massacre commemoration March for Justice in Derry in January 2025. The one in centre of photo is a mass-produced reproduction whereas to the left one can see part of a quilted sewn individual one. (Photo: D.Breatnach)

    There are others who strive to ensure the exact opposite, who as Connolly did, see in the combination of those two strands Ireland’s only chance for freedom from colonialism, neo-colonialism and an advance towards a socialist society.

    For them, the original design and colours of the Starry Plough is their flag and its entire symbolism points the way forward.

    End.

    FOOTNOTES

    1In the USA this constellation is commonly referred to as “the Big Dipper”.

    2Rarely used by the Irish Labour Party nowadays. It was popular with the Irish Republican Socialist Party for decades but nowadays a version in white stars on a black panel on a red flag is flown by the organisation.

    3https://historyireland.com/citizen-armys-starry-plough-flag/

    4Ibid: O’Casey appears not to have been invited, which suggests that the accuracy of his stated recollection was doubted.

    5Ibid.

    6Ibid.

    7‘The rebels, on taking possession of the Imperial Hotel in Sackville Street, hoisted their flag over the building, and there it remained intact on one of the ridges of the front wall while the entire contents of the premises were being consumed by fire. At great personal risk the flag was eventually brought down by second Lieutenant T.A. Williams of the 9th Reserve Cavalry, Kildare Barracks, assisted by Inspector Barrett, Dublin Metropolitan Police.’ https://historyireland.com/citizen-armys-starry-plough-flag/

    8https://www.dib.ie/biography/ocasey-sean-a6553 O’Casey objected to the enrolment of Constance Markievicz in the Irish Citizen Army because she was also a member of Cumann na mBan, which had been set up as a female auxiliary organisation to the Irish Volunteers. O’Casey proposed that membership of the ICA precluded joint membership with any Irish nationalist organisation. Having had his motion defeated, O’Casey resigned from the ICA in July 2014.

    9‘[Connolly’s] speeches and his writings had long indicated his new trend of thought, and his actions now proclaimed trumpet-tongued that the appeal of Caitlin Ní hUllacháin—“If anyone would give me help, he must give me himself, he must give me all”—was in his ears a louder cry than the appeal of the Internationale, which years of contemplative thought had almost written in letters of fire upon his broad and noble soul. Liberty Hall was now no longer the headquarters of the Irish Labour movement, but the centre of Irish National disaffection.’ https://historyireland.com/sean-ocaseys-battle-of-words-with-the-volunteers/

    10And of course Cumann na mBan.

    11The third volume of O’Casey’s autobiography, published in 1949.

    SOURCES

    Blue or Green?

    The Starry Plough (Green or Blue?)

    Click to access lawlor.pdf

    https://siptu.medium.com/unfurling-of-the-starry-plough-61ef310f8afa

    National Museum curator on provenance and tests: https://historyireland.com/citizen-armys-starry-plough-flag/

    O’Casey’s separation from Connolly: https://historyireland.com/sean-ocaseys-battle-of-words-with-the-volunteers/

    O’Casey and the reality of the Dublin working class