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Several people with banners take part in a march to call for the cessation of the war in Ukraine, April 3, 2022, in Madrid, Spain. (Isabel Infantes / Europa Press via Getty Images)
This War Does Not End in Ukraine. The title of Raúl Sánchez Cedillo’s new book certainly sounds like it offers a gloomy perspective on the international fallout of Russia’s war.
In the book — which has appeared in Spanish and German and is forthcoming in English translation — the philosopher and activist discusses the rise of a new political logic he calls the “war regime.” Sánchez Cedillo finds parallels between the bloodbath in Ukraine and the inter-imperialist competition that led to World War I — including its effect in generating fascism.
But the author also warns against a “doomsday” outlook on the conflict, instead insisting that we need collective, global action for peace.
Podemos cofounder Pablo Iglesias, who has called Sánchez Cedillo “one of the most important political analysts in Spain,” interviewed him about the book, the meaning of the “war regime,” and why the Left has struggled to respond to this moment.
Pablo Iglesias
What led you to write this book?
Raúl Sánchez Cedillo
I had been writing articles about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and some editors at Katakrak — the Spanish publisher — suggested expanding them into a book. It was extremely important for me to write about a conflict that will, in all probability, shape the rest of the century, even if we do not yet know exactly how. But we can be certain of one thing: without a far-reaching political and social uprising in Europe, it will turn out for the worse.
A big part of the problem is that nothing really can be ruled out. There is military escalation between blocs that have not only nuclear weapons, but also massive stores of conventional and biological means of causing damage, capable of destruction on an unimaginable scale. The longer this war lasts, the more it will foster further developments of authoritarianism and/or fascism. As if that weren’t enough, this is all happening in the middle of an ongoing energy crisis, at a moment of more and more human migration in response to extreme weather caused by global warming, and as people flee war, hunger, desertification, and shortages of drinking water.
There is military escalation between blocs that have not only nuclear weapons, but also massive stores of conventional and biological means of causing damage, capable of destruction on an unimaginable scale.
It might seem like I am falling into the kind of catastrophist panic caused by a Eurocentric bias. After decades of watching wars unfurl from a safe distance, Europeans must now rapidly come to terms with a war that has broken out in the middle of our continent — and not just a conventional war, but a hybrid one encompassing information warfare, infrastructural sabotage, and, some sixty years after the Cuban missile crisis, the return of nuclear rhetoric. But this catastrophist stance is not my position. Not at all.
It’s some time already since the capitalist world system entered what Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver called a stage of systemic chaos. From their perspective, this transformation was set in motion by the progressive decline of US hegemony after 1945 — a decline that does not imply, by any means, an actual loss of the hegemonic position. The United States has the largest current account deficit in the world. Since the 1980s, it has suffered a collapse not only of its industrial production (manufacturing), but also of human development, as measured by global indicators.
At the same time, it remains the world’s largest military power without comparison. The United States operates 750 military bases in some eighty countries. It determines the development of humanity through the dominance of the dollar as the world’s most important trade and reserve currency, and through the roles that the US Federal Reserve and Wall Street can play as the largest recipients of current account surpluses from large exporting countries. When we consider these realities, it becomes clear that the existence of the United States as a nation-state ultimately depends on maintaining this hegemony at all costs.
As if that weren’t enough to cause systemic chaos, we also need to consider the turbulences around “peak oil” and the falling profitability of energy extractivism. On the one hand, it is increasingly apparent that critical resources including energy, food, and raw materials are finite. On the other hand, the spirit of contemporary capitalism is shaped by the psychopathic refusal of this fact, embodied in personas like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.
In my view, the vulnerability of the health care system that became evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, together with increasing climate extremes, make it necessary today to go beyond Arrighi and Silver’s term and to speak of a phase of ecosystemic chaos. What a perfect time for a war between nuclear powers to break out, one that implicates not only the European countries but the whole planet! This is why the book title states that this war does not end in Ukraine.
The brutal fact of Russia’s imperialist invasion cannot be separated from the larger context. And this is why it is ludicrous, if not irresponsible, to believe that the whole thing could be understood as a violation of the UN Charters and the Geneva Convention. If we consider the involved actors and their respective allies, as well as the history of Ukraine itself, we must assume that what is unfolding is the beginning of a world war from the center of Europe, in the middle of an ecological and capitalist systemic crisis. So, there are more than enough urgent reasons, I think, to write this kind of book.
Pablo Iglesias
You talk in the book about a “war regime.” What does this mean?
Raúl Sánchez Cedillo
It refers in a very fundamental way to the deployment of a friend-enemy division in government operations, both domestic and international. In other words, the regime of war becomes applied to relations between parties and political forces, between governments and political and social struggles — in the media and social networks, and in the domain of freedom of expression, rights to assembly, and political demonstration.
In government and political activities, this friend-enemy division implies the elaboration and spread of narratives that accuse a constructed enemy of being responsible for the worsening of a social crisis and its consequences. This “enemy” is even made responsible for harsh policy measures that affect whole populations, ranging from budget cuts and wage suppression to the suspension of climate goals, increases in military funding, and even military intervention.
In the case of Russia, it makes less sense to speak of a war regime in this way. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin’s coup d’état, the long war in Chechnya has served to consolidate the power of the oligarchs and siloviki (ex-members of Soviet security and defense forces). Since the annexation of Crimea and the support for the “People’s Republics” in the Donbass, it is more accurate to speak of modifications to an existing authoritarian and militarized regime that is growing in power.
With respect to the EU countries, on the other hand, the establishment of a war regime interrupts a period of uncertainty with respect to the ruling order. This arose in the course of the pandemic and in the face of imminent climate crisis, but also in relation to certain political movements in the United States, including Black Lives Matter, the feminist wave starting in 2018, and unionization movements among multiracial coalitions of workers in retail, service, and platform logistics companies. In a sense, this recent conjuncture can be compared to the years following the 2008 crisis. Neoliberalism and its regime of financializing and creating profits out of growing indebtedness in the middle and working class no longer appeared inevitable.
The militaristic response of the EU to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reduced the probability of a truly reformist path in the EU to almost nil.
But in comparison to the years following 2008, the situation today is more acute. The economic, social, and psychological effects of the pandemic; the criminal delays in decarbonization; and, no less importantly, the growth of the racist and nationalist right in EU member countries threaten not only EU institutions but also the entire existence of the EU. And all this gave impulse to social welfare–oriented policy like the European Green Deal, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, and the NextGenerationEU funds, as well as EU-level regulations for temporary labor contracts, minimum wages, and false self-employment (the registration of freelancer status for people who are de facto employees of companies, a common practice in logistics and service industries).
There is a connection between the pro-military, pro-confrontation stance of NATO states and new announcements of solutions “from above” to social contradictions. If we fail to recognize this connection, we will not be able to hold ground against the new wave of austerity and authoritarianism promoted in the name of a European project that has been taken over by financial, corporate, political, and media oligarchs. These actors prioritize the war and a permanent state of exception over a New Deal for the present, over any attempt at reformist dialectics between union, feminist, migrant, environmental, and LGBTQ movements that would require abandoning the accumulation of financial capital.
There is an obvious affinity between the reactionary imperialists of the Kremlin and a part of the racist and supremacist right in Europe and the United States.
The militaristic response of the EU to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reduced the probability of a truly reformist path in the EU to almost nil. To the contrary, we can observe a process of fiscal, economic, military, and diplomatic federalization [i.e. tightening integration] in the EU. This does not change the structure of financial and corporate power. Rather, it uses the European Commission to coordinate that power in a centralized manner against centrifugal tendencies unleashed by a new wave of austerity, itself a consequence of the raising of interest rates by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. The latter can only be understood as an oligarchic move to put an end to all post-neoliberal and socialist follies that gained force in the post-pandemic depression and with the need for decarbonization.
In this sense, we cannot underestimate the Kremlin’s long-term strategy. There is an obvious affinity between the reactionary imperialists of the Kremlin and a part of the racist and supremacist right in Europe and the United States. This suggests that the Right will benefit from the explosion of contradictions underway, and this will not be prevented by the hypocritical values upheld by the EU. As we know, the EU has no problem collaborating with the Polish right — whose stance on gender and LGBTQ rights is no different from its Russian counterpart, despite its historical role opposing the Kremlin — or with the likes of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Pablo Iglesias
You devote the first part of the book to examining the origins of the current war in the post-Soviet context. And there, you write about discourses that normalize war dynamics in both military and civilian contexts. Can you say more about this?
Raúl Sánchez Cedillo
In the Russian and Belarusian discourse, but also in what in the book I call “zombie neo-Stalinism” (in Spanish rojipardo, or red-brown, referring to left-wing authoritarian formations), the Russian invasion is considered the inevitable outcome of increasing aggression on the part of NATO since 2004. According to this depiction, Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 serves as evidence that the Russian government always had peaceful intentions, and that it gave sufficient warning about what could happen if NATO did not end its expansion, and if no new security agreement were reached that would ensure the neutrality of all countries bordering the Russian Federation.
In these discourses, everything follows a strategic plan by the United States to suffocate the already minimal diplomatic and economic autonomy of the EU, to weaken a serious contender in the global geopolitical arena, and to clear the way for strategic confrontation with China. Of course, this discourse has various expressions. For example, [former Bolivian president] Evo Morales’s hallucinatory support of Putin as an “anti-imperialist leader,” which in a sense fits a kind of classic realpolitik, should be distinguished from the ongoing shape-shifting of “red-brown” positions — which, to be clear, embody a “leftist” fascism.
The latter represent a convergence of the most resentful, reactionary, racist, and patriarchal affects of residual Stalinism among generations old and young, on the one hand, and, on the other, the national-revolutionary and neo-communitarian stances of people like the French alt-right representative, Alain de Benoist; the “Marxist”-identifying Italian far-right thinker Diego Fusaro; and the Russian anti-communist Aleksandr Dugin, who has been called “Putin’s brain.”
This convergence is characterized by a civilizational idea that represents the symmetric counterpart to the values espoused by the EU and United States: the defense of the nation, of tradition, of the white working class and its supposed linguistic and cultural roots, of the bourgeois family and patriarchal notions of gender and sexuality, and the idea that migrants are “masses” manipulated by “globalist elites” who aim to destroy the nation and its imaginary national working class. There is a terrifying link between the unconcealed anti-communism of Putin, his oligarchs, and siloviki, and the pro-police, militarist, patriarchal, and paranoid Stalinism of the self-identified “anti-imperialist” camp.
With respect to what Putin calls the “Western collective,” we see the flip side of what I just described. As Bill Clinton wrote in the Atlantic shortly after the war began: we did our best to integrate Russia in the club of democratic nations, but it proved impossible. NATO is a military organization for the defense of liberal democracies in Europe, and only a totalitarian power could be against its expansion.
There have been attempts in Europe since the start of the war to forge a new power bloc between neoliberalism and neocolonial Eurocentrism. This is an attempt to bring bourgeois-conservative and Atlantic-oriented formations of the far right — including Giorgia Meloni and the Spanish Vox party — together with traditional social democrats and greens against the emancipatory challenges coming from socialist, communist, and anti-colonial struggles, but also against the pro-Russian extreme right. This comes as no surprise. History shows that dictatorial extremes always win in war, and that there is a demonstrable intimacy between neoliberalism, colonialism, and fascism. In the end, fascisms are always the preferred “provisional solution” for the propertied.
Pablo Iglesias
You write that World War I, not World War II, is the historical comparison that allows us to understand the political present and the current war. Why is that?
Raúl Sánchez Cedillo
The use of analogies of this kind always entails problems and traps, so we need to be careful. For a start, our ears should perk up when we hear both sides of the current war calling each other Nazis and totalitarians. Putin is being characterized as a present-day Hitler, while Zelensky supposedly leads a government that inherited its ideology from the Nazis and is being used by degenerate “globalist elites” to break open and besiege Russia.
This propagandistic cannibalization of World War II makes it difficult to recognize certain aspects of the present that become evident when we consider World War I as a comparison. I’m thinking about the conflict between imperialist blocs over a key country that is itself weakened by a civil war in the context of a war for independence, which in World War I was Serbia; the backdrop of a hegemon, Great Britain, that had entered a period of decline; and the presence of a semi-peripheral power that was fighting for a spot at the center of the world system, Russia.
There is a terrifying link between the unconcealed anti-communism of Putin, his oligarchs, and siloviki, and the pro-police, militarist, patriarchal, and paranoid Stalinism of the self-identified “anti-imperialist” camp.
There are further aspects of World War I that are helpful points of reference for understanding the current war in Ukraine: the moral arrogance with which both sides treat the war as a civilizational crusade, and the simultaneous frivolousness — or, to cite Christopher Clark’s characterization of the political elites in 1914, the “sleepwalking” — with which those in power openly promote military agitation and demand unconditional victory. Another resemblance can be seen in the current portrayal of pacifist stances as defeatist and as siding with the opponent. Logics like this were also operational during World War I, in the superficial suspensions of domestic political conflict in the name of national defense. The “civil truces” of the union sacrée in France and the Burgfrieden in Germany were based on leftist parties abandoning internationalism and class politics, while agreeing to not oppose the government or call to strike.
On the other hand, the analogy between the current war in Ukraine and World War II based on a struggle between democracy and fascism or authoritarianism does not hold. Regrettably, we must acknowledge that fascist tendencies can be observed on both sides, in equal parts.
Pablo Iglesias
The second part of your book describes a correlation between the war regime and new forms of fascism. Could you go into that?
Raúl Sánchez Cedillo
It’s not just a correlation, but a kind of causation. Or, at least, a kind of multiplying or accelerating effect. This is a premise of the book, and it also explains the book’s urgency. World War I was the first time that entire economies and populations were transformed into war machines aiming at military and social war. Trenches, chemical weapons, tanks, shells, and “storms of steel” marked a fusion of energies that arose in European political culture and its conservative, colonial, patriarchal, and militarist subjectivity.
The current war is hybrid, nonlinear, and unrestricted.
The traumatic “experience” of war and the consequences of defeat (in the cases of Germany and Austria-Hungary) are catalysts for the deadly passions and the narratives of what is known as the “conservative revolution.” This is the birthplace of fascist forms. There is an intimate relationship between war, modern machines of warfare, and their effects on bodies and subjectivity. In war machines, which can be both military and social in nature, there is always the risk of war becoming absolute. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called this a “black hole.” When this happens, it becomes a kind of moral emblem, a source of values, to deliver and encounter death, and to anticipate and want catastrophe.
The current war is hybrid, nonlinear, and unrestricted. The establishment of war regimes creates an expansive ecotope in which fascisms linked to military, social, and media/informational warfare machines are able to thrive. This alone is reason enough to stop this war. The paradox of the war propaganda is that it claims to fight totalitarianism and fascism while creating conditions in which new forms of fascism can flourish.
Pablo Iglesias
You argue that pacifism should become the key force in a social and political movement in Europe. But we don’t see anything today that comes close to the antiwar protests that exploded across the continent in 2003. Do you think this will change?
Raúl Sánchez Cedillo
There is something unsettling, and horrifying, about the social mainstream’s apathy toward the current escalation of war — both before and after the Russian invasion. I include here the pro-military enthusiasm of the liberal left in both Europe and the United States, which propagates civilizational warmongering with moral arrogance. These phenomena still need to be analyzed. In Spain, the pacifist movement has long been a strong force in what can be called the social left, and thus the political left. The fight against joining NATO in the early 1980s gave rise to Izquierda Unida, the main coalition of leftist parties in the country.
More importantly, this fight brought younger generations into social movement politics who, starting in 1989, took on the campaign to end compulsory military service. Finally, the movement against the Iraq War was ethically transformative for many Spanish citizens. This paved the way for the (center-left) Zapatero government and the radical democratic movement known as 15-M, which in turn resulted, among many other things, in the Left becoming part of Spain’s current coalition government. So why not now? And why not in Spain?
There is something unsettling, and horrifying, about the social mainstream’s apathy toward the current escalation of war — both before and after the Russian invasion.
Let me point out a few things that should be considered, not separately but in their interconnectedness: the brutal nature of the Russian invasion and its media performance; the excellent Ukrainian-US propaganda machine and its social media tentacles; and the fact that no party on the Left in Spain, with the exception of Podemos, is speaking out about the militarization underway in the EU. The EU, of course, is the provider of the funds that prevent social collapse.
I see two factors of paramount importance. For one, the Russian invasion has broken the backbone of the Left. It has divided the Left and accelerated the militaristic transformation of both pro-Atlantic and pro-Russian factions. And secondly, this vulnerability can only be understood if we bear in mind the deep depression and distress that the capitalist management of the COVID-19 pandemic caused in the global psyche, especially with respect to how we perceive the value of life. We can now see the resulting frustration, vengeance, and paranoia, but also attempts to reconnect, heal the body, and rescue love for the common good and cooperation against the absolutism of capitalist profits, property, and power.
The background of this emerging war regime is a planetary capitalism whose rulers are now looking to the limits of earth and its biosphere — a capitalism that is ready to further intensify fiscal austerity, with results that will make life difficult to bear for most human beings. In this context, war comes once again as a solution to social and political contradictions, as a means of imposing “order” both at home and abroad. Resistance to war is inevitable, and I think it will grow in the months to come. But this does not mean resistance will develop as an offensive counterforce.
History teaches us that without an uprising, pacifism has always lost the game. This is why I propose “constituent peace” as a practical political orientation: a meeting point where antiwar resistance, disobedience, desertion, and sabotage are linked to labor, feminist, LGBTQ, anti-colonial, anti-fascist, and ecological struggles, as well as fights for public health and education. This could be a multiple but convergent movement toward an uprising capable of bringing about new forms of people’s power. Our goal in Spain is to build an anti-fascist and emancipatory democracy, breaking the bonds between war, austerity, the concentration of wealth, and authoritarianism. We are aiming for a confederal republic, something that became possible to imagine in the course of the 15-M movement — something new and feasible, not nostalgic. Something that social and political lefts until now have failed to create.
Students protest in London over cuts to the Educational Maintenance Allowance, January 19, 2011. (John Phillips / UK Press via Getty Images)
As the cost-of-living crisis in Britain continues to worsen, government attempts at relief for the most vulnerable are falling short. While some have rightly taken to industrial action, others haven’t been able to join the strike wave and have hardly gotten a look in from government support either. Students have felt the squeeze, forcing many to abandon their education; the number of undergraduates dropping out of university jumped almost 25 percent last summer.
Unable to receive benefits and often working low-paid jobs, students find it hard to afford the rising costs of food and shelter. Research published by the country’s National Union of Students found that a quarter have only £50 a month left after paying their regular bills, and 42 percent are surviving off less than £100 a month. Nine out of ten say the crisis has affected their mental health, too.
In fact, university students have witnessed the biggest ever dip in their living standards. In November, the Institute for Fiscal Studies announced that compared with what they would have been entitled to in 2020–21, maintenance loans for university students from the poorest families had shrunk by more than £1,000 over the last year due to inflation — and that all students would be financially better off working a full-time minimum wage job.
Students in further education (FE) — in most cases, colleges after high school and before university — have it worse. The minimum wage for under-eighteens is £4.81/hour, just half that of their colleagues aged over twenty-three, and they receive no maintenance loans like their peers in higher education do. Instead, they rely heavily on their families’ support, which is getting harder to provide as inflation hits the poorest the hardest. Other students are estranged, carers, or struggle at home and can’t rely on the adults in their life to provide for them. Financial pressures cause many FE students to drop out and instead take up low-waged work to support themselves or their families. Hartlepool College’s welfare officer Ronnie Bage told FE Week, “I have clothed somebody this week. Every week I clothe somebody. Sometimes I pay out of my own pocket.”
Enter Lutfur Rahman, mayor of Tower Hamlets, a borough in East London that is home to over three hundred thousand people. In a historic victory last May, Rahman led a group of independent councilors in an election that saw them win the mayoralty and a majority on the council from the right-wing-controlled Labour Party. After his win, Rahman wrote in Jacobin of his admiration for the Poplar Rates Rebellion of the 1920s, in which councilors refused to inflict austerity on their residents.
Today, his administration has insisted that austerity is a political choice, not a necessity — and chosen to invest money into the borough instead. It has so far implemented a host of reforms, including reintroducing the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), which became available for students on New Year’s Day. Before he was elected mayor last May, Rahman made it clear that reinstating the EMA, alongside another bursary scheme for university students, was among his biggest priorities.
“Our residents are in an incredibly difficult situation. With the cost-of-living crisis following off the back of the pandemic, people need all the support we can give them. This is worse still for our young residents, 40 percent of whom live in poverty while their parents work tirelessly to secure their futures. The EMA and University Bursary schemes are two of the best tools we have available to aid them,” Rahman told me.
The EMA was first launched in 2004 by Tony Blair’s government for students from poorer households. It supported almost one in three sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds with means-tested payments of £10, £20, or £30 a week paid directly to those in post-sixteen education. Payments were aimed at supporting students with food, travel, and equipment costs so that they would stay in education. It wasn’t perfect, but it did well to ease inequalities. For students who were eligible, the EMA significantly increased the chances of them staying in post-sixteen education instead of dropping out to support their families.
In 2010 it was announced that the EMA would be scrapped in England as part of the coalition government’s attacks on education, although the devolved parliaments opted to keep the scheme. At the time it was ditched, 647,000 students received the payment in England. In some places like Birmingham and Leicester, as many as four in five students received the EMA. At the same time, during his first stint as Tower Hamlets mayor, Rahman kept the EMA going for the next four years.
For many it was a lifeline. Most remember the 2010 student protests as the work of university students. After all, the tripling of university tuition fees by David Cameron’s government symbolized the austerity era, especially as the other party of government — Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats —had earlier promised to oppose this move. But secondary schoolers also turned out in their thousands at demonstrations, letting the government know that they didn’t want the EMA to end.
Tower Hamlets council has committed £1.1 million a year to fund both the EMA for FE students, and a University Bursary Award for students from the borough traveling to university. The EMA’s return on January 1 made Tower Hamlets the only council in England to still offer the EMA. So, as the cost-of-living crisis deepens and students feel under pressure, could this East London council be setting an example for others?
Reinstating the EMA was, in fact, one of the pledges of Labour’s 2017 manifesto, and in October, a party-commissioned review chaired by former education secretary David Blunkett recommended that Labour bring back the EMA. A Student Cost of Living Campaign has been launched since then, and the first of its five demands centers around finance. Among other things, it is demanding an immediate cash payment to students and the restoration of the EMA. With students struggling, there’s clearly a need for more schemes like this.
So, why isn’t it happening? Councilor Nabeela Mowlana, elected last year to Sheffield City Council, is chair of Young Labour. A proud socialist, she agrees that the allowances are important: “EMAs can go a long way in supporting working-class students access opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have available to them. In some cases, it helps students get to campus and they’d struggle to be there without it,” she says.
But after more than a decade of austerity, some councils are trying to help — with the government holding one arm behind its back. Some, like the council in Sheffield, haven’t received a penny from the government’s so-called leveling up fund, meant to help out less wealthy parts of the country. Mowlana explains:
Councils have seen a cut to their funding but an increase in the number of residents relying on our services. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the argument for EMA, but with significantly lower resources it’s becoming harder for local councils to patch the gaps left by national government. Under the Tories, Sheffield council alone has seen a 50 percent cut to its budget in real terms.
The government should be supporting councils to invest in younger residents and secure their futures instead of letting inequalities deepen.
However, under a Conservative government, Mowlana doesn’t see the EMA returning on a large scale. She adds, however, that there are other things councils can do for students — too often seen as an undeserving group separate from “society”:
Students are renters, workers, and local residents just like everyone else. The state of student housing affects other housing conditions in the city for example. . . . Councils with large student populations have an opportunity to work with students and establish initiatives such as landlord licensing, better public transport systems and so much more.
Many councils who are keen to reintroduce the EMA simply don’t have the money. For Rahman however, the money is there. He insists that there’s no point penny-pinching when his residents are in desperate need of help — especially if in the long term, investing in residents will save the council money. “What we are trying to do, in these particularly fraught times, is create a council that works for people. To improve the lives of our residents, not simply fulfil the duties required of us. We are determined to deliver a better Borough,” he says.
Young people across the country are in a dire situation — and know they have been hung out to dry by the major parties, including the Labour leader elected in 2020. At a vigil in London for the murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey, young people could be heard chanting “f*ck Keir Starmer.” Sometimes positive change doesn’t require reinventing the wheel — but today’s Labour party has moved so far to the right that it baulks just at reintroducing Blair-era measures. Faced with a historic cost-of-living crisis, Starmer’s Labour seems scared even of moderate reforms.
Labor introduces bill to dissolve Knesset, prime minister meets with ministers in bid to secure his support for judicial reform pause and avoid fracture in government.
By World Israel News Staff
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with National Security Minister and Otzma Yehudit party chairman Itamar Ben-Gvir Monday afternoon in a bid to reach an agreement on a delay of the government’s judicial reform package.
The meeting came after a tense gathering of coalition party leaders Monday morning during which, according to a report by Hebrew-language Kan, Ben-Gvir shouted at Netanyahu and threatened to resign. Ben-Gvir did not threaten to topple the government, however, reportedly saying his party would support it from the Opposition.
Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant (Likud), Sunday evening, a day after Gallant publicly called on the government halt the judicial reform.
Mass protests roiled Israel overnight, with President Isaac Herzog calling on the prime minister to freeze the judicial overhaul.
While Netanyahu had initially planned to address the nation on the issue Monday morning, with Channel 12 reporting that he had decided to suspend the reform, the televised statement was repeatedly delayed.
Justice Minister Yariv Levin (Likud), Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party) and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir all pushed back on the proposed pause, with the Religious Zionist Party issuing a public statement demanding the government at the very least pass the judicial appointments reform bill before delaying the remaining reforms.
The Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee approved the bill Monday morning, sending it to the Knesset for its second and third readings.
At the same time, the Labor party – which is not in the government, having failed to meet the electoral threshold in the November national election – drafted a bill to dissolve the 25th Knesset.
With the protest movement expanding Monday, shutting down international air travel and leading to partial hospital closures, Netanyahu pressed his coalition allies to acquiesce to a temporary freeze on the legislation, saying it would last just several weeks.
Smotrich agreed to the pause, Kan reported, while Levin, an architect of the judicial reform, issued a statement vowing to adhere to “any decision” reached by the prime minister in order to preserve the current government.
“This stems from an understanding that in a situation in which anyone can do whatever they feel to right could lead to the immediate toppling of the government and collapse of the Likud,” he said.
“We must all make an effort to stabilize the government and the coalition. We are all obliged not to make the mistake that led to the toppling of the Shamir government, a mistake that led to the disaster of the Oslo Accords.”
The post Coalition threatened: Netanyahu calls for judicial reform pause, justice minister acquiesces appeared first on World Israel News.
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Hundreds of doctors are enraged by the strike ordered by the Israeli medical association, which is against the judicial overhaul.
By World Israel News Staff
Over 600 doctors are calling on the Israeli Medical Association not to make the body political and not to use their names and the membership fees they pay for political purposes, Hebrew-language Channel 14 reported Monday.
Following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s firing of Yoav Gallant Sunday evening over the defense minister’s public opposition to his planned judicial overhaul, the country erupted in protest, with strikes ranging from pre-schools to flights abroad, among other industries. The Histadrut medical association joined in the revolt, ordering all non-emergency, life-saving services canceled until the reforms are nixed.
“The Medical Association will operate an Exceptions Committee as usual and will enable life-saving treatments and services,” the organization stated.
Hundreds of doctors signed a petition against the decision, saying “Don’t use our name.”
“We want to express our strong opposition and even our anger” over this strike, they declared.
“We would like to express our disgust at the attempts to turn the representative organization of doctors in Israel into a political body,” they stated, adding that the strike, which includes all public hospitals and community clinics, would be “crossing all red lines.”
“Keep your political opinions to yourself and do not use our name, the membership fees we pay to the organization and the many long hours that many of us contribute through the organization for the advancement of medicine in Israel. Do not drag us all down the slope,” the petition read.
“The Association is not a political body, was not elected as a political body and did not receive authority from its members to function as one,” they said.
“Israeli doctors represent a variety from the entire spectrum of society and the political spectrum and work side by side without bias and without differences of religion, race and gender…
“We will not allow our name and membership fees to be used against our will for political purposes. We will not allow the political position, principles or values of any side of the map to be trampled upon, and we will not allow them to say things on behalf of an entire community of doctors, things that range from political to just controversial.”
“The common denominator for all of us is the desire to provide optimal care to all patients, regardless of their opinions, and to instill in the patients confidence in us as an independent, reliable and stable body, which is not affected by policy fluctuations and political positions,” they stated.
Prof. Zion Hagay, chairman of the assocation, countered the doctors’ objections.
“We recently reiterated that the Medical Association is a non-political organization. We represent male and female doctors who come from all over the country and from the entire political spectrum. But we are not in a political event,” he said.
“We are not discussing here either a peace agreement or the distribution of cases in the government. We are in a moment of historical and unprecedented crisis in the life of a nation, in a last attempt to put a finger in the dam…to bandage the bleeding wound before we have to turn off the monitor. That is why we will not be satisfied with stopping the legislation without more substantial content.”
The post ‘Keep your political opinions to yourselves’: Doctors oppose medical shutdown in Israel amid protests appeared first on World Israel News.
“We respect you,” the Israelis, who were protesting against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the UK, told the anti-Israel demonstrators.
We filmed some naive, but well intentioned, left-wing Israelis join an anti-Israel protest in London.
What happened next shows why there isn’t peace. pic.twitter.com/GWbSwW9fdI
— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) March 26, 2023
The post WATCH: Left-wing Israelis join Palestinian protest in London, and this happened appeared first on World Israel News.