Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The record of the New York Times on the “war on terror”
A quarter century after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the events of that day have passed, for many, from memory to history. About one in three Americans alive today was born after the attacks.
With this, the task of the apologists of American imperialism has graduated from propaganda to historical revisionism. The New York Times’s editorial board, speaking for the Democratic Party, took up this dirty business in an editorial published Friday. “On this 25th anniversary … we ask that America face the mistakes that it made,” it wrote.
The “mistakes” it names are the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the torture of prisoners and the mass warrantless surveillance of Americans that “clearly went too far.” “The principal legacy of America’s response,” the New York Times wrote, is “two long, bloody wars—one of which, in Iraq, was started on false pretenses—that mostly weakened the United States, at home and abroad.”
The Times names “America” as the subject of these “mistakes,” in order to absolve any responsibility of specific actors. With everything dissolved into the nation as a whole, no one can be assigned responsibility, let alone criminal liability.
The phrase “mistakes were made” was made notorious by President Ronald Reagan, who used it in his State of the Union address of January 27, 1987, to cover up the Iran-Contra scandal, the secret sale of weapons to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras: “serious mistakes were made in trying to do so.” The Contras, a force organized and armed by the CIA against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, killed, tortured and kidnapped civilians, as Americas Watch documented in 1984 and 1985, and the International Court of Justice ruled on June 27, 1986 that the United States had violated international law by arming and financing them.
As with Reagan’s statement on the Iran-Contra scandal, the Times speaks of “mistakes” in an effort to deflect attention from the fact that it justified and encouraged both the criminal wars of aggression and sweeping attacks on the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people. Its editorial pages justified these actions, and its news section published lies used to sell these “mistakes” to the public.
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The Times’s central complaint is that the wars launched under the label of the “war on terror” did not succeed in the US goal of dominating the Middle East. “For much of the period after the disaster of the Vietnam War, America adhered to its lessons,” the Times editorial board writes. “Go to war only with defined and achievable goals. Prevent ‘mission creep.’ Most of all, win.”
In this the Times echoes the Democratic Party’s criticism of the Trump administration’s war on Iran. Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan put the same demand to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on July 21: “You don’t have a strategy. You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war.” Peters demanded that Hegseth “win this war.” These “mistakes” were, according to Peters, “an utter and complete failure to win this war to this point.”
The wars, the Times editorial board writes, “drained resources that could have been used to strengthen the country against emerging rivals,” that is, nuclear-armed China and Russia, which it does not name. Here the purpose of the exercise becomes clear. The “lessons” the Times draws from the “war on terror” are not lessons against war. They are lessons for even greater crimes.
This is why the editorial asks “America” to “face the mistakes that it made.” The American people did not decide to invade Iraq, to build the CIA’s secret prisons or to wiretap themselves. Those decisions were made by a ruling class, its two parties and its press, including the Times. Not one of the officials who ordered the torture, the editors who printed the lies or the politicians who voted for the wars has been held to account. The same people, and in many cases the same institutions, have supported the genocide in Gaza, agitated for decades for war against Iran, are demanding the escalation of the war against Russia, and preparing the war against China.
There is no reckoning with the “war on terror” that does not begin by naming those responsible for it, and no struggle against the coming wars that does not break with the imperialist Democratic and Republican parties and the entire corporate-financial military-intelligence establishment that the New York Times speaks for. That reckoning can be carried out only by the working class, mobilized independently and on the basis of its own interests, in the United States and internationally.
2. Bond market sell-off sinks Bessent plan
The attempt by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to bring down bond yields (interest rates) at the longer end of the market by organizing an increased Treasury buyback operation of up to $6 billion has hit the ground with a thud.
With the launch of the operation on Thursday, in which the Treasury bought $5.19 billion worth of 10-year and 20-year bonds, the sell-off continued unabated sending yields to the highest levels seen in two decades.
Besides widespread market skepticism about the Bessent plan, the sell-off was fueled by the jump in oil prices to $109 a barrel from around $100 the day before.
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The market’s thumbs down on the Bessent buyback did not come as a great surprise given the reaction the previous day to his announcement that the Treasury could spend as much as $6 billion, compared to the usual outlay of $2 billion per operation.
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The national debt in the US has just passed $40 trillion. It is expected to reach $41 trillion by the end of the year, possibly even faster if US President Trump’s promise to pay every adult $5,000 if the Republicans retain control of the House and the Senate in the midterm elections at the start of November is met. The total cost of the Trump bribe is estimated to be more than $1 trillion.
The interest bill on past US debts is running at around $1 trillion a year and rising. But it is only the sharpest expression of a mounting crisis in the entire global financial system.
According to analysis published in the FT earlier this week, “the world’s governments have created a $2 trillion monster” in the form of the debt servicing burden that “gobbles up tax revenue.”
It reported that more money is spent on servicing the debt than on military spending in the US, the UK and France and the same was true for more than a dozen countries which comprise the 38 members of the OECD, the grouping of the richest countries. The total for the group is $2 trillion. The French government expects the cost of servicing its debt to rise by 25 percent this year.
With the OECD nations expected to borrow a further $18 trillion this year, an all-time high, investors are lowering the price they are prepared to pay for this increased supply, increasing the yield on bonds.
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The money used to finance bailouts after 2008 and again in the COVID pandemic and more recently to expand military spending pushed global public debt to 94 percent of world GDP last year—up more than 10 percentage points since 2019. According to the International Monetary Fund it will hit 100 percent by the end of the decade.
The mounting debt did not present a significant financial problem until interest rates began to rise in 2021–22, due to the surge in inflation triggered by the pandemic, and which has continued since then and is now being accelerated by the US war on Iran.
Twenty years ago, an interest rate of 5 percent did not present a major problem for debt financing. Now it does.
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There are now warnings that the increase in the interest rates on long-term US government debt, particularly on the 10-year bond which forms the base line for corporate borrowing, will impact on the broader economy, hitting the AI boom which is becoming increasingly dependent on borrowed money.
One of those making such warnings is Ruchir Sharma, the chair of Rockefeller International. In a recent column in the FT, he noted that “runaway debt” and the global government bond sell-off is “starting to matter,” noting that every major bubble going back 300 years ended when borrowing costs rose significantly for companies at its core.
Sharma has written in the past that the AI boom has many of the hallmarks of a bubble and would end when interest rates reached prohibitive levels.
He wrote that the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond had reached 4.8 percent (it has since hit 4.95 percent) and that “when it decisively breaches 5 percent, the upper end of its rate since the dotcom period, the AI bubble could pop.”
Writing in the FT, Benn Steil, the director of international relations at the Council on Foreign Relations, drew attention to a significant change in the structure of the Treasury bond market which is contributing to its volatility.
In 2007, on the eve of the global financial crisis, some 76 percent of US bonds were held by price-insensitive investors such as central banks who held them as part of their stable management policies. Today they hold only 43 percent, with the majority held by price-sensitive investors, including investment funds, which demand greater returns as government debt grows and inflation erodes their purchasing power.
The issuance of Treasuries needed to finance US debt was outpacing the demand of the once-reliable price-insensitive investors, he continued. “The new private buyers pay far more attention to yield and have to be offered higher and higher rates to absorb the growing Treasury supply.”
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The maneuvers of Bessent and other finance ministers and central bankers around the world can only provide at best a temporary “fix” and maybe not even that as the failure of this week’s Treasury buyback has revealed. The drumbeats in ruling circles are beating ever louder for a full-scale and devastating onslaught on the social conditions of the working class as increasing amounts of money are set aside for war.
The ruling class is making its preparations and likewise so must the working class in the US and internationally in the fight for a revolutionary socialist program—the only viable solution to the breakdown of global capitalism being manifested not least in its financial system.
3. Trump ends fascist convention by calling on attendees to pledge allegiance to him
President Donald Trump capped off the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, an orgy of fascist reaction, by calling on those in attendance to pledge themselves to him and “cheat like hell” in the November 3 elections, less than two months away.
Ordering the crowd inside the less-than-capacity American Airlines Center to raise their right hands, Trump, pausing for the audience to repeat each phrase, spelled out the following pledge:
Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends. I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.
He later told the crowd that anyone who did not vote would “go to hell.”
Trump’s pledge and attack on the elections are not just one-off comments. He and the Republicans are systematically trying to undermine and take control of elections in states across the country. The main line of attack is on mail-in voting. At the same time, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is targeting voter rolls in so-called “blue states,” seeking to disenfranchise immigrants and citizens who are legally entitled to vote on the basis of the lie that millions of “illegals” are voting.
Trump speaks for an increasingly besieged and unpopular ruling class. Ahead of the November elections, support for Trump and the Republican Party has cratered, with mass anger among millions of workers over the illegal war in Iran, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the war on immigrants, and skyrocketing inflation and inequality.
As workers and young people look for alternatives to the two big business parties and capitalism, the corporate oligarchy cultivates fascistic elements. At the Dallas event, nearly every speech featured attacks on immigrants, transgender persons, Muslims and socialists.
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Trump repeatedly claimed on both nights that the convention was packed and additional supporters were waiting outside. The images inside American Airlines Center told another story. Entire seating sections were covered with tarps, while large portions of the upper level remained empty.
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Seeking to whip up a pogrom-like atmosphere ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Texas Senator Ted Cruz denounced the Democratic Party, claiming it had been overtaken by a “new and dangerous red-green alliance: communists and Islamists.”
Cruz named New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Senate nominees in Michigan and Texas. As he spoke, a man in the audience repeatedly called for their assassination.
“When Mamdani says he wants to seize the means of production, he means it,” Cruz said.
“He should be shot!” the man yelled.
“When Abdul El-Sayed says he has a, quote, ‘obligation to comply with Sharia law,’ he means it,” Cruz continued.
“He should be shot!” the man shouted again.
“And when James Talarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism, he means it,” Cruz said.
“He should be shot!” the man yelled a third time.
Cruz did not acknowledge or condemn the death threats. His social media account later posted a video of the speech in which the threats were clearly audible.
Cruz, a supporter of Trump’s failed January 6 coup, said communists and Islamists were united because “they hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution, and they hate America.”
Trump’s pledge, including his call for supporters to “cheat like hell,” and the death threats shouted against three Democratic politicians came nearly 15 months after the assassination of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman. Despite this context, neither incident received prominent treatment on the homepages of several major news organizations Friday afternoon.
The New York Times homepage contained two articles about the Republican convention, but neither headline mentioned Trump’s pledge or the death threats. ABC News’ live coverage of the convention, last updated several hours after Cruz spoke, did not mention his speech or the audience member who called for Mamdani, El-Sayed and Talarico to be shot.
This is not a mistake by the major capitalist press but a deliberate decision to downplay the danger of dictatorship and the threat of fascism. The turn towards fascism in the United States is part of a global process. From the recent election victory of the AfD in Germany to the promotion of fascist Giorgia Meloni in the pages of the New York Times, the ruling class in every country is turning toward far-right reaction. The defense of democratic rights depends on the development of an independent socialist movement of the working class against the financial oligarchy.
4. Australian businessman jailed for “reckless” foreign interference
Alexander Csergo’s imprisonment underscores how someone can be ensnared into being accused of supplying information to a foreign entity under draconian foreign interference laws.
5. Australia: Private school teachers in Melbourne vote to strike for first time
The strike vote at Overnewton College is a further indication, following strikes in government schools across Australia, of a developing revolt by educators against wage cuts and intolerable workloads.
6. The US National Archives to close facilities in San Francisco and Chicago
The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will close its branches in San Francisco and Chicago, creating new and significant burdens for historical research and historic preservation.
While news of the closures only reached a major national news outlet last month, with an August 12 article published by NBC news, the pending shutdowns have been under way since at least late June. It was then that NARA Chief Operating Officer Jay Trainer announced the closures in an email to NARA staff. In the email, Trainer told staff that the closures would “support the long-term financial health and viability of the Federal Records Centers Program’s revolving fund, reduce expenses for the Operating Expense (OE) fund, and reduce our real estate portfolio in alignment with the administration’s priorities.”
The Trump administration has made its attitude toward history and the institutions responsible for communicating historical knowledge to the public abundantly clear. Since returning to office, the Trump administration has waged an all-out assault on history educators and institutions in the name of replacing current curricula with “patriotic education,” a euphemism for the right-wing nationalist distortion of American history.
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The stated purpose of the National Archives is to “preserve, protect, and share the historical records of the United States to promote public inquiry and strengthen democratic participation.” Shutting down the NARA facilities in San Francisco and Chicago betrays that mission.
The San Francisco branch of the National Archives, actually located in San Bruno, California, holds the records of federal agencies and courts from a vast geographic territory including California, Nevada, Hawaii, American Samoa, and Guam. Documents held in San Francisco are essential for researching the anti-immigrant regime of the United States during the Chinese Exclusion era, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the expansion of U.S. imperialism into the Pacific, including the annexation of Hawaii in 1898.
Perhaps the most famous of the archive’s many holdings, having special political releavance today, are the records of the United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 U.S. Supreme Court case that affirmed the principle of birthright citizenship in the United States. With the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to overturn this fundamental democratic principle, closing the home facility of these records and forcing their relocation amounts to tampering with historical evidence.
It also removes the evidence from the scene of the crime. A visit to the archives in San Bruno places researchers within reach of many of the locations referenced in archive documents. There is San Francisco’s historic immigration station at Angel Island, where US authorities detained many thousands of Chinese immigrants during the first half of the twentieth century. There is also San Francisco’s Chinatown, where a mural dedicated to Wong Kim Ark is prominently displayed on Grant Avenue, a vivid reminder that Wong’s story and birthright citizenship is history with living importance worth defending today.
The National Archives at Chicago holds federal records from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. Among these are records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the federal agency founded in 1824 to oversee relations between the United States and Indigenous Americans. The BIA records reveal a history of dispossession, forced removals and forced assimilation.
Many of the well-known records held at the Chicago NARA facility concern the US government’s suppression of dissent. This includes the records of the United States v. Eugene V. Debs, the case which saw socialist leader Eugene Debs convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 after making his famous anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio. Documents of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the trial of the Chicago 7, as well as documents relating to the Kent State shooting of 1970 are all held in Chicago.
The accessibility of these records following the closure of facilities in San Francisco and Chicago remains unclear. An email sent by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society to its membership in July warned that the records would be sent “to a site in Missouri with no research facilities.” The Organization of American Historians has also warned that the records will be consolidated at “a storage-only site with no research room.” A post buried on the National Archives web site in August suggests the records will be scattered among facilities in California, Colorado, Maryland, Texas, Georgia, Missouri and Massachusetts.
In addition to the obstacle these closures and relocations create for scholarship by professional historians, they present a significant burden to the public currently served by the San Francisco and Chicago locations. Should the records even be accessible to the public, those whose family histories are intimately bound up with the historic crimes of Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment or the Indian Removal Act, and who lack the financial support of universities and academic associations available to professional researchers, would now be forced to travel across the country at great expense or forgo their research entirely.
The NARA closures have been protested by scholars whose work has relied heavily on research materials held at the targeted facilities. In a statement published in the journal California History, historian Erika Lee, who has written extensively on immigration and Asian American history, called the NARA closures part of a “politically motivated war on American history and the historical profession,” which poses “an enormous threat to historical research and to the teaching and learning of history.”
W. Caleb McDaniel, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his book Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, has stressed the importance of archive staff who will likely lose their jobs if the closures go through. McDaniel wrote on his website that his experience working with staff at NARA’s Chicago location showed what it actually takes to uncover the many, many stories about the nation’s past that are not yet known. It requires researchers to go in person to archives whose managers are not always aware of all the treasures they hold. And it requires expert, professional staff who understand those archives better than anyone and can troubleshoot problems when a researcher requests a file.
Historian David A. Chang, who specializes in Native American and Native Hawaiian history, told Hawaii Public Radio in August that most of the materials held at NARA San Francisco are “not available online. They've not been printed. There's millions and millions of pages, and you can't get to them unless you go there.” Chang added, the archive “should be close. It should be free. It should be publicly available. These are our records. They belong to the citizens of the United States. They must be available to them. And they’re making it harder to get to them or, for all we know, impossible. And we object to that.”
Thus far the campaign to defend the National Archives and public access to these important documents has been confined to letter-writing initiatives launched by academic associations or alliances of non-profit and community organizations like Save Our National Archives (SONA). These campaigns have encouraged opponents of the closures to appeal to their Congressional representatives for support. Democratic Congressman Kevin Mullin recently responded by introducing a bill, the “National Archives Protection Act,” that would prevent NARA from closing facilities without first acquiring Congressional approval.
However well-intentioned these letter-writing campaigns may be, no confidence should be placed in the US Congress to halt the closure of National Archives facilities. The ultimate guardians of these institutions must be the working class, and it is to the working class and not Congress that appeals must be directed.
7. Florida executes Daniel Conahan as DeSantis killing spree reaches 15 in 2026
Florida killed 72-year-old Navy veteran Daniel Conahan while DNA evidence that he said could exclude him went untested. He was the 15th death row inmate executed in the state in 2026.
As Trump posts a map of North America draped in the US flag and threatens military action against the cartels, the Sheinbaum government answers with patriotic declarations while offering to serve Washington as a war base.
9. Fifty-three years after the coup: US imperialism and the coming confrontation in Chile
What was covert in 1973 is now proclaimed from the stage of a fascist summit in Santiago. The Trump administration does not hide its operations in Latin America, but on the contrary advertises them.
10. In answer to Trump’s trade war, Carney advances Canada’s own imperialist agenda
The trade war between the US and Canada intensified Tuesday after President Donald Trump announced a series of new charges and outright bans on approximately US$1 billion worth of Canadian goods imports. Earlier in the day, Ottawa’s “dollar for dollar” retaliatory tariffs of 15, 25, and 50 percent on some US$20 billion of US imports—a response to Trump’s imposition of imposts following the collapse of trade talks in August—came into force.
Trump’s aggressive strategy is based on the drive to annex Canada as the 51st state or at least reduce it to vassal status, with its trade, energy and foreign policies largely dictated by Washington. The so-called “Donroe doctrine” is premised on US control over the entire Americas, stretching from Greenland and Canada in the north, through Mexico and the Panama Canal, to all Latin America. With a stranglehold over the Western hemisphere’s economic supply chains and governments, Trump and the American oligarchy for which he speaks believe they can wage a world war against their rivals, above all China, to reassert American imperialist global hegemony.
The fascist-minded president demonstrated his commitment to this agenda once again over the weekend with a social media post showing American control over Greenland and Iceland in the North Atlantic, Canada, Mexico and the Panama Canal.
Trump’s executive orders signed Tuesday banned motorcycles, and some alcohol and dairy products outright, while imposing higher tariffs on other goods. He set September 29 as the deadline for this late barrage of trade restrictions to come into force.
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Canada’s establishment does not oppose Trump’s far-right social and foreign policies—notwithstanding the sharp criticisms Carney, his ministers and political allies, including almost all provincial premiers, the NDP social-democrats, and the trade unions, have made of the US president. Rather, Canada’s political establishment has used Trump as a foil to shift politics sharply right. Their “opposition” to Trump is solely from the standpoint that his “America First” program fails to recognize Canada’s prerogatives as a junior partner of American imperialism and grant its ruling class “first rights” to the proceeds from exploiting the country’s working class and natural resources.
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Their chief complaint with Trump is that he is using the close economic and military-security ties Canadian imperialism has forged with its larger southern neighbor as, to use Carney’s words, “vulnerabilities,” to push Ottawa and the Canadian economy into an explicitly subordinate relationship.
Since the outbreak of the second imperialist world war, the Canadian ruling class has pursued its imperialist interest through the US-Canada military-security alliance and US-led “liberal” world order, whose dismantling Trump is completing because it is deemed insufficiently tilted in favor of Washington and Wall Street. Ottawa was a staunch US ally through the Cold War, and over the past 35 years has backed US-led wars of aggression and “regime change” operations across the globe.
While staggered by Trump’s effective termination of the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement (USMCA) and cognizant that Trump could repudiate any deal within days of his signing it, Ottawa continues to plead for a reconfigured “partnership” with US imperialism, based on confronting their historic rivals, principally China and Russia.
In a video speech released Tuesday shortly after Canada’s retaliatory tariffs came into force, Carney explained his strategy as a “pivot” away from Canada’s reliance on its bilateral relationship with its southern neighbor, and accused Trump of trying to “break us to own us” and make Canada “dependent” on Washington.
At the centre of this pivot is an intensification of worker-exploitation to increase the global “competitiveness,” i.e., the profitability, of Canadian capitalism and the forging of closer ties with the European imperialist powers, as they rapidly rearm to pursue war on Russia and otherwise seek to aggressively assert their interests around the globe.
Carney and several leading ministers will host a two-day Canada Investment Conference in Toronto next Monday and Tuesday to this end. The event aims to initiate the process of attracting C$1 trillion in investments from the vultures of international finance capital. Prominent participants include top executives of BlackRock and Blackstone, Barclays Bank, Canada’s Big Five banks, and various pension and state “sovereign wealth funds.” One day later, Carney will attend European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s “State of the Union” address in Brussels before receiving the honor of giving an official address to the European Parliament.
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A major component of Ottawa’s pivot or “diversification” strategy is a turn towards European imperialism, where Carney is searching for allies for his massive rearmament drive. Earlier this summer, he unveiled a C$100 billion package for the purchase and maintenance of a new submarine fleet from Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems. The agreement was no less a geopolitical move than a military procurement decision, integrating a key sphere of Canada’s military capacities with a resurgent and aggressive German imperialism. The government is also considering abandoning plans to purchase new F-35 fighter jets from the US-based Lockheed Martin in favor of Swedish Saab’s Gripen fighter jet. In his Tuesday speech, Carney lauded Montreal-based Marconi Technologies for becoming the first non-European company to secure a contract for military equipment under the EU’s multi-billion-dollar rearmament program, SAFE.
Ottawa, unlike Trump, has lined up with the European powers in their reckless escalation of the war against Russia in Ukraine. With billions of dollars in financial and military aid, its ideological fostering of far-right Ukrainian nationalism, and backing for Ukraine’s drone and missile attacks on Russia, Ottawa has made a major contribution to escalating the war, which poses the real danger of exploding into a nuclear conflagration.
On Thursday, Carney hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose government has outlawed opposition to the war, as shown by the 15-year sentence handed down to the Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk because he has called for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers to stop the war in articles posted on the World Socialist Web Site.
The eruption of inter-imperialist antagonisms and initial stages of the third world war have exacerbated the regional divisions that have always been a feature of Canada’s ruling class.
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There is widespread and entirely legitimate hostility to Trump across Canada, but this can find no progressive outlet by lining up with the Canadian ruling class or any of its regional factions. Workers across Canada must instead unify their struggles with workers in the US and internationally, who all suffer the consequences of trade war, economic breakdown and imperialist war. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in a perspective this week,
The urgent task is to revive the long traditions of joint struggle between American and Canadian workers, stretching back to the eight-hour-day movement in the 19th century and the building of the industrial unions in the 1930s, and infuse them with a new and higher socialist content. The only alternative to intensifying inter-imperialist antagonisms and world war is the fight for the socialist transformation of society.
Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced government plans Tuesday to ban trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Britain has long deemed to be in breach of international law, and sanction individuals and companies facilitating settlement expansion. He also announced plans for a ban on arms licenses and other exports that “materially contribute to the occupation”, as well as on the advertising of illegal settlement properties in Britain.
Britain’s plans were announced in coordination with Canada and France, with other countries pledging to follow suit. It comes decades after these governments denounced the settlements while continuing to trade with the businesses that sustain them.
It was widely seen as a belated—and face-saving—attempt by incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham to shore up support for Labour in the wake of its slavish support for Israel’s three year-long genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza under Keir Starmer. Labour faces a by-election in Starmer’s former Holborn and St Pancras seat that Green party leader Zack Polanski will contest. Polanski has won popular support in large measure due to his opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Giving the lie to any notion that the sanctions would have a significant impact, British diplomats reportedly told their US counterparts that the move was “largely symbolic” and would have “no material impact on the UK’s wider relationship with Israel on trade or security”.
This distinction is even clearer in Britain’s military relationship with Israel. While Miliband said the government would impose further restrictions on the export of arms to Israel, over and above those announced in September 2024, UK firms will continue supplying parts for the F-35 fighter jet, of which the UK builds 15 percent by value, under a “carve-out”. Israel has used its US-supplied F-35 jets in its illegal wars on Gaza and Iran, as well as its attacks on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
Miliband, in a handwringing speech, told the House of Commons that Britain could no longer stand back and watch the suffering in the West Bank and Israel’s destruction of the two-state solution. Nearly 60 years after Israel seized the West Bank in the 1967 Arab Israeli war, he declared that the British government officially regards the occupation as unlawful and stated that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is taking place in the West Bank.
It comes more than two years after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion in July 2024, at the request of the UN General assembly, confirming yet again the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem under international law. The ICJ called for settlement building to stop and Israeli settlers to leave occupied Palestinian territory and for governments to stop helping sustain Israel’s unlawful presence.
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Britain is now acknowledging that ethnic cleansing is taking place in the West Bank while insisting that its sanctions target settlements and settlers, not Israel. But the Israeli government promotes settlement expansion, protects settler violence and advances the displacement of Palestinians.
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The economic significance of the trade ban is extremely limited. Total UK-Israel trade in goods and services was £5.9 billion ($7.86 billion) in the four quarters to March 2026. Goods originating in Israeli settlements are not separately identified in British trade statistics, but settlement goods are only a tiny proportion of Israel’s overall exports. The latest available figures put total UK trade with the Occupied Palestinian Territories at only about £40 million.
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The government has provided little detail on how it will distinguish settlement goods from other Israeli products as they pass through companies, distributors, packing centres and complex supply chains, or how it will prevent goods being routed through other channels.
By presenting the problem as one of “settler terrorists”, Miliband turned a system of state-supported territorial expansion into a problem of a few extremist individuals. Yet settler attacks take place under the protection of the Israel Defence Forces, while the Israeli state provides the land, infrastructure, military protection and legal framework through which settlement expansion takes place. The foreign secretary insisted, “The sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel.”
Britain’s token sanctions are not only an attempt to distance London from Israel’s past crimes, but from worse crimes to come.
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In August, Israel issued a tender for the construction of more than 1,000 housing units in the E1 area east of Jerusalem. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had earlier praised the plan that “practically erases the two-state delusion” by splitting up the territory designated for a future Palestinian state.
There was predictably a furious response from Israel to Miliband, with Foreign Minister Gideon Saar calling the announcement “morally distorted” and accusing the UK of “blatant interference in the affairs of a sovereign state and its electoral process.”
Israel said it would close the British consulate in East Jerusalem and exclude British representatives from the International Gaza Support Center in Kiryat Gat. It announced that Britain would no longer be permitted to train Palestinian security forces in the West Bank and that 12 British lawmakers and other nationals, including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, would be barred from entering the country.
Britain’s Orthodox chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, who functions as a cheerleader for the Netanyahu government, claimed that action against Israel’s illegal settlements would unleash a new wave of antisemitism, endangering the safety of Britain’s Jewish population.
His comments came a few days after US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee accused the British government of “Jew hate”. However, an Axios report said that US President Donald Trump did not oppose British plans to sanction Israeli settlements in a briefing on the plan during a conversation with Burnham ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.
This is a true measure of their limited character, as a means of posturing over some of Israel’s crimes while leaving untouched British imperialism’s fundamental relationship with the Zionist state, even as it plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza and to annex the West Bank.
12. Right-wing consensus over militarism and austerity in Sweden’s election campaign
All the main parties agree on readying Sweden for war, scapegoating immigrants for the social crisis, and curbing public spending to fund rearmament and subsidies to wealthy investors.
13. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
India:
New Zealand:
Pakistan:
Sri Lanka:
14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
