This Perspective was published in the World Socialist Website Site on 06 October 2025.
Today marks two years since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, one of the greatest crimes of the modern era. Before the eyes of the entire world, the Israeli government—armed, financed and defended by every imperialist power—has carried out a campaign of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation. At least 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 20,000 children, and the entire population has been repeatedly displaced.
Displaced Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza carry their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025, after the Israeli army issued evacuation orders from Gaza City. [AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi]
In order to launch this long planned genocide, Israel used as its pretext the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, in which a few thousand fighters with small arms, possessing no armored vehicles or aircraft, breached the Israeli border without resistance. To claim that Israel, with one of the most sophisticated intelligence networks in the world, was taken completely by surprise by a few thousand Hamas fighters is a despicable fiction.
As the events of the past two years have shown—in Israel’s assassinations of foreign leaders, military officers and scientists—Israeli intelligence has penetrated every state and movement in the region. Indeed, within months of the October 7 attacks, newspaper accounts revealed that Israel possessed the entire Hamas battle plan but orchestrated a deliberate stand-down of its troops stationed on the border.
The genocide that followed was the premeditated outcome of 75 years of brutal oppression, the implementation of the “final solution” to the Palestinian “problem.” It has exposed before the entire world the bankrupt and reactionary character of Zionism. The Israeli state has shown itself to be a murderous instrument of imperialism.
While carried out by Israel, the genocide has been a joint operation of world imperialism. Every imperialist government, from Washington to London, Paris and Berlin, together with the entire media, justified the Israeli assault on Gaza. A hideous double standard was adopted, in which any act of mass murder by Israel, which illegally occupies Gaza, was justified, while any effort at resistance by the Palestinians was demonized as “terrorism.”
Opposition to the Israeli state was slandered as “antisemitism,” in an exercise that the WSWS referred to as “semantic inversion,” in which “a word is utilized in a manner and within a context that is the exact opposite of its real and long-accepted meaning.” This became the framework for a brutal and escalating assault on democratic rights, in which opposition to genocide has been criminalized. The attempt to equate opposition to the genocide with hatred of the Jews, is, in any case, negated by the prominent role played by Jewish people around the world in mass demonstrations.
The United States has been Israel’s key weapons supplier, funneling unlimited amounts of deadly military gear to fuel the slaughter. But Germany, France, Britain and others have all contributed their share to the bloodbath. Moreover, they have all purchased billions in Israeli government bonds to help finance the murderous military machine they also armed.
Underscoring the fact that these crimes have been facilitated by the major North American and European powers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was allowed to defend his actions from the podium of the United Nations last month, even though an arrest warrant against him for war crimes is outstanding.
The imperialists back the genocide as a central component of their drive to secure control over the oil-rich Middle East, part of a global eruption of imperialist war targeting Russia and China. Their support for the genocide has demonstrated that they are ready to deploy any and all means to secure for themselves access to markets, raw materials, labour and geostrategic influence.
This imperialist plunder has culminated in Trump’s “peace” plan, which proposes robbing Palestinians of all their rights by creating a neo-colonial protectorate under the control of America’s would-be Führer and his bagman, the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair. If Hamas follows Trump’s demand to accept this arrangement, the Palestinians will be expelled to make way for a US-controlled trade corridor through the Middle East. If they refuse, Israel will get the green light to slaughter the remaining Palestinians en masse.
A particularly foul role in this process has been played by the bourgeois nationalist regimes of the Middle East. The entire history of the 20th century has shown the incapacity of any form of nationalism to secure the democratic and social rights of the working class. The despicable role of these governments culminated in their embrace of the “peace” plan promoted by Trump, which completely repudiates the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
The genocide in Gaza has provoked mass revulsion and opposition throughout the world. Over the past two years, tens of millions have participated in demonstrations spanning every continent, from Europe and the Americas to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Trump’s plan to turn the Middle East into a US fiefdom on the bones of the Palestinians, and Israel’s violent seizure of the Sumud aid flotilla, have ignited a new and broader wave of protest.
In recent days, millions have filled the streets of Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Colombia and Argentina. In Italy, action initiated by dockworkers, who refused to load weapons for Israel, triggered a one-day general strike of more than 2 million workers and a million-strong march in Rome. Though still limited by the trade union bureaucracies and appeals to the Meloni government, these actions point to the immense potential power of the international working class to halt the genocide.
One day of coordinated strike action has shaken Trump’s closest European ally. An organized, global industrial and political movement of the working class could stop the imperialist war machine in its tracks. Nothing less than a mass, international movement of workers can end the genocide and block the extension of American imperialism’s drive for domination—from Gaza to a wider war aimed at Iran, Russia and ultimately China.
The development of opposition to the genocide must be guided by an understanding of the political lessons of the past two years. The central lesson is the total bankruptcy of all appeals to governments of the imperialist powers. They are not the instruments for halting genocide but its perpetrators and enablers.
The perspective of a two-state solution has failed. Only the unification of all the peoples of the Middle East can lead to a viable future. The Israeli state has proven to be a historical monstrosity, resulting in demoralization and degradation. The Israeli working class must repudiate the poisonous ideology and politics of Zionism, reject the reactionary dystopia of the “Jewish state” and strive for the unity of Israeli and Palestinian workers in the struggle for the United Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
In a lecture delivered on October 24, 2023, three weeks after the beginning of the genocide, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North explained:
In the final analysis, the liberation of the Palestinian people can be achieved only through a unified struggle of the working class, Arab and Jewish, against the Zionist regime, as well as the treacherous Arab and Iranian capitalist regimes, and their replacement with a union of socialist republics throughout the Middle East and, indeed, the entire world.
This is a gigantic task. But it is the only perspective that is based on a correct appraisal of the present stage of world history, the contradictions and crisis of world capitalism and the dynamic of the international class struggle. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine are tragic demonstrations of the catastrophic role and consequences of national programs in a historical epoch whose essential and defining characteristics are the primacy of world economy, the globally integrated character of the productive forces of capitalism, and, therefore, the necessity to base the struggle of the working class on an international strategy.
Two years later, there are growing signs of a global resurgence of working class struggle. The Trump administration’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship is bringing it into head-on conflict with the working class in the United States, despite all efforts by the Democrats to sow complacency and passivity. President Macron in France is unable to form a stable government, amid mass opposition to his demands for austerity to pay for remilitarisation. Starmer in the UK and Merz in Germany have no popular support whatsoever.
Internationally, there has been an explosion of popular anti-government struggles, led by “Generation Z”—in Kenya, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco and Madagascar.
The development of this opposition along revolutionary lines requires that workers break free from the control of the social democratic, Stalinist and trade union bureaucracies, along with their pseudo-left defenders, who work to contain and dissipate opposition. This requires building new, democratic organizations of class struggle—rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood—to coordinate and lead a unified international offensive of the working class.
Workers, students, youth and all opponents of Zionism and imperialism must fight for:
An immediate halt to all weapons shipments to Israel;
A comprehensive boycott of all trade and other economic activity with Israel;
The prosecution of all US, European and other corporations assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide.
The arrest of Israeli officials for war crimes;
An end to state repression of anti-genocide protesters and the repeal of all anti-demonstration laws;
Immediate, unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza by all available routes.
These demands must spearhead the broader movement already developing in the working class internationally. The same governments that funnel weapons of death to Israel are erecting dictatorial forms of rule at home to suppress opposition to oligarchic rule, mass impoverishment and the drive to world war.
The genocide in Gaza has laid bare the historical dead end of the capitalist system itself. The “normalization” of genocide is the product of a system that has exhausted any progressive role. It is accompanied by the normalization of fascism, the normalization of military-police dictatorship, the normalization of world war and oligarchic rule.
The perspective that must guide the working class is Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. The democratic and social aspirations of the oppressed can be achieved only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, on a world scale, for the conquest of power.
The critical task is the building of a new revolutionary leadership to guide this struggle. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its sections, the Socialist Equality Parties, fight to unite workers and youth across all borders in a single movement against capitalism, for the establishment of workers’ governments and the socialist reorganization of the world economy to meet human need, not private profit.
Reposted below is the article of the World Socialist Web Site published on 02 September 2025.
The two-day gathering of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) leaders finished yesterday in the Chinese city of Tianjin. The host, Chinese President Xi Jinping, put forward his vision of a multi-polar world in opposition to “hegemonism and power politics”—a barely veiled criticism of the US.
Putin, Modi and Xi. [AP Photo/Suo Takekuma]
The grouping has its roots in what was dubbed the “Shanghai Five,” formed by China and Russia with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in 1996 to counter US interventions in Central Asia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The SCO was formally established in 2001 and expanded to include Uzbekistan. India, Pakistan, Belarus and Iran have subsequently been included as full members, while 14 other countries including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt are dialogue partners.
While the attendance of many of the 20 leaders at the summit was unremarkable, the presence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—his first visit to China in seven years—triggered alarm bells in Washington. US imperialism has carefully cultivated economic and strategic relations with India for well over a decade, as it has accelerated its preparations for war with China, which it regards as the chief threat to US global dominance.
Modi had previously signalled that he would not be attending the summit, citing his necessary attendance at a sitting of India’s parliament, in what could only be construed as a calculated snub to China. Although a thaw had begun, relations between the two countries were frosty following military clashes along their disputed border in 2020 that left 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers dead.
Modi abruptly changed his plans amid a standoff with the Trump administration over India’s purchase of oil from Russia. In early August, Trump attempted to bully India into submission by doubling tariffs on Indian exports to the US to a massive 50 percent. Modi refused to cave in and the final 25 percent of the tariff hit came into effect last week. Indeed, Reuters reported last Thursday that India plans to increase purchases of Russian oil by between 10 and 20 percent.
Trump had been pressing India and China to end imports of Russia oil as a lever to strongarm Russian President Vladimir Putin into making concessions to Ukraine as part of negotiations over a ceasefire in the ongoing war. The fact that Trump had not imposed a similar tariff punishment increase on China to that on India was no doubt doubly galling for Modi, given India’s longstanding strategic partnership with the US.
Modi’s presence in China this week was something of a diplomatic coup for Xi, who effusively welcomed him on Sunday, saying the two countries must not let the border issue define overall relations, and should be development partners not rivals. Modi, in turn, declared that there was now an “atmosphere of peace and stability” between them.
Modi and Xi met in Russia last October on the sidelines of the BRICS summit shortly after reaching a border patrol agreement. Over recent weeks, a further warming of relations has been evidenced by the re-establishment of direct flights and a lifting of Chinese export restrictions on India including on rare earths. Yesterday, according to Modi, the two leaders discussed reducing India’s huge trade deficit of $99 billion with China, the country’s largest trading partner.
Xi clearly used the SCO summit as a platform to demonstrate China’s ability to counter US efforts to isolate it internationally and encircle it militarily. “Global governance has reached a new crossroads,” he said.
In another swipe at the US and Trump, without naming names, Xi criticised “bullying practices” and declared: “The house rules of a few countries should not be imposed on others.”
The meeting agreed to Xi’s proposal for a new SCO development bank in a move to further undermine the dominance of the US dollar in world trade and finance. Beijing is to provide 10 billion yuan ($US1.4 billion) in loans to the new banking consortium and another 2 billion yuan in aid to member states this year. China also plans to build an artificial intelligence cooperation centre for SCO nations.
Putin also used the opportunity to call for “genuine multilateralism” to lay the groundwork for “a new system of stability and security in Eurasia.” In an obvious reference to the US and NATO, he added: “This security system, unlike Euro-centric and Euro-Atlantic models, … [would be] truly balanced, and would not allow one country to ensure its own security at the expense of others.”
Putin also lashed out against the US and NATO over the war in Ukraine, saying it “did not arise as a result of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, but rather as a consequence of a coup d’état [in 2014] in Ukraine, which was supported and provoked by the West.” He praised the efforts of China and India in facilitating a resolution to the crisis and said he would inform SCO members of details of last month’s negotiations with Trump in Alaska in bilateral meetings.
Both China and India have called for an end to the war, but at the same time pointedly refused to condemn Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Efforts were made to present an atmosphere of conviviality and bonhomie. Modi and Putin arrived together in Putin’s vehicle to yesterday’s meeting after a lengthy discussion and joined Xi for a photo opportunity holding hands in a close circle. The Indian and Russian leaders also publicly praised their own discussions.
An editorial in the Washington Post entitled “Trump’s white-knuckling with India could backfire” expressed the alarm in US ruling circles that the White House’s crude attempt to use hefty tariffs to bludgeon New Delhi into submission and break up longstanding Indian ties with Russia had failed.
“Beijing remains Washington’s most powerful rival. In purely economic terms, China is already a far more formidable adversary than the Soviet Union ever was,” it noted, then concluded:
“Trump’s zero-sum approach is to not leave any money on the table in negotiations. Even in business, that’s arguably a mistake. Goodwill has value. Trump’s talks with China might yet turn out to be every bit as bruising as those he is having with allies. Maybe that’s when he might appreciate better relations with friends.”
Trump officials, however, have shown no signs of heeding the advice. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the SCO summit as “performative” and denounced India and China as “bad actors” that were “fuelling the Russian war machine”. Trump’s anti-China trade adviser Peter Navarro condemned India as “arrogant,” declaring that the “Brahmins are profiteering at the expense of the Indian people” with the Russia oil trade. In a fit of exasperation, Navarro branded the conflict in Ukraine as “Modi’s war.”
Modi has no intention of immediately rupturing relations with the US. On his way to the SCO summit, he stopped in Tokyo where he praised the work of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad—a quasi-military pact with Japan, the US and Australia. Speaking to Nikkei Asia, Modi repeated stock standard US propaganda, declaring: “As vibrant democracies, open economies and pluralistic societies, we are committed to a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific”—directed against “authoritarian” China.
Like the other SCO members including China and Russia, India aggressively pursues its economic and strategic interests amid worsening international economic turmoil, exacerbated by Trump’s trade war measures, along with heightened geo-political tensions and an emerging world war. Wracked by social tensions at home and divided by many unresolved disputes, none of them has a progressive solution to the global eruption of imperialist violence and deepening crisis of the capitalist system.
We repost below the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Statement of August 17, 2025, published Here.
President Donald Trump meets with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin Friday, Aug. 15, 2025, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]
The heads of all the major European powers are heading to Washington today for emergency meetings with US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, following Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. That meeting, in which Trump warmly embraced Putin and called for a negotiated peace in Ukraine, has set off a political crisis across Europe.
Attending the talks in Washington are German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. They aim to present a united front as they confront the fallout from Trump’s shift in US support for the Ukraine war, hoping they can prevent Trump from abruptly pulling the plug on their entire operation.
In advance of Monday’s talks, debate within the media and among officials in both the United States and Europe centered on whether any settlement would involve binding “security guarantees” for Ukraine and, at the same time, compel Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia. On Sunday, US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN that for the first time Russia had agreed to allow the United States and European powers to extend “Article 5-like protection” to Ukraine, a reference to NATO’s mutual defense clause.
Zelensky called it “a historic decision,” writing on X that the guarantees must provide “protection on land, in the air, and at sea” with Europe’s full participation. At the same time, however, Trump has diverged from Ukraine and the major European powers by backing Putin’s demand that Kiev cede territory, including sections of the Donbas region not currently under Russian control.
That such a change was coming had been evident for some time. The Alaska summit made it official, and the reaction in European capitals has bordered on hysteria, augmented by the fact that Ukraine has suffered a series of military defeats. Whatever they declare publicly, the reality is that without US backing the prosecution of the war in Ukraine becomes untenable. The NATO alliance has been held together until now by Washington’s ferocious hostility toward Russia, a policy spearheaded by the Democratic Biden administration.
Trump, reviving the tradition of the far-right “America Firsters” of the World War II era, speaks for layers of the American ruling class oriented toward war in the Pacific and the confrontation with China. He has coupled this outlook with tariff and trade war measures directed against the European powers. For this faction, disengaging from the conflict with Russia over Ukraine offers potential advantages: securing access to vital resources in Russia and Ukraine, loosening Moscow’s alignment with Beijing, and weakening European imperialism.
Particularly since Trump’s re-election, the US foreign policy establishment has discussed a “reverse Kissinger” strategy. Faced with China’s economic rise, they aim to invert the policy championed in the 1970s by US President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of allying with China against the Soviet Union. In an article titled “A ‘Reverse Kissinger’?,” the American Enterprise Institute think-tank endorsed attempts to ally with Russia against China, but noted that the Ukraine war was an obstacle to winning over Putin. It wrote:
Moscow and Beijing have been forced together by the war in Ukraine. Ending that war, and mending ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, could slow the Sino-Russian convergence—and perhaps even make Moscow a partner in containing Beijing. The aspiration is admirable. … It didn’t work, because Putin was less interested in stability than in swallowing Ukraine.
At the same time, any shift in Washington’s policy toward Russia will provoke bitter conflicts within the American state apparatus. For powerful sections of the ruling class, the defeat of Russia remains non-negotiable—not only to salvage the credibility of American imperialism after pouring vast sums into the Ukraine war, but also because they view concessions to Moscow as weakening the broader confrontation with China.
The heads of European imperialism converging on Washington are not only seeking to pressure Trump directly, hoping to play for time if not shift course, but also to rally allies within the American political establishment to block any retreat from the NATO war drive.
However the situation develops, certain fundamental issues must be stressed. First, Trump’s shift on Ukraine is not a “peace policy.” His support for the genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran make this clear. The divisions within the American ruling class center on tactical issues related to a shared project of global domination.
Second, Trump’s maneuver takes place within the framework of an escalating global war and intensifying conflicts between the United States and the European imperialist powers. The costs of this conflict will be imposed through a massive assault on the working class.
Across Europe, governments are carrying out a vast program of remilitarization that can only be financed by dismantling what remains of social protections and diverting trillions into a military build-up. In the United States, Trump is spearheading a social counterrevolution and dictatorship against the working class, tearing down every constraint on the accumulation of wealth by the rich. One element of his calculations is undoubtedly the need to redirect military resources toward the “near abroad” in Latin America and against workers within the United States itself.
Third, Putin’s fawning praise for Trump at the summit on Friday underscores the thoroughly reactionary character of the Russian government. Putin’s ludicrous flattery recalls Stalin’s infamous toast to Hitler in August 1939, as the Stalin-Hitler Non-Aggression Pact was being concluded: “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer. I should therefore like to drink to his health.” Within a week, World War II had erupted; two years later, Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union, at the cost of 27 million Soviet lives.
Like Stalin, Putin seeks deals with imperialism that can only end in disaster for the working class. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was provoked by the US and European imperialist powers, through the relentless expansion of NATO to the east and the refusal to negotiate over Ukraine. The invasion, however, was the action of a bourgeois state defending its own interests. It had nothing in common with the independent mobilization of the Russian or Ukrainian working class against imperialism.
The reactionary character of Putin’s rule is underscored by his alignment with far-right forces across Europe and the United States—including Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, and Alternative for Germany. They will be strengthened by the realignment now underway.
The outcome of today’s talks in Washington remains uncertain, but what is beyond doubt is that the fundamental tendencies driving the world toward catastrophe remain. There will be no progressive resolution to this crisis without the independent intervention of the international working class.
The Trotskyist movement completely rejects the opportunist mantra that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Neither the maneuvers of Trump, nor the intrigues of the European powers, nor the reactionary calculations of Putin offer a way forward. The struggle against genocide, austerity, dictatorship and war requires the building of a conscious, international socialist movement of the working class, fighting irreconcilably against all the capitalist governments and their political agents.
Chemmani Mass Graves on August 01, 2025. Photo courtesy of Kumanan Kana Facebook page.
At the close of the 28th day of the second phase of excavations at the newly uncovered Chemmani–Ariyalai “Siththupaththi” Hindu Cemetery mass grave in Jaffna, 147 skeletons have been exhumed—among them toddlers, children, and babies less than twelve months old. The remains were unearthed in a pit as shallow as two feet, scattered without order—some bodies stacked atop one another, some with bent limbs suggesting they were buried alive. All were stripped of clothing, with clear signs of on-the-spot killings of women alongside their babies, hurried burials, and accompanied by chilling artifacts: a school bag identical to those donated by UNESCO in the 1990s, a baby’s toy and a feeding bottle, small glass bangles, socks, slippers, a suspected machine gun barrel, and fractured skulls. These discoveries, together with already available reports and evidence, leave no doubt that these were not the victims of natural disaster or random violence, but of a systematic, state-organised campaign of mass murder.
The ongoing excavation, conducted under the supervision of Jaffna Magistrate A.A. Anandarajah and led by archaeologist Professor Raj Somadeva, was temporarily halted on August 6 and is scheduled to resume on August 22. On August 3 and 4, this writer visited the site and spoke directly with the Magistrate; J. Thathparan, Executive Director of the Office of Missing Persons (OMP); and Professor Somadeva. All confirmed the significance of the discovery—not only for the scale of barbarism and human tragedy it reveals, but also for the irrefutable evidence it provides of crimes committed against innocent civilians.
From left at the Chemmani grave site, August 3, 2025: Jaffna Magistrate A.A. Anandarajah; J. Thathparan, Executive Director of the Office of Missing Persons (OMP); and the writer. Photo credit Kumanan Kana facebook page.
Chemmani from 1998 to today: Linking State Military to the Graves
One does not have to grope around to relate these mass graves to the Sri Lankan armed forces who occupied Jaffna after 1995. It is an indisputable fact—even acknowledged by ultra-right Sinhala racists—that mass graves exist and massacres were carried out by the state military. Alarmed by the Chemmani exhumations, racist warmonger Udaya Gammanpila, leader of the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya and a former minister, told the media: “The North is war-ravaged, so mass graves will appear anywhere. Digging them up and commenting [on them] is pointless and a waste of money.”
Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) reported in December 1997: “The fate of about 600 people who disappeared from Jaffna Peninsula in recent times is unknown”. The name “Chemmani” entered the world’s attention in July 1998, when Sri Lanka Army Corporal Dewage Somaratna Rajapaksha, convicted for the rape and murder of 18-year-old Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, told the Colombo High Court: “We didn’t kill anyone. We only buried bodies. We can show you where 300 to 400 bodies have been buried.”
In Jaffna Magistrate Court, just prior to exhumations in June 1999, he said, “I can show you how people were arrested in Ariyalai, tortured and buried…I can show you 10 places in Chemmani where bodies are buried. The other four convicted with me can show another six places.”
Rajapaksha’s testimony exposed a network of clandestine mass graves in the Jaffna area, containing hundreds of civilians who had “disappeared” following the Sri Lankan military’s recapture of the peninsula in 1995. In the late 1990s, limited excavations at Chemmani confirmed the remains of 15 individuals, but political obstruction, witness intimidation, procedural impediments, and the deliberate tampering with evidence ensured that most sites remained untouched for over two decades—like many other mass graves scattered across the country.
The present Ariyalai mass grave—only a short distance from the original Chemmani site—confirms the truth of Rajapaksha’s claims and directly links the Sri Lankan army to these atrocities. Media reports from the period documented hundreds of Tamil civilians vanishing after being stopped at military checkpoints and round-ups. The close proximity of the central army camp at Chemmani at the time, few yards away from the burial site, random placement of the skeletons, absence of clothing, a military item found with the bodies, and evidence of blunt force trauma all fit the established pattern of military abductions, torture, and summary executions.
The fractured skull of a victim found on August 6, 2025 at the Chemmani mass grave. Photo credit: Shabeer Mohamed.
State repression: from the North to the South
The AHRC documented the systematic nature of disappearances, noting in December 1997 that more than 16,700 cases had been verified in the South during the 1988–90 counterinsurgency against the fascist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Only in isolated instances were prosecutions initiated against the perpetrators, and almost all of these resulted in no convictions. In both the South and the North, the Sri Lankan ruling elite deployed the full apparatus of the state—the military and police, death squads, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and emergency regulations that served as a legal licence to kill and dispose of bodies with impunity, along with the use of mass graves—to eliminate perceived threats to capitalist rule from the political right and, above all, against the innocent rural poor and the oppressed.
There were, however, differences in the methods of disposal. In the South, tyre pyres—burning corpses in public—were used to terrorise the population and demonstrate the cost of defiance. In the North and East, the army often concealed its crimes, burying the bodies in remote or controlled areas to evade scrutiny while continuing the repression.
These were not “excesses” or “aberrations,” but the outcome of deliberate class policy. The AHRC identified seven patterns behind disappearances, including direct political decisions to eliminate thousands as a precondition for introducing free-market economic policies, and the use of 1965 Indonesian-style mass killings as a model for repression.
Successive governments, shared crimes
The Chemmani mass graves, like nearly two dozen others uncovered around the island, indict not only the military but every government—UNP, SLFP, SLPP, and now NPP/JVP—that has presided over a regime of impunity for state violence.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which today attempts to posture as a “clean” and democratic force, played a key role in the nationalist, chauvinist, and militarist campaigns that legitimised repression in both the North and the South—at least since July 1987, when the reactionary Indo–Sri Lanka Accord was signed. The JVP did so while entering into coalition governments with former presidents Chandrika Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapaksa. The JVP’s hands are soaked in the blood of Tamils. Its current silence on Chemmani speaks volumes about its real class allegiance—to the capitalist state and imperialism, which it defends against the working class and the poor.
Militarization, Intimidation, and Suppression
In the South, it was only after 1994—when President Kumaratunga came to power with phony pledges of truth and justice to the families of the disappeared—that limited space was opened for victims of state terror under the UNP government and of JVP fascists to lodge even police complaints. Soon, the military was elevated to the highest esteem by the People’s Alliance (PA) government in resuming the war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The continued militarization and repression in the North did not spare the South, where abductions were commonplace under president Rajapaksa’s reinvigorated war, keeping the working class and all dissenters in a state of terror. All throughout, the JVP waged a sinister chauvinist campaign supporting the war. Today, retired military officers have largely found a safe haven under the JVP/NPP government. These were the conditions that prevented the aggrieved relatives of the disappeared from pursuing judicial processes, while the police and military actively intervened to block prosecutions.
Nationalist traps and the dead-end of appeals to imperialism
Neither Tamil nationalist organisations operating in the North or Colombo, nor the Tamil diaspora—whose real aim is to secure an elite self-rule in the North and East to safeguard their privileges against the Tamil working class and poor—offer any way forward. Their appeals to the United Nations, Western governments, and international human rights bodies have only been pretexts, largely for US imperialism to exert pressure on Colombo into submission. These are the very same imperialist powers that provided military, intelligence, and diplomatic backing to Colombo during the war.
Similarly, Sinhala nationalism justifies past and present massacres under the cover of “protecting the unitary state” and defending “national security.” Both ethnic nationalisms serve to divide the working class, the only social force capable of ending the cycle of repression and impunity.
Massacres as class war
Like the massacres in the South during 1988–90, those in the North and East during the 1983–2009 anti-Tamil civil war were not simply crimes committed against an ethnic minority, but primarily acts of class war. The victims—whether rural Sinhala youth accused of JVP links, or Tamil villagers suspected of aiding the LTTE—were overwhelmingly drawn from the working class, unemployed youth and oppressed rural poor. Their elimination was intended to crush political opposition and terrorise the masses into accepting the “open economy” policies demanded by the local bourgeoisie and international finance capital.
As the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) has emphatically explained, there has been—and will be—no justice for the victims of the South without justice for the victims of the North, and vice versa. The capitalist state, founded in 1948 on communal division, cannot and will not prosecute itself.
The way forward: a socialist programme for the working class and the Oppressed
The ICFI advances a clear perspective for ending repression and securing genuine justice: the independent political mobilisation of the working class, uniting Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers in the struggle for a Sri Lanka–Eelam United Socialist States, as part of the Union of Socialist Republics of South Asia.
This requires building a revolutionary party grounded in the Trotskyist programme of permanent revolution, fighting to unite the oppressed rural and urban poor, along with unemployed youth, behind the leadership of the working class. The middle class and petty bourgeoisie must break from nationalist illusions and join forces with their true class brothers and sisters, both nationally and internationally.
The truth is that justice will not come from The Hague, Geneva, or Washington, but from the victory of the working class over the capitalist system that breeds war, dictatorship, and mass murder. The graves at Chemmani are not merely relics of past atrocities—they are a warning of what the Sri Lankan state will resort to again if the working class suffers another defeat. This is not a distant possibility but a living reality, demonstrated before our eyes in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians by imperialist-backed Zionist Israel.
Reposted below is the WSWS.org Perspective published here on August 08, 2025.
Palestinians struggle to get food and humanitarian aid from the back of a truck as it moves along the Morag corridor near Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, Monday, Aug. 4, 2025 [AP Photo/Mariam Dagga]
The decision by the security cabinet of Israel’s fascistic government to expand its military occupation of the Gaza Strip will mean death for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and presages their final ethnic cleansing. Workers and young people who want to stop this barbarism must construct a socialist movement in the working class against the Zionist regime and its imperialist patrons.
The phased plan proposes the military conquest of the Gaza Strip, including Gaza City, Khan Younis and other refugee camps, where at least a million displaced Palestinians are located. Responding to tactical concerns expressed by the Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir of an unnecessary loss of military personnel and endangering the 20 hostages still held by Hamas, open talk of permanent annexation has given way to a proposal to hold the captured areas for five months with a new security perimeter set up inside the enclave, while Hamas is eliminated and the remaining hostages are freed. This is to be followed supposedly by some unspecified form of Arab control.
Behind this rhetorical shift, mass murder and ethnic cleansing are still on the order of the day. The IDF has already issued new enforced displacement orders in parts of Gaza City in the north and Khan Younis in the south. A military spokesman said ground troops were preparing to “expand the scope of combat operations.”
One million people, around half of the enclave’s population, will initially be driven south toward the Mawasi “humanitarian zone”—a concentration camp—after which a military offensive will be launched in the ethnically cleansed area. Many of these people, who are already starving and have been displaced multiple times since the genocide began, will die en route.
This is a genocide carried out by the Zionist regime but made in Washington, Berlin and London.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to escalate the extermination and expulsion of the Palestinians is made possible by the unconditional support his government enjoys from the imperialist powers that have flooded weapons and other war materiel to the Zionist regime. Indeed, President Trump greenlighted Netanyahu’s plan when he declared on August 5, “So Israel is going to have to make a decision. … It’s going to be pretty much up to Israel.”
Since the outset of Israel’s latest onslaught on Gaza in October 2023, the imperialist governments have combined their arming of Israel with efforts to crush popular opposition to the genocide at home by deploying police violence and smear campaigns branding anti-genocide activists as “antisemites.”
But the decades-long support for the Zionist regime by the imperialist powers goes back to the creation in 1948 of a Jewish-exclusivist state in the British mandate of Palestine. As the Fourth International explained in May 1948, the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab territories “is a compromise between the imperialist robbers” in the US and Britain aimed at securing their positions in the region. Partition would “throttle the anti-imperialist fight of the masses, while Zionists and Arab feudalists will vie for imperialist favours,” the Fourth International warned.
Nearly eight decades on, the imperialists can only preserve Israel as a bridgehead for their domination over the Middle East by backing the annihilation of the Palestinians.
The determination on the part of Washington and its European accomplices to facilitate the genocide and crack down on any opposition flows from their desperate striving to advance their predatory economic and geopolitical interests amid a global capitalist breakdown. The same antagonisms between the major powers that led to two world wars in the last century have created the conditions for a third imperialist world war, which threatens the very survival of humanity.
The initial stages of this conflict are well underway, with the genocide of the Palestinians serving as a component of US imperialism’s push to secure unchallenged hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East. At the same time, the imperialist gangsters are waging a war against Russia with the aim of reducing it to a semi-colonial status and preparing a war on China to block its economic rise. The imperialists’ readiness to sanction the slaughter of an entire people provides an indication of the barbarism of which they are capable in pursuit of raw materials, markets, pools of labour and geostrategic influence.
The despotic Arab regimes continue to vie for imperialist favours and are deeply complicit in mass murder. For the Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi and other Gulf ruling elites, their main concern is to serve as junior partners in Washington’s war of regional conquest and plunder, forming an anti-Iranian alliance, without provoking an upsurge of the oppressed Arab working class against their rule. Thus their refusal to offer any opposition to the genocide beyond hypocritical statements of concern and proposals to orchestrate the expulsion of the Palestinians, i.e., carry out a crime against humanity more “humanely.” On the very day that Netanyahu discussed the expansion of military operations in Gaza with his security cabinet, Egypt inked a joint deal with the Zionist regime for the export of natural gas worth an estimated $35 billion.
The Zionists and their imperialist paymasters have succeeded for nearly two years in carrying through their criminal “final solution” of the Palestinian question thanks above all to the despicable conduct of the social democratic parties, trade unions and their political hangers-on. Parties like Labour in Britain and Germany’s Social Democrats that are in government have supplied Netanyahu’s fascist regime with weapons and military equipment and outlawed popular opposition. The trade unions in all of the major imperialist centres have systematically suppressed opposition in the working class to the genocide, ignoring the appeal of Palestinian trade unions at its outset for global solidarity actions to halt Israel’s onslaught.
Millions of workers and young people have taken to the streets around the world to express their outrage over the genocide. However, the social democratic and Stalinist parties, as well as the pseudo-left organisations and campaign groups in their orbit, have shackled protesters to the bankrupt strategy of moral appeals meant to pressure the very imperialist war criminals responsible for butchering the Palestinians.
The urgent task facing the working class in the imperialist centres is to mobilise its immense social power to halt the Gaza genocide and the war machine responsible for its implementation. Workers throughout manufacturing, transportation, and other key sectors must organise themselves in defiance of the union bureaucracy to fight for the following demands:
An immediate halt to shipment of all weapons to Israel.
The boycott of all trade and other economic activity with Israel.
US, European and other corporations assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide must be indicted and prosecuted.
The arrest of Israeli officials for war crimes.
The end of repression of the opposition to the Gaza genocide.
The immediate and unhindered access to Gaza for the supply of aid via all available land crossings.
These demands can only be enforced through the initiation of an industrial and political struggle by the working class. This week’s strike at Boeing, at the very heart of the US war machine, underscores the real basis for the development of a mass movement against imperialist war and the horrendous crimes it produces.
Strikes and a refusal to produce and handle goods destined for Israel must be combined with sustained efforts to broaden the struggle to other sections of workers and young people. Resolutions should be adopted by workers and delegations sent to other workplaces aimed at mobilising the working class all over the world to stop imperialist barbarism by taking up the fight for socialism.
Reposted below is the WSWS Editorial Board Statement published on wsws.org here on July 24, 2025.
Palestinians carry boxes containing food and humanitarian aid packages delivered by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S.-backed organization approved by Israel, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 27, 2025 [AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana]
Every day brings new reports of the genocidal violence the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are unleashing on the defenseless Palestinian population. With food distribution to Gaza reduced to a trickle, dozens of Palestinians are dying of hunger each day, and more than 1,000 have been shot by IDF forces while trying to reach aid distribution points.
In Deir al-Balah, raided by Israel on Sunday, Palestinians returning to their homes are met with scenes of devastation—“complete destruction,” as one resident described it in comments to CNN. “There is nothing that indicates a source of life.”
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday that the people of Gaza are confronting “mass starvation … a large proportion of the population of Gaza is starving.”
While the Israeli government is carrying out these atrocities, the United States and the major European imperialist powers are directly complicit. For nearly two years, they have armed and financed Israel as it wages genocide in Gaza, criminalized domestic opposition to the slaughter, and politically justified this historic crime—one that ranks alongside the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II.
A coalition of European powers and other close allies of US imperialism issued a cynical statement Monday trying to wash themselves of responsibility.
In the statement, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, along with a number of smaller powers now acknowledge Israel’s undeniable resort to mass murder. Yet they remain steadfast in their support for the Zionist regime. Refusing to call the Gaza war a genocide, they offer only vague euphemisms while fully endorsing the policies of Washington, which alongside Berlin, is the main provider of arms to Israel.
They state, “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity. We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food. It is horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid.” Calling for a “permanent ceasefire,” they conclude, “We reaffirm our complete support to the efforts of the US … to achieve this.”
But Washington is not seeking peace, any more than Israel is focused on delivering aid to Gaza. For nearly two years, the United States has shipped bombs, artillery, drones and other weapons used by Israel to target hospitals, refugee camps, medics and starving women and children. From the outset, top Israeli officials openly declared their genocidal aims, referring to Palestinians as “human animals” and invoking the Biblical command to exterminate the “seed of Amalek.”
Six months ago, Trump pledged that Washington would “take over” Gaza, expel the Palestinians, “level it out” and turn it into a beach resort, the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Now, Israeli officials are moving to implement this plan, which has underpinned their policy from the beginning. On Tuesday, in the Knesset, fascist Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Israel to “conquer and settle Gaza,” declaring, “We have strong support from President Trump to turn Gaza into a prosperous region, a coastal city with settlement and employment.”
The statement from the European imperialist powers refrains from labeling the Israeli war a genocide and ethnic cleansing, but they are well aware that this is what is taking place. Indeed, their statement declares: “Proposals to remove the Palestinian population into a ‘humanitarian city’ are completely unacceptable. Permanent forced displacement is a violation of international humanitarian law.” Nonetheless, they cynically embrace US policy under the banner of peace.
The imperialist powers support Israel’s genocide because it is in line with their geopolitical interests. If Israel’s actions conflicted with those interests, they would be halted immediately. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz bluntly admitted, “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us.” Backed and armed by the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Canada and Australia, the Zionist regime functions as a proxy for imperialist domination of the oil-rich Middle East.
Mass and growing opposition to Israel’s crimes exist throughout the world. What is lacking is a clear program and perspective. The International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties insist that the genocide will not be stopped through appeals to the very capitalist governments carrying out and enabling the genocide. What is urgently required, and what has not yet occurred, is the independent eruption of the working class onto the political stage.
We propose that workers and young people throughout the world raise definite demands, including:
An immediate halt of shipment of all weapons to Israel. Since the beginning of the genocide, it is estimated that Israel has received some $25 billion in weapons and other assistance. The vast majority of bombs dropped on Palestinian homes has been provided by the United States and the European imperialist powers.
The boycott of all trade and other economic activity with Israel. The ability of the Israeli state to carry out the genocide must be halted by crippling its economic foundations. A recent comment in the Financial Times noted that since October 2023, Israel’s stock market has been the “best-performing in the world,” with an influx of foreign capital fueling the wealth of the ruling elite and financing the Zionist regime’s ability to murder Palestinians.
US, European and other corporations assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide must be indicted and prosecuted. The ruling class internationally is arming Israel behind the backs of the population and reaping vast profits by providing the IDF weapons, AI and surveillance infrastructure, just as corporations like IG Farben profited from making Zyklon B gas for the gas chambers the Nazis used to kill Jews. Washington retaliated against UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s denunciation of this “economy of genocide” by revoking her visa and freezing her bank accounts.
The arrest of Israeli officials for war crimes. International arrest warrants have already been drawn up against many Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but are ignored by the imperialist powers. Moreover, serving in the IDF are many citizens of the US and European countries. They should be subject to arrest and prosecution if it is determined that they in any way contributed to the genocide.
The end of repression of the opposition to the Gaza genocide. Capitalist governments, including those that signed this week’s statement, have relentlessly criminalized opposition to the genocide. They have carried out mass arrests against organizations criticizing it, launched bloody police assaults on pro-Gaza protests, and prosecuted defenders of Gaza on bogus terrorism or antisemitism charges. Workers and youth must fight to defend those who come out in defense of Gaza, for charges against them to be dropped and to end the repression of their activities.
These demands will not be achieved through appeals to the governments and institutions responsible for the genocide. It requires the intervention of the international working class through strikes, walkouts and other forms of independent action. This means organizing outside the stranglehold of the trade union apparatus, which in every country has done nothing to stop the slaughter in Gaza.
The struggle must unify workers across all borders—Palestinian, Israeli, American, European and beyond—in a common fight against imperialist war, genocide and the capitalist system that produces them. This includes Israeli workers, who must reject the Zionist regime and its crimes. There are significant layers of the Israeli population who are horrified by the actions of their government. In earlier decades, the Israeli state honored non-Jews who resisted the Nazis as “righteous among the nations.” Today, Israelis who recognize the criminal character of the genocide must speak out and take action.
The fight against the genocide in Gaza is inseparable from the fight against the expanding global imperialist war, of which it is a component part. The aim of the imperialist powers to create a “new Middle East” under their domination is inseparable from their broader war plans against Russia and China.
The World Socialist Web Site, the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties call for an end to the Gaza genocide through the building of a new international anti-war movement. This movement must be grounded in the working class and based on a revolutionary socialist program. Its goal must be to abolish the capitalist profit system, which is the root cause of war.
Reposted below is the article published on wsws.org here on July 11, 2025.
President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky at Trump Tower, Sept. 27, 2024, in New York. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]
In a complete about-face from the position his administration declared last week, United States President Donald Trump announced on Monday that his government would continue to send weapons to Kiev in order to fuel the ongoing proxy war against Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands in its over three-year history.
“We’re gonna send some more weapons we have to them, they have to be able to defend themselves, they’re getting hit very hard now,” Trump told reporters during a meeting of US and Israeli officials at the White House.
Later that day, the Pentagon released its own statement confirming more war materiel would be sent to Ukraine, likewise contradicting its previous statements that aid had been paused.
“At President Trump’s direction, the Department of Defense is sending additional defensive weapons to Ukraine to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops,” it stated.
While initial reports from Politico cited Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby as the Trump official responsible for the weapons halt last week, shortly thereafter NBC News named Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the individual who made the decision, as part of a “capability review,” to unilaterally halt shipments to Ukraine starting on July 2.
According to the Washington Post, included in the items being held back from Ukraine were over two dozen Patriot air defense missiles, over two dozen Stinger air defense systems, precision artillery rounds, Hellfire missiles, drones and more than 90 AIM air-to-air missiles that Ukraine launches from F-16 fighter jets. These were reportedly already in Poland and being prepped for delivery to Ukraine when the order to cease was declared.
The move, which was roundly criticized by the Ukrainian government, was later confirmed by both the Pentagon and White House, with Trump’s press secretary stating that the decision “was made to put America’s interests first following a (U.S. Defense Department) review of our nation’s military support and assistance to other countries across the globe.”
As has become typical of his crisis-plagued, criminal presidency, Trump later performed an about-face while speaking to a NY Times reporter last Friday.
“Why did you pause weapons shipments to Ukraine?” the journalist asked Trump as he was boarding Air Force One.
“We haven’t,” Trump replied, flatly contradicting multiple previous statements from his own government. “We’re giving weapons.”
Trump’s 180-degree foreign policy turn is being publicly celebrated by the right-wing dictatorial government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, following a disastrous public meeting at the White House between the two presidents, who was just months ago was accusing Trump of living in a Russian “disinformation space.”
On Tuesday, Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s closest presidential advisor, vociferously hailed Trump as the “only leader” who can pressure Russia to end the war on Ukrainian terms in an interview with the NY Post.
“I always knew that the two presidents share a lot in common. They have many of the things that they see the same way—they just need to talk more,” he said. “There was a brilliant meeting in the Vatican, and then several phone calls, and then meeting in The Hague, and so all that is the work to understand each other more deeply.
“And you know, certain events had to unfold, certain conversations had to happen—including conversations with (Russian President Vladimir) Putin.”
Yermak’s glowing description of Trump is a tacit admission that both the war and the Zelensky government itself are highly dependent on the continuation of US military and financial aid.
Despite having been allocated $182.8 billion in US support since the beginning of the full-scale war in February 2022, the Ukrainian government continues to be totally dependent on foreign aid to function.
Speaking Wednesday at the 2025 Ukraine Recovery Conference, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal underlined the critical financial situation of the country.
“The total financial resource for defence and security in 2025 will amount to nearly US$50 billion. That is 26% of GDP,” the prime minister stated.
The weapons procurement budget is also at a record-high $16.4 billion, while the state’s own revenue is projected to be just $48.5 billion.
“Thus, external financing is critically important for us, as it allows Ukraine to allocate its own resources directed at defending our country,” Shmyhal said.
Shmyhal also noted that Ukraine has already secured $22 billion in foreign aid for 2025. But it needs more for next year.
“Meanwhile, 2026 remains a challenge. Our external financing needs will stay above $40 billion. The key task is to develop mechanisms and instruments that will make it possible to raise these funds.”
As Trump has demonstrated, despite his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine in “24 hours,” he is just as committed to war as his predecessors, as long as it maximizes the interests of US capitalism.
