Against the Current

29 January 2025: The return of displaced Palestinians from the south to the northern Gaza Strip. Photo: Jaber Jehad Badwan

ON MAY 21 a brutal and indefensible targeted killing of two young Israeli Embassy workers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, was committed at the Jewish Museum in Washington, DC.

In grappling with the issues arising from this murder, it’s with some qualms that the editors of Against the Current are devoting an amount of editorial space to this event while Israel’s U.S.-abetted mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians, in progress before and after, continues without a pause....

The resistance rising! Photo: Dan La Botz

THE ABDUCTION OF Mahmoud Khalil — the Palestinian graduate student and green card holder seized March 8 at his Columbia University residence — is now multiplied by other high-profile detentions and deportation threats, and dozens or even hundreds of unpublicized cases. Secretary of State Marco Rubio openly boasts as much.

These arrests and disappearances highlight a reign of terror confronting student visa and even green card holders. They pull together multiple interwoven aspects of the five-alarm civil and human rights emergency in the United States and the global U.S. empire:...

GEORGE FLOYD WAS murdered on May 25, 2020 when a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for 9-1/2 minutes while Floyd was handcuffed, pleading that he couldn’t breathe....

Erik Helgeson, vice-chair of the Swedish Dockworkers’ Union, Labour Day, Gothenburg. Photo: Daniel Bernman

Erik Helgeson asks whose “national security” is Swedish law really protecting?

SECURITY IS A funny elixir. The more of it that you have, the less there is for someone else… or that’s the conventional wisdom anyway. Erik Helgeson’s experience, however, proves otherwise.

Erik, 42, is the vice-chair of the Swedish Dockworkers’ Union and he cared deeply for the security of his members — and also for the safety of Gazan civilians, some of whom have been killed by weapons which may have passed through the port of Gothenburg, where he has worked for 20 years.

Erik cared so much in fact that in February of this year, he led a symbolic six-day blockade....

The General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA), a leftwing voice in the South African labor movement, posted the statement below following the May 21 White House meeting of Donald Trump and president Cyril Ramaphosa. Trump's sickening racism was on full display as he pressed the mythology of the "white genoicide" of Afrikaner farmers. On this occasion Trump even exceeded his everyday spectacle, presumably prompted by Elon Musk who's seeking to extort favorable concessions....

Teamster vs. Trump striker at the Marathon Petroleum refinery near Detroit last October. Photo: Jim West

The following discussion is part of a longer analysis published in Social Policy (Spring 2025), “From L4B to TAT. Challenging Union Political Endorsements Takes Rank-&-File Action,” which includes an account of the Labor for Bernie initiatives in the 2016 and 2020 presidential election campaigns. Steve Early worked for nearly 30 years as an International Union representative for the Communication Workers of America and helped co-found....

THE INDIAN ARMED Forces have launched “Operation Sindoor,” which has carried out strikes in as many as nine places spread over three cities in Pakistan occupied Kashmir and Punjab province. A counter-strike by Pakistan, also to be condemned, has led to lives lost in Poonch.

All this is an extremely worrisome development, though not entirely....

Flag-lowering ceremony at Wahgha/Attar border, looking from Pakistani side Photo: Kamran Ali CC BY-SA 3.0

ON THE MORNING of 7th May, when I answered my doorbell and went outside looking for who rang, my neighbor loudly asked me to turn off all my lights. This command signaled to me that we are living in a moment of war. Living near the Wahgha border, we heard a deafening noise around 8.30 am, followed by a blast. An Indian Harop drone, made by Israel, struck a close by military installation....

Map of the Civil War in Sudan, updated April 16, 2025. Pink controlled by Sudanese Armed Forces, green by Rapid Support Forces, yellow by Sudan People's Liberation Movement–North (al-Hilu) and brown by Sudan Liberation Movement (al-Nur) Elijah Pepe, CC BY-SA 4.0

Two years have passed since the war broke out in Sudan between the two sides of the military regime that the country inherited from the infamous Omar al-Bashir. While the situation in Sudan does not get even a tenth of the global media attention that the ongoing Zionist genocidal war in Gaza receives, the scale of the human catastrophe there is equally horrific. The death toll from the military-on-military war is estimated at more than 150,000, while the number of displaced people stands at approximately 13 million, and the number of those threatened with severe famine reaches 44 million — a record number that makes the war....

“The problem of the 21st century is not only with conservatism. Over recent decades and especially in recent years, there is rampant confusion of all political spheres: left, center and right. But widespread loss of basic conservatism stands out. It underwrites the white-supremacist and Christian nationalist transformation of the Republican party since the 1960s and most actively since the 1980s.”

Flashback to Trump 1.0 "conservatism" or Christian nationalism?

[In this commentary, historian Harvey J. Graff looks at the loss of meaning of what used to be called “conservatism,” and the real-world consequences. --The Editors]

ON APRIL 9, 2025, my day began with these daily news headlines.

First in the Washington Post: “How conservatives are using Columbia as a ‘test case’ to enforce Trump’s agenda: The Ivy League university so far is the only school to see federal funding canceled, but it is hardly the only target of....

A month after sectarian violence erupted on Syria's coast, the Syrian state has yet to recognise the importance of transitional justice, says Joseph Daher.

The euphoria that followed the fall of Assad’s regime in December 2024 has largely dissipated after the large-scale massacres of Alawite civilians in coastal areas, carried out in early March 2025 by armed forces within the newly formed Syrian army....

THIS STATEMENT BY the Socialist Project (Canada) was published before Donald Trump's April 2, 2025 announcement of global tariffs, precipitating a two-day plunge of more than 3500 points on the U.S. Dow-Jones stock market and threatening to trigger a world economic recession, or worse....

WE ARE SPEAKING only for ourselves in this article.

The UAW leadership should reverse its declaration of support for Trump on tariffs and protectionism, and should stand on international labor solidarity in organizing for a labor party and a general strike.

The UAW’s statement on March 4, 2025 on relations with Trump and tariffs should be read in full. It is copied at the end of this article.

The UAW’s statement is right to reject “free trade.” “Free trade” is the...

International Women's Day demonstration against sexual violence on March 8, 2025 in Lviv, Ukraine.

The predatory policies of the newly elected U.S. president make it impossible to establish a lasting peace for Ukrainians. Ukraine’s refusal to sign the mineral extraction agreement, designed to serve the interests of American capital, demonstrates the country’s determination to avoid colonial dependence. This opens the door to exploring a more equitable model of relations between Ukraine and the states of Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world under the banner of resistance to imperialist domination. However, if the current approach persists, Ukraine risks facing an imminent reduction or even a complete halt of military aid from the United States....