http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Palestinians-Form-First-Ever-Left-Wing-Coalition-20160811-0033.html
The October local elections won't only have Hamas and Fatah on the ballot.
Palestinian politicians are uniting in a first-ever left-wing coalition to win the October local elections, Quds Press reported on Wednesday.
Qais Abdul-Karim, head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said in a press conference Wednesday that his party would form a coalition with four others in order to “overcome the mutual popularization (between Hamas and Fatah) which corrupts the Palestinian political process.”
The new coalition, the “Democratic Alliance,” would be committed to transparency and propose candidates who enjoy a wide base among left-wing Palestinians in an attempt to unite the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The other parties, which previously ran separately, are the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian Popular Party, the Palestinian Initiative and the Palestinian Democratic Union.
“This pushed the left-wing forces to unite and provide a unified vision with social dimensions that serve all Palestinians and not a particular movement,” said Kayed al-Ghul, a member of the PFLP, in an interview with a PFLP-affiliated website.
Urbandale posted:PFLP, PPP, PI, PDU, and DFLP are forming a leftist electoral coalition
if only tpaine were here to see this
Sorry Urbandale, I'm totes temporarily commandeering your thread to let peeps know about this other very important Palestinian thing. But yeah, this is awesome.
shriekingviolet posted:I eagerly await the incoming barrage of articles that will inform us that the mysterious Democratic Alliance (why haven't we heard of them before? what are they hiding?) are rabid terrorist baby-eaters who kick puppies just for fun and specifically insulted your mother. Yes, yours. Here's an anecdote about how one of their members was rude to me at a party six years ago, a clear indicator of their violent and irrational psychology.
Actually they will receive Shin Bet funding to create an alternative to Hamas and when they take power their leader will say that socialism has a lot of different meanings to different people and that to him it means prosperity built on Foreign Direct Investment. Then he will sign the Harlem Accords in Clinton's neighbourhood which recognizes the historical right of Jews to settlements in the West Bank in exchange for Israeli guarantees for security.
getfiscal posted:shriekingviolet posted:
I eagerly await the incoming barrage of articles that will inform us that the mysterious Democratic Alliance (why haven't we heard of them before? what are they hiding?) are rabid terrorist baby-eaters who kick puppies just for fun and specifically insulted your mother. Yes, yours. Here's an anecdote about how one of their members was rude to me at a party six years ago, a clear indicator of their violent and irrational psychology.
Actually they will receive Shin Bet funding to create an alternative to Hamas and when they take power their leader will say that socialism has a lot of different meanings to different people and that to him it means prosperity built on Foreign Direct Investment. Then he will sign the Harlem Accords in Clinton's neighbourhood which recognizes the historical right of Jews to settlements in the West Bank in exchange for Israeli guarantees for security.
D...Damn...
gyrofry posted:RIP
looks like they haven't signed on yet
Urbandale posted:alls well! it should be noted that the PFLP is actually organizing that strike, as well as nearly every other prison solidarity action in occupied palestine
Yeah, they do a damn good job too
getfiscal posted:Actually they will receive Shin Bet funding to create an alternative to Hamas and when they take power their leader will say that socialism has a lot of different meanings to different people and that to him it means prosperity built on Foreign Direct Investment. Then he will sign the Harlem Accords in Clinton's neighbourhood which recognizes the historical right of Jews to settlements in the West Bank in exchange for Israeli guarantees for security.
shriekingviolet posted:Most groups organized explicitly around solidarity with Palestinian people, when they have representation from actual people from/in Palestine, are extremely legit and good. Some of the best people and best organizing I've known.
The Palestinian left has been on the cutting edge of Leftist action literally for decades IMO. One could talk all day about how 'effective' their various plane hijacking etc... actions were but I think there's no denying that Palestinians as a relatively small population have more recognition for their cause than pretty much any mass movement against colonization (Not as a beacon of colonized people struggling for socialism obviously as any Palestian movement is conflated with Hamas or Fatah but like if you brought up even say Catalonian separatism right in W Europe a random Amerikan wouldn't know what it was but they would at least have some idea or notion in their mind about Palestine.)
I don't want to call any Palestinian communist group an 'undogmatic' group because that's not true but I think they are a sort of clarion call to people worldwide as an anti-imperialist icon in a way which transcends leftist politics or whatever. As I've learned there actually is a very large corpus of mostly Jemeni communist who had published debates on Communism etc but also just in general Arab Communist theoretical work that has probably never been translated to English like ever that I think Palestian groups were a part of and influence to a degree we can unfortunately never understand by because their dialogue isn's translated. I met a PHD student who was translating them for the first time straight up. I guess if you think about how hard it is to find an English translation of a Polish or Russian document from Blood Lands let alone a work by a Jemeni communist published in a Jemeni communist periodical in Arabic.
Edited by EmanuelaBrolandi ()
gyrofry posted:this could turn out good or bad depending upon whether its a good idea or a bad idea
too often we forget this
getfiscal posted:JMP made a good point once about how in a lot of the radical left, open support for Palestine was very anxiety-provoking for a long time, and even when it started to shift it was basically like "obviously we don't support them doing attacks etc". He said if people wore like keffiyeh to protests people would ask them to remove it and be like we don't want to look like suicide bombers. It took enormous work to get to the point where that's somewhat different. Reformists still are uneasy about it. There were protests in Canada in 2006 where prominent politicians marched in a group that included Hizballah activists openly flying their yellow flags and the media flipped out. On my campus they try very hard to crush it in various ways by like saying that protests break rules, it's silly as hell.
students for justice in palestine on UC campuses have been the target of a coordinated campaign by the san francisco democratic machine and groups like breitbart and the daily beast for the past decade, it sucks. theyve been hit with so many SLAPPs that campus chapters sometimes fold immediately, since its not like students are going to have the money to go up against the UC system's ability to field legal fees.
the most notable exception is the UC Irvine chapter. theyre great and have formed strong links with the black student union and muslim student union against the billion zionist organizations around that campus, despite lawsuits materializing against them every couple years.
Edited by Urbandale ()
EmanuelaBrolandi posted:mass movement against colonization (...) Catalonian separatism
????????????????
EmanuelaBrolandi posted:I was just using it as a reference point about how most americans have an idea what Palestine is but if you said 'people in catalonia want independence' theyd be like 'where?'
It's a good point too because there are all sorts of intrigues and crimes around the world and only a small number get any sort of attention from the left at large. And almost always its because the US foreign policy blob has deliberately made the issue part of their current narrative and the left is just trying to combat some of the lies about it, or, just as often, participate in those lies in a self-serving way (Support the Maidan Revolution folks).
Even the nonsense cliche people use of "why do people care if Paris gets bombed but not Baghdad" usually uses the same parameters, people don't tend to mention Chad in those sentences. When Lenin said "turn the imperialist war into a civil war" I think the broader point was that the left has to set the agenda or else you get stuck in these stupid debates about whether it's progressive to support France against Germany because France is a liberal republic and Germany is a militarist authoritarian regime.
EmanuelaBrolandi posted:i think he's grasping at straws to make some sort of call out as if I claimed the catalonian independence movement is somehow a radical leftist thing when in fact I was just using it as a reference point about how most americans have an idea what Palestine is but if you said 'people in catalonia want independence' theyd be like 'where?'
this, i wasnt trying to shoot you down or w/e i just thought it was a weird comparison
shriekingviolet posted:I eagerly await the incoming barrage of articles that will inform us that the mysterious Democratic Alliance (why haven't we heard of them before? what are they hiding?) are rabid terrorist baby-eaters who kick puppies just for fun and specifically insulted your mother. Yes, yours. Here's an anecdote about how one of their members was rude to me at a party six years ago, a clear indicator of their violent and irrational psychology.
getfiscal posted:JMP made a good point once about how in a lot of the radical left, open support for Palestine was very anxiety-provoking for a long time, and even when it started to shift it was basically like "obviously we don't support them doing attacks etc". He said if people wore like keffiyeh to protests people would ask them to remove it and be like we don't want to look like suicide bombers. It took enormous work to get to the point where that's somewhat different. Reformists still are uneasy about it. There were protests in Canada in 2006 where prominent politicians marched in a group that included Hizballah activists openly flying their yellow flags and the media flipped out. On my campus they try very hard to crush it in various ways by like saying that protests break rules, it's silly as hell.
Where I live in germany the weird "anti-german" strand is still inexplicably popular, to the point that what Antifa groups exist here are all incredibly pro-Israel. Some few months ago some BDS people were gonna hold a small speech at the building of the student-evangelical group until the entire faculty of philosophy of my university intervened and pressured the talk to be canceled, at which point the BDS people tried to hold it somewhere else, at which point some of the local Antifa groups threatened to beat up any pro-palestinians so it got canceled altogether to "preserve public peace". (there was a recent electronicintifada article about that whole event)
Although thats a larger problem with german politics in general, the big "SED-descendant" leftist party's Die Linke leadership circles are full of people who are members of Israel aligned groups like the "Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft", even though the actual base of the party is largely pro-palestine. I also still remember when the center-left newspaper "TAZ" ran very gross gloating articles about those people on the relief flottilas getting shot to death, right after it happened.
Anti-German is incoherent and silly enough that you'd think noone would swallow that stupid line, but I guess some people are just really stupid and REALLY want to go around yelling slogans about how Dresden should be napalmed again
c_man posted:is anti-deutsche mostly an east or west german thing? or does it not have geographical coherence like that?
I don't think it really has any "base". The very anti-german influenced 'leftist' magazine konkret is from Hamburg, another anti-german publication the Bahamas paper is from Berlin. Reading the wiki even Austria has some anti-german publications which seems funny to me somehow. Well maybe I'd know more about it if I left my room more but what can you do.
are there antifascist people that will oppose them on the streets?
xipe posted:whats the age mix of antideutsh, do lots of young people still join them?
are there antifascist people that will oppose them on the streets?
If anything most of the anti-germans I know of are strictly on the young side, but I mean its pretty hard to really get a bigger demographic look on a current like that when it expresses itself mostly in weird antifa groups that want to kick my damn ass. Theres still lots of pro-palestinian sentiment among leftists but that's mostly something you find in the base of partys like Die Linke which always trys to discipline them. Which also reminds me of the whole "Toiletgate" incident, which both shows how utterly pathetic the Die Linke leadership is, how ineffectual the pro-palestinian opposition to them in the upper echelons is, and how stuck up and lame the political process in germany is in general.
The only other real anti-german opposition I know of is well, actual Nazis (although frankly an ideology founded on the idea of genocide and brutality and savagery being in the german cultural DNA just sounds like the flipside of nationalism to me, like german exceptionalism but with a negative sign in front of it, like how John Dolan put it), since the anti-germans are big fans of the RAF (not the good one, the bad one from britain) and their most popular slogans are centered around asking 'Bomber Harris' to carpetfirebomb Dresden again. So you have the kind of awkward scenario where the people most critical of firebombing civilians are actual Nazis, with antigermans yelling that hell maybe bombing civilians is cool when its the right kind of civlians, and most of the rest of the left just kinda not touching the subject at all for obvious reasons. Although don't take my word on it.
Ronnski posted:their most popular slogans are centered around asking 'Bomber Harris' to carpetfirebomb Dresden again. So you have the kind of awkward scenario where the people most critical of firebombing civilians are actual Nazis, with antigermans yelling that hell maybe bombing civilians is cool when its the right kind of civlians
lol this is why i never go visit my relatives. germans are the worst.
getfiscal posted:JMP made a good point once about how in a lot of the radical left, open support for Palestine was very anxiety-provoking for a long time
but these people sucked and were worthless and recognized as such. more than me i mean