Over the coming weeks and years the three stages of the ceasefire agreement are supposed to be completed (that is, if the zionists do not reverse the process). The conditions are: the beginning of a ceasefire, the releasing of settler hostages, the freeing of Palestinian political prisoners, the clearing of IOF forces out of Gaza, and humanitarian relief. Stage two formally establishes the ceasefire and consists of more freeing of Palestinian political prisoners. Stage three is the great reconstruction of Gaza.

In the past, Democrats pointed fingers at the Bush family for their genocides in Iraq. Now, Palestine, Gaza, this is their genocide. The Democratic Party genocide. The Biden-Harris genocide. They said the other party would do genocide worse — but now it is wholly the operation of the Democratic Party. Still, arguing Trump is worse when it comes to Gaza can be ascribed only to ignorance and lies. Every Democrat who said there was no way to stop the genocide has nothing to say now. Nothing remains in the bank of excuses — it is empty, they have no choice but to embrace reaction even more explicitly and to deny the blatant reality that has arrested their efforts.

Reactionaries will try to sell the lie that this ceasefire changes the entire situation. Fundamentally, no change in the relation between colonizer and colonized has been affected. Palestine remains in antagonism with the zionist entity; struggle for the liberation of Palestine continues as long as the zionist entity continues to exist. It is a temporary move, not a permanent qualitative leap.

It is important to stress this because as we write these words, the zionist imperialist running dogs are now proceeding to storm the streets of Jenin in the West Bank (after already having stormed Jenin time and time again in the years of constant attack and bombardment). Zionists are ordering displacement of Palestinian people in Jenin and are trying to kill the Palestinian resistance there, which is itself, like Gaza, a home of refugees displaced from other Palestinian communities. To the degree that Gaza is able to live in so-called “peace” shall be the degree to which Jenin is being bombed and raided.

Gaza — every city; north, south and central — is left completely in ruins. Not a single part has been untouched, there are but rubble and broken families scattered about, the people dreaming of relatives that today only exist as memories. Already before October, Gaza suffered high rates of PTSD, depression, and poor mental health — particularly among youth. How much has it risen, after 400 days? Now more than ever before, the terrorized Palestinian people will fight for their nation; the Palestinian people have repeatedly had to bury entire family lines and have been militarized by it. If it was to be argued that this was about clearing Gaza of resistance fighters, even the highest-ranking zionist officials know (though perhaps want to forget) that this is impossible — unless every Palestinian person is murdered. The women and youth are now militarized. Gaza’s streets were filled with civilians chanting “we’d rather die than be humiliated.” And this is why zionism can only mean the complete extermination of the Palestinian people. A permanent ceasefire is impossible — it will not hold, it is simply extra time for the zionist entity; a ceasefire is an unsolved antagonism, it will last as long as the previous ceasefire that was agreed to in 2021. There have been many ceasefire agreements — practically every zionist operation in Gaza has ended with a ceasefire, though the firing never ceases — and soon after the zionist offensive against Palestine started back up in full swing.

We have to stay vigilant. Palestine must remain our pulsing priority, all the more so because we are in the imperial core — the decaying, moribund, spiritually dead core that has been trying and failing miserably to wash its hands of all of the Palestinian blood that has stained it. 

What, in any case, is a ceasefire when the West Bank is still under attack? What is ceasefire while relentless, unyielding settler expansion continues into Gaza, along with the continued colonialist whitewashing and demolition of everything Palestinian? What is a ceasefire when Palestine is still under blockade, when Palestine still cannot control its resources and the zionists can cut them off at any time, when Palestinians do not even have houses to live in during wintertime?

Criticism must be made of those who insisted only upon “ceasefire now” in the west: a westerner is someone drowned in material privileges from the super exploitation of the entire world. On this basis, chauvinism is a conditioned trait of the westerner. To be cured of it they must be persistently, unceasingly educated in a decolonial Marxist politic that leads them to supporting resistance of the third world against “their own” bourgeoisie, imperialism, and colonialism. “Ceasefire now” accomplishes nothing in this direction — it only requires temporary attention to a colony, rather than the persistent demand for the immediate liberation of the colony. We will not stop and shall not rest until the dissolution of zionism. “Ceasefire now” only means taking the knife out of the back of the oppressed by a few inches. It neither removes the knife nor covers the wound. It does not start any process of healing and restoration. This demand being so strongly emphasized will bring with it many “pro-Palestine” westerners who only care for Palestine when the terror is most explicit — and they will be distracted and apathetic. These people will forget about Palestine and will turn away to join the rest of the world in its collective amnesia and complicity. 

We have a ceasefire, but it is a ceasefire within the bounds of genocide. On the part of zionists and the imperialists which direct them, the point is still to make Palestine nonexistent, and to make the Palestinian people a bygone fact. Netanyahu tried to delay the ceasefire agreement — one of the many signs that the zionist entity is simply, by virtue of existence, incompatible with peace. And on the morning of January 29th, a zionist air strike murdered ten Palestinians in the West Bank, purportedly “militants.” Every Palestinian is a militant to the zionist entity because the Palestinians have dared to not be eradicated. 

It is being argued this ceasefire is an agreement the Trump administration helped push — this interpretation is incorrect. A certain use for this claim might be found as a jab at the genocidal Biden administration and the genocidal Democratic Party to show how, for all their supposed “progressivism” and “concern for human rights,” they did not stop the genocide or even bring about the ceasefire. Instead, they did the opposite. But this forgets what is crucial; the ceasefire agreed to was the same one the Palestinian resistance itself several months ago proposed, which the zionists initially rejected. When it comes to the ceasefire, one point must be borne in mind: the Palestinian resistance has forced it through political-military power. They have forced it through mortars and explosives, through liquidating tanks and by shooting back at zionist invaders. It was not the doing of any one person, but rather of the Palestinian resistance going on the offensive. The zionist entity spent 400 days fighting against the Palestinians for daring to refuse quiet submission to holocaust. The spirit of the Warsaw ghetto uprising existed within them, and all the passion went into fighting zionism. All the genocide, all the killing, and yet the Palestinian resistance has only become stronger. By the end of it, the zionist entity was simply losing, and they couldn’t possibly make it appear otherwise except to their most rabid supporters.

The zionists cannot win what they have already lost. They bombed all of Gaza, terrorized all its people but Hamas and Al-Qassam are still standing in Gaza today. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Al-Quds brigades are still standing. The PFLP and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades are still standing. And more brigades are emerging in the embrace of mass spontaneous demonstrations.

Marxists will always support armed resistance by Gaza and Palestine. “Well-meaning” young Marxists like to argue that zionists are first to attack in nine cases out of ten, and that in the case of October, the al-Aqsa flood, they had no choice; that the root cause stems back far before October. Perhaps in the context of talking to very confused people, this is sensible (hasbara monopolizes upon the insistence that there was no sign of this uprising coming and that it was some wanton act of violence), and most certainly this has to do with social context before October — but ideologically speaking, this is fundamentally not the point, because regardless of when the oppression began, Marxists support uprisings of the Palestinian resistance, supports national liberation wars, and supports them with utmost enthusiasm regardless of who attacks first, regardless of if it seems “unexpected” or not, regardless of whether or not it seems to have been timed correctly or strategically, regardless of all the ploys of the oppressor to placate the population and surrounding countries with deceptive promises and false peace treaties. With Palestine, the concern is not whether one side or the other attacked first. The concern is national liberation and the blow against imperialism and settler colonialism — an attack on capitalism itself. The violence of the oppressed is supported because it is scientific and a cleansing force against colonialism and imperialism.

All eyes must remain on Gaza because the zionists will violate the ceasefire again; it is not a matter of if but of when. It will come in the form of savage zionist terror that manages to surprise the entire world again and become even worse than before. 

All eyes must remain on Palestine, but also on Lebanon and Yemen, both of which the zionist entity will repeatedly aggress against regardless of this ceasefire agreement. 

And all eyes must remain on all the agents of terror who in one way or another perpetuated this genocide. They must not be allowed to sleep in peace. We shall swamp them with the irate and strenuously haunt them with the deceased. And when the ceasefire inevitably fails, it is they who will be at fault for all of the renewed suffering and the renewed terror.

Here is the ideological degradation of the yankee political movement. Here is our diagnosis. It has been desolated. It has been converted into a lackey of an imperialist colonialist government. It cannot even accept what is happening to itself.

We are now in the “post-politics” era of bourgeois propaganda. Now our politics is relegated to this ridiculous demand of democracy. If there are many genocides, a cop city for each municipal government in fascist amerikkka, another operation wetback, continued rabid islamophobia, continued rabid anti-immigrant and anti-refugee terror, continued genocide in Sudan, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Congo, continued constant executions of Black people which go to the protest of only a small awake portion of the masses of the yankee empire,  continued terroristic bombing of Syria, continued terroristic yankee occupation of Somalia — all this is fine. It is very well. We must protect our democracy. Our democracy first.

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

Who wants to study politics, wants to work on politics, wants to practice politics? We cannot just sit and click a vote button or sign a letter and receive our portion of imperial privileges stolen from a poor country whose genocide we only protest tomorrow.

To Cesaire, colonialism is thingification — the bringing down of a person into dehumanized subhuman status. Now, we see furthermore the thingification of revolutionary consciousness. The social being of this nightmarish empire, of this settler project, has been split into dehumanized parts that are easily manipulable — the social consciousness hereof is bourgeois-ified to the extent that it is so degraded, so pacified, so depoliticized that it can now be, with a few words, with a few slogans, manipulated into turning off consciousness altogether, and into reaction.

The social consciousness derived from the majority’s social position in settler society has by default inclined them into such slavishness, into such political apathy, inaction, that they accept whatever the bourgeois fascist government says, and whatever its political parties and spiritual instruments of oppression say, by underwhelmingly deceptive slogans. That economic position — one that, not unlike the israelis, siphons material benefits from settler-colonial occupation and looting of the Global South — pollutes the worldview of those inside the U.S.-Canadian empire, hoping to ensnare us in a belief that the imperialist vampire is our friend. There is not even a need for a programme anymore in the yankee empire, only repetitions of: Democracy! Protect your rights! Lesser of two evils! Vote against Trump! It is just these simple, blank slogans – and by invoking them you have all of the workers paid off by the spoils of empire behind you, all of the social democrats and “vanguard communists” behind you, and it is now scandalous for anyone outside of this crowd to point this indisputably weak and illogical capitulation out to the world.

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

Regarding the Black nation, this special colonial question, everyone who is still somehow awake still charges genocide. The chauvinists by contrast have disputed this, and demand only a paper “unity” between the white laborer and the Black laborer that completely ignores the super exploitation of the latter for the sake of the former.

Regarding immigrant people, so often fleeing the devastation of U.S. foreign policy, we charge genocide. The government is continuing its policies of concentration camps and systematic destruction of immigrant languages, culture, communities. Deportation is an instrument of the most chauvinistic and fascistic oppression. The chauvinists meantime are demanding merely a paper “immigrant non-immigrant unity.”

 To “protect democracy” means to close the border in the collective yankee mind. Chauvinism assuredly has always been embedded in the minds of the imperial “left,” as they are and always have been settlers here — and now it is flaring still more. Fascism was already here; the fascist positions before now were superficially rejected, now the fascist positions are widely, universally accepted, and our rotten, all pervasive chauvinism today is only deniable because, by its very omnipresence, it is now unquestionable. Deportation is rising; we vote for a cop. People die; we vote for the killers.

Unity only for unity’s sake: unity around “democracy” that does not exist.

 They speak of “democracy.” I speak of over a hundred thousand dead in Gaza, of wholesale slaughter of peoples, of Black peoples who are still being genocided, who are still suffering in the prison colonies, who are still being enslaved in the prison colonies. I am speaking of many genocides and immigrant people fleeing countries “our own” government has overthrown who are now being oppressed and deported again by this same government of ours. 

I am speaking of the fact that in the epoch of imperialism and colonialism, the national and colonial questions are embedded with all other problems. They speak of the need to “protect democracy.” I speak of the need to destroy a “democracy” which is itself the agent of colonialist and imperialist terrorism and wholesale slaughter of nationalities.
We need to destroy the “democracy” of Death Rows lined up state to state with Black people who are shipped to the objection of absolutely zero tangible social-political force to the legalized gallows. We need to destroy the “democracy” that smothers Syria, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon. We need to destroy the “democracy” that for more than 200 years has relegated Black people to  second-class citizenship. This “democracy” is rotten and parasitic. It demands we focus all our political energies on it until it consumes our capacity for political life. They are in anguish for this “democracy” of theirs. Insofar as it is a democracy of ongoing Nakba, of lynchings, of mass oppression of Black and Indigenous people, of occupations and coups, we aim to destroy it.

This demand for “democracy” is chauvinism. It is a demand for the improvement of a settler order that is committing many genocides, that is itself genocide against Turtle Island, and nothing more. This is the belly of the beast but it is not being accepted as such.

 As long as chauvinism continues to control our movement for the abolishing of present-day society, it is no such thing, and we have no urgency — we are not meeting the maturing crisis, and we are instead fleeing from it. We say we want to work “for democracy in November” because we want to regress into “business as usual” and accept the epoch of many genocides as normal. We have forsaken our Marxism and our anti-zionism for colonialist, ruling-class endorsed privileges. We are giving up on the oppressed for ourselves to be “ascended” still closer to being a bourgeoisie.

Without a single doubt there is a election coming upon the horizon which shall be the genocide ticket, in which the two parties of the bourgeoisie will indulge in theatrics and meaningless trifles, but fundamentally be enthusiastically propagandising and materially supporting the multiple genocides they are carrying out. Joe Biden, the so-called “most progressive” president of the empire is apathetic about the horrors he is supporting and we are left to debate “social gains” outside of a genocide we may or may not get as a result of this election cycle.
 He is actively, consistently supporting the genocidal entities which depend on his government. He is actively, consistently ignoring the demands of every oppressed movement. Joe Biden and his Democratic Party are in no way progressive – they’re the most progressively apologetic for reaction. 

But there are no social gains independent of genocides, in the era of many genocides. The epoch of imperialism is the epoch of decaying, moribund capitalism – it is absolutely a fetter upon continued social development. It is abating any forces of progress. It is a hindrance – not a tool with which to reach a preferred end. There can only be progression with its destruction. And when imperialism reaches rabid stages of genocides, multiple genocides, it is calling for its own gravedigger. 

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

The material force of oppression in bourgeois society is also its spiritual force of oppression. In the epoch of many genocides it has never been a greater spiritual force of oppression than now.

The colonialist bourgeoisie has successfully reduced politics down to papers and ballots. Chauvinism is abundant and the many genocides are now to the chauvinists less important than their little medal of democracy. Politics in the empire is materially for genocide insofar as it is rhetorically for democracy.

We need a truly internationalist proletarian party. It is time to consolidate communist organizations of the oppressed, of the lumpenproletariat, of the super exploited and colonized masses, of Indigenous people — which will be the first really communist party, which will first and foremost, and primarily and always (until the epoch is truly over, until we have smashed it with our hands), struggle against the many genocides, always in relation to the genocides. 



This is for all land back. This is for the death of the zionist entity. This is for freeing the Land and New Afrika. This is for Hawaiian independence and all the rest of the colonies of the yankee empire. This is for the end of the yankee empire and for Palestine to be free from the river to the sea. This is for a globalized intifada. This is for Nasrallah, Khaliifah Williams, Ismail Haniyeh,  and all of our martyrs.
All of this constitutes what is actually important, what is practically the most important. This title does not allot itself to the “democracy” of hypocrisy.

And all politics which does not see this, which does not accept this, which does not struggle around all of this all of the time, is a politics which is as good as dead, just as “democracy” in the yankee empire is as good as dead. There is no room for saying otherwise. There must be the reconsolidation of the movement along the lines of the most awakened and oppressed peoples imprisoned herein because in them lies our only hope. 
The movement must learn to disrupt business as usual, to disrupt settler, imperialist, chauvinist politics as usual, to disrupt “democracy” as usual. In this fascist empire we have to knock down bourgeois democracy, not protect it. Every protection of it is 100 more state executions, 100 more million dollars to the zionist entity, 100 more immigrant families deported. There are no more excuses for passivity. 

We must stop wasting time and start committing to gaining in this task now. We must make daily gains in this task starting now. And if we do not do this, we are going for barbarism.

We are on the path to barbarism now.
 We have a duty to get off this path.



We cannot waste any more time.

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

There will be more.

We cannot let there be more.

Northwestern University is a private university based in Evanston, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. The morning of April 24th, a body of about 100 students, faculty, and professors established an encampment, joining the wave of similar encampments sweeping the United States and even universities globally. The police ordered the protesters to leave and halt all activities — an order the group initially followed, but then ignored. Tents were taken down, but then put back up by the protesters. 

The demands of the student movement are simple: divestment from the zionist entity, perpetrator of the ongoing Nakba and genocide of the Palestinian people, and full disclosure of university funding. 

The encampment stood strong despite daily aggression by the police and zionist counter-protesters. The encampment endured despite specific zionist smears directly aimed to portray it as particularly “antisemitic.” Originally, campus police were to raid the encampment and attempt to disperse it, but the protesters held the line by outnumbering them. Protesters were even able to encircle the entire camp to prevent the police from entering. Unfortunately even this would eventually not be enough to outright offset police repression, as the State has virtually unlimited resources to call upon as needed. The police continued to state their intent to violently disperse and raid the encampment, but did not establish a clear date upon which this would happen. This was significant, it spelled life for the encampment: the camp was given both a material and morale boost, as they were able to continue expanding the camp, bringing in resources, etc — and more, the protestors felt encouraged to persist in the struggle. Police dispersal orders continued to be ignored.

The demonstration was seemingly winning. The encampment fluctuated in its population at first, but soon stayed consistent. As one of the protesters said, it was quite literally impossible for the police to infiltrate and arrest everyone at once. But the encampment would be defeated through other means.

A week later, and mockingly enough on May Day, the encampment suddenly ended. On day five of the encampment, the organizers came back with ostensibly happy news. A deal between the university and the organizers had been made — the university agreed to the possible future implementation of “pro-Palestinian policies” in exchange for the forced dissolution of the encampment zone. The organizers claimed it to be (and this is a direct quote) “tangible steps toward divestment.”

College president Michael Schill, however, made clear that the agreement was not in any way legally binding. From the outset, it was a proposal agreed to on completely hypothetical grounds, merely in word, and susceptible to being swept away as soon as the university finds it convenient. What exactly, however, was this “agreement”? The agreement consists of the following: 1. no protests for the rest of the academic year (ranging into June 2024) without approval from the college administration; 2. that the university “answers questions to internal-stakeholders about specific holdings” — granted, “to the best of its knowledge” and “to the extent legally possible,” and possibly (or possibly not!) within 30 days; 3. “Support for Palestinian faculty and students” which consists merely of funding two Palestinian professors and fully waiving tuition for five Palestinian undergraduate students; 4. A Muslim and Arab cultural center in 2026.

Even these meager and rotten breadcrumbs were enough to pacify the organizers and the organizers took the encampment with them. The negotiators of this agreement were not democratically chosen by the encampment, and there was no broad consultation with encampment participants about its fate. With haste, campus life returned to the mundane horror of “business as usual.”

This first clause of the agreement resulted in a May Day protest at the same location (without any accompanying encampment or direct connection to the protests for Palestine) promptly being declared disorderly and disobedient and thereby in violation of student conduct. It was immediately clear that the agreement implicitly carries with it a ban on the right of students and faculty to protest and boycott attendance at school. The second notable clause consists of much prattle and will likely only amount to merely bits and pieces of information about the university’s funding being made available to a few select people and within an almost arbitrary time range. The agreement does not allow any opportunity to combat or change the funding practices. The third clause provides no real support for Palestinian people at all. There are 2.3 million Palestinian people in Gaza, millions more in the rest of Palestine, and still millions more outside of occupied Palestine, but the most “generous” and “kind” university can provide is the opportunity for seven Palestinian people to go to their college for a few years! The last clause speaks for itself but is still worth haranguing. The “cultural center” has nothing to do with divestment at all, and is likely not taking funds that would have gone to the zionist entity for its completion and maintenance either. More importantly, the plan for a Muslim and Arab Cultural Center has been in development for approximately a year already, meaning the organizers accepted a promise for something already being planned, and treated that as a concession, as a real victory.

The organizers voted for this “agreement” by a 17-1 ratio. The tents, the megaphones and other sound amplifiers, all physical signs of the encampment, invitations extended to other parties from outside the university to speak — all of this work was sacrificed for the rest of the semester, and the prohibitions against further protests will likely arbitrarily extended into the next ones. It allows for the university to exercise repressive measures of all kinds against the students. By obligating the students to register directly with the university ahead of time before protesting, the university can proactively prepare suspensions and other academic discipline for organizers, and can prepare the police. It puts organizers, students, and faculty alike into danger, and prevents the possibility of bringing in help from experienced external organizers (e.g., SJP organizers).
The organizers betrayed the momentum of the student protests they supposedly represented for a deal which consisted of absolutely nothing those same organizers had originally asked for at the start of the encampment. Again, the encampment did not ask for anything unique — the slogan was for Northwestern to divest and disclose their funding. The organizers settled for no divestment and no disclosure. If there is to be any disclosure the administration evidently means it facetiously, as there are funds they consider “impossible to disclose.” What they feel can be disclosed is money provided in part by the tuition of exploited students and faculty, money which is deliberately and ordinarily spent by the college! Yet this was praised by the capitulating organizers as a concrete step toward divestment! They sang victory songs in the morgue of their project. The university has merely pacified the student organizers with a vague commitment to disclose any information regarding the funding at its whim. How are we to know that this information will not also end up being unrelated? How do we know the university will not simply argue that the funds that the organizers and protestors originally wanted disclosed are all “confidential” and therefore non-exposable? It is not my intent to in any way portray the protesters as wrong. They were wronged by the university and the organizers who capitulated to it on their behalf, but without their knowledge or consent – organizers who then had the audacity to announce that they had won the battle.

Further compounding this problem was that SJP, an experienced Palestinian anti-zionist organization, only came in after the start of the encampment, and were not amongst its main organizers. Whether or not they were internal organizers or external organizers, it would have been best for the students to have consulted them about this agreement.

An additional demand the organizers made was for the university to protect the right of speech, assembly, etc, for anti-zionist and pro-Palestinian students, faculty, and other people on campus grounds, who are being repressed and forced to conform with a largely apathetic liberal zionist university body. The university, like all other universities in the U.S. empire, are repressive and hostile places for anti-zionists, who are constantly at risk of being punished, ostracized, suspended, etc., for daring to not support the fascist zionist entity. Was the prioritization of the rights of these students in the deal to which the organizers agreed? No. Was a promise made by the university to hold itself accountable for this repression and to be held accountable in the future if it continued to perpetuate this repression of anti-zionism? Again, no. Was there even an attempt made by the organizers to make encampments themselves recognized by the university as merely a part of students’ right to freedom of speech, assembly, association, etc? Once again, no! They paved the way for the university to explicitly ban encampments, which the university already describes as “not peaceful assembly” or as obstructions to campus life and duties.

The organizers settled for hot air. 

One thing is for sure: when an agreement like this is agreed to, it suggests that the bourgeois character of higher education has successfully scarred the minds of the students. Through all of the constant tasks the university throws at its students, it trains them to be tiredly unquestioning whilst attempting to complete them all. Bourgeois education gives knowledge to the ruling classes; to the subordinate classes, it gives advice on how to be good servants to their masters. This results in a student body that wants to be revolutionary, and organizers which fall for the easiest of bourgeois traps. They believe they’ve won, when in fact they were defeated and brought to betray the cause they claim to represent.

Like with the other encampments, the Northwestern encampment lived a lively life, but underwent a sudden death. Unlike with the other encampments, the Northwestern encampment voluntarily underwent a sudden death. It causes worse shudders insofar as it was not attacked by the enemy, and therefore behaved in line with the enemy.