A WIN Discussion February 2025. See the meeting HERE.
The entire Middle East is in flames. To take just a few illustrations of the region’s instability…
· The Assad government in Syria – a dynasty which had been in power for six decades – collapsed on December 8th after just eleven days of fighting.
· Casualties of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza amount to at least 50,000, with many thousands more buried under rubble. The United Nations Human Rights Office has said that nearly 70% of Gaza’s verified fatalities were women and children.
· The West Bank of Palestine has been devastated by the Israeli Defence Forces.
· Political instability has spread to Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and other countries.
· Israeli society is deeply divided. Israeli cabinet members are seeking to continue the war and to annexe Gaza and the West Bank.
· And now US President Trump has added his voice to the demand to illegally expel all Palestinians from Gaza, in the interests of profiteering land speculators.
At our meeting we discussed all the issues that are pertinent to what is happening in the Middle East today: the role of Hamas and Hezbollah; the responsibility of western imperialist countries for carving up the area after World War One; US involvement in seeking oil resources and in maintaining Israel as its military outpost in the region; the exploitation of religious differences from the outset by imperial powers in their policy of ‘divide and rule’. We will also examine policies that can resolve the conflict: principally, what role workers and working-class communities can play in uniting the oppressed people of the region across national boundaries.
The discussion was opened by Finn Geaney, president of the Dublin Council of Trade Unions, who visited the West Bank in 2017 as part of a trade union group and has made a special study of the history of the region.